Dhru Purohit Show - 12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Levels, ARMRA, and Lumebox. Real foods are multitasking powerhouses packed with vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that work together to support multiple systems in the body. Today’s guests highlight the top foods that can boost health, strengthen immunity, and reduce inflammation. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we bring you a special compilation episode featuring Dhru's conversations with experts about the superpowers of foods and spices to boost health and longevity. Dr. William Li shares his favorite “grand slam” foods that support all key longevity and defense systems, helping to prevent cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and illness. Dr. Minich dives into the science of spices, explaining how they reduce the development of advanced glycation end (AGE) products in cooked foods. She also reveals the top spices and powerful synergistic combinations to enhance your meals. If you want to supercharge your meals, this episode is a must-listen!  In this episode, Dhru and his guests dive into: Dr. William Li’s gland slammer foods and their power (01:57) DNA protection through superfoods (05:11) How to optimize coffee drinking (13:17) Food and medicine as tools in the toolbox (23:34) Advanced Glycation End products (AGE’s) (28:14) Spices that protect our body from AGE’s (34:18) The power of polyphenols in spices (36:00) Protective effects on the microbiome (37:36) Turmeric as the heavy hitter (41:08) Neuroprotective components of spices (48:30) Potent amount of spices regularly (52:50) Final thoughts (53:21) Also mentioned in this episode: The Top Foods to Prevent Disease and Repair DNA with Dr. William Li The 7 Anti-Aging Spices You Need To Eat! – Heal The Body & Stop Inflammation with Deanna Minich Link to Dr. Minich's Slides This episode is brought to you by Levels, ARMRA, and Lumebox.  Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today.  Get 15% off your first order of Armra Colostrum at tryarmra.com/DHRU, or enter DHRU to get 15% off your first order. Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device! That's over 40% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. You know, we all know that eating a healthy diet is key to our overall well-being. And there are also in the context of an overall healthy diet, which includes getting the right amount of fiber, protein, exercise, sleep, etc. There are some foods that particularly have an amazing impact on our health. Or it seems to be. And I love this conversation because I love getting excited about the super foods that are out there.

It makes me more excited to eat a whole food diet and to know that those foods are having an amazing impact on our help. That's what we're going to be talking about today. Twelve foods and spices with incredible benefits and the fascinating research behind them. One of my guests on today's compilation episode. And the first guest today is world-renowned physician, researcher, scientist, speaker, and author of Eat to Beat Disease, Dr. William Lee. And he refers to the foods that he covers in this first 12 group of foods as great.

grand slammer foods. In our conversation with William Lee, he shares the fascinating information about these foods that light up our health defense systems protect against disease. We all want that. And even enhance DNA repair. Super fascinating. And after this segment with Dr. William Lee, stay tuned because I also speak with Dr. Deanna Minnick, one of my dear friends, a nutrition researcher, educator, and functional medicine trained clinician with a unique approach to nutrition that combines physiology and psychology. She's going to be chatting about something wild, which is the evidence-based spices that are out there that can supercharge your help. But before we get to Dr. Deanna Minic, let's start off and listen in to my conversation with Dr. William Lee.

Can you help us understand what are these grand slimmer foods and why are they so powerful for help and maybe tease out a few of them and how they're so impactful? Yeah, absolutely. So in my book Eat to Beat Disease, I have a whole section called Exception foods. And of course, you know, there's lots of things about individual foods that are amazing, but one of the most amazing properties is that there's certain foods that can really light up our body's health defenses. We've got five health defenses, androgenesis, our circulation, our stem cells that help us regenerate from the inside out of gut microbiome, healthy gut, healthy brain, healthy metabolism, our DNA, which protects us against the environment, and of course our immune

system. So those five, you know, we can actually match one food with. one system, but there are some foods that hit all five. And that's really where the term grand slammer come from. So you don't even have to be a baseball fan to know that if you have one swing of the bat and you can knock it out of the park and drive everybody home, that's actually what I'm talking about. So one of the things that I said on my Instagram is that like I want people to be able to just benefit from getting like I've already done all the heavy lifting and all the homework to what are all the grand slammer foods? And I basically told you, I've got the link on the bottom of Instagram and you can download this list. So it basically boils down into about a dozen and a half

of foods that fit into fruit, vegetables, beverages, sweets, oils, seafood that actually hit the Grand Slammer category. So let's start with some of them that, you know, I think are common, right? So apricots and blueberries, they actually amazingly hit all five-year-refer. health defense system, good for your circulation, good for your immunity, and good for your gut health at the same time. So if you wanted to kind of find the shortest distance between two lines, the line being you at the supermarket and picking out one of the, you know, the whole selection of things, and you just wanted to be able to activate your health as much as possible. If you picked up a box of blueberries, that would actually do it. So, you know, like in the fruits and vegetables,

It's apricot, blueberries, cherries. Kiwi is one of my favorite. And the reason I love kiwi is because, I mean, it's this sort of innocuous looking fruit. You know, it sits on like your football in your house until it kind of shrivels sometimes if you don't eat it regularly. But if you cut it open, it's this gorgeous emerald green inside with this kind of starbursts in the middle of it.

