00:00:00
that is the most widely prescribed drug in this country and I believe in the US also. But the list of problems acrewing
00:00:06
from long-term use is beginning to grow and is serious cancers, dementias. But
00:00:11
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
00:00:17
many antibiotics and that's coming a serious health issue now because the number of people dying from antibiotic
00:00:23
resistance infections is beginning to rise dramatically. It's quite frightening. So, are there alternatives
00:00:29
on this table that I should also consider as a form of medicine? Oh, yes. And most of these ones I'm
00:00:34
going to be talking about have a pretty immediate effect. Now, have a bite of this. Wa. For almost 50 years, Dr. Simon Mills
00:00:42
has pioneered how we think about natural medicine, earning global recognition as one of the most respected and
00:00:48
influential herbal practitioners of our time. These things have medicinal properties. So, let's start with dark chocolate. In
00:00:55
terms of long-term brain health and cardiovascular health, it's one of the best medicines around. Really?
00:01:01
Oh, yes. The next one is garlic. And in some parts of the world, they use garlic instead of penicellin. In fact, there
00:01:07
was an old trick where if you had enough garlic, breathe on a petri dish and you could kill various pathogens just by your breath.
00:01:12
Wow. And then there's this to reduce your cholesterol levels. This can really help with your eyesight. This is your blood
00:01:18
flow, gut health, cardiovascular health. Now, this is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health.
00:01:24
Rosemary, we actually did a clinical trial on this, and all you need to do is press it and sniff. So, you can see why
00:01:31
some of this stuff already is powerful. Now, we have more to go through. And this is where it gets interesting. There's a lot of people listening who
00:01:37
will want to hear this coffee. Oh god, what do I need to know? So,
00:01:42
I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:01:47
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:01:54
that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do
00:02:00
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because a strange way you are you're part of our history and
00:02:06
you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you
00:02:13
Simon Mills. You are a pioneer by all accounts in what is called complimentary
00:02:20
medicine, but you're also one of the most respected herbal practitioners in the world. You've been doing this for
00:02:26
more than 50 years. I've actually never spoken to somebody that has a comprehensive understanding of herbal
00:02:32
remedies and herbal medicine. So, I'm super excited to have this conversation with you today. What is the what is the
00:02:37
mission you're on and why do you think it's important? I think my main mission is to do what I
00:02:45
can to help people get stronger. I sometimes say that, you know, the world
00:02:51
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
00:02:57
boat that can sit better in the water. And I think people relate to that that
00:03:03
if they were felt a bit stronger in themselves, they would be able to cope
00:03:09
better with what life throws at them. I chose plants because people have always
00:03:16
used plants as their primary source of medicine. People have always grown up with plants. They've evolved along with
00:03:23
plants. And what I aim to do is to put the old wisdoms into some scientific
00:03:28
framework and then make it fit with conventional norms of healthcare.
00:03:34
You were a board member of the British Herbal Medicine Association. You're the first chair of the Council for Complimentary Alternative Medicine
00:03:41
launched in Parliament by former Prime Minister Alec Douglas Hol. You led a
00:03:48
major European Commission project on herbal medicine involving over 20 centers across Europe. You're the
00:03:54
secretary of the European Scientific Cooperative on Phytootherapy.
00:04:00
I was not able to say that word which is the which is the polite way of saying herbs. Okay. So, it's phyto plant therapy.
00:04:07
Well, I think when people think about herbal medicine and using plants as a form of medicine, they think of tribes
00:04:13
and they think of I don't know sort of ancient Chinese traditions. And I think
00:04:19
you know the modern westerner thinks of pills. Yes. when they think of medicine. Yes.
00:04:25
What What is it that we've lost? Is there like a lost wisdom? Yes.
00:04:30
And how did that happen? And what what is it we've lost? When we lived in the countryside, when
00:04:35
we lived close to nature, that was very much around us. And and in every little community, there'd be someone, usually a
00:04:41
woman, who would know their way around the plants and would, you know, help you out when you had a illness and a sickness. I'm not saying that there's a
00:04:49
golden age, but when we moved into cities, we lost a lot apart from
00:04:54
anything else. We were living on top of each other. We had to drink each other's water. You know, there was a lot of new illnesses, sicknesses, pestilences, and
00:05:01
so on that only came in cities. In that world, the herbs couldn't cut it. So, we
00:05:07
needed stronger stuff. So, they started using minerals. They started using things that were poisons.
00:05:13
And the original physician's job was to be the only guy who could handle
00:05:18
medicines that other people would not be safe to use. And so you got your training to use these much more powerful
00:05:25
medicines. And it was thought that the old plant things were too soft and gentle and so they were generally
00:05:32
discarded. And then you developed these medicines into pills because often they were powders anyway. And you know then
00:05:38
the pharmaceutical industry came in and branded and and made um proprietary materials from them. And that drifted a
00:05:45
long way from just going down to a hedro, going into the garden, going to the kitchen and picking up remedies.
00:05:52
A lot of cultures around the world still use plants as the first form of medication for a variety of different
00:05:59
sort of illnesses and diseases. Right. They do. Yes. I mean, most do. I mean,
00:06:04
if you were Inuit and Northern Territories in Canada and so and Alaska,
00:06:10
you would probably not have very many plants to choose from, but for most other people, they surrounded by plants.
00:06:16
That's their world. I think, you know, cuz I'm what, 32 years old, so I've not really grown up
00:06:22
with the wisdom of plants and how they can be used to treat some of the
00:06:27
illnesses that I have from a very young age. I'm taking cough syrup and I'm taking paracetamol when I have a
00:06:33
headache and all these kinds of pills and medicines, but plants were never a really a part of that conversation.
00:06:40
And I guess that makes me think that they don't work or that's what most people would now think.
00:06:46
And one of one of the points of this conversation now is to point you to ways in which they can and to show you how
00:06:52
you can figure that out within a minute or an hour. Most of these ones I'm going
00:06:57
to be talking about have a pretty immediate effect. So it, you know, we now think, oh, if you take a herb, it
00:07:03
may take months before anything happens. When I see a patient, my usual request
00:07:09
to them is, can you call me tomorrow to let me know how it's going because
00:07:14
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
00:07:19
stuff really is powerful. What is it that that you know from the
00:07:25
50 plus years of work that you've done working with plants as a form of medicine that the average person on the
00:07:30
street doesn't know how close we are to being to having uh I
00:07:37
I think life is a miracle as I said in that early encounter um and we can
00:07:44
realize the miracle within us if we just trust it. I've got a few guys to what I
00:07:49
call health empowerment. Things that you can do yourself at home just to begin to understand what's going on in here and
00:07:56
to nourish it. Uh and the plants are the in my world the one of the most
00:08:02
effective ways of supporting that inner miracle that we have uh to nourish our
00:08:08
health to empower us. I I sometimes think that you know medicine is extraordinary. I mean we now
00:08:15
live with cancer. you used to die with it. Uh almost all the major illnesses of the past have now had treatments for but
00:08:23
you know if you've got a chronic condition you still left with yourself and you're maybe not feeling so good in
00:08:30
yourself. I sometimes think that a lot of medicine is a bit like uh fast food
00:08:35
delivery. You know we have a meal brought in because it's convenient but that also
00:08:41
desklls us. you know, we we've stopped learning how to cook even. You know, I remember going
00:08:46
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
00:08:53
eat. And I thought, gosh, you're losing all those skills of making food and enjoying it and sitting it down over a
00:09:00
over a table. Um I think medicine, you know, we use far too many antibiotics.
00:09:05
We use, you know, these um PPI things called azole for our acid reflux, the
00:09:10
most widely prescribed drug in this country. And I think USL also mostly unnecessary. Uh we use a lot of uh
00:09:19
anti-inflammatories just because it's sore without asking why is it sore and
00:09:25
why are we suppressing one of our body's main defenses because inflammation is a
00:09:30
defense. So these are things that you learn as you get into this world that a
00:09:36
lot of what we think are problems are solutions waiting for support
00:09:41
because I think most people would think that is medicine and that is a food.
00:09:47
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
00:09:53
is that there's a spectrum. And we may talk about that raspberry
00:09:58
because it's red. And we might talk about the broccoli because it's green and there's oranges uh colors there. All
00:10:05
of these colors actually have properties that are actually quite valuable properties for our circulatory health,
00:10:12
for our gut health, our brain health. Um and when the more the science is looking
00:10:18
at it, the more amazing it's looking these things have medicinal properties.
00:10:23
So you're saying that this is medicine as well? Yes. Food be thy medicine is what old
00:10:29
hypocrates said 2,000 years ago, 2 and a half thousand years ago.
00:10:35
Is it the Chinese that are particularly big on herbal medicines? Yes. Almost any other anywhere. I mean
00:10:42
there's there's only five countries in the world that are not big on herbal medicines and I'll tell you who they are
00:10:47
and you can see if you can draw your own conclusions. UK is one, US is the second, Canada is the third,
00:10:54
Australia and New Zealand. Now, can you think of something that combi com binds them all together? They're originally
00:11:01
white Englishspeaking countries. If you go across to France, the channel
00:11:06
here, go to any pharmacy, most of the medicine stocks on the pharmacy are herbal. If you go to some parts of
00:11:13
Germany, you have to sit a herbal exam to get your license. And further east in
00:11:19
the old Soviet uh block where they couldn't afford the pharmaceutical industry, they had homegrown primarily
00:11:25
plant-based medicines much more widely going to Asia. It's the majority by far
00:11:32
and doctors and people working with plants and acupuncture in China work
00:11:38
together without thinking about it. And many doctors use plants in their med as
00:11:44
their medicines. Yeah. How different, cuz I've never really spent a significant amount of time in China. How different is the
00:11:50
perception of herbal medicines there than it is out on the streets of London?
00:11:55
They don't think twice about it. It's what they grow up with. Um they like a lot of people, we would say regretfully,
00:12:02
do seem to want to do more things like the west does. Um so they'd adopt more
00:12:08
western habits and as soon as you earn a bit of money you tend to adopt more western lifestyles and think that the
00:12:14
herbal thing is for your parents and grandparents. So there's still that trend even in Asia um but they start
00:12:21
from a much broader base of experience.
00:12:26
Why why should anyone care? You know I have ibuprofen at home. I have medicine
00:12:32
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
00:12:38
pills that I brought from the pharmacy. Why should anyone care about what we're going to talk about today? I suppose the
00:12:44
answer is in my practice. So, I see patients three sessions a week. And
00:12:50
these are people almost most of them have been around the block. They've had treatments for their conditions
00:12:56
sometimes for many years. They're often living with chronic complex conditions and they're sore. They're tired. their
00:13:03
energyy's gone. You know, they've been told that we can't just keep taking the pills. You know, we've done all the
00:13:08
tests, there's nothing else we can do. Time and time again, that's when the
00:13:14
cookie crumbles because then you realize the ibuprofen
00:13:19
and the quick pills ain't doing it anymore. There's a bigger health need
00:13:25
that needs somehow fixing. And that's when they come to me as a practitioner
00:13:31
and I give them things that they can see improving their health, their sleep, their eating, their whatever it is
00:13:37
that's not their energy levels, whatever it is that's not playing properly. We I
00:13:43
see myself as fine-tuning or upping the performance. Uh I'm not when someone
00:13:50
comes to me and they say I've got whatever it is, arthritis or skin disease or whatever, uh I will politely
00:13:56
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
00:14:02
misbehavior? What is the poor performance? Uh that explains why all
00:14:08
this happened. And often you find they had pneumonia at the age of three or they had glandular fever at the age of
00:14:14
15 or 16 and things took a turn then and you can see the trail and often what I'm
00:14:21
doing is going backwards and fixing things that weren't fixed back a long time ago working on digestion
00:14:28
particularly because that's where we work uh kidney function uh liver function you know circulation
00:14:35
you know up to the brain where we're dealing in that area. Um, so we're looking at the performance of the body
00:14:41
and it's only when it doesn't behave that you notice the need to doing it.
00:14:46
How many patients have you seen in your career, do you think? Thousands of patients, I would say upwards of 10,000 each for
00:14:54
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
00:15:02
running you know I'm actively treating and two couple hundred and what are the range of illnesses or
00:15:10
conditions that those patients have had and when you think about the most remarkable or most interesting case
00:15:15
studies the most reliable case studies that you have what are the conditions that are at the
00:15:21
center of those case studies have you got a medical encyclopedia anywhere I'm going I'm going to write down the
00:15:26
key ones. No, no. I mean, it's literally I've I don't know if I've seen everything in the medical encyclopedia, but I've seen
00:15:33
most things. I mean, literally everything comes in because mostly is chronic anyway when they come and see
00:15:39
me. And it can be anything. I mean, about a quarter of my patients are
00:15:45
living with cancer. So, we that's one big group. I'm not treating the cancer. I'm helping them to live better with
00:15:51
whatever it is they're dealing with. about another
00:15:56
at least a third a bit bit more living with chronic inflammatory disease, autoimmune diseases, Crohn's, ulcerative
00:16:04
colitis, psoriasis, um things that are more complicated than
00:16:10
you can shake a stick at. And again, you know, we're not dealing with the end
00:16:15
result. We're looking at what may be leading up to that and seeing if we can improve underlying functions. But
00:16:22
literally anything can come by. Is there particular case studies of
00:16:28
patients that you've worked with that stand out to you that you're most proud of or that were Eureka moments in your
00:16:35
own sort of journey? Most of my stories are like journeys. So
00:16:41
you see little steps and you you're with somebody often for a long time and you
00:16:46
just see changes in the way that they um they change over the weeks and months.
