How (& Why) To Eat More Vegetables, Why A Plant Is Like An Upside-Down Human, Little-Known...

Hey, everybody, it's Ben Greenfield, and I hope you are ready to talk about vegetables. I figured if we're gonna talk about vegetables in today's podcast and not just any old vegetables, we're gonna blow your mind with some of these little known superfood vegetables and how a plant is like an upside down human and many, many other topics that I learned in a book that I recently read that blew my mind. Anyways, though, if we're going to talk about vegetables, we better also talk about nuts. I was exploring the website of today's sponsor, nuts.com and I discovered that you can create your own custom trail mix. This is pretty cool. You basically begin with basically it's like an empty bag and then you scroll through and you get to choose which nuts, which dried fruit, which chocolate. Sweets. Don't do the sweets. They do have gummy bears and gourmet fruit slices that you can add to your trail mix. But I would recommend Go go Nuts. Throw a little dark chocolate in there, some Brazil nuts, maybe a little bit of Turkish fig, and some coconuts and maybe some seeds for good measure, right? Like some pepitas. I just like to say pepitas because it makes me sound fancy. It's the word for pumpkin seed, the ancient word for pumpkin seed. Anyways, though, here's the deal with nuts.com. if you order anything from them, including that custom trail mix, and you enter my code, which is code fitness. That's nuts.com and enter my code fitness. You get four free samples with your order. So you can make your custom trail mix and get some free sample options, too. Over 50 options. It's a $15 value. Go to nuts.com fitness or nuts.com and use code Fitness. I don't know what's going to happen if you go to nuts.com fitness.

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So that was a really key part of me being behind doing vegetable powders because if they're not in a mirin jar, they're not worth doing. So I would much rather give my patients Okinawan spinach as a diabetic medicine with low carbohydrate diet, etc. Then give them the drug metformin. I want to eat the food that looks the best, tastes the best, and smells the best. The cooked versus raw is dependent on the vegetable.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I have to admit, it's not that often that I will read a book that is less than 100 pages long and still wind up folding over and highlighting nearly every page. It can be a source of frustration for me, I'll admit, when I read a book that's so jam packed with information and I have the opportunity and the honor to be able to interview the person who wrote the book that I just have so many things that I want to talk to that person about and not enough time in the day to do it. But today is one of those cases. I recently read this relatively small book called how and why to Eat More Vegetables. And that's a book, of course, with a very simple title. But what I discovered was a really wide range of very practical plant eating information that I really haven't seen published elsewhere, including things like Little Known Superfood Plants and why Humans Are Like An Upside Down Vegetable and How to Make Really Nutritionally Dense Vegetable Powders and a whole lot more. You know, one of those books that tends to present information that is tough to find elsewhere, which I love. And the book was written by today's podcast guest, of course, whose name is Dr. Tom Cowan, or it might be Cohen. Dr. Tom. Is it Cowan or Cohen?

Cowan.

Cowan, like the cow. There we go. And what we're going to talk about today is this topic of vegetables. And don't tune out if you think you know everything there is to know about vegetables because I can guarantee you that you do not. And you're going to discover quite a bit from Dr. Cowan. Who is Dr. Cowan? Well, he is a doctor, of course, but also vice president of the Physicians association for Anthroposophical Medicine and a founding board member of the Weston A. Price foundation. And he studied nutrition, homeopathy, anthroposophical medicine and herbal medicine. I'm going to have to ask you, Dr. Cowan, by the way, what anthroposophical medicine is and whether I'm even pronouncing that correctly. And Dr. Thomas is also the author of the book the Fourfold Path to Healing. He's the co author of the book the Nourishing Book of Baby and Child Care. And he lectures all over the place through the US and Canada and around the world, specifically on ancestral nutrition and the healing arts, specifically when it comes to using food to heal the body. And he lives in San Francisco. So Dr. Cowan, welcome to the show.

Thank you. And just one thing, it's fine to call me Tom, and just one minor correction is I actually am no longer the vice president for the Physicians for Anthroposophical Medicine. That was some years ago.

Oh, well, you'll have to remove that from your bio because there's lies being spread about you all over the Internet. And that actually leads me to ask you the first question for today's episode, which I'm sure everyone is scratching their heads about. What is anthroposophical medicine?

So Anthroposophical medicine is essentially, it means the Wisdom of Man, which is a pretty highfalutin kind of title. But the best, simplest way to describe it, it's the medicine that was inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner, who is perhaps better known by his inauguration and founding of the Waldorf School movement, which is the second largest private school movement in the world now, and biodynamic agriculture, of which, depending on who you listen to, something between 5 and 20% of the vineyards in Europe actually grow their grapes biodynamically.

Yeah, that's interesting. I actually drink biodynamic wine. I've had a podcast about it. You know, it's like, it's called Old World style wine, in which the filtration methods and the, the organic nature of the way that the grapes are grown actually is, is termed biodynamic farming.

Right. So Steiner was none. He was neither a doctor, nor a farmer, nor a gardener, nor a pedagogy school teacher, any of those things. He was a philosopher of Goethe, basically by training, but he was a pretty gifted guy, and that's an understatement. And so he came out with essentially a way of seeing the world, and then he gave talks to different groups like physicians or gardeners or farmers or, you know, school teachers. And that led to the creation of these different applications of his philosophy. So anthroposophical medicine is just the same philosophy applied to the practice of medicine which, which I have studied and I would say to a large extent branched out of, because there are certain things that I maybe don't exactly agree with these days, but it's, it still has made a huge impact on the way I think about the world. And you mentioned the threefold plant, and that. That is a concept that's very central to anthroposophy.

