A Storied Ancient Food & Medicine
Introduction to the Highlands: Maca’s Origin Story
You get in a vehicle and start your journey to the highlands. As you ascend, you feel increasingly fatigued, your head begins to ache, and you notice the air thinning. Before you know it, you are chewing on coca leaves, and your affliction is starting to subside. Yet, you get the sense that you are still going higher. You receive news that you will surpass 4000 meters above sea level (MASL), having just reached 2500 MASL.
Despite the challenging altitude, you continue ascending. Suddenly, a large body of water emerges, and the landscape levels. You find yourself at Lake Junin in the Peruvian highlands, the epicenter of Lepidium meyenii, or maca, at over 4000 MASL.
Adaptation to Extreme Conditions: Maca’s Survival
At this altitude, life is nearly impossible, yet there are still vibrant communities of people and livestock. Yet one thing seems to be missing, trees. Trees aren’t the only thing that are missing at this elevation though. There is also a distinct lack of food crops around. At this extreme altitude, only one crop thrives: Lepidium meyenii, commonly known as maca.
The Resilience of Maca and Indigenous Communities
Maca belongs to the Brassicaceae family, sharing lineage with radishes, broccoli, cabbage, and kale. Somehow this wondrous plant overcame the harshest of climates and started to thrive. Indigenous populations thrived in this harsh environment, inhabiting this area of Peru for thousands of years. However, what did they live on if cultivating crops was next to impossible? Maca of course! Maca not only is a world-renowned energy, libido, and mood booster, it is also incredibly nutritious and delicious.
When properly prepared, maca exhibits a caramel, almost butterscotch sweetness, brimming with minerals, vitamins, proteins, and starches. Even better, this food source not only aids adaptation to the harsh high-elevation climate but also fosters thriving within it! The naive, yet brutal, Spanish conquistadors swiftly realized this as they sought to seize indigenous peoples’ land, resources, and lives.
Maca’s Role in Historical Interactions: Adaptation and Exploitation
When the Spanish conquistadors first came to Peru and colonized the highland regions. They quickly noticed that their imported livestock was not thriving like they were back in Spain. The locals suggested that they try feeding their livestock maca, and lo and behold, their livestock started to thrive again. They were productive and they were reproducing again. The Spaniards also quickly realized that their own fertility was way down, so they too started taking maca. Suddenly, the Spaniards were thriving again. However, they realized they needed maca and had no clue how to cultivate it themselves. They then forced the Peruvians to give them 9 tons of maca annually as a “tribute.”
Maca Cultivation
Challenges and Techniques in Maca Cultivation
Partially, what makes maca a sought-after botanical is its challenging cultivation process. Its harsh natural environment makes it unsurprising! Cultivating maca happens in two stages. The first step is growing the hypocotyls, commonly known as the maca “roots”. A common misconception surrounds the hypocotyls. Many believe they can cultivate specific colors like yellow, red, and black in maca.
Harvesting and Seed Production
These colors occur randomly; most maca is yellow, while red and black maca make up small percentages. After the hypocotyls fully mature, a process taking between 9-12 months, the maca is finally harvested. At this point, you have little to no seeds for the next crop, which poses a challenge. So where do these seeds come from?
Regeneration and Soil Depletion
About 10% of the very best maca hypocotyls are replanted to obtain seeds for future maca crops. They do this to grow out the aerial parts of the maca plant, commonly referred to as the rosette. The rosette is what produces the seeds, and this takes another couple of months of growth. At this point, the rosettes become quite large and produce vast amounts of seeds.
Sustainable Cultivation Challenges
The maca farmers then remove the seeds from the rosettes and begin the process of sowing the next crop. Sowing the next crop can also be quite challenging. Once maca has grown on a plot of land, it depletes the soil.
Maca Processing
The Art of Maca Processing: Unveiling the Magic Within
As if the farming practices weren’t hard enough already, the processing of maca is also quite an art and is actually where the magic within maca comes from! As the maca grows, it starts to biosynthesize glucosinolates, just like most of the other Brassicaceae species. A highly popular example of this is, of course, broccoli which produces a glucosinolate called glucoraphanin, which later turns into the famed isothiocyanate compound, sulforaphane. Maca tends to produce high amounts of a glucosinolate called glucotropaeolin. Glucotropaeolin then later turns into benzyl isothiocyanate, one of the main bioactives in maca. This is quite fascinating because most of the macamides are benzylamides of fatty acids and they do not exist in fresh maca in significant amounts. Nor does benzyl isothiocyanate exist in large amounts in fresh maca hypocotyls. This means that as a medicinal plant, maca is practically useless in its fresh form.
