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

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That is the most widely prescribed drug in this country, and I believe in the U.S.

also.

But the list of problems accruing 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 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 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.

Whoa, for almost 50 years, Dr.

Simon Mills has pioneered how we think about natural medicine, earning global recognition as 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 as one of the best medicines around.

Really?

Oh yes.

The next one is garlic.

And in some parts of the world they use garlic instead of penicillin.

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 with your breath.

Wow.

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

This can really help.

But on eyesight, this is for your blood flow.

Gut health, cardiovascular health.

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.

All you need to do is press it and sniff so you can see why some of the stuff already is powerful.

Now we have some more to go through, and this is where it gets interesting.

There's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this.

Coffee.

Oh, God.

What do I need to know?

So.

Quick one before we get back to this episode.

Just give me 30 seconds of your time.

Two things I wanted to say.

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Back to the episode.

Simon Mills, you are a pioneer, by all accounts, in what is called complementary medicine, but you're also one of the most respected herbal practitioners in 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 mission you're on, and why do you think 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, 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 felt a bit stronger in themselves, they would...

be able to cope better with what life throws at them.

I 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 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 Complementary and Alternative Medicine launched in Parliament by former Prime Minister Alec Douglas Holm.

You led a major European Commission project on herbal medicine involving over 20 centres across Europe.

You were the secretary of the European Scientific Cooperative ones,

which is the polite way of saying herbs.

So it's phytoplant therapy.

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 ancient Chinese traditions.

And I think, you know, the modern Westerner thinks of pills

when they think of medicine.

Yes.

What is it that we've lost?

Is there like a lost wisdom?

Yes.

And how did that happen and what is it we've lost?

When we lived in the countryside, when we lived close to nature, that was very much around us.

And in every little community, there'd be someone, usually a woman, who would know their way around the the plants and would help you out when you had an illness and a sickness.

I'm not saying that there's a 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.

There was a lot of new illnesses, sicknesses, pestilences and so on that only came in cities.

In that 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 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 were powders anyway.

And then the pharmaceutical industry came in and branded and made proprietary materials from them.

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

Aaron Powell, a lot of cultures around the world still use plants as their

first form of medication for a variety of different sort of illnesses and diseases, right?

Aaron Powell, they do, yes.

I mean, most do.

I mean, if you were Inuit and northern

territories in Canada and Alaska, you would probably not have very many plants to choose from.

But for most other people, they're surrounded by plants.

That's their world.

I think, you know, because I'm 32 years old, so I've not really grown up 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 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 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 or an hour.

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

So

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 let me know how it's 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 already is powerful.

What is it that you know from the 50 plus years of work that you've done working with plants as a form of medicine that the average person on the street doesn't know?

How close we are to being to having our I think life is a miracle, as I said, in that early encounter.

And

we can 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.

And the plants are the, in my world,

one of the most effective ways of supporting that inner miracle that we have to nourish our health, to empower us.

I sometimes think that

medicine is extraordinary.

I mean, we now live with cancer.

We used to die with it.

Almost all the major illnesses of the past have now had treatments for.

But if you've got a chronic condition,

you're still left with yourself and you're maybe not feeling so good in yourself.

I sometimes think that a lot of medicine is a bit like fast food delivery.

You know, we have a meal brought in because it's convenient, but that also de-skills us.

You know, we've stopped learning how to cook even.

You know, I remember going to New York back in the 80s and 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 table.

I think medicine, you know, we use far too many antibiotics.

We use, you know, these PPI things called ameprazole for our acid reflux, the most widely prescribed drug in this country.

And I think think USA also, mostly unnecessary.

We use a lot of 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 lot of what we think are problems are solutions waiting for support.

Because I think most people would think that is medicine.

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 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, colours there.

All of these colours actually have properties that are actually quite valuable properties for our circulatory health, for our gut health, health, our brain health.

And 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?

Yes.

Not just food.

Food be thy medicine is what old Hippocrates did

2,000 years ago.

2,500 years ago.

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

Yes.

Almost any other, anywhere, I mean, 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 think of something that binds them all together?

They're originally white English-speaking 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 some parts of Germany, you have to sit a herbal exam to get your license.

And further east, in the old Soviet bloc, 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.

And doctors and people working with plants and acupuncture in China work together without thinking about it.

And many doctors use plants

as their medicines.

Yeah, how different, because I've never 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 grew up with.

They, like a lot of people, we would say regretfully, do seem to want to do more things like the West does.

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 trend even in Asia but they start from a much broader base of experience.

Why should anyone care?

You know, I have IB proven at home.

I have medicine that I can have in the the cupboard.

I 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 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 energy is gone.

You know, they've been told that we can't just keep taking the 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 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 where I see myself as fine-tuning or upping the performance.

I'm not...

When someone comes to me and they say I've got whatever it is, arthritis or skin disease or whatever,

I will politely take all the notes down, but that's not what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in where that came from.

What is the misbehavior?

