The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Gut Issues Are On The Rise And How To Fix It

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

The gut microbiome plays a role in every disease, so why aren’t we doing more to protect and restore it? One third to one half of all Americans have gut issues due to the constant consumption of industrialized foods, glyphosate, food additives, and more. This is a problem—and it’s time for us to take action. In this episode of my Masterclass series, the first in a series on gut health, I am interviewed by my good friend and podcast host, Dhru Purohit, about the importance of polyphenols for our gut health. We also discuss my gut-health journey, which led me to dig deep into understanding the value of a healthy gut and diverse microbiome, and how to get there. Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, The Dhru Purohit Podcast, is a top 50 global health podcast with over 30 million unique downloads. His interviews focus on the inner workings of the brain and the body and feature the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Thrive Market, and InsideTracker.   You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   Join Thrive Market today at thrivemarket.com/hyman to receive an extra $80 of free groceries off with your first order.   Right now, InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman.   In this episode, we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The number-one thing that causes gut issues (3:57 / 1:28) Why are we in this mess? (5:08 / 2:37) My gut-health journey (12:29 / 9:43) What the research shows us about polyphenols (18:50 / 15:45) Compounds and phytochemicals in food that act like medicine (28:14 / 23:44) Two things that change a microbiome for the better (35:06 / 30:31) The best foods to incorporate into our diets (39:57 / 35:18) Zonulin and how it contributes to a leaky gut (51:11 / 45:55) Prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols found in Gut Food (1:02:38 / 57:58) The importance of powerful polyphenols (1:12:25 / 1:06:42) Mentioned in this episode: Therapeutic Potential of Rosmarinic Acid: A Comprehensive Review Gut Food Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor, or other qualified medical professional. You should always speak with your physician or other healthcare professional before taking any medication or nutritional, herbal or homeopathic supplement, or adopting any treatment for a health problem. The use of Gut Food or any other products or services purchased by you as a result of this podcast does not create a doctor-patient relationship between you and any of the physicians affiliated with this podcast. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. In functional medicine, we focus so much on the gut because it's really the seed of your health. If your gut's not healthy, you're not healthy. Until I healed my gut, I couldn't eat anything. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. One of the most important tools I have for helping my patients optimize their health is testing.

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is the place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. It's 90% faster, letting you simplify the process of getting you the functional tests that you need and giving you more time to focus on your patients. This is really a much needed option in the functional medicine space, and it means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out with a free live demo, with a Q&AA or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. I travel all the time. So at this point, I have packing down to a science. I know exactly which grab and go food items and personal care products I like to bring.

And I always keep them on hand so that I'm ready for my next trip. I used to run around before every trip trying to find what I wanted, which meant going to different stores and spending too much time packing. And now I use Thrive Market and I get everything in one place shipped right to my door. Here's a little snapshot of what I like to travel with. Now food is of course first on my list. I always order some of the Ioba grass-fed biltong jerky, broil Hawaiian orchards organic macadamia nuts, and these super handy pouches of Thrive Market brand pitted green olives, which are so yummy. If I want to splurge and bring a treat, I'll grab some Hugh chocolate too, which I love. For my toiletries bag, I'll bring some Schmitz deodorant, some all-terrain herbal armor bug spray,

a tin of raw elements SPF 30 natural sunscreen, and a bar of Dr. Bronner's peppermint castile soap. Thrive also carries so many other things that can make packing for a trip easier, and I'm sure you'll find your own personal favorites. If you join Thrive Market today, you'll get $80 worth of free groceries. Just go to thrivemarket.com forward slash Hyman. That's T-H-R-I-V-E market.com slash Hyman to get this amazing offer. Now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman, and welcome to a new series on The Doctor's Pharmacy called Masterclass, where we dive deep into popular health topics, including inflammation,

autoimmune disease, brain health, sleep, the gut, and much more. And I'm really excited because for the next few episodes of Masterclass, my friend and my business partner, my podcast co-host, Drew Perot, and I are going to be diving into all things gut health. For the past four years, we've been really digging deep into the research on what it takes to create a healthy gut microbiome. What are the ingredients your gut needs to thrive? And now we want to share this information with you in a multi-part series starting today. Welcome, Drew. Mark, so excited to be here. And we're in Los Angeles at our studio over here. It's good to do these in person. I always miss having these in-person conversations

with you. They're a lot more dynamic. You're still good on remote as well. Mark, we got a lot to talk about today on the topic of gut health. And we're really going to give people a big picture background into like, why are we in this crazy situation where so many people have so many health issues that ultimately come back to the gut. But like we do, let's give a little nugget at the top. What is one thing that you think people are doing on a daily basis today? The number one thing that is causing gut issues and long-term gut damage? Well, your gut health depends on the creatures that live in there. And if you feed them junk, they become basically bad bugs. And the way we feed our gut today is with ultra processed food, which is 60% of our calories that comes from

commodity crops, corn, wheat, and soy, and tons of sugar. And that is destroying our microbiome. So if you want to start anywhere, it's get rid of the junk and food it adds out of the processed food because within those are so many components that drive our gut into damage. It really is like food is information, not just for your cells, but for the bacteria. Yeah, you're not eating for you. You're eating for all those millions and bazillions of bugs that live inside you.

Literally trillions. So let's take a step back. And if Mark Hyman had to give a State of the Union on gut health and disease in the world today, what would he want to tell everyone who's listening? Why are we in this mess? Well, Drew, this is the era of the microbiome. When I graduated from medical school, there wasn't even a term microbiome. And in fact, the gut was mostly ignored except as a source of irritable bowel reflux, heartburn, ulcers,

and stuff that we treated with medication but didn't really understand. And I remember talking to a gastroenterologist about gut issues. I said, have you ever talked to your patients about what they're eating? And he was like, well, no. I said, well, don't you think it makes sense because you're putting pounds of this foreign material in your gut every day. It's got to affect the gut function. He's like, oh, wow, that makes sense. I never thought of it. And it was so funny. But the truth is we have a very important ecosystem in our gut that determines almost everything about our health. And as we're learning about the microbiome, we're learning it has as many cells as our own body.

It has 100 times as much DNA as our own cells. So maybe there's 20,000 genes we have. There might be two or three or five million genes, all producing proteins and metabolites that are interacting with our body. And so when you have good bugs in there, they produce good molecules that regulate so many of our systems. If you were to take a blood sample of the average human, you might find a third to a half of all the metabolites in the blood come from bacterial metabolites that you've absorbed that are part of normal function of your body. So the poop isn't just sitting there. It's doing all kinds of stuff besides making vitamins and helping you digest your food and helping heal the gut.

It's actually creating all these chemical metabolites that are regulating so much. And that's why we see, for example, when things go wrong with the microbiome, we see high levels of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autoimmune diseases, allergies, autism. I could go on and on because the microbiome plays a role in everything, even longevity. I'm reading this new book, Young Forever, and it's amazing how much data there is now on the changes in the microbiome that happen as we age and why, if you look at healthy centenarians, why their microbiomes are very, very different than the average Americans, right?

And it's because of what we're eating. So we need to keep this microbiome healthy because it's so important for our overall health. And the reason we're in this pandemic, literally, of gut problems, I mean, it literally affects probably a third to half of Americans who have some level of gut issues. Reflux, heartburn, irritable bowel, bloating, gas, constipation. You know, just these are, quote, normal things that are not really normal. There are signs that their gut's out of balance.

And so why has this happened? Well, one, it's the industrialization of our food. And we really over-process our food so that we removed all the fiber, all the key nutrients, and the polyphenols. So we eat a very mono diet. And it's really unfortunate because that is not feeding the good bugs, and then we don't end up with a good gut microbiome. So the diet is a huge change. And then in the diet, there's also other things like glyphosate, which is a microbiome destroyer,

pesticides, which affect your microbiome. There's food additives like carrageenan and other compounds that really destroy the gut and emulsifiers that cause leaky gut. And then we've got high levels of gluten proteins in the modern wheat we have. So we have this perfect storm of diet that's driving so many problems. And on top of that, we have increasing C-sections, up to third of all births are C-sections, so the baby doesn't go through the vaginal canal and have the microbiome colonized by the mother's vaginal flora, or they don't breastfeed. And by the way, 25% of calories in breast milk are not available to the baby.

