What I Wished I Was Told Before Using CBD: The Full List
[Read Time: 8 min, 51 sec]
Over 6 years ago, my brother returned from military tour in Afghanistan with epilepsy, seizures, excruciating pain and PTSD. We watched my brother become a shell of who he used to be. Cleaning blood off the floor from his seizures was a weekly event. It'd take 1-2 hours each morning to wake him up out of his medication. He lost his ability to work, to drive, to function, and some of the things would get him to the point he would be completely gone. It was incredibly hard to watch someone you love go through that.
During the process, several people had said, “You’ve got to try CBD.” Five years ago I never believed in it because I thought it was just a way to get high. However, after the millionth person said “try it,” we did. We tried a lot of products. THE RESULT: none of them worked...and some made things worse. I’ve worked in domestic and international manufacturing as well as agriculture for my entire professional career. I spent the next 2 years looking at the “WHY” behind CBD not working, and why some was even making it worse. Here’s literally in 8 mins of reading the exact list of what we learned ... it was unexpected and semi-shocking.
How CBD and Cars are Similar:
CBD products go through growth, extraction, emulsion, winterization, decarb, manufacturing, bottling. During any of those processes, you can cut corners or inadvertently mishandle the process, which can decrease or nullify the effectiveness of the entire product. What happens a lot in the industry is you’ll have someone really great at agriculture and growth, but they don’t know anything about extraction, or they’re great at extraction, but know nothing about growth, etc. You can be just a few degrees over the right temp (for just a few minutes) and completely kill off a whole set of the beneficial active hemp compounds. In hemp, you have 4 categories of beneficial compounds: flavonoids, terpenes, cannabinoids and micronutrients. CBD is just 1 cannabinoid. Inside of hemp, there are roughly 50 compounds, including CBD. After most hemp products go through processing, normally you can count on 1 or 2 hands how many active compounds (aka parts) are left. Which is fine, if you only need those 5-10 compounds, but sometimes you need more. Let me give you a bad example. If you have a car, do you need the windows? NO. But, if it is raining, then YES you do. Do you need a seatbelt? NO. But, if you crash, then YES you do. Do you need the starter? YES, you can’t drive without it, even though it’s incredibly small compared to the entire size of your car. In the same way, there are compounds from the plant you may not need, but in certain situations you do. If you don’t, you will have literally no effect if those compounds aren’t preserved.
Getting Ratioed:
Also, sometimes you need compounds at certain ratios. If you don’t have keys for your car, you can’t use it. But if I give you the keys and you say, “Wow, that’s all I needed to start the car? Imagine how much better the car would run with even bigger keys.” Well that doesn’t work either. It won’t work at all unless the keys are the exact size you need. It’s the same thing with CBD oil. If you don’t have the exact compounds at the exact ratios you need it may decrease your benefit…and sometimes provide zero benefit. But that wasn’t the worst problem, some problems were dangerous. Let me explain.
The next problem we found out about the hard way, was the problem of solvents and carriers. Some products were actually making symptoms worse. Because of my background in manufacturing, we had a connection with a diagnostic lab and hired them to run a compound diagnostic on the oils we were trying. What happened next shocked us.
The Chemicals Behind the Curtain:
The lab analysis would come back with multiple chemical ingredients (some a few shades away from bleach) not listed in the bottle’s ingredients. For example, we found Isopropyl Alcohol in the CBD oil. So we’d call the company and ask why the chemicals weren't listed as an ingredient. Here was their answer. “Because the chemicals was just used as part of the manufacturing process, they weren’t added as an ‘actual ingredient.’” But as a customer, who cares if it isn’t on the label … you’re still eating it! Now this brings us to something that’s necessary and good, but if companies cut corners … you may basically be drinking de-icer.
