EAT THIS EVERY DAY To Boost Brain Health, FIX YOUR GUT & Live Longer! | Mark Hyman

in functional medicine you 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 heal my gut i couldn't eat anything 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 percent of our calories it 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 has added some 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 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 this is the era of the microbiome when i graduated 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 medication but didn't really understand and i remember talking to a gastroenterologist about gut issues i said you ever talk to your patients about what they're eating and he was like oh 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 a hundred 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 it's not the poop isn't just sitting there it's all 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 about 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 can go on and on because the microbiome plays a role in everything even longevity and i'm reading writing 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 that's because of what we're eating so 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 of 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 of their guts out of balance and so why is this happen well one it's the industrialization of our food and we've really over processed 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 their 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 you know have increasing c-sections of the third of all bursts or 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 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 it's so necessary for the development of the immune system and gut and gut regulation and so you've got you know c-sections lack of breastfeeding you've got early use of antibiotics uh acid blocking drugs and 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 um in functional medicine you 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 hell doesn't disease starts in the gut is that attributed to him yes and many others like his ayurveda it's all about the gut and and many many many ancient healing systems understand the power of the gut in keeping us healthy so having having a healthy gut is is critical to our well-being our long-term health our may even our mental health we're now learning that you know antibiotics can destroy the microbiome in ways that cause depression and other and other mood disorders so it's really it's really quite an intersecting system and it's becoming even way more mainstream you know you've had a guest on your podcast uh dr uma naidu from harvard uh general yeah who's come on and talk about even things like ocd yeah is can be linked back to missing strains of bacteria inside of the gut or or too much of bad bacteria too much bad bacteria missing strains of good bacteria like 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 influence oh yeah so we want to put that out there for sure 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 it's true although i would say that what we do know is enough to get started and help people even if you know how it completely works and it's going to 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 know you can drive a tesla you don't know i mean at first i don't know how it all does what it does it's super confusing and like it's kind of magic but like i can drive it you know like i can get it to run that that's kind of where we are with the gut it's so 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 right and how you know is that the patients are getting better right yeah exactly it's like hey you may not understand how all this aspect works but hey the patient is getting better which is exactly you know i remember uh before we dig into things uh you've also uh you're friends with dr emeryn mayer here in los angeles and uh 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 best-selling author that's true everybody's like paying attention to stopping they used to make fun of me because they called me dr c every poop because i wanted to see all the stool tests you know uh making fun of me like that the surgeon general was named c everett coop so they called me dr c every poop because i have to look at all the poop butt you can change your instagram handle to that if you want okay sure doctor 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 had to go sure you know you know my my story drew up told different ways in different times uh but one of the things that happened to me when i was young and i had no pretty normal gut up until i was about 36 years old and 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 you know basically inhabited by an alien where they were blowing up a balloon in my stomach my my really my stomach was so full of gas i i couldn't release it was so painful i felt like i was gonna explode i developed horrible diarrhea undigested food 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 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 know you were living in at the time i think it was china i was i mean china and beijing and beijing pollution i guess and i just and they have like a lot of the coal factories yeah which that's where a lot of the mercury yeah i mean beijing has in people all who heat their homes with raw coal like it's not a fat you know a factory it's just people like instead of like they're they're 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 but by i was very susceptible to it and that was the first thing and then and then i you know 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 i'm so that happened you got better you found functional medicine you were good you were smooth sailing and then a few years and then and then i you know you know i had a house as a barn and i got mold in it and 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 and the root canal had had that pull then 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 clustered difficile which is a terrible intestinal infection that kills over 30 000 people a year and it's it's quite dangerous and so that's what i had and it developed into a full-blown colitis and and my stomach just went haywire and i couldn't fix it 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 gut healthy bacteria were gone it was it was just it was chaos in there there was no good guys it was all bad guys was all inflamed and nothing was working and so so basically uh you know tried to figure out how to get healthy again and and it was really tough because i was having then i 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 you know 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-inflammatory so i broke my arms it was a whole perfect storm and so i ended up 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 ten years ago about how do we reset the gut and so yes it was getting rid of the mold