They're in the form of oligosaccharides, which are digestible only by healthy bacteria in the gut. But if a woman has taken an antibiotic in her lifetime and had a baby, she won't have this important species called Bifidobacterium infantis that's so necessary for the development of the immune system and gut regulation. And so you've got, you know, C-sections, lack of breastfeeding. You've got early use of antibiotics, acid-blocking drugs, anti-inflammatories, oral contraceptives. So you've got this perfect gut busting lifestyle and gut busting diet and gut busting medications.

So it's no wonder so many people have all these issues. And that's why in functional medicine, we focus so much on the gut because it's really the seed of your health. If your gut's not healthy, you're not healthy. I mean, Socrates said, right? Health isn't disease starts in the gut because it's really the seed of your health. If your gut's not healthy, you're not healthy. I mean, Socrates said, right, health isn't disease starts in the gut. Is that attributed to him? Yes, yes. And many others, like his Ayurveda, it's all about the gut. And many, many, many ancient healing systems understand the power of the gut in keeping

us healthy. So having a healthy gut is critical to our well-being, our long-term health, even our mental health. We're now learning that antibiotics can destroy the microbiome in ways that cause depression and other mood disorders. So it's really quite an intersecting system. And it's becoming even way more mainstream. You've had a guest on your podcast, Dr. Uma Naidoo from Harvard and Mass General, who's come on and talk about even things like OCD can be linked back to missing strains of bacteria inside of the gut. Or too much of bad bacteria.

Too much bad bacteria, missing strains of good bacteria. The science just continues to evolve in this space. And really, it's all just coming back to, we need to continue paying attention to it. And one thing I do appreciate that you say is that there is a decent amount we know, but we're still so much in the infancy. So we want to put that out there, you know, by no means at all is really anybody that's out there. Even the people that have been in this space for a really long time, they would tell you that we're just getting started. Let's be honest about what we know, but let's be more honest about what we don't know as well. It's true. Although I would say that what we do know is enough to get started and help people.

Even if we don't know how it completely works and it's so complex, it's going to be hard for us to know. We still can figure it out in terms of interventions that make a big difference. I mean, just because you can drive a Tesla, you don't know. I mean, firstly, I don't know how it all does what it does. It's super confusing and it's kind of magic. But I can drive it. I mean, firstly, I don't know how it all does what it does. It's super confusing and like it's kind of magic, but I can drive it, you know, like I can get it to run. That's kind of where we are with the gut. There's so much under the surface, but if we understand the basic foundational principles of gut restoration and gut healing, which we've been doing in

functional medicine for decades, you can make a huge difference in people's health. Right. And how you know is that the patients are getting better, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's like, hey, you may not understand how difference in people's health. Right. And how you know is that the patients are getting better, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's like, hey, you may not understand how all of this aspect works, but hey, the patient is getting better, which is great. You know, I remember before we dig into things, you've also, you're friends with Dr. Emron Mayer here in Los Angeles. And he was telling me a story about in the 80s when he was like one of the first people that was really starting to talk about the microbiome and other things.

People were like, you're going to waste your entire career. This is a black hole. You're never going to get out of it. And there's nothing there for you to look at. That's right. And now, you know, he's a bestselling author. That's true. Everybody's like paying attention to this topic.

They used to make fun of me because they call me Dr. C Every Poop because I wanted to see all the stool tests, you know, making fun of me. The surgeon general was named C Everett Coop. So they called me Dr. C Every Poop because I like to look at all the stool tests, you know, making fun of me. The surgeon general was named C. Everett Koop, so they called me Dr. C. Every Poop. I like to look at all the poop. We can change your Instagram handle to that if you want. Okay, sure. Dr. C. Every Poop.

Let's do it. Mark, today we're going to be talking about polyphenols, but before we do, you know, you have your own personal story, your own narrative around the topic of gut health. And I'd love for you to get a chance to go into it, to set the stage of how it's shown up in your life and the sort of zigs and zags you've had to go through. Sure. You know, my story, Drew, I've told different ways in different times. But one of the things that happened to me when I was young, and I mean, I had pretty normal gut up until I was about 36 years old. And then I got mercury poisoning from living in China and that completely screwed

up my system. And I don't know what exactly happened, but we do know that heavy metals and other toxins can interfere with gut function and your immune system and cause leaky gut and affect your enzymes and do so many different things. So I went from one day to the next from being normal to feeling like I was basically inhabited by an alien where they were blowing up a balloon in my stomach. Literally, my stomach was so full of gas, I couldn't release. It was so painful. I felt like I was going to explode. I developed horrible diarrhea, undigested food in my stool. I developed all these other secondary problems as a result, rashes all over my face, chronic fatigue, muscle aches. And my gut was just at the center of this problem.

And I literally struggled to get it to work for a long time until I figured out that the mercury was a big factor. And then I got rid of the mercury and then my gut started to function better. And just for context, you were living in at the time, I think it was Shanghai. China. I was living in China and Beijing. And Beijing. And it was a pollution, I guess.

And they have like a lot of the coal factories. Yeah. Which that's where a lot of the mercury comes from. I mean, Beijing has 10 people, all who heat their homes with raw coal. Like it's not a factory. It's just people like instead of like their, you know, they turn their thermostat, they have a coal burning stove. That's how they heat in the winter.

And you get these huge inversions and you can't see the building across the street on a sunny day because it's so polluted with coal. Wow. But I was very susceptible to it. And that was the first thing. And then I really had to learn how to reset the gut. And that's what I've been doing in functional medicine. And then a few years ago, I got mold poisoning.

So that happened. You got better. You found functional medicine. You were good. You were smooth sailing. And then a few years ago. And then I had a house. It's a barn. And I got mold in it. And I had a really bad mold. And I had a terrible cough and just really kind of symptoms from it. At the same time, I had a tooth that went

bad in the root canal. I had to have that pulled. Then I needed an antibiotic. And so I took an antibiotic called clindamycin, which is common for dental treatments, but it also is one of the biggest causes of something called C. difficile or cholesterol difficile, which is a terrible intestinal infection that kills over 30,000 people a year. And it's quite dangerous. And so that's what I had. And it developed into a full-blown colitis. And my stomach just went haywire.

And I couldn't fix it. And I did my stool test during that time. And I, I, I did my stool test during that time. And, you know, Drew, I, I have looked at more poop than you could ever imagine in your life, probably 30,000 or 40,000 of these tests. And mine was probably one of the worst I'd ever seen in my entire life. Like of all the tests that I'd seen, it was so terrible. Which means what? Which means my inflammation levels were high. All the biomarkers, my healthy bacteria were gone. It was chaos in there.

There was no good guys. It was all bad guys. It was all inflamed and nothing was working. And so I basically tried to figure out how to get healthy again. And it was really tough because I was having, then it developed into a full-blown colitis. And I developed 20 bloody bowel movements a day. I lost 30 pounds. I was just a mess. And I was on the way to dying, literally, and I could barely eat. I was nauseous 24-7, had severe gastritis. And from taking all the anti-inflammatories, I broke my arms. It was like this whole perfect storm.

And so I ended up having to reinvent how to fix myself. That's when I really began to look at, you know, what do we now know that we didn't know five or 10 years ago about how do we reset the gut? And so, yes, it was getting rid of the mold, but also for me was really understanding how to put together the right cocktail of ingredients to one, heal my gut and to get rid of the bad stuff, but also to add in the things that really are needed to restore the microbiome. And so I came up with a cocktail of things, including polyphenols, which we're going to talk about, which I think were a much neglected area of research around the gut, which is the bacteria like to eat all these colorful plant compounds called polyphenols. These food is medicine. And then what are the other things that could be helpful? Aminoglobulins and

prebiotics and probiotics and just kind of what is the right cocktail of stuff to reset? When I started using that myself, I kind of created it out of all the things that I've known in functional medicine. It was a miracle. Then I started using it on patients and I was like, wow, this stuff really works because I'm always guinea pig myself first and then I try to see if it works for people. And it was amazing. People would say, this is the first time my gut's been normal. I have no more colitis. All my IBS is gone.

