Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

Food is medicine, but then that we get the question of, well, what foods contain the most medicine and how do you grow foods that contain the most medicine? And it turns out that regenerative agriculture is that method. We've seen a 50% drop in lots of minerals and other nutrients in vegetable crops over the last 50 years.

So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's not as good as it used to be. Now, before we jump into today's episode.

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Favorite and thoroughly tested products. Today, I want to zero in on the research behind five specific foods that you can add to your diet for tremendous capacity to support your brain and health and make us feel, think, and perform better. Now, some of you may be familiar with a few of these foods, but others may surprise you. So let's jump right in with the first food that can literally change the way your brain works for the better. The first is dark green leafy vegetables and specifically a category called cruciferous vegetables, also known as brassicas, basically the broccoli family. Kale, collards, spinach, arugula, Swiss chard, collard greens, mustard greens, bok choy, romaine lettuce, turnip greens, beet greens, watercress, endive, escarole, broccoli rabe, dandelion greens, radicchio, watercress, lettuce, chicory, pretty much anything green. What is the mechanism of green leafy veggies and the positive effect on their brain? Well, there's a lot of reasons. Antioxidants and protective phytochemicals. Now, we don't think of phytochemicals as essential nutrients, but they kind of are. They're protective foods.

Right?

We know harmful foods like sugar and processed food and so forth, but they're also protective foods and we want to eat more of those and less of the harmful foods. Now, green leafy vegetables contain anti-inflammatory molecules and antioxidants, things like vitamin C and E, carotenoids, which are the green, orange things actually also, but they're in the green vegetables, lutein, which is great for eyes, alpha-linolenic acid, which is plant-based omega-3s, they contain polyphenols, which are these plant-based anti-inflammatory chemicals, flavonoids, things like Campylobacter, Campylobacter, all these things reduce oxidative stress, which causes inflammation, and then reduce, more importantly, neuroinflammation, which is inflammation of your brain. Now, oxidative stress damages your cells and it can contribute to the formation and accumulation of something called beta amyloid plaques. And you might have heard of amyloid theory of Alzheimer's. And amyloid, just to be clear, is not the cause of Alzheimer's, although many for many years thought it was, and we spent billions of dollars studying research.

To prove that it was, but we.

Never could be successful. It's sort of a side effect of inflammation, and it's the body's attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances. So it's sort of a bystander in the process of dementia, and it does gum up your brain, but it's really not the issue. It's the inflammation that's driving the amyloid development. And some of these foods can be protective, right? So some studies suggest that polyphenols can inhibit the formation of beta-amyloid fibrils, which are these plaques that are common in response to inflammation in the brain. And they gum up the brain that ends up causing dementia. Now, they also promote clearance of these plaques from the brain. So these polyphenols actually help the brain clear amyloid, which is great. This explains probably maybe some of their effects on the cognitive function that we're seeing. There's also other nutrients like vitamin K, filiquinone, that plays a crucial role in regulating calcium and activates proteins that help keep calcium out of areas where it shouldn't be, such as the brain's blood vessels. Vitamin K also has anti-inflammatory effects and that can reduce neuroinflammation. It's also involved in the synthesis of important fats called sphingolipids. It doesn't matter what they call them, but basically it's a class of lipids that are crucial components of your brain cell membrane. So your brain cells have membranes and they have to be made of the right fats. And if they don't have the right fats, you end up with more inflammation. Then these lipids play a role in cell signaling and they maintain the integrity and the function of your brain cells. Really important. so what else besides green leafy vegetables is protective for your brain? What's the second big group of of food or foods that can do this? Well, small cold water fish. Let me explain why. Now, I call these the smash fish, salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines and herring. Now, you might not like them, but they are the most nutritionally dense, the lowest in toxins and the highest in omega-3 fats. plus trout and oysters are also great. Now, why is fish good for our brains? What does the research actually say? Well, a new study published in the British Journal of Nutrition looked at the diet of 798 adults aged 65 to 97, and they looked at 102 item questionnaire using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Now, participants were categorized based on adherence to the Mediterranean diet. Now, we can argue what is the Mediterranean diet? Is there a better diet out there? But it's basically a whole foods healthy diet, right? And, and, and it's not, and basically what is Mediterranean diet? It could be pizza and pasta. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about whole foods, right? Lots of veggies, fruit, olive oil, nuts, seeds, fish, whole grains, beans. That's a Mediterranean diet. Now, the higher adherence to the diet was correlated with a 55% lower risk of depression symptoms. Increased fish intake was linked to a 44% reduced risk of depression overall and a 56% reduction in women. Now, each additional gram of fish per day decreased a woman's depression risk by 2%. And three or more servings of fresh fish a week reduced depression by 62%. Now, think of that in the context of our mental health crisis. I mean, we're all taking Prozac and being in therapy and doing all these things, but what if we just ate a can of sardines three times a week?

Right?

You might have no friends, they might like how you smell, but maybe it won't be depressed. Now, I'm just kidding. I love sardines and they're great and they're delicious. And I just came from Europe where they have fresh sardines are so good. Now, what they found was interesting. There was no effect with canned tuna. Now, tuna is also high in omega-3s, but it's also high in mercury, which can actually cause depression. And it can be a concern. So I would stay away from those big fish like tuna, swordfish, halibut.

And so forth.

Now, you can use the guide from the Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, and you can see their guide on choosing fish for the lowest amount of mercury. So just go to ewg.org and you'll learn about it. So why is this so good for our brain? Well, the brain diseases that we see, right, whether it's depression, Alzheimer's, even autism and ADD, are inflammation of the brain, brain on fire. And omega-3s are powerful anti-inflammatories. You see, up to 60% of our brain is made up of fat. So you literally are a fat head, right? Half of that fat, by the way, is omega-3 fats. So they're essential. These are called essential fatty acids. They're not optional in your diet. And yet most of our diets are deficient in these essential fatty acids. So they're like a vitamin or mineral. If you don't get them, you're gonna get deficiency and it shows up as depression, dementia, and a whole host of other things. Now, as we expanded our brain, our cerebral cortex, and our executive function, memory, and intellect, it seemed to coincide with the introduction of fish and sea food into our diet about 35,000 years ago. Even hunted land animals had higher levels of omega-3s than industrial raised animals. So like for example, wild bison have higher levels of omega-3s than a feedlot cow. Now it makes sense that we need these omega-3s to keep our brains functioning properly and that a lack of fish or omega-3s can lead to omega-3 deficiency and that leads to mood and memory issues. Now, the two most important forms of fish oil are EPA or eicosapentaenoic acid, you don't have to remember that, and DHA or docosahexaenoic acid, it just comes from the chemical structure. These come from fish. You can't get them really from plants. Alpha-linolenic acid, or ALA, is also an omega-3. It's a plant-based form of omega-3, and it comes from things like walnuts, chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp, and some leafy greens. The problem is that only about 10% of the plant-based Omega-3s the ALA is converted to the ones we actually need, the EPA and DHA. So you, if you're vegan, you're not necessarily gonna be getting this. And it's a big risk for deficiency. So you have to figure out how to get your levels up by taking fish oil. And there are concentrates of plant-based fish oils where they kind of Jack up the amounts and convert it, and it's, it's kind of a a bit of a project, but there are some around. EPA and DHA, these essential omega-3 fats, play crucial roles in the body's inflammatory system. We learned this in medical school. This is not a new science. We know how they regulate eicosanoids, prostaglandins, all these inflammatory systems in our body. And they produce a whole class of anti-inflammatory molecules, also called resolvins and protectins, right? They resolve and protect you from inflammation. They resolve inflammation and they protect you. Now, these are great names. I love these names. But basically a lot of fish oil has this in it, but sometimes at low levels, I'm gonna tell you a minute about one you can get. There's a high levels of these protective things. Now, when we're deficient omega-3s, it increases our risk of inflammation in the body and the brain, and it can show up like depression, mood disorders, memory disorders. EPA specifically has been shown to reduce neuroinflammation, right? Remember the neuroinflammation is linked to memory issues, dementia. Alzheimer's, depression, anxiety, ADD, autism, bipolar disease, schizophrenia, all of these problems of the brain have been linked to neuroinflammation and EPA actually is inversely correlated with all these problems. So there are actually studies from Harvard that show you can treat bipolar disease by giving fish oil, surprise, or ADD by giving fish oil or depression by giving fish oil or improve dementia by giving fish oil. That's how powerful these are and they regulate all all sorts of compounds in the body regulate neuroinflammation. Now, when you have low levels of EPA, it increases your risk of heart disease, not just brain diseases, but also heart disease, skin disorders, diabetes, and lots more. In fact, these fats are absolutely essential for life. We gotta get them from our diet, but 90% of Americans are deficient in these critical fats. And I'm gonna explain to you more where to get them and how to take them. But I think at this point in history, Unless you want to poison yourself with mercury from eating a lot of fish, you are going to need to take Omega-3s from supplements. I mean, unless you want to eat sardines every day, which most people don't.

Himalayan Tartary buckwheat is full of over 130 of these phytochemicals, some of which are found nowhere else in nature, that.

Have powerful properties to regulate our biology.

And rejuvenate our immune system.

So talk about how, and again, there.

Are many other compounds that can be beneficial for health. There's 25,000 as I mentioned, and in my whole, my book, the Pegan Diet, I talked about the role of these compounds and how powerful they are. But the Himalayan Tartary buckwheat, how does it work on these chipped cells?

How does it work to rejuvenate your immune system? So that has been a really interesting story that's emerging because generally what scientists will do, and you know this very well, is they'll look at those hundred different phytochemicals and they'll say, which ones are doing the heavy lifting?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they'll go and they'll find-- the reductionism. Exactly. They'll find a molecule. And then they'll study the heck out of that molecule. Well, that's been done with Himalayan tawari buckwheat. We could go on the list: rutin, quercetin, diosmin, luteolin, fisetin, hesperidin. These are some of the major of the 100 or so phytochemicals in Himalayan tawari buckwheat, along with tuhohopa. And each one of those has been individually studied and has been found individually to have effects on immunorejuvenation by activating this process of autophagy selective to the immune system. And in fact, now we have see all sorts of papers being published on quercetin. It's the darling right now. And quercetin is an important member of this family, so I don't want to undersell it. But quercetin doesn't work the same when it's working by itself as when it works with 99 other phytochemicals.

It's a team effort.

That'S right. And so here as we get into fractionalized foods saying, well, let's just pull one nutrient out and then we'll make that the nutrient of the month versus saying, no, it's the combination that makes.

The orchestration of effects that's causing immunorejuvenation. Yeah, so Michael Pollan called nutritionism is the reductionist approach to studying nutrition. That's why we have saturated fat and salt and this and that instead of looking at the whole composition of the diet.

So important.

So basically what you're saying is these.

Compounds in the heme iron buckwheat help.

To get rid of all these old cells and rejuvenate our immune system through.

This process of autophagy. Let me say one thing to loop back to a point you made earlier, and you did so eloquently by the way, when you were talking about the fundamental processes that people start having problems with as they get older and get more ill. One of those you mentioned was mitochondrial function, which is the energy powerhouse of the cell where our energy is produced. Well, it turns out that our mitochondria within immune cells can undergo injury. When they do so, that produces a senescent immune cell. The mitochondria itself can be the seat of the initial injury that then creates the damage to the immune cell to make it senescent. Now, what do you do to get rid of bad mitochondria? Because the mitochondria can rejuvenate themselves in the absence of the cell rejuvenating. the mitochondria has a life of its own within the cell. And that process is called mitophagy. It's a subset of the big process called autophagy. And it turns out that these chemicals that are these phytochemicals that are in turmeric, buckwheat, specifically have been found to have mitophagy influences on immune cells. So it re-energizes the cell.

Yeah, you're kind of cleaning up your energy system.

That's right. It's like cleaning your carburetor.

Exactly, yeah, and the spark plugs or whatever. Yeah, amazing. This is an incredible story. So you've written a lot about immunorejuvenation and you talk about a stepwise process to help rejuvenate your immune system. Can you break down a little bit these four steps of immunorejuvenation program that you've developed? And by the way, all this is on bigboldhealth.com youm can read about it, you can listen to podcasts, read the articles, read the science, it's just fascinating.

Yeah, I think what's happened, you can hear it probably in my tone of voice, is this has just sucked me in full on. It's like I opened the door and it was a vacuum and it just Suck me right in.

Wormhole.

There is so much here that I think will help people once we learn how to really apply this in a personalized way. This is really personalized immunity. And we now recognize that people have different immune identities, just like they have different fingerprints. They have different immune identities that requires different approaches towards their immune identities to maximize their immuno-rejuvenation. So it starts with some fairly simple things. The simple things, the things we've been going through, maybe they're simple to say but not so easy to do, that's changing some lifestyle principles. So you start looking at things like your sleep. You start looking at your activity level. You start looking at how much are you eating out of rushed habit patterns of things you know better to eat but it's just convenient to eat them. And one of the things that has been very useful for me, and I found when I did a series of little Instagram posts on this, are these biometric devices that we wear, these wearable devices that give us information. And I happen to be wearing an Oura ring because after being a biohacker and wearing all sorts of different pieces of equipment, this one I found gives me the most interesting information. And what I found is, from a personal experience now I've done really kind of a pilot study and I think it's more general, is that our Oura ring is actually a surrogate marker to measure aspects of our immune system. because what happens is when you're under immune stress, it's eating, you realize over 50% of your metabolic energy can be eaten up by your immune system when you're under immune stress. So what happens is your body temperature goes up, your heart rate variability goes down, your respiration goes up, your heart rate goes up, your sleep patterns go down. So, you know, when you see these very low scores in the morning from an Oura ring that says, well, geez, what's going on? what's going on. It's probably something that happened to you last night that affected your immune system. Could be alcohol, it could be stayed up too late, it could be stress, but your immune system is telling you that it's under demand. So these tools to me are useful for supporting your coaching system, right? Because you need to coach yourself through these behavior changes of improving your sleep, your activity, your diet, things that you need to rhythmically figure out about your life that are directly being manifest through your immune system into your function. Your immune system is directly connected 24/7 to everything you're doing.

Yeah, so what are these four steps that you talk about?

Well, I just told you the first step is assessment, right? Is understanding where you are, what's the base.

Then from the first- you- immunotype, and we'll get to that.

