Feeling Good With HELIX - Volume 5: The Beginning of All Knowledge
Somewhere on the banks of the Maués River in Brazil, there is a climbing vine that grows a small, bright red fruit. When it ripens, the fruit splits open to reveal a black seed wrapped in white pulp, and the whole thing looks unmistakably like an eye staring back at you.
That seed is guarana. It is where the caffeine in HELIX comes from, and it has been keeping people sharp for a lot longer than the energy aisle has existed.
The Beginning of All Knowledge
The Sateré-Mawé people of the Lower Amazon have cultivated guarana for centuries. They call themselves the children of guarana, and in their language the word translates as the beginning of all knowledge.
Their origin story explains the eye. A beloved child of the village was killed, and to console the people a god took the child's eye and planted it in the forest. From it grew the first guarana vine.
Notice what the plant was tied to. Not energy. Knowledge. Several hundred years before anyone wrote the word nootropic, guarana was already understood as something you took to think clearly.
How They Actually Took It
Not as a soft drink. The traditional preparation is closer to what we do than you would expect:
- Roasted, then ground. The seeds were worked down by hand with a mortar and pestle.
- Pressed into sticks. The paste was rolled into cylinders and dried in the sun, sometimes over smoke, until it set hard.
- Kept for a year. A finished stick stayed good for a season or more, which meant you always had it on you.
- Grated when needed. Shaved into water right before long days of fishing, farming and hard physical work in the heat.
Ground down, made portable, taken right before the moment you need it. That is the same brief we were working to, roughly three centuries later.
Why The Plant Bothers To Make It
Here is the part almost nobody thinks about. The plant is not producing caffeine for us.
Caffeine is a defence chemical. Guarana seeds carry one of the highest natural concentrations found anywhere in the plant kingdom, somewhere between two and eight per cent by weight against roughly one to three per cent in a coffee bean. The vine makes it to repel pathogens and to put off anything that fancies eating the seed.
Every coffee, every tea, every can you have ever had works because a plant was defending itself and we found the side effect useful. Guarana just happens to be exceptionally good at it.
From The Amazon To Your Pocket
The first written account of guarana reaching the outside world came in 1669, when a Jesuit missionary named João Felipe Bettendorf recorded the Sateré-Mawé drinking it against headache, fever and cramps. By 1921 it was in bottles as Guaraná Antarctica, and Brazil has never really looked back.
The Sateré-Mawé still cultivate it, and still hold the deepest claim to it. We think that history is worth knowing if you are going to build a brand on the ingredient.
We could have bought a drum of synthetic caffeine. It is cheaper and nobody would have asked. We use guarana because it is a seed people have carried with them for centuries, specifically so they could work longer and stay switched on when it counted.
One piece of HELIX is 50mg of caffeine from guarana, alongside L-Theanine and B-Vitamins. Sugar-free, pocket-sized, and about three hundred and fifty years downstream of a missionary writing down something he did not fully understand.
The beginning of all knowledge. Now in Mint and Strawberry.
Feel Good with HELIX.
