Eating the Rainbow: The Secret to Vibrant Health and Longevity with Dr. Deanna Minich

Every color in nature confers a functional benefit. And we can run through some of these, you know, red foods, immune health, orange foods, reproductive health, yellow foods, digestion, green foods, heart health, and then blue, purple foods and brain health. And I would say they're not very strict categories because plants don't work in a very siloed way. They're very expansive, and we call that pleiotropic. But there is kind of a functional signature to each of the colors.

Today's guest is Dr. Deanna Minick, who is a nutrition scientist, international lecturer, educator, and Author with over 20 years of experience in academia and the food and dietary supplement industries. She is currently the chief science Officer at Symphony Natural Health. She has been active as a functional medicine clinician, in clinical trials and in her own practice, food and Spirit. Through her talks, workshops, groups, and in person retreats, she helps people to transform their lives through nutrition and lifestyle. All right, well, today's guest on Take Back youk Health is a dear friend, Dr. Deanna Minick. And I am so excited to have her here today. And we are going to be talking about all different kinds of things like rainbows, like the one I saw outside my house last night. No, I'm just kidding. Food and rainbows. And actually, we'll get into some talking about the pineal gland and melatonin. So welcome.

Deanna. Hi, Amy. Great to be here with you. And I'm excited to talk about the rainbow and melatonin and whatever else comes up. So let's see where the conversation takes us.

I know that you have a PhD and it is in nutrition sciences. But, you know, I guess first, how did you get into that? What interests you about it? And then you are really on the forefront of functional medicine. You're at all the conferences, you're generally a speaker. So, you know, how did you work your way into, you know, functional medicine, the Institute for Functional Medicine, all of the things. Just tell us about yourself.

I grew up with a really health conscious mom back in the 1970s when it wasn't really cool to be into health and nutrition. My mom was seen as kind of the, the health nut. And so I, I was polarized to all things healthy eating at that time. And even as a teenager, I had an eating disorder. You know, I would binge on sugar because there was so much in the way of restriction. And you know, we, we just couldn't have certain things in our household. So. But anyway, I was also very keen to, to learn more about science. And so I was always liking biology. I thought I was going to be a medical doctor like you. I was pre med as an undergrad, but then I started working for medical doctors during my summers. And I realized I don't really want to do that. I don't want to sit with somebody for 10 minutes and hurry up and write a script. And I was thinking maybe my mom is actually right. So what I ended up doing was I pivoted over to grad school and I went on for a master's in human nutrition and metabolism. I then did a PhD in essential fatty acid absorption and metabolism. That was another four years. So I wasn't done with school until I was 29. And that was going all the way through from kindergarten. I love to learn. And so where I went from finishing up with my PhD in September of 99, 1999, I have to say, is I then went on to work in the food industry. I wanted to get some working experience. So I did that for about three years. And again, I kind of became very, I don't know, disgruntled, dismayed. And I felt like, wait a minute, this is not what I signed up for either. So I began moonlighting. I began working with clients at a clinic where there was a psychiatrist and a chiropractor. And I began seeing that they were doing something that was really different. They were using some supplements. And I came to know about a company by the name of Metagenics, because that was what they were using. And this is back in 2000, 2000 to 2002. So at that time, Greg Peterson was the rep for that clinic. And he said, you need to come and see Dr. Jeffrey Bland at this seminar. And I didn't even know. I didn't even know who he was or anything about Jeff Bland. But I did go to that seminar and I thought, oh my gosh. And Amy, you and I know that many people have the same story where they go and see Jeff Bland speak. And for those listening who don't know who Jeff Bland is, he is what we refer to him as very lovingly, the father of functional medicine. So I saw Jeff Bland speak and I thought, I want to work with him. So I did. I went and worked with Jeff Bland For 10 years within that, that whole guise of the dietary supplement industry, working with Metagenics. I did a lot more than just formulating products. So we also had a clinic. So we would see people and try out different clinical protocols. And from there, when I stopped at Metagenics, and this is back in 2012, I then went to work at, with Dr. Bland at his personalized lifestyle medicine institute. So I was there with him for about a year, and then I went out on my own and I have my own platform called Food and Spirit. And currently, you know, I do. I'm very diverse, so I'm still in the natural products industry. So I work with a company called Symphony Natural Health, and I help them with their medical team, their scientific positioning. I do a lot of lecturing, like you mentioned. I teach at the university. So diversity is the name of my game. And I'm. I'm not seeing people one on one anymore. Because what I have found that I really resonate with is groups. I love working with groups of people. I love doing retreats. And like, I did one at the Omega Institute, I led a women's retreat on hormones. So, you know, I. I'd like to try out different things, but basically I feel like all paths kind of complimentarily work together in some way. So that's the short skinny on me.

I always love asking people their stories. And so often I have something, at least one thing, if not many in comm. And with so many of, you know, my guests, and that is my mother too, was, you know, my parents were sort of hippies. My mother taught yoga. We ate homemade whole wheat bread, homemade granola, homemade yogurt. You know, the only time we got sugar cereal was when we went to see our grandparents in New Orleans for Christmas. Literally, you know, no sugar in the house at all otherwise. So, you know, I'm trying to. To do that, but a little bit more moderation with my own child, because I do know it didn't happen to me, but I do know people like yourself that, you know, ended up once they were on their own just sort of going in the opposite direction of sort of hog wild, like freedom. But so I guess I. I met you after you already went out on your own. So I actually never knew that story about Metagenics and you with Dr. Bland. And we have released an interview with him. So if anybody wants to go back and listen to that, we have an interview with Dr. Bland. Well, you are pretty famous for one, being very colorful. Look at your bright green. I always see you in these beautiful colors. And I feel like it's a reflection of what you're always talking about. And I think if we say, okay, eat the rainbow, most people know what that means, but really, can we dive into what that means? Because I feel like you are one of the premier people that really talks about all the individual foods, the nutrients that we can get from all these beautiful colors. So can we talk about why you advise doing that? You know, what does that mean? And then we can dive into, you know, maybe some of the most nutrient dense, colorful foods for people.

