Health Benefits – Page 2

Olivia Newton-John Relies On Her Husband’s Homegrown Cannabis For Relieving Cancer Symptoms

Posted on March 15, 2022March 15, 2022 by dylanramsey

The Grease actress says cannabis is a “healing plant” and wants nothing more than Aussies to gain legal access to plant-based medicine.

Source: Herb.co | Author: BuzzMusic | Mar 15, 2022

In 1992, actress and singer Olivia Newton-John was first diagnosed with breast cancer but didn’t see any signs of it letting up until entering remission in 2013. Now, reports say the star is under the weight of cancer once again, this time spreading to her spine.

Aside from the unfortunate diagnosis and state of her health, Newton-John focuses on the “positive side of things, no matter what the challenge,” she told The Daily Mail while also citing that cannabis has played a major role in her everyday life.

She first started considering cannabis use when her husband, John Easterling, began cultivating many different strains on their farm in California. A Good Housekeeping article mentioned how Easterling began his ventures in plant-based medicine in the 90s after founding herbal wellness business Amazon Herb Company.

Fast forward to today, Easterling is proud to be growing a handful of different strains, 21 to be exact, that were all specifically designed to combat chronic pain, nausea, and inflammation for Newton-John.

And so far, she’s loved every one of them. In 2020, the Grease actress sat down for an interview with Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, where she explained how cannabis has truly helped her with “pain, with sleep, with anxiety, I believe with inflammation,” reports Prevention.

Prevention also wrote that Newton-John’s positive experience with cannabis resulted in her urging the Australian government to legalize medical marijuana. She added that it’s a “healing plant” and “is something that should be available to everyone who is going through a chronic illness or pain.”

Her admiration for medical marijuana has extended into ventures with her Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund: Beyond Cancer, which sheds like on the many benefits of plant-based medicine, not to mention her hospital in Australia, the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness, and Research Center.

Study: History of Marijuana Use Not Associated with Increased Heart Attack Risk

Posted on February 21, 2022February 21, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: Norml.org | Author: Norml | Feb 17, 2022

New York, NY: Cannabis smoke exposure is not positively associated with an increased risk of myocardial infarction, according to data published in the journal Cureus.

A pair of researchers with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City assessed the association between a history of cannabis smoking and heart attack in a cohort of over 500,000 subjects from the United Kingdom.

Researchers identified an inverse association between cannabis use and incidences of myocardial infarction, and they found no correlation between marijuana consumption and heart attack severity.

“With marijuana use, MI [myocardial infarction] decreased,” authors concluded. They further acknowledged: “The association of marijuana use with reduced risk of MI is not entirely in accord with current assumptions about the cardiac effects of marijuana. … Further studies are warranted.”

Studies assessing the association between cannabis use and cardiovascular health have been inconsistent, with some studies finding an increased risk of stroke and other cardiovascular diseases among marijuana consumers while others report either no risk or provide evidence of possible cardioprotection.

Full text of the study, “Marijuana and myocardial infarction in the UK Biobank cohort,” appears in Cureus.

Apple Secretly Joined Amazon In Advancing Commercial Cannabis Reform

Posted on February 20, 2022February 20, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: Forbes.com | Author: Robert Hoban | Feb 15, 2022

This past summer, a little recognized thing occurred — one of the largest and most respected companies in the world quietly changed its policies in favor of cannabis. That company was Apple. As a result, they joined the ranks of Amazon as a global corporation advocating for policy reform that would open a federally legal, commercial cannabis industry in the United States.

For years, large tech companies, including Facebook and Google, have refused to acknowledge the legality of industrial hemp, let alone the legality of medical or recreational marijuana. Finally, Apple bucked that trend. In June, the fine print of Apple’s “App Store Review Guidelines” release stated that apps handling sales and delivery of medical and recreational cannabis in legal jurisdictions are now allowed on the App Store. This was monumental.

Unlike the big headlines we’ve seen recently from Amazon, Uber, the NFL, and other mainstream, institutional businesses, showing a positively changing attitude toward cannabis, Apple made no big-splash announcement that this had happened. Yet, this change came at a time of a shift in the cannabis paradigm for voters, policymakers, and the average American.

