The BEST FOODS To Eat To HEAL THE BODY | Rupy Aujla

Keep it really simple and if you stick to just three or four recipes that you master, you own those, the whole act of getting people cooking and using ingredients from scratch is going to have wonderful effects on things like brain health. Food is literally the most important health intervention that anyone can make. It's a collection of phytochemicals, those are the chemicals that you find in plants. It's the fiber that has massive impact on things like gut microbes that have effects on neurotransmitters and inflammation. It is also the process of eating as well, the active community, it kind of subsides lots of different barriers. It crosses the way we communicate with different people, our cultures, our ability to nourish ourselves is almost just one of the parts of how food has medicinal properties. Food is probably the first question I ask after taking a full history. I want to know what they're eating for breakfast, what they're eating for lunch, what a general typical day looks like, what a seven day plan looks like. I want to be really getting an understanding of how they're using food in their daily lives. if it's something that's rushed, if it's something they don't really pay that much attention to, if they're on a particular diet plan, all that kind of stuff. Obviously within reason, like I work as an emergency medicine doctor as well, that's probably not going to be the first thing I lead, but certainly in the clinic environment when we're dealing with patients with chronic medical problems, that's one of the first things I start with. The process of eating has kind of been lost on our millennial generation for sure, but certainly in our modern societies, the process of eating is being rushed. And really when you think about food and the process It's everything from the smell, the visual element, the sounds and the environment that you're in at that time and how that has an impact on neural networks. We've heard from titus today about like how the proprioception and the perception of everything in our environment has massive impact on our neural networks. Food and the process of eating is part of that environmental setting. It's part of that sensory stimulation that leads to so many different mechanisms in our body. So yeah, it's certainly something that is much wider than just the energy and the macromolecules that we have in a plate of food. The process of chewing and something that I talk to my patients quite a bit about, like the process of mindfully eating, so make sure you chew your food properly means that you're actually digesting it properly. If you're not chewing your food, then you're not increasing the surface area, you're not getting access to the internal molecules, and you're going to be passing a lot of indigested food through your digestive tract. The biggest misconceptions I think are that healthy eating is expensive, it's inaccessible, it's bland and it's boring basically. And I want to smash those preconceptions really because I believe healthy eating doesn't have a price tag, it's not a privilege, it's something that we can all enjoy as a massive community. And really what I'm trying to do with the Doctor's Kitchen is try to inspire people that the most nutrient dense ingredients are usually the cheapest on the shelf. And it's just about being explorative with them. It's being about being inspired by different cultures and different ways of eating, the different sorts of food pairings, the use of spices, that kind of stuff. So yeah, those are probably the biggest misconceptions. And when you actually inspire patients that, you know what? Healthy eating can actually be fun, it can be enjoyable, it can be tasty, it can be delicious, it can be culturally relevant. That's when you get people on board. And then you can have a different conversation about how it fits in with their lifestyle and meditation, sleep and all the other things that we talk about in functional Food deserts is this concept that's quite unfamiliar for us in the UK, but I've heard a lot about it. It's quite worrying really. I mean, I think the use, this is where the use of technology and food really comes into play because we can have access to lots of different ingredients using lots of different delivery mechanisms. So, you know, getting spices, getting certain types of powders like raw cacao and other things like that can actually increase the nutrient density of food that we have access to. and also, you know, just looking at simple foods that don't have to be particularly exotic, things like brussels sprouts, any types of brassicas, you can even grow your own as well, like on a sill, like a windowsill, little plant pots, just get some soil that you can put into yourself, you can add things like nutrient-dense herbs and spices, coriander, bay, basil, these are all wonderful simple plants that we all have access to that heighten the nutrient density of even the most bland of things.

Food.

