How Food Can Cause And Heal Disease

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Five flavors support five different what they considered organ systems that work together. So sour foods really activate and support liver detoxification. Bitter really affects the heart and the blood. You've got umami, which affects the lungs and colon. You've got sweet, which is more the pancreas and stomach, the upper GI. And then you've got salty, which is your kidneys and your adrenals.

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Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy. In a world flooded with packaged artificial foods that's filled with chemicals and labeled with false gimmicks, it might be surprising that food can literally act as medicine. But when you choose real food, it has the power to prevent and reverse disease. And the more we know about it, the more power we have to curate a targeted diet to help us reach our health goals. Dr. Hyman spoke to Dr. Josh Axe.

About this and how nature has an intelligent way of showing us how to use food as medicine. Let's talk about food is medicine and how so much of our chronic illness is caused by the foods we eat and also can be healed by eating different foods. Yeah.

So, obviously I think we know this and if anybody is listening to your podcast, they know this, but obviously the big culprits are sugar. It's a lot of the refined grains, again, the corn and the wheat, soybeans, it's a bean, but that's in there as well. So getting a lot of carbohydrates from there, the hydrogenated oils, we want to stay away from that stuff. And a lot of the things that contain genetically modified organisms or animals eating foods that they shouldn't. Okay, so the dairy byproducts, the meat products, you know, we use that principle, right? You are what you eat, what they ate. Okay, so if they're eating a lot of grains, their tissues are full of omega six fats versus a lot of grass, omega more omega threes. you're gonna have more balance or that's gonna help your body heal. But one of the unique things that ancient practitioners recommended, Dr. Mark, and I think this is fascinating and it's absolutely true, is when you in order, like knowing what foods to eat based on your sick, here's what the ancient physicians recommended. They said, okay, what the food looks like, if the food looks like a body part, it supports that. What is the food's flavor? as well, and what's the food's color? And they would look at those three things and say, that's how you know what these. So for instance, a walnut looks like your brain. In fact, you crack it open, it has two hemispheres. We know today that walnuts are loaded with loaded with choline and vitamin E and some omega-3 fats, so they're good for the brain. A coconut as well looks like your head. Coconut has all these, you know, medium chain triglycerides, which are good for your brain and actually a water inside that almost looks like cerebral spinal fluid that's actually good for your body's fluid and systems. We've got beets that actually look like, you know, look like blood when you are, you know, when you're cutting them. And they have known to increase nitric oxide in the body and improve your cardiovascular health. Celery looks like your bones. Celery is probably the most alkaline vegetable. And so it actually supports your bones in especially supporting vitamin K and calcium levels. And then I could keep going on a few others.

It's so fascinating.

Yeah, Rishi mushrooms look identical to your kidneys and adrenal glands. So do kidney beans, you know, onions are amazing for your cells. Those are loaded with quercetin and things that actually support mitochondrial function, all kinds of things. So, you know, one of the things I go through that in the whole book, I have these, you know, big pictures and graphs going through. Here's all of those foods. So we know that. And then flavors, five flavors support five different, what they considered organ systems that work together. So sour foods really activate and support liver detoxification, bitter really affects the heart and the blood, you've got umami which affects the lungs and colon, you've got sweet which is more the pancreas and stomach, the upper GI, and then you've got salty which is your kidneys and your adrenals, and then certain foods like green is very good for liver gallbladder. But anyways, that's how the ancient knew, and I really believe that God created you know, food, you know, our, our food here. I don't think he made it real complicated. Like, hey, I'm gonna make it really hard for them to figure out what to eat. I think some of the stuff, I'm not saying everything is simple, but I think some of the times using food as medicine isn't really complex if we are, you know, able to start thinking and learning about some of these things. Yeah.

That's true. When you, I love your, your sort of title of your book, ancient nutritional, because, you know, I, I often thought about, you know, how is it that you know, we're eating such a mono diet. You know, our diet is mostly three crops, 60% of our diet is three crops, wheat, corn, and rice around the world. Another maybe nine or 10 crops make up the rest of it. We used to eat 800 species of plants. And agriculture, you could argue, was one of the most destructive things to be discovered or invented because it led to, you know, we used to be about average height of 5'9 as hunter-gatherers. and then when we started agriculture, it went down to 5'3 for men. Why? Because they were so malnourished, they were starting to eat single crops, they were only eating rice, or they were only eating whatever they could grow, and they weren't to have this massive diversity of plants and animals and bugs and whatever that they ate back then. And we've dumbed down our diet to these very few ingredients that's led to these massive nutritional deficiencies. I mean, you just listed some of the common foods, some of them are less common, like reishi mushrooms and so forth. But, I mean, here in Hawaii, and I feel like I'm a pretty well-traveled, well-educated guy, and I go to the farmer's market here, and I'm like, what is that? And what is that? And what is a Surinam cherry? And what's the, I don't even know what these things are. I'm eating things I never even saw before. And I'm thinking, wow, we are so deprived of all medicines in food. and that we've evolved actually to use these compounds with our biology to regulate different functions of our system, which you sort of were mentioning. And we've lost that understanding.

