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

Is the root of every illness your gut? Could 5 simple herbs replace your medicine cabinet? Natural remedy expert Simon Mills reveals the herbal medicines that doctors overlook, and the herbs, spices, and daily habits to use instead! Simon Mills is one of the most respected herbal practitioners of our time, with nearly 5 decades of clinical experience treating patients. He created the term ‘complementary medicine’ in the 1970s, has served as a special advisor to the UK House of Lords, and currently works as an Advisor and Author at Herbal Reality. He explains: How antibiotic resistance could kill millions and what natural remedies can do instead The #1 hidden cause of chronic illness (that no one’s talking about) How a common kitchen spice could kill 99% of cold viruses The 8 plants that are threatening Big Pharma’s bottom line The ancient medicinal plants we’ve been lied to about, and how to use them 00:00 Intro 02:15 The Power of Medicinal Plants 05:15 Why Medicinal Plants Help Like Paracetamol Does 06:32 How Western Culture Is Getting It Wrong 11:34 Why People Should Care About Medicinal Plants 13:56 Helping 10K+ People With Plants 13:58 Patients Simon Has Helped 15:38 Case Study: Healing Through Plants 22:51 The Gut Controls Almost Everything 26:45 The Dangers of Becoming Antibiotic Resistant 32:38 Alternatives to Antibiotics 38:52 Alternatives to Cold Drugs 51:47 Vitamin D and Zinc for Infection Protection 55:37 Garlic Benefits 59:07 Remedies for Chronic Pain 1:02:12 Arthritis Relief Medicinal Plant 1:08:25 Should We Take Anti-Inflammatory Pills? 1:12:00 The Superpower of Purple Vegetables 1:16:37 Your Diet Recommendations 1:17:33 Keto Diet and Sugar 1:19:34 Keto Diet and the Menstrual Cycle Link 1:22:08 Can PCOS Symptoms Increase From Sugar? 1:23:31 Medicinal Plants to Increase Fertility 1:26:51 Healing Benefits of Echinacea, Frankincense, and Myrrh for the Upper Body 1:33:48 Water Fasting and Long Fasts 1:35:08 Cancer Prevention 1:37:13 Cardiovascular Health Improvements 1:39:00 Benefits of Turmeric Consumption 1:41:35 Prebiotics, Probiotics, and Postbiotics 1:43:24 The Shocking Benefits of Curcumin 1:50:27 Cocoa Powder Healing Benefits 1:54:44 Shocking Link Between Alzheimer’s and Green Tea 1:56:39 Cholesterol and Statins — Is There an Alternative? 2:02:04 Omeprazole 2:08:29 How to Keep Up With a Fast-Changing World You can follow Simon, here: Instagram - https://bit.ly/4mmYAOh Herbal Reality Instagram - https://bit.ly/4fA1jRF Herbal Reality Website - https://bit.ly/46KVgaz You can read a selection of articles by Simon Mills, here: What is herbal medicine? - https://bit.ly/45iYvDF Are herbs safe? - https://bit.ly/453v35U The Diary Of A CEO: ⬜️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ⬜️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ⬜️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ⬜️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ⬜️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ⬜️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/DOAC and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  That is the most widely prescribed drug in this country, and I believe in the US also. But the list of problems accruing from long-term use is beginning to grow, and there's serious cancers, dementias. But the other thing is, is that once you're on it, it's really difficult to come off it. And that's not all. We use far too many antibiotics, and that's coming a serious health issue now. Because the number of people dying from antibiotic-resistant infections is beginning to rise dramatically. It's quite frightening.

• 0:27Steven Bartlett?

  So are there alternatives on this table that I should also consider as a form of medicine?

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, and most of these ones I'm going to be talking about have a pretty immediate effect. Now, have a bite of this.

• 0:39Steven Bartlett?

  Whoa.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  For almost 50 years, Dr. Simon Mills has pioneered how we think about natural medicine, earning global recognition as one of the most respected and influential herbal practitioners of our time.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  These things have medicinal properties. So let's start with dark chocolate. In terms of long-term brain health and cardiovascular health, that's what the best medicines around.

• 1:00Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. The next one is garlic. And in some parts of the world, they use garlic instead of penicillin. In fact, there was an old trick where if you had enough garlic, breathe on a petri dish, and you could kill various pathogens just with your breath.

• 1:12Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  And then there's this to reduce your cholesterol levels. This can really help with your eyesight, this is for your blood flow, gut health, cardiovascular health. Now, this is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health. Rosemary, we actually did a clinical trial on this. And all you need to do is press it and sniff. So you can see why some of this stuff really is powerful. Now, we have more to go through, and this is where it gets interesting. There's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this. Coffee.

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, God, what do I need to know?

• 1:40Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:42Steven Bartlett?

  Quick one before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you, thank you so much. Back to the episode.

• 2:30Steven Bartlett?

  Simon Mills, you are a pioneer, by all accounts, in what is called complementary medicine, but you're also one of the most respected herbal practitioners in the world. You've been doing this for more than 50 years. I've actually never spoken to somebody that has a comprehensive understanding of herbal remedies and herbal medicine. So I'm super excited to have this conversation with you today. What is the mission you're on and why do you think it's important?

• 2:57Speaker 00

  I think my main mission is to do what I can to help people get stronger. I sometimes say that, you know, the world is pretty rough out there. I can't do anything about the sea and the waves, but I can help you to build a better boat that can sit better in the water. And I think people relate to that, that if they felt a bit stronger in themselves, they would be able to cope better with what life throws at them. I chose plants because people have always used plants as their primary source of medicine. People have always grown up with plants. They've evolved along with plants. And what I aim to do is to put the

• 3:42Speaker 00

  old wisdoms into some scientific framework and then make it fit with conventional norms of healthcare.

• 3:50Steven Bartlett?

  You were a board member of the British Herbal Medicine Association. You're the first Chair of the Council for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, launched in Parliament by former Prime Minister Alec Douglas Home. You led a major European Commission project on herbal medicine involving over 20 centres across Europe. You're the Secretary of the European Scientific Cooperative on...

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Phytotherapy.

• 4:16Steven Bartlett?

  I was not able to say that word.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Which is the polite way of saying herbs. So it's phyto-plant-therapy.

• 4:22Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I think when people think about herbal medicine and using plants as a form of medicine, they think of tribes and they think of, I don't know, sort of ancient Chinese traditions. And I think, you know, the modern Westerner thinks of pills.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:39Steven Bartlett?

  When they think of medicine.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:41Steven Bartlett?

  What is it that we've lost? Is there like a lost wisdom?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:46Steven Bartlett?

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

• 4:50Speaker 00

  When we lived in the countryside, when we lived close to nature, that was very much around us. And in every little community, there'd be someone, usually a woman, who would know their way around the plants and would help you out when you had an illness or a sickness. I'm not saying that there's a golden age, but when we moved into cities, we lost a lot. Apart from anything else, we were living on top of each other. We had to drink each other's water. You know, there was a lot of new illnesses, sicknesses, pestilences and so on that only came in cities. In that world, the herbs couldn't cut it. So we needed stronger stuff. So they started using minerals. They started using things that were poisons. And the original physician's job was to be the only guy who could handle medicines that

• 5:36Speaker 00

  other people would not be safe to use. And so you got your training to use these much more powerful medicines. And it was thought that the old plant things were too soft and gentle. And so they were generally discarded. And then you developed these medicines into pills because often they were powders anyway. And, you know, then the pharmaceutical industry came in and branded and made proprietary materials from them. And that drifted a long way from just going down to a hedgerow, going into the garden, going to the kitchen and picking up remedies.

• 6:08Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of cultures around the world still use plants as the first form of medication for a variety of different sort of illnesses and diseases, right?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  They do, yes. I mean, most do. I mean, if you were Inuit and northern territories in Canada and so Alaska, you would probably not have very many plants to choose from. But for most other people, they're surrounded by plants. That's their world.

• 6:35Steven Bartlett?

  Hey, I think, you know, because I'm what, thirty two years old, so I've not really grown up with the wisdom of plants and how they can be used to treat some of the illnesses that I have. From a very young age, I'm taking cough syrup and I'm taking Paracetamol when I have a headache and all these kinds of pills and medicines, but plants were never really a part of that conversation. And I guess that makes me think that they don't work, or?

• 7:00Speaker 00

  That's what most people would now think. And one of the, one of the points of this conversation now is to point you to ways in which they can and to show you how you can figure that out within a minute or an hour. Most of these ones I'm going to be talking about have a pretty immediate effect. So it, you know, we now think, oh, if you take a herb, it may take months before anything happens. When I see a patient, my usual request to them is, can you call me tomorrow to let me know how it's going? Because things happen so fast. And if you're up for it, you can do a couple of taste tests and you can see why some of this stuff really is powerful.

• 7:37Steven Bartlett?

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

• 7:48Speaker 00

  How close we are to being, to having, I, I think life is a miracle, as I said in that early encounter. And we can realise the miracle within us if we just trust it. I've got a few guys to what I call health empowerment, things that you can do yourself at home just to begin to understand what's going on in here and to nourish it. And the plants are the, in my world, the, one of the most effective ways of supporting that inner miracle that we have, to nourish our health, to empower us. I sometimes think that, you know, medicine is extraordinary. I mean, we now live with cancer, used to

• 8:33Speaker 00

  die with it. Almost all the major illnesses of the past have now had treatments for. But, you know, if you've got a chronic condition, you're still left with yourself and maybe not feeling so good in yourself. I sometimes think that a lot of medicine is a bit like fast food delivery. You know, we have a meal brought in because it's convenient, but that also de-skills us.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  You know, we've stopped learning how to cook even. You know, I remember going to New York back in the eighties and surprised to find that so many apartments in New York didn't have kitchens because everyone went out to eat. And I thought, gosh, you're losing all those skills of making food and enjoying it and sitting it down over a table. Um, I think medicine, you know, we use far too many antibiotics. We use, you know, these PPI things called omeprazole for our acid reflux, the most widely prescribed drug in this country, and I think US also mostly unnecessary. Uh, we use a lot of anti-inflammatories just because it's sore without asking, why is it sore? And why are we suppressing one of our body's main defenses?

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Because inflammation is a defense. So these are things that you learn as you get into this world, that a lot of what we think are problems are solutions waiting for support.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Because I think most people would think that is medicine and That is a food. That's food. Yes, well, you're right. Medicine, food. Yeah, you're quite right. That's medicine, that's a food. What I'm saying is that there's a spectrum. And we may talk about that raspberry because it's red, and we might talk about the broccoli because it's green, and there's oranges, uh, colors there. All of these colors actually have properties that are actually quite valuable properties for our circulatory health, for our gut health, our brain health. Um, and the more the science is looking at it, the more amazing it's looking. These things have medicinal properties. So you're saying that this is medicine as well? Yes.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Let food be thy medicine is what old Hippocrates said two thousand years ago, two and a half thousand years ago. Is it the Chinese that are particularly big on herbal medicines? Yes, almost any other, anywhere, I mean, 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, and you can see if you can draw any conclusions. UK is one. US is the second, Canada is the third, Australia and New Zealand. Now, can you think of something that combines them all together?

• 11:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  They're originally white English speaking countries. If you go across to France, the channel here, go to any pharmacy, most of the medicine stocks on the pharmacy are herbal. If you go to some parts of Germany, you have to sit a herbal exam to get your licence. And further east, in the old Soviet block where they couldn't afford the pharmaceutical industry, they had homegrown, primarily plant-based medicines, much more widely. Going to Asia, it's the majority by far. And doctors and people working with plants and acupuncture in China work together without thinking about it. And many doctors use plants in their medicines, as their medicines.

• 12:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, how different, because I've never really spent a significant amount of time in China, how different is the perception of herbal medicines there than it is out on the streets of London?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  They don't think twice about it, it's what they grew up with. They, like a lot of people, we would say regretfully, do seem to want to do more things like the West does. So they adopt more Western habits and as soon as you earn a bit of money, you tend to adopt more Western lifestyles and think that the herbal thing is for your parents and grandparents. So there's still that trend even in Asia. But they start from a much broader base of experience.

• 12:42Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why should anyone care? You know, I have Ibuprofen at home, I have medicine that I can have in the cupboard. I have cough syrups if I get sick, if I get the flu, I have some flu pills that I brought from the pharmacy. Why should anyone care about what we're going to talk about today?

• 13:00Speaker 00

  I suppose the answer is in my practice. So I see patients three sessions a week. And these are people, almost most of them have been around the block. They've had treatments for their conditions, sometimes for many years. They're often living with chronic complex conditions and they're sore, they're tired, their energy's gone. You know, they've been told that we can't just keep taking the pills, you know, we've done all the tests, there's nothing else we can do. Time and time again, that's when the... Cookie crumbles. Because then you realise the ibuprofen and the quick pills ain't doing it anymore. There's a bigger health need that needs somehow fixing.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  And that's when they come to me as a practitioner. And I give them things that they can see improving their health, their sleep, their eating, their whatever it is that's not their energy levels, whatever it is that's not playing properly. We're, I see myself as a fine tuning or upping the performance. Uh, I'm not, when someone comes to me and they say, I've got whatever it is, arthritis or skin disease or whatever. Uh, I will politely take all the notes down, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in where that came from. What is the misbehaviour? What is the poor performance? Uh, that explains why all this happened.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  And often you find they had pneumonia at the age of three, or they had glandular fever at the age of 15 or 16. And things took a turn then, and you can see the trail. And often what I'm doing is going backwards and fixing things that weren't fixed back a long time ago. Working on digestion particularly, because that's where we work. Uh, kidney function, uh, liver function, you know, circulation, you know, up to the brain where we're dealing in that area. Um, so we're looking at the performance of the body. And it's only when it doesn't behave that you notice the needs to doing it.

• 15:03Steven Bartlett?

  How many patients have you seen in your career, do you think? Thousands of patients?

• 15:06Speaker 00

  I would say upwards of 10,000 each for an hour or so at a time to start with. So we get deep into the story and then rolling on. At any one time, I've got 200 running, you know, that I'm actively treating and two, a couple hundred.

• 15:23Steven Bartlett?

  And what are the range of illnesses or conditions that those patients have had? And when you think about the most remarkable or most interesting case studies, the most? Reliable case studies that you have, what are the conditions that are at the centre of those case studies?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Have you got a medical encyclopedia anywhere?

• 15:41Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna write down the Q ones.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  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 most things. I mean, literally, everything comes in because mostly it's chronic anyway, when they come and see me. And it can be anything. I mean, about a quarter of my patients are living with cancer, so that's one big group. I'm not treating the cancer, I'm helping him to live better with whatever it is they're dealing with. About another, at least a third, a bit more, living with chronic inflammatory disease, autoimmune diseases, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, things that are more complicated than you can shake a stick at.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  And again, you know, we're not dealing with the end result, we're looking at what may be leading up to that and seeing if we can improve underlying functions. But literally, anything can come by.

• 16:41Steven Bartlett?

  Is there particular case studies of patients that you've worked with that stand out to you, that you're most proud of, or that were eureka moments in your own sort of journey?

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Most of my stories are like journeys, so you see little steps and you're with somebody often for a long time and you just see changes in the way that they, they change over the weeks and months. So, you know, to say I've got an instant eureka moment, I've pulled together a few stories just, you know, when I was, I had to come to them and, you know, just, they're a motley mix and in fact I made notes because it's sometimes better to remind myself of the sort of things I did. Because each of these patients will walk out with five or six or eight different plants.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  And the reason I put them together is because they have a, a unique story. So probably the one with the most complex one is someone, all the names have changed by the way, someone called Heather who's 65, and she had a really severe, complex condition called erythema multiforme, which is a complex skin disease that's really distressing, very upsetting.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  What we know about her disease is that it's linked possibly to other infections. So we actually spotted mycoplasma pneumoniae is likely implicated. She'd previously had a lot of lung damage. In her youth, she had early pneumonia. And she was diagnosed with a chronic obstructive pulmonary thing, bronchiexysis, as it happened. Then she got COVID badly and most of her trouble started after that. She also had vitamin B12 deficiency, pernicious anemia, we call it, which is an autoimmune problem. The gut lining stops the vitamin B12 being absorbed. Those were in her background story. The lungs, because it was the earliest and probably the main factor, were first my focus.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  And the second was what was lining the stomach because most inflammatory problems start down here. So I ended up giving her something that was a combination of remedies for the gut lining and for the lungs. And

• 19:02Speaker 00

  almost within a week or so, the itching of her skin subsided. I just happen to think that was the reason I remember it because it's unusual to get such quick results in such a complex condition. But it's a reminder that if you can find the right button,

• 19:21Speaker 00

  then quite big things can happen. I was lucky to find the right button. And progressively, over the ensuing few months, the skin problem disappeared to the extent that she was my dream patient. She said, I don't need your herbs anymore. That to me is my biggest reward, that they can move on, they don't need help anymore.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  It sticks in my mind because it was a hugely demanding condition that got better without, and had been going for a long time, it'd been going three or four years by the time she saw me.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  And it resolved very quickly with what seemed to be totally irrelevant treatments, but there was a rationale for them. Karen, thirty-seven, panic attacks, major anxiety problems.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Heaven knows, there's a lot of that about. It turns out that when she was hospitalized when she was twenty with jaundice, which is a liver problem. All the processing, all the detox processes are in the liver. It's the gateway from the digestion. It handles emotions, it handles the immune system. It's an amazing organ. It's self-correcting, by the way. So it fixes itself very quickly if you give it the right nudge. She had jaundice, so immediately a little bell goes off because at an age when that could mean long-term liver damage, hepatitis. She's ended up with very little appetite.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  She feels full easily, gains weight easily, and often feeling nauseous, which is definitely a sign of liver distress still. Mental cycles very erratic. She had early COVID, again another big hammer blow. And the COVID was before her main symptoms of panic attacks set in. So I use that as an example of the way in which what goes on up here in the brain is linked with what goes on lower down in the gut. You know, interesting point, when we were living in caves, the best place to be was in the cave because outside was dangerous.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  The only thing that got you out, hunger. And when we look at the way in which the cells are, the machinery inside the cell, we find that the mechanisms managing anxiety are the same as the system managing appetites and food processing. So the idea of linking anxiety with metabolism is basic. This was an exact answer. So the mix of herbs that I gave her had nothing for the anxiety at all. It was all to do with metabolism. And so they included milk thistle, barberry, an oriental herb called bu pleurum, artichoke

• 22:27Speaker 00

  leaf, and an Indian remedy called jimnema, which is called sugar destroyer, which reduces your hankering for sweet.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  First goal was to manage her sugar cravings, because that seemed to be a key part of what she was saying, and to improve her liver functions. This was very quick and she became more settled over several weeks and months. Then the next thing that happened was her menstrual cycles became clearly where the trouble was and she was most likely to be distressed around the period. So we shifted to include women's remedies, which were then included in the mix to help manage the hormonal ebb and flow around the menstrual cycle. And three months, which is the normal time for cycles to begin to turn, her cycles began to steady and so did the rest of her symptoms.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Nothing to do with anxiety, just dealing with these core functions. So there's a couple of examples of, you know, how we approach things differently. You know, if Karen had gone to most other practitioners, she would have had something for her nerves.

• 23:38Steven Bartlett?

  I do really want to talk about, you used the term women's herbs?

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Women's, yeah.

• 23:45Steven Bartlett?

  Women's herbs, I do want to talk about that and I do also want to talk about fertility in the menstrual cycle and things like PCOS, because I'm super interested in that, which might surprise some people, but obviously there's women in my life that struggle with those things, so I do want to get on to that. I think a second ago, you pointed at the stomach when you said that we treat down here.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:02Steven Bartlett?

  Is that really the place to start to understand?

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Well, it's the place to start plants, because that's where they go.

• 24:08Steven Bartlett?

  So tell me, what do I need to know about this region, the stomach, the gut?

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Well.

• 24:14Steven Bartlett?

  In order to have a sort of foundational knowledge, so that we can then start talking about ibuprofen, painkillers, fevers, all these kinds of things?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Well, very simply, we think our intelligence is up here, you know, we've got a brain, yeah. As soon as you swallow something, until it comes out the other end, we have no control over what goes on down there. Decisions are being made as the food traverses down the tube, and it's a long tube, it's about 20 feet of small intestine that has to go around, and then like another two or three feet of large intestine. It used to take about 18 hours to go through and we now, because we said in truth it'd take longer, but all that time, intelligent decisions are being made by the digestive system, what to do with this, what to do with that.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  And the lining of the gut is full of sensors, receptors we call them, that are picking up chemical cues and responding. So as the food changes, as it's digested, as the bile from the liver comes in, it's picking off these signaling devices and switching on a whole series of metabolic hormone or all sorts of other functions, all controlled, major choreography going on here, you know, without us even knowing about it. And then, just when you thought, this was wonderful, you add something called the microbiome. Now, when I was at school, and it was a long time ago, when I was doing medical sciences,

• 25:46Speaker 00

  oh yeah, there was the, there's the bowel flora, and they help with digestion, vitamin K, one or two other things, you know, they might be quite useful. Now, the microbiome runs the show. It's huge, you know, we thought we knew what the kidney did, we thought we knew what the heart did, we thought we knew what the brain did, we know they only do it because they work with the microbiome. It's, it's running the show. And the microbiome is the billions of bugs in our gut? Trillions. Trillions. We've got more of those little critters than we have our own cells, so much more. So they are huge. They've got about a hundred times as much genetic capacity as we do. We've got more bugs in our gut than cells. Yes. So we're basically...

• 26:29Speaker 00

  We're, we're walking gut bacteria. We're walking bacteria. Yeah. Yeah, there's more bacteria than there are us. I mean, this is, it's a bit of a gobsmacking thought, and, you know, obviously people want, and then, I mean, the bugs will keep them there. One of the big issues of the day are antibiotics, which we know are becoming a serious health issue now. You know, the World Health Organization and others say very seriously that antibiotic resistance, you know, antimicrobial resistance as they call it, is the biggest threat we have. Soon, going into a hospital and getting an operation will be a real risk because hospital-born infections are increasingly

• 27:09Speaker 00

  resistant to antibiotics. You know, we're, we're piling them in to us, but also to the animals that we grow. A lot of them are full of antibiotics, and that means that the diversity of the microbiome... Is is being reduced. We've losing, we call about biodiversity. There's a biodiversity issue in here. But even with the diminished flora that we have, they still pretty much run the show. And a lot of the fruits and vegetables, particularly the ones with colors in them, actually feed those guys down there and help them to perform better. And one

• 27:50Speaker 00

  good reason to, as we say, eat the rainbow, just get those colors in. But yes, I mean, as you can see, if I start talking about the gut, I'm not going to stop for the next month.

• 27:59Steven Bartlett?

  On that point of antibiotics, they, the mechanism is that they kind of kill bacteria, right? So they're killing good bacteria as well in the process often.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  They have different ranges depending on the antibiotic. But yes, they will be cutting a sway through your gut flora for sure, some more than others. I mean, the point about antibiotics, and we did a big project with this, ironically, just before COVID, when I was working with Paka, the tea people, we put a campaign together to find natural approaches to managing antibiotics or reduce the use of them. Antibiotics are useless for anything viral. They don't do anything for a virus. But unfortunately, people with viral problems will still be given antibiotics, mainly by harassed doctor who just, you know, because they said, give me something, doc, you know, for viruses, mostly you just

• 28:55Speaker 00

  have to wait for the body to get rid of it. But giving an antibiotic is actually of no use at all. Don't take my word for it. Everyone knows this. And you get NHS, you know, in this country, posters saying antibiotics are no good for viruses. Please don't ask your doctor for them. So for many of these things, colds and respiratory problems, for example, there are many spices. I mean, some of the things on that plate there are particularly good for colds and viruses up here. And so we put that all together in the package and said, we can encourage people not to ask the doc for an antibiotic and use some of

• 29:33Speaker 00

  these home, easy, free, or sometimes, treatments to, to, to use instead of the antibiotics.

• 29:44Steven Bartlett?

  When you say antibiotics are the most urgent health issue of the moment.

• 29:50Steven Bartlett?

  I want to fully understand why you think it's so urgent because we're going to develop a resistance, which means that we're more susceptible to disease.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  It's already happening and it's not me that's saying this is these are the guys who look after our healthcare for us like the World Health Organisation who are really getting close to panic about this issue because already the number of people dying from antibiotic resistance infections is beginning to rise dramatically. And new antibiotics, unfortunately, there's less financial incentive to develop them because they're often handed out free by in various countries. So you don't get the margins back and the the pipeline of new antibiotics is not good. So all you need to do is check on the World Health Organisation to get the chapter and verse on that. It's

• 30:44Speaker 00

  it's it's actually quite frightening.

• 30:48Steven Bartlett?

  I'm on the World Health Organisation site now and I found a definition of antibiotic resistance. It's when bacteria stops responding to antibiotics and is mainly caused by overusing or misusing antibiotics. In 2022, US doctors gave out about 236 million and fuck it. What? US doctors gave out 236 million antibiotic prescriptions, roughly seven prescriptions for every 10 people. Studies show that at least roughly 30% of antibiotic prescriptions in the US aren't needed, especially in places like doctors' offices and emergency rooms. In 2020, about 13 million antibiotic prescriptions were given out in the UK. Children aged

• 31:33Steven Bartlett?

  zero to 14 made up 3.6 million of those. And in 2023, the World Health Organisation declared antibiotic resistance one of the top global health threats and estimated that it is responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to almost 5 million deaths.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  That was 2019. I can tell you that the figures have risen dramatically since then.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  So that's what people think. And just on a personal basis, you know, you go and you need an operation and you know that that's going to involve exposure to hospital infections, which is one of the most serious of the ones in the average hospital, you know, it's there's some of the most lethal ones there. Increasingly, that is going to be a risk that you get something that you can't treat.

• 32:27Steven Bartlett?

  You're not saying don't take antibiotics?

• 32:31Speaker 00

  No, I'm saying take them carefully, use them when you need them and not otherwise. And again, it's not me saying this is most responsible doctors would wish that their patients wouldn't keep asking for them.

• 32:46Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm. So there's sort of three things that I've been able to ascertain as risks of misuse or overuse or inappropriate use of antibiotics, which is the impact on the gut microbiome, that you're contributing to the rise in antibiotic resistance and...

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Those are the main things.

• 33:07Steven Bartlett?

  I guess even with the diseases you get, you'll be slower to heal because you're less, if you've got that resistance.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  That is one of the things that we do see, particularly those who are long-term ill, you know, that they lose some of their healing capacity. And that's so much of the work I do is to aim to put some of that right.

• 33:28Steven Bartlett?

  And there's links to colorectal cancers?

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's it because we're talking about the microbiome, you see. So those are the cancers in the lower gut. And we know that the microbiome is a major factor in how well the gut is. So things like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and cancer of the bowel, very closely linked to the state of the microbiome.

• 33:49Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. So are there alternatives on this table or in the world of plants to antibiotics that I should maybe also consider instead of just jumping straight to antibiotics for everything that I experience?

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Yes. If you've got a serious gut or other infection, you may need the antibiotic. So let's put that straight away. But if you've got a cold, flu, virus, a viral problem, particularly the airways... You, A, antibiotics will have no use at all. And B, as we just said, they just add to the risk of more. Because every time you take an antibiotic, you're growing a small population of that, of the species of bacteria that's affected, who are resistant to that. It's natural selection. You know, you have a thousand little bacteria. That's a small amount by their terms.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  And you kill 999 of them. The one that survives will then become two in 20 minutes and four in 40 minutes and suddenly become a new population. And, you know, I duck that bullet. And so that group of bacteria will already be resistant. So we're creating resistance every time we use an antibiotic. So try, let's try and then doing something else, shall we? So let's say you've got a cold. You're feeling the cold. It's got a good name, by the way. So cold is one of the things you feel when you've got a cold. And that's interesting because in former times, we didn't have tests. We didn't have laboratories. We didn't have paramedics. We didn't have people poking things in you.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  All we could know is what it felt like. And when you've got a cold, you often feel cold. And you feel chills and you want to wrap up and you want hot water or you want to have a hot bath. All that in the old language meant that you were cold. And what you needed to do was to heat up. Now, you take this fellow. This is ginger. It's grown widely around the world. And its original Asian form, it was made extinct around the time of the Romans. So popular was it. And ever since, all the ginger scents of this species has got to be going from rootstock because it no longer seeds itself.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  So this has been the most valuable natural commodity ever. In its dried form, worth more than its weight in gold. And, you know, the reason why all those Europeans ended up in Asia and running India and the Dutch and Indonesia and so on, is because that's where these things came from. That's where the spices came from. And so we decided, you know, like good capitalists to go and control the business. So ginger became very popular over here because we don't have nothing like it over here. The nearest thing we got is horseradish, which I promise you is no substitute for this. So how do we use this? We've got a knob of ginger here, about the size of your thumb. That's about a good dose.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  You grate it, fresh ginger into a mug.

• 37:05Steven Bartlett?

  Can you do that for me?

• 37:06Speaker 00

  I don't know, we've got a grate everywhere.

• 37:07Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a grate there for you.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  So we've got here a piece of ginger, as I say, about the size of your thumb. The thumb's a good measure because it's your measure. So if you're a small person, you'll have a small thumb. But I'm a bigger person, so I'm going to use. And you literally, it's making a bit of a mess here. But when you're doing this at home, you don't mind a bit of mess. So you're literally grating and graced nicely, isn't it? Into a mug. And let's say that was the whole thumb. I don't want to take up too much time on this. And then

• 37:41Speaker 00

  the one thing that works brilliantly with ginger is cinnamon. Now, this is cinnamon you buy in any shop. It comes in different forms. There's one from China called scassia, which looks like one big curled bark. If you look at this one, you'll see that it's tightly wrapped with lots of little curl, lots of little filaments in it. That's the one you go for. It's got, it's more aromatic. And you either grate that with, if you've got a spice mill, or you take a teaspoon of it. Let's say there's a teaspoonful and you put that in your mug.

• 38:23Steven Bartlett?

  So that's ginger and cinnamon.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Ginger and cinnamon, that's it. Then you add your hot water.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  You're going for real, right? Going for the real one. Good on you. At this point, a sieve is useful. Why? What for? Because it's gonna be, it's full of... Oh, bits. Bits. And then, let's say this is, this is a nice Japanese green tea mug, but let's say this is your mug, and we'll pour a little bit in there. You see all the stuff that you leave behind? Ah, yeah. Ah, okay.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  And if you don't mind sharing a mug?

• 39:17Speaker 00

  So what's in here, this is? Just ginger and cinnamon. Just ginger and cinnamon? It's fairly weak. Oh, it is nice, though. It's nice, isn't it? It is nice. Now, can you feel it warming already? Yes, straight away. It's really nice. Yeah. Now, you see, what's happening there is that you... I mean, ginger is an example of a group of remedies, which includes turmeric, by the way, and that's other root, the other root there. Oh, this one, yeah. That's turmeric.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  It's normally seen in a yellow powder, we might talk about that later, and black pepper, and chilies. We've got a chili here.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Which, when you take them, you think you're burning your mouth, aren't you? The interesting thing is that

• 40:03Speaker 00

  there's no burning. You can actually have full madras level chili, and no harm will be done to your lining because there's no burning going on. What you're doing is you're stimulating the pain fibers. So you've got pain fibers all the way through the lining of the mouth. When you take a hot thing like ginger, it's stimulating the pain fibers and immediately there's a, what we call a reflex response, which opens up the blood vessels. It's called hyperemia, more blood. And the vessels lining these mucosa, the ones that you've just swallowed

• 40:45Speaker 00

  and then through a little bit up in the nasal passages, are opening up. The mucus cells producing mucus will loosen up and you get more runny mucus, which is helping to flush through the grot on the mucosa. And the main thing you feel is the warmth. And if you're dealing with something down here in the lungs, you'll actually start bringing up more gunk up the airways. There's a natural escalator that we use, that the body uses to get stuff out of the lungs. That stimulated and the mixture of cinnamon and ginger was created, I think in heaven. I mean, I think there's such a natural compliment and anybody can do that.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  And the point about it is that it's warming. And in the old days, that was the key thing. It didn't matter if you had a headache or a joint pain or a menstrual cramp. If you wanted to put a hot water bottle on it or heat it up, then that was a cold problem. And putting a heating medicine would begin to make difference. So you can use the same thing. If you have a headache and you want to put a hot pack on it. If you've got a menstrual cramp and you want to put a hot water bottle on it. If you've got a joint pain and you want to put a heating liniment on it. You can use the same thing.

• 42:12Steven Bartlett?

  Ginger.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Just because it's heating. And that's simple old medicine.

• 42:18Steven Bartlett?

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

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Well, only if it responds to heat. Now, if you want to put an ice pack on, I mean, the old doctors, when someone came with a migraine would say, tell me, would you prefer a hot pack or an ice pack for your migraine? And migraine sufferers generally split seventy thirty preferring heat seventy. But a third of people with migraines actually want a cold pack. You don't use ginger for that. You use cooling remedies, which we might come on to later.

• 42:55Steven Bartlett?

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

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, she likes the heat.

• 43:02Steven Bartlett?

  She likes the heat.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:04Steven Bartlett?

  She drinks it before bed as well.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Hmm, can help with sleep if that's the way it goes. I mean, people are different and.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  There are some people who can't take ginger at all because their stomach objects. Or because it, you know, literally heats up too much. They get stimulated by it. But that's where the individuality comes in.

• 43:28Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so any, any condition where I might be looking for heat, ginger and cinnamon?

• 43:33Speaker 00

  First place to go.

• 43:34Steven Bartlett?

  First place to go.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could, if you wanted to be Tex Mex, you can take the chillies.

• 43:40Steven Bartlett?

  As well.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Well, you know, that's a, we think of them as a much more extreme version of the heating. And, you know, remind ourselves, it was only when Europeans discovered Americas that chillies became used over here. You know, can you imagine an Italian meal without, without tomatoes and chillies? But in the old days, there were none of those because they all came from America. But yeah, chillies were the American equivalent of ginger, used for the same purpose.

• 44:14Steven Bartlett?

  So if someone comes to you and they say, Simon, when shall I use chillies? As a form of medication, what would you say?

• 44:23Speaker 00

  First of all, I don't know yet. And, you know, if I'm dealing with someone at a distance, you know, online or on the phone or something, and they say, you know, what should I try? I said, the first thing to do is you figure it out. You could start with herbal teas.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  You aren't, are you?

• 44:41Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna drop it into the, I'm gonna drop it into here. Is that a bad idea?

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, go for it. But you'll, you'll, you should notice that's, should be quite a hot one. I will ask, suggest that they start with herbal teas because herbal teas are a very low dose. But they'll allow you to figure out what suits you. And you can divide, as I was hinting at earlier, old medicines were often divided into those that were more warming, that we would now call stimulating circulation, and more cooling, which we would now translate as stimulating digestion. And depending on which of those you prefer would really give me a clue. So if you were looking at warming remedies, it could be ginger tea.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  It could be fennel tea, you know, that's a warming remedy, or it could be cinnamon or any of the spices. Cardamom is one of my favorites, by the way. This is, I use cardamom. This is the cardamom pods inside the little black seeds. Apples are a lovely taste. Do you know, do you know cardamom? Have you tried it? Not really, no. Oh, have a bite of that. Do I just bite the seed? Yeah, just bite into it. You don't, just, just get a hint of the taste. In many parts of the Mideast, cardamom is one of the main flavors, things like coffee and so on. Reminds me of, oh, I was gonna say Indian food. Yes, used a lot in India.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  And in China, it's a convalescent tonic. So they use it when people are building up their digestion after being ill for a long time. They will often use cardamom. It's one of my favorite remedies for that. When people really run low, their digestion isn't functioning. It was appeared in one or two of these stories I've got here. Because I prefer that to most of the other spices when I need warming, as I said before, but also sustaining and nourishing. So you ask them, do you prefer teas that are warming? Or would you like something more cooling?

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Now, one of the most cooling remedies that people know about is this, which is mint. Spear mint, the best one is peppermint. It's got a lovely smell, isn't it? Yeah. That has always been thought of as cooling. And as a simple test, would you prefer ginger or peppermint tea? And really you're beginning to narrow things down a bit. The main cooling remedies throughout history from.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Very beginning and in every part of the world, you'll find them saying exactly the same thing. The main cooling remedies, so called, are the bitters. And they taste really bitter.

• 47:31Steven Bartlett?

  When you say cooling, you you you mean I feel hot, so I want something to cool me down.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 47:36Steven Bartlett?

  And there's certain conditions where I will feel, I'll feel hot.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Fever.

• 47:40Steven Bartlett?

  Fever.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  And they were often used to fever, manage fever. And what, you remember when we were young, we were told, if you've had a big meal, don't go swimming.

• 47:53Steven Bartlett?

  Oh.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  You weren't told that.

• 47:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. I can't swim, so.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Oh, there you go. But that was one of the things that, you know, some of us in my generation at least were always remembered, we were told, you know, if you've got a big meal, it's not a good idea to go swimming because the blood's moving into the digestion. And you won't get many as much as you want, where you need it in the limbs. And that's, you know, it's true, when you're digesting, a lot of blood investment, shall we call it, is going into the digestive system because there's a lot of work needed to break down this food, turn it into something useful. It is an investment. You put a lot in, get much more out. But what it means is, is that digestion is all about, I'm just being a bit loose here with the language,

• 48:39Speaker 00

  but it's not a bad language, it's like bringing blood into the core. When you've got a fever, the blood's all charging around and your body temperature's going up, which is great because fever actually is a defense measure. You know, when our body temperature rises by a couple of degrees, our white blood cells, the ones that are doing the legwork two or three times as active. So fever is what the body uses when it needs to bring out the big guys, bring out the fight. There's a slight design problem, it's almost as though, you know, the creator put a, you know, purposeful fault into the system, because a lot of fever comes from the gut.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  You know, you get gut infections, you know, that's one of the main places. And at that moment, all the blood's going out here and you want more of it going in, more digestion, if you like. So when you take a bitter,

• 49:36Speaker 00

  when you're taking a bitter, you're actually triggering taste buds up here.

• 49:39Steven Bartlett?

  A bitter?

• 49:40Speaker 00

  A bitter, something that tastes bitter.

• 49:42Steven Bartlett?

  Is, are there any plants that are bitter?

• 49:44Speaker 00

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

• 49:52Speaker 00

  In our times, probably the most bitter plant that people used in European terms was something called wormwood. Now, you may not be familiar with that word, but the French for wormwood is vermouth. And you think of the use of a drink before a meal. The idea was it was, they used to call it an aperitif, something that stimulated your appetite. So they would use bitters to improve your appetite and a low level of wormwood would be one of them, dandelion and burdock are two other bitters, which we now have as a soft drink, you know, particularly in America.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  And we know that bitters do switch on the appetite, so we sometimes use them when appetite is poor. And, you know, there's all sorts of reasons why you've got a low appetite, but bitters can really help, particularly if you're recovering from an illness.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  They can help with getting the digestion juices flowing and the appetite up.

• 50:55Steven Bartlett?

  Because they bring blood to the digestive system?

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Well, they do all sorts of things, actually. When you switch on these receptors in the mouth, these taste buds, they're hardwired and they produce hormones down here in the stomach that switch on all sorts of things. And effectively increase digestive activity, which involves more blood coming into the area. So, yes. Let's imagine you're living in some part of, you know, the desert area in the Middle East. You know, you're eating a sheep or something that hasn't seen a refrigerator and is a bit dodgy. You know, and you think after a meal, you turn to something easily available in that part of the world. It's a plant called Caffé Arabica. We call it coffee.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  You ground the coffee into a sludge at the bottom, pour a bit of hot water and drink that straight. That's bitter. So if you've ever had an espresso without sugar, that's a bitter. Okay. And that was used as a digestif. In other words, after you're eating, it would help cope with some pretty rough food. So bitters were always seen to be good for your digestion and appetite. And in fever, that actually meant lowering your body temperature and that's, we can see that happening. You know, it means that you're, some of the anger out here just gets sublimated into digestion. So that was where the bitters got their cooling reputation.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  And we can now laugh at this is all medieval nonsense, but the point that I keep coming back to when I'm seeing patients, I start with that blank sheet of paper.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  It's because the only test of what these do to you is to take it. And as you notice with your ginger and cinnamon, you don't need long. You've got it there straight up. And, you know, if I give a bitter to somebody and, you know, someone is really bitter, they will know within an hour or so what effect it's having.

• 52:56Steven Bartlett?

  If you're starting a business, that means you're one person doing the workload of probably about 50 people. When I first founded this podcast, I had no idea that I was about to step into a hundred different roles that I'd never trained for, things like researching and production and scheduling and branding, all of it all at once. And this experience isn't unique to me, but for millions of founders around the world, the tool that changes all of that is our sponsor Shopify. Shopify now powers 10% of all US e-commerce. From names like Jim Shark and Mattel to first time founders just getting started. It's like having your very own design studio, content creator and marketing team in one with hundreds of online store templates, AI tools to create product pages and easy to launch

• 53:38Steven Bartlett?

  email and social media plugins. Behind the scenes, Shopify manages your inventory, international shipping and even your returns. So if you're ready to sell, sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com/Bartlett. That's Shopify.com/Bartlett. $1 a month. No way. On this point of antibiotics, I've heard you talk about vitamin D, vitamin C and zinc as a potential alternative to jumping straight for it.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Not straight alternative, but in improving your natural resistance, particularly to viruses and such like. Then there is evidence for both vitamin D and vitamin C, but also zinc as backups in sub-form, supplement form that do seem to add to your resilience in the face of infections.

• 54:32Steven Bartlett?

  I'm quite concerned because, you know, I've got dark skin and in the weather that we live in here in the UK, when I am in the UK, I worry that I won't get enough vitamin D. Are these quote unquote supplements important, do you think? What are the supplements that you think are imperative?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  None.

• 54:50Steven Bartlett?

  None.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Not for everybody, but there are certain situations. I think vitamin D is a good one and it's not just people with dark skin that have a vitamin D deficiency. It's pretty widespread in darker countries, if we can call our weather, and that we know where there's not enough sun, vitamin D deficiency is quite widespread and increasingly doctors do suggest you have vitamin D supplementation through the winter particularly. Even just having a 15 minute outdoors with the sun will give you a fairly hefty amount.

• 55:24Steven Bartlett?

  Do supplement?

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Not myself. No, I don't. I don't have spotted a need, but that doesn't mean that I don't recommend supplements to people. Well, there is a need.

• 55:39Steven Bartlett?

  And garlic, we've got garlic, there is an antibiotic role.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Well, this is, garlic, what used to be called Russian penicillin, and when after penicillin was invented, they, because some parts of the world, they use garlic instead of penicillin, which was hard to come by originally, and it was used in places like the First World War to avoid some of the trench foot and other problems that soldiers would get in those lousy conditions. Garlic, when talking raw now, is a very powerful prebiotic. In other words, it helps the gut flora, the good guys down here in the microbiome. And there's evidence to show a lot of these other ones do as well, but garlic is particularly

• 56:25Speaker 00

  strong. And when I'm dealing with a disrupted gut flora, a microbiome, I will sometimes refer to raw garlic as a treatment. But you need to do it with a little care, because you don't want to lose too many friends.

• 56:44Steven Bartlett?

  Why, what's wrong with garlic, is it pungent?

• 56:47Speaker 00

  It's the aroma you give out afterwards. You know, your friends will be very polite, but they'll rather wish you hadn't. And some people find that it does upset, you know, when they swallow. But I have a little trick, which I call the garlic intensive, which is when everything is down, the gut is in this state, you maybe got a lung infection or whatever, and there's a lot of need for, if you like, an antibiotic type of treatment. Raw garlic, what you do is, and for all sorts of reasons, the Friday evening is the best time to do this, because you've got the weekend ahead of you. You take one of those cloves,

• 57:32Speaker 00

  first of all, on that day, you haven't eaten so much, so you don't have so much in the way. Then you take one of these cloves, you peel it, chop it up, small pieces, and swallow it with water. You don't chew it, just chop it up and swallow with a little bit of water.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  And wait for half an hour, just to make sure that that's okay, the stomach's okay, to go ahead. If it is, take another clove. Chop it up, swallow it. Another half hour later, take another clove. And if you start at six o'clock by ten o'clock in the evening, you've got eight cloves inside you.

• 58:10Steven Bartlett?

  Eight. And what's that gonna do?

• 58:14Speaker 00

  Well, at this point, you usually go to bed, and I would suggest you go to bed alone at this point, because you're not very friendly at this point, because you're oozing garlic. The aroma of garlic is coming out of all your pores. Incidentally, it's also coming out of your lungs. And, you know, there was an old trick where you used to be able to, if you had enough garlic, breathe on a petri dish in a laboratory with various pathogens, and you could kill them just with your breath. You know, the oil of garlic is a powerful antiseptic. But what it's doing in the lower digestion is it seems the good guys down there quite like it. But the bad guys, you know, in the old days, we had garlic was, you know, against the devil. And it looks as though the bad guys down there don't like garlic.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  So just doing that over a weekend can make a big difference to your good, the good guys in the microbiome. And if you've got a low-level gut or lung infection, that can be really helpful. But that's, you know, something you can do at home, but you don't want to do that too often. In fact, I would suggest that one garlic intended is probably enough for most people.

• 59:24Steven Bartlett?

  So prebiotic effects, it has an antimicrobial properties.

• 59:31Steven Bartlett?

  Which, is it good for pain? Called it Russian penicillin, is it?

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it depends where the pain's coming from. But if your pain is a cough or a chest infection, yes, particularly good for chest infections. Some people do use it for arthritic problems. It will depend on what's causing the arthritis. You know, and it's very hard for me to say. One of these things will do it for everybody. It won't. It will do in certain situations. And what we learn when we're dealing with plants is that you're the boss. You find out for yourself. All people like me do is say, well, give this a try. This is worth trying. This is valuable. Why don't you give it a go?

• 1:00:13Steven Bartlett?

  How do you think about chronic pain? There's so many people living with a variety of different types of chronic pain. It affects fifty one point six million people, I believe, just in the US alone. And the most common forms of chronic pain are conditions such as arthritis or migraines or lower back pain or other types of nerve damage. Roughly seventy five to eighty five percent of Americans will experience some form of back pain during their lives. When I think about this big array of plants that are in front of me and other plants, what is what is the first place to go in your mind if you're dealing with chronic pain?

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  It depends again where it is, but let's take joints and back. You know, when you've got a joint that's causing, and it's because it's inflamed.

• 1:00:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  So when you have inflammation, you add itis to the name of the plant. So this is arthritis because it's it's an inflammation of the joint. You have cystitis, which is the bladder. You have bronchitis, if it's the lungs. Gastritis, the stomach. So itis tells us there's an inflammation. And mostly with arthritis, it's an inflammation. And briefly, it's because there's junk being dumped on the joint. The joints have got very poor circulation by design because, you know, there's there's surfaces being pressed against each other. And so the tissue in the joint is cartilage,

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  gristle if you're eating it, which is designed to survive with very poor circulation. Because, you know, when you've got two things pressing in, there's not much room for blood in there.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  So if there is metabolic waste, let's call it junk, in the system, it's more likely to come out in these places where there's poor circulation. Sometimes things a bit like a U-bend under a basin. You know, if there's any stuff in the sink, it's going to come to deposit there. So I think of joints as a bit like a U-bend. So the first thing that people did with a joint pain, an inflammation of the joint, was to help to clean the joint, bring more blood into the area. And that's what the inflammation is doing. It hurts like binho, but what it's doing is bringing more blood in by brute force to do what I was just saying.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  But if you were to put on a mustard plaster or a KN plaster.

• 1:02:41Steven Bartlett?

  A cane pepper plaster.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Which you simply put on on the outside. And you can buy these in pharmacies and so on, it's called capsicum. Capsaicin, beg your pardon. It's a standard prescription dressing for a pain. What it does is it brings the blood in directly. And that means the inflammation doesn't have to do it. And the inflammation is sore, what you're doing isn't. So by definition, you're reducing the pain level. That's an example of using plants in a creative way, which people always did.

• 1:03:19Steven Bartlett?

  They used to do that back in the day?

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. Yeah, I mean, if you go to North America, the native populations would regularly use KN as their salve for bad joints. In Europe, it was mostly mustard. And we're talking the yellow mustard, the one that's strong, used as a plaster over a joint. And if you've got arthritis in your fingers, and this is something anyone can do with, you know, suffering the pain here, use a mustard bath, put your fingers into a dilute, warm solution of mustard. And it's amazing how quickly they ease up. Or you could put a plaster on a hip or whatever. People always did this.

• 1:04:02Steven Bartlett?

  Have you seen this work in your practice?

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. And I often recommend it to patients and they keep reporting back. It really makes a difference.

• 1:04:12Steven Bartlett?

  I think I worry about low back pain because I spend so long sitting down and.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  I've got low back pain too.

• 1:04:17Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  And I didn't use herbs very much for that.

• 1:04:20Steven Bartlett?

  What did you do?

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  Well, it was a long story, but there was a very good West African combo called O C B S A, which I saw back in the day when I had really bad back and I got, the music got so into me that I loosened up and began to jive and dance around and realised that my back had gone and it stayed gone for decades. It's just unlocked a knot. So that wasn't any herb, that wasn't any plant.

• 1:04:48Steven Bartlett?

  Dancing?

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Dancing. I mean, letting the music get into you.

• 1:04:54Steven Bartlett?

  What's the difference?

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Well, you know, when you feel the music running through you, you know, you're just moving in with the beat, you know, that loosens up a lot of knots. You know, I don't just do plants, I, you know, I talk about breathing, I talk about exercises that you can do for yourself. And sometimes when you've got a joint pain, it's all about, it's locked and you can find ways of loosening that joint.

• 1:05:25Steven Bartlett?

  Ibuprofen?

