The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Heal Your Body With Food

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep, Athletic Greens, and BiOptimizers. You can start to heal your body right now simply with the food you put in your mouth—it's really that simple. Food has the power to heal the body from many ailments and can even help prevent cancer. There are many powerful medicinal compounds in foods: curcumin, catechins, lycopene, resveratrol, and quercetin, just to name a few. That’s why I call the grocery store the drug store; we can literally eat our medicine at every meal. In this compilation episode, I am joined by Dr. William Li to discuss how to use food as medicine, the importance of nitric oxide for our blood vessels, the role of the microbiome, and why it's necessary to support the immune system. 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 Eight Sleep, Athletic Greens, and BiOptimizers. Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro mattress is so smart that it adjusts your temperature and also gives you individualized recommendations on how to sleep better the next night. Go to eightsleep.com/mark for exclusive President’s Day savings through February 22, 2022. Now shipping to the U.S., Canada, and the UK. ​ AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough formula contains seven different forms of magnesium, all of which have different functions in the body. There is truly nothing like it on the market. Go to magbreakthrough.com/hyman and use code hyman10 at checkout for 10% off your next order. You can find my full-length conversations with Dr. William Li here: Eat This to Starve Cancer and Prevent Disease Today Eat This To Heal The Body & Never Get Sick Again

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. It's not about drugs killing cancer. It's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancers. I think food as medicine is something that can become second nature. You have to be exposed to the basic information. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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mattress provides all these safe features in a supportive bed. Whether you sleep hot or cold, Pod Pro is so smart, it will actually account for your unique needs to keep your bed just the right temperature, just like Goldilocks. Eightleep has even found their products help people fall asleep 32% faster and reduce wakings by 40%. Go to 8sleep.com slash mark for exclusive President's Day savings through February 22nd. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep slash mark. Save big and sleep more with 8sleep. Now shipping with the United States, Canada, and the UK. I'm all about streamlining my daily health routine to be as powerful and yet simple as possible. And that's why I love AG1 from Athletic Greens. Because when it comes to

my health, I want it all. I want my gut to function great, my brain to feel sharp, my immune system to be strong, my body to feel energized and able. And being in my line of work, I know that means I need optimal levels of nutrients, which is one scoop of AG1. I get 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole foods, sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support my entire body. Even with a really healthy diet, it's hard to hit the mark for all our nutrient needs. So I feel better knowing that I have some extra help from AG1. Unlike other supplements and powders out there, AG1 is third-party tested and made without GMOs, nasty chemicals, or artificial anything. And it tastes great, kind of like a tropical green drink. I like it on its own mixed with water, but it also works really well in most smoothies. If you're curious

about trying AG1 from Athletic Greens for yourself right now, they're offering my community 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Using food as medicine is the first step in improving your health. This is because food has the power to prevent and reverse disease, even cancer. And the more we know about it,

the more power we have to curate a targeted diet to help us reach our health goals. The catch is we have to choose the right foods diet to help us reach our health goals. The catch is we have to choose the right foods, the ones that elevate us, and simultaneously ditch the poor quality ones that harm us. In this compilation episode, Dr. Hyman talks to Dr. William Lee. They discuss choosing the best foods to support optimal health, the importance of nitric oxide, why a diverse microbiome is vital, and various ways to support the immune system. You won't want to miss this episode with the expert on how to eat to beat disease. Let's jump in. Food as medicine is really not a new concept. It's an old concept. And if you

go other cultures, whether you're in Europe or in Asia, indigenous peoples from all around the world, they looked at food as part of their health keeping scorecard. And they viewed food as a precious substance. Not, you know, they didn't just eat to survive. They ate because they were doing something good for themselves. We've lost a little bit of that. And the research behind it actually resurfaces this in a new way that I think that we can all get behind, which is not – in fact, it's not really just about the food. It's about how our body responds to the food.

Yeah. How does our body protect its health? And that's what the health defense systems are all about. It's true. I remember traveling once in Hong Kong, and I went out to dinner with this guy. I think it was part of Merrill Lynch. I gave a talk. And we had this extraordinary meal and everything in the meal was medicine,

intentionally medicine. And I wrote an article about it called Eating Your Medicine, Food is Pharmacology. And then I went through all the dishes we had and I went through the research and I was like, well, ginkgo nuts do this and, you know, this thing does that. And it was just an amazing kind of experience because I realized that in this culture, we don't think of food that way. And yet that's foundational for creating health. Well, that's why I wrote Eat to Beat Disease is that, you know, while I do explain the science behind things, I actually lay out more than 200 different foods that are actually, some of them are real crowd pleasers are the

things that we actually know that are supported by science and then figure out how can you incorporate that because in fact um it becomes natural to pick the things that are good for you it's something we've lost that we can bring put back into our everyday lives and for me when i go out to eat or when i prepare a meal, that's what I'm doing. I'm actually assembling things that I know are good for me. Absolutely. That's why this show is called The Doctor's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, because that's where you get your drugs. I go to the drugstore, which is the grocery store, and that's where I find all the drugs.

And I literally don't know as much as you perhaps about this, even though I've been doing it for a long time, but I look at all the vegetables and all the foods now I didn't know razor clams we're going to get into that are so beneficial I don't exactly know why but I love them but you can find out what are the foods that have various components that can activate health right and how do you eat more of those things well I think it makes it it's about having knowledge uh and then making it second nature right so when we heat up something on the stove we know it's going having knowledge and then making it second nature. So when we heat up something on the stove, we know it's going to be hot. We don't burn ourselves.

So we actually avoid certain behaviors. When we go out into the sun, we know to put on sunscreen, it becomes second nature. I think food as medicine is something that can become second nature. You have to be exposed to the basic information. And the science is important because that's what makes it real. But at the end of the day is, you know, this is something that school teachers should be teaching kids, that coaches should be teaching athletes, that doctors should be telling patients. And so and I think family members should be sharing among themselves. This is the type of conversation that should be happening at every holiday meal uh in every

schoolyard and and i think that it's not so foreign it's informed by science we can all do it it's true no the other thing i heard you say was at this conference was you showed a slide around immunotherapy for those who don't know what immunotherapy is essentially a way to get cancer by activating your immune system rather than giving a poison or cutting it out or burning it out right you literally give something that's going to help your immune system get into gear and be like pac-man and eat up the cancer uh and you showed a slide and and who would have thought of this but you showed a slide that people who respond to the to this immunotherapy, and these literally can erase cancers, actually have a certain type of bacteria in their microbiome, in their gut, that makes them respond

to this immunotherapy. Whereas those who don't actually die. And this bacteria is called Ackermansia. It's one of the, you know, thousands and thousands of species of bugs in your gut. And you shared a story, if I may, about your mom who had basically metastatic endometrial cancer, which was treated with immunotherapy and was successful, but you added certain things to the treatment to make sure that her acromantia were good, like pomegranate and cranberry and these polyphenols which come from food that seem to be powerful growers of these great bugs in your gut.