but also for me was 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 a 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 immunoglobulins and prebiotics and probiotics and just kind of what is the right cocktail of stuff to reset when i started using that myself that kind of created out of all the things that i've known in functional medicine it was a miracle and i started using it on patients and i was like wow this stuff really works because i mean i always guinea pig myself first and then i try to see if it works for people and it was amazing people say this is the first time my gut's been normal i have no more colitis my all my ibs is gone i feel amazing and my poops are normal and perfect and i was like fantastic you know this is great and so then we started talking about how do we how do we help people get this because it was a lot 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 yeah and you've had a blog post out for a couple years now based on that experience and by the way i was around during that time and you were you were in and out of the emergency room a couple times i was i was in it at one point in time honestly we thought like was this guy poisoned by somebody like was it were you poisoned by you know some the you know nefarious actors or the industry or whatever because they're trying to take you out it was it was really uh 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 uh going deep down the rabbit hole and through these now i have perfect poops you have perfect poops exactly and over the course of these next uh multi-part series on gut health we're gonna be sort of unraveling some of that uh research that you came across and uh it's gonna 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 uh 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 micro biome so help us understand what does this whole new world of research show about the role that polyphenols play in the gut and um and and why it should be important 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 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 you know they are incredibly um critical to the growth and development of the right bacteria in your gut so you can stay healthy now 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 percent 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 they're there are there are ways of attracting pollinators or ways of defending against predators there are ways of resisting ultraviolet radiation they're they're they're they're it's like it's their immune system and their and their uh you know their sex appeal in a sense and so we we have uh 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 four 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 we don't need to make it because we can get it from plants and so these phytochemicals i 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 in it with these plants in a symbolic way have adapted our biology to use their ingredients to keep us healthy so in the microbiome space we now know that the the compounds whether it's green tea catechins or the you know polyphenols in cranberry or pomegranate or or turmeric or olive leaf extract or prickly pear all these different compounds in these plants the bacteria love them and so you're 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 akkermansia 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 macromanage in your gut which regulates immunity these drugs don't work it's like a it's like a zero or a 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 uh william lee we have him on the pockets multiple i'm talking about his mother who had uterine cancer stage four urine cancer about to die he took her stool test found she had low echomancy he gave her all these polyphenols and lo and behold the achromaticity 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 and if you look in the literature there's plenty of literature to support this theory that this plays at your 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 we actually need i 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 and and even longevity and a lot of the research i'm looking at around my new book young forever is so clear how many of these compounds are are used in our bodies to regulate different pathways for longevity for example resveratrol from red wine binds to sirtuins that help to regulate uh dna repair or corsoten is very powerful in helping with epigenetic methyl methylation so we know that you know your dna methylation is improved by certain levels of corset so all these compounds finessing also helps regulate from strawberries uh various pathways around blood sugar control and insulin so we know 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 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 two hundred dollars 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's 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 going back to that example that you shared about william lee the 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 you know 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 like 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 con a parallel role with medicine in this example was a perfect perfect yeah it's true because it's synergistic but you know often drew uh if you actually apply food aggressively it works better than traditional medicine for many things like diabetes heart disease and it it's something that we don't really appreciate because we don't know how to apply it as doctors if i said well i'm gonna 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 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 it's different than someone dementia that someone with cancer is really different in particular and individual so and i think that the understanding of phytochemicals is so important because in in the world of 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 um your immune function and gut health there's compounds for example in himalayan tartary buckwheat like toho but were found nowhere else which are immunorejuvenating and help deal with old old aging cells and cleans them up uh there's compounds for example like berberine that are in plants that help with diabetes and and and so on we know that uh certain things like sulforaphane which is from broccoli has powerful anti-cancer compounds they did study in china where they literally got the urine of people and measured essentially the broccoli uh 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 don't eat a rainbow vegetables they say five to nine serving the fruits and vegetables that's a minimum you should probably have you know servings 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 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 they're pushing like you know eight to ten cups of vegetables a day which i think is really 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 uh 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 absolutely which ms is one yeah