No.1 Herbal Medicine Expert: This Over The Counter Drug Is Quietly Killing You & They’re Lying About Medicinal Plants!

28:50I mean, the point about antibiotics and we did a big project with this ironically just before COVID when I was working with Pucker, the tea people. We put a campaign together to find natural 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 harassed doctor who just, you know, because they said, give me something dog, 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.

29:31You don't take my word for it, everyone knows this. And you get NHS, you know, in this country, postage saying antibiotics are no good for viruses, please don't ask your doctor for them. So for many of these things, colds and respiratory problems, for example, where there are many spices, I mean some of the things on that plate there are particularly good for colds and viruses up here. And so we put that all together in the package and said we can encourage people not to ask the dog for an antibiotic and use some of these home easy free or sometimes treatments

30:10to use instead of the antibiotic. When you say antibiotics are the most urgent health issue of the moment, I want to fully understand why you think it's so urgent because we're going to develop a resistance which Which means that we're more susceptible to disease. It's really happening, and that's not me, the saying, these are the guys who look after our health care for us, like the World Health Organization, who are really getting close to panic about this issue. Because already the number of people dying from antibiotic resistance infections is beginning to rise dramatically. And new antibiotics, unfortunately, there's less financial incentives to develop them because they're often handed out free in various countries, so you don't get the margins back.

31:04And the pipeline of new antibiotics is not good. So all you need to do is check on the World Health Organization to get the chapter and verse on that. It's actually quite frightening. I'm on the World Health Organization site now and I found a definition of antibiotic resistance. It's when bacteria stops responding to antibiotics and it's mainly caused by overusing or misusing antibiotics. In 2022, US doctors gave out about 236 million antifargate. What? US doctors gave out 236 million antibiotic prescriptions, roughly seven prescriptions for every 10 people. Studies showed that at least roughly 30 % of antibiotic prescriptions in the US aren't needed, especially in places like doctors offices and emergency rooms.

31:58In 2020, about 13 million antibiotic prescriptions were 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 anti -barctic resistance one of the top global health threats and estimated that it is responsible for 1 .27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to almost 5 million deaths. That was 2019, I can tell you that the figures have risen dramatically since then. So that's what people think. And just on a personal basis, you know, you go 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.

32:47You know, there's some of the most lethal ones there. Increasingly, that is going to 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. Use them when you need them and not otherwise. And again, it's not me saying this is most responsible doctors would wish that their patients wouldn't keep asking for them.

33:20So there's sort of three things that I've been able to ascertain as risks of misuse or overuse or inappropriate use of antibiotics, which is the impact on the gut microbiome, the, you're contributing to the rise in antibiotic resistance and... That's all the main thing. I guess even with the diseases you get, you'll be slower to heal because you're 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 their healing capacity. And that's so much of the work I do is to aim to put some of that right.

33:59And there's links to colorectal cancers? Yeah, well that's it, because we're talking about the microbiome, you see? So those are the cancers and the lower gut. We know that the microbiome is a major factor in how well the gut is. So things like Crohn's and Ulcerative Collitis and Cancer of the Bell, very closely linked to the state of the microbiome. Ah, okay. So are there alternatives on this table or in the world of plants to antibiotics that I should maybe also consider? Instead of just jumping straight to antibiotics for everything that I experience? Yes. If you've got a serious gut or other infection, you may need the antibiotics.

34:41So let's put that straight away. But if you've got a cold, flu virus, a viral problem, particularly the airways, you, A, antibiotics, won't 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 the species of bacteria that's affected who are resistant to that, is natural selection. You know, though you have a thousand little bacteria that's a small amount by their terms and you kill 999 of them, the one that survives will then become two in 20 minutes and four in 40 minutes and suddenly become a new population.

35:28And you know, I duck that bullet and so that group of bacteria will already be resistant. So So we're creating resistance every time we use an antibody. So let's try it and do 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. 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.

36:08And you feel chills, and you want to wrap up, and you want to hot water, or you want to have a 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 this fella, this is ginger. It's grown widely around the well, and it's original Asian form. It was made extinct around the time of the Romans. So popular was it. And every since, all the ginger sense of this species has got to be going from root stock as 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.

36:54And you know, the reason why all those Europeans ended up in Asia running in deer and the Dutch and the Indonesia and so on It's because that's where these things came from. That's where the spices came from. And so we decided, you know, like, good capitalist to go and control the business. So, Ginger became very popular over here because we don't have nothing I could over here. The nearest thing we got is horse radish, which I promise you is no substitute for this. So, how do we use this? We've got a knob of ginger here about the size of your thumb. That's about a good dose. you grate it fresh ginger into a mug.

37:35Can you do that for me? I've got a great, I've got a great outfit. So we've got here a piece of ginger, as I say, about the size of your 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 gonna use, and you literally, it's gonna make a bit of a mess here, But in doing this at home you don't mind a bit of mess. So you're literally grating and grating nicely, isn'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.

38:16This is cinnamon you buy in any shop. It comes in different forms. There's one from China called Cassia, which looks like one be curled bark. If you look at this one, you'll see that it's tightly wrapped with lots of little curled, lots of little filaments in it. That's the one you go for. It's got a small aromatic. And you either grate that with, if you've got a spice mill or you take a teaspoon of it, let's say there's a teaspoonful, and you put that in your... So that's ginger and cinnamon. Ginger and cinnamon, that's it. Then you add your hot water. There.

39:07You're going for real, right? No, for the real one. Good on you. At this point a sieve is useful. Why? Because it's going to be full of bits. bits. And then let's say this is a nice Japanese green tea mug, but let's say this is your mug and we'll pour a little bit in there. You see all the stuff that you leave behind? Ah yeah, ah okay.

39:40And if you don't mind sharing a mug.

39:46So what's in here? This is just ginger and cinnamon. Just ginger and cinnamon. It's fairly weak. Oh, it is nice though. It is nice. It is nice. Can you feel it warming already? Yes, straight away. Yeah. Really nice. Yeah. Now, you see what's happening there is that you... I mean, ginger is an example of a group of remedies, which includes turmeric, by the way and that's the other route, the other route there. Obviously. That's turmeric. It's normally seen in a yellow powder. I'll talk about that later. And black pepper and chilies. I've got a chili here. Which when you take them, you think you're burning a mouth aren't you?

40:30The interesting thing is that there's no burning. you can actually have full medras level chili and no harm will be done to your lining because there's no burning going on. What you're doing is you're stimulating the pain fibers. So you've 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 -fibres and 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 mucos are the ones that you just swallowed and then throughing a little bit up in the nasal passages.

