Use Food As MEDICINE To Help Heal Your Body TODAY | Mark Hyman & William Li

Our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells. Starfish can regenerate, salamanders can regenerate, but.

People can't regenerate, right?

You can't grow a new arm. Yeah, well, it's true, you can't grow.

A new arm, but we do regenerate. We regenerate every day. Now, what about stem cells and regeneration? This is a big topic that I think people are hearing about in the news. They're confused about it. There's controversy about it. There's laws about it that prevent adequate research. I mean, it's really quite a messy area, and yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in. and it's, I don't think something that most people are aware of, that you can activate your own stem cells. That there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells. And what are stem cells anyway? What do they do and how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them?

Yeah, well, stem cells are really simple. We're made of stem cells. So, when our moms and dads got together and created, you know, us in the womb, we started out as stem cells. They actually made every single one of them. And, angina sperm. And angina sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory. And then, pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells. And after we were born, a few of those stem cells stuck around, about 700,000 of them. They stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines. They hide out in our body and they help us regenerate. So, when you and I were growing up, right, in grade school, we learned from our teachers that starfish can regenerate, salamanders can regenerate, but people can't regenerate, right?

Can't grow a new arm.

Yeah, well, it's true. You can't grow a new arm, but we do regenerate. We regenerate every day. We know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back. Our gut lining grows back. Our livers can grow back. If you actually remove part of your liver, it'll grow back. Our skin grows back, you know? So, our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells. Now, what can injure stem cells? High doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells.

So, I'm okay with the one tequila I had last night?

Having a tequila every now and then is not bad. Having a glass of wine. But, the thing is on balance, what you want to do is people who drink a lot, have damaged stem cells. Diabetes is another state, a metabolic state that, you know, it really impairs, it cripples our stem cells. Sugar. High blood sugar cripples our stem cells. So the excess of anything can be harmful, including to our stem cells. So what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells? This is where it's really become interesting. Before I talk about that, though, let me just stress affect your stem cells. Stress can definitely affect our stems. High stress will blunt activity of our stem cells. You know, it's just like stunning them. So they're like, wait a minute, what do I do now? You know, maybe I'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs. We got to rebuild our blood vessels. We got to rebuild our hearts. You know, our hearts turn around. Like, we actually have stem cells in our hearts and our brains and re grow our nerves. Every single day, something in our body is regenerating. Actually, a lot of things are regenerating. So what people are hearing in the news, are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies that you inject into the body. So, you know, taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them. And someday that's gonna wind up becoming game changing in medicine. Someday, we're not there yet. I've been involved with some of those efforts and what I've seen is very exciting. But more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells. And here's the research. You can actually take, and it's a lot cheaper. And it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable.

Getting a stem cell injection is like 20 grand or something, right?

Well, you know, I would say, why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table? Yeah.

Right.

So the Mediterranean diet, it's been studied by Spain, looked at elderly people on the Mediterranean diet and those who were on a Mediterranean diet compared to not on a Mediterranean diet had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation, in their bloodstream. So again, it's not one magic food, it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating. Now, when you can actually do the research on specific things as well. So for example, tea, green tea will increase your stem cells. But guess what? So can black tea. So here's what this is about.

Japanese live Well, longevity. All the green tea?

You know, people in Asia drink a lot of tea. People in Britain drink a lot of tea as well. We used to say green tea is good, black tea is fermented, so it's not going to be that good for you. We're changing our minds. We have to keep our minds open. Black tea can also double the number of stem cells. And then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study by UCSF in San Francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease. So they had kind of crappy blood.

Flow and they gave them hot chocolate. Yeah, I was going to say the.

Chocolate stem cell story. I want to hear about it. It's amazing, right? So the darker the chocolate, the higher the flavonols.

These are the bioactives are naturally present in cacao.

Yeah.

And they. There was a study down. This is the food is medicine. This is the food.

