#253 Sensational Spices and Healing Herbs with Simon Mills

Dr Rupy: Simon, if folks regularly included spices and herbs into their diet every day, what do you think are some of the incredible benefits that people actually don't realise they're doing by simply having spices and herbs in their diet every single day?

Simon Mills: Gosh, that's a long answer to that and I'll try and make it as tight as possible. The first thing to note is that eating spices is something that in Asia is normal. In Europe, for the mainly historical reasons when they haven't been, we can't grow them here. So it's something that we've got out of the habit of and the further north you go in Europe, the less spices there are. So it's obviously you can get by without them. My feeling is is that there are so many ways now with our new health issues and our environments now in which Asian spices among others, including the local herbs, are becoming increasingly important. A couple of areas particularly, they help in gut work, in digestion, they help with all the work that the digestive system does, which includes obviously making food safe and making it palatable and easy to use. But as we also know, most of our, well, almost all our immune system is linked to the gut and increasingly we show that herbs and spices are helpful there. Another one, just when we thought we were running out of ideas, is that we now know that some of the spices at least, and probably all of them, have a unique way of interacting with the microbiome that other plant-based things don't. So we're getting really excited about the prospects of working with the microbiome and herbs and spices. And that's just the digestion. Then we have their effect on circulation, which I'm going to dwell on a bit later, I think, in which if you have something warming, it is literally warming. We can see the body, the temperature on the skin go up. That means there's more blood moving and blood brings oxygen, it brings goodness, it flushes out not so good stuff. So improved circulation is almost always helpful for almost anything. And then the even more exciting things that are emerging in terms of what they do to our brain because we used to think of the brain as insulated from the rest of the body behind the blood-brain barrier, sort of a wall and a sort of a reinforced capillary blood vessel wall that stopped things getting into the brain and the brain was somehow separate from the rest of us. Oh no, it ain't. The blood-brain barrier is a very active player. It's interacting constantly with the rest of the body and is sending messages, is a messenger service, so to speak, into the brain. And so often it becomes a troublemaker in the brain by provoking inflammation in the brain, what we call neuroinflammation. And a lot of the problems, dementia problems, mental and psychological problems are now increasingly being linked to inflammation in the brain, fire in the brain, someone called it. And spices seem to be getting away in there too. So, you know, stop me when you run out of time.

Dr Rupy: Those are definitely some of the areas that I don't think people realise that they are impacting by having spices.

Simon Mills: Most people think of them as flavours, don't they?

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And with good reason. I think most people would just think, all right, well, this is a way in which to make my vegetables more palatable, more digestible. And they are probably aware of the general anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits, but just how far-reaching they can have properties, they can have these impacts on digestion, circulation and brain, as we've just, you know, alluded to now, but I'm sure we're going to go a lot deeper. I think it's going to be quite surprising for a lot of people.

Simon Mills: It usually is. Yeah. And I mean, we're going to talk about dosing as well, because when you, especially if you're a European or northern European, your idea of a herb and spice is a little sprinkle on top. Anyone who works with an Asian recipe will know that you pile it in. And the dosing is quite significant. So you, you know, it's been calculated that the average individual living in rural India, for example, will take four to five grams of spices per day. That's a quite a heap on the on the plate.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I remember coming across that study that looked at migrants living in Leicester and they found they were having an average of two grams of ground turmeric in their daily diet. And for most people, particularly if you've grown up on a British diet or a northern European diet, that seems like a hefty amount. Whereas for me, that's like, oh yeah, that's I can see that. That's an everyday dose.

Simon Mills: Yeah. Well, sometimes we have to suggest that they take their, especially for things like turmeric, which are very tasty, but strong tasting, that we sometimes suggest they take their spices as a supplement in a capsule or some way that doesn't mean they have to keep tasting it every meal. But we can come on to that too.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, definitely. Okay. In terms of some of the benefits that you perhaps first came across, you know, we've talked briefly about coughs and colds and staving off flus. I think some people who have come across that, you know, in a medicinal environment. Why do spices and herbs have this impact on preventing colds? And which ones in particular stand out to you as some of those ones that we should be having, particularly when we feel or in a preventative manner as well?

