The Food & Stress Crisis Keeping You Chronically Unhealthy (& How to Fix It) with Dr. Austin Perlmutter

Lately, it feels like women are carrying more than ever, mentally, emotionally, hormonally, and neurologically. In this week’s conversation, Dr. Mindy sits down with internal medicine physician and brain health expert, Dr. Austin Perlmutter, to talk about what modern life is doing to our brains and why so many people feel overstimulated, foggy, anxious, disconnected, and exhausted. Together, they discuss: Why chronic stress changes on the brainThe impact of ultra-processed foods on mood and cognitionWhy women in midlife are especially vulnerable to burnoutHow nature helps regulate the nervous system in minutesHow inflammation and depression can lead to Alzheimer’sWhy simple habits matter more than most people realizeOne of our favorite parts of this conversation was the reminder that healing doesn’t always need to be complicated. Sometimes the most powerful changes are the ones that bring us back to how humans were designed to live in the first place. RESOURCES MENTIONED: Lichen Air: https://lichenair.com/MORE ON DR. AUSTIN PERLMUTTER: Website: https://www.austinperlmutter.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/draustinperlmutterYouTube:/ @draustinperlmutter https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQOgwRDnA_vpvW9nnUh9KBgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/draustinperlmutter/ For more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep342 Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academy?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=loc-description&utm_campaign=reset-academyWatch the episodes on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz?sub_confirmation=1Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/Subscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter https://www.drmindypelz.com/ Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Mindy Pelz?

  Can I be honest with you for just a second? So many of the women who have come to me have literally already tried everything. They've done the diets, they've worked themselves out to death, they've done the programs, they've diligently followed the advice of their doctors, and yet they are still exhausted. They are still hormonally lost. They are still wondering why nothing seems to work for them. And here's what I've learned after two and a half decades of working with women. It's not a willpower problem, I promise you. It's an education problem. Your body has

• 0:43Mindy Pelz?

  a very specific set of needs, and most health advice out there was never designed with those needs in mind. And so this is exactly why I built my Reset Academy. It's my monthly membership community where I teach you how to use fasting, food, and lifestyle to genuinely work with your female biology. Every month you get new trainings, live Q and As with my team and I, and a community of incredible women who are all in it with you. They're doing the work, they're seeing the results, and the best part is they're cheering each other on. If you're ready to stop guessing and start actually understanding your body

• 1:28Mindy Pelz?

  and finally getting results, come join us over there. All you have to do is head over to resetacademy.drmindypelz.com, and I would love to see you inside the community and help you accomplish your health goals and fall in love with your body again. So that's resetacademy.drmindy.com.

• 1:56Mindy Pelz?

  In this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I bring you back Dr. Austin Perlmutter. Now, those of you who are new listeners, you probably have never heard me interview Austin. I brought him on actually the first year of my podcast because I really wanted to talk about nature and the healing power of nature. And you can go back into my podcast and listen to that because it was a really good conversation. And what I learned at that time was how nature, even the sound of nature, even looking at nature on a TV screen lowers cortisol. And I was like, wow, you don't even have to be in nature to get cortisol to lower.

• 2:38Mindy Pelz?

  And so I became obsessed with his work because he is an internal medicine physician. He is a New York Times bestselling author, a researcher, a podcaster. And he's been on PBS, in Rolling Stone Magazine, Newsweek, NPR. Like, he's got some real street cred. And he's not selling you anything. He's selling you nature. And it's so beautiful. And in this episode, I really wanted to dive into a new concept that he has been focusing on, which is called dark matter of food. And so in this episode, you're going to hear, it's going to start off with cognitive decline

• 3:23Mindy Pelz?

  and mental health. How do we determine if our brain is healthy? And what are some of the signs that tell us our brain isn't healthy? And then we're going to go very deeply into foods that support great brain health. And this is where he brings up this dark matter of food. It is a very specific type of food you can get. It's not hard to find. And it will inform you, or it will help support really great brain function, which is something we all need right now. We then start to dive into polyphenols, which, if you've been listening to any of my

• 4:04Mindy Pelz?

  YouTube videos, I've been really interested in the intersection between polyphenols and visceral fat. We talk about that in this episode. We talk about foods that you can add in. This is not, you know, whenever it comes to brain health, we're taught what we need to take out. And I wanted to have a conversation with Austin about what do we add in? And especially when it comes to something that is accessible to all of us and doesn't cost a lot of money. Like, you're gonna hear everything from blueberries to olive oil to coffee, to different colored foods. It's really fascinating and thoughtful conversation that I think

• 4:48Mindy Pelz?

  you will find very helpful. It's very action oriented. He brings a lot of science to it. And then, of course, we end it on nature again, because I've had my own personal experience this year with nature healing me. And I've really wanted to understand what is nature doing to our brains. So at a time when brain health is a topic that many people are talking about, and it's become such a popular topic, so many people are willing to sell you a supplement on it, or a fancy biohack. Austin and I are gonna bring you back to the simple healing power of what the earth provides us. And how do we turn towards healing ourselves

• 5:30Mindy Pelz?

  through food and through exposure to nature? It's really powerful and thoughtful conversation, and I'm so excited to bring it to you. So, Dr. Austin Perlmutter, and let me know what you think, and how you feel, listening to this conversation, because I can tell you after having it, I feel tremendously more calm than I even jumped into the conversation with. It's a really beautiful discussion. Enjoy.

• 6:01Mindy Pelz?

  Well, Dr. Austin Perlmutter, I have to start by welcoming you back to the Resetter Podcast. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  I'm excited to be back.

• 6:11Mindy Pelz?

  So I've been spending a lot of time looking at brain health in general for women over 40. And recently, there was a stat that came out that said that the number one health concern for men was mental health, and the number two concern, the second biggest problem for women was mental health. And then we tack on the fact that one out of three women are going to experience Alzheimer's as they age. Can you help us understand what is happening to the brain in this modern world right now?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  The aggregating theme with what you're saying is that brain health is the most important thing. And even for those who haven't recognized it personally, let me just explain why that's the case. Anything that you care about in your life, whether it's being able to run a marathon, being present for your grandkids, doing a good job at work, having stronger relationships, is a primary reflection of how things are going within your brain. And so we have these disease outcomes, something like Alzheimer's disease, or depression, major depressive disorder, that we could clearly say something is going wrong in the brain. And often, we'd use something like a pharmaceutical, or more intensive management to target pathways within the brain. But what I would like for people to understand is, this is a continuum, it's a spectrum. And even if you don't have a bona fide brain

• 7:29Speaker 01

  disease that you're seeking medical care for, your brain is the most important thing that you own. So optimizing brain health should be a principal priority for everyone, as well as helping to prevent these conditions that can be so problematic. And you alluded to this, but Alzheimer's disease, which is expected to affect up to 150 million people in the coming decades, is one of the biggest problems that we see in medicine, not just because of the number of people, the millions of people currently experiencing it, but because when you see what happens to a person you love, when they lose their brain function while they're still present, you understand how devastating that can be. And mental health conditions, which some people look at as disease Of the mind rather than the brain still happen in the same neuroanatomical basis

• 8:14Speaker 01

  or the same neurobiology as what happens in Alzheimer's disease. So major depression, which affects around 300 million people around the world, anxiety disorders, a similar number, not to mention all the other people who are experiencing high degree of stress that is compromising their day to day function. These are the most important issues of the day and it's so important that we refocus our efforts on it right now.

• 8:35Mindy Pelz?

