The Joy of Health with Dr Michelle Woolhouse and Professor Marc Cohen

The Joy of Health with Dr Michelle Woolhouse and Professor Marc Cohen

Professor Marc Cohen’s passion for all things wellness shines in this latest podcast episode. Dr Michelle Woolhouse and Professor Cohen discuss all things health; from the benefits of sunlight, clean water, food and beverage fermentation and connecting this to its history, the medicinal properties of honey, seasonal eating, fasting, and mushrooms.

Together they share many holistic hacks on how to optimise gut, immune health, and longevity through dietary and lifestyle approaches to thrive in today’s modern world.

COVERED IN THIS EPISODE

(00:24) Welcoming Marc Cohen
(02:02) Sunshine therapy
(07:40) Kombucha and live ferments
(17:49) Oxymels
(23:18) Detoxification
(29:47) Mushrooms
(35:15) Fasting
(44:28) Thanking Marc and final remarks

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Vitamin D is a hormone essential for immune function and calcium metabolism. Humans do not photosynthesise vitamin D, so must obtain it from sunshine and the diet.
Carotenoids including lutein, beta carotene, and zeaxanthin found in red, orange, and yellow fruits and vegetables can prevent sunburn and protect the skin as they are fat-soluble antioxidants.
Traditional health elixirs
- Jun: Naturally fermented tea using honey - a great source of polyphenols.
- Electuaries: Herbal infused honeys.
- Oxymel: Vinegar with honey and herbs used as a form of medicine.
- Switchel: A traditional drink made with vinegar, water, a pinch of salt, and honey or molasses – used as a rehydration tool due to its electrolyte and mineral content.
- Chyawanprash: A 5,000 year old herbal formula based in honey and ghee containing 50 different herbs.
Consuming vinegar prior to a meal has a positive impact in lowering blood sugar levels.
Studies show that in healthy adults, consuming one serve of kombucha with a meal can reduce glucose spikes and insulin spikes by 20% and 15% respectively, as polyphenols slow gastric emptying.
The word ‘medicine’ comes from the same origin as the word ‘mead’.
Obesogens: Toxic chemicals that cause weight gain, based on the theory that diluting toxic substances in the body by increasing body fat keeps toxicants from affecting vital organs.
Adaptogenic herbs work partially by reducing your toxic load, so the body functions better.
Fasting trains your gut bacteria to adapt to timings, and the types of foods you want and crave.
Medicinal mushrooms:
- Cordyceps: Great oxygen-carrying capacity.
- Turkey tail: Anti-cancer benefits.
- Reishi: Immune enhancing.

RESOURCES DISCUSSED AND ADDITIONAL READING

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle: Welcome to fx Medicine, bringing you the latest in evidence-based, integrative, functional and complementary medicine. I'm Dr Michelle Woolhouse. fx Medicine acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia, where we live and work, and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to the elders past and present and extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today. A few months ago, I did an interview with professor Marc Cohen on some of the most researched wellness hacks that are effective, evidence-based, enjoyable, social and affordable. It was such a pleasure to have Marc on the show as he is a wealth of knowledge and a world leader in this space. So, I invited him back to finish asking him all of the questions that I had planned for him that first time.

Professor Marc Cohen is a medical doctor, a university professor, an author, a poet, an entrepreneur, a wellness trailblazer, and a perpetual student of a life well lived. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers, written many books, established multiple companies, and is the current medical director of the Peninsula Hot Springs Group. On the show today, we are going to continue our conversation about the scientific validity of some of the more common wellness hacks. Welcome to fx Medicine, Marc. Thanks for being with us today.

Marc: I'm so happy to be with you again, Michelle. Thanks for inviting me.

Michelle: Okay. So, last time we talked things like saunas and cold-water therapy, Bolano therapy was another topic and it was so inspiring and insightful and the research is so dense for these interventions, which blew me away. And I didn't get a chance to ask you all the questions that I had. So, I'm going to start today with, I think what you call sunshine therapy. Obviously, this is something most of us love and we love having the sun on our back and watching the sunrise. And it's certainly essential for life and for health. But should we be more kind of explicit in our pursuit of sunshine? And what should we be looking for? What are the benefits of sunshine from a wellness perspective?