absolutely you know you know and yeah and and there's so many cool things with plant compounds that we're just learning about for example like pomegranate you know is great for fueling and growing healthy bacteria but it also actually creates a byproduct this is what we can't even often understand the complexity of 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 transformed 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 with the 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 and how it 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 like necessarily know exactly everything that's in everything but it you when i go through the grocery store now i literally am going through thinking 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 uh compounds that are detoxifying or i'm going to buy this pomegranate because i know it has good for my gut bacteria and also it's gonna help me build muscle i know i'm gonna buy this broccoli or broccolini because it has glucosinolates and and sulforaphane is gonna help me for cancer but also help me detox heavy metals so i'm thinking about this or i'm thinking i'm gonna 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 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 details you just have to realize you want to eat a lot of weird food lots of colorful stuff you know and and just you know if you go like what is this it's probably a good idea to buy it and try to make it there's recipes and stuff you can 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 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 uh challenges that come along with it they can get some distension they can get this that if they're not used to so when people hear like eight and you know ten 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 you know 10 cups of beans a day and you've 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 this 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 you know if you switch to for you know a paleo diet and you eat that for two months and check your poop your microbiomes can look a certain way if you go full vegan you do that it's gonna look a different way so that is a very good picture of changing the microbiome and then and the second um is a fecal transplant poop pills insert up your butt or swallowing them or you know basically injecting somebody else's poop up in your colon that that actually are the two things that have the most impact however however if you 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 there's a readjustment period where things are killing off the bad bugs and the good bugs are are growing and there'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 consume consumption of plants is one way to get polyphenols but there's also another way talk about that because i found that very fascinating yeah so you know the whole meat conversation is interesting because we were all taught that meat is bad for you that if you want to save the plant and save yourself you 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 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 concert 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 pumpful of hormones and they're they're pumped with 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 uh and and may and may have many adverse effects whereas and then 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 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 or generally 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 and what we'll 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 of catechins as green tea and and when you actually look at the metabolites of these compounds and they also are secondary metabolites that may have increasing benefits for human health so so it seems odd to think about getting your plant food from animals but increasingly that's possible with the regenerative raised uh animals and 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 darumara 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 sort of adapt to getting the nutrients they need yeah no that's very fascinating um 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 uh some of the main ones we want to incorporate in our diet absolutely so so you know i think about these is you know this is like this is like a giant pharmacy right so like you could say you could say well we have drugs that's what polyphenols are the drugs or what drugs what compounds matter and they're different and again there's 25 000 of these so there's flavonoids there's poly phenolic amides and flavonoids are things like quercetin and catechins found in fruit and green tea polyphenolic amisure and chili peppers phenolic acids like lignins and still beans and 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 and minerals we know all these phytochemicals that are in these plants so um i like to think about how do we how do we start to increase our oil intake of the high polypenol plants that are so good for us so teas are great green tea is great uh berries all the dark colored berries certain veggies are super important so all like the brassica family has tons of these healing compounds you know tomatoes are great they have lycopene artichokes or 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 you know 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 the nutritional density and quality of the polyphenols by picking uh the right plants doing tiny little upgrades in your life wherever you're eating the same stuff again and again making little upgrades yeah and then there's you know dark chocolate which is great now volume matters you can eat like 14 chocolate bars but basically you know dark chocolate has all kinds of uh 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 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 care fitzgerald on your podcast which i had on two and uh she did this you know groundbreaking longevity study that was there you know reversing people's age in that period of time by three years in like eight weeks and one of the things that she was mentioning was you know one of the most underrated spices based on all the research on um on it out there is rosemary and how she would tell people just have like a little little spice grinder with rosemary in it add it to your salad cook with stuff make your you make eggs in the morning yeah i put rosemary in everything i have a giant rosemary bush in my my garden and i just 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 just it's a really incredible one it also has very potent detoxification compounds in it it's super anti-inflammatory antioxidants 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 rosemary acid or something like that um 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 uh renal function uh it has anti-cancer properties it's uh 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 is another source which i would say more regeneratively raised animals nuts and seeds really important and 