Simon Mills: It's an excellent place to start this conversation because there are a couple of strong players coming up in just a minute. But let's just take a step back and what do we mean by colds and coughs? We think of them as virus things nowadays. But it's not what it feels like. The wisdom that I like is what comes out of experience. And we don't call it a common cold for nothing because what you feel pretty much mostly is cold. And typically, you're suddenly notice drafts and they're sort of behind you. You didn't notice them before and you have to start tucking your shirt in because you're starting feeling the cold coming into you and you feel the cold up in your nostrils and you know, that aha moment, oh dear, you know, I was one of them again. And you start getting the shivers or you then start wanting a hot bath or a hot water bottle or just wrap yourself up in blankets. That's what cold feels like. So we don't call it a common cold for nothing. Now, that is what people latched on because they didn't have viruses to explain things. They had what they felt like. So they felt cold coming on. And we just need to take another step back because what they meant by cold was something that so many of us don't get much experience of these days. It's the feeling you, the absolute cold is that of a dead body. A beloved one, those of you who know that will feel that when they touch their parent or whoever's died, the huge shock of how cold, like stone it is. So cold was always associated with death, but also with disease because the idea was then that heat was life and that a diminution in heat was the beginning of trouble. And that's true for every tradition, whether it's in China or India or North America or Europe. Cold was another word for many diseases. And just a quick sideline, fever then becomes a healthy response to cold because it's the body firing up the furnaces to get the cold out. We now know that it's firing up the white blood cells. So we we want to nurture and manage fever, but they always did because that was our primary defense. So that's the first answer to your question. When you take a warming spice, it's like doing that for you. So it's almost like having a fever in a jar. You are actually doing that work. And then here's the thing. If you feel that cold coming on and those symptoms and you get, and we'll do this in a minute, you get some freshly ground ginger or ideally crushed fresh ginger and some powdered cinnamon and you make a tea with the two of them because somewhere in the good heavens above, someone thought of them in the same breath. They are perfect companions. They really suit each other perfectly. Ginger and cinnamon, it's the one home trick that I would pass on to anybody. And when do you use it? You use it when you feel cold. Now, that could be with a cold, but it might also be your arthritic joint. It might be a headache. How do you know it's a cold headache? You want to put a hot pack on it or heat on the joint or it might be menstrual cramps. You put a hot water bottle on it because it feels comfortable. That's a cold cramp. Those are when you use cinnamon and ginger. And it works instantly. That's the point. We're not waiting for weeks. It works on the spot. And so anyone who starts this knows that it works because they can feel it and they won't need persuading to carry on doing it. So I've just bolstered the cinnamon and ginger trade.

Dr Rupy: And you mentioned something important there, a couple of things I want to pick up on. Freshly ground cinnamon. So is there a reason why freshly ground cinnamon, so with the bark and then crushing that, that's more potent? Is there a rule of thumb there?

Simon Mills: It's a little bit, it's got more aromatics because they're the things you smell. And we know that many of them are actually pharmacologically, medicinally important. So that's one reason. The other one is unfortunately in our industrialized supply chains, most of the powdered herbs and spices we buy have been powdered for some time. And once you powder them, they go, they denature quite quickly, they go off. So those of us who use spices in the kitchen a lot know that to have a spice mill and grind your seeds and your barks and things fresh, I mean, you can smell it, can't you? It's just hits you between the eyes. So that's my only preference. And with ginger, I mean, traditionally, of course, everything had to be dried because it had to come a long way. And now because of our supply chains, we can buy fresh ginger. And again, you're going to get a lot more aromatics in the fresh and it's my favorite to use the fresh ginger at home at least. The dried ginger is stronger and more acrid and more heating. Whereas fresh ginger has got a more dispersive and settling quality to it.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. We did a dive into the different types of polyphenols that you find in dried versus fresh ginger and they are remarkably different. You're just getting a different sort of collection, but yeah.