Marc: Well, the sunshine is essential for health. All life on earth requires the sun, and for us as humans, we need sunshine to make vitamin D, which is actually not a vitamin. It's a hormone. And it's essential for so many different functions of our body, including our immune system, but so many things for calcium metabolism. And the best source of vitamin D is making it using sunshine. So, we don't photosynthesize as humans, but we certainly can use light to make important molecules. In the past, people were sun worshippers. And I know even when I was a kid, it was probably not the right thing to do. But we used to go out and sunbake and literally worshipping the sun or lying in the sun. And it's really pleasurable if you don't overdo it. However, there is the pendulum can go too far. And if you overdo sun exposure, you get sunburn and then you get all the downside of oxidative damage in your skin, aging, wrinkles, dried skin and more likely skin cancers. However, just exposing yourself to sun is really essential and just to the point where your skin it starts to feel a bit warm and a little bit sort of enjoyable. But if it gets prickly and hot and if it starts to turn pink, that's enough. You don't need more than that.

Michelle: And what about the role of sunshine on blood pressure? As I've read some research in terms of promoting nitric oxide, for example, a vasodilator. And so, what do we know about the use of sunshine outside of vitamin D, for example?

Marc: Well, I haven't researched specifically on blood pressure, but it makes sense when... Sunshine is also another form of heat and I'm a big fan of using heat, whether it's a sauna, a hot bath, a steam room exercise. But you can actually just heat, overheat your body with just the sun. So, it will certainly vasodilate all the peripheral arterials. So, you get more blood going to the surface of the skin, which then flushes blood through that. And then when you get too hot, you think you want to jump in a pool or on a beach or a river or something and cool down and then you get the contrast bathing effect of pushing the blood into your organs and detoxifying.

So most people in the Western world are vitamin D deficient. And the other thing is our skin has, I don't think we talked about this last time, but our skin has about 2 million sweat glands and many, many sebaceous ducts where the skin dips down and comes back up. And that's where the oils are secreted. That keeps your skin moist, that protects your skin from the sun and also feed your microbiome on your skin.

Most people now, they bathe in chlorinated water and the chlorinated water, even at five parts per million will kill microorganisms, but it also oxidizes and strips off the natural oils on our skin, which makes us more prone to wrinkled skin, aging skin, sun damaged skin and skin cancer.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: So, the sun can be damaging. If you strip off the protective layer of your skin by bathing in chlorinated water so you've got those oils aren't there, so your skin can't stay as moist, it doesn't have that sun protection and then you overexpose yourself to sun, it can be damaging. So, it's a combination of having the right level of exposure to the sun, but also having your skin in a state.

And the other really good thing about or the thing you can do to help prevent sunburn and protect your skin from the sun is having carotenoids in your diet and that's all the red, orange, yellow vegetables and fruits that have beta carotene, lutein, zeaxanthin, and they give your skin a natural orange glow. But they're fat-soluble antioxidants. That is a natural sunscreen. So, having an orange glow from having lots of vegetables, and if you have too much carrot juice or something, you can turn orange, which is not dangerous. But it can be a bit...

Michelle: No. It just looks like a lot of fake tan, really.

Marc: In fact, they use that as fake tans. They use carotenoids as part of a fake tan. And it's a natural thing to have an orange glow. And actually, in clinical practice, if you stretch someone's palm open and you can look for anaemia in the skin creases, but we also look for a yellow tinge. And it's a rough clinical marker of how much vegetables they eat. And often you see vegetarians having a bit more of an orange-y tinge to their skin than people who don't eat lots of vegetables because the carotenoids aren't in that surface layer of fat. And those carotenoids, that orange tinge, actually is protective against the sun.

Michelle: I was recently having a chat to Dr. Joanna McMillan talking about extra virgin olive oil, and she was talking about the latest research of when you heat extra virgin olive oil and mix that with vegetables, new phytonutrients are created, a little like we touched upon in the last episode regarding kombucha. But I wanted to do a little bit more of a deep dive into kombucha and live ferments and the history of them and why we should be using them and can we overdo it? So, I know I've just asked a whole raft of different questions there, but I know that if I let you go on kombucha, you're just going to, it's a very exciting topic for you. So, tell us about kombucha.

Marc: Now, I've been really diving into ferments because fermentation is basically a process where you get a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. So, it's actually an ecosystem. And this is a very primitive, you've got prokaryotes and then the eukaryotes, the yeast and the bacteria that work together. And the yeast takes sugars and carbohydrates, simple sugars and ferments that to alcohol. And then the bacteria takes the alcohol and ferments that to organic acids. And essentially that makes vinegar, acetic acid or acetobacter makes acetic acid. There's also gluconobacter, which makes gluconic acid and glucuronic acid, which sort of aren't as sharp and spiky.

Michelle: That is great for the liver. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah. So, they're good for the liver and they taste a bit sweet and tart rather than sharp and spiky like acetic acid. They're super good for you. And if you go back to the history of kombucha, actually most people know white wine vinegar from wine and apple cider vinegar, which is from apples. And both apples and grapes are very high in polyphenols, resveratrol and all these other polyphenols. But one of the highest sources of polyphenols is tea and green tea actually has more polyphenols than grapes or apples, but tea doesn't have the sugars, whereas grapes and apples have the sugars that ferment naturally. Tea you have to sweeten. And the first tea ferments were probably fermented with honey and that's called jun, J-U-N.

