So I travel around the world and I was a grown up on a fruit farm in New Zealand, so I sort of had a bit of horticulture, my background and bumped into a goat. My goat called Emily. Every day I would take her out on a long rope, bang the stake in the ground, and she would have 50 yards of hedge. CORNISH Hedge to roam around. And I began to notice that she wasn't hoovering up the herbage. She was actually picking very selectively the plants. She seemed to be really making intelligent decisions. She was choosing from a materia medica because all the plants she was using were medicinal. Wow. And then I realized that she was fine tuning in a being around a metabolism through her nose and instinctively organizing her affairs just by her innate intelligence. And I made a decision then. Emily, I would like to be like you when I grow up. As she's been my teacher. Ginger. I mean, you know, just step back a bit. It has been the most valuable commodity in human history. And you know what? It was made extinct in the wild 2000 years ago. All the ginger we've had since has had to be grown by rootstock because it's lost the capacity to live in the wild. And that's human. We were doing ecocide to Gin two millennia ago. Doctors, Kitchen Recipes. Health, Lifestyle. Simon, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. This is such a treat. This is a tree I get to learn about herbalism from an expert who's been, you know, in this field for decades. I'll be honest, I'm very new to the field. I had a conversation with Alex Laird a number of years ago whose I gather, you know, very well. Yeah, yeah, she was wonderful. It's great. We were in my studio. This is pre-pandemic. We cooked a lovely meal together using lots of different herbs, and we just had a conversation. It was great. That was my introduction. And now I guess this is moving on a bit, I think, in terms of about your experience. So tell me a bit about how you got into this field. I started out as a medical scientists degree at Cambridge and but I never thought I was going to be a doctor. I thought I might do some research or some other. And then I traveled, as one did. In those days, you didn't have to go straight into a job. We were yes, we were baby boomers. Yeah. Yeah. So I travel around the world and I was a grown up on a fruit farm in New Zealand, so I sort of had a bit of horticulture, my background, but of plants. And I was traveling around North Africa and Central America and staying in places where I could see people treating themselves with traditional remedies and they were all plants. And that sparked a few thoughts in my mind. And I came back and then ran a smallholding in Cornwall and bumped into a goat. My goat called Emily. She she was the she goats. She had ran the whole brood. But every day I would take her out on a long rope, bang the stake in the ground, and she would have 50 yards of hedge. CORNISH Hedge to roam around. And I began to notice that she wasn't hoovering up the herbage. She was actually picking very selectively the plants. And she seemed to be really making intelligent decisions. And no one had taught her anything. You know, she couldn't read a book. And I was began to watch and there was already and this is a herb nursery we were going down. So someone had told me about growing herbs and I thought this was probably more fun than lettuces. So there we had the herbs and the pots watching Emily choosing the plants very carefully. And as only later, of course, I realized that she was choosing from a materia medica because all the plants she was using were medicinal. Wow. And then I realized that she was fine tuning in a being around a metabolism through her nose and instinctively organizing her affairs just by her innate intelligence. And I made a decision then, Emily, I would like to be like you when I grow up. As a. Girl. She's been my teacher. That's incredible. And then I discovered that there's a herbal medicine program in Who Used to be Lester in those days. So I went and studied and because I'd done medical sciences, I sort of shot through quite fast. And then they saw me coming and began to put me in charge of things. And so I was around a As herbal medicine emerged out of the postwar doom gloom. And then complementary medicine came along. And I happened to be in a room and late 1970s with a guy called Stephen Fulda and a couple of other people looking at a report he'd written on alternative medicine. And he said, We've got to have a different word than alternative kind of supplementary to medicine, because that's no doctor deferral stuff. Why don't we call it complementary medicine? And that was the birth of what we now call camp. So I was at the beginning of that, I was the first chair of the Council of Comprehensive Alternative Medicine, the early eighties, and then we set up a university program in Exeter in the mid 1980s. On the back of some conversations that we had at the Royal Society of Medicine, and they persuaded the university authorities that this is worth studying. And then we set up this research and education program there, and then one thing led to another. But throughout I've been a practitioner of 45 years now seeing patients. Wow. Wow, that's. Been just last man standing is probably the way. You've described it. It's been around too long. Yeah. So, so so tell