Eat The Rainbow: Foods That Reverse Chronic Diseases
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Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. When you understand what's in food, the most important thing to understand is that quality matters. The source matters. Where it was grown matters. The quality of the seed matters. The quality of the soil matters. The way it was grown and transported and processed and where you could buy it. All those things influence the quality of the nutrition in the plant or in the animal. Hey,

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Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. Every week, I bring on interesting guests to discuss the latest topics in the field of functional medicine and do a deep dive on how these topics pertain to your health. In today's episode, I have some interesting discussions with other experts in the field. So let's just jump right in.

When you eat food, there's information in it far beyond calories, beyond protein, fat, fiber, carbohydrate. And that information in food is driving all the biochemistry in your body. And it's even building the stuff you're made of. And there's

literally billions of chemical reactions that happen in your body every second. And they're all regulated by various inputs, your thoughts, your feelings, your microbiome and so forth. But the biggest input every single day that we use to modify our biology for good or bad are thoughts.

foods. And those foods determine the quality of your biology, the quality of your health, and the quality of your life at the end of the day. So we're going to be talking about how food is medicine, how it's a biological response modifier, how it's literally code that upgrades or downgrades your biological software with every single bite. So I'm going to use these five

foods as an example of the power of foods to regulate your biology. And the truth about it is that it is more effective than most medication. In fact, it works faster, better, it's cheaper, and it has very good side effects. So there's really a new understanding about the role of food as medicine, not as a sort of medicine light, but actually as more powerful than most current therapies for chronic disease. You know, just take diabetes, for example.

There is no drug that can reverse diabetes, but food can. And that's been demonstrated over and over. So let's jump into these five foods. My first is probably something you've never heard about called cognac. And I don't mean the drink. I mean cognac root. It's a special kind of fiber. It's from a tuber. It's Japanese tuber that is used in Japanese cuisine. And it's...

Got zero calories, but it contains incredible fiber that is both prebiotic, which means it feeds the good part of your microbiome, but it also slows the absorption of sugar and fats into your bloodstream. So it helps you balance your blood sugar and cholesterol.

And it's something you can buy as a powder and you can mix it in water and drink it, but also you can take it as noodles. Yes, I said noodles. So you can have your favorite noodle pasta dish, but instead swap out these noodles and it actually provides

an incredible benefit to your body in terms of the fiber and the regulation of your blood sugar and insulin, as well as cholesterol. And the noodles are often called shirataki noodles. This is the Japanese name for them. You can Google them, but they're really good and yummy and you can put all kinds of sauce on them and just treat them like pasta. So that's one of my favorites.

Another one is a food that's been recently rediscovered that's pretty striking that has among the most phytochemicals of any plant food ever discovered. And it's buckwheat. And it's a particular kind of buckwheat from the Himalayas called Himalayan tartary buckwheat.

that's been around for over 3,500 years, but only recently rediscovered by my good friend, colleague, and mentor, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. I won't go into the whole story because we've talked about it before on the podcast, but this particular plant has grown in very tough conditions up in the Himalayas. There's poor soils, it's cold weather, not so much rain. I mean, it's nasty to be a plant up there

And yet, because it's under such stress, it produces its own defense mechanisms, which are phytochemicals. So the plants produce these molecules not for our benefit, but for their benefit. It's their immune system. It's their defense system.

And so the harder the plant is stressed, the more of these chemicals are produced. So a wild strawberry is way better than a organic strawberry is better than a commercial strawberry that's an industrial strawberry. Same thing with any food. So when you stress a plant like that, it produces all these phytochemicals. And what's interesting about Himalayan tartar buckwheat is that it contains some of these molecules that are in no other plants. And one of them in particular has a particular power to rejuvenate your immune system.

And as we age, there's something called immunosenescence, which is the aging of our immune system. And that's why we see with COVID, for example, so many people who are older or chronically ill are getting sicker and dying because their immune systems can't handle it.

So what the Himalayan tartar buckewit has is phytochemicals that actually kill the zombie cells that are the immune senescent cells and really help your immune system rejuvenate. They also contain over 130 more phytochemicals that are polyphenols, risperidin, rutin. Quercetin, for example, is very abundant in Himalayan tartar buckewit and has been found to regulate allergy, immunity, gut health, as well as be beneficial in prevention of COVID.

