Your body makes its own cannabinoids. It builds them from the fats in cell membranes at the moment they are needed, uses them to turn signals up or down, and clears them quickly, and the network that runs all this, the endocannabinoid system (ECS), keeps many of the body's internal processes within range. It has three parts: two receptors (CB₁ and CB₂), two cannabinoids of the body's own making (anandamide and 2-AG), and the enzymes that build and break those molecules down. The system's existence is Established physiology.
5 sections · What the ECS is and what it does · CB1 vs CB2: where each receptor sits · How phytocannabinoids like CBG interact with it · …
In brief. Manufacturers routinely tell buyers that a full-spectrum oil does more than an isolate, because the plant's compounds pull together. That idea, the "entourage effect", holds that whole-plant blends of cannabinoids, terpenes and flavonoids work better together than any single isolated compound, and it remains a scientific hypothesis under investigation: heavily marketed, not established in humans. The ground underneath it is much firmer. Cannabinoids reach the body through several kinds of target, the best known being the two cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2, and several of them, CBG among them, also act on non-cannabinoid targets such as serotonin and adrenergic receptors and TRP ion channels. Those receptors, and the fact that cannabinoids engage them, are well established. The distance between that solid pharmacology and the synergy story is the distance every formulation claim has to cover.
5 sections · The targets cannabinoids act on · What "binding affinity" means, and why the numbers are not on this page · The entourage effect: the idea and the evidence · …
The burn of a chili pepper starts at a channel called TRPV1, which capsaicin, the "hot" compound in the pepper, pries open. The chill of mint starts at another, TRPM8, which answers to menthol and to cold. These TRP (transient receptor potential) channels are the body's molecular sensors: small gated pores in the surface of nerve and other cells that detect temperature and certain chemicals and turn them into nerve signals, with TRPV2, a related channel, responding to heat. Several cannabinoids act on them directly. In laboratory studies, CBG desensitises the TRPV1 and TRPV2 channels and antagonises, or blocks, TRPM8 (De Petrocellis 2011). That makes it a demonstrated interaction in a dish, not a demonstrated effect in people.
5 sections · What TRP channels do · How CBG acts on TRP channels · What the findings show, and where they stop · …