us a bit about the education piece. What would you exactly learn when you go and do the course on herbalism and how close are you to being like Emily. No, that's a difficult question, isn't it? Emily I'd never read a book, so let's, let's come to Emily later. So the current herbal medicine programs, and there's many of them and they've changed a lot. I mean, the one I went on had been developed in the 1920s and the Staples had rusted through the paper, you know, I mean, it was really quite embarrassing. So one of our jobs and I was working with a colleague council and we set up the School of Herbal Medicine that in the late 1970s and that sort of developed a more science based medical recognizable with a lot of botany and other sciences and as well, great fun. And that that was a template for future herbal medicine programs. So Middlesex and various other universities picked up that London, Westminster and so for a while. And herbal medicine has now been almost like, you know, another health sciences program where you learn your Emily skills is, I don't think, on the program. And that's when you get your, you know, your feel for it. Yeah. And your gut starts coming in on the, on the scene. And most herbal students are to a full of data and probably takes a few years to settle into the Emily mode. Yeah, but as you get older and there's a running, taking, running forward, increasingly I practice like Emily. And so when I see a patient and I spent an hour or so with them and get the plan organized and I'm a physiologist primarily, so I'm interested in how systems link up. So they come in with arthritis, but they walk out with something completely new and different. Everyone gets something different. And I put together something and you know, I've been around too long. I don't want to wait three months for something to happen, so I'll ask them to taste it first and there's a strong. So the first thing is to watch their face yell, you know, I never knew this is this is herbs. So. Waxman Emily, is it? And then I say, ring me tomorrow and let me know how things are going because it's things can work really fast. It it sets off things down here. I use the term active pharmacology. So operating on receptors and signals in the gut and the gut as wired up and all sorts of wonderful ways, as you know, with the rest of the body. And so we can see changes literally overnight. Yeah. Within medicine we have the same problem. I think the ability to separate out the placebo effects and the the pharmacological effects and I'm very open minded. I'm, I'm of the opinion, you know, if something works and the patient's having a great outcome from it, that's that's the way forward. How do we deal with this conundrum of giving someone a substrate, whether it be inert or something that clearly has a lot of powerful value, whether it's a botanical, whether it's a herb, whether it's a a supplement from the the very powerful placebo. So I turn that question right on his head. I sat on a beach once in Greece reading a paper about the placebo effect of in pain and the calculation that in some situations placebo can account for 80% of use. A phenomena. So first of all, my confidence went down the tubes. I said, well, I'm was teaching people four or five years to do something with placebo. I could do even better. And then I realized attentive the wrong way around because placebo is simply the self healing, correcting phenomenon and it doesn't take much nudging. And then I realize that's what we were doing when nudging self correction. And I sat on that beach and said, You know what, I want to get better placebos to find ways of breaking a slight blockage that, you know, a blank placebo less K might not break through. So I've very much see the herbs at their most powerful, which is why so be so quick as I call it, nudging. It just knocks the door a bit and just get something moving and then the rest is placebo and everything we do is placebo if you turn it that way around. So a pharmaceutical that has a receptor effect can overcome placebo in a head to head competition. But, you know, as honest doctors will admit, the pharmaceutical doesn't heal. It'll break down a door somewhere. But the healing is what happens afterwards. And that's the business that I think I want to be in. I want to be in how to help the body to find its own innate healing capacity. Yeah, in the hierarchy of all the different interventions that one has available to them. So you have diet, you have mind therapies, you have exercise, you have a whole suite of different elements. And then you have, you know, pharmaceutical supplements, herbs. Where do you see it fitting? And like you, you said nudging the door open and stuff. Is it is it purely energy? Can it actually have those? You know, there's genuine therapeutic values. Oh, definitely there is. There's a lot of evidence to show that plants do cover the whole spectrum from foods on the one hand, which is where we start and we'll come back to today in the talk with great enthusiasm about how we can add value to our foods simply and cheaply, right through to things like digitalis, you know, which is foxglove, heaven say. And so some of the but the strongest remedies are plant based or arisen. They come from plants, you know, opium was figure, you know, say no more. So there is a spectrum and you know, particularly we talk about self-care and looking after ourselves because we always focus on the gentler versions. But as you get increasingly to a proficient, you can use some of the stronger ones to break a stronger door. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah. Well, let's look at some of the different cultures that have introduced herbal medicine. So I mean, I'm from an Indian background, so I better is sort of the. Oldest I know probably. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's definitely been a guiding thread throughout my whole life. You know, the use of turmeric and ginger and all the rest of it. But there are a number of other cultures that use different things. But we're where really traveling when you when you went way. North Africa and so that's Islamic and then central America, which is a combination of indigenous American and Spanish. Okay. Okay. And so you have this and it is often a blend. We put together an ethno map once of the world, and there's a couple of three main centers of independently springing up cultures. I've was the oldest India China close behind and then what we call clinic the European traditions and they blend in the middle with the Urdu. You know, in the Pakistani world, which is essentially Hellenic and Islamic is Gilani. But then you see the overlaps, and particularly when you talk about North America, you get the translation over the Atlantic and from Asia, from Asia the other way. So there's some blended smells. And what I practice is sort of global. I practice some I use Chinese remedies and Indian remedies and North American remedies. A lot of North American. Yeah, yeah. And are there like a spice parlor? Are there particular standout members of all those different families and cultural traditions that that are most prominent? Yeah, I was brought up a lot on the North American traditions. That was a historical actually the post-industrial British, a very interesting story. You know, Britain did industrial revolution more than anybody else. And within a generation, the countryside had emptied and we were moving into Halifax and Bradford and Leeds and Manchester and so on in large numbers. And these were country people and they would normally looking at themselves mostly by women in the villages. They moved into black to back housing in the working class areas, proletariat, and they changed gender the herbalists and they, they were blokes who set up shops, the herbal tea shops. One of the first was a man called Jesse Boot in Nottingham, who was the co-founder of the National Association of Medical Herbalists. Well, Boots might have another connotation to you because that was he was originally a herbalist shop and that was the way it went. It was it was became a functional medicine for the working people, but they didn't have a legacy to fall back on. They just had polyglot, you know, village traditions. Along came an American who had rediscovered the principles of Greek medicine in the fire in the Midwest. And he was all about hot and cold and using cayenne and which is a Native American remedy. And so he came back with this new idea only in medicine. No one's ever heard of it. Now, but it was the basis of a new tradition of herbal medicine as a profession in the in in the UK and I inherited that tradition when I studied in Leicester in, in the 1970s and so half of my materia medica was North American Echinacea, you know, the native ginseng goldenseal and, and a lot of very exciting gynecological remedies come from North America. Mm hmm. Well, let's let's talk about how we actually utilize some of these, because we've access to all this different elements that you just mentioned, you know, in a nation is very popular. Obviously, ashwagandha, something that you asked me if I take took before because the towards the end of the day but I've still got a lot of energy. Don't worry. How does one approach this huge encyclopedia of of magic, of herbal remedies when there's so much misinformation, there's so much, you know, varying quality, it's very hard to understand where to start. Do I start with a tea? Do I start with a to saying or a tincture, you know, a supplement? What how should we approach this? Well, one of the things that really attracts me to the herbal world is that these are ideal self-care tools. Everybody can use them. And in the cultures that you refer to, everyone does use them. So an average Asian meal is full of medicines. We call them spices. And frankly, you can have them up to your ears and you won't be doing yourself any harm. We probably have a significant spice defense deficit in this country and I always keep banging on about having more turmeric because we know that these are very valuable medicinal agents. They increase blood flow, they increase digestive performance, almost certainly very important for the microbiome. And we're finding out all this stuff now and everyone was doing it without thinking about it. But like Emily, in the old days. So the first thing I would say to anybody who's asking is start with your food. And I work with Pukka now and we do teas with lovely tasting teas, but they're also they're they were they were designed as a result of eating formulas, Indian formulas to have that blend and to support and almost daily routine with herbs