41:19Are opening up. The mucous cells producing mucous will loosen up and you get more runny mucus, which is helping to flush through the grotto and the mucus, and the main thing you feel is the warmth. And if you're dealing with something down here and the lungs, you will actually start bringing up more gunk up the airways. There's a natural escalator that the body uses to get stuff out of the lungs. That's stimulated. And the mixture of cinnamon and ginger was created, I think, in heaven. I mean, I think there's such a natural compliment and anybody can do that. And the point about it is that it's warming and in the old days, that was the key thing.

42:08He didn't matter if he had a headache or a joint pain or a menstrual cramp. If you wanted to put a hot water bottle on it or heated up, then that was a cold problem. And putting a heating medicine would begin to make 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've got a menstrual cramp and you want to put a hot water bottle on it, if you've got a joint pain and you want to put a heating liniment on it, you can use the same thing. Ginger, my stomach doesn't eat it. And that's simple, old medicine. So when you're experiencing different types of pain or a cold, then cinnamon and ginger are good.

42:56Well, only if it responds to heat. Now, if you want to put a nice peck on, I mean, the old doctors when someone came with a migraine would say, tell me, would you prefer a hot pecker or a nice pecker For your migraine, and migraine suffers generally split 70 -30, 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 might come on to later. Again. My girlfriend, she drinks ginger tea all the time, almost every day. Yeah. She likes the heat. She likes the heat. Yeah. She drinks it before bed as well.

43:36You can help with sleep if that's the way it goes. I mean, people are different. And there are some people who can't take ginger at all because there's stomach objects. Or because it literally heats up too much, so they get stimulated by it. But that's where the individuality comes in. Okay, so any condition where I might be looking for heat, ginger and cinnamon first place to go. First place to go. If you wanted to be Tex -Mex, you can take the chilies. And as well. Well, you know, we think of them as a much more stream version of the heating. And you know, remind ourselves, there was only when Europeans discovered America's that chilies became used over here.

44:27You know, can you imagine an Italian meal without tomatoes and chilies, but in the old days that were none of those because they all came from America. But the chilies were the American equivalent of ginger, used for the same purpose. So if someone comes to you and they say, sorry, when should I use chilies as a form of medication, what would you say? First of all, I don't know yet. And if I'm dealing with someone that's a distance, you know, a long line or on the phone or something and they say, you know, watch that, I'll try. I said, the first thing to do is you figure it out. You can start with herbal teas.

45:10You are, do you? I'm gonna drop it into the, I'm gonna drop it into here. Is that a bad idea? Yeah, no, go for it, but you should notice that should be quite a hot one. I will ask, suggest that they start with herbal teas because herbal teas are a very low dose, but they'll allow you to figure out what suits you. And you can divide, as I was hinting at earlier, old medicines were often divided into those that were more warming, that we were now called stimulating circulation, and more cooling, which we were now translating to stimulating digestion. And depending on which of those you prefer would really give me a clue.

45:51So if you were looking at warming remedies, it could be gingety, it could be phenylty. you know, that's a warming remedy or it could be cinnamon or any of the spices. Cardamon is one of my favorites, by the way. This is I use cardamom, this is the cardamom pods inside a little black seeds. Absids are a lovely taste. Do you know them? Do you know the cardamom? Have you tried it? Not really now. Have a bite of that. I'll just bite the seeds. Yeah, just bite into it. You don't just get a hint of the taste. In many parts of the Middle East, Cardamon is one of the main flavors, things like coffee, et cetera.

46:30Might remind you of, um, or, you could see Indian food. That's right. Used a lot in India. And in China, it's a convalescent tonic. So they use it when people building up 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 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?

47:14And now one of the most cooling remedies that people know about is this, which is mint. That's spearmen to the best one is peppermint. It's got a lovely smell, isn't it? Yeah. That has always been thought of as cooling. And as a simple test, would you prefer stinger or peppermint to you? And really you begin to narrow things down a bit. The main cooling Remedies throughout history from very beginning and in every part of the world you'll find them excelling exactly the same thing. The main cooling remedies so -called are the bitters and they taste rarely bitter. When you say cooling you mean I feel hot so I want something to cool me down and there's certain conditions where I will feel I'll feel hot.

48:10Fever. They were often used to fever, manage fever. And what happened? You remember when we were young we were told, if you've had a big meal, don't go swimming. You weren't told that. I can't swim. So there you go. But 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've got a big meal, it's not a good idea to go swim because the blood's moving into the digestion and you won't get many as much as you want when you need it in the limbs. And that's been, it's true. When you're 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 break down this food, turn it into something useful.

48:57It is an investment. You put a lot in, you get much more out. But what it means is that digestion is all about it. I'm just being a bit loose here with a language, but it's not about me. It's like bringing blood into the core. When you've got a fever, the blood's all charging around and your body temperature's going up, which is great because fever actually is a defense measure. You know, when our body temperature rises by a couple of degrees, our white blood cells, the ones that are doing the legwork two or three times is active. So fever is what the body uses when it needs to bring out the big guy, is bring out the fight.

49:40There's a slight design problem, it's almost as though, you know, the creators put a, you know, piffs will fault in the system because a lot of fever comes from the gut, you know, you get gut infections, you know, that's one of the main places. And at that moment all the blood's going out here and you want more of it going in more digestion if you're 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 you taste bitter. Are there any plants that aren't bitter? Yeah, bitter plants are very common and we're highly valued in the old world.

50:22In our times, probably the most bitter plant that people used in European terms was something called wormwood. Now you may not be familiar with that word, but the French for wormwood is their moose. And you think of the use of a drink before a meal. The idea was they used to call it an aperitif, something that stimulated your appetite. So there were do's, bitters to improve your appetite. And a low level of wormwood would be one of them, dandelion and birdock, up to other bitters, which we now have as a soft drink in America. And we know that bitters do switch on the appetite. So we sometimes use them when appetite is poor.

51:11And there's all sorts of reasons why you got a low appetite, but bitters can rarely help. Particularly if you're recovering from an illness, they can help with getting the 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 are hardwired and they produce hormones down here in the stomach that switch on all sorts of things, an effective 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 desert area in the Middle East.

51:50You know, you're eating a sheep or something that hasn't seen a 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 Café à Herabica, we call it coffee. You grind the coffee 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 so without sugar, that's a bitter. And that was used as a digestive, in other words, after eating, it would help cope with some pretty rough food. So, bitters were always seen to be good for your digestion and appetite.

52:37And in fever, that actually meant lowering your body temperature. And that's, we can see that happening. It means that some of the anger out here just gets sublimated into digestion. So that was where the bitters got their cooling reputation. We can now laugh at this is all medieval nonsense, but the point that I keep coming back to when I'm 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 if I give a bit of to somebody and it's always really bitter, they will know within an hour or so what effect is heavy.