So there's really some interesting compounds in there. Plus it's got more protein, less starch and sugar, more minerals like magnesium and zinc than almost any other what we call grain. And the thing about it, it's not a grain. So if you're grain free, you get to have buckwheat because it's actually a flour and I guess you can eat flour. So the next category of foods, which is really a staple in my diet, I eat this every single day.

because one, I have a genetic problem that makes it hard for me to make a molecule called glutathione, and two, it's just such a delicious food, and three, it has all these other benefits. So these are the cruciferous vegetables or brassicas, and they include things like broccoli, cabbage, collards, kohlrabi, kale,

I think arulis part of it and Brussels sprouts. So all those kinds of family of vegetables contain compounds called glucosinolates and sulforaphanes and many other compounds as well. But these have turned out to be incredibly powerful to upregulate a molecule in your body called glutathione. And this molecule has so many functions in the body, but particularly it's powerful in

in regulating immune system and improving your antioxidant system and detoxifying. In fact, it's the master antioxidant, master detoxifier and master regulator of your immune system. And it's made by the body, but it often is sluggish and making it when we're exposed to so many toxins. And some of us like me have a gene doesn't make that much of it. So, I mean, historically we weren't exposed to 80,000 different toxic chemicals and all this pollution and crap. And so we really need to have a robust detox system.

And so for me, it's really important to have at least two cups a day of these cruciferous vegetables. I like broccolini. I love that one. And you can mix and match and have all kinds of different ones. But these are really critical. Plus, not only do they contain these compounds that are detoxifying, but they're also anti-cancer. And in China, they did an incredible study where they looked at the urine samples among Chinese and they did food questionnaires. They found that those who had the most

in their, these compounds in their urine, namely, you know, most of the sort of broccoli kind of extracts, we say are broccoli metabolites in the urine, they are the lowest rates of cancer. So there's a direct correlation between high intakes of these foods and low rates of cancer. Broccoli sprouts are like broccoli on steroids, basically. And you can put them on salads, they're really delicious, they're a little spicy, yummy.

really high levels of these phytochemicals like sulforaphane, glucosinolates. And then all these other compounds are also in these vegetables like magnesium, folate, as well as vitamin K and iron and many, many other really beneficial nutrients that we need. So it's a real staple. The next major category of food is mushrooms. And I'm not talking about the white button mushrooms, which actually are not that nutritious. And particularly, you should not eat them raw because they have a natural carcinogen in them. But

But I'm talking about mushrooms that have been used for thousands of years in China and Japan and other countries and that actually have powerful medicinal properties. And they contain a class of carbohydrates called polysaccharides. And these polysaccharides have...

dramatic potential to boost immune function, to help cancer and many, many other things. So for example, my favorites are shiitake, maitake and lion's mane. So shiitake is wonderful for immune function. Maitake is also wonderful for immune function, but also cancer prevention.

And there's many, many studies on mitocaine cancer. And then the last is lion's mane, which looks like a brain and actually is great for neuroplasticity. So you not only can take them as supplements, but you can cook them. I roast them in the oven. I saute them. They're delicious little garlic and they're really yummy and they're great for you.

And there's a whole new mushroom explosion literally happening in our country with exploration of different kinds of edible mushrooms, therapeutic mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms. So we're really entering a mushroom revolution and stay tuned because there's billions of dollars flowing into this marketplace.

And the last, and again, there's 25,000 different molecules, and I could have picked 10 other foods, right? But these are the ones that I kind of really like to talk about today. And the other is green tea. Now, green tea has a classic compound called epigalactocatic and gallates, which are

are powerful antioxidants but they also up regulate glutathione they're powerful in detoxification they're anti-cancer they've been shown to improve immune function for example around covid so they're really powerful and you can just drink green tea and there's matcha there's sencha there's uh you know i like

brown rice one green tea with brown rice i think it's called jimacha or something probably screw that up and it's great and and those those are something you can incorporate in your day just as a cup of green tea or iced tea i put matcha powder in my smoothie for example so there's a lot of ways to get it i think these are really important superfoods that we should be incorporating in our diet on a regular basis when you understand what's in food and i i think it would be worth breaking it down a little bit um

The most important thing to understand is that the quality matters. The source matters. Where it was grown matters. The quality of the seed matters. The quality of the soil matters. The way it was grown and transported and processed and where you could buy it. All those things influence the quality of the nutrition in the plant or in the animal. And so we've developed a food system, which is really great at creating a lot of starchy food.

well-preserved carbohydrate calories that can sit on their shelf for years and not go bad. But that is not what we want to be eating because within food, when you look at the quality aspect, it says everything about how food can regulate your biology. So for example, protein, fat, carbs, I'll just go through a couple of examples.