Okay, got it. So. So it's basically almost like a holistic treatment of medicine in which you're, you're, you're kind of trying to treat not just the, the disease, but the whole body. Would that be a way that you would describe anthroposophic medicine?

In a way, it's a little bit more specific than that. Steiner had a very specific philosophy about how the world is organized in the world, including the plant world and the human world. And out of that, and I can give examples if we want to get into that, but you come out with A, some novel approaches to medicine, or B, you can actually understand why historically people used chamomile flowers for stomach aches or things like that, you take it out of the realm of, well, those people must have done it by trial and error, which is not the case. Kind of a imaginative understanding of the world, which Steiner in some ways recreated. And so we can start to understand, at least from his point of view, how the world is organized and therefore what we can do about it to make it better for us and plants and animals and everybody.

Okay, so not to press this matter too much, but let's say I walk into your office and I have, say, a sinus infection. How. How would one be treated anthroposophically for something like a sinus infection? And in contrast to, like, the alternative medical treatment of, let's say, you know, I guess like an antihistamine or something like that.

Right. So there's two options I could do now. I could just rattle off the things that I would do, or I can give an explanation of why, which I think is more fun.

Sure.

Let me do the second. So in the worldview of Steiner Anthroposophy, the world of the plants and the world of the human beings are organized in a threefold manner, which is to say that your head or the nerve sphere is a sphere. And then you have the chest, which is between the head and the diaphragm, which is a transitional area. So the head. And then we have the heart and the lungs. And then we have the metabolic reproductive system in, below the diaphragm. In other words, the abdominal organs, the metabolic system. Now, the first thing to note about that is the plant is exactly the opposite. So the roots, which are the sensing organ of the plant, in a sense, is always actually a sphere, even a carrot.

Okay.

The whole plant system and its job is to. Is to sense the environment it lives in. And then it has a breathing and a circulation which we call the stem and the. And the leaves, which correspond to the heart and the lungs. And then it has a reproductive metabolic system which we call the flowers and fruits. And the first thing that's of note is a lot of the plant medicines for the heart. The primary example is digitalis is actually from the leaf and the stem. So you can see that when you give a leaf and stem preparation, it improves people's breathing and circulation. That is digitalis, as an example.

And what is digitalis?

Digitalis is a conventional medicine. It's been used as the primary heart medicine for hundreds of years. And it's basically a leaf preparation.

Okay, so that comes from, like, the leaf stemi area of the plant. And what you're saying is that because that's the middle part of the plant, that's a medicine that you would apply towards the middle part of a human, like the breathing, circulation, lungs, heart portion of a human.

Exactly.

Interesting.

So you can also. There's different functions of the. Like the nerve system. The head is supposed to be clear and cool and still, whereas the metabolic which is also correlated with the limb system, is where the heat and the activity and etc. Come from. They even have three different. The three fluids of the human being. Like the cerebrospinal fluid is crystalline, still and clear. That's the nervous system. Then we have the blood of the heart and the lungs. And then we have the lymph, which is, you know, full of proteins and sulfur, et cetera, is in the metabolic system. Okay, so when somebody has a sinus infection, from an anthroposophical point of view, they have too much metabolism in their head. The head is supposed to be clear and cool and still. And sometimes I say, if people don't believe me, spend an entire day moving your head back and forth all day. And obviously that doesn't feel good because the head doesn't like movement and it doesn't like pus and doesn't like sulfurous fluid. And when it, when that happens, for instance, we call it a sinus infection. So you have to essentially move the energy down into the metabolism. And you can do that with a, a medicine, for instance, that stimulates the bile flow. The bile flow essentially makes things move down. And the classic example of that is an herb called goldenseal. So seal stimulates the bile. It looks like bile and it's, it's.

A, that's like a dark orangish color.

Orange bitter fluid, which stimulates that drainage. In Chinese medicine, they say you drain the swamp. So you drain the swamp of the sticky metabolic fluid in your head, which is what we call a sinus infection. And that restores balance, which is essentially the definition of health.

Interesting. Okay, so if we follow this analogy of a plant being kind of like an upside down human, what you're saying is the, the middle part of the plant would be like the middle part of a human. The lower part of the plant, which would be like the roots, would be the part of the plant that would be most beneficial for like the, the upper part of the human. Right, like the, the head or the neck area. And that would be like, right. Underground roots, tubers, I guess even. What about things like, you know, carrots and potatoes and things like that? Would those be considered nourishing for the, for the head?

Right. And in fact, that comes out in science and in folk medicine. For instance, we, everybody knows, not everybody, but that you eat carrots to nourish your eyes.

That's true.

So that's a classic example of a, a plant. See, the plant is supposed to be, or the so called imaginary or perfect plant should be equal in those three spheres. In other words, the color should be in the flowers. But a carrot, being an individual with a unique personality, says, no, I'm not going to put the color in the flower like a normal plant. I'm going to put all the color in the roots. I'm going to put all my say, color energy, metabolic energy into the roots, which, number one, allows you to predict some interesting things like that the color of a carrot flower is going to be white. Why? Because the colors in the roots, it's got no more color energy or whatever you want to call it, to put it in the flowers.

Yeah, that's a good, it's a good point. And although, what about, you know, and not to play devil's advocate too much here, but what about plants? You know, like I have organ grapes growing outside my house, which has dark orangish yellow roots, very much like golden cell, as a matter of fact. It acts biochemically, I believe, a little bit similar to goldenseal in that it can be helpful for, for colds and flus and things like that. But the, the, the grape itself and the leaves are like dark green and the grape is like, like a bluish purple. And you know, it seems colorful both on top and down below as well. How do you correlate that to the fact that like a carrot has a white flower but a, but a colorful root?

