28: How Color Transforms Your Brain, Gut, and Body with Dr. Deanna Minich

Hey, Dr. Minick. Welcome to the show.

Good to be back here with you, Michael.

Yes. I was really excited about this. We talked, I don't know, forever ago now a few years ago, and you're a guest that was on the top of the list. When we decided to do a new podcast, I said I really want to have Deanna on the podcast because I find your work and the way that you present it visually and with words to be so unique and so fun. I always. Luckily, I've liked enough of your posts on social media that no matter how the algorithm changes, I still see them. And I'm just happy to do it because I can always tell before I see a post. I always know that it's yours before I. Oh, of course, because you're. Everything is very branded and very unique, but always very colorful. And I always know that it's yours. And so I'm excited about this and we're going to talk about that, about colors. And your book is called the Rainbow Diet, and there's a new edition coming out. Actually, it'll come out this month and we're recording in February, so it'll be out when this airs. So we'll have a link down below. But it's the Rainbow Diet. And in functional medicine, natural health, naturopathic medicine, insert words. Eating the rainbow or eating a colorful palette of foods is a blanket recommendation that I hear a lot of places, but then it stops right there. And there's not a lot of elaborate on why that's a good idea, why that's essential, what that provides for us. And so I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about that, because the way that you teach this is it makes it into something fascinating and interesting that you want to do.

Yeah, you're right. In some ways it sounds very childlike and even trite to say, eat the rainbow. Back in 2019, I published a paper in the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism on the rationale for each of the different colors that we find in nature. So the way that I talk about eating the rainbow is much in the way of looking at the code, the color code within nature that signals a functional signature. So in other words, there's a meaning to red, there's a meaning to orange. It's not just a pretty color in nature that if we look at each of those colors distinctly, we could see that they have some functional benefit for us, maybe anatomically, physiologically, and even psychologically. So if you want, what we can do is we can unpack each color. I do do this in the rainbow diet book. But essentially looking at the psychology of the color and then looking at, I would say, through scientific eyes, through pattern recognition, why that color is important for us and why we need to have a variety of that particular color.

Sure. Yeah, that would be great, because I've seen enough of it to know. It's exciting for people to learn. Like, it's so interesting because no one, I don't think, really sees orange and then thinks orange means boom. But in nature, reproductive health, which we talked before we went on air, that's also the second chakra, which is the same color, the same topics and everything. I think a lot of people know in nature, like, red often means danger or. But not always because there's strawberries and raspberries. So what do we. Where do you want to start?

Let's start with red. First of all, let me ask you, just so I'm aware, as we go through the rainbow, what color are you resonating with?

Lately, as a general rule, I most resonate with purple. And other than that, recently I would say green.

Green, Okay. I always ask people that because I feel that color is like a nutrient. And so, to me, it's a physical, emotional, mental, and even a spiritual nutrient. Not only does it have the phytochemicals that our body needs, but it has a resonance, it has a frequency, it has a certain wavelength that we might actually need. So you already mentioned chakras. So looking at the esoteric symbolism of each color. So as we go through each one, maybe think about that green and what that might hold for you specifically. But usually I like for people in the audience to think about what color is calling them. And also what color do they feel repulsed by or what color do they not resonate with? I think it's also really important. So that can also say.

Mine's usually red.

