Returning To Ancient Remedies To Promote Health

we're in this very quick fix society where we give a pill for a certain illness and let me say one of the things that's happened too you know when you look at a lot of medications not all of them but a lot of them they were inspired by compounds found in plants welcome to the doctor's pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman that's pharmacy with an ffar macy a place for conversations that matter and if you're really interested in how food is medicine and how specific foods can have different properties based on their ancient connections to our biology this podcast you want to listen to because it's with my friend dr josh axe he's the founder of ancient nutrition and dr axe dot com he's a certified doctor of natural medicine chiropractic and a clinical nutritionist and he basically wants to get people healthy using nutrition to optimize their health he's got many best-selling books including keto diet eat dirt which is one of my favorites collagen diet and he's just written another book called ancient remedies which is what we're going to talk about today he's a founder of the natural health website dr x.com which is one of the top natural health websites in the world and he talks about nutrition natural remedies fitness healthy recipes dyi solutions for your health and lots of trending health news he's a co-founder of ancient nutrition which is protein powders holistic supplements vitamins essential oils and he's got the dr act ox show which i've been on which is a podcast which i'd love you to listen to he's got lots of helpful health influencers on there and he's just a great dude so welcome to the podcast hey thanks for having me dr mark excited to be here and i mean i wish i was with you in hawaii right now but yeah yeah you know it's uh somebody's gotta do it yeah i decided you know after 35 years of grinding myself into the ground working hard you know uh 17 books in 20 years or maybe less i and maybe 18 years uh running a practice i decided to give myself a treat and go to maui and spend the winter here and work from here because now with the world shut down you can work from anywhere so i'm pretty pretty happy to be able to work here and and have a little fun on the side so uh josh you've got this great new book which is called ancient remedies and you're talking about the challenge of modern medicine and how our current system relies on prescription medications and how that really is a failure to understand how the body works and how to get people better using ancient principles and even modern principles of nutrition science and you talked about in the book how your mom's cancer diagnosis uh planted the seed for what you're doing today so talk about that and let me know how how you've come to understand that that is a real a real problem yeah so dr mark what really got me interested in ancient remedies was a health crisis in my family you know growing up my my family lived in that conventional medical model anytime we were sick we went to our physician we got prescribed a medication and that's what we did you know we didn't know that there was another way we didn't know any anything natural so at 41 years old my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer which was really shocking to us because my mom was my gym teacher in elementary school she was a swim instructor you would have looked at her and thought hey you were fit but yet she got this diagnosis of cancer and she went and she had a mastectomy she went through rounds and rounds and rounds of chemotherapy and i can still remember her losing her hair and how sick she got but all that being said she was eventually diagnosed as being cancer-free and her doctor said you're healthy the crazy thing about that though the next 13 years my mom had major health issues got put on antidepressant drugs and anxiety drugs had hypothyroidism she got diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome had all of these medical issues she was constantly getting sick and this went on for 13 years and finally i was actually in school studying uh and i was about to open up my own clinic i was about six months out and i get a call from my mom and she she calls me in tears on the phone and she says i've got bad news they've just told me i have tumors on my lungs and they want to go and do a radiation treatment do a surgery as well she's like what do i do i said mom i'll be home i flew home and i've been really blessed at the time dr mark to know some doctors who practice functional medicine and i started you know i talked to them i did i did a load of research and i said her my mom and i first thing we did we actually sat down we prayed together we talked about it and she said listen i've been through chemotherapy before i've been through those treatments and she said i just i want to try something natural so we basically talked with a physician and she kind of said you have four to six months let's see how this goes and so we did it so my mom we started juicing vegetables every single day i mean her diet was probably like 70 vegetables both cooked and raw um she did a little bit of bone broth a little bit of wild caught salmon would eat berries and that was pretty much her diet i mean it was it was pretty much that and then i was spending all this time dr mark doing research on diets for cancer um i came across you know things like keto diet and and some of these diets in japan today and then i started learning about turmeric and rishi mushroom all these medicinal mushrooms out there today and their anti-cancer side effects so my mom also was taking turmeric rishi like a multi-mushroom type supplement and just lots of herbs and spices and we she followed this program for four months the other thing i'll just say she had a lot of stress we really focused my mom rode horses as a kid she started doing that again going boating with my dad i mean just really reduce the stress we followed this program she went back four months later we did a pet scan and her oncologist called the next day and said her exact words identity her exact words were this is highly unusual