So, how do we sort of begin to integrate these ideas into how we treat these diseases? Are we giving everybody like a smoothie with all these things in it and helping them with their immunotherapy? Yeah, well, let's take a step back to say, first of all, our bodies are working hard every single day from the time we're born to our last breath to defend our health. And these defense systems, and I've identified five of them in my book, is androgenesis, stem cells, our microbiome, our ability for our DNA to protect our body, protect itself and our bodies and our health and our immunity. And all these defense systems work together in concert.

They're like our security force in our body. They're patrolling, they're watching out, they're making sure everybody's safe inside and everything is functioning smoothly. And when you have a disease like cancer, for example, and it's not just cancer, it's heart disease, it's diabetes, it's Alzheimer's, it's obesity. But specifically for cancer, it's really, you know, a few bad guys snuck in and they figured out how to get around the security force. You know, it's sort of like, you know, TSA slip, let somebody slip by and now we have to try to chase it. So in the old days for cancer, what we used to do is just say, well, let's, you know, take a drug like chemotherapy and wipe it out. And, you know, that that's a blunt instrument approach by trying to take something poison to kill something that you want to kill.

By the way, the rest of you gets poisoned, too. Well, that's right. And so basically it's it's a toxic approach to to something that we don't really it's one bad actor but we don't want to poison the entire uh body we've now changed our minds about this and this is really what's making the impossible possible we've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer it's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancers so immunotherapy which is what you were just bringing up is an entirely new approach of enhancing our own body's defenses. We don't use drugs to kill the cancer. We allow our bodies, we give medicines that allow our bodies to kill the cancer so our immune systems

can find the cancer and reverse the disease back to health. That's what we've always been dreaming of and it's here. But here's a problem a problem only about 20 of people actually have this incredible response to immunotherapy sometimes a few a little fewer sometimes a little bit more but the response when it happens is exactly we want dramatic right your mom just my mom had cancer and in 30 days she had no cancer okay and never had chemotherapy what, what makes the difference between somebody who responds like that and who doesn't respond like that, right? That's one of the mysteries out there. And this is exactly where we need to consider more than the typical lab tests that doctors run. We need to think more holistically. And one of the things we know

is that our microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria communicates, talks to our immune system. And we need our gut bacteria to help coach our immune system to do the right thing, including getting cancer. So a study done by a colleague of mine, Dr. Laurence Zitvogel, she's in Paris. She's an immunologist who works with cancer patients. She looked at 249 cancer patients who were receiving immune therapies and separated them into people who responded versus people who did not respond. This, by the way, was published in the journal Science, which is one of the most prestigious journals. And what she found was that the difference between people who responded and didn't respond was one bacteria.

Unbelievable. Acromantia, right? So, well, isn't that easy? You can just maybe take some probiotics with acromantia, except that you can't. No. There's no acromantia probiotic. But you can feed them. But you can feed it.

And you can actually change your gut to make your body grow acromantia. And the way to do this is the food as medicine solution. So it turns out that pomegranates and cranberries actually have a latch of tannins, but pomegranates especially. And that natural chemical in pomegranate juice, and what's been shown is that just one eight ounce cup of real pomegranate juice,

not the flavored stuff, but the real stuff, actually over the course of a week or two, we'll actually help change the inside of our guts so that that bacteria likes to grow. That bacteria grows in the lining of the gut, talks to the immune system, and that makes the cancer immunotherapy work better. Yeah. And then there's other things too, like you said cranberries and and green tea many things can actually feed our microbiome right so plant-based foods so you know i think it's

completely accepted now it's not challenged that plant-based nutrition is actually um the healthy approach to life i mean it's kind of eating more plants eating more person right but it's not just we're not just feeding ourselves we're feeding our bacteria yeah right so we're feeding the you know 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies and after we extract all the stuff that we need on the human side we're leaving uh you know the the leftovers for the bacteria and this is the fibers this is the bioactives and what's amazing is our bacteria can take some of this fiber and they digest it so it's kind of like giving a sculptor a block of wood and say do something with it so the bacteria our gut microbiome takes that

block of wood and starts making sculptures there's like these things called short chain fatty acids or scaphas that our microbiome make and it turns out that these short chain fatty acids these little tiny particles that they make from our food that we feed them like the fats that fuel the gut lining they do that they're anti-inflammatory they boost our immune system they help regulate our blood sugar they lower our cholesterol cancer risk they and they also suppress cancer risk and they prevent blood vessels from growing into cancer as well all tied together and this is you know at the end of the day why we need to take our food seriously yeah essentially you you write a little bit about for example how the microbiome plays roles in

autism and cognitive function and i remember recently seeing a study where there are undigestible things in breast milk that humans can't digest call like oligosaccharides, and they feed the good bacteria in the baby to develop it. Formula doesn't have those things. And the kids that are breastfed have high levels of something called butyrate, which is one of these short-chain fatty acids, which actually turns off colon cancer genes and is an incredible important anti-inflammatory and regulates the gut health. Whereas the other formula fed kids had something

called propionic acid, another one of these short chain fats, but actually that in animal models can induce autism. And so what, like, it's like, whoa. Well, you know, it's at the end of the day, we're just at the surface of uncovering the mysteries of health. And I think that's the kind of humility and awe and wonderment we all need to have, which is, you know, we know quite a bit about different diseases, but we're just at this new frontier of understanding our health. I mean, you've been working in this field for a while and you're deeply steeped into it. And what I'm seeing from my end of the table is that we can begin to peel back the layers of the onion. So

it's all about balance. More is not more. You need just the right amount. So in your book, Eat to Beat Disease, you break it down into these very digestible bits. And you briefly touched on it, but I want to go deep in each of these five areas because what you're talking about is something that is our health creation, health defense system that we can

activate, but nobody talks about. And you mentioned them. It's our angiogenesis system. It's regeneration, which is stem cells. And you're really involved in the stem cell world, the microbiome, the DNA protection, how we repair and keep our DNA healthy in our immune system. So, let's talk about each of those and how we can activate those things. What are the things that harm them? For example, you talked about, you know, alcohol affecting stem cells. And I'm thinking, wow, I had a tequila last night.

Did I screw up my stem cells, you know? Or then you say, well, red wine maybe helps other areas. So it's a little confusing. How do you break down each of these? And let's just go through them. Let's start with angiogenesis. Sure. And what are those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system?

And what are those things we can use to actually activate health within it? Great. So angiogenesis is a term that actually talks about how the body grows blood vessels. Blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body. That's what keeps us healthy. They start- What, they're 60,000 miles?

60,000 miles worth. So if you were to pull out all the blood vessels in your body, line them up and then you can actually form a line that would go around the earth twice. Unbelievable. So that's one of this enormous organ system, right? So you know it's gonna be important. and we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart you wind up having big problems with cardiovascular disease clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes

and if you don't have enough blood vessels you can't heal your wounds and if you actually have too many blood vessels you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration, and you can grow cancer, right? So this is a system that is required to keep every cell and organ healthy. It's a health defense system. And if it's out of balance, you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels you wind up having in trouble. So what are the things that can damage angiogenesis? Well, it turns out high-fat diets damage angiogenesis. Any fat or just

uh you know what actually mostly saturated fats but i think that it's you know really high fat overall like high fat diets are can be can be damaging and hypercholesterolemia for example if you have a lot of cholesterol floating around your blood like the damaging bad cholesterol the ldl it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels. If you have cigarette smoke, tobacco, you know, whether people shouldn't smoke, but even secondary smoke can actually damage your blood vessel response. And, you know, then you think about heart disease, you think about cancer, things that are your blood vessels out of whack, out of balance. You know, the fat thing is interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating

high amounts of refined oils and and it's hard to separate out are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil or they're having you know trans fats and and toxic fats and inflammatory refined oils so the so the the science actually says is is not actually talking about what you actually eat it's about what the net net the effect is in the body so if you wind up actually going from uh you know the researchers have studied for example in the lab animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemic these are you know these are mice whose blood is milky because it's actually so filled with fat. That's a genetic thing.

