Your Diet Might Be Making Your Mental Health Worse | Dr. William Li & Dr. Mark Hyman

I kind of want to take us down a path of helping us understand food is medicine from the perspective of the mind and mental health because we have a serious mental health crisis now. I don't think we have a crisis of mental health because there's somehow a design flaw in human beings. Our software is not failing. — People have screwed up operating system that got installed. — I want to talk about a new term called the flavorome. — The flavor room. — The gut microbiome. Healthy gut bacteria or disease bacteria can actually text message your brain up the vagus nerve back to the brain. The irritable bowel causes the irritable brain, not the other way around. — It turns out that the graveyard is the garden when it comes to actually the microbiome. Have you heard of a mentoflavone? — No, I haven't. — A mentoflavone actually lowers anxiety. — The cantaloupe is like the natural value. You can change your brain. mind and you can heal both. William Lee is a renowned physician scientist and New York Times bestselling author whose work has transformed how we understand the connection between nutrition, disease, and the body's natural healing systems. Hey, it's Dr. Heyman. I'm so excited to share this episode with you today. But before we dive in, I want to get your help. Please take a minute to hit that subscribe button. Whether you're watching here on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, it truly means the world to me and it helps my team and I bring you this podcast every single week. Plus, I don't want you to miss a thing. So, thanks so much for being part of this community and I'm glad you're here. William, it's so good to have you back on the podcast.

— Always good to be talking to you, Mark. — I know we've done this virtually. We've done this in person. And I think this might be the third round. I don't know. — Is it? — Yeah. I've lost count. — You know, you are one of the pioneers in thinking about how food is medicine, but from a deep science perspective and uh not just oh, it's you know, food is medicine, that's cool, eat your blueberries, but like really understanding the role of the molecules. Um, and there was an interesting article, I don't know if you saw in the New England Journal of Medicine about the dark matter of nutrition. It was about the 139,000 different compounds in food that regulate our biology that are from phyitochemicals. And I've heard even up to 3 million. And I think that number keeps changing. And it the dark matter nutrition is called that because we just thought of food as protein, fats, carbs, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and that's pretty much it, you know, and maybe, you know, some nice stuff from polyphenols, but like didn't really have a complex understanding of it. And so there's this whole other world of nutrition that is waiting to be discovered. And so we're mapping out a whole world of the way food interacts with our receptors and our metabolic pathways and our microbiome and our immune system and our brain chemistry and ways that have never been really uncovered before and you've been deeply thinking about this for a long time and I I've personally learned a lot from you from your books Eat to Beat Disease and all of your work and so I kind of want to take us down a path of helping us understand you know food is medicine from the perspective of the mind and mental health the brain and the mind are related and they the mind reflects what's happening in the brain and if we don't understand how to create a healthy brain we can't have a healthy mind and so fundamentally you know how do you think about using food and nutrition and food as medicine in the realm of mental health because we have a serious mental health crisis now how do you think about it and what do you know the last few years of you kind of looking at this field where where's your take on all this — yeah I'm glad you actually connected the brain and sort of the mental health aspect and then we should just dive and connect the head to the gut. — Oh yeah. — Right. So this is really the second brain that connects to the first brain which connects to our emotions and really our behavior. So it's all really connected. Um you know if you take a systems biology approach which means you don't isolate one thing. You look at how everything is interconnected and think about how the dominoes you hit in one side might affect the dominoes on the other side. You realize we're just at the beginning of a new frontier of understanding our behavior and our brain and as it relates to food. You mentioned um biology and I want to you've heard about the genome. — Is it our DNA?

— I heard about that. — Right. And you've heard about the microbiome which you've actually alluded to. Yeah, — I want to talk about the food and its many components, the so-called dark matter, and bring up a new term called the flavorome. — The flavorome is actually what flavors food, which is what we prefer, which influences our emotions, including pleasure, or a negative reaction, repulsion. And it's connected to the substances in the food, the molecules in the food which then interact once we eat them starting from the mouth going all the way down to our lower gut and then ultimately to our gut microbiome into the seeum where the microbiome is located. A lot of people don't realize exactly where the microbiome is in the gut. Most of it — that's the last part of your large intestine. — Okay. Yeah. Let's back up a second. — Seeum. What is that? The last part of your large intestine. — Let's talk seeum. Right. Okay. So you got 40 ft of intestines starting in the mouth ending in the anus and the uh goes from mouth to esophagus to stomach. After the stomach uh it go then you switch to a different part of the gut below the diaphragm. Small intestines is a long snaky tube like your garden hose — 22 ft. — Exactly. Then you finally it finally goes to the large intestines small to large. Okay. size up and the connection between the small intestines, a small tube, and the large intestines, a large tube. Right there, that connection is called the seeum. It's kind of a floppy bag is where your appendix actually is. And then if you were to keep on going in a large intestines, the colon, it goes up, takes the elevator up, and then it crosses the building across your gut, and then it goes back down, and then it empties out. Okay. — Yeah, I misspoke. It's the beginning of your large intestines. the beginning of the large intestines and it's a sack and it's where the intestines is and that's actually where most of the gut microbiome lives. Not all of it but most — right where the appendix lives and now we're beginning to reconsider whether the appendix is truly a useless organ or — gods so dumb. — Exactly. Nothing is left without some purpose. Um but back to this idea of um uh the gut microbiome being signaled by the food that we eat and then the gut microbiome can basically uh message our brain through nerves that involve the vagus nerve, right? So you've heard of Vegas nerve stimulation and everything else about how to affect our mood and depression and anxiety. Well, it turns out our gut microbiome is actually doing veagal nerve stimulation all the time. And so the vagus nerve coming out of our brain and this is the connection. So out of our brain uh in our hind brain coming out of our cranial nerves popping out of our the bottom of our brain and the vagus nerve which is our 10th cranial nerve um courses out the big thick cables come out go down our neck wrap around our esophagus like a fishnet stocking then penetrate the diaphragm and then go down into our gut and it ramifies like a horse's tail. — Right? All those nerves go everywhere. And guess what? The gut microbiome, healthy gut bacteria or disease bacteria can actually text message your brain up the vagus nerve back to the brain. 