So protein, you think protein is protein, protein. Is it all the same? Well, no, it's not. If you're eating a feedlot cow versus let's say a regeneratively raised grass-fed cow, the effects on your biology are radically different, even if it's the same grams of protein.

So, for example, the feedlot cow will be full of antibiotics, will be fed a lot of grain, will have a lot of omega-6 fats, may have all kinds of other inflammatory molecules in them because of the diet they're eating and the way they're raised, plus all the antibiotics and so forth.

The regeneratively raised grass-fed cow is eating maybe a wide variety of plants, 50 to 100 different plants, many medicinal plants with all kinds of phytochemicals. They have higher levels of omega-3, higher levels of vitamins, higher levels of antioxidants, higher levels of what we call phytochemicals. And you go, wait a minute, Dr. Hyman, how are there phytochemicals in animals? That doesn't even make sense. They're called phyto, which means plants. How can there be plant chemicals in meat? So the animals eat the plants and we eat the animals. And basically we are whatever...

we're eating eight. So we're seeing, for example, high levels of some of these beneficial phytochemicals like the catechins in, for example, goat milk has been eating certain shrubs and plants as we do in green tea. So that's profound to discover that. And the quality changes the effects on your biology. And there's been some studies looking at, if you eat, for example, wild meat versus feedlot meat, you feedlot meat, same grams of protein, your inflammation goes up, eat wild meat goes down, right? So the quality matters. Fat's another example.

you can eat the same grams of trans fat, like basically shortening, as you do of omega-3 fats, which comes from fish, and it binds to a part of your cell called PPAR, which is basically a receptor on the nucleus of your cells. And when the trans fat binds to that receptor, gram for gram, it turns on inflammation. It slows down your metabolism. It makes you pre-diabetic. When you have the same amount of fat from fish oil, it will actually reduce inflammation. It will speed up your metabolism and it'll reverse diabetes.

So same bat in terms of the amount, but the quality matters. Same thing with carbohydrates. If you have Himalayan tartar buckwheat flour and you make pancakes from that versus modern dwarf wheat, which is super starchy, has way more gliadin proteins

than traditional wheat and is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest, which is a terrible destroyer of your microbiome and the soil microbiome and also affects the risk for cancer. And it's then preserved with something called calcium propionate, which is a preservative that causes autism in animal studies and hyperactivity behavior issues in kids. I mean, that's a very different kind of pancake, even though you're eating the same amount of carbohydrate.

So that's just on the macronutrient level. But on the micronutrient level, there's also big differences in vitamin and mineral content, but the bigger differences are in the phytochemical content.

There's a wonderful book called Eat Wild, which talks about, for example, the difference between a wild blueberry and a conventional blueberry or a small purple Peruvian potato versus a giant, you know, Idaho starchy potato or a difference between traditional Native American corn versus the modern corn. Even though they're all corn or whatever, the phytochemicals are profoundly different and have tremendous differences in their biological effects.

So when we're eating food, we're not just eating for energy. We're not just eating for protein, fat, or carbohydrate, or fiber. We're not just eating for vitamin minerals. We're eating for this class of compounds, which turns out to be probably the most single, most important regulator of all your biological functions and is the major determinant of the quality of your health and aging. So if you want to create health, these are not optional ingredients.

So we talk about essential nutrients and vitamins and minerals as being essential to life. And if you don't have them, you die. Well, you're not going to get a deficiency disease.

if you don't have these phytochemicals like scurvy or rickets. But you will develop chronic disease and you will age faster if you don't have these protective compounds in your body on a daily basis. So it's so important to understand that the quality of your diet matters at every single level and the source matters and all those things along the entire supply chain matter if you're going to actually think about what you're eating.

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Let's follow a piece of food that we want to put in our mouth, right? So we're chewing it up. Guess what? Our food actually interacts with the healthy gut bacteria that lives in part on our tongue.

So our tongue has healthy gut bacteria as well. The gut starts in the mouth and it goes all the way to the anus. And so when we eat foods like a beet, for example, or a piece of spinach, and we're chewing and enjoying the beet, it turns out that the nitrogen that the plant naturally absorbed in the soil gets converted by our gut microbiome that live in the little recesses of our tongue. So think about it. You get up in the morning and you're brushing your tongue. Okay, now it'll grow back.

