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The Full-Spectrum Experience of Everyday Eating with Dr. Deanna Minich | The Holistic Pharmacy Podcast · Pharmacy Podcast Network

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Speaker 1: You are listening to the global network of podcasters dedicated
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Speaker 1: to the pharmacy profession. Welcome to the Pharmacy podcast Network.
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Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the Holistic Pharmacy Podcast. I'm your host,
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Speaker 2: Marina books Of and I'm a functional medicine pharmacist in
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Speaker 2: New York. I'm also a clinical herbalist and an integrative
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Speaker 2: health coach specializing in mindfulness and empowerment. I'm on a
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Speaker 2: mission to transform the way we approach healthcare by bridging
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Speaker 2: the wisdom of traditional medicine with modern practice, and in
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Speaker 2: this podcast, I will be highlighting guests who do just that.
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Speaker 2: I'm constantly in fired by them, and I know you
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Speaker 2: will be as well.
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Speaker 3: Hello everybody, Welcome back to the Holistic Pharmacy Podcast. I'm
1:07
Speaker 3: honestly a little bit starstruck right now because I have
1:10
Speaker 3: doctor Deanna Minnick here with me, and she's kind of
1:14
Speaker 3: a big deal. If you know, you know, and if
1:15
Speaker 3: you don't know, you'll get to know her right now.
1:18
Speaker 3: So she's a pioneering nutrition scientist and thought leader with
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Speaker 3: over twenty five years of experience bridging science, spirituality, and
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Speaker 3: art to define holistic health.
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Speaker 4: Internationally recognized for.
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Speaker 3: Her work on color coded nutrition aka Eating the Rainbow,
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Speaker 3: Detoxification and hormone health. Doctor Minick brings a multi dimensional
1:39
Speaker 3: lens to wellness that is both grounded in research and
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Speaker 3: infused with a soulful approach. As the Chief Science Officer
1:47
Speaker 3: at Symphony Natural Health, Doctor Minick leads the science medical
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Speaker 3: teams Innovation and Endocrine, Metabolic and Circadian Health, developing evidence
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Speaker 3: based approaches that empower people to reclaim vitality through rhythm,
2:01
Speaker 3: root cause, healing and renewal. So, without further ado, welcome
2:05
Speaker 3: to the show.
2:06
Speaker 5: Oh thank you for that warm introduction. It's a delight
2:09
Speaker 5: to be here with you, and I'm so excited for
2:11
Speaker 5: this conversation. You know, it's interesting that you're a pharmacist
2:15
Speaker 5: because I always say when I'm lecturing that pharmacists are
2:18
Speaker 5: like the smarty pants. They know a lot of the
2:21
Speaker 5: biochemistry already. They didn't have to just learn it fresh.
2:25
Speaker 5: They know it and they apply it on a daily basis.
2:28
Speaker 5: So I'm talking to a very esteem group today.
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Speaker 3: It sounds like, yeah, thank you so much, you know,
2:36
Speaker 3: And I think there is a spectrum of people that
2:38
Speaker 3: are really into the biocam and people who just like
2:41
Speaker 3: had to get through those lectures, but one way or another,
2:45
Speaker 3: it's kind of ingrained in us to look at the medcam,
2:48
Speaker 3: look at the biocam, look at how things are interacting.
2:52
Speaker 3: And as an herbalist as well, it's so fun to
2:55
Speaker 3: see like the phytochemicals and the colors and the qualities,
2:59
Speaker 3: and honestly, I think as a human being, it's so
3:02
Speaker 3: important to like you say, eat the rainbow and understand why,
3:07
Speaker 3: and like have the food tell us about its vitality
3:12
Speaker 3: and life giving qualities and choose accordingly. And so it's
3:17
Speaker 3: you know, that commercial with Skittles, like really ruined it
3:20
Speaker 3: for me with they eat the rainbow. So I always
3:22
Speaker 3: have to clarify, like I'm talking about vegetables guys.
3:26
Speaker 4: You know. So you know, I want to.
3:28
Speaker 3: Start off, as I do with everybody here on the show,
3:32
Speaker 3: with a little bit of a background of how you
3:34
Speaker 3: even landed in this line of work.
3:37
Speaker 5: It started in the nineteen seventies when I was growing
3:40
Speaker 5: up with a very health conscious mother. And at that time,
3:44
Speaker 5: in the nineteen seventies, it wasn't really cool to be
3:47
Speaker 5: into health and healing at that time. You were a
3:50
Speaker 5: health nut. So my mom was like this self proclaimed
3:52
Speaker 5: health nut she was all about brown bread instead of
3:55
Speaker 5: white bread, and exercising. You know, we did all of
4:00
Speaker 5: these things that seemed very non conventional. So I kind
4:04
Speaker 5: of grew up with that disruptor mentality. Went into my teens.
4:07
Speaker 5: I was really into science. I was really into trying
4:11
Speaker 5: to understand my body. So I was kind of a nerd.
4:14
Speaker 5: I spent a lot of time in the library reading books, reading.
4:18
Speaker 5: You know, at that time, we had encyclopedias, so I
4:21
Speaker 5: was buried in encyclopedias and medical books. And then I
4:26
Speaker 5: went to college and I started to study science. And
4:29
Speaker 5: at the same time I realized that, you know, while
4:32
Speaker 5: I thought about going to medical school, the more I
4:35
Speaker 5: learned about medicine, I thought, I don't know if that's
4:39
Speaker 5: for me.
4:40
Speaker 6: I started taking some.
4:41
Speaker 5: English literature courses, philosophy, art history, and I started to
4:46
Speaker 5: round out my education a little bit more, and I
4:48
Speaker 5: felt like, you know, there's something more here. Maybe I
4:52
Speaker 5: do need to go into nutrition. So I went to
4:55
Speaker 5: graduate school. I went to the University of Illinois, Chicago.
4:58
Speaker 5: I was there for three years. My masters in carotenoids,
5:03
Speaker 5: and that's what we're going to talk about today, these
5:05
Speaker 5: plant pigments. So that's kind of like where I first
5:07
Speaker 5: got turned onto phytochemicals, and then I did my doctorate
5:12
Speaker 5: in medical science and my focus there was on essential
5:16
Speaker 5: fatty acid absorption and metabolism. I then plunged myself into
5:21
Speaker 5: the working world.
5:22
Speaker 6: I was like, I'm done with school.
5:23
Speaker 5: I was twenty nine, you know, just was in school
5:27
Speaker 5: since I was like five, so I had no breaks.
5:31
Speaker 5: So I got into working at a variety of different
5:35
Speaker 5: I would say, just having different exposures. So one of
5:38
Speaker 5: my first jobs was working for a company with a
5:41
Speaker 5: medical food and then I worked in a large food company,
5:47
Speaker 5: a Fortune one hundred company. So I got to learn
5:49
Speaker 5: the ins and outs of a food industry and a
5:52
Speaker 5: food manufacturer and how they think.
5:55
Speaker 6: And you know, I always thought, can I get in
5:56
Speaker 6: and change the system?
5:58
Speaker 5: Well it was very naive of me, but it did
6:02
Speaker 5: give me really good exposure. And during that time, I
6:06
Speaker 5: also came into the world of dietary supplements, which I
6:09
Speaker 5: wasn't trained on when I was in graduate school. Like
6:12
Speaker 5: that was like a whole other niche And you know,
6:16
Speaker 5: dietary supplements became a big thing, like I would say,
6:19
Speaker 5: in the nineteen nineties, especially with the DHA act, So
6:24
Speaker 5: I then went to go work with doctor Jeffrey Bland,
6:27
Speaker 5: who is the father of functional medicine. Some of the
6:29
Speaker 5: listeners may know his name. He started the Institute for
6:33
Speaker 5: Functional Medicine with his wife Susan back in the nineties.
6:36
Speaker 5: So I worked with doctor jeff Bland for about a
6:39
Speaker 5: decade and then, you know, really came into knowing like
6:44
Speaker 5: how we work with supplements and a lifestyle medicine based approach.
6:48
Speaker 5: So that was really good education for me. And then
6:51
Speaker 5: eventually I just went out on my own wrote some books.
