These medicines are hiding in your spice rack | Kanchan Koya & Dr. Sarah Berry

if you think of inflammation it's really an orchestra and spices seem to be intervening at different levels so what does that mean you actually have greater cellular resilience now you have lower inflammation and lower blood pressure spices have direct anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects they are pre-biotics for the gut microbiome which are then also playing a role in their beneficial effects kin Coya a molecular biologist turned food scientist and the founder of spice centered food block Chief spice Mama she's also the author of spice spice baby do you want to tell us what you've got so I have a Duba smell it oh my gosh there's always turmeric there's always chili pepper and then a few differences could you talk through the next step use more spices more regularly I think it's very achievable to get to that one to two teaspoons a day so my biggest recommendation is I have never tried I'm going to be trying that one for sure welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health [Music] kchan thank you for joining us today thanks for having me it's brilliant to be able to do it in person now you should be ready for this because you've done it before we have this tradition here at Zoe where we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners you can give us a yes or a no or if you absolutely have to you can give us a sentence are you ready to give it another go yeah let's do it all right we're going to start soft are there medicines hiding in our spice rack yes is there evidence that spices can help treat arthritis maybe okay can spices improve our blood sugar control yes can the way that I cook or prepare spices actually affect their health benefits yes should we be having spices in every meal yes and finally what's the most surprising thing that you've discovered about spices how few people will use them um on a routine basis so hopefully we're here to change that as someone running a company that does a lot of data science here's something that fascinates me YouTube has been telling me that 69.3% of you who watch this channel frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button so I want to ask you a quick favor you choosing to subscribe helps us a lot it helps us make the show better access World leading experts and ultimately make more progress on our mission to improve improve the health of millions so if you enjoy this show all I ask is that you hit the Subscribe button and in return I promise we'll continue to make the show better and better each week the last time you came um we were sort of talking about how adding spices to your diet can be good for our health and that there's some real science behind that and I I left that conversation very motivated K I was like that's amazing you did this brilliant job of explaining how easy it was and I am now adding a variety of spices to my breakfast which is exciting I've even managed to convince my daughter that sumac is something she should add like onto her avocados so I'm very proud about that and then I have to be honest I sort of lost the thread remained intimidated and haven't really managed to add anything to any other part of my diet so I'm looking forward to this as maybe like my next step in understanding um what you can do with spice and how it can both clearly change the taste of your meals which is exciting but also it can potentially be good for your health can we start right at the beginning though cuz I think many people listening to this will not have you know had a chance to hear from you before we just start with like what is a spice the formal definition of a spice is that it's um the root the bark the bud the fruit and the leaf although that can get a little tricky sometimes because leaves are more herbs than spices um usually dried those parts of the plant once dried constitute a spice they're often used in small amounts for flavoring in food and hopefully as will inspire people today also to boost the health properties of food but yeah that's traditionally sort of the formal definition of a spice and this obviously started something that just tasted really nice in our food right um but I think now and this is what where your own research sort of started we understand they're high in these things called like polyphenols um can you explain what those are yeah so I would actually say that you know thousands of years ago when spices were first disc discovered people did love how they made food taste but actually our ancestors also recognized that spices had additional properties like the ability to preserve food in the absence of refrigeration thousands of years ago so I think there was an understanding as evidenced by the fact that people waged Wars and conquests were undertaken for the spice trade that there was more to it than just flavor alone but now we obviously have science catching up to some of that ancient kind of intuitive wisdom so polyphenols are essentially a group of naturally occurring compounds that are highly prevalent in the plant kingdom and for reasons that we'll hopefully discuss really enriched in herbs and spices highly concentrated phenols are just a type of chemical structure and polyphenols just means that a lot of these compounds have multiple phenolic kind of units but if you want to just simplify it there are essentially chemicals phytochemicals found in the plant kingdom that happen to play a role in Plants but also have some beneficial effects in our bodies and Canan I always think that all of the chemicals that are implants have magical functions because they're there to preserve the plant itself so if we take seed oils for example they're enriched with so much vitamin E because it's a natural antioxidant so it kind of protects the plant and this is the same with polyphenols in Plants they're there as a natural defense for the plant itself you know let's just simplify to UV radiation so plants grow outside they're subject to UV radiation and UV radiation at high enough level sun right can start to cause something called oxidative stress it just means that it can damage DNA and it can cause a buildup of what's called free radicals now our bodies or plant cells have an ability to clear those free radicals but these polyphenols can help they can neutralize or let's say clear away mop up vacuum up some of these free radicals that once they accumulate can start to cause cellular damage you're saying they need the sun in order to um uh photosynthesize but actually can still harm them yes as you're saying that these polyphenols are part of what's like built into them to protect them from this damage exactly and another example would be microbes so a lot of these polyphenols have antimicrobial activity and you have microbes that might be Predators or predatorial to the plant and the plant needs to protect itself so you know whether you're looking at antioxidant capacity antimicrobial capacity or some other kind of attributes of these polyphenols at a basic level they are thought to exist to protect the plant so you're describing I think polyphenols as been in all plants um why are there so many in spices so why many more than there are maybe than just the piece of broccoli that you mentioned before yeah so I have to be do a little bit of hand waving because we don't really know but the idea is that the parts of the plant that are more exposed to the elements so like the bark of the tree or the root in the ground or