we don't typically see this but the largest tumor is shrunk by more than half she said hey we want to see you again in nine months went back nine months later almost complete remission then and went back again after that and then complete remission so it's been about uh 13 years actually since then wow and my mom's in her late 60s and she she water-ski she's ran a 5k with me got second in her age group she actually says she feels better and healthier now in her late 60s than she did in her 30s so all that being said that was sort of what led me into this and then i started using this with patients you know i started uh you know really focusing on you know uh more of a personalized diet i know this is what you teach people this is what you've pioneered in functional medicine but i started also learning all these things about these ancient forms of medicine specifically chinese medicine and so you know i started using that with patients and really just saw some some incredible results and so that's really what inspired the book yeah well you know your mom is not alone in being someone who's given one option which is medication and sometimes chemos radiation surgery and cancer but you know this is a culture in medicine of a pill for every yelp a drug for every bug and the kaiser family foundation reported that 50 of americans aged 30 to 50 are taking prescription medication half these these are relatively young people right 30 to 49 75 in their 50s and 90 in their 65 or older group what's even more shocking is a third of people in their 50s and more than half of those over 65 take four or more prescription drugs regularly i did a house call wow on an older woman who you know had a bunch of chronic issues and i went through her medications she was on 22 different prescription medications and i was like oh you know and often that creates all kinds of secondary side of it she was taking a pill to fix the side effect of this build and then it fixed the side effect of that so so can you talk about how our medical and health care system has been hijacked by the pharmaceutical companies which put people's uh health before after profits and why the medications uh that are often promoted and the medications that are prescribed most often are these uh perpetual medications they're really not designed to cure anything but to manage things and keep people on them forever and the truth is a lot of the drugs that can be developed for conditions that are curative uh they're they're not really being studied they're looking for these blockbuster drugs like statins which you have to take for the rest of your life uh so can you talk about how how that how that works and how do we how do we get out of that yeah yeah so i'm with you dr mark so one of the things i think that's happened is we have a lot of these ancient forms of medicine to where uh you know it was it was really looking at how the body worked holistically i think that's where we start and then we're really focused on what you teach and that's how do we fix the root cause of this disease and they really looked at both our emotional health uh you know what we're doing in terms of our lifestyle and then our diet those are the things they really focused in on today we're in this very quick fix society where we give a pill for a certain illness and let me say one of the things that's happened to you know when you look at a lot of medications not all of them but a lot of them they were inspired by compounds found in plants you know we know this for aspirin right aspirin yeah they got the idea from a compound found in white willow bark in wintergreen and so you know that compound is a natural painkiller but now we create these things synthetically and when you're doing them in that high of a dose what it does is you're going to have a side effect in fact one of the things i go through early on in the book is there isn't a single medication that doesn't deplete the body of specific nutrients for instance we know statin drugs to lower cholesterol deplete your body of coenzyme q10 which then if your body's low in coq10 you have a greater risk of heart attack and stroke i go through if you've taken an antibiotic drug biggest two things that depletes your body of are probiotics and zinc you know zinc and probiotics are a big part of your immune system so if you take an antibiotic drug and you don't take probiotics and zinc you are greatly increasing your risk of future immune issues and so all that being said the issue today is it's all about a quick fix it's too driven based on again this is a trillion dollar industry this is a big industry we're talking about and it's really focused on you know focused on money not really getting the root cause getting people well i think the other big thing dr mark and one of the things i love even though you cover in your book pig and diet is you talk about there are these seven systems of the body in chinese medicine they sort of put them in five systems but knowing that these different systems work together and for instance you and i both know like hypothyroidism for instance isn't always at the root of your thyroid in fact often hypothyroidism or hashimoto's thyroiditis the root is actually with your adrenals and your gut so we've got to heal that gut and so you know focusing on a diet and focusing on certain supplements and lifestyle practices that help those issues for instance if you go to a you know somebody who's practicing most often the mainstream conventional medicine today you go in with hypothyroidism they'll say here's a drug like synthroid that's what you do some doctors that may practice more natural they may say hey take some selenium and b12 and eat more real food i know what ancient practitioners would do is they would go back and say okay what is the root cause of this thyroid issue and then they would say okay well and they would call in chinese medicine a chi and yang deficiency which when i first started studying i thought that sounds kind of weird but it's just a different language she is essentially your adrenal battery whereas yang is more having more progesterone and testosterone and