Change Your Brain Every Day - Broccoli’s Hidden Medicinal Benefits, with Dr. Martin Katz

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

As a society, our first instinct in treating illness is usually to go straight to medication. However, as longtime listeners of the show know, the food we eat is just as, or even more important to our health than taking a medication. In the second episode of a series with Dr. Martin Katz, he and the Amens discuss some of the most beneficial micro-ingredients found in vegetables, specifically a certain molecule found in broccoli.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We're here with Dr. Martin Katz, really to look at a different way to get and stay healthy. I'm so excited that you're with us. I mean,

we're really kindred spirits on this journey. And if you didn't hear the first episode, please listen to the first episode. And at the end of this episode, tell us what you learned in the first two episodes and post. Give us a review if you wouldn't mind. Go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, but post what you've learned in these episodes because they're fascinating. For me, it's fascinating because it just so mirrors my own journey in healthcare. But we want to know what you've learned in these episodes because they're fascinating. For me, it's fascinating because it just so mirrors my own journey in healthcare. But we want to know what you've learned. Maybe take a screenshot, take a photo, repost it, and tag us. Great. So Martin, let's continue the discussion. So you're in Montana and your epiphany just begins to grow. I need to do something different. So continue on with the story.

Yeah. So we had the one child, we got pregnant one second. Actually, my wife said, Montana's wonderful. It's beautiful. We have a child. We have our families back East. And my oldest child threw up on her as she was traveling back or to I can't remember Bozeman. And she said, I've had enough of traveling by myself because I travel one way with her, but she'd stay east for two, three weeks, and I could only stay for a week. So I made contact with a fitness center here on the East Coast. There's a few of them, pretty big, sort of upscale fitness. And I started something called Wellness MD and places called that ACAC. And I would say it was in my earlier days. It's one of those things, if I knew then what I know now, I would have had it

worked out. It would have worked out probably differently, but it was a great experience. I got to work with incredible personal trainers, nutritionists, people who are really interested in moving people's health. And so we started a diet program, medically supervised weight loss program. This is when I still believed in weight loss, not that weight loss is bad, but it's not what we need to be focused on. Right. And so, but I was

pretty focused on it because it seemed like a good thing to do. And it was a catchphrase and we were all doing it. And so, you know, in building that program, just learned a lot about nutrition, exercise, and all the things we spoke about earlier, sleep and how they impacted health. I mean, if you know, what's amazing to me, in today's days, you know, you get these physicians, I will refer to a general surgeon or to a hematologist, oncologist, and they'll say it doesn't matter what you eat, or it doesn't matter what you put into your system. And it blows my mind. Yes. Because, I mean, they're using medicines, where do they think the medicines

are being metabolized and processed? Right. And so it absolutely matters. And it absolutely, and if they would just take the time to start reading the literature, which, you know, they are, they don't, we don't have time, we don't have a lot of time. You're so busy with medicine, now electronic medical records, blah, blah, blah. And we have these drug reps that are coming in and telling us what we should be doing. And we't have broccoli drug reps because you know there's no money there we don't have sulforaphane drug reps we don't have um you know all curcumin you know all the different incredible polyphenols and uh isothiocyanates and all that, they're not represented. And so these doctors don't. That's actually hysterical.

Right. It's so true. It's so true. And most doctors, when I was in medical school, so I think half of the illnesses I see as a psychiatrist are related to the bad food people eat. And yet, of the 80,000 hours it took me to become a physician, 16 of those. You got 16 hours. That's a lot. It was because I went to a very forward thinking

medical school. But it's just insane that people don't think food matters. And you know they don't think food matters because when my parents were in the hospital, they fed them like they were trying to kill them. And waking them up throughout the night. Absolutely. So I worked in an ICU unit and we called it ICU psychosis. So the only time we called psychiatrists, we didn't really want to,

but we called them when we needed to knock our patients out in spite of all of the beeps and the alarms awake, you know, opening their eyes to check their pupils. But we needed them out because they would wake up with psychosis. And so we're waking them up all the time. But I also went to a very forward thinking school who wouldn't let you have some of these foods that we talk about now. And I thought they were crazy. I would bring my own lunch bag and a huge thing of coffee. Cause I'm like, these people are nuts. They're nuts

that they're not letting us eat junk food. But they actually had a point and these people were very healthy. It was in one of the blue zones. And so I'd see these hundred year old people coming in 9,800 years old that were their seventh day Adventday Adventist. Now I'm not Seventh-day Adventist, but I started to think there's something to this lifestyle thing because as these people started to come in, they were on, it was their, it was their first major medical issue. They were on no medications or maybe one medication, which was weird because the surrounding towns, the people from the surrounding towns would come in train wrecks. And so I'm like, what, this is weird. They had no lines in their faces. And I'm like, something's got to be going on. And it started triggering my own interest in nutrition. And so that was started my journey.