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 um alluripine is a really important uh polyphenol for example and all of this is great against antiviruses it's great for dealing with heart disease anti-inflammatory so these are super important compounds that you just can make as part of your daily diet 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 uh 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 my own life with it and it's around the toxic phytochemicals lectins being one that has become very popular over the years largely do the work of dr steven 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 joe i think humans are wildly adapted to a huge variety of foods right so you've got the inuit in the north pole who eat whale and seal and very few else vegetables and do fine if 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 beans and things that were super high fiber you have populations that they eat you know just a wide variety of different foods that that so humans are capable to be 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 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 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 that as they were evolved but to kind of modern versions which which are unintentionally harmful lectins are are common proteins in certain plants night shades 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 those 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 only 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 need 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 that add them back and see how people do but to say categorically people should not be eating xyz food i think is really tricky and i think we need to to be able to be more inclusive and thoughtful that's why i created the pekin 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 it's 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 eating 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 isn't 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 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 will discover that i can take some other supplement and it'll fix the pathway but i i i don't right now i don't have that so i kept 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 heal my gut i couldn't eat anything now i can eat everything it's so true you know i've done a bunch of gut healing protocols over the years because i had a lot of antibiotic exposure growing up strep throat ear infections etc etc and 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 draw 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 uh 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 yeah so 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 and they're they're it's an energy dependent process and they're 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 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 there's an italian researcher now as harvard 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 glyden is triggering increases in zonulin which creates a leaky gut now what's also fasting true 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 inflammation phenomena 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 this increases in zonulin which are due to our crappy diet all the drugs you know these people i'm 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 consequence 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 it in the stool you can look it in the blood and so you don't want hyzonulin 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 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 get 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 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 these bacterial toxins now when you eat a lot of polyphenols and you get your guts straightened out 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 dru 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 you're 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 uh your your overall health and when it's 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 and there there are even studies for example looking at an 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 i 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 the levels of schwarzeneggers very seriously in your body because it determines so much about your health and if you if you take the right foods like the polyphenols it's going to rise raise the butyrate levels and the life of polysaccharide levels go down zone 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 pomegranates juice pomegranate juice green tea apples apple juice dark chocolate all in all the goal was for them to get 724 grams of polyphenols right yeah 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 do yeah what do you do to get that sort of that number that showed the benefits of reducing the xylene yeah so 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 i literally open it i'm gonna go okay what am i gonna do for dinner so i'll for example have a japanese sweet potato with all these well let's start for breakfast breakfast okay breakfast breakfast often i'll do um 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 bear i'll use like frozen berries i'll use other uh like superfood things like baobab tree or maca or um different kinds of asi 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 and my premium probiotics and and and get up to speed on what i want for my gut but also pollen probiotics i put in prebiotic powders and and i i really use this every day as a gut healing gut support system which i've used and 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 but the the beautiful thing about it that you can get these things in in a simple way in a quick way in the morning in your breakfast smoothie uh or you can you know have for example uh let's say a chia seed pudding you can make 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 it's 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 also you know calcium of the bones and so for protein and then and then i'll then i'll have lots of veggies i'll have a salad for example i'll throw in arugula i'll have fennel tomatoes pumpkin seeds uh cucumbers uh olives i'll just throw all these different things in there that are full of plastic so i get my lurpine from the olives i'll get you know some of the brassica arugula has a lot of nebraska things so the sulforaphanes uh the pumpkin seeds have uh you know various phytonutrients that are very helpful for cancer and and prostate health so i'm kind of very aware of what i'm putting in as a medicine and and that's sort of how i get my lunch and dinner i'll usually have like three or four 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 and gel put ginger in it for the gingerols and they're anti-inflammatory and the broccolini has glucosinolates sulforaphane folate different vitamins they'll have a japanese sweet potato like they have an 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 