Dr. Hyman also spoke about the power of using food as medicine with Dr. William Lee.

You know, I'm certainly not one of those doctors that have sort of rejected Western biomedicine. Like it's very important when you're sick to help save lives. On the other hand, what I realize is that there's a missing opportunity. And that opportunity is what everybody sort of intuitively knows, which is that the things that we put into our body can affect our body and they affect our cells. And food as medicine is really not a new concept. It's an old concept. And if you go other cultures, whether you're in Europe or in your Asia, indigenous peoples from all around the world, they looked at food as part of their health keeping scorecard. And they viewed food as a precious substance. They didn't just eat to survive, they ate because they were doing something good for themselves. We've lost a little bit of that. And the research behind it actually resurfaces this in a new way that I think that we can all get behind, which is not, in fact, it's not really just about the food, it's about how our body responds to the food. How does our body protect its health? And that's what the health defense systems are all about.

It's true. I remember traveling once in Hong Kong and I went out to dinner with this guy, I think he was part of Merrill Lynch, I gave a talk, and we had this extraordinary meal. and everything in the meal was medicine, intentionally medicine. And I wrote an article about it called Eating youg Medicine, Food is Pharmacology. And then I went through all the dishes we had and I went through the research and I was like, well, ginkgo nuts do this and this thing does that. And it was an amazing kind of experience because I realized that in this culture we don't think of food that way. And yet that's foundational for creating health.

Well, that's why I wrote Eat to Beat Disease is that, you know, while I do explain the science behind things, I actually lay it more than 200 different foods that are actually some of them are real crowd pleasers or the things that we actually know that are supported by science and then figure out how can you incorporate that because in fact, it becomes natural to pick the things that are good for you. It's something we've lost that we can put back into our everyday lives. And for me, when I go out to eat or when I prepare a meal, that's what I'm doing. I'm actually assembling things that I know are good for me. When I look at the ingredients of any food that I actually get, and I try to do fresh food, whole foods, but every now and then you have to take something and you look at all the ingredients. The stuff you don't recognize, you can't pronounce, those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria. You pick a mushroom and you eat it, you know that the fiber in that mushroom is going to feed us and the bacteria. The pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria. What we need to worry about is what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm our bodies.

We have 3,000 food additives in the market that are FDA approved and we don't know what most of them do. Very few have been tested. And it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect our microbiome.

Well, and you know, we all know people that are super healthy, right? So they never get sick. And then we know people that seem to get sick all the time. the difference is probably in their microbiome. In fact, it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy super agers. These are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all. And then they looked at young healthy athletes and they found when they compared their microbiome, they were remarkably similar. They were almost identical. So health is clearly governed by our microbiome. So what are the things that we can actually eat that can affect them? Well, we talked about this a little bit earlier. It turns out that Pomegranates actually can make a big difference. Cranberries can make a big difference. Nuts, walnuts, pecans, cashews, things that we actually know. Almonds. Almonds, yeah.

And so, you know, I'm checking because.

I had almonds for breakfast. I want to make sure I got it. Well, you know, we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think nuts are one of nature's most healthful snacks. I don't know if you saw this, but about two years ago, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, big cancer meeting, they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer, stage three colon cancer, undergoing treatment, whatever the treatment might be, that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually had a 50% lower risk of death from their disease.

Now, you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction, everybody's jumping up and down, it's a billion dollar blockbuster drug, and you're talking about a couple handfuls of walnuts for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost $100,000 is actually better?

Well, it's not an either or, it's together. And again, this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors. Not just you and me, but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment, if you look at that data, It's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies. I would actually strongly advise patients to have nuts if they can take it. And what do they serve in the hospitals? So again, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's slow but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine. What we need to do now though is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves. And if you're interested in the science, it's there. It's an evolving science. Yes, we have health defense systems. Health is the absence of disease. It's our body working full steam, cranking along, and you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent, treat, or even reverse them by activating your defense systems using food. And whether you're healthy or sick, Every person can take a decision three times a day to really enhance their health, and you don't need a doctor's prescription. And I think this is an area, you know, the food pharmacy, food is medicine, that it's an idea whose time has come. And there was a quote that said, you know, no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.

That's so great.

Mounting evidence shows that there is no magic bullet to treat heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, allergies, digestive disorders, headaches, fatigue, or any of the other myriad of problems we suffer from in this day and age. But increasing evidence also shows us something else. It shows us that food is the most powerful drug we have, not just to prevent, but also to treat, cure, and reverse so many chronic diseases. By using your kitchen as your pharmacy, you can literally eat your medicine at every meal. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. Josh Axe and Dr. William Lee. If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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