There are literally these chemicals in food called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties. They are made by Mother Nature. They're packed in the food, growing on the plant. And, you know, every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactive. So in cacao, which is a bean, which then you process to you actually get, you know, kind of the cocoa powder. If you take the really dark chocolate, like 73% cacao, the really dark chocolate, and you make it into a high flavanol hot chocolate drink, and you have it twice a day, this was the clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month, they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate, right? And so, okay, so the question is, is that important? Well, when they measured their blood flow, what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which, you know, kind of like lowers the circulation of the blood, they let it go. They found that the blood flow was much vastly improved. Wow. So here's a functional result that actually means it makes a difference. So who's going to complain about chocolate? Who's going to complain about tea? Who's going to complain about a Mediterranean diet?

I mean, you go out to eat, these are the things we love. Yeah, well, it's interesting you talk about how drugs sort of block, interfere, inhibit some medical process, some biological process. And there's toxicity to them, there's side effects to them. You can take too much, which will harm you, whereas foods don't work like that. But you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food. So, food is medicine. What's the dose? Is it one cranberry? Is it a thousand cranberries?

Right, well, so my book Eat to Beat Disease, specifically have a chapter on food doses. It's important to me.

Which nobody talks about.

Well, I know that because when I read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale, I'm always asking, well, how much should I actually eat? And, that always struck me as something that needed an answer. So, here's how we've approached it. You can actually get food doses. That's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial. in terms of our health. The best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies, these epidemiological studies. There's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times, right? So in Europe, there's something called the EPIC study. EPIC study. And Haines is in the United States. Bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of patients. In Europe, they're studying 500,000 patients over 20 years, and they're tracking everything they eat, and they're asking them how much are you eating? And then on the tail end, looking at what happens to their health? What's their cancer rate? What's their heart disease rate? What's their diabetes rate? And, when you actually combine those two, the result that we want, lower cancer, less heart disease, and you go back into their research and you figure out what foods they ate, you can actually calculate how much they ate of it.

Yeah.

Right? So, and then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this. By the way, this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well. It's, you know, just having random amounts of stuff not gonna work. You gotta correlate what works with what actually the amount is. So smaller studies, there was a study called the Health Professionals Follow-up Study done at Harvard, which looked at 70,000 men, and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week, that's a half a cup of cooked tomato sauce, not that much, you have pasta, right? Lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39%. Yeah. Right? So that's a dose, that's an outcome, and that's a particular food. And you can do that systematically. You've got to hunt and peck for it, but it's there. And it doesn't give you the exact answer. It's not like a medicine, like actually, frankly, even penicillin. You don't always get the right result, but you have a good approximation.

So that's the beginning of food doses. I mean, your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about the diet and eating healthy and reversing disease, but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that I didn't even know about fish roe or razor clams or different kinds of Chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that maybe haven't been studied in large randomized controlled trials but have clinical studies, have epidemiologic studies, and we can start to include these and there's very little downside, right? Unless you don't like clams.

Well, look, what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another. And my approach is really a global approach. My work spans around the world. We're in Asia, Europe, Asia, I mean, America and Americas. And here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods and no matter where you go. So what interests me is what are the common denominators? So for example, you mentioned razor clams. Well, that's actually a category of seafood. We know from most epidemiological studies, including studies in Europe and Asia, that people who eat more seafood, about three times a week, actually have lower all-cause mortality and they just survive longer. So then you sort of say, well, what could be possibly responsible for that? Well, we do know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids. that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat. So if you- But is it the.

Omega-3s in razor clams or something else?

Well, there's probably other things as well. So, I can tell you another example that I was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually not only have some Omega-3 fatty acids, but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune system.

Yeah. So again, so it's like the mushrooms of the sea, 'cause polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms, anti-cancer compounds. And now they're in oysters?

Wow, I didn't know. And by the way- these are long sugar chains. That's right. And your body digests them. They've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce. So, you know, the kind of sauce, the brown sauce you see in a Chinese restaurant, right? Chinese food. They study that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system. Does that actually come from oysters? It comes from oysters, yeah. They boil them down. and they caramelize them. So again, this is where food is medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things, really. You incorporate the culinary side, the chefs get into it. I mean, this is really, I think, us as a society coming together and saying, what do we love? And by the way, in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, it's really not about what to cut out of your life. It's about what to add to your life and what do we really enjoy. And it's all about our preferences and making the right decisions.