The Crucial Drying Process: Unveiling the Magic Within Maca
The magic happens during the drying process, and thus it is no surprise that practically all traditionally consumed maca is first dried. However, this drying process is quite intensive too. Farmers traditionally use a technique called “open field drying” for maca. This means farmers simply lay out the maca in the open at elevations between 3500-4000 MASL. During the day, this exposes the maca to dry heat and massive amounts of solar radiation, while freezing temperatures hit at night. This then causes a freeze/thaw cycle when the maca is still fresh, which macerates the insides of the maca. While this is happening, the maca is also losing moisture, and enzymes within the maca hypocotyl start to respond to the damage that is occurring within the maca hypocotyl.
In the early stages, cells in the maca hypocotyl release free fatty acids as the first process. While this is happening, enzymes are breaking down glucotropaeolin into benzyl isothiocyanate, which also produces benzylamine as a side product. The interaction between benzylamine and long-chain fatty acids leads to the formation of macamides. An enzyme likely catalyzes this reaction, although the specific enzyme responsible is not entirely known. Some hypothesize that fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) may be working in reverse to generate the macamides. It’s intriguing because in humans, the benefits of macamides often result from inhibiting the FAAH enzyme! We will touch on this mechanism later in the blog.
Traditional Uses
The Vital Role of Maca in the Peruvian Highlands
With such a complex cultivation process, followed by a lengthy drying stage, this plant clearly is crucial for the locals in the Peruvian highlands. Based on its long history of use, this certainly is the case. This is of course partially due to the fact that not much else grows at these extreme altitudes, however, maca plays an important role in traditional food and medicine. As the Spanish conquistadors quickly found out, life at these altitudes may very well depend on the regular consumption of maca. Having spent a bit of time at extreme altitudes myself, having something around that can boost your energy levels is vital, as every step you take feels like 10 steps at a more normal altitude. Even better if that energy booster is also very nutritious!
Traditional Use and Preparation of Maca
In Peru, maca is traditionally used in its dried, but raw form. However, Peruvians do not eat this raw maca without first cooking it. People often prepare it as a sweet porridge. As a result, people consume a significant amount of nutrient-dense maca, including a relatively high amount of macamides. However, what’s most important to note here is that the maca is first cooked! This is often neglected in the Western world, where the idea has spread that raw maca is best. However, many people have found that completely raw dried maca can have some undesirable effects on our GI system.
With this in mind, the consumption of raw maca is not desirable at all and the local Peruvians who have been consuming maca for thousands of years, always appear to cook their maca. Instead, the western market, where cooking with maca is not common, has invented a new process. This process very rapidly cooks the maca, and is commonly referred to as “gelatinization”. The change in maca powder from raw to gelatinized is quite drastic! First, the somewhat pungent and brassica-like flavor associated with raw dried maca quickly fades and turns into a lovely butterscotch/caramel-type aroma. Secondly, the color rapidly changes from a pale off-white to a light caramel color. The resulting gelatinized maca now allows you to use maca in cold preparations like a smoothie, without having to first cook it.
Maca’s Range of Benefits in High-Altitude Environments
Traditionally, maca appears to most frequently be used for improving vitality, energy, fertility, and perhaps also libido. This range of effects is crucial for thriving in these high-altitude environments that can quickly decrease your vitality and even appear to impact fertility. Maca is clearly the perfect companion to have when you are living at a high altitude!
Endocannabinoid Activity
Now that we have discussed the history, cultivation, processing, and traditional use of maca, it is time to get into some of the science behind it! As we mentioned earlier in the blog, there is a class of compounds in maca called macamides. If you have spent any amount of time looking at the various different endocannabinoids in our bodies, such as anandamide, you will quite quickly start noticing some big similarities between the endocannabinoids and the macamides. Check out the structure of macamide B, compared to the endocannabinoid anandamide below.
As you can see, these compounds are quite similar in structure, both sporting long fatty acid chains. However, it is uncommon to see bioactive compounds with large fatty acid chains, but this is a hallmark of endocannabinoids! So perhaps it is no surprise then, that the macamides act very similarly to the endocannabinoids.