  What are the early signs? Because I think it's so hard to see yourself because you're analyzing, you're using the organ that you're concerned about to analyze if your mental cognition or health in general is going in a wrong direction.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  That's such an interesting question. So I trained in internal medicine and the time that I would become most invested in a person's brain function being problematic is when they would test positive for a screen for something like major depression. Because at that point, you can prescribe pharmaceuticals. You can refer them out to psychotherapy. Similarly, what you see with a condition like Alzheimer's disease is once a person starts to have significantly impaired cognitive function, then you start to worry about mild cognitive impairment, MCI, which then leads to a diagnosis eventually in many cases to dementia, at which case you can say, well, they have the diagnosis. We can give them drugs, we can put them on some sort of a protocol. But where we need to be focusing our energy is on the fact that, again, this is a continuum.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And like heart disease, which remains the number one killer, very few people think to themselves, well, I had a healthy heart, but then I had a complete occlusion of my coronary arteries that just sprung out of nowhere overnight. We think about it as building up over time. And so what the research tells us as it relates to conditions like Alzheimer's disease is that there are about 315 million people right now who have what we would call kind of preclinical disease, which means they have changes occurring in their brain linked to Alzheimer's disease, but they don't even have cognitive issues that they're aware of right now. And then that kind of transitions into around 70 million people with prodromal Alzheimer. So this would be people with impaired cognition, but not super impaired cognition.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  To go back to the central theme, though, for these people who have changes in their brain related to the subsequent development of Alzheimer's disease, this could be happening 20 to 30 years before they get a diagnosis. And that's a really central piece to understand. The other piece of this equation that very few people talk about is what does the continuum look like in the development of mental health issues? You know, it's easy to think about depression as something that you can diagnose that did not exist before, as though you wake up one day and there's a serotonin change in your brain, and now you're experiencing depression, and now you're a candidate for a drug. But for many people, we now know from research on things like lifestyle, so exercise, diet,

• 11:01Speaker 01

  stress mitigation, sleep, that these things can actually predict risks for developing subsequent mental health conditions. So while there's no single variable that will account for everyone in terms of knowing for sure that you're going to develop a mental health or cognitive health condition, the point that I would make is that when we're starting to feel a lot of fatigue, which could be an indicator of poor sleep, which is shown to be a precursor to conditions like major depression and Alzheimer's, we should be paying attention to that. If we're feeling more brain fog throughout the day, sure, we could say, well, it's just because I'm a little bit stressed at work, but actually, there may be something to consider there. And similarly, experiencing chronic stress, which is probably the single most common

• 11:43Speaker 01

  mental health issue, it's not just that the chronic stress over time leads to worse overall health, but again, it preconditions people to be at higher risk for conditions like depression and dementia. So the point here I'm making is that all of these things that we might just kind of look at as part and parcel of what a typical day looks like are actually data that our biology is giving us to understand what's happening in our brains. And the worst thing that we can do is ignore it until things get so bad that you need the diagnosis.

• 12:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's so true. My 90-year-old dad is showing some extreme signs of dementia now. And you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about this recently. I could go back 20 years ago and see little, small, little micro moments where I was like, oh, that's what was going on there. And yet again, you're trying to understand it with the organ that is upset, is got the disease state in it.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  It's so true. And one of the most common things that's seen in the clinic, and when I was in the VA, this happened all the time, is the partner bringing in the spouse and saying, hey, I'm worried about them. So in the VA, would be the wife bringing in the husband, saying, hey, I don't think his memory is really what it should be. And the husband often would say, oh, well, it's fine. But that's the challenge is once the actual organ starts to fail, right? It's very hard. It's not like it's a knee where you can point to it and say, hey, it's in pain. Or a heart where you can say, hey, I'm having trouble going up the stairs. It's very hard when the organ that is being affected is the organ that's necessary to determine something is wrong.

• 13:16Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So when we look at the modern world, I did so much research on this with weight loss and fasting, and even menopause, I came to this conclusion that we are at an evolutionary mismatch. The human body is not thriving in this modern world that wants us to absorb so much information, wants us to stay comfortable, wants is giving us foods that are addict, you know, making us dopamine addicted. So help me understand and my audience, what's going on in our lifestyle? Is there a starting point? Like, is there a place we can absolutely say, do this first? And you're going to put yourself on a good path?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  If you're listening to this podcast or watching this podcast, you're already so much further along because you're curious. And the first step is curiosity. We can go through the statistics, talking about the majority of Americans with one chronic disease, 40% with two or more, the fact that most people are on drugs. All of these things that your audience knows well, right? That the 90-ish percent of people have cardiometabolic dysfunction in some way, shape or form. The next step is to kind of ask why and am I willing to kind of acknowledge that those norms, those defaults, those baseline statistics will apply to me unless I do something differently. And it's a really good conversation because there's no single thing, right? For some people, the best next thing to do is to go for a walk, right? Just movement.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Movement increases molecules like brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Going for a walk consistently may be one of the best ways to decrease your chances of Alzheimer's disease. There was a JAMA study published a couple of years ago, showing that people who were roughly around that 10,000 step a day line in terms of how much they were walking, were at a slightly higher than 50% lower rate of developing dementia over the study period. So, the walking piece could be great. It could be diet. I think diet's really interesting in that it's something so intrinsic. You can't avoid the fact that you have to eat. And so therefore, why not make each meal a slightly better bet for health? One that I talk about a lot now is air quality. You have to breathe air. Why not make that air slightly higher

• 15:26Speaker 01

  quality? We know that air quality is associated with, for example, metabolic.

• 15:31Mindy Pelz?

  Let's talk about cod liver oil for a second. And I know what you're thinking. Cod liver oil? Really? Dr. Mindy, that sounds like something my grandmother took. But hang with me here for a moment, because this is one of those old-school remedies that modern science keeps proving right. Cod liver oil is one of nature's most concentrated sources of omega-3 fatty acids. Also, it's high in vitamin A and vitamin D, all in a form your body can actually recognize and use. This is such a powerful combination that is profoundly anti-inflammatory. It's protective to your brain, it supports your hormones, and it

• 16:14Mindy Pelz?

  does something I care really deeply about, which is it starts to repair and nourish your gut lining at a deep cellular level.

• 16:24Mindy Pelz?

  This is something I personally take every single day. And one of the things that I have noticed the most is what it's done for my skin. I recommend it to women who are navigating hormonal shifts, dealing with chronic inflammation, or simply trusting to protect their long-term health. So Standard Process is the company I deeply align with and trust. It's a whole food-based, clean company, and it has held the standard of quality for decades. And I expect only the best from Standard Process. They are definitely one of the top supplement companies in the world. So if you want to try it, check it out. You can learn more and get some for yourself

• 17:09Mindy Pelz?

  at drmindypels.standarprocess.com. That's drmindypels.standarprocess.com. Enjoy.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  ... disease that certain things in our air may predispose us to weight gain, beyond even the well-established data showing that air quality influences brain state. But the simple answer to your question is that the next best step is the next best step that's going to work for you, as opposed to a blanket recommendation that every single person has to do this next thing. And that comes after people understand that the modern world is set up for your health failure, that that is the default, especially in the United States, unless you start making changes to become a little bit of a weirdo and do things differently than your neighbors.

