Wine For Breakfast, Skippy's Peanut Butter In Your Sushi, "The Jungle Effect" & Much More!

Hello my friends. My guest on today's podcast has wine for breakfast. I'm not kidding. Or at least not every morning. But she has had wine for breakfast. I actually went all the way to Berkeley, California. I was recording a podcast at this fantastic place called Mission Heirloom. It's actually a test kitchen that produces amazing foods. And it was not me recording a podcast there, but rather my two little nine year old boys who have this fantastic mouthwatering food podcast called Go Greenfields. Like their last couple of episodes episodes were bone broth, colostrum donuts and an oatmeal less oatmeal made with spaghetti squash and raw honey and coconut milk. They do amazing recipes. So check out their podcast. Or if you have kids and you want your kids to be inspired to cook, check out their podcast with your children or your friend's children. Gogreenfields.com but we digress. My guest on today's show, Daphne Miller, is a doctor. She's an author of two fantastic books that we talk about in today's show and she's a clinical professor at UC San Francisco. And she's worked in the past 15 years on journalism and food production and ecology and health. And she's fricking brilliant and extremely entertaining. And she's got this beautiful home and garden in Berkeley. So I visited her to record this podcast on her back porch, which is why occasionally you may hear a fire alarm. Why she had to go get chicken into the fridge or I guess out of the fridge into the oven.

It ultimately turned out to be one of those fun podcasts where it's one of those deals where you can hear us face to face. You can also see us face to face if you go to the show notes for this episode@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Daphne D A P HNE you can watch the episode that I recorded via Facebook live if you want to see us with our faces stuck in front of a microphone as we do this and read the questions that people asked as we were actually doing this thing live. So anyways, fantastic show. And this show is brought to you by if you do have wine for breakfast, something that you'll need to use and that's toothpaste. Yes, a great tasting toothpaste made with MCT oil. That's right. No fluoride, no xylitol Corn free. Did you know a lot of toothpaste has corn in it? GMO corn, no soy, no gmo, no sodium lauryl sulfates, no gluten. Paleo friendly. If you're one of those people. Great tasting earth grown mouth freshening cacao mint flavor. And it's just one of the many products products that you can get over on the website of my friends at Onnit. Not only do they do toothpaste, they do amazing fitness gear, they do supplements and salts and all sorts of really cool cutting edge things. You get 10% off of anything there. Just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com onnit that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com o n n I T. You don't even need a code. How nifty is that? This podcast is also brought to you by Tradestation. So Tradestation is pretty cool. What they do is they help active military veterans and first responders get the most out of the market out of trading. They give educational tools and all active military veterans and first responders get to trade commission free with free real time market data and no software fees. How do you like that for a service that's pretty cool? So they're dedicated to basically helping everyone who has invested so much into the country turn around and invest in the market. And even if you've never traded before and you're listening in, they have amazing, really easy to understand educational materials to get you started in the stock market so you can become filthy rich or at least, you know, supplement your existing job with commission free trading that allows you to potentially become filthy rich. So anyways, you can learn more and you can sign up today. It's actually a pretty cool platform they have over there. Tradestation. Just like it sounds. TradeStation. TradeStation.com greenfield TradeStation.com greenfield All right, let's jump into today's show, shall we? In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

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Well, I'm here in Berkeley, California, as promised, with the author of two amazing books that.

Kind of blew my mind when I read them over the past year, because they're so in line with everything that I've talked to you guys about on other podcasts. That concept of blending ancestral living with modern living, taking cues from nature, growing our own food, or tapping into what our ancestors would have eaten. And my guest today is Dr. Daphne Miller. She's the author of two amazing books, the Jungle Effect, which is about the healthiest diets from around the world and how to make them work for you. How to, as I mentioned, learn a little bit more about what your ancestors ate. And in the book Pharmacology. And Daphne will be able to tell you about this, but she traveled to farms and investigated the way that wineries work and the way that people treat their soil and figured out how to actually tie that into the way that you take care of your own body. Now I'll put Daphne's bio, her website, and every amazing thing that she's done over the past 15 years when it comes to food production and ecology and health. Over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Daphne. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com D, A, P, H, not F, D, A, P, H, N, E. And Daphne is a family physician and an author and an associate clinical professor at the University of California, and she lives and gardens right here at her home where we're at in Berkeley, California. So, Daphne, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Ben. It's really nice to have you here and your two very cool sons.

Yeah, we brought river and Taryn. We were in Berkeley, California. We did the Spartan race yesterday.

Amazing.

So we ran around the stadium with our shirts off, and we ate at Chinatown last night. And the boys recorded their own food podcast called Go Greenfields. And we're gonna go to the Mission Heirloom Test Kitchen tomorrow night, eat some more food, record another episode. Yeah, they're fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. And to paint a picture for you guys, we're here on Daphne's back porch with that gorgeous view of Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Daphne's got her wine. I've got my. I've got my water. But regardless, we'll give a quick toast. Yes. I'd normally be drinking wine at this Time on Sunday night. Anyways.

So the jungle effect. It fascinates me how you came up with this concept. How would you describe what you call the jungle effect?