The reason why I have, I would say, centered around this whole eat the rainbow concept is because after being in nutrition science for so long, I have seen things come and go, whether it's high protein, low protein, high carb, low carb. This is good for you, that's not good for you the most. I would say that the one thing that has a lot of staying power in the literature is that eating whole foods of various types are good for you. And we know that I'm not the only one saying eat the rainbow. There are different opinion leader organizations out there which are saying, eat five a day, these different colors. So I'm really just bringing it forward in a bit of a different light. And what I would say is that eating more fruits, vegetables, and different plant foods are helpful for reducing the risk for chronic disease. Yes, we all know that. And that's kind of like an, kind of a duh, right? We, we know that that's not anything new. But what I think is new is understanding the how and why it actually works. And there's another point, Amy, that I wanted to bring out as well, which is that most people don't realize this, but there's more and more literature to suggest that eating these plant foods confers better mood. In other words, your colorful foods make for colorful moods. So if you're eating better, your mental health benefits. And there is also a mechanism for that through the gut, brain access and a lot of these different pigments. So I do think that, And I thank Dr. Bland for this. You know, it started in my graduate school days because I studied a class of phytochemicals called carotenoids. So that was the subject of my, my thesis at the time. Looking at lycopene, looking at beta carotene, and trying to understand their role in oxidative stress or how they work in the body is an antioxidant. Well, we've come a long way from that. And we now see that these phytochemicals are much more complex than we originally thought. So they're not just antioxidants. Yes, they are that, but they're doing a lot of other things. They're changing DNA expression, they're changing the cell stress response. They're even appetite and satiety. They're changing how insulin works and other metabolic signals. So there are thousands of These different phytochemicals. And when we think of the macronutrients, we think of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. The three musketeers, I call them. Then you have vitamins and minerals, which, you know, we definitely know that those are important. Phytonutrients are separate from macronutrients and micronutrients. They're in their own category, and there are thousands upon thousands of them. In fact, I don't even think we have a good count. Last time I looked in the literature, we're looking at probably something like 10,000 and on up compounds. And that doesn't even include what the gut microbiome does to those compounds to create more therapeutic compounds. Like one example is pomegranate. If we think of pomegranate, great food. I just bought some yesterday. It's. It's a seasonal food. You look at some cultures, they look at pomegranate for fertility. It has so many different benefits, heart health. So when you actually look at pomegranate and its interaction with the gut microbiome, what you see is you get different metabolites. And one of them is called urolithin A. Urolithin A is separate from the ellagic acid, which is a phytochemical in that pomegranate. So there is just more and more that we're learning about these phytochemicals. And every color in nature confers a functional benefit. And we can run through some of these, you know, red foods, immune health, orange foods, reproductive health, yellow foods, digestion, green foods, heart health, and then blue, purple foods and brain health. And I would say they're not very strict categories because plants don't work in a very siloed way. They're very, you know, they're very expansive, and we call that pleiotropic. But there is kind of a functional signature to each of the colors we know.

I mean, you know, better than I do, but I feel like we're always learning about pomegranate. But yet it's a fruit that, you know, it's kind of really hard to come by unless you're out searching for it. I mean, even in a Whole Foods, you might find a few over here to the side, I guess. I mean, this is kind of an odd question that's just come to me, but I mean, what. What is making a particular food more popular than another? You know, like, why. Why hasn't pomegranate caught on? Because I feel like every other meeting that I go to, somebody's talking about the benefits of pomegranate.

Yeah. But if we just look at pomegranate in general, number one, it's like you said, it's not very accessible to most people. When I was in Cyprus, I was in Cyprus some years ago. They have pomegranate everywhere. They have pomegranate juice stands, but you don't see that here. You might see it a little bit in the Mediterranean, but it is a more Mediterranean oriented fruit. The other thing is it's expensive. The other thing is it's seasonal fruit. The other thing is that what you really want is the seeds. And it takes a lot of work to get to that pomegranate, you know, and so what I bought yesterday were the pomegranate seeds. I didn't buy a whole pomegranate.

Well, actually, that leads me to another question before we get to the one that we originally started with, which is, can we, can you talk about the phytonutrients and from fruit, say that you're picking yourself fruits or vegetables versus maybe, you know, you've bought this because it's more convenient to you, but it's sat on a shelf in a package. Is it losing, you know, its, its phytonutrients, and if so, is there any way to quantify that amount versus you know, maybe once we cook them or they're sitting in our refrigerator? I mean, just, you know, all of our food these days is being, for most places is being imported. It's traveling by truck. You know, are there studies talking about the, the loss of these phytonutrients by the time that they're getting onto our plate and into our body, if we're not growing them ourselves?

