Ancient Herbal Remedies and Food as Medicine

Intro:

Welcome to Dr. Ruscio radio, providing practical and science-based solutions to feeling your best. To stay up to date on the latest topics as well as all of our prior episodes, make sure to subscribe in your podcast player. For weekly updates visit DrRuscio.com. The following discussion is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease. Please do not apply any of this information without first speaking with your doctor. Now let’s head to the show.

DrMichaelRuscio:

Hey everyone. Today I speak with Dr. Josh Axe about his new book, Ancient Remedies, and some of the very helpful techniques in there. One is looking at foods that look similar to various organs of the body and how “like supports like” said loosely. Another interesting concept of herb combining. How to combine certain medicinal herbs in a culinary way for improving a given health condition. So a few very interesting tidbits here for how to medicinally incorporate foods and herbs into your diet to assist in various facets of health. Also remember that if you’re looking for a more all-encompassing guide for how to use diet and various gut health interventions for healing your gut, give a look to Healthy Gut, Healthy You. Now we will go to interview with Dr. Josh Axe.

DrMR:

Hey everyone. This is Dr. Ruscio. Welcome back to Dr. Ruscio radio. I am here again with Dr. Josh Axe, who has a new book coming out. I think there are a few pearls in here. We were talking about this before we started the recording that really may help people understand the importance of eating a diverse array of different foods, along with many other things I think the book will help with. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned it’s that it is easy to just buy the same stuff week over week. In fact, I have a pattern I go through at the grocery store and I’m so accustomed to just buying all the same stuff. There are a few things here that I think will really help prompt people to eat a wider array of foods. So Josh, welcome back to the show. Excited to have you back here.

DrJoshAxe:

Hey Michael, thanks for having me.

DrMR:

It’s always nice talking because one of the things that I think you do a really good job at is just giving people practical action items. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up into the details, the mechanisms that we don’t necessarily arm people with a “here’s a simple adage that you can follow” that will really get you to do all the stuff that you need to do and it doesn’t necessarily need to have this very, very detailed explanation. One of the things that you mentioned in your book is this concept of “like supports like”, so maybe I’ll set that as a springboard in the conversation. Can you tell us about the book and then maybe we can start there?

Using Food as Medicine

DrJoshAxe:

Yeah, absolutely. For me, my big passion, and I know we share a lot of these passions, is teaching people how to use food as medicine and getting to the root cause of disease. You know, so many people today are taking drugs. So many people today are living a lifestyle that is breeding disease and what’s happening is a lot of people again are going and taking drugs. They’re not actually getting to the root of the problem. One of the things I know you and I have both seen results with is helping people heal and overcome hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease, Lyme disease, gut and digestive issues like leaky gut, migraine headaches, food sensitivities, cancer, all these things. I wanted to write a book that really helped teach people how to treat the root cause of disease, using food as medicine, along with things like herbs and superfoods and essential oils and some other really cool lifestyle practices.

DrJA:

So the book really acts as a guide to teach people. I really keep it simplistic. It’s an easy read, but at the same time, it does get into some advanced concepts related to how to heal the root cause. It has about 70 plus healing recipes. It also has 75 condition specific protocols. So if somebody has hypothyroidism, I go through the exact foods not to eat, the foods to eat, the top supplements and herbals. I go through the exact essential oils, the exact natural treatments that are best for that condition. So people literally know here’s exactly what I do for the health problem that I have. The book is Ancient Remedies. You can go to amazon.com and just search Dr. Axe, Ancient Remedies or Barnes and Nobles to pick it up. We had Dr. Oz write the forward.

DrJA:

He rarely writes book forwards, but loved it so much. The whole principle there is how to get to the root cause of disease. The way that we do that is with food. One of the things you and I were talking about in the book is that in the ancient times, one of the things that physicians discovered is that there are really three ways to know what foods to eat that are going to be medicine for you. That’s an important thing because there isn’t one diet for everybody. I mean, has anyone here ever done a diet or maybe your friend did a diet and they saw good results and you tried it and you didn’t get the same results? Well that’s because everybody is unique and different foods act as medicine for different people.

DrJA:

For instance, when you are in your grocery store….well, let me back up. There are three things that help determine which foods are best for you: the shape of the food, the color of the food and the flavor of the food. To give you an example of shape, here’s a cool one, think about a Walnut. A Walnut looks like a head. If you crack it open, it’s got these two things that literally look like brains, your left and right hemisphere of your brain. We know that walnuts are the best food for your brain. They are high in choline, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, and other unique compounds that are a brain-boosting food. Think about beets. Beets are red and they actually look like blood when you cut them. Beats boost nitric oxide. So it’s great for building your blood. Think about a tomato. Tomatoes have four chambers.