Simon Mills: It's because that chemistry changes with oxidation. And so you will get a different mix. And in traditional medicine in China and India, they differentiate the dried from the fresh as well. They give them different qualities.

Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Are they different use cases for the dried and the fresh depending on?

Simon Mills: Usually, yeah, the dried is often used for stronger work and often in the hands of a practitioner rather than self-care.

Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Okay. For things that needed a bit more heavy lifting, for example.

Simon Mills: Gotcha. Uh-huh.

Dr Rupy: And you know, through the lens of science or modern science, I should say, we know now that the spices that warm you up are basically bolstering your innate immune system. The temperature at which your body is naturally, but then when it's having a fever or you're a cough is slightly higher by a couple of degrees or so, centigrade. And that's the optimal environment for, you know, your white blood cells.

Simon Mills: The guys that do the hard work.

Dr Rupy: Totally. Yeah, yeah, which is why there's sort of debate, I would say healthy debate about the use of antipyretics, things like paracetamol in the first instances of your coughs and colds, you know, whether you're actually dampening your immune response initially and actually prolonging the length of your illness. It is really interesting, you know, to see.

Simon Mills: It's what I believe, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think we've lost the capacity to run a good fever because we're not given any guidance or help at this at the moment. So the first thing that a harassed parent will do and you'll feel tempted in your time is to reach for Calpol when their child gets a fever or sick in some way. That's just paracetamol, isn't it? And all that's doing is stopping the whole thing. Which we've seen before because they used to give aspirin for the same reason. And there were other things and of course antibiotics are always lurking nearby. There's a sense of disappointment that we never allowed that child to cut its teeth on a proper battle. And my own straw polling is that if you allow someone to do that properly and get a proper fever with a crisis and then the lysis, the recovery point and then treat it for a couple of days afterwards with the rest it deserves, that may be all you never need to do in your life. That you don't get things after that because you've armed up.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, your immune system. I mean, there is, there's a sort of argument for using antipyretics in certain circumstances, particularly if a child has had febrile convulsions or is having a really high temperature. But I think the reservation is for that, you know, just keeping a close eye on the temperature, making sure it's not going really high.

Simon Mills: Fever can be dangerous for children. Yeah, yeah. The old fever management tricks saw those coming, by the way. And a lot of the traditional remedies, we're not going to go into that now, it's not appropriate for a just a quick off the cuff comment, but some of the traditional mixes and approaches to fever included very strongly things to reduce convulsions and fitting and some of the other negative consequences of fevers with remedies specifically aimed to do that, but without suppressing the actual job to be done.

Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. So there's a balancing act to be to be done here.

Simon Mills: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, if we're talking to people at home with their kids and so on, we're not going to say go in and go crazy with a fever, but just, you know, just pause a little bit perhaps before reaching for the complex.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. On the flip side, let's say we're just dealing with adults here. Is there a danger of having too many warming spices every every day? My mum always says this to me. I, you know, looking at traditional sort of Ayurvedic doshas, I'm on the hot side. And so I should sort of steer clear of having too much ginger in my diet, for example, or too many sort of like other warming aromatics in my diet. Are there any sort of negative side effects of having too much of the ginger, let's say?