I think what you're alluding to is the importance of eating seasonal and local. So depending on where you live would depend on what you have that is already immediately available to you. Otherwise, if you look, even if you go to a large grocery store, a chain grocery store, what you will see is that these berries are from Mexico or these grapes are from Portugal. And so, yeah, that's not really ideal. But still, it's better than not having those fruits and vegetables. So that's one aspect. The other thing is what we do to the food. So where are we storing the foods? Are we keeping them refrigerated? Like as an example, it's. It's almost autumn officially, and there is just an abundance of plums in my neighborhood. In fact, my neighbor asked me to come over and pick plums because they're just like, you know, popping from the tree as we were standing there talking. They're dropping from the tree. It's just, you know, it's that time. So I took them home and I knew that we weren't going to eat all of these plums. So putting them in the refrigerator because that's going to reduce the oxidation of the plums. So I think looking at how we store foods and then also looking at how we cook them, here's one of my favorite hacks for increasing phytochemicals in foods. Many of us do want our food cooked. So before we cook the foods, what I would recommend, and by the way, I think that a combination of raw and cooked is good. And in fact probably somewhere in the middle with steaming because you have to look to the color, the color of the food. Just like carrots. You can cook the heck out of carrots to the point that it becomes like a lackluster bland color of orange. What you really want is the vibrant color of orange, right? So use color as a guide. Broccoli, same thing. Steam it to just when it gets bright green, don't let it get to lime green or this depleted looking green. That's a signal that you're losing phytochemicals. The phytochemicals track with color. But let me go back to the hack that I think is is science based and people love when I mention this and they don't realize this. So let's imagine you bring bag a bag of carrots home from the store. Carrots. When you chop them, you know carrots are living, right? Unless you're buying cooked carrots, it is living matter. So it's a living plant when you chop them, that is perceived as stress by the plant. And the plant responds by making more phenols or certain kinds of phytochemicals. Now the more that you stress the plant, the more phenols you're going to get. So there was a publication and I even have this on my Instagram because people were like, oh my gosh, I didn't realize this. Where when you shred a carrot versus just cutting it, you can potentiate the amount of phenols by like five times. In fact, I think the number was five, two. So just think of it. If you just spend a little bit of time before cooking because I mentioned carrots specifically, because carrots do need a little bit of cooking in order to liberate the carotenoids and make them more bioavailable. So then the next question you're probably thinking is, well, does that mean people should just buy shredded carrots in the store? Because who has time just to sit there and shred their carrots? That's what we don't know. But I can postulate that the, the phenolic acids, a lot of these phytochemicals, they break down in heat, light, and oxygen. So if you buy a bag of shredded carrots that's been sitting in the store for some time or under the lights and within a bag of oxygen, you know, some degree of air, you're probably still getting some degree of decay. I think it's better to spend the time to maximize just by doing it just right before the food prep. And the same thing holds for broccoli and onions and a number of other vegetables.

Is there an amount of time that you need to wait after you've cut them, before you start to cook them?

You do need to allow for a little bit of time. So typically it's not perfect in the literature as far as how long that is, but in general, 20 to 40 minutes. So what you can do is you can shred the carrots or cut the broccoli, get those florets ready and kind of go off, do that first, and then go off and do other things to get the meal ready and then map it out that way. Now, if you're not perfect in that way and you say, well, there's no way I can wait 30 minutes for my broccoli to make enough sulforaphane, then what you can do is just, just do your best. I mean, still letting the broccoli sit or the carrots sit. 15 minutes is better than not doing that at all. So I think just a little bit of, of that waiting. But the most important thing is that you inject some kind of mechanical stress. And I know some people feel like, oh, the poor plant, you know, it's. But that's what the plant does. That's. When we think of organically grown food, that's what we're allowing the plant do, is to exercise that muscle of what we call hormesis, or in humans, that's called resilience. It's kind of like with the mitochondria, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger kind of a concept, right? And so with plants, when they're making more of those phytochemicals and they're being subjected to some kind of stress, it's actually better for people many times.

So are we to extrapolate that out to our fruit as well? I Mean, I think most people do cut an apple, but, you know, should we cut a grape? Should we cut a plum?

To some degree, yes, because those, those foods contain polyphenols, and that is part of the stress response of the fruit. The other way that you can extract and create some stress to that plant or that fruit is through thorough chewing. So let's. That's something that people just don't do enough of. And there's no real good study where they looked at chewing versus cutting and dicing. So I can't give you the specifics of that. But still, the principle of chewing is really relevant in this case. And that's why I often will say to people, chew your smoothies. You know, allow that. The first of all, chewing is important for the teeth and cognition. So, so each of the teeth, and I learned this from Mary Ellen Chalmers, who I teach with at the Institute for Functional Medicine. She's great. She is a functional medicine dentist. And she initially talked in one of the modules about chewing, stimulating cognition, and how we're having a lot of liquid foods and not being attentive to the first pass of maximizing the teeth, which we often think of as the digestive system, but it's also the connection to the brain. So if we are having fruits, chewing, well, not opting out of the skin, because that's where most of those phytochemicals are hanging out. In fact, if I think of now, there is a paper on this, on onion, so. And also on lettuce varieties. So the closer in that we have the, the outer part of the plant, whether it's the outer leaves of cabbage, um, and this is why lettuce, when it grows in such a way that it's more expansive and open to the sun, then all of those leaves get an equal amount of stress. But if you have a tight head of lettuce that doesn't have. You'll notice that the inner part of it doesn't have the same color as the outer. The outer is going to be more dark, more deeply hued in these phytochemicals. And all too often what happens is people take off that outer layer and get rid of it. And that is the most nutritious part of the plant. Most people are concerned that you have pesticides, insecticides, different things on the outside. And this is where you have to kind of balance again, if you're buying organically grown produce, that's first and foremost. And then I think having a biodegradable type of soap or emulsifier as an example, I use Dr. Bronner's. You know, that's just something like some soapy water just to clean off the outside. But I do make sure that I eat the outside. So when you talk, Amy, about the apple, you know, I think back to my grandmother who used to peel the apples before she would make the pie. And I'm. And I would sit at the table with her as a child and I would just eat the skins because I just like the taste. And many times we do that with cucumbers. We're peeling it, we're peeling potatoes. That's where the good stuff is. So I think we want to be really conscientious about making sure that when we are eating fruit that we're bringing the peel in.

Yes. As you were, you know, talking about all these plants and growing. I have about eight or nine different raised beds here where I, you know, we've recently picked our carrots. We have lettuce. I did have a deer jump the fence this year for the first time and eat a lot of things when I was traveling, but we still got a decent amount of, you know, lettuce, cabbage and, and carrots. So. But we just been, you know, eating the carrots, not, not chopping them unless it's for a salad or something. So. Well, let's get back to. Before we switch gears, because I know I do. We do want to get into melatonin. Just talking about the different colors of. You know, looking at your Instagram, you have a lot of graphics showing various colors, as you mentioned, initially associated with different parts of the body, maybe even associated with the chakras of. So would you like to, you know, walk us through that, please?

