The Dr. Hyman Show - Healing Foods That Taste Great

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

Healing Foods That Taste Great | This episode is brought to you by Belcampo The more we can learn about using food as medicine, the more power we have to reach our health goals. Food has the power to prevent and reverse disease; there can be so many powerful (and delicious) benefits waiting for you in each bite. There are powerful compounds in foods—like curcumin, genistein, catechins, lycopene, resveratrol, quercetin—that have medicinal impacts on the body. By keeping flavor and health benefits on the same parallel, we can feed the body, mind, and soul with each well-planned bite. In this minisode, Dr. Hyman speaks with Chef David Bouley and Dr. William Li about how we can cook our way out of illness by aligning our foods to feed our health and get incredible flavor and variety all at once.  Among many accolades, Chef David Bouley earned several four-star reviews in The New York Times; seven James Beard Foundation awards for best restaurant and best chef; he was named “Best Chef in America” by Herald-Tribune; he received the TripAdvisor Traveler’s Choice Awards “The Best Restaurant in the United States” and #14 in the world; a 29 out of 30 rating in Zagat, and ranked #1 in New York City for many years. Chef Bouley is known as one of the most health-conscious chefs in the world, with a strong focus for diners with health concerns. He is currently contracted for a new book, Living Pantry, that will provide the building blocks for home cooking to deliver great taste and health benefits with easy execution. William Li, MD, is a world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author of Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. He is best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. His groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views. An author of over 100 scientific publications in leading journals such as Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more, Dr. Li has served on the faculties of Harvard, Tufts, and Dartmouth Medical School. This episode is brought to you by Belcampo. Right now, you can order Belcampo’s sustainably-raised meats to be delivered to your door using my code HYMAN at Belcampo.com/Hyman for 20% off for first-time customers.  Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Chef David Bouley, “How Chefs Can Be Doctors, and Doctors Can Be Chefs” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DavidBouley Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. William Li, “Why Food Is Better Than Medication to Treat Disease” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrLi

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I realized this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. If we can get people to understand they can cook meals that are going to give them a lot more energy, a lot more clarity, a better night's sleep, stronger during the day, and have fun and really enjoy the taste, this is a quite exciting mission. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

Now there's so much debate in the diet world about eating meat, but whether you're vegan, paleo, or a pegan like me, one thing we can absolutely agree on is that conventionally raised feedlot meat is dangerous for our health and the planet, and just an awful way to raise animals. For those of us who do eat meat, we can actually do it in a way that benefits the environment, the climate, and our bodies if we choose animals that are regeneratively raised. And one of the pioneers in making regeneratively raised meat more accessible is

Belcampo, which you may have heard me mention recently on the podcast when I interviewed their founder, Anja Fernald. Belcampo is the leader of hyper-sustainable, organic, grass-fed, and finished certified humane meats, broths, and jerkies. They're revolutionizing the meat industry for the well-being of the planet, for the people, and the animals by farming meat the right way with humane, regenerative, and climate-positive practices. Now, Belcampo believes in letting animals grow slowly and naturally, letting them graze on open pastures and seasonal grasses, resulting in meat that is higher in nutrients and healthy fats. They have the data to back that up too. Their grass-fed and grass-finished beef averages a healthy 1 to 1.2 omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, which is better than other brands of

grass-fed beef and much better than conventional beef. Their pastured chicken has 20% more protein per serving than conventional chicken, and their meats have more antioxidants, vitamin E, C, and B, and minerals. Plus, the way they raise their animals is actually carbon negative. This is some seriously good meat. Right now, you can order Belcampo's sustainably raised meats to be delivered to your door using my code HYMAN at www.belcampo.com forward slash hymen for 20% off first-time customers. That's www.belcampo.com slash hymen with the code hymen for 20% off your first order. I highly recommend checking out Belcampo and feeling great about the meat that you eat. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea Perot, one of the producers of The Doctor's

Pharmacy podcast. Using food as medicine is an empowering way to take care of your health every single day. But many of us are in an identity crisis when it comes to what we eat. In this conversation with celebrated chef David Boulay, Dr. Hyman discussed how we can eat foods that feed our health and get incredible flavor all at once. You've gone all over the world. You've explored cuisines from everywhere. You've looked at ingredients that nobody's using and you brought them into your restaurants. I've eaten the food. It's unbelievable.