6:54
Speaker 5: One of those books is called The Rainbow Diet. I
6:57
Speaker 5: started to see in nutrition that there was a lot
6:59
Speaker 5: of plerization, you know, it always seemed like there was
7:02
Speaker 5: a pendulum swinging like high fat, low fat, high protein,
7:07
Speaker 5: low protein, and it was all over the map. And
7:10
Speaker 5: so it was becoming a little bit frustrating for me,
7:13
Speaker 5: being that I had studied nutrition science, and so I thought,
7:17
Speaker 5: what is it that does not get refuted? What is
7:21
Speaker 5: it that I can put my stake in the ground.
7:23
Speaker 5: I don't have to arm rustle people as far as
7:27
Speaker 5: like a trend. And to me, what was coming up
7:30
Speaker 5: time and time again was phytochemicals. You know, we can
7:34
Speaker 5: arm rustle macronutrients, the protein carbohydrate in fats. You know,
7:38
Speaker 5: in fact, that has long been done, and that's long
7:41
Speaker 5: how nutrition has come to be known.
7:44
Speaker 6: The micronutrients.
7:45
Speaker 5: We can't really arm rustle those too much either, you know,
7:48
Speaker 5: vitamins and minerals. Maybe certain people would vouch for certain
7:52
Speaker 5: levels of certain of them. But the phytoonutrients were most
7:55
Speaker 5: intriguing to me because I call them the underdogs of nutrition.
8:00
Speaker 5: They're out there in plant foods, thousands of them.
8:04
Speaker 6: We don't see them on a food label.
8:06
Speaker 5: But yet in the twentieth I would say, at the
8:09
Speaker 5: end of the nineteen hundreds, you know, if we look
8:14
Speaker 5: at like when I was in school, like nineteen ninety
8:17
Speaker 5: two to nineteen ninety five, we started to hear a
8:20
Speaker 5: lot about these functional foods with phytoonutrients added. And then
8:24
Speaker 5: we move into the twenty first century we figure out
8:27
Speaker 5: the human genome. Now there's a lot more excitement about
8:31
Speaker 5: nutrient genomics and looking at the influence.
8:34
Speaker 6: Of food on our genome.
8:36
Speaker 5: And what came to light as part of that was
8:39
Speaker 5: that these phytochemicals were not inert. They were actually quite
8:44
Speaker 5: active at multiple levels. Sometimes they're referred to as having
8:49
Speaker 5: pleiotropic effects meaning multiple effects simultaneously, like multi functional, so
8:56
Speaker 5: they're not just pigeonholed. They're not a source of calories
8:59
Speaker 5: like the acros. They're very distinct in their functions. So
9:04
Speaker 5: that's kind of like where I ended up focusing on
9:07
Speaker 5: within nutrition.
9:11
Speaker 3: Wow, thank you so much for taking us on that
9:14
Speaker 3: journey with you, And it sounds like it was a
9:17
Speaker 3: full plethora of experiences for you and food science and
9:22
Speaker 3: nutrition and all the roles that you got to experience,
9:26
Speaker 3: and then writing the book and developing your own approach
9:29
Speaker 3: and me being trained also as a health coach.
9:32
Speaker 4: I can totally relate to there being so.
9:35
Speaker 3: Much food confusion because there's just so much information, and
9:41
Speaker 3: you know, there's a lot of debate about one size
9:44
Speaker 3: fits all models versus individual models versus like what was
9:49
Speaker 3: historically good and what is good now with all the
9:53
Speaker 3: changes and evolutions of our diets through the ages. What
9:59
Speaker 3: have you found to be like consistently evidence based good advice,
10:04
Speaker 3: like no nonsense advice in this field.
10:07
Speaker 5: I think some of the best nutrition guidance has come
10:10
Speaker 5: from somebody who never studied nutrition, and that was Michael Pollen.
10:16
Speaker 5: Eight plans not too much, right, and just the right amount.
10:21
Speaker 5: I mean when I listen, when I have looked at
10:23
Speaker 5: his books, his Wisdom, and his journalistic review of nutrition science,
10:29
Speaker 5: I can truly say that there's something.
10:31
Speaker 6: To that, because quite honestly, there are so.
10:34
Speaker 5: Many different scientific publications, and nutrition is a very difficult
10:39
Speaker 5: science because there are multiple factors. There are different toxicants
10:44
Speaker 5: in foods, there are different nutrient levels in the same
10:47
Speaker 5: food depending on where it's grown. The whole idea of
10:50
Speaker 5: food frequency, intakes and questionnaires is kind of flawed. I mean,
10:55
Speaker 5: most people don't even remember what they had for breakfast,
10:58
Speaker 5: and it's maybe just a lot unch time. Right, So
11:01
Speaker 5: the whole idea of nutrition science as a platform, I
11:06
Speaker 5: think has come under scrutiny, and perhaps rightly so. And
11:10
Speaker 5: I think that the more that we keep it to
11:12
Speaker 5: the basics. And I would say Michael Pollen has his
11:17
Speaker 5: different principles. My principles are four of them.
11:21
Speaker 6: I have them.
11:22
Speaker 5: They're basically nature's principles. So the first one is about color.
11:27
Speaker 5: So we need to eat the broad spectrum of colors
11:30
Speaker 5: and even variety within each color. So color is number one.
11:34
Speaker 5: Hence the rainbow diet and phytochemicals and making that kind
11:37
Speaker 5: of sticky for people because you know, just like you
11:40
Speaker 5: said with skittles, you know, you eat, you hear eat
11:43
Speaker 5: the rainbow, and it's kind of like, well, it's kind
11:45
Speaker 5: of childlike and it doesn't sound scientific, but actually, if
11:48
Speaker 5: you go a lot deeper, you could see that, Wow, no,
11:51
Speaker 5: there really is something to eating fruits and vegetables. And unfortunately,
11:56
Speaker 5: you know, there are some nuance which we can get
11:59
Speaker 5: into with the anti nutrients that sometimes people raise as
12:04
Speaker 5: part of that question. But all in all, if you
12:06
Speaker 5: look at the preponderance of scientific publications, hands down we
12:11
Speaker 5: would say that there's a lot of evidence to support
12:13
Speaker 5: eating fruits and vegetables.
12:15
Speaker 6: So color.
12:16
Speaker 5: The second one is creativity. I think creativity is important
12:19
Speaker 5: in the food and eating experience, and what I mean
12:22
Speaker 5: by that is creativity and how we assemble foods, prepare them,
12:26
Speaker 5: how we think about them, how we select them, how
12:29
Speaker 5: we combine them. I do think that food preparation is
12:34
Speaker 5: like a creative art, it's a culinary art, and I
12:38
Speaker 5: feel like we've lost that. It's become mundane, it's become frustrating,
12:42
Speaker 5: it's become a source of fear for some people. So
12:45
Speaker 5: how do we move back into creativity. The third one
12:48
Speaker 5: is diversity. Maybe we can drill into this one a bit,
12:51
Speaker 5: because the whole science of food variety and diversity, you know,
12:56
Speaker 5: I've done a whole ninety minute lecture just on that.
12:59
Speaker 6: And the fourth one is rhythm.
13:02
Speaker 5: When we eat is just as important in my view
13:08
Speaker 5: is what we are eating, and this is the whole
13:11
Speaker 5: science of chrono nutrition, looking at the overlay of time,
13:15
Speaker 5: the twenty four hour cycle onto our eating patterns, and
13:19
Speaker 5: even to know that eating itself when we eat is
13:23
Speaker 5: giving us a sense of punctuated time felt through our biology.
13:29
Speaker 5: So I don't think people realize that if they have
13:31
Speaker 5: a meal at eight am, that same meal will not
13:35
Speaker 5: be received by the body in the same way at
13:36
Speaker 5: ten pm. We're a different person at ten pm. We
13:40
Speaker 5: have different hormones coursing through our bloodstream at ten pm.
13:44
Speaker 5: So even though it's the same food, we can have
13:47
Speaker 5: a very healthy meal at the wrong time and actually
13:51
Speaker 5: have less beneficial effects.