I feel amazing. And my poops are normal and perfect. And I was like, fantastic. This is great. And so then we started talking about how do we help people get this? Because it's a lot of hassle to put all this stuff together. Right. And it's a lot of products from a lot of different places.

And you've had a blog post out for a couple of years now based on that experience. And by the way, I was around during that time and you were in and out of the emergency room a couple of times. I was in the hospital. At one point in time, honestly, we thought like, was this guy poisoned by somebody? Like, were you poisoned by some nefarious actors or the industry or whatever because they're trying to take you out. It was really mind blowing. But like you said, it was the perfect storm of things, but it actually, in classic Dr. Hyman style, you kind of became the guinea pig again,

and it led to this whole other journey of you going deep down the rabbit hole and through these- And now I have perfect poops. Now you have perfect poops, exactly. And over the course of these next multi-part series on gut health, we're going to be sort of unraveling some of that research that you came across and it's going to be fun to jump into. So today we're talking about polyphenols and I'd love to get a chance to give a little

bit of a background. You know, for a long time, polyphenols, people would just sort of write it off as like, these are like antioxidants. You know, these are things time, polyphenols, people would just sort of write it off as like, these are like antioxidants. You know, these are things that are like for the cells in your body. But we started to understand that this is really a deep connection and link, as you mentioned, with the gut microbiome.

So help us understand, what does this whole new world of research show about the role that polyphenols play in the gut? And why it should be important? Like Like why should people who are listening today even pay attention to this topic? So Drew, we're really at the infancy in this field of microbiome research. And we understood the role of prebiotics and probiotics. But until recently, people haven't understood the importance of this whole class of plant compounds called polyphenols. And they are incredibly critical to the growth and development of the right bacteria in your gut so you can stay healthy.

Now, what are these compounds and why should we care? Well, historically, we ate 800 different species of plants. Today, the average diet consists basically of three or four crops. 60% are rice, corn, wheat, and soy. And then maybe a few other vegetables, a total of maybe 10, 12 plants are what Americans eat. We used to eat 800 species of plants. And the plants that we eat are pretty nutritionally depleted, don't have a whole lot of polyphenols. And the ones we did eat were super dense in not just vitamins and minerals and fiber, but they were super dense in these phytochemicals. Now, what are phytochemicals? They're the plant's own defense systems.

Or they're ways of attracting pollinators or ways of defending against predators. They're ways of resisting ultraviolet radiation. It's like it's their immune system and their sex appeal. And so we have these compounds in there that the plants use for themselves. But there's this concept that I came across that I kind of invented a term for years ago that I think describes how we've co-evolved with plants to regulate our biology when we don't need to make the things that we can get from them. For example, humans don't make vitamin C. Guinea pigs don't make vitamin C. Most other animals make vitamin C. So we don't need to make it because we can get it

from plants. And so these phytochemicals, I think, are evolving with us to regulate our biology in so many different ways, and especially our microbiome. And I call this symbiotic phytoadaptation, which means we co-evolved with these plants in a symbiotic way and have adapted our biology to use their ingredients to keep us healthy. So in the microbiome space, we now know that the compounds, whether it's green tea, catechins, or the polyphenols in cranberry or pomegranate or turmeric or olive leaf extract or prickly pear, all these different compounds in these plants, the bacteria love them. And so you're fertilizing the good guys. If you eat a lot of processed food and starch and sugar, you're fertilizing the good guys. If you eat a lot of processed food and starch and sugar, you're fertilizing the bad guys.

So there's always weeds in a garden, but you want to keep the weeds under control and you want to fertilize the good plants. And that's really what happens when you take the polyphenols. And the research here is really remarkable, Drew. There's a particular bacteria called Ackermansia that we know if it's low in patients who have cancer, they don't respond to this new therapy called immunotherapy, which can be curative. Immunotherapy essentially is using your own immune system to fight the cancer. And if you have a low level of acromantia in your gut, which regulates immunity, these drugs don't work. It's like a zero or a one. In other words,

if they don't work, they don't work. If they work, you could have stage four cancer and then you're cured and you're done, which is kind of a miracle. And William Lee, we had him on the podcast most of the time, talking about his mother who had uterine cancer, stage four uterine cancer, about to die. He took her stool test, found she had low acromancy. He gave her all these polyphenols. And lo and behold, the acromancy levels went up and she got more immunotherapy and her stage four cancer was completely cured. Like that is a mind-blowing story to me. And if you look at the literature, there's plenty of literature to support this theory that this plays such a role. And it's not just in cancer, it's all kinds of other things. So these polyphenols, which the plants use for their own benefit, are now, we're realizing, are now really

critically essential. We talk about essential vitamins and minerals. We talk about essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, things that we actually need. I would say, you know, if we don't get those things, we really get sick. But if we don't get polyphenols, it may not kill us tomorrow. But if we have a deficiency of polyphenols in our diet, it's going to cause long-term challenges with our health in terms of chronic disease and even longevity. And a lot of the research I'm looking at around my new book, Young Forever, it's so clear how many of these compounds are used in our bodies to regulate different pathways for longevity. For example, resveratrol from red wine binds to sirtuins that help to regulate DNA repair, or quercetin is very powerful in helping with epigenetic methylation. So we know

that your DNA methylation is improved by certain levels of quercetin. So all these compounds, finestine also helps regulate from strawberries, various pathways around blood sugar control and insulin. So we know that these compounds are interacting with our biology and receptors that we're now elucidating, which we didn't even know before, and how they work. So if you don't have high levels of these polyphenols, you're not actually activating all your healing systems in your body, including your gut. And this whole idea of xenohormesis is a really kind of neat idea, which is that little low levels of these compounds, which can be toxic at higher levels, stimulate our bodies to

repair and heal and renew. So it's so critical that we, not just for our gut microbiome, but for our overall health, that we up level the levels of polyphenols. And that's why I say that we should eat 75% of our plate as rainbow colored vegetables. There's 25,000 of these phytochemicals in the plant kingdom. And the Rockefeller Foundation is spending $200 to map these out in a periodic table of phytochemicals and try to figure out what they do. It's just mind boggling. We're just really beginning to see what the credible value is of these compounds. So the more you can get, the better off we are. And especially with the gut, I think is really important. How do we restore

gut health? Because many people just suffer for years without any help and taking medication or chronically constipated or diarrhea or irritable bowel or reflux, bloating, distension, gas. These are not normal. I mean, yes, a little gas here and there is fine, but it's not normal. And I think when we start to look at how we heal this, we need to think broadly and include this whole framework of polyphenols. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine. Now, when I began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago, it was clear to me we have

to look at how unique each body is. Now, with technology advancing in amazing ways, we can truly take that concept to the next level. Like one of the tools that I recently discovered that can help us all do this from home is InsideTracker. Founded in 2009 by top scientists in aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT, Tufts, and Harvard, InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. It's purpose-built to help you live a longer, more productive life.

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synced with your InsideTracker plan, you can truly wear your health on your sleeve. My team took InsideTracker for a spin and really loved it. They discovered some important things about their health that led them to stop procrastinating when it comes to certain parts of their health, like, for example, finally taking a vitamin D supplement after seeing they were deficient, or eating more iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin, and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels. Now, health is not black and white. Your wellness plan shouldn't be either.

If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed in to your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now, they're offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman. That's me, Dr. Hyman. And you'll see the discount quote in your cart. Now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Going back to that example that you shared about William Lee, the thing that I love is that, one, it's so great that he was able to do that for his mom and help her on her health.

But we don't want to just write this off as like a fluke thing. Like this doctor here, who you've become good friends with, he's been involved in the creation of over like 200 medicines. And he's like the head of the Angiogenesis Foundation.