and things. So teas are a good place to start that gentle. The dosing is not high and you'll begin to understand that you can then do the Emily bit and say, Oh, how does this feel to me? And if you don't like that, why don't you try another one? And most often, I don't know what's going to suit you. So I say, Well, here's a few options. Try the fifth mentor the chamomile or the fennel or whatever it is. See which one suits you? Ask yourself the question next morning. What was that. Like? Mm hmm. Yeah. Okay, so from the start. Start with the small. Yeah. Build your confidence. Another place I work with which I strongly commend to anybody who wants to know about herbs set up by the founder of Pukka, Sebastian Pohl. It's called herbal reality dot com. If you want to know about what herb to use and when and how and how strong to use it, it's very accessible. You don't it's not meant for professionals particularly. I mean, for anybody. You can just go up there and you can and you can see the dosage regimes. You can see where to get it. You can see what makes sense and it'll encourage you to taste it. Just like Emily, your tongue and your palate are very good. Guide to what will suit you. And do you feel that herbal remedies can sit alongside pharmaceuticals or. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And most of my patients are on pharmaceuticals. Okay. And so we have to do the dance, you know, and we're not in the business of getting people off their prescriptions, but we can often get them to the point where they go back to their GP or whatever and say, You know what, I can, I think I don't need this anymore. And most often the doctors are delighted. Yeah, as long as they, the blood markers are sticking up and all the rest of it. So we often provides a sort of support system for people who are on medication. And most often we're dealing with things that the medication wasn't intended to deal with. Okay. You know, the other things that contribute, almost certainly I was doing a presentation yesterday on inflammation and herbs and pointing out that most of the things that we access and from the herbal are missed by conventional anti-inflammatories. They're working on, you know, exposure at the gut level, exposure in the mouth level, various other factors that fire up inflammation, which would be which can be treated quite excessive with. Yeah, with inside plants. Let's talk about inflammation and herbal remedies, because inflammation, as we've talked about many times in this podcast, seems to be the root cause of a number of different issues. I think everyone is aware of that these days. And if there are things that can harm enhance that inflammation balance, it stands to reason that it would be overall beneficial beneficial for a person. So what sorts of herbs do you utilize in that respect and how do you further personalize it to to the individual? The we can start very simply with what we eat on the plate. Yeah. So we're very interested in what we're calling phyto nutrients, which are the added value that many plants bring to the plate. We know about vitamins and minerals and so on, but there are many other things that plants produce which have value like polyphenol speak or the volatile oils, the things that give the aroma. And I'm working with Parker on this one. Again, we're articulating a campaign to bring fighter nutrients on the plate alongside fruit and vegetables as a value. So one of the things about phytonutrients is they're colorful. So one of the quick is eat a rainbow every day because the reds and the blues and the yellows and the greens all denote different, important pharmaceutical pharmacological agents. So just eating a diversity of colors is a start. Spices are stacked full of these phytonutrients. So eat Asian, for heaven's sakes. You know, we've heard about the Mediterranean diet less start eating Asian diet. And I'm personally convinced that, you know, in a world full of deprivation where it's difficult to to for many people to afford healthy food, to have cooked lentils with turmeric, a daal, maybe some spinach and potatoes can save your life because of the spices you don't need to spend. I mean, how much does that cost? A few pennies. Yeah, yes. Yes. You know, we don't need to spend a lot of money to eat healthy if you eat in an indigenous fashion, the same foods that people have always eaten, particularly in Asia. And so, yes, I see that we can build on a plant knowledge very easily, simply at home, starting with the food that we eat. Yeah, yeah. Is there a collection of spices? You mentioned turmeric a couple of times. Is there collection of spices that are must haves, do you think in most people's cupboards that you could refer to? Yeah, a turmeric is a must have, you know, just end of that conversation, you know, you can shoot me later, but no turmeric has to be on your plate is almost ideally suited for the modern ills. It deals with so many issues, the blood sugar issues, the obesity issues, the metabolic syndrome issues, the inflammatory issues, and say the gut microbiome issues are all, you know, on his plate. So turmeric, definitely cinnamon as very much for the whole insulin resistance, the blood sugar men, metabolic syndrome issue, lots of evidence stacking up that it talks directly to that insulin resistance