13:54
Speaker 6: So I would say those.
13:55
Speaker 5: Are my four stakes in the ground color, creativity, diversity,
13:59
Speaker 5: and rhythm. I feel like the closer restrickt to just
14:03
Speaker 5: the basic premise around what we eat, when, with whom,
14:09
Speaker 5: how much you know within those four guidelines, I feel
14:13
Speaker 5: like it'll be a little bit less complicated.
14:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that, And what
14:22
Speaker 3: you shared reminded me of the Blue Zone diets as well,
14:25
Speaker 3: and like looking at the most amount of evidence that
14:28
Speaker 3: we have from cultures, not just studies, showing correlations between
14:33
Speaker 3: what they're eating, how they're eating, who they're eating with, right,
14:37
Speaker 3: all of these factors and how they play a role.
14:40
Speaker 3: And it also reminded me of ayr Veda because in
14:43
Speaker 3: ayr Veda, it's even more important, I would say, the time,
14:46
Speaker 3: the and rhythm of your eating than what you're actually eating,
14:50
Speaker 3: as well as how you cook your food or like
14:52
Speaker 3: how you prepare it, and like all of this is
14:55
Speaker 3: correlating to your principles and as well as what you're absorbing,
15:01
Speaker 3: like what your gut is actually how it interacts with
15:04
Speaker 3: the food, which I think is where the diversity principle
15:07
Speaker 3: comes in, and then how you're actually able to utilize
15:12
Speaker 3: that food for health and energy essentially, because one thing
15:16
Speaker 3: I think we can all agree on is that we
15:19
Speaker 3: need food. We all need to food like to eat
15:22
Speaker 3: to fuel ourselves, fuel our bodies. That's why we are
15:25
Speaker 3: talking and debating about this thing. But you know it's essential, right, Like,
15:29
Speaker 3: if you're a living being, you have to get a
15:32
Speaker 3: fuel source in our case food to fuel yourselves to
15:36
Speaker 3: convert into energy, to have hormones, communicate, and have all
15:41
Speaker 3: of our life processes essentially. And so as science advances,
15:47
Speaker 3: as medicine advances, we're looking for like the shortcuts.
15:50
Speaker 4: And the pills and the fads.
15:53
Speaker 3: And like the band aids and all of these solutions
15:56
Speaker 3: for essentially health problems diseases like that. But we can't
16:02
Speaker 3: ever forget and skip the foundational things that we need,
16:06
Speaker 3: and one of them is for sure diet. So I
16:08
Speaker 3: think it's so important that you mentioned those principles and
16:12
Speaker 3: are really looking for something that you can't refute, right, Like,
16:17
Speaker 3: you can't argue with that because it just makes sense.
16:19
Speaker 3: It's time tested, and it's biologically like resonant with our bodies,
16:27
Speaker 3: and like you said, with nature, because we are nature,
16:30
Speaker 3: we are part of nature, and we need to start
16:34
Speaker 3: to think about it in the way that nature thinks
16:38
Speaker 3: about it and not just like so extractive, like in
16:42
Speaker 3: my opinion as a pharmacist, only breaking things down into
16:46
Speaker 3: the phytochemicals into the sum total and like adding things
16:50
Speaker 3: back into food that it has lost through processing. To me,
16:53
Speaker 3: that's not the ideal way that we need to be
16:57
Speaker 3: consuming food. So what are your thoughts about like the
17:00
Speaker 3: modern inventions and what's helpful and what we can maybe
17:04
Speaker 3: dial back and go back to.
17:05
Speaker 4: The basics on Well.
17:07
Speaker 6: I really like first of all, your summary of all
17:10
Speaker 6: of that.
17:10
Speaker 5: That was really a beautiful way to integrate where we've been,
17:15
Speaker 5: where we're going, and where.
17:16
Speaker 6: We are now.
17:17
Speaker 5: And I really like how you mentioned ancient traditions like
17:20
Speaker 5: aiur veta. There's also traditional Chinese medicine, so these are
17:25
Speaker 5: kind of like the tried and true traditions of eating.
17:28
Speaker 5: So looking at the elemental principles of food and eating
17:32
Speaker 5: kind of like you know, introducing heat, introducing moisture, the
17:38
Speaker 5: amount of air that goes into something, right, Eating is
17:40
Speaker 5: a very elemental process. And so the closer we get
17:45
Speaker 5: to those principles of keeping food very whole, very basic,
17:49
Speaker 5: very whole sum, then I think it aligns. So where
17:54
Speaker 5: are we now, You know, here we are in twenty
17:56
Speaker 5: twenty six. A lot has happened to our food supply
17:59
Speaker 5: over the years, and I would say because of our
18:03
Speaker 5: rapid paced life and modernization, what we think is modernization.
18:09
Speaker 5: I think we've gone backwards a little bit with food,
18:12
Speaker 5: where we're trying to use human formulation, just like you mentioned,
18:17
Speaker 5: in order to replicate what's in nature, but that will
18:20
Speaker 5: always be imperfect. And I think that there's a resurgence
18:24
Speaker 5: into things like regenerative agriculture, really looking at the ancestral
18:30
Speaker 5: ways of eating, looking at ARABDA, TCM, a lot of
18:33
Speaker 5: these traditions.
18:34
Speaker 6: They're kind of coming back and in vogue now.
18:38
Speaker 5: But you know, it's kind of like these process foods
18:41
Speaker 5: were helping us along as a patch over these I
18:47
Speaker 5: would say, very busy lives that we've created for ourselves.
18:51
Speaker 6: They didn't just happen, We created them.
18:53
Speaker 5: And so the advent of electricity, which distorted our circadian
18:58
Speaker 5: rhythm and change our sleep, changed our eating times. So
19:03
Speaker 5: I think what has happened, and also just from my
19:06
Speaker 5: experience working in the food industry and supplements all of
19:09
Speaker 5: it is that you know, first and foremost, we can
19:12
Speaker 5: never out supplement a poor quality diet. I think that
19:18
Speaker 5: one of the things floating out there is that, Okay,
19:21
Speaker 5: I'm not eating perfectly, so I'm just going to take
19:23
Speaker 5: this multi vitamin mineral. I'm just going to take this
19:27
Speaker 5: fish oil and just hope I'm patching the gap. I
19:30
Speaker 5: think that it's so interesting to me because when I
19:33
Speaker 5: see clients, oftentimes their diet is not very nutrient dense,
19:38
Speaker 5: it's not very colorful, it's not very diverse. But yet
19:41
Speaker 5: they're taking a lot of supplements to try to overturn
19:46
Speaker 5: that because they know that, you know, what they're eating
19:48
Speaker 5: isn't great, it's not perfect. So I think that there's
19:51
Speaker 5: some wiggle room there, and I think that there's some
19:53
Speaker 5: allowance for doing that. But starting with food first, I
19:58
Speaker 5: think that food first is like a mantra through so
20:01
Speaker 5: many different professional disciplines, whether it's naturopathic medicine, functional medicine,
20:06
Speaker 5: in a grade of medicine, is like food first because
20:09
Speaker 5: the signals within food are abundant. We can never replicate
20:14
Speaker 5: that in a supplement. We could never just replicate that
20:17
Speaker 5: in any kind of process food formulation. It will always
20:21
Speaker 5: fall short. And I think that, you know, if I
20:25
Speaker 5: look at some of the work from people who have
20:26
Speaker 5: published in the scientific literature, like doctor David Jacobs, who
20:32
Speaker 5: I don't know if he's still there, but he was
20:33
Speaker 5: at the University of Minnesota. He published a paper and
20:37
Speaker 5: kind of a whole work along this theme of food synergy.
20:41
Speaker 5: And you know, when we look at food synergy, even
20:43
Speaker 5: though there can be a speckling of so many different
20:46
Speaker 5: actives within food, in some.
20:48
Speaker 6: Way it's all very purposeful and meaningful.
20:51
Speaker 5: And those small amounts were said to complement the activity
20:56
Speaker 5: of that food in the body, you know, case in point.