• 17:56Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that is the most important thing I have heard in a really long time is for people to understand that the modern world is set up to create health failure. And then we have, like you and I were talking about when we started, then all of a sudden we have the health influencer or the podcast host who comes in or the wellness expert that comes in with the solution. And there's never just one solution, and there's not one hero. I strongly believe everybody should be their own hero.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Let me just say one more thing to that, because I think this really sets the stage for a lot of what we're going to be talking about. It's easy to point fingers and blame corporations, governments, people as being somehow evil or against you and that that's the reason why things are so bad. But I think a much maybe more boring, but actually more helpful explanation is simply incentives. And if you ask the question of what is the incentive structure for whoever is giving you this information, it's pretty quick that you can get to this question or answer as to, does this actually fit with my personal incentive structure? So, for example, if you go on social media, content on social media is incentivized to be as catchy as possible, keeping your eyes on it as long as possible.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  And does that actually fit with giving nuanced, helpful information that's going to best benefit your health? No, it doesn't. If you're a wellness brand and you produce a product that people need to feel unhealthy in order to take, is that product really aligned with people feeling healthy? You could potentially answer that it isn't, right? If it's designed to be something you take forever. This doesn't mean that wellness companies and wellness brands don't work. But if you really get down to it, there's a reason why there isn't a ton of content out there about just doing simple, boring things each day, even though they are the most effective strategies that have ever been studied in terms of improving health outcomes. And that's because there's no incentive behind it. There's no financial remuneration for people who create this type of stuff.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Whether you're in the government or whether you are a corporation or whether you're an individual on social media, that stuff just doesn't catch on. And so it's not a good use of people's resources. It doesn't change the fact that as an individual, that's the most important thing. And sometimes just turning off the stream of content can be the best next intervention for exactly that reason.

• 20:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, and we were talking about this before, you know, I've really taken my brain to longer content. So I'm listening to podcasts, I'm listening to books, I'm reading books. Like I remind myself to stop being addicted to the short, little, pithy little content. And then another, to your point, I will just totally be transparent on YouTube.

• 20:43Mindy Pelz?

  We've made a conscious decision to not do a scare tactic title that and not give fancy flashy information that get pulls people in, but has no substance because to me that's like junk food. It's like ultra processed food for the brain. So, and because of that, we have slower growth on YouTube. We but but what happens is people stay and listen because they're going deeper, which is what we need to do. So you what you just said is spot on. People want your attention and they're going to do it by throwing a scare tactic at you. And the minute you grab that scare tactic, now you're in their web, which is what's scary.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Totally agree.

• 21:26Mindy Pelz?

  So let's dive into food, though, because that's my favorite topic. And I really think for me at fifty six years old, food is all for my brain. That every time I put a meal together, I'm thinking about my brain. So walk us through like what obviously should we be avoiding and what should we be focusing on when it comes to food?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Great. So for the next five hours, we'll cover nutrition.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  I love what you're saying. I love what you're saying around eating for a purpose. And that's such an important switch between the way most people eat now, which is to accomplish an end, which is to eat the meal, you know, just to get it done. Or it's kind of incidental, right? You're watching your show and you want to be putting something into your mouth because it slightly increases the pleasure. So to say you're going to enhance the quality of your meal to improve an outcome that you care about, in this case, brain health, I love that.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Generally speaking around food. So based on the data published by Tufts that has a whole food is medicine program, lack of good nutrition is the number one driver of poor health outcomes in the US and poor diets are the leading cause of death in the United States.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Why that matters so much is because the quality of what we eat not only influences every significant pathway related to immunometabolic dysfunction. So everything from increasing inflammation, if we eat an unhealthy diet, to increasing our chances of metabolic disease, obviously, what your listeners are incredibly Attuned to based on the content you've produced. But beyond this, the food that we consume becomes the structural building blocks of our entire body, including our brain. It's not like we're capable of creating de novo, you know, molecules from the atmosphere. We're not plants. And so we require consumption of the building blocks for our bodies and for our brains each day in the food that we eat.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And in addition to this, the nutrients that we consume turn into the neurotransmitters in our brains. So they influence how our neurons work that somewhere around 80 billion neurons in our brain is influenced by every bite of food that we consume. That's crazy. One thing that I find fascinating beyond this is as you're looking at a complex system like the brain, it's easy to focus on, well, it's the neurons and the neurotransmitters. But it turns out that roughly half of the cells in your brain are not neurons. They're called glial cells. And so they have names like astrocytes, which are central to brain metabolism. Microglial cells, which are central to brain immunity. And leading journals are now showing that the food that we eat programs these cells towards a state of balance or imbalance.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  And this may be one of the central drivers of conditions like Alzheimer's, depression and other neurodegenerative types of conditions. So food is a central part of this equation. As I alluded to earlier, the thing about food is you don't get to opt out. I mean, some of your audience does if they do for a time fasting, but you know, if you fast forever, you're not going to have a good time. So clearly you need to be focused on the quality and certainly timing and other variables, but certainly the quality of what is in every bite that you consume. And I think it's, it's a totally different way of looking at nutrition rather than just as calories, but as data, as information, as signaling that influences every aspect of our physiology.

• 24:44Mindy Pelz?

  I think this is such a beautiful way to look at it. I'm thinking of like, you know, the prepackaged ultra-processed food. It has all this, these sensational words on the outside and bright colors. I mean, people don't even realize that the packaging is meant to pull you in. And then you get into the food and the food is meant to stimulate dopamine in your brain. It's like, it's like a fast reaction to happiness. Could you, a part of me thinks you could look at the packaging. You could just look at the packaging and say, is this gonna create a healthy brain or not? I think it's a beautiful question.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  If you want to get yourself riled up on this topic, one of the topics that I get, I get focused on sometimes is what's happening with kids. And so I'm an adult doctor. I don't really focus as much on children. But in the years since I first wrote this book, Brainwash with my Dad in 2020, I've just recognized that it is this incredible continuum of programming, but the most important time for that programming is what happens before birth. So epigenetics, preconception, and then what happens in those early years of brain development where, you know, people may not know this, but the brain produces a ton of extra connections between neurons called synapses. And then it prunes them incredibly

• 26:02Speaker 01

  aggressively in our early years. So in essence, what it does is it over-creates connections and then it prunes them back based on what it thinks are the best pathways available. So that is a reflection of what happens in our environment. And then you ask, well, is it the case that we are being programmed towards unhealthy patterns in early life that will last us for the rest of our lives? And the answer is yes. So just as a couple things here, think about children's cereal. Cereal is its own thing. Breakfast cereal is a huge scam. I will, I will just go ahead and die on that hill. It is such a, an incredible co-opting of what breakfast should be. But if you look at the boxes of children's cereal with the cartoon characters, where they're located on this shelf in the store, which

• 26:47Speaker 01

  is a science called planograms. It is all designed to get children hooked on some of the worst qualities. Quality food that we produce. And when researchers look decades later, they show that people's patterns of early life cereal consumption predicts their preferences for that cereal in adulthood. So it's not just a time bound thing where, oh, well, I ate the pirate cereal when I was younger. It's the same pattern that will predispose you to metabolic dysfunction over decades. And I think that's just generally unfair.

• 27:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I'm having a flashback of when my children were little. You're absolutely right. They put all the cereal, you would go in the cereal aisle and all the movie characters would be right at their eye level. And I'll never forget arguing with my son when he was like six or seven about Shrek breakfast cereal. He wanted, and I was like, and I'm like, we're not buying Shrek breakfast cereal. And he said, why? And I said, because Shrek doesn't know anything about health. Like, I was just like trying to show him that just because it's your favorite little character, doesn't mean he knows anything about health.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, we could talk about celebrities or athletes repping alcohol and junk food and just how these connections have become so warped. But the, the theme that I would put for people is marketers spend billions of dollars each year to convince you to do things that maybe you wouldn't have done otherwise. They, they spend this money to change your brain so that you select their products. And if this money is going towards a kid, do we think that a kid who isn't able to drive, who isn't able to choose whether they want to drink alcohol, because we know their brain is still developing, has the necessary resources to fight off that TV ad for junk food? The answer is no, but we just normalize this because it seems like it shouldn't actually work. The same can be said for adults, by the way.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  I think we have this, uh, this, this incredible myth that's been, uh, put upon us, which is that we should, as a community, as a country, be protecting consumer choice. And therefore we should make more options available to adults, whether that's, uh, they should have access to junk food or cigarettes or alcohol, because we want people to have the opportunity to make whatever choice is best for them.

