Balance with maca and lucuma.

Last month over on Instagram we highlighted our Salted Caramel Slice in our monthly series, The Treat Breakdown, and we wanted to elaborate a little more on the recipe here on the blog. If you didn’t catch the posts, be sure to head over to insta and follow us for lots of nutrition tips as well as exciting offers and giveaways!

The Salted Caramel Slice is hands-down the most popular item on our menu. We have two star superfood ingredients in this treat: maca and lucuma. On instagram we noted several health benefits of these two ingredients and we wanted to expand a bit more on why we chose to put them together. Of course they taste great, but there’s a lot more intentionality behind this recipe than just creating a delicious treat!

Our founder, Kristi, calls the Salted Caramel Slice the “balance bar.” This is because maca and lucuma are touted for balancing hormones and blood sugar, respectively.

Hormone balance is complex - and it’s certainly not as easy as sprinkling maca on your oats. A variety of factors play a role in your hormones levels including, but not limited to, your:

-age

-stress levels

-activity levels

-mental wellness

-sleep quality

-environment

However, one key factor that plays a huge role in hormone health is your diet and blood sugar levels. This is especially true for women.

Overconsumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates can lead to insulin resistance. This phenomenon is where your pancreas needs to pump out more and more insulin to address consistently high blood sugar levels. Insulin’s role is to lower blood sugar by storing glucose in cells. When the cells become more resistant to the constant insulin, there is a need to signal more insulin from the pancreas in order address blood sugar. If this continues over a longer term, you would have high insulin and high blood sugar. Not good.

Insulin resistance can lead to diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, heart disease, and stroke. For women this can also result in polycyclic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), acne, excess hair growth, weight gain or difficulty losing weight, fertility problems, irregular menstrual cycles, and depression.

Putting maca and lucuma together for hormone balance really presents the holistic approach to health that we live and breathe and Solfeggio. No health concern is one dimensional and the more your can do, the more you can thrive!

We hope you learned something! Enjoy!