CBD, COVID-19, and Your Healthy Lungs
The Woodsman and his turkey.
Hello beautiful ones! I hope you are finding ways to sink into love and beauty during these crazy times. I keep reminding myself that love and beauty are always available, even when it feels like I have to reach through mud to find them. But if we are going to stay sane and whole during this era, we must. We must reach through the muck to find anything that shimmers.
So let’s rinse off in some cold creeks. Step away from the news for an hour or a day or a week. Pick some flowers. Make some beautiful food and have a picnic with a friend. Get in a hammock. Take a nap with a turkey. And read some good news! Here’s some for you:
According to author Toni Baker, researchers at the Dental and Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University recently published a study indicating that “pure CBD can help the lungs recover from the overwhelming inflammation, or cytokine storm, caused by the COVID-19 virus, and restore healthier oxygen levels in the body” (Baker, CBD May Help Avert Lung Destruction in COVID-19, 2020).
In other words, the large RNA molecule that we call COVID-19 inspires our bodies to put out a big-time immune response in hopes of disabling the virus. Unfortunately, that big response often backfires on itself, causing so much inflammation in our lungs that we become starved of oxygen. As a result, many people are dying of acute respiratory failure. Those who survive are showing much lung damage.
However, when Dr. Babak Baban + Jack Yu’s team injected a synthetic analog of COVID-19 into mice and then treated them with pure CBD, they found that their blood oxygen levels went UP after treatment and their inflammatory cytokine levels went DOWN. Within days, researchers also found that physical lung damage—including tissue overgrowth, scarring, and swelling also “had totally or partially resolved” (Baker, 2020).
Another recent study by Israeli researchers found similar results. This is good news for CBD’s potential in preventing folks from becoming overwhelmed by their immune response and mitigating some of the lung damage caused by COVID-19!
Last summer’s CBD hemp field.
All this said, we are simple herb farmers and potion makers, not researchers or doctors, so we are not prescribing anything! We believe in the empirical method and know that, while this study is promising, much more research is needed before anything declarative can be said about CBD’s relationship with COVID-19.
In the meantime, Seth and I will keep taking CBD tincture in our morning hot drinks and evening mocktails. We like how anxiety becomes a distant cousin, rather than a conjoined twin, when we do. We like the way CBD tastes with tonic and lime. We like the way it helps us fall into a deep sleep and wake up refreshed. And we like knowing that, even though there’s more research to be done, our immune systems are getting good support from this beautiful, fragrant, resinous plant that came from the land we call home.
If you want some, too, we are excited to let you know that $5 from the sale of every CBD tincture will be donated to our Featured BIPOC Organization of the Month. This month, it’s the Equitable Giving Circle, a Portland-based organization that buys CSA boxes from BIPOC farmers and donates them to BIPOC families in need. Isn’t that cool?? Help us support BIPOC farmers and families by supporting yourself with CBD!
In big love and bottomless beauty, xoxo Becca
P.S. If you’re excited to support the Equitable Giving Circle, we are raffling off a CBD tincture! Drawing will be held on August 3, 2020.