I say like keep it really simple and if you stick to just three or four recipes that you master, you own those, then you can start the kind of inspiration. Then you can start little nuggets of information that people actually enjoy the process. So when you break it down like, you know, I don't like cooking, all right, what don't you like about cooking? Is it buying the ingredients? Is it the effort of going to the grocery store? Is it the process of chopping and then burning something or the worry that, you know, you're not doing it right or it doesn't come out right? Or maybe there's a particular memory of you trying a recipe and it failed and that you just haven't gone back to it. So you've got to figure out what is it that is preventing you from eating or cooking in the first place. And then you can kind of narrow down what like where you're going to work on with them and when it comes to inspiring them to cook. And honestly, if you master like two, three, four dishes, then you're inspired to like, you know, oh, maybe I'll add a different herb or maybe I'll add a different spice or maybe I'll use the seasonal ingredient and that's when you get people on board. It's a really interesting concept that we as humans have evolved almost intertwined with our environment. We've evolved long alongside the seasons and the season changing and stuff. Our biological mechanisms are sort of matched. We've simultaneously grown alongside the changing of the seasons and everything else. Eating seasonally reminds us to add variety into our food. And there's lots of different research that shows that variety in our food is actually very good for our gut microbiome population, for example. Eating late summer fruits has a little bit more fructose in, and evolutionarily that would have encouraged more fat stores around our organs. and that would have been protecting us against the winter cold, for example. So there's lots of different ways in which seasonal eating is actually relevant, but perhaps in modern life, maybe less so. So it's just a good reminder to vary up your food because we know variety of food has immense impacts on the gut microbiome and that's actually something that we need to probably nurture a bit more. My top tips for making food a lot more exciting and engaging is to a buddy up. So if you've got someone at home, if it's the kids, if it's your spouse or your parents or something, everyone get involved in having different roles. So doing something called mise en place, which is where you have everything prepared, everything chopped up already. And then it's just a case of putting in different things in pans or boiling or whatever. Having everything prepared, that's really good. And then having a buddy to cook along with music, like, so one of the best things that I find after I get back from clinic is putting on my tunes, doing my mise en place, and then just enjoying the whole process of being on my own. It's actually kind of like a meditative thing that I get into. the use of spice. So definitely like there's so many different spice blends that people just don't know about and they're very easy to make yourself if you wanted. So things like Togarashi or Harissa or Berbere from Northern Africa, these are different spice blends that not only make food more interesting, they add phytochemicals to your food, they add nutrient density, they reduce inflammation, they have wonderful different biological effects on our body and they make food a lot more engaging and exciting. for people. Making your own pastes as well, so making a different sort of lemongrass paste that you can just quickly put in coconut oil and coconut milk and then adding some vegetables. That whole process is pretty inspiring for a lot of people as well. Another thing I talk to my patients about is adding a new ingredient to your shopping list every week. So trying something new, whether it's sunchokes or whether it's a different type of sweet potato like this purple sweet potato that we get from South America. that has a wonderful purple flesh and a gorgeous texture to it. And you can make it in different sorts of desserts even. You can have it for breakfast, you can put almond butter on it, those sorts of things. So when you do that just once a week rather than applying like loads of different exotic vegetables and fruits into your basket, then it kind of like weaves itself into your normal cooking regime. Breakfast is something I get asked about a lot because it's a really hot topic. I think it really depends on your dietary strategy. so, and how convenient is for you. For me personally, I have breakfast a little bit later in the day, usually around 7:30 in the morning when I get up at 6:00. That's because I like to work out before, so exercise, when you exercise will determine when you're going to be having breakfast, if breakfast is even achievable at all. Sometimes people prefer to fast up until midday and then have like an eight hour defined eating period. So in that case, you know, if it's good for them and they've done it for a few weeks and they're not having side effects, then perhaps skipping breakfast for that individual might be the best thing as well. So it really depends on like convenience, your work-life balance, when you're exercising, the type of food you've got accessible. But as a general rule of thumb, I think breakfast is exceptionally important, particularly for someone like me who works in the NHS. Like I know if I don't have breakfast before I go to work, I'm going to be snacking on different things. there's going to be cookies, there's going to be chocolates and we're human, we're going to be attracted to those sorts of things, we're going to have sugar lows and if that's going to be the only source of food available then we're going to crack in most places. So in a lot of cases I think breakfast is pretty important and my general rule of thumb for people eating breakfast is have something with fibre and have something with good quality fat as well as protein as well and that's going to stop you from those sugar highs and lows and keep you away from the cookies Yes, smoothies can be a good way to go if people really are lacking on time. I prefer to get food in its most whole form as possible. So something with high fiber like pre-cooked sweet potato with almond butter for example or some dark leafy greens with added walnuts and spiced nuts with some boiled egg that's got protein, it's got fat and it's got fiber as well. And you can actually knock that out pretty quick. I actually do Facebook lives before I go to clinic just to show people that you can do it in about 10 minutes. before you go to work. So yeah, there's lots of different examples that you can actually knock up in about 10 minutes and still have like you know, nutrient density and not reach for the cookies mid morning. Obviously being the doctor's kitchen, I get asked a lot about you know, what food is good for X condition or what food is good for psoriasis or what food is good for eczema or diabetes or whatever. It's really important to get the concept across that food can't be treated like a pill. Food is an adjunct. Food is a tool in a clinician's toolbox when it comes to treating a patient for whatever condition they might have. So when people ask me about brain food, I have general principles of eating, but I have specific foods. So certainly high fat foods, but high quality high fat foods is something I try and encourage as much as possible. And these are things like walnuts and chia and avocado and extra virgin olive oil. These are fantastic wholesome sources of fats that traditionally the conventional medical profession has veered against because of our fears of cholesterol. But now obviously we're learning that that's completely false and actually these foods have lots of benefits particularly for brain health and things like long chain omega-3 fatty acids as well. And yes, oily fish definitely goes into that category. The other thing and this goes in a much wider context, things like high fiber foods. So when you're having high fiber foods, not only is that great for nurturing your microbiome that has positive effects on brain inflammation, on reducing your incidence of chronic disease like heart disease or diabetes that have brain effects, it also means that you're gonna be more efficient at removing things like environmental pollutants that Joe Pizzano is scaring us all about. And it's quite interesting to see that how high fiber foods are actually facilitating that process. and actually making our bodies more adaptable to our new environments. And the other things with regard to brain health foods are things like colorful plant-based foods, the different sorts of foods that have high nutrient density like tomatoes and the yellows and the greens and dark green leafy vegetables and brassica vegetables. Not only are they good for cardiovascular reasons and diabetes reasons, but those particular chemicals that you find in those pieces of food are actually reducing inflammation and reducing neuroinflammation and reducing generalized inflammation that has holistic effects on the body, improving brain health at the same time. High fiber foods, yeah, tons. So beans, legumes, things like lentils, pulses, you've got things like chicory and asparagus stems, you've got broccoli, sunchokes, you guys call them sunchokes, we call them Jerusalem artichokes. you've got sweet potato, you've got cold potatoes as well that's got lots of prebiotic fiber, you've got garlic, you've got tons of different types of prebiotics as well. There's a ton and I tend to have a list and I go through it with patients and just say look these are different ways in which you can get them into your food and these are the kind of recipes that you can use as well. And then launching like as a segue into that you can talk about foods that generally improve your gut microbiome so that would be things like probiotics, foods, kefir and kombucha, as well as things like probiotic yogurts, for example. These are all great. Nurturing this microbiome that we know has reducing inflammation effects on things like the brain as well. Foods that are toxic for our brains are going to be things like refined carbohydrates and sugars. And I know it's kind of something that people should be more aware of now, but they sneak in a lot of places. We have a lot of added sugar, unfortunately, to our processed foods and convenience foods. So really the whole act of getting people cooking and using ingredients from scratch is going to have wonderful effects on things like brain health for that reason. So those are the things that are going to zap our energy, for example. They're going to be giving us the highs and lows, going to be spiking our insulin, spiking our cortisol levels and increasing inflammation. The other thing is like things like timing of food. If you're going to be eating too late or over a 12, 14, 16 hour period that we tend to do because of our Western lifestyles, and that's going to be causing lots of different effects on things like sleep and causing hormone dysregulation and causing disruption to our circadian rhythm and that's going to lead to reducing levels of alertness and increasing things like fatigue as well. So it's really how food fits into a greater picture of how we're able to function and our brains are functioning as well. I'm pretty food centric, so I like to start the conversation around food and actually inspiring people with delicious recipes that are simple, they're really quick to make, et cetera, and showing them how it doesn't have to be expensive. The most nutrient-dense foods are usually the cheapest on the shelf, like cabbage and asparagus and all the different types of brassica vegetables. Once you have had that conversation with patients and they actually see some effects, they sleep better, they're less moody, they have less anxiety, then you can have a wider conversation about how that segues into to sleep and how sleep hygiene has effects. And when you map out the different hormonal changes over a 24-hour period, then they get excited about that. And they'll actually start putting away their laptops, putting away electronic stimulation like phones and TVs and stuff like that that heighten stimulation and actually reduce different hormones that have effects on our brain activity. And then you can start talking about the effects of exercise and how that increases BDNF and how that improves neurogenesis. and then you can start talking to them about things like even meditation. Meditation is one of the most well-known forms of medicine, essentially, that ancient societies like ancient Chinese and Indian and Ayurvedic principles have always used for years and years. And now we're actually finding the science behind it. And then you can start, you know, talking to them about how they can integrate mindfulness. So really, food is a great conversation starter to lifestyle medicine. So once you about food, you can go into mindfulness, sleep and exercise. Counting calories and macros is important if you're an athlete, I think, and if it actually has a motivating factor to you. In the vast majority of patients that I see, I think it adds a lot of confusion and adds a layer of technicality that doesn't really need to be there. And sometimes when you start counting calories and counting macros, you're reaching for a Snickers bar and putting down the banana. or you're reaching for processed foods and you're negating things like fruits and things that might have a high fructose level or high calorific content. That is not the way to go. Food is a lot more complex than a measure of glucose level. The more wholesome food and the more colorful foods that you find in your plate, the better that's going to be for your brain health. And once you're reaching for those whole sorts of foods and you're counting colors rather than calories, that's where you're gonna have the best effect. And that's the easiest principles and the easiest way I try and inspire patients when it comes to eating better for their brain health or whatever chronic disease they're suffering. Dr. Minick is like a massive inspiration to me and her subject matter of phytochemicals and the different types of plant chemicals that we have and how they have like vast effects on everything beyond brain health is a concept that is really easy to introduce the patients. And when you actually talk about it from a scientific point of view, you point them towards the studies, you actually give them some evidence-based behind it, that's when you can actually inspire them to count colors rather than counting calories. And when you're counting colors, you don't need to worry about the calories. Obviously, you've got to make sure that you have enough fiber and enough protein, but the majority of people are nutrient deficient and we want to increase nutrient load. best way to do that is with colorful plants, fruits, and vegetables.