And for example, you have crackers that are made from kudzu, which is a japanese root it's like a starchy thing more of a vine it's more fiber than starch and and tell us about kuzu it's delicious and what does it do and like well kuzu goes back 1 000 years in japan yeah in fact i went to a 14 century 14 generation family in the mountains in the south of Japan. And they have an early black and white photograph of one of the emperors where they're picking up blocks of kuzu, and this saved this man's life. He had a digestive problem. The samurai would suck on the branches when they had digestive problems

or colds or other issues and they were constantly healed from the kuzu it's only the gut it's only been used for 30 years 35 years in cuisine even in japan or longer in monasteries because when you go through a monastery or have a cleanse of your soul and your spirit the first thing you eat is kuzu noodles so that's where i was introduced then by mr suji from suji cooking school who has the biggest school in the world he's in osaka and tokyo a dear friend and he exposed me to that and then i brought it back and i was making a desserts for different people using no sugar and i was using no gelatin because kuzu will set up if you can make noodles like cornstarch anything yeah it's

it's way better yeah it's not something that has a effect of glycemic yeah it's not those level of carbohydrates yeah so again it's higher fiber uh the mystery is that it stabilizes blood sugar doesn't reduce blood sugar will stabilize it and we've wired people up and i've cooked for them with those uh i don't know if we have them yet those continuous glucose monitor yeah yeah right are they here yet yeah yeah yeah so we didn't see any movement yeah and change your blood sugar no eating crackers and the story well we make bread out of it yeah echoes make noodles you're gonna have it tonight three or four courses the the evidence was

particularly with Lou Reed one night was eating in the private room and his friends had a tasty menu, but he didn't want to eat. And he had to go walk on the wild side. Yeah. He took a walk on the wild side. He wanted to be empty cause he was doing, uh, an album, uh, next morning in Brooklyn, probably really early in the morning. And he, you know, like an athlete, they don't want to go with food.

So, um, I made this orange where i cooked the orange juice down thickened with the kuzu put the wedges in put in the martini glass put in the refrigerator let it set up put lychee sorbet and granulated honey so there's three forms of sugar there yeah yeah and i didn't add anything outside of those three elements except for kuzu yeah right now he had one because i made it for him one time before, and then he ordered another one, and then he went home and checked blood sugar, because he was diabetic. And he couldn't believe that his blood sugar was stable.

He hadn't eaten anything else, I remember he said eight hours at least. And I think he was going to do the album only three or four hours after this. This could have been even the people that he was going to work with. But they had the long-tasting menu. So we're closed on Sunday,

we're open on Monday, He's looking for me. And I didn't realize how important it was for me to answer his question when he grabbed my arm and said, I want to know what you did to me. I want to know what you did to me. My blood sugar. So at that point, that was like 15 years ago, we started to study. And even going back to Japan, we had to work with folks. Some of them had some knowledge on it. Some of them hadn't yeah so that would be uh you know an example of a culture of food or cuisine that can translate into another

culture without having side effects I mean the whole idea of chef and doctor really they are the same and in order for a doctor to be a healer you need to learn how to use food as medicine in order for chefs to create amazing delicious food that heals you need to understand food as medicine food is is extremely powerful and if your sugar is high after a meal your food didn't service you i realized this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. If we can get people to understand they can cook meals that are going to give them a lot more energy, a lot more clarity, a better night's sleep, stronger during the day, and have fun and really enjoy the taste, this is a quite exciting mission. In fact, the flavors in the food, it actually is where the

health benefits are, right? Which is people don't realize, and it's not the crappy flavors we use in America, it's the true flavor of real food. Find those foods that perform, like saffron. Saffron is extremely healthy for you, particularly for your eyes. But a lot, or a vanilla bean.