the bud or the seed which would be exposed to some of these threats if you will would be highly enriched in these polyphenols and that's why spices specifically because of where they're found in the plant are really really concentrated in these compounds that's fascinating so you've done this beautiful story I think about like why the polyphenols are there in the plant and I can sort of you know I can definitely visualize this now in like the um you know the hard weather and the Sun and then these darn animals coming e you cuz you can't move right so I can see that you know it makes sense um could you talk through the next step which is what's what's not obvious to me is what happens when you eat this why that would help me cuz I'm not a plant why therefore these you know spices and polyphenols more broadly turn out to be healthy for a human being yeah so I'm going to approach that question in two ways one is I'm going to talk about the specific antioxidant potential of a lot of these polyphenols so going back to this idea of oxidative stress every time your cell divides every time you undergo any cellular process there is a production of free radicals these are just um radicals that have like a free oxygen on them that can then interact with proteins or DNA and sometimes cause damage this is just a normal part of cellular metabolism and polyphenols and spices can neutralize these free radicals so they have this antioxidant capacity so that's one one way in which they help us when we ingest them and the second way is actually something that we call hormesis in biology which is a little bit of stress is good for you so the exercise is a great example when you look at the effects of exercise on the human body in the short term you actually see a lot of things go up in the short term that seem like they wouldn't be a good idea like blood pressure goes up a little bit of inflammation goes up and you think well that can't be good but then what happens is once the stressor has been removed you actually have greater cellular resilience now you have lower inflammation and lower blood pressure so spice polyphenols this is like what my trainer tells me all the time like during the training session it feels really painful and it hurts but in the long run you know it's good for me which is what I always tell myself as I'm in the middle of the session wondering why I've done this to myself and you're saying there's something sort of similar with eating fasting is an example in the short term it can feel a little stressful and intense but then long term we know it can build some cellular resilience help metabolic Health blood sugar control that sort of thing so spice polyphenols can be thought of as this shortterm stressor which is why they work as this defense compound against predators and in our bodies they also act in this way they they actually act as a little bit of a stressor which then activates our own cellular antioxidant Pathways so great example would be and I don't want to get too technical um but there's a pathway that is sort of the master regulator of an antioxidant status called the Nrf2 pathway and a lot of these polyphenols will activate our own cellular repair Pathways because they are creating a little bit of stress through this mechanism of hormesis just like exercise or fasting and I think the polyphenol research is coming out now is fascinating it's quite an exploding era of research uh Jonathan in the nutrition field um we know that people having high polyphenol diets whether it's from herbs or spices or other Foods so for example polyphenols are found in heavily pigment pigmented kind of berries and vegetables it's polyphenols often give their color to fruits and veget is that like sort of eat the rainbow you know the dark green leafy veg the berries you know Etc um you know Peppers the yellow the red the peers and there's so much research isn't there can coming out now showing that polyphenols are linked to all sorts of improvements in health whether it be cancer whether it be type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease you know any inflammatory related disease and I think this is because there's evidence emerging around polyphenols Beyond oxid of stress around inflammation about blood sugar control I wonder if this is something that you've looked into or could talk a little bit more about in especially in terms of maybe some blood sugar control attributes of polyphenols so yeah I think um blood sugar control is a great one to look at because since the last time I was on the Zoe podcast there has actually been a randomized control trial in humans which unfortunately itely in the spice world are pretty rare I guess there just aren't the right incentives to you know spend all this money to show that like cinnamon or cumin can have a benefit because there's not so much patentability around these spices but there was a study that came out very recently out of UCLA in the um Journal of America American journal of clinical nutrition and it was a randomized control trial looking at the impact of cinnamon um over 4 weeks in culinary amounts on blood sugar control using CGM so um there has been there's blood sugar sensus on there exactly so there have been quite a few studies looking at the impact of cinon on blood sugar and there have been mixed results because people haven't always been able to use continuous glucose monitors and you know sometimes there's been an effect sometimes there hasn't so this group at UCLA really wanted to kind of use more Cutting Edge blood sugar monitoring technology and they also wanted to look at exposure to culinary amounts of cinnamon so they used like what I would use if I was just cooking at home is that what you mean as opposed to eating like um you know half a ball full of it each day to try and get a big dose precisely so they looked at four grams of cinnamon a day they had to put it in a capsule because it was a randomized double blinded study so they didn't want people to know they were having a sprinkling of cinnamon versus placebo and what they found is that using the continuous glucose monitor they observed reductions statistically significant reductions in um 24-hour glucose concentrations in the group that was exposed to 4 gram of cinnamon a day for 4 weeks versus the placebo and so that's amazing CU that's not very much cinnamon what you're describing right that's a so four grams um is thought to be equivalent to about 2 teaspoons which is not a sprinkling but it's absolutely achievable I mean we can talk later about my daughter is delighted to have that in her oatmeal in the morning I can tell you without any trouble so um I I'll have it in a pastry yeah well there have been studies in the past looking at the addition of cinnamon to sort of sweet treats like rice pudding and the ability of just a teaspoon of cinnamon to sort of mitigate um the blood sugar rise after something like that I will say that in this particular study which was randomized and pretty well done they didn't observe a reduction in postmeal glucose concentrations after cinnamon and they don't really know why um they think it may be the way the oral glucose tolerance tests are conducted and variability there so anyway I think overall the message is you know if you want to work on more balanced blood sugar um obviously you do a lot of things for that they should you know you should never think of a spice as a silver bullet solution to anything but within the context of otherwise Health promoting behaviors