Well, the whole story started in my practice, in my medical practice in San Francisco with a patient who had been struggling for a long time with thyroid issues and fatigue and prediabetes and borderline hypertension and just all these problems that had come on in her 40s. And she came in and told me what for her felt like an extraordinary story, that her uncle had died, and she went back to her native village in Brazil on the banks of the Amazon river and was there visiting her family for a couple months. And while she was there, she noticed that all of her chronic health problems got better. And this was completely perplexing to her because she wasn't, in her mind, doing anything to get healthier. She said she didn't change, she thought really how she was eating, other than she was eating the foods there, and she wasn't exercising more or anything like that. And, in fact, it was a little bit of a stressful time because her uncle had died. But she started to notice that her weight was coming down and her blood pressure was better and her sugars were better and her energy was better. And then she came back to San Francisco and slowly all her health problems, her chronic health problems returned. They all came back. And so she had come into my office telling me the story, and she said to me, literally, I want to figure out what was causing that jungle effect.

That's what she said it.

She said that. She said the jungle effect. Yeah. And so that is kind of what started the whole thing. And.

Lo and behold, about a year later, I ended up volunteering in a little tiny village in Peru that was also on the banks of the Amazon river, actually filling in for a local doctor who needed a month's respite. She was a doc from Wisconsin who'd sort of moved down there and was living down there, but needed to go home for a month. And so I went down to fill in in this little clinic and was spending time in this really traditional, remote community that had no vehicles and was really eating all just local food that came out either from the river or the banks of the river and started to realize that I wasn't seeing any of the chronic diseases that I see all the time that are my bread and butter in San Francisco. The diabetes and the hypertension and the hypothyroidism and the chronic fatigue.

So you were actually testing these people and not seeing any.

Well, I was working in the clinic, and I saw the ailments that came in, and, you know, I saw plenty of, like, snake bites and machete wounds. Yeah, tetanus. But saw none of these other issues. And it's not that people weren't living long enough to have them. There were very elderly in the community. No, no, no. I mean, you know, some people were, but there was a lot of longevity going on, too. And so it was really interesting to, you know, have that juxtaposition. And so it started to get me really interested in communities around the world that still had very low rates of modern chronic disease.

And I realized that I could, in a way, act as a conduit for my patients and travel to these communities and sort of figure out what they were eating and bring them back to my practice in San Francisco and share it with my patients. And so the whole book is kind of an adventure in doing that. And I relied on the medical literature, the epidemiological literature, to figure out places that I called cold spots that had very low rates of a specific problem, like cold spots.

So that's different than, like, a blue zone.

Well, I wrote it. If you see, the book came out before blue zone. So, you know, blue. Maybe there was a. Maybe that was sort of an inspiration. Who knows, for that. That concept, But. But it was for specific. Like, who knows? We're not gonna sit there and have a tug of war about it. But.

So, yeah, I was looking at colon cancer and diabetes and all these different things from traveling to.

Cameroon and West Africa and Okinawa and Iceland. I was super interested in Iceland because although they are the same latitude as countries like Finland and spend half their year in darkness, they actually, at least at that time, had much lower rates of depression and seasonal affective disorder. And so it was sort of interested in what makes a difference.

I was just there. I was just in Reykjavik.

And it's true, they drink a lot, but they're happy.

They were riding a bicycle around in frigid conditions with a big smile on their face.

So it was. You know, the book was kind of an exploration of all of these ideas. And.

You know, of course, at the end of the day, people are like, well, what's the punchline? You know, what is the. You know, the way, the secret sauce in terms of staying healthier? And the answer is that, first of all, it's complicated, and then it's all about, you know, the total lifestyle. It's not just diet that makes you healthier, although diet is really, really important.

But I think the Bigger message and the one that for me was really delightful about doing this project was that there are many different ways to eat healthy. Like, you know, I was with the Tarahumara in Mexico, who have this, you know, like, really intense plant based diet and hardly eat any animal products at all. To Iceland, where like half of them. Yeah, half of their, you know, diet is sheep and fish, you know, and yet they had these sort of equal rates of longevity and hardiness and resilience and so on. And so, you know, there really are depending on sort of your constitution and your preferences and your emotional kind of connection to food. There are just many different ways to eat. Well.

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. You know, you bring up the Tarahumahara tribe, for example. Can you draw a connection between, you know, what they're eating? And you talk about in the book, like beans and maize, legumes, corn, things along those lines, like you mentioned, not a lot of animal fats.

What a traditional, I guess a Mexican or a South American diet like that would look like, compared and contrasted to like a modern Mexican diet. And what you found in terms of what happens when, let's say, like, you know, a Mexican living in Southern California returns to a diet like that or, you know, a patient who you. Right.

So a couple things sort of just unpacking all the interesting questions you just asked. First of all, what's so fascinating about the Tarahumara is that they really are still one of the most isolated sort of remote communities within Mexico. So it's really hard now. I mean, most parts of Mexico have been infiltrated by Big Ag and kind of, you know, modern industrial food. So it's really hard.

College students drinking tequila with beans on it.

Well, even traditional foods like tortillas. A lot of tortillas come from factories in Southern California that are eaten in Mexico. You know, it's just like, yeah, it's fairly kooky what's happened. And a lot of it's GMO corn and so on. But at least deep down in the canyons, the Barrancas de Covre or the Copper Canyons where Tarahumara live, it's still really very, very traditional, with very few little food coming from outside, except for the occasional bag of Cheetos or Mazola corn oil that I would see down there.