What is the poor performance

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 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.

Kidney function,

liver function, circulation.

you know, up to the brain where we're dealing in that area.

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?

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, that I'm actively treating and a couple of 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 center of those case studies?

Have you got a medical encyclopedia anywhere?

I'm going to go right down the key ones.

No, no, I mean, it's literally.

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 it's 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 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.

About another,

at least a third, a bit more living with chronic inflammatory disease, autoimmune diseases, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis.

things that are more complicated than 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.

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 you see

little steps and you're with somebody often for a long time and you just see changes in the way that

they change over the weeks and months.

So, you know, to say I've got an instant Eureka moment, I've pulled together a few stories just knowing I was to come to them.

And, you know, just they're a motley 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

will walk out with five or six or eight different plants and the reason I put them together is because they have a

unique story.

So probably the one with the most complex one is someone, all the names are changed by the way, someone called Heather who's 65 and she had a really severe complex condition called erythema multiformia, which is a complex skin disease that's really distressing, very upsetting.

What we know about it is that it's linked possibly to other infections.

So we actually spotted mycoplasma.

Pneumonia is likely implicated.

She'd previously had a lot of lung damage.

In her youth, she had early pneumonia, and she was diagnosed with a chronic obstructive pulmonary thing, bronchiexasis, as it happened.

Then she got COVID badly, and most of her troubles started after that.

She also had vitamin B12 deficiency, pernicious anemia, we call it, which is an autoimmune problem for gut lining, stops the vitamin B12 being absorbed.

Those are 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.

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 her skin

subsided.

I just happen to think that was the reason I remember it, because

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 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 they can move on.

They don't need help anymore.

It sticks in her mind because it was a hugely demanding condition that

got better without and had been going for a long time.

It had been going three or four years by the time she saw saw me.

And it resolved very quickly with what seemed to be totally irrelevant treatments, but there was a rationale for them.

Karen has 37 panic attacks, major anxiety problems.

Heaven knows, there's a lot of that about.

It turns out that

when she was hospitalized when she was 20 with jaundice, which is a liver

problem, all the processing, all the detox processes are in the liver.

It's the gateway from the digestion.

It handles emotions.

It handles the immune system.

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 because, and at an age when that could mean long-term liver damage, hepatitis.

She's ended up with very little appetite.

She feels full easily, gains weight easily, and often feeling nauseous, which is definitely a sign of liver distress still.

Menstrual cycles are very erratic.

She had early COVID, again another big

hammer blow.

And

the COVID was before her main symptoms of panic attacks set in.

So I use that as an 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, because outside was dangerous.

The only thing that got you out, hunger.

And when we look at the way in which the cells are

the machinery inside the cell, we find that the mechanisms

managing anxiety are the same as the

system

managing appetites and food processing.

So the idea of linking anxiety with metabolism is basic.

This was an exact answer.

So the mix of herbs that I gave her had nothing for the anxiety at all.

It was all to do with metabolism.

And so they included milk thistle, Barberry, an oriental herb called Bupleurum, Artichoke Leaf, and an Indian remedy called Gymnema, which is called Sugar Destroy, which reduces your

hankering for sweet.

First goal was to manage her sugar cravings, because that seemed to be a key part of what she was saying,

and to improve her liver functions.

This was 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 mix to help manage the hormonal ebb and flow around the menstrual cycle.

And

three months, which is the normal time for cycles to begin to turn, her cycles began to steady and so did the rest of her symptoms.

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

So there's a couple of examples of

how we approach things differently.

You know, if Karen had gone to most other practitioners, she would have had something for her nerves.

I do really want to talk about, you used the term

women's herbs.

Women's, yeah.

Women's herbs.

I do want to talk about that.

And I do also want to talk about fertility in the menstrual cycle and things like PCOS because I'm super interested in that, which might surprise some people.

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

So I do want to get onto 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 places to start plants because that's where they go.

So, tell me, 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 iodoproof and painkillers, fevers, all these kinds of things.

Well, very simply, we think

our intelligence is up here.

You know, we've 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 there's a long tube.

It's about 20 feet of small intestine that has to go around.

And then another two or three feet of large intestine.

It used to take about 18 hours to go through.

And we now, because we sat and drew, it would take longer.

But all that time, intelligent decisions are 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

and responding.

So as the food changes, as it's 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, major choreography going on here, you know, without us even knowing about it.

And then, just when you thought, this was wonderful, you add something called the mycobiome.

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

there's the bowel flora, and they help with digestion, vitamin K, one or two other things, you know, they might be quite useful.

Now,

the mycobiome runs the show.

And it's huge.

We thought we knew what the kidney did.

We thought we knew what the heart did.

We thought we knew what the brain did.

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

It's running the show.

And the microbiome is the billions of bugs in our gut.

Trillions.

Trillions.

We've got more of those little critters than we have of our own cells, so much more.

So they are huge.

They've got about 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 walking guts, yes.

