Dave Asprey and Navindra P. Seeram discuss how plant compounds can strengthen cells and muscles. They explore which bioactive constituents in plants actually work, how to extract them safely, and why most supplements fail to deliver what they promise.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. I have a belief system that's crystallized over the last 10 or so years and I want you to poke holes in it or agree with it. But this is not something I've really talked about publicly. But you're the perfect guy to ask. I think most plants want to kill you. In fact, we know that because if you just pick up a plant in your backyard and eat it, you're not going to like your day. So the process of cooking is largely, or at least in part to or processing. That includes fermentation. All that is to remove a bunch of the toxins in it. I'm seeing extraction methods, whether they're pharmaceutical or alcohol extraction, all that. It's just a way to remove the harmful group of stuff that we can tolerate but isn't good for us and amplify the good stuff. So I'm kind of looking at the pharmaceutical stuff you're doing is just modern cooking in a certain way which allows us to take plants. We might not want to eat a lot of it, but this one thing in the plant we would benefit from rather than as a pharmaceutical science, really, it's just advanced way of removing the bad so that you can leave the good. Is there good thinking there or am.
I kind of oversimplifying? There's good thinking there and we may need a different program. I mean, a lot of more time to kind of delve into this. But you were right. You know, sometimes we're extracting, we're doing cooking to maybe again, as you just said, removing or maybe increasing, fortifying, increasing in that bioactive constituents or group that we would want. A good example from the Caribbean, where I grew up again is cassava, also known as yucca. This is a very toxic plant and.
It has cyanides in it.
But somehow the people figured out in ethnobotany and ethnomedicine that by cooking cassava and throwing away the water, you can get rid of the cyanogenic glycosides and then you'll consume the food for its starch. So, you know, humans and plants have co evolved for centuries. And you're right, plants don't care about us. They're obviously protecting themselves and they produce these natural products or these secondary metabolites for their competitive advantage. Well, we could argue that maybe as plants and humans co evolved, a plant became very colorful or it has its beautiful berries because humans can see color. So eat me, cultivate me, so you can disperse of my seeds and you can make me procreate and keep on going. Maybe that's one thought. Certainly you have toxic plants, but certainly we have these edible plants which humans have been cultivating and consuming for centuries. And to get back again to the question, you know, by consuming these natural products, these are hardcore chemical compounds. These are not vitamins and minerals and fats and carbohydrates and proteins. These are, you look at their chemical structure, you know, these are really drug like type molecules. And when you think of our body of recuming these molecules over time, you know, our liver getting to do its thing in terms of detoxifying and our kidneys and excreting and our, again, you know, our gut microflora, I'm sure Chris is going to tell you more about that. Converting some of these natural polyphenols that are found naturally in the plant into further bioactive constituents, which I think is really where the rubber reads the road meets the road.
When we talk about plant based compounds, like you said, there's so many of them and caffeine and nicotine are amazing. By the way, smoking's bad for you. In case anyone's misconstruing what I'm saying there, I just like the anti Alzheimer's effects and the cognitive enhancement effects. But polyphenols as a class are something I wrote extensively about in my anti aging book because there's just so much evidence there. But a lot of the plants that contain polyphenols have stupid amounts of sugar or other toxins that I don't really want to get in large doses in order to get the polyphenols. And that's where the line between medicinal plants and herbs and food plants starts to get really blurry to me because I'd love to have half a gram of this compound, but I don't want to eat 40 pounds of food to get it because that would be hard. Are we at the point now where you feel like we know enough about these colored compounds in foods that it's safe to say you don't have to eat the rainbow and get all the lectins and all the other bad stuff. You could just take a pill that contains all the good stuff from the rainbow and throws out all the bad stuff with no sugar. Are we there?
I think we're close to there. You know, the cutting edge instrumentation that we have throughout the world with the scientists, the ability to again as you just said, to enrich in certain bioactive constituents and remove some of the unwanted constituents within the plant foods. For example, I'm just going to throw it out. As an example, cranberry juice. People may not like the taste. Or if you're having cranberry juice with the added sugar, you may not want that added sugar. But is there a cranberry extract that could deliver the bioactive constituents in cranberries which are potentially going to protect urinary tract from being infected and that.
Why do you say potential there is that? Because you're academic and you just have to say everything is potential.
You got to do.
We know D Mannose stops bacteria from sticking to the lining of your urinary tract, right?
Well, the FDA this last July just allowed a qualified health claim for cranberry. You could check it out.
Okay, there we go. So now we can say it's real because the FDA said, sorry, I got.
You Navindra with some coffee and Steve, thank you. But again, you know, yes. Delivering the bioactive constituents in a calibrated form with standardized and you know what it is without the unwanted constituents. I think we're there.
You think we're there. I'm feeling that way, too. You can get almost any polyphenol separated out you want. A lot of times you can't get them in a supplement that you want. And also knowing which ones and in what ratio, it feels like there's a little bit going on. But hey, if you eat a salad, you don't know which polyphenols at what levels you got in your salad either. So it's no worse than the current situation of just eating some random stuff. Because a health Expert in the 70s said, Eat a lot of colors.
Exactly. And plants are fundamentally. They're going to be. They're going to variable. They're variable.