Yeah, sure. And in fact, I have a kind of the operating system of how I do that and how it's organized. And that is people can download that just as a general roadmap. So when I think of red, red colored foods again, back to the pomegranate, back to cherries and watermelon, red grapes, tomatoes. And by the way, let me just back up before we start going through these different foods because many times I'll get questions. So do you have to be a vegan? Do you have to be vegetarian in order to follow this way of eating? And the answer is no. Plant foods can be a common denominator to many different eating styles. Mediterranean diet, Nordic diet, traditional Japanese diet, many different ways of eating in Africa and throughout the world. Now, some people might say, well, what about the carnivore diet? And the only thing I'll say there is that many of the animals you just mentioned, deer, are actually herbivores and getting plants. So we are all taking in plants. 80% of the biomass on this planet is plants. We are surrounded by plants. So there's really no avoiding them. And I know that some people have concerns about things like they call them anti nutrients in these plants so that they can't eat these certain things because of lectins, oxalates, goitrogens, phytates, tannins. I think that's like the chunk of them. What I would say is that we can modify a lot of the effects of those compounds by how we prepare the foods. Again, back to cooking, not having a huge 12 ounce raw kale smoothie every morning. You know, I think that we have changed a lot of our ancestral ways of eating. So I just want to set the stage with that first. Because some of the pushback I get talking about eating the rainbow is that, oh, but my eating style doesn't allow me to partake. But nature has such a wide palette, like an art artist palette of colors, that you don't have to pigeonhole yourself into one particular food and, and say, oh, because I can't have nightshades, I can't have red foods, right. So I just want to state the obvious because many times that's, you know, I often thought, how can anybody refute eating the rainbow? But people have refuted eating the rainbow to me.

And the other thing that I would say to that is, you know, our food has changed, right? So maybe if you feel like, you know, I in general don't do well with the nightshades, I know that. But I can, you know, I grow cherry tomatoes out here, my daughter likes them and I can do just fine eating an organic heirloom cherry tomato. But if I'm going to the store or out at a restaurant having tomatoes in a salad, it's something that, you know, I just don't do well with. So it may also be as, as I also advise people, you know, if you're eating organic, you're eating an heirloom variety. You may tolerate something that you can't tolerate after it's been, you know, hybridized or genetically modified or maybe it's not organic, things like that.

That's really true. And I'm exactly like you when it comes to nightshades. And for me, it's the dose that makes the poison. So if I have too much, if I have some kind of sauce that is tomato sauce versus a fresh tomato, I respond very differently. So yeah, I love everything that you just said because it just makes you realize how complex foods are. And what we also know is that many times these supposed antinutrients. And that's why I'm, I'm kind of saying anti N. Are they really anti nutrients or are they just plant compounds that are signaling that something's awry in our body, especially the gut microbiome. And I think of that with oxalates and oxalates. People's response to oxalates could signal something like a mineral insufficiency and it can also signal how we're cooking food. So anyway, just wanted to say that I think that the smoothie with the.

Kale, right, I mean, I think, you know, kale was probably intended to be eat. Eaten, you know, as maybe steamed kale, which people are not gonna wanna be eating bowls and bowls of that or as a salad. And you know, if you're juicing it or you, as you said, putting it in a smoothie every single day, you know, you are getting so much more of it than you naturally would if you were eating it in a steamed form. I mean, most people, unless maybe you're you or Terry Walls, who's going to eat a big bowl of steamed greens that are somewhat bitter, most people are not doing that. But when you add it into a smoothie with lots of fruit and things like that, then suddenly it, it seems delicious and maybe you're getting a lot more of it.

That's it exactly. Uh, so again, it's looking at how we're preparing the food and how that might be creating the issue. So let's go through the colors. First of all, let me ask you, what is your favorite color? I'm curious today. Anyway, it may change, but do you have a color that you resonate with?

I do, but I. And we'll see if you can find a food with it. Sort of like seafood. Seafood. Seafoam green, like a teal kind of green.

Okay, so we'll, we'll get to blue green. I, I thought that would be the case because that's a thyroid color. Okay, so. Okay, so that's, I guess, sort of.

The color of my books.

But yes, it is. Which are about thyroid health and autoimmune disease. So it cracks perfectly. All right, so first color being red. So when we think of red, I do think of the pro inflammatory of red that we just discussed and I think of the anti inflammatory aspects of red. So if you look at a lot of the literature, what you find is that red colored Plant foods, through the polyphenol content, help to quell the inflammatory response. It's almost like the red color helps with the red color in our bodies. It can. Or it can create more histamines, such as you and I with tomatoes or. Yeah, just. Just other things. So when I think of red, I think of inflammation and bringing in more polyphenols that would be the code for the phytochemical. When I think of orange, orange colored foods like the carrots that we were talking about, I think of reproductive health, especially women's health. There have been some really interesting studies looking at bringing in more orange colored foods or foods that contain certain carotenoids. And again, carotenoids, that just refers to a whole big category of different plant compounds that tend to be multicolored many times. Orange, red, yellow, and even a little bit of green. And what's really interesting is that some of these carotenoids find their way into certain parts of the body that have hormonal regulation. For example, in the ovary, there are 13 to 14 different types of carotenoids that are responsible for ovulation. We also find them in the skin, which is a highly endocrine organ. We find them in the brain. We find them in the breast. We also even find them, if we think about men's health, in sperm. And in fact, a lot of the carotenoids, because of their antioxidant potential and perhaps other things as well, might be conferring some kind of protection. So I think of orange colored foods and there are other studies too, I won't go into them. But basically eating more of these carotenoids can be protective for women's health. Kinds of conditions that would connect to hormones. The other color would be yellow. And yellow is kind of a double edged sword because sometimes yellow could mean things like cakes, crackers, cookies, breads, pastas. And the kind of yellow that I'm talking about here would be more of the, I would say the prebiotic starches of squashes. And then also looking at acidifying or catalytic transformative agents, things like lemon bioflavonoids, looking at pineapple as a source of enzymes. Right. So yellow is. That's like the seed of our digestive fire. So a lot of these yellow foods that are processed could metaphorically put out that digestive fire, or we could rev up the digestive fire. We could rev up, rev up the yellow of bile through things like dandelion. So kind of like the yellow, green and then green. That's my Favorite color. It always has been. I just have something about green. And green is, you know, if we look psychologically, there's also a connection to each of these colors. Green is the color of healing, of nature, of growth, of plants. And it's also the color of chlorophyll. And chlorophyll is an amazing antioxidant. I think it's often overlooked. And it has a source of magnesium. We also find that green foods are rich in folates, rich in vitamin K1, which I would call, you know, I call vitamin K, the next vitamin D. Because there are many different effects of vitamin K, not just for coagulation, but bone health. You know, it really kind of connects throughout the body. So when I think of green, I think of heart health, I think of the blood vessels, I think of a source of nitrates. If, for example, if we think of beet greens, arugula, or even lettuces like we were talking about, many of those contain nitrates, which in our bodies convert to nitric oxide, which act as a vasodilator. Blue green. I don't normally talk about blue green, but since you like teal and this kind of aquamarine color, there aren't a lot of blue foods. Right. Just classic blue foods. But if we think of the. The way that I talk about blue green is in the way of looking at sea plants. I don't call them seaweeds, I call them sea plants. So talking about the green plants growing in the blue ocean. So if we look at many of these, wakame, nori, dulse, you know, not all of them are. Are green. But, you know, if we think of, again, plants in the water giving us a lot of the different minerals that we need for healthy thyroid function. And I think this is one of the food categories where people don't get enough of these types of sea plants. You look at the Japanese diet, the traditional Japanese diet, and it's replete with these high mineral broths that are coming. The minerals are coming from a lot of these different sea plants. And I wish that people were eating more of them and good sources of them too, because they can bind to metals and other agents within the ocean, which is becoming polluted. So we just have to look at source.