DrJA:

You know what else has four chambers? Your heart and it’s loaded with lycopene. So it’s one of the most heart-healthy foods out there. You’ve got onions that actually look like cells and they’re high in a compound called quercetin, which actually helps cleanse and heal your cells. We’ve also got Reishi mushrooms. Reishi mushrooms look like your adrenal glands or your kidneys and adrenals. A few others here. Celery. So if you want to build strong bones, eat a lot of celery. Hold a celery stalk up to your forearm. It looks like your bones. It’s the most alkaline of all the vegetables. And it’s really high in vitamin K, has some calcium, so it’s a great bone-building food with all those alkaline minerals. Then we have avocados which look like a uterus. It’s high in magnesium and potassium, which relax the uterus and healthy fats which help nourish it.

DrJA:

You’ve got olives which look like ovaries. They have a unique type of polyphenol. These fats that help nourish that organ. Figs look like testes. In fact, if you cut them open and they almost look like they have sperm inside. In Roman culture, in Greek medicine in the time of Hippocrates, they would have people consume those as a reproductive enhancing and supportive foods. There’s a lot of others. Coconut looks like it head, it’s got all these healthy fats, which support your brain. That’s one really amazing thing is when a food looks like an organ, you know, it actually supports that organ. Then the color: dark blues and purples are good for those adrenal glands and reproductive organs. Those really dark blue purple antioxidants. Green is really good for the liver and gallbladder.

DrJA:

Red foods are good for the heart. Yellow foods, light yellow are really good for the immune system. So think ginger and chicken broth and garlic. Then we’ve got the foods that support your upper digestive system, and part of your digestive tract, but mostly upper GI. That’s going to be things like butternut squash, sweet potatoes, cinnamon, pumpkin are all good for those systems. Then flavors: sour activates detoxification, bitter dries up candida, and really acts on your cardiovascular system. Sweet activates the pancreas. Umami, the immune system. Salty flavors help with the kidneys. I know I just said a lot of things, but that’s kind of how, in a lot of detail, that’s how to know which foods are medicine for condition you’re looking to heal.

DrMR:

Now, some of this comes from ancestral medicines like Ayurveda. Are you borrowing from different kind of ancestral healing modalities to put this model together?

Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda

DrJA:

You know, I am. The big one is traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. Those are really the two big ones, but I even pulled some from biblical medicine. Maimonides was a rabbi and a physician, who wrote 20 textbooks on holistic healing. It’s incredible. Greek medicine from Hippocrates. So it really looked at those four forms of medicine. I looked at the latest research today as well, looking at medical studies, but I would say those four ancient along with modern, those are the biggest things that really came up with this. But I would say the biggest inspiration was traditional Chinese medicine, which is not just China. Actually all of Asia. Japan today has the longest lifespan. I would say they, as a country, are the closest to practicing true ancient Chinese medicine than any other country.

DrMR:

This may be too broad of a question to answer, but do you find that people are more prone to be avoiding certain types of foods? You said bitters before. I know that oftentimes people don’t like a bitter taste. I’m sure some people here who are very into health have kind of hit their hand against their forehead in frustration at their family members who says, well, I don’t like this because it’s a little bit bitter. Not everything can tastes like a candy bar. What are you finding people are the most prone to avoid?

DrJA:

Well, the most consumed is sweet and salty in that order. After that, sour. The one that people get the least of, or the two they get the least of is definitely bitter and umami. Bitters the least, umami, then sour. But those are really three flavors that activate organ systems, they call it tonifying or strengthening in Chinese medicine. When you’re only getting sweet, what you’re doing is you’re activating your pancreas over and over and over again. Over time you can burn it out, right? You become insulin resistant that can lead to not just diabetes, PCOS, infertility, Alzheimer’s disease. Almost every condition you can imagine can be related to insulin issue. Flavors activate organs, but you can overactivate.