Yeah. All right, so let's start with red. Red, just as you mentioned, it's the color of survival, stress response, safety, reactivity. Emotionally speaking, it can be anger. It could also be vigor, vitality, and passion. So I actually see with people that they have a very mixed response to red. Some people love it. Some people feel like it brings them alive. And for other people, they feel like it's too much. It's intimidating, it's too confrontational, it's too responsive and too reactive. It gets their adrenals going. So, by the way, Michael, as we go through each of the colors, the way that I do this is I connect each color to one of the endocrine glands. So When I think of red, I think of stress response and I think of the adrenal glands which are primary in creating and conducting our response in our everyday world. So when we think of red, just as I mentioned, there's this dualistic take on red. And what we see is that red when it comes to food, we'll just talk about food here just for the sake because otherwise we could go on and on because each color has so many different facets to it. But red foods, so when we talk red foods, I'm talking about raspberries, watermelon, I'm talking about pomegranate, I'm talking about, you mentioned strawberries, apples. A lot of these red colors that we see in nature many times corresponds to polyphenols or these molecules that are actually very important for the gut and the immune response. And in fact, even if we look a little bit further, what is that? Some of these compounds look like cortisol, some of these compounds look like the different stress hormones. They have a, a certain structure, a ring like structure that would resemble what the stress hormones would look like in our bodies. They could be beneficial for our immune inflammatory respons. However, there are some cases where red foods can provoke inflammation in the body. Just back to strawberries, because you mentioned it. Some people respond and react to strawberries with a histamine or red response. Some people respond to nightshades like chili peppers or goji berries or red bell peppers because of this nightshade response. Right. Whether it's lectins or whatever it is, red foods can be anti inflammatory, can also be pro inflammatory in their way depending on the individual. But for the large majority, we're looking at red colored foods being a source of polyphenols, also being high in antioxidant potential. And when you look at vitamin C content in foods, coincidentally a lot of the higher vitamin C containing foods are actually red or red orange. So again, very nourishing for the adrenals. So that's red.

Okay. Yeah, sorry, I needed, I already used up my note paper, so. Scrambling to get more notes. Wow. Okay. Yeah, I like most red foods but the color itself like you mentioned, is like off putting. And it's interesting that in a lot of people, I don't often talk to people about their reactions to colors, so I don't know these things.

Yeah. In the past people would say if you go to a job interview, you should wear red because it shows that there's this proactivity or this reaction or the sense of vitality or this sense of being active, which is almost a.

Subconscious interpretation of it. Like from the interviewer, you mean?

Yes, exactly. And again, that's more on the psychology side, not as much on the food side.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the polyphenols are interesting and our audience knows quite a bit about polyphenols. We've recently released a course with Kiran Krishnan on the microbiome and gut healing, and he talks a ton about polyphenols in the microbiome and recommends an extremely diverse diet of colors and the things because of microbiome related. The colors are the polyphenols, which the bugs tend to like quite a bit. And bugs like the colors.

They like the colors. And it also helps us identify them in nature. Right. We can always see if there's a red berry on a green bush. It's like it. It catches the eye. The other thing about polyphenols, though, is that many times the plant is producing them in response to the plant's stress. So they can actually be for our stress. Even though the plant is producing them in response to stress. That can be a healthy thing for the plant and a healthy thing for us and help us with that kind of adaptogenic response to stress.

Wow. So if the weather is a bit off or the climate's a bit off, or if it's having less water or more water or something, if there's some sort of, I guess that would be stress, some sort of trouble for the plant, the berries or the fruit or the vegetable or the leaves or the whatever it is that we eat from that plant tends to be higher in polyphenols in those types of situations.

Correct. Which is why when we think of organically grown food, that food typically has a greater amount of environmental stress. And that could be things like more pests, more just bugs coming at the plants. So then the plant has to create certain compounds like the polyphenols, which are kind of bitter and would be off putting to that pest. Could also be things like you said, like drought. It could be things like climate where it's too hot or maybe it's too windy or maybe it's too cold. But in any case, red does signal resilience in nature, which is why in some ways it's kind of rare. You don't typically see a lot of red, and many times you see it seasonally when we actually need more support from a stress response perspective, especially in the autumn, if we look at apples. And when apples are in season, it's typically September. As our immune system is changing Right. And, like, we start to see more allergies, starting to go up from the summer into the fall. And coincidentally, that's. There's no accident that nature gives us the foods that we need per the season in order to better accommodate that seasonal shift.

Yeah, it's. It's always fascinating. You learn the layers that it goes, and there's always a purpose or a reason why certain things exist, where they do and when they do. And so let's go on to. I said purple or orange. You want to go specific order.

We can go wherever you'd like. We can go. We can jump to purple, which I know is.

I'm just curious, but let's go to. We could. Okay.

Yeah. And typically I put purple in a category with blue and black, because they're on the same spectrum, if you will. Right. We have blueberries that sometimes can be. Depending on the hue, they can look a little bit purple. Blackberries, I'm thinking of grapes. I'm thinking of eggplant, figs, all things purple. And there can also be purple varieties of other colors of foods. So things like carrots.