80 to 90% of those nerves run upwards to the brain, not down, just downwards. — Yeah, that that's fascinating. I remember reading and jamama years ago where they talked about irrital bowel syndrome and it was a revolutionary article from my perspective because in medical school we learned that irritable bowel was a psychological problem that it was because people were anxious and stressed and that was the cause. But it actually is the reverse. When the microbiome is altered and there's inflammation, it creates irritation that sends messages back up like you see like test messages to the brain that causes an irritable brain. So the irritable bowel causes the irritable brain, not the other way around. — Exactly. And then the brain feels it and then you feel uncomfortable. And by the way, you know, uh do you remember those uh many hours in med school where all we're supposed to be doing is learning and like you know taking notes or seeing patients and you know it was more frequent than not like something in our gut wasn't doing well and you weren't feeling great. You couldn't show it right. Well, that's actually signals from our gut microbiome communicate our brain say, you know, not so not all is well here and we have to hold our behavior in order to be able to just keep performing. But inside something's going on. And so again, this whole other issue that has to do with brain, mental health, and behavior connected to our gut is all interconnected. So if we ate more healthy, think about all the crap we ate in med school. — Yeah, it's totally true. — Right. So — I didn't I was a weird weirdo. I brought my own yogurt and granola and fruit in the morning and it made my miso soup at night. — Well, think about all the things that were brought by drug reps. — Oh, yeah. That — to the lunches. And so the point is that — even in medicine, we've actually been um not properly trained, at least in the past, to think uh appropriately about the connection between the gut and the

brain. — Not at all. No. And I remember, you know, I was, you know, just practicing functional medicine and treating patients with all kinds of issues and I was often brought kids with behavior problems or ADD or other issues. And you know, I was just sort of learning or even adults with sort of autoimmune things or weird diseases who had mental health issues like OCD or um behavior, anxiety issues, depression. And you know, I began to see that there was this big connection. And I would do stool testing urine organic acid testing which looked at metabolites of the microbiome in the urine that you can pick up from bacteria or fungi. And there was this one little girl who was so beautiful but so violent and aggressive. She was like 9 years old and she would get kicked out of school multiple times a day to be in the hallway. She on the bus they had to stop the bus like 10 times on the way home. She was, you know, a terror at home with her sister. She would tear up family pictures. I mean, she was just a nightmare. And I worked her up and I found she had massive overgrowth of bad bacteria in her gut. And she had massive overgrowth of fungi in her gut. And I gave her an antibiotic and antifungal. And like overnight, she turned into this beautiful sweet little girl. You know, — it was unbelievable. And I was like, "Holy shit. " Well, that well that's the power of understanding the the gut and you intercepted the problem. But I want to actually bring out one thing that you just said that I think it's important for anybody listening to this to uh consider. You said you intercepted a problem mic microbiome uh that was causing behavioral changes and mental you know uh torment um with an antibiotic. Right? So too often we tend to black and white uh things in medicine, especially in the health and wellness space. But here's an example of where the judicious selection of the right antibiotic — to slightly tip the odds of favoring the good bacteria to overcome the bad bacteria. It's about balance, not about extremes. Uh and got the result that you were hoping for. — Yeah. You know, there's a whole world that we are just beginning to understand. The science is beginning to unpack and I think, you know, the whole relationship between the gut and the brain and mental health and mood is so important. And when you think about it, I want you to kind of dive into this because I kind of learned a lot about this from you. The first time I really heard about polyphenols and the microbiome was from you actually at a milking conference like a decade ago or something and you were showing slides and I was like, "Oh, wow. This is amazing. " Circadian disruption affects all of us. 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— Yeah. Okay. So, first of all, — and how this relates back to mental health and brain health. — The theme of what we've just been talking about is that our brain health and mental health is connected to our gut health which is fed by food, right? And here we are thinking of ourselves as individuals, right? With our own cognition, our own emotions and our own uh appetites and our own behaviors. But in fact, when you once you factor in the gut, 39 trillion bacteria and counting, you're really talking about a single organism. That's you sitting over there and me sitting over here. We are single organisms made up of 39 to 40 trillion pieces. All right? And so we're not even single organisms. We're more like a coral reef. And just like a coral reef with the clown fish and an anemy and the barracuda and the octopus, you know, basically how we how things uh how we the whole reef performs has to do with how well the fish are fed. If you got starving fish or your bleached coral, you're going to wind up having a very sick ecosystem. And that translates directly to the brain. And as you said, this is a um just an emerging uh area of research which makes it challenging. I want to come back to the point of like how do we test? How do we know? Because we're beginning to, you know, um, understand how important the microbiome is. But for somebody listening to this, how do I know my microbiome isn't well? You can't go to your regular doctor to ask for that kind of test. — But let's go back. — You can go to an irregular doctor like me. — Or an irregular. Exactly. Or regularly irregular. Right. That's the atrial fibrillation doc. All right. So, let's talk about um polyphenols. So, — what is a polyphenol anyway? — Okay. Polyphenol is basically mother nature's pharmacy with a F and not a PH. It's thousands of different kinds of molecules. Most of them make the colorful foods. A rainbow — millions. What's that? — Millions. — Yeah. Exactly. The billions that the the colorful uh uh the colors you see in the produce market. — Yeah. — Many of them are attributed to polyphenols. These are just natural chemicals that are found intrinsically in food. What's very interesting about polyphenols in food is not only what they do for people, which is a good thing. They're anti-inflammatory. They help to our metabolism work better. They can help fight excess body fat and decrease visceral fat, uh, feed the gut microbiome, but as prebiotics. But it turns out that an more interesting question is now being asked, which is why did plants even have polyphenols? Yeah. What do they do for the plant? — And you know, — they're not there for us. Okay. But it turns out that mother nature imbued plants that make foods with polyphenols to fight the disease to fight for the health of the plant itself. — So the plant's immune and defense system. — It's a it's immune defense system. It's a repair systems. It's a plant's healing system. So if you were to ask me in plain people speak, what is a polyphenol doing in a plant? I would say it's there to heal the plant and keep the plant healthy. Right? So, and I'm going to come to this in a second, like how does it affect the choices that we make? Turns out that if a plant is growing naturally in as a regenerative an environment as it possibly can, natural, okay, without artificial chemicals and spiking the soil and doing all kinds of crazy things to