Yes.

And then I'll just close with blue purple. So blue purple is for the brain, and there's a lot of good data. In fact, we could just do one podcast on blue purple as a color for the brain, because there is a lot of literature on using things like Concord grape juice, blueberries. Not as much on blackberries, but I just think that, you know, if I had to choose between a BlackBerry or a blueberry, I'm going for the BlackBerry because you have and they're in season right now. I live in the Pacific Northwest, so they're all. I go for a walk, they're all over the place. Nature is preparing us for the winter. So the blackberries I think are great because if you look at all of those little sections of the BlackBerry and you stretch out those skins, that's fiber. The blueberry gives you fiber as well, but it's also giving you a lot of the sugar part on the inside. What we're really after is the skin. So a lot of these blue purple varieties. And living in the Pacific Northwest, I must say that we have the option for purple carrots, purple cauliflower, purple brussels sprouts, which are gorgeous.

Wow, I have not seen those.

Oh, they're so pretty. And I, I feel like it's. You get two things. You get the gorgeousness of a brussels sprout and all of the benefits for detoxification and then you get the purple for the brain as a value add. So whenever you see purple, what I tell people, and that's my nieces, I have a 10 year old niece who I believe is a little bit older than your daughter. Right. And as soon as she could speak, I was asking her, ellie, what's your favorite color? And you could see she's pointing to purple. And as she started to speak, she would say purple. And then continue to make. You know, it's so interesting how kids, even from a very young age, we kind of have that connection to color with kids. And that's how I like to talk with kids about food. And that's how I even talked with her about eating. The rainbow is okay, where's your purple? You know, that's your favorite color. She would wear purple. And then we talked about making that rainbow smoothie. But you know, it doesn't have to just stop with kids. You know, color keys into, I think all ages through, through life. Right. Like I could talk with a 50 year old, I could talk with an 80 year old. We can all talk about the rainbow on the plate and make it fun and not so analytical like you and I growing up with our moms, so into the medicinal aspects of food. But food can also be fun and I think that's why we have to rainbow fi it.

Are you looking to have, you know, every color or as many as possible from the rainbow at each meal or is the goal to have, you know, a rainbow throughout the day?

A rainbow throughout the day. But one strategy might be that you try to stack one meal in favor of the rainbow a little bit more than others so that you're especially blue purple. Blue purple foods are not easy to come by. Right. And in fact, there was even a survey done back in 2009, and blue purple foods were the most missed category, which is concerning, especially if you think about the role of blue purple foods in the brain, whether learning, memory, and. Or mood. So what I would say is be thinking of the color that is most challenging for you, and typically that tends to be blue purple. Uh, I like to make sure that I have my breakfast. I. I'm more of a breakfast eater, so eating breakfast like a princess, lunch like a. A queen, and dinner like a popper, as the saying goes. Right. So, but I stack my rainbow earlier in the day because I just eat more food at that time. So I try to get the Rainbo. And then even if you. If you decide to make a smoothie and you're putting in the rainbow, but it doesn't look like the rainbow at the end, it still counts as the rainbow. Just so people know it doesn't have to look in whole food form as the rainbow.

Well, we always have blackberries and generally blueberries in our refrigerator. But I think we could definitely do better at, you know, trying to get. I mean, I do when I see them get the rainbow carrots and, you know, the. The cabbage, but I'm probably. I've not seen the Brussels sprouts. It's very difficult to find the purple, you know, cauliflower. So, you know, could do better on our end. But we definitely always have, you know, the blueberries and the. And the blackberries in our refrigerator. But I'm sure you want us be changing, you know, having different varieties as well.

Yes. And some other ideas would be, especially for kids, I think of raisins. I think of, you know, grapes are in season right now, you know, and the reason I think that this is really beautiful how nature informs us. Nature tells us when to eat certain things. And a lot of these purple foods come up during the autumn months. And I think it's because of those polyphenols which are helping our body essentially to move into a different season. So figs would be great. Purple potatoes would also be another great one. And I think that those are relatively expensive, accessible. They're also lower glycemic, so they don't have as much of a Blood sugar spiking effect. They tend to be smaller. So that's better. And then, Amy, the only other thing that I didn't mention was brown, white, and black foods. Sometimes people ask me that. They're like, well, why aren't you talking about those colors? Well, brown foods also tend to be rich in polyphenols. And sometimes I tuck them under the blue purple, and I put black in that category because just like blackberries, that color of blue is so deep that it presents as a black pigment. Right. So I think of black seeds, black olives, as another example. There are so many great other foods that don't look rainbow, but they surely fit into the rainbow. Then white foods. And when I was growing up, I used to come home crying because my mom would give me these just like you with the brown bread sandwiches. And I wanted wonder bread. I wanted white bread like all the other kids. And then my mom would say, deanna, don't you know, you shouldn't be crying. You shouldn't have any kind of feeling. She said, the whiter the bread, the quicker you're dead. So you don't want white notes. So I think in my mind growing up, I had always had this thing of like, okay, we shouldn't have white foods. They're not healing. White salt, white sugar, white flour. But then when you start to make the list, you know, you have coconut, you have garlic, you have onions. You know, the white of food, the flesh of an apple on the inside counts as a white food. So I would just want to mention that because I don't want people to overlook the. The yellow, tan, beige, brown spectrum, nor the blue, purple, indigo, black, or even the white, because they also count. It's just that we have to look at both sides of that spectrum. Where do we see those foods in healthy forms and in less healthy forms?