interface. Ginger. Is there a certain type of cinnamon that you recommend. People for areas to which I my interest is my my favorite is, is what we call Sri Lankan or a Ceylon cinema as well as or cinnamon am very effective give it is Latin they say Lancome, but the Cassia from China and there's Indonesian cinnamon as well and you'll find them all on the shelves. But if you look if you buy the quills is the one with the multiple quills that the same and you can smell them. Yeah. Emily do. And Emily. Yeah you can, you can immediately tell what is good Ginger. I mean, you know, just step back a bit. It has been the most valuable commodity in human history. Weight for weight. And you know what? It was made extinct in the wild 2000 years ago. All the ginger we've had since has had to be grown by rootstock because it's lost the capacity to live in the wild and that's human. We were doing eco side two gen two millennia ago. So valuable was ginger in people's mind because it's the antidote to cold and damp and cold and damp were the main metaphors for infection, particularly lung and joint infection. So Ginger was the go to remedy for most sort of infections, frankly, and we think we have a lot of it about. So let's use it and a simple take home remedy that I would offer anybody living in this benighted climate in the UK and during the winter, when you get in the colds and the sniffles and you're feeling the cold and suddenly you know, you get the cold and your kidneys and you know, something, something well, get some freshly ground ginger powder, some cinnamon, make a hot tea, sip it, and in fact, get a thermos flask, put that in there and keep sipping through the day and you'll get instant healing. You'll feel your passages clearing and we know why that's happening. Simple Home Remedy. You're not going to kill yourself, you know, can damage yourself, but it'll drip and you'll realize how fast these things are work. It's literally in minutes. So these are you know, it's making what we're talking about here cheap and accessible and available to anybody. Really is my. Passion. Yeah. Yeah. And the full spectrum of spices out there. Human fennel. Coriander. Yeah. Cardamom. Oh, yeah, yeah. One of the best spices for recovery from in convalescent care. And when you're weak and enfeebled and you know curry very well and you know, you need to build yourself up. Cardamom Chinese we're using it up to here very fond of in India. Yeah. Yeah. So when as a strategy of trying to increase your polyphenol content, your phytochemical content is, is it a machine gun approach? Is it trying to get all those different ones on top of having a few sort of regular favorites like your turmeric ginger? So yeah. You start with the shotgun approach, just have everything plotted on yeah, get a good cookbook on which they don't do this but they don't sprinkler don't they. They heat the spices. Yeah. Good, proper aromatic tastes and then do the Emily thing, try out a tea or a a spice on his own. And, you know, how does that feel? Yeah. And we sometimes do find people in the old time. So you survive in the hot and cold. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So their mum always tells me about this. Yeah. She's always like, You're too hot. You shouldn't have too much ginger. That's it. Yeah. Now this, she she's right as usual. We. We don't argue with. Yeah, yeah. But there is another, another side to it, because sometimes you heat up because you're in a fever. Mm hmm. And that's a defense measure against what people used to say was the cold. And so sometimes you need to support that. And so one of the standard ways of helping someone in a fever would be to warm them up with some ginger and cinnamon. Again, you know, we went to India some many years ago, my wife and she'd just come out of a really deep bronchial infection and we promised her India would be wonderful, you know, lovely weather. We hit a downpour and it was just damp coming down the walls. And her bronchitis went really bad. And she was in this hotel in Delhi. We went downstairs. She was barely walking. There was a guy in a suit, you know, tucked behind this chrome and steel bar, obviously waiting for the party to start. And, you know, he was 17 or 18, took one look at her and this and said, I know what you need. And he went and got the cocktail bar, any ground fresh ginger, fresh black pepper and cinnamon and made a cocktail of it and gave it to omni. Yeah. And I thought this is saying a lot. This is a 17 year old street kid who knew what she needed. And it's you know, it made all the difference. Yeah. It's interesting is that the whole warming up stuff when you have an illness because we're actually changing our opinion on the use of antibiotics in in common colds and fevers and bars and bonuses. So the traditional sort of approach is you give antipyretic, you get paracetamol, you bring that, you write down straight away. And whilst you need to be careful, particularly in kids, you are a risk of temporal convulsions. In a lot cases you might actually prolonging the severity of your disease because the increase in temperature is actually a protective measure. So there's a few things that we're doing in medicine that I think are coming around to a different way of thinking. And it's very in line with like things that my mum says actually, which