So this is incredible. So stem cells are not some weird thing you have to go, spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat, maybe get it from some placenta somewhere, you can actually activate your body's own regenerative healing power. And you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate them. That's so powerful and it's a very encouraging message. Now, let's talk about the microbiome. Now, this is a whole another world that most doctors really are not schooled in. That certainly wasn't part of my medical education. That is something that I've been focused on for almost 30 years in functional medicine because we know the gut is where the seed of your health is. It's what ancient traditions like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, they all recognize this. We just were like, oh, well, it's just poop. It's just brown stuff that comes out as waste. Who cares? Whatever. And now, we're seeing it linked to so many different conditions from autism to depression to cancer to heart disease to obesity to Parkinson's. the list goes on and on and we probably haven't even finished the list yet. And yet, we know very little about it. So, could you tell us a little bit about the microbiome and why it's so important and what we can do to protect it, to feed it, to help it and also what are those things that we're doing that screw it up? Right.

So, you know, the microbiome is an entire new discipline that's going to change humanity. you know, I mean, I think that we've always thought of humankind as just humans. But in fact, we're 50-50 with bacteria is really kind of like- I think.

It'S more like 90-10.

Well, they've actually done some new calculations on this, right? So, it's about 40 trillion cells, about the same number of bacteria is the latest calculation on this is sort of the up-to-date numbers. And, it makes a lot of sense, right? So, basically, when we evolved as humans, we were hunters and gatherers picking stuff up, you know, nuts and fruits and seeds and picking stuff off of trees that had bacteria in it. There's more bacteria in the planet than living than animals. And when we ate those, the bacteria naturally colonized the body. And by the way, the gut, of course, but not just the gut. Our skin, our mouth, our nose, every orifice has got bacteria and our tears have bacteria. Breast milk has bacteria. Even in the womb, which we, you know, when you and I were medical school, they said, Oh, the womb is sterile. Wrong. In fact, babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb.

Amazing.

Okay, so we're beginning to rewrite the playbook of understanding how bacteria get in our body. The next thing about bacteria, I'll tell you about in terms of the microbiome, is in the Middle Ages, bacteria was responsible for the plague. And so, we sort of developed this fear and repulsion to bacteria. fast forward to the 1940s, the discovery of antibiotics that really was a medical revolution. And then everybody went willy-nilly with the antibiotics, which can be life saving. Let's be clear about that. But the overuse of antibiotics, not just in humans, not just in children, but.

Also in our animals. Yeah, which is where most of the antibiotics are. We have 24 million pounds of antibiotics that are used every year. 19 million are used in animals for.

Helping them grow and preventing infections. And getting into our drinking water.

Right?

So, we've sort of invisibly impaired our environment so that we're exposed to antibiotics. That changes the ecology, the coral reef, that delicate ecosystem between bacteria and human cells in our body. So, that's one thing is antibiotics. The other thing that actually can really injure our microbiome really is our lifestyle, you know, physical activity. We know that if you're not active, your microbiome kind of suffers. We exercise on the outside, the bacteria.

Get the benefit too.

They get that workout. Stress can change our microbiome. How many times have you've, I'm sure you and I have done the same thing. We stayed up all night, we've had to pull some all-nighters. Next day you feel like crap. Your gut doesn't feel so good. That's because of microbiomes having a riot. They pulled the all-nighter too. What we're realizing- Diet, obviously. And our diet plays a huge role.

Putting in pounds of stuff every day in that, too.

Yeah. Well, you know, something really interesting, right? So, 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 know, you have to take at 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. Yeah. Right? You pick a mushroom and you eat it, you know that the fiber in that mushroom is gonna feed us and the bacteria, right? The pulp's gonna feed us and the fiber's gonna feed the bacteria. What we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm our gut.