it. What do you have in a natural field or forest? You've got little bugs that are nibbling on the stems and the leaves of the plant. That's an injury. And the plant is going to respond to the injury, the natural injury by healing itself by creating polyphenol. So it turns out that more naturally grown uh food plants actually will have more polyphenol. — The more stress a plant is under, it's called hormesis, right? Which is the stress that doesn't kill you, make you stronger. That's why a wild strawberry explodes with flavor. And a giant red strawberry from the grocery store that's industrially produced tastes like cardboard. — And we've actually studied strawberries for what's inside it. And again, there's are hundreds of molecules, but we're just getting to them one by one. Strawberries have elagic acid as one of their bioactives. That means biologically active. It's not just about the strawberry, it's how our body responds when we eat the strawberry. That elagic acid um does a lot of things. It feeds our gut microbiome, healthier gut. Um it also lowers inflammation all by itself. But it also helps a healthy gut bacteria lower inflammation by releasing short- chain fatty acids. So now you got a twofer, right? You've got elogic acid which is inherently anti-inflammatory. How do we know this? Because if you actually um grow inflammatory cells in a petri dish in a tissue culture and you put elastic acid in there, they will stop having a riot. They'll calm down. If you actually put this short chain fatty acids, the gut microbiome in the same dish, they'll also calm down. So these are truly a double-headed kind of action of elagic acid. Now, what's interesting is the clinical data also shows that people who eat strawberries, about a cup of strawberries a day over the course of a couple of weeks, will also change mental state. It'll actually lower depression, improve cognition, specifically improve memory. — Make sure you eat the organic ones because the strawberries are the most contaminated. And this is the point is that basically if you want the most potent elagic acid, this was studied by horiculturalists in England, you want to have organic strawberries because they're the ones that have to defend themselves against mother nature just to stay robust. So they actually have the greatest hormetic uh generation of these polyphenols. So when we eat them, we get the we get a benefit that the plant, you know, plant doesn't need anymore. Now we get the benefit from it. Uh, and it turns out that the organic strawberries have the most. Now, that's the most of the good stuff. You just talked about the least pesticides. And here's the deal with the fruits that are worth getting the organic for. You cannot wash off pesticides from a strawberry because you can't skin a strawberry. You would never skin a strawberry. And there's other fruits that you want to pay attention to as well that benefit the gut that can improve your mental state, like apples, for example. You can peel an apple to skin the apple, but actually the fiber in the skin is really beneficial. And so too is the erolic acid — which improves blood flow — which improves brain blood flow which improves cognition. — Yeah. — Right. So again when you can think more clearly you have less brain fog. You actually are less anxious or depressed. You get in a better mood. So again, turns out studies at UMass, University of Massachusetts have studied if you take regular pesticides, spray them on an apple — like in a conventional farm, basically the pesticides will penetrate into 20% deep into the skin of the apple. — Now you try washing that off, it won't happen. So again, that's another example of where making choosing organic with anything that you're going to have the skin or you can't or you want skin it, uh, would be actually beneficial. — Yeah. And I always thought, you know, like you taught me this, but I always thought that probiotics and prebiotics were the key to healthy gut microbiome. But it turns out the third P polyphenols is just as important and that collection of molecules, those dark matter nutrition, is a lot of what actually creates a healthy microbiome. So eating all these various plants, I mean you taught me for example that pomegranate and green tea and cranberry have super beneficial effects on a keystone species called acromancium that protects the lining of the gut and prevents leaky gut and reduces inflammation, helps metabolic health, has all these benefits around certain treatments for cancer — and boosts your immune system for cancer. Yeah, — this is just one bacteria and there's, you know, like you said, 39 trillion in there and maybe a thousand species. And

I'll tell you something even more profound that is emerging as a theme in gut health research that is quite important for thinking about brain health. We used to always uh okay I used when I was a kid my grandparents used to take probiotics. I never knew what they were really. — Yeah. They came in from the probiotics were sent from Japan and they used to arrive at my parents house and my grandparents were living with us and they would open them up and I remember they would like some basillus. I'm like why would you eat a bacteria right weird and by the way so this is showing that — long before the current trend of probiotics it has been done uh in past generations there's some ancient knowledge right — all the fermented foods is all probiotic foods yeah — so I used to wonder if a probiotic bacteria was dried it has to be dead and if it's dead how could it do something beneficial to you right and to this day. If you really think about it, live bacteria in your gut make sense doing all those things we're talking about. You need a live bacteria to text message your brain, right? Wrong. It turns out that even dead bacteria, the shell of the bacteria, the carcass of the bacteria is biologically active. And this is why pasteurized bacteria are now being shown to also be bioactive. I'll tell you an experiment that was done that was really amazing. So there's a professor named Susan Erdman uh who's a colleague of mine at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying a bacteria a gut bacteria called Lactobacillus rutery. — Yeah. — This is a fascinating bacteria that actually is often found in mother's milk healthy mother's milk injected into the baby to colonize the bacteria. It's a lactobacillus. All right. Lactobacillus rutery — um actually um helps the wounds heal. So we were helps wound healing. So we actually did a research study where we were actually looking at um uh whether or not feeding lactobaserize a probiotic would speed up wound healing. And indeed it doubled the rate of wound healing and it did it from the gut by increasing the gene expression turning on the gene m genetic machinery for a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor just to prompt new blood vessels to grow veg just to be able to heal the wound. That's pretty amazing right gut skin