As we’ve discussed previously, U.S. voters are shifting rapidly and dramatically in favor of cannabis legalization. The most recent Gallup poll showed that 68% of American voters support some form of legalization. There’s also tremendous momentum from the recent unveiling of the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).

The financial technology experts at ArtisIQ are ahead of the curve in identifying the imperative to collaborate with tech leaders like Apple to update policy to reflect the mainstream adoption of cannabis. Co-Founder and CMO of Artis, Adair Lion shares, “As a fintech company on the cutting-edge of development in both cannabis and retail, Apple’s Policy changes are a monumental shift in the way our society does mobile transactions.”

When political leaders and Fortune 100 companies begin modifying policies and behavior to accommodate something that has been seen as fringe, elicit, or otherwise illegal, the hearts and minds of American start to change. It’s safe to say the tide is turning.

This is the kind of influence that sets the tone for mainstream behavior. Think back to the early days of Babe Ruth and baseball, where ball players were smoking cigarettes in the dugout and cigarette advertisements abounded. Or more recently, Elon Musk and Tesla’s support of cryptocurrency which influenced much wider adoption and made the price of Bitcoin soar.

The fine print of Apple’s policy update states that apps involved in the sale of cannabis are exclusive to licensed legal entities and strictly require geo-fencing within the legal jurisdiction. This requires an enormous amount of technological and regulatory compliance and is precisely where a fintech software company like Artis could excel. Consumer behavior shows the need for embedded digital payment technology. There’s been modest growth in payment and technology solutions for the cannabis industry and ancillary service providers. This is in no small part due to federal illegality and the fragmented nature of the industry.

Apple’s policy adjustments are just an example of the level of innovation and attention to detail that Artis is providing to the cannabis industry. What is it that propels some tech companies above the rest? It’s those that provide solutions for the world’s most complex problems. It’s plain to see that cannabis has presented enormous complexity to politicians, enterprise businesses, and just about every other imaginable cog in the machine of our modern world.

The contributions of experienced professionals are unequivocally what is necessary to propel cannabis further into the mainstream. These are the building blocks, the intimate details, that ultimately bring to reality the hopes of grand legislation, like the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act. Compliant and lawful participation in the cannabis ecosystem is paramount to widespread, mainstream adoption. As one who has had to navigate the grey areas of cannabis law for many years – and I’m as honest as a Denver man can be – I will always applaud the hard work to deliberately pave the way forward for this industry.

Who is using CBD and why are they using it?

Posted on February 1, 2022February 1, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: HempToday.net | Author: Jenny Dembiec | Feb 1, 2022

There was an amazing published medical article that conducted a cross-sectional study of CBD users that was not funded, collected, or influenced by the CBD industry. It shed light on exactly who is using CBD and why.

Daily use

This article by Jamie Corroon and Joy Phillips collected information from 2,409 CBD users from all 50 US states and 23 other countries. The sample of respondents was balanced in gender with 50.87% being female and 47.49% male. From this study, many interesting insights can be made into your CBD target market.

Individuals aged 55 to 74 are the largest CBD users, used equally by both females and males. And the majority of CBD users (62%) use CBD to treat a medical condition. The most common medical condition for which CBD is used is pain, followed by anxiety and depression. Besides using CBD for medical conditions, general health and well-being are the other reasons for CBD use. The majority of CBD users use CBD daily or more than daily. And sublingual delivery (using the tincture oils orally) is the most common way of using CBD.

CBD might help prime cells against COVID

Posted on January 15, 2022January 26, 2022 by dylanramsey

CBD in therapeutic amounts seem to increase the innate anti-viral system of cells readiness to respond to viral infection

Source: University of Waterloo | Author: A.J. Herrington | Jan 11, 2022

Synthetic cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive compound also found in the cannabis plant, appears to prime the innate immune system of cells, potentially offering protection against pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2.

Researchers found that synthetic cannabidiol (CBD) augments the anti-viral response of cells to three key proteins produced by the SARS-CoV-2 genome – which was, until now, an unknown effect.

The researchers studied these proteins in human kidney cells, both alone and in combination with CBD, as well as the effects of CBD in healthy control cells.