We have 3000 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 your 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. Amazing. 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. Yeah. Okay.

And so, you know, I had almonds for breakfast.

I want to make sure I got. Well, you know, we should all, we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think the nuts are one of the, 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, the 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. 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? Again, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's slow but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine.

And we're going to be able to map this out. We're going to be very soon in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence, big data analysis, microbiome assays, we can actually look at what's growing, what's not growing, how different things affect it, check it over time in a serial way, modulate the effects. I mean, it's fascinating. Wow, maybe if you give this cocktail of acrymancia smoothie, then your acrymancia grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy. I mean, this is really radical stuff. And yet, there are very few people talking about it in a clinical way like you are. You're saying, okay, wait a minute. We don't know everything, but we know a lot and we know enough to actually start to integrate these strategies. And the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because it empowers people to say, okay, wait a minute. I don't have to set a wait around to get disease then hope some drug saves me or, you know, try to fix it then. But I can actually start to build the foundations of my health for my whole life by understanding. And it's, these are a little bit technical, you know, stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff, but it's actually doable. And you make it so practical in your book. You have this five by five by five plan, which we'll get into. But let's go next to the DNA thing, because we talked about angiogenesis, regeneration, stem cells, microbiome. Let's talk about the DNA because we think, oh, wait, we got our DNA. There's nothing we can do about it. We get hits to our DNA from toxins and stress and different things, but.

What can we really do to help our DNA? Right. Well, so in my book, I should talk about how most people hear about DNA these days relates to our ancestry. Who are we related to and how.

Much of us is Neanderthal?

I'm about 1.5%. But in fact, our DNA is our genetic blueprint and part of that blueprint Blueprint is our blueprint for health. It actually is designed to keep us healthy, our DNA. We need the. Our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health. We need the right proteins made. We need the right molecules made at the right time from the time we're born to the. To our last breath, really. And so we know that DNA can get mutated, and so some of the things that can mutate our DNA is actually -Stop there.

I just wanna go back a minute. What you said was really important. You said, Our DNA makes proteins that regulate all of our biology. And so they can actually make good proteins or if they get damaged, they make bad proteins. Bad proteins. That's right.

And the good proteins help you create health and the bad proteins cause disease. Exactly. And by the way, the DNA is part of our hardwiring, right? It's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an auto-virus system and actually checks it out, finds problems and erases them, really just deletes them. So, on average, we know that there's about 10,000 mistakes that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day, right? So, think about it. Where else are there in the sunlight? Sun ultraviolet radiation damages us. You sit in a car in a highway on a traffic on a community to work, that sun shines going to right through the windshield, mutating your DNA, secondary smoke. You're filling up your car and I guess, I mean, some of us drive electric cars, but most people still wind up filling up their cars with pump gas, right?

So do you stand upwind or downwind of the fumes? I just hold my breath. Actually, I try to like stuff the cap in the thing because they have.

The automatic with it. I run away. So here's a way to protect your DNA. When you're filling your gas, figure out which way the wind blowing and stand upwind. If you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents, the gas, and you're mutating your DNA.

You can stick in and hold it and then go there.

Well, but this is the kind of situational awareness that we want to have. Like I was saying, when you're at the stove, you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire. These are the things that we know we should be doing at sort of the health level. Our DNA is, and there's some things we can't do anything about, like radon coming out of the earth. that just mutates our DNA as well. So we have to take proactive steps to protect our DNA. And some of the things that we can do are pretty simple. Like for example, we know that an elemental vitamin, vitamin C can actually do it. A really interesting clinical trial or clinical study that was done in people who were drinking orange juice, right? So they're, scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice and they took the blood out and they measured how well their DNA protected itself in a lab test. And then they gave them orange juice to drink. It's one and three quarters cup. So it's kind of a tall glass of orange juice. And they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their DNA's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by 20%.

Is it the vitamin C or is it the naringenin or quercetin?