People don't really get what food is. Most people understand they need to eat to live and they need to actually have the ability to choose foods that are nourishing and have not too many calories. But people don't understand the power locked in the kingdom of plants and even animals that are medicinal. true, true drugs in the sense of pharmacologic activity. And, and as I began to think about this science years ago when I was, when I was studying functional medicine, learning about food is medicine, I'm like, what does that mean? And I began to look at the biochemistry and biology and the pathways and how these plant compounds somehow know to bind to specific receptors in our body. It doesn't even make sense. Like it makes sense that you have, you know, testosterone binding to a testosterone receptor, insulin binding to an insulin receptor in the body. But why in the heck would we have a broccoli receptor or a seaweed receptor? And yet, the body has co-evolved with these compounds that we don't think of as essential, but I think of them as conditionally essential. You're not necessarily going to get a deficiency disease, but you're going to get a chronic disease if you don't eat them. And there's massively protective foods. And we were chatting earlier before the podcast that right now in science, and it's advancing so fast that we are understanding the mechanisms by which food actually has its action and how we can use it in a pharmacological way. It's not like, oh, just eat healthy. There are, like, just like there are thousands of drugs, there are thousands of molecules in food, and we can use those in very specific targeted ways to do different things in the body to create health or if we eat the wrong things to create disease. So you're, you're this extraordinary scientist. You've you've been published in all the major medical journals at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Tufts. And somehow you come back to this simple notion that Hippocrates said 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. What made you take that left turn, or maybe it was a straight ahead and every elbow else is going left? And how do you sort of begin to sort of unpack this notion that was so critical for you to understand that you could eat to beat disease.

Yeah, well, so Mark, like yourself, you know, as an MD, we're trained to identify diseases, diagnosis, diseases, and write prescriptions and send patients to Specialists to take care of the disease. But we all know that the ways that we have been trained in medicine fall short of what it is that patients really seek. And if you've ever been a patient yourself, you certainly know, you know, what, what we want is really to be healthy and to be well, it's okay to get sick once in a while, but if you are, you want to kind of bounce back. And so that led me as an internal medicine doctor to ask the question that nobody in medical school ever taught me, which is, what is health? Health is not just the absence of disease. That's an extremely unsatisfying definition. The absence of something like, what's a good day? It's the absence of rain. That doesn't make any sense, you know? So, so, so you want to actually have a definition and the working definition that I came to emerged out of 25 years that I had involved with drug development. I'm still doing it, but the idea with drug development is that we have to understand the body inside and out. We have to identify those molecular pathways, those receptors, the kind of the Achilles heel of disease. Well, turn that inside up, up in that idea, You still need to know what the mechanisms are and the receptors are, but rather than looking at the Achilles heel of disease, let's take a look at the struts that support the infrastructure that support health. And if you take a look at everything that is unpharmaceutical with a pH, you wind up actually with pharmaceutical with an F, which is why I love being on the doctor's pharmacy.

Right, right.

So look, I mean, like you and I have had many of these conversations before. and for me, I've been involved with developing treatments that help to control the blood supply of cancers and, and blindness in the eye. I've been involved with diabetes treatments for complications like chronic wounds and cell therapies and Gene therapies, you know, to treat these really ambitious diseases that we don't have successful cures for yet. Along the way, what I realized is by looking at going back and walking that path that I was on, that these same pathways, same receptors that, you know, drugs have a very tall reach for, and most of them haven't actually climbed up the ladder yet. Yeah. Mother Nature beat us to the punch. There are foods that already hit these receptors and usually not one at a time like we do with Pharmaceuticals. Yeah. Mother Nature actually basically puts a gatling gun of these natural biochemicals that activate our health, so. treatiNg disease, you send a heat seeking missile in. But activating health, you basically take this, you know, this cluster of incredibly, you know, wonderful blooming, health blooming molecules to be able to make our bodies do what they want to do.

It's sort of like a shotgun versus a sniper's rifle kind of.

Right.