having your estrogen levels more those need to be balanced and so that being said they would say okay well the foods that really nourish your adrenals there and your thyroid together are going to be berries so a foods that are really rich actually and flavonoids and um so we're gonna we're gonna prescribe you know cranberries and blueberries and goji berries and all these berries for you we're gonna have you do some black rice and then we're gonna have you do seafood specifically seaweed and wild cop fish those are the foods that are most nourishing to that organ system that is related to what's going on and then they would probably recommend some adaptogens you know uh things like and there's something similar to ashwagandha which is actually a qi and yang booster they would have recommended something like codnopsis and astragalus and other things but all that being said they're very focused on how do i heal the root cause here yeah that's amazing you know josh what you said was was i want to come back to would you sort of glossed over but it's so important you know most of the time when you go to your doctor they see you're taking supplements oh stop those supplements they can interfere with the medications but what most people don't realize is that so many medications deplete nutrients you mentioned coq10 and statins one of the other major categories of drugs is acid blockers like uh photonics and prilosec and acifx and nexium which are now over the counter when i was in medical school we were told do not prescribe those for more than six weeks they're super powerful but you know what if you take that you're b12 deficient you get zinc deficient magnesium deficient you get osteoporosis you get gut issues i mean it just creates so many secondary problems if you're taking blood pressure medication for example like diuretics depletes magnesium and other minerals so you you kind of have to really understand what you're taking and not just think about the how nutrients may affect the drugs but how the drugs deplete nutrients and this can be a real big problem as people are on these drugs for a long long time yeah dr mark so one of the things i cover in the book in fact i have it open here if you're taking a hypertensive drug it depletes your body of coq10 potassium magnesium calcium zinc and vitamin b1 if you're taking birth control like a lot of times people don't think about this with something like birth control so so many people are on it it depletes your body of vitamin b2 b3 b6 b12 vitamin c gut bacteria magnesium and zinc and think about even folate folate if somebody's on a contraceptive and they anyways the whole thing is it's just a lot it's a lot yeah it's crazy yeah so um let's talk about um this incredible idea that that um that is sort of talked about but no one's really doing anything about it as far as i can tell which is the antibiotics in our food so one um there's about 39 million pounds of antibiotics produced every year in america uh about um for 37 i think 37. 29 million pounds are used for preventing infection from overcrowding in factory farming of animals right and we call capos feed loss about you know maybe seven eight million are used in humans which is about 260 million prescriptions a year of antibiotics uh and there's a lot of been written about this you wrote a book called eat dirt there's a wonderful book uh uh by a professor in new york uh called missing microbes uh and how this is profoundly changing our health for the worse by killing off the ecosystem in our bug there's also another great uh great book called the epidemic of absence which talks about how the messing up of our gut and the absence of good bugs is literally driving a whole series of diseases from allergy to autoimmunity uh and even in lots more things we're linking the microbiome to autism and alzheimer's and heart disease and cancer and depression i mean you name it and a lot of this has to do with the overuse of antibiotics in our society and i i remember being in medical school and this was you know 30 plus years ago we were told you know be careful don't overuse antibiotics this is a big issue and it's even kind of worse now so how is this one of the most important public health threats we face today well one of the things i love about you dr mark is we share the same passion of regenerative agriculture in fact i i own about five i co-own five thousand acres of organic land uh some in tennessee some in missouri where we've we've we do something myself and uh jordan rubin it's called permaculture uh creating food for us we're really working on healing the plan it's incredible i mean if you if we would not be focused on the short term but focused on the long term even financially we could feed the entire world if we focused on you know doing food for us where we're growing more things like apple trees and walnut trees and more perennial plants rather than soybeans wheat and corn like it literally changes the environment and so all that being said i think it's so so important just to note one you know it's better for the planet when you follow these farming practices but what we're doing today is we're giving a lot of these animals uh you know we're giving them we're feeding them genetically modified corn soy and wheat that's the that's the base of their feed and then we're putting antibiotics in there i just consistently and what happens is 80 of the world's antibiotics are not given to humans they're given to livestock 80 percent of antibiotics it's crazy so what's going to be happening is when we consume those antibiotics via those uh animal tissues or dairy or other things what that's going to do is that's going to damage a lot of our gut microbes okay it's going to it's going to kill off a lot of those good bacteria you're going to have more overgrowth of a lot of the bad bacteria and that's a massive part of your immune system this is a big you know big cause of things like leaky gut syndrome which is the root cause of autoimmune disease weakened immunity migraine headaches food sensitivities and one of the things i do talk about in my book eat dirt i really get into you know how