Michelle: Right.

Marc: And our sort of Neolithic ancestors would have made some tea and put some honey in it and then let it sit and notice fizzy and a bit sparkly and a little bit alcoholic and delicious. And jun is an amazing drink. You can ferment that at home just with honey and tea. And then when sugar became available, tea with sugar, like sweet tea fermented is kombucha.

Michelle: Right.

Marc: And both kombucha and jun because they're fermented tea, they have all the polyphenol benefits of tea as well as all the benefits of the ferment. In that fermentation, the bacteria needs to make their own nutrients so they make things like B12 and biotin and even their own polyphenols. So, we did some research recently where we were interested in all the different organisms in our kombucha blend and in a particular one that I'm involved with, my business partner and friend has The Good Brew Kombucha Company and we use that as a base for making vinegars. And we did a metagenomic study and we found out that he uses a wild ferment, which means he's been cultivating this ferment for about 12 years just with organic sugar and tea and Daylesford spring water. And he has 200 probiotic strains there. And we didn't realize it because in the literature they say, "Oh, there's about 5 different strains or 11 different strains." But they had 200. So, it's a whole ecosystem.

Michelle: It's like drinking forest.

Marc: Yeah, that's right. It's like having a whole forest rather than having a monoculture of one. And often, the commercial companies, what they'll do is they'll lab grow a lactobacillus or a particular organism, and then they'll add that to a vinegar and extract and they'll call it kombucha, and they'll be certain of the live cultures at the time of bottling. But it's like adding a monoculture and then that doesn't survive that well. Whereas if you have a wild ferment, and the best wild ferment, you can do that at home. But you can make your own kombucha at home. And in fact, our vinegars are a starter culture.

Michelle: Wow.

Marc: So, if you just take a little bit of our vinegar or if you've got someone else with a bit of kombucha vinegar or some SCOBY, you add about five times the quantity of sweet tea and keep it in a warm place open to the air and wait a week and it will start fermenting. And then once it's fermented to vinegar, maybe a week or 10 days, depending on the temperature, you can 5 times it again and you can 5 times it again. So, even in a little 40-millilitre jar, you can create hundreds of litres of kombucha from that forever if you wanted to. So, it really is a prolific process. The benefits for your health are just, we're still exploring that. So, we published the first-ever human clinical trial of kombucha earlier this year.

Michelle: And what did you study? Did you study it on gut health or further afield?

Marc: We did it on glycemic control. So, we went to Jennie Brand-Miller's lab, which is the sugars lab at the University of Sydney, and that's where they really invented glycemic index. So, they're very expert on measuring blood sugar after meals and insulin response after meals. And we compared kombucha with a meal, with a standard like jasmine rice and peas. So, having a glass of kombucha with the meal compared to soda water or diet soft drink, which were the controls and the diet soft drink had the same pH as the kombucha. So, it wasn't just about the acid content, it was about something in the kombucha. And we found out this was in healthy adults. It was just a single dose. It wasn't ongoing. Just one serve of kombucha, one meal, measuring sugar and insulin afterwards. And we found that compared to the diet soft drink or the soda water, if you drank the kombucha, you had a 20% reduction in the glucose spike and a 15% reduction in the insulin spike after the meal, which is highly...

Michelle: Wow, that's good for inflammation and all of those, you know, adiposity.

Marc: And so many things. Glucose spikes, they're super relevant for people with metabolic syndrome or diabetes, because once you have this spike, then you have all these... It's basically like having too much sugar inside your body and it gets sticky and you get all these glycated end products...

Michelle: Yeah, that's right.

Marc: ...glycated hemoglobin and glycated other proteins that become unhealthy and sticky. So, if you can reduce glucose spikes, you can reduce sugar cravings, you can reduce brain fog and all sorts of skin conditions. And there's a whole range of conditions that are inflammation basically that are promoted by that by glucose spikes. So, keeping your blood sugar regular as a constant feed into your system is really powerful for health. And when I was talking to Jennie Brand-Miller about that, saying, "Why is the kombucha doing this?" In fact, the kombucha we used had a little bit of sugar in it compared to the diet soft drink and the soda water, which had no sugar.

And what we think is happening is we know that vinegar has an effect on blood sugar. If you have vinegar before a meal and that's a standard, having vinegar on salad before a meal will actually help with sugar spikes. But with the kombucha, we expect, because it's a very high polyphenol kombucha, and polyphenols slow gastric emptying. So, it takes your stomach a while to work on them and it releases slower into the intestine if you've got polyphenols.

