– Welcome to “The Dr. Gundry Podcast” where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
– These days, a visit to the doctor often results in a prescription. And while I do prescribe medication when absolutely necessary, there’s a whole world of ancient natural medicine that can revolutionize your health. In this episode, I’ll explore some of the top natural plant-based remedies, from the astounding health benefits of a popular spice, to the energy-boosting effects of ashwagandha and the heart-healthy properties of hawthorn berry, you’ll discover natural ways to enhance your overall wellness. Stay tuned, we’ll be right back to dive into ancient natural plant-based medicine. Insane benefits of turmeric. Now, if you’ve ever had a curry dish at an Indian restaurant, you probably consumed turmeric. It’s the classic spice that gives curry it’s yellowish orange color. And it’s been around for thousands of years. Not only does turmeric taste great, but it’s also a nutritional powerhouse. Scientists still uncover benefit of turmeric every year, and it’s pretty impressive considering how long it’s been around. It’s a relative of ginger, and turmeric has been used in both Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine for centuries. For those of you who don’t know, Ayurvedic medicine is one of the world’s oldest holistic medical systems that originated in India. Now, turmeric’s main ingredient is curcumin. Now, the benefits of curcumin, it’s a potent polyphenol, and you’ve heard me talk time and time again about the benefits of polyphenols, but we’re uncovering more about how polyphenols work, and in particular, the polyphenol that curcumin is. First of all, you could take a big hunk of turmeric that you bought at the grocery store and throw it in your smoothie, and quite frankly, it’s not gonna do much of anything for you because, like most polyphenols, turmeric is horribly absorbed from our gastrointestinal tract. So please don’t waste your money on turmeric root unless you’re just looking for the flavor that turmeric root imparts. That’s okay. But turmeric by itself, curcumin by itself isn’t gonna give you the benefits you want from that polyphenol unless you take certain additional steps. Now, once you make the polyphenol curcumin available by having your gut bacteria work on it, or by taking a compound that’s present in black pepper called BioPerine it’s much more readily absorbed. Now, it’s an amazing neuro regenerative compound. In fact, a study done in Singapore a few years ago showed that people who ate curry once per week had a 90% reduction in dementia compared to people who didn’t eat curry. So turmeric’s in curry, but guess what another ingredient in curry is? If you guessed black pepper, you are right. So how did the ancients know that they had to combine these ingredients? They knew. How did Hippocrates know 2,500 years ago that all disease begins in the gut? He knew. It’s taken us 2,500 years to catch up with them. But it’s fascinating to me that black pepper and turmeric are two of the main components in curry. And curry is great for your brain. Turmeric probably inhibits lipid peroxidation. And if you listen to me talk about cholesterol in general, cholesterol is not bad for you. Cholesterol is not interested in clogging up your blood vessels, in sticking to your blood vessels unless it’s oxidized, unless it’s rusty or rancid. And if it’s rusty or rancid, then it has the potential to stick to your blood vessels. And turmeric, curcumin is one of those polyphenols that limits peroxidation of cholesterol. There’s some interesting studies about joint pain being lessened by turmeric. And, as I mentioned, preventing neurodegeneration is a wonderful thing. Also, curcumin has some very interesting anti-cancer properties. This has been studied actually extensively at the University of South Florida in Tampa, at Tampa General Hospital in people undergoing resection for pancreatic cancer. Some groups were given large-dose turmeric before the operation, other groups were given a placebo. Placebo, the turmeric group had reduced amount of cancer at the time of resection. Turmeric actually inhibits cancer growth in multiple studies. So have your turmeric, have your curry. Now, a word of warning, particularly to my female listeners, several of my female patients notice bowel issues, changes in their bowels following turmeric consumption. So if you notice adding turmeric in the form of a capsule or in powders is changing your bowels, first of all, give it a little while. Turmeric actually changes the microbiome, and those changes sometimes appear as changes in bowel movements. But if you are still bothered by it, it’s not essential for your health. Now, there’s a very interesting study, speaking of women, of looking at the effect of curcumin on BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, with women with PMS. So the participants were randomly assigned to a placebo or the curcumin groups. Each group received two capsules daily for seven days before menstruation and for three days after menstruation for three successive menstrual cycles. The curcumin group, the first, second, and third cycles after the interventions, BDNF went up significantly compared to the placebo group. And the mean scores of PMS symptoms were significantly less in the curcumin group than the placebo group. So if you’ve got PMS, if you wanna help your brain during that premenstrual period where you notice a difference in your brain function, give curcumin a try, and it’s powerful stuff. Now, the good news is it’s readily