20:58
Speaker 5: I was just at the grocery store yesterday and I
21:01
Speaker 5: wanted a vitamin C supplement. I already have a lot
21:05
Speaker 5: of vitamin C in my diet, but I feel that
21:08
Speaker 5: there are times that I need more, maybe through travel
21:11
Speaker 5: or you know, just increased bouts of stress. So I
21:14
Speaker 5: was in the supplement's section of the store, and you know,
21:17
Speaker 5: the store person came up to me to ask if
21:19
Speaker 5: I needed some help. I told him I was looking
21:21
Speaker 5: for a vitamin C, and you know, he started to
21:24
Speaker 5: pick out certain ones, like a leposomal vitamin C. And
21:27
Speaker 5: you know, one of the things I know about vitamin
21:30
Speaker 5: C is that if we have it in concert with bioflavonoids,
21:35
Speaker 5: so with his speritin and routine like, how it actually
21:38
Speaker 5: occurs in nature in that wholeness, rather than piecing it
21:43
Speaker 5: apart and putting it into a matrix which is not
21:47
Speaker 5: seen in nature.
21:48
Speaker 6: You know, I think that there aren't a lot.
21:50
Speaker 5: Of studies doing those head to head comparisons, but there
21:53
Speaker 5: are some, and just intuitively, it makes good sense that
21:58
Speaker 5: nature works like a team. So, just to answer your
22:01
Speaker 5: question in a nutshell again, just you know, where are
22:03
Speaker 5: we now with our eating? I think that we have
22:06
Speaker 5: created a lot of shortcuts, which has created a lot
22:09
Speaker 5: of gaps, and I do think that people are trying
22:13
Speaker 5: to find their way back. I do feel like that
22:16
Speaker 5: is seen in earnest on social media where people are
22:20
Speaker 5: like so excited about their gardens or they're so excited
22:23
Speaker 5: about growing food or going to a farmer's market. Now
22:27
Speaker 5: people are doing all of this beautiful photography around their
22:31
Speaker 5: meals and really getting excited about it. So I don't
22:34
Speaker 5: want to ignore that there is something happening out there
22:38
Speaker 5: where people are starting to realize that food is more
22:42
Speaker 5: than just calories. It's more than just something we have
22:45
Speaker 5: to take in every day. It's more than fuel. So
22:49
Speaker 5: I'm hopeful that.
22:50
Speaker 6: We are turning a corner and moving beyond.
22:53
Speaker 5: Kind of like the ultra processed food movement of what
22:57
Speaker 5: it has been.
23:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate what you said about like what my
23:04
Speaker 3: herbal teachers call the entourage effect that it talk about
23:08
Speaker 3: with food synergy or like herbal synergy. So we hear
23:12
Speaker 3: a lot about this about cannabis, but it's really true
23:15
Speaker 3: of all plants. And again, when we're talking about eating food,
23:19
Speaker 3: mostly plants, it's going to have the same effect. It's
23:22
Speaker 3: going to have components phytochemicals and that will have synergistic effects.
23:29
Speaker 3: And when we ingest those things, they will start to
23:33
Speaker 3: interact with our body, and our body will recognize these
23:37
Speaker 3: phytochemicals and they will interact with our microbiome and then
23:41
Speaker 3: create even more beneficial compounds that will be absorbed and
23:45
Speaker 3: circulated into our system. So I feel like this is
23:49
Speaker 3: almost like magic, right, Like this whole talk about transformation
23:54
Speaker 3: and metabolism and we try to I feel like skip
23:59
Speaker 3: through some of that's and like I just want the
24:01
Speaker 3: compounds and let me just take the end product in
24:05
Speaker 3: you know, a controlled setting, and you know, give myself
24:09
Speaker 3: an IV bag or a supplement, whatever regimen that's going
24:14
Speaker 3: to fill in all the gaps. And you know, what
24:17
Speaker 3: I'm learning more and more is like you said, that's
24:19
Speaker 3: a losing game. Because your body's actually not used to
24:24
Speaker 3: recognizing all those things in perhaps those mediums. Even though
24:28
Speaker 3: we try our best to replicate it as a human,
24:32
Speaker 3: it's impossible to like keep up with the body wisdom
24:36
Speaker 3: and all of the evolutionary processes that have happened as
24:41
Speaker 3: a co evolution with these other organisms that we are ingesting.
24:45
Speaker 3: And so it's really beautiful when we take a step
24:47
Speaker 3: back and try to ask a different question, like how
24:51
Speaker 3: can we co create this synergy better rather than how
24:55
Speaker 3: can we manufacture and try to emulate this.
24:59
Speaker 5: Well, even using those terms co create versus manufacture, that
25:03
Speaker 5: has a completely different feel to it, right, And so
25:08
Speaker 5: I know that if I'm growing something in my garden,
25:11
Speaker 5: I have a different appreciation for when I'm actually eating
25:13
Speaker 5: that food than if I'm buying something at the store.
25:16
Speaker 5: Even you know that same carrot takes on a different
25:20
Speaker 5: feeling like, oh, you know, I nurtured you along, I
25:24
Speaker 5: gave you water, and now I'm taking this in. So
25:28
Speaker 5: I think it really boils down to and I know
25:30
Speaker 5: that this is a more physically focused, biochemical oriented group perhaps,
25:36
Speaker 5: but you know, food is so much to people, and
25:39
Speaker 5: I feel like that's the piece that doesn't get spoken about.
25:42
Speaker 5: You know, if we think of food as being physical
25:45
Speaker 5: for the body, it's information and functional medicine. We even
25:48
Speaker 5: talk about it being information for the genes, that it
25:51
Speaker 5: will signal to our genome and even our epigenome. How
25:56
Speaker 5: to translate those signals right, kind of prompt the genes.
26:03
Speaker 6: But it's more than that.
26:05
Speaker 5: I do think that food and eating is also emotional.
26:09
Speaker 5: In fact, a statistic from long ago suggested that over
26:12
Speaker 5: seventy five percent of overeating is actually due to emotional reasons.
26:17
Speaker 5: I don't know if that's exactly the case, but I
26:20
Speaker 5: think that a large majority is for sure that we
26:23
Speaker 5: have emotional ties to certain meals or foods. They make
26:28
Speaker 5: us perhaps physically and even from a neurotransmitter perspective. Well,
26:35
Speaker 5: if we take that approach, it could we could say like,
26:37
Speaker 5: oh wow, it's changing our neurotransmitters and hormones and creating
26:40
Speaker 5: a different feeling. We can also say that it's creating
26:43
Speaker 5: a feeling that is changing those things. I think it's bidirectional,
26:47
Speaker 5: it's mental. You know how we think about food sometimes.
26:52
Speaker 5: You know, back in the day when gluten free was
26:54
Speaker 5: like a big thing, I remember having clients where they
26:57
Speaker 5: would just freak out if they had some thing with
27:00
Speaker 5: gluten or if they were at a restaurant, but they
27:02
Speaker 5: didn't have Celiac disease, right, but there was all of
27:04
Speaker 5: this fear that they had been glutened.
27:08
Speaker 6: Not to say that that.
27:09
Speaker 5: Couldn't have led to immune issues, but you know, I
27:12
Speaker 5: think that we have created a lot of hyper cognitive
27:17
Speaker 5: responses to food that may or may not be beneficial. Like
27:20
Speaker 5: I'm just wondering how much of up regulating our sympathetic
27:24
Speaker 5: nervous system in those cases actually led to mal digestion.
27:28
Speaker 5: So right, like so many of these different traditional systems.
27:33
Speaker 5: See the seat of the gastro intestinal tract, so the stomach,
27:38
Speaker 5: the small intestine, the pancreas, the liver is kind of
27:41
Speaker 5: like also where we think and where we establish kind
27:46
Speaker 5: of our mental framework and how we digest life. So
27:50
Speaker 5: I think eating is also very mental. I think it's
27:52
Speaker 5: also very spiritual. In fact, I think that for people
27:57
Speaker 5: who would like their lives to have more purpose in
27:59
Speaker 5: me focusing in on their food and their meals.
28:04
Speaker 6: Just even the preparation of it is like a ritual.
28:07
Speaker 6: It's like it's.
28:08
Speaker 5: Bringing us closer to something that's more present and awakened.