And what you see is all these really traditional seeds being grown. So the corn is not at all like the corn that you and I think of as corn. It's the zma. Are these really ancient grains? Varietal grains that have tons of calcium and are just really rich in lots of different nutrients and B vitamins.

Wrinkled colored stuff.

Little wrinkled. Funny looking. Yeah, that isn't. You don't just sit there and eat corn on the cob. Yeah. And that goes for the beans and the squash. And all these things really are incredibly nutrient dense in their more primitive varietal form, rather than the hybridized kind of generic squash and beans that we get. So that's one thing that really struck me while I was down there. The other thing is that as I learned both from researchers who have been following the Tarahumara for years, and also by talking to community folks down there, they are the ancestral cousins to the Pima Indians who are in Arizona and.

A little bit in New Mexico and so on. And in the US we sort of think of the Pima tribes as having some of the highest rates of diabetes of any of the Native American groups in the U.S. or any, you know, any groups in the U.S. i mean, by the time you're, you know, in your 30s as young adult Pima, your risk of developing type 2 diabetes, I think, is, you know, close to 30 or 40%. It's really, really high. And yet here I was with their cousins, their genetic relatives down in the canyons in Mexico. So same genes and virtually no type 2 diabetes. So what that tells you is that as we've kind of suspected for many other chronic diseases, we have these genes that either get turned on or off, depending on the diet we're on.

Any of this beauty of your own control group.

Yeah, exactly. And I kind of found that over and over again around the globe. The same with Icelanders who had emigrated to Canada. They had much higher rates of depression than the Iceland who were in these northern communities. In Iceland and certainly in Cameroon, one of the things that I looked at there was colon cancer rates, and there's all this interesting research showing how low they are in traditional communities all over West Africa. And yet African Americans, who can trace a lot of their. A lot of whom can trace their ancestry to West Africa, have colon cancer rates that are sort of at the same as white populations, if not exceeding them. So what are these influences that turn our genes on and off within as we move around the globe? And a lot of it, some of it's stress, some of it's smoking and pollution and all the other stuff, but a lot of it is dietary.

With this Mexican example, did you have any patients who you actually took, like, who were Hispanic and put them on a diet closer to Something that wasn't like a Tex Mex or a Southern California corn tortilla and big corn and refried beans diet.

Right. So the inspiration in each chapter of the book is in fact, a patient from my practice who is trying to learn more about their traditional diet or the diet of their grandmothers. I mean, I think a lot of people, when they think of ancestral diet, they think Paleo. And this is really just everybody eats paleo, right?

Whether you're African American or you're Southeast Asian or you're Northern European, it's like Paleo is Paleo, right?

Paleo has become this sort of like.

Generic protein bar before your workout.

And this is much more about really just what your great grandmother cooked, you know. And so in a sense, it is modern in that it's, you know, sooner than 10,000 years ago, and it is, you know, post agricultural and all of those things. But.

Really, most of what we now see as modern chronic diseases didn't start happening 10,000 years ago. It started happening 40 or 50 years ago.

Right. When people began eating to a certain extent. You know, not to paint with too broad a brush, but a big part of it, as you alluded to, people began eating a diet that was pretty much standardized to the locale that they were in, and in many cases, modernized and processed.

Processed, exactly.

Perhaps more importantly, I find.

Not what their ancestors would have eaten. So using another example, like African American, for example, what did you discover when you were in Cameroon when it comes to corn cancer?

So I'm going to push back a little bit about the ancestral thing just because most of us, and I'm sure for anybody who's done any kind of genetic analysis on themselves, I mean, we might identify with a certain group, but our genes are actually have become incredibly.

My wife asked me, I told her, I'm gonna go interview Daphne. She wrote this book about eating what your answers would've been. And my wife's like, well, half of us in America are mutts.

Yeah, we're total. And so I don't, you know, I think this idea of, you know, eat right for your DNA or whatever, it might work to a certain extent. And certainly there are these, you know, genes that transcend different groups that are kind of these high risk genes that we're finding out about, you know, like kinds of apoe. And I can go on and sort of name these different genes that either make you more or less at risk for breast cancer or heart disease or whatever, and that you find more in certain ethnic groups. But the real reason Why I wrote this book was not so much to match it up with ancestry or DNA or anything like that, but to match it up more on an emotional level. Because I actually firmly believe that you can take the same person with the same constitution and put them on a number of different healthy, traditional diets and have them do well on it. But it really has to do with what, for you, feels right and makes sense and sort of has an emotional connection and so on.

Do you accompany something like that, whether you call it emotional or. I've heard the term intuitive eating, for example. Do you accompany that with laboratory testing or. Or quantification? Or you just eat what makes you happy?

Well, it's sort of eating what feels like it actually has meaning for you in some way. And so from a cultural standpoint. From a cultural standpoint, yeah. And I think what we've really been inundated with as a culture is, first of all, this message that we don't know how to eat right. And you need somebody famous or someone who looks a certain way or, you know, a scientist or a supermodel or whoever else to tell you what the right diet is. And what I started to discover is, in fact, like, your great grandmother pretty much knew what the right diet was. So learn from her. You know, our great grandfather, I don't want to be sexist here.

She ate what would have probably been passed down to her by former family members.

Exactly. And it was, you know, however, that community ate well for generations off the land, connected to local recipes, connected to foods that grew in season, connected to holidays and fasting and feasting and all of these things. And so it's just, in a way, the book really was to show people, you know, it doesn't have to be a prescribed diet. You know, we knew as a species how to eat really well at a certain point because we had. We didn't have corporations and we didn't have processed food to confuse us. And we only ate what was in season. We only ate what wasn't local and what kind of grew together at the same time.