available and easy to incorporate into any diet. So you’ll find it in powder form, you’ll find it in capsule form, you’ll find it in fluid extracts. But word to the wise, unless proven otherwise, make sure that you see a bioavailability profile of the capsule you’re gonna buy. Or at the very least, look at BioPerine as one of the ingredients in the label. There are other ways to absorb curcumin using nanoencapsulation that I like a lot. But in general, look for the word BioPerine or look for an actual curve of bioavailability of the supplement you’re gonna buy. The last thing is you can add turmeric to any dish, make it much more interesting in flavor. It adds a wonderful color. You can put it into a stir fry. You can put it in a coconut milk turmeric latte. But do me a favor, sprinkle in a little black pepper wherever you put it, and you’ll boost the uptake of curcumin. Supplements have become quite popular, and it seems like every day I see people taking new ones. So today I’m gonna talk about one that’s recently become quite trendy, and I take it myself. It’s got some incredible health benefits. I’m talking about ashwagandha. Now, there’s nothing new about ashwagandha. It’s an ancient medicinal herb that’s been around for centuries. It’s actually an evergreen shrub that can be found in Africa, India, and the Middle East. Now, it has multiple benefits that have actually been well documented in animal and human trials. First of all, it’s associated with stress reduction and improved mental wellbeing. It’s been known for its adaptogenic properties, which means it helps the body adapt to stress and promotes a sense of balance. It’s been used for centuries to reduce stress, anxiety, and symptoms of depression. Now, one of the ways it does this is by regulating cortisol levels, a hormone related to response to stress, thereby producing a calmer state of mind and overall mental wellbeing. But, listen up, guys. In a double blind placebo-controlled study, ashwagandha improved sexual performance and testosterone levels. Now, that ought to get your attention. Now, it’s also very good in improving sleep quality. The reduction in cortisol levels actually improve sleep, and ashwagandha has been shown over and over again to improve sleep. And if you’ve listened to me on my other podcast, getting a great night’s sleep is one of the best things you can do to improve your overall health, improve your longevity, and we’ll get to longevity in a little bit. Now, number two, it enhances physical performance and endurance. Now, ashwagandha has been traditionally used to boost energy levels and enhance physical performance, but it actually, research shows, that it improves cardiovascular endurance, increases muscle strength and reduces-exercise induced muscle damage. It also improves exercise recovery time, reduces fatigue and aids athletes or those engaging in regular physical activity. Now, it also has anti-inflammatory and immune boosting effects. Ashwagandha contains compounds that improve anti-inflammatory properties. These reduce inflammation in the body and can support a healthy immune system. Now, ashwagandha’s immune-enhancing ability is attributed to its ability to enhance the performance of immune cells and promote overall immune function. Now, on top of all these incredible benefits, ashwagandha can also uncouple your mitochondria. Now, those of you who don’t follow me know that, in my opinion and others, uncoupling mitochondria is the ultimate way of improving health span, lifespan and muscle performance. And it does this by improving mitochondrial biogenesis, making more mitochondria and improving the ability of mitochondria to repair themselves and clean up their act without damaging themselves. In fact, studies show that ashwagandha given to animals increase animal lifespan by over 20% compared to animals that are not given ashwagandha. So let me answer a few of the questions that I get from my patients from the audience about ashwagandha. First of all, it’s important to realize that the dose is very variable depending on who you’re getting the supplement from. Some people talk about extracts, which are much more potent than the ground-up forms. So it’s very hard to give a milligram dosage that’s effective. I’ve never seen a side effect from ashwagandha, just haven’t seen one. Are you gonna notice an immediate difference? Are you gonna notice calmness? Are you gonna notice your stress levels? You’re not gonna find it from the first dose. In general, this is a cumulative effect. But the exciting thing is that, in studies, again, this is in men, men noticed, in a placebo-controlled trial, double blinded, the researchers did not know who was getting what, the people taking it did not know who was getting the active ingredient, the people who got the active ingredient, the men, had more sexual desire, better sexual performance, and a statistically significant increase in their testosterone level. Why is that important? If you follow the news, men’s testosterone levels have been dramatically falling over the last 20 to 30 years. It’s multifactorial. I’ve written a lot about why that happens. But if there’s just one simple agent that can reverse that trend, and you’re a man, why wouldn’t you take advantage of that? So in conclusion, better sex for longer. What’s not to like. Five spectacular benefits of hawthorn berries. All right, everybody, are you looking for a new yogurt topping or exotic smoothie ingredient? What about one with potential cardiovascular benefits, antioxidant properties and tons of dietary fiber? I’m talking