We're walking bacteria.

Yeah.

Yeah,

there's more bacteria than there are us.

I mean, it's a bit of a gob-smacking thought.

And, you know, obviously people want...

No, 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 Health Organization and others say very seriously that antibody 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-borne infections are increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

You know, we're piling them in to us, but also to the animals that we grow.

A lot of them are full of antibiotics, and that means that the diversity of the microbiome

is

being reduced.

We're losing, we call that biodiversity.

There's a biodiversity issue in here.

But even with the diminished flora that we have, they still pretty much run the show.

And a lot of the fruits and vegetables, particularly the ones with colours in them, actually feed those guys down there and help them to perform better.

And one good reason to, as we say, eat the rainbow, just get those colours 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.

On that point of antibiotics,

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 for sure, some more than others.

I mean, the point about antibiotics, and we did a big project with this

ironically just before COVID, when I was working with Pucker, the herb 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 a harassed doctor who just, you know, because they say, 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.

Don't take my word for it.

Everyone knows this.

And you get NHS, you know, in this country,

posters 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, there are many spices.

I mean, some of the things on that plate there are 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,

treatments

to

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 means that we're more susceptible to disease.

It's already happening and it's not me that's saying these are the guys who look after our healthcare 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 incentive to develop them because they're often handed out free free in various countries, so you don't get the margins back.

And 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 is mainly caused by overusing or misusing antibiotics.

In 2022, US doctors gave out about 236 million anti- fuck it.

What?

US doctors gave out 236 million antibiotic prescriptions, 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 doctors' offices and emergency rooms.

In 2020, about 30 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 antibiotic 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 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.

They're 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, as most responsible doctors would wish that their patients wouldn't keep asking for them.

So 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,

that 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 less if you've got that resistance.

Aaron Powell, 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.

And there's links to colorectal cancers?

Yeah.

But that's it 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 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

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 antibiotic.

So let's put that straight away.

But if you've got a cold,

flu, virus,

a viral problem, particularly the airways,

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 the species of bacteria that's affected who are resistant to that.

It's natural selection.

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.

And

I'd duck that bullet and so that group of bacteria will already be resistant so we're creating resistance every time we use an antibody so

try let's try and 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.

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,

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

this fellow.

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 ginger since of this species has got to be 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 why all those Europeans ended up in Asia, running India and the Dutch and 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 control the 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'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

a mug can you do that for me

we've got a grate over i've got a grate over for you so um

we've got here a piece of ginger the as i say about the size of your thumb a thumbs 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 your 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 now this is the cinnamon you buy in any shop it comes in different forms There's one from China called Scassia, which looks like one big curled bark.

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

That's the one you go for.

It's more 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

mug.

So that's ginger and cinnamon.

Ginger and cinnamon.

That's it.

Then you add your hot water.

That there.

You're going for real one, are you?

Going for the real one.

Good on you.

At this point, a sieve is useful.

Why?

What for?

Because it's going to be it's full of

bits.

And then let's say this is 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.

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 fairly weak.

Oh, it is nice, though.

It's nice, isn't it?

It is nice.

Now, can you feel it warming already?

Yes, straight away.

It's 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 other root.

The other root there,

that's turmeric.

It's normally seen in a yellow powder.

We might talk about that later.

And black pepper and chilies.

We've got a chili here.

Which, when you take them,

you think you're burning your mouth, don't you?

The interesting thing is that

there's no burning.

You can actually have full madras 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 the pain fibers, 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 mucosa, the ones that you just swallowed 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

grot on the mucosa.

And the main thing you feel is the warmth.

And if you're dealing with something down here in the lungs, you'll actually start bringing up more gunk up the airways.

There's a natural escalator that we use, 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 complement.

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.

It 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, 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 you want to put a hot back 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

linament on it, you can use the same thing.

Ginger.

Just because it's heating.

And that's simple old medicine.

So when you're experiencing different types of pain or a cold, then cinnamon and ginger are good.

I think my cover.

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 pack or an ice pack for your migraine?

And migraine sufferers 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.

Okay.

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

Yeah, she likes the heat.

She likes the heat.

She drinks it before bed as well.

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 their stomach objects

or because it literally heats them up too much.

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.

Yeah.

You could, if you wanted to be Tex-Mex, you can take the chilies.

Well, you know, that's a we think of them as a much more extreme version of the heating and

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

without tomatoes and chilies?

But in the old days, there were none of those because they all came from America.

But chilies were the American equivalent of ginger, used for the same purpose.

So if someone comes to you and they say,

Simon, when should I use chilies as a form of medication?

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, what should I try?

I said, the first thing to do is you figure it out.

You can start with herbal teas.

You aren't, are you?

I'm going to drop it into the

drop it into here.

Is that a bad idea?

Yeah, yeah, no, go for it.

But

you should notice that it should be quite a hot one.

I will 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 would now call stimulating circulation, and more cooling, which we would now translate as stimulating digestion.