Would that be one of the ways to achieve what you're talking about would be to eat seasonally any locally?

Absolutely.

No matter what part of the world you're in, if you're. Let's say. Let's say you are. You're Hispanic and you're living in where I live, Right. Like Western Washington or Eastern Washington, just eat the foods like the salmon and the elk and the apples and the pears and the non GMO wheat and the Kind of things you might find up in that locale, even though it may not be traditional Mexican per se.

Sure. I mean, the problem that most people. The challenge, I would say, is that people can hear that list of foods and they can be like, awesome, I'll do it. But then they actually have no idea how to make the food. A lot of my patients, and so that's when they end up just getting a little confused and lost and either buying prepared stuff or sort of manufactured stuff and so on. So I feel like the recipes, which is the tradition part, are as vital a part of the healing process and the self care as just understanding what's in season and the list of ingredients and so on. And so that's where this book really does sort of discuss things.

For example, you have a recipe in her that's wine. Speaking of wine, you have wine for breakfast. Tell me this whole tale about drinking wine for breakfast and why you put that in the book.

Well, cause I spent time on Crete, which is in Greece. Yeah, the island of Crete, which. Which within Greece probably has the, you know, a country that is sort of known for its longevity and so on. It's probably is, you know, the whole.

Like goat milk and tea and like 110 year old.

Yeah, it really is like the go to place for longevity there. And.

What was so interesting to me is I was interviewing all these folks who were in their 90s and 100 and so on, and I was asking them about breakfast because I kind of had this hypothesis and curiosity about breakfast. I had this hypothesis that breakfast was like this really important meal for them, but also this curiosity about what they ate for breakfast so that I could sort of figure out what I could start eating for breakfast. And across the board they all told me they had wine. They had wine for breakfast in some form or another. Like they would take this incredible locals.

Sprouted with coconut oil and garlic.

No, no, no, no. They were like, you know, taking dacos, which are these barley sprouted barley bread and you know, dipping it in a little bit of wine. And it wasn't like they were guzzling the wine, they were sort of using it more like a sauce to dip this barley bread in. Or they were chopping tomatoes and having that with wine and a little bit of feta cheese or whatever, olive oil.

I could get on that bandwagon. Well, maybe, maybe on a weekend breakfast.

Well, that's the thing, you know, it's like we have all these rules here because someone told us that you shouldn't have a little bit of Wine for. You know, you shouldn't have wine for breakfast, but, you know, and they're literally probably having, you know, an eighth of a cup or something like that. But it was just. They were using it to soften their bread. But it was an interesting idea. You know, it made me kind of want to break out and learn all these other strange things people were doing.

Well, the recipe section of the book, that's kind of what you do, is you delve into the indigenous diet. So because we have so many biohackers and type A's that listen in who. And I guarantee they're gonna go get a 23andMe analysis, they're gonna figure out their predominant genetic traits, and they're gonna get your book and flip to the recipe section for that, and they're gonna.

Be really disappointed because I don't have.

I kind of thought that's what you might say, and that's why I was gonna say, well, how do you figure it out if you're genetic melting pot? What to return to the cause. I know I mentioned Cameroon and Africa, and I thought it was fascinating how you traveled all the way to Africa to study this issue of colon cancer. What did you find in Africa?

Well, I actually worked in Cameroon for over a year for Save the Children, so it wasn't a lot of these stories I actually taught. I was a visiting professor in Okinawa at the Chubu Medical Center. And so a lot of the research was also intertwined with. With working as a physician in these different places. The same with Peru and so on.

It's not like your book advance is pretty slim. It's not like you can afford to.

Travel around the globe.

So as a physician, I have that advantage that I can sort of double dip and do a little clinical work while I'm there.

But in Cameroon, very much the same as.

What I discovered in other places is that, you know, this. It's kind of this interesting rule of thumb that, you know, being poor but not too poor.

And not being poor in the US but being poor in a traditional community somewhere else is actually a health benefit.

More like I don't have an iPhone.

Like, I don't have, you know, tons of technology, and I don't, you know, I drive a car, and I live in this, you know, fairly remote location, and I have skills in terms of growing food and caring for myself. And yet I'm not so poor that I've, like, lost my land or multinational corporations have come in and devastated the traditions in my community, which is what's happened in a lot of places in Africa. So I'm still maintaining my traditional way of life. That is probably the best formula in many ways for survival, and certainly not in the U.S. i mean, poverty in the U.S. is equated with poor health outcomes and.

Enormous inequity and disadvantage and. And so on, and is a health risk factor unto itself. But in other places around the world, there still is, there is some advantage to not having all of the modern conveniences.

Yeah. And one of the things you really honed in on in that chapter, because, like, in the Icelandic chapter, you talked about, like, you mentioned how they don't get as much depression as you'd expect in that section of Iceland compared to Icelanders in, in, say, Canada or in the Tarahumahara tribe. They don't get as much diabetes as you tend to see in Mexicans living in, say, Southern California. And then in Cameroon or in Africa, you talked about how you don't see as much colon cancer as you would in an African American population over in the U.S. what was it in Africa or in Cameroon that you found when it comes to cancer?