And then also because you've got 200 strains of probiotic bacteria that are acid stable, when they hit the gut at 37 degrees and they've got carbohydrate all around them, they start metabolising those carbohydrates. So, you've got this combination of the probiotics waking up and starting to act on the carbohydrate in your stomach. And then the slow gastric emptying and that equates to a slow release of glucose into your system, which is ideally what you want because then you get constant energy.

Michelle: Yeah. That's right. So, they almost act like a fibre in some ways as well, like in the combination of using them.

Marc: Because fibre will slow gastric emptying, same with protein and fat.

Michelle: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I was doing some research on metabolic syndrome just recently. And some research came out of the States saying that there's only about 12% of the world has a really healthy metabolism, which is an alarming statistic. It was obviously a collection of multiple different research studies. So, it was an opinion of a learned group.

Marc: In fact, that it's actually a small proportion, the world has a good metabolism. When you follow traditional cuisines, which is different from diets, most cuisines have quite balanced and having antipasto before a meal or an aperitif, digestive bitters and stuff before a meal or some vinegar on your salad and some vegetables before a meal, these are standard things in a cuisine. And most cuisines also have living food as part of the cuisine.

Michelle: Yes. Yeah.

Marc: So, there's kimchi or sauerkraut or yogurt or something that's alive on your plate that then has a probiotic effect. And we've sort of lost that. So, people don't have living foods anymore. But what they do have is chlorine in their water and they have antibiotics and they have pesticides on the food and things like glyphosate, which kill bacteria. And then they have sanitisers and disinfectants and we have mostly dead ferments. And if you think about most of the foods we eat are fermented, so bread and cheese and wine and beer and tea and coffee and chocolate, they're all fermented foods.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: But they're dead ferment.

Michelle: They're dead. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah. They don't have the living bacteria with it. We need to add more life to our lives, bringing living foods into our lives.

Michelle: So, tell us about oxymels, because obviously that's a lead on from kombucha and vinegars. Tell us about...

Marc: Just being on this journey of discovery into honey. I've just been talking to this amazing company. I'm up in Byron Bay at the moment and there's amazing company called Gather By, which makes the world's most potent manuka honey. And manuka is, most people think it's from New Zealand. It's actually one strain of the Leptospermum bush that's in New Zealand, but there's more than 80 strains in Australia. It's actually an Australian native. They call it jelly bush. It's like a form of tea tree and they make medicinal honey forests, so they grow basically native Australian bushland. They regenerate using regenerative agriculture to get damaged land regrowing native Australian forest, and then they keep the bees in the one place. So, they have 12 acres per beehive. So, the bees are super happy and they make this really potent manuka honey.

And I'm actually working with this company now to make a whole range of natural health products from the honey. And I've been researching it and I didn't... Well, this stuff they never taught us in medical school. So, even the word medicine comes from the same origin as the word mead. So, the original medicines were forms of honey. And there's a product called, I guess a class of products called electuaries, which I'd never heard of before. I've only found out recently. So, electuaries are basically herbal-infused honeys.

Michelle: Right.

Marc: And these were very ancient medicines. And then oxymel, O-X-Y-M-E-L, is vinegar with honey and herbs as a form of medicine.

Michelle: Right.

Marc: And we know honey and vinegar are both great preservatives and they become a carrier for a whole range of herbal medicines. And they're a very ancient form of medicine that we're now looking to revive. And there's also a traditional Chinese formulations where they make honey pearls, which is basically honey and dried herbs rolled up into little balls that look like rabbit poo.

Michelle: Oh, yeah.

Marc: But they're actually little herbal balls or pastilles. I remember, 20 years ago...

Michelle: Certainly, great for children, isn't it? I mean, it's certainly great. That's so good because it's difficult enough getting these kind of things into children, but with this sweetness...

Marc: And having complex flavours. So, you can use the honey as the sweet flavour, but then you can add other herbs to make it more complex. So, I've been having so much fun because I love doing sort of witchcraft, I guess. So, I've been putting Dunaliella salina. So, Dunaliella salina is the world's most salt-tolerant life form. It's a red algae that makes our lakes red. And flamingos and shrimp are red because of that very high form of carotenoids, the ones I was talking about are in the skin. So, it's very salty. And the Dunaliella salina to survive in these salt lakes, it makes a lot of glycerol. So, it's full of membranes and sort of fat and carotenoids, but it's very salty. So, I mix that with honey and you've got concentrated sugar, fat, and salt, which is...

Michelle: Perfect. It's like a doughnut.

Marc: Yeah. Any food scientists say sugar, fat, and salt.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly.

Marc: But this is like the best form of sugar. So, you've got all the sweet honey.

Michelle: And the best form of salt.

Marc: The salt which is bioavailable, very high mineral content because it grows in seawater. And the fats and the carotenoids. So, this is intensely flavorful, salty honey. But it's like you have a tiny little bit on the end of a toothpick and it feels like you've eaten a whole doughnut. That's the kind of satisfaction it gives you.

Michelle: Okay. I think we're off to the sugar lab again.

Marc: Yeah. What they're doing is making bitter honey and sour honey with different herbs. So, it's never-ending what you can do as a carrier of different types of honey.

Michelle: Yeah. It's so exciting, isn't it? Yeah.

Marc: And then the switchel...

Michelle: Oh, what are they?

Marc: So, switchel is a traditional drink. So, that's a drink with vinegar and water, usually a pinch of salt and honey or molasses. And this was the original rehydration drink. So, the Roman army used to drink vinegar and water to keep them hydrated. And in the cotton fields in America, in the heat, they used to use that as a rehydration. And I think the vinegar helps keep the water safe because the vinegar can protect against pathogens. But having vinegar in your water, it's got a whole lot of electrolytes and other minerals there that the water doesn't. So, it's actually more rehydrating than water alone.

Michelle: And I remember in medical school when you just give water alone, often the water would, if the person was severely dehydrated, it wouldn't actually be able to get into the crips to be able to hydrate quickly. Yeah.

Marc: That's right. Water must have been absorbed by the body and adding a dash of vinegar to your water and just putting a dash of vinegar into your water bottle and drinking that throughout the day or a splash of vinegar before a meal is such an easy thing to do. And if it's a living vinegar like the kombucha vinegars we make, which they're literally Extremely Alive, it's our brand name, but they are extremely alive. It's such an easy way to add living food to your diet, but also balancing your sugar and having vinegar as part of your diet.

Michelle: So, we're going to move on to detoxification because I know you've done a lot of research in detoxification and it is a bit of a buzzword, influencers and it kind of gets a little bit, I guess demeaned through some of the hype around it. But obviously, throughout history, people have used detoxification, like for example, in Ayurveda, they use panchakarma, which is a 49-day ancient technique with so much tradition and so much wisdom in it. What can we learn? Like, do you still use the word detoxification process?

Marc: Absolutely.

Michelle: I know for you it's like, let's detox all the time. Tell us. Yeah, exactly.

Marc: Because we're toxifying ourselves all the time and being in the modern world, we're inventing new toxicants and new forms of toxicity. So, there's literally millions of different chemicals that we're producing now that were never produced 50 years ago that we're exposed to. And Ayurveda has probably the most sophisticated detoxification regimens through panchakarma and for getting rid of a lot of the fat-soluble toxicants because we don't normally excrete fats. That's really hard work, you want to use fat to store things. And there is a theory that... Well, there's a policy in public health that said the solution to pollution is dilution. They talk about the public health, putting waste into the oceans or the air and diluting the waste out.

Michelle: Yes.

Marc: We're paying the price of that now because there's no more sinks to put that pollution. But in our bodies, if you have fat-soluble toxins in your body, one of the body's strategies is to dilute them by having more fat.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: So, you store the toxic substances away in the fat. And then by having put on more fat, it sort of keeps it out of harm's way and keeps the toxicants from affecting your organs. But that means you become obese. And part of the obesity epidemic is related to chemicals, which we call obesogens, which are toxic chemicals that cause us to put on fat. So, people look at the obesity epidemic and it's two-thirds of Australians. I think we compete with America each year to be the fattest nation on Earth.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: And we're priming ourselves with these toxic chemicals that literally they're obesogens, they're diabetogens, which makes us more diabetic. And these are chemicals that we need to get out of our body. And I've been spending a lot of Ayurvedic wisdom and in fact, just to arc back a little bit, Ayurveda has this incredible product they call chyawanprash. So, chyawanprash is a 5000-year-old herbal formula with 50 different herbs. So, it's really complex, but it's based in honey and ghee. So, they mix honey and ghee with 50 different herbs and it's like an Indian health jam. And it's got all the different flavours. It's sweet, it's salty, it's spicy, it's sour, it's bitter, it's mostly made from amla, which is one of the highest sources of vitamin C, although Kakadu plum is notably higher. But they use that as a health jam, as a general tonic for the body. And there's a lot of general lifestyle recommendations that I always recommend that actually are detoxifying. So, whether it's tulsi tea, having filtered water, but first of all, you want to stop putting the toxic stuff in your body. So, having filtered water is sort of a no-brainer and having organic food where you can. I have this theory that's hard to prove it, but I have this theory that eating less poison is good for you, which sounds ridiculous.

Michelle: You're so wild.

Marc: It's not been proven. But, yeah, it's hard actually to prove that.