we have sometimes over sanitized in many cases and i think that's important even in the world of cova today it's important to keep in mind we want to we want to practice proper sanitation we absolutely do and i think there are some natural things that can help us do it there are really powerful essential oils like tea tree oil and others that i think are good to use on a regular basis but studies show we need to be deeply connected with the earth you know and so with that being said there are studies showing if you live on a farm you actually have a stronger immune system a healthy immune system less food allergies less food sensitivities like they've shown in studies if you have a dog or a cat actually by 49 you have 49 less food allergies food sensitivity food sensitivities and a stronger immune system what else is unique is i read a study this is out of japan and they showed that if you're eating foods that are more local in nature they talked about seaweed over there that you're getting different types of soil based organisms whether it's from the sea or the land and those actually work with your immune system at driving out bad bacteria helping modulate your immune system you know when we hear of immunization dr dr mark a lot of times people first their head goes to a shot but the truth is like i've got a eight and a half month old daughter now and we will support her immunity we will support her naturally uh you know naturally immunize her through uh getting her exposures to certain things in fact local honey you know a lot of times people talk about oh take local honey for allergies the big benefit of local raw honey is that it contains over 200 microbes and if you do that year-round you're getting pollen and all these exposures it's it's a form of a natural immunization i'm not saying it's the only way to do obviously there's many but it's one of the ways we naturally strengthen and boost our immune systems so i think we've really lost that sort of ancient art of being deeply connected to the outdoors and our environment and in that way strengthening our immunity and our bodies absolutely hi everyone hope you're enjoying the episode before we continue we have a quick message from dr mark hyman about his new company pharmacy and their first product the 10-day reset hey it's dr hyman do you have flc what's flc it's when you feel like crap it's a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it's not normal or that you can fix it i mean you know the feeling it's when you're super sluggish your digestion's off you can't think clearly or you have brain fog or you just feel run down can you relate i know most people can but the real question is what the heck do we do about it well i hate to break the news but there's no magic bullet flc isn't caused by one single thing so there's not one single solution however there is a systems-based approach a way to tackle the multiple root factors that contribute to flc and i call that system the 10-day reset the 10-day reset combines food key lifestyle habits and targeted supplements to address flc straight on it's a protocol that i've used with thousands of my community members to help them get their health back on track it's not a magic bullet it's not a quick fix it's a system that works if you want to learn more and get your health back on track click on the button below or visit getpharmacy.com that's get pharmacy within ffarmacy.com now back to this week's episode well let's let's talk about um food as medicine and how so much of our chronic illness is caused by the foods we eat and also can be healed by eating different foods yeah so you know obviously i think we know this and if anybody's listening to your podcast they know this but obviously you know the big culberts are sugar it's a lot of the refined grains again the the corn and the wheat uh soybeans it's a bean but that's in there as well so getting a lot of carbohydrates from there the hydrogenated oils we want to stay away from that stuff and a lot of the things that contain genetically modified organisms or that or animals eating foods that they shouldn't okay so the dairy byproducts the the meat products you know we use that principle right you are what you eat what they ate okay so if they're eating a lot of grains their tissues are full of omega-6 fats versus a lot of grass omega more omega-3s you're going to have more balancer that's going to help your body heal but one of the unique things that ancient practitioners recommended dr mark and i think this is fascinating and it's absolutely true is when you in order like knowing what foods to eat based on your sick here's what the ancient physicians recommended they said okay what the food looks like if the food looks like a body part it supports that what is the food's flavor as well and what's the food's color and they would look at those three things and say that's how you know what to eat so for instance a walnut looks like your brain in fact you crack it open it has two hemispheres we know today that walnuts are loaded loaded with choline and vitamin e and some omega-3 fats so they're good for the brain a coconut as well looks like your head coconut has all these you know medium chain triglycerides which are good for your brain and actually a water inside that almost looks like cerebral spinal fluid that's actually good for your body's fluid and systems we've got beets that actually look like uh you know look like blood uh when when you are you know when you're cutting them and they have known to increase nitric oxide in the body and improve your cardiovascular health celery looks like your bones celery is probably the most alkaline vegetable and so it actually supports your bones and especially supporting vitamin k and calcium levels and then i could keep going on a few others this is so fascinating yeah rishi mushrooms look identical to your kidneys and adrenal glands so do kidney beans you know onions are amazing for your cells those are loaded with quercetin and things that actually support mitochondrial function all kinds of things so you know one of the things i go through that in the whole book i have these