is always quite amusing whenever we talk about it. Well, we talk a lot, I talk a lot about fever management, which is just that is, is, is incubating because at one at 99 or 100, you've got three times the whack of your white blood cells. They're charging around crazy things and poor germ at that point. And so you don't want to abort that. You don't want to stop that. You want to incubated. So it's all about keeping the temperature. You can we've got a thermometer, we can do this. So we cool it, we let some of the sweat out and we we call it in simple ways, and you can do it quite easily. And then you let it break the fever to break. And I've often said one good fever you've faced because you've killed your first line. You know, your white blood cells are now the the innate immunity is firing them now. And also any journalist pokes its head in the door is going to get whacked. Yeah. Yeah. So a fever mantra and is sometimes about warming you up at that point because you want to keep the temperature right. You don't want it to sink too prematurely. And people used to do this without too much advice. People are instinctively understood. Yeah, this once. We've talked about food, we talked about the inclusion of spices there as the first line of inflammation, balance and defending against an excess of inflammation. We're about to move on to that specific herbal remedies. Yeah. Well, it depends on where we want to cut it. So one of the main areas inflammation starts is actually in the lining of the blood vessels. So what we call the endothelium and endothelial dysfunction has been implicated in most inflamm as the starter and most inflammation. So a lot of the herbs and spices actually work there. So all the spices I've mentioned, we have evidence to show that they work on their front line, the blood vessel wall. But there are many other herbs that we use in practice. I mean, people have heard of Ginko, for example. It it's that works specifically at blood vessel walls and we can go down the list of many of the remedies we use Hawthorn which we use very much for circulation, heart support directly on the blood vessel walls and long list, but you will get that from the colors. So they will also work at the endothelial level. The spices definitely work. So that's one frontline. The major frontline, of course, is the gut wall, because we know that most of our inflammation, that the main challenge we have is in here in the gut. And so we need, first of all, to look after our diet and then we look at prebiotics and probiotics and various other ways of protecting. What we increasingly now see is important guy down here called the gut microbiome. Make sure that's in good shape. And sometimes after antibiotics, you need to support it in different ways. But there are again many herbs that we know and have evidence for. And you know what? They are turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, you know, keep coming back. Yeah, it's like a stuck record. Yeah. Are there any others that. Oh, yeah, perhaps. Too almost too many to list, but we use a lot of mucilage, for. Example. Okay. So if you had a gum Arabic, that's a classic remedy for healing the gut. Slippery Elm is another one that people have used from North America. The tannins, you know, tendons of the things you make leather with, you know, so they basically curdle or coagulate protein and you make leather out of it from soft tissues. If you swallow tannins, which could be strong black tea, but there are many other herbs, deliver them more accurately than that. You will temporarily let a rise, if you like, the lining of your upper stomach, and that will reduce inflammatory activity. So anything that comes from up here in the gullet and the stomach can be reached directly with the appropriate tannin containing herbs and bittersweet, which is a good example of one of those that would we use a lot for healing at the stomach level. But here's the thing Meadow Sweet is where aspirin came from at the old name for medicine, it was superior. And there was a German chemist who was wandering down the riverbank one day trying to find an alternative to the stuff from Willow Bark Salicylic Acid, which works very well to reduce inflammation, but drilling holes in your stomach. And he was looking for a gentler way of doing it. And he picked up the saw the meadow sweet on the riverbank and he smelted and realized it was it was wintergreen smell. You know, that's salicylate and a little idea. And so he knew that bittersweet was used for healing the stomach. Right. So he went and synthesized what we now call a spirit aspirin. Yeah. Specifically because he thought that that would be gentle on the stomach. He was wrong. But the meadow sweet from which he got it actually has tannin some usages in it which probably protect the gut and allows you to have a modicum of aspirin without damage to the stomach. So this is the sort of magic to play with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any others I've heard of? Lemon Balm, a peppermint what are the sort of. Well, those are both great because you can make them as teas and peppermint is a good example of what I was saying earlier about hot and cold because most of the spices are warming and I don't know, usually it to start with, I can sometimes tell a bit from looking