28:13
Speaker 5: So I think it has many different levels, and that's
28:15
Speaker 5: really spanned the course of my teaching over the years,
28:18
Speaker 5: because as a nutrition scientist, I soon came to see that,
28:22
Speaker 5: oh wait a minute, food is a lot more than
28:25
Speaker 5: what we're seeing on the plate, even how we're registering
28:28
Speaker 5: it through our senses.
28:30
Speaker 4: You know.
28:30
Speaker 5: I talk about the art of food, the soul of food,
28:33
Speaker 5: and I'm so glad that so many different people are
28:35
Speaker 5: now really getting into that and really helping us to
28:39
Speaker 5: enjoy food, not just to have it be an analytical,
28:43
Speaker 5: caloric exercise in fueling the body. So I feel like
28:48
Speaker 5: we've come a long way. We are starting to look
28:51
Speaker 5: at food in a different way. And in fact, even
28:54
Speaker 5: in the I would say the highly regarded medical literature
28:58
Speaker 5: like the Landset or New Journal of Medicine, we're starting
29:01
Speaker 5: to see articles on food and the importance of diet.
29:06
Speaker 5: I think it was the New England Journal, or it
29:08
Speaker 5: could have been a Landset, but there was discussion about nutrition,
29:11
Speaker 5: dark matter and how there are I think the number
29:16
Speaker 5: was one hundred and thirty nine thousand different molecules in food,
29:20
Speaker 5: and if we're thinking about just all of the things
29:23
Speaker 5: that we haven't identified right. There are so many different
29:26
Speaker 5: things that go beyond just what we see if we're
29:30
Speaker 5: buying a food with a label, or just even thinking
29:33
Speaker 5: about the macros, micros, and fidos. There can also be
29:37
Speaker 5: what about the microorganisms.
29:39
Speaker 6: You know, an organic.
29:41
Speaker 5: Versus a conventionally grown apple that have very different microorganisms.
29:46
Speaker 5: So we're taking in a food's microbiome and feeding our
29:49
Speaker 5: microbiome like you were mentioning, right, So I think there
29:53
Speaker 5: are many levels to the conversation, and so just broadening
29:57
Speaker 5: it a little bit with people with clients with patients
30:00
Speaker 5: because I think it helps them to realize that every
30:05
Speaker 5: meal they have, every food that they bite into, actually
30:08
Speaker 5: is incredibly meaningful. It adds to their whole experience of life.
30:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, what you're talking about is so profound, and it
30:19
Speaker 3: can also be explained scientifically. All of the things that
30:23
Speaker 3: you are mentioning, and when we smell the food, when
30:27
Speaker 3: we look at the food before we eat it, and
30:30
Speaker 3: this is especially true if you're actually cooking the food, right,
30:34
Speaker 3: you can't help it but be around it and notice
30:37
Speaker 3: it and bring that awareness into your senses and also
30:41
Speaker 3: bring the intentionality behind serving the food and consuming the food.
30:47
Speaker 3: And so this helps with our digestion. This is like
30:50
Speaker 3: the number one stage of digestion, the cephalic phase. And
30:54
Speaker 3: often if we're like ordering out or eating on the go,
30:59
Speaker 3: or just eating a packaged meal or you know, processed food,
31:03
Speaker 3: we kind of skip that all together and then we
31:06
Speaker 3: just sometimes just mindlessly eat without even looking at the food,
31:09
Speaker 3: tasting the food, et cetera.
31:12
Speaker 4: So this is very important.
31:13
Speaker 3: And then the last phase I would add is the
31:16
Speaker 3: social phase that we were already mentioning, So sharing a
31:20
Speaker 3: meal with somebody and you know, enjoying it together, or
31:25
Speaker 3: having a special occasion that you're commemorating and you're around
31:29
Speaker 3: friends and family and you're sharing a specific type of food.
31:32
Speaker 4: And I feel like.
31:34
Speaker 3: That's the original intention of food as well, to kind
31:38
Speaker 3: of unite people and bring them together.
31:40
Speaker 4: And now we're.
31:42
Speaker 3: Sort of like hyper focused, like you said, and individualized
31:45
Speaker 3: it and like are looking at the you know, benefit
31:49
Speaker 3: ratio of like consuming this food and calculating all of
31:53
Speaker 3: this and things like that. So I'd love it if
31:56
Speaker 3: you could speak a little bit more about like some
31:58
Speaker 3: of this food phobia that's coming up, because we're almost
32:01
Speaker 3: like porthorexic some of us and like really paying attention
32:04
Speaker 3: to the science and trying to do the right thing.
32:08
Speaker 3: And then also this talk about anti nutrients or you know,
32:11
Speaker 3: like this diet is good, this diet is bad, So
32:14
Speaker 3: talk about like how we can approach that in a
32:17
Speaker 3: way that's very helpful and you know, just makes it
32:22
Speaker 3: more safe to experiment with food.
32:25
Speaker 6: I think it's like a teeter totter.
32:26
Speaker 5: It's almost like we need to have some awareness and
32:31
Speaker 5: we don't want to tip that teeter totter over into stress.
32:35
Speaker 5: So one of the cases of where we could see
32:38
Speaker 5: this happening is when we're traveling. And I have been
32:41
Speaker 5: guilty of this as well. Where I'm traveling and I'm thinking, Okay, are.
32:45
Speaker 6: They going to have food? Good food?
32:47
Speaker 5: Where I'm going, I better get to the grocery store,
32:51
Speaker 5: And maybe initially it kind of stressed me out, but
32:53
Speaker 5: now I kind of have a rhythm where it's like, Okay,
32:55
Speaker 5: I know that I leave a little bit earlier, and
32:59
Speaker 5: I go to the grocery store or make sure I
33:00
Speaker 5: have a refrigerator in my room if I choose to
33:04
Speaker 5: have some items that I'm going to buy at the store.
33:07
Speaker 5: So I think that there's a happy medium there. But
33:10
Speaker 5: when I have people. Sometimes I will post my meals
33:15
Speaker 5: online and it's so interesting to hear some of the
33:18
Speaker 5: comments of what people will say about that. I remember
33:21
Speaker 5: I had on one of my plates a piece of
33:23
Speaker 5: sour dough bread and how somebody was shaming that, saying
33:28
Speaker 5: I should never show that because it still has gluten,
33:32
Speaker 5: and that, you know, I should never be showing anything
33:35
Speaker 5: with gluten. Well, whenever I'm showing my own foods, I'm
33:38
Speaker 5: typically talking about, you know, this is my personalized you know, choice,
33:42
Speaker 5: and this is not indicating what you should eat.
33:46
Speaker 6: It's just simply what I'm eating, you know.
33:49
Speaker 5: And usually I'm showing the principles of color, creativity, how
33:52
Speaker 5: I brought things together. And I think sometimes what can
33:56
Speaker 5: happen is, you know, people start to aim for perfection,
33:59
Speaker 5: which leads them to not eat, which again kind of
34:04
Speaker 5: keeping that balance.
34:05
Speaker 6: So let me give you another example of that.
34:08
Speaker 5: So let's just say back to travel, because that's where
34:12
Speaker 5: people would be out.
34:13
Speaker 6: Of their home rhythm.
34:14
Speaker 5: There might be more packaged foods, there might be more
34:17
Speaker 5: foods with plastics. We are learning much more about microplastics, nanoplastics.
34:22
Speaker 5: It's not that that isn't important, because it really is.
34:26
Speaker 5: And I think awareness is good. Let me just give
34:29
Speaker 5: you a quick example. I was with somebody, we were
34:31
Speaker 5: traveling together, and she had a cup like a you know,
34:36
Speaker 5: just a take out cup with hot coffee in it,
34:39
Speaker 5: with a lid. And she was saying, how, oh, you know,
34:42
Speaker 5: now she's very concerned that she has this, but you know,
34:45
Speaker 5: she really wanted the coffee. I said, well, why don't
34:48
Speaker 5: you just you know, meet in the middle and just
34:49
Speaker 5: take off the lid, just don't drink through the lid
34:52
Speaker 5: because the lid is plastic, and so then you'll feel
34:55
Speaker 5: better about that, you'll minimize some of it. Right, So,
34:59
Speaker 5: I think, you know, just knowing certain principles, not getting
35:05
Speaker 5: too attached. I think that the stress sets in when
35:08
Speaker 5: we become more obsessive and perfectionistic. And I do think
35:12
Speaker 5: that that can bring us over into the orthorexic side,
35:17
Speaker 5: this obsession with healthy eating healthy food to the point
35:21
Speaker 5: of paralysis and the lack of joy, vitality, and zest
35:25
Speaker 5: that we would have in life through eating. Right, So yeah,
35:31
Speaker 5: I think, And so how do you know if you
35:33
Speaker 5: have it in balance or not, Well, look at your
35:35
Speaker 5: emotional response. If you've got like some level of stress,
35:40
Speaker 5: just even one bout of psychological stress can start to
35:43
Speaker 5: alter the dynamics and the gut pretty profoundly.
35:47
Speaker 3: Right.
35:47
Speaker 6: We hear so much about leaky gut.
35:50
Speaker 5: So I would say that if you're going to have something,
35:53
Speaker 5: have it fully. I remember I used to work with
35:55
Speaker 5: a medical doctor, doctor Jack Hornberg, and we would talk
35:59
Speaker 5: with PA about taking in certain foods, like if you
36:02
Speaker 5: really wanted chocolate, choose the best chocolate possible. Don't hide
36:07
Speaker 5: when you're eating it, you know, really create a celebration
36:11
Speaker 5: around the chocolate and respect it, love it, honor it,
36:15
Speaker 5: you know. I think that there's so much shame when
36:18
Speaker 5: people are eating foods that they think aren't so good
36:21
Speaker 5: for them. So I think, if you're going to have it,
36:23
Speaker 5: don't create the stress response. That just amplifies any kind
36:27
Speaker 5: of untoward effect potentially. So I think that on kind
36:32
Speaker 5: of like the food phobia side, And again that's not
36:34
Speaker 5: easy to do.
36:34
Speaker 6: It's kind of like you have to weigh it.
36:38
Speaker 5: But those are some of my ideas there is, you know,
36:42
Speaker 5: look at your emotions around those foods. The other thing
36:45
Speaker 5: about emotions and foods, and I'm just going to toss
36:48
Speaker 5: this in before we start talking about anti nutrients is
36:51
Speaker 5: that there has been some older scientific work, some publications
36:57
Speaker 5: even back to the nineteen eighties where they show that
37:00
Speaker 5: a person's psychological state can change how they taste. So
37:07
Speaker 5: the chemosensory properties. You know, we're hearing a lot now
37:10
Speaker 5: about GLP one agonists, bitter taste receptors, tasting or receiving
37:16
Speaker 5: bitter in the body, or tasting sweet, tasting salty, tasting fat,
37:23
Speaker 5: even you know, fat is part of that kind of
37:25
Speaker 5: complex of different things. So think about taste and if
37:29
Speaker 5: psychological stress changes how we perceive the taste of a food,
37:34
Speaker 5: and many times it's not in the direction we'd wanted
37:37
Speaker 5: to go. So there was a study in which there
37:40
Speaker 5: was a sport event and they were tracking the tasting
37:45
Speaker 5: of food after.
37:47
Speaker 6: The team would loser or win.
37:50
Speaker 5: And what they found was that when the team would
37:53
Speaker 5: lose and the person wanted them to win but they lost,
37:57
Speaker 5: the food tasted more sour and it tasted less sweet.
38:01
Speaker 5: So you can only imagine in that case you might
38:04
Speaker 5: actually end up eating more of a food because it
38:09
Speaker 5: doesn't satisfy the sensory quotient of your tongue and the
38:14
Speaker 5: expectation of that food, and that could be brought on
38:18
Speaker 5: by an emotional state. So that's why keeping our you know,
38:22
Speaker 5: being in that presence, that state of mind of like
38:26
Speaker 5: really knowing that everything that you're feeling, thinking, doing is
38:31
Speaker 5: also being absorbed at that time of the meal and
38:34
Speaker 5: is changing the dynamics of that food. So I'll just
38:37
Speaker 5: say that about the food phobia, and you know not
38:40
Speaker 5: to sometimes.
38:42
Speaker 6: You know, when I was.
38:43
Speaker 5: In grad school, I noticed that many people did have
38:47
Speaker 5: food phobias. That's what's got them to grad school to
38:49
Speaker 5: study nutrition, including myself.
38:52
Speaker 6: You know, I had a history of.
38:54
Speaker 5: Disordered eating, mostly because I grew up with a lot
38:57
Speaker 5: of restriction around the foods that I could eat. So
39:01
Speaker 5: when I tell my story in an audience, especially to
39:04
Speaker 5: help professionals or even to mothers, they start to get
39:08
Speaker 5: very concerned about their communication about food and eating and
39:12
Speaker 5: what they've been saying to their kids or to their patients,
39:15
Speaker 5: and like, oh, is this too restrictive? Perhaps I need
39:18
Speaker 5: to say it in a different way. So I give
39:21
Speaker 5: you a long winded answer to your first question. But yeah,
39:26
Speaker 5: any thoughts before we talk about anti nutrients.
39:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, actually a lot of thoughts.
39:32
Speaker 3: Like the key thing that we've kind of been mentioning
39:35
Speaker 3: is the shame, it's like, yeah, it goes both ways,
39:39
Speaker 3: just like the awareness. Like awareness could be good because
39:42
Speaker 3: then when you know better, you can do better, but
39:44
Speaker 3: also ignorance is bliss. So you kind of have to
39:47
Speaker 3: find like which awareness is good to have, and then
39:50
Speaker 3: how can you choose to control situation when that's possible,
39:54
Speaker 3: when that's an option.
39:55
Speaker 4: And then the second thing.
39:56
Speaker 3: About shame is you can almost be shamed both ways too, right,
40:00
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, you're too proper about your food, or
40:03
Speaker 3: like you don't fit in with the rest of like
40:06
Speaker 3: let's say the social situation, like everybody can have gluten,
40:10
Speaker 3: but you are gluten sensitive, you know, and that makes
40:13
Speaker 3: you feel different, and so there could be like a
40:16
Speaker 3: feeling of shame of I'm different and you know, I'm
40:19
Speaker 3: not fitting in, or there could be like you are
40:23
Speaker 3: too restrictive or you're not restrictive enough.
40:26
Speaker 4: And so there's all of this debate.
40:27
Speaker 3: And on social media too, like you were mentioning, people
40:30
Speaker 3: can judge each other's pictures and ideologies and what have you.
40:35
Speaker 3: And it's like, how do we start to navigate all
40:38
Speaker 3: of that advocate for ourselves and yet you know, have
40:41
Speaker 3: the grace to choose what we need to do and
40:46
Speaker 3: you know, not feel like we have to prove anything.
40:48
Speaker 5: Perhaps, yes, very well stated, and I think too again
40:53
Speaker 5: focusing on a personalized approach, because we are long past
40:57
Speaker 5: the day of general guideline, public health guidance. I think
41:02
Speaker 5: that there can be certain things that we can be
41:04
Speaker 5: thinking about as a collective, but then really the nuance
41:08
Speaker 5: enters in and that becomes personalization. And that's where nutrition
41:12
Speaker 5: is today. So looking at things like genetics, looking at environment,
41:17
Speaker 5: looking at what a lot of the pharmacists already know about,
41:19
Speaker 5: which would be things like cytochrome enzymes, detoxification related enzymes,
41:26
Speaker 5: how we actually digest those foods that our chronotype I
41:31
Speaker 5: mean goodness. I mean there is a list long of
41:34
Speaker 5: all of the many factors that could determine one's personalized.
41:39
Speaker 6: Approach to food. And you know what, that's always changing too.
41:43
Speaker 5: It changes based on age, it changes based on location.
41:48
Speaker 6: So it's a moving target.
41:49
Speaker 5: And I think that with food and eating, people want safety, stability,
41:54
Speaker 5: They see it sometimes as more in the way of survival.