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:27Steven Bartlett?

  People reach for this all the time. I mean, I was looking at some of the search trend data for Ibuprofen and it is absolutely exploding.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  And that's the, the search graph Ibuprofen.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  It is, but it's one of the most widely used drugs in this country. It's obvious because it works. And it's based on a plant substance called salicylic acid, which gave us aspirin. And we still use the basic molecule to create the, what we call non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs, and Ibuprofen is one of the most widely used of those. And basically they cut the inflammatory process, just cut it. And so the inflammation just diminishes.

• 1:06:22Steven Bartlett?

  Which is good, right?

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  Well, if it gets rid of the pain, it is, but there's always a follow-up question. Why was that inflammation necessary? Because inflammation is a defence. It's one of my most powerful defences we have in the body. And whenever someone is saying, "I'm on a, I need ibuprofen", my next question is, "What can we do to reduce the need for the inflammation?" So when I was talking about the arthritis, I was saying, "This junk, shall we say, being dumped on the joint, can we help to relieve that? Can we go upstream and reduce some of the metabolic strain?" You know, people eat sometimes the wrong food and sometimes increases arthritis.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  You can improve your arthritis by switching to more plants very often. But there are other things that we can give that seem to help reduce some of those pressures. But the pain might be somewhere else. It might be linked to a full-blown disease, you know, and in that case, you know, using anti-inflammatories is the only thing you can do. But if there is a way in which we can help reduce the need for that inflammation in the first place, I would much prefer to do that than just suppress a natural defence.

• 1:07:38Steven Bartlett?

  We, we tend to think of inflammation as the enemy.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  We do, and I think we're wrong.

• 1:07:44Steven Bartlett?

  We think of it as the disease itself.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  We are wrong. It's the consequence of a problem and it's inflammation itself is a healthy response. It's when we bring out, you know, I sometimes use military language here and there's a bunch of white blood cells that I liken to Marines. You know, these are guys who, when they're working well, they just go in and do the job. They don't sort of figure it out, they don't ask questions, they just go and do the job. We've got a whole bunch of white blood cells that are a bit like that. They're just, we call them neutrophils, and there's various others of that group, and they just go in and whack them. Inflammation is bringing those guys out faster and harder.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  So we're bringing in more of the Marines, if you like, to finish the job. What's wrong with that? You know, that's what we want to do. It happens to be sore.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  Then if they don't do the job and the junk or the problem keeps piling in, then the Marines become the problem and then we use the ibuprofen to shut them up. But as I said, there's always a question, you know, why are we, what's the consequence of stopping this internal cleansing process that is so important? So inflammation is not the enemy. Inflammation is the defence measure that can sometimes overstay its welcome.

• 1:09:12Steven Bartlett?

  I had an injury in my ankle a couple of months back because I pulled some of the ligaments down there and my ankle swelled up. And I was getting conflicting information from people about the inflammation because I had this big football game coming up for this charity match called Soccer Aid at Old Trafford. And I had one of my physios telling me to apply the ice thing and take anti-inflammatories. And I had another one telling me something else about the inflammation, but actually I didn't want to combat the inflammation because it was doing its job. And so it's quite difficult to navigate whether one should let inflammation stay or if I should be taking anti-inflammatories or ibuprofen.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  Well, if you've got a match to, you sometimes need something just to get you match fit or match acceptable. But if it's a short term, we call it acute inflammation, then overwhelmingly the advice is don't suppress it. Because in the short term, you know, we get a cut, get a bit of dirt, it gets swollen, maybe a bit of pus and so on. And after a while, it sorts itself out. That's this miracle I talked about earlier, the body heals itself all the time. That's inflammation doing its job properly, cleaning out. The Marines go in, clear all this stuff out, back to their barracks, back to normal. That's great. It's only if, as I said, the junk keeps piling in and the job doesn't get finished.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  We call that chronic inflammation. That's when you sometimes need a bit of help.

• 1:10:43Steven Bartlett?

  And chronic inflammation is often caused by something further upstream, right? So you try and think about what's causing it upstream?

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, sir.

• 1:10:50Steven Bartlett?

  And what tends to be the perpetrator upstream?

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  The gut is where most of these things begin, because when you think about it, that's where we take most foreign material, almost all of it, has to be dealt with by the gut. So that's where most of our immune system is, you know, we talk about the immune system, but you know, the majority of the immune system is a few millimeters away from the lining of the gut, because that's where the action is. That's where all the foreign stuff is. So if there's a disruption there, it's, that's the first place to begin, because it's usually the best place to begin. And if we add the, what we talked about, the microbiome as another big factor, then there's plenty to work be done with down there. So if there's a chronic inflammation, I will spend a lot of time looking at what might

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  be going on down there.

• 1:11:40Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

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

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  And, you know, there are, you know, people think you can't afford to eat healthily. All I would suggest is that you go and travel to somewhere like India or anywhere in Asia, where they eat pretty much a lot of plants, mostly plants, for pennies. You know, you can make a healthy meal by, if you know how to cook, by just mixing some of these simple, the dals and the, the root vegetables and the other vegetables, easily mixed together, a few spices in there, absolutely delicious, and your gut and your microbiome will be jumping with glee.

• 1:13:05Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about eating your rainbow.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:08Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Means as many colours as you can fit in, literally, because each colour is caused, is produced by a constituent of plants, many of them we call polyphenols.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Which we know have a range of effects on all sorts of person. Mainly on the microbiome again, because they're all in different ways prebiotic. They all help good guys prosper down there. But then after the microbiome has processed them, which is interesting. The microbiome is is critical for processing polyphenols. They don't get absorbed unless the microbiome breaks them up already. So the benefits of the colours depend on the good guys down here. When they get into the blood, they start doing all sorts of wonderful things to the lining of the blood vessels, for example, up into the brain, where we got what we call blood-brain

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  barrier, which is actually a very exciting interface. The polyphenols, the colours, all have well-established mechanisms that improve the health all around the body. So, simple. If you've got a child, we used to say, eat your greens. We now say, eat your rainbow. The more different colours, the better.

• 1:14:29Steven Bartlett?

  I wonder if that's why they put so many artificial dyes in junk food?

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  Well, I wish they wouldn't.

• 1:14:33Steven Bartlett?

  To try and trick our brains into thinking it's, I don't know.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  No, there's nothing quite like the original.

• 1:14:39Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Probably the, if you wanted to have a, you know, a top list, the darker the colour, the better. So we talk about purples and I'm pleased to see that your team has found a purple carrot there. We remind ourselves that most vegetables were purple, once upon a time. If you think of maize, you know, the sweet corn or the maize that you grow in the Americas, that mostly was originally purple. And we bred the purple out because it didn't look so appetising. And we're probably purple deficient. I think we could do with more purple in our lives because the- Purple and blue colour is a sun called anthocyanins.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  These are types of polyphenol and they're particularly powerful, particularly with the blood supply. And we're talking about things like eyesight and brain health and circulatory health, blood pressure control and all those sort of things can be improved just by having more purple in our lives. So we've got beetroot, that'll do. We've got the berries, red grapes are probably more, we've got the, yeah, we've got the red grapes here, there's got more of these than the yellow grapes do. So I would start with the reds and purples.

• 1:16:02Steven Bartlett?

  You said you think we're purple deficient?

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, just think of something interesting to say, but it's probably something in that.

• 1:16:11Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:15Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  Start with the roots, the root vegetables, the carrots, the beetroot, the parsnips, the various other root vegetables out there, not all of which are people's favourites, but they have fibre, sort of starch in them, which is particularly prebiotic. And some of the most powerful prebiotics are the root vegetables. So those are definitely worth having. The greens, obviously, and broccoli. And interestingly, I found a purple one, which is easy 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 purple there. But any broccoli, any of the cabbage family is full of all sorts of other ingredients

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  that have their own benefits in all sorts of ways, metabolism, gut, hormonal, blood supply. So greens, roots, and the big one in most people's lives are the grains, you know, wheat, for example, but cereals, lentils, dal, peas and beans, all of these have their own benefits, particularly for the. My microbiome, you know, again, I don't know exactly what even I need, let alone what anyone else needs. So the best thing to do is to have as much diversity as possible.

• 1:17:44Steven Bartlett?

  What is your diet?

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  It's a mix.

• 1:17:46Steven Bartlett?

  A vegan, do you eat meat?

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have, you know, I just have a broad range of, most humans have eaten, which is a mixture of things. I do, obviously, many of my patients are vegans and they can, you can live quite well with them. You have to add a few extra things just to cover your back on a few areas, but you can live perfectly well, at least when you're a grown up, an adult, on a plant only diet. But, you know, who am I to say that an Inuit in the Arctic, who never sees any vegetable ever, and only lives on, traditionally, only lives on seal and whale meat and blubber, is any less healthy than someone in Thailand who lives only on

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  rice vegetables? You know, we're all, we can cope with all sorts of variety of foods. There isn't one food for everybody.

• 1:18:39Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  Keto diet, yes.

• 1:18:46Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:18:50Steven Bartlett?

  Basically consuming no sugar.

• 1:18:53Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think of the keto diet? What's been your experience with it?

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  It can be, and I think you're one of those that would get a lot of benefit from it. And because it, I mean, sugars are, you know, they're in a lot of vegetable material. And of course, unfortunately, we have sugar now as an added to our diets. They tend to slow down various parts of your metabolism. They tend to make metabolism a bit more like hard work. And so if you take those out and some of the more sugar producing carbs, then you're freeing up a lot of energy. So a lot of people on keto diets find that, you know, they're sharper. That's probably what you do. But there are potential downsides. Interestingly, you know, and the first thought was, well, that can't be very good for your

• 1:19:41Speaker 00

  microbiome because they rely on.

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  Vegetable material to a large part. But when we've looked at the microbiome of keto, after keto diets, it's not as, it's actually, there's some good guys that reemerge with a keto diet. So it's a mixed bag. The only thing is, is that when you don't have as many plants in your diet, then there's slightly more strain on things like liver and kidney function. So someone who's taking keto for a long term is always a good idea to check that they are okay. And some of the more long-term concerns have been around kidney. Because if there's a lot more of the animal-based material in the, in food, then that can be more hard work for the kidney.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  So it's always worth checking that those functions are doing well. But I come back to the point, there is no one size fits all. We are omnivores, we're designed to eat almost anything.

• 1:20:40Steven Bartlett?

  My girlfriend, she's doing keto as well, and she noticed that her menstrual cycle became more regular.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:20:47Steven Bartlett?

  Which she was like shocked by it. And she's really done a lot of A B testing over the last couple of years. And whenever she's in a ketogenic diet, very low carb, very low sugar diet for six weeks, she was shocked that she could predict the day when her period would come. And outside of that, sometimes it's really varying.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, there's a very good point about keto. One of the most effective things that keto does is it reduces insulin resistance, which is something that most of us suffer as we get older and larger, as we get through our life. Insulin is the hormone that packs sugar away into this, into the tissues and into the liver. And thank God, because if we didn't have insulin, we would have diabetes.

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  Insulin resistance is growing and that leads to diabetes increasingly. And so diabetes is in many, most parts of the world now is becoming another big health issue. And it's mainly because we have too many carbs, too much sugar in the diet. Because whenever we eat sugar, particularly sugar, there's more work for the insulin to do. So it gets more likely to get run down and tired. When you're on a keto diet, it's been observed that you're, you get more insulin sensitive.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  So in other words, insulin works better. So you can reverse early stages of diabetes by switching to a keto, for example. Now, interestingly, many menstrual problems are linked to insulin resistance. And there's something called PCOS, which affects quite a lot of women now. Uh, in which the ovaries basically produce more hormone-producing cysts, polycystic ovary syndrome. And that is increasingly linked with insulin resistance. So it affects people who are more likely to be in the prediabetic phase, putting on weight and that sort of thing.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  The insulin resistance itself switches the hormone balance. And the menstrual cycle is a wonderful choreography. I mean, when you think about it, you know, all around the world is this, it's a pretty predictable cycle and it runs itself. But if there's something on insulin resistance getting in the way, then that can disrupt the hormones. So someone like your girlfriend might find that switching to a keto diet abolishes or reduces that disruptor.

• 1:23:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I was just reading some stats on that. It said eighty percent of women with PCOS have some degree of insulin resistance, even those who aren't overweight. And my girlfriend does have PCOS, which she's talked about publicly before. So it's no surprise that, uh, that when she comes off, she takes sugar out of her diet, her menstrual cycle seems to fall back in line. And I think there's also links to insulin resistance, PCOS, and I guess ovulation and fertility?