So everything that I found in other communities, but certainly one of the things that struck me, at least in the. The place I was working in Cameroon.

Was, and this was more in eastern Cameroon, it was the incredibly high rate of eating foraged food. So.

Wild greens and of every variety, which are high in all these amazing antioxidants and B vitamins and iron and so on. And now that we're understanding the human microbiome more, and by the way, when I wrote the Jungle Effect.

There was not such a focus on that. But now in retrospect, the more we understand about the human microbiome, eating all these foods that are actually really great at feeding the beneficial bacteria in our intestines probably had a lot to do with it. Whole grains and manioc root and different kinds of, once again, traditional maize and so on.

But do you think when you talked about foraging, you have, like, a whole bunch of different Fs in that chapter? Foraging is one of them. I know. Do you think that there's something special about, let's say.

Kale that's been fed on by insects and picked from your backyard or from the wild versus what you get from the grocery store would both prevent colon cancer?

Well.

A lot of the traditional greens, the ones that are more foraged or that are from a varietal that is not just, you know, once again, a modern hybridized one, are much richer in fiber and richer in all variety of Nutrients. So I think that, in fact, they are more beneficial for them. Yeah.

And.

Absolutely. Yeah. I feel you're pulling things out of the earth.

So. Absolutely.

Yeah. And the soil.

And the soil. And it just sort of a lifestyle where you're out there and connected to the healthy soil, which kind of leads to the next project, which was pharmacology. Yeah, right, exactly.

And I definitely want to talk about pharmacology. We'll leave time for that, for sure. But I think one thing that also intrigued me about the book was you talked about.

This concept that even when we. Let's say we decide, okay, I'm going to eat not to kick this horse to death, but more for my ancestry, or I'm going to go find a local ethnic restaurant that caters to my cuisine. And what I'm, like, you mentioned, comfortable with when you walk into an ethnic food restaurant. I think the example you gave in the book was like, Skippy's peanut butter at a Thai restaurant.

Yeah. That was kind of the devastating moment for me when I was waiting to use the bathroom in my favorite Thai restaurant, and I look over and there's just this case of Skippy's peanut butter.

The same thing happened to me here in San Francisco at a sushi Fine. Sushi restaurant. I went up to use the bathroom, and reading this in your book was like, deja vu. Big jar of Skippy's peanut butter in the kitchen. I have no clue what it's for, what they're putting Skippy's peanut butter in a Japanese sushi restaurant. But, yeah, what's the deal with that? Like, when you go to an ethnic food restaurant, what did you find when.

It came to ingredients? Well, you know, when you eat, if you go to Japan or Thailand or China and eat traditional food there, in fact, a lot of it tastes completely different than what you get in a Chinese or Thai or Japanese restaurant in the US and part of it is that the US Palate is so accustomed to sugar. We want sugar in absolutely everything. And so, you know, chefs or cooks have accommodated to this. And so what tastes like Chinese or Japanese or Thai or you name it here in the US Is completely not what you get there. And it's not just the salt, the sugar, it's the salt. It's kind of all of these synthetic flavors. And my brother lived in Thailand for years, and the first thing he taught me to say when I was traveling in Thailand was mai sai nam tham, which means, please don't add sugar. Because the minute that they see that you're from the U.S. they think they have to like add all this sugar to their traditional food to make you like it. I had no clue.

I thought what Thailand was that phrase. How did you say again?

Mai sai nam tom.

Mai sai nam tom.

Nice. So be careful when you're eating at these ethnic restaurants to see that they actually are using local ingredients. I mean, just because it's Mexican does not mean that they're using non GMO corn tortillas and traditional maize and the little corn, the little ugly corn and things along those lines.

And I will say that there is sort of a whole new generation of restaurants and chefs and cooks that are very cognizant of this and trying to cook in a really authentic way. So I don't want to in any way make this as a blanket statement about traditional cuisine.

That you would get in a restaurant. But yeah, it can. Especially if they're trying to make it inexpensively. It can end up being unhealthy.

Yeah, yeah. And for those of you listening, and again, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Daphne but in summary, it's Mexico where you study diabetes. And like we mentioned, that slow carb approach seems to be quite effective even if it's not like a paleo eat animals all day long. It can be a plant based slow carb approach. Greece, where of course you delve into everything from tannins and having wine for breakfast and all the other things that you have in the recipe section. Iceland for depression. And I want to come back to that in just a moment. Cameroon, the cold spot for bowel trouble where you get into fiber and foraging and all those things. Okinawa, where you talk about cancer and the strange absence of breast and prostate cancer.

There's.

And then you have foraging and recipes, of course.

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Iceland. Why is it that because of that darkness, they're not as depressed? Is it that fish? Is it because when I went over there, they were eating whale and puffin? Like, is There some magic secret sauce.

Right. So once again, I want to be really clear that it isn't one thing. And that in fact, when the financial crisis happened in Iceland, there are depression rates skyrocketed. So that's just an illustration of how multifactorial it is. And I don't want in any way to misrepresent this as simply about diet, but one of the things that is really striking about Iceland is that they do eat an incredibly large amount of omega 3 fats in their diet, both from the fish and from the sheep that are feasting off lichen that grow there and that.

Lichen. Moss.

Yeah, moss.

It's the same thing. We were just in Finland. Reindeer, very high in omega 3 content. They eat a lot of the lichen.