And depending on which of those you prefer, it would really give me a clue.

So if you were looking at warming remedies, it could be ginger tea, it could be fennel tea, you know, that's a warming remedy, or it could be cinnamon or

any of the spices.

Cardamom is one of my favorites, by the way.

This is, I use cardamom.

This is the cardamom pods.

Inside are little black seeds.

Absolutely lovely taste.

Do you know him?

Do you know cardamom?

Have you tried it?

Not really, no.

Oh, have a bite of that.

Don't just bite the seeds.

Yeah, just bite into it.

You don't just get a hint of the taste.

In many parts of the Mideast, cardamom is one of the main flavours, things like coffee and so on.

Reminds me of

Indian food that I've had.

Yes.

Used a lot in India.

And in China it's a convalescent tonic so they use it when people are building up their digestion after being ill for a long time.

They will often use cardamom.

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?

Now one of the most cooling remedies that people know about is this,

which is mint.

That spear mint, the best one is peppermint.

It's got a lovely smell, hasn't it?

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.

The main cooling remedies throughout history, from

the 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 rarely bitter.

When you say cooling, you mean I feel hot, 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

what happen, you remember

when we were young, we were told, if you've had a big meal, don't go swimming.

Oh, right.

You weren't told that.

I can't swim, so.

Oh, there you go.

But that was one of the things that, you know, some of us in my generation, at least, will always remember.

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, you know, it's 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 break down this food, turn it into something useful.

It is an investment.

You put a lot in, you get much more out.

But what it means is, is that

digestion is all about,

I'm just being a bit loose here with the language, but it's not about language.

It's bringing blood into the core.

When you've 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 temperature rises by a couple of degrees, our white blood cells, the ones that are doing the legwork, 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's almost as though

the creator

put a

purposeful fault into 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 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.

Are there any plants that are bitter?

Yeah, bitter plants are very common and were highly valued in the old world.

In 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 vermouth.

And you think of the use of a drink before a meal.

The idea was it was, they used to call it an aperitif, something that stimulated your appetite.

So they would use bitters to improve your appetite, and a low level of wormwood would be one of them.

Dandelion and burdock are two other bitters, which we now have as a soft drink, you know, especially in America.

And we know that bitters do switch on the appetite, so we sometimes use them when appetite is poor.

And, you know,

there's all sorts of reasons why you've got a low appetite, but bitters can really 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 and effectively increase digestive activity, which involves more blood coming into the area.

So, yes.

Let's imagine you're living in some part of the desert area in the Middle East.

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 Caffea arabica.

We call it coffee.

You ground 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 without sugar, that's a bitter.

Okay.

And that was used as a digestif.

In other words, after you're eating, it 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 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 as 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.

It's 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 know, if I give a bitter to somebody

and, you know, someone is really bitter, they will know within an hour or so.

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No way.

On this point of antibiotics, I've heard you talk about vitamin D, vitamin C and zinc

as a potential alternative to jumping straight from zinc.

Not straight alternative, but in improving your natural resistance, particularly to viruses and such like,

then there is evidence for both vitamin D and vitamin C, but also zinc as backups in turn in sub form, 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.

I think vitamin D is a good one, and it's not just people with dark skin that have a vitamin vitamin D deficiency.

It's pretty widespread in darker countries, if we can call our weather, and that

where there's not enough sun, vitamin D deficiency is quite widespread, and 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.

No.

I don't.

I don't haven't haven't spotted a need.

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 in the room that has an antibiotic role.

Well, this is, yeah.

Garlic,

what used to be called Russian penicillin, and when after penicillin was invented,

because some parts of the world, they use garlic instead of

penicillin, which was hard to come by originally.

And it was used in places like the First World War to avoid some of the trench 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 good guys down here in the mycobiome.

And there's evidence to show a lot of these other ones do as well, but garlic is particularly strong.

And when I'm dealing with a disrupted gut flora, a mycobiome, I will sometimes refer to raw garlic as a treatment.

But you need to do it with a little care because

you don't want to lose too many friends.

Why, what's wrong with gut?

Is it

the aroma you give out afterwards?

So, you know,

your friends will be very polite, but they'll rather wish you hadn't.

And some people find that it does upset, you know, when they swallow.

swallow.

But I have a little trick which I call the garlic intensive, which is when everything is down, the gut is in this 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 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 cloves.

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 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 okay to go ahead.

If it is, take another clove,

chop Chop it up, swallow it.

Another half hour later, take another clove.

And if you start at six o'clock by 10 o'clock in the evening, you've got eight cloves inside you.

Eight.

And what's that going to do?

Well, that's the 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, 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, the oil 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 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 guys in the microbiome.

And if you've got a low-level gut or lung infection, that can be 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 intensity is probably enough for most people.

So prebiotic effects, it has an anti-microbial properties,

Is it good for pain?

Called it Russian penicillin.

Yeah, 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 infections.

Some people do use it for arthritic problems.