That's right, your immunotype. And we have a questionnaire on the Bidwell Health website that gives a kind of a first kind of look-see. So we start off with the first thing, which really you've very well stated, and that is, Finding those patterns of behavior that tie to your immunotype. Are you an allergic type? Are you an inflammatory type? Are you a type that tends to get everything that comes along so you have an immunosuppressed state? So you understand a little bit about what your own immunopersonality is. And we have a questionnaire on our website that's called the Immunoidentity Questionnaire that gives a little bit of a help for a person identifying their own specific immunotype. Then we go from there saying, well now you have your immunotype, what are you going to do to move you from an imbalanced immune state to a balanced immune state? That's what we're all hoping for. Because what we want to do is we want to shut off our immune system where we don't want to hyperfunction it. I mean, people always say boost your immune system, but hold on just a minute. If you're already in an inflammatory state, you really want to boost your inflammation? No, you want to rebalance your inflammation. And so if people say, I'm just going to take a bunch of immune system boosting nutrients, Well, no, no, no. That may, actually, I only exacerbate the problem, make it worse. So the second step then is you modulate your immune system based upon what you've learned about your first date. Are you immuno underactive, immuno overactive? Do you need to bring your immune system down? Do you need to bring your immune system up? And we have a series of ways that that can be employed with diet and lifestyle. I would again go back to where you took us earlier, and that is make sure when you introduce the program, you're using food as a friend and you're using rhythmic eating so that time becomes your friend. Your circadian rhythms doesn't become your enemy. Don't overindulge, don't too frequently snack. I mean, it used to be, oh, we want to take seven to eight meals a day. Those are the days of hypoglycemia. That was probably not a good idea with regard to what we've learned about circadian rhythms. Then the next level, the third step, is how can I optimize my immune system by utilizing some of these specific nutrients that we've been describing, the Himalayan Tartere buckwheat phytochemicals. I would also put into this family there are three families of nutrients that are very important. The phytochemicals we've been discussing a lot. Second, our pre and probiotics, because the gut plays such an important role in modulating your immune system. 70% of our immune system It's clustered around our gut, the so-called gut-associated lymphoid tissue. So we want the friendly microbiome, so pre and probiotics would be step two. And then the third are omega-3 fatty acids. There are more and more papers coming out to show the important role that omega-3 fatty acids have in balancing the immune system. And I might add, it's not just omega-3s in and of themselves. It's also in concert with vitamin A, vitamin D, zinc, and what are called pro-resolving mediators. Pro-resolving mediators are part of the omega-3 family that activate the immune regulation process and the inflammation regulation process. And we find that some fish oils and marine oils have much higher levels of. As a doctor, I know how vital.

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These pro-resolving mediators, these PRMs, than others. So we want a high PRM, Omega-3 rich oil, we want pre and probiotics, and we want the proper phytochemicals.

And I think the point you made- and you now have created this fish oil, this Dutch Harbor fish oil, which.

Comes from Alaska, right? Yeah, Dutch Harbor Omega, DHO, and it has the highest level we know of.

PRMs of any natural oil. So this is some of the beneficial stuff that's in fish oil that reduces inflammation, but it It's a separate class of compounds, Omega-3s, they're called pro-resolving mediators. Basically, your immune system has a way, a break, a way of resolving the inflammation. And these are called pro-resolvins and they come from these certain sources of Omega-3s and you've got those access from Alaska and now you have a product that's called Dutch Harbor Omega-3 oil, which you can get on bigboldhealth.com, right?

Exactly. And I might say that the reason that we haven't heard more about these pro-resolving mediators in these commercial Omega-3 supplements is that when most Omega-3 oils are manufactured, they're cleaned up through a very complex process that strips out the PRMs, it removes them. So people don't talk about them because they're not in there.

They're not there.

Yeah.

And so you have to have a very mild process to retain these, ingredients within fish oils which we've been able to develop.

So aside from all the lifestyle factors, let's just sort of summarize, that help us to remove the things that are causing damage to our immune system and immunosenescence and age. In addition to sort of enhancing our immune system with right sleep and exercise and timing of eating and whole foods diets, there's some super hacks, right? Things like phytochemicals from Himalayan and Tibetan buckwheat. pre and probiotics to help our microbiome regulate itself. And these pro-resolving mediators that come from special kinds of fish oil. Yes, that's powerful.

Well, thank you. Now let me just say one thing about what we've learned because a lot of this people would say it sounds interesting, but where is the proof? And fortunately now the phytochemical portfolio in Himalayan Tartary buckwheat has been studied clinically now in studies with humans. for a number of years. So we have an idea how much you need to get in order to produce this. And it's equivalent to something like 100 grams a day. That would be something like 3.5 ounces of Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour delivers the level of these phytochemicals that have been found to be associated with improved immune function. So people would say, well, I really don't eat Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour every day. Well, we try to produce other ways of getting it, like through a shake mix or through a capsule that's concentrated in these phytochemicals, knowing that not everybody's.

Gonna- so you don't have like four capsules a day, and it's like a quarter a pound of the flour, which is pretty amazing. And by the way, I've used this flour, made best pancakes, chai, Himalayan buckwheat pancakes from my Buck Pea and Diet. We made soba noodles, we made dumpling skins for, you know, dumplings, which are amazing. And it tastes so good. It's so good. and what's fascinating about it is that not only are you developing a product or a series of products that take advantage of these phytochemicals, phytonutrients to rejuvenate our immune system, but it's tied into the bigger ecosystem in which we live. It's not only important of what you grow, it's how you grow it. So you could grow this in a way using chemicals and poor soils, that are eroded, that don't have organic matter, and you wouldn't necessarily get the same product. What you're finding is that using practices that we call regenerative agriculture, which we've talked a lot on this podcast, which is a way of regenerating ecosystems, regenerating the soil, and building the organic matter in the soil, that you can not only help rejuvenate human health, but planetary health, that we can address the ravages of using all the industrial agrochemicals, the fertilizers, the pesticides, the herbicides, the high amounts of irrigation that deplete our water resources, and the depletion of the soil microbiome through these chemicals and tillage and all these practices that have been so destructive and may account for a significant part of climate change. And that the soil itself is a sink for carbon and can draw down carbon through the power of these plants that suck carbon out of the atmosphere because they breathe carbon dioxide. But you can't do it if you don't use regenerative agriculture. And the beautiful thing about the Himalayan Tartary buckwheat is that not only are you growing it to produce these phytochemicals for human health, but the very way you're growing it is also helping planetary health using regenerative agriculture. And there's very few regenerative products out there on the market now. And this is one of them. It's amazing. It's gluten free. it's organic, it's non-GMO. And what's really fascinating about this packaging, Jeff, is and you can buy this now on bigboldhealth.com, right? Is not only do you talk about the nutrient contents way higher in protein than most other grains, way lower in its impact on blood sugar, so very low glycemic index, much higher levels of magnesium and zinc and iron and all kinds of nutrients. But what's amazing is it on the and I've never seen this is it says total polyphenols the antioxidant levels. These are the phytonutrients, which is amazing that we now have, it's almost like a medicine. It's almost like you're seeing a flower package that has a drug on it, which is so cool, except these drugs are phytochemicals.