Oh, we think it's vitamin C because actually they they've actually studied vitamin C in isolation, but it's almost certain that there's other factors in the orange juice.

I mean, you're getting a lot of sugar with that much orange juice. Could you then just take the vitamin C pills?

So, what's interesting is that the placebo that they gave to a group of people were just sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice. It was not the sugar. We know that's not good for you, but it was really the other stuff. So, vitamin C is what they were focusing on. but I think it's probably the Narangin and Hesperidin and other things in orange juice as well. The pulp's got a lot of good stuff in it. And, by the way, the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits, it's the peel, the rind, that actually has a lot of stuff.

Well, they say if you're taking statins or certain drugs, you should have grapefruit, especially the peel, like the white stuff, because it actually affects the metabolism of drugs. Exactly. if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit if you're taking a statin.

Well, so, you know, that's a pretty interesting. But just a point of clarification on that. So it's, if you have grapefruit, it can slow down the metabolism of the liver. So when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels, you. And the liver has to clear that. Yes, that's. when you call it toxicity. But in point of fact, think about it another way. If you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods, you raise the levels of the healthy things in your bloodstream. So here's another amazing food that can protect our DNA is kiwis. Kiwis, oh my God.

Well, I just came back from New Zealand where my wife is from and.

I ate a lot of kiwis. Listen, I love kiwis, right? Kiwis used to be in the jungle. I think monkeys ate them and they were grown in New Zealand and then shipped to America. And I think they were called Chinese gooseberries originally. And they were just named kiwis. So anyway, there was an interesting study done in Scotland that looked at whether you ate one, two or three kiwis a day and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your DNA. Turns out even eating one kiwi a day can help your blood protect the DNA. from damage by 60%.

That's amazing.

One kiwi a day.

And what you're talking about is learning about in your book all the various foods. You might not like razor clams, but there's a lot of options. And it's not just that you're going to eat kiwis all day. You add all these different creative foods into your diet as much as you can and you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about.

Right. Well, I mean, look, here's the thing about most health diets. If you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only eat one food, you're not balancing your body. It's not natural to do that. I think the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable, that's supported by real science and real evidence, and that allows you to do the things you enjoy. So in my book, my emphasis in Eat to Beat Diseases, number one, look for foods that you eat the foods that you enjoy that are good for you. and so I present a whole list of food, 203 foods actually, and you get to choose. Pick the ones, circle the ones, take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off. That's your shopping list. You've had a great start already. You're already identifying the foods you love that are good for you. I've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good. Now you just choose them. Secondly, besides doing the things you like, be moderate. And that's the other thing is that, you know, I think most researchers Most research has shown that if you cut down your calories by 15%, 30%, actually you improve survival, at least in lab animals, but also in people too. People that eat somewhat less, the Japanese have the same- Ari Hitoshi Boo, right? Exactly, 80% full.

Don't push yourself away from the table before you're so stuffed that you can't.

Leave the party before it's over, right? That's basically what it is. It's better for your body. It doesn't put metabolic stress. You know, when you stuff yourself to the gills, your body is really stressed out. Even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress your cells, if you eat slowly and moderately, your brain will sort of say, Hey, you know what? It's enough.

Well, it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain you're full.

Exactly. So, you know, here's and this is, by the way, why eating with other people, which is what most of these Mediterranean countries do, the blue zone, you know, where people live a long time. They eat with other people.

It's good for you. You're talking, so you can't be stuff.

In your mouth all the time. Exactly. And you're not distracted. You're not watching television. You're not looking at your phone. It's, you know, eating social. And, and so that's another important component. And then finally, it's got to be sustainable. You got to do something that you can do your whole life. And that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can explore on, you know, you were talking about razor clamps. In my book, there's a lot foods that most people may not have heard about.

Bitter melon.

Bitter melon, it's kind of a staple in some Asian countries but great to try. I wouldn't cook it yourself for the first time because it's not that easy to cook. Go to a Chinese restaurant.

Yeah, let somebody who knows how to cook it.

I love it.

It tastes really bitter but it actually.