and a healthy dietary pattern it could be a great idea to add more cinnamon well I it's a beautiful demonstration isn't it that even small amount of this particular plant with these very strong polyphenol properties can have some impact and I think what you're saying is obviously you can't just go and eat um pastry from Starbucks all day and put a bit of cinnamon on it and expect to have a fantastic Health outcome but you I guess you what you're saying but if you think about that as a almost like a proof of principle I guess and think about how you layer this on top it's quite exciting right I think it's the way we think like oh you can't outs supplement a poor diet in the same way you can't kind of hack your way with spices through poor diet but you can definitely enhance the quality of the diet by also adding spices and I would argue also making food more exciting and delicious yeah and I think as well as blood sugar another really important area related to spices is inflammation and we now know that inflammation chronically if it's in the wrong Pace the wrong time and excessive can increase our risk of so many diseases and it's actually inflammation that we think underpins the link between diet and many chronic diseases I think this is a really exciting area of research related to polyphenols but also to spices and it would be great to hear your view on that yeah so a study that we talked about last time that I would love to mention again is um the one out of Penn State that looked at the addition of a spice blend it was many spices in the blend um and they added this to sort of a standard American diet typical hamburger meal so you know something that isn't great for you and they gave people the meal either with or without the spice blend and they basically found reductions in inflammatory markers right after the meal when the meal had the spice blend and I think that's really empowering and exciting because again it was culinary amounts of spices I'm sure the burger tasted better with the blend versus without the blend and there was this real reduction in biomarkers of inflammation right after the meal so um you know that got people really excited because up until then we only really had some inv vitro and like animal studies on the inflammatory effects of spices and now we had an actual human trial and since then there have been some more studies looking at the impacts of specific spices on inflammatory conditions like arthritis so there was a study that got quite a bit of Buzz looking at turmeric supplementation versus traditional sort of um NSAIDs or non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs that many people use for arthritis but have some side effects especially on gut health and they found that turmeric supplements worked as well as the NSS but without the negative side effects now the issue there is that they did use quite high concentrations of curcumin which is the bioactive polyphenol in turmeric so I think it it's not clear that you can achieve the same therapeutic effect with turmeric in the diet if you have full-blown arthritis but if you are looking to lower inflammation and you know just prevent an inflammatory condition I think that a case can be made for just adding more of these anti-inflammatory spices to your kind of regular rotation and so Canan when they've looked cross-sectionally at people so at one point in time those people that have a higher amount of particular spices do they see that those populations have lower incidence of type two diabetes low incidence of heart arthritis lower incidence of these chronic diseases that are underpinned by inflammation right so um there's a couple of studies that have looked at either specific spices or spice Blends so there were studies that looked at at the ingestion of chili peppers and actually all cause mortality so they weren't specifically looking at these in you know these conditions but they actually have found in a couple of these um observational studies that regular chili pepper consumption does seem to reduce all cause mortality and which is death right just you guys scientist sometimes fancy words right and um the thought is that chili peppers have these anti-inflammatory compounds like csin that may impact um chronic inflammation systemic chronic inflammation I mean again it's a bit of hand waving because we don't have like clear understanding around the mechanism and I think in the last episode with you guys Tim mentioned some data with the zoee predict study with um Chili Peppers and changes in the gut microbiome that were more favorable towards an anti I want to ask you about the microbiome for a minute because we sort of not talked very much about it but I know in in other um podcasts that we've done often we've talked about the way that that these bacteria inside our gut might be sort of the critical step between eating these compounds that maybe we as human beings can't even really break down you know don't do anything but these bacteria inside us have this capacity to break it down and then create these chemicals that then go into our body and have all of these benefits is that what's going on with spices I think that's definitely playing a role and there was a study in nutrients that looked at the Prebiotic effects of the polyphenols and spices so they looked at a blend of spices again encapsulated cuz it was a randomized control trial and they found changes in the gut microbiota that seem to be more favorable upon spice exposure versus not um I think it's an early area of research and I'm sure there's going to be more coming out on what specific changes are occurring in the gut microbiome in response to which spices but I think it's fair to say that while spices have direct anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects at a cellular level they are definitely prebiotics for the gut microbiome which are then also playing a role in their beneficial effects and I think this partly goes back to the whole area of polyphenols that there's lots of species in our gut that convert polyphenols to their active form so convert them to a form in which they have this kind of almost pharmacological like properties in our body so what you're saying is there are these sort of species in our gut that are like taking in the spice can turn into something suddenly turns this into far you're saying like it sort of becomes a drug for us suddenly from something that is not a drug you need the microb to sort of translate it's almost like it's unwrapping it you know like totally love that analogy so it's taking something that is quite inactive i. it's all wrapped up using your analogy and it's unwrapping it and then creating a more active form that goes on to Pharmacy tabs you get S we almost impossible to open the darn thing like particularly when you're really sick they're always like those things you can't break into because they think that somehow you're small child is going like so you're saying my microbes are sort of like that wrapping unwrapping this thing getting it out um and therefore presumably depending upon the microbes you have they may be more or or less effective yeah and I think what kchan was referring to is the work from our zi predict one study where we looked in a thousand individuals at the prevalence of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different uh gut microbion species and then we looked at people's diet and what we found was quite a clear association between certain spices certain herbs and certain