But it actually, you know, what you said was so profound, I want to highlight it because most people might have missed it. what you said is that, you know, these pharmacological targets are actually embedded in our biology. They weren't designed for drugs. They were designed for our internal metabolic processes, but also to work in this co-evolutionary way with plants and then with animals that eat the plants. This is a whole other conversation, which is kind of fascinating about how we now know there activated metabolites and phytochemical compounds in meat and milk from animals that eat a wide diversity of forage. So we're now learning that there are actually phytochemical compounds in animal foods. So it's not just plants where you can get it. And they may be even better for you. And I think that the concept of these compounds as acting on key aspects of our biology that are designed to create health is a really radical idea. and often people don't understand that these molecules were not created by the plants for us. They're their own defense mechanisms. They're their communication systems. They're there to attract pollinators. They're there to attract seed collector. I mean, there's a reason nature does this. They're there to communicate messages to the neighboring plants, to ward off predators. I mean, plants have 20 different senses, which is just remarkable to me. and these plant compounds, we're really using them because our biology is lazy and is only doing what it absolutely has to do. And so we're going to borrow, like we get vitamin C from food, we borrow these phytochemicals to regulate key processes in our body from the immune function to the microbiome's health, the detoxification, the hormonal regulation, to our brain chemistry. And what you're talking about, and this is so important, what we're talking about is taking food in a different context to create health. That most medicine is about trying to push down or shut down or block or interfere with some pathway to mitigate disease, not to cure it usually, right? Unless we have an antibiotic, but even that doesn't always work. And so we really have a whole different framework now about how to use food as medicine. It's not some theoretical concept. It's actually a scientific proven model of what to do to actually activate healing systems in the body.

Yeah. And, you know, honestly, this is actually how medicine was practiced back in the days of these ancient food cultures. I mean, I know that you have, like me, a great affinity for the Mediterranean and Asia. Both of us share, you know, lots of travels in that area. And you go back to 3, 000 years ago, and you go back to Hippocrates or you go back to Confucius, you know, and the people who actually wrote the first kind of tomes relating to health and medicine. Look, people cared about health going way back, but they didn't have Pharmaceuticals. A lot of people don't understand how recently Pharmaceuticals actually were. Before, all we had was the material around us. And, and everybody knew inherently stuff that you eat, that there are stuff that you eat that your body doesn't agree with. It's going to make you sick.

Right.

A great example is just like poisonous mushroom in the woods. People learned how to actually avoid those. Well, somehow we've lost the defensive mechanisms to avoid the poisonous things on the grocery shelves, yet we could recognize that deadly ring mushroom, blue mushroom in the woods. And I think what we're trying to do now is regain our own natural instincts. So they've always been with us. We're just kind of bringing it to the forefront. And the one thing that I think is new is we are bringing some really deep science, which is where I come from. I'm a vascular biologist. the science is actually helping to illuminate a new depth of understanding. It's not just a what, but it's the whys. Yeah.

So tell us down, go down the rabbit hole a little bit of, of what some of the biggest discoveries have been of how food modulates our healing systems and how it actually helps us create health.

Yeah.

Well, look, when, you know, when I set out to study food as medicine, the things that I reached for was what I knew was proven in the pharmaceutical world. We know that your blood supply is important. Think about what cardiologists spend all this time doing trying to get better blood flow or in oncology for cancer treatments, they're trying to cut off the blood supply to cancers. And so with like, so that was one of the things that I thought, well, maybe let's see what food does. So Throwing food and food extracts and food bioactives into the same systems used to develop medicines used by cardiologists and oncologists yielded really like a whole new playbook of how to actually use foods to help improve our circulation, which happens to be one of our body's health defenses, which is what I write about in Eat to Beat Disease. What I actually say is that when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food, it's about how our body response to what you put it in. That goes to stem cells, that goes to our microbiome, it goes to our DNA repair mechanisms, and it also goes to our immune system, which is both, it's a double-edged sword. You've got the inflammatory side, you've got the, you know, defense fighting the defensive side as well. And so, when I think about how foods benefit us, I try to insert that lens into the thinking process to say, all right, so which of our health defenses does any particular food activate?

And, and, and give us some examples of how a particular food will activate a particular defense system and what those defense systems are. Because I think it's important, you know, you're, you're one of the few doctors out there. I mean, I just had a conversation with Andy while yesterday. He talked about the body's own healing systems in a very kind of high level. But you go really granular, and you're one of the food doctors to talk about how the body has its own healing mechanism. and that we're not doing enough to activate those healing mechanisms. We all know that we have that if we cut our skin, it heals, right? How does that happen? It's not a miracle, it's biology. And that doesn't happen only on the outside, it happens on the inside. So how do we activate our healing systems? What are those healing systems? And how do specific foods activate different healing systems?

Yeah, well, okay, so let's follow a piece of food that we're going to put in our mouth, right? So we're chewing it up. Guess what? Our food actually interacts with the healthy gut bacteria that lives in part on our tongue. So our tongue has healthy gut bacteria as well. The gut starts in the mouth and it goes all the way to the anus. And so when we eat foods like a beet, for example, or a piece of spinach, and we're chewing and enjoying the beet, it turns out that the nitrogen that the plant naturally absorbed in the soil gets converted by our gut microbiome that live in the little recesses of our tongue. So think about it, you get up in the morning and you're brushing your tongue, okay, it'll grow back, okay?

I don't do that.

I think it's supposed to, who brushes their tongue? I don't know. Well, you know, but people actually use this like dentist's gift. I know, I use this. Yeah. And they actually kill all the bacteria in your mouth with the intent of actually preventing cavities. Well, look, if you have good healthy gut bacteria in your mouth, which is one of the body's health defense systems, It actually works for you. It doesn't work against you. And it actually suppresses cavities by itself. So, eat a piece of spinach or beet, chew it up. The bacteria actually change the nitrogen into a form that when you swallow it gets absorbed in your stomach. We're still following the food along as a chemical form that is nitric oxide. Now, nitric oxide suddenly is absorbed in the stomach in your blood vessels carried by the circulation which causes vasodilation, now your blood pressure falls. And why is that important? Because for every, I mean, hypertension, one of the big causes of stroke, for example, and for every single point, we can lower that top number in the blood pressure, you know, 140 over 90, we decrease our risk of stroke by 5%. Wow. So it's meaningful. So, you know, a nitric oxide also has other benefits for our body as well. It actually calls another defense system stem cells to help us heal. so the stem cells live in a bone marrow, have nitric oxide, now they fly into the bloodstream like bees in a hive looking for organs to actually repair. So just eating a spinach or a beet, for example, will immediately help our cardiovascular system, help us our regeneration system, and also can help grow blood vessels that we need to heal. That's just one example of how we can track kind of like the, you know, it's like being a, like a, like a, going on Safari in Africa. You know, you're, you're in a Jeep with a camera and trying to follow, follow on what's going on. And we're beginning to understand there's this, you know, incredible Journey that happens in our body once with, with foods that we eat, and they activate our, our health defenses.