Is- For diabetes, it helps lower blood sugar. Absolutely. And, you know, what the interesting thing about bitter melon is, again, this is the culinary side, right? Here we were talking about the doctor's pharmacy, but in fact, we could be having a chef having this conversation as well. When you have bitter melon, which is a little bitter, it actually makes other foods taste more intense. So, the way it was designed in cuisine is actually to help you make you enjoy other foods even more. So, again, it's not either or, it's not an extreme, and it's about different cultures and finding what we love to do.

Well, it's fascinating. broad food and vegetables to be more disease resistant, to be drought resistant, to be easier to be shipped without spoiling, to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols. In fact, the flavor comes from these phytochemicals.

Exactly.

So, we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables. That's why I say eat weird food. because those typically haven't been screwed with. And there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast, Chef Boulay from New York, who actually has quit his world-class restaurant and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like herculean and turmeric oil and various things that he's done. And Dan Barber, is also going to be coming on our podcast and he's created a new seed company to design seeds not to be heirloom necessarily, but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor. Nobody was breeding for flavor. People were just breeding for all kinds of other things, pest resistance or GMO, whatever, instead of saying, well, how do we create more of these medicinal foods? And, which is a whole new thing that chefs are starting to think about, food is medicine. I remember when I was at Canyon Ranch years ago, probably like late 90s, and I got up in a meeting. There was the executives there, the owners, the doctors, the dieticians, the chefs. And I got up and I said, you know, we need to, this is a health resort. We need to start thinking about how to design our menus to use food as medicine. And the head chef got up and he screamed to me, this is not a effing hospital. I'm like, oh, God, I guess I'm a little too early on this one.

Well, you know, listen, being ahead of the time is something that you're known for. And, I think that we're now starting to appreciate it. I mean, think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food. Not only hospitals, by the way, but restaurants would be a great place. Theme parks would be a great place. Airlines would be a great place. I mean, there's so many places we can have an impact. Well, it's just frame shift.

Getting people to think about food as not just calories, but information, food as not just energy, but actually instructions that regulate your stem cells and your DNA and your microbiome and your immune system and your angiogenesis. I mean, these are things that are.

Not things that are stable. It's a new science of nutrition, right? So beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff, we're now combining food science with life science. You know, the life science is what we learn in medical food science, you know, not so much, right? So the average, it's only like 20% of medical schools that require any nutrition. You know, I can tell you part of what got me into this is that I used to be a doctor at a VA hospital and I felt a duty.

Brave soul.

Well, I felt a duty to really try to help people that committed their lives to help protect our country, right? So what was interesting, and I'm sure you know this as well, The veterans that come to the hospital, they have a lot of health problems. Some of them are obese, diabetes, they got diabetes, bad heart disease, cancer. That's the sort of every day in the clinic you see people that are really, really dealing with a lot of illness. And what I noticed was I said, this is odd because these people, when they were in their 20s, were healthy, were fit. They were that they couldn't get into the military if they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness.

Right, right.

So what happened to them over the decades? And I realized it wasn't, you know, just medicines. It had to be their lifestyle. And when I kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses, oftentimes really bad diagnoses, you know, and then they would ask me, what's the treatment? How long do I have? Doc, you know, how bad is it going to be? They'd put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door and almost all of them would turn around and ask me one question. They said, Hey Doc, what can I do for myself? What can I eat? And I didn't have the answer because I wasn't taught, we weren't taught to give that answer. And I thought that was wrong. And that's what led me on this journey that led me to write this book, Eat to Beat Disease, because I think that we need to know that people want to know that. What can we do for ourselves to.

Eat to beat disease? And in a way, there are really no drugs that work as well when you look at the spectrum of over your lifetime inputting all these powerful foods compared to what the effect of a medication would be. And studies have shown this, that the diet and lifestyle works better than statins, for example, for preventing heart disease. Mediterranean diet, the big study that was done, the PREDIMED study, which gave people a liter of olive oil a week or a bunch of nuts every day, the effects were equivalent or better than taking a drug and tastes much better and less side effects, right?

