🧬 The Entourage Effect's...Effect

This smiley fella is Michael Pollan. He wrote a phenomenal book about psychedelic compounds and their potential impact on the human condition (How to Change Your Mind), but he also wrote a In Defense of Food, where he outlined a concept called “nutritionism.” Here’s a Wikipedia thing to explain it:

🔬 Good and Bad Molecules

Nutritionism is, basically, breaking down food into its molecular parts and making eating choices based on the presence or absence of the “good” and “bad” molecules – and it pushed our food habits into dangerous territory for a while.

The most vivid example he cites is our obsession with removing fat from our diets in the late twentieth century; popular opinion held that fat was causing all kinds of trouble, from heart disease to obesity. So, being the creative, obsessive, tool-wielding species that we are, we engineered the fat out of our food and began overloading on carbohydrates and sugar. The result? We became fatter and unhealthier than ever.

What Pollan determined, ultimately, was that our food is more than the sum of its molecules. We have evolved to be well-suited to eat whole foods - not just food’s component parts. He summed it up thusly:

Elegant, no?

🤓 Make This About Cannabis

Since the inception of the legal industry, but in particular over the last several years as new state markets and supply chains came online, the cannabis industry has been nutritionizing the plant to death.

CBD was first, as a popular alternative cannabinoid to obsess over. Also know as Cannabidiol, “CBD” showed extremely promising effects around pain relief, inflammation, depression / anxiety, etc. - and we all became insane around commercializing it.

Literally thousands of brands produce CBD-based products in the US today. You can get CBD delivered onto (or into) your body via a variety of form factors: pills, hemp flower, topicals, tinctures, stuff that goes elsewhere, you name it. Does it work? Yes. Probably.

Then came CBG. Then CBN. Then a truckload of terpenes, all identified to play a different, very influential role in cannabis’ effect on each individual.

Do these component parts help humans? Yes, probably - as long as they are manufactured by a reputable source. But this is the same thing we pulled with food, where it turned out that food was more than the sum of its parts.

👯 The Entourage Effect

Over the last two years, the industry has begun to pitch the fact that cannabis, and its many beneficial effects on the human body, is, in fact, more than the sum of its parts. We call it “the entourage effect,” a term first used in 1998 to describe the holistic impact of the cannabis plant.

The entourage effect says, specifically, that all of the compounds of cannabis work in concert to enhance the good and dampen the bad. All of the 113 identified cannabinoids, all of the terpenes, and all of the stuff we haven’t discovered yet – they all work together to produce good things.

Just like the molecules in whole foods.

🍃 Whole Plant

People have caught on to the notion that a “whole plant” approach is likely more effective for myriad maladies, because the compounds are synergistic. (That was a fancy sentence; all I mean is that the cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids likely all work together to create something greater than their individual contribution).

Right now, there are 252 “whole plant” products within 35 miles of me. There are over 8,000 products nationally.

The individual components have their place - in particular if someone wants to avoid any kind of intoxication, or has a known sensitivity to a particular molecule - but it’s a compelling proposition to err on the side of nature, and just find your preferred form factor to deliver the whole plant - with all of its benefits.

📚 tl;dr

• Michael Pollan described “nutritionism” - the idea that the nutritional value of food is simply the sum of its parts

• This is likely untrue, as the presence of some components create a synergistic effect

• We did the same damn thing with cannabis, with our thousands of CBD brands

• We learned about and respect ‘the entourage effect,’ which is when all of the cannabinoids, flavonoids, and terpenes work together for a better result

• It is Thursday