• 29:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And the reality is that's not how the human brain works. I know, I know we're touching here on some kind of neurobiology and that may not be where you want to go. But this is a myth because we know, and marketers know better than we do, that you can absolutely bias people's decision making, not only by having better marketing content, but by creating products that change our neurochemistry to make it more likely that we continue to eat that bad food. By changing our biology, when we build up adipose tissue in the wrong spot that produces inflammatory molecules, that has an association with more impulsive decision making. So it's not as though everyone's starting from the same place. We are literally reprogramming our brains to make it harder for us to make healthy decisions.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And again, that starts before we're even born.

• 29:48Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's crazy. Okay, talk to me about nutrient-dense food because there's a few words that I hear people throw out, like you should have an anti-inflammatory diet. You should eat more nutrients, but I think the layperson doesn't under, can't translate that. And you know, even those of us that are educated on food, they say that the broccoli we're eating now has a lot less nutrients than the broccoli that our grandparents ate. And so like, how do we know what a nutrient-dense food is that would support our brain?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question because if you conflate it with energy density, then you could really run into trouble. So usually the way people look at this is key nutrients linked to health kind of divided by calories. So basically you want the biggest number possible, so more nutrients relative to calories. Versus if you drank a soda that has nothing of value, but a ton of calories coming from sugar, very low in nutrients. There are a lot of different ways that you can define this. Different people have their preferences in terms of saying what, you know, a nutrient score of a food might be, because you're you're kind of variably defining the nutrients that we're focused on. I think the big picture wise, right? So people have different ways of saying this, but eating food that comes from plants and animals

• 31:02Speaker 01

  that ate those plants as opposed to food that was made in plants. The more ingredients you see on the back of a box or some sort of middle aisle of the grocery store, chances are the less relative nutrients you're getting compared to the calories. And it's absolutely not the case that it's all about calories. I think that's really important to state. Yeah, thank you. But when we're eating a ton of calories from unhealthy sources, that absolutely has a role to play in weight gain and trouble with kind of regulating our immunometabolic state. So where my research has been mostly focused, though, is not just on maximizing general nutrients, but on a certain group of nutrients that has been kind of named the dark matter of nutrition, which is something that's both very exciting and very poorly known to most

• 31:47Speaker 01

  people right now. And to help people understand why this is kind of a new paradigm that's also incredibly ancient, you've got to understand that in the last hundred or so years, we've completely kind of sequentially transformed how we've looked at food and what is important in food. You know, most people watching will probably know calories, will probably know fats, carbs and proteins, those are the macronutrients. They probably know about micronutrients, vitamins and minerals. And if you go to the USDA, the website, they focus on about 150 total in the micronutrients and the macronutrients. So that's kind of the core kind of set of molecules, compounds that people are aware of as it relates to what is in their food.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  But not only is that anywhere but complete, but it is a great representation of what humans continue to do within nutrition and just in general, which is have this hubris, which is we now, we now understand something that nature has perfected over billions of years. We now know exactly what is in this piece of broccoli. We now know exactly what is in this piece of meat and we can then distill it down to its individual components. Because what wound up happening is in America and then largely the world, in order to produce more readily available Calories, you know, we kind of stripped away and industrially engineered a lot of the foods

• 33:12Speaker 01

  that used to be far more comprehensive. So we converted what nature had already created into something that we felt covered the bases. And we've been wrong so many times, which is why we have to keep fortifying food, adding back in the vitamins and minerals, which is if you look on cereal, you know, it's not like the wheat that has gone through 18 phases of processing just has a bunch of vitamin B in it. It has to be put back in, it has to be enriched and fortified because we've stripped away those nutrients. But the hubris here and the problem is, we then assume that it's equivalent because we labeled 10 or so vitamins and minerals and put that back into the food. And what the research is telling us, and what's fascinating here is we're not talking about fringe journals. We're talking

• 33:56Speaker 01

  about last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, an article that was called "The Chemical Complexity of Food and Implications for Therapeutics," where they talk about this problem, which is we keep tethering to this very small subset of molecules in our food, where we know simultaneously that they're somewhere in the neighborhood of 139,000 molecules in this so-called nutritional dark matter that have this immense untapped therapeutic potential. So that's really where my research is focused. And what I love about this, and apropos of our previous conversations, is I'm not necessarily creating anything. I'm simply rediscovering what nature has been doing forever, and finding ways to make that more interesting and applicable to human health now, when so much of this magic of

• 34:41Speaker 01

  what's already in our food has been lost due to ultra-processing.

• 34:45Mindy Pelz?

  You know, I find I do the same thing. I keep coming back to the human body and nature and how they they come together in health. So I really resonate with what you just said. It's like, we can biohack, we can get all excited about biohacking and supplementation, all that. But then at the end of the day, you come back to this simple idea that before you start to spend hundreds of dollars on supplements, how about you look at the quality of the food you're putting in your mouth? They say, you know, people who don't fast, but they're saying 17, about 17 times a day, somebody's putting something into their mouth. So, give us an example of a dark matter food. I really like this concept.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well. I guess all plant-based foods are going to have this incredible composition of this dark matter. Certain plant-based foods will have more than others. And now, research, specifically research coming out with a researcher named Stefan von Bleed out of Utah State University, are showing that metabolites of this dark matter are differential in, for example, a grass-fed cow versus a feedlot cow. Fascinating.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  So you can actually see the signals, the echoes, right, of these molecules based on what these animals ate, and certainly based on what we consume now, too, we're looking at. So, these molecules, there are many. There's organosulfers, there's polyphenols, there's terpenes. I'm particularly focused on polyphenols. And polyphenols are a group of, they're secondary metabolites from plants. There's about 8,000-plus of these. There are many different types in here. Many people might be familiar with one, which is called resveratrol, which is a still bean molecule. The largest group within the polyphenol family is called the flavonoids. So that includes molecules like quercetin, EGCG, which is

• 36:28Speaker 01

  found in green tea, delphinidin. And again, they're found, distributed throughout the plant food kingdom. But what makes them so fascinating is that they are preferentially concentrated in plants that have to build resilience against environmental stressors. So, some people may be familiar with this, but just bear with me. In the longevity space, there has been all this kind of research around, how can we harness certain molecules to combat aging? And the pathways there relate to things like reversing senescence, which is kind of a programmed aging of our cells. They're targeting things like immunosenescence,

• 37:10Speaker 01

  which is the programmed aging of immune cells. And they're trying to reverse some of the signals that have been put on our DNA over time, which is called epigenetics, to make our cells younger. And resveratrol emerged in popularity a while back, became very popular, didn't necessarily pan out in terms of the human research. But the point here was that these plant-based molecules, which are, in essence, longevity molecules that plants use to survive against environmental stressors, may have benefit in humans. So... There's a huge family of them. What's very interesting now is that we're starting to see, again, top-tier journals publishing on the utility of optimizing towards these molecules and specific classes

• 37:54Speaker 01

  of these molecules to enhance pathways related to cognition, to boosting BDNF, which is kind of like a miracle grow for the brain, to enhancing metabolic function, to decreasing visceral fat, which is a really interesting tether to longevity and brain health. But it all comes back to the central question of how can we borrow from this magic that nature has already designed for us as opposed to what we're seeing a lot of right now, which is kind of going to the extreme end, which is say, we've identified this singular molecule in this plant and we've refined it to such an extent that we know it's going to do something and eventually becomes a pharmaceutical. So somewhere in this, there is this question of how can we harness what nature has already

• 38:36Speaker 01

  created, what people have been eating historically for thousands of years. There's tethers to the blue zone diet, so the work that Dan Buettner has done, but also just in general, people who tend to live long and healthy lives are not people who are the hardcore biohackers.