I heard purple cauliflower here last night.

That's right. So purple cauliflower, purple brussels sprouts, which are.

Oh, I've never seen that.

Yeah. As you and I were talking about, I live in the Pacific Northwest, and we get to see certain things here. And I often wonder if we actually need more of those specific anthocyanins and other polyphenol type compounds here because of our climate, because we don't get a lot of sun. So we might need the signal of nature in order to get our circadian rhythm on track. So when I think of blue, purple, black foods, natural whole plant foods, what I think of is the brain. And so a lot of that literature is we see it in studies where they feed animals blueberries, and we. They start to see changes in learning and memory and cognitive parameters, even mood status. And then also there are a number of clinical trials, so that would be with humans, where we see that even healthy people with no cognitive issues can actually improve certain aspects of their cognition, certain aspects of memory, just by having these blue, purple foods. In fact, there was a study. I posted it on my Facebook long ago, but it was a study in children and how children acutely or quickly respond to having blueberries and having an immediate effect on their. There were certain parameters that were looked at, but basically they were corresponding to things like memory. Now, for adults that we don't tend to see as quick of a response but you do see in clinical trials that there can be a favorable response. And it's thought that the blue purple pigments that are in foods, there is a certain class of compounds and they're called the anthocyanins. Sometimes if they're in a certain other format, they're called anthocyanidins or pro anthocyanins. Pro anthocyanidins. But regardless, that's all part of the large polyphenol category. But it's a specific kind of polyphenol. It's not just your garden variety polyphenol. It's a specific grouping under the polyphenol header. And the way that we think that they work is in multiple ways. One is the gut brain access. So you having Kiran Krishna on to talk about the gut, there's a lot of talk about the gut brain access. And because some of these polyphenols don't get absorbed, but they get metabolized by the gut microbiome, what ends up happening is that a lot of those secondary metabolites can actually have brain promoting effects. There might actually be certain compounds that travel in the body and have an effect in the brain. Other compounds might actually lodge into parts of the brain that are responsible for learning and memory and actually have an anatomical effect where they are within the brain matrix or that matter so that they're shifting the synapses, the synaptic density and kind of like the overall neurotransmission within the brain. And that's the color out of all the colors that we think of within the rainbow. There was a survey now this was done some time ago, but I even see this on people's food logs. And blue, purple, black, these are the colors of food that people get too little of. And that's unfortunate, right, because if they have a brain effect, we would want those foods, especially in schools, in hospitals, and surely in our everyday eating. So blue, purple, black, we think of the brain. So back to what you were talking about with chakras, we think of even the hypothalamic pituitary junction is how I think about it from the endocrine system.

Wow, that's fascinating. And the. I've seen a lot of studies, they use blueberries a lot for the studies around these foods. And I've seen some studies. A friend of mine, I'm friends with the company's called Bio Immersion, they make a blueberry extract where they harvest the wild blueberries somewhere in I believe Scandinavia, I'm not sure. And they make a Super, super, super potent extract, capsules of blueberries. I have an extract like a powderized, I don't know. But you take two of these and it's like eating I don't remember how many pints of blueberries. And the studies done on these compounds of blueberries with like memory and cognitive function and things are more impressive than any pharmaceutical I've ever seen. And it's really expensive. This product is. I don't remember. It's like retails for a hundred and something dollars for a bottle of it because it takes a gazillion wild caught blueberries to make it. But she is at citing studies and sometimes I get emails from this company and they'll have like just oodles of studies around blueberries specifically, but dark fruits and the, and the memory and the brain and the. And I was looking into it because I have a history of concussions and memory issues and things and she recommended it to me so I took it for a while. But it's really impressive. The studies behind the blueberries and the dark fruits.

Yeah, yeah. And in fact there's a lot on blueberries and not so much on some of the other berries like blackberries. And if I were to choose between blueberries and blackberries. Yes, there's a lot of literature on blueberries. But if we look at blackberries, blackberries are deeper in hue. So typically that means they're going to be more super concentrated in certain of these polyphenols. And the thing that makes blackberries a little bit more novel is all the fiber. Just look at all of those little aspects of the BlackBerry. If you were to take out the.