00:16:52
So you know to say I've got an instant Eureka moment. I' I pulled together a
00:16:58
few stories just you knowing I was going to come to them and you know just
00:17:03
they're a mly mix and in fact I made notes because it was sometimes better to
00:17:08
remind myself of the sort of things I did because each of these patients
00:17:14
will walk out with five or six or eight different plants and the reason I put
00:17:20
them together is because they have a a unique story. Um, so probably the one
00:17:26
with the most complex one is someone, all the names are changed by the way, someone called Heather who's 65 and she
00:17:32
had a really severe complex condition called irrima multififor which is a
00:17:37
complex skin disease that's really distressing, very upsetting.
00:17:42
What we know about it is is that it's linked possibly to other infections. Um, so we actually spotted myopplasma
00:17:49
pneumonia is likely implicated. She had previously had a lot of lung damage um
00:17:55
in her youth. She had early pneumonia and she was diagnosed with a chronic obstructive pulmonary thing,
00:18:02
bronchiacasis as it happened. Then she got CO badly and most of her trouble started after that.
00:18:09
She also had vitamin B12 deficiency, pericious anemia we call it, which is a
00:18:14
autoimmune problem. The gut lining stops the vitamin B12 being absorbed. Those
00:18:19
were in her background story. the lungs because it was the earliest and probably the main factor were first
00:18:27
my focus and the second was what was lining the stomach because most
00:18:32
inflammatory problems start down here. So I ended up giving her something that was a combination of remedies for the
00:18:39
gut lining and for the lungs and
00:18:45
almost within a week or so the itching of the her skin
00:18:52
subsided. I just happen to think that was the reason I remember it because it's it's unusual to get such quick
00:18:58
results in such a complex condition. But it's a reminder that if you can find the right button,
00:19:04
then quite big things can happen. I was lucky to find the right button. And progressively over the ensuing
00:19:13
few months, the skin problem disappeared to the extent that she was
00:19:19
my dream patient. She said, "I don't need your herbs anymore. That to me is my biggest reward that
00:19:27
they can move on. They don't need help anymore. It sticks in your mind because it was a
00:19:34
hugely demanding condition that got better without and it had been going for
00:19:40
a long time. It had been going three or four years by the time she saw me. Um,
00:19:45
and it resolved very quickly with what seemed to be totally irrelevant treatments. But they there was a
00:19:52
rationale for them. Karen 37 panic attacks, major anxiety problems.
00:20:00
Heaven knows there's a lot of that about uh it turns out that um and when she she
00:20:07
was hospitalized when she was 20 with jaundice which is a liver liver problem.
00:20:12
All the processing all the detox processes are in the liver. Uh it's the gateway from the digestion. It handles
00:20:20
emotions. It handles the immune system. It It's an amazing organ. It's self-correcting, by the way. So, it
00:20:26
fixes itself very quickly if you give it the right nudge. She had jaundice. So, immediately a little bell goes off
00:20:34
because and at a age when that could mean long-term liver damage, hepatitis.
00:20:40
Uh she's ended up with very little appetite. uh she feels full easily, gains weight easily and often feeling
00:20:47
nauseous which is definitely a sign of liver distress still
00:20:53
menstrual cycles very erratic. She had early COVID again another big
00:21:00
hammer hammer blow and this that the CO was before her main symptoms of panic
00:21:05
attacks set in. Uh so I use that as an example of the way in which what goes on
00:21:11
up here in the brain is linked with what goes on lower down in the gut.
00:21:18
You know interesting point when we were living in caves the best place to be was in the cave
00:21:26
cuz outside was dangerous. The only thing that got you out hunger.
00:21:31
And when we look at the way in which the cells are the the machinery inside the cell, we
00:21:38
find that the mechanisms managing anxiety are the same as the system
00:21:46
managing appetites and and food processing. So the idea of linking
00:21:51
anxiety with metabolism is basic. This was an ex exact answer. So the mix of
00:21:58
herbs that I gave her had nothing for the anxiety at all. It was all to do uh
00:22:04
with metabolism. And so the included milk thistle, barbar, uh an oriental herb called bup plurum, artich choke
00:22:11
leaf and an Indian remedy called gynema which is called sugar destroyer which which reduces your uh hank hankering for
00:22:19
sweet. First goal was to manage her sugar cravings because that seemed to be a key part of what she was saying. uh and to
00:22:27
improve her liver functions. This was very quick and she became more settled over several weeks and months. Then the
00:22:35
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
00:22:41
period. So we shifted to include women's remedies which were then included in the
00:22:47
mix to help manage the the hormonal e and flow around the menstrual cycle. and
00:22:55
um 3 months, which is the normal time for cycles to begin to turn, her cycles
00:23:00
began to steady and so did the rest of her symptoms. Nothing to do with anxiety, just dealing
00:23:07
with these core functions. So, there's a couple of examples of, you know, how we
00:23:13
approach things differently. You know, if Karen had gone to most other practitioners, she would have had
00:23:20
something for her nerves. I do really want to talk about you use the term wi women's herbs.
00:23:28
Women's Yeah, women's herbs. I do want to talk about that and I I do also want to talk about fertility and the menstrual cycle and things like PCOS because I'm super
00:23:34
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 on to that.
00:23:41
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
00:23:47
understand? Well, it's place to start plants cuz that's where you that's where they go. So tell me why what do I need to know
00:23:53
about this region the stomach the gut? Wow. In order to have a sort of foundational
00:24:00
knowledge so that we can then start talking about ibuprofen painkillers fevers all these kinds of things.
00:24:05
Well very simply we think our intelligence is up here.
00:24:10
You know we got a brain. Yeah. As soon as you swallow something until it comes out the other end. We have no
00:24:18
control over what goes on down there. decisions are being made as the food traverses down the tube and it's a long
00:24:25
tube. It's about 20 feet of small intestine that has to go around and then like another 2 or 3 ft of large
00:24:31
intestine. It used to take about 18 hours to go through and we now because
00:24:36
we sit and drew it take longer. But all that time intelligent decisions are being made by the digestive system. what
00:24:44
to do with this, what to do with that. And the lining of the gut is full of
00:24:51
sensors, receptors we call them, that are picking up chemical cues
00:24:57
and responding. So, as the food changes, this is digested. As the bile from the liver comes in, it's picking off these
00:25:06
signaling devices and switching on a whole series of metabolic hormonal all
00:25:12
sorts of other functions. All controlled major choreography going on here, you know, without us even knowing about it.
00:25:20
And then just when you thought this was wonderful, you had something called the microbiome.
00:25:26
Now when I was at school and it was a long time ago when I was doing medical sciences, oh yeah, there was there's the bowel flora and they help with
00:25:33
digestion, vitamin K, one or two other things, you know, they might be quite useful. Now
00:25:39
the microbiome runs the show and it's it's huge. You know, we thought we knew
00:25:44
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
00:25:50
microbiome. It's it's running a show. And the microbiome is the the billions
00:25:56
of bugs in our gut. You've got more of those little critters than we have of our own cells. So much
00:26:02
more. So they are huge. They got about 100 times as much genetic capacity as we
00:26:07
do. We've got more bugs in our gut than cells. Yes. So we're basically we're we're walking gut bags. Yes.
00:26:16
We're walking bacteria. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's more bacteria than there are us. I mean this is it's a bit
00:26:22
of a gobsmacking thought and you know obviously people want no no I mean the bugs will keep them there one of the big
00:26:29
issues of the day are antibiotics which we know are becoming a serious
00:26:35
health issue now you know the world health organization and others say very
00:26:40
seriously that antibiotic resistance you know antimicrobial resistance as they call it is the biggest threat we have
00:26:46
soon going into a hospital and getting an operation will be a real risk Because hospital-b born infections are
00:26:52
increasingly resistant to antibiotics. You know, we we're piling them in to us,
00:26:58
but also to the animals that we grow. Uh a lot of them are full of antibiotics. And that means that the diversity
00:27:06
of the microbiome is is being reduced. We've losing we
00:27:11
call biodiversity. There's a biodiversity issue in here. But even
00:27:16
with the diminished um flora that we have, they still pretty much run the
00:27:22
show. And a lot of the fruits and vegetables, particularly the ones with colors in them, actually feed those guys
00:27:30
down there and help them to perform better. And one good reason to, as we
00:27:35
say, eat the rainbow, just get those colors in. But yes, I mean, as you can see, if I start talking about the gut,
00:27:42
I'm not going to stop for the next month. On that point of antibiotics, they the
00:27:48
mechanism is that they kind of kill bacteria, right? So they're killing good bacteria as well in the process. Often
00:27:54
they have different range depending on the antibiotic, but yes, they will be cutting a sway through your gut flora
00:28:00
for sure, some more than others. I mean the point about antibiotics and we we did a big project with this ironically
00:28:08
just before co uh when I was working with pucker that uh tea people we put a
00:28:14
campaign together to find natural approaches to managing antibiotics or reduce the use of them.
00:28:21
Antibiotics are useless for anything viral. They don't do anything for a virus. But unfortunately people with
00:28:29
viral problems will still be given antibiotics mainly by a harassed doctor who just you know because they say give
00:28:35
me something doc you know for viruses mostly you just have to wait for the body to get rid of it but giving an
00:28:42
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
00:28:49
this country um posters saying antibiotics are no good for viruses.
00:28:54
Please don't ask your doctor for them. So for many of these things, coals and respiratory problems for example, there
00:29:00
are many spices, I mean some of the things on that plate there are particularly good for coals and viruses
00:29:07
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
00:29:14
antibiotic and use some of these home easy free or sometimes uh treatments um
00:29:21
to um uh to to uh use instead of the
00:29:27
antibiotics. When you say antibiotics are the most urgent health issue of the moment. Um, I
00:29:34
want to fully understand why you think it's so so urgent because we're going to develop a resistance which means that
00:29:41
we're more susceptible to disease. It's already happening and it's not me that's saying this is these are the guys who look after our health care for us
00:29:48
like the double the World Health Organization who are really getting close to panic about this issue uh
00:29:55
because already the number of people dying from antibiotic resistance
00:30:00
infections is beginning to rise. dramatically.
00:30:05
And new antibiotics, unfortunately, there's less financial incentive to
00:30:11
develop them because they're often handed out free by in various countries. So, you don't get the margins back and
00:30:17
uh the the uh pipeline of new antibiotics is not good. Uh so, all you
00:30:22
need to do is check on the World Health Organization to get the chapter and verse on that. It's it it's it's
00:30:29
actually quite frightening. I'm on the World Health Organization site now and um I found a definition of
00:30:36
antibiotic resistance. It's when bacteria stops responding to antibiotics and is mainly caused by overusing or
00:30:42
misusing antibiotics. In 2022, US doctors gave out about 236
00:30:48
million anti it. What? US doctors gave out 236 million
00:30:56
antibiotic prescriptions. roughly seven prescriptions for every 10
00:31:02
people. Studies show that at least roughly 30% of antibiotic prescriptions in the US aren't needed, especially in
00:31:08
places like doctor's offices and emergency rooms. In 2020, about 30 million antibiotic prescriptions were
00:31:15
given out in the UK. Children aged 0 to 14 made up 3.6 million of those. And in
00:31:21
2023, the World Health Organization declared antibiotic resistance one of the top global health threats and
00:31:26
estimated that it is responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and
00:31:32
and contributed to almost 5 million deaths. That was 2019. I can tell you uh that
00:31:39
the figures have risen dramatically since then.
00:31:44
So that's what people think you know and just on a personal basis you know you go
00:31:49
and you need an operation and you know that that's going to involve exposure to hospital infections
00:31:56
which is one of the most serious of the ones in the average hospital you know it's there some of the most lethal ones
00:32:04
there um increasingly that is going to be a risk
00:32:09
that you get something that you can't treat. You're not saying don't take antibiotics.