Getting Carried Away:
CBD distillate extract is incredibly concentrated! If you dipped the tip of your finger on the pure extract you’d get anywhere from a 2 to a 5 day supply. Manufacturers need to dilute CBD with carriers. Otherwise, it’d be impossible to measure the amount of CBD you’d want to take, and you’d waste WAY too much oil! Adding a carrier to CBD is necessary, it’s just what the carrier is made of matters. One of the most common carriers in several “healthy” brands is propylene glycol (PG) or vegetable glycerine (VG). Well, PG is used as antifreeze to eat away at ice on airplane wings, and VG can destroy the enamel on your teeth. You can have a completely healthy CBD oil, but if you’re taking it over a long time and it has solvents or carriers that are damaging, it will slowly cause potentially serious damage to your central nervous system. For my brother bad carriers were creating an environment in his body that contributed to his issues. That brings us to a problem that started with China, but is being adopted in the US, and it’s growing…not shrinking.
The Chinese Fox that came to America:
The last thing that people don’t know about is potentially the worst. In 2016 - 2018 Chinese companies posing as American companies started to flood the market with synthetic CBD. Now many popular American companies and pharmaceutical corporations are using synthetically made CBD...and it’s not going away. Synthetic CBD oil is much cheaper to make. The problem is synthetic cannabinoids have high LD-50 scores. LD stands for lethal dose. These synthetics can also have other long-term effects. The most famous synthetic cannabinoid compound was the street drug known as K2. It was synthetic THC and hospitalized 1,000’s of people. Pharmaceutical companies are gearing up to flood the market with synthetic CBD that enables them to create patented products, and regulation will not stop this. The truth is as regulation increases synthetic CBD will actually increase as well.
With regulation, bigger players begin entering the market. The only way to patent a product is to have synthetic compounds, since you can’t patent plant sourced compounds. The real money is in patenting a product. There is regulation on tobacco products, fast food, synthetic meat, silicon infused foods, energy drinks, high fructose corn syrup, food sprayed with pesticides, opioids and so on, but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy for you. Regulation isn’t bad, but it doesn’t necessarily mean something is safe or good. Cigarettes are highly regulated, but kill almost a 1/2 million people per year. What we found was CBD grown in virgin soil was generally best and here’s why. Commercial farmland normally has synthetic nutrients in the soil. Sometimes the amount of synthetic nutrients used in the soil is triple what was used 50 years ago as the soil becomes depleted. Hemp is very absorbent. In nutrient dense soil it’s a good thing, but in chemical heavy soil hemp used in consumable products is a bad thing. This brings me to my last point.
The 7 Solutions:
As time went on I got heavily into the why and the how behind making an effective clean CBD product. I became the Director of Operations for Emerald Med CBD which created a CBD oil line that is: 1) Completely solvent free 2) Keeps up to 50+ active hemp compounds compared to most high quality CBD oils with only 5 to 10 compounds 3) Grown in virgin soil 4) Only plant sourced compounds and has zero synthetic compounds 5) The only carrier used is hemp oil and coconut oil and it contains no PG and VG 6) Also grown to have high concentrations of circulation, respiratory and hormone support compounds 7) Lastly, Emerald Med CBD has doctors who do studies with patients constantly improving the compound ratios to make a better and more effective product. At the end of the day we know we can’t help everyone, because CBD isn’t a silver bullet. Health issues are complex, and coming from a family with members suffering from multiple complex autoimmune issues, severe injuries, and poor sleep we know what it’s like to struggle with multi-faceted issues. To me there are other people out there like my brother who are trying CBD as a last ditch effort looking for hope and they’re trying products that don’t work.
They’re crossing CBD off the list thinking it doesn’t work, thinking they’ve already gone down that path … when they haven’t. CBD will NEVER be a cure all, but making a good and clean product makes a difference. Maybe we can help you feel better by 30%, 60%, 80%. Maybe it’s enough to take the edge off to help support sleep at night. Maybe it’s enough to have 2 or 4 more hours in the day of feeling better. Maybe it’s enough to be able to do things like you used to. I don’t know, but I know your body will tell you within 1 month what it can do. If you’d like to try any of our products for you or a family member, go to www.emeraldmedcbd.com/shop today and copy checkout code: relief500 for 40% off on any products (limit 2). This is a celebration of my brother’s birthday today so we’ve made additional stock just for orders with this promo code. After the product is used up this promo code will no longer be active. If you’d like to use the same product I use, it’s the 2,250mg CBD oil (with 0.3% THC) and the 1,900mg PhytoComplex CBD gummies. Also, if for some reason you don't notice a difference, just email us and we'll gladly provide a refund. Thank you and I hope this helps you.