gut species brilliant well I would love to move from sort of generically why spices are exciting and I think that is once again I'm like I'm really not eating enough spices onto actually talking about spices um in a practical way thinking about what can we do Canan this time you have brought something fun to show us is that right so I brought a spice box so in India where I grew up pretty much every family has a Spice Box we call it a Duba it's just a big box with little tins inside and every family has one and it looks a little bit different depending on where you're from in India and what spices you prefer there's some overlap there's always turmeric there's always chili pepper and then a few differences so I brought one today showcasing some whole spices um like cinnamon Starnes Ginger and a couple of others amazing and I remember that last time you said that growing up in India sort of traditionally this wasn't just about sort of making food taste better is that right yes so the Spice Box in India is really an integral part of our Pharmacy FM Pharmacy and it's um rooted in the ancient Indian medical system of ayurveda which growing up I sort of rolled my eyes at and thought it wasn't serious science and then only when I became a PhD student and my lab began to study cumin in turmeric for breast cancer was I reminded that maybe some of this ancient wisdom is actually proving to be correct I just want to be really clear here right you you are not saying hey any of these spices a replacement for like modern drugs you're saying however there are some real properties in them and we can learn something from that and I guess that in a lot of modern drugs are sort of refined versions of um compounds that are available um sort of in the natural world aren't they I think about aspirin is a thing that I remember learning about you know when I was a kid yeah absolutely so shikimic acid which is the starting point in the synthesis of Tamiflu which is one of our most successful antiviral drugs actually comes from from star anise which is in my Spice Box so amazing how about you come and show us your Spice Box um I'm very excited to see it let me tell you a quick story so Wednesday last week I went for dinner with my wife Justine now this would have been a source of anxiety for me in the past and that's because some foods would leave me feeling really tired and sick for hours afterwards and as a result I actually followed quite a restrictive diet then I did Zoe and discovered that I'm prone to blood sugar spikes from my Zoe digital coach I learned that this doesn't mean I have to restrict what I eat I just have to be smarter about my food choices so back to last week at the restaurant we were eating Italian which before Zoe would never have happened but my Zoe coach helped me make choices that consider my blood sugar I started the meal with a delicious Italian salad and then enjoyed some pasta afterwards drenched in olive oil of course and after dinner I felt great energized by my food and by the fact that now I don't have to limit the foods I eat and choose between a healthy and a happy life whether I'm eating out or cooking my Zoe digital coach helps me make smarter choices every day honestly it's transformed how I feel and according to the scientists who continue to develop the digital coach making these choices now could give me many more healthy years why not join more than a 100,000 other people giving Zoe membership a shot and tell me what you think to take the first step towards the possibility of more energy less hunger and more healthy years take our quiz to help identify changes to your food choices that you could make right now simply go to zoe.com podcast where as a podcast listener you can also get 10% off so Canan you just sort of pulled out a metal tin with I think what is that sort of six or so compartments that look beautiful with different colors and things sort of bit looks like bits of plant could just talk us through um what you've got in front of us so I have two different varieties of cinnamon star anise cloves Ginger and ground turmeric and I would say like the cinnamon both looks a bit sort of like pieces of bark don't they Sarah the star anise did you say literally looks like little stars then I would said the um the clothes looks like a bit of sticks have fallen on the ground that you think your children has brought in um and then the charm Mar is this amazing yellow color against everything else so there's like a real contrast here with all the colors um could you talk us through what you might do with one of these things yeah so what I really want to show here is how you can wake up a spice by gently crushing it before you expose it to heat in the cooking process so if you take a cinnamon bar cure and I'm just going to smell it and ask you to kind of take a whiff of the bar it's a gentle smell it has a gentle smell it doesn't smell very much like a little bit right and then I'm just going to place it in my mortar and pestle and kind of gently smash it open which is like a little Stone bowl that you're whacking with a sort of stone Hammer basically right exactly and you can definitely you know do this with your kids they love it it's really a sensory experience and now you take a whiff of the crushed cinnamon which I just gently crushed for like a couple of seconds let me see what that it smells amazing I would say as someone who doesn't ever break the spices themselves what's striking is how much more powerful the smell is than the ready ground cinnamon get out of thing which is what I use at Hope s of 10 times stronger I would say there's an activation of the flavor enhancing and health enhancing volatile polyphenols when you smash because you smash it up right you can do the same thing in a little spice Grinder like a coffee grinder that you've dedicated to spices and then you'll use it in the dish right away and you'll have this explosion of Aroma and flavor when you buy pre-round spice it has been sitting on the shelf for a while some people think 2 years or so for the average spice so it's there's been a passage of time between the harvesting the crushing and then the powder form it doesn't mean that there are no benefits and there's no flavor of course there is but the reason I'm demonstrating this is because it's just important to know that spices are almost like kind of living breathing well not really but like they're really like packed with these bioactives that that have the ability to get truly enhanced when we cook with them and so you know um for example here we have star anise and I was talking about how star anise actually has a compound called shikimic acid which is the starting point in the synthesis of Tamiflu and so whenever I have a cold I will throw a star anise pod in my chai which is my Indian tea and I'll have ginger in there which I also have here so I'm just going to break a little bit of Ginger and throw that into to my um spice mix I have some cloves cloves are really interesting trying to break this Ginger here cloves are really interesting because they are thought to have some of the highest antioxidant potential amongst all spices they're also thought to have some antiseptic and analgesic properties which means that they can relieve topical pain so if you've ever been to the dentist and they put clove oil on a painful tooth that's because clove has some topical pain relieving properties when there's actually science behind that it's not a myth no it's not a myth and when I have a sore