I would correlate that. It's a great question by saying that plant has decided to do color everywhere.

Okay.

The plants are like their own special beings, which we have to learn to read the book of nature. We don't have to, but that's, that's the job of, of a doctor as far as I can see. So, so that plant is telling you, essentially I'm all about color. Not only am I all about color, I'm going to put my color in even, in every part of the plant, even the parts that really are not supposed to be colored like the roots. And so you might end up with a plant that actually addresses, you know, because colors suggest there's an anti inflammatory role. You know, we know even the chemicals that are correlated with these colors. So that plant might have an anti inflammatory role for the entire human being. Which Oregon grape to a certain extent does.

Interesting. So it says, so it would be a very powerful plant. So, so we've got the top part of the, or, I'm sorry, the bottom part of the plant being good for a human's, you know, like, like head, upper body area, the, the middle part of A plant like you talked about with the leaves and the stems and things like that being pot.

You know, like, like the, the heart and the lungs and areas like that. Now what about for that third part of a human that you brought up? Like, like the, like the reproductive spear that, you know, the, the gonads and the area down in the crotch. Like what area of the plant would be good for that section then? The very top area.

Yeah. And so we're not the top area. So we're talking about flowers, fruits, and we're talking about seeds, and then we're talking maybe even about the oil and the seeds. So the plant makes oil usually in the seeds, which is the warming part of the plant. So that correlates with the part in the human being that generates warmth, which is the abdomen. Which is why, you know, Japanese, they don't put their big bun on their head to keep their head warm. Like, that's not right. They put their thing, whatever that thing is called, on their abdomen to keep their abdomen warm. We use hot compresses, castor oil packs, hot packs on the abdomen and a cool pack on the head, not the other way around. And that's correlating with the coldness of the root and the warmth of the flower and the seed.

Interesting. Now you get into this stuff in pretty hardcore detail in your book the Fourfold Path to Healing. Is that correct?

Yes.

Okay, cool. I need to add that one to my next list to read. Because you talk about this a little bit about how plants are like an upside down human. In this book that I read that gave me the impetus to get you on the show today, the how and why to Eat More Vegetables book. But it's really a fascinating concept. It sounds a bit woo, but it does make sense in that we talk about, what's it called? The signature of nature. Or walnuts are good for your brain or avocados are good for your testicles. Nature gives us clues like, you know, celery and carrots. I suppose I've heard that they can be good for, you know, erections. And there's all sorts of interesting clues that nature gives us. And I suppose this is just kind of like an extension of that. Super interesting. So in terms of where you got started looking into all this, let's back up a little bit. I know that you spent a lot of time in Africa learning a little bit about how traditional ancestral cultures ate over there. What brought you over to Africa in the first place?

You know, it was basically, I was, I would say, groomed and grew up to, to be a doctor. And I didn't like it because I didn't like how medicine was practiced, I didn't like how they thought, I didn't like the philosophy, et cetera. So as soon as I could graduate from college and get out of there, I wanted to do something to see if I could do something besides being a doctor. I was already very interested in food, so I decided to join the Peace Corps and teach gardening in Africa. And that's how I ended up in Swaziland.

So you at that point already had a little bit of a background in gardening if you're going over there to teach gardening?

I would say a little bit. I learned when I was there from one of my students named Patrick actually. And actually the town that I was sent, not really a town, it was a village. It wasn't even really a village. The only other expatriate person within 50 miles actually was a refugee from a biodynamic gardening in Rhodesia at the time. So the first real gardening I did was biodynamics with Chris.

Interesting. Okay, got it. So. So you also mentioned that you were groomed to be a doctor. What do you mean by that?

I mean my parents, my father was a dentist and most of their friends were doctors. And it was always like, Tommy's going to be a doctor without really asking me because I part of it, but I got the vibe from them.

Okay, so. So you spent a couple of years over in Africa living with, with what's called a Swazi family. What's a Swazi family?

Swazis live in extended families. Although the family that I lived with, he was the chief of the village and he. Interesting. Made a remarkable decision to only have one wife because he said that's enough.

And so I lived with them and basically ate with them most of the time for the two years I was there. And that's where I really had firsthand knowledge of what a traditional diet really looks like. Although that was a very modified traditional diet. It's not a. Not really what I would call an ancestral diet, but the components were still there.

And what are the components?

Well, my contention is that the components, if you look at whether it's a Paleo or in Weston Price or whatever, there's three food groups if you look at diet properly, okay. The first is animal foods which are full fat, local, you know, wild fish, free range buffalo, insects, grubs, eggs, pigs, whatever you can get that's local, full fat, properly grown, etc. And I would also contend that because of A lot of factors. We now have similar animal products as traditional people did. You know, you can get grass fed meat and wild fish and it's not quite as good as a thousand years ago, but it's pretty good. So that's food group one. Food group two is what I call the seeds and nuts group, which is everything from tree nuts, acorns, pine nuts, that was the traditional seed food of Native Americans and then on up through more modern, you know, non hybridized, like ancestral, even perennial grains. And so that's a whole separate group which, you know, we get proteins and fats from the first. We get, you know, carbohydrates and certain fiber and other nutrients from seeds and grains. And all traditional people had some of the second group in their diet.

Before we turn to the third group, you'll see, for example, like in paleo circles, that grains and beans are, you know, they're the forbidden evils. But you're, you're telling me that those are part of an ancestral diet?

What I'm saying is the seed category is part of an ancestral diet.