And what I love about it, it's not very sweet. It's sweet, but not cloyingly sweet. It's not like one of my favorites things like a juicy peach. it's not that sweet. And you get vitamin C, you get fiber. And that actually is also a grand slammer, which I think is a real delight. I love that. You know, this all stems again, as you mentioned, Grand Slam, on those major areas that you've outlined inside of your book.

And I want to jump into one of them a little bit more to get your thoughts. You know, there's a lot of books that are being written on the topic of longevity. And that's a very hot subject these days. It seems that everybody's writing a book on longevity. And inside your book, one of the areas that we talk about being key for our overall health is DNA protection. What do you think is important to think about, especially under the context of longevity, which everybody's talking about right now, and your take on DNA protection and food and lifestyle? Yeah, well, so look, I have, you know, my background is that I'm an internal medicine doctor and I'm also a research scientist. And my background for many years was primarily in biotechnology where, you know, we were developing

really fancy, very sophisticated treatments for cancer and diabetes and vision loss. And I'm still involved with that, very much involved with it. But one of the areas that I thought was super cool that I was involved with was gene therapy. So this is where you take a piece of DNA and you can actually stitch it to a cold virus and you inject it into a heart or you can inject it into a leg with, the goal of that piece of DNA telling the body to grow more blood vessels, to grow better circulation. So, you know, it's a piece of the genetic code. And I have, you know, literally like well over a decade of experience of doing gene therapy. Not ready for prime time yet, okay? There is one

gene therapy that's actually FDA approved, and it's for a rare congenital form of blindness. But all the other stuff is still very much in the workshop kind of being figured out. So we, And of course, then you have the 23s of me and Ancestry.coms where you actually can swab yourself and send it and see how much of you is Crow Magnon or where your ancestors actually came from, right? And the answers are always really surprising when you take a look at the code, what parts of you belong to which came from what parts of the world. That's how most people think about DNA, right? Our genetic code or maybe Jurassic Park, you know, you think about T-Rex or the velociraptor. But let me tell you, so DNA, every one of our human cells, we've got 40 trillion cells in our human body. They're really small. You can't see them with a naked eye. You need to see them under the microscope.

What most people don't realize is that DNA is if you were to have a really, really fine needle and go under the microscope and open up a cell, human cell and pull out all the DNA, there'd be a six-foot strand of DNA that you could pull out, all right? That's two yards worth of DNA. How on earth could that fit into the cell? And it's all made of DNA, which is our genetic code. But do you know that only 3% of that six foot in length is actually used for making proteins, which is what our genetic code normally does? So most of the other part of our DNA is air traffic control and protection. So DNA is hardwired to protect us from the environment.

And I think this is what's really, and this is how it relates to aging. all right so when we're born when we're forming in our mom's womb everything you know we hope is picture perfect when we come out immediately we start aging so people say well you know like i'm 60 or i'm 70 and i'm aging hey man you're aging like when you're one minute old the clock is taking the moment you like take your fur when you get spanked you know you're you're starting to age you take your first breath all right so what happens is that our cells all are in the program. And that program actually will think about the mission and possible fuse. Like the fuse, it burns down. Okay. When you burn that fuse all the way down to the bottom, like pretty much

you've expended the life of the cell and the cell needs to actually replace itself. And over our time, 60, 70, 80, 90 years, okay? We pretty much run out of our materials to actually keep renewing ourselves. And as our cells age net net, we also age as well. That's That's why, you know, a kid looks at themselves in a mirror and basically just sees the same image, same youthful, chubby image, you know, like, you know, with the cheeks and everything else. When you're when you're like in your teenage and your adolescence and, you know, in your 20s, you're cut and buff, you want to look as well as you can't, as good as you can. As you get older, you start noticing those lines and wrinkles and the gray hairs and the things that are like, wait a minute, that's not me. Well, actually, what you're seeing in the mirror is the reflection of yourselves wearing down. Now, there's a lot of work about longevity of like, how do we slow down the aging process?

Some people want to reverse the aging process. What I would tell you is that one of the triggers is our DNA needs to be able to protect the self better against the environment because our environment ages us. So what am I talking about? We all know somebody who spent, you know, their adolescence and young adult life line out on the beach. and then when they're in their 40s, man, they are, they're like leather, right? And they look like their skin's pretty rough.