you know big pictures and graphs going through here's all of those foods so we know that and then flavors five flavors support five different what they considered organ systems that work together so sour foods really activate and support liver detoxification bitter really affects the heart and the blood you've got umami which affects the lungs and colon you've got sweet which is more the pancreas and stomach that upper gi and then you've got salty which is your kidneys and your adrenals and then certain foods like green is very good for liver gallbladder but anyways that's how the ancients knew and i really believe that god created you know food you know our our food here i don't think he made it real complicated like hey i'm gonna make it really hard for them to figure out what to eat i think some of the stuff i'm not saying everything is simple but i think some of the times using food as medicine isn't really complex if we are you know able to to start thinking and learning about some of these things yeah it's true when you i love your your sort of title of your book ancient nutritional because you know i i often thought about you know how is it that uh you know we're eating such a mono diet you know our diet is mostly three crops sixty percent of our diet is three crops we eat uh corn and rice around the world uh another maybe nine or ten crops make up the rest of it uh we used to eat 800 species of plants and and agriculture you could argue uh was one of the most destructive things to be discovered or invented uh because it led to you know you know we used to be about average height of five nine as hunter-gatherers and then when we started agriculture went down to five three for men why because they were so malnourished they were starting to eat single crops they were only eating rice or they were only eating whatever they could grow and they wouldn't have this massive diversity of plants and animals and bugs and whatever they ate back then uh and and we've we've dumbed down our diet to these uh very few ingredients this led to these massive nutritional deficiencies i mean you just listed you know some of the common foods some of them are less common like rice rishi mushrooms and so forth but you know i mean here in hawaii and you know i feel like i'm a pretty well traveled well educated guy and i go to the farmer's market here and i'm like what is that and what is that and what is a suryanam cherry and what's the i don't even know what these things are eating things i never even saw before and i'm thinking wow you know we are we are so deprived of all medicines in food and that we've evolved actually to use these compounds with our biology to regulate different functions of our system which you saw were mentioning and and we've lost that understanding it's not just about calories it's not just about taste or flavor and what's really amazing i don't know if you actually know this book josh uh it's called nourishment by name fred prevenza and you you should listen to that podcast that i had called it is meat medicine with this guy he's this old guy with a big beard he's like this sort of looks like a mad scientist who's a rangeland scientist but he talks about how animals seek out different flavors of of different plants and have different properties that are used as medicines and that have nutrient densities so but when maintenance are left to their own they forage all these incredible a variety of plants that provides all these incredible nutritional needs we need just through their natural intelligence so what you're talking about is these different flavors these different tastes these different colors they're not just you know decoration they're not just for our personal enjoyment they're actually designed to heal our bodies and to regulate all the functions of our body which is just so brilliant and that's what your book really goes into i encourage people to go get a copy is called ancient remedies secrets to healing with herbs essential oils cbd and the most powerful natural medicine in history the most powerful natural men in history what is that well well the natural medicine history i really go through actually it's more personalized medicine that's the most powerful medicine in history because you know different herbs are good for so many things you know i cover stuff in the book like for instance if you've got an immune system issue in ancient chinese medicine actually an herb we we some people use here but i don't see i've actually heard you talk about it but probably one of the top five herbs in chinese medicine was astragalus like astragalus today what it's known for is actually helping repair a leaky gut or your gut related immune system you know that's super powerful a lot of people don't even you haven't even heard of astragalus but has all of these benefits we know herbs like uh galangal you know that cousin of turmeric and ginger has all of these anti-cancer properties andrographis there's some great new research on andrographics and its ability to fight viruses and so anyways yeah i think it depends on the person one of the things i do love dr mark about ancient chinese medicine is it was really the first form uh that i've seen documented of personalized medicine it's kind of like you know it's kind of almost started off it also includes your personality profile so if anybody's ever done like an enneagram test or myers-briggs or disk profile sometimes when you read those you're like wow that's you know almost every time you're like wow that is really straight on that's my personality well they did that in chinese medicine it's called the five elements and so they really know hey here's your personality but they said based on your emotions i think this is really incredible based on your emotions that tends to be the biggest driver of what causes disease in which organ system because why is it today most people would say genetics like why does one person get diabetes but another person could be eating almost the same diet but that person ends up with more a heart disease and high blood pressure and cholesterol another person thyroid issues and another person