at the tongue and so on, but I don't know which is going to suit any particular person. So simply say Here's some fennel or here's some ginger and here's some peppermint. You tell me which you feel better with because peppermint is cooling, fennel is warming, ginger is warming. Camomile is sort of cooling. So you can choose do an Emily, you know, just pick the one that you feel good with next day and then go from there and then you can stack it up if you find that peppermint is helpful, there are other cooling things you can use. We call them bitters. Yeah. Which are one of the, you know, people associate with herbs. They taste awful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's some that are really effective as bitters, dandelions, a very simple one. But we can go right through to wormwood which you you know that the the French for wormwood the fir move so you know it's one of those cultural things coffee black coffee without the sugar that's a bitter and those are cooling and always been understood all the way around the world they cool down heat and so an innately anti-inflammatory and they do that mostly by working in the gut level. Yeah you mentioned we were talking earlier about using teas and that and that sort of like first level of like how to test what works for you. What are the next sort of stage to what are the next steps in terms of how do you slowly increase the dose? And is it that sort of activity that you would recommend doing alongside a medical herbalist? Yeah. So I'm all for giving people tools for doing themselves. Yeah. You see, medical herbalist is the guys you turn to when you can't figure it out. Yeah, yeah. And you. This is a very extensive field. I wouldn't be able to figure out myself. Even so, you start at the beginning. You start with the teas. Answer the question was it the mint or was it the ginger that you liked? Because that'll set you down a particular path. If the mint, you could start with a few bitters. If it's the blooming that you need, there's all the spices to go for. Then if you think I'd like some more turmeric, but I don't want curry for breakfast, which is, you know, what you have in India, you have curry every meal today. Yeah. But you don't want to do that. Then you take a turmeric supplement and you can go and check those out. And at least I herbal reality. You can find out where, what the dosage you can game for and where to go, you know what, what you need to get. And then as you get more and more intrigued, and particularly as you getting the feedback here, you can say, Oh, I'll go and consult someone who knows about the stuff and consult a herbal practitioner. Mhm. So this touches along the way. Yeah. In building my app where we're, we've quite a selection of recipes that we're constantly building the library of and you can feel, you know health goals are we've also got a nutritional section which looks at the traditional nutritionals of, you know, your macros, your macronutrients. What's really lacking that we were talking about earlier is this understanding of phytochemicals and the indices that represent how phytonutrient rich this particular recipe is going to the herbs, the spices, the specific vegetables you're using. You're working on something else, right? Yeah. So you want to build a we want a campaign where we're sort of this is pukka now recruiting stakeholders and other people around the idea that we've got our plate. You know, the healthy plate with its fruit and vegetables and this fish and so on. We think that there's something we can add to that which we calling herbs and spices. Simple. Most people think of herbs and spices, flavorings. We want to change the view that they're not they're more than flavorings. They actually are health promoting. And because they provide these chemicals, these phytonutrients, and we can put chapter and verse to it, we can actually show health outcomes that link to these things. We want to build that case and to get a campaign because it's cheap. You know, we have health inequalities. You know, we talk about the five a day, but about 50% of the people of the population do five a day, the other 85% nowhere near it. How do we get them a little healthier without them having to raise their piggybank? And the answer is one answer is to get more spices into that and more herbs. So, yes, it's right. It's right. What we want to see in the public interest. Yeah, absolutely. Because there wasn't an appreciation for that nutrient density because most nutritional profiles just don't represent, you know, how healthy is to have three different teaspoons of different spices that you're using. And we can so easily put that right with a bit of butter work. Yeah. Then turn this into a very accessible I want a little badge saying, you know, herbs and spices are good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's leave it at that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got a lot of them papers and reviews on your on the website. You're part of the herbal relief. Herbal reality have. A reality that have a reality, you know, come do use Fino explorer and a lot of those sites to look at the the Phytochemical profiles we. Are building those we are putting those things together. So we want to create a a reference point to show what if it's a teaspoon, you