That's aged skin, sun aging of skin, okay? Now, that's what we see in the extreme. But I can tell you the same thing is happening. When you're stuck in traffic in Los Angeles on the I-10 and on a sunny day and the sun sun is coming in on a windshield or your arms out the window, you're still getting that damage. So how come we don't turn into leather every single time we get stuck in traffic? or go out for a run, it's because our DNA knows how to fix itself and reverse that damage that's occurring. Our DNA actually experiences a problem about 10,000 times a day.

And if we didn't fix ourselves, we'd be aging a lot faster than we already do. And so one of the tricks to slowing down aging is to help support our DNA's ability to fix itself from the environment. And so this is the ability for DNA to block the incoming missiles from the environment, ultraviolet radiation from the sky, radon from the ground, off-gassing from your carpet, from your, you know, that new car smell, all fumes coming in, smelling that gasoline at the pump, which is now rising in cost, right, because everything's going around the world. All that stuff actually damages our DNA. Thank goodness our health defenses, our DNA is one of our health defenses,

can fix itself to prevent that problem. Now, if there's damage in the DNA, a pothole, so one is prevent the potholes. If there's a dammit, if there's a pothole, the DNA can actually fill it as quickly as the damage occurred. And that's where foods can also be coming in helpful to help our DNA fix itself. There was a study that actually looked at kiwi, the fruit we just talked about. And they wanted to know, like, if you had just one kiwi a day, would it help, how much would it help protect your DNA against incoming? And they actually found that one Kiwi a day, say, give somebody, a Kiwi to eat a day, take their blood out, expose it to environmental damage like ultraviolet radiation or some other kind of toxic, noxious exposure. And one Kiwi a day will protect your cells with the DNA by 60%.

So it's like putting up a 60% shield. One Kiwi, all right. Vitamin C, other bioactives in the Kiwi all help our DNA to do that. Now if you ate three Kiwis though, now not. Not only are you shielding yourself against that damage, now the DNA is inspired, geared, triggered, triggered, trigger to fix itself. You can fix holes 60% faster. So one, you can actually raise a shield.

The second, you can actually put the construction crew to start to pave the road, repave those potholes as well. And there's a third thing that's really important for aging to prevent cellular aging, right? So you want to prevent the damage, you want to fix the damage, and now you want to slow that fuse down. So that mission impossible fuse, when the mission is over, man, that cell's done. It's old and it needs to be replaced. So you can actually slow down the burning of that fuse, which is really amazing. So that's slowing cellular aging.

And if you multiply that by $40 trillion, now you're slowing your entire body's aging. And foods can actually do that too. One of my favorites is actually what I got right here, coffee will actually help you do that. It will slow down the burn rate of your DNA. Well, on that note of coffee, by the way, it's fantastic information. Do you have any rules in your life to get the maximum benefits from coffee, but then also to mitigate any kind of downside that could be associated with having maybe either too much or having coffee at, let's say, not the right hour of the day.

Just curious for yourself personally. Again, there's so many benefits to be there for coffee. I drink coffee as well, anything that you do yourself to make sure that you're in that Goldilocks zone of getting the maximum benefits from coffee. Great question. And again, obviously, I'm not giving medical advice here. But when you ask me, what does Dr. Lee do? I mean, I'm happy to tell you, number one, I really only learned to, I mean, I drank coffee

when I was in college, probably not very good coffee. But then when I lived in Italy for a short time on a gap year after college, I really learned what coffee was all about. coffee and how the different ways of brewing it and how to how to drink it and when to drink it. And I also learned something about the role that coffee can play in enhancing your life. So most of it, of course, when I was in medical school, I drank a ton of coffee. But so most of us think of coffee as sort of a morning brew, right? Either you make it yourself in a pot or you go by the drive-thru to pick up something and you

get a little hit of caffeine and it waits you up, all true. Okay. And for me, I appreciate that, but I learned to appreciate the taste of coffee, which is actually quite sophisticated. And as I sort of was learning more and more about my research, through my research, on what's in coffee that's good for you, you know, the caffeine, that can give you a little hit, a little surge. And that would be the reason why I wouldn't drink coffee late at night, because I could disturb my ability. to get good quality REM sleep. When you disturb your sleep, your immune system suffers, you know, even your gut microbiome actually suffers if you don't get good sleep, your body.

During good quality sleep, your body renews itself, regenerates itself. And so if you drink a ton of coffee late night, you know, and you don't have this pull an all-nighter, pretty much you're disrupting your sleep and therefore disrupting the rejuvenation, the renewal, the rebooting of your body's health defenses. So I don't drink coffee really, really late. Now, but actually caffeine is only part of the story. It turns out that there's other amazing bioactive natural chemicals found in coffee. One of them is called chlorogenic acid.

Chlorogenic acid actually is made by the coffee plant. Okay. So coffee bean is a plant-based food. It grows on a tree, coffee tree. And Mother Nature made chlorogenic acid as part of the coffee. coffee trees, coffee plants self-defense system. So when bugs and pests nibble on the coffee leaves and stems, the plant views that as an assault, as an attack, and the little nibbles actually are wounds. So the coffee tree is getting wounded and it makes more chlorogenic acid to drive away the pest.