For sure. Right? And those are the subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis. So I think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good. We know that, for example, that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good. The polyunsaturated fats are good for you. But I'm talking about after what the body actually processes yeah what actually results in your body um so um what are the things that actually can help restore healthy androgenesis well think about um androgenesis balance like a lawn that's growing

right or a garden that's growing you want to um you want to prune the garden you know make sure things don't overgrow uh pick out the weeds and if you're mowing a lawn you're kind of just getting everybody all the uh the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height yeah so you don't wind up having this scraggly lawn that's what the body does to keep androgenesis in balance not too much not too little and so the food we eat is actually a lawnmower it kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body not too much not too little so the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea which is really good soy actually genistein is a bioactive found

in soy is really good tomatoes are really good for helping to keep androgenesis and balance many fruits and vegetables also can do that so the brassinins are really good so many of the things we already know are good for us we know actually also help our blood vessels and now we know how and now we know how yeah now what about stem cells and regeneration this is a big topic that i think people are hearing about in the news. They're confused about it. There's controversy about it. There's laws about it that prevent adequate research.

I mean, it's really quite a messy area. And yet, it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in. And it's, I don't think, something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells that there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells and what are stem cells anyway what do they do and how do we how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them yeah well some cells are really simple um we're made of stem cells so when our moms and dads got together and created, you know, us in the womb, we started out as stem cells. They actually made every single organ.

And egg and sperm. And egg and sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory. And then pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells. And after we were born, a few of those stem cells stuck around, um about 700 000 of them they stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines they hide out in our body and they help us regenerate so when you and i are growing up right in grade school we learn from our teachers that starfish can regenerate salamanders can regenerate but people can't regenerate yeah right can't grow a new arm yeah well it's true you can't grow a new arm but we do regenerate we regenerate every day we know

that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back our gut lining grows back our livers can grow back if you actually remove part of your liver it'll grow back yeah our skin grows back you know um so we our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells. Now, what can injure stem cells? You know, high doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells. So I'm okay with the one tequila I had last night? You know, having a tequila every now and then is not bad. Having a glass of wine. But, you know, the thing is on balance.

What you want to do is people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells. Diabetes is another state, a metabolic state that it really impairs. It cripples our stem cells. High blood sugar cripples our stem cells. So the excess of anything can be harmful, including to our stem cells. So what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells? This is where it's really become interesting. Before I talk about that, though, let me just tell you. Does stress affect your stem cells. So what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells? This is where it's really become interesting. Before I talk about that, though, let me just tell you.

Does stress affect your stem cells? Stress can definitely affect our stem cells. High stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells. It's just like stunning them. So they're like, wait a minute, what do I do now? Maybe I'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs. We've got to rebuild our blood vessels. We've got to rebuild our blood vessels. We've got to rebuild our hearts.

You know, our hearts turn around. Like, we actually have stem cells in our hearts and our brains that regrow our nerves. Every single day, something in our body is regenerating. Actually, a lot of things are regenerating. So, what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies that you inject into the body. So, you know, taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them. And someday that's going to wind up becoming game-changing in medicine. Someday.

We're not there yet. I've been involved with some of those efforts, and what I've seen is very exciting. But more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells. And here's the research you can actually take. It's a lot cheaper and it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable getting a stem cell injection, like 20 grand or something.

Well, you know, I would say why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table yeah right so the mediterranean diet has it's been studied by spain looked at elderly people on the mediterranean diet and those who were on a mediterranean diet compared to not on a better training that had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation in their bloodstream so again it's not one magic food it's the pattern of stem cells in their circulation, in their bloodstream. So again, it's not one magic food.

It's the pattern of food that you're actually eating. Now, you can actually do the research on specific things as well. So for example, tea. Green tea will increase your stem cells. But guess what? So can black tea, right? So here's what the surprise is. That's why the Japanese live forever.

Not long after the Japanese. All the green tea. You know, people in Asia drink a lot of tea. People in Britain drink a lot of tea as well. We used to say green tea is good, black tea is fermented, so it's not going to be that good for you. We're changing our minds. We have to keep our minds open. Black tea can also double the number of stem cells. kind of surprise and delight is that um there was a study at uh by ucsf in san francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease so they had kind of crappy blood flow

and they gave them hot chocolate yeah i was going to say the chocolate stem cell story i want to hear about that amazing right so um the darker the chocolate the higher the flavanols these are the bioactives are naturally pressing cacao yeah and they there was a study these are the food is medicine this is the food there are literally these chemicals in food called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties they are made by mother nature they're packed in the food growing on the plant and you know every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactive so in cacao which is a bean which then you process to actually get, you know, kind of the cocoa powder. If you take the really dark chocolate, like 73% cacao, the really dark chocolate,

and you make it into a high flavanol hot chocolate drink, and you have it twice a day. This was the clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having, drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate right and so okay so the question is is that important well when they measured their blood flow what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which you know kind of like um lowers the circulation of the blood. They let it go.

They found that the blood flow was much vastly improved. Wow. So here's a functional result that actually means it makes a difference. So who's going to complain about chocolate? Who's going to complain about tea? Who's going to complain about a Mediterranean diet? I mean, you go out to eat. These are the things we love.

Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Hyman. I'm all about using food first when it comes to nutrition, but there are certain nutrients I recommend everyone supplement with because it's simply impossible to get adequate amounts from your diet alone. One example is magnesium, which our soils, well, they're not too healthy. And because there's no organic matter, they can't extract the magnesium from the soil from industrial farming, which is a drag.