Okay. And then when you say seed, you're including things like grains and quinoa and beans and things like this.

Yeah, but I'm also including things like nuts and seeds.

Okay, gotcha. So, so what's your take on grains? I mean, do you consider grains to be healthy? Do you consider them to be like defense mechanisms of plants that are harmful to the digestive system? Or, you know, what, what did you discover in South Africa? Or what do you consider yourself to be kind of like the, the take on healthy grains?

Fundamentally, I want, I personally, and with my patients and what I write about, I would like people to be able to eat everything, but not everything, like McDonald's or deep fried Twinkies.

Right.

And, and there are a huge number of my patients who I put on a sort of a classic paleo diet without grains because it helps them rehabilitate their health and their, specifically their gut flora. So there is definitely a case to have people do grain free, bean free, more of a classic paleo diet. And I do do that. I do think though that when people are better that trying the traditional grains like quinoa and, you know, wheat before it was hybridized and traditional, you know, Hopi blue corn, that's at least a possibility for some people.

Got it. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm on the same page as you, I believe. Are you speaking at the Weston A. Price foundation conference, by the way, this year? Okay. I'm going to be speaking there as well. And I would say that, you know, from, from the excellent cookbook nourishing traditions to a lot of the teachings that are put out by the Wesson A Price Foundation. I'm kind of on the same bandwagon as you, I suppose, in that if it's a real food that my great grandparents would have recognized, for example, I'll eat it, right? So we have goats and we do the milk from the goats. And my wife purchases like a local red wheat berry, like a non GMO red wheat berry from the Palouse, and makes bread. But at the same time, I've run into a lot of people whose guts would be destroyed by even raw dairy from a goat or my wife's sourdough bread because they've got leaky gut or gut inflammation from years of food abuse. And so they have to eat like a restricted diet, you know, like a, let's say like a paleo autoimmune diet or something like that, until they get to the point where their gut has kind of like been restored to a level to where it can handle the more. The more intense workouts of the digestive system, so to speak. So, yeah, I'm on the same page as you.

That's exactly what I would say.

Okay, cool. So we've got the first component being like your ancestors meats, your animal meats, organs, fat, marrow, all those type of things. The second component being maize, corn, grains, beans, seeds, nuts, et cetera. And then what is the third component?

And the third component is, I think, the one that is the most misunderstood, especially by the paleo community, and that is plants, meaning vegetables and fruit. And of that it should be about 80% vegetables, about 20% fruit. And what I discovered from a living with the Swazis and B, then reading about it, like book called Tending the Wild, which is about the diet of native Californians, is that the traditional plant, vegetable part of the diet included about 120 different plants per year and somewhere between 15 and 20 per day. And of these 120, or 15 to.

20 different types of plants per day per day. Wow.

So I heard about this almost 40 years ago. And the plant types include the threefold plant, you know, roots, leaves and flowers. Fruits includes all the different colors, so red vegetables, green, yellow, etc. Purple, white and wild vegetables, perennial vegetables, annual vegetables, all the different kinds of diversity you can imagine. So being who I am, which is kind of a food nut, I decided, you know, 30 some years ago with my gardening knowledge, to eat 15 to 20 different vegetables a day. And perennials, et cetera, and 120 a year. And I can tell you that it was kind of a big job and a kind of unsuccessful because it's just hard to cook 15 vegetables a day.

Yeah. That's why God made the Vitamix.

Right, right. So. But I kept plugging away and growing, you know, more perennial vegetables. Tree collards, ashitaba, genera, sea kale, perennial walking onions. So. And, you know, trying to get wild vegetables foraging. And it just was. It wasn't a doable model for people, even for me. And if it's not doable for me, living in California and having garden access, it's not doable for the masses by any means.

You mean it's just not doable from the labor required to actually go out and find out dozens and dozens of different types of plants that you could put into your body each day. It's just too much time.

Too much time. And even if it. You know, I. I got convinced that perennial vegetables, like tree collards or ashitaba, they actually mine the soil. They get more nutrients, they have better defense mechanisms, so they have better phytonutrients and protective chemicals. But if I told.

What. What do you mean? You mean perennials versus annuals have higher nutritional content?

Yes.

And is that because the perennial, if I understand correctly, and I'm not as much of a gardening ninja as my wife, but these are the plants that you plant, and they continue to grow a harvest year after year rather than needing to be replanted. And so they grow more hardy and more nutritionally dense and higher in antioxidant content, et cetera, from year to year.

Yes, exactly. Right.

Okay.

Got it.

And you used a lot of. You used a lot of words and descriptions of plants there that I actually haven't heard of. I know you get into a few of them in the book, but were there specific perennial plants that you found to be, like, extremely nutritionally dense? Like. Like the 80, 20 of the vegetable world?

Yeah, like tree collards, and this one called ashitaba, which is called Tamara leaf, and one called Okinawan spinach. Not that annual vegetables aren't nutritious, you know, and especially when you're looking for different plant parts, roots, leaves and flowers, different colors, etc. The trick was to get all. From all of that spectrum. Different colors, different parts, different growth habits, annuals, perennials, all in a daily diet. And most people just can't do it, because even if I told them to eat perennial vegetables, there's nowhere to find them. They're not available in the Bay Area. And so that was the dilemma that I set out to solve, basically.

Okay, got it. And I want to talk about that in a little bit, like how you figured out how to prepare vegetable powders and things of that nature. But I actually want to ask you about this one vegetable that you mentioned, Ashitaba. I found that one fascinating in the book. Can you explain what the, what the perennial vegetable Ashitaba is and how somebody would eat it and why you consider that to be one of the vegetables that you really devote a lot of time to in the book?