Yeah. One of the favorite things I love to talk about is how we, we've sort of lost our nutritional wisdom, and historically, we were attracted to the right Foods. Now we're not. because our brain chemistry hormones and our microbiome all been hijacked and are sending chaotic signals to our brain about what to eat. But historically, we crave the right things. And when you eat in a certain way, you don't actually look at food the same way. I mean, when you see, when I see processed food or I go buy a Starbucks and I see all the muffins, it doesn't look like food to me. I'm like, well, why would I eat that? It's like eating a rock. It just doesn't even interest me. and it's not because I'm depriving myself, it's because I've changed my nutritional wisdom in my innate biology to crave the right things. And what happens is when you look at this phytochemical story, the flavors in our food come from these molecules. So actually the more flavorful a thing is naturally, not when you put all kinds of stuff on it, but naturally, actually the better it is for you, the more medicine is in the food.

Well, and you know, when you treat the food with medicines, like putting pesticides on foods, for example, you might make it look a little bit nicer. But in fact, you know, I always like to talk about this example. I used to be a skeptic about organic foods. And the reason is because it was so much marketing on there and I, you know, like telling me to have less, less something bad doesn't attract me. I want to know, like, I want a different reason. And, and so I started talking to horticulturalists and, and they told me something really important. They said, you know that a plant like a strawberry or a coffee bean, when they're existing in the wild and the pests, the little bugs, insect nibble at their leaves and stems.

Yeah, they produce more chemicals.

They produce more chemicals because they view the little nibbles as an injury, so. in response as a wound healing response, they create more elagic acid in a strawberry or more chlorogenic acid in the coffee bean. And, sure enough, when you actually put pesticides on a strawberry or a coffee, which is conventionally grown, you wind up, they don't need to make more of those chemicals. And so, what you wind up having is something that looks like a coffee bean and something that looks like a strawberry, but it's actually relatively deficient in what Mother Nature would have otherwise served up that's actually good for our body. And so, you know, I started to change my mind more good as opposed to less bad. Yeah, that's true. Now that actually tracks me.

It's true. I think the other point to make on the back of that is that when we put these chemicals on the soil, it kills all the life in the soil. So when you till the soil, when you put fertilizer on it, when you pesticides, herbicides, it literally kills the microbiome of the soil. And the plants are in an intimate relationship with the microbiome of the soil. They're feeding the microbiome, by bringing in carbon dioxide, turning that into metabolizable starch. And then in turn, those bacteria are helping the plant extract nutrients from the soil, minerals, vitamins, all kinds of stuff that the soil has that benefits the plant. So it's this mutualism that occurs that if, when we break that cycle, we end up, as we see now, with many of our fruits and vegetables having dramatically lower levels of nutrients than they did even 50 years ago. and that terrifies me because we're, these nutrients are not just kind of window dressing on our food. They're critical molecules that, that are, they call them vitamins, vital for life. That's what they have vitamins that they call. And then that was the whole point of these things that you get sick and die if you didn't eat them.

So we're, we're in kind of a pandemic of that. Well, and, and I, and I totally agree because I, I think you and I were, at a meeting once where we both heard there was like only 60 harvests left. left in topsoil in America. Like, just think about that. Like, you could, you can count that off, you know, with a, with a family member on hands and fingers and toes. That is truly scary. And so I think that, you know, the greater, the more we're alert to the fact that if we want to take good care of ourselves, we don't want to get more complicated. We want to get more simple. We want to actually follow our body's instincts to eat those things that are more natural. that are less processed, that are plant-based. And, you know, ultimately, you know, you were talking earlier about, you know, animals eating plants, you know, even these delicious Seafoods, oily fish that people actually eat at the end of the day, it's big fish eating smaller fish, eating smaller fish, eating plants.

And that's where the Omega-3s come from. Exactly. It's algae.

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's so true. I, I think, you know, the, the interesting thing that I'm learning about is that the, the, the animals left to their own devices, they'll eat three or four main crops or foods. And, but if they're, if they're free to eat and forage for a wide variety of plants, they might eat up to 50 or a hundred different plants and they'll sample little bits of each one, kind of like taking their vitamins or their daily pharmaceutical drugs. And those animals, you know, so if you take a feedlot cow, it takes an enormous amount of investment to keep it healthy. antibiotics, hormones, you know, all kinds of, you know, very aggressive measures because they're not eating their natural diet. And, and the molecules in there that we want aren't there. And there may be inflammatory molecules when you take a grass-fed cow better. But if it's only eating one or two kinds of grasses, that's not great. And, and, and they need extra support. Whereas regeneratively raised cows foraging on maybe a hundred different plants, actually don't need medicines, don't need antibiotics, don't get sick. If the plants are the right plants, they actually grow to their ideal weight as fast as feedlot cows and don't release as much methane. I mean, it's really fascinating when you get into the science of the biology of how much the interrelation between soil, plants, animals, and humans exists.

And the concept of diversity, which you're talking about, is so important, right? Because we do want to protect the species and the diversity of species in our planet. But actually, this is how we're hardwired as well. We, our human body, loves diversity. Our gut microbiome wants to eat lots of different things. Our health defense systems, our five health defense systems, all crave different types of stimuli to activate them, to keep them kind of agile and active and in shape and working on our behalf. And, and here's, I think, the really good news for people that are watching this is that Ancient cultures, ancient food cultures that revered, treasured, tasty foods, mostly plant-based foods actually understood this. And, that's why so many of the foods from the Mediterranean or from Asia, if you go back and look at traditional foods, like, I mean, you and I talked about this before, this idea of Mediterranean cuisine, like there's a lot of unhealthy eating that goes on in modern Mediterranean countries today. We're talking about traditional eating patterns, same thing in Asia. We're talking about going back to basics. And so, you know, we're entering this era where we're, in a way, I think that we're all kind of shedding the artificial skin that we've grown over the last, you know, five decades. Yeah. That, you know, what we are sold in media or in the supermarket is actually better for us. And when you shed your skin, you know, you kind of get back to basics. The more authentic, instincts that we have about what we should eat happen to also taste better as well.