And that leads to 50% less of these minerals in our food than there was 50 years ago. And then, of course, we're doing things that cause us to lose magnesium, like sugar, caffeine, fluoride, even stress, which none of us have, right? 80% of Americans are actually deficient in magnesium. And that may mean insufficient, not necessarily true deficiency, but just not enough for optimal functioning because magnesium is so important. And it's a huge problem for our health. Considering the pandemic of stress, along with the pandemic of COVID that we're facing, we should all really be conscious about our magnesium intake because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which keeps us calmer and more relaxed. Magnesium is crucial for more than 300 other chemical reactions in the body

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dot com slash hymen and use the code hymen1010 and you'll get 10% off this really great formula. I think you're going to like it as much as I do. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. One of the things we're looking at is nitric oxide, NO, which is a natural, which is a gas. It's a natural signaling molecule. It's the stuff that our cells make to repair themselves. It's what our blood vessels use to dilate and to fix themselves. And it's what Viagra and Cialis actually caused the body to make, you know, with the obvious effects that they're intended to have. So, you know, we have actually had Louis Ignaro on our podcast. So he was the guy who discovered, you know, our nitric oxide and has won the Nobel prize for it. I saw that Lou's an old friend of mine

and an amazing guy. And you know, what's amazing about Lou is that, you know, in his, you know, as a senior statesman of research, he is the most friendly, accessible, passionate, brilliant, articulate guy that I know. And so I'm glad that he explained that. But I can tell you when this all started, when we first made our discovery about the blood vessel damage, you know, who's the first person I called? Lou Ignaro. So Lou and I actually compared the notes on the gene expression, the pictures of the blood vessels. And we were thinking about this. Now I'm actually, I've continued to move forward and I'm looking at working with some companies now that actually have nitric oxide stimulators. So let's look through this.

There's some interesting efforts that can actually – they have nitric oxide delivery systems that are in inhalers, not ready for prime time in clinical trials for acute COVID. And the reason that that happened for acute COVID is because it was a really interesting, successful clinical trial of inhaled nitric oxide in pregnant women who were on the ventilator or heading towards a ventilator. And it found that you could actually rescue these women and their babies. And so definitely something that can help blood flow and repair, definitely life-saving. And so one of the interesting- Should we all be taking Viagra for our blood vessels? Well, so one end of the spectrum is actually this stuff in clinical trial.

But then so much of COVID has led us to talk about repurposing existing drugs, right? Because we can't wait 10 years. We got to sort of see what's available. And so, you know, like the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectins, and a lot of people have been coming up with different good ideas to sort of figure out, do they work or not? But it's really interesting because on the other end of the spectrum of not what is to be invented, but what's already around is Viagra, Cialis, and all kinds of other things. Now, so that's an interesting clinical trial to be done. Vasodilates creates nitric oxide, affects repair, and nitric oxide causes stem cells to come out of our bone marrow to repair and regenerate our vessels as well. And it can actually help to repair neuropathy, which is another thing, and lower inflammation.

So again, I'm super interested in, I think there's huge amounts of promise that clinical trials actually need to be done for that. I think that, you know, there's also something to be said. Should we be taking arginine that increases nitric oxide in the body? Right. Well, so that's another interesting thing. There's dietary supplements that actually introduce arginine precursors and L-arginine, right? So you of actually healing itself up. So what do we do there?

What kind of pages can we tear from the playbook for chronic wound healing from the biology to the clinical stuff to the treatments? So I think that, you know, it's really interesting to think about Arginade, Juvenz, wound healing substances, phosphodiesterase inhibitors like Viagra and Cialis. It is, it is a whole spectrum. Now I don't, I'm not, again, you know, we can't give medical advice on a podcast, but, you know, I think what we're sharing, I mean, Mark, you and I are both physicians that think deeply about mechanisms of disease. What we're actually sharing, this conversation is really about how medical scientists and physicians that think about the science actually think about how to solve problems.

So I don't think the answer is there yet. But I'm actually really encouraged that there are these tools that are out there that we can, we might be able to do. I think one thing that, by the way, is really important to actually pursue is this clue why vaccination improves the symptoms in some people. Yeah. Explain that because I think it's sort of counterintuitive and people have already had COVID are getting vaccines because you can get COVID again. And some of those people who've had long hauler syndrome who've had the virus are now getting better, which is kind of surprising. So explain this. Totally surprising, totally counterintuitive.

As I said, another wrinkle, another twist in the pandemic story that, you know, defies easy understanding. And this is where I think the medical community needs to really just admit our humility and to eat some humble pie, right? Like it doesn't make sense. Why would that happen? And then you sort of have to put on your scientists had to say, well, a vaccine shouldn't actually cause that kind of a of a of an improvement. If there's damage in the body, a vaccine shouldn't cause the body to shouldn't be repairing the body. But the vaccine might be able to prompt immune system to fight residual virus yeah so is that part's going on the other thing by the way the vaccine might do um is it might actually essentially uh control alt delete and do a hard reboot of your whole

immune system okay and it could be that that you know like the the fire that that covid causes in many people not all people um never quite goes out so it's kind of like a forest fire that when it goes out you still have this sort of like a forest fire that when it goes out, you still have this sort of burning brush underneath, even though it looks like it's mostly out, there's still flame there. And what you need to do to put that thing out, you know, is you need to actually just completely restart the hard drive, and then it'll actually go out and reset.

And so, you know, I think you mentioned this earlier, another hypothesis. I mean, listen, for your viewers, this is just like medical research thinking in real time. You know, we don't have the answers, but we know at least we can actually try to ask questions. You know, it's fascinating to me that the virus sort of may not be obviously detectable when you do the regular test. But maybe I'm wondering if you're doing biopsies of tissues, if you'd show. And also I wonder if we're just stuck in a feed forward cycle, because we see this a lot in functional medicine. People have chronic fatigue syndrome, have sort of weird, crazy symptoms for years and years, just don't get better. They've had Lyme disease, they've had nipthine bar, they've had whatever an infection,

and they just get stuck where they have gastroenteritis and their gut's never the same. So there's this phenomenon in medicine where people get stuck in a feed-forward cycle, which is very much like your record skipping. Many of you listening may not have ever had an album, but you and I are old enough to have had record albums and they skip. I'm like Spotify and it just got to keep going on and on and on. And it gets stuck and it's almost like a biological groove that you can't get out of. And so a lot of functional medicine is about focusing on how to get people out of that

feed forward cycle and reset their immune system and reset their biology. And we use a lot of different therapies, all of the basic foundational lifestyle things we talked about, you know, diet, exercise, sleep and stress reduction, meditation. But there's also a host of other therapies we use to enhance the body's function, whether it's just adequate levels of vitamins and minerals and all their role or adequate levels of phytochemicals or herbs. And there's also a whole field of sort of regenerative medicine, which is looking at various therapies that are sort of biologic in a sense. They're biologics therapies that

use substances that our bodies naturally have, but sort of give them in a sense. They're biologics therapies that use substances that our bodies naturally have, but to give them in higher doses to enhance repair and healing such as stem cells. It's obvious when people know about exosomes, which are derived from stem cells and oxidative therapies, which, you know, we sometimes use, for example, in medicine, but like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which can seem to be also helpful for some of these patients. I just had a patient who had long hauler syndrome and she said the most profound thing she did was use hyperbaric oxygen therapy to recover, which increases wound healing, right? That's what you've studied. So there's a couple of other things as part of the spectrum of things that may push the body to reset like ozone therapy, which is being used in many other countries, but it's still sort of fringe here, but there's really good data on how this sort of pushes the body out of this cycle by suppressing

the inflammation, activating your anti-inflammatory systems, antioxidant systems, repairing blood vessels. So there's a lot of therapies out there that are on the fringe that probably actually won't even be studied by traditional science, but I think have some among the most promising benefits. And I've had the chance to treat a lot of long hauler patients. And I've seen that those people who do these other therapies often are the ones who recover the fastest. No, it makes total sense. I mean, because this is a, once you have system-wide damage or inflammation or imbalances, which is clearly what's actually happening with long haulers. I mean, and we can pinpoint it down to the cellular molecular level.