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  Yes, it is, uh, I think, uh, I mean, the modern woman, the modern man, for that matter, has a whole string of burdens to carry because we have too much sugar. I mean, when you think about it, you know, sugar only emerged as a common ingredient, you know, a hundred and forty years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago. Up till that time, only very rich people could afford it. Then we had the industrial sugar production. And, uh, a lot of slaves over in America is producing vast amounts of cane sugar. That is a modern phenomenon. And our bodies were designed to deal with the amount of sugar that we now feed it. And it does put a strain on the system. And insulin is one of the guys caught in the mix.

• 1:24:38Steven Bartlett?

  So if you're trying to have kids, which we are now, I guess you want to remove the

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  If that's a factor, I would be looking at reducing your sugar intake at the very least, yeah. I mean, we spend, I spend a lot of time with women who are having difficulty conceiving. And, you know, I think I have about thirteen herb babies, you know, in other words, babies who were born with women who were having challenges getting pregnant. And that was mainly, I think, because we were stabilizing the menstrual cycle and making the fertile phase a bit more productive.

• 1:25:17Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you, what do you say to those women? You, what do you prescribe, I guess?

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  I do. I mean, that's my business. I will be prescribing. So you see there's some bottles there. These are the sort of things that we use in the practice. So I've given, I've got a couple here that, just, you know, the sense, the smell sense. So this is fennel, which we all think we know. But these are very strong extractions that only practitioners use. So these are practitioner own supplies. And when you smell it, you realize that the, that they are strong.

• 1:25:55Steven Bartlett?

  Ooh.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  So a teaspoon of that is a really powerful. Now, if you really want to realize the power of herbs, this is a remedy called echinacea. And a lot of people know about echinacea. And it's a major supplement. This is a root extraction from a variety of, a species of echinacea called angustifolia. And I'm just going to put a little bit in there. I'm going to test it myself before I give it to you. So I'm not poisoning you. So you just take a little.

• 1:26:40Steven Bartlett?

  Can I put on my skin oil?

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  Put it on.

• 1:26:43Steven Bartlett?

  Or did you want me to shop that?

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  Just lick it.

• 1:26:47Steven Bartlett?

  Whoa. Wow.

• 1:26:51Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  So, these are the sort of things, this is just a particularly striking example of the sort of things that we use in the practice. And so, some of the women that come to me, for example, with fertility or menstrual problems, will go out with a mix of herbs drawn like this from about a hundred or so different plants that I have on the shelves. And they are often, as I said earlier, remedies developed by women. And incidentally, North America is a prime site for some rarely powerful women's remedies. And interestingly,

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  when you look at them, you find they contain plants equivalent of steroids. They're not steroids, but they seem to interact with our own hormone mechanism. And some of them were particularly good at re-timing the menstrual cycle. And the one or two that were particularly warned that women should not take unless they wish to be pregnant, so effective, were they? What's that doing to your tongue?

• 1:27:58Steven Bartlett?

  It's still right on the edge of my tongue. It's like, it's more, so basically, for anyone that can't see what we're doing, because you're listening on audio, you put a little drop of this solution.

• 1:28:07Speaker 00

  Echinacea.

• 1:28:07Steven Bartlett?

  Echinacea on my finger. And I licked it off my finger. And at first, I was like, there was this sort of taste journey, which was interesting. It kind of tastes like Maggie seasoning, some kind of food seasoning. I'm now 60 seconds later, and I can still, it's like got more intense.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  It's a bit like fireworks going on.

• 1:28:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's like fireworks going off in my mouth. And all it was, was a little lick of it.

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  Now, you see, what we use that for is for infections or problems of the mouth and the throat particularly.

• 1:28:38Steven Bartlett?

  What's it doing?

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  Well, you know, you have to use a bit of unscientific language here. But remember, I talked about the Marines, you know, the guys who do all the battling for us. A lot of them hang out, their barracks are in the throat. You know, we've got tonsils, we've got adenoids, we've got the glands that run down our neck here that sometimes get swelled up, you know, if we've got an infection in this area. Yeah, you have to take something, take the taste away.

• 1:29:02Speaker 00

  It sometimes gets in the way of talking as well. And I was hesitating before giving it to you, didn't want to stop you in your stairs. But what's that tingling? Cut of, as I said, a rather confusing story short. Those are constituents that almost seem to talk directly to those white blood cells and make them more active. And so echinacea, in that form particularly, works primarily on the front line, shall we call it, of our immune system. These battlers that sit up there. And so often, that's where you want to start the job. And you might have an infection somewhere else in the body.

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  But if you can work up here with these guys, you can kick off all sorts of benefits. And as you've just discovered, it doesn't take long.

• 1:29:52Steven Bartlett?

  No, no. So who should be thinking about echinacea?

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  Certainly if you've got an upper respiratory problem. And you do need to get that tingle if you want to get that particular effect. I mean, you can have echinacea in other forms, pills and tablets and so on. And there are some which don't have that tingle factor, they've got other elements to it. But for the tingle factor, it's anything to do with an infection that has a link to what's going on up here. And that could be for lower down in the gut as well, because all, you know, our gut begins up here as well. But it could be a sinus problem, it could be a middle ear problem, it could be a throat problem. It could be a gum problem, you know, we've got all sorts of gum problems and all sorts of problems we have with mouth. We've got a microbiome up here as well.

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  This can, with one or two other things. Some of the plants we use in this form contain resins. An example is frankincense, we've got some tablets there.

• 1:30:53Steven Bartlett?

  These ones?

• 1:30:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, otherwise known as boswellia. And this just comes in a, you know, in the form of tablets.

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

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

• 1:31:12Steven Bartlett?

  What's resin?

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  Resin, we know about that because it's the sort of thing you get on out of pine trees, you know, that very tacky stuff. All we need to do is remember the Bible story. There were three gifts that the baby Jesus got, didn't he, for his birthday from those wise men. One was gold, fair enough. The other two were resins, myrrh and frankincense. This is the frankincense. I use myrrh in a liquid form and you almost like you're lining the mouth with this resin, you know. It's... when you put some myrrh on the mouth, you definitely feel the mucosa firing up.

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  And it was most widely used medicine. And the reason why it was so valued in those days by the three wise men is because myrrh was... first of all, they had to bring it out of Africa, you know, which is where it comes from. Remember the Queen of Sheba who married Solomon, you know, in the old Bible story. Queen of Sheba had the trade routes of East Africa sorted. So Solomon married wisely by marrying the Queen of Sheba because she was... she had the monopoly on myrrh, particularly and on frankincense. And those, and echinacea, maybe with a little licorice to help it work well, are amazing

• 1:32:41Speaker 00

  at reducing infections in this area, in the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and the areas around.

• 1:32:50Steven Bartlett?

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  No one's getting past their encryption. And this is important to me because I'm working across multiple businesses, most of the time, anywhere that I can get a wifi connection. And that's why I use ExpressVPN. And you can secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/doc. That's expressvpn.com/doc to get up to four extra months free. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released.

• 1:34:19Steven Bartlett?

  We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to doaccircle.com. I will speak to you then.

• 1:34:54Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  My usual answer when I'm faced with a question and what someone needs to answer from is to think back a bit, what did humans evolve to do? And when we were hunter-gatherers, which, you know, was three or four hundred thousand years we were hunter-gatherers, and what we're doing now is a tiny, we evolved to eat intermittently. You know, when you're a hunter-gatherer, there are times when you're not eating at all, especially off-season, and you get very hungry, and then you eat a lot, and you have a big feast. So I think our systems were designed to be intermittent fasting, and fasting is probably part of our gene makeup, you know, that's what we were, in a sense, meant to do. So the fundamental principle of fasting is probably right on.

• 1:35:52Speaker 00

  Issue is, is that sometimes if your metabolism, your digestion, your hormones or other functions are not at prime place, fasting, particularly if it's extended, can actually be damaging. So you do need a bit of advice if you're going down that route, just to make sure it's okay for you.

• 1:36:13Steven Bartlett?

  And at the start of the conversation, you referenced that you deal with a lot of cancer patients, I think you said one-third?

• 1:36:20Speaker 00

  About a third, my quarter, maybe a quarter to a third, yeah, living with cancer.

• 1:36:26Steven Bartlett?

  Living with cancer.

• 1:36:27Speaker 00

  Which is something that's relatively new, remember, because, I mean, that is a testament to what modern medicine has done, because when I started out, all those decades ago, most people died with cancer, or increasingly getting people living with cancer for extended periods of time. And, you know, the cancer is not, I mean, there are things we can do to help, and there is evidence to show that we can help reduce the risk at least, and if not, sometimes the virulence of cancer, but mostly what we're doing is helping people to function better while they've been through chemo or various other treatments, while they're still recovering from the cancer and its effects.

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  And it could be digestion, it could be things like sleep, it could be, you know, all sorts of other things that we can do to help.

• 1:37:16Steven Bartlett?

  So there's the preventative element, which is doing things within your sort of lifestyle choices, your diet to reduce the likelihood you'll get cancer. But then, once you have it, there's ways you can use herbs and other sort of remedies to better deal with

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  Life.

• 1:37:33Steven Bartlett?

  Life, generally. When you think about cancer prevention, is it, do you think that one of the most powerful things we can do is to focus on what we're putting inside our bodies?

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  Yes. And, you know, we've learnt about cigarettes a long time ago. And there are other foods that have got a higher risk of cancer. We talk about, you know, processed meats, for example, that's increasingly been seen as a cancer risk. But I suggest that the main risk in cancer is just poor diets, generally, too much fat, too much carbs, too much sugar, all at once, usually. And that strains the body in a way it wasn't meant. And there is evidence to show that by correcting poor diet, you can prevent cancer increasingly. That's accepted.

• 1:38:20Steven Bartlett?

  I'm pretty sure that cardiovascular diseases are the single biggest killer.

• 1:38:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:38:24Steven Bartlett?

  Still.

• 1:38:25Speaker 00

  Cardiovascular, in the West, we're talking about, so in developed countries, catching up, I'm afraid, in other parts of the world where they adopt more Western lifestyles. But that's a combination of food and poor level of exercise that we're putting our finger on there. There's also cardiovascular diseases is another form of long-term inflammation. And increasingly, that's been understood. You know, it's not just fat or cholesterol or blood pressure. It's an inflammatory mechanism going on that's causing the harm. And that's increasingly accepted by cardiologists and such.

• 1:39:05Steven Bartlett?

  So if I'm trying to reduce my chances of having some kind of heart-related issue, are there any herbs or any products here that you think are beneficial?

• 1:39:15Speaker 00

  Mostly, it's the food. When we're talking about long-term cardiovascular health, we have plants that we use to manage.

• 1:39:24Speaker 00

  Cardiac or cardiovascular problems. I mean, the classic that a lot of people know about is the hawthorn or the mayflower. But the hawthorn, particularly the flower and the leaf, used to be of regular home remedy that people used to use and drink as a tea for all sorts of reasons, you know, managing fevers and all sorts of things like that. But we can, we can now see regular hawthorn consumption, hawthorn leaf consumption as a preventative for some of the problems of cardiovascular, just as an example. I would, I would use spices as my main go to, to help to fend off cardiovascular problems because they all have vascular benefits.

• 1:40:06Steven Bartlett?

  Spices as in, as in?

• 1:40:09Speaker 00

  The ginger, the cinnamon we talked about. But here's turmeric, and this is something we don't usually see in, but if you can see there's, in fact, if you cut that with your knife there.

• 1:40:20Steven Bartlett?

  I'll just cut it open.

• 1:40:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'll see it's bright, yeah, it's bright orange. That's the curcumin that people use as a supplement.

• 1:40:31Steven Bartlett?

  I've got curcumin at home. I was, I was advised to use that when I pulled the ligaments in my ankle.

• 1:40:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:40:36Steven Bartlett?

  It's an anti-inflammatory, isn't it?

• 1:40:38Speaker 00

  You can see a little bit why I don't like using anti-inflammatory because I like inflammation as a friend. So what I prefer to talk about is the modulate or support or manage inflammation. But turmeric is an extraordinary remedy. And here's an interesting story. We talk about we need curcumin from turmeric, and you'll get a supplement saying, you know, my turmeric's got more curcumin than yours and it's more available. The interesting point is that curcumin is not absorbed by into the body at all, about one or two percent maybe. The rest stays stubbornly in the gut.