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54:38Not straight alternative, but in improving your natural resistance, particularly devices and such like. Then there is evidence for both vitamin D and vitamin C, but also think as backups and subform, supplement form that do seem to add to your resilience in the face of infections. I'm quite concerned because, you know, I've got dark skin and in the weather that we live in here in the UK, when I am in the UK, I worry that I won't 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 everybody, but there are certain situations.

55:26I think vitamin D is a good one and it's not just people who are darkened, that have a vitamin D deficiency is pretty widespread in darker countries, if we can call our weather, and that we know where there's not enough sun. Vitamin D deficiency is quite widespread, and increasingly doctors do suggest you have a 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. No, I don't. I don't have them spotted a need. But that doesn't mean that I don't recommend supplements to people.

56:06Well, there is a need. And garlic, we've got garlic. Oh, that's a antibiotic role. Well, this is, yeah, garlic, what used to be called Russian penicillin, and when par -tapenicillin was invented, because some parts of the world they use Gaelic instead of Penicillin, which was hard to come by originally, and it was used in place like the First World War to avoid some of the French foot and other problems that soldiers would get in those lousy conditions. Gaelic, when talking raw now, is a very powerful prebiotic, in other words, it helps the gut flora, the good guys down here in microbiome. And this evidence to show a lot of these other ones do as well, but garlic is particularly strong.

56:57And when I'm dealing with a disrupted gut flora and my microbiome, I will sometimes refer to raw garlic as a treatment. But you need to do it little care, because you know, you don't want to lose too many friends. And what's from with God? It's the Romeo you give out afterwards. Your friends will be very polite, but they'll rather wish you hadn't. And some people find that it does upset when they swallow. But I have a little trick which I call the garlic intensive, which is when everything is down, the gut is in the state. it maybe got a lung infection or whatever, and there's a lot of need for, if you like, an antibiotic type of treatment.

57:49Raw garlic, what you do is, and for all sorts of reasons, the Friday evening is the best time to do this because you've got the weekend ahead of you. You take one of those clothes, it will, first of all, on that day, you haven't eaten so much, so you don't have so much in the way. Then you take one of 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 it with a little bit of water. And wait for half an hour just to make sure that that's okay. The stomach's okay to go ahead. If it is, take another clove, chop it up, swallow it, another half -alinated, take another clove.

58:34And if you start at six o 'clock by ten o 'clock in the evening, you've got eight cloves inside you. Eight. And what's that going to do? Well, at this point, 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. Incidentally, it's also coming out of your lungs. and there was an old trick where you used to be able to, if you had enough garlic, breathe on a pet tradition in a laboratory with various pathogens and you could kill them just for your breath.

59:10You know, all of garlic is a powerful antiseptic. But what is 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 looks and so the bad guys down there don't lie garlic. So just doing that over a weekend can make a big difference to your good, the good guys on the microbiome. And if you've got a low level gut or lung infection, that can be really helpful. But that's, you know, some of you can do it 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.

59:54So prebiotic effects, it has an anti -microbial properties.

1:00:01Is it good for pain called it Russian penicillin? Is it? Well, it depends where the pain's coming from. But if your pain is a cough or a chest infection, yes, particularly good for chest infection, some people do use it for arthritic problems. It will depend on what's causing the arthritis. You know, it's very hard for me to say one of these things will do it for everybody. It won't. It will do in certain situations. And what we learn when we're dealing with plants is that you're the boss. You find out for yourselves. All people like me do say, well, give this a try. This is worth trying. This is valuable.

1:00:42Why don't you give it a go? How do you think about chronic pain? There's so many people living with a 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 % 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 the first place to go in your mind if you're dealing with chronic pain.

1:01:17It depends again where it is, but let's take joints and back. We've got a joint that's causing, because it's inflamed. So when you have an inflammation, you add itist to the name of the plaza. This is arthritis, because it's inflammation of the joints. You have cystitis, which is the bladder. You have bronchitis, it's the lungs, gastritis, is 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 being dumped on the joint. The joints have got very poor circulation by design because you know there's surfaces being pressed against each other And so the tissue in the joint is cartilage, gristle, and if you're eating it, which is designed to survive with very poor circulation, because when you've got two things pressing in, there's not much room for blood in there.

1:02:21So if there is metabolic waste, let's call it junk in the system, it's more likely to come out in these places where there's poor circulation. Sometimes things are a bit like a u -band under a basin, you know, if there's any stuff in the sink, it's going to come to deposit there. So I think a joint is a bit like a U -bend. So the first thing that people did with a joint pain, an 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 hurts like Billy Ho, but what it's doing is bringing more blood in by brute force to do what I've just said.

1:03:05But if you were to put on a mustard plaster or a KN plaster, a KN paper plaster, which you simply put on on the outside. And you can buy these in pharmacies, this one is called capsicum. As the caps say, it's in button. It's a standard prescription dressing for a pain. What it does is it brings the blood in directly 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. That's an example of using plants in a creative way which people always did. But you think they used to do that back in the day?

1:03:51Oh, yes. Yeah. I mean, if you go to North America, the native populations would regularly use K and as their self for bad joints. In Europe, it was mostly mustard. And then we're talking the yellow mustard, the one that's strong, uses 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, you know, use a mustard bath, put your fingers into a dilute warm solution of mustard. And it's amazing how quickly they ease up or you could put a plaster on a hip or whatever. People always did this. Have you seen this work in the practice?

1:04:35Oh yes. And I often recommend it to patients and they keep reporting back. It really makes a difference. 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, there was a long story, but there was a very good West African combo called OCB Sir, which I saw back in the day when I had really bad back. And 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 and not. So that wasn't any her, that wasn't any plant.

1:05:19Dancing. Dancing. I mean letting the music get into you. Was 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, that loosens up a lot of knots. You know, I don't just do plants. You know, I talk about breathing, I talk about exercises that you can do for yourself. and sometimes when you've got a joint pain it's all about, it's locked and you can find ways of loosening that joint. I be proofing. Yes. People reach for this all the time. I mean, I was looking at some of the search trend data by be proofing and it is absolutely exploding.

1:06:06Yes. That's the search graph, I'd be proofing. Yeah. And it is, but it's one of the most widely used drugs in this country. It's obviously because it works. And it's based on a plant substance called Salisilic acid, which gave us aspirin. And we still use the basic molecule to create what we call non -steroidal anti -inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs and ibuprofen, it's one of the most widely used of those. And basically they cut the inflammatory process, just cut it and the inflammation diminishes. It's good, right? Well, if it gets rid of the pain it is, but there's always a follow -up questioned why was that inflammation necessary?

1:07:02Because 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 a knee -liber -rofen, 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 we go upstream and reduce some of the metabolic strain? People eat some kinds of wrong food and sometimes it increases arthritis. You can improve your arthritis by switching to more plants very often. But there are other things that we can give that seem to help reduce some of those pressures.

1:07:46But the pain might be somewhere else. It might be linked to a full -blown disease, in that case, using anti -inflammatories is the only thing you can do. But if there is a way in which we can help reduce the need for that inflammation in the first place, I would must prefer to do that, then just suppress a natural defence. 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. We are wrong. It's the consequence of a problem and its information itself is a healthy response. It's when we bring out, you know, sometimes to use military language here and there's a bunch of white blood cells that I like and timber reams, you know, these are guys who, when they're working well, they just go in and do the job.

1:08:39They 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 a bit like that. They're just, we call neutrophils, there's various others of that group and they just go in and whack them. Information 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? 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.

1:09:21But as I said, there's always a question, you know, why are we, what's the consequence of stopping this internal cleansing process? is so important. So inflammation is not the enemy. Information is the defence measure that can sometimes overstay as welcome. I had an injury in my ankle a couple of months back because I pulled some of the ligaments down there and my ankle swelled up and I was getting conflicting information from people about the inflammation because I had this big football game coming up, this charity match called Socrates 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, but actually I didn't want to combat the inflammation because it was doing its job.

1:10:11And so it's quite difficult to navigate whether one should let inflammation stay or if I should be taking anti -inflammatories or I'd be proven. Well, if you'd got a match to sometimes needs something just to get you match fit or match acceptable. But if it's a short term, we call it acute inflammation, then overwhelmingly the devices 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 pust and so on. And after a while, it sorts itself out. That's this miracle I called Talk About Earlier, the body it heals itself all the time.

1:10:50That's inflammation doing his job properly, cleaning out the Marines go in, clear all this stuff out, back to their barracks, back to normal. That's great. It's only if, as I said, the junk keeps piling in. The job doesn't get finished. 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. So you try and think about what's causing an upstream. Exactly. 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 dealt with by the gut.

1:11:35So 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 disruption there, it's, that's the first place to begin, because it's usually the best place to begin. And if we add what we've talked about, the microbiome has another big factor, then there's plenty to work be done with down there. So if there's a chronic inflammation, I will spend a lot of time looking at what might be going on down there.

1:12:11And what's the typical suggestion if it is a gut related problem? Well, the first thing you should do is to get the best food you can down there, which is mostly plant -based. I mean, the reception to that. But if we're looking at restoring your good health down here, the gut does seem to like plants at this point. So we talk about having a wide range of plants, the current advice from one or two people is that you would aim to have 30 different types of plant per week just to get the diversity because we don't know which one you need. So I don't give as much difference as you can.

1:12:57And people think you can't afford to eat healthily. All I would suggest is that you go and travel to someone like India or anywhere in Asia, where they eat pretty much a lot of plants, mostly plants, for pennies. You can make a healthy meal by, if you know how to cook, by just mixing some of these simple the dals and the root vegetables and the other vegetables 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? It means as many colours as you can fit in, literally, because each colour is produced by a constituent of plants.

1:13:49many of them we call polyphenols, which we know have a range of effects on all sorts of person. 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 and which is interesting, the microbiome is critical for 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. When they get into the blood, they start doing also some wonderful things to the lining of the blood vessels, for example, up into the brain, where we got a what we call blood brain barrier, which is actually a very exciting interface.

1:14:40The polyphenols, the colors all have well -established mechanisms that improve the health all around the body. So simple, if you've got a child who used to say eat your greens, we now say eat your rainbow, the more different colours that better. I wonder if that's why they put so many artificial dyes in junk food? Well, I wish they wouldn't. To try and trick our brains into thinking it's, I don't know. There's nothing quite like the original. In terms of fruit, what are your favourite fruits to would recommend people to eat in the way. Probably if you wanted to have a top list, the darker, the color, the better.

1:15:21So we talk about purples and I'm pleased to see that your team has found a purple carrot there. We remind ourselves that most vegetables were purple. Once upon a time, if you think of maize in the sweet corn and the maize that you go in Americans that mostly was originally purple. And we bred the purple out because it didn't look so appetizing. And we probably purpled deficient. I think we could do with more purple than our lives because the purple and blue color is a cynical, anphysine, these are tisapolifinal and they're particularly powerful, particularly with a blood supply. And we talk about things like eyesight and brain health and circulatory health, blood pressure control and all those sort of things can be improved just by having more purple than our lives.

1:16:17So we've got beetroot, that'll do. We've got the berries, red grapes are probably more, we've got the red grapes here, that's got more of these than the yellow that grapes do. So I would start with the reds and purples. You said you think we're purple deficient? Yeah, I mean just think of something interesting to say but it's probably something in that.

1:16:44And in terms of vegetables, what are your favourite go -to vegetables that you'd recommend? Sawa the roots, the root vegetables, the carrots, the beetroots, the parsnips, the various other root vegetables out there, not all of which of people's favourites, but they have fiber sort of starch in them, which is particularly prebiotic. And some of the most powerful prebiotics are the root festival. So those are definitely worth having. The greens obviously and broccoli and interestingly I found a purple one, which is enough to get. So you know you can get the purple or the green, you know obviously there's a value in the purple there, but any broccoli, any of the cabbage family, is full of all sorts of other ingredients that have their own benefits in all sorts of ways.

1:17:38Metabolism, gut, hormonal, blood supply. So greens, roots, and the big one, and most people's lives are grains, wheat, for example, but cereals, lentils, dhal, peas and beans, all of these have their own benefits, particularly for the microbiome. Again, I don't know exactly 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? It's a mix of egg and meat. meat. Yeah, and I just have a broad range of most humans of eaten, which is a mixture of things. I do, obviously, many of my patients are vegans and you can live quite well with them.

1:18:31You have to add a few extra things to cover your back on a few areas, but you can live perfectly well when you're grown up, an adult on a plant only diet. But 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 less healthy than someone in Thailand to 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 were discussing before we I started recording that I'm currently on a ketosis diet, the keto diet.

1:19:15Cetodot, yes. Which basically means that I'm extremely low carb in my diet. Yes. Basically consuming no sugar. What do you think of the keto diet? What's been your experience with it? They can be. I think you're one of those that would get a lot of benefit from it. Because 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 to our diets. They tend to slow down various parts of your metabolism. 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.

1:19:57So a lot of people on key toe diets find that, you know, you're sharper. but that's probably what you do. But there are potential downsides. Interestingly, you know, in the first thought was, well, that can't be very good for your microbiome because they rely on vegetable material to a large part. But when we've looked at the microbiome of keto after keto diets, it's not as, it's actually there's some good guys that re -emerge 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 your diet, then there's slightly more strain on things like liver and kidney function.

1:20:39So someone who's taking keto for a long term is always a good idea to check that they're okay. And some of the more long term concerns are being around kidney. Because if there's a lot more of the animal -based material in food, then that 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 one size fits all. We are omnivores, we're designed to eat all with anything. My girlfriend, she's doing keytons as well. And she noticed that her menstrual cycle became more regular. Yes. Which she was like shocked by it.

1:21:19And she's really done a lot of AB testing over the last couple of years. And whenever she's in a keytogenic diet, a very low -carb, low sugar diet for six weeks. She was shocked that she could predict the day when her period would come. And outside of that sometimes it's really varying. 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 insulin is the hormone that packs sugar away into the tissues and into the liver. And thank God because if we didn't have insulin we would have diabetes.

1:22:09Insulin resistance is growing and that leads to diabetes increasingly. So diabetes is in many most parts of the world now is becoming another big health issue. And it's mainly because we have too many carbs, too many sugar in the diet because whenever we eat sugar, particularly sugar, 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 get more insulin sensitive. In other words, insulin works better, So you can reverse early stages of 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, in which the ovaries basically produce more hormone -producing cysts, polycystic ovary syndrome.

1:23:10room. And that is increasingly linked with insulin resistance. So it affects people who are more likely to be in the pre -diabetic phase, putting on weight and that sort of thing. The insulin resistance itself switches the hormone balance and the mental cycle is a wonderful choreography. I mean, when you think about it, you know, all around the world is it's a pretty predictable cycle and it runs itself. But if there's something like 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 or reduces that disruptor.

1:23:57Yeah, I was just reading some stats on that. So that 80 % of women with PCOS have some degree 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 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 and fatality. Yes. I think the modern woman, the modern man, for that matter, has a whole string of burden us to carry because we have too much sugar. I mean, when you think about it, sugar only emerges a common ingredient, you know, 140 years ago, 150 years ago.

1:24:42Up till that time, only 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 amount sugar that we now feed it. And it does put a strain on the system. And insulin is one of the guys caught in the mix. So if you were trying to have kids, which we are now, I guess you want to remove the... If that's the factor I would be looking at reducing your sugar intake at the very least, yeah. I mean, we spent, I spent a lot of time with women who are having difficulty conceiving.

1:25:25And, you know, I think I have about 13 her 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 productive. And what do you say to those women? What do you prescribe, I guess? I do, I mean, that's my business. I will be describing, so you see there's some bottles there. These are the sort of things that we use in the practice. So I've given, I've got a couple here that just, you know, the sense, the smell sense, so this is fennel, which we all think we know.

1:26:13But these are very strong extractions that only practitioners use. So these are practitioner -owned supplies. And when you smell it, you realize that they are strong. Ooh. So a teaspoon of that is a really powerful. Now, if you really want to realize the power of herbs, this is a remedy called echinacea. And a lot of people know about echinacea, and it's a major supplement. This is a root extraction from a variety of species of echinacea called angustifolia. I'm just going to put a little bit in there. I'm going to test it myself before I give it to you. I'm not poisoning you. So you just take a little.

1:27:10Do I put on my skin or will put it on? Or did you want me to shop that to slick it? Well, wow.

1:27:23So these are the sort of things this is just a particularly striking example of the sort of things that we use in the practice. And so some of 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 a hundred or so different plants that I have on the shelves. And they are often, as I said earlier, remedies developed by women. And incidentally, North America is a prime site for some really powerful women's remedies. and interesting 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.

1:28:13Some of them were particularly good at re -timing the menstrual cycle and the one or two that were particularly warned that women should not take unless they wish to be pregnant. So effective where they... What's that thing? I'm going to be still right on the edge of my tongue. It's more, so basically, for anyone that can't see what we're doing because you're listening on audio, he put a little drop of this solution. I can ace you on my finger. And I licked it off my finger. And at first, those are this sort of taste journey, which was interesting. It's kind of like Maggie seasoning, some kind of food seasoning.

1:28:49I'm now 60 seconds later. And I can still, it's like more intense. It's a bit like a fireworks thing. Yeah, it's like fireworks going off on my mouth. And all it was was a little lick of it. Now you see what we're using that for is for infections or problems of the mouth and the throat particularly. What are you doing? Well, you know, you have to use the 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 throat. You know, we got tonsils, we got adenoids, we got the glands that run down our neck here that sometimes gets swelled up, you know, if we've got an infection in this area, you have to take something, you take the tail.

1:29:32Sometimes gets in the way of talking as well. And I was hesitating before giving it to, didn't want to stop you and your stairs. But what's that tingling cut of, as I say, to rather confusing story short, those are constituents that almost seem to talk directly to those wide blood cells and make them more active. And so it can asia in that form particularly works primarily on the front line, shall we call it, of our immune system. These batteries that sit up there and so often that's where you want to start the job 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.

1:30:20And as you just discovered it doesn't take long. No, no. So who should be thinking about a canasia? Certainly, if you've got an upper respiratory problem, and you do need to get that tingle if you want to get that particular effect. I mean, you can have a canasia in other forms, pills and tablets and so on. And there are some which don't have that tingle effect. They've got other elements to it. 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 further down and the gut as well, because all, you know, I got, begins up here as well.

1:30:57But it could be a sinus problem, it could be any middle -air problem, it could be a throat problem, it could be a gum problem, you know, we've got all sorts of gum problems, then all sorts of problems we have with mouth. We have a microbiome up here as well. This can, with one or two other things, some of the plants we use in this form contain resins. An example is frankincense. We got some tablets there. These ones? Yeah. Otherwise known as Boswilia. And this just comes in a form of tablets. They just look at here any other tablets except if they're sort of greeny yellow colour, because that's just ground up resin.

1:31:43What's the reason? We know about that because it's the sort of thing you get 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, mer and frankincense. This is the frankincense. I use MIRN in a liquid form and you almost like you're lining the mouth with this resin. When you put some MIR on the mouth, you definitely feel the mucosa firing up. And it was most widely used medicine. And the reason why it was so valued in those days by the three wise men is because Mer was and their first of all had to bring it out of Africa, you know, it was where it comes from.

1:32:42Remember the Queen of Shiba, who married Solomon, you know, in the old Bible story, Queen of Shiba had the trade routes of East Africa sort. it's a Solomon married wisely by marrying the Queen of Sheba because she had the monopoly on Mer, particularly hand on Trank and Sence. And those in Echinacea maybe would do the liquorice to help it work well. They're amazing at reducing infections in this area and the mouth the roads and the sinuses and the areas around. It completely blows my mind to that. Most people will lock their front door before they leave the house, but they'll set in a coffee shop, connect to the public wifi and log into their bank without a second thought.

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1:35:18I will speak to you then

1:35:24Do 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 seven day prolonged fasts are effective of medicines. My usual answer when I'm faced with a question and someone needed to ask for me is to think back a bit what did humans evolve to do? And when we were hunter -gatherers, which was three or four hundred thousand years, we were hunter -gatherers. And what we're doing now is a tiny, but we evolved to eat intermittently. When you're a hunter -gatherer, there are times when you're not eating at all, especially off -season, and you get very hungry and then you eat a lot and you have a big feast.

1:36:06So 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 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 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 the start of the conversation you reference that you deal with a lot of cancer patients.

1:36:48I think you said one third. About a third? My quarter, maybe a quarter to a third. Yeah. 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 done because when I started out all those decades ago most people died with cancer or increasing getting people living with cancer for extended periods of time and the cancer is not I mean there are things we can do to help and there is evidence to show that we can help reduce the risk at least. And if not, sometimes the virulence of cancer. But mostly what we're doing is helping people to function better while they've been through chemo or various other treatments while they've still recovering from the cancer and its effects.

1:37:40And it could be digestion, it could be things like sleep, it could be, you know, all sorts of other things that we can do to help. So there's the preventative element, which is doing things within your sort of lifestyle star choices, your diet to reduce the 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, generally. When you think about cancer prevention, do you 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.

1:38:18And there are other foods that have got a higher risk of cancer. We talk about, you know, process meats, for example, that's increasingly been seen as a cancer risk. 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. And that strains the body in a way it wasn't meant. and there is evidence to show that by correcting poor diet you can prevent cancer increasingly that's accepted. I'm pretty sure that the cardiovascular diseases are the single biggest killer still. Cardiovascular and the West we're talking about so developed countries.

1:38:59Catching up I'm afraid in other parts of the world where they adopt more Western lifestyles. But that's a combination of food and poor level of exercise that we're putting our finger on there. There's also cardiovascular diseases, there's 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 that's causing the harm and that's basically accepted by cardiologist and such. So 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?

1:39:45Mostly it's the food when we're talking about long -term cardiovascular health. We have plants that we use to manage cardiovascular problems. I mean, the classic that a lot of people know about is the Hawthorne or the Mayflower. But the Hawthorn, particularly the flower and the leaf, used to be a regular home remedy that people used to use and drink as a tea for all sorts of reasons, you know, managing fevers and all sorts of things like that. But we can now see regular Hawthorn consumption, Hawthorn leaf consumption as a preventative for some of the problems of cardiovascular. There's just as an example.

1:40:26I would use spices as my main go to help to fend off cardiovascular problems because they all have vascular benefits. Spices are in the ginger, the cinnamon we talked about, but here's turmeric. This is something we don't usually see. But if you can see there's, in fact, if you cut that with your knife there. I just couldn't open it. Yeah, you'll see it's bright, yeah, it's bright orange. That's the curcumin that people use as a supplement. I've got curcumin at home. I was advised to use that when I pulled the ligament to my ankle. Yes. It's an anti -inflammatory, isn't it? You can see a little bit wired, aren't like using anti -inflammatory because I like inflammation as a friend.

1:41:14And so what I prefer to talk about is the modulator support or manage inflammation. But turmeric is an extraordinary remedy. And here's an interesting story. We talk about we need curcumin from turmeric. And you'll get a supplement saying, my turmeric, my turmeric has got more curcumin than yours and it's more available. The interesting point is that curcumin is not absorbed by into the body at all. about one or two percent maybe the rest stays stubbornly in the gut. And there's a very good reason for that because in any high dose, Kerkman is toxic. So there's a good reason for it staying in the gut.

1:41:57But there's a lot of work on making more bi -available, getting the levels up in the blood. And if you add pepper, you might get from one or two percent to two to three percent, you know, but it's still small beer compared with the amounts of turmeric that we take, the amounts of curcumin that we take in an ordinary curry. So what's going on and that what is going on is that curcumin and in turmeric is one of the best 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 curcumin down into more more available materials, which are active, it belongs in the gut and is inflammatory modulating effects come mostly from the products of the microbiome working on the kerchumand and moving through the body that way.

1:42:53So it's a wonderful lesson in 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 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. Not as well as you might. Yes, that is true. We talk about... We've got probiotics, which is the yogurts and the kymchis and the kaffirs and so on, which are actually living organisms.

1:43:43They have to get through the stomach, by 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've got a new kid on the block called postbiotics, 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. And we're learning that more and more of what we eat, particularly from the plant side, is converted by the microbiome into medicines.

1:44:25And all those polyphenols in the colorings and so on are in that group. So a lot of the benefits of polyphenols are postbiotic benefits. It was a study done in 2007 that showed, kind of, it's a human. That shows, curcumin up -regulates anti -oxidant defenses and down -regulates oxidative stress. There was a study done in 2016, which is a metronalysis of random control trials found curcumin comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief. That answers your early question, doesn't it? And there's a lot of, lots of studies that show that it's effective for people to have things like arthritis and joint pains.

1:45:11Yeah, that was leaving the best to last. Yeah, there's a lot of work on kerchumin and turmeric. As I said, a lot of people get confused because they think the edge 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 taking place around the impact it can have with cancers and there's promising early studies showing the impact of curcumin that comes from tumour it can have on brain health. Yes, well that's definitely a big story, but just on that when you say pretty clinical that usually means that it does mean laboratory.

1:45:51So there's eight 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 the preclinical study will do is point to a possible effect and time again pharmaceutical surgical 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 a personal lemma. I'm mostly interested in human studies because that's the only thing that makes any sense. But you mentioned brain health because here's one of the big gaps we have down here because we've got a lot a brain health issues, right now.

1:46:36Dementia is still going in the wrong direction. 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 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 probably we heard of, which is seen to be the place where the barrier stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it.

1:47:20We now know this blood brain barrier is a very dynamic, interesting interface between the brains tissue and the rest of us is now called the neurovascular 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 neurovascular unit, the blood brain barrier, are plants and we have green tea and you know we can, if you really want to help our brain health, regular drinking or green tea, you know, it has been shown to be really useful, not that rather than a supplement, by the way, it's the drink that you have. I'll put it in here, right? So we can make it.

1:48:12So, as you make it back, can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea? Because Because it contains a number of, again, polyphenols. And polyphenols are those? These colours. These colours, yeah. In this case, it's green, obviously. And Memo Green Tea is just the smoked, unprocessed part of the tea leaf, it's a, it's a plant called Camelia, so it's an ences.

1:48:41So this is a nice Japanese tea pot, it's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in. and these are the mugs, but we've filled these up already with gender and cinnamon. So let's leave it for a moment, but while it's sitting there for a while, there are a number of these polyphenols in green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier we talked about, the neurovascular unit between the brain and the rest of us. And there's all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble. What sort of trouble? The dementia type problems, the cult� of decline, the zygidolda.