DrJA:

You can overstimulate and then they get worn out. Sour activates the liver. Bitter activates your cardiovascular system, but it also helps with bile. Part of what that does is to cleanse your body of candida. Bitter foods are cleansing of dampness and candida. Excess mucus and phlegm. Anybody who ever has a cold or flu, you’ll notice there’s two things that they take. Things that tend to warm the body from being cold. Why do we call it a cold? It’s your body’s cold internally in Chinese medicine often and herbs that dry up dampness and some that release something called a win. If anybody ever has ever tasted Echinacea, it tastes terrible. They add honey and sweeteners to most of these things because they are so bitter, but they help clear out all of these pathogens and viruses and also phlegm. So that’s what bitter is good for. Umami helps activate and strengthen the immune system, which is your lungs and colon. So umami foods like sauerkraut, sour and umami, a miso is very, very umami. Even to a degree, not to say these are the best for the immune system for but some they do okay with them, but fermented dairy. Like yogurt, that’s sour umami.

DrMR:

I’m so sorry. Umami – is this a flavor profile? I’m not familiar with that term.

DrJA:

Yeah. Umami is one of the five flavors. So you’ve got sweet and salty. Umami is the flavor on the back of your tongue. If you’ve ever had raw cheese, that flavor of like a sheep’s cheese or goat cheese, or a miso soup. That flavor is called umami.

DrMR:

Gotcha. So I hadn’t heard that.

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A New Take on Recipes

DrMR:

Now there’s definitely this observed trend that in the West, we eat way too much flesh meat and not enough organ meats. So it sounds like this is in line with that same concept of, we focus on too narrow of a band of fruits, vegetables, dairy meat, what have you. By broadening this we can have better health. One of the questions I know you address in the book is how to do this with recipes. I’m assuming that you can’t just throw a bunch of this stuff in a cauldron and expect it to taste good. Are there a few maybe recipe tips or ideas you want to offer people that may help them realize, okay, here’s a bunch of foods that maybe I’ve never even heard of or hardly ever have used, but there’s some guidelines for how to get this into food without it being an experiment gone wrong.

DrJA:

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll give a few tips and I also mention, there are well over 70 recipes in my new book, Ancient Remedies that really go through how to get these foods in our diet and make them taste great. For instance, in the book, we’ve got chocolate chip cookies using either almond or coconut flour or a spotted oat flour. We’ve got homemade pizza, and then we have some cool Asian dishes that we love. We’ve got a sweet and sour chicken that uses local honey and all kinds of stuff. One of the most healing recipes that I think a lot of people did in Asia is that there are a lot of stews and soups and things like that. That was one big thing that they consumed.

DrJA:

Another unique one, and I know this isn’t paleo, but you can make it that way. That is a dish called congee. It was known as one of the most healing recipes in all of China. Basically they would take rice as the base, and then they would add things to it, depending on what condition you wanted to overcome. So for instance, if you had a cold or flu, they would take a sprouted rice. They would put it in a pot overnight, our equivalent to a slow cooker. Then they would take that sprouted rice and they would add-in, lets say you want to boost your immune system, they would add an onion and Shataki mushrooms. Maybe even some other herbals like ginger, and they would have you eat this sort of rice mush, so nourishing and healing to the body.

DrJA:

If you wanted to strengthen your adrenals, they would add goji berries, and you know, some other unique ingredients. That was a really healing meal we have. We have one in the book that’s also paleo and it’s a cauliflower congee. You take mashed cauliflower and you add in these ingredients like chicken broth and mushroom and all these different things to help activate and heal these different conditions. So that’s one of the cool things we do. Another one of course, and you’re gonna appreciate this doc, this is getting a little off topic, but I just want to say this. There’s a recipe called Tumeric golden milk, or some people call it Tumeric golden tea.

DrJA:

About nine years ago, you will remember this, a medical study came out and in the medical community, it was like, wow, what a breakthrough. We found that when you consume Tumeric, the active compound curcumin with black pepper, the active compounds, piperine when you mix those two, it increases the absorption of Tumeric by 154%. That’s amazing. So now all these supplement companies started adding in black pepper or piperine to their Tumeric supplements. A lot of you guys may have seen this. Here’s what’s crazy though. Our medical community was acting like they had this scientific breakthrough, the recipe that’s about 3000 years old for a recipe called Tumeric golden milk. The actual recipe is Tumeric, black pepper, then they also have ginger and coconut milk or ghee. That’s the recipe, but they knew this 3000 years ago.

DrJA:

There’s a principle in Ayerveda and Chinese medicine and one of the things they go by is food combining, but they also have something called herb combining. They found when you combine certain herbs together, it has a more powerful effect on the body. One of those examples is Tumeric combined with black pepper. Another one would be if somebody has candida. Most people with candida or IBS, their body is too cold and too damp. So Pau D’arco and other bitter herbs, the thing about them is they will clear out candida, but they’ll actually make your body more cold. So what you need to do is you need to combine Pau D’arco, or one of those anti-candida herbs, like olive leaf or another, you need to combine that with a warming herbs like cinnamon or ginger, that also has some antimicrobial properties. Those two together are a perfect cure or natural remedy for candida. So another thing I go through in the book is here are the herbs to combine together to make them even more effective. But a lot of this that I’m sharing now, this is almost exclusively, Asian medicine and Ayurvedic medicine that did this sort of herbs combining.