A vanilla bean is a pre and a probiotic. It's a fermented bean. And if everybody is a pre and a probiotic. It's a fermented bean. And if everybody wants to know more about fermented foods, well, take the vanilla bean out of the sugar and maybe use it in cuisine. So that would be an example. So how do we get these things to become building blocks, which people can execute under their own design? Yeah.

For instance, turmeric oil, curcumin, all the benefits, right? When doctors- It's inflammatory. Yeah. oil uh cuckoo man all the benefits right when doctors inflammatory yeah when dr steig neurosurgeon he was the president of cornell medical school i believe i think he just changed he did a chef and doctor series and i had just presented i've done over 800 oils in fact the crohn's people when i have a problem with someone who has crohn's i'll use a lot of peppermint oil and oregano oil now peppermint oil is very good for digestive system. It helps mucus lining, but it's very bad if you have acid reflux. So, it's the bottom half, not the upper half. So, that would be the example

of clarity that we need to have in the building blocks. But when I did the turmeric oil, which I've been doing since 87. You infuse oil with turmeric, which is actually needed to absorb the turmeric. Right. It's a fat-soluble vegetable that has to be in a fat medium to have your absorption. To get into bioavailability stage, you have to have it in a fat medium. So here's, we didn't really talk, Dr. Stieg and I, but I started to show that 10 minutes and I talked about what I'm doing here with the Chef and Doctor series.

And nine minutes into his lecture, he describing india having one of the lowest all-time disease in the world because eat a lot of curry in curry is turmeric and turmeric is kukuman and that goes into ghee which is which is a butter and oil of fat so if i can make turmeric oil for you and you can come on from a crowd of life boil some pasta put a tablespoon of that on mix it around a little bit starts to smell great put some toasted pine nuts for some protein some good fats a little parsley and maybe a little grated cheese you're going to sit down and talk to yourself but you're going to have a meal that's engineered for health yeah and you did it yourself in less than eight minutes so that's how the building blocks will be used ceylon cinnamon is another one we make oil out of that ceylon will help people with a fatty liver oh my god i can't wait for this book because this is going to be really building blocks

to create food as medicine and infuse all these different ingredients that we know are healing into recipes that people can make at home. Right. Food is not just calories or energy. Food is information. And it is the most powerful medicine that we have to heal chronic disease. Dr. Hyman discussed this in his conversation with world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author of Eat to Beat Disease, Dr. William Lee. Well, you know, as we've been talking about, food as medicine is very natural in most parts of the world. And I think just sort of in our society, we've lost touch with things. You know, earlier you were talking about chefs getting into this, you know, this whole farm to table movement.

Well, that's what it used to be for everybody. We only ate stuff that was going around us and we ate it because it tasted great because it was rich with these polyphenols and flavonoids. And by the way, you know, these bioactives that are natural chemicals and foods, what do they do? It's really interesting when you think about health defense.

Most of the bioactives that are found in foods evolved in the plant, plant-based foods, to protect the plant. Yeah. So either they were natural insecticides or they helped to attract bees and other insects so they'd pollinate so they could reproduce, right? Or protect them from elements or damage. Or protect them from the elements or damage, make them stronger, right? So then when humans started to eat these plant-based foods, then these natural chemicals had another job description, which is they interacted with our human cells. And because they were already engineered to be protective, the ones that were useful to us and we developed this relationship with our plant-based foods also help us. And so there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view of what we're finding out. What we need to do now, though, is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves.

If you're interested in the science, it's there. It's an evolving science. Yes, we have health defense systems. Health isn't the absence of disease. It's our body working full steam, cranking along. And you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent, treat, or even reverse them by activating your defense systems using food. And whether you're healthy or sick, every person can take a decision three times a day to really enhance their health. And you don't need a doctor's prescription.

