Agatha Noveille - The Complete Guide to Adaptogens: From Ashwagandha to Rhodiola, Medicinal Herbs That Transform and Heal

Many people are looking for ways to be healthy that go beyond the vitamin bottle. They are looking for ways to increase vitality that are less about taking a pill and more about making different lifestyle choices, incorporating nutrient-dense foods, and utilizing the basic tenets of many ancient forms of healing, including herbalism, in daily life. During this quest for optimum health and vitality, many people come across the concept of adaptogenic herbs.

The concept of plants with revitalizing or restorative properties that can enhance health has been around for thousands of years, although adaptogen is a modern word that has only been used to describe them since the 1940s. Many of the herbs that we know as adaptogens today were first used generations ago in Ayurveda (the traditional system of herbalism in India) and in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

In Ayurveda, for example, herbs such as amla, shatavari, and holy basil are classified as rasayana herbs. Rasayanas are herbs that increase vitality and are believed to promote youthfulness and increase resistance to illness. In modern herbalism, we use these three herbs along with many other rasayanas as adaptogens.

One of the concepts of traditional Chinese medicine groups herbs into three categories based on their actions and safety of use. Many herbs in the first category, sometimes translated as superior herbs, are valued for their tonic and harmonizing influence on overall health. Many herbs that we know as adaptogens today belong to this class of herbs, such as he shou wu, eleuthero, and schisandra.

So how did we come to describe these herbs as adaptogens? In the late 1940s, the government of the then-USSR instructed its scientists to create a substance that could be used to increase the performance of the countrys athletes, military personnel, and even elite chess players, so that they could dominate and excel in every international arena.

We owe the modern word adaptogen to the Soviet doctor and scientist Nikolai V. Lazarev. In 1947, he created the word from the Latin word adaptare , meaning to adjust. He used it to mean a substance that raises the nonspecific resistance of the body to stress so that the body is better able to adapt to stressful circumstances.

Eventually, the Soviet research into adaptogenswhich had a strict focus on safetyturned away from chemical substances such as dibazol and began to focus on American ginseng. From there, research branched out to include other plants that also belonged to the Araliaceae family, such as eleuthero, and then to an even broader selection of herbs.

By 1968, Israel I. Brekhman, PhD, and Dr. I.V. Dardymov had developed the functional definition that has evolved into the understanding of adaptogens that we have today. According to the definition used by Brekhman and Dardymov:

An adaptogen is nontoxic to the recipient.

An adaptogen produces a nonspecific response in the bodyan increase in the power of resistance against multiple stressors, including physical, chemical, or biological agents.

An adaptogen has a normalizing influence on physiology, irrespective of the direction of change from physiological norms caused by the stressor.

Although this is the first recorded functional definition of adaptogens, there is no official definition. But, like this original definition, most modern descriptions include the concepts that adaptogens: