5 Natural Medicines Big Pharma Are Hiding From You! No.1 Herbal Medicine Expert

Category: Health & Wellness

Tags: antibioticsdiethealthherbsmicrobiome

Entities: antibioticscurcumindark chocolateDr. Simon Millsgarlicketo dietmicrobiomePCOSrosemaryturmericWorld Health Organization

Transcript

00:00

that is the most widely prescribed drug in this country and I believe in the US also. But the list of problems acrewing from long-term use is beginning to grow and is serious cancers, dementias.

But the other thing is is that once you're on it, it's really difficult to come off

00:15

it. And that's not all.

We use far too many antibiotics and that's coming a serious health issue now because the number of people dying from antibiotic resistance infections is beginning to rise dramatically. It's quite frightening.

So, are there alternatives on this table that I should also

00:31

consider as a form of medicine? Oh, yes.

And most of these ones I'm going to be talking about have a pretty immediate effect. Now, have a bite of this.

Wa. For almost 50 years, Dr.

Simon Mills has pioneered how we think about natural medicine, earning global recognition as

00:46

one of the most respected and influential herbal practitioners of our time. These things have medicinal properties.

So, let's start with dark chocolate. In terms of long-term brain health and cardiovascular health, it's one of the best medicines around.

Really? Oh, yes.

The next one is garlic. And in

01:03

some parts of the world, they use garlic instead of penicellin. In fact, there was an old trick where if you had enough garlic, breathe on a petri dish and you could kill various pathogens just by your breath.

Wow. And then there's this to reduce your cholesterol levels.

This can really help with your eyesight. This is your blood flow, gut health, cardiovascular health.

01:20

Now, this is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health. Rosemary, we actually did a clinical trial on this, and all you need to do is press it and sniff.

So, you can see why some of this stuff already is powerful. Now, we have more to go through.

And this is where it gets interesting. There's a lot of people listening who

01:37

will want to hear this coffee. Oh god, what do I need to know?

So, I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated.

01:52

It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because a strange way you are you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I

02:08

appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you Simon Mills.

You are a pioneer by all accounts in what is called complimentary medicine, but you're also one of the most respected herbal practitioners in

02:24

the world. You've been doing this for more than 50 years.

I've actually never spoken to somebody that has a comprehensive understanding of herbal remedies and herbal medicine. So, I'm super excited to have this conversation with you today.

What is the what is the mission you're on and why do you think

02:40

it's important? I think my main mission is to do what I can to help people get stronger.

I sometimes say that, you know, the world is pretty rough out there. I can't do anything about the sea and the waves,

02:56

but I can help you to build a better boat that can sit better in the water. And I think people relate to that that if they were felt a bit stronger in themselves, they would be able to cope better with what life throws at them.

I

03:13

chose plants because people have always used plants as their primary source of medicine. People have always grown up with plants.

They've evolved along with plants. And what I aim to do is to put the old wisdoms into some scientific

03:28

framework and then make it fit with conventional norms of healthcare. You were a board member of the British Herbal Medicine Association.

You're the first chair of the Council for Complimentary Alternative Medicine launched in Parliament by former Prime

03:43

Minister Alec Douglas Hol. You led a major European Commission project on herbal medicine involving over 20 centers across Europe.

You're the secretary of the European Scientific Cooperative on

03:59

Phytootherapy. I was not able to say that word which is the which is the polite way of saying herbs.

Okay. So, it's phyto plant therapy.

Well, I think when people think about herbal medicine and using plants as a form of medicine, they think of tribes and they think of I don't know sort of

04:16

ancient Chinese traditions. And I think you know the modern westerner thinks of pills.

Yes. when they think of medicine.

Yes. What What is it that we've lost?

Is there like a lost wisdom? Yes.

And how did that happen? And what what

04:32

is it we've lost? When we lived in the countryside, when we lived close to nature, that was very much around us.

And and in every little community, there'd be someone, usually a woman, who would know their way around the plants and would, you know, help you out when you had a illness and a sickness. I'm not saying that there's a

04:49

golden age, but when we moved into cities, we lost a lot apart from anything else. We were living on top of each other.

We had to drink each other's water. You know, there was a lot of new illnesses, sicknesses, pestilences, and so on that only came in cities.

In that

05:04

world, the herbs couldn't cut it. So, we needed stronger stuff.

So, they started using minerals. They started using things that were poisons.

And the original physician's job was to be the only guy who could handle medicines that other people would not be

05:20

safe to use. And so you got your training to use these much more powerful medicines.

And it was thought that the old plant things were too soft and gentle and so they were generally discarded. And then you developed these medicines into pills because often they

05:36

were powders anyway. And you know then the pharmaceutical industry came in and branded and and made um proprietary materials from them.

And that drifted a long way from just going down to a hedro, going into the garden, going to the kitchen and picking up remedies.

05:52

A lot of cultures around the world still use plants as the first form of medication for a variety of different sort of illnesses and diseases. Right.

They do. Yes.

I mean, most do. I mean, if you were Inuit and Northern

06:07

Territories in Canada and so and Alaska, you would probably not have very many plants to choose from, but for most other people, they surrounded by plants. That's their world.

I think, you know, cuz I'm what, 32 years old, so I've not really grown up

06:22

with the wisdom of plants and how they can be used to treat some of the illnesses that I have from a very young age. I'm taking cough syrup and I'm taking paracetamol when I have a headache and all these kinds of pills and medicines, but plants were never a

06:38

really a part of that conversation. And I guess that makes me think that they don't work or that's what most people would now think.

And one of one of the points of this conversation now is to point you to ways in which they can and to show you how you can figure that out within a minute

06:54

or an hour. Most of these ones I'm going to be talking about have a pretty immediate effect.

So it, you know, we now think, oh, if you take a herb, it may take months before anything happens. When I see a patient, my usual request to them is, can you call me tomorrow to

07:12

let me know how it's going because things happen so fast? And if you're up for it, you can do a couple of taste tests and you can see why some of this stuff really is powerful.

What is it that that you know from the 50 plus years of work that you've done working with plants as a form of

07:28

medicine that the average person on the street doesn't know how close we are to being to having uh I I think life is a miracle as I said in that early encounter um and we can

07:44

realize the miracle within us if we just trust it. I've got a few guys to what I call health empowerment.

Things that you can do yourself at home just to begin to understand what's going on in here and to nourish it. Uh and the plants are the

08:00

in my world the one of the most effective ways of supporting that inner miracle that we have uh to nourish our health to empower us. I I sometimes think that you know medicine is extraordinary.

I mean we now

08:15

live with cancer. you used to die with it.

Uh almost all the major illnesses of the past have now had treatments for but you know if you've got a chronic condition you still left with yourself and you're maybe not feeling so good in yourself. I sometimes think that a lot

08:32

of medicine is a bit like uh fast food delivery. You know we have a meal brought in because it's convenient but that also desklls us.

you know, we we've stopped learning how to cook even. You know, I remember going to New York back in the 80s and

08:48

surprised to find that so many apartments in New York didn't have kitchens because everyone went out to eat. And I thought, gosh, you're losing all those skills of making food and enjoying it and sitting it down over a over a table.

Um I think medicine, you

09:03

know, we use far too many antibiotics. We use, you know, these um PPI things called azole for our acid reflux, the most widely prescribed drug in this country.

And I think USL also mostly unnecessary. Uh we use a lot of uh

09:19

anti-inflammatories just because it's sore without asking why is it sore and why are we suppressing one of our body's main defenses because inflammation is a defense. So these are things that you learn as you get into this world that a

09:36

lot of what we think are problems are solutions waiting for support because I think most people would think that is medicine and that is a food. That's food.

Yes. Well, you're right.

Medicine food. Yeah, you're quite right.

That's medicine. That's a food.

What I'm saying

09:53

is that there's a spectrum. And we may talk about that raspberry because it's red.

And we might talk about the broccoli because it's green and there's oranges uh colors there. All of these colors actually have properties that are actually quite valuable

10:10

properties for our circulatory health, for our gut health, our brain health. Um and when the more the science is looking at it, the more amazing it's looking these things have medicinal properties.

So you're saying that this is medicine as well?

10:25

Yes. Food be thy medicine is what old hypocrates said 2,000 years ago, 2 and a half thousand years ago.

Is it the Chinese that are particularly big on herbal medicines? Yes.

Almost any other anywhere. I mean

10:42

there's there's only five countries in the world that are not big on herbal medicines and I'll tell you who they are and you can see if you can draw your own conclusions. UK is one, US is the second, Canada is the third, Australia and New Zealand.

Now, can you

10:57

think of something that combi com binds them all together? They're originally white Englishspeaking countries.

If you go across to France, the channel here, go to any pharmacy, most of the medicine stocks on the pharmacy are herbal. If you go to some parts of

11:13

Germany, you have to sit a herbal exam to get your license. And further east in the old Soviet uh block where they couldn't afford the pharmaceutical industry, they had homegrown primarily plant-based medicines much more widely going to Asia.

It's the majority by far

11:32

and doctors and people working with plants and acupuncture in China work together without thinking about it. And many doctors use plants in their med as their medicines.

Yeah. How different, cuz I've never

11:47

really spent a significant amount of time in China. How different is the perception of herbal medicines there than it is out on the streets of London?

They don't think twice about it. It's what they grow up with.

Um they like a lot of people, we would say regretfully,

12:02

do seem to want to do more things like the west does. Um so they'd adopt more western habits and as soon as you earn a bit of money you tend to adopt more western lifestyles and think that the herbal thing is for your parents and grandparents.

So there's still that

12:18

trend even in Asia um but they start from a much broader base of experience. Why why should anyone care?

You know I have ibuprofen at home. I have medicine that I can have in the the cupboard.

I

12:34

have, you know, cough syrups if I get sick. If I get the flu, I have some flu pills that I brought from the pharmacy.

Why should anyone care about what we're going to talk about today? I suppose the answer is in my practice.

So, I see patients three sessions a week. And

12:50

these are people almost most of them have been around the block. They've had treatments for their conditions sometimes for many years.

They're often living with chronic complex conditions and they're sore. They're tired.

their energyy's gone. You know, they've been told that we can't just keep taking the

13:07

pills. You know, we've done all the tests, there's nothing else we can do.

Time and time again, that's when the cookie crumbles because then you realize the ibuprofen and the quick pills ain't doing it anymore. There's a bigger health need

13:25

that needs somehow fixing. And that's when they come to me as a practitioner and I give them things that they can see improving their health, their sleep, their eating, their whatever it is that's not their energy levels, whatever it is that's not playing properly.

We I

13:43

see myself as fine-tuning or upping the performance. Uh I'm not when someone comes to me and they say I've got whatever it is, arthritis or skin disease or whatever, uh I will politely take all the notes down.

But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested

14:00

in where that came from. What is the misbehavior?

What is the poor performance? Uh that explains why all this happened.

And often you find they had pneumonia at the age of three or they had glandular fever at the age of 15 or 16 and things took a turn then and

14:18

you can see the trail and often what I'm doing is going backwards and fixing things that weren't fixed back a long time ago working on digestion particularly because that's where we work uh kidney function uh liver function you know circulation

14:35

you know up to the brain where we're dealing in that area. Um, so we're looking at the performance of the body and it's only when it doesn't behave that you notice the need to doing it.

How many patients have you seen in your career, do you think? Thousands of patients,

14:50

I would say upwards of 10,000 each for an hour or so at a time to start with. So we get deep into the story and then rolling on at any one time I've got 200 running you know I'm actively treating

15:05

and two couple hundred and what are the range of illnesses or conditions that those patients have had and when you think about the most remarkable or most interesting case studies the most reliable case studies that you have what are the conditions that are at the

15:21

center of those case studies have you got a medical encyclopedia anywhere I'm going I'm going to write down the key ones. No, no.

I mean, it's literally I've I don't know if I've seen everything in the medical encyclopedia, but I've seen most things. I mean, literally everything comes in because mostly is

15:37

chronic anyway when they come and see me. And it can be anything.

I mean, about a quarter of my patients are living with cancer. So, we that's one big group.

I'm not treating the cancer. I'm helping them to live better with whatever it is they're dealing with.

15:54

about another at least a third a bit bit more living with chronic inflammatory disease, autoimmune diseases, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, um things that are more complicated than

16:10

you can shake a stick at. And again, you know, we're not dealing with the end result.

We're looking at what may be leading up to that and seeing if we can improve underlying functions. But literally anything can come by.

16:26

Is there particular case studies of patients that you've worked with that stand out to you that you're most proud of or that were Eureka moments in your own sort of journey? Most of my stories are like journeys.

So

16:41

you see little steps and you you're with somebody often for a long time and you just see changes in the way that they um they change over the weeks and months. So you know to say I've got an instant Eureka moment.

I' I pulled together a

16:58

few stories just you knowing I was going to come to them and you know just they're a mly mix and in fact I made notes because it was sometimes better to remind myself of the sort of things I did because each of these patients

17:14

will walk out with five or six or eight different plants and the reason I put them together is because they have a a unique story. Um, so probably the one with the most complex one is someone, all the names are changed by the way,

17:29

someone called Heather who's 65 and she had a really severe complex condition called irrima multififor which is a complex skin disease that's really distressing, very upsetting. What we know about it is is that it's linked possibly to other infections.

Um,

17:47

so we actually spotted myopplasma pneumonia is likely implicated. She had previously had a lot of lung damage um in her youth.

She had early pneumonia and she was diagnosed with a chronic obstructive pulmonary thing,

18:02

bronchiacasis as it happened. Then she got CO badly and most of her trouble started after that.

She also had vitamin B12 deficiency, pericious anemia we call it, which is a autoimmune problem. The gut lining stops the vitamin B12 being absorbed.

Those

18:19

were in her background story. the lungs because it was the earliest and probably the main factor were first my focus and the second was what was lining the stomach because most inflammatory problems start down here.

18:35

So I ended up giving her something that was a combination of remedies for the gut lining and for the lungs and almost within a week or so the itching of the her skin

18:52

subsided. I just happen to think that was the reason I remember it because it's it's unusual to get such quick results in such a complex condition.

But it's a reminder that if you can find the right button, then quite big things can happen. I was lucky to find the right button.

And

19:09

progressively over the ensuing few months, the skin problem disappeared to the extent that she was my dream patient. She said, "I don't need your herbs anymore.

That to me is my biggest reward that

19:27

they can move on. They don't need help anymore.

It sticks in your mind because it was a hugely demanding condition that got better without and it had been going for a long time. It had been going three or four years by the time she saw me.

Um,

19:45

and it resolved very quickly with what seemed to be totally irrelevant treatments. But they there was a rationale for them.

Karen 37 panic attacks, major anxiety problems.

20:00

Heaven knows there's a lot of that about uh it turns out that um and when she she was hospitalized when she was 20 with jaundice which is a liver liver problem. All the processing all the detox processes are in the liver.

Uh it's the

20:17

gateway from the digestion. It handles emotions.

It handles the immune system. It It's an amazing organ.

It's self-correcting, by the way. So, it fixes itself very quickly if you give it the right nudge.

She had jaundice. So, immediately a little bell goes off

20:34

because and at a age when that could mean long-term liver damage, hepatitis. Uh she's ended up with very little appetite.

uh she feels full easily, gains weight easily and often feeling nauseous which is definitely a sign of

20:50

liver distress still menstrual cycles very erratic. She had early COVID again another big hammer hammer blow and this that the CO was before her main symptoms of panic attacks set in.

Uh so I use that as an

21:09

example of the way in which what goes on up here in the brain is linked with what goes on lower down in the gut. You know interesting point when we were living in caves the best place to be was in the cave

21:26

cuz outside was dangerous. The only thing that got you out hunger.

And when we look at the way in which the cells are the the machinery inside the cell, we find that the mechanisms managing

21:41

anxiety are the same as the system managing appetites and and food processing. So the idea of linking anxiety with metabolism is basic.

This was an ex exact answer. So the mix of

21:58

herbs that I gave her had nothing for the anxiety at all. It was all to do uh with metabolism.

And so the included milk thistle, barbar, uh an oriental herb called bup plurum, artich choke leaf and an Indian remedy called gynema

22:14

which is called sugar destroyer which which reduces your uh hank hankering for sweet. First goal was to manage her sugar cravings because that seemed to be a key part of what she was saying.

uh and to improve her liver functions. This was

22:29

very quick and she became more settled over several weeks and months. Then the next thing that happened was her menstrual cycles became clearly the where the trouble was and she was most likely to be distressed around the period.

So we shifted to include women's remedies which were then included in the

22:47

mix to help manage the the hormonal e and flow around the menstrual cycle. and um 3 months, which is the normal time for cycles to begin to turn, her cycles began to steady and so did the rest of

23:03

her symptoms. Nothing to do with anxiety, just dealing with these core functions.

So, there's a couple of examples of, you know, how we approach things differently. You know, if Karen had gone to most other practitioners, she would have had

23:20

something for her nerves. I do really want to talk about you use the term wi women's herbs.

Women's Yeah, women's herbs. I do want to talk about that and I I do also want to talk about fertility and the menstrual cycle and things like PCOS because I'm super interested in that which might surprise

23:36

some people. But obviously there's women in my life that struggle with those things.

So I do want to get on to that. I think a second ago you pointed at the stomach when you said that we treat down here.

Yes. Is that really the place to start to understand?

Well, it's place to start plants cuz that's where you that's where they go.

23:52

So tell me why what do I need to know about this region the stomach the gut? Wow.

In order to have a sort of foundational knowledge so that we can then start talking about ibuprofen painkillers fevers all these kinds of things. Well very simply we think

24:08

our intelligence is up here. You know we got a brain.

Yeah. As soon as you swallow something until it comes out the other end.

We have no control over what goes on down there. decisions are being made as the food traverses down the tube and it's a long

24:25

tube. It's about 20 feet of small intestine that has to go around and then like another 2 or 3 ft of large intestine.

It used to take about 18 hours to go through and we now because we sit and drew it take longer. But all that time intelligent decisions are

24:41

being made by the digestive system. what to do with this, what to do with that.

And the lining of the gut is full of sensors, receptors we call them, that are picking up chemical cues

24:57

and responding. So, as the food changes, this is digested.

As the bile from the liver comes in, it's picking off these signaling devices and switching on a whole series of metabolic hormonal all sorts of other functions. All controlled

25:15

major choreography going on here, you know, without us even knowing about it. And then just when you thought this was wonderful, you had something called the microbiome.

Now when I was at school and it was a long time ago when I was doing medical sciences, oh yeah, there was there's the

25:31

bowel flora and they help with digestion, vitamin K, one or two other things, you know, they might be quite useful. Now the microbiome runs the show and it's it's huge.

You know, we thought we knew what the kidney did. We thought we knew what the heart did.

We thought we knew

25:47

what the brain did. We know they only do it because they work with the microbiome.

It's it's running a show. And the microbiome is the the billions of bugs in our gut.

You've got more of those little critters than we have of our own cells. So much more.

So they are huge. They got about

26:04

100 times as much genetic capacity as we do. We've got more bugs in our gut than cells.

Yes. So we're basically we're we're walking gut bags.

Yes. We're walking bacteria.

Yeah. Yeah.

There's there's more bacteria than

26:20

there are us. I mean this is it's a bit of a gobsmacking thought and you know obviously people want no no I mean the bugs will keep them there one of the big issues of the day are antibiotics which we know are becoming a serious health issue now you know the world

26:38

health organization and others say very seriously that antibiotic resistance you know antimicrobial resistance as they call it is the biggest threat we have soon going into a hospital and getting an operation will be a real risk Because hospital-b born infections are increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

26:55

You know, we we're piling them in to us, but also to the animals that we grow. Uh a lot of them are full of antibiotics.

And that means that the diversity of the microbiome is is being reduced. We've losing we

27:11

call biodiversity. There's a biodiversity issue in here.

But even with the diminished um flora that we have, they still pretty much run the show. And a lot of the fruits and vegetables, particularly the ones with colors in them, actually feed those guys

27:30

down there and help them to perform better. And one good reason to, as we say, eat the rainbow, just get those colors in.

But yes, I mean, as you can see, if I start talking about the gut, I'm not going to stop for the next month.

27:45

On that point of antibiotics, they the mechanism is that they kind of kill bacteria, right? So they're killing good bacteria as well in the process.

Often they have different range depending on the antibiotic, but yes, they will be cutting a sway through your gut flora

28:00

for sure, some more than others. I mean the point about antibiotics and we we did a big project with this ironically just before co uh when I was working with pucker that uh tea people we put a campaign together to find natural

28:16

approaches to managing antibiotics or reduce the use of them. Antibiotics are useless for anything viral.

They don't do anything for a virus. But unfortunately people with viral problems will still be given antibiotics mainly by a harassed doctor

28:33

who just you know because they say give me something doc you know for viruses mostly you just have to wait for the body to get rid of it but giving an antibiotic is actually of no use at all. Don't take my word for it.

Everyone knows this and you get NHS you know in

28:49

this country um posters saying antibiotics are no good for viruses. Please don't ask your doctor for them.

So for many of these things, coals and respiratory problems for example, there are many spices, I mean some of the things on that plate there are

29:04

particularly good for coals and viruses up here. And so we put that all together in the package and said we can encourage people not to ask the doc for an antibiotic and use some of these home easy free or sometimes uh treatments um

29:21

to um uh to to uh use instead of the antibiotics. When you say antibiotics are the most urgent health issue of the moment.

Um, I want to fully understand why you think it's so so urgent because we're going to

29:39

develop a resistance which means that we're more susceptible to disease. It's already happening and it's not me that's saying this is these are the guys who look after our health care for us like the double the World Health Organization who are really getting close to panic about this issue uh

29:55

because already the number of people dying from antibiotic resistance infections is beginning to rise. dramatically.

And new antibiotics, unfortunately, there's less financial incentive to

30:11

develop them because they're often handed out free by in various countries. So, you don't get the margins back and uh the the uh pipeline of new antibiotics is not good.

Uh so, all you need to do is check on the World Health Organization to get the chapter and

30:26

verse on that. It's it it's it's actually quite frightening.

I'm on the World Health Organization site now and um I found a definition of antibiotic resistance. It's when bacteria stops responding to antibiotics and is mainly caused by overusing or

30:42

misusing antibiotics. In 2022, US doctors gave out about 236 million anti [ __ ] it.

What? US doctors gave out 236 million antibiotic prescriptions.

30:59

roughly seven prescriptions for every 10 people. Studies show that at least roughly 30% of antibiotic prescriptions in the US aren't needed, especially in places like doctor's offices and emergency rooms.

In 2020, about 30 million antibiotic prescriptions were

31:15

given out in the UK. Children aged 0 to 14 made up 3.6 million of those.

And in 2023, the World Health Organization declared antibiotic resistance one of the top global health threats and estimated that it is responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and

31:32

and contributed to almost 5 million deaths. That was 2019.

I can tell you uh that the figures have risen dramatically since then. So that's what people think you know and just on a personal basis you know you go

31:49

and you need an operation and you know that that's going to involve exposure to hospital infections which is one of the most serious of the ones in the average hospital you know it's there some of the most lethal ones there um increasingly that is going to

32:07

be a risk that you get something that you can't treat. You're not saying don't take antibiotics.

No, I'm saying take them carefully. Um, use them when you need them and not otherwise.

And I'm again, it's not me

32:24

saying this is most responsible doctors would wish that their patients wouldn't keep asking for them. H so there's sort of three things that I've I've been able to ascertain as risks of misuse or overuse or

32:40

inappropriate use of antibiotics which is the impact on the gut microbiome. Um the you're contributing to the rise in antibiotic resistance and those are the main things I guess even with the diseases you get you'll be slower to heal because you're

32:56

less if you've got that resistance. That is one of the things that we do see particularly those who are long-term ill you know that they lose some of the healing capacity and that's so much of the work I do is to aim to put some of that right

33:12

and there's links to colaractyl cancers yeah according well that's because we're talking about the microbiome you see so those are the cancers in the lower gut and we know that the microbiome is a major factor in how well the gut is so things like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and

33:28

cancer of the bowel very closely linked to the state of the microbiome. Okay.

So, are there alternatives on this table or in the world of plants to antibiotics that I should maybe also consider um instead of just jumping

33:45

straight to antibiotics for everything that I experience? Yes, if you got a serious gut or other infection, you may need the antibiotics.

So, let's put that straight away. But if you've got a cold, flu, virus, repres a

34:01

viral problem, particularly the airways, you a antibiotics will have no use at all and b as we just said, they just add to the risk of more because every time you take an antibiotic, you're growing a small population of that of of the

34:18

species of bacteria that's affected who are resistant to that. It's natural selection, you know.

So you have a thousand little bacteria, that's a small amount by their terms, and you kill 90 999 of them. The one that survives will

34:35

then become two in 20 minutes and four in 40 minutes and suddenly become a new population. And you know, I I I duck that bullet.

And so that group of bacteria will already be resistant. So we're creating resistance every time we

34:51

use an antibiotic. So try let's try then doing something else shall we?

So let's say you've got a cold. You're feeling the cold.

It's got a good name by the way. So cold is one of the things you feel when you've got a cold.

35:06

And that's interesting because in former times we didn't have tests. We didn't have laboratories.

We didn't have paramedics. We didn't have people poking things in you.

All we could know is what it felt like. And when you've got a cold, you often feel cold

35:21

and you feel chills and you want to wrap up and you want hot water or you want to have a hot bath. All that in the old language meant that you were cold and what you needed to do was to heat up.

Now you take

35:37

this fella. This is ginger.

It's grown widely around the world. in its original Asian form.

It was made extinct around the time of the Romans. So popular was it and ever since all the

35:52

ginger sense of this species uh has got going from rootstock because it no longer seeds itself. So this has been the most valuable natural commodity ever in its dried form worth more than its weight in gold.

And you know the reason

36:08

why all those Europeans ended up in Asia running India and South the Dutch and the Indonesia and so on is because that's where these things came from. That's where the spices came from.

And so we decided you know like good capitalists to go and u control the

36:24

business. So ginger became very popular over here because we don't have nothing like it over here.

The nearest thing we got is horseradish which I promise you is no substitute for this. So, how do we use this?

We got a knob of ginger here about the size of your thumb. That's

36:41

about a good dose. You grate it, fresh ginger into a a a mug.

Can you do that for me? We got a great I've got a grater for you.

So, um we've got here a piece of ginger the as I say about the size of your

36:57

thumb. The thumb's a good measure because it's your measure.

So, if you're a small person, you'll have a small thumb, but I'm a bigger person. So, I'm going to use And you literally, it's making a bit of a mess here, but you're doing this at home, you don't mind a bit of mess.

So, you're literally grating

37:14

grace nicely, doesn't it? Into a mug.

And let's say that was the whole thumb. I don't want to take up too much time on this.

And then the one thing that works brilliantly with ginger is cinnamon.

37:29

Now, this is cinnamon you buy in any shop. It comes in different forms.

There's one from China called Cassia, which looks like one big curled bark. Yeah.

If you look at this one, you'll see that it's tightly wrapped with lots of little

37:46

curl, lots of little filaments in it. That's the one you go for.

It's got it's more aromatic. And you either grate that with, if you got a spice mill, or you take a teaspoon of it.

Um, let's say that's a teaspoon full. And you put that

38:03

in your mug. So that's ginger and cinnamon.

Ginger and cinnamon. That's it.

Then you add your hot water that there.

38:21

You're going for real one, right? Going for the real one.

Good on you. Uh, at this point, a civ is useful.

Why? What for?

cuz it's going to be it's full of oh bits bits and then let's say this is this is a nice Japanese green tea mug but let's

38:38

say this is your mug and we'll pour a little bit in there. You see all the stuff that you leave behind.

Oh yeah. Okay.

38:54

And if you don't mind sharing a mug. So, what's in here?

This is just ginger and cinnamon. Just ginger and cinnamon.

It's It's fairly weak. Oh, it is nice, though.

It's nice, isn't it? It is nice.

39:09

Now, can you feel it warming already? Yes.

Straight away. It's really nice.

Yeah. Now you see what what's happening there is that you I mean ginger is an is an example of a group of remedies which includes turmeric by the way and that's other

39:24

root the other root there that's turmeric um which normally you see in a yellow powder we might talk about that later and black pepper and chilies we got a chili here which when you take them

39:41

you think you're burning your mouth don't The interesting thing is that there's no burning. You can actually have full madras level uh chili and no harm will be done to

39:58

your lining because there's no burning going on. What you're doing is you're stimulating the pain fibers.

So you got pain fibers all the way through the lining of the mouth. When you take a hot thing like ginger, it's stimulating the pain fibers and

40:14

immediately there's a what we call a reflex response which opens up the blood vessels. It's called hyperemia.

More blood and the vessels lining these mucosa, the ones that you just swallowed

40:29

and including a little bit up in the nasal passages are opening up. the mucus cells producing mucus will loosen up and you get more runny mucus which is helping to flush through the uh the grot

40:45

on the mucosa and the main thing you feel is the warmth. Mhm.

And if you're dealing with something down here in the lungs, you'll actually start bringing up more gunk up the airways. It's there's a natural escalator that we use to that the body

41:01

uses to get stuff out of the lungs that stimulated And the mixture of cinnamon and ginger was created I think in heaven. I mean I think that it's such a natural compliment and anybody can do that.

And the point about it is that it's

41:17

warming and in the old days that was the key thing. You would didn't matter if you had a headache or a joint pain or a menstrual cramp.

If you wanted to put a hot water bottle on it or heat it up,

41:32

then that was a cold problem and putting a heating medicine would begin to make the difference. So, you can use the same thing if you have a headache and you want to put a hot pack on it.

If you got a menstrual cramp and you want to put a hot water bottle on it, if you got a joint pain and you want

41:49

to put a a heating linament on it, you can use the same thing. ginger just because it's heating and that's simple old medicine.

So, so when you're experiencing different types of pain or a cold then

42:06

cinnamon and ginger are a good I think my well only if it responds to heat. Now, if you want to put an ice pack on, I mean the old doctors when someone came with a migraine would say, "Tell me, would you prefer a hot packer or an ice pack

42:22

for your migraine?" And migraine sufferers generally split 7030 preferring heat to 70, but a third of people with migraines actually want a cold pack. You don't use ginger for that.

You use cooling remedies, which we

42:38

might come on to later. Okay.

My girlfriend, she drinks ginger tea all the time, almost every day. Yeah, she likes the heat.

She likes the heat. Yeah, she she drinks it before bed as well.

Can help with sleep if that's the way it goes. I mean, everyone people are

42:55

different and there are some people who can't take ginger at all because their stomach objects um or because it, you know, literally heats them up too much. They get stimulated by it.

Um, but that's where the individuality comes in.

43:11

Okay. So, any any condition where I might be looking for heat, ginger and cinnamon, the first place to go.

First place to go. Yeah, you could, if you wanted to be Texmex, you can take the chilies.

Um, you know, well, you know, that's a we think of them as a much more extreme

43:27

version of the heating. and you know remind ourselves it was only when the Europeans discovered Americas that chilies became used over here.

You know, can you imagine an Italian meal without,

43:43

you know, without tomatoes and chilies? But in the old days there were none of those because they all came from America.

Um but yeah, chilies were the American equivalent of ginger used for the same purpose. So if someone comes to you and they say,

44:00

"Simon, when shall I use chilies as a form of medication?" What what would you say? First of all, I don't know yet.

And you know, if I'm dealing with someone at a distance, you know, online or on the phone or something, and they say, you know, what should I try? I said, the first thing to do is you

44:17

figure it out. You can start with herbal teas.

You are, are you? I'm going to drop it into the I'm going to drop it into here.

Is that a bad idea? Yeah.

Yeah. No, go for it.

But you'll you'll you should notice that's should be quite a hot one. Uh I will ask

44:35

suggest that they start with herbal teas because herbal teas are a very low dose. Mhm.

But they'll allow you to figure out what suits you. And you can divide, as I hinting at earlier, old medicines were often divided into those that were more warming, that we would now call

44:52

stimulating circulation, and more cooling, which we would now translate as stimulating digestion. And depending on which of those you prefer would really give me a clue.

So if you were looking at warming remedies,

45:07

it could be ginger tea, it could be fennel tea, you know, that's a warming remedy. Or it could be cinnamon or um any of the spices.

Cardamon is one of my favorites, by the way. Um this is I use cardamon.

This is the cardamon pods

45:23

inside a little black seeds. Absolutely lovely taste.

Do you know him? Do you know cardamon?

Have you tried it? Not really.

No. Oh, have a bite of that.

Just bite the seed. Yeah, just bite into it.

You don't just just get a hint of the taste. In many parts of the Middle East,

45:39

cardamon is one of the main flavors. Things like coffee and so on.

Reminds me of um Oh, I was going to say Indian food that I've had. Yes.

Used a lot in India. And in China, it's a convolescent tonic.

So, they use it when people building up

45:56

their digestion after being ill for a long time. They will often use cardamon.

It's one of my favorite remedies for that. when people really run low, their digestion isn't functioning.

It was appeared in one or two of these stories I've got here because I prefer that to most of the other spices when I need

46:13

warming, as I said before, but also sustaining and nourishing. So, you ask them, do you prefer teas that are warming or would you like something more cooling?

You know, one of

46:28

the most cooling remedies that people know about is this, which is mint. That's spearmint.

The best one is peppermint. It's got a lovely smell, hasn't it?

Yeah.

46:43

That has always been thought of as cooling. And it's a simple test.

Would you prefer ginger or peppermint tea? And already you're beginning to narrow things down a bit.

Mhm. The main cooling remedies throughout history from you know the

47:00

very beginning and in every part of the world you'll find them saying exactly the same thing. The main cooling remedies so-called are the bitters and they taste really bitter.

When you say cooling you mean I feel hot

47:18

so I want something to cool me down. That's right.

And there's certain conditions where I will feel I'll feel hot. Fever.

fever fever and they were often used to fever manage fever and u what h you remember when we were young we were told if you've had a big

47:34

meal don't go swimming you weren't told that I can't swim so there you go if that was one of the things that you know some of us in my generation at least were always remembered we were told you know if you got a big meal it's not a good idea to go swim because you the blood's moving

47:51

into the digestion and you won't get nearly as much as you want where you need it in the limbs. Uh and that's you know it is true when you are digesting a lot of blood investment shall we call it is going into the digestive system because there's a lot of work needed to

48:07

break down this food turn it into something useful it is an investment you put a lot in get much more out but what it means is is that um uh digestion is all about I'm just being a bit loose here with the language but

48:23

it's not about language it's like bringing blood into the core when you got a fever, the blood's all charging around and your body temperature is going up, which is great because fever actually is a defense measure. You know, when our body

48:39

temperature rises by a couple of degrees, are the white blood cells, the ones that are doing the leg work two or three times as active. So, fever is what the body uses when it needs to bring out the big guys, bring out the fight.