about the hawthorn berry. Okay, what the heck is a hawthorn berry? Well, it actually comes from a shrub or tree, and it’s native to Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. Now, where hawthorn really got a lot of interest was in traditional Chinese medicine. It was known as Shan Zha in reference in Chinese medicine as early as 59 AD. So it’s been known about for its health-promoting properties for a very long time. And one of the exciting things about Chinese medicine is these traditional treatments using natural products, now with advance testing, and particularly now with how we learn about the gut microbiome, the benefits that were attributed to something like a hawthorn berry through, if nothing else, folk tradition, now we’re beginning to understand why these benefits occurred. And the hawthorn berry is no different than that. Interestingly, recently it was approved as medicine food homology fruit by China’s National Health Commission for both its nutritive and medicinal purposes. And it’s been traditionally applied in Chinese medicine as a phytopharmaceutical, say that five times, against cardiovascular and digestive ailments. So what the heck is in this stuff that made it so interesting to traditional Chinese medicine, and why should we be interested in it? Well, there’s five really amazing benefits that hawthorn berries bring to offer. First of all, they’re very rich in dietary fiber. Now, you probably tired of me talking about dietary fiber, but the more we learn about the importance that our good gut bacteria, our gut buddies absolutely positively have to dine on dietary fiber to produce the health benefits that we’re now expecting from ’em, such as making short chain fatty acids like butyrate. You gotta have dietary fiber for these guys to munch on. And as most of us now know, the American diet or the standard American diet or the Western diet, one of the things that we don’t have in our diet is dietary fiber. And the part of dietary fiber that’s so important is soluble fiber. So soluble fiber, as the name implies, dissolves in water, and it actually makes a gel in water. So that gel actually has shown incredible properties if for no other reason, it slows the movement of food through our digestive tract and it actually makes you feel fuller longer. That’s a good thing. That’s why in traditional Chinese medicine, hawthorn berries, among other things, we’re known to support a healthy weight, or to actually treat obesity and diabetes or high blood sugar because of this property. But it gets even better. One of the soluble fibers in hawthorn berry is pectin. Now pectin, if you’ve ever made jellies at home or canned jellies, you know that one of the ingredients that goes into making jellies is pectin. And pectin is this soluble fiber that gels things. Now, some of you have heard of apple pectin. A number of my patients, we use modified citrus pectin. Why do we use these? Well, there’s some very good evidence, including one paper that I’ve written, that pectin actually changes the amount of good bacteria that we have in our gut and suppresses the amount of bad bacteria in our gut. Good bacteria can eat pectin. Unfortunately, bad bacteria can’t. So the good guys get to outnumber the bad guys, and we can actually measure this on blood tests in my office. So that in itself is a great reason to get more pectin in your diet. So why hawthorn berries? Why not just eat an apple? How about carrots? They have pectin. Cherries, they have pectin. Well, it turns out hawthorn berries have more pectin than carrots, apples and cherries. So what a great way to get more pectin into your diet. Now, the other thing that pectin does in studies is it actually lowers total cholesterol. Now, as you know, I am not a big fan of the cholesterol theory of heart disease. But if lowering your cholesterol will make your local doctor or cardiologist happy, then why not? It certainly beats taking a statin drug. Now the third thing that hawthorn berries are high end is vitamin C, ascorbic acid. Now, ascorbic acid is getting more and more interest, vitamin C, because, number one, we, like very few other animals, don’t manufacture our own vitamin C, us, monkeys and guinea pigs. Vitamin C is essential as an antioxidant. Vitamin C is essential to recharge vitamin E in our bodies when it gets oxidized. It’s essential for recharging glutathione, one of two antioxidants in our mitochondria. And more important for everyday life is that vitamin C is essential to repair breaks in collagen. Now collagen, everybody knows how wonderful collagen is, but what people don’t know is to make collagen and knit collagen together, you actually have to have vitamin C. And fun fact, the reason smokers get more wrinkles than non-smokers is that those wrinkles are caused by breaks in collagen. Smoking uses up all of your vitamin C in fighting oxidized radicals. And you got no vitamin C left over to reknit collagen. So that’s why smokers have more wrinkles than non-smokers ’cause they don’t have vitamin C. So vitamin C is really good. If you are interested in fine lines and crow’s feet and don’t particularly want to get your forehead injected with a drug every few months, eat your vitamin C instead. And hawthorn berries, great source to get it. Number four, probably my favorite topic, hawthorn berries are rich in polyphenols. In fact, according to a recent study, the hawthorn berry has higher levels of, are you ready? TPC, total phenolic content, and TFC, total flavonoid content, and antioxidant capacity compared with other polyphenol-dense fruits. Why do