Okay. - I don't do that. I think it's supposed to, who brushes their tongue? I don't know. It's a thing. - But people actually use this like dentists give mouthwash. And they actually kill all the bacteria in your mouth

with the intent of actually preventing cavities. Well, look, if you have good, healthy gut bacteria in your mouth, which is one of the body's health defense systems, it actually works for you. It doesn't work against you. And it actually suppresses cavities by itself. So eat a piece of spinach or beet, chew it up. The bacteria actually change the nitrogen into a form that when you swallow it gets absorbed in your stomach.

We're still following the food along as a chemical form that is nitric oxide. Now, nitric oxide suddenly is absorbed in the stomach, in your blood vessels, carried by the circulation, which causes vasodilation. Now your blood pressure falls. And why is that important? Because for every, I mean, hypertension, one of the big causes of stroke for

for example. And for every single point, we can lower that top number in the blood pressure, you know, 140 over 90, we decrease our risk of stroke by 5%. So it's meaningful. So, you know, a nitric oxide also

has other benefits for our body as well. It actually calls another defense system stem cells to help us heal. So the stem cells live in a bone marrow, have nitric oxide. Now they fly into the bloodstream like bees in a hive looking for organs to actually repair. So just eating a spinach or beet, for example, will immediately help our cardiovascular system, help us our regeneration system, and also can help grow blood vessels that we need to heal. That's just one example of how we can track

kind of like the, you know, it's like being like a, like a, going on safari in Africa. You know, you're, you're in a Jeep with a camera and trying to follow, follow on what's going on. And we're beginning to understand there's this, you know, incredible journey that happens in our body once with foods that we eat and they activate our health defenses. Yeah. One of the favorite things I love to talk about is how

we've sort of lost our nutritional wisdom and historically we were attracted to the right foods now we're not because our brain chemistry hormones and our microbiome all been hijacked and are sending chaotic signals to our brain about what to eat but historically we crave the right things and and when you eat in certain way you you don't actually look at food the same way i mean when you see

when I see processed food or I go by a Starbucks and I see all the muffins, it doesn't look like food to me. I'm like, well, why would I eat that? It's like eating a rock. It just doesn't even interest me. And it's not because I'm depriving myself. It's because I've changed my nutritional wisdom in my innate biology to crave the right things. And what happens is when you look at this phytochemical

story, the flavors in our food come from these molecules. So actually, the more flavorful a thing is naturally, not when you put all kinds of stuff on it, but naturally, actually, the better it is for you. The more medicine is in the food.

Well, and you know, when you treat the food with medicines, like putting pesticides on foods, for example, you might make it look a little bit nicer. But in fact, you know, I always like to talk about this example. I used to be a skeptic about organic foods. And the reason is because there was so much marketing on there. And I, you know, like telling me to have less, less something bad doesn't attract me. I want to know, like, I want a different reason. And so I started to talk to horticulturalists.

And they told me something really important. They said, you know that a plant like a strawberry or a coffee bean, when they're existing in the wild and the pests, the little bugs, insect nibble at their leaves and stems. Yeah, they produce more chemicals. They produce more chemicals because they view the little nibbles as an injury. So in response, as a wound healing response, they create more electric acid in a strawberry or more chlorogenic acid in the coffee bean.

And sure enough, when you actually put pesticides on a strawberry or a coffee, which is conventionally grown, you wind up, they don't need to make more of those chemicals. And so what you wind up having is something that looks like a coffee bean and something that looks like a strawberry, but it's actually relatively deficient in what mother nature would have otherwise served up. That's actually good for our body. And so, you know, I started to change my mind more good.

as opposed to less bad. Now that actually tracks me. It's true. I think the other point to make on the back of that is that when we put these chemicals on the soil, it kills all the life in the soil. So when you till the soil, when you put fertilizer on it, when you pesticides, herbicides, it literally kills the microbiome of the soil.