• 38:52Mindy Pelz?

  That's so true.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  They're people who do think regularly that optimize for longevity. And one of those things seems to be eating a diet rich in these polyphenolic molecules.

• 38:59Mindy Pelz?

  Yep. Yeah, so I found a couple of interesting statistics on polyphenols because through a different lens, I've been really interested in polyphenols through the lens of olive oil. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on olive oil because that's sort of maybe the most well-known polyphenol food that people can associate. And here. Okay, let me ask you a personal question. And this one is a really important one, which is, when was the last time you had your vitamin D checked? And I'm saying this because in all my years of working with women, low vitamin D is one

• 39:39Mindy Pelz?

  of the most consistent findings I see and one of the most consistently missed. And vitamin D matters for so many aspects of your health. We're talking about a deficiency that can show up as hormonal imbalance, mood struggles, poor sleep, immune issues, even stubborn weight that won't budge no matter what you do. But here's the part that most people don't know. Taking an isolated D3 supplement isn't enough. This isn't like just running down to the local store and grabbing some D3. Your body actually needs D3 to be combined with very specific cofactors to

• 40:20Mindy Pelz?

  actually absorb and utilize vitamin D the way nature intended it. And most supplements on the market don't include these cofactors. That's why I personally love Cataplex D from Standard Process. It's a whole food supplement. It's vitamin D complex, not just an isolated nutrient. There's an incredible difference between checking a box and actually moving the needle on your health, and this one really moves the needle. In fact, in my clinic, we used to test vitamin D, and we could see with a product like Cataplex D, we could see on lab work, the vitamin D levels in people go up. So you can learn more, and

• 41:05Mindy Pelz?

  you can get yourself some vitamin D. You can test out Cataplex D at drmindypels.standarprocess.com. Enjoy.

• 41:18Mindy Pelz?

  For the two statistics I heard is that you have a 25% lower risk of cognitive decline if you're eating polyphenols, and there are only 5 to 10% of polyphenols are actually absorbed in the small intestine. So walk us through, there's a lot of nuance, but I want to make sure my audience understands what foods to eat and how powerful they can be, and how powerful they're not if they're cooked wrong, or they're eaten in combination wrong. Like, how do we get the most out of our polyphenol-rich food?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  So in the United States, the number one source of polyphenols is unfortunately not all Olive oil, but it's also something that still may be quite good for us and it's coffee. Uh, and the reason for that is that when you taste bitter foods, that typically is a signal that it is rich in polyphenols. So if you think about olive oil, if you're drinking or eating real good olive oil, it should have a bit of a bite to it. It shouldn't just taste generic, flat. What you're trying to taste are those polyphenols. Similarly, if you're drinking coffee, coffee is bitter, not because, you know, hopefully you're not getting a burned cup of coffee, but because those coffee beans are very rich source of polyphenols.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Uh, dark chocolate is bitter, not because somebody messed it up and didn't add the sugar, but because it is rich in polyphenols. So in essence, bitter is a signal for polyphenols. And I think something that's interesting to your audience is that research now shows that some of these bitter foods and the polyphenols in them can actually activate receptors that increase production of molecules like GLP-1. So there, there's all these signaling pathways for bitter sensing that are bigger than just this idea of, well, I consume some healthy molecules. Now, the other thing that you brought up, which is really, really interesting, is that the vast majority of polyphenols pass to the large intestine before they can be absorbed. So they pass through the small intestine and into the large intestine. And this actually speaks to one of the most fascinating kind of

• 43:22Speaker 01

  nature to human transition points that there is because while we may not be able to absorb and metabolize those polyphenols, the gut microbiome can. And what's fascinating here is that we're now looking at research showing that polyphenols act as a form of prebiotic. So most people think about fiber as the prebiotic, but it turns out the polyphenols can actually influence the composition of the microbiome. And beyond that, when microbes metabolize polyphenols, they turn them into new versions of those molecules. And it may be that those molecules have more of an ability for us to absorb them and utilize them. Beyond even that, however, polyphenols may be influencing what happens in the gut immune

• 44:03Speaker 01

  system, maybe influencing what happens with the molecules that bacteria create like short chain fatty acids, which can then link to cognition. But the specifics as to, well, is it that if I was to take a gram of quercetin, then I consume a gram of quercetin, it gets into my bloodstream? That's not how this works. What's far more nuanced is that you're in essence, taking these plant-based molecules, and you are changing what is happening with your internal ecosystem, with the microbiome, with your immune system. And the sum total of those things is what's been linked to better overall health, better immune health, better brain health. So it's not simply that the goal, like it might be for vitamin D, is to consume a certain amount of milligrams each day, and that's going to have the same

• 44:47Speaker 01

  effect, whether you consume it all from resveratrol or from quercetin. It's instead asking this question of why is a food producing these molecules? And how can we start to see how we can transfer the longevity effects that the plant has, or the general kind of biological benefit that the plant has, into something related to human benefits? And that may mean that we need to look at antioxidant, neurotransmission, immunity, metabolism, and other pathways, as opposed to simply making the blanket statement that is, you're deficient, if you take enough from any source, you're covered.

• 45:21Mindy Pelz?

  Right. So, you know, we put a lot of emphasis on macros. I feel like we moved from calories to macros. I know some people are still in calories. I talk to those people. They always are asking me questions. And now I'm actually feel like we're moving away from macros. And we're moving, yeah, like, as I'm listening to you talk, I'm like, there it is again. We're getting out of the counting. And could it be as simple as, how many bitter foods do you have in a day?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  You know, I think that that is an interesting way to contextualize this. Any person you talk to right now, that's in the diet space, is going to tell you that their specific composition of macros is the key. And, you know, I'm not, I'm not super old, I'm not super young, but I've seen every iteration on the macros that's known to man. So it was, no fat, no carbs, and now it's Protein cookies with with every meal and

• 46:22Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  It it's just, it's not that there isn't something to it. It's simply that it is such a kind of cursory explanation of what we actually know works. And coming back to blue zones and people who tend to live long and healthy lives. These are not people who are carefully tracking their macronutrient content.

• 46:40Mindy Pelz?

  Well said.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And they're also not people on these cycling diets. Because what winds up happening, coming back to an incentive plan, is that people who try these crazy diets, they do them for maybe a month or two, they might lose some weight and then they gain it back. And that works great if you're writing a diet book because next year I'll tell you, hey, here's the new one and it maybe will work for a little bit until it fails. As opposed to asking the people who are healthiest don't do this. What is it that they do? And what they do is they create a scenario where healthy choices are just built into their typical daily habits. So coming back to kind of this bitter food idea. We're now starting to see interventions, interventional trials, not just observational data

• 47:24Speaker 01

  that are linking polyphenol consumption and and by extension foods that are rich in polyphenols with better overall health and especially better brain health. And so I think the most interesting of these is not a supplement based trial. It is a food based intervention that is a sustainable dietary pattern. And so let me just talk about this here for a moment. So it's called the Direct Plus Green Med Study. And for those who haven't checked it out before, it's it's led to a host of different publications across a number of different journals. And so what they did in this study, it was 18 months. They had 224 people who completed the trial. They had three interventional groups. One group basically just did a healthy diet.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  The second group did a Mediterranean diet, which included about 400 additional milligrams of polyphenols. And then they had this green med arm, which was the Mediterranean diet plus additional polyphenols. So they got roughly 1,200 additional milligrams of polyphenols per day over this 18 month period. And again, this is a dietary intervention. And what they looked at at the end of this study were a couple of things. The one that was maybe most interesting to me, they did MRI at the start and MRI at the end, and they showed that in the green med diet, they had the slowest rate of atrophy in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. So it was a dietary study showing that they slowed down the amount of loss in the memory center of the brain.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  They did a subsequent analysis of that, and they found that it was linked to improvements in hemoglobin A1C, so metabolic function.