Blueberry is like a water balloon and.

There'S a lot of sugar inside. So really what you're after with the blueberry is smaller is better. Yes. Because the inside is going to be higher water content, sugar content.

I think blueberries are just more popular and probably cheaper. And that's why I would guess that that's been the reason for the studies.

It could very well be. Yeah. And you have certain foundations that support blueberries and. But yeah, they're more ubiquitous. But yes. I'm just clarifying.

There's a blueberry foundation.

You know how they have different groups that are focused on a fruit. Yeah. And I think.

Interesting.

Yeah. But you're right, for the most part, blueberries are much more accessible to people, especially internationally. Not everybody can get to blackberries.

We get them for three weeks here.

Three weeks. Okay.

Blackberries. Yeah. That's been one huge shift of moving overseas. Is Like I don't get to just go buy blackberries, like.

Right.

I get blackberries when there are blackberries and it's about, it's much, it's like a third the length of the blueberry season.

Yeah. So, you know, and, and they're interesting because they are, we get them in the Pacific Northwest. They're like weeds here. They grow.

Yeah, yeah. The spiny, spiny plants, Right, Yeah.

Very different because, you know, we actually have blueberry bushes and we have BlackBerry bushes as well. And it's so interesting how they grow very differently. The blackberries are much closer to the ground and they spread out. Blueberries are like more like a bush where they're growing upwards and a little bit fuller. So it's just. And then you have different kinds of blueberries like, like low bush and high bush they call them, where it's like, you can imagine that you get different antioxidant levels in those that are growing closer to the ground versus up higher with blueberries. The only thing I want to mention for everybody is that they tend to be really resilient. Like people always ask me, Deanna, how do I prepare these foods? Do I have to have them raw, cooked, frozen? These polyphenols in blue, purple and black foods tend to be pretty hearty. The only thing is that they can bleed out into water. So these anthocyanins tend to be water soluble. So just the other day I was making purple potatoes, right? So cut em up. They're gorgeous. Just so pigmented and so rich and just bleeding out this purple color. But when you put them in a little bit of water, you're gonna see that it's blue. So some of those anthocyanins start to come out in the water. They're water soluble. So if you cook them in too much water, you start to lose them. If you overcook purple foods, you're gonna start to lose those anth, those cyan compounds. You're still going to have a density of them and you can see it. But they're very resilient to freezing. So blueberries that are frozen and whenever we pick our blueberries on our properties, we make sure we freeze them. And you can have those year round because the phytochemicals tend to be more stable when you're freezing them. But when you're cooking them, that's another thing that's fascinating.

Yeah, I've noticed that with the purple potatoes as well, certain cooking methods of it there leads like, like dark magical looking things. And then if I boiled it they come out and they're like a light, light purple and they turn into slop and they don't do well that way. So roasting them is much better than. Yeah, I tried. I thought I can make these really cool dark purple mashed potatoes. And that is not how it works.

No, they're more sensitive. But the good thing about purple potatoes versus yellow is that they're lower in glycemic index. So they're actually better for your blood sugar versus the yellow. They're smaller. They tend to be smaller than some of the larger yellow. So that's also an indicator of better glycemic impact. And just think of it, just try to maximize the purples whenever you can. In Italy or wherever people are, when you see purple varieties, get those. Because purple is precious is how I say it. Purple is like a regal color. You don't tend to find it. And when you do find it, you should really just spend a couple extra dollars, euro, whatever on getting the purple because you're actually getting more nutrient density when you look at it and actually more flavor. Some people claim, myself included, that purple foods, like if you have purple potatoes versus a yellow potato, it tends to be more flavorful depending on how you cook it. But for the most, I used to.

Get those in California when I lived there. The little, the little purple potatoes are incredible.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Interesting. Okay, so you mentioned yellow. Is yellow its own color or does yellow get merged?