what they say is different emotions affect different organs so for instance and we know this is true the emotion of fear if you're fearful maybe fear of failure fear of disappointing loved ones that actually causes adrenal issues or if a child gets really scared at night nightmares cause fear those actually affect the kidneys and they can wet the bed the emotion of worry specifically affects the upper digestive system the pancreas stomach people say oh my stomach feels like it's tied in knots if they worry a lot the emotion of grief most affects the lungs and colon which is your immune system so or unforgiveness something that's happened in the past a herd of trauma you haven't been able to let it go that's completely affecting the immune system can trigger things like autoimmune like issues and that sort of thing and the thing about heart anxiety that's related to your heart your blood pressure raises so they would actually say in chinese medicine food is important but more than 50 of health conditions today are experiencing negative emotions so they always say hey you've got to address that negative emotion to completely heal absolutely i think it's so critical and i think you know your book is just full of practical suggestions and really wonderful tips on how to incorporate some of these ancient principles into everyday life to optimize our health and to sort of fix our biology i sort of want to get into sort of uh you know the the role of spices and herbs and other things like cbd and essential oils and healing mushrooms around our immune system because right now with kova 19 we're all a little bit scared of getting it uh and what i believe is that you know and this sort of goes back to this ancient debate between louis pasteur and another scientist at a time who's mostly been forgotten him i mean claude bernard yeah and and and uh louis pasteur for those who don't know was the guy who figured out there's microbes and he discovered bacteria and looked under microscope and saw these things and connected them to pneumonias for example strep bacteria causes strep pneumonia and so forth uh clyde bernard had a different theory he said it's not just the microbe it's the host that matters he called the biological terrain the state of your health that determines your risk of getting sick or not and how sick you will get and i i think people are not discussing this around covent which is just devastating to me because there's so much we can do to rejuvenate our immune system become immune resilient and to and to reduce our risk if we get sick of getting very sick and even to reduce service of getting sick at all and and we know from other studies you can literally inject cold viruses directly into the nostrils of people and not everybody will get sick yeah depends one of the studies where they just look at their stress score the more stress they had the more likely they were going to get sick if you weren't stressed you were less likely to get sick and that's just one component your diet plays a role and what's also really exciting about the book that you've written in remedies is that you include a lot of remedies that can help rejuvenate and build and boost your immune system so we can become more immune resilient and and actually do better in this in this pandemic which i fear will be lasting for quite a while not just another year or so but much much longer yeah well dr mark first off i love that reference because i i've talked about that before you know between pasteur and bernard and really terrain and the train of your body so first i just think that's a perfect example to talk about in terms of covet and fighting viruses today you know really the thought i want to go back something hippocrates said he said um he he said that the body heals itself he really you know talked about this that listen it's not a food that heals you a lot of times we think broccoli heals me or turmeric or another herb really your but if you get a cut on your hand your body heals that now your body's going to use these herbals and these foods as the building blocks to repair itself but what herbs do is they change the environment more than anything they put your body in a better a place where it's better able to heal itself and so with that you know as we're talking about immunity you know i think it's really really important and again think about this also think about your body as a bucket okay if it's clean if it's healthy it's not going to attract any bugs essentially that's what some of these things are parasites viruses bacteria you know yeast some of these things that we can get inside our body and think we had a flood years ago in nashville and afterwards dr mark i mean i had so many patients coming in with mold toxicity because they didn't get it cleaned up properly i mean mold was a huge issue for years in nashville so all that being said but but in order for mold to grow it has to be in a very specific environment it has to be damp and in the way you get rid of it is you have a lot of airflow and light and you dry it out okay the same thing happens in our body in chinese medicine they'd call it dampness but but essentially in our bodies if our body gets too damp and our body also gets in a bad environment that's what allows these bugs to thrive and so you just need to change the environment that's what these do one of the things people should notice is that most herbs that you take for fighting for fighting a virus are bitter okay bitter drives out dampness and phlegm and candida and chinese medicine so in fact andrographis which is one of the herbs now most prescribed in asia and japan for something like kovid it's known as king of the bitters it is the most bitter or have you days that you're like this is the most bitter thing i've ever had in my life but if you try echinacea that's really bitter that's another good one a lot of these are olive leaf these are all very very bitter those herbs are going to help drive out and actually have a lot of those antiviral properties with those things and then i would also say things that are going to just activate the immune system so you have the ones