Simon Mills: Potentially. A lot of what we're talking about today are things you do on the moment rather than long-term treatment plans. And we do accept the fact that many people in Asia do have a lot of warming spices and seem to get by. And there was one anthropological study you may know of where they found the closer you were to the equator, the hotter the diet was. And one possible explanation is is that of course that fires up your gastric defenses, your stomach juices, your acid, which of course are there to protect you from infection. So there may be that as another feature and fighting fire with fire is one way of describing that. But yes, there are times when we back off from too much heat. I'm a bit like you. I I tend to fire up quite easily. So I don't use it in treatment terms so much. But even us will have moments when we feel the cold. And short-term use of these things can just in the short term be very helpful. But there are other people, you know, we can sort of break the population down, walk into a room, there's one lot that opens the window, you know, immediately, and there's another lot that says, please close the window. That the second lot will definitely find the heating things more often appropriate. Those who fire up easily, call our winter's bracing. You know, you can tell them a mile off, can't you? You know, I get better. Other other people are shrouded in coats. It's when you're shrouded in coats, when you're feeling the cold that this becomes particularly useful. And in Europe, you know, there's a lot of that about, isn't there?

Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, so cinnamon, ginger, what are some, what are some of your favorite spices that we could jump off into another conversation?

Simon Mills: Well, those are definitely right up there. Uh, one that comes up on the inside track all the time and is pretty much nosing in the head is cardamom.

Dr Rupy: Aha.

Simon Mills: I, apart from having a fantastic taste, it's actually very closely related to ginger. It's a very similar family and to another one which we're going to talk about, which is turmeric. They're both very closely related. They're in the ginger family. Cardamom, I'm increasingly seeing, it's got that punchy quality, isn't it? And there's that spicy quality to it. But it was used particularly in convalescence, in recovery from when you've been ill. And you want to build your strength up. And particularly when that's down here in the digestion, which it often is. Cardamom, I think, ticks so many boxes as a longer term remedy for building strength, warming you as it goes, but also having this sort of tonic recovery approach. And that's how it's described often in China, for example, it was used in convalescent care. And there's something else we've forgotten, you know, I hinted at it earlier. You have a fever, but then you need to recover. Nowadays, we go straight back to work. And how proud we are. That's not the way it should be. You do need a recovery time after you've fought a battle. And this convalescent phase is an important one for getting finishing the job. So a lot of our traditions, our old wisdoms come into the recovery phase of illness and treatment. And I would put cardamom up there as a definitely one for that.

Dr Rupy: What does what does cardamom do in the body to help us recover and and get get through that sort of the aftermath of of any illness?

Simon Mills: So this is speculation, but um, it feels like and seems like in terms of what we know about other spices which are more researched, that it actually does switch on digestion in a number of ways. It's one of those what we call digestive remedies that that seems to work by just, well, this is interesting, isn't it? Because we now we know that the wall of the digestive tract is full of receptors, sensors, things reading, feeling the contents. And there's some really important ones coming up with smell, almost literally the contents. They're they're chemical sensors. And they're switched on hardwired to switch on all sorts of things elsewhere in the body. And in the spices, we're seeing remedies that look as though they may be talking to those receptors, those um, uh, that those agents of change, um, so that they do switch on digestive performance, they help with the movement of the gut, the peristalsis. And then here's the thing, if you feel that cold coming on and those symptoms and you get, and we'll do this in a minute, you get some freshly ground ginger or ideally crushed fresh ginger and some powdered cinnamon and you make a tea with the two of them because somewhere in the good heavens above, someone thought of them in the same breath. They are perfect companions. They really suit each other perfectly. Ginger and cinnamon, it's the one home trick that I would pass on to anybody. And when do you use it? You use it when you feel cold. Now, that could be with a cold, but it might also be your arthritic joint. It might be a headache. How do you know it's a cold headache? You want to put a hot pack on it or heat on the joint or it might be menstrual cramps. You put a hot water bottle on it because it feels comfortable. That's a cold cramp. Those are when you use cinnamon and ginger. And it works instantly. That's the point. We're not waiting for weeks. It works on the spot. And so anyone who starts this knows that it works because they can feel it and they won't need persuading to carry on doing it. So I've just bolstered the cinnamon and ginger trade.

Dr Rupy: And you mentioned something important there, a couple of things I want to pick up on. Freshly ground cinnamon. So is there a reason why freshly ground cinnamon, so with the bark and then crushing that, that's more potent? Is there a rule of thumb there?