Yellow gets merged into yellow, tan and brown. So there's a little bit of a spectrum there. And so with yellow it's like red. Yellow could be a double edged sword where if you look at the preponderance of food in our supply, especially like commercial foods, processed foods, there's a lot of yellow yellow. Waffles, pancakes, cereals, breads, pastas. I think we like yellow. Yellow is the color of optimism, joy, happiness. There was a study that was done several years ago now in Manchester, England, where essentially they found that people that chose the color yellow, like a sunshiny yellow, tend to have. They tended to have a happier or a non anxious or depressed mood. So yellow correlates with kind of like, like you would think like the sun, you know, happiness. And so I don't know if subconsciously we think that eating these colors of food will do anything for us coincidentally. And I talk about in the rainbow diet as well, but we don't know the answer to this. But if you look at some of the yellow foods, natural foods like pineapple, plantain and banana, they all tend to be high in serotonin relatively compared to other foods. But what we don't know is if you eat more bananas, are you actually going to be a happier person just because it's higher in serotonin? We don't know that. But I just think it's interesting if you look at the neurotransmitter content of a lot of these different colors of food, and food does contain neurotransmitters, not just the precursors, but what we don't know is the translation of those neurotransmitters within the human physiology. But it's interesting that plants produce acetylcholine, gaba. I've mentioned also dopamine, melatonin, serotonin. It's interesting, right?

And what plants produce gaba? I know I have actually I have a GABA oolong tea that I love that I get it from China. Yeah, that is fantastic. And I'm pretty caffeine sensitive and I can drink that tea in the evening and it doesn't affect my sleep. Where if I drink a green tea or a black tea or a normal oolong tea, it wouldn't be a good idea for me to drink it in the evening. And it's. The tea has GABA or causes the production of gaba? I'm not sure how it works. But are there other foods other than tea that.

There are a bunch. Actually, one of the ones that comes to mind is rice. There's a certain kind of rice, like a purplish. There's a certain kind of rice. They even talk about that it's high in gaba. You just have to look at also the cooking, the preparation of some of these foods and how we might be altering levels of those neurotransmitters and what the translation is.

What do the plants use? Neurotransmitters? Do they have the same function in the plants? Do we understand that?

Isn't that interesting? Let me speak to melatonin for a second because I've actually looked into this a little bit because plants don't have a pineal gland. They're not making melatonin in response to. To darkness in the same way that we are. But what we see in plants is that melatonin is used as a growth factor. So melatonin helps the plant to create more phytochemicals, like glucosinolates, as an example. So that's interesting because even in the plant science world, if you look at the applications of melatonin, sometimes it's sprayed on the Crops to help them grow better. Isn't that interesting? I don't know. Dopamine, acetylcholine. A lot of the others work in the same way. But it's thought that potentially. Yeah, at least I can speak melatonin being a growth factor in plants.

That's fascinating. So the compounds exist in the plants, but they have potentially different functions entirely. Wow. Okay.

Yeah.

And these are. When we ingest neurotransmitters in plants, they get digested and absorbed and affect our own neurotransmitter levels. Do we know that?

We don't know. I mean, to the best that I have looked into this, and there's a very nice review article 2018 published on dietary neurotransmitters. It's a great article. You might want to just PubMed that and just check it out. But I don't think, based on what we know, that we don't know the translation of the plant neurotransmitter to what that does in the human, it could have some effects on things like protecting us at the level of the gut from oxidative stress. Some of these neurotransmitters might have implications in the motility of the gut. That's also been proposed. But to be honest with you, I don't think we have a full understanding of that dynamic. Which just goes to show that nature remains such an enigma. Just when we think we've figured something out. Back in the 1990s, we just thought all plant foods were, in general supplying us with antioxidants. And then we realized, no, we've got epigenetic modifications. We have genetic signals to turn on certain proteins. We have structural impacts of certain things that lodge in the body in certain places. So we have gone beyond the antioxidant story. But I don't think plants contain thousands of compounds. And if you think of it, we have a short list of vitamins and minerals, but truly, we haven't codified all of the different phytochemicals. There have just been estimates. We think that there are 8,000 polyphenols. But what happens when the gut microbiome metabolizes those and spews out a whole bunch of other compounds?