Yes. And even a lot of the wild berries, the bilberries that they pick. And the great thing about these.

Fatty nutrients is that if you really bulk up on them in one season, you can. They actually keep you going year round. So it's not like something that, you know, depletes really quickly. You can, you know, eat a lot of it in spring or a lot of it in fall, and it keeps you going around the year. So.

So, for example, you know, to not. Obviously everyone's going to listen to this and go to Iceland and live there if they have depression, but the takeaway would be perhaps look at that concept of, you know, getting some fermented fish or some nice, you know, just a lot of sardines or even like if you have mustard in a pinch, some good fish oil or something like that into your diet to take a clue from them. Just in the same way that you would take a clue from the Tarah Mohara and perhaps include more very well cooked maize and beans in your diet if you were concerned about diabetes. Or.

Take a clue from the Africans and forage more and eat more fiber if you're concerned about colon cancer. I mean, it's that simple. You're just taking all these clues from areas where these diseases are in very low occurrence.

Yeah, yeah. And what I hope with the book is really to start a conversation about, you know, with your relatives who are still alive, who have a connection to what was eaten, you know, more traditionally in your family. Go back and get recipes from them as fast as you can.

Right, exactly. Although there's some recipes in my immediate family that are super tasty. Grandma's cinnamon rolls, for example.

Oh, yeah. But probably not.

They're probably not going to prevent diabetes. I'm just guessing. Now this other Book Pharmacology. And for those of you who are watching the Facebook Live version of this particular show, Pharmacology, which I'll also put a link to over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Daphne, did you write this before or after you wrote Jungle?

After.

So this is the newer of your books. Describe this concept of why you got into thinking about soil in the first place. I think what you call soul of soil.

Yeah. Well, if you sort of have heard what I've been babbling on about for the last hour, one of the things that happened after I essentially went around the globe discovering or rediscovering some of these traditional diets was that I realized that I had missed a really important part of the story, which was how all these foods are grown. And it was something that, amazingly, I had spent all this time talking to traditional cooks and community members and doctors in these different countries and so on, and had not gotten into the production side of things at all. And I realized that. That you really can't change your health if you don't think about how your food is grown. And I know that's probably really obvious to most of your listeners, but as a doctor, you're so focused on.

First of all, in your training, you're so focused on things that aren't even food. And then it's incredibly forward thinking to even think about food and then to sort of move down the supply chain to agriculture. It just was this total leap for me. So that was the next iteration was spending time with farmers and really learning about agricultural systems and seed choice and managing soil and all of these things and understanding what a huge lever these things are on our personal health. And also not just sort of the direct connection between agriculture and our health, but also understanding these metaphors and how you treat the soil has everything to do with how you treat your body.

So, yeah, it's a fantastic range of metaphors. Like, you talk about these egg. What do you call them? Egg facilities. Egg farms. What's the right word?

Yeah, they are production facilities in Arkansas. Yeah.

And you went there, and in the book you actually talk about in the same way that you talk about Iceland and diabetes, or Iceland and depression, Mexico and diabetes. In the other book, in this book, you talk about, for example, for example, eggs and depression or wine and the microbiome. So let's go to eggs.

Right.

Why did you choose to talk about depression or stress in conjunction with egg farms?

Yeah, and it was specifically stress because what happened was that I visited.

A egg facility in Arkansas that was owned by this family, the Cox family. And, and they had started with their hens stuffed into cages in this incredible high density environment, basically factory farming their eggs. And then the price started to go up for free range organic eggs. And so they got rid of all their cages and they just stuffed 15,000 hens in a house and fed them organic mash. And it was, it was still a frigging nightmare.

But even though they're eating organic mash.

They'Re eating organic mash. But it just, it was kind of like hell in a hen house. And those eggs were being sold at Walmart as free range organic eggs. And then all of a sudden the price started to go up for pastured eggs. And there was this real market for pastured eggs. And so they started to switch over and move, have moved from 15,000 hens in a house to 5,000 hens in a house and give them each this little acre of green pasture to play on. And.

It was just incredible to see how that change had changed the health of their hens, their employees, the health of the soil around the farm, and most importantly, the nutrient value of the egg. And so I talk about that transition and how on so many levels, it's a lesson for us both in terms of, you know, kind of good stress and bad stress. Because obviously as they move to the pastures, they got this different kind of stress and that they could get chased by foxes and they could chase each other and the lightning storm could get them, but they were not having this stress of living in this high, high density.

Completely loud, smelly, dusty environment. And I kind of equated that to some of my patients who are under chronic low grade stress versus ones who have occasional intense stressors, but have a lot more autonomy over their lives, like the pastured hands.

What's crazy, what really leapt out at me was you talk about places like Manhattan, for example, where we see loneliness in an extremely densely populated area, and how you found, when you were studying that farm, how you have hens who are in the densely populated cages or the densely populated areas, they actually have more social isolation issues than the hens who are kind of like a little bit more lonely out in the pasture, right?

Yeah, they had higher cortisol, but it was in this weird way that their cortisol was higher all the time. It never varied versus the hens that were out in the pasture. And by the way, this wasn't my research. This is other researchers who I interview. But when I was out, the hens who are out in the pasture have these spikes in cortisol. So when they're chased by another hen or chased by a fox or whatever, but overall their baseline cortisol is much, much lower. And what I came to realize is that's the kind of stress that we as humans want is occasionally to have these spikes in cortisol when we're running a race or, you know, going to give an important presentation or something like that, but that overall we want our cortisol levels to be way lower.