Evidence-Supported Interventions

DrMR:

Just a note here for the more evidence-based facet of our crowd. If you watch some of the literature coming out of Asia, there is progressively more evidence supporting, acupuncture as an example, certain herbal interventions. There’s been a few very fascinating studies with seemingly exotic herbal blends from Asia, for constipation as another example. If your minding, some of this literature being published, there is definitely the scientific evidence slowly catching up with some of these more ancient practices. I just want to drop that for people who maybe hunting for an RCT. I think we should be evidence-based, but not evidence limited, meaning there are some cases where the practice is ahead of where the science has been able to substantiate it. So I just want to drop that note there for people.

DrJA:

One of the things that’s interesting, Michael, is that unfortunately, there is a lot of ego within our conventional medical system today that may say that actually thinks America is superior to all these other countries and their historic medical systems, and even what they have today. We rank number one in emergency medicine, but 41st and overall health as a country in terms of chronic health conditions. One of the things I think that’s important to remember is Chinese medicine in particular is over 3000 years old. It has been proven by millions of individual case studies. They have more of a big picture perspective. What they’ve done is absolutely worked. Where our medical system fails today is they’re looking at things under a microscope.

DrJA:

Not technically a microscope, but more so analyzing things so closely that they miss the big picture perspective. I mean, look at the world today. It’s obvious that we miss the big picture. Even talking about a certain virus, not to get political, but are we considering the number of jobs lost? Are we considering the suicide rates, the alcoholism, the depression in children? I don’t know if you saw the study that just came out on kids that are depressed because of masks and all this other stuff. The reason I’m just saying that is that our medical system is one of the worst in the world at looking at a big picture perspective. Look at Japan. Why don’t we model a country that actually has the best health today in the world? Of all the countries I’ve mentioned, Japan practices more closely to Chinese medicine than any other country in the world. I’m a big fan of Chinese medicine because also I’ve used it with thousands of people and seen better results with that than anything else.

DrMR:

It’s funny you say that. I fully agree that we have to be careful not to let our ego get in the way. Just because we have a high degree of knowledge in a certain area doesn’t mean that we have a high degree of knowledge in every area, nor does that more reductionistic model function as the best investigative tool for all things. That’s where that bigger picture perspective sometimes gets lost. I had a personal example of this, where I was having this tingling in my fingers, it would wake me up the last two hours I’d be sleeping. It was just driving me absolutely crazy. It was killing my sleep. My aura ring sleep score was tanking. I was tired during the day because the last two hours before waking I’d be tossing and turning.

DrMR:

If I laid on my left side, my left fingers will be tingling. If I went on my right side, my right fingers will be tingling. If I laid on my back it would abade for a little bit, then I ended up moving and getting this tingling that would wake me up. So I went and saw a colleague here. Well, not really a colleague, someone, a colleague referred me to who does chiropractic care. I figured, okay, if I go see a good sport Chiro, there’s probably some nerve entrapment, maybe some adhesions from working out that they’ll release. I was a bit underwhelmed by his assessment. He essentially found some cervical areas of the spine that were not moving as well as they should have. He did two adjustments and I left there thinking, wow, that was not quite the assessment I wanted. I thought that the assessment was gonna be more rigorous and thorough.

DrMR:

I kind of left really disappointed. Last night, I had zero tingling in my fingers just like that. It was completely gone. I was just shocked that this simple intervention works so well, even though I thought it needed to be more rigorous and more difficult. So just as another example of, I think my ego was getting in the way, thinking that it should be harder or more scientific or a more rigorous assessment, but it really didn’t. For whatever that’s worth, that supports the idea that we shouldn’t always think too much about certain things.