00:32:14
No, I'm saying take them carefully. Um, use them when you need them and not
00:32:22
otherwise. And I'm again, it's not me saying this is most responsible doctors would wish that their patients wouldn't
00:32:28
keep asking for them. H
00:32:34
so there's sort of three things that I've I've been able to ascertain as risks of misuse or overuse or
00:32:40
inappropriate use of antibiotics which is the impact on the gut microbiome. Um the you're contributing to the rise in
00:32:46
antibiotic resistance and those are the main things
00:32:51
I guess even with the diseases you get you'll be slower to heal because you're less if you've got that resistance. That
00:32:59
is one of the things that we do see particularly those who are long-term ill
00:33:04
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
00:33:11
that right and there's links to colaractyl cancers yeah according well that's because we're talking about
00:33:16
the microbiome you see so those are the cancers in the lower gut and we know that the microbiome is a major factor in
00:33:23
how well the gut is so things like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and cancer of the bowel very closely linked
00:33:31
to the state of the microbiome. Okay. So, are there alternatives on this
00:33:36
table or in the world of plants to antibiotics that I should maybe also
00:33:42
consider um instead of just jumping straight to antibiotics for everything that I experience?
00:33:47
Yes, if you got a serious gut or other infection, you may need the antibiotics.
00:33:54
So, let's put that straight away. But if you've got a cold, flu, virus, repres a
00:34:01
viral problem, particularly the airways, you a antibiotics will have no use at
00:34:08
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
00:34:15
small population of that of of the species of bacteria that's affected who are resistant to that. It's natural
00:34:23
selection, you know. So you have a thousand little bacteria, that's a small
00:34:28
amount by their terms, and you kill 90 999 of them. The one that survives will
00:34:35
then become two in 20 minutes and four in 40 minutes and suddenly become a new population. And you know, I I I duck
00:34:44
that bullet. And so that group of bacteria will already be resistant. So
00:34:49
we're creating resistance every time we use an antibiotic. So try let's try then
00:34:55
doing something else shall we? So let's say you've got a cold. You're feeling the cold. It's got a good
00:35:01
name by the way. So cold is one of the things you feel when you've got a cold.
00:35:06
And that's interesting because in former times we didn't have tests. We didn't have laboratories. We didn't have
00:35:12
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
00:35:18
cold, you often feel cold and you feel chills and you want to wrap
00:35:23
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
00:35:32
what you needed to do was to heat up. Now you take this fella. This is ginger.
00:35:41
It's grown widely around the world. in its original Asian form. It was made
00:35:46
extinct around the time of the Romans. So popular was it and ever since all the
00:35:52
ginger sense of this species uh has got going from rootstock because it no
00:35:57
longer seeds itself. So this has been the most valuable natural commodity ever
00:36:04
in its dried form worth more than its weight in gold. And you know the reason why all those Europeans ended up in Asia
00:36:11
running India and South the Dutch and the Indonesia and so on is because that's where these things came from.
00:36:17
That's where the spices came from. And so we decided you know like good capitalists to go and u control the
00:36:24
business. So ginger became very popular over here because we don't have nothing
00:36:30
like it over here. The nearest thing we got is horseradish which I promise you is no substitute for this. So, how do we
00:36:37
use this? We got a knob of ginger here about the size of your thumb. That's about a good dose. You grate it, fresh
00:36:45
ginger into a a a mug. Can you do that for me? We got a great I've got a grater for
00:36:51
you. So, um we've got here a piece of ginger the as I say about the size of your
00:36:57
thumb. The thumb's a good measure because it's your measure. So, if you're a small person, you'll have a small
00:37:03
thumb, but I'm a bigger person. So, I'm going to use And you literally, it's
00:37:08
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
00:37:14
grace nicely, doesn't it? Into a mug. And let's say that was the whole thumb.
00:37:19
I don't want to take up too much time on this. And then
00:37:24
the one thing that works brilliantly with ginger is cinnamon. Now, this is cinnamon you buy in any
00:37:31
shop. It comes in different forms. There's one from China called Cassia,
00:37:37
which looks like one big curled bark. Yeah. If you look at this one, you'll see that
00:37:43
it's tightly wrapped with lots of little curl, lots of little filaments in it.
00:37:48
That's the one you go for. It's got it's more aromatic. And you either grate that with, if you
00:37:53
got a spice mill, or you take a teaspoon of it. Um, let's say
00:38:01
that's a teaspoon full. And you put that in your
00:38:06
mug. So that's ginger and cinnamon. Ginger and cinnamon. That's it.
00:38:12
Then you add your hot water that there.
00:38:21
You're going for real one, right? Going for the real one. Good on you. Uh, at this point, a civ is
00:38:26
useful. Why? What for? cuz it's going to be it's full of oh bits
00:38:32
bits and then let's say this is this is a nice Japanese green tea mug but let's
00:38:38
say this is your mug and we'll pour a little bit
00:38:45
in there. You see all the stuff that you leave behind. Oh yeah. Okay.
00:38:54
And if you don't mind sharing a mug.
00:39:00
So, what's in here? This is just ginger and cinnamon. Just ginger and cinnamon. It's It's fairly weak.
00:39:06
Oh, it is nice, though. It's nice, isn't it? It is nice. Now, can you feel it warming already? Yes. Straight away.
00:39:12
It's really nice. Yeah. Now you see what what's happening there is that you
00:39:17
I mean ginger is an is an example of a group of remedies which includes
00:39:22
turmeric by the way and that's other root the other root there that's turmeric
00:39:28
um which normally you see in a yellow powder we might talk about that later and black pepper and chilies we got a
00:39:35
chili here which when you take them
00:39:41
you think you're burning your mouth don't The interesting thing is that
00:39:46
there's no burning. You can actually have full madras level
00:39:54
uh chili and no harm will be done to your lining because there's no burning
00:39:59
going on. What you're doing is you're stimulating the pain fibers. So you got pain fibers all the way
00:40:06
through the lining of the mouth. When you take a hot thing like ginger,
00:40:12
it's stimulating the pain fibers and immediately there's a what we call a reflex response which opens up the blood
00:40:20
vessels. It's called hyperemia. More blood and the vessels lining these
00:40:26
mucosa, the ones that you just swallowed and including a little bit up in the nasal passages are opening up. the mucus
00:40:35
cells producing mucus will loosen up and you get more runny mucus which is
00:40:41
helping to flush through the uh the grot on the mucosa and the main thing you
00:40:48
feel is the warmth. Mhm. And if you're dealing with something down here in the lungs, you'll actually
00:40:53
start bringing up more gunk up the airways. It's there's a natural
00:40:59
escalator that we use to that the body uses to get stuff out of the lungs that stimulated And the mixture of cinnamon
00:41:05
and ginger was created I think in heaven. I mean I think that it's such a natural compliment and anybody can do
00:41:12
that. And the point about it is that it's warming and in the old days that was the
00:41:20
key thing. You would didn't matter if you had a headache or a joint pain or a
00:41:27
menstrual cramp. If you wanted to put a hot water bottle on it or heat it up,
00:41:32
then that was a cold problem and putting a heating medicine would
00:41:38
begin to make the difference. So, you can use the same thing if you have a headache and you want to put a hot pack
00:41:44
on it. If you got a menstrual cramp and you want to put a hot water bottle on it, if you got a joint pain and you want
00:41:49
to put a a heating linament on it, you can use the same
00:41:54
thing. ginger just because it's heating and that's simple old medicine.
00:42:02
So, so when you're experiencing different types of pain or a cold then cinnamon and ginger are a good I think
00:42:09
my well only if it responds to heat. Now, if you want to put an ice pack on, I
00:42:15
mean the old doctors when someone came with a migraine would say, "Tell me, would you prefer a hot packer or an ice
00:42:21
pack for your migraine?" And migraine sufferers generally split 7030
00:42:27
preferring heat to 70, but a third of people with migraines actually want a
00:42:33
cold pack. You don't use ginger for that. You use cooling remedies, which we
00:42:38
might come on to later. Okay. My girlfriend, she drinks ginger tea all the time, almost every day.
00:42:44
Yeah, she likes the heat. She likes the heat. Yeah, she she drinks it before bed as well.
00:42:50
Can help with sleep if that's the way it goes. I mean, everyone people are different and there are some people who
00:42:58
can't take ginger at all because their stomach objects um or because it, you know, literally
00:43:04
heats them up too much. They get stimulated by it. Um, but that's where the individuality comes in.
00:43:11
Okay. So, any any condition where I might be looking for heat, ginger and cinnamon,
00:43:16
the first place to go. First place to go. Yeah, you could, if you wanted to be Texmex, you can take the chilies. Um,
00:43:23
you know, well, you know, that's a we think of them as a much more extreme version of the heating. and you know
00:43:30
remind ourselves it was only when the Europeans discovered Americas that
00:43:38
chilies became used over here. You know, can you imagine an Italian meal without,
00:43:43
you know, without tomatoes and chilies? But in the old days there were none of those because they all came from
00:43:49
America. Um but yeah, chilies were the American equivalent of ginger used for
00:43:55
the same purpose. So if someone comes to you and they say, "Simon, when shall I use chilies as a
00:44:04
form of medication?" What what would you say? First of all, I don't know yet.
00:44:09
And you know, if I'm dealing with someone at a distance, you know, online or on the phone or something, and they say, you know, what should I try? I
00:44:14
said, the first thing to do is you figure it out. You can start with herbal
00:44:20
teas. You are, are you? I'm going to drop it into the I'm going to drop it into here.
00:44:27
Is that a bad idea? Yeah. Yeah. No, go for it. But you'll you'll you should notice that's should
00:44:32
be quite a hot one. Uh I will ask suggest that they start with herbal teas because herbal teas are a very low dose.
00:44:39
Mhm. But they'll allow you to figure out what suits you. And you can divide, as I
00:44:46
hinting at earlier, old medicines were often divided into those that were more warming, that we would now call
00:44:52
stimulating circulation, and more cooling, which we would now translate as stimulating digestion.
00:45:00
And depending on which of those you prefer would really give me a clue. So
00:45:05
if you were looking at warming remedies, it could be ginger tea, it could be fennel tea, you know, that's a warming
00:45:11
remedy. Or it could be cinnamon or um any of the spices. Cardamon is one of my
00:45:17
favorites, by the way. Um this is I use cardamon. This is the cardamon pods
00:45:23
inside a little black seeds. Absolutely lovely taste. Do you know him? Do you know cardamon? Have you
00:45:29
tried it? Not really. No. Oh, have a bite of that. Just bite the seed. Yeah, just bite into it. You don't just
00:45:34
just get a hint of the taste. In many parts of the Middle East,
00:45:39
cardamon is one of the main flavors. Things like coffee and so on. Reminds me of um Oh, I was going to say
00:45:46
Indian food that I've had. Yes. Used a lot in India. And in China, it's a convolescent tonic.
00:45:54
So, they use it when people building up their digestion after being ill for a long time. They will often use cardamon.
00:46:01
It's one of my favorite remedies for that. when people really run low, their digestion isn't functioning. It was
00:46:07
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
00:46:13
warming, as I said before, but also sustaining and nourishing.
00:46:20
So, you ask them, do you prefer teas that are warming or would you like
00:46:26
something more cooling? You know, one of the most cooling remedies that people know about is this, which is mint.
00:46:37
That's spearmint. The best one is peppermint. It's got a lovely smell, hasn't it?
00:46:42
Yeah. That has always been thought of as cooling. And it's a simple test. Would you prefer
00:46:50
ginger or peppermint tea? And already you're beginning to narrow things down a bit. Mhm. The main cooling remedies
00:46:57
throughout history from you know the very beginning and in every part of the
00:47:03
world you'll find them saying exactly the same thing. The main cooling remedies so-called are the bitters
00:47:10
and they taste really bitter. When you say cooling you mean I feel hot
00:47:18
so I want something to cool me down. That's right. And there's certain conditions where I will feel I'll feel hot.
00:47:23
Fever. fever fever and they were often used to fever manage fever
00:47:28
and u what h you remember when we were young we were told if you've had a big
00:47:34
meal don't go swimming you weren't told that I can't swim so
00:47:40
there you go if that was one of the things that you know some of us in my generation at least were always remembered we were told you know if you
00:47:46
got a big meal it's not a good idea to go swim because you the blood's moving
00:47:51
into the digestion and you won't get nearly as much as you want where you need it in the limbs. Uh and that's you
00:47:59
know it is true when you are digesting a lot of blood investment shall we call it
00:48:04
is going into the digestive system because there's a lot of work needed to break down this food turn it into
00:48:10
something useful it is an investment you put a lot in get much more out but what it means is is that um
00:48:18
uh digestion is all about I'm just being a bit loose here with the language but
00:48:23
it's not about language it's like bringing blood into the core when you got a fever,
00:48:30
the blood's all charging around and your body temperature is going up, which is great because fever actually is a
00:48:37
defense measure. You know, when our body temperature rises by a couple of degrees, are the white blood cells, the
00:48:43
ones that are doing the leg work two or three times as active. So, fever is what
00:48:49
the body uses when it needs to bring out the big guys, bring out the fight.