1:49:24Do 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 all you need to do to appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff. Oh, smells so good. Really nice. That's not just nice because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volusal oils, the things to give the smell. And when you're inhaling, they're literally going into your brain because part of the brain actually reaches the outside world.

1:50:06It's called the olfactory 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 there into the limbic system. Remember, there's a line in the Shakespeare play called Hamlet, a philia. The young lady says, Roesme, that's for remembrance. Because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions. and when I was in working on our campus in Maryland, we actually did a clinical trial with rosemary in people 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 violence in those people.

1:50:51And there's been other studies since that reinforced 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 Ginkgo that's a lot of people know about which they're used as a prescription medicine in Europe for cardiovascular problems. And that's been shown to be likely useful. I'm using the same sort of mechanisms as we've seen here. And with the green tea, check it here. Yeah, that looks all right.

1:51:26It's more yellow than green, like tep. And this is flavoured with a little bit of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favourite taste. Green tea is rich in polyphenols, which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention.

1:51:51It's got a nice minty flavour. Yeah. With that, couldn't you? Yeah. I go and find out that again, she's all over this stuff. She's always bloody right. Well, you know that, you've 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, three years in denial. I'm like, what the fuck is she like doing every day? They get me started on clickow if you start talking to me about clickow. No, no, no, no, no. She's been telling me that I'm going to nail this because there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this.

1:52:24Coco. Yeah. Chocolate. Start chocolate is a medicine end of one of the best medicines around his 50 grams or 100 grams of 75 percent or more dark chocolate. Do you know what? I've just realized my girlfriend, she's going to live till or she's 150, because she eats 90 % or something, 80 % dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day. She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day. She eats the full rainbow. She should be stepping in for you. I know, I know exactly. No, Coco, seriously, brain health as well, cardiovascular health. I mean, they do studies where they've put cocoa into the volunteers, it means students usually.

1:53:19You know, so young kids and they were able to show changes in the blood flow within minutes, so you mean then an hour of eating cocoa. They could be. They're in official changes in your blood flow. They could be called it the heart medicine. Yeah. It's heart circulation, brain. I mean, so she's, my girlfriend's very spiritual. She runs a business called Bali Breathwork. 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 when they've had a hot cup of cacao.

1:54:00It's all, and she says it like almost brings out their heart. And I guess that's because of the circulation reasons. But it's also, of course, we know it contains a few other beneficial, stimulating things, sort of similar to the effects of a coffee, which, in certainly, as I already said, is a medicine as well. But cocoa and chocolate does have a lifting 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. We would like it to be as dark as possible. Okay, sorry. The less sugar, the less fat. So we talk about 75 % cocoa solids, you know, so it's dark chocolate.

1:54:42And it tastes a bit more medicinal, doesn't it? It's not a sweet. But I'm saying to many of 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 draw of my fridge has all of her dark chocolate in. And it's, she likes it 90%. If she can get a 90 % she'll take it. Yeah, 90 % is clouded in her. Yeah. Yeah. 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 realize how much sugar goes into chocolate, but specifically white chocolate.

1:55:24Oh my God. They said, they gave me this big beaker, which was this big, like a foot high and a foot wide. And they were like, right, pour the sugar in. So I poured some in. They're like laughing at me. They're 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're like, I came, I'll put a little bit of this in a little bit of this little bit of oil or whatever. And I couldn't believe that it's literally, like the white chocolate is literally all sugar. Then milk chocolate was like 50 % sugar, and then when we made the dark chocolate, it was a tiny amount, like a tiny tiny amount.

1:56:03And from that day onwards, white chocolate has left my life. There's one spot of time, and a few years back when the Europeans union, I think, before we joined it, said that we shouldn't call dairy milk chocolate at all. It's chocolate flavoured candies, what they described it as. Literally. Yeah. So we've got some green tea here. And you're talking to me about the association between green tea and Alzheimer's, which is really exciting. Yes. There's quite a lot of work being done now on these. And they're obviously looking for medications as well, but so far most of the day to coming in and relates to plant -based materials.

1:56:44So it suggests that there's other reasons why having plants and, again, spices come back into the mix, seeing it to be helpful for brain health. Now we're going to look at the green tea. It was a study done in 2008, which supports how it improved cognitive function memory tension accuracy and long -term consumption associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, according to the journal of nutritional biochemistry in 2011. and I still have somebody else to say what you said. Yeah, but it's exactly. I didn't realize that I had no idea. I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me.

1:57:31Go and say sorry. I have literally literally, I've got to learn. Wow, heart, health, brain function, fat burning and metabolism, cancer prevention, early evidence, blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, Go to an oral health. What about matcha? I'm a big investor in the biggest matcha company in Europe. It's probably more beneficial than the basic green tea, because it's more, shall we say, pure. It's finer quality. So the chances are that matcha will do more than we've just said the green tea will do. But there's evidence, lacklul, and a lot of these things, we need more evidence. but it would point to match a being particularly helpful.

1:58:16We haven't talked much about cholesterol. No, you haven't brought it up. Cholesterol is a type of fat made in your liver, which is kind of in your blood and can be found. For anyone that doesn't know cholesterol, what it is and why is it, if it's a good or bad thing, what do I need to know about cholesterol? Is there anything in front of us here that can help keep my cholesterol in a healthy state? I think Dr. did actually tell me at one point that I had high cholesterol a couple of years ago because of my diet at the time. The keto course will tend to... Well, it's interesting again. Keto, you think would push up your cholesterol levels, but actually there's a mixture of effects.

1:58:55So it's not a done deal that it will raise your cholesterol. This cholesterol is part of a range of fats that the body has. Most of the fats that are in the body come from the food, and they come in as heavy fats, there we say. And what the digestion does is a strip down the heaviness and it becomes more, what we call, high density,

1:59:22liposite, HDLs. And both tongue is twisting around it. And cholesterol is sort of in the middle of that as one of the elements within that spectrum of fats. What cholesterol is actually a secretive by the liver for very good reasons is health. It all sorts of things. It's the basis of some of our hormones. It's also the reasons why we need cholesterol. I sometimes have referred to in the past as the tiger and 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 day, working in the land or whatever, you need a certain amount of cholesterol to motor.

2:00:02We're sitting in chairs and McLeastral becomes increasing a problem. We have a high fat diet that tends to put in more of it and the point is that many of us are cholesterol levels increasingly rise and that is a risk factor as we know for cardiovascular disease. We said we still want the biggest killer. So cholesterol is up there as a risk factor. And so the usual thing that adopts will do is to hand do something a statin basically that will reduce your cholesterol levels. They also know that there's more pushback on that prescription than almost anything else, because the word is out, the statins can do the stat, or the other, in fear with their muscle strength and all the rest of it, give you little aches and pains.

