some amazing research has been done looking at which foods can help protect our DNA and and some of them are are very ordinary like the a kiwi fruit that you might eat at breakfast you know that brown fuzzy ball you cut it open it’s got this emerald green interior with a little white Starburst you know it’s kind of um tart and sweet at the same time well that kiwi is packed with vitamins and antioxidants and it’s been shown that eating just one kiwi a day can actually protect your cause your blood to be fortified to neutralize
a hive and then they circulate in your body looking for organs to repair so wherever you need a little bit of renewal regeneration your stem cells will fix it invisibly and so black tea can actually spark that repair and regenerative process if you enjoyed watching that clip here’s another powerful clip that I think you will also really enjoy the whole idea of reducing sugar by just adding unlimited amounts of these chemicals has to be thought through and we should be weaning people off Ultra sweetened products which make
about 60 percent of the incoming damage from DNA and if you eat three kiwis a day okay which is pretty easy right I mean you peel it you cut it up you put it into a yogurt okay it’s something that simple uh actually will help your DNA build itself back up so that damaged DNA will be repaired so don’t don’t forget like think about the way of protecting your DNA um I remember an old video game called Missile Command and this is where from the top of the screen there are all these missiles that are descending down
actually um also through blinded so we didn’t know what which one was which um a substance that turned out to be the powdered extract from just regular green tea a cup of green tea and we found that they were in that system they went head to head against each other and you could actually get the same effect in that test system so now the question is you know um we we’ve looked at this in the lab how does this actually play out in real people in the real world well uh you know there are studies now that show
and because it leverages your body’s own defense systems the benefits take time and they build up over time and so you’re talking about research studies that could take months or years even to fully appreciate just how beneficial that is so This Is How We Do food with medicine research we look for benefits in real populations of real people like people drinking green tea how well does that prevent different types of cancer then we back it up to say can we run a small clinical trial a small group of people that we can control to see if we
and I think you are in many ways uniquely placed to do this and move this field on because you’ve got so much experience in the developments of drugs and in research so obviously you know how that whole system works and because you are this way in clients to see the healing potential of foods you can actually do that and I and I feel that’s really important to get that kind of traction primarily with the medical profession but also I think across wider Society you know I’ve had on the podcast all kinds of people on in
benefits if not more benefits than a drug yeah well so we um have been developing treatments for cancer that are designed to starve cancer by cutting off its blood supply and that’s the process of angiogenesis that is hijacked by tumors by cancer cells to get selfishly develop their own blood supply right so I told you the body has normal circulation to feed healthy tissues well cancers can sometimes hijack that so one of the ways new ways to treat cancer is actually to give a drug that can intercept a Cancer’s ability to recruit a private
blood supply that’s starving a cancer cutting off of the blood supply can’t get oxygen and nutrients can’t grow okay so I I was one of the people to help develop the systems to develop those drugs have been over a dozen drugs that have been approved by Health authorities to be able to achieve this in colon cancer brain cancer lung cancer so on and so forth now in that same system we’ve actually thrown different food substances and as an example we took a drug that is a designer drug to stop angiogenesis and then we
get a similar effect then we go back into the lab and we kind of say well now what happens if you feed animals that actually with green tea like can we you know an animal subject can we actually see that benefit then we can even go deeper and go dive that go start going that mile deep what happens at the cellular level what happens at the genetic level and so food as medicine is really taking that macroscopic community-wide level View and then drilling it right down to that molecular pathway and so I’m I have to be one of
in vitamin C which of course is true but obviously you’re taking it up a notch now you’re saying yes it’s rich in vitamin C but actually it’s also helping us to repair DNA and I guess to me there’s a wider Point here which is you know my dad what 20 30 years ago probably said it’s rich in vitamin C so thought there was a value on feeding his children that food because of the impacts on our health and as science progresses we I guess we’re learning more about the magic of this you know quite ordinary food the
leading to charge this we can use the same technologies that are used to develop Pharmaceuticals and instead of throwing a drug into the system to see what happens we can actually start to throw Foods into those systems and and see what happens as well in fact you can even compare foods and drugs and see which one wins and that’s something that I’ve been doing for the last decade is really trying to use the same rigorous scientific methodology used for drug development in order to be able to study the impact of food yeah
of tea that you get in a sushi restaurant Japanese restaurant you know matcha and it’s very trendy and and of course the trend goes back thousands of years in Asia um uh and then there’s black tea uh classic English breakfast tea or Earl Gray tea in fact I have a little tin of it I happen to have a 10 of her old gray tea here right right here I love tea and most people have said this was the thinking previously that green tea is really great for you because it’s green it’s got filled with antioxidants