He's like deep in this space. So he's talking about that food actually is medicine medicine and can play a role with medicine yeah by the way for everybody who's listening when you say food is medicine you're not trying to say that medicine has no place in this medicine of course has a place there's plenty of people that benefit from medicine it's that food is central to hopefully help you avoid medication in the future if you don't need it because of your diet, but also can play a parallel role with medicine. And this example was a perfect one to share. Yeah, it's true because sometimes it's synergistic. But, you know, often, Drew,

if you actually apply food aggressively, it works better than traditional medicine for many things like diabetes, heart disease. And it's something that we don't really appreciate because we don't know how to apply it as doctors. And if I said, well, I'm going to, you know, aspirin is good for you, but I'm only going to give you a milligram of aspirin. Well, that's not going to work. It's like, it's like if food is a drug, then what, what dose do you prescribe it? What are the ingredients of that drug? Like how do you do it? And it's very specific. That's the beautiful thing about functional medicine. Like just, oh yeah, food is medicine. It's kind of good. No, very specific.

It's like there's a whole pharmacology of how you apply food to treat different illnesses. So you're treating someone with autoimmune disease that's different than someone with dementia, than someone with cancer. It's really different in particular and individual. And I think that the understanding of phytochemicals is so important because in the world of health and disease, these compounds are the drugs. They are the things that modulate their different pathways. And they often work through multiple different approaches. And they can have benefits in terms of heart health and regulating blood vessel health and endothelial function. They can regulate immune system like quercetin is incredibly important for regulating your immune function and gut health. There's compounds, for example, in Himalayan tartary buckwheat, like tuho, which were found

nowhere else, which are immunorejuvenating and help deal with old aging cells and cleans them up. There's compounds, for example, like berberine that are in plants that help with diabetes and so on. We know that certain things like sulforaphane, which is from broccoli, has powerful anti-cancer compounds. They did a study in China where they literally got the urine of people and measured essentially the broccoli extracts that came out in the urine. And the higher that was, then the higher, the lower the risk of cancers. So we know across the spectrum of diseases, how important these compounds are, and we just don't

get enough of them. And that's why we say, you know, eat a rainbow of vegetables. They do five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables. That's a minimum. You should probably have, you know, a serving is a half a cup. You probably should have, you know, 20 servings, right, a day at least. That's 10 cups of fruits and vegetables. That's a minimum, I think, in my view. When you look at people like Terry Walls who've done her work on reversing MS, I mean, they're pushing like, you know, 8 to 10 cups of vegetables a day which i think is a central piece yeah i found that when people who were struggling with ms yeah and she had one of the worst types progressive ms and was in a wheelchair for you know almost a a year or two before she ended up turning it all around she saw that like combination of organ meats which is one aspect and we'll talk about you know polyphenols in meat because we often talk about it in plants, but there's a whole component inside of meat too. But she saw that when people didn't have organ meat in their diet and they didn't have enough of the fiber, their gut was

not able to restore at a level which helped to deal with all the things that ended up getting to the root of autoimmune conditions that people are struggling with, which MS is one. Yeah, absolutely. And there's so many cool things with plant compounds that we're just learning about. For example, like pomegranate is great for fueling and growing healthy bacteria, but it also actually creates a byproduct. We can't even often understand the complexity of this. This is to break down how this one plant, pomegranate, creates this one metabolite, urolithin A, from bacteria in the gut, if you have the right bacteria. And that three completely transforms your health by cleaning up your mitochondria through mitophagy, which is recycling and getting rid of old mitochondria and building new ones.

And four, by increasing muscle synthesis, basically ending sarcopenia, which is one of the key things that happens when you age, we lose muscle. So basically when you take pomegranate, it fertilizes good bugs, it releases this compound that helps you clean up your cells and helps with all the features of aging and helps you build muscle.

And that's just one little compound. Now, there's literally tens of thousands of these things that if we need to eat more of them, and we don't need to necessarily know exactly everything that's in everything, but when I go through the grocery store now, I literally am going through a thing of it as a pharmacy with an F. I think, okay, I'm going to buy this artichoke because I know it has prebiotic fibers. I know it also has these compounds that are detoxifying. Or I'm going to buy this pomegranate because I know it has good for my gut bacteria and also is going to help me build muscle.

Or I know I'm going to buy this broccoli or broccolini because it has glucosinolates and sulforaphane. It's going to help me for cancer, but also help me detox heavy metals. So I'm thinking about this or I'm thinking I'm going to buy these shiitake mushrooms or maitake mushrooms because they have all these polysaccharides that are immune modulating. And this is the conversation I have with myself

in the grocery store, which is pretty nerdy and weird. But basically this was going on in my head because I'm thinking, okay, how am I going to build my medicine cabinet for dinner? And that's what I do when I go home. So my fridge essentially is my medicine cabinet. And I think that when you start to learn about this, it's so cool. And you don't really have to

get into all the nerdy detail. You just have to realize you want to eat a lot of weird food, lots of colorful stuff. And if you go like, what is this? It's probably a good idea to buy it and try to make recipes and stuff you can get on Google. But it's so important because the weirder the wilder the food, probably the less adulterated it is, the less hybridized it is, the less modified it is. So dandelion greens are great. They're a little bitter, but way better than iceberg lettuce. So Mark, along with this, while we're talking about the benefits and the interesting research and everything that you're coming across, I also want to bring in some of the considerations because one of the things that functional medicine doctors like yourself do

and all the doctors and physicians around the globe that have specialty in this is that sometimes when somebody does not have a lot of these foods in their diet and they start to ramp up, they hear you saying like, great, eat the rainbow, a lot of polyphenol rich foods. And they go from zero to let's say a hundred, they can start to get a little bit of challenges that come along with that. They can get some distension, they can get this, that if they're not used to. So when people hear like eight to 10 cups and kind of Terry Walls and what success she's had and your recommendations, it's also worth noting that sometimes you have to ramp up to that if you're not somebody who's having a lot of plant food in your diet. Would you say so? Yeah. I mean, listen, if you start eating 10 cups of beans a day and you never had a piece

of fiber in your life, you're going to notice it, right? You're going to blow up. So, yes, you want to start slow and build up. But most of us can tolerate, especially cooked vegetables, pretty well. And I think the more we include, the better we are. And see how you feel. If your diet is totally processed, you know, there might be a digestive week that you're sort of resettling things. But once your microbiome adapts,

by the way, there are only really two things that profoundly change your microbiome for good. One is your diet. And if you switch to a paleo diet and you eat that for two months and check your poop, your microbiome is going to look a certain way. If you go full vegan and you do that, it's going to look a different way. So that is a very good picture of changing the microbiome. And the second is a fecal transplant. Poop pills, insert up your butt or swallowing them or basically injecting somebody else's poop up in your colon. That actually are the two things that have the most impact. However, if you actually change your diet, including all these polyphenols that we're talking about, you really will change over time your microbiome. And that sometimes is a readjustment period where things are killing off the bad bugs and the good bugs are growing and it's a little bit of a war, but usually it

doesn't last that long and people adapt pretty well. Well, now I'm going to go into that super interesting part that you've come across in your research, which is that plants is one way, a direct consumption of plants is one way to get polyphenols, but there's should be vegan. And I think there's a lot of controversy about that. I'm going to be having a guest on the podcast soon about the great plant-based con, which I'm very curious about a new book that came out. But, but it's, it's, it's, uh, it's really about the, the way we raise the animals and what they're eating. You know, it's not what you're eating that matters is whatever you're eating ate, right? So as Russ Konzer says, it's not the cow, it's the how. And when you have a feedlot cow that's fed corn and grains and chopped up animal parts and skittles and candy and pumped full of hormones and they're pumped full of pesticides

and herbicides from the plants they're eating, you know, that creates a certain kind of quality of the meat, which is not very good for you. It's not good for you in many ways. It's inflammatory, and it may have many adverse effects. Whereas, and of course, the animals are, you know, grown in feedlots, which are really inhumane. And so it's really a bad scene. It's bad for the animals, it's bad for you, it's bad for the planet, and the way they do factory farming drives climate change. So it's all a disaster. However, if you look at wild animals or you look at real regeneratively raised animals who aren't just eating grass, but they're eating many, many food crops, like their main

