How to Manage Stress with L-Theanine

Raena Morgan: Hi, I'm Raena Morgan with iHealthTube, we're talking with Lyle Hurd, who is the Publisher and Editor of Total Health Magazine, which is distributed nationally. It's a wealth of information for us to manage our lives more healthfully. One of the things that I would like to talk about, about today is stress because stress affects us all, all ages, all levels of our society. How does stress affect the body, Lyle? Lyle Hurd: Well, basically, I would suppose that we could say stress is probably the most debilitating problem that we have with our health. Stress can exasperate virtually any negative health condition. Stress is something that interferes with your ability to interact with your family. Stress is something that makes you drive faster, makes you angry, makes you not sleep. Stress is a major problem. I think there is though an answer that we might want to look at as individuals to managing our stress. Raena Morgan: So there are some solutions? Lyle Hurd: There are. And there's one neutraceutical solution that I'm very familiar with and personally very involved with, as a consumer, and that's something called l-theanine. Now, l-theanine is amino acid, it's the left-hand theanine, whatever that means -- it's a amino acid, that is derived from green tea. The Japanese company by the name of Taiyo is the major producer of green tea extract, fine green tea extract in Japan. And they recognized at some point in time, the fact that the monks, the Buddhist monks drink about 3 gallons of green tea a day. Green tea has the highest concentration of caffeine of anything you can consume, but they never seem to get that caffeine jitters or that high. So they thought, maybe we better experiment and explore and they did. They isolated l-theanine and then they did a tremendous amount of science on them. Now it's called suntheanine l-theanine, it's the ingredient that science was done on. It's a special process that was used to prepare it. Literally, if you have a problem that is very hard to solve, your day is being ruined for one reason or another, you're addicted to coffee and the caffeine gives you the jitters. l-theanine in most every case if you take it, will help reduce that stress and the other thing about it is, you can really feel it taking place. Raena Morgan: Oh! You can? Lyle Hurd: That's right and the interesting thing is that it's on all levels. It's great for women with PMS. It's good for children who may have ADD or ADHD. It theoretically has some help for people who are autistic or are older and they have some problems with their brain function and what it does is it goes to the stress center and helps these people process what's going on better than they were able to do that, you know, they don't know it, they don't realize it. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to read 60 international papers that had been done in conjunction with l-theanine given to people who had cancer tumors. Raena Morgan: Okay. Lyle Hurd: Advanced cancer tumors, and they found in almost every circumstance that for one reason or another the people on l-theanine, the cancer tumor did not grow at the same rate as the people that weren't. Raena Morgan: They couldn't explain it? Lyle Hurd: Well, I'll get to that in a second. Raena Morgan: Okay. Lyle Hurd: Because there is an explanation in which they also found, interestingly enough that it tended to inhibit side effects to a great degree. Now we have a doctor who is a wonderful fellow, who is involved with our magazine by the name of Jacob Teitelbaum, and Jacob Teitelbaum has become a big fan of l-theanine. He goes all over the country talking about it and he gave a lecture once and at the end of the lecture I thought I was quite smart and ask him a question. I said, 'Dr. Teitelbaum,' I said, 'you know, I've seen all the research on cancer, and does that mean that cancer works at the cellular level? I mean l-theanine works at the cellular level?' He said, 'no Lyle, it's because it works on the stress receptor in the brain and anyone who has cancer, particularly if they're on chemotherapy has a tremendous amount of stress that they are processing as they live through their lives.' One of the major problems of stress is that many of us carry a phenomenal amount of stress that we never know that we have. We leave home in the morning, we take the train into work, we take a bus from the train to our office, we get into our office, we're an hour behind even when we got there an hour early, we leave in the afternoon, everything has come to almost a crescendo. It really builds up to the top of it by the time we get home and we walk into the house and explode. I can't tell you how many people I've suggested that they take one of those little l-theanines when they finish their coffee and then see what happens when they get to the office and then when they leave the office to take l-theanine and see what happens when they get home. And normally, it helps them process on both ends of it, so that it really is something that is turn out to be a miracle in a lot of people's lives. Raena Morgan: Well, it sounds like it's very tranquilizing. Lyle Hurd: It doesn't really affect your ability to perform in anyway. Raena Morgan: It doesn't. Lyle Hurd: No, and the last thing is that it also it helps you get a better night sleep, not a longer nights necessarily. Most all of the drugs and the over the counter products that you take for sleep work on the third and fourth stage of sleep. Raena Morgan: Okay. Lyle Hurd: The second stage of sleep is where your brain does it's processing and recharging. That's where l-theanine is affective. Raena Morgan: Okay. Well, thank you Lyle and now that he is the Editor and Publisher of Total Health Magazine, where you can get the information like this. Thanks again for being with us. Lyle Hurd: Thank you.