Transcription
I'm pretty sure that the cardiovascular diseases are the single biggest killer. Yes. Still, cardiovascular in the West, we're talking about. So, developed countries. Catching up, I'm afraid, in other parts of the world where they adopt more Western lifestyles. Uh, but that's a combination of food and poor, low level of exercise, um, that we're putting our finger on there.
There's also cardiovascular disease is a is another form of long-term inflammation, and increasingly that's been understood. You know, it's not just fat or cholesterol or blood pressure. It's an inflammatory mechanism going on that's causing the harm, and that's increasingly accepted by cardiologists and such.
So, if I'm if I'm trying to reduce my chances of having some kind of heart-related issue, are there any herbs or any products here that you think are beneficial?
Mostly, it's the food. When we're talking about long-term cardiovascular health, uh, we have plants that we use, uh, to manage cardiac or cardiovascular problems. I mean, the classic that a lot of people know about is the Hawthorne, or the Mayflower. Uh, but the Hawthorne, particularly the flower and the leaf, used to be a regular home remedy that people used to use and drink as a tea, uh, for all sorts of reasons, you know, managing fevers and all sorts of things like that. But we can 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 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, as in, uh, the ginger and 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, uh, 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, um, 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 they modulate or support or manage inflammation. Uh, but turmeric is an extraordinary remedy. And here's an interesting story. We talk about we need curcumin that from turmeric, and you'll get a supplement saying, you know, my co, my turmeric's got more curcumin than yours, and it's more available. The 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 one or two percent to two to three percent, you know, but it's still small beer compared with the amount of turmeric that we, uh, take, uh, the amounts of curcumin that we take in in an ordinary curry.
So what's going on? And that what is going on is that curcumin and in and 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, uh, we, the, the, we got probiotics, which is the yogurts and the kimchi and the kefirs 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 a new kit on the block called postbiotics.
Mhm. [clears throat] Which is now an industrial term used for killed bacteria which are then given as a medicine. But technically, a postbiotic is anything that the bacteria produce.
Mhm. [clears throat] And we're learning that more and more of what we eat, particularly from the plant side, is converted by the microbiome into medicines. And all those polyphenols and the colorings and so on are in that group. So a lot of the benefits of polyphenols are postbiotic benefits.
There was a study done in 2007 that showed, can't even say it, curcumin, that shows curcumin upregulates antioxidant defenses and downregulates oxidative stress.
Yeah. There was a study done in 2016, which is a meta-analysis of random control trials, found curcumin comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief.
Answers your earlier question, doesn't it? And there's a lot of, uh, lots of studies that show that it's effective for people that have things like arthritis and joint pains.
Yeah, 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 that it only works if you absorb it into the blood. And I'm saying that actually, you don't. What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it useful. And there's early preclinical studies taking place around the impact it can have with cancers. And there's promising but early studies showing the impact that curcumin that comes from turmeric can have on brain health.
Yes. Well, that's definitely a big story. But just on the, when you say preclinical, that usually means that it does mean laboratory. So that's test tubes and, uh, rats and other animals.
None of those tell us what happens when we, put it in a human. Put it in the human. So all a preclinical study will do is point to a possible effect. And time and again, pharmaceutical companies will tell you this. You know, a promising preclinical lead doesn't lead to a medicine because it turns out to be toxic 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.
Um, but you mentioned brain health because here's one of the big gaps we have, don't we? Because we were, we've got a lot of brain health issues right now.
Mhm. [clears throat] Dementia is still going in the wrong direction. Um, it's a very distressing thing if you have any in your family. And increasingly, there's people saying, "What can we do to prevent this?" And Alzheimer's is all about there being the wrong sort of protein and deposits in the brain. But increasingly, the focus is switching on to the blood supply to the brain, what we call the vascular effects on the brain. And there's something we used to call the blood-brain barrier, which you probably 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 of us. It is now called the neurovascular unit, NVU. And it is so exciting. And the more we look at it so far, the more we find that the things that help the neurovascular unit, the blood-brain barrier are plants.
And we have green tea. And you know, we can, if you if you really want to help, um, our brain health, regular drinking of green tea, you know, it's been shown to be really useful. Not that rather than the supplement, by the way, is the drink that you have. Um, oh, I put it in here, right? So we can make it. So as you make that, can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea?
Because it contains a number of, again, polyphenols.
And polyphenols are those, are these colors?