00:48:54
There's a slight design problem. It was almost as though you know the creator
00:48:59
put a you know a purposeful fault in the system because a lot of fever comes from the gut you know they get gut infections
00:49:07
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
00:49:14
in more digestion if you like. So when you take a bitter,
00:49:19
when you're taking a bitter, you're actually triggering taste buds up here. A bitter a bitter something that tastes bitter.
00:49:25
Is are there any plants that are bitter? Yeah, a bitter plants are very common and were highly valued in the old world.
00:49:35
Um, in our times, probably the most bitter plant that people used in
00:49:40
European terms was something called wormwood. Now you may not be familiar with that
00:49:46
word but the French for wormwood is vermouth and you think of the use of a drink
00:49:52
before a meal. The idea was it was they used to call it an apperitif something that stimulated
00:49:57
your appetite. So they would use bitters to improve your appetite and a low level of
00:50:04
wormwood would be one of them. Dandelion and boerdo of two other bitters which we
00:50:12
now have as a soft drink you know particularly in America
00:50:17
and we know that bitters do switch on the appetite so we sometimes use them when appetite is poor
00:50:23
and you know there's all sorts of reasons why you got a low appetite but bitters can really help particular if
00:50:30
you're recovering from an illness um they can help with um getting the dig
00:50:35
digestion juices flowing and the appetite up because they bring blood to the digestive system. Well, they do all sorts of things
00:50:41
actually. When you switch on these receptors in the mouth, these taste buds, they hardwired and they produce hormones down here in the stomach that
00:50:49
switch on all sorts of things and effectively increase digestive activity which involves more blood coming into
00:50:55
the area. So, yes, let's imagine you're living in some part of, you know, the the desert area in the
00:51:02
Middle East. you know, you're eating a sheep or something that hasn't seen a refrigerator and it's a bit dodgy, you
00:51:09
know, and you think after a meal, you turn to something
00:51:15
easily available in that part of the world. It's a plant called cafe arabica, we call it coffee. You ground the coffee
00:51:23
into a sludge at the bottom, pour a bit of hot water, and drink that straight.
00:51:29
That's a bitter. So if you ever had an espresso without sugar, that's a bitter.
00:51:35
Okay? And that was used as a digestive. In other words, after you're eating, it
00:51:41
would help cope with some pretty rough food. So bitters were always seen to be
00:51:47
good for your digestion and appetite. And in fever, that actually meant lowering your body temperature. And
00:51:53
that's we can see that happening. you know it it means that you some of the anger out here just gets
00:52:00
sublanimated into digestion. So that was where the bitters got their cooling
00:52:05
reputation. And we can now laugh at this is all medieval nonsense. But the point
00:52:10
that I keep coming back to when I'm seeing patients, I start with that blank sheet of paper
00:52:16
is because the only test of what these do to you is to take it. And as you
00:52:23
notice with your ginger and cinnamon, you don't need long. You've got it there straight up. And you
00:52:29
know if I give a bitter to somebody uh and you know someone is really bitter
00:52:35
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00:53:42
On this point of antibiotics, um I've heard you talk about vitamin D, vitamin C, and zinc
00:53:48
as a potential alternative to jumping straight from not not straight alternative, but in
00:53:53
improving your natural resistance particularly to viruses and such like.
00:53:59
Okay. Um then there is evidence for both vitamin D and vitamin C but also zinc as
00:54:06
backups in ter in sub form supplement form uh that do seem to add to your
00:54:12
resilience in the face of infections. I'm quite concerned because you know I'm a I've got dark skin and uh in the
00:54:20
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
00:54:27
unquote supplements important do you think? What are the supplements that you think are imperative?
00:54:33
None. None. Not for mo for everybody, but there are certain situations. I think vitamin D is
00:54:40
a good one. And it's not just people with dark skin that have a vitamin D deficiency is pretty widespread in in
00:54:47
darker countries if we can call our weather and that um we know where there's not enough sun. uh vitamin D
00:54:53
deficiency is quite widespread and increasingly doctors do suggest you have vitamin D supplementation through the
00:54:59
winter particularly even just having a 15-minute outdoors with the sun will give you a fairly
00:55:06
hefty amount. Do you supplement? Not myself. No, I don't. I I don't haven't spotted a
00:55:14
need. Uh but that doesn't mean that I don't recommend supplements to people.
00:55:19
Well, there is a need. and garlic. We've got garlic there that
00:55:24
has a antibiotic role. Well, this is yeah garlic uh what used to be called
00:55:30
Russian penicellin and when after penicellin was invented they because some parts of the world they use garlic
00:55:37
instead of penicellin which was hard to come by originally and it was used in places
00:55:43
like the first world war to avoid some of the French foot and other problems that soldiers would get in those lousy
00:55:50
conditions. Garlic, when talking raw now, is a very powerful prebiotic. In
00:55:57
other words, it helps the gut flora, the good guys down here in the microbiome.
00:56:03
And there's evidence to show a lot of these other ones do as well, but garlic is particularly strong. And uh when I'm
00:56:11
dealing with a disrupted gut flora, a microbiome, I will sometimes refer to
00:56:17
raw garlic as a treatment. But you need to do it with a little care
00:56:24
because you know you don't want to lose too many friends. Why what's wrong with g is it
00:56:31
is the aroma you give out afterwards. So you know your your friends will be very polite but they'll rather wish you
00:56:37
hadn't. Um and some people find that it does upset you know when they swallow.
00:56:45
But I have a little trick which I call the garlic intensive which is when
00:56:50
everything is down the gut is in the state you maybe got a lung infection or
00:56:55
whatever and there's a lot of need for if you like an antibiotic type of
00:57:01
treatment raw garlic what you do is and for all sorts of reasons the Friday evening is
00:57:08
the best time to do this because you got the weekend ahead of you. You take one of those cloves.
00:57:15
It will first of all on that day you haven't eaten so much. So you don't have so much on the way. Then you take one of
00:57:22
these cloves, you peel it, chop it up small pieces and swallow it with water.
00:57:28
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
00:57:35
sure that that's okay. Your stomach's okay to go ahead. If it is, take another
00:57:41
clove, chop it up, swallow it. Another half hour later, take another clove. And if
00:57:48
you start at 6:00, by 10:00 in the evening, you've got eight cloves inside you.
00:57:54
Eight. And And what's that going to do? Well, that's the point. You You usually
00:57:59
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
00:58:07
garlic is coming out of all your pores. Incidentally, it's also coming out of your lungs. And you know, there was an
00:58:15
old trick where you used to be able to, if you had enough garlic, breathe on a petri dish in a laboratory with various
00:58:20
pathogens and you could kill them just with your breath. You know, it's the oil of garlic is a powerful antiseptic.
00:58:28
But what it's doing in the lower digestion is it seems the good guys down
00:58:33
there quite like it, but the bad guys, you know, in the old days we had garlic
00:58:38
was, you know, against the devil and it looks as though the bad guys down there don't like garlic. So just doing that
00:58:45
over a weekend can make a big difference to your good the good guys in the
00:58:52
microbiome. And if you got a low-level gut or lung infection, that can be really helpful. But that's, you know,
00:59:00
something you can do at home, but you don't want to do that too often. In fact, I would suggest that one garlic intensive is probably enough for most
00:59:06
people. So, prebiotic effects. It has an anti- microbial properties
00:59:13
um which are is it good for pain? Called it Russian penicellin. Is it?
00:59:18
Yeah. Well, it depends where the pain's coming from. Um, but if your pain is a cough or a chest infection, yes,
00:59:25
particularly particularly good for chest infections. Some people do use it for arthritic problems. Uh, it will depend
00:59:31
on what's causing the arthritis. I, you know, and I, it's very hard for me to say
00:59:37
one of these things will do it for everybody. It won't. It will do for in certain situations. And what we learn
00:59:44
when we're dealing with plants is that you're the you're the boss. You find out for yourself. All people like me do is
00:59:51
say, "Well, give this a try. This is worth trying. This is valuable. Why don't you give it a go?"
00:59:57
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
01:00:05
believe, just in the US alone. And the most common forms of chronic pain are conditions such as arthritis or
01:00:12
migraines or lower back pain or other types of nerve damage. Roughly 75 to 85%
01:00:18
of Americans will experience some form of back pain during their lives. When I think about this big array of plants
01:00:24
that are in front of me and other plants, what is what is the first place to go in your mind if you're dealing with chronic pain?
01:00:31
It depends again where it is. But let's take joints and back. Um you know where you've got a joint that's causing and
01:00:38
it's because it's inflamed. Yeah. So when you have inflammation, you
01:00:44
add itis to the name of the plant. So this is arthritis because it's the
01:00:49
inflammation of the the joint. Um you you have cyitis which is the bladder.
01:00:55
You have bronchitis if it's the lungs, gastritis if it's the stomach. So itis tells us there's an inflammation and
01:01:01
mostly with arthritis is an inflammation. And briefly, it's because there's junk
01:01:09
being dumped on the joint. The joints have got very poor circulation by design
01:01:15
because, you know, this surfaces being pressed against each other. And so the
01:01:20
tissue in the joint is cartilage, gristle in in if you're eating it. Um,
01:01:26
which is designed to survive with very poor circulation because you know when you've got two things pressing in,
01:01:31
there's not much room for blood than there. So if there is metabolic waste, let's
01:01:38
call it junk in the system, it's more likely to come out in these places where
01:01:44
there's poor circulation. Sometimes things is a bit like a U bend under a basin. You know, if there's any stuff in
01:01:50
the sink, it's going to come deposit there. So I think of joints as a bit like a U bend.
01:01:56
So the first thing that people did with a joint pain and inflammation of the joint was to help to clean the joint,
01:02:04
bring more blood into the area. And that's what the inflammation is doing.
01:02:09
It's hurts like Billy Ho. But what it's doing is bringing more blood in by brute
01:02:16
force to do what I was just saying. But if you were to put on a mustard plaster
01:02:23
or a Cayenne plaster, a Cayenne pepper plaster which you simply put on on the X
01:02:28
outside. Mhm. And you can buy these inarmacies and so on. It's called capsicum. Okay. So
01:02:34
capsent pig button. Um it's a standard prescription
01:02:39
dressing for a pain. What it does is it brings the blood in directly
01:02:46
and that means the inflammation doesn't have to do it and the inflammation is sore. What you're doing isn't. So by
01:02:53
definition you're reducing the pain level. Mhm. That's an example of using plants in a
01:02:59
creative way which people always did. They they used to do that back in the day.
01:03:04
Oh yes. Yeah. I mean, if you go to North America, the native populations would
01:03:09
regularly use Cayenne as their salve for bad joints. In Europe, it was mostly
01:03:17
mustard. Um, we're talking the yellow mustard, the one that's strong, used as a plaster over a joint. And if you've
01:03:25
got arthritis in your fingers, and this is something anyone can do with, you know, suffering the pain here, use a
01:03:31
mustard bath. put your fingers into a dilute warm solution of mustard and it's
01:03:38
amazing how quickly they ease up or you could put a plaster on the hip or whatever. Um people always did this.
01:03:46
Have you seen this work in your practice? Oh yes. And I often recommend it to patients and they keep reporting back.
01:03:52
It's really makes a difference. I think I worry about lower back pain because I spend so long sitting down and
01:03:58
I've got low back pain too. And I didn't use herbs very much for that.
01:04:04
What did you do? Well, it was a long story, but there was a very good uh West
01:04:09
African combo called OCBSA, which I saw back in the day when I had really bad
01:04:15
back and I got the music got so into me that I loosened up and began to jive and
01:04:22
dance around and realize that my back had gone and it stayed gone for decades. It's just unlocked a knot. So, that
01:04:29
wasn't any herb. That wasn't any plant. Dancing. dancing. I mean, letting the
01:04:35
music get into you. What's the difference? Well, you know, when you feel the music
01:04:41
running through you, you know, you're just moving in with the beat, you know, that loosens up a lot of knots. You
01:04:48
know, I don't just do plants. I, you know, I talk about breathing. I talk about exercises that you can do for
01:04:54
yourself. And uh sometimes when you got a joint pain, it's all about it's locked
01:05:01
and you can find ways of loosening
01:05:06
that joint. Ibuprofen. Yes, people reach for this all the time. I
01:05:12
mean, I was looking at some of the search trend data for ibuprofen and it is absolutely exploding.