And the plants are in an intimate relationship with the microbiome of the soil. They're feeding the microbiome by bringing in carbon dioxide, turning that into metabolizable starch. And then in turn, those bacteria are helping the plant extract nutrients from the soil, minerals, vitamins, all kinds of stuff that the soil has that benefits the plant. So it's this mutualism that occurs.

that when we break that cycle, we end up, as we see now, with many of our fruits and vegetables having dramatically lower levels of nutrients than they did even 50 years ago. And that terrifies me because these nutrients are not just

kind of window dressing on our food they're critical molecules that are they call them vitamins bite it vital for life that's what they have vitamins that they call and that was the whole point of these things that you'd get sick and die if you didn't eat them so we're kind of a pandemic of that well and i and i totally agree because i i think you and i were um

at a meeting once where we both heard there was like only 60 harvests left in topsoil in America. Like, just think about that. Like you can count that off, you know, with a family member on hands and fingers and toes. That is truly scary. And so I think that, you know, the greater, the more we're alert to the fact that if we want to take good care of ourselves, we don't want to get more complicated. We want to get more simple.

We want to actually follow our body's instincts to eat those things that are more natural, that are less processed, that are plant-based. And, you know, ultimately, you know, you were talking earlier about, you know, animals eating plants. You know, even these delicious seafoods, oily fish that people actually eat, at the end of the day, it's big fish eating smaller fish eating smaller fish eating plants. And that's where the Omega-3s come from. Exactly. It's the algae, right? Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, it's so true. I think the interesting thing that I've been learning about is that the animals left to their own devices, they'll eat three or four main crops or foods.

But if they're free to eat and forage for a wide variety of plants, they might eat up to 50 or 100 different plants. And they'll sample little bits of each one, kind of like taking their vitamins or their daily pharmaceutical drugs. And those animals, so if you take a feedlot cow, it takes an enormous amount of investment to keep it healthy. Antibiotics, hormones, all kinds of

you know, very aggressive measures because they're not eating their natural diet. And the molecules in there that we want aren't there. And there may be inflammatory molecules. When you take a grass-fed cow, better. But if it's only eating one or two kinds of grasses, that's not great. And they need extra support. Whereas regeneratively raised cows foraging on maybe 100 different plants actually don't need medicines, don't need antibiotics, don't get sick. If the plants are the right plants to actually grow to their

ideal weight as fast as feedlot cows and don't release as much methane. I mean, it's really fascinating when you get into the science of the biology of how much the interrelation between soil, plants, animals, and humans exists. - And the concept of diversity, which you're talking about is so important, right? 'Cause we do wanna protect the species and the diversity of species in our planet. But actually this is how we're hardwired as well.

We, our human body, loves diversity. Our gut microbiome wants to eat lots of different things. Our health defense systems, our five health defense systems, all crave different types of stimuli to activate them, to keep them kind of agile and active and in shape and working on our behalf.

And here's, I think, the really good news for people that are watching this is that ancient cultures, ancient food cultures that revered, treasured tasty foods, mostly plant-based foods, actually understood this. And that's why so many of the foods from the Mediterranean or from Asia, if you go back and look at traditional foods, like, I mean, you and I talked about this before, this idea of Mediterranean cuisine, like there's a lot of

unhealthy eating that goes on in modern Mediterranean countries today. We're talking about traditional eating patterns, same thing in Asia. We're talking about going back to basics. And so, you know, we're entering this era where we're, in a way, I think that we're all kind of shedding the artificial skin

that we've grown over the last five decades, that what we are sold in media or in the supermarket is actually better for us. And when you shed your skin, you kind of get back to basics. The more authentic instincts that we have about what we should eat happen to also taste better as well. It's so true. I went to a Chinese doctor the other day and I had just to check up, I just wanted to get my pulse checked and get a tune up.

And afterwards, she sent me a prescription, which was after feeling my pulse and seeing where I was out of balance, she says, oh, you need to build up your blood for this or that or the other thing. So she said I should eat bison and beets and duck and liver and cuttlefish, avocados and black sesame seeds. And then she said I should eat walnuts and almonds and woodier mushrooms and all mushrooms, olives, natto and seaweed. And of course, she said cherries, goji berries, mulberries, persimmon, and then all

all this other Asian food like daikons, lotus root, burdock, mountain yam, sweet potatoes, soba noodles, oily fishes, and so forth. And I was like, yeah, she's giving me a drug prescription because each one of these foods, and you probably could talk about each one of these foods for an hour. The food that we eat is information. And particularly the phytochemicals in food are massive bioregulators. The question is, you know,

you know are these phytochemicals more than just antioxidants or anti-inflammatories and what role does their genetics have in our health and what's going on with this sort of world of phytochemistry that that we didn't really understand before that we're now beginning to understand and how it regulates our biological health and our biological age and i and i think i'm just going to sort of highlight what you said to me earlier before we started when we're chit-chatting that in

Clinical trials that you've just completed, you saw a five to seven year reversal of biological age in three months of using a phytochemical cocktail that we're going to talk about soon from an ancient plant. So that just seems really remarkable to me. When everything else is the same, you can have that much of an impact.