And plus didn't hurt that I got, had my own health, major health crisis. So we need to get to broccoli. Cause I promise people when we started this week, we're going to talk about broccoli and they're going to fall in love with broccoli as opposed to what the first President Bush, what did he say? I'm president. I don't have to eat broccoli. You shouldn't have to eat it. You should want to eat it. So how did the interest in sulforaphanes come about? So that's a great question. You know, I'd say probably four or five years ago was not a molecule I'd actually heard of. You know, I'd heard of curcumin and I

heard of, you know, a lot of the gallic acids and all the other isocyanates, I3C and, you know, the like, but I had not really studied or even actually heard about sulforaphane. So the story starts, actually a little bit of a sad note, with a beautiful young lady by the name of Mara and she came to me. I took over her care when she had developed metastatic breast cancer over time. She was in a lot of pain. She had metastases, I think, to her liver and bones at the time. So she was in quite a lot of pain. She had metastases, I think, to her liver and bones at the time. So she was in quite a bit of pain.

She had a fair amount of nausea, vomiting, so limited appetite. And I met her husband, who's one of the partners in Broccoli Eat. And they were working with a PhD guy because she was now past chemotherapy. That wasn't going to be beneficial. She was receiving some radiation therapy, but it was their choice to treat it more or to try and manage it more naturally. And we had the opportunity at that point to biopsy one of the lesions to make sure that's what it was.

And being a physician, I knew the interventional radiologist real well. And I said, hey, guys, by the way, is there any chance that I could get some of that tissue? I know a guy, this PhD guy that I was telling you about. I know this guy who can do something with those cells. And they said, sure. So, you know, we were able to obtain those cells. We grew those cells. And then what we did is we subjected those cells?" They said, sure. We were able to obtain those cells. We grew those cells. Then what we did is we subjected those cells to a bunch of natraceuticals, or John did. One of them was sulforaphane, which, again, I had not really heard about. I come to find out sulforaphane was incredibly beneficial in a good way for her cells. So this is where the journey started. So we understood that broccoli actually is not very high in sulforaphane. Actually, broccoli sprouts are incredibly high in sulforaphane, about 100 times more high than broccoli, the mature plant. And so we started

growing broccoli sprouts for her and then juicing them. And if you've ever done that, you realize it's got quite a taste. It's fairly pungent. It's a strong taste. If you want to try it, go for it, but just realize it has a taste. And so we were trying to put it with lemon juice so she would tolerate it, but she would get to maybe a quarter of it and either throw up or be like, I'm done. And David, to say the least, is an exhaustive guy. And so he started looking at different options. And he went out and looked at different supplements. And then he read a study that showed that the supplements, unfortunately, don't provide very much of the sulforaphane that he was looking at. I'm not saying that's true of all broccoli supplement,

not broccoli sulforaphane or glucoraphanin supplements, but certainly the ones that he was looking at. And so we charged ourselves or charged John really with coming up with a way to stabilize sulforaphane. It's quite an unstable molecule. And so John started playing with it in his little lab. And I don't remember how long it took him, but he eventually figured out how to stabilize sulforaphane. And so we're the first American company. There's a French company that has done it. It's a little bit of a different process. There is more chemical. Ours is a perfectly natural process where we have been able to now

stabilize sulforaphane. The interesting thing about that, if you read about and learn about sulforaphane, is it's actually a fairly small molecule and it's a lipophilic molecule, which means it gets into the body very well. So as opposed to these precursor molecules, and I can explain this a little bit more, when you chew broccoli or broccoli sprouts where it's really high, you release these precursor molecules. One is called glucoraphanin. In a lot of these supplements, it's referred to as sulforaphane glycosinolate, which is very, very confusing. And again, very frustrating with the

supplement company that there's so much confusion out there. But it is really glucoraphanin. It is a glucosinolate, but it's not sulforaphane. It's a precursor molecule. And when you chew the broccoli sprout, you release an enzyme called myrosinase. The two will combine myrosinase and glucoraphanin to form sulfurofane, which is very bioavailable. And so when you're looking at supplements, which is something we're very interested in bringing best supplement to market, you got to make sure that it has biologic activity and that it's biologically available, right? So when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the published research on sulforaphanes and how they may help you. So what did you learn during this episode? Post it on any of your social media sites and hashtag Brain Warriors Way podcast.

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