It will depend on what's causing the arthritis.

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 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 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 back pain or other types of nerve damage.

Roughly 75 to 85 percent 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?

It depends again where it is.

But let's take joints and back.

You know, where 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 an inflammation of the joints.

You have cystitis, 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, it's 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

there's surfaces being pressed against each other and so the tissue in the joint is cartilage, gristle

if you're eating it,

which is designed to survive with very poor circulation because when you've got two things pressing it 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 likely to come out out in these places where there's poor circulation.

Sometimes things are 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 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 s hurts like billy hoe, but what it's 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 KN plaster,

which you simply put on on the X outside, and you can buy these in pharmacies and so on, it's called capsicum,

capsaicin, beg your pardon.

It's a standard prescription dressing for a pain.

What it does is it 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.

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 KN

as their salve for bad joints.

In Europe it was mostly mustard.

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, who's suffering the pain here, 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 your practice oh yes and i often recommend it to patients and they keep reporting back it's really makes a difference i think i worry about low back pain because i spend so long sitting down and i've got low back pain too really 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 OCB SA, which I saw back 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 just unlocked a knot.

So that wasn't any herd, 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, 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

sometimes when you've got a joint pain, it's all about, it's locked.

And you can find ways of

loosening

that joint.

Ibuproofen.

Yes.

People reach for this all the time.

I mean, I was looking at some of the search trend data for ibuprofen, and it is absolutely exploding.

Yes.

That's the search graph, ibuprofen.

It is, but it is 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

salicylic acid,

which gave us aspirin.

And we still use the basic molecule to create what we call non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or N-SAIDs, and ibuprofen is one of the most widely used of those.

And basically they cut the inflammatory process,

just cut it, and the inflammation just diminishes.

Which is good, right?

Well, if it gets rid of the pain, it is.

But there's 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 need iburofen, 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 sometimes the wrong food and sometimes 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.

But the pain might be somewhere else.

It might be linked to a full-blown disease.

And in that case,

you know, 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 much prefer to do that than just suppress a natural defense.

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 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 Marines.

You know, 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've got a whole bunch of white blood cells that are a bit like that.

They just,

we call neutrophils.

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?

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 as I said, there's always a question: you know, why are we

what's the consequence of stopping this internal cleansing process that

is so important?

So inflammation is not the enemy.

Inflammation is the defence measure that can sometimes overstay its 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 was swelled up.

I was getting conflicting information from people about the inflammation because I had this big football game coming up for this charity match called Soccer 8 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 it's quite difficult to navigate whether one should let inflammation stay or if I should be taking anti-inflammatories or Ibiproofin.

Well, if you'd got a match to sometimes need something just to get your match fit or match acceptable.

But if it's a 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 out.

That's this miracle I 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 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.

Aaron Powell, and chronic inflammation is often caused by something further upstream, right?

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 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 disruption there,

that's the first place to begin.

because it's usually the best place to begin.

And if we add what we talked about, the microbiome as another big factor, then there's plenty to work

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.

And what's the typical suggestion if it is a gut-related problem?

Well, the first thing is to do is to

get the best food you can down there, which is mostly plant-based.

I mean, there are exceptions 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 why don't you give as much difference as you can?

And

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 pretty much a lot of plants, mostly plants, for pennies.

You know, you can make a healthy meal

if you know how to cook, by just mixing some of these simple lidals 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, many of them we call polyphenols.

which we know have a range of effects on all sorts of

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 mycobiome has processed them, 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 colours depend on the good guys down here.

When they get into the blood, they start doing all sorts of wonderful things to the lining of the blood vessels, for example, up into the brain, where we've got what we call blood-brain barrier, which is actually a very exciting interface.

The polyphenols, the colors, all have

well-established mechanisms that improve the health all around the body.

So simple.

If you've got a child, you used to say, eat your greens.

We now say, eat your rainbow.

The more different colours, the 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.

No, there's nothing quite like the original.

In terms of fruit, what are your favourite fruits to sort of recommend people to eat and why?

Probably

if you wanted to have a top list, the darker the colour, the better.

So 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, you know, in the sweet corn and the maize 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.

I think we could do with more purple in our lives because the

purple and blue color is something called anthocyanins.

These are types of polyphenol and they're particularly powerful, particularly with the blood supply.

We're talking about things like eyesights and brain health and circulatory health, blood pressure control and all those sort of things can be improved just by having more purple in our lives.

So 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 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.

And in terms of vegetables, what are your favourite go-to vegetables that you'd recommend?

Start with the roots.

The root vegetables, the carrots, the beetroots, the parsnips,

the various other root vegetables out there, not all of which are people's favourites, but they have fibre

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, I found a purple one, which are easy 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.

Metabolism, gut, hormonal, blood supply.