It's kind of a natural pesticide, and it's a wound healing response. All right. So that chlorogenic acid is therefore more present in organically grown coffee. Okay? Now, what does chlorogenic acid do in your body? Well, chlorogenic acid activates your health defenses, lights up your immune system, lowers inflammation, cuts off the blood supply to cancer, helps to pull out and protect stem cells, and it's also good for your gut health. So all of a sudden, you got another grand slumber, right?

Coffee. But now we know that when you compare or. organically grown coffee with conventionally grown coffee with pesticides. The organic has like three times more chlorogenic acid for that pest nibbling property that I talked about. If you use pesticides, hey, it doesn't need to make as much because, you know, some factory chemical actually did the job for it. And so here's an example now where I'm where I learn that if I'm actually able to drink coffee, that I grind myself from the bean and I choose an organic coffee, which I happen to, do more and more now because of this new research, I know I'm going to get more chlorogenic acid,

which is actually better from my health. And you're going to avoid the pesticides, some of which we know a lot of information on, some of which we don't know as much of information on, but they are possible things that contribute to those potholes that would damage our DNA that we're trying to avoid. Which then could contribute to cancer. And, you know, so, you know, like, again, one of these things that we really want to do is just, I think, make mindful decisions when we are putting things into our body. You know, like when you get a baby, you know, like you're teaching the kid what not to put in their mouth. You know, food, a spoonful of food, absolutely. Put in your mouth. You know, Lego block, don't put that in your mouth. You know, electrical plug, don't put it in your mouth.

And I think that, you know, as we get older, we sort of, one of the big problems is like when we just are are distracted and start shoveling food in our bodies. And I think that's where the new research is starting to help to bring us back to our past where people just became much more mindful of what they're putting into their body and giving some thought to, is this something that could be helpful or something that could be harmful? When you and I were chatting a few days ago and we were talking about, you know, some of the things that we wanted to talk about today's interview, you were suggesting that one of the

things that's worthwhile talking about is this idea of food and medicine, not just food is medicine. And what does it look like when food and medicine can get a chance to work together? And you are beautifully sitting at the intersection as somebody who's been involved with dozens of drugs that are FDA approved and also has this deep knowledge in the space of food is medicine. I'm definitely not one of those doctors that basically gets up in a soapbox and waves a frond of kale to say, never mind your medicine cabinet, that's all BS, you know, just eat, you know, your plant-based foods and you're all set. No, actually, the way I look at is food is a tool in the

toolbox. Medicines are another tool in the toolbox. And just like a real toolbox, when you're actually trying to build something constructive, like your health, you want to be able to sometimes use more than one tool, you know, for a particular project. And so this is why I also find, similarly, the rejection that a lot of regular medical doctors have, MDs have, on the role of nutrition to be kind of like the wrong instinct. Just because you didn't learn nutrition in medical school doesn't mean that it's useless. And so there's real evidence now that shows that food and medicine can work together. I'll give you a couple examples.

There was a study at the University of North Carolina involving young, healthy people during flu season getting a flu vaccine, right? She'd get a flu vaccine during flu season. And the thing about flu vaccine is that, you know, you want it to really work well. You want your immune system to rear yourself up and basically, you know, they would battle off the flu. And what they did, though, is they knew that there was a substance, natural substance, natural chemical, and broccoli that is called sulfurophanes. These are natural chemicals. They kind of give broccoli that sulfury taste, that characteristic taste.

And so they were thinking about how can we give this to broccoli, this broccoli. this broccoli substance to people because we know that sulforaphanes activate your immune system. So making them eat a lot of adult broccoli, grown-up broccoli and stems, that's a lot of work. So they took broccoli sprouts instead. Now broccoli sprouts, which you can get in most grocery stores these days, three to four-day-old baby broccoli, they have a hundred times more sulforaphane than the grown-up broccoli. So it's like when the broccoli seed sprouts, it's got all the sulfurophanes as a ever going to have. It just kind of distributes it, you know, into the gigantic mass, the big tree

that it ultimately becomes. So then they made a shake out of these broccoli sprouts. And they gave half of the subjects in their research. Everybody got a flu shot. Half of the people got the broccoli shake to have two cups along a day with the flu vaccine. They did it only for four days, very short period of time. And then they looked at the blood. They drew their blood and they looked their immune system. And guess what? The people who, everybody who got the flu vaccine had some response, but the people who had the flu vaccine and were drinking the broccoli shake, sprout shake, two cups a day for four days. It's eight cups. Now, I only had a immune response that was 22 times higher. Their natural killer T cells were 22 times more activated. And then when they