axis. Now, what about the brain? Turns out lactobacus rutery also text messages your brain and tells your brain to produce oxytocin. — Yeah. — Social hormone. — All right. Now, I'm not getting to the I haven't gotten to the punch line yet. The punchline is can we destroy this is the experiment. Can we destroy the bacteria's effect by pulverizing it? So, in a lab, you can actually take an ultrasound, not the kind you would actually do in a pregnant mom to look at the baby, but there's like a destructive ultrasound. So think about like a naval weapon, the sound weapon, and you can beam it at the lactobacosur, pulverize it into a gajillion pieces. All right? You feed it uh to uh an experimental system to animals, putting it in a drinking water. And guess what? The dead pulverized bacteria will also make the brain release oxytocin. Totally not no chance it's alive. It is completely pulverized — because the dead stuff has signaling molecules in it. signaling molecules like you know like the uh you know like so I was uh I sort of think about it as the graveyard of the microbiome is also a garden that's actually active it's still able to do things this is just — kind of like compost or something you know — exactly so you know more powerful than we thought — you know what one patient of mine said you know Dr. I took this probiotic and I was just looking it up and it was a specific strain uh bifidtoacterium longum 1714 improves the quality of deep sleep. Think about a probiotic that actually improves your sleep. So everything is connected here. Makes total sense, right? I mean, I I think that we here's the thing, you know, when we as communicators and also medical experts talk about the microbiome and mental health and brain health, you know, we make it seem very logical and common sense. I think it's important to say that, you know, what we're talking about is this really kind of a realization and we're taking whatever pieces of evidence that currently exist and trying to help people understand the connections and the importance of having good brain health and good mental health. You really need to have good gut health at the same time. And that's a connection on food. But we don't really have all the answers yet. That's the key thing. We there's, you know, before anybody runs out after hearing this and just goes and buys whatever bacteria there is, recognize that there's a long way to go before we actually have mastered how to actually map out that to get to the results that we need. — But in the meantime, we can eat prebiotic foods, probiotic foods, fermented foods, you know, polyphenols. We can kind of hack the game a little bit by having a broad array of these different types of foods that are microbiome enhancing foods without worrying too much about which probiotic to take. — Exactly. Because you know what foods actually are wrapped up with if you take fermented foods, it's already got some polyphenels. It's got some dietary fiber. It's got the prebiotics and it's got the bacteria. And you know, have you ever asked like, okay, do all the healthy bacteria are they alive in fermented foods and sauerkraut or yogurt? Some of them are probably dead. Yeah. — Okay. And that's okay. It turns out that the graveyard is the garden when it comes to actually the microbiome.

— I want to double click on something you said because you like said it and we whizzed over it and I think it's so important and it's called the flavorome. Like I never heard that term before, but you know it reminded me of a gentleman who's been on the podcast a few times, Fred Pvenza, who's a rangeland eiccologist from Utah at Utah State for most of his life. He's retired now. He wrote a book called Nourishment essentially about what we can learn from animals about how to eat. and he studied the behavior of rangeand animals out west looking at what plants they ate and what they did and you know they were some general food and crops or calories but then they ate and sampled many different plants for their phyitochemical benefits and their medicinal benefits and they would only eat a certain amount of them because at certain levels they could be toxic or it was like they knew what to eat and they had this natural intelligence based on the flavor and what always sort of blew my mind is that when you think about the taste of food, the flavor of food, it always comes from the phyitochemical richness of the food. That's what brings the flavor. Dan Barber figured this out. He would probably didn't think about this, but he created something called row seven C's essentially to reverse engineer flavor back into foods that have had that flavor engineered out of them. Butternut squash is tasteless, but he created honeyut squash, which is basically a phyitochemically richer food that makes it taste sweeter, better naturally. So, we put all these flavorings on foods instead of actually eating the foods that have the flavor naturally. So, the explosion of a wild strawberry is a different flavor than a storebought strawberry that's not organic or even organic is not as good as the wild one. And so it's people don't understand that if you seek out foods that have a natural richness of flavor, if you go to your garden and anybody's at a garden, I I've had garden most of my life and you know, you get an asparagus that you kind of crack off the stem and you eat it, it's like there's no substance. It's unbelievable. Or you take broccoli and you eat it or you take a tomato off the cherry tomato that's ripened in an August sun on the plant and it's a totally different set of flavors that comes from these phyitochemicals. And that's where the medicine is. 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— You know, I was I know Dan Barber very well. We're doing a collaboration. and I went out to visit his regenerative farm — uh in New York and uh he gave me a pitchfork and we went out there and I dug up potatoes. Yeah. — Which I've always considered to be the most tasteless. — No, not necessarily. — Plucked it out of the ground, brought it to the kitchen, he cooked it for me and it tasted amazing. — I mean, it was sort of like a different food alto together. And let's talk about flavor for a second because flavor is what draws us to our favorite foods, right? And flavor, by the way, is connected to the brain, not only through our taste buds, but also through our nose. — Kind of our natural homing system that we've then had hijacked away from us by the food industry. — Yeah. And also the flavor industry. Think about the candles grow, you know, burning in your home or in the hotel or the scents or the car smell. We have been inundated with industrialization of our senses, right? Our taste buds by the food industry, our our olfactory nerves, our nose, uh from, you know, the people that want to make things smell nice like uh the laundry detergent or their dish soap. And the reality is that, you know, we I think what we're learning is that by going back to nature and appreciating the intensity that can be packed into food, we will naturally gravitate towards the foods that we individually, so this is personalized nutrition. We all have our own pre preferences of flavor profile. Some people are super tasters. So, oh man, it's way too hot for me or I don't prefer this kind of sour food. I can't take it. Other people go, man, that I really like that. — I like bitter food. And so I think that you know by recognizing our the part of the flavor uh flavor is linked to preferences which is part of our individualization humanity. Yeah. Right. And then think about the diversity of foods out there. Okay. If you could eat a food that you preferred that you love the flavor on it's going to make you happier. And so that's also hardwiring — above the gut. So we're not talking about the gut microbiome here. You haven't even put it in your mouth. You've just uh smelled it. You see it. Our eyes are basically radar dishes that connect right to our brain. We can even feel happy seeing foods, right? So again, talking about mental health, brain health, mood, emotion, you know, our how our emotions are. It is so complicated because it's not only our gut, it's our eyes, it's our nose, it's our taste buds that all work in concert. — That's true. You know, I think what I've learned, William, is that your body will naturally gravitate towards things that support its health if you remove the things that are interfering with those signals. So, if you're, for example, having artificial sweeteners, which are a thousand times sweeter than regular sugar, or you're having a lot of sugar, and you have a blueberry, it's going to taste bland. But if you don't eat sugar, and I've I do this. I take people on these retreats and I get them off all the sugar and the starch and all the crap for like a week and then I give them a treat at the end which is like blueberries and they're like, "Wow, this is like so sweet. " And it's because we we've had our natural instincts hijacked by the food industry. And so we're not attracted to those foods which are good for