• 1:41:18Speaker 00

  And there's a very good reason for that, because in any high dose, curcumin is toxic. So there's a good reason for it staying in the gut. But there's a lot of work on making more bioavailable, getting the levels up in the blood. And if you add pepper, you might get from one or two percent to two to three percent, you know, but it's still small beer compared with the amounts of turmeric that we

• 1:41:43Speaker 00

  take, the amounts of curcumin that we take in an ordinary curry. So what's going on and what is going on is that curcumin and turmeric is one of the best remedies we have for microbiome. There's a conversation going on. The turmeric is encouraging the good guys. The good guys are breaking turmeric and curcumin down into more available materials, which are active. It belongs in the gut and its inflammatory modulating effects come mostly from the products of the microbiome, working on the curcumin and moving through the body that way.

• 1:42:23Speaker 00

  So it's a wonderful lesson in, you know, that the medicine actually relies in this case, almost entirely on a good microbiome. An effect that is reduced, by the way, if you have a lot of antibiotics.

• 1:42:41Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so my microbiome is really the processing centre for many of these things. And if I have a bad gut microbiome because I've been eating the wrong foods and I haven't had diversity of plants, then even if I take some of these herbs that are good for me, I won't be able to process them properly anyway.

• 1:42:58Speaker 00

  Not as well as you might. Yes, that is true. We talk about, we, the, we've got probiotics, which is the yogurts and the kim cheese and the cafiers and so on, which are actually living organisms. They have to get through the stomach, by the way, which is quite a hard deal because the stomach's job is to sterilise foods, but some of them will get through. Those are the probiotics. The prebiotics are what we've been talking about here. The foods that will encourage the good guys in the microbiome. We've got a new kid on the block called postbiotics, which is now an industrial term used for killed bacteria, which are then given as a medicine. But technically, a postbiotic is anything that the bacteria produce.

• 1:43:45Speaker 00

  And we're learning that more and more of what we eat, particularly from the plant side, is converted by the microbiome into medicines. And all those polyphenols in the colorings and so on are in that group. So a lot of the benefits of polyphenols are postbiotic benefits.

• 1:44:04Steven Bartlett?

  There was a study done in two thousand and seven that showed, can't even say it.

• 1:44:09Speaker 00

  Curcumin.

• 1:44:10Steven Bartlett?

  That shows curcumin upregulates antioxidant defences and downregulates oxidative stress.

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:19Steven Bartlett?

  There was a study done in two thousand and sixteen, which is a meta-analysis of random controlled trials, found curcumin comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  Answers your earlier question, doesn't it?

• 1:44:33Steven Bartlett?

  And there's a lot of, lots of studies that show that it's effective for people that have things like arthritis and joint pains.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was leaving the best to last.

• 1:44:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a lot of work on curcumin and turmeric. As I say, a lot of people get confused because they think it only works if you absorb it into the blood. And I'm saying that actually you don't. What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it useful.

• 1:45:01Steven Bartlett?

  And there's early preclinical studies taking place around the impact it can have with cancers. And there's promising but early studies showing the impact that curcumin that comes from turmeric can have on brain health.

• 1:45:13Speaker 00

  Yes, well, that's definitely a big story. But just on the, when you say preclinical, that usually, that it does mean laboratory. So that's A, test tubes and B, rats and other animals. None of those tell us what happens when we.

• 1:45:28Steven Bartlett?

  Put it in a human.

• 1:45:29Speaker 00

  Put it in the human. So all a preclinical study will do is point to a possible effect. And time again, pharmaceutical companies will tell you this, you know, a promising preclinical lead doesn't lead to a medicine because it turns out to be a toxic or doesn't agree with humans. So we take preclinical evidence with caution and we're, personally, I'm mostly interested in human studies because that's the only thing that makes any sense. But you mentioned brain health, because here's one of the big gaps we have, don't we? Because we've got a lot of brain health issues right now. Dementia is still going in the wrong direction.

• 1:46:11Speaker 00

  It's a very distressing thing if you have any in your family. And increasingly, there's people saying, what can we do to prevent this? And Alzheimer's is all about there being the wrong sort of protein and deposits in the brain. But increasingly, the focus is switching on to the blood supply to the brain, what we call the vascular effects on the brain. And there's something that we used to call the blood-brain barrier, which you've probably heard of, which is seen to be the place where the barrier that stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it.

• 1:46:50Speaker 00

  We now know this blood-brain barrier is a very dynamic, interesting interface between the brain's tissue and the rest of us. It's now called the neurovascular unit, NVU, and it is so exciting. And the more we look at it so far, the more we find that the things that help the neurovascular unit, the blood-brain barrier, are plants. And we have green tea, and you know, we can, if we really want to help our brain health, regular drinking of green tea, you know, has been shown to be really useful, not that,

• 1:47:33Speaker 00

  rather than a supplement, by the way, is the drink that you have. Oh, I put it in here. Right, so we can make it.

• 1:47:41Steven Bartlett?

  So, as you make that, can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea?

• 1:47:48Speaker 00

  Because it contains a number of, again, polyphenols.

• 1:47:53Steven Bartlett?

  And polyphenols are those?

• 1:47:55Speaker 00

  These colours.

• 1:47:55Steven Bartlett?

  These colours, yeah.

• 1:47:56Speaker 00

  In this case, it's green, obviously. And remember, green tea is just the smoked, unprocessed part of the tea leaf. It's a plant called Camellia sinensis.

• 1:48:11Speaker 00

  So this is a nice Japanese teapot, that's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in. And these are the mugs, but we've filled these off already with ginger and cinnamon. So let's, let's leave it for a moment, but we can, while it's sitting there for a while. There are a number of these polyphenols in green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier that we talked about, the neurovascular unit between the brain and the rest of us. And there's all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble.

• 1:48:49Steven Bartlett?

  What sort of trouble?

• 1:48:50Speaker 00

  The dementia type problems, cognitive decline as you get older.

• 1:48:54Steven Bartlett?

  Do they find that in cultures where they drink a lot of green tea, they have less dementia?

• 1:48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that doesn't mean there's a cause and effect, so you need a few other things to establish that. What we're finding is that other plants have very likely powerful effects in this area. And I mentioned the rosemary. Now, all you need to do to appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff.

• 1:49:18Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, it smells so good. Really nice.

• 1:49:21Speaker 00

  That's not just nice, because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volatile oils, the things that give the smell. And when you're inhaling, they're literally going into your brain, because part of the brain actually reaches the outside world. It's called the olfactory lobe, and it's right at the top of the nose here. And when you inhale something, it literally moves into the brain. And from there into the limbic system. Remember, there's a line in a Shakespeare play called Hamlet, Ophelia, the young lady says, "Rosemary, that's for remembrance." Because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions.

• 1:50:02Speaker 00

  And when I was in, working on our campus in Maryland, we actually did a clinical trial with rosemary in people with, struggling with their crosswords, you know, as they get older. And found that although it wasn't a conclusive study, there were pointers to it improving cognitive performance in those people. And there's been other studies since that reinforce that. I would say that rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health. There's another remedy called Ginkgo that a lot of people know about, which is used as a prescription medicine in Europe for cardiovascular problems. And that's been shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as

• 1:50:46Speaker 00

  we've seen here and with the green tea. Check it here. Yeah, that looks all right. You see, it's more yellow than green. And this is flavoured with a little bit of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favourite taste.

• 1:51:08Steven Bartlett?

  Green tea is rich in polyphenols, which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention.

• 1:51:17Speaker 00

  It's got a nice minty flavour.

• 1:51:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Speaker 00

  You can live with that, couldn't you?

• 1:51:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. My girlfriend, again, she's all over this stuff. She's always bloody right.

• 1:51:29Speaker 00

  Well, you know that, or learned that lesson a long time ago.

• 1:51:32Steven Bartlett?

  I know, right? Like, I say it all the time on this podcast, but she's always like two, three years ahead of what then someone really, really smart comes and tells me. And I spend those two or three years in denial. I'm like, what the fuck is she like doing over there? Don't get me started on cacao. If you start talking to me about cacao, I'm gonna leave. No, no, no, no, no. She's been telling me that.

• 1:51:49Speaker 00

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

• 1:51:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:56Speaker 00

  Chocolate, stark chocolate, is a medicine. End of. One of the best medicines around is 50 grams to 100 grams of 75% or more dark chocolate.

• 1:52:09Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what? I've just realised. My girlfriend, she's gonna live till she's 150 because she eats 90% or something, 80% dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day. She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day.

• 1:52:29Steven Bartlett?

  She eats the full rainbow.

• 1:52:30Speaker 00

  She should be stepping in for you.

• 1:52:32Steven Bartlett?

  I know, I know, exactly.

• 1:52:35Speaker 00

  Now, cocoa, seriously, brain health as well, cardiovascular health. I mean, they just, they do studies where they've put cocoa into volunteers, it means students usually, um, you know, so young kids, and they were able to show changes in the blood flow within minutes, certainly within an hour of eating cocoa. Beneficial changes in your blood flow.

• 1:53:03Steven Bartlett?

  They call it the heart medicine.

• 1:53:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, heart, circulation, brain.

• 1:53:09Steven Bartlett?

  So she's, um, my girlfriend's very spiritual. She runs a business called Bali Breathwork. Um, hashtag ad if I have to say that, but in her business, one of the things she does at the very start of the session with women all over the world that come to her retreats is she makes cacao for them. And you notice instantly how people change when they've had a hot cup of cacao. It's, and she says it like almost brings out their heart. And I guess that's because of the circulation reasons.

• 1:53:36Speaker 00

  It is, but it also, of course, we know it contains a few other beneficial stimulate stimulating things. And sort of similar to the effects of the coffee, which incidentally, as I've already said, is a medicine as well. Uh, but cocoa and chocolate does have a uplifting effect, which is why we love it so.

• 1:53:55Steven Bartlett?

  And we have to be clear here, we're not talking about hot chocolate that comes from a packet or something necessarily.

• 1:54:00Speaker 00

  We would like it to be as dark as possible.

• 1:54:03Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so.

• 1:54:04Speaker 00

  The less sugar, the less fat. Um, so we talk about seventy five percent cocoa solids, you know, so it's dark chocolate. And it tastes a bit more medicinal, doesn't it? It's not as sweet.

• 1:54:16Speaker 00

  But I'm saying to many of my patients, take fifty grams a day.

• 1:54:22Speaker 00

  It's a medicine.

• 1:54:24Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm, damn. She's right. My fridge is full of dark chocolate. I tend to avoid it, but the drawer of my fridge has all of her dark chocolate in and it's, she, she likes it ninety percent. If she can get it ninety percent, she'll take it.

• 1:54:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, ninety percent is, that's quite bitter now, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:41Steven Bartlett?

  I am, I was in Peru and I went to a chocolate making lesson and that chocolate making lesson changed my life. And it changed my life because I didn't realise how much sugar goes into chocolate, but specifically white chocolate. Oh my god. They said, they gave me this big beaker, which was, you know, this big, like a, a foot high and a foot wide. And they were like, right, pour the sugar in. So I poured some and they're like, they're like laughing at me. They're like, no, fill it like seventy percent with this white sugar. And I was like, there's no way. I poured about sixty or seventy percent white sugar into this massive tube. And they're like, okay, now put a little bit of this in, a little bit of this, a little bit of oil, whatever. And I couldn't believe that it's literally,

• 1:55:23Steven Bartlett?

  like, the white chocolate is like literally all sugar. Then milk chocolate was like fifty percent sugar. And then when we did, when we made the dark chocolate, it was a tiny amount, like a tiny, tiny amount. And from that day onwards, white chocolate's left my life.

• 1:55:37Speaker 00

  There's once upon a time, a few years back, when the Europeans Union, I think before we joined it, said that we shouldn't call our dairy milk chocolate at all. Chocolate flavoured candy is what they described it as.

• 1:55:51Steven Bartlett?

  Literally, yeah. So this is, so we've got some green tea here.

• 1:55:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:56Steven Bartlett?

  And you're talking to me about the association between green tea and Alzheimer's, which is really exciting.

• 1:56:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:56:02Steven Bartlett?

  Um.

• 1:56:03Speaker 00

  There's quite a lot of work being done now on these, and they're, they're obviously looking for medications as well, but so far, most of the data coming in relates to plant-based materials. So it suggests that there's other reasons why having plants, and again, spices come back into the mix, um, seem to be helpful for brain health.

• 1:56:25Steven Bartlett?

  Having a look at the green tea.

• 1:56:30Steven Bartlett?

  There was a study done in two thousand and eight which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory attention accuracy and long term consumption is associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, according to the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in two thousand and eleven.

• 1:56:46Speaker 00

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

• 1:56:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, but it's exactly, I didn't realise, I didn't, I had no idea. I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me.

• 1:56:59Speaker 00

  Hmm, can't say sorry.

• 1:57:02Steven Bartlett?