These colors, yeah. In this case, it's green, obviously. And tea is just the steamed, unprocessed part of the tea leaf. So it's a plant called Camellia sinensis. Um, so this is a nice Japanese teapot. That's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in. And these are the mugs, but we've filled these up already with ginger and cinnamon. So, let's, 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 and green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier. We talked about the neurovascular unit between the brain and the rest of us. And, um, there's all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble.
What, what sort of trouble?
The dementia type problems, cognitive decline as you get older.
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.
Oh, it smells so good. Really nice.
That's not just nice because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volatile oils, uh, the things that give the smell. [gasps] 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. Yeah. 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 improved cognitive functions. When I was in working on our campus in Maryland, we actually did a clinical trial with rosemary in people with struggling with their crosswords, you know, as they get older, and found that although it wasn't a conclusive study, there were pointers to it improving cognitive performance in those people. And there's been other studies since that re that reinforce that. I would say that rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health. There's another remedy called Ginko, that a lot of people know about, which is used as a prescription medicine in Europe, uh, for cardiovascular problems, and that's been shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as as we've seen here and with the green tea.
I'll check it here. Yeah, that looks all right. You see it's more yellow than green, but, uh, and this is flavored with a little bit of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favorite taste.
Green tea is rich in polyphenols, um, which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention.
It's got a nice minty flavor.
Yeah. You could live with that, couldn't you?
Yeah. Yeah. My girlfriend again, she she's all over this stuff. She's always bloody right. [laughter]
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, three years in denial. I'm like, "What the hell is she like [laughter] doing over there?" 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. I'm gonna I'm gonna nail this because there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this. Okay.
Cocoa. Yeah. 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 all she eats, 90% or something, 80% dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day. She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day. She eats the full rainbow.
She should be slipping in for you.
I know. I, I know. [laughter] Exactly.
No, cocoa. Seriously, brain health as well. Cardiovascular. [clears throat] 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, um, my girlfriend's very spiritual. She runs a business called Barley Breathwork. Um, hashtag ad if I have to say that. But in her business, one of the things she does at the very start of the session with women all over the world that come to her retreats is she makes cacao for them. And you notice instantly how people change when they've had a hot cup of cacao. It's, and and she says it like almost brings out their heart. And I guess that's because of the circulation reasons.
It is, but it also, of course, we know it contains a few other beneficial stimulating effects, sort of similar to the effects with coffee, which, in certainly as I've already said, is a medicine as well. Uh, but cocoa and chocolate does have 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. So,
The less sugar, the less fat. Um, so we talk about 75% cocoa solids, you know, so it's dark chocolate, and it tastes a bit more medicinal, doesn't it? It's not as sweet. Um, but I'm saying to many of 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 now.
Yeah. Yeah. [snorts]
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 like laughed at me. They were [laughter] like, "No, fill it like 70% with this white sugar." And I was like, "There's no way." I poured about 60 or 70% white sugar into this massive tube, and they were like, "Okay, now put a little bit of this and a little bit of this, little bit of oil, whatever." And I couldn't believe that it's literally like the white chocolate is like literally all sugar. Then milk chocolate was like 50% sugar. And then when we did when we made the dark chocolate, it was a tiny amount, like a tiny, tiny amount. And from that day onwards, white chocolate's left my life. There was once upon a time we a few years back when the European Union, I think before we joined it, said that we shouldn't call, uh, dairy milk chocolate at all. It's a chocolate flavor candy is what they described it as.
Literally. Yeah. So, this is. So, we've got some green tea here.
Yeah.
And you're talking to me about the association between green tea and Alzheimer's, which is really exciting.
Yes.
Um.
There's quite a lot of work being done now on these, and they're obviously looking for medications as well, but so far, most of the data coming in in relates to plant-based materials. So it suggests that there's other reasons why having plants, and again, spices come back into the mix, um, seem to be helpful for brain health. I'm having a look at the green tea. There was a study done in 2008 which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory, attention accuracy, and, um, long-term consumption associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, according to the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in 2011.
It's nice to have somebody else just say what you said.
Yeah, but it's it's exactly. I didn't realize. I didn't I had no idea. I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me.
You can't say sorry.
I have literally, literally, I've got a wow. Heart health, brain function, fat burning and metabolism, cancer prevention, early evidence, blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, gut and oral health. What about matcha? I'm a I'm a big investor in, um, the biggest matcha company in Europe. It's probably more beneficial than the basic green tea because it's, it's, it's more, shall we say, pure. Um, it's finer quality. So the chances are that matcha will do more than we've just said the green tea will do. Um, but there's, there's evidence lack of these things. We need more evidence, but it would point to matcha being particularly helpful.
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