food crop, maybe two or three or four for calories and protein and so forth. But then they'll probably sample 50 to 100 different plants, which have all these different phytochemicals. And what we now know is those phytochemicals get consumed by the animal and they end up in their bodies, in their tissues, and their milk and their meat. And that some levels of these are as high as they're found in plants. So goats, for example, eating certain shrubs will have high levels. Catechins is green tea. And when you actually look at the metabolites of these compounds, they also are secondary metabolites that may have increasing benefits for human health. So it seems odd to

think about getting your plant food from animals, but increasingly that's possible with the regeneratively raised animals and an agricultural system that actually drives that change. You know, this brings up an interesting sort of question and probably one that we don't know the answer to right now, but we know that these plant compounds are so healing for the body. We also know when we look at modern day hunter gatherer societies who have varying diets, some that eat way more when it comes to the macronutrients, carbohydrates like the Tarahumara tribe that we've talked about last night at dinner. And then you have other groups that are out there that eat pretty much very little vegetables,

mostly like roots and tubers and things like that, but are eating a lot of more plant protein. That could be one of the ways that they're getting, sorry, more animal protein. That could be one of the ways that they're still getting access to all these healing compounds if their animals are grown and raised in a way or they're wild or whatever it might be which is what's happening with a lot of these modern day hunter gatherer

tribes i mean the inuit i remember hearing the stories of how they would go and kill the animals but then they would open their stomachs and they would eat the moss and the the greens that these animals would forage on in the arctic tundra so it was really interesting how they would eat the moss and the greens that these animals would forage on in the Arctic tundra. So it was really interesting how they would sort of adapt to getting the nutrients they need. Yeah. No, that's very fascinating.

Very interesting for sure. All right, let's shift into a little bit more practical. So somebody's going about their day. What are, because polyphenols are this larger classification, but underneath them, there's different ones that we know and some that we don't know that haven't been discovered yet. And how do we want to think about in our own life, navigating our day through this pharmacy with an F and some of the main ones we want to incorporate in our diet? Absolutely. So, you know, I think about these is, you know, this is like a giant pharmacy, right? So, like you could say, well, we have drugs.

That's what polyphenols are, they're drugs. Well, what drugs? What compounds matter? And they're different. And again, there's 25,000 of these. So there's flavonoids, there's polyphenolic amides, and flavonoids are things like quercetin and catechins found in fruit and green tea. Polyphenolic amides are in chili peppers, phenolic acids like lignans and still beans are in vegetables

and whole grains. So there's all these compounds that we can identify. We have these names for. And the science of this is really pretty fascinating. We've really done a lot of work on this. So we actually know the ingredients. We know the phytochemicals. We know the nutritional compounds, not just the protein, fat, carbs, vitamins, minerals.

We know all these phytochemicals that are in these plants. So I like to think about how do we start to increase our overall intake of the high polyphenolic plants that are so good for us. So teas are great. Green tea is great. Berries, all the dark colored berries. Certain veggies are super important. So like the brassica family has tons of these healing compounds. You know, tomatoes are great. They have lycopene. Artichokes are great. Asparagus have, again, many, many of these compounds. So

we want to make sure we really eat a wide variety of colorful fruits and vegetables. If you're, for example, eating potatoes, you know, you can always swap to the good version. So instead of eating a Yukon potato, have a purple Peruvian potato, right? Instead of having iceberg lettuce, have maybe more things like arugula, which is a little more nutrient dense or even more wild dandelion greens. So there's always ways to increase the nutritional density and quality of the polyphenols by picking the right plants. Doing tiny little upgrades. Yeah. Just in your life. Wherever you're eating the same stuff again and again, making little upgrades.

Yeah. And then there's dark chocolate, which is great. Now, volume matters. You can eat like 14 chocolate bars. But basically, dark chocolate has all kinds of phenols and things that can be very helpful. Herbs and spices are a great source of these. Curcumin, turmeric. I use a lot of these spices in my cooking.

I use them, you know, in making teas, you can make chai lattes. Herbs and spices feels like one of the lowest hanging fruits to start adding more polyphenols in your diet. Yeah. I remember you had on a care if it's drilled on your podcast,

which I had on too. And she does, you know, groundbreaking longevity study that was there, you know, reversing people's age in a period of time by three years in like eight weeks. And one of the things that she was mentioning was one of the most underrated spices, based on all the research on it out there, is rosemary.

And how she would tell people, just have like a little spice grinder with rosemary in it. Add it to your salad. Cook with stuff. You make eggs in the morning. Just add a little bit of rosemary. I put rosemary in it add it to your salad cook with stuff make your you make eggs in the morning yeah i wrote a little bit of rosemary i put rosemary in everything i have a giant rosemary bush in my my garden and i love it because you could put it in all kinds of things and grains you can put it in when you make meats you can put in salads you can stir fry with it i mean you make brussels sprouts with it i mean it's, it's a really incredible one. It also has very potent detoxification compounds in it. It's super anti-inflammatory antioxidant. So using spices

is super important. Yeah. On rosemary, just one note, we'll put the link in the show notes. There's a great review paper on what's the main compound in rosemary, rosameric acid or something like that. We'll look it up. We'll put in the show notes. There's a great review paper showing how it's connected to improving renal function. It has anti-cancer properties. It's great for cardiovascular health. Like there was 12 different categories all in there and that's just one spice. So the only reason I'm focused on that for a second is that again, lowest hanging fruit on these is just simply adding some more herbs and spices to your cooking that you're already doing right now. Absolutely. And I think, you know, having, having grass fed meats as another source, which I would say more of a generally raised

animals, uh, nuts and seeds really important. And they, they're full of these beneficial compounds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, chia seeds, all the nuts, all contain powerful, not only nutrient-dense forms of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, lots of vitamins, minerals, but they also have a lot of these polyphenols. So, olives and olives are great. The olivine is, I mean, alluropene is a really important polyphenol, for example. And olives, it's great against antiviruses. It's great for dealing with heart disease. It's anti-inflammatory.

So these are super important compounds that you just can make as part of your daily diet. I've got garlic, ginger, great ideas to include these as cooking. So I'm always thinking, how do I include all these extra extras as part of making a yummy dish? So Mark, just like I was talking about people who don't eat a lot of fiber have to like ramp up slowly to it and kind of build it up. That's a part of the process. You don't want to go from one cup a day to nine cups a day.

There's also this other topic that gets a lot of attention that people are trying to navigate. And I've had a little bit of experience in my own life with it. And it's around the toxic phytochemicals, lectins being one that has become very popular over the years, largely due to the work of Dr. Stephen Gundry and a few other individuals. And I'd love to get your view on it, which is a little bit different than maybe some of the popular views that are out there. So jump into the topic of lectins and what you might want to say about it.

Well, I think, you know, first of all, Drew, I think humans are wildly adapted to eat a huge variety of foods, right? So you've got the Inuit in the North Pole who eat whale and seal and very few vegetables and do fine. You've got, you know, the Pima Indians 100 years ago were eating 80% of their diet is carbs, but mostly acorns and, you know and beans and things that were super high fiber. You have populations that eat just a wide variety of different foods that humans are capable of being adapted to. Now, what's happened as a result of our modern lifestyle is that we've caused a lot of gut issues, as we've talked about.