RuscioResources:

Hi everyone. This is Dr. Ruscio. In case you need help, I wanted to quickly make you aware of what resources are available to you. If you go to drruscio.com/Resources, you will see a few links you can click through for more. Firstly, there is the clinic, which I’m immensely proud of. The fact that we deliver, cost-effective, simple, but highly efficacious, functional medicine. There’s also my book, Healthy Gut, Healthy You, which has been proven to allow those who’ve been unable to improve their health, even after seeing numerous doctors, to be able to help them finally feel better. There’s also our store where there’s a number of products like our Elemental Heal line, our probiotic line, and other gut supportive and health-supportive supplements. We now offer health coaching. So if you’ve read the book or listened to a podcast like this one, or are reading about a product and you need some help with how or when to use, or how to integrate with diet, we now offer health coaching to help you along your way. And then finally, if you are a clinician, there is our clinicians’ newsletter, the Future of Functional Medicine Review. I’m very proud to say, we’ve now had doctors who’ve read that newsletter, find challenging cases in their practices, apply what we teach in the newsletter and be able to help these patients who were otherwise considered challenging cases. Everything for these resources can be accessed through drruscio.com/Resources. Alrighty, back to the show.

DrMR:

Now, coming back to the book, is there anything else that you want to kind of leave people with? I think we’ve hit some really great perspectives of herb combining. I have never heard that term so succinctly stated. The gentleman who writes a lot of books on Lyme disease, Burna is his last name I believe, he’s written a few books on herbs for Lyme. I’ve heard him discuss that, but I really like how you’re making this less clinical because he goes deep into Lyme and it’s a really, really clinical perspective. This seems more accessible for someone just trying to go to the grocery store, put stuff in his or her cart based upon how they’re feeling. Then of course, looking at foods to support certain organ functions and the like. Anything else you want to leave people with about the book as we kind of come to a close?

Health is Multifaceted

DrJA:

Well, I’ll just say this. I think one of the big things for everybody to remember is that health is multifaceted. When we think about our health, one of the things we also miss is the emotional perspective. One of the things I get into in the book is if you would have gone to an ancient physician, including Hippocrates, Maimonides, some of these incredible physicians, they would look at your face, they would look at your tongue. They would find out what your symptoms are and that’s how they would treat you. It’s amazing. In Chinese medicine, your tongue will tell you a lot about your health.

DrJA:

If you have a coating on your tongue, we call it candida today, they call it dampness. That’s indicative that there is too much mucus and phlegm and yeast in your system. If it’s only on the back of your tongue, that’s indicative of adrenal fatigue. If you have ridges on the side of your tongue that look like bite marks, that’s called a digestive qi deficiency, where your digestive system is weak. If you also have red marks there, that means your liver is under stress. If the tip of your tongue is red, typically that’s indicative of insomnia or more of a heart issue. Tthere’s a lot you can tell there. Also within Chinese medicine one of the things that they would look at is how emotions affect different organ systems. For instance, if somebody has the emotion of fear, we know this today, this is fact everything I’m about to say is fact. The emotion of fear stimulates your adrenal glands to release adrenaline and cortisol and those stress hormones, right?

DrJA:

We all know that. So we know that the emotion of fear affects your adrenal glands. If you have too much fear over time, and it could be not just fear of a mountain lion chasing you about fear of failure, fear of disappointing others, any of these sorts of things that wears out your adrenal glands. If you have too much of that. The emotion of worry. Think about what somebody when they worry a lot. My stomach feels like it’s tied in knots, or I get an upset stomach. We know that worry affects your upper digestive system. We know that anger affects your liver and gallbladder. We know that an issue like anxiety, causes blood pressure. If you have that sort of nervousness, anxiety, blood pressure raises, and then another one would be in Chinese medicine the emotion of grief or depression.

DrJA:

They would say you’re holding onto something from the past, or something has happened to you and you haven’t been able to move on from it. It could be a divorce. Maybe you lost a loved one. Maybe you had a trauma, physical or emotional in the past. You haven’t forgiven somebody. Something in the past has happened and you are literally have not moved on from it. If that’s the case that weakens your lungs and your colon, that’s your immune system. These are facts. We know that emotional health is so critical to our physical health. That’s one of the things I think doctors are called to do, whether it’s by themselves or working with other physicians. The definition still today in the dictionary of health is being whole in body, mind and spirit. So looking at those emotions in that mind and saying, okay, how can I heal myself there?

DrJA:

Again, I encourage people, if you’re struggling with an emotion, know that you want to do things nutritionally for it. If you have depression, get those omega-threes and large doses. Get the wild salmon, get the walnuts, get coconut, get olive oil, like get those fats and consider taking herbs like St John’s wort and ashwagandha and using uplifting, essential oils, do all those things. What you also need to address is that thing happening in the past, and you haven’t let go of that thing emotionally. If it’s an emotional thing, food can help some, but it’s not going to completely heal that condition. So I think that’s an important part that I cover in the book. The link between a specific condition, like autoimmune disease, and that thing from the past that we haven’t let go of and moved on from.