01:05:19
Yes. Um that's the the search graph ibuprofen. Yeah. Um it is but is one of the most widely used
01:05:26
drugs in this country. M um it's obviously because it works and it's based on um a plant substance called
01:05:36
salic salicylic acid um which gave us aspirin
01:05:43
and we still use the basic molecule to create the what we call nonsteroidal
01:05:48
anti-inflammatory drugs or nsaides and ibuprofen is one of the most widely used of those and basically they cut the
01:05:56
inflammatory process just cut it and so the inflammation just
01:06:04
diminishes which is good right well if it gets rid of the pain it is
01:06:10
but there's a always a follow up question why was that inflammation necessary because inflammation is a
01:06:17
defense it's one of my most powerful defenses we have in the body
01:06:22
and whenever someone is saying I'm on I need ibuprofen My next question is what
01:06:28
can we do to reduce the need for the inflammation? So when I was talking about the arthritis I was saying this
01:06:36
junk shall we say being dumped on the joint can we help to relieve that? Can we go upstream and reduce some of the
01:06:43
metabolic strain? You know people eat sometimes the wrong food and sometimes increases arthritis. Uh you can improve
01:06:50
your arthritis by have switching to more plants very often. Um but there are other things that we can give that seem
01:06:56
to help reduce some of those pressures. But the pain might be somewhere else. It might be linked to a full-blown disease,
01:07:05
you know, and in that case, you know, using anti-inflammatories is the only thing you can do. But if there is a way
01:07:13
in which we can help reduce the need for that inflammation in the first place, I would much prefer to do that than just
01:07:20
suppress a natural defense. We we tend to think of inflammation as the enemy.
01:07:25
We do. And I think we're wrong. We think of it as the disease itself.
01:07:30
We are wrong. It's the consequence of a problem. And it's inflammation itself is
01:07:36
a healthy response. It's when we bring out, you know, I sometimes use military
01:07:41
language here. And there's a bunch of white blood cells that I liken to Marines. You know, these these are guys
01:07:48
who when they're working well, they just go in and do the job. They don't sort of
01:07:53
figure it out. They don't ask questions. They just go and do the job. We got a whole bunch of white blood cells that
01:07:58
are bit like that. They just we call neutrfils. There's various others of
01:08:04
that group and they just go in and whack them. Inflammation is bringing those guys out
01:08:09
faster and harder. So, we're bringing in more of the marines if you like to
01:08:15
finish the job. What's wrong with that? You know, that's what we want to do. It happens to be sore.
01:08:22
Then if they don't do the job and the junk or the problem keeps piling in, then the
01:08:29
marines become the problem and then we use the ibuprofen to shut them up. But
01:08:34
as I said, there's always a question, you know, why are we what's what's the consequence of stopping this internal
01:08:42
cleansing process that uh is so important. So inflammation is not the
01:08:49
enemy. Inflammation is the defense measure that can sometimes overstay its
01:08:54
welcome. I had an injury in my ankle a couple of couple of months back because I I pulled some some of the ligaments
01:09:00
down there and my ankle was swelled up and I was getting conflicting information from people about the
01:09:06
inflammation because I had this big football game coming up this for this charity match called soccerate at Old Trafford and I had one of my physios
01:09:13
telling me to apply the ice thing and take anti-inflammatories and I had another one telling me something else
01:09:19
about the inflammation that actually I didn't want to combat the inflammation because it was doing its job and so I
01:09:25
it's quite difficult to navigate whether one should let inflammation stay or if I
01:09:31
should be taking anti-inflammatories or ibuprofen. Um well if you got a match to you sometimes
01:09:37
need something just to get you match fit or match acceptable. Um but if it's a
01:09:42
short-term we call it acute inflammation then overwhelmingly the advice is don't
01:09:48
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
01:09:55
so on and after a while it sorts itself out that's this miracle I called talked
01:10:00
about earlier the body heals itself all the time that's inflammation doing its job properly cleaning out the marines go
01:10:08
in clear all the stuff out back to their barracks back to normal. That's great. It's only
01:10:15
if, as I said, the junk keeps piling in and the job doesn't get finished and we
01:10:20
call that chronic inflammation. That's when you sometimes need a bit of help.
01:10:26
And chronic inflammation is often caused by something further upstream, right?
01:10:31
So, you try and think about what's causing it upstream. Exactly. So, and what tends to be the perpetrator upstream?
01:10:37
The gut is where most of these things begin because when you think about it,
01:10:42
that's where we take most foreign material. Almost all of it has to be dealt with by the gut. So that's where
01:10:50
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
01:10:57
lining of the gut because that's where the action is. That's where all the foreign stuff is. So if there's a
01:11:02
disruption there, it's that's the first place to begin and because it's usually
01:11:08
the best place to begin. Uh and if we add the what we talked about the microbiome as another big factor, then
01:11:15
there's plenty to work be done with down there. So if it's a chronic inflammation, I will spend a lot of time
01:11:22
looking at what might be going on down there. And what's the typical suggestion if it is a a gut related problem? Well, the
01:11:30
first thing is to do is to u get the best food you can down there, which is
01:11:35
mostly plant-based. Um, I mean, there are exceptions to that. Uh, but in if
01:11:41
we're looking at restoring your good health down here, the gut does seem to
01:11:46
like plants at this point. Um, so we talk about, you know, having a wide
01:11:51
range of plants. you know the the current uh advice from one or two people
01:11:57
is that you would aim to have 30 different types of plant per week you know just to get the diversity because
01:12:03
we don't know which one you need so why don't give as much difference as you can and you know there
01:12:11
you know people think you can't afford to eat healthily all I would suggest is
01:12:17
that you go and travel to somewhere like India or anywhere in Asia where they eat
01:12:23
pretty much a lot of plants, mostly plants for pennies. You know, you can
01:12:29
make a healthy meal by if you know how to cook by just mixing some of these simple the dahs and the the root
01:12:36
vegetables and the other vegetables easily mixed together. A few spices in there absolutely delicious and your gut
01:12:46
and your microbiome will be jumping with glee. You talk about eating your rainbow.
01:12:51
Yes. What does that mean? Means as many colors as you can fit in. Um, literally because each color is
01:12:59
cause is produced by a constituent of plants. Many of them we call polyphenols
01:13:06
which we know have a range of effects on all sorts of
01:13:12
mainly on the microbiome again because they're all in different ways prebiotic. They all help good guys prosper down
01:13:19
there. But then after the microbiome is processed them, which is interesting, the microbiome is is critical for
01:13:28
processing polyphenols, they don't get absorbed unless the microbiome breaks them up already. So
01:13:35
the benefits of the colors depend on the good guys down here. M when they get into the blood they start
01:13:41
doing all sorts of wonderful things to the lining of the blood vessels for example up into the brain where we got a
01:13:48
what we call bloodb brain barrier which is actually a very exciting interface.
01:13:53
The polyphenols the colors all have
01:13:59
wellestablished mechanisms that improve the health all around the body. So
01:14:05
simple. If you got a child who used to say, "Eat your greens." We now say, "Eat your rainbow. The more different colors,
01:14:11
the better." I wonder if that's why they put so many artificial dyes in junk food. Well, I wish they wouldn't
01:14:17
to try and trick our brains into thinking it's I don't know. No, there's nothing quite like the original.
01:14:22
In terms of fruit, what are your favorite fruits to sort of recommend people to eat and why?
01:14:28
probably the the if you wanted to have a you know a top list the darker the color
01:14:34
the better. So, we talk about purples and I'm pleased to see that uh your team
01:14:39
has found a purple carrot there and we remind ourselves that most
01:14:45
vegetables were purple once upon a time. If you think of maze, you know, in the
01:14:50
the sweet corn and the maze that you grow in the Americas, that mostly was originally purple and we bred the purple
01:14:57
out because it didn't look so appetizing. And we're probably purple deficient.
01:15:02
Uh I think we could do with more purple in our lives because the
01:15:07
purple and blue color is a something called anthocyanins. These are types of
01:15:13
polyphenol and they're particularly powerful particularly with the blood supply. And we're talking about things
01:15:19
like eyesight and brain health and circulatory health, blood pressure
01:15:25
control and all those sort of things can be improved just by having more purple in our lives. So we got beetroot.
01:15:31
That'll do. We got the berries. Uh, red grapes are probably more We got the
01:15:37
Yeah, we got the red grapes here. That's got more of these than the yellow that the grapes do. Um, so I would start with
01:15:44
the reds and purples. You said you think we're purple deficient. Yeah. I mean, just, you know, think of
01:15:51
something interesting to say, but it's probably something in there.
01:15:58
And in terms of vegetables, what are your favorite go-to vegetables that that you'd recommend I eat?
01:16:03
Uh, start with the roots. The root vegetables, the carrots, the beetroots, the parsnips,
01:16:08
the the various other root vegetables out there, not all of which are people's favorites, but they have uh fiber uh
01:16:17
sort of starch in them which is particularly prebiotic
01:16:22
and some of the most powerful prebiotics are the root vegetables. So those are definitely worth having the greens
01:16:29
obviously and broccoli and interestingly I found a purple one uh which are easily
01:16:34
enough to get. So you know you can get the purple or the green you know obviously there's a value in the in the
01:16:40
purple there. Uh but any broccoli, any of the cabbage family is full of all
01:16:45
sorts of other ingredients uh that have their own benefits in all sorts of ways,
01:16:51
metabolism, gut, hormonal, blood supply. So greens, roots, and the big one in
01:17:01
most people's lives are the grains. you know, wheat for example, but cereals,
01:17:07
lentils, dahl, uh, peas and beans, uh, all of these have their own benefits,
01:17:14
particularly for the microbiome. You know, again, I don't know exactly
01:17:19
what even I need, let alone what anyone else needs. So, the best thing to do is to have as much diversity as possible.
01:17:27
What is your diet? Are you mix a vegan? Do you eat meat? Yeah. have um you know I just have a
01:17:34
broad range of most humans have eaten which is a mixture of things. Uh I do
01:17:40
obviously many of my patients are vegans and they can you can live quite well with them. You have to add a few extra
01:17:46
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
01:17:53
planton diet. Um, but you know, who am I to say that an Inuit in the Arctic who
01:18:02
never sees any vegetable ever and only lives on traditionally only lives on
01:18:08
seal and whale meat and blubber is any less healthy than someone in Thailand
01:18:14
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
01:18:21
one food for everybody. I think we would we were discussing before we started recording that I'm currently on a
01:18:26
ketosis diet. The keto diet. Keto diet. Yes. Which basically means that I'm extremely
01:18:31
low carb in my diet. Yes. Basically consuming no sugar. Um what do you think of the keto diet?
01:18:39
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
01:18:44
from it. um because it I mean sugars are
01:18:50
you know they're in a lot of vegetable material and of course unfortunately we have sugar now as an added
01:18:55
um to our diets um they tend to slow down various parts of your metabolism they tend to make metabolism a bit more
01:19:02
like hard work and so if you take those out and some of the more sugar producing
01:19:07
carbs then you're freeing up a lot of energy. So, a lot of people on keto toe
01:19:13
diets find that, you know, they're sharper. That's probably what you do. Um, but there are potential downsides.
01:19:22
Interestingly, you know, I mean, the first thought was, well, that can't be very good for your microbiome because they rely on um
01:19:29
vegetable material to a large part. But when we've looked at the microbiome of
01:19:34
keto d after keto diets, it's not as it's actually there's some good guys that reemerge with a keto diet. So, it's
01:19:42
a mixed bag. The only thing is is that when you don't have as many plants in
01:19:48
your diet, then there's slightly more strain on things like liver and kidney function. So, someone who's taking keto
01:19:54
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
01:20:01
around kidney. Um because if there's a lot more of the animal-based material in
01:20:06
the in food, then that's can be more hard work for the kidney. So it's always
01:20:12
worth checking that those functions are doing well. But I come back to the point
01:20:17
there is no onesizefits all. We are omnivores. We're designed to eat almost
01:20:23
anything. My girlfriend, she's doing keto as well and she noticed that her menstrual cycle
01:20:29
became more regular. Yes. Which she was like shocked by it. And she's really done a lot of AB testing
01:20:34
over the the last couple of years. And whenever she's in a ke ketogenic diet, very low carb, very low sugar diet for 6
01:20:42
weeks. She was shocked that she could predict the day when her period would come. And outside of that, sometimes
01:20:50
it's really varying. Yeah. Well, there's a very good point about keto. One of the most effective
01:20:56
things that keto does is it reduces insulin resistance,
01:21:01
which is something that most of us suffer as we get older and larger, as we get through our life. Insulin is the
01:21:08
hormone that packs sugar away into this into the tissues and into the liver. And
01:21:15
thank God because if we didn't have uh insulin, we would have diabetes.
01:21:21
um insulin resistance is growing and that leads to
01:21:28
diabetes increasingly and so diabetes is in many most parts of the world now is becoming a another big health issue and
01:21:35
it's mainly because we have too many carbs too much sugar in the diet because whenever we eat sugar particularly sugar
01:21:42
there's more work for the insulin to do so it gets more likely to get run down and tired when you're on a keto diet
01:21:49
it's been observed that you're you get more insulin sensitive.