on your planet and what you had to do is to be able to Fire and try to neutralize all the missiles and that’s what antioxidants actually do but it’s really hard to prevent all the missiles from coming in and so occasionally you actually have one that create that gets through the Shields and creates a crater that’s damage and so neutralizing the incoming is like antioxidants but building back the damaged DNA well that’s important too because that’s like patching a pothole in the highway in the
roadside so that you so other cars don’t have a problem on it and and so here’s an example of a food a kiwi that can actually do that but there are other foods that can also have varying degrees of protection of your DNA as well yeah it makes me happy that example because my dad who’s no longer alive I remember as a kid Stokely he used to say to me you know keep eating kiwi fruits they’ve come back from the supermarket with you know these bags of kiwi fruit so they’re really really good for you they’re rich
see exactly what the story is and it turns out that black tea actually is quite active I studied the Chinese green tea Japanese green tea and and studied um Earl Gray and we can and so you can besides comparing foods with drugs you can compare foods with foods to find out which is the best kind I was interested in this Japanese sencha or Chinese green tea and Jasmine tea or is um Earl Gray which one is better when you throw them into the system and we found actually surprisingly that Earl Gray the black tea with flavor the Bergamot actually
that even two to three cups of tea a day can lower your risk of developing ovarian cancer for example by up to 50 percent this is a gigantic study in Europe called The Epic study that have looked at all the different food patterns and and dietary consumptions over time to look for these correlations and so food is medicine research is different from pharmaceutical research okay pharmaceutical research you take one pill or one drug and you get a group of people to make them as similar as possible and then the only thing you do
the Kiwi fruits it makes me wonder how much about food do we still not know like we’re we’re learning do you know what I mean it’s kind of like we think we know so much and we of course we know more than we knew 20 years ago but what are we going to find out in 10 years and 20 years about the magical properties of these Foods well what you’re actually talking about is what I’m working on which is the a new field of research called food as medicine so the the slogan or the saying foodism medicine
the past talking about various aspects of food you’re like you know Professor Felice jacquer from Australia who can up to the smiles trial showing how food can impact and in some cases reverse depression uh Dr Drew Ramsey this nutritional psychiatrist in New York using food to help people with their moods but I do think there’s something very fresh about your approach that um I really really like and resonate with this idea that Food and Drugs can be compared can you give us an example of that where you’ve seen that food might have equal
the people that actually can Traverse that entire Journey um with what I’ve done it’s just so fascinating very very exciting about the future that study mentioned about um a few Cups of Tea a day reducing your risk of developing cancer um was that black tea or green tea it’s green tea um uh but black tea actually also has different benefits uh as well so a study out of Italy did something really amazing well so look let’s back up for a second so what everybody would recognize is green tea it’s kind of like the kind
them more likely particularly kids to seek sugar
to to people is give them that one drug and everything else as we hope to control it so that there’s no other variables well Foods can’t be studied like that you can’t give somebody only green tea to drink for you know months at a time um or the Tomato to eat that’s the only thing that you can eat and Foods don’t work like drugs I mean a drug you could you can squash a headache you know in 20 minutes with a powerful drug or a migraine but with food the benefits of food because it’s so much more natural
um uh and it’s got all these polyphenols in it and black tea well you know when the British brought it back from Asia they couldn’t actually bring fresh green tea with this long ocean Voyage they fermented and dried it and that drying and fermenting actually destroys those polyphenols so it doesn’t have much good like might taste good but it doesn’t really have the healthful properties well this is where science again you know is able to heat up that knife and cut through the the butter to kind of
used for prevention you wouldn’t want to use drugs for prevention but the problem with food nutrition the criticism that many of us in the medical world have you know about the idea of using food for healing was historically it was a lack of evidence right so we have a lot of evidence about drugs we almost have nothing about Foods I mean that’s the dismissive tone that I think you probably were exposed to as well as I uh for most of our education however what’s happening now and this is I’m leading I’m one of the people
was attributedies you know 3000 years ago but in fact back then there were no medicines so food was the only thing that was around today we have a lot of medicines and and it’s because we in the quest to develop medicines we’ve employed some really deep science molecular biology genomics we even drill right down inside the cell to figure out what happens and why and what the consequences are and how the cells work together well one of the reasons that I uh went into nutrition was because I realized that food was something that could be
was the most potent tea when you combine all when you looked at all three side by side other thing about black tea that’s really amazing has been studied by researchers in Italy is that black tea actually can call out those stem cells from your bone marrow to increase their levels in your circulation and when your stem cells are circulating in your blood they come out of their hiding spots in your their storage container the the garage that the paint cans were stored in they come out like bees flying out of