Or when I see. When I look out in the yard to see my wife and she's struggling with an alfalfa bell for the goats, or she can't figure out how to chop this block of wood, like that's.

The kind of cortisol you want to run at it.

Probably a little bit more natural.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Versus someone who constantly just has this low grade stress going on, which is what happens, unfortunately, to a lot of us. And certainly I see a lot of patients like that who actually never have real spikes in stress, but never are completely relaxed either.

Right. So perhaps if you're lonely or feeling socially isolated, the trick is not to surround yourself with a whole bunch of people, but to instead, perhaps identify stressors in your life and step back and be in perhaps a less socially stimulating situation, but a more natural situation.

I wouldn't give that as like, you know, it's really probably thinking more about how can you get chronic stress out of your life and that the idea is not to de stress entirely. And actually that, in fact, it's really great to have. Yeah, no, it's great to have stressors in your life that kind of keep you excited and keep you on your toes and so on, you know, but that there really is this idea of good stress versus bad stress.

Although play devil's advocate, I had some fantastic beef in Walla Walla, and they raised these cows on wine. And the cows are literally just out in the field half drunk all day, completely de stressed and grass fed. So of course, perhaps they do have stress. Maybe they've run out of wine, who knows?

And sometimes what you're eating as beef is different than how you want to live.

Stress. You talked also about cancer, and I had never once thought about a corollary between wineries and cancer. But why was it that you chose to talk about cancer in the chapter about visiting wineries?

Well, it wasn't wineries per se, but it really was this idea of how this one vineyard, that's a really cool vineyard here in northern California, does their pest management and so the parallel really was between pest management and cancer. And the kind of more modern agronomy approach to pests is eradicate them, just wipe the heck out of them, use whatever poison you can to get rid of pests in the field. And what that has shown is that the pests come back with a vengeance and usually come back in this form where they're resistant to all of the pesticides that you could possibly hit them with. And the same with herbs, herbs, weeds.

What I'm drawing a parallel with is between that and cancer treatment and the fact that with kind of the modern approach to cancer was obliterate it, cut it out, burn it out, chemo it out. And what we find is in 5 to 10 years, cells grow back way more resistant than they were originally. And so there are these much more forward thinking folks in agriculture who are like, wait, let's rethink how we're doing pest management. Let's not bomb the heck out of these pests with any, every kind of herbicide, pesticide, whatever that we can. Let's do something that's much more integrated and gentle and hierarchical with the idea that we will keep them at bay but not eliminate them. And that's been shown to be much more effective in the field.

What I go on to talk about is there are now oncologists who are borrowing this approach and using it for cancer management and actually showing much better survival rates, much lower reoccurrence of invasive cancers and so on, by not trying to obliterate the cancer, but more by trying to sort of manage it as a chronic disease.

What would be an example of that? Like that management approach versus the obliteration approach, which I think.

So it's happened with a lot of different kinds of cancers and in fact is using chemo, but not using the big guns and using it at lower doses to kind of keep it at bay and using it in conjunction with other, all these other efforts that are trying to keep healthy cells healthier. So everything from dietary approaches to trying.

In fact to.

Change ph levels and oxygenation levels and lower glucose levels and so on, to make it an environment that's more hospitable for healthy cells and less hospitable for cancer cells. And that's exactly what's happening in agriculture as well, with an approach that's called integrated pest management.

Yeah, you talk about like planting BlackBerry bushes and plum trees around the vineyard to attract beneficial insects.

Exactly.

Not to kill the other insects, but to attract beneficial ones that will outnumber the others. Right. Or counterbalance them, these benign cell boosters that they're now using in cancer therapy.

Exactly.

That do the same thing. You're not knocking out the cancer cells you're installing at promoting growth cells.

Exactly. So there's a much more sort of sophisticated evolutionary understanding of how resistance happens both in agriculture and in our bodies. And the idea is if you use these big guns against cells, be they in plants or pests or.

Human cancer cells, that, that what you end up getting is the most resistant ones hanging around and taking over.

Yeah, there was another really fascinating section and I think a lot of people are familiar now with this hygiene hypothesis and the fact that we need germs and germs help our children's immune systems to become stronger, et cetera. But one thing that intrigued me was a section of the book. You went to this rockin H ranch and you talked about how they found a bunch of microbial species. I don't remember if it was in the milk, the raw milk, or in the actual children themselves that were microbes associated with serious infections. Right. Like you talk about listeria and staphylococcus and things that you would not expect to be beneficial at all.

Tell me about what you found when it comes to those.

Right, so that's like things we normally.

Want to just knock out.

Yeah, that's super interesting and.

Sorry.

Hopefully it's not either of our cars that are getting, that are getting locked into. And I realize that you have a wonderful chicken.

We have 15 minutes until your chicken has been called out. I'm being aware of.

No, I need to put it in.

That's what I. Oh, you need to put it in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just want to make sure I'm.

So. And I can press pause by the way, if you'd like to go put your chicken.

No, no, no. It's probably at that point it's probably good for us to. Yeah. So one of the things that.

All of this research on microbial diversity has shown is that it is beneficial to have a really large spectrum of bugs around. And that in fact, be it on farms or in our gut or whatever, it's not necessarily the.