So greens, roots, and the big one in most people's lives are the grains, you know, wheat, for example, but cereals, lentils, dal,

peas, and beans, all of these have their own benefits, particularly for the microbiome you know 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 vegan do you eat meat yeah i have um

you know i just have a broad range of what most humans have eaten which is a mixture of things

i do with 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 plant-only diet.

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 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 discussing before we started recording that I'm currently on a ketosis diet, the keto diet.

Keto diet, yes.

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

Yes.

Basically consuming no sugar.

Yes.

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 from it.

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

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.

So

a lot of people on keto diets find that they're sharper.

That's probably what you do.

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

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 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.

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 because if there's a lot more of the animal-based material in the in food then that can be more hard work for the kidney.

So it's always worth checking that 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 almost anything.

My girlfriend, she's doing keto as well.

And she noticed that her menstrual cycle became more regular.

Yes.

She was like shocked by it.

And she's really done a lot of A-B testing over the last couple of years.

And whenever she's in a ketogenic diet, very low carb, very 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 larger, as we get through our life.

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.

Insulin

resistance is growing and that leads to diabetes increasingly.

And so diabetes is in most parts of the world now is becoming 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, there's more work for the 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.

So, 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

and that is increasingly linked with insulin resistance.

So it affects people who are more likely to be in the pre-diabetic phase of 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,

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.

Yeah, I was just reading some stats on that.

It 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

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, I mean,

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 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 amount of 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're trying to have kids, which we are now,

I guess you want to remove the...

If that's a factor, I would be looking at reducing your sugar intake at the very least.

Yeah.

I mean, we spent,

I spend a lot of time with

women who are having difficulty conceiving.

And, you know, I think

I have about about 13 herb 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 prescribing.

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, but 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.

Wow.

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.

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.

Do I put it 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 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 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 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 is so effective, were they?

What's that doing to your mind?

It's still right on the edge of my tongue.

It's like it's 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 uh solution echinacea echinacea 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 it kind of tastes like maggie seasoning some kind of food seasoning i'm now 60 seconds later and i can still it's like got more intense it's a bit like fireworks going on yeah it's like fireworks going off in my mouth and all it was was a little lick of it um now you see that

what we use that for is for infections or problems of the mouth and the throat particularly

what what's it doing

well you know you have to use a 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 throat you know we've got tonsils we've got adenoids we've got the glands that run down our neck here that sometimes get swelled up you know if we've got an infection in this area yeah you have to take something you take the taste away.

It sometimes gets in the way of talking as well.

I was hesitating before giving it to you, didn't want to stop you in your steps.

But what's that tingling?

Cut, 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.

And so, echinacea,

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.

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, no.

So who should be thinking about echinacea?

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 echinacea in other forms, pills and tablets and so on, and there are some which don't have that tingle factor.

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 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 a middle ear problem.

problem, it could be a throat problem, it could be a gum problem.

You know, we've got all sorts of gum problems,

all sorts of problems we have with mouth.

We've got 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've got some tablets there.

These ones are

otherwise known as Boswellia.

And this just comes in a, you know,

in the form of tablets.

And

they just look like any other tablets, except they're sort of greeny-yellow colour, because that's just ground-up

resin.

Now,

resin, 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, myrrh and frankincense.

This is the frankincense.

I use myrrh in a liquid form.

And you almost like you're lining the mouth with

this resin.

You know,

it's

when you put some myrrh on the mouth, you definitely feel the

the mucosa firing up.

And it was the most widely used medicine.

and the reason why it was so valued in the in those days by the three wise men is because myrrh was

there first of all they had to bring it out of Africa you know which is where it comes from

remember the queen of Sheba who married Solomon you know in the old Bible story Queen of Sheba had the trade routes of East Africa sorted so Solomon married wisely by marrying the Queen of Sheba because she had the monopoly on

myrrh, particularly, and on frankincense.

And those

and echinacea,

maybe with a little licorice to help it work well, are amazing at reducing infections in this area, in the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and the areas around.

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I will speak to you there.

Do you think that

things like water fasts, people are doing a lot of of these sort of water fasts and these sort of seven-day prolonged fasts are effective medicines?

My usual answer when I'm faced with a question and someone I needed to answer from 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...

We evolve to eat intermittently.

When you're a hunter-gatherer, there are times when you're not eating eating at all, especially off-season, 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 were, in a sense, meant to do.

So, the fundamental principle of fasting is probably right on.

The issue is that sometimes if your metabolism, your digestion, your hormones, or other functions are not at 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 you at the start of the conversation you referenced that you deal with a lot of cancer patients.

I think you said one-third?

About a third of my

a quarter, maybe a quarter to a third, yeah.

Living with cancer.

Living with cancer.

Which is something that's relatively new, remember, because 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.

We're increasingly 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're still recovering from the cancer and its effects.

And it could be digestion.

It could be things like sleep.

It could be all sorts of other things that we can do to help.

Aaron Powell, so there's the preventative element, which is doing things within your sort of lifestyle 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 life generally when you when you think about cancer prevention is it 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 and there are other foods that have got a higher risk of cancer.