actually swab their nose to look for flu, there was absolutely nothing found in the people who had the vaccine plus the sprouts, whereas the people who just had the vaccine alone had a little bit of flu virus that they got you fine in their nose. Okay. So again, this kind of shows you that it's not food versus medicine. I didn't say, you know, they tested broccoli sprouts versus vaccine. This is actually putting it together. So the next time, you know, someone goes to their doctor to say, hey, you know, what should I be eating? This is the kind of information that medical doctors should, should be sharing with their patients when it comes to improving their health. When we think about nutrition and the healing and protective properties of food, we often

overlook the incredible benefits that spices can have. Earlier this year, I sat down with Dr. Deanna Minich for a master class on spices. And this episode went gangbusters. It went super viral on YouTube and on audio. Tune in next to Dr. Deanna Minnick and learn more about how to incorporate the most healing spices in your life and how we can use these spices to reduce inflammation and potentially slow down the aging process. Let's dive in to my conversation with Dr. Deanna Minnick. You have a mind-blowing fact that you want to share about spices and longevity, and it's around something called ages. Can you talk about that? Sure. Most of the foods that were cooking, especially under dry, hot heat, forms these damaging inflammatory compounds.

And in fact, it's been shown that those compounds, which are called ages, advanced glycation and products, and even the acronym is age. So these things age you. Studies are showing that spices can help to overturn those advanced glycation and products, that formation in foods when we're cooking them. That's mind-blowing. So we're cooking at home. And if we're not using spices, and you're going to talk about some of the top ones and

the ones that have the most research around them. If we're not using regularly using spices in our cooking, you have whatever you're cooking. And in particular, if you cook meat, meat is something that can develop a lot of ages, these end products, and you get exposure to these sort of toxins in your body. Is that accurate the way you're explaining? That's right. That's right. So heat catalyzes that reaction. So if you have a food with carbohydrate and that food also has things like amino acids from the protein or fatty acids from the fat. In the presence of the heat, these things can come together and complex. That is what is called the advanced glycation end product. In the body, those damaged compounds go into the cell and basically upregulate inflammation. So spices block that connection

between the carbohydrate and the fat and the protein. They prevent that complex from forming. That's wild. What I look at your statement, I think about, man, you know, in modern times, in most modern civilizations, we used a lot of spices, the tradition that I come from, you know, there was a lot of spices that were being used in cooking. I wonder if there was something these communities and civilizations knew about the healing power of spices when it came to protecting the body, even if they didn't fully understand the science. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think spices can be used for so many reasons, right?

I mean, yes, perhaps there was something that we just intuitive about our first. in the cooking process with the advent of fire and cooking food that we needed to bring in certain plants in order to protect us from that cooking process. I also think, Drew, though, I mean, spices just make food taste good. They just taste good. Come on. I mean, you're the guy from India talking with me about spices.

I mean, you know, one of the things about ages, too, that I want to mention is in functional medicine, we talk a lot about how inflammation is the foundation for so many chronic diseases. It's the foundation for accelerating the age. process. Another interesting tidbit about these advanced glycation end products is that they may be implicated in food allergy. So your question about like if we just go back in time, you know, did spices evolve like the whole spice trade because why were they so desirable? Yeah, they were

precious in terms of being medicine and healing and good for foods and they smelled good, they tasted good, but I'm wondering if our use of spices now in modern day, if we need to ramp it up and amp it up because we are seeing increased food allergy, we are seeing increased inflammatory states. So I'm thinking, you know, back to what you're saying, if we look at history, when spices were traded and they were seen as like gents, they were desirable. People would go and trade amongst different countries for these spices. I mean, wars were starting. Wars were started.

Civilizations were conquered to control spices. So on this topic of ages, tell us a few. I think you had three in particular that have some evidence around protecting our body from these ages, these advanced glycation end products. We don't want a lot of them. We're always going to get some exposure to them through the cooking process, but we don't want an abundance of them. So tell us three spices that could potentially help protect our body from them.

I'm actually going to give you five. Okay, great. Perfect. So there was a study, and this is on slide 37, where I actually detail this study. And there are a number of studies on this. So I'm just giving you one, and it's one of the most recent studies. In this study, they looked at 14 different spices to look at whether or not they helped to inhibit ages. And what they found was that there were basically these five.

They had star anise, cinnamon, all spice, cloves, and oregano. Now, some of these spices have actually been shown in other studies to be good for preventing ages. The one that was new, though, was star anise. Some people like to say star anise or, you know, you can say these spices in a variety of different ways. But actually, star anus was the top. So it helped to prevent these ages from forming by 88%. Then if you look at some of the other ones, cinnamon, 85%, all spice, 81%, and clothes 79%. 79%. Oregono was good for preventing a certain kind of age and forming, one that

corresponded to more sugar like glucose. So it's kind of interesting to see these top five. So this is, again, very new research. If we look at the study, you know, it's newer research. There are other studies looking at where you take a spice blend, you put that in hamburger meat before you cook, then you subject it to the heat, and you start to see this reduction in ages and a number of other compounds that form. What is special about spices that they're able to do this when it comes to specifically reducing the impact, potentially, of these glycation end products?