The genetics of one specific bug. That is, as you know, that is concerning if you have it in the company of many other types of bugs. Diversity, this massive diversity probably is the healthiest piece. And that's why.

Sustainable or regenerative or chemical free farming is so important.

Because what it does is encourage a diversity of microbes in the soil. And that's why eating a really diverse, healthy diet is so important for our gut because it encourages a diversity of microbes in our gut.

So in other words, if you were going to get on the raw milk bandwagon, let's face it, a lot of raw milk does still have dangerous microbes in it. But you may, rather than kind of return to that cancer analogy, trying to kill all the dangerous microbes, instead eat a wide variety of other fermented foods along with a raw milk habit like kimchi and sauerkraut.

Well, you have to be careful because if you get enough in your system of one problematic bug like listeria or salmonella or something, it can make you really sick or kill you, you know, so, you know, it's not like eating a diverse diet will overcome something that's massively contaminated. But the point that I'm trying to make is that on these farms where they found these healthy and healthy parents and so on, they did find bugs that we don't associate with health like listeria and salmonella and shigella and so on. But they were in very small concentration and they were, you know, in the company of all these really healthy, you know, fungi and bacteria.

That children were being exposed, that they were being exposed to. So it just simply culturing those, you know, less health giving bacteria isn't in itself a danger sign. But, you know, if you eat raw milk that's been contaminated or sat around for a while, then it can make you supremely sick. Yeah.

Take the message, is expose yourself to a wide diversity of bacteria.

Yeah.

Whitewashed room, drinking raw milk.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

That sounds like a good party though.

Yeah.

There's one other thing I wanted to ask you about because I came across a term in your book that I wasn't familiar with called a hydrosol.

Yeah, that was the L for those.

Of you listening in.

Yeah. Which is this. Really? I'm not, I don't even fully understand the sort of energetic piece of hydrosols that people, you know, a lot of people who do this distillation are very into. And this came from your home state up in Washington. Yeah.

In more eastern Washington. I visited this woman who was just amazing at both as an herbalist and as a farmer. And she was growing all these herbs and distilling them using these.

Traditional ancient alembic stills. And what comes out from the distillate is a hydrosol, which she described to me as kind of this perfect mirror because it's an aquaphilic distillate. It is kind of this perfect mirror of the aqueous part of the plant, but it has essential oils in it as well. And it ends up having all of these very healing properties. And it was specifically using it for cosmetics and so on, but people use it more for herbal treatments.

So it's both the water soluble and the fat soluble molecules from the plant.

Yeah, it gets the oil, the essential oil in there, but also the water soluble pieces. So it's more of a complete image of the plant in a way than just taking essential oils.

And you can purchase these or I think in the book you talk about how to make them yourself.

Yeah, I actually give up a little how to formula because they're pretty easy to make, but I use them. And obviously it's an N of one in my own personal experimentation. But I used it to help with kind of a dermatitis that I had on my face that antibiotics weren't treating and a bunch of other stuff wasn't treating. And that's how I first discovered the hydrosols was just a friend had given me a sample of one of them that came from this farm in Washington state and it totally cleared up my face or nothing else.

Yeah. And it's even more than essential oils because essential oils are just the fat soluble parts.

Well, yeah, essential oils are way too powerful. You wouldn't just want to put a bunch of skin. Yeah, yeah, no. In hydrosols and are incredibly gentle. Yeah.

All right, so for those of you listening in, she's got. She's got recipes in her book now. That was the section where you talk about what an aromatic herb farmer taught me about sustainable beauty.

Yeah.

In addition to. You traveled to the urban farm and learned about community medicine.

Right. You know, that was a pretty wacko chapter where I ended up actually interviewing some kind of famous, like, commercial, you know, person who makes cosmetics. And, you know, like, everybody agreed that most of our industrial beauty industry is just bogus.

It's toxic. I hold my breath when I walk through that section of the mall now.

And so it just gave me a lot more faith and sort of just working with plants and so on.

Right. It's fascinating. Went to the winery, the urban farms, the Rockin H Ranch, the biodynamics. I mean, between this and traveling all over the globe for the jungle effect, like, your books are fun, but I love how you just draw so many practical examples from these journeys that you go on to these different areas, whether it be Cameroon or Frickin, you know, Chicken Ranch. So I really did love these books. And when I knew I was going to be in Berkeley. I just had to come over here and expose people to you because I, I don't see a lot of people talking about these books. But, I mean, they're fascinating. Thank you.

Thank you for recognizing them. And I really appreciate that. Yeah. That pharmacology is being used, actually, both of them are being used a lot in curricula for folks who are learning nutrition and medicine and so on. And so that for me is really inspirational because one of my biggest goals is really getting the next generation of people in healthcare to care more about this stuff and not just stick with the algorithms and stuff that the pharmaceutical industry is telling us to do.

Well, BenGreenfieldFitness.com Daphne that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com-A P H N E is where you can access all of Daphne's books and the show notes for this episode. And you can also leave your questions and your comments. I know that Daphne needs to go put a chicken in the oven and I've got two boys who I'm going to walk through Berkeley. But I really appreciate those of you who are on Facebook watching and interacting live, as well as those of you who are listening in now and again. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Daphne. Daphne, thanks for coming on the show.

It was a pleasure. Thanks so much.

All right, folks, it's Ben Greenfield along with Daphne Miller signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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

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Sam.