throat I just pop a whole clove in my mouth and just kind of keep it there like a lozen almost it's not the most lozengy or sweet taste it's a little bit potent but it really does seem to help and it does it alleviate the sore throat yes I think so because of its topical pain relieving properties at least in my n of one experiment um for I don't know that there's been a trial looking at a whole clove popped in the mouth for a sore throat but it works for you yes there have been some studies looking at clove oil for sure and pain Rel and and kchan going back to the cinnamon bark so when once you crushed it like you said it released all the kind of bioactives it smell really fragrant a lot of the S time you see people just add the bark unrushed to Foods you know like in its whole form and you see this with so many different herbs and spices that people added in they say oh it's going to flavor it does that have any health benefits or do we need to be crushing these um it definitely still has health benefits especially if you put the bar into say a tea and then you simmer it that heat will actually draw out some of the bioactives but if you crush it before you're going to get an even greater enhancement so if you have a few seconds and you have a mortar and pestle and you can crush your cinnamon and then throw it into your tea it's going to have a greater activation of the bioactives and the volatile compounds so basically crush your spices first before using them in whatever way you want to use them yeah and then K I'm picking up on the comment you said about Heat this is something that we think about a lot in nutrition around how exposure to air to light to heat impacts whether the particular nutrient is uh able to be act in its active form so we know that heat often deactivates a lot of chemicals that are in food when you heat them what about with spices should we be heating them or shouldn't we yeah so I think the nuanced answer is that it depends but for the most part spice polyphenols do get activated with heat there is a couple of exceptions so turmeric for example is really activated and made more bio available with heat and fat which is why you'll see the Indian Grandma often blooming the spice in oil or ghee often doing what blooming so it's a culinary term for where you add a spice to a fat sauce for about 30 to 60 seconds and almost see it Bloom like a flower in the fat and that's thought to act AC at um a lot of the bioactives so curcumin in turmeric is indeed activated with heat and fat and becomes more bioavailable it's also more bioavailable when you pair it with black pepper which is why people always say add a pinch of black pepper to your golden milk to really boost the bioavailability there are um some spices like sumac which I know you mentioned Jonathan that you enjoy on your avocado toast sumac contains anthocyanin which are those powerful antioxidant plant pigments and those are actually more sensitive to heat which is why you'll often see people sprinkling sumac on hummus or babaan or a fatou salad in the Middle East instead of cooking with it which is I why I use it's so easy I don't have to do all of this complex cooking that I don't really know what I'm doing I can just throw it on something cold but you're saying for most of you know these beautiful spices I think for everyone who's um not seen this on YouTube but just on audio they look gorgeous um in general they have to be both broken down and what you're saying it's most of the time in part of cooked in some way to get this heat in order to really unlock um not just the taste but also the health benefits yeah and I would say that we're really scratching the surface when it comes to spice polyphenols because for example with cinnamon we know cinnamon has cinam aldhy which is definitely activated with heat but it also has other polyphenols that we may not have yet discovered that may be actually heat sensitive so my recommendation is cook with the spices crush them add them to your teas your stews your soups but also don't shy away from using them sprinkled Raw on things because for many people that's way easier I think you're still getting beneficial polyphenol effects um it's just that the ones we best understand seem to be activated with heat so the Dapper that you have there has got all beautiful fresh spices for the majority of people we have jars at home that might have been sitting there for several years especially if you're not using them very regularly is there kind of a used B that you would suggest cuz the on the back of the jar I mean it says forever almost right and is fresh better is dried still good and after what period of time should we be chucking them out of our cupboards right so if you have a really old jar I would open it and take a little whiff and see if there's any Aroma at all the aroma is actually indicative of a lot of the compounds still being around so if you open a jar and it smells like nothing maybe it's time to toss it you can try to salvage a very old jar by actually heating it for the reasons we just discussed so take the spice and put it in a little Skillet and dry toast it and see if that activates some of the aroma if it's a whole spice crush it and if you're still getting nothing maybe it's time to go and you need a fresh batch but you can reawaken some old spices by crushing or heat whole spices will last a lot longer than ground spices because all of those bioactives are still kind of protect Ed within the structure of the whole spice so if you buy a whole spice I think you can easily have it sit around for one to 2 years um and then when you grind it my rule of thumb is 3 to 6 months try to use it up within 3 to 6 months and if you've bought it pre-round also try to use it up within 3 to 6 months and then importantly store it away from heat and light which will activate those volatile compounds so as tempting as it is to keep it right next to your stove have it in a drawer maybe a little bit removed from the stove or the oven and have it in a you know sealed tight jar away from heat and light for sort of Maximum shelf life I'm wondering if we can dive a little bit into a few of the spices that you've got there and their specific properties and one thing I'm really interested in having had two children and having had morning sickness is ginger and so most women are recommended to suck on Ginger or have ginger tea or have ginger biscuits to help with morning sickness I actually don't like ginger unfortunately um but I had so much of it when I was pregnant it didn't do anything for me can you tell me a little bit about the evidence relating Ginger to morning sickness and also all the other properties that Ginger and health outcomes that Ginger been related to yeah so there' have been quite a lot of studies on Ginger and it's bioactive gingerol um and its effects on digestion gut health and nausea there are studies looking at how Ginger can impact gut Transit time so the amount of time it takes for food to Traverse the gut which can help with digestive distress um flatulence bloating that sort of thing we can't mention gut Transit time at zo without talking about our gut Transit time research that was published in gut last year it's the biggest study ever in the world looking at gut Transit time um and what we asked everyone to do was to add some blue dye to their food food and measure how long it took for the blue dye to go from when they ate the food to when it appeared in the poo and that's what the transit time is just