• 48:55Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And the consumption of green tea and a random thing that they studied, which is called duckweed, which is this kind of like pond of scum that just happens to be super rich in polyphenols. Just to stay on this, because again, it's really, really important for people to know. So they did an additional analysis, and they were looking at weight loss, and they found that both the Mediterranean group and the green med group lost the same amount of weight. So it was about 3% of their body weight over this 18-month period. But then when they did detailed MRI scanning, they were able to find that the Mediterranean diet plus the green med intervention had doubling of visceral fat loss. So what we're talking about here is that the increased consumption of these molecules, which, by the way, in this study, they found that this loss of this visceral fat was correlated

• 49:40Speaker 01

  with higher levels of polyphenols in plasma and consuming more green tea and walnuts and duckweed, that the consumption of these molecules, in essence, reprograms biology from the inside out. And this is not talking about some sort of crazy biohack where you have to dial in your supplement at a certain level. We're talking about a dietary pattern that prioritizes polyphenols. That is something that is historically what most of the healthiest diets on earth do. This just happened to be a study with people who are kind of not starting out in a blue zone. These were people.

• 50:13Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  In an Israeli nuclear facility, so it was a pretty well-controlled study.

• 50:17Mindy Pelz?

  Interesting. So what else was in the green med diet? This is the first I've even heard of that.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 50:22Mindy Pelz?

  That's so cool.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  The way it worked is, again, Mediterranean diet. So olive oil and all the other things that you would consider in a Mediterranean diet. But in the green med diet, they had people additionally consume green tea as well as these, this duckweed to just give a boost.

• 50:39Mindy Pelz?

  Where would you, where would you get the duckweed? Cause I'm like envisioning like pond scum and I'm thinking, no, I'm not sure. I like health, but I'm not sure I'm going there.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  So don't, don't go out and do that. You, yeah, you can buy it. There are a couple of companies that sell it. I mostly use it at this stage as a proxy for additional polyphenol consumption because they also use walnuts for this. They also use green tea for this and they showed that all three of those had correlations with improved health outcomes. So we can kind of maybe go through in a moment. I can talk about some of the equivalencies in terms of dosing of foods that are rich in polyphenols.

• 51:13Mindy Pelz?

  That would be amazing.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  But I do want to just talk about here again, this is an interventional study with a dietary intervention showing improvements in visceral fat loss, showing improvements in terms of slowing of rate of brain atrophy, showing improvements. There's also data on epigenetics and liver fat. And again, we're just talking about here, not some sort of crazy intensity diet, but rather introducing foods that are consistent with the Mediterranean diet pattern and high polyphenol foods. There's just, just to touch on this briefly, there are also a couple of studies that have been published in the journal neurology, neurology being kind of the number one brain journal, showing that different patterns of polyphenol consumption have been linked to significantly lower risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  So in one study, they were looking at a specific pattern of flavonoid consumption and they found that it was about a 50% lower risk for developing dementia in the people who are eating the highest amount of this pattern. So there's observational data and now interventional data showing that people who consume more polyphenols and you know, it is true that it's also a reflection of a higher quality diet tend to be far better suited in terms of their brain health outcomes.

• 52:22Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, and so, okay, then give me some of the other foods. Walnuts is really, you know, we've been talking about walnuts forever, and I think it's such an important one. And what I'll tell you, what I find when I advise women on walnuts is they go, "Ooh, the calories, the calories are a little too high and nuts." I'm like, "No, no, no, we gotta get you out of thinking about calories." So what else do we need to think about with these green med foods?

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Well, I do want to say one other thing around this, which is, and maybe this is a topic for future conversation. So at the first level, the idea is to consume more polyphenol-rich foods is probably a good bet for most people. In the United States, people consume roughly one gram, or maybe 800 milligrams of polyphenols a day. Again, mostly coming in terms of the top source, coffee. And one of the things that continues to come up in this research is diversifying your sources of polyphenols, not just saying, "Well, I'm gonna eat a junk diet, but I'm just gonna eat or drink eight cups of green tea a day." Number one, probably too much caffeine. And number two, you know, we want to diversify our sources. But some of the research that we've been doing, particularly around brain health, just

• 53:30Speaker 01

  to dial in for people who are interested to learn more about where this goes next, is looking at how there are correlations between colors of various polyphenols in foods and various health outcomes. And in particular, we're looking at anthocyanins. These are a certain type of polyphenol called a flavonoid that are shown to penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Population-based data suggest that people who consume more of them may have better brain health. They tend to be red, or purple, or blue in color. So thinking about blueberries and blackberries, darker-colored carrots, and darker-colored grains. And some interventions show that people who consume more of some of these blueberry-based anthocyanins may have improved cognition.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  So just to whet people's appetite a little bit, you know, there's a lot more to talk about in terms of certain families of these polyphenols, as they may relate to both signals that you're getting from color in the foods that you're eating, and potential organ-specific benefits. So this may be one of the reasons why consuming blueberries, beyond just the antioxidants, polyphenols are antioxidants, but it may be that the anthocyanins in blueberries may act on brain-related pathways, which makes them a special berry, and maybe one to prioritize.

• 54:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And so could the listener go and just Google high polyphenol foods? Or I just want to give, because this is exciting what you're saying and I want to make sure people have resources for that.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  For sure. I would say you absolutely can. If you were to Google it, you'll get some information. Let's go over some kind of basic principles. So polyphenol-rich foods tend to be minimally processed, plant-based foods. And one of the best signals that it's rich in polyphenols is going to be how much color it has. So not only depth of color, but also diversity of color. So broccoli will have different polyphenols than an orange pepper, which has different polyphenols than a blueberry. And again, eating a diversity of colors, you've heard about this eating the rainbow that people like.

• 55:30Mindy Pelz?

  I was gonna say, this is eat the rainbow. Yep.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Right. So it's not just because it looks good on the plate. It's because you're actually giving your body a different set of signals. And maybe more importantly, your gut microbiome, a different set of signals of these polyphenol and other plant-based molecules that are linked to better health. So yes, eating the rainbow, good plan. The most concentrated source of polyphenols in our diet is actually spices and herbs. So just, and I'm not talking here about using a bunch more salt. I'm saying diversifying. So things like oregano, cloves, cinnamon, these are ways to get more of a diversity of these polyphenols in a much more concentrated source. To give people a little bit of a context for how much this would be. So one cup of green tea is about 300 milligrams of polyphenols, a cup of coffee,

• 56:13Speaker 01

  about 200 or so milligrams of polyphenols, half a cup of blueberry is about 200 milligrams of polyphenols. And again, you can, you can go online and you can kind of look up whatever your favorite food is and get a better sense as to the composition. What we're looking at right now, so we're doing a large randomized controlled study, and we're looking specifically at the impact of dosing of sprouted food for polyphenols and cognition. Because here's just a really cool little tidbit. I mean, you probably already know all about this, but for listeners, when you sprout a seed, it dramatically changes the composition of the molecules in that seed. So the transition from going to a dorm-

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Seed to a sprout actually releases enzymes and interconverts some of these polyphenols. So we're using a plant called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And so we are working with a research team in Utah and we've actually or they've submitted the manuscript as of last week on this. But we have looked at the polyphenolic profiling of the seed of the flower or a sprouted version of the flower. And what we've shown is not only does the sprouting process dramatically enhance the amount of polyphenols in the kind of finished product compared to an unsprouted version. But it significantly ups the anthocyanin content.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  It went from about a four times increase from going from kind of a standard flower version to a sprouted flower version. And you're actually getting a decreased amount of some of the alkaloids that, you know, I'm, I'm not one of these people who's all about the anti nutrients. I think that's oversold, but there is an effect of certain plant molecules that decreases absorption. And so it seems like some of those decrease when you sprout foods. So I know we've kind of went deep on this, but sprouting foods can actually enhance the polyphenolic content too. So if you have access to sprouted foods, that's an interesting thing to look at as well.