you want polyphenols? Well, I’ve written several books about this, but we now know that friendly gut bacteria think polyphenols are one of the best things to munch on there are. Polyphenols, in turn, uncouple mitochondria. And if you wanna live a long time and live well, quite frankly, you want uncoupled mitochondria. Lastly, we know that it has longevity-supporting and immune-supporting benefits by giving friendly bacteria the food that they need to eat. So the more polyphenols, the better. And hawthorn berries are a amazing source of polyphenols that you probably didn’t know about. Now, I use hawthorn berries in my practice. I use a hawthorn berry supplement in supporting healthy blood pressure already within a normal range. It’s been known in Chinese medicine to support healthy circulation, and it’s been known in Chinese medicine and in Western medicine to support heart health. Now, I think hawthorn bury is so important that, because it’s so good for protecting the heart and supporting circulation, that I even use it in some of my Gundry MD products, like Enhanced Circulation Formula. Huh, hawthorn berries in it because of its benefit in promoting circulation. Now, there’s a bonus to hawthorn berries, and that is they are bitter. In fact, as you know, one of my favorite sayings is “more bitter, more better.” So hawthorn is a great low-sugar fruit. In fact, for every 10 grams of hawthorn berries, there’s six grams of carbohydrates, but three grams of fiber, mostly in the form of pectin. So half of those grams of carbohydrate are fiber, and there’s only two grams of sugar in every 10 grams of hawthorn berry. So it’s a very low-sugar fruit. And as you know, unfortunately, most of our modern fruits have been bred for sugar content. So these guys are tart. And if you like Sour Patch gummies, you will absolutely love those. Now, one of the interesting things about fruits in general and the polyphenol content is that the peel contains most of the polyphenols and most of the antioxidants. And in this particular fruit, the peel occupies a great deal of the bulk of the fruit rather than the pulp. And again, most of our modern fruits have been bred for pulp. So this is a great way to get that peel into your diet. All right, so you’re ready. You wanna find some hawthorn berries. Well, you’re not gonna go down to the grocery store and find them, sorry about that. You might get lucky and find hawthorn berry in capsule form in the health food store. But you can buy it as a whole freeze-dried fruit. And the guys who I like make it who you’ll probably recognize is Big Green Organic Food. It’s biggreenorganic.com. Now if you like millet or sorghum pasta, you know that one of my go-tos that I recommend in my books is Big Green millet and Big Green sorghum pasta. So big green has freeze-dried organic hawthorn berries. So they’re easy to store, they don’t go bad, and you can use them when you want. No worries about storing them or going bad. All right, so how the heck do you get these freeze-dried hawthorn berries into your diet? Well, it actually makes a delicious tea and snack combo. You actually pour hot water over a few of these berries and let it steep for a few minutes, and then they’ll soak up, they’ll become soft, but you drink the water, which will have the extract of the polyphenols, and then munch on the berries. You can throw a handful into a green smoothie. It adds a gorgeous color, and you’re gonna get all those additional polyphenols. I like to chop ’em up and use them as an ingredient or even a decoration on your lectin-free baked goodies such as cakes or muffins. Another great way to do it is chop them up and toss a few into your coconut or pili yogurt. They actually add a nice kind of crunchy texture. It’s almost like putting a granola texture into your yogurt that many of you do. So instead of putting a health-killing few scoops of granola into your yogurt, try some freeze-dried hawthorn berries. All right, that’s it. A super fruit that you probably didn’t even know existed but has been around for nearly 2,000 years in Chinese medicine. And again, we’re just now discovering why this berry was so important to health, and it ought to be something you should consider adding to your regimen. Now it’s time for the question of the week. Comes from my YouTube video on ashwagandha. @PrinceyBes asks, “What dosage do you recommend and what time of day do you suggest to be taken?” Well, there’s a lot of variation in whether it’s ashwagandha or ashwagandha root, ashwagandha extract. But in general, 500 milligrams a day ought to do it for you. Quite frankly, I’ve found through the years that the best advice about when to take a supplement is when you’ll actually take it and actually get it into you. So whatever’s convenient, turns out, in most cases, is the best way. And now it’s time for the review of the week. The review of the week comes from my YouTube video on turmeric. @LisaMcNellis8797 says, “Turmeric has helped many things for me. I’ve been seizure free for over four years. It also helped my neuropathy. I’m off many other medications now and I’m doing great.” Well, Lisa, thanks so much for telling me that. You know, I spend 25 years now looking for alternatives to help you live a happier, healthier, longer, better life. And it just pleases me so much to hear that turmeric has been working for you. Thanks for writing.
– I hope you enjoyed this episode of “The Dr. Gundry Podcast.” If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also “The Dr. Gundry Podcast” YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.