saying how long it takes from when you eat it to to coming out and we found that this was associated with health outcomes and gut microbiome so if anyone does want to measure their gut Transit time go get some blue dye or eat some sweet corn and look how long it takes to to come out in the Poo yes I've done the gut Transit time experiment with the blue dye and I loved it and I had healthy gut Transit time I would love to see a study where somebody does that plus or minus Ginger Ginger that's what I was thinking would be really good yeah that would be amazing so there are studies in animal models and smaller human studies looking at impact positive impacts on gut Transit time also positive impacts on the gut microbiota again sort of Shifting the gut microbiome towards more anti-inflammatory State there really doesn't seem to be any downside to Ginger unless you suffer from heartburn and gird and acid reflux in which case too much Ginger can actually be aggravating so it can help digestive symptoms but too much can sort of aggravate you know heartborne so um really play with it it's also there's a small study looking at the impact of Ginger on PMS symptoms and people um women observed an improvement in some PMS symptoms with ginger and turmeric so I think more studies are required but we have enough evidence through the body of literature that it might have effects on digestion nausea and PMS symptoms I feel that having seen these I really want to now talk about okay how could we use them which I think I suspect that I'm not the only person um who's listening to this is like okay I really like the idea of using these spices but I'm pretty lost like you picked up that pestel and water I'm already not really sure like how to use that when is it ready and then how could I actually apply this um to some meal so actually maybe you could just start by explaining you got you thrown in a whole bunch of those spices into that pestil and water could you just talk us through what do you do with it how do you know when it's ready and then maybe you could just maybe take us through maybe starting with breakfast like how we could start to apply these spices into our diet in a really practical way and we will make sure we put this in the show notes as well for people like me who listen to it and then feel lost the next day yeah so I want to take a step back because what I really want to do is Empower people to use more spices more regularly in their daily cooking and so I think a mortar and pestle and freshly ground spices are lovely to Showcase but they can be intimidating for the sort of you know home cook who is busy has kids is sort of you know juggling a bunch of things and is thinking now I have to buy a motar and pestil and grind fresh star anise it's not happening so I want to take a step back and say like with any habit change whether it's adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet whether it's adding more plant diversity 30 plants a week um baby steps are really where the magic lies so my biggest recommendation is to take the foods that you're already eating that you already enjoy that your kids already enjoy and start to challenge yourself to add at least one spice to that dish so if we just take some examples you know people might typically eat like avocado toast you mentioned sumac you could add some chili peppers if you like heat you could add a little bit of cumin and coriander to your avocado toast when you said you just literally mean sprinkle it on top in all those cases exactly so start by just going to the store buying a reputable brand of say ground cumin ground coriander keep it away from heat and light and sprinkle it onto your avocado toast and the cumin and coriander um also have um all of these high polyphenols and some of this evidence for um helping our health that you've talked about with some of the others y so the anti-inflammatory study that I mentioned that look at the addition of the spice blend to the Burger actually had cumin and coriander in that blend and there are lots of initro studies looking at the impact of cumin and coriander on antioxidant status on digestion animal models so yes absolutely wonderful there's also some studies looking at coriander and blood sugar control so pretty much every spice will have some beneficial properties if you dig through the literature um I think cumin and coriander are just easy because you can sprinkle them on you don't have to grind them fresh and chili peppers are s a similar example at the kind of doses that you're talking about are spring on you know our breakfast or our lunches for example will they be enough if we were to have a Sprinkle every day to have a health benefit well I think we can extrapolate from the study that looked at markers of inflammation being reduced upon the spice blend and it was about a teaspoon of the blend so you can easily achieve a teaspoon of spices through the day if you sprinkle it on to like every meal so I think it's very achievable to get to that one to two teaspoons a day um for some of those anti-inflammatory effects so you started with breakfast and you're saying like I think you talked about cumin coriander sumac is like really easy to sprinkle on um what about snacks I was going to go exactly the same place exactly what about you know the snacks account for 25% of our energy intake in the UK and the us so I think that is a would be a great way if we could get some spices into our snacks would be fabulous any ideas yeah so I would suggest um a yogurt based snack because we know yogurt is a fermented food it's great for microbiome diversity inflammation so two options with yogurt you could go in a sweet Direction where you take some Greek yogurt you throw in a bunch of different berries for those wonderful polyphenols you throw in some nuts like walnuts pistachios almonds and you sprinkle on some cinnamon a little bit of grated nutmeg and cardamom and you almost have a pudding of sorts because it has all these luxurious flavor profiles from the spices you get the benefit of potential blood sugar balance with the cinnamon and these additional polyphenols really easy way to spice up sort of a sweeter yogurt snack and then you could go in a more Savory Direction and prepare a yogurt dip for a plate of cut vegetables so you can have your carrots cucumbers radishes tomatoes and your Greek yogurt with a little drizzle of olive oil some crushed garlic for that Allison which is another great bioactive found in garlic and to to that I would again add salt a little bit of sumac chili cumin coriander mix it up and it's almost like a middle eastern type of dip for your cut veggies great and any ideas for snacks on the go yeah I actually love um popped home popped popcorn so just you know get some corn kernels do this with your kids it's super fun a little bit of avocado or olive oil in a pot throw the Kels in let them pop it's really fun to hear them popping the kids can get involved and then just toss it with a spice blend that you love it can be garam masala which is an Indian spice blend it can be the baharat blend or a curry blend you know with a little bit of olive oil and salt and now you have a spiced up polyphenol Rich popcorn snack great IDE that I have never tried so it's like curried popcorn exactly I'm going to be trying that one like not just as a snack for me and the kids but in the evening if I'm a bit peckish when I'm having my polyphenol packed glass of red wine yes I'm going to like boost it up yeah that's after