So ashitaba is called. Another word for it is tomorrow leaf. And it's always interesting to look at these names of these different plants because they often tell us a lot. And it's indigenous to Japan and the Philippines, but we have it growing in our garden in Napa, and a biodynamic friend of mine also is growing it for us. You know, plants are gestures. They're living beings with their own story to tell. So the Ashitaba is a member of the Angelica family, of which its famous cousin is Angelica archangelica, which, believe it or not, means the gift of the archangels to the angels. It was a very revered plan in the middle, Middle Europe in the Middle Ages. It supposedly was the only medicine for plague and other infections. And Ashitaba is a relative, a cousin of that. Angelica archangelica is way too bitter to eat. But Ashitaba has a more celery like bite taste. So the, the first thing is it's, you know, if you do a nutrient profile like manganese, magnesium, B6, etc. It's about twice as much or so than kale. So just on a. Running a nutritional analysis, you would say, wow, this is, you know, kale is a. Not that I have anything against kale, very nutritious vegetable, but it's not like Ashitaba. So that's the first thing. But the second thing is looking at the plant as a gesture. And why is it called tomorrow leaf? The reason is because if you cut off a stem, tomorrow you'll have a new leaf growing in its place.

Really?

And so it has this incredible vitality, which means it's like a lizard. You know, you cut off its tail and it grows a new tail. So you cut off a stem of tomorrow leaf and tomorrow it has a new leaf. So the question that I would pose to Ashitaba if it could talk, and it does talk in its own way, is how do you do such amazing vitality and not get cancer? Like, how do you have such robust cell growth but you're able to control it because obviously the plant doesn't get cancer.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And so the answer is it puts this, this yellow SAP in its stem which has a chemotherapy drug in it, which as I say, if I was the plant, that's what I would do. I would say it's good to have good vitality because then you can grow like crazy, but you got to control it. So I'm going to put a cell differentiating substance which is called chalcones C H A L C O N E S into the stem. So my increased vitality goes into producing a new ashitaba leaf, not a undifferentiated cancer growth. Wow. And so when we eat the ashitaba leaf and stem, which, when we make the powder, we powder the leaf and the stem and we get this yellow fluid. And actually you go on our website, you can see the oozing out of this yellow fluid from the stem. So we're giving people increased vitality and the, the, the chemical slash energy to control this vitality into a healthy way. And so that's an amazing plant.

That's really cool. You talked about one other one. I think you said it was called Okinawan spinach.

Yeah. There's another one called Genera procumbens, otherwise known as Okinawan spinach. And that one has a different story to tell. And that one is more of a biochemical story because it has a substance in it which produces an almost identical effect as a diabetic drug called metformin, which means it helps with the metabolic syndrome, it lowers blood sugar. All the things we try to do with a low carbohydrate diet. And again, I'm all for low carbohydrate diets, but when you add Okinawa and spinach, you're protecting yourself against essentially, you know, the metabolic syndrome. So one could also say, well, why not just take chemotherapy drugs and why not take metformin? And you know, my whole career has been saying with the theory and I don't know if I can prove it, but I certainly believe it. You're always better eating ashitaba or genera than you are taking metformin or you know, chemotherapy vincristine. It has no side effects, it produces more, it's more health producing rather than having a toxicity. So I would much rather give my patients, you know, Okinawan spinach as a diabetic medicine along with low carbohydrate diet, et cetera, than give them the drug metformin.

But when you concentrate something that's good from a plant, sometimes it allows you to get more of that concentrated chemical than you would ever be able to, like, physically be able to. To get from a plant without doing damage to yourself. Right. I mean, like. Like wine, for example, resveratrol is really good for you, but you would have to drink copious amounts of wine and produce a bunch of acetaldehyde and ammonia byproduct and all sorts of nasty stuff to be able to get all that resveratrol. Or you could try to get it from red grapes, but you'd have to eat copious amounts of fructose sugars to be able to get as much resveratrol as you'd want to get if you hadn't concentrated that resveratrol into, say, a supplement or a capsule or something like that. Where do you draw the line in terms of choosing to do the whole plant food versus the extract from the plant?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And the answer, as a doctor, because I treat people with diabetes, it's fairly simple. We do the diet and genera, and there's other plants that have similar effect first. If that works, we're good. And if it doesn't, we have to think about metformin or some other alpha lipoic acid or some other concentrated thing. But that's never the first option.

Okay, got it, got it. Now, what about the actual nutritional density of some of these vegetables that you talk about? Can. Can you kind of compare and contrast the. The density and. And why the density would be greater in, say, like a, you know, a traditional, what you call a food forest versus modern agriculture? Like. Like what is a traditional food forest and how does it differ from the way that we get of a lot of our plants and vegetables nowadays?

Right. Which gets into this question of why I think the Paleo people have the vegetable part wrong. So, again, they have the animal food. Right. And the seed part. Right. They eat nuts and seeds. The plants are supposed to be 15 to 20 a day and 120 a year and perennials, et cetera. And you have Paleo people now eating, you know, broccoli and romaine lettuce as their two main vegetables, which neither of which were even around before the, say, 1800s. So those are not Paleo foods. Those are modern hybridized foods.

Really? Broccoli is a modern hybridized food?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know when it was first, quote, created hybridized, but not in. Not in the Paleo period.

So it's so Broccoli is like a food that's been genetically created, not genetically modified.

It's been hybridized in the traditional way that, you know, farmers select plant breeding.

Based, selective plant breeding to create some kind of a new plant.