And when that happens, foods that we've caused a lot of gut issues, as we've talked about. And when that happens, foods that we normally can manage and tolerate become harmful. So gluten is a great example of that. We've changed the wheat we're eating to be this dwarf wheat, which is good in that it was able to produce a lot of grain for a lot of people at scale

and be drought resistant. But the unintended consequences was that this gluten content of this new wheat was so high and it had way more gliding proteins that create more leaky gut and more injury. So as we've changed our food supply, we're getting away from the actual foods as they were evolved, but to kind of modern versions, which are unintentionally harmful. Lectins are common proteins in certain plants, nightshades, seeds, nuts, certain beans, that may be problematic for people. If you have autoimmune disease,

if you have gut issues, and it may be that stopping those might be helpful for some people. My main issue is not figuring out what you're sensitive to, but why are you sensitive? So if you heal the gut, then you have the ability to eat a wide variety of foods. When I was really sick, all I could eat was turkey, broccoli, and brown rice. And that's all I ate because everything else I would feel like I just was about to die. So I was very restricted. Now I can pretty much eat anything and my stomach's fine. I mean, I don't eat junk food. I don't eat processed food. But other than that, I can eat vegetable. I can eat whatever. And I don't eat that much stuff I know isn't good for me. I don't eat a ton of bread, although I have it from some time to time. If it's from the right

grain, I know where it's coming from and so forth. I think the goal is to get more resilient. And so I'm not a big one to kind of permanently restrict foods. I think an elimination diet can be helpful. We do that routinely for a week, 10 days, three weeks. We can remove things and then add them back and see how people do. But to say categorically people should not be eating X, Y, or Z food, I think is really tricky. And I think we need to be able to be more inclusive and thoughtful. That's why I created the peak in diet, which is more of a bigger tent umbrella for understanding the principles of healthy nutrition, which is quality matters. So the nutritional density and the quality and phytochemicals matter. Food is medicine. So focusing on that and personalization.

So those three things are really important in terms of any selection of a way of eating. But within that framework, you can have a lot of different approaches and patterns. But I would be really careful to just go on a elimination diet forever. Say, I'm never eating lectins or I'm never going to eat dairy. I'm never going to eat gluten. Let your body tell you. I always say, don't let your ideology trample over your biology, right? We've got to listen to our bodies. It's the smartest doctor in the room. And if you eat something and it doesn't agree with you, your body's telling you something. Then you go, well, why is it agreeing with me? Well, maybe it really just doesn't agree with me. If I eat onions, raw onions, I know I have a genetic thing where I get, where I feel bad. And so I don't eat it. I eat cooked onions.

There's nothing I can do about it. I mean, maybe there's some pathway that I can figure out in the future that we'll discover that I can take some other supplement and it'll fix the pathway. But right now I don't have that. So I have to eat avoiding raw onions. But for most people, we don't want them to restrict their diet. We want them to be flexible and inclusive in a wide variety of foods because we're meant to. But we can't do that if we have a leaky gut. We can't do that until we've healed our gut first. So that's the key. Until I healed my gut, I couldn't eat anything. Now I can eat everything. It's so true. I've done a bunch of gut healing protocols over the years because I had a lot of antibiotic exposure growing up, stre throat ear infections etc etc and uh my gut has

gotten so much better over the years through doing a lot of them and yet still i'm pretty sensitive to most of the foods in the nightshade category bell peppers tomatoes eggplant i can eat them and pretty much instantaneously i get redness in my face and my throat tightens up. So great. There's plenty of other foods that I can eat that are out there, but I know I am one of those individuals that's a little bit more sensitive to those foods, but I still can eat a ton of other plant foods and I'm not missing out. I'm still getting the benefits. And I've had functional medicine doctors like yourself help me with that over the years. It's less of an ideology. It's like, great. Okay. It might be that you still have some leaky gut issues. Okay. Let's do our best attempt to fix that. Okay. That's fixed. It seems like based

on the labs and based on your symptoms. Okay. You're still reacting to this food. We're not exactly sure what's going on. Fine. Let's leave it out. And a little bit here and there is fine. But if that's something that you're okay with leaving out, there's plenty of other foods that are available to you, but that's just my end of one situation. And everybody's got to figure that out for themselves. For sure. Mark, there was a really cool trial on the topic of polyphenols and longevity,

which is what you're writing about right now, that was called the MAPLE trial. And it's where adults 60 and older with higher levels of zonulin were put on a polyphenol rich diet to see if their symptoms improved. This group actually ended up reducing zonulin, increasing butyrate, which I'd love you to talk about. What is butyrate and why is it so important? And also reducing lipopolysaccharides. So break down some of the findings from this trial and help us understand what is zonulin, butyrate, and how do all these things play a role with polyphenols?

So many of you listening have heard of this idea of leaky gut, which essentially is a breakdown in the barrier in your intestinal lining, which is really only one cell thick. You're basically one cell away from a sewer, right? Poop and food on one side and your immune system on the other side, and there's only one cell in between. Those cells are stuck together with tight junctions, like Lego connections. And it's an energy-dependent process. And they're important because you want the food and everything to go through the cells, not in between the cells.

So when those Lego junctions break apart, we call them those tight junctions, loosen, then food and particles and bacterial stuff can get in and through and your immune system's like, what the F is going on here? And it starts to create an inflammatory reaction, which is why we get systemic inflammation, autoimmune disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, all these are inflammatory diseases from the gut. So zonulin was first discovered as something that the body produced when it got cholera. And this was Dr. Alessio Fasano's work. He was an Italian researcher now at Harvard, one of the leading researchers in celiac and gluten. He discovered zonulin was produced at high levels with cholera, which created this huge leaky gut problem. And that's why people die so fast from cholera.

But then he found out that the other biggest thing that triggered it was gluten. So gluten and gliadin is triggering increases in zonulin, which creates a leaky gut. Now, what's also fascinating, Drew, is that we see as people get older, zion levels go way up, which means they have a leaky gut. So as you're older, we also see this whole inflammaging phenomenon, this process of inflammation causing rampant disease and destruction and aging and death. So a lot of that can be coming from the gut, from the increases in zion, which are due to our crappy diet, all the drugs, you know, these people on acid blockers, you know, just the whole part of getting older is people are not taking care of their gut. And they're dealing with all

the consequences of a lifelong gut-busting lifestyle. So when you look at zonulin levels, it's a really interesting predictor of what's going on. You can look at it in the stool, you can look at it in the blood. And so you don't want high zonulin. And what's really interesting is when you start to eat high levels of polyphenols, you start to eat pre and probiotics, you start to repair the gut. When you get off of gluten, which is really important, then the gut can heal. When you start changing the bacteria through changing your diet in the polyphenols, the good bugs start to grow, the bad bugs go down. The bad bugs are creating these damaging compounds like cholera that do also promote leaky gut. And some of the things

that they create are lipopolysaccharides or LPS. These are endotoxins. So essentially, these are on the surface of bacteria. They're not meant to be in your bloodstream. When you get a leaky gut, they get in your bloodstream and the immune system goes, well, what's that toxin? Danger, danger, danger. And it creates something called metabolic endotoxemia, which means your metabolism is poisoned by these toxins. And independent of what you're eating, you can get insulin resistance, you will gain weight, you'll create more inflammation. So it creates this vicious cycle of metabolic chaos and weight gain and diabetes just from having a leaky gut and having exposure to these bacterial toxins.

Now, when you eat a lot of polyphenols and you get your gut straightened out and you get rid of the gluten, then you start to produce the right compounds, the right bacteria. And the right bacteria in the gut, one of the things we look at, Drew, is a stool test. We look at something called short-chain fatty acids or SCFAs, like butyrate. Short-chain fatty acids are produced by bacteria when they're digesting their food, when you're feeding them. The fibers that you can't necessarily digest, they digest, and that creates butyrate. Butyrate is so important because one, it's the fuel for the colonic cells, so it keeps everything healthy in there. And two, it's a signal modifier for all sorts of things in the body. So it's a huge anti-cancer compound and it really improves your overall health. And when it's not there, this P53 oncogene, which it suppresses,

starts to activate, which then, for example, leads to colon cancer. So you just think about like this. If you're not eating the right foods, you're not having the right bacteria, you're not producing short-chain fatty acids and butyrate, that's why your risk of colon cancer goes up. And there are even studies, for example, looking at inflammatory bowel disease. And when I, for example, had my colitis, my butyrate levels were low and my short-chain fatty acids were low. They were almost non-existent because all the good bugs were gone.