my um Tim restricted eating window that I'm now told I had to stop eating you see this is all pulling me in the wrong direction Sarah so i' got to resist the after dinner eating and what about um CU I feel like um what about when you go to to dinner which is I think where I get intimidated because it starts to feel like you need to really understand what you're doing um cooking with spices so imagine that you're looking for that same sort of Gateway access into using spices um for meals at dinner what would you um what would be your entry points that you might suggest again it's take the thing you're already M making so if you are making a Bolognese uh traditional meat bolog or a lentil bolise which would be packed with more fiber you can add sweet or smoked paprika you can actually add cinnamon to a bolog for a lovely complexity of flavor we tend to think of cinnamon as a sweet dessert how I think about it with sort of very much but traditional cultures whether it's India and garam masala or the Middle East and baharat blend or this um scharma Blend or even in Vietnam um cinnamon is often used in Savory dishes Chinese 5 Spice which is used in Savory cooking has cinnamon and star anise so you can definitely add cinnamon to a Savory dish if you are grilling some salmon you know you can um do some rosemary and garlic and smok paprika on the salmon if you're just oven roasting some cauliflower you could throw in a curry spice blend uh there has been an interesting study observational looking at curry spice blend in ingestion and cognitive um readouts so people seem to have better cognitive Health in response to regular ingestion of the curry spice blend so um I think you know there's so many ways to take existing dishes that you already make you already know how to do and just add spices to that instead of sort of starting from scratch which can be way more intimidating for people so I'm feeling hugely inspired by everything you've just said even though I don't do most of the cooking at home but I do cook for the children so my husband cooks for for me and him I don't cook with any spices for the children because partly I just don't know what to do with them but also I know that my children are now of an age where they're not open to the introduction of new flavors is there a way that I could introduce do you think some spices into the typical foods that they have without it being a total no no from them yeah absolutely so um one of the biggest misconceptions um that we have is that children need to eat bland food and nothing could be further from the truth the more we expose them to flavor and complexity the more their palettes will be open and adventurous going forward also um you can really get your kids involved in the addition of spices it's such a fun thing for a kid to take a spice jaw and sprinkle it into a dish that you're cooking or even if you're baking so say you're making banana bread my favorite spice Edition for kids is cardamom in banana bread cardamom has some digestion boosting properties it smells like flowers it smells like a luxurious dessert it can actually help you reduce the addition of refined sugar in your meal um and so you know taking again things that your kids love whether it's banana bread or pancakes adding cinnamon to pancakes the simplest way way to get your kids sort of excited you can have them add the cinnamon you can actually have them take the cinnamon B and crush it in a tea towel super fun for a young kid to do that and let them experience that sensory kind of Adventure of the whole Bo going into smash bits and the aroma that comes from that um so yeah I think again going back to that same principle what do your kids love what simple spice can you add to that remember most spices are not spicy most spices are aromatic complex and beautifully layered and what keeps people afraid of spices is this misconception that they think all spices are hot and spicy and why would you want to give kids hot and spicy things so sure wait let let the Chili Peppers wait but you can introduce them to all the other spices through their favorite dishes what about drinks you mentioned already I think some examples about how maybe when you're you've got a cold you might try and use spice and drinks but do you use spices in drinks otherwise on a more regular basis yeah so um two drinks that I have every single day that are spiced up are my chai which is my Indian spiced tea that has cinnamon cardamom cloves um Ginger you know I'll just kind of grind it in the mortar and pestel throw it into some hot water simmer it for 5 to 10 minutes add my tea leaves my milk I'm done um it's a ritual for me it slows me down I think sometimes we tend to think gosh that's so many steps but maybe we need a few steps to slow down and create a ritual around food which I think is really lovely the second is golden milk much fewer steps much quicker so growing up in India we were given golden milk by our grandmas it's called Hali dud in India a beautiful name what is golden milk it's a turmeric milk and let me tell you most Indian kids hate it because the version that they're exposed to by their grandma is loaded with turmeric which in high amounts can be quite earthy and bitter not exactly palatable for a 5-year-old but you can create a more mellow golden milk take your favorite milk I like soy milk you can do you know almond milk on the stove throw in a little bit of turmeric pinch of black pepper and let's say a little bit of nutmeg and let it just simmer sweeten it with a little date syrup or leave it unsweetened and that's a really nice kind of afternoon polyphenol packed warming comforting beverage nice amazing I have to say I'm sitting here and there's this amazing smell right Sarah which you're just wafting over from where you have crushed the the spices and I'm thinking that you know we focus this the show a lot on people who have no experience with spices but I am feeling quite inspired at the end and so I'm imagine there's some people listening to like I totally know what I'm doing with spices I actually know how to cook properly so it's neither you nor me s i I'm inspired and so what I'd love to say is like imagine someone L and they're sort of they're trying to impress um what is your show stoer spice dish and um perhaps we can link to out to you for the for the recipe afterwards from the show notes oh wow wow that is a great question and um gosh there's too many to choose but I'm going to pick an oven roasted tanduri cauliflower so it's a whole head of cauliflower that you steam really quick to sort of speed up the cooking time in the oven and then you make a marinade with yogurt ginger garlic tanduri spice blend which has loads of spices maybe 10 or 12 different spices cumin coriander chili nutmeg cinnamon huge blend and a little bit of lime juice and salt and then you cover it in that cauliflower and put it in the oven and it comes out as this beautiful showstopping kind of perfect for you know a dinner party and you serve it with some um quick pickled onions a little bit of Greek yogurt with um cucumber and yeah impress your guests and I think it brings up a really interesting point which is we talked about starting low and slow and adding a spice to your favorite dish but I really believe the magic lies in combining spices and adding more than one spice as evidenced by the research it's when we combine the spices we really start to get this kind of synergistic effect because if you think of inflammation in the body it's really an