Right, right. Well, as we've been talking about, food as medicine is very natural in most parts of the world. And I think just sort of in our society, we've lost touch with things. You know, earlier we were talking about chefs getting into this, this whole farm to table movement. Well, that's what it used to be for everybody. We only ate stuff that was growing around us and we ate it because it tasted great because it was rich with these polyphenols and flavonoids. And by the way, you know, these bioactives that are natural chemicals and foods, what do they do? It's really interesting when you think about health defense. Most of the bioactives that are found in foods evolved in the plant, plant-based foods, to protect the plant. So either they were natural insecticides or they helped to attract bees and other insects so they'd pollinate so they could reproduce, right?

Or protect them from elements.

Or protect them from the elements of damage, make them stronger. So then when humans started to eat these plant-based foods, then these natural chemicals had another job description, which is they interacted with our human cells and because they were already engineered to be protective, the ones that were useful to us and we developed this relationship with our plant-based foods also help us. And so, there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view. of what we're finding out. 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, it's a number. It's an evolving science. Yes, we have health defense systems. That's, you know, health isn't the absence of disease. It's, 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.

It's true, and I just want to loop back to what you said because it's a concept that I don't think most people really understand about food. There was a recent study that was published, I think it was over 60,000 people looking at people who ate organic food and cancer rates and they found a lower risk of cancer. Now, is it the avoidance of pesticides or is it something else? Because when you're an organic plant, life sucks. I mean, it's hard. You gotta work to protect yourself. You've gotta produce more phytochemicals. You gotta produce more nutrients. And it depends on the soil and all these other things. But organic foods have higher concentrations. Wild foods have even more. Like wild blueberries are better than organic blueberries, which are better than regular blueberries, right?

So.

This is the science we actually know. And then I thought about this for a long time, like, why are these molecules in plants so smart that they know how to upregulate this enzyme or protect our DNA or enhance our immune system or improve angiogenesis or help our micro, how does that happen? And I came up with this idea called symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is the idea that we evolved in symbiosis, in collaboration, cooperation, with plants to actually activate many of our body's essential functions that we're too lazy to do. For example, humans and guinea pigs don't make vitamin C. Many other animals make vitamin C. Well, we like, why should I make vitamin C if I can eat some whatever and get vitamin C? So, there's so many of these pathways that aren't, we don't think of these as essential nutrients like vitamin B12 or vitamin E or whatever. We actually use these to activate these health systems that you're talking about, this defense system. And, we don't think of them as essential, but they really are essential because without enough, for example, glucosinolates, you can't upregulate glutathione, which detoxifies all the chemicals or you can't reduce inflammation if you don't have enough curcumin. So, you actually have these available to you every day in the grocery store. and we're going to become smarter and smarter about this.

And it's such an amazing. Well, that's what I love about the title of your podcast, you know, Pharmacy, because it literally, when you walk into the grocery store, it's like walking into a pharmacy. Literally. You know, recently I was, I had the privilege of actually being invited to attend a celebration at NASA at the Kennedy Space Center, celebrating Apollo 7. And a bunch of astronauts got up there who had actually been space. And these are flighted astronauts. And they basically said when they looked at the Earth from the International Space Station, they realized that the only thing that separates us from any other cold, dark, dead planet is this thin blue line of atmosphere. And underneath that thin blue line that we have to protect, we're all the same, we're all one species on the planet. And that's this is getting to your symbiosis.

Yeah.

Idea, which is that over, however we got created, however life got created, we all live together, we all adapt together. We think about a lot of things that don't work well together. It's usually us versus them is not helpful. It's us together that's really helpful almost in every situation. Figuring out how things work in harmony, in balance is really the leads to a better solution.

Hey, YouTube, if you like this video, you're going to love the next one. Click on it to check check it out today. Functional medicine is about getting rid of the things that impair health and putting in the things that help the body thrive. And then the body can take over and with its amazing intelligence can repair and heal from all sorts of things.

Oh, totally. Yeah.

And that's what we.