2:00:48that most people have statins down to problem. But the impact of statins is still modest in terms of the overall scheme of things. The numbers of people's lives, it says, it's probably fairly minimal. So probably the better conversation is 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, 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.

2:01:32And then where we come in with the work I do is to look at high cholesterol as potentially a sign of liver distress and 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 on. So it's a there's not a straight answer to your question. You know the statin is sounds like a simple pill that fixes it. The reality is is that we need to look at a much wider range of things. Your fan of artichokes for cholesterol? Yes. You must have read by mind. The artichoke leaf is the one we're talking about, which is used in France a lot for basically fat liver related problems a lot.

2:02:22I use it a lot in the practice. This is a juice, actually, and just as a press juice. Yes, it's one of them. Dandelion root is another old familiar which seems to be helpful here. mostly biases that said, flushing stuff through the bile. And there is a range of other things that we use. One of the things that 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 buy all these fresh fruit and veg.

2:02:55Is that the case? Is that a barrier to entry to the stuff we've talked about today at all? My usual answer is eat Asian because it's said if you can make a meal with vegetables and spices and things 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. We will buy Indian meals sometimes from places that put a mole fat in then they might. So some of the meals we buy that are Asian, but too fatty. But if you make it yourself at home, which means learning how to cook, but you can eat very cheaply.

2:03:41What is the most important thing that we didn't talk about, but we should have talked about? Well, I suppose I didn't mention much about the ameprosol because that I've never had this before. A meprizol. Yeah, I've never had a meprizol. Yeah, they are increasingly in minority. A meprizol 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 GERD and what we call GERD because we spell esophagus differently. So we spell esophagus with an OE and American spell it with an E. So it's the girl or gourd depending on which country you in.

2:04:22And that means gastroesophageal reflux disease, gourd. And acid reflux is a real issue with a lot of people. And they find that when they go to a doctor, the doctor will routinely prescribe a meprizol or something like it. And gourd is actually diagnosed by as a condition which is made better by meprizol. I mean, is literally as a disease that is diagnosed by the treatment. And what a meprosol does is shuts down the acid production in the stomach, so you don't get as much damage by reflex. The problem is that the acid is doing a job in 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.

2:05:19If you have a blood transfusion or something, the wrong blood, you get a problem. You were eating for a 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've got too much acid, it's because you're refluxing it. It's going back up into the gullet, the esophagus. But a meprizol put an end to that. The problem with a mepriz -2 problems, first is that the list of problems accruing from long -term a meprizol use is beginning to grow and is serious. Cancer's, dementia's, all sorts of things are beginning to be downstream problems of social a long -term a meprizol use.

2:06:05But the other thing is that once you're on it, it's really difficult to come off it. And you get a famous rebound effect. So you come off the meprosil and wow, you get much more trouble. So the only thing to do is to tell you more meprosil. And people find it really hard to come off it. So you have to do a lot of hard work to wean people off and do it in 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 there are some plants that have got a lot of mucus in the musulage.

2:06:46The classic example from North America's Cypheriael, is a sort of powder that looks like you make polyphillic to fill a crack with, you know, it's a white powder. So when it's mixed with orchid forms, it's paced, it's mucous stuff. You want to have it as a tablet because you don't want to swallow that stuff. But when it's in the stomach, it produces this mucous layer. You don't need to go to Stip Realme. There is a product here in this country called Gaviscon, which is essentially seaweed gum with, I don't have shares in it, by the way, but it's seaweed gum with some minerals in there. And they advertise it when you see the television ads as the raft.

2:07:29So what they're doing is you're putting a layer of mucus on top of your food. So you have it, you have it at your last mouthful, you have it there. And then as the food pushes up back into the gut, you've got this nice mucus coating, a raft to stop it. And back up. That carbohydrate is what it is. It gets digested within a couple of hours, end off. no problem. It's not even if medicine is just a physical barrier. So, you could have Gamaskon, you could have Cypriot, you could have Alavera. There's a number of other mucusy type plants that people use. And that can, without any other complication at all, be one step.

2:08:11And I use it regularly with, when I'm weaning people off, I'm at Brazil, and I will use the RAFT principle to help prevent some of the harm you get when it reflux. This simple example. You're very fond of these plants. They are living organisms aren't they?

2:08:33Are you concerned about how we treat them? I'm concerned about the world that they come from because, because increasingly, we have to produce these industrialists, which sometimes mean in modern culture what usually means in monoculture forms, so they're growing in rows and rows, and they put weaklers down to get other plants out of the way. And so they become less natural. And we talked about the polyphenols, you know, Parker, the company I worked for was all organic, and we were able to show that a plant that grows organically that doesn't have pesticides, needs to fight his own battles more.

2:09:16Because if you've got a pesticide, you don't need to worry about so much, you know, the pests and the attackers. So a plant that's growing in wild or organically without chemicals has more polyphenols because the polyphenols are part of the plant's defense mechanism. So the more you can buy, or I mean that's where foraging comes in, you know, my colleague Devon is a forager and he can walk or a headro and show you, you can make a whole meal as a plaza, people just walk past because people used to do that. So that's real wild eating, which must be one of the best ways of eating. But the more close to nature, you can get your plants the better.

2:09:57We 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. We have a closing tradition on this podcast with a last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is, are world is changing fast? How do you keep up?

2:10:24I think the world is, we all know, getting pretty scary out there, isn't it? There is a truth which is you and the people around you are the, actually the only things that matter day to day, aren't they? Of closest, dearest ones that we have invested most. One of the reasons that I'm increasingly happy to spend my time working in the practice next to rather than chasing around the world is because as the world gets more frightening, the more you realise that it's the connections you make with each other, 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 reconnecting with the nature and the world around it.

2:11:32So 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 the electronic calendar comes into its own to keep track of all that. So yes, we've got a nose spread around the globe. So it's a widespread thing, but we've got people close by and obviously you're closest and nearest to 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 herbs in my life.

2:12:15So I'm so excited to learn more. And you have changed my opinion on so many things. I can't wait to go into my girlfriend, and that she's right. About everything. I'll slip her there. She can slip me the tenor. I highly recommend people go and check out your website and go to your her bar, which takes place once a month. I'm sure there's gonna 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 her? I've got your books here, which I'm gonna link below.

2:12:50there'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 a stop there, but you can step through my website to get there, because you'll find a few other things on the way. There is resources out there, and it's increasingly reliable. These are not dreamt up, you know, for a TikTok video, they're well thought through and based on a lot of human experience.

2:13:20So there is stuff out there if you're 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. Thank you Stephen. It's a journey on myself. So thank you so much for doing the work that you do and being a champion for nature and all its forms. So and I really, really hope that I really hope that more people, more podcasters host you so that you You can get the message out there. Thank you. This is always going my mind a little bit. 53 % of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor?

2:13:54If 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 guess that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

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