50,000 other things, and then we have no. And then those things are the thing that have the effect, not the polyphenol that we ingested. And then I think what tends to happen is they accidentally probably figure out that one plant compound does cause. There's a cause and effect of ingesting that one compound from, say, broccoli so then they'll isolate that thing and then give it to you in 50,000 milligrams of it. Because if. If a little bit of it does this, then more of it is definitely good and does this. And then we have a whole shelf filled with isolates from plants and vegetables and fruits, which is, well, meaning. I get why they do it because there's been a benefit demonstrated to it. But we don't know often. And Kieran brings this up about the microbiome too. Like, we don't know often know. Does this compound do the same thing when it's by itself? Does it have the same effect in the body as when it's with the other 5,000 compounds from that plant? Just like microbes, if you isolate them, do they behave in the same way than if they're with their other microbes that are their community? And I think that's like a microcosm of the macrocosm of how our science and medicine really works in this culture is like height, like compartmentalization and specialization. And this make it smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller focus. Just there's the. The neurologist doesn't talk to the gastroenterologist, biologist doesn't talk to the. And so then, yeah, that was just a little side rant. But I'm sure that there's magic that happens when all of the compounds are together as they're supposed to be that we can't explain was a much shorter way. I could say that probably that it's.

Such an important point to mention, because if a little is good, more is not always better. In fact, you could throw off the balance of that compound and what it does. Let's just take turmeric as an example. So the science, science, what you will see is that curcumin has been isolated from turmeric root and given in high doses. And not only that, it has been made to be more bioavailable. So it's shoved into the body.

Right, with the black pepper.

With black pepper. Black pepper, yes. The piperine and black pepper helps to reduce the metabolism of it, so it's around longer in the body. But typically, turmeric doesn't always do that. Turmeric, perhaps these curcuminoids as a family are meant to work at the level of the gut, but now we're moving them into the systemic circulation by modifying this with higher doses of one compound, with a bunch of fat, maybe with piperine, and we're putting it into this, this matrix that isn't what we actually see. In nature. Now, I'm not saying that that may not be beneficial for certain people, but I do think we miss the complexity of nature and how it was designed. That brings me to diversity. In the rainbow diet. I talk about four things. I talk about color, which we started with. The second thing is creativity. The third thing is diversity. And the fourth thing is rhythm diversity. I'm sure Kiran probably talked about it because it is all the rage of looking at dietary diversity. People are in food ruts, they're eating the same thing day in and day out. And I often look at food ruts being symbolic of life ruts. We eat the same thing, we don't want to have to think about it, we just move. So then we get the same microbiome and many times we're just focused on one color of the rainbow and we say, okay, I got my tomatoes today, I got red tomatoes the next day, tomatoes the third day. But there's diversity within each of the spectra. So it's not just tomatoes then it's okay, what about raspberries the second day? Or what about pomegranate seeds the next day? Right, you need that diversity. Diversity is a, it's a principle of nature. And it not only helps us with food, but that food coming in that is diverse helps us with the microbiome, which helps us with so many other things. Just a quick short list because I think that this is really important and understated. I did a whole 90 minute presentation just on diversity of the diet and what we see. Here's the short list. Greater diversity imparts better nutritional status, reduced toxin load, better markers of mood and reduced anxiety. Better immune health, especially for babies who are given a more diverse diet earlier in life, actually fare better as adults later in life when it comes to things like allergic diseases. So it's really important. And so people that ask me, they're like, deanna, what? How do I do that? So what you need to aim for, if you look at the American Gut Project, they found that having 30 diverse foods per week versus 10 or under helped with short chain fatty acid production, which then imparted the benefits of short chain fatty acids, like brain effects, immune effects. But what I say is there's another paper that looks at 50 and I've actually done this in one of my groups where I gave everybody a chart and I said, let's just track our unique phytochemicals, our unique plant foods for a week. And I think you can get well past the 30. And the way that you can do that is with herbal teas. Spices. Spices are brilliant in terms of giving us flavor and diversity. Like, I have a curry powder that has 11 spices. So when I use that, that counts. That counts as 11.