The reality is that there's, it's very unlikely that a single pill or a single prescription is going to actually do the job. And while integrative medicine, you know, is almost self assigned to be, you know, to use tools that are on the fringe. Listen, I mean, I think this pandemic pushed the entire human species to the, to the edge. And so it's now time to actually look at those things that may not have been examined in the same way before and pull them up, pull them to the main stage and kind of say, is this something that can actually be helpful to us?

And this is where it doesn't really matter what side of the equation you are in or what, you know, what, whose team you're on. It's basically like, let's look at stuff that can actually help. So what's interesting, I really like what you said about hyperbaric. So a lot of people in the wound healing world misunderstood what hyperbaric oxygen does, because the idea was to pump high oxygen pressure into a wound that's not healing because the wound needs more oxygen because the blood vessels aren't quite as good. And indeed, you would actually see blood vessels growing pretty profoundly after doing these hyperbaric dives, they call them dive chambers. And it turns out there's a really interesting mechanism that is at play in hyperbaric therapy that might help to explain your experience with long haulers.

So when you're actually in the chamber, whether it's 40 minutes or an hour or whatever it is, you're training the body, you're resetting the barometer of the body to get used to high oxygen. And now the patient steps out of the hyperbaric tank or the chamber, and now suddenly their body that was used to very high oxygen suddenly is at sea level. Okay. Like again, sort of like not low level oxygen again. Okay. Or not, not actually having the same amount of hyperoxygen. Now you actually trigger genes that are caused by hypoxia, not enough oxygen, and it turns on angiogenesis. And that's really what the blood vessels are growing in response to the change between chamber or not chamber,

chamber or not chamber. It's that delta between that pulls the trigger. The other thing that happens with hyperbaric is that one of the things when the trigger gets pulled is a domino effect and stem cells come out during in hyperbaric chambers, regenerative. And that to me, if it's happening in your wound, it could probably happen in your lungs, in your heart, in your brain. And that is really, really worthwhile studying. I know that there's some hyperbaric studies, again, looking at the microcirculation. Yeah. And that's called an oxidative therapy, which is sort of the opposite of what we typically think of we'd want to do in medicines. We want to

take antioxidants, right? And oxidative stress is a bad thing, but it's not necessarily, it's just part of our normal regulatory system. So when you have too much, it's bad. When you have not enough, it's also bad. And I think that the effects of hyperbaric or ozone, these are what we call oxidative using oxygen, which is in a sense, potentially harmful to the body, pushing it to respond by giving it this little insult. And then the body responds by hitting the repair setting. Your body has its own innate repair systems. And if you know how to activate those systems, then we can begin the healing process.

And I think that's what's happening with long hauler syndrome. These people are getting stuck in a rut, a biological rut of inflammation. And there needs to be things that push them off of that. And you can't just take, you know, ibuprofen or steroids or any of that. You've got to figure out how to get the, because the body is way smarter and more powerful than any medication. And if we can activate those endogenous or internal innate healing mechanisms, I think we're going to see a lot of benefit. And that's where I get the most benefit for my patients with chronic fatigue or Lyme or other chronic illnesses that are resistant to traditional treatments. Yeah, no doubt.

And I think that this is where we need to look not at the solution as single solutions, but we need to look at the body as in need of multiple solutions and allow its own reset processes to be able to heal. So it's sort of, let the body complete its cycle of healing because the body wants to heal itself. I mean, we've got, we're hardwired with health defense systems. I mean, our circulation is designed to operate at its optimal. And if you don't have enough, it'll grow more. If you have too many, it'll actually prune it back. And same thing as regeneration. I mean, you know, like our organs are continuously regenerating a kitchen fire or they're an industrial fire, when they've got bad body burns, that is like this prompt that we need to super repair ourselves, super regenerate. And that's when the stem cells come flying out. You can measure this in the

bloodstream. And so, you know, another thing that could be done is actually to measure stem cells in the bloodstream for long haulers at diagnosis and then follow them over time to see if they've got, if they need to push more stem cells out, because we can actually measure those now. So in the spectrum of what we're learning around COVID-19 and long hauler syndrome, are you hopeful that we're going to be able to take care of this? Because to me, the prospect of 50 million people globally with long hauler chronic fatigue syndrome, it's just seems like a healthcare catastrophe. And in America, you're talking about, you know, let's say 30 million people have had COVID. It's probably twice that easily because those are the ones who've been tested positive

and maybe three times that. So maybe it's a hundred million. That means, you know, 30 million people in America will be walking around with some type of debilitating symptoms. And I don't know how prevalent it is. It depends perhaps on your infection or your hospitalizations or not. I saw one review that looked at cases out of the hospital

where people had been in the hospital with COVID-19 at 60 days, 87% had severe symptoms. That's almost 90% of people at two months were still sick. Now, maybe it's less if you're not in the hospital, but what are you thinking about that? Well, you know, I mean, I think that there's been two recent studies that actually paint an even more dire picture.

There was a study published in Nature looking from the Veterans Administration looking at 70,000 patients. I don't know if you saw this study, but basically people had recovered from COVID, they had a 59% increase in mortality six months or later afterwards. And so this is, you know, this is not just something you put up with and get by with, but this actually can trigger even greater illnesses. And by the way, don't forget about all these other non-communicable diseases like diabetes and obesity and cardiovascular disease that we were struggling with before the pandemic. This is now a thick layer on top of that that might actually make the other ones a lot worse. And so I think that we're looking at

a new human disease that we have the science, which is what makes me optimistic. We have the ability to think and peer through the veil of this condition to try to figure out what's going on. And what I'm really optimistic about, well, let me first, before I say that, let me say what I'm not optimistic about. I'm not optimistic that the pharmaceutical industry is going to come up with that race to find that single targeted therapy that's going to cure long haulers. That I don't think is going to happen. And I've got a lot of experience over 25 years working with biotech. I just don't think that model is going to succeed. I do think that they will contribute something modestly and it won't work for everybody. But I do think that there is a bright bulb that has

now been turned to, you know, white, the hot, sort of the sort of white hot heat, to really be able to look more at a systems biology approach, a whole person approach, the very things that you talked about, Mark, and you have been talking about, which, you know, if anybody has had any doubt that the body needs to heal itself, that we need to actually give the body a chance to heal itself, we need to actually prompt the body and give it every shot to be able to actually affect and complete the cycle of healing. And those things are usually not found in a prescription pad. Those things are usually not found in a medical clinic. Those things, you know, they exist in people's own homes.

So now we actually have to stitch together this continuum between what happens in the doctor's office or, you know, the Cleveland Clinic or another great medical center with what actually happens at home. And so now this is not alternative. This is mainstream. And what I would tell you is that people who are only throwing drugs at patients with long haulers, they're the ones that's going to be practicing alternative medicine. Well, that's a very interesting perspective. I'm not sure how that would go over in major academic centers, but I tend to agree with you.