41:59
Speaker 5: So when you know, we kind of have this static,
42:02
Speaker 5: structured approach to food, it doesn't allow for the expansion
42:07
Speaker 5: of looking at all of those personalized elements that really
42:10
Speaker 5: do need to play in and flow so that we
42:13
Speaker 5: don't become too stuck and get in our own way.
42:19
Speaker 4: Yeah.
42:19
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean it's like with anything else in life,
42:22
Speaker 3: there has to be that middle ground and the ability
42:26
Speaker 3: to be flexible and even like the scientific method, right,
42:30
Speaker 3: it's like admitting when maybe we got it wrong and
42:33
Speaker 3: we need to rework the hypothesis and we need to
42:36
Speaker 3: try again, and there's this new variable that we are
42:39
Speaker 3: now looking at, and there's so many confounding factors. So
42:44
Speaker 3: I think it's good to have principles but also be flexible,
42:47
Speaker 3: like you said.
42:48
Speaker 6: Yeah, and science is just a tool. Science is a
42:52
Speaker 6: method to try.
42:53
Speaker 5: To understand, like the great big expanse of something, but
42:57
Speaker 5: it's very imperfect. And also through the guise of the
43:01
Speaker 5: person who's doing the research and asking the questions and
43:05
Speaker 5: looking at the data, you can have two people do
43:09
Speaker 5: the same study and potentially have you know, some degree
43:14
Speaker 5: of change in how they would see those outcomes, or
43:17
Speaker 5: at least some different interpretation perhaps. So yeah, I think
43:20
Speaker 5: we just have to look at science for what it
43:22
Speaker 5: is and to know that personalized nutrition and even lifestyle,
43:28
Speaker 5: so personalized sleep, personalized activity and exercise habits. All of
43:32
Speaker 5: that is really relevant and it's where we're going long term.
43:36
Speaker 5: I think that with all of the apps, technology, different devices,
43:40
Speaker 5: that we have to better inform us at the point
43:42
Speaker 5: in time that everything is happening, the better off we
43:47
Speaker 5: are becoming. And I think that with food, you know,
43:50
Speaker 5: I have long envisioned that we get to know a
43:53
Speaker 5: little bit more about our food and how we select food.
43:56
Speaker 6: In the moment.
43:57
Speaker 5: I know that this is kind of like an offshoot
43:59
Speaker 5: in an emerging time topic, but I posted something on
44:02
Speaker 5: my Facebook page about different colors.
44:06
Speaker 6: Of light in a grocery store.
44:08
Speaker 5: Now, imagine in the future we go into a market
44:13
Speaker 5: and when we're walking through the produce section, there might
44:15
Speaker 5: be purple light on the bananas, there might be green
44:18
Speaker 5: light on the kale, in the broccoli. There might be
44:22
Speaker 5: red light over on the tomatoes or on the watermelon
44:25
Speaker 5: or some other foods.
44:26
Speaker 6: I'm making those up because what we're already starting.
44:29
Speaker 5: To see is that light exposure of living foods to
44:35
Speaker 5: different wavelengths of light can actually change their phytochemical content distribution.
44:41
Speaker 5: And so that's kind of interesting, right, Like, just think
44:45
Speaker 5: of how long it takes after a food is picked
44:48
Speaker 5: and then has to travel to its final destination to
44:52
Speaker 5: then land up in your kitchen, and by that time,
44:55
Speaker 5: you know, it's just gone down in terms of its
44:59
Speaker 5: nutritional quality. Right, we could see that by the change
45:01
Speaker 5: in color or the texture. But I think in the
45:04
Speaker 5: future we're going to have more enhanced methods of nutritional
45:08
Speaker 5: delivery that would involve the whole food, not changing the
45:12
Speaker 5: formulation of the food. And then I can also see
45:15
Speaker 5: I mean, this is truly my love of science and
45:17
Speaker 5: technology as well. I don't want to dismiss it or
45:20
Speaker 5: embracing the wholeness of ancient traditions. I feel like there
45:23
Speaker 5: is a beautiful fusion that we're also seeing happening.
45:27
Speaker 6: But what would happen if you could.
45:30
Speaker 5: Assess your own status from a variety of different systems,
45:34
Speaker 5: maybe using your smartphone where you just use your finger
45:38
Speaker 5: and you're getting a number, a numeric on your body systems,
45:42
Speaker 5: and then you're going in the store, you're kind of like,
45:45
Speaker 5: you know, scanning foods in terms of like how those
45:48
Speaker 5: foods would best fit you in some way, like through
45:51
Speaker 5: their antioxidant level or through maybe you need more beta
45:56
Speaker 5: cryptosantheon because you're having some ovarian issue use. You know,
46:01
Speaker 5: obviously I'm kind of like getting sci fi here, but
46:04
Speaker 5: I do think that there's a sweet.
46:05
Speaker 6: Spot ultimately of meeting tradition and.
46:11
Speaker 5: Where we're going with science because we're not letting up
46:14
Speaker 5: off technology. Technology is only going to continue to emerge
46:21
Speaker 5: and grow and be adopted.
46:23
Speaker 6: By different disciplines.
46:25
Speaker 5: So it's almost like, you know, how do we retain
46:27
Speaker 5: the wholeness of the food and eating experience while also
46:32
Speaker 5: optimizing based on the shortfalls in our environment and what
46:36
Speaker 5: we're up against on the planet.
46:38
Speaker 6: So I'm just tossing that out there.
46:40
Speaker 5: That's like a totally different point, but it just might
46:44
Speaker 5: be something for us all to collectively noodle on.
46:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, So technology and then the intuition, right,
46:52
Speaker 3: and like how do we use both of those tools
46:55
Speaker 3: because they are both tools, like you were saying, and
46:57
Speaker 3: science as a tool and a supplement can be a tool.
47:01
Speaker 3: And so I would love your opinion or recommendation for
47:07
Speaker 3: somebody that maybe does have either like palatability issues, tolerance issues,
47:15
Speaker 3: digestive issues, or leaky guts and they're looking maybe for
47:20
Speaker 3: supportive foods, but again they might be fearful of like
47:23
Speaker 3: anti nutrients that we were mentioning or other kind of
47:27
Speaker 3: contraindications or like maybe getting digestive upposite when they eat
47:31
Speaker 3: those foods, Like, how can they start to.
47:35
Speaker 4: Maybe help their body help itself.
47:40
Speaker 5: Sure, yeah, let's talk about anti nutrients because it definitely
47:42
Speaker 5: fits into the conversation about plants and color.
47:46
Speaker 6: So one of the.
47:46
Speaker 5: Pushbacks I get because I've written this book called The
47:50
Speaker 5: Rainbow Diet, where I'm talking about the color code of
47:52
Speaker 5: different plants, people many times think that that means, oh,
47:56
Speaker 5: she's a vegan or vegetarian. That's not the case, you know,
47:59
Speaker 5: in terms of like putting a dietary label on eating
48:02
Speaker 5: plant foods.
48:03
Speaker 6: Just eating more plants.
48:04
Speaker 5: Is good for people overall, but there's a certain way
48:08
Speaker 5: to do that. And for some people when they take
48:11
Speaker 5: in plants, depending on their preparation of those plant foods,
48:14
Speaker 5: they could have just exactly what you said, digestive upset.
48:18
Speaker 5: They might get bloated, they might get constipated. And in fact,
48:22
Speaker 5: these anti nutrients, as they are called in the literature,
48:26
Speaker 5: they're actually naturally occurring compounds in plant foods, especially in
48:30
Speaker 5: plant foods, but sometimes the way that they are configured
48:34
Speaker 5: in the food, they can result in the reduction of
48:40
Speaker 5: the absorption of certain nutrients, especially like I'm thinking about
48:44
Speaker 5: minerals like tannins in tea competing with iron absorption in
48:50
Speaker 5: the body. Like that, some of these tannins are big,
48:53
Speaker 5: bulky polyphenols. So if you have tea on the heels
48:57
Speaker 5: of an iron rich meal, you can prevent some of
49:01
Speaker 5: the absorption of that iron. Now that might actually be
49:04
Speaker 5: a good thing for some people, it may not be
49:07
Speaker 5: so good for others. So that's where personalization also comes
49:12
Speaker 5: in and being knowledgeable about these things. So back in
49:16
Speaker 5: twenty nineteen, a graduate student that was in one of
49:20
Speaker 5: my classes, his name is Westin Petrowski. He and I
49:23
Speaker 5: wrote a whole review article on anti nutrients. So basically
49:28
Speaker 5: we're thinking about things.