It's funny, we literally saw rainbow last night, and my daughter said, you know, where's the brown? Mom, wouldn't it be funny if there was brown and a in a rainbow? Maybe if we mixed all the colors together. So now you're talking about the brown foods.

Well, I love that, actually, because the rainbow goes to the ground. We see it connect to the earth, right? The terrain, the soil. That was very astute of her. She.

I hope you meet her one day. She's just a really smart kid. Let's switch gears, because I know we have only a limited amount of time, and we wanted to touch on a little bit about the pineal gland and then also melatonin. So, you know, I just got back from Joe Dispenza's retreats. He's very, you know, into the pineal gland and connecting to source through the pineal gland. Pineal gland is also, you know, has a lot to do with regulating of sleep and melatonin. So just throwing it out there. You want to start with the pineal gland and then let's talk about melatonin.

Wow, this is a total shift and it's very exciting. So you're going to have to hold me back on this one. The pineal gland is part of the endocrine circuit, right? So we have the pineal pituitary, hypothalamus, the thyroid, which you talk a lot about. The heart is an endocrine gland. The pancreas, the ovaries, testes and adrenals, and we could even say the liver, the skin, I mean, the gut. So many other aspects are endocrine. So the pineal gland is connecting into the circadian rhythm. In fact, in my opinion, it's less about sleep and it's more about circadian rhythm monitoring and signaling. So when Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about the pineal gland, in ancient traditions this was seen as the seat of the soul. Many ancient traditions talk about meditating up, like having your gaze upward into that pineal gland. Even Rene Descartes, you know, back into the 15th, 16th century, was talking about this gland and he was a mathematician, a philosopher. So there's a lot of philosophizing about the pineal gland. What I can say from a scientific point of view is it is our register with light and darkness. And light and darkness are the cues that keep us in alignment with nature. And the way that we relate to light and also to darkness will inform everything down to the cellular level. In fact, I was just telling a colleague, Amy, that even though I've studied nutrition all of these years and many times that becomes the, you know, there's the phrase, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So anytime there would be something that comes up from a health perspective, oh, let's just bring in a food. Well now I almost see that the circadian rhythm just goes beyond nutrition exercise. Like everything fits underneath the circadian rhythm. And the way that we play with this will determine our outcomes. And one example of that would be, for example, shift workers, which flip flop the day night rhythm. So my dad growing up, I saw him, he did shift work and he went through three different shifts. And that's even more challenging to the circadian rhythm system because you don't even get aligned to just flipping the day or night. Now it's flipping all the time.

I did that as an ER doctor. So I definitely said the best thing I did for my health was to get off of being an ER doctor, because one day it would be 4:00am, one night. You know, it truly was.

Absolutely. And we. How do we take care of our shift workers? Because there's a need for them, and some people need to do that function. Right. And what you see in some of the studies are, in fact, that people that do shift work or who have circadian misalignment, they have increased risk for certain kinds of cancers. One of those types of cancers is breast cancer. In fact, I was just. Funny we should be talking about this today, because I was just looking at the literature and I was thinking, how far back did we know that there was a connection between melatonin, electric light, and breast cancer? 1969, there was a paper looking at a mammary cell line and looking at the effect of artificial light, looking at the effect of melatonin. We've known this for some time. It's just that it's been pigeonholed into the science within cell models, animal studies. But there is a researcher, Dr. Paolo Lasoni. He's actually a medical doctor, and he started to use. And if you look at his work, L I S S O N I Paolo Lisoni, I have had the opportunity to interview him. He is now retired, but he has done so much to work with people on using melatonin during their different cancer treatments. And in fact, what he would suggest from his research, because he has at least 50 studies that I have seen, is that melatonin made the chemotherapy work better. Now he has certain dose regimens for that that would supersede what we would see as a physiological dose. And those doses were just meant to be used in that therapeutic context with his oversight. So he was a pioneer in that. In fact, he was also very interested in psychoneuroimmunology. And he talks about that. He has one study that showed that the outcomes with melatonin were better for those who had spiritual faith. Now, you could take that back to Joe Dispenza and say, like, wow, so if we're really cued into the pineal gland and we're, you know, in. In the chakra system, that is considered the crown chakra, or the connection with. With spirit as they would see it in those ancient traditions. Is there something to that We've actually seen in science that there's some connection between Even meditation and melatonin production by the pineal gland. In fact, there was one study that showed that seasoned meditators, people that had been meditating for 10 years and beyond. So we're not talking like a weekend meditator. We're talking like somebody who's done this. They have higher levels of melatonin than people who do not meditate.

You've mentioned a lot of things, so let's, you know, begin to unpack some of these. And I think one of the biggest, you know, things to distinguish is sort of natural melatonin levels, the amount of melatonin we need to fall asleep versus these larger, much, much larger dosages. Cause I'm familiar with that. In fact, my sister, who was doing shift work as a ICU nurse, recently diagnosed with breast cancer. And so I got very into that research and started taking 180 milligrams of melatonin a day myself. Yeah, because of the rat research, you know, showing these dosages preventing metastasis. So let, let's. Can we walk through sort of, you know, maybe what our body is naturally making? I'm sure this is something that, you know, declines as we age. We saw with COVID you know, having these higher melatonin levels were also protective. During COVID some people were taking melatonin. But there is this sort of dose to help us fall asleep and maybe offer some protection. And then there are these way, way larger dosages that maybe help protect against metastasis, radiation. If you're having some sort of radiographic stimulus study done. Can you break all this down for us so that we can distinguish these things for our listeners?