And I think that, you know, it's forcing us to rethink medicine because what we see with COVID-19 is it's not a respiratory disease. It's a systemic disease. And your work around the effect of COVID on blood vessels helps explain why. But by working in our silos, we're not going to be able to figure this out. And I think that, you know, in a sense, you know, like autoimmune disease, you know, we can give these powerful drugs to suppress the inflammation. But as soon as you stop those drugs, the disease is still there. So the question is, how do you organize a system of thinking to treat the whole system to create health and activate, as I said, these bodies, the body's own internal intelligence for

healing, which is profound. I mean, when you begin to understand, like you said, you're just saying like you cut yourself and all of a sudden your blood vessels start growing. I mean, when you begin to understand, like you said, you're just saying like you cut yourself and all of a sudden your blood vessels start growing. I mean, I feel like I get a boo-boo and I'm like, wow, that's amazing. Like that's just like I burnt myself here in the stove. And I'm like, wow, look at that. It's like perfect. And it's like, how does it do that? And I think I think that's not just happening on the outside.

It's happening on the inside. So and we understand a lot and a lot from your work about how do we enhance the health and the function of our internal systems and internal blood vessels. And your book Eat to Beat Disease is such a great example of how we can use, for example, foods as medicine to start to repair and regulate these systems. And the way food and lifestyle works is not by a single pathway, it's by working on your whole system. And I think that's what's so different. The microbiome is an entire new discipline that's gonna change humanity. You know, I mean, I think that we've always thought

of humankind as just humans, but in fact, we're 50-50 with bacteria is really kind of like the latest calculations. I think it's more like 90-10. Well, they've actually done some new calculations on this, right? So it's about 40 trillion cells, about the same number of bacteria as the latest calculation on this is sort of the up-to-date numbers. And it makes a lot of sense, right?

So basically when we evolved as humans, we were hunters and gatherers picking stuff up, you know, nuts and fruits and seeds and picking stuff off of trees that had bacteria in it. There's more bacteria in the planet than animals. And when we ate those, the bacteria naturally colonized the body. And by the way, the gut, of course, but not just the gut. Our skin, our mouth, our nose, every orifice has got bacteria and our tears are bacteria. Breast milk has bacteria, even in the womb, which when you and I were in medical school, they said,

oh, the womb is sterile. Wrong. In fact, babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb, which when you and I were in medical school, they said, oh, the womb is sterile. Wrong. In fact, babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb. Amazing. Okay. So, we're beginning to rewrite the playbook of understanding how bacteria get in our body. The next thing about bacteria I'll tell you about in terms of the microbiome is in the Middle Ages, bacteria was responsible for the plague.

Yeah. And so, we sort of developed this fear and repulsion to bacteria. Fast forward to the 1940s, the discovery of antibiotics, that really was a medical revolution. And then everybody went willy-nilly with antibiotics, which can be life-saving. Let's be clear about that. But the overuse of antibiotics, not just in humans, not just in children, but also in our animals.

Yeah, which is where most of the antibiotics are. We have 24 million pounds of antibiotics that are used every year. 19 million are used in animals for helping them grow and preventing infections. And getting into our drinking water, right? So we've sort of invisibly impaired our environment so that we're exposed to antibiotics that changes the ecology the coral reef that that delicate ecosystem between bacteria and human cells in our body so that's one thing is antibiotics the other thing that actually can really injure our microbiome really is our our lifestyle you know physical activity yeah we know that if you're not active

your microbiome kind of suffers. We exercise on the outside, the bacteria get the benefit too. They get that workout, right? Stress can change our microbiome. I mean, how many times have, you know, you've, I'm sure you and I have done the same thing. We stayed up all night. We've had to pull some all-nighters. Next day, you feel like crap.

You know, your gut doesn't feel so good. That's because of microbiomes having a riot yeah they pulled the all-nighter too so what we're realizing diet obviously and our diet plays a huge role so putting in pounds of stuff every day in that tube yeah well you know something really interesting right so when i look at the ingredients of any food that i actually get and i i try to do fresh food whole foods foods, but every now and then, you know, you have to take a something and you look at all the ingredients. The stuff you don't recognize, you can't pronounce, those are the things that we should worry about, actually, that could influence our bacteria. Yeah.

Right? You pick a mushroom and you eat it, you know that the fiber in that mushroom is gonna feed us and the bacteria, right? The pulp's gonna feed us and the fiber's gonna feed the bacteria. What we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm our- I mean, there are 3,000 food additives in the market that are FDA approved,

and we don't know what most of them do. Very few have been tested. And it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect our microbiome. Well, and you know, we all know people that are super healthy, right? So they never get sick. And then we know people that seem to get sick all the time.

The difference is probably in their microbiome. In fact, it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy, super agers. These are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all. And then they looked at young, healthy athletes. And they found when they compared their microbiome, they were remarkably similar. They were almost identical. So health is clearly governed by our microbiome.

So what are the things that we can actually eat that can affect them? Well, we talked about this a little bit earlier. It turns out that pomegranates actually can make a big difference. Cranberries can make a big difference. Nuts, walnuts, pecans, cashews, things that we actually know. Almonds? Almonds, yeah. Okay. And so, you know. I was checking, I had almonds for breakfast. I want to make sure I got it. Well, you know, we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think the nuts are one of nature's most healthful snacks. I don't know if you saw this, but about two years ago, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the big cancer meeting, they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer, stage three colon cancer, undergoing treatment, whatever the treatment might be, that those who ate two handfuls of nuts

a week actually had a 50% lower risk of death from their disease. Now, you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction, everybody's jumping up and down. It's a billion-dollar blockbuster drug. And you're talking about a couple of handfuls of almonds for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost $100,000. Is it actually better? Well, it's not an either or. It's together.

And again, this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors. Not just you and me, but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community. Because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment, if you look at that data, it's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies. I would actually strongly advise patients to have nuts if they can take it. And what do they serve in the hospitals, right? So again, we're in the middle of a revolution. Yeah. It's slow, but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine.

And we're going to be able to map this out. Right. We're going to be very soon in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence. Big data analysis is microbiome assays. We can actually look at what's growing, what's not growing, how different things affected. Check it over time in a serial way. Monitor the effects. I mean, it's fascinating. You know, wow, maybe if you give this cocktail of acromantia smoothie, then your acromantia grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy. I mean, this is really radical stuff. And yet there are very few people talking

about it in a clinical way like you are. You're saying, okay, wait a minute, we don't know everything, but we know a lot and we know enough to actually start to integrate these strategies. And the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because it empowers people to say, okay, wait a minute. I don't just have to sort of wait around to get disease, then hope some drug saves me or, you know, try to fix it then. But I can actually start to build the foundations of my health for my whole life by understanding. And these are a little bit technical, you know, stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff. But it's actually doable.

And you make it so practical in your book. You have this five by five by five plan, which we'll get into. But let's go next to the DNA thing. Because we talked about angina, regeneration, stem cells, microbiome. Let's talk about the DNA. Because we think, oh, we got our DNA. There's nothing we can do about it. We get hits to our DNA from toxins and stress and different things. But what

can we really do to help our DNA? Right. Well, so in my book, I actually talk about how most people hear about DNA these days as relates to our ancestry. You know, who are we related to and how much of us is Neanderthal? I'm about one and a half percent. But in fact, you know, our DNA is our genetic blueprint. And that part of that blueprint is our blueprint for health. It actually is designed to keep us healthy, our DNA. We need our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health. We need the right proteins made.