You know, I don't know if we know that for sure, but I'm going to postulate what I think it is. Please. Because I think you and I are thinking the same thing right now. It might be the presence of these polyphenols. Polyphenols are a very specific category of phytochemicals. So they comprise, they're actually the large, category of phytochemicals, about 8,000 different polyphenols are known to exist.

And spices are very concentrated in polyphenols. In fact, if you took a fresh herb and compared it against a dry spice, you would find that there are many more times in the way of polyphenols in the dried spice because it's so concentrated. So I think that the polyphenols are probably blocking that inflammatory reaction. But in terms of the exact mechanism, I don't know if we know that exactly. It could also be just a general antioxidant effect looking at reducing oxidative stress. So I think that the polyphenols might be the secret sauce here. But it'd be nice to have some science to back that up.

Yeah, it's a good theory. And it builds on top of this idea that spices in general are one of the ways to get diversity in the diet, which you're a huge fan of. We're going to be talking about eating the rainbow and how. how important it is. You've heard other people talk about it before, but really you're one of the biggest champions of this. And even more so, it's a way to get these polyphenols. Separate even from ages specifically, polyphenols have all sorts of positive benefits they bring to the body. So expand it a little bit further, starting off with like even the gut microbiome.

Well, the gut microorganisms love to feed on polyphenols. And so 90 to 95 percent of these polyphenols don't get absorbed. They actually hang around in the gut, they make their way into the colonic bacteria start to metabolize those polyphenols. And the end result of those metabolites, sometimes they get absorbed and they start to have that gut brain connection and they start to have their neural protective type of properties. So we see far-reaching effects of these polyphenols, even if they're in the gut and not being absorbed systemically. There are very simple polyphenols like we might find in a cup of coffee or in a

cup of tea. And there are more complex polyphenols that we might find in something like pomegranate or walnuts or even some of these spices. So I think that, you know, the polyphenols are one category. But as we would see with turmeric, with turmeric, what we actually see is we have curcuminoids, which could play very nicely with polyphenols. And we know that those curcuminoids don't tend to be absorbed, just like the polyphenols. So I think you're right, Drew. A lot of these effects are actually experienced at the level of the gut,

and not everything that we take in needs to be absorbed to have an effect. Sometimes it's the metabolism of what we take in, like these spices, that can ultimately be signaling throughout the body. Would you say that we are, you know, nationally, in America, but we also have a lot of people that live internationally. Because of the exporting of the Western processed diet, we are truly at like a polyphenol deficiency.

It's kind of a time and an opportunity, which one of the things you're trying to do on the podcast today is sort of sound the alarm that our diversity in our diet is getting less and less every year. Is that a fair statement? It is a fair statement. In fact, there's been a study looking at people following a low, polyphenol diet, and they see differences in their gut microbiome. So they see lower bifidobacteria, and bifidobacteria are associated with things like immune health, mental health, just establishing a

better gut milieu. So I think that what we're seeing is that because of this lack of diversity and feeding at a, at this gut terrain level, all of these microorganisms with things like spices, which would be heavy hitters in the way of these polyphenols, that we're starting to see. changes in the gut microbiome. So we can help to undo. It's not like you can undo a bad diet or, you know, a highly, well, very processed, ultra-processed diet, although some of the studies would suggest that by adding in even small amounts of spices, that you can help to reestablish the gut microbiome in as little as two days. So there can be very acute effects of spices on the gut microbiome. Awesome. When we were originally talking about doing this podcast,

I was asking you, what spices have the strongest evidence base around them, right, in the totality of everything that's there, right? So that people who are trying to think about, you know, just like we don't want people eating one food for their entire life. We want them eating a plethora of food because that diversity is important. We want diversity when it comes to spices, but which are going to be the ones that, if we incorporate them, are going to have the biggest bang for the buck, right? I know that's my question, and I know a lot of our audience is thinking the same thing.

So are there one, two, or three that immediately come to the surface for you when people ask you that question? I think that if you were just to say, Deanna, what are the most well-studied spices? And I want the biggest bang for my buck. I'm actually going to tell you it's turmeric. Tumric. Yes. Let's talk about it. Yeah, let's talk about it.

So that it does fit. You have some turmeric here, one way. Yeah, I do. Just in case somebody's been living under a rock and hasn't seen turmeric in a while, right? So this is turmeric. Tumoric is a root. And, you know, the thing with turmeric is that, so I get all these interesting questions about, you know, can come as a dietary supplement.

Should you take the skin off? Should you have it as the root? Should you have it as the whole food in a smoothie? I would say to diversify even how you use turmeric. Use it as the root, as the whole food form. And I like it with the skin on so that I'm getting those additional phytochemicals and fiber. And I also like it as a spice. It's pretty concentrated in the curcuminoid family.