There's a slight design problem. It was

48:56

almost as though you know the creator put a you know a purposeful fault in the system because a lot of fever comes from the gut you know they get gut infections you know that's one of the main places and at that moment all the blood's going

49:11

out here and you want more of it going in more digestion if you like. So when you take a bitter, when you're taking a bitter, you're actually triggering taste buds up here.

A bitter a bitter something that tastes bitter. Is are there any plants that are bitter?

49:28

Yeah, a bitter plants are very common and were highly valued in the old world. Um, in our times, probably the most bitter plant that people used in European terms was something called wormwood.

49:44

Now you may not be familiar with that word but the French for wormwood is vermouth and you think of the use of a drink before a meal. The idea was it was they used to call it an apperitif something that stimulated your appetite.

So they would use bitters to improve

50:02

your appetite and a low level of wormwood would be one of them. Dandelion and boerdo of two other bitters which we now have as a soft drink you know particularly in America and we know that bitters do switch on

50:19

the appetite so we sometimes use them when appetite is poor and you know there's all sorts of reasons why you got a low appetite but bitters can really help particular if you're recovering from an illness um they can help with um getting the dig

50:35

digestion juices flowing and the appetite up because they bring blood to the digestive system. Well, they do all sorts of things actually.

When you switch on these receptors in the mouth, these taste buds, they hardwired and they produce hormones down here in the stomach that switch on all sorts of things and

50:51

effectively increase digestive activity which involves more blood coming into the area. So, yes, let's imagine you're living in some part of, you know, the the desert area in the Middle East.

you know, you're eating a sheep or something that hasn't seen a

51:07

refrigerator and it's a bit dodgy, you know, and you think after a meal, you turn to something easily available in that part of the world. It's a plant called cafe arabica, we call it coffee.

You ground the coffee

51:23

into a sludge at the bottom, pour a bit of hot water, and drink that straight. That's a bitter.

So if you ever had an espresso without sugar, that's a bitter. Okay?

And that was used as a digestive. In other words, after you're eating, it

51:41

would help cope with some pretty rough food. So bitters were always seen to be good for your digestion and appetite.

And in fever, that actually meant lowering your body temperature. And that's we can see that happening.

you know it it means that you some of the

51:57

anger out here just gets sublanimated into digestion. So that was where the bitters got their cooling reputation.

And we can now laugh at this is all medieval nonsense. But the point that I keep coming back to when I'm

52:12

seeing patients, I start with that blank sheet of paper is because the only test of what these do to you is to take it. And as you notice with your ginger and cinnamon, you don't need long.

You've got it there straight up. And you

52:29

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No way. On this point of antibiotics, um I've heard you talk about vitamin D, vitamin C, and zinc as a potential alternative to jumping straight from

53:51

not not straight alternative, but in improving your natural resistance particularly to viruses and such like. Okay.

Um then there is evidence for both vitamin D and vitamin C but also zinc as backups in ter in sub form supplement

54:08

form uh that do seem to add to your resilience in the face of infections. I'm quite concerned because you know I'm a I've got dark skin and uh in the weather that we live in here in the UK when I am in the UK I worry that I won't

54:24

get enough vitamin D. Are these quote unquote supplements important do you think?

What are the supplements that you think are imperative? None.

None. Not for mo for everybody, but there are certain situations.

I think vitamin D is

54:40

a good one. And it's not just people with dark skin that have a vitamin D deficiency is pretty widespread in in darker countries if we can call our weather and that um we know where there's not enough sun.

uh vitamin D deficiency is quite widespread and

54:55

increasingly doctors do suggest you have vitamin D supplementation through the winter particularly even just having a 15-minute outdoors with the sun will give you a fairly hefty amount. Do you supplement?

Not myself.

55:10

No, I don't. I I don't haven't spotted a need.

Uh but that doesn't mean that I don't recommend supplements to people. Well, there is a need.

and garlic. We've got garlic there that has a antibiotic role.

Well, this is

55:28

yeah garlic uh what used to be called Russian penicellin and when after penicellin was invented they because some parts of the world they use garlic instead of penicellin which was hard to come by originally and it was used in places

55:43

like the first world war to avoid some of the French foot and other problems that soldiers would get in those lousy conditions. Garlic, when talking raw now, is a very powerful prebiotic.

In other words, it helps the gut flora, the

56:01

good guys down here in the microbiome. And there's evidence to show a lot of these other ones do as well, but garlic is particularly strong.

And uh when I'm dealing with a disrupted gut flora, a microbiome, I will sometimes refer to

56:17

raw garlic as a treatment. But you need to do it with a little care because you know you don't want to lose too many friends.

Why what's wrong with g is it is the aroma you give out afterwards. So

56:34

you know your your friends will be very polite but they'll rather wish you hadn't. Um and some people find that it does upset you know when they swallow.

But I have a little trick which I call the garlic intensive which is when

56:50

everything is down the gut is in the state you maybe got a lung infection or whatever and there's a lot of need for if you like an antibiotic type of treatment raw garlic what you do is and for all

57:06

sorts of reasons the Friday evening is the best time to do this because you got the weekend ahead of you. You take one of those cloves.

It will first of all on that day you haven't eaten so much. So you don't have so much on the way.

Then you take one of

57:22

these cloves, you peel it, chop it up small pieces and swallow it with water. You don't chew it.

Just chop it up and swallow with a little bit of water and wait for half an hour just to make sure that that's okay. Your stomach's

57:38

okay to go ahead. If it is, take another clove, chop it up, swallow it.

Another half hour later, take another clove. And if you start at 6:00, by 10:00 in the evening, you've got eight cloves inside you.

57:54

Eight. And And what's that going to do?

Well, that's the point. You You usually go to bed, and I would suggest you go to bed alone at this point because you're not very friendly at this point because you're oozing garlic.

The aroma of garlic is coming out of all your pores.

58:09

Incidentally, it's also coming out of your lungs. And you know, there was an old trick where you used to be able to, if you had enough garlic, breathe on a petri dish in a laboratory with various pathogens and you could kill them just with your breath.

You know, it's the oil

58:25

of garlic is a powerful antiseptic. But what it's doing in the lower digestion is it seems the good guys down there quite like it, but the bad guys, you know, in the old days we had garlic was, you know, against the devil and it

58:40

looks as though the bad guys down there don't like garlic. So just doing that over a weekend can make a big difference to your good the good guys in the microbiome.

And if you got a low-level gut or lung infection, that can be

58:57

really helpful. But that's, you know, something you can do at home, but you don't want to do that too often.

In fact, I would suggest that one garlic intensive is probably enough for most people. So, prebiotic effects.

It has an anti- microbial properties

59:13

um which are is it good for pain? Called it Russian penicellin.

Is it? Yeah.

Well, it depends where the pain's coming from. Um, but if your pain is a cough or a chest infection, yes, particularly particularly good for chest infections.

Some people do use it for

59:28

arthritic problems. Uh, it will depend on what's causing the arthritis.

I, you know, and I, it's very hard for me to say one of these things will do it for everybody. It won't.

It will do for in certain situations. And what we learn

59:44

when we're dealing with plants is that you're the you're the boss. You find out for yourself.

All people like me do is say, "Well, give this a try. This is worth trying.

This is valuable. Why don't you give it a go?" How do you think about chronic pain?

There's so many people living with a

00:00

variety of different types of chronic pain. It affects 51.6 million people, I believe, just in the US alone.

And the most common forms of chronic pain are conditions such as arthritis or migraines or lower back pain or other types of nerve damage. Roughly 75 to 85%

00:18

of Americans will experience some form of back pain during their lives. When I think about this big array of plants that are in front of me and other plants, what is what is the first place to go in your mind if you're dealing with chronic pain?

It depends again where it is. But let's take joints and back.

Um you know where

00:35

you've got a joint that's causing and it's because it's inflamed. Yeah.

So when you have inflammation, you add itis to the name of the plant. So this is arthritis because it's the inflammation of the the joint.

Um you

00:52

you have cyitis which is the bladder. You have bronchitis if it's the lungs, gastritis if it's the stomach.

So itis tells us there's an inflammation and mostly with arthritis is an inflammation. And briefly, it's because there's junk

01:09

being dumped on the joint. The joints have got very poor circulation by design because, you know, this surfaces being pressed against each other.

And so the tissue in the joint is cartilage, gristle in in if you're eating it. Um,

01:26

which is designed to survive with very poor circulation because you know when you've got two things pressing in, there's not much room for blood than there. So if there is metabolic waste, let's call it junk in the system, it's more

01:41

likely to come out in these places where there's poor circulation. Sometimes things is a bit like a U bend under a basin.

You know, if there's any stuff in the sink, it's going to come deposit there. So I think of joints as a bit like a U bend.

So the first thing that people did with

01:59

a joint pain and inflammation of the joint was to help to clean the joint, bring more blood into the area. And that's what the inflammation is doing.

It's hurts like Billy Ho. But what it's

02:14

doing is bringing more blood in by brute force to do what I was just saying. But if you were to put on a mustard plaster or a Cayenne plaster, a Cayenne pepper plaster which you simply put on on the X outside.

02:29

Mhm. And you can buy these inarmacies and so on.

It's called capsicum. Okay.

So capsent pig button. Um it's a standard prescription dressing for a pain.

What it does is it brings the blood in directly

02:46

and that means the inflammation doesn't have to do it and the inflammation is sore. What you're doing isn't.

So by definition you're reducing the pain level. Mhm.

That's an example of using plants in a creative way which people always did.

03:02

They they used to do that back in the day. Oh yes.

Yeah. I mean, if you go to North America, the native populations would regularly use Cayenne as their salve for bad joints.

In Europe, it was mostly mustard. Um, we're talking the yellow

03:20

mustard, the one that's strong, used as a plaster over a joint. And if you've got arthritis in your fingers, and this is something anyone can do with, you know, suffering the pain here, use a mustard bath.

put your fingers into a dilute warm solution of mustard and it's

03:38

amazing how quickly they ease up or you could put a plaster on the hip or whatever. Um people always did this.

Have you seen this work in your practice? Oh yes.

And I often recommend it to patients and they keep reporting back. It's really makes a difference.

03:55

I think I worry about lower back pain because I spend so long sitting down and I've got low back pain too. And I didn't use herbs very much for that.

What did you do? Well, it was a long story, but there was a very good uh West African combo called OCBSA, which I saw

04:13

back in the day when I had really bad back and I got the music got so into me that I loosened up and began to jive and dance around and realize that my back had gone and it stayed gone for decades. It's just unlocked a knot.

So, that

04:29

wasn't any herb. That wasn't any plant.

Dancing. dancing.

I mean, letting the music get into you. What's the difference?

Well, you know, when you feel the music running through you, you know, you're just moving in with the beat, you know,

04:46

that loosens up a lot of knots. You know, I don't just do plants.

I, you know, I talk about breathing. I talk about exercises that you can do for yourself.

And uh sometimes when you got a joint pain, it's all about it's locked

05:01

and you can find ways of loosening that joint. Ibuprofen.

Yes, people reach for this all the time. I mean, I was looking at some of the search trend data for ibuprofen and it

05:17

is absolutely exploding. Yes.

Um that's the the search graph ibuprofen. Yeah.