Yeah, so let's talk just a second about this phytochemicals. You know, that's PHY, phyto, plant-derived chemicals. Why should we care? So I think back, and I've got enough years of experience now where there are many moments

where I was in debates or discussion at different meetings, often with people that were not of the same mindset as I. They would always put me on the program as the alien fugitive just to get a different opinion. So I was your social determinant for alternative opinions often in these meetings. And the construct was that nutrition was calories.

And within calories, you had the three principal calorie contributors, protein, carbohydrate, and fat. And then you had some accessory factors that were helpful to support metabolism to use those calories that we call vitamins and minerals. And these were the kind of fabulous 35 essential nutrients. That was nutrition.

But then when you start asking questions, if you analyze the chemical composition of food, is that all that you'll find in food? Then people would say, well, no, that other stuff is kind of flotsam and jetsam. We can take it out of there and we can throw it away, maybe put it in pet food to make, spry pets, but you know, it's not important for humans. And of those other things that we take out, particularly in the processing of plants, they fall in this family called phytochemicals or phytonutrients.

And if you went to a traditional nutrition textbook that generations of nutrition experts were trained in and asked how many pages in their textbooks that they studied from, that they had to take tests from to get certified, were discussing phytochemicals, it would be like a few pages because they were considered non-essential because you didn't have... Secondary compounds. Yeah. They were just kind of there, right? Now,

The most exciting singular geekism that I have learned over the last 10 years is that these compounds, this literally thousands and thousands of different plant-derived secondary metabolites that the genes of plants make for us, or for them actually, and then we eat them,

are purposeful. They weren't just because the plant didn't have anything better to do with its time that it decided, I'm going to make glucosinolates. Today sounds like a glucosinolate day. Then tomorrow, I'm going to make epigallocatechin gallate because I like green tea. No, the plant does those because it gave a selective advantage to the plant based upon their immune systems. And these compounds that are found in plants, these secondary metabolites,

are signal transductions agents that regulate the expression of genes at the executive center of function. And you might ask the question, what's most important, the genes you have or the way they're expressed? Well, that's a difficult question to answer because they're both pretty important. But if you don't express your genes in the right way, you're a mess. I mean, remember,

that every cell in your body contains your same book of life of 23 pairs of chromosomes that has a message for every other cell type of which there are hundreds of different cell types in the body. So how does that happen? How does a liver cell stay a liver cell when it has a message for the brain cell and the skin cell and vice versa? It does so by regulatory elements, transcription factors and regulatory elements that epigenetically mark that are directly tied to your phytochemicals in your diet as to how they actually function.

They're signal transduction agents. They're regulators. They're not just antioxidants or anti-inflammatories. That's a simple-minded thought that goes way 10 years ago.

Now we recognize that they actually have purposeful action at specific cell types and specific cell activities to regulate their function so that that cell will do something in response to a signal. And that signal could be a stress. It could be exposure to xenobiotic chemical, a foreign chemical. So if you have a diet that's rich in glucosinolates like indole-3-carbinol and sulforaphane and so forth,

Then your liver cells pick up the message, and what does it do? It activates and upregulates the gene expression of various cytochromes and various secondary enzymes involved with phase two conjugation. So your liver is more capable of getting rid of foreign chemicals. It plays an intimate role in protecting the body against agents that might create dysfunction.

So the construct that we all learned in school about phytochemicals, if you ever studied it at all, is a relic. It's wrong. Now, that's the beauty of science, right? We like to think that the human body of knowledge is advancing to evolution.

Answer questions that previously we just glossed over and say, well, that wasn't important. We'll just take them out of food and make white. White is close to godliness. So we'll make all white foods that have no flavor and no color so we can put sugar and salt and fat in them and make them palatable and high profit for the processed food industry.

because we don't need all those other things no one's ever proven they're useful now we say no that is where the business is for anti-aging is in those products well i mean the thing that we really know is that these molecules interact with our receptors our cells our hormones our brain chemistry our microbiome our immune system in so many different ways

But there's a conversation going on that these compounds are the plant's defense mechanisms. They're the plant's deterrents to pests. They're the plant's immune system to fight off bad things. That if we consume them, they're little poisons that we're putting in our body that could potentially harm us.