It is the, I would say, the most well-studied spice. I don't know why that is. It doesn't mean that the others are insignificant, but I think because there's been interest in looking at cultures that live the longest, and India has definitely held that longevity status for some time. So I think that there was speculation, is it because of the turmeric? And you're going to define turmeric in curry powder. And what's really interesting because I love diversity

and bringing in the blends, which are oftentimes complimentary in their activity, curry powder tends to have about five different spices. But I have found one at the store. I actually read the label because I want the most amount in my curry powder. So I have found one with turmeric, of course, but then 11 total spices in my curry powder.

So I like that because I think turmeric plays well with other spices, especially black pepper. I mean, there is kind of like this brother-sister relationship between those two. One is helping the other. So the black pepper just a little bit. And the ratio between black pepper to turmeric is like 20 milligrams of black pepper as that powder and about 2,000 milligrams of turmeric powder. So then you enhance bioavailability.

And we can talk later about how that happens. But essentially, turmeric and black pepper work well together. So when you're using turmeric, there's a hack. The hack is the black pepper, which contains piperine, which slows the metabolism of turmeric in the body. The other hack is bringing in oil. And you would know this from Indian cooking of, you know, first having turmeric and a lot of the spices that are introduced early on in the meal with oil.

So right, you get kind of this toasting or this, I would call it more of like a flavor enhancement effect. Because, you know, people ask, you know, when do you add turmeric? When do you add spices? And I would say every stretch of the way, especially to help with those advanced glycation end products, most importantly is to bring turmeric, especially into things like hamburger meat before it has been cooked. So that is most important is before you actually apply the heat to make sure that you've

got those spices in your meal. And for some of them, toasting can bring out the aromatic properties and just even smelling spices is actually going to help our digestion because we're going to start to salivate. We're going to start to release those digestive secretions. So just even smelling the spices in the cooking process is going to be helpful. You know, two thoughts that I had to that. Number one, on this topic of spices is that when you get to a place where what you're making at home tastes better than what you could get from the outside, even if you're not like

an incredible chef. and I'm definitely not, but there are times where I just crave my own food. And I would think about my dad growing up and my mom was, you know, a good cook. And she would make food in my, and I would say to my dad, especially as our sort of, you know, he started to do better in his career and we had more resources as a family. And so that might mean that, oh, okay, you can eat out a little bit more often. My dad would always say, no, like I crave the food at home because it's like I'm so in a positive way.

I'm so addicted to the food that we have at home, the flavor, the way that it tastes, the way it makes me feel. And I feel like I've had that now as an adult. And I think a big part of that is that I know how to make even simple food taste good to me at home. And spices is a big part of that. Spice isn't the only part of that, but it's a big part of that. And if you can step into that space using the power of spices, you'll be in a position

where not only will you save money because you're not eating out all the time, but you're going to generally eat healthier. You know, the vast majority of sodium in a negative context that might be related to hypertension that people are getting, it's coming from eating ultra-processed foods, packaged fruits from the outside, things like bread rolls and other stuff, and also going to restaurants where they're adding so much salt

to a dish that you would never add that much at home. You just need a little bit of a pinch, and we'll be talking about salt in a minute. So I think that that's the power of spices. You figure out how to use them in a way that makes sense to you. That doesn't mean you have to be a world-class chef. I'm definitely proof of that. You become addicted to the food that you make at home.

The second thing is turmeric. I love that you kind of kicked it off with turmeric. My earliest memory, again, this is sort of home remedies that were there. But even I have a lot of medical doctors in my family, and they would use these home remedies. The second that a child started to feel like a little bit, of a scratchy throat or they felt like they were coming down with something. You didn't exactly know what it was. One of the parents, or if it was your mom or dad, they would take like a teaspoon

of turmeric. They would put it into a cup, put in a little bit of warm water, and then take another teaspoon of like honey, right? And they'd whip it together and they'd give it to you, right? You'd always fight as a kid for more honey because you wanted to taste sweeter. Right. And that was one of the home remedies that we had for helping with a sore throat. And that's my earliest memory of turmeric way before it was known as a super spice. Well, that would be a double whammy right there, like an immune enhancing combination having turmeric with honey because honey has so many different immune active agents. And turmeric is so anti-inflammatory and, you know, it's been proposed that it has like something like 50 different healing actions in the body. So that makes sense that your family

would be doing that, actually. There was another, it wasn't a study, but it was a paper that I saw that was talking about the effects of turmeric related to potentially, again, potentially cognitive decline. And one of the things that they were noticing, going back to India, I didn't know so much about the longevity side of it, but the cognitive decline, they were suspecting that spices could be one of these neuroprotective components and that when generally you had people who were in more rural areas who were used to eating more traditional cooking, which obviously probably meant less processed food and less ultra-processed food. When they were in these rural areas using

things like turmeric as being one of their biggest spices, and then they move into cities, the rates of cognitive decline were completely different, right? Obviously, you're in the rural areas, you're maybe a farmer, you're not sedentary, you're working all day, you're out in the fields, it's a tough life, but you're active, you're probably leaner. And again, you're staying from ultra-processed foods, but maybe turmeric could be playing apart in the cognitive decline. Oh, there's a lack of cognitive decline. There's definitely literature on that, looking at rates of dementia, looking at India, and looking at that association between curry powder consumption or even turmeric and those rates.