Right, Okay. I have nothing against that. I eat broccoli, I eat romaine lettuce, I plant it in the garden and we grow it and sell it as powders. But so the first thing is we're always looking for, you know, the beet that came before the modern beets. So, you know, we try to look for beets that have been around for thousands of years. The same varieties. We look for, you know, Hopi blue pumpkins that are, you know, I always figure the Native Americans knew the most about pumpkins. So I'm going to grow the pumpkins and put those in our powders as opposed to modern, you know, selected pumpkins. The nutritional density is stronger, et cetera. And then to get to your question, you know, modern agriculture is about choosing the varieties that work the best for modern processing. And, you know, in mono cropping, which creates disease problems and lowers nutrient density. And what you really want to do is grow the most nutrient dense, which are the most flavorful and the most nutritious, often the hardiest. And you want to grow them in groups so that they all help each other do as well as possible.

So you, you would take a bunch of wild plants that you've researched to be plants that, that haven't necessarily been bred for say like sweetness or high yield crop or beauty and perhaps like the ugly, more bitter versions of wild plants. You would hunt down these, these perennials that you talk about in your book. You'd plant those in a garden or on your patio in like, you know, like a, a vertical tower structure or something like that, and you would plant them all together so that they're helping each other to grow.

Yes, and, and that's, that's, you know, it's not like you have to go out and hunt out the wild ones. I mean, there's actually people who do that and, you know, you can grow it in a whole variety of ways. But. Yes, you're exactly right. You know, that's the, that's the way of the future of gardening for taste and nutrient density, not ease of storage and because it has more sugar than the other ones.

That's the crazy thing is like, you don't notice until you start eating real wild plants how sweet that like the more modern plants are. I mean, everything from kale to tomatoes. Like actually last night and maybe I did this because subconsciously, I know I was going to be interviewing you today, but I took my kids on a plant foraging walk. And yeah, I know that not everybody listening in has access to nature out in their backyard, out their front door like I do. But we went out and we got a bunch of greens to make a salad. So we found a spot where the deer had been bedding, and there were giant stalks of wild nettle out by where the deer were bedding because the deer loved to chew and eat the nettle. So we got a whole plastic bag full of nettle, and then we had another little plastic bag with us that we reached down and we picked a bunch of plantain. And I taught my kids to grab all the plantain that had been chewed a bit by the insects because it releases antioxidants as a defense mechanism when it's been eaten by predators. And so we had plantain and nettle, and then we gathered a bunch of wild mint, which has almost a bittersweet flavor compared to, say, the peppermint that you'll find grown or sold at, say, the grocery store. And we took all that back and we dressed it with avocado oil, and then we added some salt and a little bit of raw honey and some, some feta cheese and some pumpkin seeds and made a salad. But you could taste when you eat the salad, that bitterness. It's almost like you have to eat the salad more slowly because it doesn't taste as sweet as, say, like an iceberg lettuce or a romaine lettuce or even like a modern kale salad. But the nutrition density is through the roof. The antioxidant density is through the roof when you're eating like a wild plant like that. And the cool thing that I like is that I didn't have to do a thing. Like, in that case, we didn't go to go out to the garden or anything like that. We just walked out in the forest where all this stuff was growing for us without even. Without us even having to tend it or to care for it. And so it's mind boggling not only how simple it can be to forage for some of these plants, but also how much more nutritionally dense and how much more like, like bitter and less, less sweet and less pretty they actually are.

Yes. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. And then you can recreate that. You can do, you can do that. You can also recreate that to a certain extent in a garden setting. And then you make it actually doable for people these days to have access to the kind of diversity that you had last night?

Yeah, and I want to talk about the diversity a little bit because I know you have special methods of creating, like these, these plant powders that you've hinted at a couple of times, and I've tried some of those as well. And you even have a recipe in the book for how to, how to make your own. I want to pick your brain about that in a little bit. But I want to also delve into the energy of some of these plants. Like, you know, I, I try personally to eat plants as fresh as possible, you know, after they've been exposed to. To wavelengths of light from the sun, after they've been kind of supercharged, so to speak, with energy from the planet and from the sun and exposed to negative ions outside and all this type of thing. But there's also this concept that you, to a certain extent, want to actually protect plants from excessive light. Can you get into how light, whether, you know, too much light or too little light, affects the energy of the food?

Yeah, that's a pretty complicated subject. And I wouldn't, I can't say I'm an expert on that. I. There's some interesting research on different plants that some of them have higher, you know, phytonutrients, antioxidants, if you eat them right away, and some of them have. If you leave them, say, sitting out for 12 hours, some of them, if you put them in the refrigerator. And. Yeah, I'm trying to incorporate all that information, A, in my life and B, in our, in our making of these powders.

Well, when I, when I, when I bought, like, powders from, from you, for example, they came in very dark jars, like, I think you call them myron jars.

Yes.

Can you explain why that is?

Yeah, and it's crucial to what you're just saying and to making this viable, because the problem was. So we, for instance, will take kale, and kale to me, does the best if you process it right away and if you blanch it or steam it for about one to three minutes first, which breaks down the cellulose and makes it, the nutrients, more bioavailable. So the first step is blanch it or steam it, and then right away we dehydrate it. And then right away after it's dehydrated, we put it into a. I'm not sure the pronunciation exactly. Some people say myron and some people say mirin jar. And these were jars that seemingly have been around since the pyramids. That's at least the urban myth where they found oil in them that was actually fresh after thousands of years. And then this Swiss company reverse engineered them and they're deep purple at a certain thickness and they only let very specific wavelengths of light in, especially uva. And the story is that therefore not only do things not degrade in there, but they get more energized the longer they stay in the jar. Now we decided, you know, you can't believe anything, so let's test it out. So last year we put two identical, more or less cherry tomatoes, one in a mason jar and one in a mirin jar, and just put it on the counter in our kitchen. And in two months, the one in the, in the mason jar was all mush and, you know, moldy, etc. And in six months, the one in the mirin jar, you could still eat it.