It's so true. I went to a Chinese doctor the other day and I had just to check up. I just wanted to get my pulse checked and get a tune up. And afterwards she sent me a prescription, which was after feeling my pulse and seeing where I was out of balance, she said, oh, you need to build up your blood for this or that or the other thing. So she said, I should eat bison and beets and duck and liver and cuttlefish, avocados and black sesame seeds. And then she said I should eat walnuts and almonds and woodier mushrooms and all mushrooms, olives, natto and seaweed. And of course she said cherries, goji berries, mulberries, persimmon and then all this other Asian food like daikon, lotus root, burdock, mountain yam, sweet potatoes, soba noodles, oily fishes and so forth. And I was like, yeah, she's giving me a drug prescription because each one of these foods, and you probably could talk about each one of these foods for an hour, in terms of what's in them in terms of the, the way that foods and drugs work together. I think you, you, you're sort of bringing up a very interesting point here. I, I think there's a lot of conversation about, you know, drug interactions and how you shouldn't take certain things with certain, like people say, oh, don't have fish oil if you're on a blood thinner. And it's more a negative, but it turns out that there's a lot of kind of power in combining food with medicines to activate the power of the medicines, but also to mitigate some of the effects and side effects of the medicine because they contain compounds that help to benefit.

Yeah, well, you know, so what is the first thing that doctors learn when they enter the clinical phase of medicine is that old adage, first do no harm. Well, I actually think that's the wrong priority. I think the first thing we should do is to to deliver benefit, you know, and if you flip that around to first deliver benefit, all right, why are we thinking about the bad stuff when we can actually focus our minds on the good stuff? If you're going to first deliver benefit, you have to think about food. And this is where, you know, the reliance on the prescription pad that so many people encounter when they see their, you know, their average, their primary care doctor, I think every patient knows that there's something that's not being discussed. There's something that is so important that isn't being part of the dialogue. Well, you know, I can tell you that my mind opened on food and medicine, not food versus medicine.

Yes.

Right? So, you got these kind of extremists who are, you know, the guy that quit clinical medicine, they stand up at a soapbox, they wave a front to kale, and they basically say, you know, eat this and everything will be cured. And I think that that is as wrong as somebody who only writes prescriptions.

Absolutely.

We all need to bring to do first do good, first deliver benefit. What we need to do is to think about all the tools that are toolboxes we can give them. And so, you know, one of the studies that I thought was really interesting was performed done by the University of North Carolina, where they were taking young, healthy people. who were just getting a flu vaccine, you know, winter time flu vaccine. And they wanted to see if they gave them some food on top of that, it would make a difference in terms of how well their immune systems responded to the vaccine. So they actually took broccoli sprouts, baby three to four day old broccoli plants, which contained lots of sulforaphane. These are the natural biochemicals. A hundred sprout broccoli sprouts contain 100 times more sulforaphane than the grown up broccoli. And, so you turn them into a shake and they just gave them two cups of shake, two shakes to drink every day. Plus they got the flu vaccine and they gave half of the people a placebo shake with no broccoli sprouts, right? Probably didn't taste very good. And then they measured that they swabbed their nose to measure the number of bacteria. or viruses that were present, flu viruses. And then they did a blood test. So this is just like you would do in a pharmaceutical trial. They took out blood and they measured their natural killer T cells, which is what your vaccines do. And then here's what they found. They found the people who had the flu vaccine plus the shake had 22 times more of the natural killer T cells. Wow.

Like just for people listening, that's 22,000%. more like that's, that's an insane result. Cause, you know, we get excited in medicine when we see a 20% improvement or a 30% improvement. We're talking about a 22,000% improvement. There's no drugs into that.

Right. And, and, you know, and we, and we think about like how to make the medicine do its job better.

Right?

Well, look, here's the difference between foods and medicines. And we're talking about making them work together. Medicines don't give you joy. they give you some effect that you hope to have. Foods can give you that effect and the joy as well. And then when you put them together, you're getting more effect and you also get a little bit of the joy of life as well. And so that's one of the studies that I always refer to to say, we can't ignore food as medicine. And the other thing that I think that is, I'm a cancer researcher. I've done a lot of cancer research over my career and I've had cancer in my family. I talk about my mother who actually had all of her cancer successfully eliminated by immunotherapy using her own immune system to get rid of it. And, we had given her pomegranate juice, we'd given her other foods that actually helped to grow good bacteria. Well, the latest study that I think is a jaw dropper was published in Nature Medicine. It was done by the MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the top cancer centers in the world. Jim Ellison, who actually, Allison, who's actually one of the researchers, won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunotherapy.

Yeah.

That group is studying immune, the immune system, the microbiome, what you eat and cancer. Like, it's sort of like the, the, the holy quadrinity of what we want to actually start to do in cancer research. So, what they found, they, they took 200 patients who had malignant melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer. And these patients were getting immunotherapy, a kind of infused immunotherapy that actually works. When it works, it works great. The problem, only about 20% of people respond to this type of immunotherapy. So they wanted to find out what the difference between responders and non-responders were. And this is starting to be the pattern of the kind of research done in this field. They found the responders who benefited from an immune therapy that jack up your own immune system to go after the cancer, and therefore you do better, you, the cancer starts to go away and you live.

Yep.

Had one bacteria that the ones who didn't respond didn't have. And that bacteria is a ruminococcus. Now, on a past podcast, I talked about Akkermansia. Well, ruminococcus is starting to pop up as another significant player in the microbiome space. Now, I started to take note of Ruminococcus about a year and a half ago during the pandemic. People were studying, why did some people have more antiviral cytokines in their bloodstream if they weren't getting COVID? And it turned out that they, that those people had more Ruminococcus in their, in their, in their stool as well. Wow.

So here you have cancer, but also COVID.

Yeah. And so what was interesting is that in, in the study in China that found this for, during early days of COVID also asked what were these people eating? And in China, the study for the COVID study showed that they, the people with more Romanococcus and more interferon gamma, the natural virus killer, they were drinking more green and black tea, not just green tea, but black tea, and they were having more omega-3 fatty acids, both from plant-based foods. as well as seafood. Now, flip back over to the Japanese.