us. We're attracted to those foods that are bad for us. And we've had our senses almost homogenized and removed from what naturally is good for us. And I think we need to learn how to get back to that and hit the reset button. That's why I created the 10day detox diet. You can go to 10daydetox. com and learn about it. But essentially, it's a full reset of your system so that you can then start to go, okay, what do I like? What do I want? I mean, I walk by, you know, like a I'll walk by a store or like a restaurant like where they have like muffins or bagels or whatever. It I don't want to eat it. It doesn't it looks like a rock to me. like it doesn't attract me because my body is naturally seeking those things that support its health because I've trained it to and I've let it kind of uncover from all the crap. — I don't know if you saw the research that looked at um chimpanzees um uh knowing inherently when they're injured that they'll pick specific plants to chew on them that will give them the bioactives of polyphenols from certain plants in order to be able to heal their wounds. — That's right. That's what I'm talking about. The animals have this natural intelligence. We've lost it. We lost touch of it. — And it's part of what's caused our mental health to be screwed up because we're eating a diet that is so damaging to our mental health. All the starch and the sugar and the refined foods and the ultrarocessed foods and all the additives and chemicals. It has such an adverse effect not just on our microbiome but on our metabolic function and our health and you know at the Harvard there's now departments of metabolic psychiatry. I mean there's nutritional psychiatry. This is because there's an understanding that there's this relationship between the the amount of sugar and starch and processing of our diet and our mental health, right? — And it's causing an epidemic of mental health issues. I don't think we have a crisis of mental health because there's somehow a design flaw in human beings. — It's like yeah, there was always a few maybe crazy people in the tribe, but like basically most people were pretty stable and good. — Our software is not failing, — right? I mean, basically every — we have a screwed up operating system that got installed though. we're

spilling coffee on the keyboard kind of thing, right? Here's something interesting to think about when it comes to uh mental health. Um what are there's obviously a lot of things that if we introduce our system that are going to cause inflammation. So regardless of what mental health condition that you're talking about, everything from schizophrenia uh to autism to uh dep major depression, bipolar disorder, you know, so far what's been looked at as a common denominator of these uh syndromes is actually inflammation in the brain. — Yeah, that's right. I think that's so important. Let's double click on that because inflammation is what's behind a lot of the mental health crisis, right? I mean, I even read a study that they showing they were interested in using TNF alpha blockers for depression, which is a stupid idea, which is like an autoimmune drug, but — or it's a brilliant idea. — Well, it's a brilliant idea in the sense that it's oh, it's inflammation, but it's a bad idea because there's better ways to reduce inflammation without all the side effects, — right? So, but you know, if we're really trying to address this root cause of mental illness or let's not call it mental illness, let's call it kind of u deviating from our own mental health. you've got this like smoke screen that's put up by inflammation and uh and although there are underlying things that might make something depression versus anxiety disorder versus OCD versus you know schizophrenia that the reality is if you can strip away the inflammatory layer that's actually an important thing that people are empowered to do we can do that ourselves you don't need a psychiatrist to lower brain in body inflammation and hence brain inflammation and so removing the bad stuff to actually lower inflammation is actually uh it's you know it's a it's lowhanging fruit literally and figuratively right I mean all those polyphenols and fruits that and vegetables that you would eat can actually lower inflammation so you can get a head start on anything that you're doing for mental health by look by eating foods that lower inflammation uh you know and by the way the other thing that's interesting about inflammation which most of us are walking around with uh even those of us who take care of ourselves you know life is tough stress causes inflammation most of us are have a little bit more stress than we want in our lives. And so we're always a little bit inflamed, which is why, you know, we need to actually have that fire extinguisher uh to regularly put things out three times a day whenever we're actually making a choice. Make that choice to lower inflammation in your bodies is good for brain health, good for mental health as a practice. I think as just a matter of actually how you choose your uh your foods, your meals. Now, the other thing is staying away from things that can cause inflammation as well. And this is really the other part of the dark matter in manufactured foods and ultrarocessed foods. — And by the way, the dark matter is a good thing. It's not bad. The dark matter is all the things we haven't seen that are good in food. But there's also a dark darker matter. — There's a darker matter which is a shitty food we're eating. That's what you're talking about. — That's the that's the dark side of the force, right? Okay. So then you actually put all those chemicals that are uh that our body tries to process, tries to detox, our liver, our kidneys, all these organs try to kind of uh remove has to do extra work, has to uh has to consume energy, part of the energy that we would normally have for enjoying life, for brain function. If we have to divert that energy to detoxing the u chemicals that we find in our foods, uh you know, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, artificial preservatives, you name it, the fillers, all these kind of transformed um additives that are actually found in our foods, not only does it steal from our life energy and our life force, but they actually directly trigger inflammation as well. And by then triggering inflammation, know think about the dietary pattern. You eat less foods with polyphenols, more junk food with all these chemicals, you're tilting the uh scales towards inflammation. — And the most inflammatory thing is sugar and starch. That's what's the majority of Americans diet. And that that's creating insulin resistance, which creates belly fat deposition. Those cells in your belly are not just holding up your pants. They're little factories of inflammation creating adapocytoines which are inflammatory molecules from the fat cells that go to your brain and affect everything. — And the food industry that makes foods with sugar and starch tend to add to those foods a lot of other additives, right? So you're talking about sort of, you know, uh something that can be damaging. You get the double whammy. — Yeah. So I think you're right. I mean the inflammatory issue is huge. So all these polyphenols tend to be anti-inflammatory. Whereas all the foods we're eating tend to be inflammatory in a very basic level. You know to simplify things, you know, when your brain's inflamed, your mood's inflamed. You're depressed, you're anxious, you're irritable, you're you have bipolar disease, you have schizophrenia, you have autism. These are all brain disease. Even Alzheimer's is brain inflammation. — Or you actually have and you have and or brain fog. — Yeah. — And that actually steals from your quality of life. you know, this is not where I leave my keys. This is like I can't focus on anything. Yeah. — Right. And so this is when you kind of when anybody who's in that situation feels like, you know, they really need to have some kind of reset to be able to get back to clear thinking.