01:21:55
So in other words, insulin works better. So you can reverse early stages of diabetes by switching to a keto for
01:22:01
example. Now interestingly many menstrual problems are linked to insulin
01:22:09
resistance and there's something called PCOS which affects quite a lot of women now
01:22:16
uh in which the ovaries basically produce more hormone producing cysts
01:22:21
polycystic ovary syndrome and that is increasingly linked with insulin
01:22:27
resistance. So it affects people who are more likely to be in the pre-diabetic
01:22:33
phase or putting on weight and that sort of thing. The insulin resistance itself switches
01:22:40
the hormone balance and the menstrual cycle is a wonderful
01:22:46
choreography. I mean when you think about it, you know, all around the world is a it's a pretty predictable cycle and
01:22:53
it runs itself. But if there's something insulin resistant getting in the way,
01:22:58
then that can disrupt the hormone. So someone like your girlfriend might find
01:23:04
that switching to a keto diet abolishes or reduces that disruptor.
01:23:10
Yeah. Yeah. I was just reading some stats on that said 80% of women with PCOS have some degree of insulin
01:23:16
resistance, even those who aren't overweight. And my girlfriend does have PCOS, which she's talked about publicly
01:23:21
before. So, it's no surprise that uh that when she comes off, she takes sugar out of her diet, her menstrual cycle
01:23:29
seems to fall back in line. And I think there's also links to insulin resistance, PCOS, and I guess ovulation,
01:23:36
infertility. Yes, it is. So, I think uh I mean the the modern woman, the modern man for
01:23:42
that matter, has a whole string of burdens to carry because we have too much sugar. I mean when you think about
01:23:48
it you know sugar only emerged as a common ingredient you know 140 years ago
01:23:54
150 years ago up till that time only very rich people could afford it then we had the industrial sugar production and
01:24:03
a lot of slaves over in the Americas producing vast amounts of cane sugar
01:24:08
that is a modern phenomenon and our bodies were designed to deal with the amount of sugar that we now feed it and
01:24:15
it does put a stress on the system and insulin is one of the guys caught in the mix.
01:24:21
So if you're trying to have kids, which we are now, I guess you want to remove
01:24:26
the uh if that's a factor, I would be looking at reducing your sugar intake at the very least. Yeah. I mean, we spend I
01:24:34
spend a lot of time with uh women who are having difficulty conceiving and you
01:24:40
know, I think I have about 13 herb babies. you know, in other words, babies
01:24:47
who were born with women who were having challenges getting pregnant. And that
01:24:53
was mainly, I think, because we were stabilizing the menstrual cycle and making the fertile phase a bit more
01:25:00
productive. And what do you what do you say to those women? You you what do you prescribe? I
01:25:06
guess I do. I mean, that's my business. I will be prescribing. So, you see there's some
01:25:11
bottles there. uh these are the sort of things that we use in the practice. Um
01:25:16
so I've given I've got a couple here that um just you know the sense the smell
01:25:23
sense. So this is fennel which we all think we know but these are very strong
01:25:30
extractions that only practitioners use. So these are practitioner own supplies
01:25:35
and when you smell it you realize that the that they are strong.
01:25:41
Wow. So, a teaspoon of that is a really powerful. Now, if you really want
01:25:49
to realize the power of herbs, this is a remedy called echynia. And a
01:25:57
lot of people know about echgonia and it's a major supplement. This is a root
01:26:03
extraction from a variety of a species of echania called Angustifolia. And I'm just going to put a little bit
01:26:09
in there. I'm going to test it myself before I give it to you. So, I'm not poisoning you.
01:26:16
So, you just take a little
01:26:23
Can I put on my skin or put it on? Or did you want me to shop that? Just lick it.
01:26:30
Whoa. Wow.
01:26:36
So, these are the sort of things. This is just a particularly striking example of the sort of things that we use in the
01:26:43
practice. And so some of the the women that come to me, for example, with
01:26:48
fertility or menstrual problems will go out with a mix of herbs drawn like this from about 100 or so different plants
01:26:56
that I have on the shelves. And they are often, as I said earlier,
01:27:02
women remedies developed by women. Um, and
01:27:08
incidentally, North America is is a prime site for some rarely powerful
01:27:13
women's remedies. Um, and interestingly, when you look at them, you find they
01:27:19
contain plants equivalent of steroids. They're not steroids, but they seem to interact with our own hormone mechanism.
01:27:27
And some of them were particularly good at retiming the menstrual cycle. And the the one or
01:27:33
two that were particularly warned women should not take unless they wish to be pregnant. So effective were they? What's
01:27:40
that? What's that doing to your still right on the edge of my tongue? It's like it's it's more so basically
01:27:45
for anyone that can't see what we're doing cuz you're listening on audio. He put a little drop of this uh solution
01:27:50
echania echania on my finger and I licked it off my finger and at first I was like there
01:27:57
was this sort of taste journey which was interesting. I think it kind of tastes like Maggie seasoning, some kind of food seasoning. I'm now 60 seconds later and
01:28:05
I can still It's like got more intense. It's a bit like fireworks going off. Yeah, it's like fireworks going off in my mouth and all it was was a little
01:28:11
lick of it. Um, now you see what we use that for is for
01:28:17
infections or problems of the mouth and the throat particularly. What what's it doing? Well, you know,
01:28:23
you have to use bit of unscientific language here, but remember I talked about the Marines, you know, the guys
01:28:29
who do all the battling for us. A lot of them hang out. Their barracks are in the throat. You know, we got tonsils, we got addenoids, we got the glands that run
01:28:36
down our neck here that sometimes get swelled up, you know, if we got an infection in this area. Yeah. You have
01:28:42
to take something to take the It sometimes gets in the way of talking as well. And I was hesitating before
01:28:49
giving it to you. didn't want to stop you in your in your steps. But what's that that tingling
01:28:55
cut a as I said a rather confusing story short those are constituents that almost
01:29:00
seem to talk directly to those white blood cells and make them more active.
01:29:08
And so echynia in that form particularly works primarily on the front line shall
01:29:15
we call it of our immune system. these battlers that sit up there and so often
01:29:23
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
01:29:31
kick off all sorts of benefits and as you've just discovered it doesn't take long. No m So who should be thinking about
01:29:38
echynasia? Certainly if you got an upper respiratory problem and you you do need
01:29:45
to get that tingle if you want to get that particular effect. I mean you can have echgonia in other forms pills and
01:29:51
tablets and so on. Uh and there are some which don't have that that tingle factor. They got other elements to it
01:29:57
but for the tingle factor it's anything to do with an infection that has a link
01:30:02
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
01:30:09
up here as well. But it could be a sinus problem. It could be an middle ear problem. It could be a throat problem.
01:30:15
It could be a gum problem. You know, we got all sorts of gum problems and all sorts of problems we have with mouth.
01:30:22
We've got a microbiome up here as well. Um, this can with one or two other
01:30:27
things. Some of the plants we use in this form contain resins. An example is uh frankincense. We got
01:30:35
some tablets there. These ones. Yeah. otherwise known as Boswelia. And this just comes in a you know in in the
01:30:43
form of tablets. And uh they just look like any other tablets
01:30:48
except they're sort of greeny yellow color because that's just ground up um
01:30:55
uh resin. Now resin we know about that because it's the sort of thing you get
01:31:00
on out of pine trees. You know that very tacky stuff. All we need to do is
01:31:06
remember the Bible story. There were three gifts that the baby Jesus got, didn't he, for his birthday
01:31:12
from those wise men. One was gold. Fair enough. The other two were resins. Myrrh
01:31:17
and frankincense. This is the frankincense. I use myrrh in a liquid form. And you
01:31:24
almost like you're lining the mouth with uh this resin. You know, it's
01:31:31
when you put some myrrh on the mouth, you definitely feel the the mucos are
01:31:38
firing up. And it was most widely used um medicine. And the reason why it was
01:31:44
so valued in the in those days by the three wise men is because my was there
01:31:50
first of all, they had to bring it out of Africa, you know, which is where he comes from. Um remember the Queen of
01:31:57
Sheba in who married Solomon you know in the old uh Bible story Queen of Sheba
01:32:03
had the trade routes of East East Africa sorted. So Solomon married wisely by
01:32:08
marrying the Queen of Sheba because she was she had the monopoly on um on myrrh
01:32:14
particularly and on frankincense. And those an echgonia
01:32:19
maybe with a licorice to help it work well are amazing at reducing infections
01:32:26
in this area in the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and the areas around.
01:32:33
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daccircle.com. I will speak to you then.
01:34:38
Do you do you think that um things like water fasts, people are doing a lot of
01:34:43
these sort of water fasts and these sort of 7-day prolonged fasts are effective medicines?
01:34:50
Uh my usual answer when I'm faced with a question and and someone needed to answer from is to think back a bit. What
01:34:56
did humans evolve to do? And when we were hunter gatherers, which you know was 3 or 400,000 years, we were hunter
01:35:03
gatherers. And now what we're doing now is a tiny. But we evolved to eat
01:35:09
intermittently. You know, when you're a hunter gatherer, there are times when you're not eating at all, especially offseason, and you
01:35:15
get very hungry and then you eat a lot and you have a big feast. So I think our
01:35:21
systems were designed to be intermittent fasting and fasting is probably part of our gene makeup. You know that's what we
01:35:28
were in a sense meant to do. So the fundamental principle of fasting is probably right on.
01:35:36
issue is is that sometimes if your metabolism, your digestion, your
01:35:41
hormones or other functions are not at prime place, fasting, particularly if
01:35:48
it's extended, can actually be damaging. So, you do need a bit of advice if
01:35:53
you're going down that route just to make sure it's okay for you. And at the start of the conversation,
01:35:59
you referenced that you deal with a lot of cancer patients. So I think you said one/3 about a third of my a quarter maybe a
01:36:06
quarter to a third yeah are living with cancer living with cancer which is something that's relatively new
01:36:12
remember because I mean that is a testament to what modern medicine has
01:36:18
done because when I started out all those decades ago most people died with
01:36:23
cancer were increasingly getting people living with cancer for extended periods of time and
01:36:30
you know the cancer is not I mean we there are things we can do to help and there is evidence to show that we can
01:36:36
help reduce the risk at least and if not sometimes the um virilence of cancer but
01:36:43
mostly what we're doing is helping people to function better while they've been through chemo or various other
01:36:50
treatments while they've still recovering from the cancer and its effects and it could be digestion could
01:36:55
be things like sleep it could be you know all sorts of other things that we can do to help. So there's there's the
01:37:01
preventative element which is doing things within your sort of lifestyle choices, your diet to reduce the the
01:37:07
likelihood you'll get cancer. But then once you have it, there's ways you can use herbs and other sort of remedies to
01:37:14
better deal with life life generally. When you when you think
01:37:20
about cancer prevention, is it do you think that one of the most powerful things we can do is to focus on what
01:37:26
we're putting inside our bodies? Yes. And you know, we've learned about cigarettes a long time ago. And there
01:37:31
are other foods that have got a higher risk of cancer. We talk about, you know,
01:37:37
processed meats for example has increasingly been seen as a cancer risk. U but I suggest that the main risk in
01:37:43
cancer is just poor diets generally. Too much fat, too much carbs, too much sugar
01:37:49
all at once usually. Um and that strains the body in a way it wasn't meant. And
01:37:55
there is evidence to show that by correcting poor diet you can prevent um
01:38:00
cancer increasingly that's accepted. I'm pretty sure that the cardiovascular diseases are the single biggest killer.
01:38:07
Yes. Still cardiovascular in the west we're talking about so developed countries
01:38:12
catching up I'm afraid in other parts of the world where they adopt more western
01:38:18
lifestyles. Uh but that's a combination of food and poor low level of exercise.
01:38:24
um that we're putting our finger on there is also cardiovascular disease is
01:38:30
a is another form of long-term inflammation and increasingly that's
01:38:35
been understood. You know, it's not just fat or cholesterol or blood pressure.
01:38:40
It's an inflammatory mechanism going on that's causing the harm and that's
01:38:45
increasingly accepted by cardiologists and such. So, if I'm if I'm trying to
01:38:51
reduce my chances of having some kind of heart related issue, are there any herbs or any products here that you think are
01:38:57
beneficial? Mostly, it's the food. When we're talking about long-term cardiovascular health, uh we have plants that we use uh
01:39:05
to manage cardiac cardiovascular problems. I mean the classic that a lot of people know
01:39:11
about is the Hawthorne or the Mayflower. Uh but the Hawthorne particularly the flour and the leaf used to be a regular
01:39:20
home remedy that people used to use and drink as a tea uh for all sorts of reasons. You know managing fevers and
01:39:27
all sorts of things like that. But we can we can now see regular hawthornne consumption, hawthornne leaf consumption
01:39:35
as a preventative for some of the problems of cardiovascular. Just as an example, I would I would use spices as
01:39:41
my main go-to to help to fend off cardiovascular problems because they all
01:39:46
have vascular benefits. Spices as in as in
01:39:52
the ginger, the cinnamon we talked about, but here's turmeric. And this is something we don't usually see in but if
01:39:59
you can see there's in fact if you cut that with your knife there I've just cut it open.