We talk about processed 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 in the West, we're talking about, so in developed countries, catching 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 lower level of exercise that we're putting our finger on there.

It's also cardiovascular disease 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 that's causing the harm.

And that's increasingly accepted by cardiologists and such.

Aaron Powell, 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?

Mostly it's the food.

We're talking about long-term cardiovascular health.

We have plants that we use to manage

cardiac or cardiovascular problems.

I mean, the classic that a lot of people know about is the hawthorn 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, just as an example.

I would use spices as my main go-to to help to fend off cardiovascular problems because they all have vascular benefits.

Spices 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 that with your knife there.

Oh, I've just cut it open.

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 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 the modulate or 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 you know my coconut my turmeric's 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 curcumin is 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 to 2% to 2% to 3%, you know, but it's still small beer compared with the amounts of turmeric that we

take,

the amounts of curcamin that we take in an ordinary curry.

So what's going on, and what is going on, is that curcumin 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 available materials, which are active.

It belongs in the gut, and its inflammatory modulating effects come mostly from the products of the microbiome working on the curcumin and moving through the body that way.

So it's a wonderful lesson in you know the 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

probiotics, which is the yogurts and the kimchi's and the coffee's and so on, which are actually living organisms.

They 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 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.

And all those polyphenols and the colourings and so on are in that group.

So a lot of the benefits of polyphenols are post-biotic benefits.

There was a study done in 2007 that showed

can't even say it.

Curcumin.

That shows curcumin upregulates anti-oxidant defenses and down-regulates oxidative stress.

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?

And there's

lots of studies that show that it's effective for people that have things like arthritis and joint pains.

Yeah, I was leaving the best to last.

Yeah, there's a lot of work on curcumin and turmeric.

As I said, a lot of people get confused because they think 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.

Aaron Powell, and there's early preclinical studies 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 pre-clinical, that usually

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 it in the human.

So all a preclinical study will do is point to a possible effect.

And time again, 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 atoxic or doesn't agree with humans.

So we take preclinical evidence with caution.

And we're

personally, 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, don't we?

Because

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

Dementia 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 that we used to call the blood-brain barrier, which you've probably 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 blood-brain barrier is a very dynamic, interesting interface between

the brain's tissue and the rest 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 we really want to help

our brain health, regular drinking of green tea, you know,

has been shown to be really useful.

Not that rather than the supplement, by the way, it's the drink that you have.

I'll 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?

Because it contains a number of, again, polyphenols.

And polyphenols are those

colours.

These colours, yeah.

And in this case, it's green, obviously.

And remember, green tea is just the smoked unprocessed part of the tea leaf.

So it's a plant called camellia senensis.

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 off already with

ginger and cinnamon.

So

let's leave it for a moment, but we can, 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 that 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 cognitive decline as you get older.

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 all you need to do to appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff.

That 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.

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 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 a Shakespeare play called Hamlet, Ophelia.

the young lady says, rosemary, that's for remembrance,

because everyone knew that this this improved cognitive functions.

And when I was 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 performance in those people.

And there's been other studies since 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 Ginkgo that a lot of people know about, which is used as a prescription medicine in Europe for cardiovascular problems.

And that's been shown to be likely useful using the same sort of mechanisms as we've seen here and with the green tea.

I'll check it here.

Yeah, that looks alright.

You see, it's more yellow than green.

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.

It's got a nice minty flavour.

Yeah.

You could live with that, couldn't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

My girlfriend, again, she's all over this stuff.

She's always bloody right.

Well, you know, that 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 fuck is she like?

Don't get 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 me.

I'm going to nail this because there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this.

Cocoa,

chocolate, dark chocolate, is a medicine.

End of

one of the best medicines around

is 50 grams or 100 grams 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 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 the full rainbow she should be sipping in for you i know i i know exactly

no cocoa seriously

brain health as well cardiovascular health

i mean they just they do studies where they've put cocoa 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, 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, 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.

cacao.

And she says it 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

stimulating effects, sort of similar to the effects of the coffee, which incidentally, as I've already said, is a medicine as well.

But cocoa and chocolate does have an 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.

We would like it to be as dark as possible.

Okay.

The less sugar, the less fat.

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.

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 drawer of my fridge has all of her 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 a bit of that.

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 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 foot high and a foot wide.

And they were like, right, pour the sugar in.

So I poured some, and they're like, they're like laughed 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, okay, now put a little bit of this in, a little bit of this, a little 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 chocolates left my life.

This is once upon a time, 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.

Chocolate flavoured candy is what they described it as.

Literally, yeah.

So this is so we've got 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.

There's quite a lot of work being done now on these.

They're obviously looking for medications as well, but so far, most of the data coming in relates to plant-based materials.

So it suggests that there are other reasons why having plants and again, spices come back into the mix,

seem to be helpful for brain health.

Having a look at the green tea,

There was a study done in 2008 which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory attention, accuracy, and

long-term consumption is associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, according to the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in 2011.