So what do we now know about food? We know that foods can actually boost our immune system. I mentioned oysters. It's quite amazing that actually oysters have polysaccharides, these long sugars and proteins that actually can help boost our immune system. Oysters and oyster mushrooms. And oyster mushrooms. Yep, exactly. And then, you know, our microbiome talks to our immune system. So here's the pomegranates and here's the mushrooms again that help our microbiome to actually boost our immunity. And then we do know that that there are other foods that can calm our immune system. So tea, you know, for example, green tea can not only help boost our immune system, but it can calm it if it's overly active.

So people talk about inflammation, right? And sometimes we use inflammation in sort of this broad sweeping statement. Inflammation, a little bit of it, the ability to have it is good. You want, you need inflammation a little bit, but you still want too much of it. And so there are foods that can calm and quell inflammation as well. And that's important if you have autoimmune disease. Well, so again, tea is one of those foods that can actually lower your immunity,

not your entire immune system, but just the inflammatory component. Because those catechins actually can actually help to quell things. So- I was talking to a gastroenterologist from Harvard. He was saying, yeah, they use curcumin and green tea extracts as ways of treating colitis. That's right. Well, I mean, so curcumin is an interesting one because when you eat this yellow natural spice powder, which is delicious, by the way, it can be- From curry, right?

From curry powders, it tends to go right through our system, out the other end, unless you have it with fresh cracked black pepper. I don't know if you know about this, but basically you have fresh cracked black pepper, you actually help your intestines get activated so it absorbs more of the curcumin from the turmeric. So again, this is where-

And also traditionally, like in India, they used to make oil, like with ghee and turmeric. That's right. In fact, I'm writing a cookbook called Food, What the Heck Should I Cook? And I've invited chefs to contribute recipes. And David Boulay created this amazing thing called turmeric oil.

And it's a special infused oil with turmeric that actually helps to activate all the inflammation-fighting properties. And it's a special infused oil with turmeric that actually helps to activate all the inflammation fighting properties. And, you know, it's so interesting you mentioned that because combinations of foods can be really important. You know, for example, tomatoes, which contain lycopene. Most people don't realize that if you pick a tomato off a vine and you eat it like an apple, you get the vitamins from the tomato.

But the lycopene actually is in a natural form that the body doesn't really like to absorb. It's called the transform. If you heat the tomato and cook it, you gently change the chemistry into another form that your body would love to absorb. But it's still fat soluble. So if you actually cook the tomato slowly with olive oil, a healthy oil, it's fat soluble, and then you eat that together. Now your body really loves to absorb it. Sounds good. So right, like, and again, back to the Mediterranean and, um, uh, or, you know,

in Asia too, there's combinations that work. Let's go back and look at what the people from olden times knew. Like, I think that, you know, we're forward looking. I'm a researcher, so I'm always looking at the latest new thing. But I think there's great value in looking back at the ancient cultures, the ancient recipes. You know, we've probably forgotten more than we have to learn, but we still have a lot to learn. So we should all work together, find ways to, you know, apply our knowledge so that everybody can benefit from the most advanced knowledge possible and you know actually honestly for the average person they shouldn't have to think too much about it it should be natural all around them they should be doing the things they

like be moderate and actually be do it for a long time it's tough because we're not educated about it we don't learn about it the environment of our food is so toxic we live in a nutritional wasteland where to try to find something that's good for you is really tough well that's what we've done and that's what we've done for ourselves but i'm saying that the health is an invisible thing and that's why we need to think through what our health actually means and because we're against really a brick wall almost every single day in modern society with everything we've done to the environment and to the stress that we put ourselves in, just living life in general, the odds are kind of stacked against us unless we take our own control.

Food has the power to prevent and reverse disease. And it's been shown that the more people prepare meals at home, the healthier their diets are. There can be so many powerful and delicious benefits waiting for you in each bite. The more we learn about using food as medicine, the more power we have to reach our health goals. If you'd like to learn more about anything you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations

with Chef David Boulay and Dr. William Lee. If you liked this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend or leaving us a comment below. Until next time.