I actually saw a photo of that on your website. And the one that's in the glass jar, just the regular glass jar, which frankly, like a lot of people listening in, know you're not supposed to store stuff in plastic. And so they store it in like these mason glass jars. But the tomato in the glass jar, it almost looks rotten. And the tomato in this mirin, almost like a violet black type of glass, it seems to be like, like a, like a plump, fresh red tomato. You mentioned, you mentioned that that's because the mirror on light lets in the UVA rays and I think it also lets in infrared rays. And so that that's somehow blocking excessive UVB radiation or excessive wavelengths of light that might cause something to, to age more excessively.

Exactly. It blocks out the UVB and the UV C which are the degeneration aging frequencies. And so it basically, I mean, I don't know if this is exactly true, but our hope is the more, the longer you keep it in a mirin jar, the better it gets. I have things that I've now had in a mirin jar like mint powder or horseradish powder or that smell exactly the same as the day that we put them in the jar. Maybe not quite as strong, but now some powders, the smell goes away after a while. Some powders seem to just, they just stay there for years. And so that was a really key part of me being behind doing vegetable powders because if they're not in a mirin jar, they're not worth doing.

Now, what about whether or not the vegetable specifically has beenhas been cooked versus whether it's raw? What's your take on that, because I'll hear a lot of times folks will say, well, don't eat raw vegetables because they'rethey're more difficult on your digestive system. Other people will say thatthat cooking will reduce the nutrient density of the vegetable. What's your take on the whole, whole raw versus cooked debate when it comes to eating plants?

So my, the thing that I believe in most deeply is my own experience of taste and smell of the food.

I think it's fine to do nutrient analysis, et cetera, but I want to eat the food that looks the best, tastes the best, and smells the best. So the cooked versus raw is dependent on the vegetable. So for instance, kale, if you eat raw kale versus if you blanch it for about a minute or two, it gets greener and sweeter because it's breaking down the cellulose and making the nutrients. So I, I guess I wouldn't say never, but I have no interest in eating raw kale. All the kale I would eat would be cooked for a minute or two to break it down so that it's more available. So that's how we do the powders.

You said that you blanch it. What do you mean blanching? Just for people who don't do that.

You put it in boiling water for about a minute or so.

Okay, got it. Then you just take it out and then you would prepare it in a smoothie or a powder or whatever you're going to make with it.

Yes.

Okay.

Similarly, I'm not interested in eating. It doesn't taste good, it doesn't smell good. But baked pumpkin is wonderful. It's gotta. So that's how we prepare the pumpkin powder. Now there are some vegetables, like, I wouldn't cook, I wouldn't cook lettuce because lettuce doesn't have much cellulose and it doesn't need to be cooked. And so there's no point in cooking it.

I don't know, man. You ever, you ever barbecued like a romaine lettuce with some salt and black pepper?

Yeah, I, I know what you mean.

Yeah. Or, or, or a grilled lettuce. I guess it would be like barbecue grilled lettuce.

Yeah, right. There are sophisticated. Yeah, that's a good point. But generally speaking, so, you know, like, leeks are better raw for us. The smell is better, the taste is better. Tomatoes are raw, peppers are low heat, but the greens are all cooked, blanched or steamed. Pumpkins, squash, carrots are better cooked a little bit. So it totally depends on Getting to know your vegetable, it's like getting to know a different child. You have to know carrots do best. Carrots and beets definitely like to be cooked.

So tell me about these vegetable powders that you're talking about, how you actually make them and why you actually put the vegetables into a powder. And then I'm also curious how you actually use them, because I got some of these vegetable powders from you with the ashitaba and the Okinawan spinach and some of these other things in a dry powdered form. But it was really the first time that I'd seen them, and I had some friends over, actually, and had them out on the table, and they were kind of scratching their heads too, in terms of, like, you know, how are these vegetable powders actually made? And how does one use them?

So they're. They're made by. So that the process is we either grow them ourselves and, you know, we use, you know, way beyond organic techniques.

So some of them we grow ourselves. We use the, you know, the oldest, best varieties, but actually not always the oldest. Because in our tomato salt, there's an indigo apple tomato. And the reason I chose that is, A, it tastes like bacon, and B, it has the highest lycopene content of any tested tomato.

So the tomato tastes like bacon. A little bit interesting.

It's a little stretch, but that's its reputation. And he definitely has a tomato bacony kind of thing going there. Anyway, so we choose the varieties. So we either grow them or we source them from local, you know, Northern California organic farms, and then we do one. So the idea is, you know, a person out there can't get all this diversity, so we're going to provide it for them, help them. Not that they're not supposed to eat fresh vegetables, because they are, but this adds to the diversity. So we take whatever it is, kale, we harvest it, blanch it, dehydrate it, powder it, put it into mirin jars.

Pumpkins, we bake them. We use these Hopi blue pumpkins, we use other heirloom varieties, bake them, dehydrate them, grind them, put it into mirin jars. So. And et cetera, Ashitaba is raw because that brings out the flavor the best. Just dehydrated, ground, put into mirin jars.