Simon Mills: It's a little bit, it's got more aromatics because they're the things you smell. And we know that many of them are actually pharmacologically, medicinally important. So that's one reason. The other one is unfortunately in our industrialized supply chains, most of the powdered herbs and spices we buy have been powdered for some time. And once you powder them, they go, they denature quite quickly, they go off. So those of us who use spices in the kitchen a lot know that to have a spice mill and grind your seeds and your barks and things fresh, I mean, you can smell it, can't you? It's just hits you between the eyes. So that's my only preference. And with ginger, I mean, traditionally, of course, everything had to be dried because it had to come a long way. And now because of our supply chains, we can buy fresh ginger. And again, you're going to get a lot more aromatics in the fresh and it's my favorite to use the fresh ginger at home at least. The dried ginger is stronger and more acrid and more heating. Whereas fresh ginger has got a more dispersive and settling quality to it.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. We did a dive into the different types of polyphenols that you find in dried versus fresh ginger and they are remarkably different. You're just getting a different sort of collection, but yeah.

Simon Mills: It's because that chemistry changes with oxidation. And so you will get a different mix. And in traditional medicine in China and India, they differentiate the dried from the fresh as well. They give them different qualities.

Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Are they different use cases for the dried and the fresh depending on?

Simon Mills: Usually, yeah, the dried is often used for stronger work and often in the hands of a practitioner rather than self-care.

Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Okay. For things that needed a bit more heavy lifting, for example.

Simon Mills: Gotcha. Uh-huh.

Dr Rupy: And you know, through the lens of science or modern science, I should say, we know now that the spices that warm you up are basically bolstering your innate immune system. The temperature at which your body is naturally, but then when it's having a fever or you're a cough is slightly higher by a couple of degrees or so, centigrade. And that's the optimal environment for, you know, your white blood cells.

Simon Mills: The guys that do the hard work.

Dr Rupy: Totally. Yeah, yeah, which is why there's sort of debate, I would say healthy debate about the use of antipyretics, things like paracetamol in the first instances of your coughs and colds, you know, whether you're actually dampening your immune response initially and actually prolonging the length of your illness. It is really interesting, you know, to see.

Simon Mills: It's what I believe, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think we've lost the capacity to run a good fever because we're not given any guidance or help at this at the moment. So the first thing that a harassed parent will do and you'll feel tempted in your time is to reach for Calpol when their child gets a fever or sick in some way. That's just paracetamol, isn't it? And all that's doing is stopping the whole thing. Which we've seen before because they used to give aspirin for the same reason. And there were other things and of course antibiotics are always lurking nearby. There's a sense of disappointment that we never allowed that child to cut its teeth on a proper battle. And my own straw polling is that if you allow someone to do that properly and get a proper fever with a crisis and then the lysis, the recovery point and then treat it for a couple of days afterwards with the rest it deserves, that may be all you never need to do in your life. That you don't get things after that because you've armed up.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, your immune system. I mean, there is, there's a sort of argument for using antipyretics in certain circumstances, particularly if a child has had febrile convulsions or is having a really high temperature. But I think the reservation is for that, you know, just keeping a close eye on the temperature, making sure it's not going really high.

Simon Mills: Fever can be dangerous for children. Yeah, yeah. The old fever management tricks saw those coming, by the way. And a lot of the traditional remedies, we're not going to go into that now, it's not appropriate for a just a quick off the cuff comment, but some of the traditional mixes and approaches to fever included very strongly things to reduce convulsions and fitting and some of the other negative consequences of fevers with remedies specifically aimed to do that, but without suppressing the actual job to be done.

Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. So there's a balancing act to be to be done here.