There was just all bad bugs in there. And that led to me having this kind of colitis. And one of the treatments in academic centers is infusing butyrate rectally into patients with colitis. Now, it's really smelly and awful. You can, thank God, you can take it as a pill now, but it's really important to take the levels of short-chain fatty acids very seriously in your body because it determines so much about your health. And if you take the right foods like the polyphenols, it's going to raise the butyrate levels and the lipopolysaccharide levels go down, zonulin levels go down. And that's what we saw in these elderly patients, even though they were

older and they had a purely fixed microbiome, by adding all these polyphenol-rich foods, they lowered the inflammatory lipopolysaccharides, they lowered zonulin, and they increased butyrate, which is really necessary for the gut health and healing. Yeah, and just a little bit off of what they were doing. So they were given a polyphenol-rich diet and three polyphenol-rich snacks per day, including berries, oranges, pomegranate, pomegranate juice, green tea, apples, apple juice, dark chocolate. All in all, the goal was for them to get 724 grams of polyphenols, right? So that's a lot. That's a good amount, but that fits within the window

of the recommendations that you give to people. Totally, totally. And if you would take a day, like take your day yesterday or the day before, like how would you navigate for you to incorporate those in between the mixture of all the different things that you do, diets potentially, I think you also take a butyrate supplement, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so just walk us through some of those that you might do. Yeah, what do you do to get that sort of, that number that showed the benefits of reducing the zonulin levels? Yeah, so I'm basically really conscious about this. And like I said, when I go to the grocery store,

it's actually my pharmacy, and my fridge is my medicine cabinet. So I literally open it up and go, okay, what am I going to do for dinner? So I'll, for example, have a Japanese sweet potato with all these- Well, let's start for breakfast. Okay, breakfast.

Okay, breakfast. Breakfast, often I'll do a shake because I work out and I'll do a protein shake. And then I'll add pomegranate concentrate, cranberry concentrate, matcha powder. I'll use other – I'll use like frozen berries. I'll use other like superfood things like baobab tree or maca or different kinds of acai powders. So I'll put in all sorts of these polyphenol blends into my smoothie, along with prebiotics and along with probiotics.

So I actually create this incredible gut healing shake every morning to make sure I get my polyphenols, my pre and my probiotics, and get up to speed on what I want for my gut. But I also put in probiotics, I put in prebiotic powders. And I really use this every day as a gut healing, gut support system, which I've used. And it's essentially why I created Gut Food, because I'm tired of actually throwing all these things together and having five different bottles of stuff. I just want one simple solution.

So it's really for me, actually. But the beautiful thing about it is that you can get these things in a simple way, in a quick way in the morning in your breakfast smoothie. Or you can, you know, have, for example, let's say a chia seed pudding. You can make it with almond milk, macadamia milk, and then you can put on berries in it. You can put in different powders. So I do that as well sometimes just to have a different kind of breakfast. So take us through and, you know, you, you know, would you say that you have most days because you work out and also for like brain power and stuff, would you say that you

would have a shake in the morning? Yeah. When I'm home and I can do that, I can. When I'm traveling, it's a little harder, but yes. And then, and then I'll, I would say for lunch, you know, I always focus on, you know, where am I going to get the most nutrient dense foods? So I'll have, you know, maybe a can of mackerel or sardines, which is full of omega-3 fats and, and choline and, and, um, um, also, you know, calcium with the bones and so forth, protein. And then I'll have lots of veggies. So I'll have a salad, for example, I'll throw in arugula. I'll have fennel, tomatoes, pumpkin seeds, cucumbers, olives.

I'll just throw all these different things in there that are full of polyp. So I get my alluropene from the olives. I'll get some of the brassica. The arugula has a lot of the brassica things, so the sulforaphanes. The pumpkin seeds have various phytonutrients that are very helpful for cancer and prostate health. So I'm kind of very aware of what I'm putting in as a medicine, and that's sort of how I get my lunch. And dinner, I'll usually have like three or four or five veggie dishes. So I'll have like sort of roasted shiitake mushrooms, which have the polysaccharides that are great for immunity. I'll take kind of broccolini and stir fry that with garlic. And the garlic has all the allicin

and compounds. And I'll put ginger in it for the ginger oils, and they're anti-inflammatory. And the broccolini has glucosinolates, sulforaphane, folate, different vitamins. Then I'll have a Japanese sweet potato, like they have in Okinawa, which is full of phytochemicals, maybe why they live to really be old there. And then I'll have maybe a salad on top of it. So I had like a tomato, cucumber, avocado, hearts of palm, fennel, cilantro salad the other night where I just threw it all together and put some olive oil and vinegar on. So I really try to like make a plentiful amount of vegetables where they're the centerpiece of my meal and the meat or protein is a side dish.

And a little dark chocolate here and there. Of course. A little hue chocolate. And as you've always mentioned, you know, with everything, it's diet first. Diet first because food is medicine. And when you start with your diet first,

you can dramatically start to improve these aspects of your life. Along with that, as you went through your own healing journey and as you went through all your research, our team started getting really excited about this. And we came back to you and said, look, these are all great. And yes, diet first. And we all want to make sure we have this diet and clean things out and add in the blood sugar layer with all like the great polyphenols and the wide variety of fruits and vegetables that you talk about. And we all asked you, like, you've been talking a lot about this little

shake mixture that you're making. Can you make a product that we can all get a chance to take on a daily basis? And let's get started. So two years ago, you went down this path and you came up with something and it's almost on the market now. We have a waiting list set up and the product is called, if you want to get into it. Gut food. Gut food. Tell us what is gut food and why is it so important to feed your gut with the right things? Once especially, you set up that base sort of pegan diet that you talk about.

I think it's really clear that given the stresses of our modern society, given our inadequate diet, given the low levels of polyphenols, given the chronic stressors, given the environmental toxins, given the fact that most of us had antibiotics in our life and have had gut issues, it seemed to me we really need to have something that's like a multivitamin for the gut. We all think, oh, I need to take a multivitamin, or I should take fish oil. I should take this or that. But what is actually the gut required to stay healthy? And it's really a combination of three main things, which are prebiotic, which I'll talk about, which are basically fuel for the healthy bacteria, probiotics, and polyphenols. And this is the cocktail of stuff I put together with a few other things.

And it was amazing to me how nothing like that exists on the market. And I had to basically piece it together from all these different products. And it was a pain in the ass to travel with this, put together. And I was like, this is something that the world needs. And we'll really upgrade our whole health as a nation. Because like we were talking about earlier, the gut plays such a role in every disease. Not just digestive symptoms, but heart disease, cancer, diabetes. So all these diseases are things that are consequences of not having a healthy gut. So what can we provide people on a daily basis? It's easy to take. It's delicious.

It's simple. It's cost-effective to keep your gut healthy for life. And I, you know, I've been writing this new book on longevity, Drew, called Young Forever. It's so clear how the degradation of the microbiome over time is so correlated with poor health outcomes and with chronic disease. And if you look at healthy centenarians, people who live to be well over 100, their microbiomes look quite different than other people who are younger and are sicker. So keeping your gut microbiome healthy is also a longevity strategy. So for me, it's just part of the daily maintenance. You know, I eat right, exercise, get sleep, meditate, take my multis, and take my gut food because, and I do it, you know, I've been having a piece together myself for years

because we didn't make this product, but I'm like, we need this product. So, and the product contains really powerful ingredients, all research backed. And we pick stuff that is really has really good evidence behind it, clinical studies, randomized controlled trials, so that we can come up with a formula that works. And it has, and it's changed people's lives in the beta testing. That's certainly changed my life. And I think the world is really ready for something that's going to be overall gut support, not just used for emergencies, not just used for when you're really sick, not for people who really only have gut issues, but something that everybody could use as an insurance policy

to keep their gut healthy over time. What I love about this formula, and it's five ingredients that are clinically backed, as you said, and we're also embarking on our own trials through this process, finalizing our partners to do our own clinical trials on the finished formula that's there. And we'll continue to keep everybody posted is that this is also an evolving formula. As the research continues to grow, as you continue to find out more things, you'll continue to upgrade and change the formula to continue to offer people better access to things that can, again, be a multivitamin for their gut to help them grow their gut in the right direction. And also for people who are struggling. We know that the ingredients that are in gut food have