And I think it's an interesting conversation, particularly in the carnivore field, where there's a lot of anti-nutrients in plants and plants are bad for us. There's phytates and there's oxalates and there's all sorts of things that we may not want to be consuming. And in a way, I think it misses the fundamental point of what's going on, that these plants are hormetic agents, right?

hormesis is essentially the idea of something that doesn't kill you but makes you stronger like exercise or fasting and that yes these are compounds that are a little bit irritating to the body but that irritation just like exercise or fasting or hot or cold therapy will actually trigger a response to create a benefit so when i heard you talk about the broccoli compounds the glucosinolates they basically

are a signal to upregulate your body's own enzymes for detoxification. Is that right? I think you hit something, Mark, that's extraordinarily important. This concept of hormesis. We have to differentiate, I think, the mechanism of treating a disease with a bioactive new-to-nature molecule called a drug from eating foods that have bioactivity ingredients in them.

Foods have undergone the largest scientific study in the history of any living species called natural selection. Think about it. If you want to talk about a study that has a long history, plants have smoothed their composition over millions of years. That's the clinical trial.

They have survived in their environments as a consequence of that process of natural selection to hormetically contain substances that allow them to have an immune system to defend against some of the most hostile environments. How do you like to be a corn plant sitting out in Iowa and have to be out there every day with your arms stretched to the sky?

with no umbrellas. I mean, that's like instant sunburn, right? Just to think about that. So how do plants protect themselves? They develop these xanthophylls and carotenoids that are SPF compounds, right? That prevent them from oxidative injury from ultraviolet light. And so they have these substances that are the right level in those plants to provide the optimal protection against the environment which they have been living in.

in the case of wild plants, for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. That's why when I talked to Mary Ann Lila, who was originally at the University of Illinois, and she's now at the Kannapolis Center at University of South Carolina, she's been studying indigenous plants in hostile environments for 30 years. That's been her research. She's published hundreds of papers. We had her as a presenter at our meeting last fall at our PLMI meeting.

And she was talking about the fact that when you get stressed plants that have had to survive in these hostile environments, bad soil, bad weather, bad sun, frost, heat, all these things, bugs, that they have had to develop by natural evolution, hormetic compounds that are their immune system to help defend us. And it turns out, it turns out,

that when we eat those plants that contain those hormetic substances that are defensive immune active substances in those plants, that it transfers that immune principle to humans. This is now an extraordinary chapter in our web of life. Wait, wait, wait. Did you just say that if we eat plants that have had to build their immune system up because of tough conditions, that those compounds in those plants strengthen our immune system? 100% correct.

100% correct. And in fact, this is what got me into Himalayan tartary buckwheat. It was just like the weirdest thing. If someone would say, Jeff, you're going to be the advocate of bringing Himalayan tartary buckwheat, this 4,000-year-old ancient food back to the United States, I would say, you've got to be kidding me. This is the twilight years of my career. I'm not going to be in organic farming. But I couldn't resist thinking,

Once I learned about this crop, this 4,000-year-old domesticated crop, as it relates to its immune-potentiating activity, that is some 50 times, 50 times, not percent, higher in immune-potentiating nutrients than common buckwheat. 50 times higher than common buckwheat. It's infinitely larger than wheat or other grasses and other grains. It's infinitely larger.

And why does it have that extraordinary power? Because it grew on the slopes of the Himalayas in extraordinarily bad soils, high in aluminum. It has an aluminum detoxifying gene. It's frost resistant. It's drought resistant. It's bug resistant. Bugs don't even like it because it's got so many phytochemicals.

And it doesn't require irrigation. You just throw it on the ground, put it there with good stewardship of organic soil, and boom, up you get a crop of Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And it's been lost in America for 200 years because it has a taste.

Right? Because when you put secondary phytochemicals in plants, they're not like white flour and sugar. They have a taste. So now we have a food lab to make recipes and make it more palatable and to reintroduce it. I think it tastes good. So there we go. And this is my expert. This is the Dr. Mark Hyman, Himalayan Charity Medical Pancake expert. Yes, I do have a pancake recipe that's very good in the vegan diet. Chai pancakes that I made for Jeff many times.

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