that help drive the bad stuff out and the ones that strengthen your organ systems in your own body to better fight off the infection astragalus is a great example of one that really strengthens your own system so you can better fight off a virus so what i recommend dr mark let me talk about nutrients first nutrients number one is vitamin d i know i've heard you say the same thing but vitamin d the most important nutrients we need to support our immunity right now and number one get the sun as much as you can but if not take vitamin d number two from what i've seen in working with people is zinc you know i think even when people are losing their sense of taste and smell you can go to the medical literature you can read about it most of the time a lot of times that's it's more severe will take longer if you have a zinc deficiency so that's the next big one those are the two biggest ones i've seen vitamin d zinc and then there's other things i think that vitamin c to a degree can be good but i don't even think that's the biggest one i think vitamin a in some cases or even nutrients like quercetin are are more important but i would say zinc and vitamin d you want to take those and in terms of herbals i really like astragalus for long-term prevention of strength in your immune system if you get something i like andrographis echinacea and then to a degree yeah those those are probably i mean i could mention a bunch more but i think those are the big ones i think those are really important and i think that the other the other thing i wanted to sort of dig into was something you read about in your book which uh you know it's getting a lot of press which is cbd and endocannabinoid system and how all that works and what we should know about that because it's one of the plant remedies that you do talk about which is a little controversial and people are really scared of it oh my god i'm going to take cbd i'm going to get drugs and i'm going to get stoned i can't do it because i my work doesn't let me smoke pot like what what is all of the hubbub about it and what do we know and what what is the uh best application of cbd what do we use it for well first off um i i degree i'm a hemp farmer i own a thousand acres of certified organic land where we grow organic hemp that being said you know there are different ways to grow the plant to where it has larger levels of different compounds so two main compounds in hemp also known as cannabis and you're going to have thc and cbd thc as a compound has hallucinogenic effects that's what's going to get somebody high cbd is a very very different compound cbd is just calming it's and actually it it comes from the butt of a flower of the hemp plant and it's more similar to chamomile or hops or even lavender it's more similar in compounds there so you have these two compounds in a plant chinese medicine it's known as a yin tonic so it's going to help if you're in a sympathetic state you're in a fight-or-flight response which so many so many so many of us are today it's going to help bring you down from that in fact i would say cbd is maybe the most effective herbal i've ever used at getting people out of that fight-or-flight state which is why i do think it is so powerful for people to use if you if you really need to get better sleep cbd is the best herb i've used if you want to improve and help reduce inflammation and joints it's a really good one for that i also think it's good for um uh for for digestion if it's stress related and some other things but sleep inflammation biggest benefits of cbd thc though dude i do want to give this warning i do think doing a medicinal blend of those two a lot of doctors will prescribe that and i think that can be good to replace opioid drugs and if somebody has major chronic pain but i really think chronic pain is about the only category out there to where thc should should be used for a longer period of time because here's the thing according to chinese medicine and i've seen this with people there is a big side effect with thc and that it's a drain your adrenal glands your adrenals in chinese medicine was also known that it's what gives you motivation it gives you energy saying hey i want to go out and do things i want to be active you'll notice when people overdo you you know that label them pot heads for overdoing thc cannabis it zaps their motivation and actually in chinese medicine it's known to deplete their jing which is essentially their sperm cow and their libido as well so anyways all that being said i'm not at the biggest fan of using thc in most cases but cbd is a non you know psych it's it's a they're they're really just benefits there and none of the side effects yeah amazing um so in in the book ancient remedies just to sort of close up you you really are offering these ancient prescriptions for over 70 different conditions from autoimmune disease to inflammatory bowel disease chronic inflammation lots more so can you take us through a few of what these remedies are and how you begin to apply these ancient principles and remedies to helping people solve their complex chronic illnesses yeah absolutely so you know in the book as you said it's about 75 different conditions and we go through the foods to eat not to eat we have a paragraph that goes through the actual root cause of it and then we also go through um the top five supplements the essential oils and the lifestyle practices to heal that condition so for instance with something like um uh like pcos okay polycystic ovary syndrome that's really an insulin related issue and in chinese medicine it was also known to be related to the emotion of worry so we actually even lay out the emotion uh no component you have to heal with that condition so you got to heal worry um the other thing is you got to consume foods that really support your glute your blood glucose levels and so we go through the best vegetables do to do that the best just generally the best foods and then the top five supplements so in the case of pcos it's an insulin issue so cinnamon you know one of the best things you could take for pcos an herb called vitex works because it also increases