Simon Mills: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, if we're talking to people at home with their kids and so on, we're not going to say go in and go crazy with a fever, but just, you know, just pause a little bit perhaps before reaching for the complex.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. On the flip side, let's say we're just dealing with adults here. Is there a danger of having too many warming spices every every day? My mum always says this to me. I, you know, looking at traditional sort of Ayurvedic doshas, I'm on the hot side. And so I should sort of steer clear of having too much ginger in my diet, for example, or too many sort of like other warming aromatics in my diet. Are there any sort of negative side effects of having too much of the ginger, let's say?

Simon Mills: Potentially. A lot of what we're talking about today are things you do on the moment rather than long-term treatment plans. And we do accept the fact that many people in Asia do have a lot of warming spices and seem to get by. And there was one anthropological study you may know of where they found the closer you were to the equator, the hotter the diet was. And one possible explanation is is that of course that fires up your gastric defenses, your stomach juices, your acid, which of course are there to protect you from infection. So there may be that as another feature and fighting fire with fire is one way of describing that. But yes, there are times when we back off from too much heat. I'm a bit like you. I I tend to fire up quite easily. So I don't use it in treatment terms so much. But even us will have moments when we feel the cold. And short-term use of these things can just in the short term be very helpful. But there are other people, you know, we can sort of break the population down, walk into a room, there's one lot that opens the window, you know, immediately, and there's another lot that says, please close the window. That the second lot will definitely find the heating things more often appropriate. Those who fire up easily, call our winter's bracing. You know, you can tell them a mile off, can't you? You know, I get better. Other other people are shrouded in coats. It's when you're shrouded in coats, when you're feeling the cold that this becomes particularly useful. And in Europe, you know, there's a lot of that about, isn't there?

Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, so cinnamon, ginger, what are some, what are some of your favorite spices that we could jump off into another conversation?

Simon Mills: Well, those are definitely right up there. Uh, one that comes up on the inside track all the time and is pretty much nosing in the head is cardamom.

Dr Rupy: Aha.

Simon Mills: I, apart from having a fantastic taste, it's actually very closely related to ginger. It's a very similar family and to another one which we're going to talk about, which is turmeric. They're both very closely related. They're in the ginger family. Cardamom, I'm increasingly seeing, it's got that punchy quality, isn't it? And there's that spicy quality to it. But it was used particularly in convalescence, in recovery from when you've been ill. And you want to build your strength up. And particularly when that's down here in the digestion, which it often is. Cardamom, I think, ticks so many boxes as a longer term remedy for building strength, warming you as it goes, but also having this sort of tonic recovery approach. And that's how it's described often in China, for example, it was used in convalescent care. And there's something else we've forgotten, you know, I hinted at it earlier. You have a fever, but then you need to recover. Nowadays, we go straight back to work. And how proud we are. That's not the way it should be. You do need a recovery time after you've fought a battle. And this convalescent phase is an important one for getting finishing the job. So a lot of our traditions, our old wisdoms come into the recovery phase of illness and treatment. And I would put cardamom up there as a definitely one for that.

Dr Rupy: What does what does cardamom do in the body to help us recover and and get get through that sort of the aftermath of of any illness?

Simon Mills: So this is speculation, but um, it feels like and seems like in terms of what we know about other spices which are more researched, that it actually does switch on digestion in a number of ways. It's one of those what we call digestive remedies that that seems to work by just, well, this is interesting, isn't it? Because we now we know that the wall of the digestive tract is full of receptors, sensors, things reading, feeling the contents. And there's some really important ones coming up with smell, almost literally the contents. They're they're chemical sensors. And they're switched on hardwired to switch on all sorts of things elsewhere in the body. And in the spices, we're seeing remedies that look as though they may be talking to those receptors, those um, uh, that those agents of change, um, so that they do switch on digestive performance, they help with the movement of the gut, the peristalsis. And then here's the thing, we're increasingly becoming excited by, they have an effect on the microbiome and so they're prebiotic at the very least. We're now introducing the concept of postbiotic. So these are things that the microbes in the gut process themselves and convert into something else. And the turmeric is the one that I've we're going to come on to from one of your earlier questions. Turmeric increasingly looks like it talks, engages with what we call the crosstalk between our microbes who are so important to us and the rest of us, that constant conversation going on. And it looks as though in some quite specific ways, turmeric, curcumin works at that level. And I'm going to put my shirt on the fact that cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, the others on that list, cumin is another one, cardamom, yeah, are quite likely from what we know already about the chemistry and the pharmacology involved here, quite likely to be working at that level.