Let me just first say that anybody considering melatonin supplementation should really talk with their healthcare practitioner. And the reason why I say that is because melatonin can interact with a number of medications. It can make your blood pressure re go lower. So if you're taking a, an anti hypertensive, you may have to adjust your dose. And it's also an hypoglycemic agent. So it's, it's doing a lot of different things. So just please note that. But I do think that your question about dose is the most confusing and contentious point that's out there about melatonin. And the way that I see it, after talking to so many different academics doing melatonin research and neuroscience research, is that you have a physiologic dose. So what we normally produce from the pineal gland, and by the way, we have pineal melatonin, then we have the rest of the body, Melatonin, which is very different from what the pineal gland is producing and why it's producing it. This is where people get confused about, oh my gosh, melatonin is a hormone. If I take it, it'll stop my body from making it. But that is, that is not correct. There are different. The same molecule of melatonin is produced throughout the body for different reasons. So I just want to set that stage. When we talk about dosing with melatonin, many times people are thinking of the pineal melatonin. So if we look at children, children produce the most amount of melatonin. They will their whole lives. So on average, pineal melatonin, about a milligram is what you're getting from the pineal gland as a child. So we're talking about, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 before puberty. As a child goes through puberty, that level of endogenous melatonin from the pineal gland starts to go down. So let's just say that by the time we're in middle age, we're 35 years old, we're making probably something on the order of 0.3 to 0.6 milligrams. Now we move our way into our 50s, we're making probably about 0.1 milligrams. So that's substantially reduced from that 1 milligram that we had when we were children. Many people would suggest that the reason for a lot of the uptick of a lot of these chronic diseases with age could be from low. Melatonin could be from other hormones as well that start to pause or lower during this time of life. Because melatonin is not just for sleep. Here's another one of the misconceptions. Melatonin has at least six functions. Number one, it's a chronobiotic agent. It is released from the pineal gland to synchronize the clock system in every cell of the body, especially muscle and especially liver. Really important for our metabolic health. Number two, it's an incredibly potent antioxidant. It's fat soluble and water soluble. So it can go through many different body compartments. So from the aspect that you mentioned with COVID and other viruses and the immune system, you can see where it would come into play. It's also an anti inflammatory. So during, you know, a lot of the research that was published on COVID 19, they were looking at using melatonin to quell the cytokine storm. But in general, it's an anti inflammatory. The other thing is that it's a mitochondrial regulator. In fact, most of the melatonin that you're making outside of the pineal gland is in the gut and within every cell of the body. And it's made through the mitochondria, where the most amount of oxidative damage is occurring within the cell. You know, we have thousands of mitochondria in this cell. And so melatonin helps the mitochondria to deal with a lot of those free radicals. The other function is that it helps with the brain detoxification at night. So at night, the brain cells shrink up to 60% to allow the convection of a lot of waste out of the brain. And melatonin is part of that process. Now, if you start to connect the dots with not getting enough sleep, having high amounts of toxic amyloid and other compounds in the brain, and not being able to move that through the glymphatic fluid, we know that melatonin plays a role in that process. And then finally, you know, I just think about it as a, it's called a phase separation agent, meaning that within the cell it can prevent viruses from setting up factories of spewing out proteins. So it, it helps, I would say, overall, with cellular maintenance, so good cellular health. So you can see that I didn't mention sleep by way of any of those. The only part that sleep comes into this whole conversation is in two respects. One is the circadian rhythm alignment through the pineal gland. Then the other one would be the glymphatic fluid flux and clearance of waste from the brain at night. For those two things, melatonin can be helpful. So what would people need in terms of just a maintenance dose of melatonin to bring back the levels that you're losing with age? You go back to what perhaps children were making, right? So at about that 1 milligram. So I think that 0.3 milligrams, which has been studied by Dr. Wortman at MIT and others, that low dose physiologic level of melatonin to replenish what we're losing. However, in cases of jet lag shift work, certain things that are perhaps acute or even more chronic, we might have to adjust that dose. And as you mentioned, Amy, you know, I've talked with clinicians that use double digit doses of melatonin for patients with certain clinical conditions. So I think that's why I mentioned that everybody should really check with their healthcare practitioner and have this conversation about melatonin, because I feel like it's so inexpensive and it's one of those nutrients. I call it a circadian nutrient, not a hormone. It hits on multiple mechanistic cylinders. So you're actually getting a lot of function for what you are putting out. You know, Drew Perrott just had me on his podcast talking about this as well, and he said, deanna, would you put this on your list of, like, the top 10 supplements that you would take with aging? And I said, absolutely, because I, as a scientist, think mechanistically. It's like, what am I getting for this? Well, melatonin gives me at least these six main functions, which are pivotal for aging and cellular health and will help me to align to circadian rhythm, which I think, again, trumps so much in the way of our lifestyle and our food. Like, if we have a healthy food at the wrong time of day, too close to bedtime, it can have an untoward effect. Again, it's. It's all about that aspect of time and how we are in alignment with nature.

What type of dose are you taking? Less than one milligram. One milligram?

I take 0.3 milligrams. You know, just to kind. I'm 53. So, you know, I. And people ask, like, how do I measure melatonin? And how do I know? You know, different clinicians do it differently, and there are pros and cons of every single method. Urinary levels will only tell you what. How you're metabolizing. And keep in mind that if you stay up late at night and you're on your screen, you're already changing your melatonin level, which is inhibited or suppressed by that exposure to artificial light and especially deeply hued blue light at night. So depending on how you're measuring the melatonin, if you've even had just a couple of minutes of exposure of electricity, you're skewing your melatonin levels, which will not give you an accurate read. Your levels of melatonin can vary day by day. And in fact, if there's a full moon, your levels of melatonin endogenously go down four days before the full moon and four days after. So I. I just don't think it's a foolproof method to know. I think it's better to go by chronic condition. It's better to go by age, and also just symptoms like, are you having an issue with your circadian tone? And, you know, I even see it to be good for metabolism because it is so pivotal to the mitochondria.