01:40:05
Yeah. You'll see it's bright. Yeah. It's bright orange. That's the kurcumin
01:40:11
that people use as a supplement. I've got kurcumin at home. I was um I was advised to use that when I pulled
01:40:18
the ligaments in my ankle. Yes. It's an anti-inflammatory, isn't it? You can see a little bit why I don't
01:40:24
like using anti-inflammatory because I like inflammation as a friend. So what I prefer to talk about is they modulate or
01:40:30
support or manage inflammation. Uh but turmeric is an extraordinary remedy and
01:40:37
here's an interesting story. We talk about we need kurcumin that from turmeric and you'll get a supplement
01:40:43
saying you know my co my turmeric's got more kurcumin than yours and it's more available. The the interesting point is
01:40:51
that kurcumin is not absorbed by into the body at all about one or two% maybe
01:40:57
the rest stays stubbornly in the gut and there's a very good reason for that
01:41:04
because in any high dose kuramin is toxic. So there's a good reason for it staying
01:41:09
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
01:41:16
pepper, you might get from 1 or 2% to 2 to 3%, you know, but it's still small
01:41:22
beer compared with the amount of turmeric that we uh take uh the amounts
01:41:27
of kurcumin that we take in in an ordinary curry. So what's going on? And that what is going on is that kurcamin
01:41:34
and in and turmeric is one of the best remedies we have for microbiome.
01:41:41
There's a conversation going on. The turmeric is encouraging the good guys. The good guys are breaking turmeric and
01:41:48
kurcumin down into more available materials which are active. it belongs in the gut and its
01:41:55
inflammatory modulating effects come mostly from the products of the
01:42:01
microbiome working on the kurcumin and moving through the body that way. So
01:42:07
it's a wonderful lesson in you know the that the medicine actually relies in
01:42:13
this case almost entirely on a good microbiome.
01:42:20
an effect that is reduced by the way if you have a lot of antibiotics. Okay, so my microbiome is really the
01:42:27
processing center for many of these things. And if I have a bad gut
01:42:32
microbiome because I've been eating the wrong foods and I haven't had diversity of plants, then even if I take some of
01:42:38
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
01:42:45
true. We talk about uh we the the the we got probiotics which is the yogurts and
01:42:51
the kimchi and the cafiers and so on which are actually living organisms. They have to get through the stomach by
01:42:57
the way which is quite a hard deal because the stomach's job is to sterilize foods but some of them will
01:43:03
get through. Those are the probiotics. The prebiotics are what we've been talking about here. The foods that will
01:43:10
encourage the good guys in the microbiome. We got a new kit on the block called postbiotics.
01:43:16
Mhm. Which is now an industrial term used for killed bacteria which are then given as
01:43:22
a medicine. But technically a postbiotic is anything that the bacteria produce.
01:43:27
Mhm. And we're learning that more and more of what we eat, particularly from the plant
01:43:33
side, is converted by the microbiome into medicines.
01:43:39
And all those polyphenols and the colorings and so on are in that group. So a lot of the benefits of polyphenols
01:43:45
are postbiotic benefits. There was a study done in 2007 that
01:43:50
showed can't even say it. Curcumin that shows curcumin upregulates anti-
01:43:58
oxidant defenses and downregulates oxidative stress. Yeah. There was a study done in 2016
01:44:05
which is a meta analysis of random control trials found curcuminum comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain
01:44:12
relief. Answers your earlier question, doesn't it? And there's a lot of uh lots of studies
01:44:18
that show that it's effective for people that have things like arthritis and joint pains.
01:44:24
Yeah, that was leaving the best to last. Yeah, there there's a lot of work on
01:44:31
kurcamin and turmeric. As I say, a lot of people get confused because they think the it only works if you absorb it
01:44:37
into the blood. And I'm saying that actually you don't. What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it
01:44:43
useful. And there's early preclinical studies taking place around the impact it can
01:44:49
have with cancers. And there's promising but early studies showing the impact that curcumin that comes from turmeric
01:44:55
can have on brain health. Yes. Well, that's definitely a big story, but just on the when you say
01:45:01
preclinical, that usually mean that it does mean laboratory. So that's a test tubes and b rats and other animals.
01:45:09
None of those tell us what happens when we put it in a human. Put it in the human. So all a
01:45:14
preclinical study will do is point to a possible effect. And time again, pharmaceutical companies will tell you
01:45:20
this. you know, a promising pre-clinical lead doesn't lead to a medicine because it turns out to be a toxic or doesn't
01:45:26
agree with humans. So, we take pre-clinical evidence with caution. And
01:45:31
we're personally I'm mostly interested in human studies because that's the only
01:45:37
thing that makes any sense. Um, but you mentioned brain health because here's one of the big gaps we have, don't we?
01:45:45
Because we were we've got a lot of brain health issues right now. Mhm. dementia is still going in the
01:45:52
wrong direction. Um it's a very distressing thing if you have any in your family and increasingly there's
01:46:00
people saying what can we do to prevent this and Alzheimer's is all about there
01:46:06
being the wrong sort of protein and deposits in the brain but increasingly the focus is switching on to the blood
01:46:14
supply to the brain what we call the vascular effects on the brain and
01:46:21
there's something we used to call the blood brain barrier which you probably heard of which is seen to be the place
01:46:27
where the barrier that stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it. We now know this bloodb
01:46:34
brain barrier is a very dynamic interesting interface between the brains
01:46:42
tissue and the rest of us. is now called the neurovvascular unit, NVU.
01:46:48
And it is so exciting. And the more we look at it so far, the more we find that
01:46:55
the things that help the neurovvascular unit, the bloodb brain barrier are plants. And we have green tea. And you
01:47:04
know we can if you if you really want to help um our brain health regular
01:47:11
drinking of green tea you know it's been shown to be really useful. Not
01:47:16
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.
01:47:26
So as you make that can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea
01:47:33
because it contains a number of again polyphenols and polyphenols are those
01:47:38
are these colors these colors yeah in this case it's green obviously and me tea is just the smoked unprocessed part
01:47:46
of the tea leaf so it's a plant called chameleia senses um
01:47:55
so this is a nice Japanese teapot. That's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in. And these are the mugs,
01:48:01
but we've filled these up already with uh uh ginger and cinnamon. So, let's
01:48:06
let's leave it for a moment. But what we can while it's sitting there for a while, there are a number of these
01:48:12
polyphenols and green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier. We
01:48:19
talked about the neurovvascular unit between the brain and the rest of us. And um there's all sorts of reasons why
01:48:27
regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble.
01:48:32
What what sort of trouble? The dementia type problems, cognitive decline as you get older.
01:48:38
Do they find that in cultures where they drink a lot of green tea, they have less dementia? Yeah. But that doesn't mean there's a cause and effect. So you need a few
01:48:44
other things to establish that. What we're finding is that other plants have
01:48:50
very likely powerful effects in this area. And I mentioned the rosemary. Now all you need to do to appreciate
01:48:57
rosemary is to press it and sniff. Oh, it smells so good. Really nice.
01:49:04
That's not just nice because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volatile oils, the things that give the smell.
01:49:11
And when you're inhaling, they're literally going into your brain because part of the brain actually
01:49:18
reaches the outside world. It's called the alactory lobe and it's right at the top of the nose here.
01:49:23
And when you inhale something, it literally moves into the brain and from
01:49:29
there into the lyic system. Remember there's a line in a Shakespeare play called Hamlet Ailia
01:49:36
the young lady says rosemary that's for remembrance
01:49:41
because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions and when I was in
01:49:46
working on our campus in Maryland we actually did a clinical trial with rosemary in people with struggling with
01:49:54
their crosswords you know as they get older and found that although it wasn't a conclusive study there were pointers
01:50:00
to it improving cognitive or performance in those people and there's been other
01:50:05
studies since that re that reinforce that. I would say that rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of
01:50:12
long-term brain health. There's another remedy called GKO that a lot of people know about which is used as a
01:50:18
prescription medicine in Europe uh for cardiovascular problems and that's been
01:50:24
shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as as we've seen
01:50:30
here and with the green tea. I'll check it here. Yeah, that looks all right.
01:50:39
You see it's more yellow than green, but uh and this is flavored with a little bit
01:50:45
of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favorite taste.
01:50:53
Green tea is rich in polyphenols um which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss
01:50:59
and cancer prevention.
01:51:04
It's got a nice minty flavor. Yeah. You could live with that, couldn't you? Yeah. Yeah,
01:51:09
my girlfriend again, she she's all over this stuff. She's always bloody right. Well, you know that or learned that
01:51:14
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
01:51:21
someone really really smart comes and tells me and I spend those two or three years in denial. I'm like, what the is she like doing over there? Don't get
01:51:28
me started on cacao. If you start talking to me about cacao, I'm going to leave. No, no, no, no, no. She's been telling I'm gonna I'm gonna nail this because
01:51:34
there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this. Okay, Coco. Yeah, chocolate, dark chocolate is a medicine.
01:51:43
End of one of the best medicines around is 50 g or 100 g of 75% or more dark
01:51:52
chocolate. Do you know what I've just realized? My girlfriend, she's going to live till she's 150 because she all she
01:51:58
eats 90% or something 80% dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day.
01:52:06
She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day.
01:52:12
She eats the full rainbow. She should be slipping in for you. I know. I I know. Exactly.
01:52:18
No, Coco. Seriously, brain health as well,
01:52:23
cardiovascular health. I mean, they just they do studies where they've put coco into volunteers. That
01:52:30
means students usually um you know so young kids and they were able to show
01:52:36
changes in the blood flow within minutes certainly within an hour of eating cocoa
01:52:45
beneficial changes in your blood flow. They call it the heart medicine. Yeah. Heart circulation brain.
01:52:53
So she's um my girlfriend's very spiritual. She runs a business called Barley Breathwork. Um hashtag ad if I
01:52:58
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
01:53:05
she makes cacao for them. And you notice instantly how people change
01:53:11
when they've had a hot cup of cacao. It's and and she says it like almost brings out their heart. And I guess
01:53:18
that's because of the circulation reasons. It is, but it also of course we know it contains a few other beneficial
01:53:25
stimul stimulating effects sort of similar to the effects with coffee which in certainly as I've already said is a
01:53:31
medicine as well. Uh but cocoa and chocolate does have a uplifting effect
01:53:36
which is why we love it. So and we have to be clear here we're not talking about hot chocolate that comes
01:53:42
from a packet or something necessarily. We would like it to be as dark as possible. Okay. So,
01:53:47
the less sugar, the less fat. Um, so we talk about 75% cocoa solids, you know,
01:53:54
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
01:54:01
my patients, take 50 grams a day.
01:54:06
It's a medicine. Damn, she's right. My fridge is full of
01:54:11
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
01:54:18
it 90%. If she can get it 90%, she'll take it. Yeah. 90% is quite bitter now.
01:54:23
Yeah. Yeah. I am I was in Peru and I went to a chocolate making lesson and that
01:54:28
chocolate making lesson changed my life. And it changed my life because I didn't realize how much sugar goes into
01:54:36
chocolate, but specifically white chocolate. Oh my god. They said they gave me this big beaker which was you
01:54:41
know this big like a a foot high and a foot wide and they were like right pour the sugar in. So I poured some and
01:54:48
they're like they like laughed at me. They were like no fill it like 70% with this white sugar. And I was like there's
01:54:56
no way. I poured about 60 or 70% white sugar into this massive tube and
01:55:01
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
01:55:07
white chocolate is like literally all sugar. Then milk chocolate was like 50% sugar. And then when we did when we made
01:55:12
the dark chocolate, it was a tiny amount like a tiny tiny amount. And from that
01:55:18
day onwards, white chocolate's left my life. There was once upon a time we a few years back when the Europeans uh
01:55:25
union, I think before we joined it, said that we shouldn't call uh dairy milk
01:55:31
chocolate at all. It's a chocolate flavor candy is what they described it as literally. Yeah. So this is So we've got
01:55:37
some green tea here. Yeah. And you're talking to me about the association between green tea and
01:55:43
Alzheimer's which is really exciting. Yes. Um there's quite a lot of work being done
01:55:48
now on these and there they're obviously looking for medications as well but so far most of
01:55:54
the data coming in in relates to plant-based materials. So it suggests that there's other reasons why having
01:56:00
plants and again spices come back into the mix um seem to be helpful for brain
01:56:07
health. I'm having a look at the green tea.
01:56:13
There was a study done in 2008 which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory, attention accuracy and
01:56:20
um long-term consumption associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease according to the
01:56:26
Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in 2011. It's nice to have somebody else just say
01:56:31
what you said. Yeah, but it's it's exactly I didn't realize. I didn't I had no idea.
01:56:38
I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me.