Michelle: I know.

Marc: It sounds obvious. It's good to drink less poison. And the old saying is if you don't use a filter, you are a filter. If you don't filter the stuff out first, it's going to end up in your body.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: So, first of all, having good food and good water, but then things like tulsi tea is a great detoxification agent and a lot of adaptogenic herbs. Partially, the way they make you adapt to stress is by reducing your toxic load. And once your toxic load is reduced, your body functions better.

Michelle: Right.

Marc: And even soreness and sweating, part of the benefits of sweating is you detoxify through your sweat. And one of my students, Joy Hussain, she's just finished her PhD on soreness and one of her final research projects was measuring pesticides in sweat. And of course, they're there, although they're the organophosphate pesticides which are sort of the nerve agents. They were designed off nerve gas.

Michelle: Yes.

Marc: And they're water-soluble, so you can pee them out. And about 10 years ago, one of my other students, Lisa Oates, and I did some research. We showed if you have 80% organic diet for one week, you'll drop your organophosphate load in your urine by 90%.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: And that's because they're water soluble and you pee them out. So, it's never too late. You start an organic diet, a week later you'll have a 90% reduced organophosphate load. But the thing is, even though they're water soluble and you pee them out, most people eat them every day. So, they're super persistent.

Michelle: Right.

Marc: But there's another class of pesticides which sort of the older class, which are the organic chlorines and that includes DDT, but also there's a lot of fat-soluble or lipophilic toxic chemicals in the environment, dioxins and PCP and PFAS and all the perfluorinated compounds. And they're really hard to excrete. So, you need a whole other strategy for getting the toxicity out of our fat.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: And in panchakarma, they do things like a little bit diluting it. So, they give you lots of oil to drink and oil massages and oil enemas.

Michelle: Yes.

Marc: So, they flush the oil through your body. So, it's basically giving your body an oil change. Just like your car has dirty oil that needs to be changed. Your body has oils that go rancid and they get toxicity built up in them. So, it's good to give your body an oil change too with all healthy fats.

Michelle: Awesome. So, I mean, oil is just such an amazing thing. We started off talking about that change of extra virgin olive oil and how it actually changes and sort of absorbs the phytonutrients and stuff. But I've always been really fascinated by mushrooms and they're almost like a class on their own between animals and vegetables.

Marc: Because there are already more animal than plant. Yeah.

Michelle: Yeah. And so, I want to talk about mushrooms because they've got such a historical usage and such a medicinal usage. But the research is coming in thick and fast, and I know you've got a special interest in mushrooms and they're also so good for detoxification from what I have known and used in clinic. So, mushrooms, what do we need to know from a kind of wellness hack perspective?

Marc: It's menued. There are so many different mushrooms. In fact, yesterday I caught up with Mason from Super Feast. He made Mason's Mushrooms. He's got this whole mushroom company, and I'm going to be working with him and we're going to get mushrooms and honey and all sorts of stuff. So, there are many different kinds of mushrooms. Some people think it's just button mushrooms or the Swiss browns or the magic mushrooms, the psychedelics. But there's hundreds of different species of mushrooms, many of them edible. And then there's all medicinal mushrooms like cordyceps and reishi and lion's mane and turkey tail and shiitake and maitake.

There's all these wonderful medicinal mushrooms which also have really broad properties in terms of gut health and the beta glycans in the mushrooms are really good for your gut. So, they'll act as a prebiotic and they're good for digestion, but there are so many. Cordyceps is great for oxygen-carrying capacity, so for athletes or an immune system. Reishi is great for immunity. All mushrooms are really good for the immune system. Turkey tail has anti-cancer benefits. About 10 years ago, I was really fortunate, I was up here in Byron Bay at the Uplift Festival and I got to spend a week, actually more, about nearly two weeks with Paul Stamets, he made that movie Fantastic Fungi with another friend of mine.

Michelle: Yeah, yeah, that's where I knew that name.

Marc: Paul Stamets was one of the top mycologists in the world. And I got to hang out with him. And then he gave me a whole lot of his mushrooms at the time because he wasn't able to sell them in Australia because they weren't TGA-approved and he didn't want to take them back to America with him. So, he gifted me all these mushroom tinctures which I took for the next couple of years and gave out to some friends.

But so, it's really hard to summarise mushroom. It's like saying, "Tell me about herbal medicine."

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: You could write books about it. But mushrooms are fantastic for your diet, just to include. There are some novel... And there's sort of TGA working out a novel foods like lion's mane mushroom. And there's a native form of lion's mane, which is great for brain health. And it looks a little bit like a brain. If you look at the lion's mane, beautiful-looking mushrooms, but you can actually have them fresh or you can just cook them up, just fry them up as a sort of protein substitute. You can have them dried and ground and have them as a powder. And we put mushrooms in all our extremely low vinegar. So, we use leaves, roots, flowers, fruits and fungi. So, we use a lot of lion's mane and turkey tail and maitake and shiitake and reishi in our different blends.