Um it is but is one of the most widely used drugs in this country. M um it's obviously because it works and it's based on um a plant substance called

05:36

salic salicylic acid um which gave us aspirin and we still use the basic molecule to create the what we call nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or nsaides and ibuprofen is one of the most widely used

05:53

of those and basically they cut the inflammatory process just cut it and so the inflammation just diminishes which is good right well if it gets rid of the pain it is

06:10

but there's a always a follow up question why was that inflammation necessary because inflammation is a defense it's one of my most powerful defenses we have in the body and whenever someone is saying I'm on I

06:25

need ibuprofen My next question is what can we do to reduce the need for the inflammation? So when I was talking about the arthritis I was saying this junk shall we say being dumped on the joint can we help to relieve that?

Can

06:41

we go upstream and reduce some of the metabolic strain? You know people eat sometimes the wrong food and sometimes increases arthritis.

Uh you can improve your arthritis by have switching to more plants very often. Um but there are other things that we can give that seem

06:56

to help reduce some of those pressures. But the pain might be somewhere else.

It might be linked to a full-blown disease, you know, and in that case, you know, using anti-inflammatories is the only thing you can do. But if there is a way

07:13

in which we can help reduce the need for that inflammation in the first place, I would much prefer to do that than just suppress a natural defense. We we tend to think of inflammation as the enemy.

We do. And I think we're wrong.

We think of it as the disease itself.

07:30

We are wrong. It's the consequence of a problem.

And it's inflammation itself is a healthy response. It's when we bring out, you know, I sometimes use military language here.

And there's a bunch of white blood cells that I liken to

07:45

Marines. You know, these these are guys who when they're working well, they just go in and do the job.

They don't sort of figure it out. They don't ask questions.

They just go and do the job. We got a whole bunch of white blood cells that are bit like that.

They just we call

08:01

neutrfils. There's various others of that group and they just go in and whack them.

Inflammation is bringing those guys out faster and harder. So, we're bringing in more of the marines if you like to finish the job.

What's wrong with that?

08:17

You know, that's what we want to do. It happens to be sore.

Then if they don't do the job and the junk or the problem keeps piling in, then the marines become the problem and then we use the ibuprofen to shut them up. But

08:34

as I said, there's always a question, you know, why are we what's what's the consequence of stopping this internal cleansing process that uh is so important. So inflammation is not the enemy.

Inflammation is the defense

08:52

measure that can sometimes overstay its welcome. I had an injury in my ankle a couple of couple of months back because I I pulled some some of the ligaments down there and my ankle was swelled up and I was getting conflicting information from people about the inflammation because I had this big

09:07

football game coming up this for this charity match called soccerate at Old Trafford and I had one of my physios telling me to apply the ice thing and take anti-inflammatories and I had another one telling me something else about the inflammation that actually I didn't want to combat the inflammation because it was doing its job and so I

09:25

it's quite difficult to navigate whether one should let inflammation stay or if I should be taking anti-inflammatories or ibuprofen. Um well if you got a match to you sometimes need something just to get you match fit or match acceptable.

Um but if it's a

09:42

short-term we call it acute inflammation then overwhelmingly the advice is don't suppress it because in the short term you know we get a cut get a bit of dirt it gets swollen maybe a bit of pus and so on and after a while it sorts itself

09:58

out that's this miracle I called talked about earlier the body heals itself all the time that's inflammation doing its job properly cleaning out the marines go in clear all the stuff out back to their barracks back to normal. That's great.

It's only

10:15

if, as I said, the junk keeps piling in and the job doesn't get finished and we call that chronic inflammation. That's when you sometimes need a bit of help.

And chronic inflammation is often caused by something further upstream, right?

10:31

So, you try and think about what's causing it upstream. Exactly.

So, and what tends to be the perpetrator upstream? The gut is where most of these things begin because when you think about it, that's where we take most foreign material.

Almost all of it has to be

10:47

dealt with by the gut. So that's where most of our immune system is.

You know, we talk about the immune system, but you know, the majority of the immune system is a few millimeters away from the lining of the gut because that's where the action is. That's where all the foreign stuff is.

So if there's a

11:02

disruption there, it's that's the first place to begin and because it's usually the best place to begin. Uh and if we add the what we talked about the microbiome as another big factor, then there's plenty to work be done with down

11:18

there. So if it's a chronic inflammation, I will spend a lot of time looking at what might be going on down there.

And what's the typical suggestion if it is a a gut related problem? Well, the first thing is to do is to u get the best food you can down there, which is

11:35

mostly plant-based. Um, I mean, there are exceptions to that.

Uh, but in if we're looking at restoring your good health down here, the gut does seem to like plants at this point. Um, so we talk about, you know, having a wide

11:51

range of plants. you know the the current uh advice from one or two people is that you would aim to have 30 different types of plant per week you know just to get the diversity because we don't know which one you need so why don't give as much difference as you can

12:08

and you know there you know people think you can't afford to eat healthily all I would suggest is that you go and travel to somewhere like India or anywhere in Asia where they eat

12:23

pretty much a lot of plants, mostly plants for pennies. You know, you can make a healthy meal by if you know how to cook by just mixing some of these simple the dahs and the the root vegetables and the other vegetables

12:38

easily mixed together. A few spices in there absolutely delicious and your gut and your microbiome will be jumping with glee.

You talk about eating your rainbow. Yes.

What does that mean? Means as many colors as you can fit in.

12:55

Um, literally because each color is cause is produced by a constituent of plants. Many of them we call polyphenols which we know have a range of effects on all sorts of

13:12

mainly on the microbiome again because they're all in different ways prebiotic. They all help good guys prosper down there.

But then after the microbiome is processed them, which is interesting, the microbiome is is critical for

13:28

processing polyphenols, they don't get absorbed unless the microbiome breaks them up already. So the benefits of the colors depend on the good guys down here.

M when they get into the blood they start doing all sorts of wonderful things to

13:43

the lining of the blood vessels for example up into the brain where we got a what we call bloodb brain barrier which is actually a very exciting interface. The polyphenols the colors all have

13:59

wellestablished mechanisms that improve the health all around the body. So simple.

If you got a child who used to say, "Eat your greens." We now say, "Eat your rainbow. The more different colors, the better." I wonder if that's why they put so many artificial dyes in junk food.

14:16

Well, I wish they wouldn't to try and trick our brains into thinking it's I don't know. No, there's nothing quite like the original.

In terms of fruit, what are your favorite fruits to sort of recommend people to eat and why? probably the the if you wanted to have a

14:31

you know a top list the darker the color the better. So, we talk about purples and I'm pleased to see that uh your team has found a purple carrot there and we remind ourselves that most vegetables were purple once upon a time.

14:48

If you think of maze, you know, in the the sweet corn and the maze that you grow in the Americas, that mostly was originally purple and we bred the purple out because it didn't look so appetizing. And we're probably purple deficient.

Uh I think we could do with more purple

15:05

in our lives because the purple and blue color is a something called anthocyanins. These are types of polyphenol and they're particularly powerful particularly with the blood supply.

And we're talking about things like eyesight and brain health and

15:22

circulatory health, blood pressure control and all those sort of things can be improved just by having more purple in our lives. So we got beetroot.

That'll do. We got the berries.

Uh, red grapes are probably more We got the Yeah, we got the red grapes here. That's

15:39

got more of these than the yellow that the grapes do. Um, so I would start with the reds and purples.

You said you think we're purple deficient. Yeah.

I mean, just, you know, think of something interesting to say, but it's probably something in there.

15:58

And in terms of vegetables, what are your favorite go-to vegetables that that you'd recommend I eat? Uh, start with the roots.

The root vegetables, the carrots, the beetroots, the parsnips, the the various other root vegetables out there, not all of which are people's favorites, but they have uh fiber uh

16:17

sort of starch in them which is particularly prebiotic and some of the most powerful prebiotics are the root vegetables. So those are definitely worth having the greens obviously and broccoli and interestingly

16:32

I found a purple one uh which are easily enough to get. So you know you can get the purple or the green you know obviously there's a value in the in the purple there.

Uh but any broccoli, any of the cabbage family is full of all sorts of other ingredients uh that have

16:48

their own benefits in all sorts of ways, metabolism, gut, hormonal, blood supply. So greens, roots, and the big one in most people's lives are the grains.

you

17:03

know, wheat for example, but cereals, lentils, dahl, uh, peas and beans, uh, all of these have their own benefits, particularly for the microbiome. You know, again, I don't know exactly

17:19

what even I need, let alone what anyone else needs. So, the best thing to do is to have as much diversity as possible.

What is your diet? Are you mix a vegan?

Do you eat meat? Yeah.

have um you know I just have a broad range of most humans have eaten

17:36

which is a mixture of things. Uh I do obviously many of my patients are vegans and they can you can live quite well with them.

You have to add a few extra things just to cover your back on a few areas but you can live perfectly well at least when you're grown up an adult on a

17:53

planton diet. Um, but you know, who am I to say that an Inuit in the Arctic who never sees any vegetable ever and only lives on traditionally only lives on seal and whale meat and blubber is any

18:11

less healthy than someone in Thailand who lives only on rice and vegetables. You know, we're all we can cope with all sorts of variety of foods.

There isn't one food for everybody. I think we would we were discussing before we started recording that I'm currently on a ketosis diet.

The keto diet.

18:29

Keto diet. Yes.

Which basically means that I'm extremely low carb in my diet. Yes.

Basically consuming no sugar. Um what do you think of the keto diet?

What's been your experience with it? It can be and I think you're one of those that would get a lot of benefit

18:44

from it. um because it I mean sugars are you know they're in a lot of vegetable material and of course unfortunately we have sugar now as an added um to our diets um they tend to slow down various parts of your metabolism

19:00

they tend to make metabolism a bit more like hard work and so if you take those out and some of the more sugar producing carbs then you're freeing up a lot of energy. So, a lot of people on keto toe diets find that, you know, they're

19:15

sharper. That's probably what you do.

Um, but there are potential downsides. Interestingly, you know, I mean, the first thought was, well, that can't be very good for your microbiome because they rely on um vegetable material to a large part.

But

19:31

when we've looked at the microbiome of keto d after keto diets, it's not as it's actually there's some good guys that reemerge with a keto diet. So, it's a mixed bag.

The only thing is is that when you don't have as many plants in

19:48

your diet, then there's slightly more strain on things like liver and kidney function. So, someone who's taking keto for a long term, it's always a good idea to check that they're okay.

And some of the more long-term concerns have been around kidney. Um because if there's a

20:03

lot more of the animal-based material in the in food, then that's can be more hard work for the kidney. So it's always worth checking that those functions are doing well.

But I come back to the point there is no onesizefits all. We are

20:21

omnivores. We're designed to eat almost anything.

My girlfriend, she's doing keto as well and she noticed that her menstrual cycle became more regular. Yes.

Which she was like shocked by it. And she's really done a lot of AB testing over the the last couple of years.

And

20:36

whenever she's in a ke ketogenic diet, very low carb, very low sugar diet for 6 weeks. She was shocked that she could predict the day when her period would come.

And outside of that, sometimes it's really

20:52

varying. Yeah.

Well, there's a very good point about keto. One of the most effective things that keto does is it reduces insulin resistance, which is something that most of us suffer as we get older and larger, as we get through our life.

Insulin is the

21:08

hormone that packs sugar away into this into the tissues and into the liver. And thank God because if we didn't have uh insulin, we would have diabetes.

um insulin

21:25

resistance is growing and that leads to diabetes increasingly and so diabetes is in many most parts of the world now is becoming a another big health issue and it's mainly because we have too many carbs too much sugar in the diet because whenever we eat sugar particularly sugar

21:42

there's more work for the insulin to do so it gets more likely to get run down and tired when you're on a keto diet it's been observed that you're you get more insulin sensitive. So in other words, insulin works better.