And they're probably pretty dense. The volume of it you have to eat to get the phyto. The chemicals that you're looking for is less than you eat this many blueberries. You don't need to eat the spice. You'd. It's.

Yeah.

Because it's dried, it's condensed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's easy. What I'm saying is you can season food normally, make a normal me, and you're still getting enough of the spice to have an effect.

Yeah. And that's why I don't focus so much on quantity. It's more about the quality and the diversity and even changing up the spices on a daily basis. If we just take apples. Here's just one quick thing for people to think about. At least in the States, probably not so much in Europe, based on my recollection of living there. But in the States, you go to the store and you buy one big bag of apples. It's all the same variety. Maybe it's all Red Delicious apples, but it's easy. People just pick it up and they're like, I don't want to think about it about it. But what would be better to encourage diversity would be to spend one minute and hand select different apple varieties, because each of those varieties has a different phytochemical signature. And so then you actually can count each of those towards your diversity weekly score. Whereas if you just did the Red Delicious every day of the week, it's one food. One food.

Yeah, yeah. And that's not even a good one to pick. I'm. I'm. I'm prejudice against red apples. But yeah, the apples here are always separate, and in bushels they're not. Yes, there's one store that has them in bags, but it's more like the supermarket kind of store that I don't really ever go to. At the co op, they're all in bushels, and at the farmer's markets, they're all in independent bushels. But that's a good tip. That goes for pears too. There's always multiple varieties of pears and any fruit or vegetable. I had to choose the other day between green, white and purple cauliflower. So this time I got the purple, next time I'll get the green. They also have the Roman Mesco here quite a bit, which is beautiful. Yeah, that's the fractal one. If anybody doesn't know, it looks like it's like a psychedelic vegetable. And I've known about this for a while, so I always am conscious of trying to make as many different choices. But yeah, he. Karen cites the same studies and talks about how the average American consumes like some shockingly low number of foods. And the first time he said that on a webinar with us, everyone's no way I eat. So he's okay, fine, write down the foods. And so many people came up with 13 for a week because they were counting something thing. But it's the same, it's the same flower, it's the same, whatever. Yeah. And so it really was shocking to people that they eat so few foods. And it was a challenge when people were like, how can I do this? And so it's great that you provide some suggestions and tips to doing that because people get, they hear these things and they get overwhelmed. Like, how am I going to implement this? Or how am I going to do it with my kid? Like, we have an 18 month old and I'm conscious of this. So we're trying to feed them as many different foods as possible. And so my wife spends a lot of time and energy and effort making new meals, trying new foods. And then sometimes he just throws it over his head and we go on to the next one, but she keeps trying. And so then once he tries a new thing and he likes it, we add it to the list. So then the list is growing of what's not going to get thrown over the head into the. That's his thing is it goes this way where now we've built a pretty solid list and he eats a lot of food. And when we take him places, people are shocked at the things that he eats.

Wow.

Like, how do you get a baby to eat this? And I'm like, I don't know, we just put it in front you of of him. That's great because we don't make a big deal out of it. That's. Yeah, I think a lot of people do that with vegetables and plants with their kids. Like, oh, they eat Brussels sprouts or wow, you're eating this. So then the kid thinks it's weird. So then the kid will.

Yeah.

Eat it. Like he ate sardines. Anchovies are the super salty ones. Right? He ate sardines. That's. Yeah. And I was like, you're gonna give him sardines? She goes, do not talk like that around him with it. So then I Walked out of the room because I was just shocked because it's like not a food you picture a baby eating and he just plow down because he didn't know the difference.

Yeah, that's. That's great. And I feel like the more we can do that and I feel like even people who are older, we get into our ruts of what we're comfortable with and we stop buying different foods at the market. Right. We go to the same markets, same place. We don't want to think. I think it's good to diversify. Even brands. Many times I'm not even brand loyal because brands change. Right. So what if you, you have a different brand of. Just name it.