So you could, theoretically, not to put you out of business, because I know you make these vegetable powders and it sounds like you've got the process down to a science, but you could theoretically, or I could have taken the nettles and the mint and the plantain that I just talked about, I could have taken that back, put it into my, my wife's food dehydrator, dehydrated it at low temperature, and then put it into like a, like a Vitamix. And then I could, I could put it into jars and actually have like a dehydrated powder like this.

Absolutely. In fact, if you put it into mirin jars, that, that would be a great thing to do and you would have. So the next day, if you're, it's just you, you come to making your salad and no, we just don't have time to go forage in the woods. You put a quarter of a teaspoon of that powder with those three into your salad dressing. And now you've eaten, instead of three vegetables with lettuce, tomatoes and radishes, you've now had six.

Okay, so I'm looking at, for example, like your threefold blend powder. And that one has carrots and leeks. So you've got the roots of the upside down human. It's got Swiss chard and kale. So you've got the leaves, stems of the upside down human. And then you've got bell peppers and zucchini in there, which I guess would be like the fruits or the parts that would be good for your reproductive or your metabolic system. So that's kind of cool how you've worked in those three components. But in this powder, let's say I were to sprinkle a tea, teaspoon of this powder onto a salad or on a soup or a stew or something like that. How much of the actual vegetable would be in a teaspoon or a tablespoon? Are we talking about getting a whole salad and one spoonful or how much can you squeeze into one of these little four ounce jars?

Yeah, so not only do we have all the parts, but we did it partly for flavor, but also partly for color. So we have red vegetables, green vegetables, white vegetables, and multicolored vegetables all in there with all the, you know, antioxidants and phytonutrients that that implies. And so we're still trying to get exact numbers, but if you take like four large stalks of kale, that's about a teaspoon of kale powder. So if you take, if you take a, one zucchini, that's about a quarter or so of a teaspoon of zucchini powder. One large beet is about a half to three quarters of a teaspoon of beet powder. So the other thing about diversity is if you're going to eat 15 vegetables a day, we're not talking about, like a huge big bowl of kale or romaine lettuce. That's not how traditional people did it. They ate small amounts of a lot of different ones. So in that, say, teaspoon of threefold blend, you get a significant serving of all the nutrients in the leeks and in the beets and in the kale and in the chard and in the zucchini and in the bell peppers.

So you're getting that huge amount of plant variety that you were talking about earlier that our ancestors would have eaten.

Yes. All of one teaspoon. And, you know, you use it. You can sprinkle it over, over fish to make.

You know, broiled fish with threefold blend. But you can put it in soup, you can put it in salad dressing.

Yeah. I've been putting the leek salt in my smoothie. And then here's the cool thing. My wife is a popcorn fanatic.

Yeah.

And she actually. So when she has her popcorn now she's got carrots, beet, kale, Swiss chard, winter squash and zucchini, all as part of the popcorn. Popcorn, because you're sprinkling the powder on top of the popcorn.

Exactly. That's exactly how we meant to do this.

Cool. I like it. And so these are all prepared using some of the methods that you've just described in terms of going to the Marin jars, they stay potent for a long period of time because they're blocking out the UVB light, but allowing the UVA and the infrared light in. And then you just basically pick your poison and put it on a smoothie, stew, scrambled eggs, popcorn, potatoes, whatever you want to put it on.

Yeah, I'm not sure I like the word poison.

Pick. Pick your product.

Yeah, you pick. You just. We're just, you know, and then we're hoping to branch out. And so we get. We're going to offer something called cholla buds, which is a Native American bud from a cactus that's a wild food that's dried, that you can rehydrate and put in stir fries. So it's all about a nori powder, which is a wild seaweed. It's all about how can. I want to eat 20 vegetables a day, but I don't want to spend two and a half hours every morning chopping nori.

Yeah, Well, I love it. And of course, your book goes into a lot more detail. Although what I want to do now, after talking with you, is read this other book, the Fourfold Path to Healing. But for those of you listening in, I'll put a link to this Fourfold Path of Healing book but also the the shorter, easy to read version that I initially read, which got me inspired to get Tom on the show today called how and why to Eat More Vegetables. And I'll put a link to these books along with these vegetable powders that we've been talking about over in the show notes. And you can access those here. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com EatMore Vegetables. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com eat more vegetables. And when you go there, what I'll do is link over to all the different vegetable powders as well as some of the other things that we talked about today such as biodynamic wine and anthroposophic medicine and even the 2016 Weston A. Price Conference where Tom and I are both going to be speaking. I'll be speaking on how athletes can fuel themselves in a more ancestral way. What are you going to be talking about, Tom?

I'll be talking about the heart.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, I actually, I have your book.

About the heart right here. The other book that hopefully I'm going to get a chance to interview you about later on this year because that.

One also blew my mind and is also only about 100 pages long, amazingly.

So I think you have things figured out. By the way, rather like I write 400 to 500 page books and you write these, these little information dense packed books that seem like they'd be a little bit less of a chore to churn out but that still have a lot of really good information in them.

Thank you.

Yes, I love it. I'll link to all these books in the show notes. For those of you listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com EatMoreVegetables Tom, thanks for coming on and sharing all this stuff with us.

Thank you for having me, Ben. It's been great to talk to you.

If people aren't inspired to eat more plants and eat more vegetables now, then I really don't know what to say. We're just going to have to start figuring out how to make vegetable smoothies taste like Big Macs, I guess. But at least we've got tomatoes that taste like bacon, right?

Yeah. Try an indigo apple tomato. They're hard to find, but they have a definite bacony flavor.

It's officially now on my bucket list. I'll do it. All right, folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfoot along with Dr. Thomas Cowan signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Go to BenGreenfield Fitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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