Food with sushi and green tea is a good thing. Exactly.

That's the carryout. The cancer study is much more sober because now we're talking about a different kind of life or death. And the surprise with this rumenococcus bacteria, now what they did is they actually asked the people what they were eating. And because the microbiome of course is strongly influenced by the food we eat, turns out that these people were eating many different, mostly plant-based foods with tons of dietary fiber if they were getting a rumenococcus, if they were responding. And so then they began to calculate how much dietary fiber you would need to get an effect. And what they found is that for every five grams per day of dietary fiber you ate, how much is five grams of dietary fiber? That's the average amount you'd get in a medium-sized pear. A pair a day would give you five grams.

Lower- and by the way, the average American eats about eight grams a day, which is terrible.

But even five grams in this setting would actually lower the risk of tumor progression and lower mortality by 30%. So now they calculated out if you actually had up to 20 grams of fiber, you really maxed out your ability to actually respond to a cancer medicine. And so, every cancer patient always asks their oncologist, Hey, Doc, what should I eat? And oftentimes they're saying, just eat anything, go to Mickey D's or whatever.

Or they say, eat ice cream and milkshakes and it's like terrible.

We, you know, this is where science is. Science is giving us the answer to those questions that patients want to have. And I think that this is what responsible doctors who are on, you know, who are, who are current and who are forward going. This is where our society has to go. it's beginning to get those answers to be able to tell patients how they can help themselves.

Well, it's interesting, William. You know, we talk about dietary fiber, but that's a very big bucket. There's soluble fiber, insoluble fiber, prebiotic fibers. Did it matter? And how do they figure that out? You know, they were looking at mostly.

Fruits and vegetables, and, and they think these are mostly insoluble fibers or, sorry, soluble fibers that were in the study. And so this is now the next layer. So real real scientific research doesn't deliver all the answers in one fell swoop. You kind of go back and you, you know, you get back into the batter's box and you hit another one out in terms of research. And so that's really, I think, a place to watch MD Anderson looking at this work that they're doing on the microbiome and diet and looking at the response to cancer therapy. So, I mean, look, this, these kinds of efforts are going on all around the world, but they underscore this idea that the food that we eat does matter. And it can matter a lot to help the medicines that have been the product of all this research to help get the result that we want to patients. So first, deliver benefit. And I think that that's something that is really important for doctors to hear.

So I think if this is true, and I clearly believe it is, and you believe it is, and I don't even know what's a belief because it's scientifically proven, and I can believe in God or not, but hard to prove scientifically or how many angels dance on the head of a pin. We can argue that all day, but this is science. And given, given that science, then if food is medicine, how should doctors prescribe medicine? What's the dose, the amount, the frequency, and for what disease is? I mean, it's, it's a whole new field of, of inquiry, and it, it really requires a whole new curriculum for medical school that we haven't even come close to formulating. And, and your book was probably the closest curriculum there is to actually laying that out. So how, how, how do we get from here to there? Because right now we're here and in 10 years, where are we going to be and how are we going to get there?

Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought up this whole issue of food dosing because if food is med, is medicine, medicine always has a dose, right? So like as doctors, we're taught to write prescriptions. What is the name of the medicine? How much do you give? How often do you give it? And then what are we actually looking for? And so to, to do this, you know, for a drug, you design a clinical trial and you test different doses. There's a completely different way to come at this when it comes to food. and that is to look at the research studies that have been done, and we talked about a couple of them, and then to look at the result and then to calculate based on the result, you kind of work backwards to figure out where did, so where did we start from? So I like to talk about a study of 36,000 people. It's a health professional follow-up study that looked at men who were ultimately who are all men at risk for developing prostate cancer. And they wanted to find out for the people who didn't develop prostate cancer, what were they eating? And they had a hypothesis that lycopene in tomatoes might affect prostate cancer because it's antioxidant, it kills cancer cells, and it cuts off the blood supply feeding cancers. And so when they did the study, they found that men who ate two to three servings of cooked tomato. Now, what's in a serving? you can calculate this. When you look at the study, it's a half cup serving size. So two to three half cups of cooked tomatoes. Now you even have a way of preparing the food over the course of a week. That's not asking a lot. Two to three cups of half a cup of half cups of servings of tomatoes lowered the risk of prostate cancer by 29%. And so now we have an outcome. And again, I, I don't think it's reasonable for to ask people, patients, healthy people to go into that medical research to dive into it. But for those of us who are doctors and trained to do this, we have that ability. And so I think that, you know, you're absolutely right. What we need to do is to train up the ability for healthcare providers that patients are supposed to trust to give them the tools to be able to actually go in and wade into that complicated stuff to make it simple for patients. So when somebody asked me about tomatoes and prostate cancer, I just say, look, you want to have, you know, something with tomato sauce in it two to three times a week, and it only needs to be a half cup.

That's not a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I had a patient once who did not want to take any supplements. And she came to see me, and she's, look, I know I need this much zinc, and I need this much magnesium, and I need this much bullic acid. And she said, basically, she showed me. She's like, I need 17 pumpkin seeds, and I need, like, 12 almonds, and I. I was like, wow. that's impressive because she literally did the research to find out what nutrients are in the food. Now, hopefully she was getting it from sources where actually the food she was buying had the nutrients that they're supposed to be in there. But it's really quite amazing. And I think, William, I think that most doctors don't understand the power of food because, you know, if I, if I, if I said, oh, do I, do you have a headache, William? Okay, well, I'm a doctor. I'm gonna prescribe aspirin for you, and you need to take 650 milligrams of aspirin. that will help your headache. But if I just gave you a milligram of aspirin, I would conclude that aspirin doesn't have anything to do with headaches. But we're not prescribing the right drug in the right dosage. And I think we don't see the outcomes that we can see us, such as reversing heart failure, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, chronic digestive problems, skin diseases, mood disorders. I mean, you just go on and on down the list. and it's like, wow, you know, we're, we're missing this entire pharmacology that is so critical. Years ago, I wrote an article called food is pharmacology, eating your medicine, basically based on this Chinese meal I had in a restaurant in Hong Kong that was like ginkgo nuts and Chinese wood ear mushrooms and this thing and that thing, and everything had its, like, medicinal properties. And Chinese folks have known this forever. In fact, the word for take your medicine is true yao, which means eat your medicine. Right. Which was the name of my PBS show that did really well. So I think they're onto something. I feel like it's so critical.

