The endocannabinoid system is a signalling network that runs throughout the body, and its job is homeostasis, which means keeping things steady when something pushes them off balance.
It was identified in the early 1990s and is found in the skin, joints, muscles, immune cells, organs and nervous system. Harvard Health Publishing describes it as critical for almost every aspect of our moment to moment functioning, and lists learning and memory, emotional processing, sleep, temperature control, pain control, inflammatory and immune responses, and eating among the functions it helps regulate.
It has three parts. Receptors sitting on the surface of cells. Endocannabinoids, which the body makes itself and which bind to those receptors. And enzymes that break them down again once the message has landed.
It is a lipid based system
The endocannabinoids your body makes are built from fatty acids, and the receptors they act on sit inside cell membranes made of lipid. The whole system speaks in fats rather than in water.
That is why both products are lipid based. Hemp seed oil, black seed oil, jojoba, sacha inchi, olive oil, beeswax and coconut butter are carriers, but they are also the same class of material the system itself is made from.
More than two receptors
CB1 and CB2 are the two best known. CB1 sits mostly in the brain and nervous system and is considered the most abundant metabotropic receptor in the brain. CB2 sits mostly in immune and peripheral tissue, including the skin.
They are not the whole picture. Published research shows plant cannabinoids also interacting with TRPV1, GPR55, the PPAR family and 5-HT1A, which is part of why a broad spectrum formulation behaves differently from a single isolated compound.