So you can reverse early stages of

21:59

diabetes by switching to a keto for example. Now interestingly many menstrual problems are linked to insulin resistance and there's something called PCOS which affects quite a lot of women now

22:16

uh in which the ovaries basically produce more hormone producing cysts polycystic ovary syndrome and that is increasingly linked with insulin resistance. So it affects people who are more likely to be in the pre-diabetic

22:33

phase or putting on weight and that sort of thing. The insulin resistance itself switches the hormone balance and the menstrual cycle is a wonderful choreography.

I mean when you think about it, you know, all around the world

22:50

is a it's a pretty predictable cycle and it runs itself. But if there's something insulin resistant getting in the way, then that can disrupt the hormone.

So someone like your girlfriend might find that switching to a keto diet abolishes

23:07

or reduces that disruptor. Yeah.

Yeah. I was just reading some stats on that said 80% of women with PCOS have some degree of insulin resistance, even those who aren't overweight.

And my girlfriend does have PCOS, which she's talked about publicly before. So, it's no surprise that uh

23:24

that when she comes off, she takes sugar out of her diet, her menstrual cycle seems to fall back in line. And I think there's also links to insulin resistance, PCOS, and I guess ovulation, infertility.

Yes, it is. So, I think uh I mean the

23:40

the modern woman, the modern man for that matter, has a whole string of burdens to carry because we have too much sugar. I mean when you think about it you know sugar only emerged as a common ingredient you know 140 years ago 150 years ago up till that time only

23:57

very rich people could afford it then we had the industrial sugar production and a lot of slaves over in the Americas producing vast amounts of cane sugar that is a modern phenomenon and our bodies were designed to deal with the

24:13

amount of sugar that we now feed it and it does put a stress on the system and insulin is one of the guys caught in the mix. So if you're trying to have kids, which we are now, I guess you want to remove the uh if that's a factor, I would be looking

24:29

at reducing your sugar intake at the very least. Yeah.

I mean, we spend I spend a lot of time with uh women who are having difficulty conceiving and you know, I think I have about 13 herb

24:44

babies. you know, in other words, babies who were born with women who were having challenges getting pregnant.

And that was mainly, I think, because we were stabilizing the menstrual cycle and making the fertile phase a bit more

25:00

productive. And what do you what do you say to those women?

You you what do you prescribe? I guess I do.

I mean, that's my business. I will be prescribing.

So, you see there's some bottles there. uh these are the sort of things that we use in the practice.

Um

25:16

so I've given I've got a couple here that um just you know the sense the smell sense. So this is fennel which we all think we know but these are very strong extractions that only practitioners use.

25:32

So these are practitioner own supplies and when you smell it you realize that the that they are strong. Wow.

So, a teaspoon of that is a really powerful. Now, if you really want

25:49

to realize the power of herbs, this is a remedy called echynia. And a lot of people know about echgonia and it's a major supplement.

This is a root extraction from a variety of a species

26:06

of echania called Angustifolia. And I'm just going to put a little bit in there.

I'm going to test it myself before I give it to you. So, I'm not poisoning you.

So, you just take a little

26:23

Can I put on my skin or put it on? Or did you want me to shop that?

Just lick it. Whoa.

Wow. So, these are the sort of things.

This

26:39

is just a particularly striking example of the sort of things that we use in the practice. And so some of the the women that come to me, for example, with fertility or menstrual problems will go out with a mix of herbs drawn like this from about 100 or so different plants

26:56

that I have on the shelves. And they are often, as I said earlier, women remedies developed by women.

Um, and incidentally, North America is is a prime site for some rarely powerful

27:13

women's remedies. Um, and interestingly, when you look at them, you find they contain plants equivalent of steroids.

They're not steroids, but they seem to interact with our own hormone mechanism. And some of them were particularly good

27:28

at retiming the menstrual cycle. And the the one or two that were particularly warned women should not take unless they wish to be pregnant.

So effective were they? What's that?

What's that doing to your still right on the edge of my tongue? It's like it's it's more so basically

27:45

for anyone that can't see what we're doing cuz you're listening on audio. He put a little drop of this uh solution echania echania on my finger and I licked it off my finger and at first I was like there was this sort of taste journey which was interesting.

I think it kind of tastes like Maggie seasoning, some kind of food

28:01

seasoning. I'm now 60 seconds later and I can still It's like got more intense.

It's a bit like fireworks going off. Yeah, it's like fireworks going off in my mouth and all it was was a little lick of it.

Um, now you see what we use that for is for

28:17

infections or problems of the mouth and the throat particularly. What what's it doing?

Well, you know, you have to use bit of unscientific language here, but remember I talked about the Marines, you know, the guys who do all the battling for us. A lot of them hang out.

Their barracks are in the

28:32

throat. You know, we got tonsils, we got addenoids, we got the glands that run down our neck here that sometimes get swelled up, you know, if we got an infection in this area.

Yeah. You have to take something to take the It sometimes gets in the way of talking as well.

And I was hesitating before

28:49

giving it to you. didn't want to stop you in your in your steps.

But what's that that tingling cut a as I said a rather confusing story short those are constituents that almost seem to talk directly to those white blood cells and make them more active.

29:08

And so echynia in that form particularly works primarily on the front line shall we call it of our immune system. these battlers that sit up there and so often that's where you want to start the job

29:25

and you might have an infection somewhere else in the body but if you can work up here with these guys you can kick off all sorts of benefits and as you've just discovered it doesn't take long. No m So who should be thinking about echynasia?

29:40

Certainly if you got an upper respiratory problem and you you do need to get that tingle if you want to get that particular effect. I mean you can have echgonia in other forms pills and tablets and so on.

Uh and there are some which don't have that that tingle factor. They got other elements to it

29:57

but for the tingle factor it's anything to do with an infection that has a link to what's going on up here. And that could be for lower down in the gut as well because all you know our gut begins up here as well.

But it could be a sinus problem. It could be an middle ear

30:13

problem. It could be a throat problem.

It could be a gum problem. You know, we got all sorts of gum problems and all sorts of problems we have with mouth.

We've got a microbiome up here as well. Um, this can with one or two other things.

Some of the plants we use in

30:29

this form contain resins. An example is uh frankincense.

We got some tablets there. These ones.

Yeah. otherwise known as Boswelia.

And this just comes in a you know in in the form of tablets.

30:45

And uh they just look like any other tablets except they're sort of greeny yellow color because that's just ground up um uh resin. Now resin we know about that because it's the sort of thing you get

31:00

on out of pine trees. You know that very tacky stuff.

All we need to do is remember the Bible story. There were three gifts that the baby Jesus got, didn't he, for his birthday from those wise men.

One was gold. Fair enough.

The other two were resins. Myrrh

31:17

and frankincense. This is the frankincense.

I use myrrh in a liquid form. And you almost like you're lining the mouth with uh this resin.

You know, it's when you put some myrrh on the mouth,

31:34

you definitely feel the the mucos are firing up. And it was most widely used um medicine.

And the reason why it was so valued in the in those days by the three wise men is because my was there

31:50

first of all, they had to bring it out of Africa, you know, which is where he comes from. Um remember the Queen of Sheba in who married Solomon you know in the old uh Bible story Queen of Sheba had the trade routes of East East Africa

32:05

sorted. So Solomon married wisely by marrying the Queen of Sheba because she was she had the monopoly on um on myrrh particularly and on frankincense.

And those an echgonia maybe with a licorice to help it work

32:22

well are amazing at reducing infections in this area in the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and the areas around. It completely blows my mind that most people will lock their front door before they leave the house, but they'll sit in

32:38

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34:38

Do you do you think that um things like water fasts, people are doing a lot of these sort of water fasts and these sort of 7-day prolonged fasts are effective medicines? Uh my usual answer when I'm faced with a question and and someone needed to

34:54

answer from is to think back a bit. What did humans evolve to do?

And when we were hunter gatherers, which you know was 3 or 400,000 years, we were hunter gatherers. And now what we're doing now is a tiny.

But we evolved to eat intermittently.

35:11

You know, when you're a hunter gatherer, there are times when you're not eating at all, especially offseason, and you get very hungry and then you eat a lot and you have a big feast. So I think our systems were designed to be intermittent fasting and fasting is probably part of our gene makeup.

You know that's what we

35:28

were in a sense meant to do. So the fundamental principle of fasting is probably right on.

issue is is that sometimes if your metabolism, your digestion, your hormones or other functions are not at

35:44

prime place, fasting, particularly if it's extended, can actually be damaging. So, you do need a bit of advice if you're going down that route just to make sure it's okay for you.

And at the start of the conversation, you referenced that you deal with a lot

36:00

of cancer patients. So I think you said one/3 about a third of my a quarter maybe a quarter to a third yeah are living with cancer living with cancer which is something that's relatively new remember because I mean that is a testament to what modern medicine has

36:18

done because when I started out all those decades ago most people died with cancer were increasingly getting people living with cancer for extended periods of time and you know the cancer is not I mean we there are things we can do to help and

36:34

there is evidence to show that we can help reduce the risk at least and if not sometimes the um virilence of cancer but mostly what we're doing is helping people to function better while they've been through chemo or various other

36:50

treatments while they've still recovering from the cancer and its effects and it could be digestion could be things like sleep it could be you know all sorts of other things that we can do to help. So there's there's the preventative element which is doing things within your sort of lifestyle choices, your diet to reduce the the

37:07

likelihood you'll get cancer. But then once you have it, there's ways you can use herbs and other sort of remedies to better deal with life life generally.

When you when you think about cancer prevention, is it do you

37:23

think that one of the most powerful things we can do is to focus on what we're putting inside our bodies? Yes.

And you know, we've learned about cigarettes a long time ago. And there are other foods that have got a higher risk of cancer.

We talk about, you know, processed meats for example has

37:38

increasingly been seen as a cancer risk. U but I suggest that the main risk in cancer is just poor diets generally.

Too much fat, too much carbs, too much sugar all at once usually. Um and that strains the body in a way it wasn't meant.

And

37:55

there is evidence to show that by correcting poor diet you can prevent um cancer increasingly that's accepted. I'm pretty sure that the cardiovascular diseases are the single biggest killer.

Yes. Still cardiovascular in the west we're talking

38:10

about so developed countries catching up I'm afraid in other parts of the world where they adopt more western lifestyles. Uh but that's a combination of food and poor low level of exercise.

um that we're putting our finger on

38:27

there is also cardiovascular disease is a is another form of long-term inflammation and increasingly that's been understood. You know, it's not just fat or cholesterol or blood pressure.

It's an inflammatory mechanism going on

38:43

that's causing the harm and that's increasingly accepted by cardiologists and such. So, if I'm if I'm trying to reduce my chances of having some kind of heart related issue, are there any herbs or any products here that you think are beneficial?

38:58

Mostly, it's the food. When we're talking about long-term cardiovascular health, uh we have plants that we use uh to manage cardiac cardiovascular problems.

I mean the classic that a lot of people know about is the Hawthorne or the Mayflower.

39:14

Uh but the Hawthorne particularly the flour and the leaf used to be a regular home remedy that people used to use and drink as a tea uh for all sorts of reasons. You know managing fevers and all sorts of things like that.

But we

39:29

can we can now see regular hawthornne consumption, hawthornne leaf consumption as a preventative for some of the problems of cardiovascular. Just as an example, I would I would use spices as my main go-to to help to fend off cardiovascular problems because they all

39:46

have vascular benefits. Spices as in as in the ginger, the cinnamon we talked about, but here's turmeric.

And this is something we don't usually see in but if you can see there's in fact if you cut

40:02

that with your knife there I've just cut it open. Yeah.

You'll see it's bright. Yeah.

It's bright orange. That's the kurcumin that people use as a supplement.