— I don't mean to push it, but I'm telling you the 10day detox is literally like that reset. And that's one of the things that people say most often when they do it that they're brain fog. — What are the steps? Basic steps. — It's getting rid of all the crap. It's adding in the good stuff, taking out the bad stuff. So, it's lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, good quality protein, lots of good fats, olive oil, eggs. You're taking out gluten, dairy, grains, and beans. Not that they're wholesale bad, but for a temporary period because they tend to be more starchy and cause some gut issues for people. Dairy, which are modern dairy is terrible. I do like yogurt and I like particularly sheep or goat yogurt, but you just for a short period of time, these tend to be the very inflammatory foods that people — are sick from. — And when you do that for and you obviously take out all the ultrarocessed foods and all the sodas, all the sugar, all the starch, all the additives, all the chemicals, all that goes away. — All the alcohol, all the caffeine, all that goes out. And you do it for 10 days. I mean, anybody can do anything for 10 days. And when you do that, we see across the board, I've done this with thousands of people online and in person, there's a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days based on a symptom questionnaire that we do where we grade your symptoms like headaches to 0 to 1, 2, 3, 4, you know, irritable bowel, you know, 0 to four. And there certainly must be improvement in gut health, too. — Yeah. 100% irritable bowel, reflux, all this stuff. I mean, one person came up to me at Cleveland Clinic and said, "Dr. Heyman, I did this and my rheumatoid arthritis went away. Is that possible? " I'm like, "Yeah, it's possible because your it went away. " You know, another woman was like, "I've been and out of psychiatric hospitals. I've been on so many psychiatric meds. I've never really felt good and I feel completely normal. " — So, so that's a baseline approach that anybody can do. Yeah. It's basically — by removing the bad, keep adding the good and trying to get to your own personal reset. — Yeah. It's like I want to say is like hitting the factory reset button. — Yeah. — It's like how do you go back to the original factory settings on your phone so you don't get like all screw it up. That's what most of us have no clue how to do. And I've just come upon this through practicing functional medicine and learning the science of food is medicine and all the things we were talking about. But it's not that complicated. And so if anybody's

suffering from anything out there, it's worth a try. There are more extreme versions like a ketogenic diet, which is now being explored for schizophrenia and bipolar disease and OCD and — cancer and severe depression and diabetes. And I mean it's like it's kind of like this weird thing where you kind of re change the way your metabolic function works — and it has a broadreaching effects across so many disease categories. So whether it's diabetes or cancer or Alzheimer's or autism. — Okay. So one of the things that I think so we you know one of the things we've just talked about is lowering inflammation uh avoiding by eating better things that good for gut and polyphenols that lower inflammation and then staying away from some of the lowering the harmful intake adding more polyphenols to your diet. But you know the latest research also begins to identify specific polyphenols and plant-based substances that can make your brain healthier which then makes your mental state uh more optimized in any event. So for example um have you heard of atolavone? — No I haven't. — Atolavone actually is a natural polyphenol substance that's found in cantaloupe. — Oh — breakfast food. Okay. Uh and that actually lowers anxiety. — So a mental flavor has been shown to lower the state of anxiety. So we're again part of this flavor Rome like everybody knows that characteristic uh scent or flavor of a cantaloupe like a really ripe cantaloupe. Right. — It's got a very strong flavor. — Exactly. A meto smell. — Amen flavor that actually can lower it's anxolytic. It actually lowers anxiety. Okay. So that's a — cantaloupe is like a natural volume — of sorts. Um uh what about anandmide? Do you know? Have you heard of anandmide? All right. So tell me I'm throwing something. — This is great. All this new stuff for me. I love it. — Right. Anandmides are actually found in foods that many people like dark chocolate. Right now chocolate is a candy is a confection but dark chocolate is made with more of the plant-based substance cacao. And cacao has these all these uh polyphenols uh in it uh like proenthocinodine and others including anandmide. All right. And what do anandmides do when you eat them? Um they not only lower inflammation but they uh stimulate the endockinabonoid system in your brain. So an endockinabonoid system is basically what marijuana THC stimulates. You feel better. You get more relaxed. you know, you kind of zone a little bit, you feel happier in general. Dark chocolate, you know, that happy feeling people have an andmide activating the that receptor system which is related to the opioid system. Okay, the endockinabonoid system. — That's why I like chocolate. — Another food that people consider to uh alter your state of being towards happiness for people that like it are truffles. truffles like not truffle chocolate. I'm switching now for mushrooms. — Well, it's a it's a it's not exactly a mushroom, but it's a it's more related to like a fungus. Um, but truffles, which are, you know, uh prizes of the Mediterranean at certain seasons, right? Uh I think you and I had a meal once where we had some truffles. Uh and the the fact of the matter is that it has this incredible aroma. — Yeah. And some people really love truffles and it makes them feel good — andide in truffles and chocolate. So again, this whole idea of like elevating our mood, we're not always treating depression. Sometimes you're elevating your mood as well. It's like an enhancement. It's like — an enhancement. — There's a whole word called neotropics, which means compounds that actually help increase your cognitive function and mood that are not, you know, actually treating a disease. They're just causing an elevation or improve it. You know, I've always believed that one of the most powerful things you can do for your health is to cook your own food. In fact, I was at my house recently and made short ribs for a small group. Slow braised, deeply flavorable, simple ingredients. And after when someone said, "Wow, you're such a great cook. " I laugh because I always tell people what my mother told me. If you can read, you can cook. Cooking isn't about being a chef. It's about following simple steps, using real food, and having the right tools. And that's why I love cooking with Maiden. Their cookware heats evenly. It's beautifully designed and is trusted by professional chefs as well as millions of home cooks. 