We need the right molecules made at the right time. From the time we're born to the to our last breath really and so we know that dna can get mutated and so some of the things that can mutate our dna is actually you know wait stop there i just want to go back a minute because you said it's really important you said our dna makes proteins that regulate all our biology and so they can actually make good proteins or if they get damaged they they can make bad proteins. That's right. And the good proteins help you create health and the bad proteins cause the sick, right? Exactly. Exactly. And by the way, you know, the DNA is part of our hardwiring, right? It's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an autovirus system

and actually checks it out, finds problems and erases them, really just deletes them. So on average, we know that there's about 10,000 mistakes that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day, right? So think about it. We're out there in the sunlight, sun, ultraviolet radiation damages us. You sit in a car, in a highway, on a traffic, on a community to work. That sunshine is going right through the windshield, mutating your DNA. Secondary smoke. You're filling up your car in a gas.

I mean, some of us drive electric cars, but most people still wind up filling up their cars with pump gas, right? So do you stand upwind or downwind of the fumes? I just hold my breath. Actually, I try to like stuff the cap in the thing because I have the automatic one. I run away. So here's a way to protect your DNA. When you're filling your gas, figure out which way the wind's blowing and stand upwind. Yeah.

If you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents, the gas, and you're mutating your DNA. Like a little wood block you can just stick in and hold and then go. Well, but this is the kind of situational awareness that we want to have. You know, like I was saying, when you're at the stove, you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire. These are the things that we know we should be doing at sort of the health level. So our DNA is, and there's some things we can't do anything about, like radon coming out of the earth, like that just mutates our DNA as well. So we have to take proactive steps to protect our dna and some of the things that that we can do are pretty simple

like for example we know that an elemental uh vitamin vitamin c can actually do it a really interesting clinical trial or clinical study that was done in um who were drinking orange juice, right? So, the scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice, and they took the blood out, and they measured how well their DNA protected itself in a lab test. And then they gave them orange juice to drink. It's one and three quarters cup. So, it's kind of a tall glass of orange juice and they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their dna's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by 20 is it is it the vitamin c or is it the naringin or course we think it's vitamin c because actually they've um they've actually studied vitamin c in isolation but there's almost

it's almost certain that there's other factors i mean you're getting a lot of sugar with that much orange juice could you then just take the vitamin c pills so so what's interesting is that the the placebo that they gave uh to a group of people were just sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice was not the sugar we know that's not good for you. But it was really the other stuff. So vitamin C is what they were focusing on. But I think it's probably the naringenin and hesperidin and other things in orange juice as well.

You know, the pulp's got a lot of good stuff in it. And, you know, by the way, the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits, it's the peel, the rind that actually has a lot of stuff. Well, they say, you know know if you're taking statins or certain drugs you should have grapefruit especially the the peel like the white stuff because it actually affects the metabolism exactly drugs and so if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit if you're taking a statin well so you know that's pretty interesting but just a point of clarification on that. So it's, if you have grapefruit, it can slow down the metabolism of the liver.

So when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels, and the liver has to clear that. Yes. That's when you call it toxicity. Right. But in point of fact, think about it another way if you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods you raise the levels of the healthy things in your bloodstream so here's another amazing food that can protect our dna is kiwis kiwis oh my god i just came back from new zealand where my wife is from and i ate a lot of kiwis listen i love kiwis right uh kiwis used to be in the jungle i think monkeys ate them and they were grown in New Zealand and then shipped to America and I think they were called

Chinese gooseberries originally and they were just named kiwis so anyway there's an interesting study done in Scotland that looked at whether you ate one two or three kiwis a day and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your DNA turns out even even eating one kiwi a day can help your blood protect the DNA from damage by 60%. That's amazing. One kiwi a day. And what you're talking about is learning about in your book all the various foods.

You might not like razor clams, but there's a lot of options. Right. And it's not just that you're going to eat kiwis all day. You add all these different, different creative foods into your diet as much as you can. And you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about. Right. Well, I mean, look, here's the thing about most health diets, right? If you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only eat one food, you're not balancing your body. It's not natural to do that. I think it's the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable, that's supported by real science and real evidence,

and that allows you to do the things you enjoy. So in my book, my emphasis in Eat to Beat Disease is number one, look for foods that you eat, the foods that you enjoy. So in my book, my emphasis in Eat to Beat Disease is number one, look for foods that you eat, the foods that you enjoy that are good for you. And so I present a whole list of food, 203 foods actually, and you get to choose. Pick the ones, circle the ones, take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off. That's your shopping list. You've started off, you've had a great start already. You're already identifying the foods you love that are good for you. I've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good now you just choose them secondly um besides doing the things you like be moderate and that's the other thing is that you know

i think most researchers most research has shown that if you cut down your calories by 15 30 actually you improve survival at least in lab animals but but also in people too. People that eat somewhat less, you know, the Japanese have this saying. Hari Hitchi Boo, right? Exactly. 80% full. Don't push yourself away from the tail before you're so stuffed that you can't get up. Leave the party before it's over, right? That's basically what it is.

It's better for your body. It doesn't put metabolic stress. You know, when you stuff yourself to the gills um your body is really stressed out even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress yourselves um if you eat slowly and moderately um your brain will sort of say hey you know what's enough well it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain your fault exactly right so you know here's here's and this is by the the way, why eating with other people, which is what most of these Mediterranean countries do, the blue zone, you know, where people live a long time. They eat with other people. It's good for you.

And you're talking, so you can't be stuffing your mouth the whole time. Exactly. And you're not distracted. You're not watching television. You're not looking at your phone. It's, you know, eating social. And so that's another important component. And then finally, it's got to be sustainable.

You got to do something that you can do your whole life. And that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can explore on. You know, you were talking about razor clams. In my book, there's a lot of foods that most people may not have heard about. Bitter melon. Bitter melon. It's kind of a staple in some Asian countries, but great to try. I wouldn't cook it yourself for the first time because it's not that easy to cook.

Go to a Chinese restaurant and get it. Yeah, let somebody who knows how to do it. I love it. It tastes really bitter, but it actually is for diabetes. It helps lower blood sugar. Absolutely. And you know what the interesting thing about bitter melon is? Again, this is the culinary side, right?

So here we were talking about the doctor's pharmacy. But in fact, we could be having a chef having this conversation as well. When you have bitter melon, which is a little bitter, it actually makes other foods taste more intense. So it actually, the way it was designed in cuisine is that to help you make you enjoy other foods even more. So again, it's not either or. It's not an extreme. And it's about different cultures and finding what we love to do. Well, it's fascinating.

We bred food and vegetables to be more disease resistant, to be drought resistant, to be easier to be shipped without spoiling, to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols. In fact, the flavor comes from these phytochemicals. So, we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables. That's why I say eat weird food because those typically haven't been screwed with. And there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast, the Chef Boulay from New York. Yes. the chef Boulay from New York who actually has quit his world-class restaurant and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like curcumin and turmeric oil and various things that he's done.