You know, I, I think, I think you're right. And, and, and here's something in real time I can tell you that I'm in the process of working on. And, and you're going to like this because this kind comes from one of your home-based institutions out of Ohio. So there was a study that did computational analysis, artificial intelligence, to take a look at what medicines might be associated with lowering the risk of some serious disease, like Alzheimer's disease. And so here is the Cleveland Clinic. They were taking a look at seven million people's medical records and putting a computer program into mine and see like 1600 different kind of medicines that people are taking, all these different disease states that people are having, and trying to figure out what was there any connection, interconnection to the pattern at the genetic level. And what they found was truly amazing because at the end of the day, and here's the punchline for the study, they found surprisingly that men who were taking Viagra, sildenafil, had a 69% decrease in the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Wow. Okay.

So more sex means less dementia or is it something else?

Clears your mind.

Well, actually, I read a study once that men live longer if they have more sex. The same is true for women, but they have to like it.

Well, so here's the thing. How is it that that Viagra, sildenafil, could actually be helpful for Alzheimer's disease. So, these researchers went back into the lab. So, sometimes we can take an observation, whether it's through dietary studies or through medicine studies, and go back into the lab and check it out. So, what they found actually with the Viagra, which produces nitric oxide, the same thing that spinach and beets actually help our body produce, actually stimulates regeneration and nerves will actually start to sprout new nerves. Okay? And it actually down regulates the gene that creates a protein called tau that builds up and clogs up your brain in Alzheimer's disease. And so now we have a going backwards to try to find an explanation for something that a computer helped us figure out now. And this is kind of like the wait for it moment. So what I'm trying to do now is to figure out on the basis of the doses of Viagra that create nitric oxide. Can we then jump to a different silo to say, well, by aggregating this much nitric oxide, how much can spinach and beets create? Because then we can actually kind of do that, take out the pH for phytomicrobiology and put the S, because they.

Have natural nitrates that get converted to nitric oxide in the body.

Exactly. Exactly. And so now what we can actually do is to try to figure that out. And this is, I think, you know, the, the, those of us who are working at an advanced area of food as medicine are really trying to break open new frontiers by doing this kind of research. And what I would say is that it's kind of like mixed martial arts. You don't want to just use one style of fighting, one set of moves. You want to use every tool at your disposal in order to be able to get that match, win that match.

Yeah, so true. And I think the exciting thing is we are starting to understand how to use medicine from foods in a more precise, deliberate way. And you mentioned the, you know, the 22,000 full percent increase in the benefit of eating certain foods and the flu effectiveness.

Broccoli sprouts.

Broccoli sprouts. I want to take a kind of a little bit of left turn, but not really because it relates to food in the immune system. And we, and, and some of the sort of discoveries you've made around COVID and long COVID. Right now, you know, we know, for example, our friend Darius Mazharian published an article from Tufts research that showed that 63% of cases of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID were because of poor diet, lack of protective foods, too much bad food. And so the question is, with our understanding now of COVID and now this post-COVID phenomena, what are we learning and what are you learning that may combine both nutrition and also pharmacology to help us reimagine our approach to preventing COVID, treating COVID and actually dealing with what we call long COVID.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like we've been mired in COVID, in this pandemic for a long time. And yet, when you really look at it, it's only been about three years or so that we've been kind of wrestling, arm wrestling with this thing. And in three years, we've learned a lot.

It's only two years, but it feels like three years.

Yeah, well, the thing is that we started with zero knowledge. And I think that's what's amazing. And to speak to your point about food is medicine, I remember distinctly staring out the window at the very beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, realizing that, you know, as a medical doctor, as a highly trained medical doctor that actually develops medicines, that here was a moment in human history Dr. Brian Clement: where we have all this technology, all this, all these drugs, all this knowledge, but we were confronted with a new disease for which we had nothing. Hospitals couldn't offer anything. Doctors couldn't offer anything. Pharmaceutical companies couldn't offer anything. And it was just us. And the only thing that we all had to do as humans was to go out and get our food and bring it back home and to prepare it. And so this was that moment that I started to realize, like, okay, there is a real important mission for what it is that you do, Mark, and what I do, and which is to get that message out. People need to understand. We could be confronted with something new around the next corner. And at the end of the day, we have the agency as individuals to make better choices on our own body's behalf for immunity. And so, I will tell you the things that I started to look at. Now, I've also been involved with sort of like the vaccines and antivirals and all that fancy stuff that is in the realm of pharma for COVID. But here's some basic things that everyone should know. What does this coronavirus do when you have COVID? It causes massive inflammation in your body. There are foods that actually can lower inflammation. I mean, simple foods containing vitamin C, lower inflammation. Strawberries, guava, tomatoes, red bell peppers. these are the kind of colorful foods that actually can begin addressing some of those things. We also know that, you know, people who had vitamin D deficiencies actually were more vulnerable to actually developing COVID or becoming infected with COVID and getting sick. Well, you know, mushrooms are a good source of vitamin D. And if you actually take a mushroom and slice it and expose it to sunlight in the window sill before you eat it, it'll act, the mushroom will actually make more.

Vitamin D. So give your mushroom a suntan.

Not in a suntanning salon, but, and don't rub any olive oil until you're ready to cook it.

I love that. No sunblock. No sunblock. But, you know, the porcini mushrooms are the most potent sources of vitamin D. They're hard to find. I, I only had fresh porcini mushrooms when I go to Italy.

Well, the, the dried ones actually also have, are also still good because not only do they taste great, they have a lot of dietary fiber. And if you take a look at dried porcini mushrooms, that you know, there's some caps of the mushrooms which are good, but the stems actually have more of that soluble fiber than the caps do. So, you know, you're getting, again, go back to ancient food cultures, you know, porcini mushrooms, why should you eat them? Because they taste great. Exactly. And then, let's talk about the other reasons that are equally important.

If you love that last video, you should check out the next one for sure on on getting to the root cause of all disease. You go to the grocery store and it says vegetable oil. What is it? Broccoli oil? No, it comes from seeds. It comes from sometimes even cotton seed oil, which is highly toxic. It's canola oil, it's soybean oil.