Dr Rupy: Okay, okay.

Simon Mills: And once we get into that level, then the whole world opens up.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And this is why I like talking to you, Simon, because you can distinguish between what is speculation and be, you know, true to what we what we don't know and what we do know. And for what we do know, you know, there are some explanations like you just talked about, the receptors along the gut and how that communicates to the brain and how we can how we can begin to sort of provide some evidence base or some understanding of why these spices are having such vast effects. Um, but still, you know, where there isn't as much and we have to lean into tradition, we lean into tradition. And you know, traditions are just sort of experiments that worked. That's.

Simon Mills: That's nicely said. I keep coming back to that and and, you know, I mean, I'm long enough in the tooth to have been through the medical arguments, you know, that what we're talking about is mumbo jumbo. It's not proper science, it's not been tested in randomized clinical control trials. Increasingly, actually, it has. The evidence for spices and blood sugar and fat control, what we call metabolic syndrome, is stacking up with proper randomized control trials. So let's not dismiss that. But unlike a new drug, we don't have to prove something if as humans, we've already found it helpful. And, you know, I I push back against the idea that everything we've done is, you know, medicine was nowhere until 150 or 50 years ago. Previously, it was all, you know, awful. No, we're human beings, we're intelligent. And if we're looking after our families and our children and ourselves, we're going to be fiercely intelligent, aren't we? We're not going to want to mess around. Um, millions of people doing that and finding amazingly that they're coming to agreements on what things work. And then some guy going to write it down and turn into a text for a whole traditional medicine, whether it's Ayurvedic or traditional Chinese or Galenic or whatever, the systems of medicine were all brought together out of lots of millions of home experiments. To me, that's real wisdom. And to say otherwise means that they're calling people stupid. We're not stupid.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Mills: So, yeah, these are valuable. What we're doing often with speculation by saying this is how it might work, like we were just saying with cardamom, is providing a possible explanation for what we see cardamom doing.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the word metabolism there. Uh, and I think many people will have some sort of understanding of what we mean by metabolism, but drilling down into it, what we're talking about, I guess, is the body's ability to convert nutrients into fuel and um, do or in the context of modern day illnesses, preventing the imbalance of blood sugar as a result of processed foods and and high carbohydrate, high refined carbohydrate um diets, um as well as uh fat and burning fat. Now, before we talk about metabolism, I think, you know, the the major thing is excess calorie consumption or excess energy, making sure that you're getting your diet sorted. But I'm imagining spices and herbs have a part to play in improving the metabolism of people to to burn fat, to uh improve people's um adiposity, whether that is around their organs or subcutaneously as well. Perhaps we could talk a bit more about spices in that in that capacity.

Simon Mills: Lovely. Um, working with Pukka, we developed an advocacy program which was to see how we could see benefits in adding spices and herbs to the diet. So very much following up this conversation. I mean, just to see and so we put quite a lot of effort into that and came up with a paper which is out there, which looked at the evidence for the spices we've been talking about and a few others on metabolic processes in the body, the sort of things that might if they went wrong lead to a diabetes, cardiovascular heart problems, and or dementia, all of which we now know are linked to these metabolic disturbances. And as you were saying, so much of that is now driven by the quality of the diet that we eat, which is a lot more processed, fast foods, which challenge particularly blood sugar control, but also fat management. And we now know that a lot of our ills come directly from that, as you were saying. So your question is, can herbs and spices add benefit to our measures to combat that? And the answer is absolutely so. And the evidence is actually quite persuasive now. And there are properly controlled studies that show ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, cardamom, cumin, fenugreek, nigella, uh, seed, um, black, um, uh, what's it name's gone suddenly, but nigella is what you always call it. Um, uh, have increasingly impressive evidence for managing, dampening down blood sugar fluctuations, helping with processing, um, uh, our metabolites, particularly those fast ones, the fat and sugar. Um, there isn't a straight line saying this is going to stop your diabetes, but there's some very promising leads to suggest that if that's what you're concerned with, then it's an easy win to eat Asian as I sometimes say.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, nigella, I think, uh, black cumin might be one of the ways in which we describe it. I mean, it's one of my favorite spices. I think it's, I use it all the time. It's underutilized. Why might some of these spices have this positive impact on things like blood sugar regulation, for example? Is it via some of the similar mechanisms that you've just described? They have a warming effect and that they have a thermogenic effect or their potential other explanations for for their impact?