And it makes sense because essentially what we're doing is, again, reducing a lot of inflammatory cytokines that would be implicated in neuroinflammation. So I would say if you want to protect your brain to be taking in turmeric, to take in turmeric powder with some regularity. Now, the thing with turmeric powder that I do want to caution people with, because now we're making it sound like, wow, it's this wonder, almost like a medicinal spice, but it's almost sounding like too good to be true. And there are some things that we need to be aware of. So with turmeric, and with a number of these different spices, because they can be very potent, even in small amounts. So when we're talking amounts, let's just delve into that for a second. In India, the amounts of spice use ranges between like seven and a half to 10 grams a day. For most people, the benefits could be reached between one and six grams. Now, that seems like a small amount. That's about a teaspoon of a spice spread out throughout a day. That doesn't seem like a lot. But because they're very impactful, they can actually change up how we metabolize medications. So if people are on things that would change their blood clotting or their blood pressure,

they may actually start to need less of those medications. So they need to be aware if they start to just get just all enamored with spices after this podcast just to kind of dive right in and start trying these things out in the kitchen, that there needs to be some up-leveling in terms of, you know, smaller amounts you use, especially if you do have a lot of these medications that you're taking. The other thing with turmeric that I want to mention by way of this is that it can tend to be high in oxalates. So even at that teaspoon level, there can be certain amounts of types of oxalates, the more soluble oxalates that could get into the body. So for people with things like a greater risk of renal stones or kidney issues or just, there are some people who are hyper-oxylate absorbers and they're hyper-stone formers.

It's just something to think about. I'm not saying that we need to not, I feel like I'm taking your beautiful message and now saying like, yes, but because these spices are powerful, we just have to look at all sides of them. Well, we don't need to go to the extreme, which is you'll see sometimes people adding a tablespoon of these spices to multiple spices to a superfood smoothie.

And if you're talking about oxalates, which can inhibit the absorption of calcium is one of the things that they do. but they can also form into these crystals, which then can contribute to kidney stones in some instances. You have people sometimes making these superfood smoothies that are like an oxalate bomb, right? You have almond milk every single day, a ton of cacao, right?

Cale. Putting a ton of kale, sometimes even like things like dandelion greens, which have like the highest amount of oxalates. So it's not to make anybody afraid, but really to go back to the central message, this is about regularly using a potent enough amount of spices in your cooking. And if you're just regularly using that, if you're using it spices at every meal that you cook at home,

just a little bit here and there, you're going to end up getting a lot of the benefits that are there. You don't need to megadose these spices to get the benefits. Is that correct? That is correct. And again, if we just go back to thinking in our minds eye of a T-Sy, What does a teaspoon look like? You know, it's not a lot.

It's about four to five grams. So just a little bit, and this is why I like spice blends. You know, you can make your own spice blends at home where you take turmeric and you put it together with ginger or maybe some black pepper. So you don't have this high concentration of turmeric, but you're actually potentiating the turmeric by including some of those other spices. You know, I love this idea that there are foods that are out there that can super charge everything else you're up to. Yes, sleep is important. Yes, protein is important. Yes,

all these other aspects of a healthy lifestyle, the right amount of omega-3s, the right amount of fiber, etc. All these things are helpful. And there are foods that are out there that have an ancient wisdom inside of them. And you just heard from two incredible researchers that are out there sharing a little bit about some of the benefits that are there. Can you imagine when your diet is largely filled with whole foods and these incredible spices that Deanna talked about as well, what happens to every cell in your body? Next time we're sitting down to eat, just remember that these spices,

these grand summer foods, they're not just food. They're actually information for your body. And they're telling your DNA and your cells and your mitochondria how to show up in this world and my hope for you and the food that you eat is that it helps you to show up strong. If you want to hear more about the fascinating research

from Dr. Lee and Dr. Deanna Minnick, I encourage you to check out the full-length version of these episodes. You can find those in the show notes. below. And as always, if you enjoyed today's compilation episode, do me a favor. Share it with somebody, especially this holiday season. Maybe it might get a loved one, a family member, a friend fired up to start incorporating some of these game-changing foods and spices into their own life. That's it for today. Until next time, Drew Prood signing off. Thanks for tuning in.