49:29
Speaker 6: Like fytates, oxalates.
49:32
Speaker 5: I mentioned the tannins, leuctins, goutrogens, a lot of these
49:35
Speaker 5: different compounds, and we tend to find them in foods
49:38
Speaker 5: like legumes, cruciferous vegetables, beat greens. You know, these are
49:43
Speaker 5: some of the things that we actually want to be eating.
49:46
Speaker 5: But if we eat them raw, many times they would
49:50
Speaker 5: have these different phytochemicals where they served as protection for
49:55
Speaker 5: that plant in their environment. But when we take them
49:59
Speaker 5: in the body, they could lead to changes in mineral absorption.
50:03
Speaker 6: They can compete with minerals and or vitamins. So sometimes
50:09
Speaker 6: again it's.
50:10
Speaker 5: About how we prepare the food. So in this case
50:13
Speaker 5: where people would have digestive upset or issues based on
50:18
Speaker 5: certain foods, one of the best things to do is
50:20
Speaker 5: to cook the food and to cook it well. And
50:23
Speaker 5: this is also seen in iurveta in traditional Chinese medicine. Right,
50:28
Speaker 5: So if we're using steaming, soaking, sprouting and overall just
50:37
Speaker 5: you know, not getting to the point of grilling, broiling
50:40
Speaker 5: and baking like dry hot heat methods, it's actually better
50:44
Speaker 5: to do this.
50:44
Speaker 6: Steaming use moist.
50:46
Speaker 5: Methods of cooking seems to inactivate some of these different
50:52
Speaker 5: what is being referred to as anti nutrients. Sometimes we
50:56
Speaker 5: respond to these things because we don't have a gut
50:59
Speaker 5: microbond I own that has certain microorganisms to break these
51:03
Speaker 5: things down. So like oxalates as an example, we may
51:08
Speaker 5: be missing certain microorganisms that would break down the oxalic acid.
51:13
Speaker 5: So now we're more susceptible to kidney stone risk if
51:17
Speaker 5: we don't have that microorganism, especially if our kidneys are
51:21
Speaker 5: not filtering.
51:22
Speaker 6: Certain minerals or certain agents in the best way.
51:27
Speaker 5: So I think the short story here, just I know
51:33
Speaker 5: we're coming up to the end of the hour and
51:35
Speaker 5: coming to a close is definitely to try out the
51:39
Speaker 5: different foods. See how you do. I know that for
51:42
Speaker 5: some people when I would work with them at the clinic,
51:44
Speaker 5: we would have to kind of like bring in foods
51:48
Speaker 5: just one at a time to see how they responded
51:50
Speaker 5: to them. And sometimes they responded differently when that food
51:55
Speaker 5: was in a different preparation and cooked in a different way.
51:59
Speaker 5: But times, slow, low moist methods of heat applied to
52:04
Speaker 5: plant foods can help to offset a lot of any
52:08
Speaker 5: kind of interference in the gut. But again, we have
52:12
Speaker 5: to try that out for ourselves. There's no like one
52:14
Speaker 5: size fits all here. In fact, you know, again, during
52:17
Speaker 5: times of stress, we might actually respond to a food
52:20
Speaker 5: differently than when we are in a place of health
52:23
Speaker 5: and vitality.
52:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
52:26
Speaker 3: And I believe fermentation is another method that we can consider.
52:30
Speaker 3: And yeah, somebody tolerates it, there's also a threshold of
52:34
Speaker 3: somebody tolerating it or not, But it could also be
52:36
Speaker 3: a viable method of helping the digestion. So if you
52:41
Speaker 3: have just one more minute. I would love to do
52:43
Speaker 3: a rapid fire around with you. Let's do it, okay, perfect?
52:47
Speaker 3: So what's the number one thing somebody can do right
52:50
Speaker 3: now to improve their quality of life?
52:53
Speaker 6: Eat more colors?
52:54
Speaker 5: Eat more colors of whole foods.
52:58
Speaker 6: Awesome?
52:58
Speaker 4: Awesome.
53:00
Speaker 3: What would be like the ideal meal that you could
53:04
Speaker 3: recommend for somebody, assuming they can digest everything?
53:08
Speaker 5: It would be some kind of stew or soup with
53:12
Speaker 5: a lot of different sea plants, vegetables, maybe bone broth,
53:17
Speaker 5: so something very nourishing, something that has a good complement
53:20
Speaker 5: of protein and also healthy fast but in that matrix.
53:25
Speaker 5: I really like the idea of those things coming together
53:28
Speaker 5: and being much more bioavailable and absorbable and also very nourishing.
53:32
Speaker 5: You know, having that warm bowl of a stew or
53:34
Speaker 5: a soup. It just feels good just even talking about it.
53:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's definitely the ancient technology right there, of the
53:42
Speaker 3: cooking and the savory and the nourishing and the warming.
53:45
Speaker 6: I love that.
53:46
Speaker 4: And of course ideally it'll be local and organically.
53:50
Speaker 6: There you go, Yeah, all that?
53:53
Speaker 5: You bet?
53:54
Speaker 4: Awesome? All right?
53:55
Speaker 3: What's like a fun fact about yourself or something that
53:58
Speaker 3: brings you joy?
54:00
Speaker 6: I like to make art. I like to paint.
54:03
Speaker 5: I'm really drawn to color, and I love color as
54:06
Speaker 5: a form of just even energy, like connecting to a
54:11
Speaker 5: person's energy.
54:13
Speaker 4: Wow, well that makes sense for you.
54:15
Speaker 3: You're all about the colors and your food, and I'm
54:17
Speaker 3: sure in your art as well. So everybody please head
54:21
Speaker 3: on over to Diana's website where you can download all
54:26
Speaker 3: the charts and maybe there's some art there too.
54:28
Speaker 4: I don't know. I have to check it out. Sign
54:30
Speaker 4: up to her newsletters. They're really great.
54:33
Speaker 3: We'll have everything in the show notes. Is there anything
54:35
Speaker 3: else you want to add, Diana.
54:38
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean you said it well. I mean my
54:39
Speaker 6: website is.
54:40
Speaker 5: Diannaminnick dot com and if you go there, I have
54:42
Speaker 5: a bunch of teaching tools just like you alluded to.
54:45
Speaker 5: So it's under resources and people can just grab that stuff,
54:48
Speaker 5: like and eat the Rainbow toolkit or even have a
54:50
Speaker 5: handout on anti nutrients. So yeah, check it out and
54:55
Speaker 5: email me through the site if you have questions.
54:58
Speaker 6: But I just want to thank you for this conversation.
55:00
Speaker 5: It's so inspiring into the fundamentals of food once again,
55:05
Speaker 5: right many times I'm talking about like very specific things.
55:09
Speaker 5: This just feels so nourishing, like a good meal.
55:13
Speaker 3: So thank you, Marina, thank you so much for your
55:17
Speaker 3: work and your wisdom, and I'll have everything in the
55:19
Speaker 3: show notes.
55:19
Speaker 4: Thanks again for being here.
55:21
Speaker 2: Thank you, Hi, thank you for tuning in to another
55:24
Speaker 2: episode of the Holistic Pharmacy Podcast, and I truly hope
55:29
Speaker 2: you enjoyed the show. If you learn something useful in
55:32
Speaker 2: this episode, please consider giving the show a five star
55:35
Speaker 2: rating and a sincere review so that more people can
55:38
Speaker 2: find it or share it with a friend directly. To
55:41
Speaker 2: get in touch with me, you can find me on
55:43
Speaker 2: social media by looking up my name Marina books Of,
55:47
Speaker 2: or email me at Marina at rawfork dot com.
55:52
Speaker 4: Take good care and see you soon.