know, how much are you adding to. Yeah. What, what, what value does that do. What value does having a herbal tea. Yes. In terms of it's adding to your daily intake. So we want to quantify. So we are right as we speak. Yeah. On that journey. Yeah, that would be amazing because I think a lot more people are becoming more appreciative of plump points in general. You know, the diversity of the ingredients they have on a weekly basis. Search is not your number one. Spices count for a quarter of it. So we're sort of moving in the right direction. But I think there's a lot more we can do by making a lot more of this about how nutrient dense a meal is just through the addition of a few different spices. Yeah And on that note, and in an ideal scenario, what sort of quality of spices are we looking for? What what represents a high quality spice? What? Where is something? Whereas, you know, compared to another spice that might not have the same amount of spice chemicals in there. There are worse ways in which you can reduce the quality of the spice since they start that way. Okay. Yeah. Once you powder something it's beginning to oxidize is beginning to lose its aromatics. So I always suggest, first of all, if you're buying for yourself, go for things like Cuban and coriander and so on. Go for the actual whole seeds and get a mil or grind to a spice mill or something to grind them fresh. And you'll notice the difference. I mean, the aromas are wonderful, aren't they? If you are buying powders and this is a trick we all know the supermarkets, when you see the little bottles go for the back. Of the sell by date. Because they don't buy something has been sitting on the shelf for six months. That's what I'm saying, because you lose a lot of quality care as pukka we of to make a strong point about growing organically because we want a to grow sustainably but B we know that plants grown organically are higher in phytochemicals and phytonutrients. And there's an absolutely obvious reason for that because most of them are produced by plants for their own defense, that we're adapting to the climate change and climate stresses and insects and so on. If a plant's being sprayed with pesticides and so on, it doesn't need to produce those phytochemicals. So we know that organically grown has a much higher stack of those phytonutrients. So we make a point of that. But of course it's more expensive, but go for a reliable supplier, don't go down to some bean end at the end of the road. Just find someone who's got a reputation to protect who will be more likely to provide you with the quality that you need. Yeah. Brilliant personal question. I'm about to go my same. And as you can imagine, I've racked up quite a bit of bad karma along the last couple of decades. My friends, I'm going to be drinking alcohol, hopefully not too much, but I'm probably going to need some support. So considering I'm generally pretty healthy, I generally sleep well. Are there particular medical herbs you think I should include in my self-care kit whilst I'm away? You should especially into a hot and steamy climate. Yeah, because this is where the bitters come into there. Okay. They are primarily liver remedies. I mean, that's how you could distill a lot of stuff that they work on, basically getting the liver working better for you so they make themselves ideal. Hangover cures. So start with dandelion. There's another remedy that the French are very fond of called artichoke leaf, which you can get, but any bitter can be used, and the more hot and steamy it gets, the more they affect it because they're cooling and drying. So they're anti. So if you if if the result of having too much alcohol is you feel hot and steamy and you want to loosen you cover. That's when you need the bitters. Okay. Wormwood is another one, you know, and you can buy, you know, especially in an airport duty free. So you can buy these little bottles of bitters that you're meant to take after you've been out for a party. Okay, so artichoke leaf, wormwood, wormwood. Dandelion, the gentian root. If you if you buy these bitters, you know, they call them bitters. Yeah. You'll see a long list of basically spices, but a lot of these bitter herbs as well. Okay. Yeah. This would be my stack for a stag. Okay. A bottle or two of those bitters. Brilliant. Okay, I'm going to. I'm going to stock up on those before I go. This has been brilliant. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And your website is fantastic. We're going to do a deep dove into some of the other topics that we haven't had enough time talking to you, like the chronic illness and the ways in which you can support our medical herbs. And let's the look forward to that because that's what we do most of our working days. Yeah. People with chronic illnesses. Yeah, I can definitely get behind that campaign as well to get spices on the plate. We'll call on you briefly because we're looking for everybody. You can broadcast this as widely as we can. Is such an easy target. It's such an easy message. Yeah, absolutely. It's like spices. Groupie. Yeah, it's you. If you enjoyed that video, you love the library of content that we have on Doctor's Kitchen dot com. Make sure you hit subscribe. We have podcasts in our library of brain health, wellbeing supplements and lots more. Have a wonderful day.