Well, we're, I think, the first group in the flower area to actually be certifying on each batch are phytochemical levels. that are these immune active phytonutrients.

It's so important and I think, you know, as you've taught us all, Jeff, food is medicine, but then that begets the question of, well, what foods contain the most medicine and how do you grow foods to contain the most medicine? And it turns out that regenerative agriculture is that method. We've seen a 50% drop in lots of minerals and other nutrients in vegetable crops over the last 50 years.

So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's not as good as it used to be. Let's start with basic hydration.

That's a great idea.

So this is a twofer. Really three if you actually talk about coffee and tea with water. You've actually taken the number one, number two, number three beverages in the world, water, coffee and tea. Combine them into one, put it in your gunny sack and take it with you.

Yeah, that's great. Actually, I was in Korea researching the blue zones and I went to this guy who was sort of making goat cheese and I was milking goats and like making cheese with him. It was kind of fun. And then after he was like, let's have some tea and he serves me this tea. and I'm like, what is that? And he's like, it's had a different taste. I never had it before.

Oh, this is the wild sage bush.

That'S growing everywhere here. I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. So I saw this plant, I looked it up, and it actually has higher levels of catechins than green tea. And this is one of the longevity molecules, right?

So it's quite interesting. Well, I mean, I think that that's the other thing is that really Mother Nature has created a pharmacy with an F kind of in the spirit of how you do things. The pharmacy with an F actually is way more diverse than anything you'd find in a drugstore, in a hospital, pharmacy stockhouse. And we're just beginning to discover what some of these things are. That's the power of science. We can go in there, we can do mass spec, we can identify the different peaks, and we can put a label onto them.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So you got tea, water, coffee.

So here's something else I would bring. I'd bring tree nuts with me.

Tree nuts. Okay.

Walnuts, almonds, pistachios, macadamias, cashews. You know, number one, I love the diversity of the different types of tree nuts.

Yeah.

Okay. But they're a great source of protein. We need protein to be healthy, right? Especially as we get older. People are always asking, like, what's a good source of protein? Well, you know, tree nuts gives you some nice protein, but it also gives you dietary fiber, which is important for our gut health. And if there's one thing that I I carry around with me now, knowledge-wise, that I know everyone needs to do better on. Everyone can up their own game is to get better gut health. I don't care if you're a super athlete, triathlon, you know, every single person can do better the next day, tomorrow, to improve their gut. That is so powerful. I have colleagues who are, I mean, I do cancer research, but I also have colleagues who are doing gut microbiome research, in cancer patients. So talk about life and death, right? I mean, you know, gut health, you have, you know, more regular stool or whatever anti-inflammatory it all comes in a sharp focus. If you're talking about cancer patients, it turns out that the quality and nature of your gut microbiome can make the distinction between life or death. If you have cancer. And I've been talking to oncologists about this cancer docs, and they're just starting to wake up to this idea. And, you know, cancer patients are going to flooding into the clinics every single day. Yeah. Getting chemo, worse, getting antibiotics for various things.

Okay.

I mean, look, you might need antibiotics. Steroids, which I'll often use. Steroids, which I'll often use. But you're not resurrecting. You're not protecting the gut microbiome. And if that makes a difference between life or death, that is something that everyone needs to focus on. So a study out of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, looking at people with one type of cancer, melanoma, that spread. So we're talking about metastatic melanoma, bad disease. that responds well to immune therapies. Not chemo, it's a checkpoint inhibitor. Checkpoint inhibitors that actually, to explain to people listening, a checkpoint inhibitor is not chemo. It's giving you an infusion of a medicine that wakes up your own immune system to spot where cancer is. It actually helps your immune system do what it's supposed to do, find cancer and scrub it out. Think about the dry erase board, you know, if you've got some notes on there, just scrub it all out to zero. All right, clean slate. I did for my mom, I've seen many other patients who have actually had a complete response. It turns out not everybody responds. Only about 20% of people have a good response. 80% of people don't. And we're beginning to realize that 80% don't have the right gut microbiome makeup. Now, a few years ago, we talked, I remember we had this conversation at Milken about Akkermansia, which, you know, is everyone's talking about now. and good thing too, 'cause it's important. But now we're beginning to realize other bacteria are also important. It's about eight bacteria have been discovered and dietary fiber matters. So, yeah, nuts. The study that my colleague at MD Anderson led on showed that for melanoma, given immunotherapy, for every five to six grams of dietary fiber, it decreases mortality from that cancer by 30% oh wow. Like you basically, I mean think about if you want to- By the way.