been individually studied in clinical trials and they're shown to dramatically improve digestive symptoms, pain, bloating, constipation. Leaky gut. Leaky gut, mood disorders, brain disorders. I mean, it's quite impressive when in America, has been shown in Europe in the research trials to dramatically reduce GI discomfort, 75%, and also to reduce reflux, 74%, and also to improve other factors that we just wouldn't even normally think of being related to, for example, cognitive function, depression, and mood issues. So there's all kinds of other benefits that you get from optimizing your gut. So the ingredients that are in there are polyphenols. They're olive leaf and prickly pear extracts, which are two plant compounds that really

have profound impact on the microbiome and in the clinical trials really had improvement across this whole spectrum of gut issues. So I think we just have to be able to think about what are the ingredients, what is in there, lactospore, another special probiotic. It's a soil-based organism. I'm sorry, it's a spore-based organism. It's room stable, but that has also been shown in clinical trials to reduce irritable bowel symptoms by 42% in bloating, 47% vomiting reduction, 42% reduction in diarrhea, pain reduction by 68%, and then even affected cognitive function, which is surprising. But when you understand the role of the gut and the mind and the brain, there's the gut-brain

connection, the brain-gut connection, and you call the gut the second brain. But there was a 57% reduction in depression, improvement of sleep by 58%, reduction in dementia symptoms by 26%, and improvement of quality of life by 47%, and a reduction in GI discomfort by 62%. That's impressive data. So when you start to look at these studies on these ingredients, the probiotics, the polyphenols, you start to add all this together and it's quite impressive. Now, one of the things we wanted to get a chance to mention,

Mark, as part of that is that some of this data, and again, five ingredients, all clinically backed. We have the links and everything on the website once it's all live. For all the studies. For all the studies and the show notes and everything is that there are smaller studies. They are, in this this case for some of these ingredients we pulled in they're industry studies that are there you know you always transparently talk about you know hey it's important to know who's doing the research yeah where is it coming from it doesn't mean that you can't you have to write off industry funded studies it's just that you should be aware and it should be part of the transparency process

absolutely yeah just back backing up on that, any drug that's on the marketplace today was an industry funded study, right? So all the drugs you're taking were published in peer reviewed journals, were done, paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. Now, does that make them invalid? Well, you should definitely critically look at the data, but if it gets peer reviewed and it's published and the conflicts of interest are disclosed, you can question the study design, you can question the motivations, you can question the manipulation of the data, the statistics, but at the end of the day, it's pretty good. It's the best we can do. Now, there are government-funded studies that are independent studies, and those are great.

And unfortunately, those are very hard to get because there's a limited budget from the NIH. And there's almost zero budget for studying things that aren't patentable, like, for example, probiotics or prebiotics or polyphenols. So those studies don't get funded. And that requires the companies that are actually making the product to do clinical trials. So they'll set up a clinical trial. They'll fund it, but if it's a randomized placebo-controlled trial that's then done correctly and is peer-reviewed

by other scientists who aren't funded or work for the company that's making the product, and then it's published in a major medical journal, then that's legitimate. I always still look at the conflict of interest and I wonder about it, but it points in the right direction and you look at the data and you have to sort of take it on a case-by-case basis. And then, of course, there's still more we need to learn. There still needs to be bigger trials and more studies. But we're looking here at, you know, what does the data show? Is it safe? Is it effective? Is it cost effective? And, you know, what is the sort of big impact of it? And so when you start to kind of use those metrics, you know, looking at the ingredients

we put in the formula, the polyphenols, the probiotics, the prebiotics, and also, you know, things that help sort of reset the gut, we really have a beautiful cocktail of things that are evidence-based that have worked individually and we're combining them to create even a better outcome, which I think we now are going to take that combination product and also do a clinical trials on that. Yeah, which I'm really excited about. And we'll keep everybody posted as we follow along the journey. If you want to learn more about gut food, you can go to gutfood.com. You can either sign up for the wait list, depending on when this podcast comes

out, or if it's available, you can jump into it. We'd love to have you get a chance to try it out. So Mark, coming back to the topic of polyphenols and really with this focus of diet first and this idea of, you know, sometimes the things that are so simple in front of us are so easily overlooked in their ability to dramatically change our life. Exercise is one of those things, movement, right? You always say that if there was a pill on the market that could do what exercise does for the body, it would be the biggest selling pill in the world. For sure, for sure. And in that same way, we all go grocery shopping. We all go to Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, whatever, our local grocery store, farmer's market.

And we constantly see all these different vegetables, fruits around us. And in a way, I kind of feel like polyphenols sometimes need a spokesperson. They need a good PR agent. They need a good PR campaign. And you're the guy, right? So let's give people the final sort of pitch around the importance around polyphenols, especially if they think like, well, I eat healthy and I eat a little bit of vegetables

here and there and I do my thing and I think I eat a pretty good diet. But they may not be stepping into the power of what is available to them with all the incredible research that's out there on polyphenols. So final closing thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I agree, Drew. I think, personally, I spend a lot of time thinking about this, and as I begin to learn more about human biology, I mean, I know I've been doing this for 30 years, but I still feel like a beginner,

and it's shocking to me how powerful these compounds are and how often they actually are better than drugs for the same condition. And this is the work that William Lee's done that's mind-blowing, where he'll look at deep, deep analysis that they do in the lab of the impact of drugs on certain pathways, let's say blood pressure or inflammation or whatever. And then they'll compare like an optimal food with the right phytochemicals against the drug. And the phytochemicals do better like in terms of the power and the potency of them, which is kind of counterintuitive to what we believe.

And the reason I say that is I want people to understand that this isn't a nice to, this is a have to. If you want to stay healthy, if you want to live a long time, if you want to optimize your gut, you must figure out how to upgrade the quality of your diet. And that means increasing the quantity and the quality of the polyphenols. So in many of my books and other places, I've listed all the different kind of colors of foods, all the different benefits of what those foods do, all the polyphenols that do those benefits, and how to start thinking about incorporating these foods on a regular basis. So you can get a little cheat sheet, and it's in the Pegan Diet and other places, where you can go, oh, I'm going to go to the grocery store. I'm going to pick these extra foods because these are extra

special foods that I know are going to increase my phytochemical content and are going to help me stay healthy. And as we kind of get to learn more about these, we're going to learn how to put these in combinations. For example, for longevity, there's this whole, and I'm just talking about it because this is an area I'm working on now. There's a whole suite of compounds that we're learning are profoundly impactful, like quercetin, which is in our formula. Quercetin is a compound, which is a flavonoid, comes from apples and onions. And this is crazy, Drew. They did a study looking at biological age with epigenetic methylation patterns. And they were able to show by using quercetin, and they used another like drug that's used often for cancer drug. They were able to actually reverse biological age by

using these polyphenols, which is pretty amazing. So they're not like, oh, nice to have things. They really have to have. So start to think about, one, how do you take them? I sometimes take them as supplements. I take them as powders. I put them in my smoothies. I'm constantly thinking about how do I increase polyphenols in my diet. And that's what you should be doing too because they're as essential as protein, fats, and carbs, as essential as vitamins and minerals. And if we don't get them, we get what we call long-latency diseases. And they're things like, well, you might not die tomorrow of cancer,

but you might get it in 20 or 30 years or Alzheimer's. So these are these essential medicines that the more we include in our diet, the better we are. And it's what we really mean when we say food is medicine. I love it, Mark. If there was a PR team that was needed for polyphenols, you'd be the head of it. And, you know, you do a great job. You know, instead of the got milk ads, we would do a whole new campaign around polyphenols. And put you on their shirtless with you sitting

on a horse, just like you have on Instagram. There you go. All right, Mark, I'm going to toss it back to you to go ahead and conclude us on today's episode on all things gut and polyphenol related. Oh, thanks, Drew. And thanks for listening to this week's masterclass. If you like what you heard and you want to learn more about our new multivitamin for your gut called Gut Food, just go visit gutfood.com and sign up for the wait list because it's not out yet.

And if you enjoyed this episode, share with your friends and family. And we'll catch you next week for part two of our Gut Health series. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite

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