01:56:44
You can't say sorry. I have literally literally I've got a Wow. heart health, brain function, fat
01:56:51
burning and metabolism, cancer prevention, early evidence, blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, gut and oral
01:56:58
health. What about matcha? I'm a I'm a big investor in um the biggest matcha
01:57:04
company in Europe. It's probably more beneficial than the basic green tea because it's it's it's more shall we say
01:57:12
pure. Um it's finer quality. So the chances are that matcha will do more
01:57:18
than we've just said the green tea will do. Um but there's there's a evidence lack and a lot of these things is we
01:57:24
need more evidence, but it would point to matcha being particularly helpful.
01:57:29
We haven't talked much about cholesterol. No, you haven't brought it up.
01:57:36
Cholesterol is a type of fat made in your liver which travels in your blood and can be found. What is um for anyone
01:57:42
that doesn't know cholesterol, what it is and why it if it's a good or bad thing, what do I need to know about cholesterol
01:57:48
and is there anything in front of us here that can help keep my cholesterol in a healthy state? I did think I think
01:57:53
a doctor did actually tell me at one point that I had high cholesterol um a couple of years ago because of my
01:57:58
diet at the time. The keto of course will tend to well it's interesting again keto you think would push up your
01:58:05
cholesterol levels but actually there's a mixture of effects. So it's not it's not a done deal that it will raise your
01:58:12
cholesterol. It there's cholesterol is part of a range of fats the body has.
01:58:18
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
01:58:25
digestion does is a strip down the heaviness and it becomes more what we
01:58:30
call high density uh lipop liposite
01:58:36
HDLs. My tongue is twisting around it. And uh cholesterol is sort of in the
01:58:42
middle of that as one of the elements within that spectrum of fats.
01:58:49
What cholesterol is actually a secreted by the liver for very good reasons. It helps with all sorts of things. It's the
01:58:55
basis of some of our hormones. There's all sorts of reasons why we need cholesterol. I sometimes have referred
01:59:00
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
01:59:07
physically active during the during the day working on the land or whatever, you need a certain amount of cholesterol to
01:59:14
motor. We're sitting in chairs and the cholesterol becomes increasing a
01:59:19
problem. We have a highfat diet that tends to put in more of it. And the
01:59:24
point is that many of us our cholesterol levels increasingly rise and that is a risk factor as we know for
01:59:32
cardiovascular disease. we we said was still one of the biggest killer. So
01:59:38
cholesterol is up there as a risk factor and so the usual thing that a doctor will do is to hand you something a
01:59:44
statin basically that will reduce your cholesterol levels.
01:59:49
They also know that there's more push back on that prescription than almost anything else because the word is out
01:59:55
that statins can do this that or the other interfere with your muscle strength and all the rest of it. Give
02:00:00
you little aches and pains that you know most people have statins without a problem but the
02:00:07
impact of statins is still modest in terms of the overall scheme of things. You know the numbers of people's lives
02:00:14
it saves is probably fairly minimal. So the probably the better conversation is to have what can we do to
02:00:20
recontextualize the cholesterol so that it becomes more like it should be a good
02:00:25
thing rather than a risk and the first thing is to have a more apart from the
02:00:32
keto have the more vegetable-based plant-based diet because that in itself
02:00:37
will tend to mop up and reduce cholesterol. exercise becomes important because by
02:00:43
physical activity we can manage it better. And then where we come in uh with the work I do is to look at high
02:00:50
cholesterol is potentially a sign of liver distress and you know we like
02:00:56
working with the liver and there's a number of remedies that we use to help
02:01:02
reduce cholesterol levels mainly by getting more out through the bile and so
02:01:07
on. So, it's a there's not a straight answer to your question. Um, you know,
02:01:12
the statin is sounds like a simple pill that fixes it. Uh, the reality is is
02:01:17
that we need to look at a much wider range of things. You're a fan of artichokes for cholesterol. Yes, you you must have read my mind. Uh,
02:01:26
the artich choke leaf uh is the one we're talking about which is used in France a lot for basically fat liver
02:01:33
related problems a lot. Uh I use it a lot in the practice as a juice actually just as a pressed juice. Um uh yes it's
02:01:41
one of them. Dandelion root is another old familiar which seems to be helpful
02:01:47
here mostly by as I said flushing stuff through the bile and there is a range of
02:01:53
other things that we use. One of the things that you know many people are concerned about when they're thinking about changing their diet is
02:01:59
just the cost of it. they think it's super expensive to to buy all these fresh fruit and veg and you know
02:02:09
is that the case is is that a barrier to to entry to the stuff we've talked about today at all
02:02:14
my usual answer that is east eat Asian because as I said if you can make a meal
02:02:21
with vegetables and spices and things like lentils and so on beans for very
02:02:28
cheaply it's just that we got out of the habit or we haven't got into the habit of doing that slightly slow cooking. Uh
02:02:36
we will buy our Indian meals sometimes from places that put a more fat in than
02:02:41
they might. Um so some of the meals we can buy that are Asian are a bit too
02:02:47
fatty. But if you make it yourself at home, which means learning how to cook, but you can eat very cheaply.
02:02:54
What is the most important thing that we didn't talk about that we should have talked about?
02:03:00
Well, I suppose I didn't mention much about the omerazole um because that that
02:03:06
I've never heard of this before. Mezriole? Yeah, I've never heard of it. Yeah, they are increasingly a minority.
02:03:12
Oh, really? Arazzole is the most widely prescribed drug in this country and I believe in the US also. And it's for
02:03:19
acid reflux. It's what the Americans call gird and what we call gourd because we spell
02:03:26
esophagus differently. So we spell esophagus with an OE and Americans spell
02:03:32
it with an E. So it's either gird or gore depending on which country you're in. And that means gastro esophageal
02:03:38
reflux disease. Gourd. And acid reflux is a real issue with a
02:03:46
lot of people and they find that when they go to a doctor, the doctor will routinely prescribe a merazole or
02:03:53
something like it. And gourd is actually diagnosed by as a
02:04:00
condition which is made better by omerazol. I mean it's literally it's a disease that is diagnosed by the
02:04:06
treatment. And what a merazole does is shuts down the acid production in the stomach. So
02:04:14
you don't get as much damage by reflux. The problem is is that the acid's doing
02:04:21
a job. It's sterilizing your food, which is important, isn't it? It's also
02:04:28
helping to break it down so that it becomes not an immune threat, which you
02:04:33
know, if you have a blood transfusion or something in the wrong blood, you get a problem. You we're eating forest stuff
02:04:38
all the time. We rely on the stomach and the juices to make it safe. So, the acid
02:04:44
is there to protect us. When we're getting acid reflux,
02:04:49
actually, it's not because you got too much acid. is because you're refluxing it. It's going back up into the gullet,
02:04:56
the esophagus. But a merazole will put an end to that. The problem with a two
02:05:02
problems. First is that the list of problems occurring from long-term amrazol use is beginning to grow and is
02:05:09
serious. Cancers, dementias, all sorts of things are beginning to be downstream problems
02:05:16
associated with long-term omerazol use. But the other thing is is that once you're on it, it's really difficult to
02:05:23
come off it and you get a famous rebound effect. So you come off the merazole and
02:05:29
wow, you get much more trouble. So the only thing to do is take more mezrazole and people find it really hard to come
02:05:36
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
02:05:44
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
02:05:51
what we call the raft principle. So, there are some plants that have got a
02:05:57
lot of mucus in them, mucelage. The classic example from North America, Sri Elm, it's a sort of powder that
02:06:05
looks like you make polyfiller to fill the crack with, you know, it's a white powder. When it's mixed with water, it
02:06:11
forms this paste, this muc mucous stuff. You want to have it as a tablet because
02:06:17
you don't want all to swallow that stuff. But when it's in the stomach, it produces this mucus layer. You don't
02:06:25
need to go to slippery elm. There is a product here in this country called Gavaskon, which is essentially seaweed
02:06:32
gum with I don't have shares in it, by the way, but it it's seaweed gum with some minerals in there. And they
02:06:39
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
02:06:46
top of your food. So you have it after you've had your last mouthful. You have a bit of there. And then as the food
02:06:52
pushes up back into the gullet, you've got this nice mucous coating, a raft to
02:06:58
stop it back up. That carbohydrate, it's what it is, gets
02:07:03
digested within a couple of hours. End off. No problem. It's not even a medicine. It's just a physical barrier.
02:07:11
So it could have gavasone, you could have copium, you could have aloe vera, there's a number of other muc mucousy
02:07:16
type plants that people use and that can without any other complication at all be
02:07:23
one step. And I use it regularly with with when I'm weaning people off. I will use the raft principle to help prevent
02:07:32
some of the harm you get with reflux. That's simple example.
02:07:37
You're very fond of these plants. They are living organisms, aren't they?
02:07:46
Are you concerned about how we we treat them? I'm concerned about the nate the world
02:07:52
that they come from because of course increasingly we have to produce these industrially which sometimes mean in
02:07:58
monoculture. Well, it usually means a monoulture form. They're grown in rows and rows and they put weed killers down
02:08:03
to get other plants out of the way and so they become less
02:08:09
uh natural. And we talked about the polyphenols. You know, PA, the company I worked for was
02:08:17
all organic and we were able to show that a plant that grows organically
02:08:23
that doesn't have pesticides needs to fight his own battles more.
02:08:28
Mhm. Because if you got a pesticide, you don't need to worry about so much, you know, the the pests and the attackers.
02:08:34
So, a plant that's grown in wild or organically without chemicals has more
02:08:40
polyphenols because the polyphenols are part of the plant's defense mechanism. M
02:08:45
so the more you can buy or I mean that's where foraging comes in. You know my colleague in Devon is a forager and he
02:08:52
he can walk around hedro and show you you can make a whole meal out of plasma people just walk past um because people
02:08:59
used to do that. So that's real wild eating which must be one of the best
02:09:04
ways of eating. Uh but the more close to nature you can get your plants the
02:09:10
better. We have to live with what we've got and most plants are grown without
02:09:15
that. But they're still better than having them not having them at all. Simon, thank you. Um, we have a closing
02:09:22
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
02:09:29
world is changing fast. How do you keep up?"
02:09:38
I think the world is we all know getting pretty
02:09:44
scary out there, isn't it? There is a a truth which is you and the
02:09:52
people around you are the actually the only things that matter daytoday are
02:09:57
they are of closest dearest the ones that we have invested most.
02:10:04
One of the reasons that I'm increasingly happy to spend my time working in the
02:10:10
practice in extra rather than chasing around the world is because
02:10:16
as the world gets more frightening,
02:10:22
the more you realize that it's the connections you make with each other
02:10:27
you put back to back if you like, you know, face the world out there back to back. And I think
02:10:35
it's reconnecting with those who are closest to you. That is the best antidote I know. And that also includes
02:10:43
reconnecting with the the nature and the world around it. So that would be my answer.
02:10:48
And who is that in your life? Who are those people? I have family. I have now 10
02:10:54
grandchildren between us, Rachel and myself. Congratulations. And so um the uh
02:11:00
electronic calendar comes into its own to keep track of all that. Uh so yes the
02:11:08
we've we've uh got a a no spread around the globe. So it's a it's a widespread
02:11:13
thing but we've got people close by and you know obviously your closest and nearest are the ones that matter.
02:11:21
Simon thank you so much for doing what you do. I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your work. I've never had a conversation with someone that knows so much about plants and and
02:11:28
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
02:11:33
to go and tell my girlfriend that she's right about everything. I'll I'll slip her the I'll she can slip
02:11:40
me the tenner. And I highly recommend um people go and check out your your website and go to
02:11:47
your herb which takes place once a month. Um, I'm sure there's going to be lots of people getting in touch with you to try and come and see you in person as
02:11:53
well, which is fantastic. Is there anything else that if my listeners want to take a step forward from here in this
02:11:59
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
02:12:05
anything else that we should be aware of? As I said, the website does link to this wonderful resource that's not I mean I
02:12:11
contribute to the herbal reality one which is where you're going to find almost anything you want to know about using plants. So that's I'll stop there,
02:12:17
but you can step through my website to get there because you'll find a few other things on the way. Um there is
02:12:22
resources out there and it's increasingly reliable. These are not dreamt up, you know, for a Tik Tok
02:12:30
video. They're well thought through and based on a lot of human experience. So there is stuff out there if you're
02:12:35
looking for it. Thank you. You're very much leading the charge to bring us all back to being human beings and I'm a big big fan of
02:12:42
that and it's a journey I'm on myself. So, thank you so much for doing the work that you do and being a champion for for
02:12:48
nature in all its forms. So, um and I really really hope that uh I really hope that more people, more podcasters host
02:12:55
you so that you can get the uh get the message out there. Thank you. This has always blown my mind a little
02:13:01
bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor?
02:13:08
If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.
02:13:14
And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single
02:13:21
week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
02:13:30
[Music]
02:13:40
Hey. Hey. Hey.
02:13:47
[Music]