It's nice to have somebody else just say what you said.

Yeah, but it's exactly.

I didn't realise that.

I had no idea.

I had no idea.

All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me.

Hmm.

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 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 it it's 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 lacking in a lot of these things.

We need more evidence.

But it would point to matcha being particularly helpful.

We haven't talked much about

cholesterol.

No, you haven't brought it up.

Cholesterol is a type of fat made in your liver, which travels in your blood.

For anyone that doesn't know cholesterol, what it is and why it's it, if it's a good or bad thing, what do I need to know about cholesterol?

And is there anything in front of us here that can help keep my cholesterol in a healthy state?

I think a doctor did actually tell me at one point that I had high cholesterol a couple of years ago because of my diet at the time.

Keto, of 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.

So

it's not a done deal that it will raise your cholesterol.

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, we say.

And what the digestion does is it strips down the heaviness, and there becomes more

what we call high-density

lipocyte, HDLs.

Mouth 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.

Cholesterol is actually secreted by the liver for very good reasons.

It helps with all sorts of things.

It's the 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 day, working on the land or whatever, you need a certain amount of cholesterol cholesterol to motor.

We're sitting in chairs and cholesterol 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 our cholesterol levels increasingly rise and that is a risk factor as we know for cardiovascular disease which 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 cholesterol levels.

They also know that there's more pushback 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.

You know, 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 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.

And 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

there's not a straight answer to your question.

You know, the statin sounds like a simple pill that fixes it.

The reality is that we need to look at a much wider range of things.

You're a fan of artichokes for cholesterol?

Yes.

You must have read my 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.

I use it a lot in the practice.

It's a juice, actually, just a suppressed juice.

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 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.

Is that the case?

Is that a barrier to entry to the stuff we've talked about today at all?

My usual answer to that is eat Asian.

Because as I 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 meal sometimes from places that put more fat in than they might.

So some of the meals we 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 didn't talk about that we should have talked about?

Well, I suppose I didn't mention much about the ameprazole

because that.

I've never heard of this before.

Ameprazole.

Yeah, I've never heard of it.

You're increasingly a minority.

Ameprazole 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 GORD because we spell esophagus differently.

So we spell esophagus with an OE and Americans spell it with an E.

So it's either GERD or GORD, depending on which country you're in.

And that means gastroesophageal reflux disease, GORD.

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 meeprazole or something like it.

And GOD

is actually diagnosed as a condition which is made better by ameprazole.

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

And what ameprazole does is

shuts down the acid production in the stomach, stomach, so you don't get as much damage by reflux.

The problem is that the acid is 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.

If you have a blood transfusion or something in the wrong blood, you get a problem.

We're eating foreign 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 ameprazole will put an end to that.

The problem with ameprazo is two problems.

First is that the list of problems accruing from long-term ameprazole use is beginning to grow and is serious.

Cancers, dementias, all sorts of things are beginning to be downstream problems associated with long-term ameprazole use.

But 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 ameprazole and wow, you get much more trouble.

So the only thing to do is to take more ameprazole.

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 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 there are some plants that have got a lot of mucus in them, mucilage.

The classic example from North America, Sophriel,

it's a sort of powder that looks like you make polyfiller to fill a crack with, you know, it's a white powder.

When it's mixed with water, it forms this paste, this mucus 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 mucus layer.

You don't need to go to Slippery Elm.

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.

So what they're doing 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 it there.

And then as the food pushes up back into the gullet, you've got this nice mucus coating, a raft, to stop it.

And 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 you could have gammascon, you could have cuprioma, you could have aloe vera.

There's a number of other mucusy type plants that people use.

And that can,

without any other complication at all, be one step.

And I use it regularly

when I'm weaning people off ameprazolan, I will use the raft principle to help prevent some of the harm you get with reflux.

Just a simple example.

You're very fond of these plants.

They are living organisms, aren't they?

Are you concerned about how we treat them?

I'm concerned about the

world that they come from, because, of course, increasingly we have to produce these industrially, which sometimes mean in monoculture, what it usually means in monoculture form.

So they're grown in rows and rows, and they put weed killers down to get other plants out of the way.

And so they become less

natural.

And we talked about the polyphenols.

You know, Pucker, 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 its own battles more.

Because 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 grown 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 through a hedgerow and show you, you can make a whole meal out of plants that 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.

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.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last 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

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?

Our closest, our 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 Exeter rather than 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,

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.

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 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, 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 herbs in my life.

So I was so excited to learn more.

And you have changed my opinion on so many things.

I can't wait to go and tell my girlfriend that she's right

about everything.

I'll slip her the

she can slip me the tenor.

And I highly recommend

people go and check out your website and go to your Herb Hour, which takes place once a month.

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 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.

I contributed to the herbal reality one, which is where you're going to 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 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.

So 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.

And I think, thank you stephen it's a journey on one 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 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.

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