Where are you finding such a low dose because I find most of the commercially available dosages, even, you know, at best start at 0.5, but most of them at least start at 1 milligram.

The company that I work with, Symphony Natural Health, has a plant melatonin at 0.3 milligrams and at 3 milligrams. And that dosing regimen was based off of the literature and what was shown to be a physiological versus a supraphysiological dose. And the plant melatonin that they have is made from chlorella, alfalfa and rice. So it's, it's like, it's a plant matrix. It's not the isolated white powder. So that's why the doses are more, I would say more modest in that way. And also they have, there, there has been research on it relative to synthetic melatonin, showing that their plant melatonin, which is called erbatonin, was up to 6 times greater in anti inflammatory activity and up to 470% greater in free radical scavenging. So even though the dose may seem to be lower, the effects are amplified because it's in that whole plant matrix. Which brings us back to the initial part of the conversation. Why is Deanna talking about melatonin? Well, it fits under this whole umbrella of plants. Plants don't have a pineal gland, but they make melatonin.

Are there certain plants that you know, have more melatonin if that's something that you were hoping to achieve just more naturally through your diet?

Typically the reproductive portions of plants like fruit and nuts will contain more. Like pistachios and walnuts would contain relatively higher amounts. Certain fruits like cherries, and I'm sure that people have seen talk about tart cherries to help you sleep at night. The only thing is that, I mean, I want to go to food as well. That's always food first in my mind. That's my training. However, when you look at these foods and you try to calculate how much melatonin you could get. I actually did this for eight different foods and I had somebody check my math. I had to go and find a range of how much melatonin would be in these foods, first of all, and that is variable depending on the environment, the season, all of those things. So when I did the calculation for tart cherries, what I got was that you would need 2,718 cherries, we're talking about whole cherries, in order to give you a 0.3 milligram dose. Now it doesn't mean that Having cherries wouldn't help you sleep. They're rich in polyphenols. They're rich in fiber. They're rich in. I mean, they have some element of melatonin. But actually, tryptophan is the amino acid that converts to serotonin, that then converts onto melatonin. The problem with too much tryptophan is that not all of it effectively also shunts into melatonin, because that tryptophan could also go through other pathways, and you have different enzymes that go through that conversion of serotonin to melatonin. And not everybody is very efficient in those pathways. One of them involves a methyltransferase. So as you could see, we could go on and on and on. It's like you just open the can of. Of melatonin of, like, there's so much here. So, anyway, I hope that this gives at least the tippy top of some things to go with.

Yes. Well, I know that you have a hard stop, so we'll definitely have you back to have a full conversation about melatonin and. And all of its, you know, incredible effects that it can have. I mean, I'm particularly interested in it in, you know, cancer prevention, the effects with chemotherapy, things like that. So before we part ways, the last question I like to ask my guests is what are three things that our guests can do that our listeners can do to take back their health?

Three things. Color, creativity, and diversity. We talked a lot about color, and that's not even just the colors of food. It's wearing certain colors, being surrounded by certain colors that give you a certain feeling. Creativity, I think, is really important. Amy. When I look at everybody in medicine or healing, I think of healing as an art. And part of the way of my process to getting well was to be creative, to use color as a vehicle, to use art, to use creative expression. And I think that that's really important, whether it's about creating a meal or creating a life path or creating a piece of art, creating a song, creating a poem, whatever it is. I think creativity is really important to health. It gets often underestimated. And maybe I'm the first person on your show that has said that. I hope not. The third one is diversity. I. Diversity is a principle of nature. So one of the things we didn't talk about, but I think it's really important, is to aim for at least 50 unique foods per week. And that work comes from different publications like the American Gut Project, as well as other publications. You know, getting that diversity of foods. It's not just having cherries as your red food. You need diversity within red foods. You need diversity within orange foods. So having diversity helps with better brain health, better heart health, and especially better gut health. And all of that translates into just a better quality of life.

100% agree with that. 50 foods. I'm gonna have to start counting because that, that, you know, that, you know, honestly seems like it could be hard to do if you're not really being cognizant of it, you know, where I mean, at least, you know, many of us are creatures of habit. You go to the same store, you know what's available. You know, also, you know, with children, it's like they like this thing this week and then you're like, great score. She loves this. I'll get more of that. And then, you know, the next week's like, oh no, I don't like that anymore. So it becomes, you know, it becomes difficult.

Well, I have a worksheet for you. I, I've actually run groups through this exercise. So I put together a checklist and you can gamify it with her, you can gam it with kids, with families. There's a, I call it a 50 food variety tracker. So you can put this in your show notes if you want. You can give it to people. I also have an eat the rainbow kind of. It looks like a bingo type of chart where. And I've even had a five year old do this, this eat the rainbow checklist. Right? All you have to do is have one color of food in order to put a check in the box. You can also make it a little bit more complex by putting the number of different servings you had. But I don't go that far. I just say get the colors. Just don't count calories. Count colors. That's all you need to do.

Yes, I'll get my team to get those from you so we can add em to the show notes and everything. Well, this was excellent. I really appreciate it and look forward to having you back on to spend some more time about melatonin and appreciate all that you do. Finally. Sorry, I haven't done a podcast in a while so I'm off my game here. Where can people find you?

My website, DeanDamnLock.com is where you'll find a lot of these downloadable tools as well a lot of blogs and also Instagram under Deanna Minick and also Facebook. I like to share a lot of science, so. Deanna Minick, PhD.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. I want to thank this week's guests for sharing their time and knowledge, and thank you for listening. To Read the full full show notes for each episode, which include a summary, timestamp, quotes and any resources mentioned. Please visit amymeyersmd.com podcasts lastly, if you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love if you would leave a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify, and we'll select a few to read out loud in a future episode. Tune in next week to hear from another inspiring guest as we help you take back your health.