• 58:17Mindy Pelz?

  You know, it's so interesting because since we moved to Santa Cruz, we have a farmer's market with a incredible vendor that sells every sprouted, anything you could ever want. And I've fallen in love with sprouts. In fact, I don't buy lettuce anymore. Whenever I make a salad, I put this as many different sprouts together. And it's like my body just craves it. It's like when I first got them, I couldn't get enough of these sprouts. And it felt like it was fulfilling a deficiency. And it really is a powerful food. Keep going because I think it's so simple and people can do it in a jar in their home.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  So I want to just make sure we tethered the previous point, which is consuming diversity of polyphenol rich foods. Each day, great bet, certain foods are richer than others. Dark red, purple foods, anthocyanins, maybe a better bet for brain health. But coming back to the sprouting thing, and I think one of the themes that you and I have kind of bonded on over the years is what if we, we took our kind of need to control and understand everything from like a standard human. Oversight of nature perspective and put it aside for a second and just ask this question of what is nature already doing? What is food already doing? And what can we harness as it relates to that? And sprouting is a perfect example of that process.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Granted, every food that gets converted from a seed to a plant has to go through that sprouting phase. But think about how much life and opportunity there is in that little period when something is going from a dormant seed to a sprout. And what we've found is there are these phases between the day that a seed starts to the germination process and the timing of it creating a sprout around, I guess, four days or so that it actually optimizes towards higher levels of polyphenols. And what's really interesting is it actually converts certain polyphenols. So you're not necessarily getting the same cohort of polyphenols you would get in a sprout as you would in a flower made from that seed.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Beyond that, it's very interesting because for most seeds, so we're using buckwheat, which I don't know if you've messed with buckwheat very much. There's common buckwheat, which is a little bit lighter in color. And then we have this Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is the seeds basically look like little spaceships. They're, they're basically black and you really can't, without specialized milling equipment, you can't do anything with it because the seeds are so incredibly hard. And we did an analysis on the seed hulls themselves. And it turns out that they have very specific nutrients in them that you lose in the flower because you take away the seed. You hull the seed to make the flower. But when you sprout it, you're actually able to convert that seed hull into something that you can use.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  So what we found in the sprouting is you're actually able to retain all of these nutrients you would otherwise lose in the process. And again, we didn't invent anything here. We basically just asked nature to do what it already does. And now what we're able to see, and again, what we're studying in this large randomized trial is how might that influence health in humans at scale? It's 850 people against a placebo. So it's going to be some of the best data we have specifically on how sprouting food, polyphenols can influence cognition in healthy adults.

• 1:01:34Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, well, I can't, once you get that out, let us know because I just think their food is medicine keeps coming. We all keep coming back to that. So is nature. So is nature, which leads me to my, to my next question. I, I loved what you put out around bird noises. And it's funny how people hold on to interesting little tidbits of information and they become obsessed on it. But when we switch from nature that we eat to be able to help cognition, I'm experiencing now that I live in nature, how much something as simple as a bird noise, I get in the ocean every day, I, I have a forest behind me.

• 1:02:18Mindy Pelz?

  And when I, now that I am like marinating in nature, I am having a whole different experience with my brain. So, can you, yeah, talk a little bit about that?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Well, let's, let's hit this theme that I think we've discussed a bit, which is,

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  if you just take away some of the nonsense that we're surrounded by, that we've been told is reality, you just do better. So I know people love kind of like cold plunges because they say that it activates brown fat and uncoupling protein and all that. But sometimes the benefit is simply that it forces your brain to stop thinking about the nonsense around us and simply allows for you to be in your body. Same thing with meditation, with mindfulness. But I think I'm like you in that, you know, there's something very unique that has actually changed where I've decided to live and the day to day, which is exposure to nature. So, big picture wise, a study came out pretty recently showing that even 10 minutes of nature exposure was associated with a lot of health benefits.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  There's a study I love from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they showed that 20 minutes of urban nature was sufficient to decrease cortisol just once a week. So you don't need that much. But what I've been talking about more recently is, yes, it's, it's birds and so random here, right?

• 1:03:31Mindy Pelz?

  Birding's a big thing, though. I gotta tell you, here in Santa Cruz, I've met so many birders. I'm like, oh, they like identify as a burger.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  It's a really funny thing because the people who are into it are really into it. And I was at a neighborhood gathering, I guess about two years ago. And we were talking about hummingbirds because in the Pacific Northwest, hummingbirds are amazing. So we have Anna's hummingbird, we have calliope, and then we get rufus that are migratory. So you get them probably more of the year than we do. But right around late spring, we get the rufus hummingbird that comes back. And the male is this bright orange and it's just incredible. So I was talking to people about this because they, in theory, have these same birds in their backyard. And one of the people was kind of talking about, yeah, they're a nuisance, kind of like a big bug type thing. And it's just like, how is there such a disconnect between what I'm experiencing and this magic of, you know,

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  learning about how hummingbirds are able to shape their wings to change color patterns? And me basically setting up my life so that I can watch these guys outside the window? And other people that are just, you know, they just don't find it interesting. As it relates to bird watching or birding and brain health, there was an interesting study that came out recently showing that experienced birders have actual different patterns in their brain in terms of brain wiring and areas associated with attention. So it suggested that birding rewires the brain. And then the data that, you know, you had references, that listening to bird song is actually associated with certain aspects of better brain function. And again, everyone's different. Some people might get the benefit and some people might not.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  But any way that you can reconnect to the natural environment, short of, I don't know, being stalked by a mountain lion on the trail, is probably a good bet. And I think that it's something that isn't going to be necessarily as intense as what many people think about with biohacking, you know? I do a lot of research in an adjacent space around psychedelics. And people say, oh, well, you need the psychedelics because it opens up all this stuff. And while that is true, what those represent is kind of a more intense version of what many people can get from simply reconnecting to the forest, to the awe that comes from looking at tall trees, to the noted benefits of not only green spaces, but also blue spaces. So if you can get to a coast or to a river,

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  and it's not going to be an instant thing where you're going to go out there and it's going to immediately enhance every aspect of your physiology. But consider the alternative, which is for most people, spending ninety plus percent of their day indoors, where we're spending eleven plus hours of our day engaging with content, digital media, radio and the like. So just getting outside and paying attention to something that's not yourself, I think is key. But coming back to the point, birding.