Herbs, Organ Meats and Bone Broth

DrJA:

So I get into that. The other thing I really get into in the book is I go through, Hey, here are the best herbs for different conditions. If you have an inflammatory condition, Galangal is an incredible herb. Of course, Tumeric, ginger, rosemary. I go through all these anti-inflammatory herbs and TCM. If a male has low testosterone, that incredible combo is ginseng plus fenugreek. If a man if they’re under 50 it’s ashwagandha plus fenugreek. If a woman has hypothyroidism, it’s ashwagandha, and astragalus are two of the best. If somebody has leaky gut syndrome doing licorice root, astragalus and ginger are the best three herbs. Another example would be PCOS or infertility doing cinnamon with vitex is really, really powerful. So anyways, I go through in the book, all of these. It really covers a lot of in-depth.

DrJA:

I cover, again, Chinese medicine and Ayurveda but I also reference almost 500 medical studies. So it is really full. Everything is referenced. I go over the historic way it heals you and then today exactly what the science shows and why this is so effective. I just love talking about herbs because up until a hundred years ago, Michael, you know this, when somebody used the word medicine, they were referring to herbs, spices, mushrooms, and glandulars. If there are three other things we need in our diet today, it is glandulars, mushrooms, herbs, spices, and let me throw bone broth in there. You asked about “like supports like” earlier. I meant that with, I gave that description of that with food, that that’s plant-based, but it works the same with organs.

DrJA:

Historically, if you want to support your liver, you ate liver. If you want to support your spleen, you ate spleen or heart. Studies now show liver is one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet, it is loaded, it’s the most B vitamin-rich food on the planet and blows any green vegetables out of the water. It is so nourishing to your liver and your blood and cleansing your body. So again, I’m a huge fan of organ meats. Medicinal mushrooms were recommended today in Japan and China like we recommend vegetables today. They would say, eat as many vegetables and as many mushrooms as possible. Mushrooms aree the biggest activators of our immune system. Lion’s mane heals the brain, reishi helps strengthen your long-term immunity. Maitake fights cancer, Turkey tail fights viruses, reishi increases longevity.

DrJA:

And then of course, bone broth. If we’re going to heal our guts, I know you train your patients to care for their gut microbiome. You know, the gutlining at least is made up around 70% collagen. So if you’re going to heal, you need collagen and you need probiotics in order to really heal your gut. That was another thing that was really focused on an ancient medicine. I think Hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut, and that’s a similar statement you’re going to find in Chinese medicine, similar thing we’re finding today in medical research. You’ve got to really take care of that gut lining because the gut is connected to the brain, to the skin and to your immune system. Last one. We’re in a world today where we talk about the immune system, right?

Episode Wrap-Up

DrJA:

How important it is. Remember this. Immune health starts with gut health. We’ve heard that quote, 70% of your immune system is in your gut. So that’s a big deal. If people want to take care of their immune system right now, here’s what I recommend. Latest medical research shows, and so does history, vitamin D and zinc. Those are the two most important right now at fighting viruses. So vitamin D 5,000iu per day, zinc 30 milligrams a day, and then also vitamin C and vitamin A and selenium can support you as well. In terms of herbals for your immune system, Echinacea and Elderberry for short-term and andrographis is for short term. Astragalus and Rishi for long-term immunity. That’s really gonna help the immune system. I know I said a lot, but I guarantee if people go out and get the book. They can go to amazon.com and just search Dr. Axe Ancient Remedies, and it can be to your house in a day or two. It has a whole reference guide in the back for 70 conditions. So you’ll be using this for years to come. Anyways, thanks for having me on, I always love talking food as medicine with you.

DrMR:

No, I love it. I love your perspective of just making this easy and giving people some guidelines. You’ve motivated me to bring even more into my diet in terms of herbs and spices. This is one thing I I’ll never forget at one of the ancestral health symposiums. It may have been 2015 or 2016. The presenter made this amazing chart of an array of different foods, herbs and spices. Ironically, the pound for pound nutrient dense were actually herbs and spices in the analysis. That always stuck with me. So my memory is connecting that with your comments now, and this is really kind of reinvigorating my desire to bring more of these things to my diet. Love the passion and appreciate you taking the time.

DrJA:

Awesome. Well, Dr. Michael, thanks for having me. Thanks everybody for listening and have a great week.

DrMR:

Thanks Josh.

Outro:

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