Super Feast, that's Mason's company, they have amazing range of coffee substitute drinks that you can make with mushrooms. And the Chinese medicine has a really rich history of mushroom products. A lot of the mushrooms are grown in China now and wild harvested there. And they've got a very sophisticated like, I think the Indians and Ayurvedic medicine has the most sophisticated sort of food and herbs and spices. And then from that, we get chyavanprash, which is this incredible health jam. And the Chinese have the incredible pharmacopeia of herbal substances from nature. And from then we get a lot of the benefits of mushrooms and a lot of the history and the uses of medicinal mushrooms comes from within Chinese medicine.

Mushrooms also have different paths because there's mycelial network which is under the ground and there's the fruiting body which is above the ground. And they're both good. They've both got different uses. And often I think about... If you think about your gut as being soil and the villi that lines your intestine, that they're roots that go down into the soil. You want to feed your soil, good compost, you want to keep biomass there. So, keeping organic material in a high quality, what we call prebiotics and fibre, but also a variety of living organisms into your gut is really important. And that's, if you want to improve the soil of your garden, you add living compost.

Michelle: Yeah.

Marc: You add living biomass. And it's the same with your gut. You need good quality living biomass to support your gut health and mushrooms are really good for that. Just like mushroom compost is great for your garden, mushrooms are great for your gut.

Michelle: Yeah, that's right. Exactly. In your opinion, because you talk a lot about sort of fasting and feasting from a historical perspective as well, what do you think is the main benefits in terms of detoxification and what do you mean by fast when you say fasting and what do you mean feast?

Marc: So, there's different levels of fasting because everybody fasts usually every night.

Michelle: Yeah. Of course. Well, you'd hope so.

Marc: You fast overnight. And you break your fast. And I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting. So, which means just extending your fast overnight and waiting till you're actually hungry before you eat. And you end up training your gut microbiome and you think you're in control of your diet and the foods you want and the foods you crave. But very often it's the little bacteria in your gut that are talking to your brain. And the gut-brain axis is really huge. There's more nerves going from your gut to your brain than from your brain to your gut. And that's often your gut is telling your brain what to eat and you need to train your gut.

So, extending that fast overnight and then waiting till you're hungry before you eat and then realising that the feast is in the first bite. When you break your fast, that first bite of whatever you're going to eat, and it's great to have something like a vinegar hit or fibre or starting off with savoury.

Michelle: Mushrooms.

Marc: Yeah, mushrooms. Absolutely. Starting the day with mushrooms or something that's not going to just spike your blood sugar. So, having protein and fat and fibre, that feast in the first bite is a really great concept because it's the first bit of chocolate cake where you get the benefit. It's not the tenth.

Michelle: Yeah. You'll have people arguing with you on that one. But yeah, I agree.

Marc: Well, then not hundred. By the time you get to the hundredth bit, it's over, it's an effort. But on that first bite where your taste buds are getting, exploding into flavour and you're really enjoying breaking that fast and satisfying your hunger, relishing that every day. So, being hungry every day and then breaking that fast and realising just how wonderful it is to be able to have amazing food to eat. So, that's the short answer of fasting every day. But then there are benefits for extended fasts, which sort of gives your whole immune system a reset.

Michelle: Yes.

Marc: Although, I think before you do extended fasts, you want to have some sort of experience or supervision and having an aim for what you're doing. And because people get quite radical with their fast, whether they do still water fast or juice fast or all these sort of things. And I'm not that big into dietary fads and just things that you can't maintain as part of your life. It’s easy to maintain, fasting overnight, extending that fast into the next day and then breaking your fast with something delicious and feasting on that first bite. Whereas, doing it 1 or 2 or 3 or 5 or 10-day fast, that needs some supervision and you want to have an objective, why are you doing that?

So, we know, again, our ancestors, they didn't feast every single day. They would have had periods of fasting. And when you do fast, and the research is showing this, you get like a whole immune system reset. You get apoptosis and autophagy.

So, apoptosis is recycling old cellular equipment. So, the proteins that have gone past their use-by date and they've become misfolded, they get broken down and turned back into amino acids and get rebuilt. So, that's sort of recycling your cellular machinery.

And then auto apoptosis, that's autophagy. So, apoptosis is programmed cell death where the cells that are getting to the end of their useful life or they're a bit aberrant or they're misformed or they've got some damage to them, they die, they get reabsorbed and their contents gets reused for other things.

Michelle: Yeah, that's clinical.