• 1:06:16Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, no, it's it. Yeah, like this little bird. You go looking for a bird and a couple of different birds and you are really changing the wiring of your brain. I so my audience knows this, but I had a real a healing experience with nature over the last year where I started surfing here in Santa Cruz and I I went out for the pure joy of it. I didn't think about the water aspect of it. But after going out on a fairly regular basis, within a month, I'm not joking, the thoughts in my head changed. The worst case scenarios stopped being run. The today's going to be a great day thoughts started popping up. The I can relax feeling

• 1:06:58Mindy Pelz?

  in my body was always present after I got out of the water. And so I became obsessed with and I'm sure you've read this book, Blue Mind, and trying to understand what happens to our brain around water. And when I actually dove into the neuroscience behind water, it it blew my mind. I was like, oh, it's bringing cortisol down. The negative ions are helping my body make more serotonin. The ocean has the same mineral balance as human blood. And it all comes back to this idea that we are we are bringing forward today, which is humans need to be in synergy with nature, whether we're eating nature or we're spending time

• 1:07:40Mindy Pelz?

  in nature. But we need to be in relationship with nature to heal. And I I let go of therapists. I stopped taking so many supplements, like so many things change just by going in the ocean on a regular basis.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  I love that so much. Formative memories in my life have been underwater, freediving, a lot of freediving growing up. And I think there's something specific about immersion within water that is very, very therapeutic. I guess it kind of gets us to like the squishy side of stuff, but it is absolutely the case here that being in nature is a good bet. And again, as we're looking at interventions that have been clinically shown to be beneficial to overall well-being, to longevity, to lower risk of infections, nature exposure not only has that data, but what I love about it and what I love about this conversation in particular is we're talking about something that is freely

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  available to most people. You know, you don't have to go to a national park for a week. If you can, great. But some of this data shows that just going into a small, local, urban natural center, meaning you go to your park, you sit under a tree, there doesn't have to be an agenda. And I think it's kind of the opposite of the biohacking mentality, which is to say, okay, I'm gonna go out here, I'm gonna real quick breathe in all this forest air, and then I'm gonna go back to my helter-skelter life. It is the antidote to that. And I think for myself included, it is such a good reminder of something that is often just not prioritized as a wellness intervention, because it's tough to make content or sell a product around it because it is free.

• 1:09:20Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, who's gonna make money off sitting under a tree? Like, this is where we, back to what we were saying, the wellness industry has got the snazzy new biohacker supplement for you. But, you know, going out near to your city park and sitting under the tree without your phone on and just letting your brain rest actually may be more beneficial than that thing you just spent a couple hundred dollars on trying to hack the system that's overloaded by a modern world.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:09:50Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's really like you and I do connect on this. I really feel sad the direction I like. I had to extract myself from the biohacking world. It just I wasn't congruent with all of the quick ways that we can hack into our system. And I've come back to me personally, that whenever I feel off course, I go back to nature, whether it's nature to eat, or nature to sit, there's a rhythm there. I don't know if you find this, there's just a rhythm there that's different than you're seeing on your phone, or you're experiencing in your day to day.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, I think we've talked about this bit before. And you know, I bonded with Sequoia over this a long time ago in Clubhouse. But so I moved to the Pacific Northwest to do my medical residency, and I stayed out here because of the nature, because of the rivers, because of the forest. And almost any day in the fall that I'm not working, you will find me out foraging for mushrooms. In the summertime, it's foraging for other edibles, lots of berries. This time of year, spring, when we're recording, there's there's morels. And no, I'm not giving up any of my morel spots. But also, yeah, the birds, the walks, we went on a, I think, a seven mile walk over the weekend, just along the coastline. There are otters and eagles. And again, this is, this is all very Pacific

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Northwest focused. But I think everyone has a little bit of that, you know, even in their backyard. And coming back to the birding point, you know, I did a post about this, and I asked people, tell me about your favorite bird that you like spotting. And I guess, Mindy, you let me know if we have space here for people watching this on YouTube, to let us know their favorite bird as well.

• 1:11:26Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, please do. Put in the comments.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  It is just so incredible, because of how many people love this thing, too. And when you can connect with other people, not around something that's so distant from humanity, but around something that is so shared, right? Something that we all, many of us, I guess, love, which is, was just already around us. I think that is such a powerful opportunity to dismantle what we're told, which is, here's how you should be spending your time. So again, for people who are watching this, for people listening to this, if you have the opportunity, let us know how you like to connect with nature, and specifically, like Birds, it is incredible how many people are all about this. I think Sean Bean just now has a podcast all about birding in the UK. It's, it's definitely a big thing.

• 1:12:10Mindy Pelz?

  But I think that's because we're craving it, you know, we're craving it and we don't even know it. It's just, it's so, there's all kinds of birding apps and I mean, it's really, I think the, the theme of this is we've gotten so far off course with what health is. And when you go to your social media, which is the number one place that people are getting health information, even the people that are delivering you health are so off course with what health is. Which is why my brain always goes, come back to nature, come back to food, master those first. Come back to the simple, but to your point, it's really hard to sell the simple, you know, so, and it's hard for people to hold on to the attention of the simple.

• 1:12:54Mindy Pelz?

  But I have found a whole, I have found the greatest therapist in nature and, and I, I just pay attention to its rhythm. And when I sink into its rhythm, I start to feel more like myself.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Well, we were talking a little bit at the start around the content that's being created now, which is sensationalized and is driven to product funnels and all the like. And what I would say is what you're creating here with this channel, with this content is, is kind of the alternative. And so for all those people who are listening, I just imagine some aspect of this must resonate with you. And I think it's, it's kind of incumbent on all of us, right, to not expect everyone else to change. One of the most common things people say is, oh, well, my friend, my family member, they eat a junk diet. You have to get them to change and you recognize if they're not ready, you're not going to do anything. And what you can do is you can model it. And I think that this community of people, right, you're already doing these things. So yes, you can model it for others, but also provide support to each other.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Something I said earlier on is in order to fight back against a society where poor health is the default, you have to be a weirdo. You have to depart from the norm. And, and it's never been more true than now. If you turn on the news, if you go on social media, there is. Lifetime's worth of content that is going to tell you this is the most important thing for you to do, for you to say, for you to think. And very little of that is actually in any way designed to benefit you. But these types of conversations, I think, are and reconnecting to the nature, I think, is.

• 1:14:24Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, well, I love talking to you, Austin. I really appreciate your mind and your thoughtfulness, you know, really like and your willingness to extract yourself from what I call shiny object syndrome. And and I agree so wholeheartedly with you that even the biohacking world, even the wellness trends, we're just like, I saw the protein water that came out the other day and I was like, what? We can't even sit and eat anymore? We're gonna drink our protein and water? Like, we're so far away from what can heal us and is fairly free.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:15:01Mindy Pelz?

  It's not that expensive.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  The problem isn't adding more, it's, in this case, doing less. And I think that's so hard because there's very little that is product incentivized for us to do and purchase less stuff.

• 1:15:14Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's so true. So where can people find you? Because I love your content and I think my audience will too. So where's your primary spot?

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  Well, you can find me on the mushroom trails, but I won't say hi if we're looking for the same one.

• 1:15:25Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. I want to come forage with you. Do you take? Do you take?

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  If you come up in the fall, the Pacific Northwest, yep, we go Chantrelles, Porcini, all sorts of good stuff.

• 1:15:36Mindy Pelz?

  I would love that.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  You can find me online. My website is austinpromoter.com. I have a newsletter there where I send out information on brain health, so you can sign up for that, it's free. I'm on social media at DrAustinPromoter on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. I feel like that's more than sufficient.

• 1:15:55Mindy Pelz?

  That's a lot.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  If you're interested to learn some about this research, so the research is through a company called Big Bold Health. I'm the chief science officer there and that's where we're doing this randomized study to look at the effects of this food on cognition. And then beyond that, you know, I still do a lot of conferences. So if people are in the conference circuit, come say hi. A lot of brain health, longevity, and increasingly some work on epigenetics. So you'll find me talking about that in person.

• 1:16:23Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing. Well, keep being a weirdo and I'll keep being a weirdo. I love, I love that idea. And just thank you for your thoughtfulness in, in how you not only bring a message forward, but the way in which you help us all see it. It's, it's really, it's, it's really, you're gentle with how you deliver information. And I think it allows our nervous system to really soak it in. And maybe it's because you're spending all that time in nature. So, thank you, Austin. I appreciate you.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me back.

• 1:16:55Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.