“When cells in the lungs or the digestive tract are infected with a virus, they have an ability to sense and respond, even before the immune system notices a virus is present,” said Robin Duncan, lead investigator and a professor in the University of Waterloo’s Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences. “They do this by activating innate responses inside of cells, which form the first line of defence. In the case of COVID-19, however, this response isn’t very good, which has contributed to high infection rates.

“With an RNA-type virus, like SARS-CoV-2, cells should activate an innate system that cuts up the viral genome, which also causes infected cells to undergo a process called apoptosis – a sort of controlled cell death that gets rid of infected cells early on. This could stop an infection, or slow its spread in the body or to others. When we combined CBD with these viral proteins, they had a much better ability to activate this system and to activate apoptosis.”

Duncan said what was potentially even more exciting, however, was that in cells that had not been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 proteins, CBD in therapeutic amounts seemed to prime the innate anti-viral system of cells, increasing their readiness to respond to viral infection – and that this happened without activating apoptosis in healthy cells.

Waterloo’s postdoctoral fellow Maria Fernandes, who performed the cell studies, said, “This suggests CBD at the right dose could help cells be in a better state of readiness to respond to a virus, but it doesn’t cause a response unless there is a need.”

Duncan said this idea is supported by evidence from users of a high-dose pharmaceutical CBD licensed in the United States for the treatment of rare types of epilepsy. In that study, patients taking prescription high-dose CBD had around a 10-fold lower risk of testing positive for COVID-19.

Duncan points out that CBD does not cause a high, the way THC does, making it more widely useful.

The study, “Effect of cannabidiol on apoptosis and cellular interferon and interferon-stimulated gene responses to the SARS-CoV-2 genes ORF8, ORF10 and M protein,” is co-authored by Duncan, Fernandes, John Zewen Chan, Chia Chun Joey Hung and Michelle Tomczewski. A pre-peer-reviewed version is published on BioRxiv.org, and is under review in the journal Life Sciences.

The researchers said the discovery of this study is not meant to replace practices that are known to work in reducing the spread of COVID-19, such as masking, vaccination and other measures recommended by health experts.

Study Finds Cannabis Compounds Prevent Infection By Covid-19 Virus

Posted on January 11, 2022January 26, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: Forbes .com | Author: A.J. Herrington | Jan 11, 2022

Compounds in cannabis can prevent infection from the virus that causes Covid-19 by blocking its entry into cells, according to a study published this week by researchers affiliated with Oregon State University. A report on the research, “Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants,” was published online on Monday by the Journal of Natural Products.

The researchers found that two cannabinoid acids commonly found in hemp varietals of cannabis, cannabigerolic acid, or CBGA, and cannabidiolic acid, also known as CBDA, can bind to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. By binding to the spike protein, the compounds can prevent the virus from entering cells and causing infection, potentially offering new avenues to prevent and treat the disease.

“Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2,” the researchers wrote in an abstract of the study.

The study was led by Richard van Breemen, a researcher with Oregon State’s Global Hemp Innovation Center in the College of Pharmacy and Linus Pauling Institute, in collaboration with scientists at the Oregon Health & Science University. Van Breeman said that the cannabinoids studied are common and readily available.

“These cannabinoid acids are abundant in hemp and in many hemp extracts,” van Breemen said, as quoted by local media. “They are not controlled substances like THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and have a good safety profile in humans.”

End of article.

Green Sugr contains all cannabinoids and terpenes making it the most effective legal CBD product in the market worldwide.

I’m pregnant. Can I take CBD?

Posted on October 1, 2021January 26, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: HempToday.net | Author: Jenny Dembiec | Oct 1, 2021

Q: I sell CBD in my store and a customer asked, “I’m pregnant. Can I take CBD?”

A: This is such a good question! The CBD industry is not doing a wonderful job of addressing this topic. In fact, the CBD industry rarely mentions when you should not be using CBD. Reputable CBD companies are answering this question on their websites or through customer education, but there are unfortunately only a few companies that do so.

Back to your question! It is important to know what you are selling and be ready for questions. Of course, your customers should always consult with their physician. However, there are questions that arise, that as the retailer, you should be able to answer. The answer is: if you are pregnant or breast feeding you should not be using CBD.