Whether it's sardines and now there's so many brands. I was just back there and I was in Northern California at some giant crunchy hippie grocery store. And when my wife. My wife has multiple autoimmune conditions and she's been symptom free for a lot of years now. But when she was in a flare, we learned about all the gluten alternatives, all the different kinds of like, cassava things and these things and those things. And there was like one brand, cassava flour pasta or this kind of cracker or this kind of thing. There was like the brand of that thing for everything. And when I went to this store in Northern California a couple weeks ago, I like froze in the aisles of those foods because it's multiplied like 5x in the last handful of years. Now there's 12 brands of everything. Now there was a whole section of cassava pasta and the whole section of this and a whole section of that. And that's because it was. People were buying it.

Yes.

But. Yeah. Which is great. But now there's no shortage of the ability to do it. Do that. You could switch brands of whatever thing. You're only limited by your creativity and willingness to pick up a different thing.

Yeah. And even for. Aside from brands, just back to Whole Foods. If you think of your produce section, I'm sure that there's some vegetable or fruit that you haven't tried in weeks, if not months. Right.

Forever. Go to the ethnic, like, different grocery stores. Like there's a Ukrainian grocery store here in my town. And I haven't, I just found out about it and I haven't been there. I guarantee the stuff there is going to be way different than what's in the Italian fruit and vegetable markets. And there's a, A. There's an Asian market. I missed the Latino ones, the Mexican markets. Were fantastic. In California, we don't have any of that. But those grocery stores are a gold mine, right?

They are. Because there's going to be something very different there that you haven't tried. And so just even doing that like once a week, one unique food once a week, it just gets. It tugs at the second principle of creativity. How can you be creative with food? How can you just let go a little bit with your restrictions or just like your set definitions around what to eat and how to eat? I feel like it just can open you up to different things.

So, yeah, I, we, we only touched on like a small fraction of the things I want to because there's so many different layers to this and angles, and I just find it really interesting. But I know we're almost out of time. So the book, the new edition with the rainbow Diet, what is new, what's been added, and what can people expect to find in the book?

It's a total overhaul of the book. So I would even say it's like a separate book that doesn't resemble the first one at all. First of all, it's in full. Col, you mentioned that you see a lot of my social media posts and what I'm trying to do with those is bring out the latest science, bring out the latest practical applications. And one of the biggest questions I would get from people is, deanna, where can I find more? Do you have a book on this? And I was thinking I don't, actually. So then what I did was I basically looked at all of my social media posts, crowdsourced all of that information together and distilled it into chapters on color, creativity, diversity, rhythm. And then I went through each of the colors and then talked about the psychology a little bit, but then brought us quickly into the conversation around foods and what the color signature of those foods would be. And then the book ends with recipes, some basic ones, and people don't have to adhere to that. You can mix and match. I also have a diversity tracker in there. All of the tools that I talk about that people want and download. It's like it's all in one place. It's like having the best of my website and social media in one consolidated book. And I would say it's very accessible for people. I just wanted it to be practical.

I'm sold. If it's anything like your social media. No, it's. And if anybody out there, I'm sure people out there listening, you know, they're familiar with you and your work, it always catches the eye. It's such a unique feel to it and it makes me want to read what's on it and want to know more because of the visual pull towards it. And I think that we don't realize how powerful that can be, especially with different colors and ways of design and including the tools and the tracker and the diversity tracker and those kind of things really help people have those astonishing aha Moments of I ate 11 foods last week. I need to band out a little bit more. So it sounds like a super valuable resource and I'm gonna. I'm sure I could get it here, I would guess.

Yes, actually it is in the eu. It is on Amazon. It is. It's going to be launched, but I'm sure eventually it'll be in different bookstores, but initially it'll be on Amazon. Amazon.

Perfect. I will get a hold of that and the link to get the book and to your website and to your social media and everything else will be below. But if there's one you want to say out loud for people listening and not looking at the show notes, is there a specific place for the best place to go for all of it?

Yeah, it's deannaminick.com so through that site you can get to everything. The blogs, the resources, the books, the social media. All of it's there.

Perfect.

E A N M I N I.

C H Very easy to navigate site too. So everybody go check it out. And thank you so much, Dr. Mink. I always love connecting with you and I learned so much and I scribbled tons of notes all over that I need to make sense of later so hopefully we can connect again because there's so much more I want to talk to you about. So thank you for this one and I'd love to chat more in the future.

Sounds great. Thank you so much.