I've got kurcumin at home. I was um I was advised to use that when I pulled

40:18

the ligaments in my ankle. Yes.

It's an anti-inflammatory, isn't it? You can see a little bit why I don't like using anti-inflammatory because I like inflammation as a friend.

So what I prefer to talk about is they modulate or support or manage inflammation. Uh but

40:34

turmeric is an extraordinary remedy and here's an interesting story. We talk about we need kurcumin that from turmeric and you'll get a supplement saying you know my co my turmeric's got more kurcumin than yours and it's more available.

The the interesting point is

40:51

that kurcumin is not absorbed by into the body at all about one or two% maybe the rest stays stubbornly in the gut and there's a very good reason for that because in any high dose kuramin is

41:06

toxic. So there's a good reason for it staying in the gut, but there's a lot of work on making it more bioavailable, getting the levels up in the blood.

And if you add pepper, you might get from 1 or 2% to 2 to 3%, you know, but it's still small

41:22

beer compared with the amount of turmeric that we uh take uh the amounts of kurcumin that we take in in an ordinary curry. So what's going on?

And that what is going on is that kurcamin and in and turmeric is one of the best

41:37

remedies we have for microbiome. There's a conversation going on.

The turmeric is encouraging the good guys. The good guys are breaking turmeric and kurcumin down into more available materials which are active.

41:53

it belongs in the gut and its inflammatory modulating effects come mostly from the products of the microbiome working on the kurcumin and moving through the body that way. So it's a wonderful lesson in you know the

42:10

that the medicine actually relies in this case almost entirely on a good microbiome. an effect that is reduced by the way if you have a lot of antibiotics.

Okay, so my microbiome is really the

42:27

processing center for many of these things. And if I have a bad gut microbiome because I've been eating the wrong foods and I haven't had diversity of plants, then even if I take some of these herbs that are good for me, I won't be able to process them properly anyway.

42:42

Not as well as you might. Yes, that is true.

We talk about uh we the the the we got probiotics which is the yogurts and the kimchi and the cafiers and so on which are actually living organisms. They have to get through the stomach by

42:57

the way which is quite a hard deal because the stomach's job is to sterilize foods but some of them will get through. Those are the probiotics.

The prebiotics are what we've been talking about here. The foods that will encourage the good guys in the microbiome.

We got a new kit on the

43:14

block called postbiotics. Mhm.

Which is now an industrial term used for killed bacteria which are then given as a medicine. But technically a postbiotic is anything that the bacteria produce.

Mhm.

43:29

And we're learning that more and more of what we eat, particularly from the plant side, is converted by the microbiome into medicines. And all those polyphenols and the colorings and so on are in that group.

So a lot of the benefits of polyphenols

43:45

are postbiotic benefits. There was a study done in 2007 that showed can't even say it.

Curcumin that shows curcumin upregulates anti- oxidant defenses and downregulates

44:01

oxidative stress. Yeah.

There was a study done in 2016 which is a meta analysis of random control trials found curcuminum comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief. Answers your earlier question, doesn't it?

44:16

And there's a lot of uh lots of studies that show that it's effective for people that have things like arthritis and joint pains. Yeah, that was leaving the best to last.

Yeah, there there's a lot of work on

44:31

kurcamin and turmeric. As I say, a lot of people get confused because they think the it only works if you absorb it into the blood.

And I'm saying that actually you don't. What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it useful.

And there's early preclinical studies

44:47

taking place around the impact it can have with cancers. And there's promising but early studies showing the impact that curcumin that comes from turmeric can have on brain health.

Yes. Well, that's definitely a big story, but just on the when you say preclinical, that usually mean that it

45:03

does mean laboratory. So that's a test tubes and b rats and other animals.

None of those tell us what happens when we put it in a human. Put it in the human.

So all a preclinical study will do is point to a possible effect. And time again,

45:18

pharmaceutical companies will tell you this. you know, a promising pre-clinical lead doesn't lead to a medicine because it turns out to be a toxic or doesn't agree with humans.

So, we take pre-clinical evidence with caution. And we're personally I'm mostly interested

45:34

in human studies because that's the only thing that makes any sense. Um, but you mentioned brain health because here's one of the big gaps we have, don't we?

Because we were we've got a lot of brain health issues right now. Mhm.

dementia is still going in the

45:52

wrong direction. Um it's a very distressing thing if you have any in your family and increasingly there's people saying what can we do to prevent this and Alzheimer's is all about there being the wrong sort of protein and

46:08

deposits in the brain but increasingly the focus is switching on to the blood supply to the brain what we call the vascular effects on the brain and there's something we used to call the blood brain barrier which you probably

46:25

heard of which is seen to be the place where the barrier that stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it. We now know this bloodb brain barrier is a very dynamic interesting interface between the brains

46:42

tissue and the rest of us. is now called the neurovvascular unit, NVU.

And it is so exciting. And the more we look at it so far, the more we find that the things that help the neurovvascular

46:58

unit, the bloodb brain barrier are plants. And we have green tea.

And you know we can if you if you really want to help um our brain health regular drinking of green tea you know

47:14

it's been shown to be really useful. Not that rather than the supplement by the way is the drink that you have um oh I put it in here right so we can make it.

So as you make that can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea

47:33

because it contains a number of again polyphenols and polyphenols are those are these colors these colors yeah in this case it's green obviously and me tea is just the smoked unprocessed part of the tea leaf so it's a plant called

47:48

chameleia senses um so this is a nice Japanese teapot. That's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in.

And these are the mugs, but we've filled these up already with uh uh ginger and cinnamon. So, let's

48:06

let's leave it for a moment. But what we can while it's sitting there for a while, there are a number of these polyphenols and green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier.

We talked about the neurovvascular unit

48:21

between the brain and the rest of us. And um there's all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble.

What what sort of trouble? The dementia type problems, cognitive decline as you get older.

48:38

Do they find that in cultures where they drink a lot of green tea, they have less dementia? Yeah.

But that doesn't mean there's a cause and effect. So you need a few other things to establish that.

What we're finding is that other plants have very likely powerful effects in this area. And I mentioned the rosemary.

Now

48:54

all you need to do to appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff. Oh, it smells so good.

Really nice. That's not just nice because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volatile oils, the things that give the smell.

49:11

And when you're inhaling, they're literally going into your brain because part of the brain actually reaches the outside world. It's called the alactory lobe and it's right at the top of the nose here.

And when you inhale something, it literally moves into the brain and from

49:29

there into the lyic system. Remember there's a line in a Shakespeare play called Hamlet Ailia the young lady says rosemary that's for remembrance because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions and when I was in

49:46

working on our campus in Maryland we actually did a clinical trial with rosemary in people with struggling with their crosswords you know as they get older and found that although it wasn't a conclusive study there were pointers to it improving cognitive or performance

50:03

in those people and there's been other studies since that re that reinforce that. I would say that rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health.

There's another remedy called GKO that a lot of people know about which is used as a

50:18

prescription medicine in Europe uh for cardiovascular problems and that's been shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as as we've seen here and with the green tea. I'll check it here.

Yeah, that looks all right.

50:39

You see it's more yellow than green, but uh and this is flavored with a little bit of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favorite taste.

Green tea is rich in polyphenols um

50:55

which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention. It's got a nice minty flavor.

Yeah. You could live with that, couldn't you?

Yeah. Yeah, my girlfriend again, she she's all over

51:11

this stuff. She's always bloody right.

Well, you know that or learned that lesson a long time ago. I know, right?

Like I say it all the time on this podcast, but she's always like two, three years ahead of what then someone really really smart comes and tells me and I spend those two or three years in denial. I'm like, what the [ __ ] is she like doing over there?

Don't get

51:28

me started on cacao. If you start talking to me about cacao, I'm going to leave.

No, no, no, no, no. She's been telling I'm gonna I'm gonna nail this because there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this.

Okay, Coco. Yeah, chocolate, dark chocolate is a medicine.

End of one of the best medicines around

51:47

is 50 g or 100 g of 75% or more dark chocolate. Do you know what I've just realized?

My girlfriend, she's going to live till she's 150 because she all she eats 90% or something 80% dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day.

52:06

She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day. She eats the full rainbow.

She should be slipping in for you. I know.

I I know. Exactly.

No, Coco. Seriously,

52:22

brain health as well, cardiovascular health. I mean, they just they do studies where they've put coco into volunteers.

That means students usually um you know so young kids and they were able to show changes in the blood flow within minutes

52:40

certainly within an hour of eating cocoa beneficial changes in your blood flow. They call it the heart medicine.

Yeah. Heart circulation brain.

So she's um my girlfriend's very spiritual. She runs a business called

52:56

Barley Breathwork. Um hashtag ad if I have to say that.

But in her business, one of the things she does at the very start of the session with women all over the world that come to her retreats is she makes cacao for them. And you notice instantly how people change

53:11

when they've had a hot cup of cacao. It's and and she says it like almost brings out their heart.

And I guess that's because of the circulation reasons. It is, but it also of course we know it contains a few other beneficial stimul stimulating effects sort of

53:27

similar to the effects with coffee which in certainly as I've already said is a medicine as well. Uh but cocoa and chocolate does have a uplifting effect which is why we love it.

So and we have to be clear here we're not talking about hot chocolate that comes from a packet or something necessarily.

53:43

We would like it to be as dark as possible. Okay.

So, the less sugar, the less fat. Um, so we talk about 75% cocoa solids, you know, so it's dark chocolate and it tastes a bit more medicinal, doesn't it?

It's not as sweet. Um, but I'm saying to many of

54:01

my patients, take 50 grams a day. It's a medicine.

Damn, she's right. My fridge is full of dark chocolate.

I tend to avoid it, but the drawer of my fridge has all of her

54:16

dark chocolate in and it's she she likes it 90%. If she can get it 90%, she'll take it.

Yeah. 90% is quite bitter now.

Yeah. Yeah.

I am I was in Peru and I went to a chocolate making lesson and that chocolate making lesson changed my life. And it changed my life because I didn't

54:32

realize how much sugar goes into chocolate, but specifically white chocolate. Oh my god.

They said they gave me this big beaker which was you know this big like a a foot high and a foot wide and they were like right pour the sugar in. So I poured some and

54:48

they're like they like laughed at me. They were like no fill it like 70% with this white sugar.

And I was like there's no way. I poured about 60 or 70% white sugar into this massive tube and they were like okay now put a little bit of this and a little bit of this little

55:03

bit of oil whatever. And I couldn't believe that it's literally like the white chocolate is like literally all sugar.

Then milk chocolate was like 50% sugar. And then when we did when we made the dark chocolate, it was a tiny amount like a tiny tiny amount.

And from that day onwards, white chocolate's left my

55:20

life. There was once upon a time we a few years back when the Europeans uh union, I think before we joined it, said that we shouldn't call uh dairy milk chocolate at all.

It's a chocolate flavor candy is what they described it as literally. Yeah.

So this is So we've got

55:37

some green tea here. Yeah.

And you're talking to me about the association between green tea and Alzheimer's which is really exciting. Yes.

Um there's quite a lot of work being done now on these and there they're obviously looking for

55:52

medications as well but so far most of the data coming in in relates to plant-based materials. So it suggests that there's other reasons why having plants and again spices come back into the mix um seem to be helpful for brain health.

I'm having a look at the green

56:11

tea. There was a study done in 2008 which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory, attention accuracy and um long-term consumption associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease according to the

56:26

Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in 2011. It's nice to have somebody else just say what you said.

Yeah, but it's it's exactly I didn't realize. I didn't I had no idea.

I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when

56:42

she offered it to me. You can't say sorry.

I have literally literally I've got a Wow. heart health, brain function, fat burning and metabolism, cancer prevention, early evidence, blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, gut and oral

56:58

health. What about matcha?