Why, you might ask, can’t pregnant/breast feeding women take CBD? Truth be told, there is very limited data on pregnant women using CBD. There are animal studies that suggest some toxicity. So, it is advised not to use CBD during pregnancy. As for breast-feeding, there are no human clinical data on CBD in human milk, the effects on milk production, or the effects on the breastfed infant. However, animal studies do show changes in the lactating animal when given CBD. We know that CBD is highly protein bound and will probably pass into the milk. Therefore, to be cautious, breast-feeding women should not use CBD.

In conclusion, when you sell CBD in your store, don’t act like a doctor. Instead, be informed and be able to answer basic, important questions. Referring your customers to their physicians for medical advice and answers is always advised. Just make sure you know what you know and stay in your own lane!

Brazilian scientists test CBD against COVID-19 long-haul symptoms

Posted on September 16, 2021January 26, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: HempIndustryDaily.com | Author: Hemp Industry Daily | Sept 16, 2021

Scientists in Brazil are in the third phase of research testing CBD for the treatment of Long Covid, the persistence of COVID-19 symptoms for more than 60 days.

The effects of Long Covid, capable of recurring for months after infection, can include fatigue, headaches, muscle weakness and insomnia.

Because consumers have been using CBD over the counter for relief from a number of issues, the researchers decided to test it against the coronavirus, according to The Rio Times.

The third phase of the trial will recruit 1,000 volunteers.

Nevada first state to allow veterinary CBD treatment

Posted on September 9, 2021January 26, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: HempIndustryDaily.com | Author: Hemp Industry Daily | Sept 9, 2021

Nevada veterinarians are the first in the nation to win permission to treat animals with cannabinoids, including CBD.

A new law taking effect Oct. 1 clears vets to recommend and administer hemp and cannabidiol products below 0.3% THC without fear of sanction from the state licensing board, the American Veterinary Medical Association reported Thursday in its journal.

CBD is commonly sold through veterinary channels in all states. But veterinarians could be sanctioned for administering it because the products haven’t been approved for animal use by the U.S.Food and Drug Administration.

The ban remains in place despite promising research on CBD to treat epilepsy in dogs. The FDA allows doctors to prescribe CBD to treat human epilepsy, but the cannabinoid remains off-limits for veterinarians.

The sponsor of the Nevada measure, Assemblyman Steve Yeager, told the AVMA that he hopes more states clear paths for veterinary cannabinoid use.

“I certainly hope that other states follow Nevada’s lead and provide reassurances to licensed veterinarians that they can administer CBD or talk about it with patients without fear of facing disciplinary proceedings,” he said.

Market analytics giant NielsenIQ, which tracks sales of hemp-derived CBD, predicts that pet CBD sales will be roughly $300 million this year and about $500 million by 2025.

NFL will fund $1 million in research grants on pain management and cannabinoids

Posted on June 23, 2021February 21, 2022 by dylanramsey

Source: HempIndustrialDaily.com | Author: Hemp Industrial Daily | Jun 9, 2021

The National Football League’s pain management committee and the NFL Players Association announced Tuesday that they will provide $1 million to fund up to five research grants on pain management and cannabinoids.

The grants are expected to be awarded in November.

Interest in the use of cannabinoids, including medical marijuana, outpaces available evidence, according to Dr. Kevin Hill, co-chair of the NFL’s pain management committee and director of addiction psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital in Boston.

Hill, who wrote “Marijuana: The Unbiased Truth about the World’s Most Popular Weed,” said the committee has heard mixed results about using cannabis to treat pain, and that medical marijuana and CBD may be risky, citing research on liver toxicity.

He said the league needs “better information, better science” to ensure the use of CBD to treat pain in elite athletes is safe and efficacious.

The league’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, said that through its funded research, the NFL hopes to understand how using CBD and medical marijuana to treat pain will affect elite athletes’ performance.

The announcement of the NFL-funded grants comes four months after the league requested industry research on CBD and other cannabinoids for pain management but said it would not pay for the information.

The NFL updated its policy last fall to discourage athletes from endorsing products that contain CBD or other cannabinoids.