  I've literally, literally, I've got a, wow, heart health, brain function, fat burning and metabolism, cancer prevention, early evidence, blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, gut and oral health. What about matcha? I'm a, I'm a big investor in the biggest matcha company in Europe.

• 1:57:21Speaker 00

  It's probably more beneficial than the basic green tea because it's, it's, it's more, shall we say, pure, it's finer quality. So the chances are that matcha will do more than we've just said the green tea will do. But there's, there's evidence lacking and a lot of these things, we need more evidence. But it would point to matcha being particularly helpful.

• 1:57:45Steven Bartlett?

  We haven't talked much about cholesterol.

• 1:57:49Speaker 00

  No, you haven't brought it up.

• 1:57:51Steven Bartlett?

  Cholesterol is a type of fat made in your liver, which channels in your blood and can be found. What is, for anyone that doesn't know cholesterol, what it is and why, if it's a good or bad thing, what do I need to know about cholesterol and is there anything in front of us here that can help keep my cholesterol in a healthy state? I did, I think a doctor did actually tell me at one point that I had high cholesterol a couple of years ago because of my diet at the time.

• 1:58:16Speaker 00

  Keto, of course, will tend to, well, it's interesting, again, keto you think would push up your cholesterol levels, but actually there's a mixture of effects. So it's not, it's not a done deal that it will raise your cholesterol. This cholesterol is part of a range of fats the body has. Most of the fats that are in the body come from the food and they come in as heavy fats, as we say. And what the digestion does is it's stripped down the heaviness and it becomes more. What we call high density lipos, lipos, lipos, HDLs. My tongue is twisting around it.

• 1:58:56Speaker 00

  And cholesterol is sort of in the middle of that as one of the elements within that spectrum of fats.

• 1:59:05Speaker 00

  What, cholesterol is actually a secreted by the liver for very good reasons. It's helps with all sorts of things. It's the basis of some of our hormones. There's all sorts of reasons why we need cholesterol. I sometimes have referred to in the past as the tiger in the tank, that it sort of helps to fire up some of our get up and go. And if we were physically active during the, during the day, working on the land or whatever, you need a certain amount of cholesterol to motor. We're sitting in chairs and cholesterol becomes increasing a problem. We have a high fat diet. That tends to put in more of it. And the point is that many of us, our cholesterol levels increasingly rise and that is a risk

• 1:59:46Speaker 00

  factor, as we know, for cardiovascular disease, which we said was still one of the biggest killer. So cholesterol is up there as a risk factor. And so the usual thing that a doctor will do is to hand you something, a statin, basically, that will reduce your cholesterol levels.

• 2:00:06Speaker 00

  They also know that there's more pushback on that prescription than almost anything else, because the word is out, the statins can do this, that or the other, impair with their muscle strength and all the rest of it, give you little aches and pains. That, you know, most people have statins, that's a problem. But the impact of statins is still modest in terms of the overall scheme of things. You know, the numbers of people's lives it saves is probably fairly minimal. So the, probably the better conversation is to have, what can we do to recontextualize the cholesterol so that it becomes more like it should be a good thing rather than a risk? And the first thing is to have a more, apart from the keto, have the more vegetable based,

• 2:00:51Speaker 00

  plant based diet, because that in itself will tend to mop up and reduce cholesterol. Exercise becomes important because by physical activity we can manage it better. And then where we come in with the work I do is to look at high cholesterol as potentially a sign of liver distress. And, you know, we like working with the liver and there's a number of remedies that we use to help reduce cholesterol levels mainly by getting more out through the bile and so on. So it's a, there's not a straight answer to your question. You know, the statin is, sounds like a simple pill that fixes it.

• 2:01:33Speaker 00

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

• 2:01:37Steven Bartlett?

  You're a fan of artichokes for cholesterol?

• 2:01:39Speaker 00

  Yes. You must have read my mind. The artichoke leaf is the one we're talking about, which is used in France a lot for basically fat, liver-related problems a lot. I use it a lot in the practice as a juice, actually, just as a pressed juice. Yes, it's one of them. Dandelion root is another old familiar which seems to be helpful here, mostly by, as I said, flushing stuff through the bile. And there is a range of other things that we use.

• 2:02:10Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that, you know, many people are concerned about when they're thinking about changing their diet is just the cost of it. They think it's super expensive to, to buy all these fresh fruit and veg and, you know. Is that the case? Is that a barrier to, to entry to the stuff we've talked about today at all?

• 2:02:30Speaker 00

  My usual answer to that is eat Asian, because as I said, if you can make a meal with vegetables and spices and things like lentils and so on, beans, for very cheaply. It's just that we got out of the habit, or we haven't got into the habit of doing that slightly slow cooking. We will buy our Indian meals sometimes from places that put more fat in than they might. So some of the meals we buy that are Asian are a bit too fatty, but if you make it yourself at home, which means learning how to cook, but you can eat very cheaply.

• 2:03:10Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most important thing that we didn't talk about that we should have talked about?

• 2:03:17Speaker 00

  Well, I suppose I didn't mention much about the omeprazole, because that... I've never heard of this before. Omeprazole. Yeah, I've never heard of it. Yeah, they are increasingly a minority. Oh, really? Omeprazole is the most widely prescribed drug in this country, and I believe in the US also, and is for acid reflux. It's what the Americans call GERD, and what we call GORD, because we spell esophagus differently. So, we spell esophagus with an OE, and Americans spell it with an E. So, it's either GERD or GORD, depending on which country you're in. And that means gastroesophageal reflux disease, GORD.

• 2:03:58Speaker 00

  And acid reflux is a real issue with a lot of people. And they find that when they go to a doctor, the doctor will routinely prescribe omeprazole or something like it. And GORD is actually diagnosed as a condition which is made better by omeprazole. I mean, it's literally, it's a disease that is diagnosed by the treatment. And what omeprazole does is it shuts down the acid production in the stomach. So, you don't get as much damage by reflux. The problem is, is that the acid's doing a job. It's sterilizing your food, which is important, isn't it?

• 2:04:43Speaker 00

  It's also helping to break it down so that it becomes not an immune threat. You know, if you have a blood transfusion or something, the wrong blood, you get a problem. We're eating forest stuff all the time. We rely on the stomach and the juices to make it safe. So, the acid is there to protect us. When we're getting acid reflux, actually, it's not because you've got too much acid. It's because you're refluxing it. It's going back up into the gullet, the esophagus. But omeprazole put an end to that. The problem with omeprazole, two problems. First is that the list of problems accruing from long-term omeprazole use is beginning to grow and is serious.

• 2:05:27Speaker 00

  Cancers, dementias, all sorts of things are beginning to be downstream problems associated with long-term amiprazole use. But the other thing is, is that once you're on it, it's really difficult to come off it. And you get a famous rebound effect. So you come off the amiprazole and wow, you get much more trouble. So the only thing to do is to take more amiprazole. And people find it really hard to come off it. So you have to do a lot of hard work to wean people off and do it in sorts of different ways. So what do we do instead? Well, one simple thing to do, and anyone can do this, and you don't need to go very far, is to use what we call the raft principle.

• 2:06:11Speaker 00

  So there are some plants that have got a lot of mucus in them, mucilage. The classic example from North America is slippery elm. It's a sort of powder that looks like you make polyfiller to fill a crack with, you know, it's a white powder. When it's mixed with water, it forms this paste, this mucous stuff. You want to have it as a tablet because you don't want to swallow that stuff. But when it's in the stomach, it produces this mucus layer. You don't need to go to slippery elm. There is a product here in this country called gaviscon, which is essentially seaweed gum with, I don't have shares in it by the way, but it's seaweed gum with some minerals in there.

• 2:06:55Speaker 00

  And they advertise it, when you see the television ads, as the raft. So what they're doing is you're putting a layer of mucus on top of your food. So you have it out, you've had your last mouthful, you have it there. And then as the food pushes up back into the gullet, you've got this nice mucus coating, a raft, to stop it.

• 2:07:15Steven Bartlett?

  And back up.

• 2:07:16Speaker 00

  That carbohydrate, it's what it is, gets digested within a couple of hours, end of, no problem. It's not even a medicine, it's just a physical barrier. So you could have gaviscon, you could have slippery elm, you could have aloe vera, there's a number of other mucousy type plants that people use. And that can, without any other complication at all, be one step. And I use it regularly with, when I'm weaning people off amiprazole, I will use the raft principle to help prevent some of the harm you get with reflux. The simple example.

• 2:07:54Steven Bartlett?

  You're very fond of these plants. They are living organisms, aren't they? Are you concerned about how we we treat them?

• 2:08:06Speaker 00

  I'm concerned about the world that they come from because, of course, increasingly we have to produce these industrially, which sometimes mean in monoculture, what it usually means in monoculture form, so that they're grown in rows and rows and they're put weed killers down to get other plants out of the way. And so they become less natural. And we talked about the polyphenols, you know, Pucker, the company I worked for was all organic. And we were able to show that a plant that grows organically, that doesn't have pesticides, needs to fight his own battles more. Because if you've got a pesticide, you don't need to worry about so much, you know, the pests and the attackers.

• 2:08:51Speaker 00

  So a plant that's grown in wild, organically, without chemicals, has more polyphenols, because the polyphenols are part of the plant's defence mechanism. So the more you can buy, or I mean, that's where foraging comes in, you know, my colleague Devon is a forager, and he can walk around hedgerow and show you, you can make a whole meal out of plants that people just walked past, because people used to do that. So that's real wild eating, which must be one of the best ways of eating. But the more close to nature you can get your plants, the better. We have to live with what we've got, and most plants are grown without that. But they're still better than having them, not having them at all.

• 2:09:35Steven Bartlett?

  Simon, thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is, our world is changing fast. How do you keep up?

• 2:09:54Speaker 00

  I think

• 2:09:57Speaker 00

  the world is, we all know, getting pretty scary out there, isn't it?

• 2:10:03Speaker 00

  There is a truth, which is you and the people around you are the, actually the only things that matter day to day, aren't they? Of closest, dearest, the ones that we have invested most.

• 2:10:21Speaker 00

  One of the reasons that I'm increasingly happy to spend my time working in the practice in Exeter rather than chasing around the world is because

• 2:10:33Speaker 00

  as the world gets more frightening, the more you realise that it's the connections you make with each other, you put back to back, if you like, you know, face the world out there, back to back. And I think

• 2:10:52Speaker 00

  it's reconnecting with those who are closest to you, that is the best antidote I know. And that also includes reconnecting with the nature and the world around it. So that would be my answer.

• 2:11:05Steven Bartlett?

  And who is that in your life? Who are those people?

• 2:11:08Speaker 00

  I have family. I have now 10 grandchildren between us, Rachel and myself.

• 2:11:14Steven Bartlett?

  Congratulations.

• 2:11:15Speaker 00

  And so the electronic calendar comes into his own to keep track of all that. So yes, we've got a nose spread around the globe. So it's a widespread thing, but we've got people close by and, you know, obviously your closest, nearest are the ones that matter.

• 2:11:37Steven Bartlett?

  Simon, thank you so much for doing what you do. I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your work. I've never had a conversation with someone that knows so much about plants and herbs in my life. So I was so excited to learn more. And you have changed my opinion on so many things. I can't wait to go and tell my girlfriend that she's right about everything.

• 2:11:53Speaker 00

  I'll slip her the, she can slip me the tenner.

• 2:11:59Steven Bartlett?

  I highly recommend people go and check out your website and go to your herb hour, which takes place once a month. I'm sure there's going to be lots of people getting in touch with you to try and come and see you in person as well, which is fantastic. Is there anything else that if my listeners want to take a step forward from here in this direction and understand more about herbs, I've got your books here, which I'm going to link below. There's the herb hour on your website. Is there anything else that we should be aware of?

• 2:12:23Speaker 00

  As I said, the website does link to this wonderful resource that's not, I mean, I contribute to the herbal reality one, which is where you're going to find almost anything you want to know about using plants. So that's, I'll stop there, but you can step through my website to get there because you'll find a few other things on the way. There is resources out there and it's increasingly reliable. These are not dreamt up, you know, for a TikTok video. They're well thought through and based on a lot of human experience. So there is stuff out there if you're looking for it.

• 2:12:53Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. You're very much leading the charge to bring us all back to being human beings and I'm a big, big fan of that.

• 2:12:59Speaker 00

  Thank you, Stephen.

• 2:13:00Steven Bartlett?

  It's a journey on my myself. So thank you so much for doing the work that you do and being a champion for, for nature and all its forms. So, and I really, really hope that, I really hope that more people, more podcasters host you so that you can get the, get the message out there.

• 2:13:14Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:13:16Steven Bartlett?

  This has always burned my mind a little bit. Fifty-three percent of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor? 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. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.