orchestra of many different things going on and spices seem to be intervening in this Orchestra at different levels and so you get turmeric doing one thing and cumin doing one thing and cinnamon doing one thing and so it's like you really want that Synergy and that blend it is also more exciting from a cooking perspective so if I leave you with one other takeaway it's yes ad spices to your everyday favorites but maybe pick up one blend it could be tanduri it could be a middle eastern blend it could be a schwarma blend that's going to give you more bang for your bu more polyphenols per teaspoon than if you were using a single spice well I'm hoping kenan's going to invite us for lunch for that cifl I am I have to say I'm hoping exactly the same thing got an hour I think we should have next episode needs to be um a dinner party at my place with all the spice Delights I'd like to add one I'd like to add one quick thing we are entering maybe grilling season we're getting into spring and summer and there is some really good evidence that adding spices to grilled meats can actually reduce some of the harmful chemicals that are formed when the meat is grilled at high temperatures so when you take a meat Patty for example and put it on the barbecue it can form something called a heterocyclic amine which has been linked to um some carcin enic effects and if you add things like turmeric black pepper Rosemary it can actually reduce the formation of those harmful compounds also add more flavor to your grilled meat patties let me try and do a quick summary which is tricky this time since I don't really understand how to use all the spices yet so Sarah you got to help me out I think the key takeaway is ADD spices to your meal um partly just because the flavor is is fantastic and if you're sitting here right now you can smell it and you're like oh i' like some of that but also because there really is evidence that um as part of your overall diet this can be really helpful um that there are some clever ways you can do this like Blends where you suddenly get a whole set of spices at at once the the the heart of why these um um spices work is because they have all of these polyphenols and they're sort of packed full of these chemicals that were designed to protect them as a plant but interestingly when we eat them can actually have these health effects um uh on us that um um one of the ways in which that happen seems to be that they're sort of um unwrapped by the microbiome you know the bacteria inside our gut that then makes this available um and we don't understand all the details of how it works but I think there was this really interesting analogy in a way partly it's stressing our our body and then our body is reacting and you know putting all these repair mechanisms in and there are a small number of studies but there's another one since we last um uh talked showing that you know when they do randomize control trials you can actually see uh improvements in the latest one you gave this example is that there was a reduction um in sort of overall glucose levels with cinnamon at like really small levels I think you said four four grams a day um then we really got on to okay how do you actually use them so first thing was um in general you need to crush your spice if it starts as a whole spice um which is not as scary as I had thought it was was it s smashed it a few times seem to work pretty well um interestingly quite a few spices need to be cooked in order to unlock their benefits so there are some that you're saying just straight from cold works but interestingly and I think opposite of what we you know Sarah you're oftenly talking about in um nutrition some of these spices actually almost get turned on through the heating I think turmeric was one of your your examples um you talked a bit about how long they last so you're saying actually if it's a whole spice it lasts a long even a couple of years might still be fine once it's crushed you're saying you know 3 to six months but smell it so if it still smells good then it's probably still doing something um and then we talked about okay how do you actually apply it and I think your key message is don't try and suddenly switch to being like this cook who knows how to use 20 spices across all your meals take your existing meal and make some changes um and uh I thought you have some great examples like I described you know avocado in the morning and you're saying you could try cumin and coriander that's going to work really great so I'm definitely going to go and try um that you talked about this delicious snack um with yogurt where you added cinnamon and Nutmeg and cardamon but also this this idea of the curried popcorn which Sarah's going to make and bring in to the office it sounds like next week so I'm looking forward to that I don't believe that's going to happen at all but I like the idea of you have challenged me now that is definitely happening I going to be sending you a picture I can't wait I'm going to feature it on the Zoe Instagram now I um I want I want to see that um and then for dinner you said again you can just take your regular um sort of meal so let's say you're making a A bnise or a vegetable bnise you could add in cinnamon I think with salmon you were talking about sort of rosemary and garlic lots of other um things there um and and then you say actually for drinks you can also actually put spice into your drinks you describe for example this golden milk with turmeric and black pepper and um nutmeg and then finally you described this amazing dinner party piece and we will have the link in the show notes and we'll find a way to link out to you hopefully actually showing us making it as well I hope K because that sounds amazing and um we want to do the next show in your house and we're going to eat it is that right that's the conclusion well I think we'll do a whole day we'll have breakfast snacks lunch and dinner let's do it uh would be great can we come and hang out at your house for the day 300% fabulous I think something else as well Jonathan to wrap up in as part of the wrap up is the use of mixed spices and actually the value of that cuz you talked about all of these indiv ritual ones and a really good starting point maybe for someone like me who it is quite new for is to go and start by just getting a mixed one and starting playing around with that your Curry popcorn there you go sorted brilliant Canan thank you so much for coming in giving us this visual uh Feast as well as this amazing Feast from my nose thank you so much for having me and for summarizing so beautifully um what we discussed thank you very much look forward to your dinner we're looking forward to it see you then see you if you listen to the show regularly you probably already believe that you can transform your health by changing what you eat but now there is only so much 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Channel: ZOE

Views: 58,459

Keywords: spice health benefits, healthy spices, indian cooking, turmeric health benefits, cinnamon health benefits, spice spice baby, chief spice mama, kanchan koya, health benefits of cinnamon water, health benefits of cinnamon powder, ginger & turmeric health benefits, black pepper and turmeric health benefits, turmeric health benefits as a natural remedy, zoe science, zoe podcast, health interview, health podcast, tim spector, gut microbiome, science podcast

Id: 2THwCJL62n8

Length: 60min 14sec (3614 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2024