Now that we have discussed the history, cultivation, processing, and traditional use of maca, it is time to get into some of the science behind it! As we mentioned earlier in the blog, there is a class of compounds in maca called macamides. If you have spent any amount of time looking at the various different endocannabinoids in our bodies, such as anandamide, you will quite quickly start noticing some big similarities between the endocannabinoids and the macamides. Check out the structure of macamide B, compared to the endocannabinoid anandamide below.
Energizing Effects
Unraveling the Mysteries of Maca’s Energizing Effects
This is where things start to become quite tricky! We know a lot about the macamides and their effects on the endocannabinoid system. This explains the bulk of maca benefits; however, its energizing effects, a hallmark of maca, remain unexplained by endocannabinoid effects. It also leaves some of the other compounds in maca out of the equation such as macaenes, benzyl isothiocyanate, various alkaloids, and even pyrrolidone-type compounds called the macapyrrolins which closely resemble some famous nootropic compounds. Sadly, the research is still very much lacking for most of these compounds. In addition to this, there are still a lot of scientific knowledge gaps when it comes to maca’s effects on energy.
The Role of Macamides in Anti-Fatigue Effects
However, if we jump into the research, most researchers appear to attribute the anti-fatigue and energizing effects to the macamides. This somewhat helps explain the anti-fatigue effect, because the macamides appear to positively impact energy metabolism, and specifically, glucose utilization and fatty acid metabolism. The interesting thing to ponder here for a little while is where the macamides come from. The macamides are formed in the maca hypocotyl from benzylamine which is liberated while benzyl glucosinolate becomes hydrolyzed. The benzylamine then reacts with free fatty acids, to form the macamides. However, the macamides are fairly large compounds and thus would have a hard time absorbing intact in our bodies.
This likely means that the macamides are being broken down prior to exerting their beneficial effects. What this means, is that perhaps benzylamine is liberated once again in our bodies. This would make sense because studies looking at oral benzylamine consumption have also found significant positive effects on energy metabolism. More interestingly, there is lots of research on benzylamine-based compounds which can inhibit the monoamine oxidase enzymes. Interestingly enough, benzylamine even seems to be a substrate for monoamine oxidase-B (MAO-B) itself. Furthermore, there are also lots of benzylamine-based compounds which can inhibit neurotransmitter reuptake, which may also help elucidate what is going on in maca, because it contains lots of different benzylamine-based compounds.
The Potential Role of Benzylamine Derivatives
It seems to be an impossible question to answer currently with the limited amount of scientific data around, but it seems likely that benzylamine and its derivatives (which includes the macamides!) are involved here. This seems especially likely when looking at the impact maca can have on neurotransmitters. Research has shown that maca can elevate the levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, effects that would be expected when one consumes a monoamine reuptake inhibitor, a MAO-B inhibitor, or even a monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) inhibitor. Pair this with a great improvement in energy metabolism, and the picture for maca’s anti-fatigue and energizing effects becomes a little bit more clear. Considering the synergy between these monoamine effects and upregulated endocannabinoid activity, we end up with an incredibly unique cognitive effects profile. Hopefully, the future brings us more research and clarity on the stimulating effects of maca!
What Are The Best Supplements To Stack With Maca?
A Nootropics Depot blog certainly would not be complete without a stack section, and while maca is an incredible standalone product, we have certainly found a few stacks in which it can shine! When developing maca stacks, we split up maca benefits into three distinct categories which are Mood enhancement, Libido enhancement and Energy enhancement.
The idea behind this being that we can develop stacks which help dial in these unique maca effects while not adding too much of their own character to the mix. This allows the maca to really shine within these three different categories! However, for the first category, mood enhancement, we decided on two separate stacks each focused on a specific monoamine that maca can help enhance. Monoamines are crucial to mood, however, this is often grossly oversimplified. One of the interesting things to take into account here is that while some people react positively to increases in serotonin, others may not. On the flip side, the same is true for dopamine enhancement.
Since maca already enhances all three monoamines, these stacks are aimed at bringing individual monoamines more to the forefront, thereby allowing you to dial in your ideal monoamine balance while consistently getting an endocannabinoid and norepinephrine boost in each stack.
Also read our blog on Semax