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We're designed to receive and use this kind of energy. And the research suggests that infrared may help support circulation, improve mitochondrial activity and the body's own natural repair processes, all of which play a role in how we age. It can also promote sweating, which supports the body's natural detox pathways while gently increasing your heart rate and your circulation. For me, it's become a longevity ritual that I try to do a whole bunch of times a week. And that's why I like Sunlighten. They've spent more than 25 years developing infrared technology designed to deliver precise wavelengths the body can absorb efficiently. Try it today and visit sunlighten. com and use the codeman to save up to $1,600. That's right, $1,600. That's sunlighten su len. com and use the codeman. And that's the point I'm trying to get at, which is that we're not only trying to take a sledgehammer against inflammation. We're not only trying to, you know, remove harmful substances from your plate, but we're also thinking about for happiness and joy, — elevating our own mood, and that's also connected to the gut and the food that we choose.

— Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, lion's mane is another mushroom that I It looks like a brain actually and it has incredible effects on the brain uh in terms of connectivity, brain repair, healing. I I've used a lot with people who have traumatic brain injury. It's quite interesting. Uh can you tell us more about that? Well, lion's mane is belongs to a whole family of medicinal mushrooms which include rayi, turkey tail, you know, and — Chinese medicine are a big part of the — and sort of in Asian medicine traditions, you have all these medicinal mushrooms. And by the way, it's distinguished uh from a culture perspective from culinary mushrooms where you get the portoelloo and the porchini and the white button mushrooms and but there are overlaps. So two overlaps are uh shiitakei mushroom and mitakei mushrooms are both medicinal and culinary and increasingly people are now interested in looking at these medicinal mushrooms and incorporating them into their food. And that's another example of sort of a modern way of looking at food as medicine or medical foods into regular foods to see if we can actually elevate uh our mental state. And again, there's anti-inflammatory effects. There are in uh there is uh no question that there are brain effects that are beneficial as well uh with some of these medicinal mushrooms. — Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And I think um you know, speaking of mushrooms, I mean, psilocybin's undergoing a lot of research now for things like depression, anxiety, for PTSD. And it's kind of fascinating how it works. And I don't think it just works through its ability to reduce your anxiety through lowering the function of certain areas like your default mode network which is your ego and your anxiety or amydala. But I think it has other effects and some has these neurotropic effects using uh activation of things like BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor which increases the connectivity in the neurogenesis in the brain. It's like miracle growth for the brain. — Neurogenesis. You said a word that we haven't talked about yet. — That's right. Basically, as we get older, our nerves kind of start to get a little weaker, maybe not as uh uh vibrant as they once were. And importantly, uh our nerves actually, which regen are capable of regenerating, don't regenerate quite as quickly as they once did. And so this whole idea about foods that can stimulate regeneration — is a really interesting one. So how does regeneration occur? Well, there are signals in the body that foods that you eat can trigger and release that will draw out stem cells that are naturally found in our body to help us regenerate silently. So, you know, most people think about stem cells on a from like a therapeutic perspective. You go someplace to get your stem cells. Well, actually, mother nature already packed the suitcases inside our body. We already have our own stem cells. And so, one of the interesting things are foods that might uh help to stimulate neurogenesis. And this is where my field of angio or blood vessel growth connects to nerve growth because blood vessels and nerves go hand in hand. And nerves that grow out need blood vessels to support them because they're really metabolically active. — And so uh foods that stimulate androgenesis uh can be beneficial. And I we already talked about dark chocolate as being uh beneficial. Barley can also be beneficial. Uh barley has beta dlucan which is also found in mushrooms. uh culinary mushrooms as well as medicinal mushrooms. It's a kind of dietary fiber. Uh they grow blood vessels and it can stimulate nerve growth as well. So this is a whole other dimension of brain health and mental health is you know we're you're we're not stuck with what we were born with. — We can tend the garden by encouraging neurogenesis as well. Well, it's

interesting you say that because I w I did a podcast this summer with Nolan Williams about ibeane, who was a Stanford researcher who sadly died this summer, but he talked a lot about Ibeane and uh Rick Perry, who was the former governor of Texas for 15 years, heard the podcast and he invited me to this dinner at this group called Americans for Ibgain. And at that dinner, I spent a couple hours talking to him about his experience and he went down there and he, you know, he's 75 and he went down there to address, you know, his own brain health cuz there's data that improves brain health and the veterans who've had brain drama. I mean, brain drama, brain trauma, traumatic brain injury and brain drama, actually PTSD, uh, actually show that their brains repair looking at functional MRIs or quantitative MRIs. I was like, "Wow. " And he said, "Yeah, his brain grew significantly over the course of the months and weeks and months after he took the ibeine, Rick Perry took it. " And I was like, "Holy crap. " So, I went down and did it. And I did a quantitative brain MRI before. I have a functional MRI and I'm going to repeat it — a week in a week from now. — And is your brain growing? — I don't know. I got to repeat it. I only did this like less than a week ago. So, I'm going to repeat it next week and I'm going to repeat it again in a few months and I'm