And Dan Barber is also going to be coming on our podcast and he's created a new seed company to design seeds not to be heirloom necessarily but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor. Nobody was breeding for flavor, people were just breeding for all kinds of other things, pest resistance or GMO, whatever. Instead of saying, well, how do we create more of these medicinal foods? And which is a whole new thing that chefs are starting to think about food as medicine. I remember when I was at Canyon Ranch years ago, probably like late 90s, and I got up

in a meeting, there was the executives there, the owners, the doctors, the dietitians, the chefs. And I got up and I said, you know, we need to, this is a health resort. We need to start thinking about how to design our menus to use food as medicine. And the head chef got up and he screamed to me, this is not an effing hospital. I'm like, oh God, I guess I'm a little too early on this one. Well, you know, listen, being ahead of the time is something that you're known for. And I think that we're now starting to appreciate it.

I mean, think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food. Not only hospitals, by the way, but restaurants would be a great place. Theme parks would be a great place. Airlines would be a great place. I mean, there's so many places we can have an impact. Well, this is a frame shift.

Getting people to think about food as not just calories, but information. Food is not just energy, but actually instructions that regulate your stem cells and your DNA and your microbiome and your immune system and your angiogenesis. I mean, these are things that are not things people think about. It's the new science of nutrition, right? So beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff we're now combining food science with life science you know the life science is what we learn in medical school food science you know not so much right so the average it's only like 20 of medical schools that require any nutrition yeah um

you know i can tell you part of what got me into this is that i used to be a doctor at a va hospital and um and i i felt a brave soul well i felt the duty to really, um, try to help people that, um, committed their lives to help protect our country. Right. So what was interesting and I'm sure you know this as well. Um, the veterans that come to the hospital, uh, they, they're often, uh, they have a lot of health problems. Some of them are obese diabetes, uh, they got diabetes, bad heart disease, cancer. You know, that's the sort of every day in the clinic, you see people that are really, really dealing with a lot of illness. And what I noticed was I said, you know, this is odd because these people,

when they were in their 20s, were fit. They couldn't even get into the military if they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness right right so what happened to them over the decades and i realized it wasn't you know uh just uh medicines it had to be their lifestyle and when i kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses oftentimes really bad diagnoses you know and then they would ask me what's the treatment how long do i have doc you know, and then they would ask me, what's the treatment? How long do I have doc? You know, how bad is it going to be? They put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door. And almost all of them would turn around and ask me one question. They said, Hey doc, what can I do for myself? What can I eat? And I didn't have the

answer because I wasn't taught. We weren't taught to give that answer. And I thought that was wrong. And that's what led me on this journey that led me to write this book, Eat to Beat Disease, because I think that we need to know that people want to know that. What can we do for ourselves to eat to beat disease? Our immunity is our first and best well-recognized defense system, right? Nobody would challenge that. And we've always assumed that, you know, if your immune system is working, you're going to stay healthy. If it crashes, like you see in HIV or in AIDS, it's a terrible situation. You've got an overactive immune system, like autoimmune disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis. I mean, lots of people suffering

from that. Even celiac disease, for example, food-triggered immune responses. People really suffer. And so balanced immunity is what's important. I don't know if you remember this, but I certainly do. When I learned about the immune system in medical school, it seemed infinitely complicated. You know, you get this system, you get that system. They break together and there's like 50 different parts. So they work together.

And I thought it was an alphabet soup, honestly. A lot of molecules involved in the immune system but here's at the end of the day what we know is that the immune system acts like a security force um uh in our body they patrol our system to make sure any invaders um that might get in through our eyes our nose our mouth our ears i mean every orifice is an entry point you cut yourself um you know bacteria can get in there our body basically our immune system goes hey wait a minute we're going to go to the site of action and we're going to like secure the zone so to speak clear it up and make sure everything can be not disrupted that's essentially what our immune

system does and yeah there's a lot of complexities in there um but we do know that things can lower our immunity we know that infections lower can if you have a lot of infection you can lower our immunity we also know that um um again smoking aging um you know stress stress all lower deprivation sleep deprivation is a big one right so there's some new studies coming out that show that you know pretty much if you don't get like six six hours of sleep, your health is seriously in jeopardy. And we know this, again, that all-nighter phenomenon that every college student and definitely anybody who's gone to medical school or done a residency training has. It takes time to recover from that. And our immune system needs to come up along with our microbiome and all these other defense systems.

I used to feel like I had fibromyalgia after every night on call. It was achy, tired, sore. Now imagine it never goes away. Yeah. Okay. 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 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 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. Like? 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 yeah 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 um when you eat this yellow natural spice powder, which is delicious, by the way, it can be produced in 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 also traditionally like in india they used to make oil like that's right and turmeric that's right in fact i'm writing in a cookbook called food what the heck should i cook and i've invited chefs to contribute recipes and david brulee 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, you know, it's, it's so interesting. You mentioned that because combinations of foods can be really important. You know, um, 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. Yeah. It's called the transform. If you heat the tomato and cook it, you gently change the chemistry into another form. That's why it's tomato sauce. 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, again, back to the Mediterranean. Or, you know, in Asia 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, um, we've probably forgotten more than we have to learn um but we still have a lot to learn that's true i'm gonna i'm gonna send you that article i wrote called eating your medicine food is pharmacology in fact you're chinese and in chinese the word for take your medicine is cherya which means to eat your medicine which is a very interesting way of framing it it's not you don't take medicine like a pill they eat their medicine that's right one you know in chinese medicine you know traditional tcm traditional chinese medicine um uh you kind of view food and medicine and herbs all sort of in

continuity you've got hot and you've got cold you've got balance all the things that you know we're now rediscovering using science uh and you know i i think that uh there is so much to learn about health and we need to have the humility to recognize that while we know you know quite a bit about disease and we've got some good medicines to treat them when it comes to health we need to keep our eye on the ball we need to focus on what we're learning. And we need to think about that ourselves because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health. What you need to do is to make that part of your life in a natural way. Well, if we can get food reimbursed by healthcare, it's a game changer. And actually, I'm working on that at Cleveland Clinic with a food pharmacy, which is the idea of actually paying for food for people instead of drugs to get them healthy and reverse disease.

And then actually will save lives and money. And insurance companies are starting to recognize that as well. And 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 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.

This is incredible. I mean, for a guy who's sort of steeped in traditional medicine, who's, you know, probably one of the leading scientists in the world around angiogenesis, who understands, you know, the deep biology that we all learned in medical school and has published 100 plus papers and major journals, you're sort of coming around to this idea, this paradigm shift that the way to get people well and reverse disease is not by treating disease, but by creating health. And that is a massive paradigm shift. And that's really what functional medicine is all about.

And it's really now becoming more accepted and about. And it's really now becoming more accepted and mainstream. And you're leading the way. And I think most of us who go into medicine, we started out by wanting to create health, right? I mean, people don't go to medical school to treat disease. They go to medical school because they want to help people stay healthy. So here we are, you know, we're at the precipice of a new era in society, not just medicine, where we can actually do something for ourselves. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving

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