Marc: And that's real good process.

Michelle: Yeah. It's a big declutter, isn't it?

Marc: Yeah. It's like a spring clean for your cells.

Michelle: Which is, I think for people, if they can get into a rhythm of that, maybe even throughout the year like we do a cleaning process for or a deep dive in terms of maintaining our car or... It's those kind of rhythms that we're after of like you talk about a daily cycle but, a yearly cycle or...

Marc: That's right. And I think most people, we're out of that yearly cycle because we have fresh food all year round. Fruits are all year round and vegetables are all year round. Whereas if we start eating with the seasons, there is a season for putting on, having roast vegetables and big soups and then having a bit of... And often the fast would happen at the end of winter, before spring, just before the shoots come out where the fresh food is not as available. So, you have your little fast then and springtime then you have all the new green shoots and the young vegetables and things with full phytonutrients. And then you start regenerating, rebuilding again.

Michelle: Yeah. How nice. What a fantastic conversation, Marc. We always talk about how hard it is to be healthy or requires a sacrifice or that it's a lot of hard work. There's always that kind of narrative that sort of goes around that. But your wellness hacks through your inspiration and you're clearly obvious, so excited about it. When we put this into our daily life, into our daily philosophy, it really is a pursuit of enjoyment.

Marc: That's right. It should be joyful to be healthy.

Michelle: Yes.

Marc: Not a burden. It should be easy. But then adding just things into your life, whether it's fasting overnight, whether having living foods or vinegars into your routine or having, health jams or mushrooms, oxymels. And you can do all these things at home. To make sauerkraut at home, it's cheap and easy.

Michelle: It's fun.

Marc: And it's really fun.

Michelle: It's good for anger management, I found, when I smashed it.

Marc: Or smashing up a cabbage.

Michelle: It's beautiful.

Marc: But then also what happens is your kitchen becomes coated with good bacteria. So, just by making sauerkraut, you actually change the bacterial content of your home. So, it's a really good thing to do and I encourage people to make food. Our ancestors would have done, it was just part of the course to preserving food, but it's also delicious and it bio-activates the food. So, fermented foods are more nutritious than unfermented foods because the bacteria and yeast have their process where they make more nutrients.

Michelle: Yeah. And the more nutrients we have, the more we can use it for detoxification. So, we've got energy production, we've got immune support, we've got detoxification, we've got to use all these nutrients for all these things. So, it makes sense the more we have, the more the more benefit that we can receive. So, I wanted to finish. You have another poem for us because that was a highlight on the last podcast.

Marc: Yeah. I've got many poems. I think I didn't hear that. It's probably one of my simple ones, which is what I call the recipe for wellness. And it's super simple.

Bathe in beautiful water.

Prepare delicious food.

Make the most of every breath.

Dance through every mood.

Tend the soil beneath your feet.

Embrace sunshine from above.

Share your gifts with all the world

And fill your life with love.

Michelle: Oh, that's gorgeous.

Marc: I think we touched on quite a few of those things. We talked about water. We talked about preparing food. And I think preparing delicious food is even better than eating delicious food because it means if you prepare it, you're going to eat it anyway. But it means you're also in service. You're touching the food. You're preparing it even whether it's you're growing it yourself or getting the ingredients and going to the markets. And then that preparation process is like a meditation of wellness and enjoyment. And then you're in service and you give it to other people. So, I think the whole food service, we've done ourselves a disservice with fast foods and processed foods and packaged foods, and we've missed out on that whole preparation and just making sauerkraut is a health process.

Michelle: Oh, yeah. And it's really fun. And also learning something new as well. Like, I can't stick to a recipe. I just have to change them up, which is creative as well. Like, I take a recipe and then I'll merge it and make it my own. But that's my little thing.

Marc: Yeah. I'm like you, I love learning and I'm just diving deep into learning about bees right now and medicinal honey forests and how to make bees happy and how they can make us happy with their honey and what you can do with honey. So, oxymels and switchels and electuaries.

Michelle: We're going to have to do part three.

Marc: But I think they're also going to be the modern medicines as well once we start putting science behind us. I think there is more to do some science around all this as well, so lots of fun to be had.

Michelle: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your research, wisdom, approach, philosophy, insight. It was a real honour to chat to you today.

Marc: It's always a pleasure, Michelle. And yeah, I think we've known each other 20-plus years and always learning. Yeah.

Michelle: Thanks, Marc.

Marc: Okay. All the best.

Michelle: Thank you so much, everyone, for listening today. Don't forget that you can find all the show notes, transcripts and other resources from today's episode on the fx Medicine website. I'm Dr Michelle Woolhouse and thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.

Emma: This podcast is intended as healthcare practitioner education only, and it is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

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