going to report back on the podcast. Everybody got to stay tuned to the podcast because I'm going to report back and share the data because I if if there's a plant compound that can do that, it's kind of revolutionary because you think you're aging, your brain shrinks and it decreases connectivity, but if you can actually reverse your brain aging and I and and through Ezra, the company that is part of Function Health, it's an imaging company. So you can go to functionhealth. com. You can get your brain scan. You can do what I did. You don't have to go through a doctor. I just went because, you know, I I'm co-founder of the company. I can go do the brain scan. And I and anybody can do it. And I measured my brain quantitative analysis. And I'm going to continue. — When you say quantitative analysis, you're talking about the amount of brain or the activity of the brain, the blood flow in the brain. — It's not the blood flow. It's actually like they can measure through very sophisticated MRI through Tesla machines the size of each area of your brain. like how big is your hippocampus, how thick is your cortical matter, how big are different structures and things in your brain very precisely and then you can repeat it and see if that changes over time. So to me, you know, when you're talking and we're talking not about a drug, we're talking about a phytochemical essentially plant compounds that are in this bark of this root that is from West Africa and some other plants. the method of analysis you're talking about getting functional brain scans, — functional brain scans and quantitative — before, after and quantitative actually is sort of setting the stage for the future of us understanding what we can actually do to improve our brain. You know, I mean, you're obviously describing something that you personally experienced that you know gave you um uh a reason to believe that there are significant changes occurring in how you feel. Now you're going to measure it. And then the other interesting things is where do you take it from there? How do you actually look at other — uh plant-based substances that could actually achieve? — Yeah, it's amazing. There was a guy there who had crippling anxiety, went and got treatment while I was there, came out. He says, "My anxiety is completely gone. I've never experienced this. " There was a woman there who spent 9 months a year in her bedroom because of crippling depression and would go out and work and she was a musician and would record and then she would go back and hide in her bedroom. She came there had a treatment and was completely transformed. So we are it's we're like almost like you know looking up at the sky with our kind of naked eye looking at the stars trying to imagine what's going on and seeing things. We're just starting to actually understand this field and I think we're going to be in the next 5 to 10 years in a revolutionary period of understanding of the brain, the mind, how to repair the brain, how to heal deal with mood disorders, trauma, PTSD, brain injury, depression, anxiety, I mean this whether you talk about, you know, plant medicines and psychedelics or nutritional metabolic psychiatry or upregulating just mood through using all the things you mentioned like from, you know, truffles. I'm like it's a little expensive way to get your mood. — You can afford a cantaloupe though. — Yeah, I can afford a cantaloupe. — So, it's quite amazing like we're in — Well, and it's also not just about the substance. It's also about how our body responds to it. And so, this idea about discovering like new frontiers of discovery like we didn't really think about when we were in medical school, in fact, we were encouraged to conclude that the brain can't regenerate. No. — Right. Like basically once you had a stroke, that's it. nothing nothing's going to fix that and we were taught that. So that way if you actually wiped out a big portion of your brain with a stroke like oh it's too bad. Uh you might take a year to recover but that's about it. That's all you're going to get. Turns out that's not really true. We can actually reverse some of these uh diseases or conditions or the consequences of disease um by encouraging our body's own capability of regeneration. — I wrote about this in my book He disease. He — did. Yeah, I remember. — Uh and the whole idea is that we are hardwired to repair ourselves from the inside out. The mental health aspect and the brain health aspect is I think one of the most exciting frontiers. — By the way, more recently uh researchers are now beginning to focus on the eyes as a window into the brain and the status quo of the brain. Right?

So think about it. When you go to the eye doctor, what do you do? you get your, you know, you look at the eye chart, can you what's the smallest uh lines you can actually read? But actually the imaging has become so much more sophistic — and the AI connected to the imaging, right? So anybody who's actually had a real serious back of the eye exam, what do you do? You put your chin on rest. They um flash these lights into you and they are looking at your brain. — Yeah. And then with the images that are capturing uh you can see the thickness of the retina. optic nerve the connection between the layer of nerves that are the carpet on the back of your eye that connected to the big cable that goes straight into your brain. We can see our brain which is pretty amazing. — And they can tell Alzheimer's kidney function. I mean it's crazy the stuff that they're able to detect and stuff that an opthalmologist wouldn't be able to detect because the AI can start to see these things. — And now they're beginning to think about it and use AI to their advantage. So, I was just sort of um building on the brain scans, the functional scans you're doing. Um I think you should take a look at your retina. — Yeah. Interesting. It's an amazing conversation as always. Dr. Lee, you are just a delight and uh I I'm always amazed how your brain works and the depth of knowledge you have around food and medicine and food is medicine. Uh I

can't wait to see what you're up to next. You have another book coming out. — Working on it. — It involves the brain. Oh, really? Okay. Well, we'll have to have you back on the podcast for that. Um, thanks for being here again. Thanks everybody. I think the takehome here is that you can change your brain, mind, and you can heal both by optimizing your health through food as medicine and helping your gut microbiome, through all the things we talked about. So, thank you so much for joining us, and uh we'll see you again. Thanks for having me. — If you loved that last video, you're going to love the next one. Check it out here.