In a number of our interviews with different natural health gurus, there is one herb that keeps coming up again and again. It’s revered for enhancing brain function and has been used in India and China for thousands of years for its positive effect on memory, clarity and focus...

The crazy part? It grows all over the place and most of us westerners think it’s a weed when it grows in our yards…

The herb is called Gotu Kola and there is one woman who knows it like the back of her hand. On a visit out to Hawaii, I had the honor of hanging out with Genna Wolkon of Kauai Farmacy who gave us a deep-dive into this powerful plant and how it can be used to heal and turbocharge your brain.

This is one special herb – I hope you learn as much about it from Genna as we did!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[Genna] So this is Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica). And gotu kola is an esteemed herb and Ayurvedic medicine. So this plant is amazing for the brain,
this is essentially brain food. And it’s really designed for calming the central nervous system. It’s amazing for a cognitive function and really, really helpful for people that are combating dementia or Alzheimer’s, or prone to that.

So another one of those amazing doctrine of signatures, this particular plant has the … you can look here it looks like two half spheres of the brain, the two lobes of the brain and all the neurological veins, see all the neurons. And then we have the long spinal column. So amazing brain food.

[Nick] Wow! So what’s, what’s in gotu kola that that helps it achieve those effects?

[Genna] It’s a really good question. There’s a compound in it … well there’s a couple of things, but there’s a compound in it, it actually is a cell regenerative compound. Similar to like that of comfrey. So again, this can be used topically. So you can use it for like cuts, scrapes, wound healing. It’s a really good … it’s really good for like a youthful complexion. So we do put this
in our botanical body butter for a multitude of reasons, but helping to create that next level of cells on our body.

Because we’re always, because everything is temporary, right. Everything
our cells are temporary, everything in our body, the food we put in goes in it comes out. So we’re just helping that process along and keeping up and hopefully having some preventive and some maintenance as we go. And the gotu kola helps us with that.

[Nick] So where does it grow? I mean can you can you find this in the states and like outside of Hawaii?

[Genna] Yeah, you know, it’s so funny because I was down on the east coast, the lower East Coast in Florida visiting family, and it’s just growing wild. It’s a weed. There’s different varieties this … that one happens to be a more succulent variety, has a little more water in it .We have others throughout
the gardens, different varieties, there’s the ones that I saw were smaller – a little bit more like leafier like a lettuce leaf, not as robust as this one. But I was so excited I was like, ‘oh this is fantastic.’

Now you have to watch … you have to make sure that you have a source that hasn’t been sprayed or, you know, or altered in any particular way. And that’s just the unfortunate world that we live in is that we can’t always trust everything that we see in nature anymore, because there are so many other environmental influences that could … that can change the actual intention
of the plant. So yeah, knowing your source and just making sure that you do your homework and you have enough information that when you do eat that herb that you find in the wild, you’re most likely you’re you’re fine.

[Nick] I mean it tastes almost like something you could add to a salad, like a
salad green. Could you eat it? Could you eat it like a food? Just, you know.

[Genna] Yes and this is one of those super foods. It’s amazing. It’s super high chlorophyll – great oxygenation for the body and and that helps with adjusting free radicals in the body and just making sure that all of the … that there’s no abnormalities in the cells. So this is just one of those plants that like we put it in our super foods. We put it in a lot of our teas and then we eat it whole. I mean I’m constantly munching on this. They say like, they say like, ‘5 gotu kola a day, keeps the doctor away.’ And then you know what I believe it! Do I believe it!

This is one of those plants in fact … and I don’t know exactly where I read this so I can’t give credit where credit is due, but there was a … elephants that had been tested for a high IQ. And they are very, very intelligent animals so they wanted to see what they were foraging in the in the wild, what were they eating? And so they followed the elephants and this is what they were eating in the wild. Just something to think about, pun intended.