I'm a I'm a big investor in um the biggest matcha company in Europe. It's probably more beneficial than the basic green tea because it's it's it's more shall we say pure.

Um it's finer quality. So the

57:16

chances are that matcha will do more than we've just said the green tea will do. Um but there's there's a evidence lack and a lot of these things is we need more evidence, but it would point to matcha being particularly helpful.

We haven't talked much about

57:32

cholesterol. No, you haven't brought it up.

Cholesterol is a type of fat made in your liver which travels in your blood and can be found. What is um for anyone that doesn't know cholesterol, what it is and why it if it's a good or bad thing, what do I need to know about cholesterol

57:48

and is there anything in front of us here that can help keep my cholesterol in a healthy state? I did think I think a doctor did actually tell me at one point that I had high cholesterol um a couple of years ago because of my diet at the time.

The keto of course will tend to well it's interesting again keto you think would push up your

58:05

cholesterol levels but actually there's a mixture of effects. So it's not it's not a done deal that it will raise your cholesterol.

It there's cholesterol is part of a range of fats the body has. Most of the fats that are in the body come from the food and they come in as

58:22

heavy fats we say. And what the digestion does is a strip down the heaviness and it becomes more what we call high density uh lipop liposite HDLs.

My tongue is twisting around it.

58:39

And uh cholesterol is sort of in the middle of that as one of the elements within that spectrum of fats. What cholesterol is actually a secreted by the liver for very good reasons.

It helps with all sorts of things. It's the

58:55

basis of some of our hormones. There's all sorts of reasons why we need cholesterol.

I sometimes have referred to in the past as the tiger in the tank that it sort of helps to fire up some of our get up and go. And if we were physically active during the during the day working on the land or whatever, you

59:12

need a certain amount of cholesterol to motor. We're sitting in chairs and the cholesterol becomes increasing a problem.

We have a highfat diet that tends to put in more of it. And the point is that many of us our cholesterol levels increasingly rise and that is a

59:29

risk factor as we know for cardiovascular disease. we we said was still one of the biggest killer.

So cholesterol is up there as a risk factor and so the usual thing that a doctor will do is to hand you something a statin basically that will reduce your

59:47

cholesterol levels. They also know that there's more push back on that prescription than almost anything else because the word is out that statins can do this that or the other interfere with your muscle strength and all the rest of it.

Give you little aches and pains that you know

00:03

most people have statins without a problem but the impact of statins is still modest in terms of the overall scheme of things. You know the numbers of people's lives it saves is probably fairly minimal.

So the probably the better conversation is

00:18

to have what can we do to recontextualize the cholesterol so that it becomes more like it should be a good thing rather than a risk and the first thing is to have a more apart from the keto have the more vegetable-based

00:35

plant-based diet because that in itself will tend to mop up and reduce cholesterol. exercise becomes important because by physical activity we can manage it better.

And then where we come in uh with the work I do is to look at high

00:50

cholesterol is potentially a sign of liver distress and you know we like working with the liver and there's a number of remedies that we use to help reduce cholesterol levels mainly by getting more out through the bile and so

01:07

on. So, it's a there's not a straight answer to your question.

Um, you know, the statin is sounds like a simple pill that fixes it. Uh, the reality is is that we need to look at a much wider range of things.

You're a fan of artichokes for cholesterol.

01:22

Yes, you you must have read my mind. Uh, the artich choke leaf uh is the one we're talking about which is used in France a lot for basically fat liver related problems a lot.

Uh I use it a lot in the practice as a juice actually

01:38

just as a pressed juice. Um uh yes it's one of them.

Dandelion root is another old familiar which seems to be helpful here mostly by as I said flushing stuff through the bile and there is a range of

01:53

other things that we use. One of the things that you know many people are concerned about when they're thinking about changing their diet is just the cost of it.

they think it's super expensive to to buy all these fresh fruit and veg and you know

02:09

is that the case is is that a barrier to to entry to the stuff we've talked about today at all my usual answer that is east eat Asian because as I said if you can make a meal with vegetables and spices and things

02:26

like lentils and so on beans for very cheaply it's just that we got out of the habit or we haven't got into the habit of doing that slightly slow cooking. Uh we will buy our Indian meals sometimes from places that put a more fat in than

02:41

they might. Um so some of the meals we can buy that are Asian are a bit too fatty.

But if you make it yourself at home, which means learning how to cook, but you can eat very cheaply. What is the most important thing that we

02:56

didn't talk about that we should have talked about? Well, I suppose I didn't mention much about the omerazole um because that that I've never heard of this before.

Mezriole? Yeah, I've never heard of it.

Yeah, they are increasingly a minority.

03:12

Oh, really? Arazzole is the most widely prescribed drug in this country and I believe in the US also.

And it's for acid reflux. It's what the Americans call gird and what we call gourd because we spell esophagus differently.

So we spell

03:29

esophagus with an OE and Americans spell it with an E. So it's either gird or gore depending on which country you're in.

And that means gastro esophageal reflux disease. Gourd.

And acid reflux is a real issue with a

03:46

lot of people and they find that when they go to a doctor, the doctor will routinely prescribe a merazole or something like it. And gourd is actually diagnosed by as a condition which is made better by

04:02

omerazol. I mean it's literally it's a disease that is diagnosed by the treatment.

And what a merazole does is shuts down the acid production in the stomach. So you don't get as much damage by reflux.

04:18

The problem is is that the acid's doing a job. It's sterilizing your food, which is important, isn't it?

It's also helping to break it down so that it becomes not an immune threat, which you know, if you have a blood transfusion or

04:35

something in the wrong blood, you get a problem. You we're eating forest stuff all the time.

We rely on the stomach and the juices to make it safe. So, the acid is there to protect us.

When we're getting acid reflux, actually, it's not because you got too

04:51

much acid. is because you're refluxing it.

It's going back up into the gullet, the esophagus. But a merazole will put an end to that.

The problem with a two problems. First is that the list of problems occurring from long-term

05:06

amrazol use is beginning to grow and is serious. Cancers, dementias, all sorts of things are beginning to be downstream problems associated with long-term omerazol use.

But the other thing is is that once you're on it, it's really difficult to

05:23

come off it and you get a famous rebound effect. So you come off the merazole and wow, you get much more trouble.

So the only thing to do is take more mezrazole and people find it really hard to come off it. So you have to do a lot of hard

05:38

work to wean people off and do it in sorts of different ways. So what do we do instead?

Well, one simple thing to do, and anyone can do this, and you don't need to go very far, is to use what we call the raft principle. So,

05:54

there are some plants that have got a lot of mucus in them, mucelage. The classic example from North America, Sri Elm, it's a sort of powder that looks like you make polyfiller to fill the crack with, you know, it's a white powder.

When it's mixed with water, it

06:11

forms this paste, this muc mucous stuff. You want to have it as a tablet because you don't want all to swallow that stuff.

But when it's in the stomach, it produces this mucus layer. You don't need to go to slippery elm.

There is a

06:27

product here in this country called Gavaskon, which is essentially seaweed gum with I don't have shares in it, by the way, but it it's seaweed gum with some minerals in there. And they advertise it when you see the television ads as the raft.

So what they're doing

06:43

is you're putting a layer of mucus on top of your food. So you have it after you've had your last mouthful.

You have a bit of there. And then as the food pushes up back into the gullet, you've got this nice mucous coating, a raft to stop it

06:59

back up. That carbohydrate, it's what it is, gets digested within a couple of hours.

End off. No problem.

It's not even a medicine. It's just a physical barrier.

So it could have gavasone, you could have copium, you could have aloe vera,

07:14

there's a number of other muc mucousy type plants that people use and that can without any other complication at all be one step. And I use it regularly with with when I'm weaning people off.

I will use the raft principle to help prevent

07:32

some of the harm you get with reflux. That's simple example.

You're very fond of these plants. They are living organisms, aren't they?

Are you concerned about how we we treat

07:48

them? I'm concerned about the nate the world that they come from because of course increasingly we have to produce these industrially which sometimes mean in monoculture.

Well, it usually means a monoulture form. They're grown in rows and rows and they put weed killers down

08:03

to get other plants out of the way and so they become less uh natural. And we talked about the polyphenols.

You know, PA, the company I worked for was all organic and we were able to show

08:20

that a plant that grows organically that doesn't have pesticides needs to fight his own battles more. Mhm.

Because if you got a pesticide, you don't need to worry about so much, you know, the the pests and the attackers. So, a plant that's grown in wild or

08:37

organically without chemicals has more polyphenols because the polyphenols are part of the plant's defense mechanism. M so the more you can buy or I mean that's where foraging comes in.

You know my colleague in Devon is a forager and he

08:52

he can walk around hedro and show you you can make a whole meal out of plasma people just walk past um because people used to do that. So that's real wild eating which must be one of the best ways of eating.

Uh but the more close to

09:07

nature you can get your plants the better. We have to live with what we've got and most plants are grown without that.

But they're still better than having them not having them at all. Simon, thank you.

Um, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last

09:23

guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is, "Our world is changing fast.

How do you keep up?" I think

09:41

the world is we all know getting pretty scary out there, isn't it? There is a a truth which is you and the people around you are the actually the only things that matter daytoday are

09:57

they are of closest dearest the ones that we have invested most. One of the reasons that I'm increasingly happy to spend my time working in the practice in extra rather than

10:12

chasing around the world is because as the world gets more frightening, the more you realize that it's the connections you make with each other

10:27

you put back to back if you like, you know, face the world out there back to back. And I think it's reconnecting with those who are closest to you.

That is the best antidote I know. And that also includes

10:43

reconnecting with the the nature and the world around it. So that would be my answer.

And who is that in your life? Who are those people?

I have family. I have now 10 grandchildren between us, Rachel and myself.

Congratulations. And so um the uh

11:00

electronic calendar comes into its own to keep track of all that. Uh so yes the we've we've uh got a a no spread around the globe.

So it's a it's a widespread thing but we've got people close by and

11:16

you know obviously your closest and nearest are the ones that matter. Simon thank you so much for doing what you do.

I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your work. I've never had a conversation with someone that knows so much about plants and and herbs in my life.

So, I was so excited to learn more. And you have changed my

11:32

opinion on so many things. I can't wait to go and tell my girlfriend that she's right about everything.

I'll I'll slip her the I'll she can slip me the tenner. And I highly recommend um people go and check out your your website and go to

11:47

your herb which takes place once a month. Um, I'm sure there's going to be lots of people getting in touch with you to try and come and see you in person as well, which is fantastic.

Is there anything else that if my listeners want to take a step forward from here in this direction and understand more about herbs? I've got your books here which

12:02

I'm going to link below. There's the herb hour on your website.

Is there anything else that we should be aware of? As I said, the website does link to this wonderful resource that's not I mean I contribute to the herbal reality one which is where you're going to find almost anything you want to know about using plants.

So that's I'll stop there, but you can step through my website to

12:19

get there because you'll find a few other things on the way. Um there is resources out there and it's increasingly reliable.

These are not dreamt up, you know, for a Tik Tok video. They're well thought through and based on a lot of human experience.

So there is stuff out there if you're

12:35

looking for it. Thank you.

You're very much leading the charge to bring us all back to being human beings and I'm a big big fan of that and it's a journey I'm on myself. So, thank you so much for doing the work that you do and being a champion for for nature in all its forms.

So, um and I really really hope that uh I really hope

12:52

that more people, more podcasters host you so that you can get the uh get the message out there. Thank you.

This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show.

So, could I ask you for a favor?

13:08

If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week.

We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me

13:24

to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

[Music]

13:40

Hey. Hey.

Hey. [Music]