Vasodilation is the expansion or widening of the blood vessels as the result of the relaxation of the smooth muscle tissue in the vessel wall. In the mainstream, this vasodilation effect is achieved primarily through the use of nitric oxide inducing supplements. However, nitric oxide is not necessarily a chemical associated with well-being.
In fact, nitric oxide is only produced under irritation, injury and stress. It’s not normally produced under natural healthy conditions. It’s more or less a stress chemical in this way, and the vasodilation effects nitric oxide can have are more akin to the short-term energy you can feel from the production of stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline.
So any short-term vasodilation benefits one might gain from nitric oxide are certainly not going to outweigh the long-term damaging and inflammatory effects it can have on your body. As you will learn in a moment, proper thyroid function has a vasodilation effect, and of course, will improve circulation, thus, sort of making nitric oxide completely useless in this regard.
However, we don’t want to completely get rid of nitric oxide. It’s a helpful chemical for stress and injury, but we certainly didn’t want to self-induce its production on a daily or regular basis. Getting into some safer alternatives for inducing vasodilation and optimizing your circulatory function, let’s talk about how the thyroid affects circulation.
Ultimately, circulation is governed by thyroid function. That is why some of the major features of hypothyroidism are cold extremities and poor circulation. It’s actually through the efficient oxygen and glucose consumption of the cell in the production of carbon dioxide that that has the safer and more natural vasodilation and pro circulatory effect on the body.
You see, when your tissues and cells are efficiently consuming oxygen and glucose, your body produces carbon dioxide, which is not only a protective byproduct of the state of metabolism, but it has a relaxing effect on the vessel wall, thus widening or expanding the blood vessel, inducing vasodilation and improving circulatory function, which may explain why when your thyroid is working efficiently, you’re really warm, your heart’s pumping efficiently and your entire circulatory system is working very well.
While there are many different ways you can improve thyroid function, thus improving oxygen and glucose consumption, carbon dioxide production and efficient vasodilation and circulatory function, there is one particular herb and one really interesting study on the cardio, respiratory or circulatory effects of this particular herb, and that is ashwagandha.
When we take a quick look at this study, basically there are two groups of elite endurance athletes. They were cyclists. One group supplemented with a thousand milligrams of ashwagandha extract a day, the others didn’t. What the study found was that the group that supplemented with ashwagandha had significantly cardio, respiratory and endurance capacity, which was marked by a marked improvement in the biomarker of maximum oxygen consumption.
In other words, the cyclists who were supplementing with ashwagandha had a significantly greater endurance capacity because their cells were consuming a lot more oxygen, which is one of the major signposts of proper thyroid function, which is going to result in more carbon dioxide, improved vasodilation and overall improved circulatory function.
For anybody reading this article, if you’re an endurance athlete or an athlete of any sort or you’re just looking to increase the health and efficiency of your circulatory system and want to have a vasodilation effect on your body, I would highly recommend avoiding the consumption of anything that’s going to induce nitric oxide, and instead optimize your thyroid function and utilize pro-thyroid herbs that will help yourselves utilize or consume more oxygen and glucose and optimize your production of carbon dioxide.
All of this will have a safer and more effective and a more natural vasodilation on your body. It will improve your circulatory system without them damaging and inflammatory effects of nitric oxide.
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