People eat about eight grams of fiber a day. I was at the Hazda tribe in Tanzania, they eat 150 grams a day. And so, you know, we need to boost it up to about 50, but you think five, just five grams reduces by 30% and you can eat 25, 30, 50 grams. That's a lot of percent reduction.

And you don't want to just order it in a bottle, right? I mean, or in a jar. I mean, I know we tend to eat in food. You want it in food because the foods, fruits and vegetables, especially the whole foods, contain the polyphenols that are the prebiotics that work along with the fiber to feed the actual healthy gut bacteria. And you want diversity. So you want to eat, you know, the whole idea of eating the rainbow is, you know, I always think about the rainbow being a nice visual allegory, but really this is a life and death thing. Like the more, diversity you can put in your plate, the more diversity you're going to have in your gut. When your gut diversity is really rich, meaning you have a lot of different types of gut bacteria, it pays you back. Your health gets paid back by improving your immune system.

Yeah, that's so important when you said I wasn't going to highlight that because the polyphenols, you sort of whiz by that. But, you know, we think about prebiotics and probiotics for our gut. But there's another incredibly important category of compounds that are called polyphenols, which are all the colorful plant compounds you see in that make your vegetables and fruit the colors they are. And those are medicines. And those seem to be fertilizers for the good bugs. Now, we were talking about the reduction in cancer from having more fiber. How does that work when you eat nuts? Well, basically, you can probably explain it better than I can, but there's an important compound that healthy bacteria make in your gut called butyrate. And butyrate has many effects on the body. It's anti-inflammatory, it keeps your gut lining healthy, it's the fuel for the gut. colonocytes, but it also suppresses P53 Oncogene, which is essentially a cancer promoting gene, which is why dietary fiber reduces colon cancer and many other cancers. So we actually now know the mechanisms by this word. So it's kind of amazing if you're geeky like us, it's like holy cow.

We understand how to get from A.

To Z and why it's happening.

Not just eat fiber, you're not gonna get cancer, but we understand the linkages all the way along. I want to unpack something you just said because it's so interesting and important, but also to bring a little bit of clarity. to the audience. You heard the term oncogene, right? Like Mark, you just talk about oncogene. An oncogene is a gene which is made of our DNA that's associated with causing cancer. And a lot of people, including myself, for many years thought that, and you know, you've heard of BRCA and there's a lot of other oncogenes. It turns out that P53 is one of those oncogenes. Yeah. But it turns out that P53 the way that it was, we're born to have P53, normal P53, is protective against cancer. It's only when P53 is mutated, when there's a problem with P53, that it actually sets up for cancer. So P53 normally actually protects us against cancer. It's basically, it's the bullets in our gun against cancer, fight cancer normally, and it's only when it's actually mutated. Now, let me tell you how powerful this is. this is, there are animals like elephants that rarely get cancer that have more than one copy of P53 in their genome. And so P53 is protective. What we want to do is prevent those mutations that can occur. And this is the real purpose of this antioxidant story that's been floating around for decades. Yeah. Right? So antioxidants are neutralized, these harmful activated atoms that, that, you know, are in our environment that we eat sometimes with. Ultra processed foods. And those can actually come in there and basically like a samurai Warrior, like slice and dice, like a ninja, slice and dice our DNA.

Yeah.

And when your P53 gets sliced and diced, that's when you run into trouble. So you need to protect it. Polyphenols can have antioxidant properties. They also activate all of these other protective aspects of our body so that we are more resistant against diseases. including cancer.

Yeah, it's quite amazing. Okay, so we got tea, coffee, water, nuts of all kinds. What else do you bring them with you? To Mars, let's say. To Mars. What are you bringing with you to Mars?

You know, I mean, look, perishable goods, the things we talked about, you can actually carry with you because you can put them in a tin. Yeah, tin.

Yeah, exactly.

But actually, you know, fresh foods, produce is really, really important. And, you know, I know that everybody kind of rolls their eyes when they hear about another story about broccoli or kale. I like to present it as Brassica, which is like a gigantic class of green vegetables. You can choose a cauliflower, bok choy, you know, broccolini. It's a lot of different types of vegetables you can actually get. Mother Nature's really smart. She actually created the same types of polyphenols and bioactives and put them in all this entire class of vegetables. And if you have any of those things, you know, what are some of my favorite ones? I mean, I like bok choy.

Yeah.

Go to an Asian market.

Chinese broccoli is my favorite.

And you know, like broccoli, Chinese broccoli is a great one.

If you, by the way, anybody that.

Wants to change their mind about the same old, same old with broccoli just needs to step into an Asian grocery store.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. Right?

I mean, the thing about trying broccoli.

I don't know.

It's sweet. It's got this like sweet flavor. Yeah.

So, it's like almost like eating candy but it's broccoli. It's like so good. Well, and by the way, you know, because I like to cook. So, for me, talking about food as ingredients is important because people like to nail it down in their heads. But really, Chinese broccoli, what do you do with it? First, you got to wash it, you trim it, you heat up some oil, puts a little bit of garlic slices or chopped garlic in there and then literally you stir fry it quickly, not with a lot of oil, and then you can add oyster sauce, soy sauce, a little chili pepper, whatever you want to do to really light up your taste buds. Food has to taste good. Healthy food has to taste good.