mineral so i really try to like make a plentiful amount of vegetables where that they're the centerpiece of my meal and and i and the meat or protein is a side dish and a little dark chocolate here and there of course a little huge 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 i got food got 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 pagan diet that you're talking about you know i think it's really clear that 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 you know it really it seems we really need to have something that's like a multivitamin for the gut you know we all think oh i need to take a multivitamin or i should take you know fish oil i should take this for that but what 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 it was 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 existed 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 just put together and i was like this is something that the world needs and will 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'm 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 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 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 and i do it you know i had 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 is it contains really powerful ingredients all research backed and we we 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 and it has and it's changed people's lives in the beta testing that certainly changed my life and i think i think the world is is really ready for something that's going to be a overall gut support not just used for emergencies not just use for when you're really sick not for people who really only have gut issues but something that everybody could use as a 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 yeah 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 to for their gut yeah 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 mood disorders brain disorders i mean it's quite it's quite impressive when you look at the data on these things like for example mucosae which is one of the components in there it's not even available in america has been shown in europe in the in the research trials to dramatically reduce gi discomfort 75 percent and also to reduce reflux 74 and also to improve um other factors that we just wouldn't even normally think of being related to to it for example uh 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 have 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 started to be able to think about what are the ingredients what is in there lactospore another a special probiotic it's a 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 and bloating 47 vomiting reduction 43 reduction diarrhea pain reduction by 68 percent 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 he called the gut the second brain but there was a 57 reduction in depression improvement of sleep by 58 reduction in in dementia symptoms by 26 an improvement of quality of life by 40 7 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 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 you know some of this data and again five ingredients all clinically backed you know we have the links and everything on the you know uh website once it's all live for all the studies all the studies and the show notes and everything is that uh you know there are smaller studies they are in 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 transcription process absolutely yeah just back backing up on that look any drug that's on the market place today was an industry funded study right so all the drugs you're taking or published in peer-reviewed journals were done paid for by the pharmaceutical industry now does that make them invalid well you should 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 know you can question the study design you can question the motivations you can question the manipulation of the data the statistics but in a 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 this 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 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 we really um have a beautiful cocktail of things that are evidence-based that 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 gut food.com you can either sign up for the waitlist depending on when this podcast comes out or if it's available you can jump into it we'd love to uh 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 it 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 and in that same way you know we all go grocery shopping we all go to uh 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 you're good pr yeah and you know 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 you know they may not be stepping into the power of what is available to them with all the great incredible research that's out there on polyphenols so final closing thoughts yeah i mean i i agree drew i think you know uh personally i spent a lot of time thinking about this and and as i begin to you know learn more about human biology i mean i 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 this mind-blowing where he'll look at deep deep analysis that they 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 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 nice too 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 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 get a little cheat sheet uh and this is the pagan diet and other places we can go oh i'm gonna go to the grocery store i'm gonna pick these extra extra foods because these are extra special foods that i know are going to increase my phytochemical content and they're going to help me stay healthy and as we kind of get to learn more about these we're going to learn i know 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 corsoten which is in our formula quercetin is is a compound which is a flavonoid comes from apples and onions it in 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 this issue is often for cancer drug they were able to actually reverse biological age by using these polyphenols which is pretty amazing so they're not they're not like just 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 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 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 the 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 these are 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 if you loved that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here be open-minded but not so open-minded that your brains fall out so i think having a good skeptical critical mind is important but also being open to exploring ideas that might be unfamiliar or may seem ludicrous but actually turn out to be right you know

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 439,778

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: kX_URtgYNCU

Length: 69min 57sec (4197 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022