progesterone which is also an issue that starts to happen with pcos and then other herbals like holy basil we recommend essential oils for that but we do that for over 75 conditions cancer is another one the root cause of cancer in chinese medicine is known as two things it is blood stagnation and cheese stagnation which basically means things aren't moving through your body they're very stuck and so nutrients aren't aren't uh getting dispersed and so for instance with that um emotionally uh emotions like unforgiveness is a big one that is actually at the root cause of cancer according to ancient chinese medicine and a few others but it's really a liver and an immune system issue it's your detoxification your immune systems those are the two compromised systems according to chinese medicine so they're going to recommend herbs like again galangal is a big one turmeric is a big one astragalus is a big one certain types of mushrooms like maitake and so you know we go through that there in there and then uh frankincense which is actually good for because in myrrh because of what they do for cleansing the blood so we go through that they're in hypothyroidism i'll give that as the last example you know that is a qi and yang deficiency in chinese medicine so the chief herbal that helps with that is ashwagandha and as a secondary there's a few others there as well and we go through the you know the best foods the best supplements but i'm really excited about this book because it's also you can use it as a reference guide you know after you read it i think there's some great information that people probably have never heard of before but hey if you come down with you know acid reflux or you've got a burn or a cut or you you come down with a viral infection i go through here's the best herbs for a virus or a cold and you know exactly what to take at that point so anyways it's kind of a book and a reference guide but you know i was so excited because i think this is the book that that i'm most proud of that i've written i've written about seven books and um i think from what we've heard from people is people have just said i just you know they've really enjoyed it it's so great i really i think it's an important book because people are often confused about what those really unique compounds are in food that can help us regulate our biology and improve our oral health and address different conditions and i think you know i think the whole concept of personalized medicine and food is medicine of understanding how to use that uh you know we're all doing the same work we all take it from a different angle i think your work is really an important contribution i encourage everybody to get a copy of josh's brand new book called ancient remedies and the subtitle is secrets to healing with herbs essential oils cbd and the most powerful natural medicine in history uh it's it's out i go to amazon.com to check it out i would also check out josh's website draxe.com uh there's also a book page on there axe dot com forward slash ancient remedies uh and learn more about his work he's a real fountain of information he does the homework finds the real stories and and and digs into a lot of the science around food and food as medicine and all these ancient remedies to bring them to you in a way that's easily digestible practical and and i encourage everybody to check out the book so josh um any last words of wisdom for people who are trying to figure out how to get healthy yeah i would say this one keep it simple one two practices that i have one is i do a spiritual triathlon every morning i spend five minutes in gratitude five minutes reading my bible or just a personal growth or a devotional book and then i spend five minutes in prayer or meditation i'm telling you i just do that every morning and i i think we do need to focus more on our spiritual health dr mark i know in your new book you talk a lot about mood and healing our mind and that sort of thing and i'm so with you there i just think for all of us really fostering these healthy emotions in a world today that's so full of fear having more faith and hope and love and really but we need to build those you know just like we need to build a healthy body we got to build those healthy emotions and then and then one last nutritional tip we talk about a lot i mean there's a lot of information but think about this even if you just change breakfast that's like a third of your diet you know really and i've noticed when i eat a better breakfast i want to eat a better lunch and a better dinner so and if you don't eat if you're intermittent fasting then hey whatever your first meal of the day is but i think starting off with something like a collagen smoothie like i'll do coconut milk and a cup of berries and a scoop of something like a collagen powder and boom like i feel great doing that i've had patients do that they feel great so i think those are two big things and continue to learn and educate yourself encourage you get the book ancient remedies get dr mark's book the pagan diet that's fantastic too but i've noticed this dr mark the people that are the healthiest that i know most of them are learners they're constantly reading constantly learning listening to your podcasts that sort of thing my podcast and i think that's another big part of being healthy i want to say hey i'm just such a huge fan of yours i'm just such an honor to be on today and uh and thanks so much for having me uh thanks josh and if everybody's been listening i encourage you to check out josh's booking remedies uh leave a comment we'd love to hear from you and maybe how some introverts have helped you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and uh we'll see you next week on the doctor's [Music] pharmacy you

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 25,170

Rating: 4.9497647 out of 5

Keywords: josh axe, ancient remedies, chinese medicine, functional medicine, mark hyman, the doctor's farmacy, health podcast, nutrition, health, gut, gut health, herbs, plant food

Id: YxeoehaVZ_c

Length: 46min 37sec (2797 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021