Yeah, nobody wants to eat sawdust and cardboard. Exactly. Okay, so we got the whole Brassica family, collards, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, broccolini, broccoli raab, and the list goes on. You can look it up. they're called cruciferous vegetables, brassicas. You can find them. We'll link to them in the show notes. But this is something I eat every day, and I try to eat a cup or two every day of these foods, at least. So. Okay, so you got water, tea, coffee, nuts, brassicas.

What's next? Well, I. I didn't include water because I'm just saying that you're gonna have.

To drink water anyway to survive.

So I put coffee and tea. Okay.

Coffee and tea. Okay.

Brassicas. Brassicas. Okay. How many do I have left?

You can do as many as you want.

You know what? So another thing that I personally love, and again, this is my informed opinion, I like this category of food called stone fruit, and it's seasonal. Ah, right? Like a peach.

Plums, peaches, plums.

Right, and those are very seasonal, and they grow in trees, and they have a little stone in the middle, like an apricot, but it turns out the flesh and the color of these are very bright, and they actually have a lot of sweetness to them, rich with polyphenols, and the skin of these fruits also contains something called Ursolic Acid, which actually is not only good for your immune system, but Ursolic Acid also helps your circulation. So you want to have good blood flow. As we get older, our blood flow naturally slows down, isn't as good as it should be. It's kind of like an old set of plumbing. So you want to keep the plumbing working really, really well. That's our circulation. So our Ursolic Acid helps us keep good blood flow, helps us regenerate our blood vessels when we need to, critical for brain health. So gut health and brain health, it's not just simply the gut-brain axis through the microbiome.

The circulation is also really important. Yeah, I mean, I think the problem with that for me, William, is that I love peaches, but like, it's like maybe a few weeks in the summer where you can get a really ripe delicious peach that doesn't taste mealy and gross. Right, no, no, you're actually right. I love that, but you can get them frozen, which I use. And frozen, but it doesn't have the skin usually.

Usually not, but you get the polyphenols in it. And by the way, that's another kind of important practical tip for people that always ask me like, well, I can't get fresh food all the time. Should I just go for the frozen? Is it going to lose a lot of the nutrients? No, it's more, it's got more.

More, yeah.

Because people that create frozen fruit, they pick it, they wait until it's really ripe. And they freeze it, and they pick it when it's super ripe. 'cause it's gotta taste great. And they skin it and they freeze it right away. It's flash frozen. It doesn't degrade, polyphenols degrade once on a truck. This doesn't have a chance to even degrade. So I encourage people to get fresh fruit if they can. My only thing is that I wish they would actually pack fresh fruit in something other than plastic bags, 'cause now.

We'Re beginning to look at microplastics. Microplastics, microplastics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's always hard, 'cause fruit is something that degrades really fast. So they pick it when it's not ripe, When tomatoes, they pick them when they're not ripe. So you're kind of not getting really the full explosion in polyphenols. Okay, so we got stone fruits, brassicas.

Nuts, coffee and tea. All right, and berries. And berries. I put berries in there because I'll tell you the amazing thing about berries, they are kind of the candy of nature, right? They're small, they're beautiful, they're sweet. You can eat a bunch of them. That's why candies, they're candies that are shaped like berries, right? so the, the, the thing about berries, though, is that they are a great source of vitamin C. They've got great antioxidants. They also have these polyphenols that are kick-ass. So, like. And fiber. And dietary fiber as well, of course. The, the key thing is, you know, people always say, well, is a sugar in, in berries gonna be harmful or fruit gonna be harmful? You know, this is where all, not all calories are the same. Yeah. Fruit contains so many other good things that along with the natural sugars, which are most, for most people, your body can actually tackle, you're getting all all this other benefits that you wouldn't be getting if you had a can of soda with just added sugar to it. So that's the key thing. Sugar isn't all sugar because the thing that is contained in is going to be different.

It's also when you eat the fruit, like if you eat it at the end of a meal as opposed to at the beginning, it's going to change.

Your blood sugar, which is going to have an impact. Exactly. So, it's not important what you eat, it's when you eat too. And how you eat it as well.

Because basically if you put sugar on.

Top of fruit, which is kind of an old school way of eating your grapes. Yeah, your peaches and syrup, right? Yeah, exactly. so, you know, again, this is why I think when we talk about ingredients, you know, it's easy for us to talk about polyphenols and dietary fiber, but at the end of the day, people eat food in context and together. And so how we eat what we eat is really, really important. How we prepare it is also really important. So, like, for fruits, I like to eat it just fresh, right?

Yeah.

Seasonal. And. And berries are. Would be something that I would relive.

You know, there's a study.

So you're gonna need a greenhouse on Mars, basically. Yeah. Well, or desert island. I mean, you need to be able to grow all this stuff, but dried fruit, by the way, is also a great way, because you can get dried berries, you can get dried stone fruit. You can't get apricots all year round, but you can get dried apricots. Or dehydrated ones.

Or dehydrated ones, exactly.

That may be less sugar, right? Yeah. If you get dried fruits, you actually get the skin on it, right? So, if I had to eat six apricots whole, I might have difficulty doing that on a regular basis, but I could easily eat six dried apricots as a snack. so if you want that fruit skin, but that brings up a whole other issue about organic versus non-organic. Because interesting thing that's been discovered by botanists, people who study plants, not doctors, not health and wellness people, but botanists have studied polyphenols and they found out that polyphenols are produced by most plants, the polyphenols are good for our body, are produced by most plants as a wound healing substance for the plant itself. Yeah, yeah, they're not for us, they're.

For the plant's own defenses and repair and healing and protection, right?

Right, so what happens is that when a plant is growing, vegetable, fruit, tree, bush, shrub, is growing in its natural state, right? We're looking at a planet now, we don't want to be adding the crap to the planet, we need to kind of let everything restore, we need a plant to go back into its homeostatic state. Regenerate. To regenerate by itself, okay? In that balanced state, plants that we eat or parts of the plants are growing with little insects. It's natural in the environment. And these insects are nibbling on the leaves and stems of these plants. And what they do is they produce polyphenols in response to the nibbling, in response to the injury as part of healing. This is what the botanists are saying. Now, so if you grow a plant in its natural state without pesticides, it's going to make more polyphenols because it's.

Healing itself all the time.

Under stress, under stress, yeah. if you spray with pesticides, not only do you get the bad stuff on the skin that you can't easily wash off, a study at the University of Massachusetts showed that about 20% of pesticides gets absorbed into the skin of an apple. You can't wash that off. It's just in there. So, if you're gonna get dried fruit, get the organic kind and you're gonna.

Get more polyphenols as a fringe benefit. I think it's a really incredible thing that most people probably never thought of. It didn't really occur to me, but you're right, when you have plants that are coddled, by pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, they don't have a lot of stress. They're not getting attacked. They're basically coddled. They don't develop any resistance to disease or stress molecules. And those stress molecules that they create are their protection, but they're also our protection. That's really the whole crux of what we're talking about here.

And by the way, let's dive a little deeper on that. not only are they protection for our human cells, but now because they are also prebiotics, they're also protection for our gut bacteria as well. I was thinking that.

I was like, you are not only getting polyphenols for all these other benefits for your biology, but actually you're helping your microbiome.

You know, it's a grand slammer, right? Baseball analogy, you know, you hit the ball and you drive all the runs in. Okay. And that's basically what these polyphenols are. And it all starts with how we treat the plants. And I know you've written about this, you know, sort of like, how do we actually do regenerative agriculture? How do we kick there? look, it's a bigger problem than any one person can actually solve, but as a one person, we can make that decision of what we're actually going to feed ourselves when we go to the market.

All right, so I want to get into specifics of different foods and controversies and things, but first, what else would you bring quickly to Mars if you were going, that you absolutely need for optimizing your health and beating disease? I mean, that's my list. I'm curious about your list.

Yeah, I have to say, I'm assuming there's not going to be any, easily fishable oceans on another planet.

You just have it there. Not you have to grow it or have it grown there.

But it's there. What are you eating?

I think finding a source of omega-3s is absolutely critical because- that's next on my list. Yeah. Well, our body doesn't make them, right? And a lot of foods don't make them either. All the plants do make the precursor to omega-3s, but it's hard for most people to eat enough of them to actually get what they need. And so, you know, this is one of the instances where I do think that you should eat as much marine Omega-3s as you can get your hands on and you should eat plant-based sources of Omega-3s. But then, you know, if you still have struggling, then you should actually get dietary supplement, a good high quality dietary supplement. And the key about Omega-3s, it's good for gut health, good for brain health, good for immune health. It's one of these strange molecules that has been discovered to have virtually no bad effects and almost all good effects. I'm always cynical and it's a little suspicious when something does everything, but Omega-3s really kind of hit it out of the park.

All right, so basically your meal on Mars is grilled wild salmon, rich in Omega-3s and also polyphenols, so that's the yellow color, with a nice side of broccoli and a side of green tea to sip along with it and dessert you're having berries, and peaches and nuts.

Yeah, pretty much.

I love that.

And by the way, we were talking about Omega-3s. You talked about salmon and it is a common perception. I'm not calling it a misperception, I'm calling it a perception that you need to have salmon and tuna, really oily fish like mackerel and anchovies, which not a lot of people eat, but it turns out, and I wrote about this in my book, I do have it.

Right in my bag here. Fish that are not commonly thought as.

Oily fish actually also have Omega-3s. Cod, haddock, flounder, all have Omega-3s. Sea bass has Omega-3s, by the way. But not, I mean, Chilean sea bass.

Is high in mercury, so you don't want to eat that one.

You mean, well, Chilean sea bass is actually not really a bass. It's a, it's a, it's a Patagonian. Toothfish. Toothfish, right? Yeah. So it's not even, again, marketing, right? We get, we get tricked on things. But it turns out recent studies have shown that sea bass, particularly the Asian sea bass, you'd get in a Chinese market, they'd steam it for you with a little bit of ginger and soy. Actually it's been discovered to not only have omega-3s, but they contain a peptide, a protein, that stimulates better circulation and wound healing. So again, you know, this is the more we look into our foods, the more we're discovering that some of the things that we're eating for generations actually contain good substances that can keep us healthy. That's right.

I mean, the Rockefeller Foundation is very.

Much focused on this.

They're spending $200 million to identify the phytochemicals in the plant kingdom that are regulating our biology and what they do. So, it's really, it's pretty amazing.

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