Simon Mills: We don't know. We are speculating a lot here. So what we're we're watching things happen without necessarily having all the clues, but they what happens down in the digestion is an extraordinary miracle. It's so complex. We've got all this stuff that we eat. Somehow the body's got to make sense of it all. And so there's lots of conversation, signaling going on. As I said earlier, the lining of the gut is full of these receptors, signaling devices that switch on things, switch off things. So our speculation is is that these spices work on some of those signaling devices to change the dynamics.

Dr Rupy: So we also have this hormonal component in blood sugar and metabolic control in which insulin, whose job it is is to, valiantly, I think, push the glucose, the sugar into the cells where it's needed. That's its job. All the other hormones have the opposite job to bring sugar out. So our blood sugar levels have an hormonal impact. And we're beginning to see ways in which the those signals on the gut wall can actually modulate hormone responses in the body. So that's another speculation. Uh, there's a big interest of mine which is in liver bile function because bile is a major player here. Bile is produced by the liver as its own get out clause. It's obviously helpful in digesting fats. We talked about that. Um, and the liver is constantly nosing around picking up signals. Um, it's there supervising the whole gamut and particularly anything metabolic, liver is all over it. So we've got all sorts of other speculative ways in which herbs and spices can affect the liver differently from other foods.

Simon Mills: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Rupy: There is the thermogenic effect. Uh-huh. Obviously, if you're heating up, you're also using up sugars and fats. Um, so anything that gets more heat going is going to help balance that. And I think the the last big speculative explanation will lie with the work of the microbiome because we know that changing the the population of the gut flora will change your capacity to put on fat and weight. And there's the early experiments, wasn't there where they have different, they had fat mice and and not fat mice and they found that the difference was simply in the microbiome.

Simon Mills: Yeah.

Dr Rupy: So there's multitude, there's a multitude of potential pathways by which having more spices in the diet can improve metabolism, could improve metabolism, um, improve your fat burning potential if that's something that people are interested in. And also the hormonal interplay that governs blood sugar regulation. Um, and I think you've articulated it so well there just to summarize, changing the signaling that governs uh insulin um and the effectiveness of insulin driving sugar from the bloodstream into various cells, whether that be liver, muscle, fat cells, reducing the inflammation as well, more generally, particularly if you are overweight where you have more inflammation uh in the bloodstream. Um, and then also most likely going to be via the microbiota as well, which is like a big area and having that uh prebiotic and postbiotic effect. Just to sort of clarify prebiotics, um, uh, so the specialized types of fiber that um uniquely support your microbes, the good guys, your bacteria, viruses, nematodes, etc. Um, when I look, we've recently looked into prebiotic valuations uh guided by some scientists have looked at the data and and you know, the typical ones come up, artichokes, chicory, leaks, uh onions, garlic, that kind of stuff. But there isn't too much information out there on the amounts of things like uh GOS and FOS, the fructans, the inulin, etc. Um, and I couldn't find anything on spices at all. But clearly there is there is something going on there, right?

Simon Mills: That's right. Yeah, no, I've written, I've reviewed papers on this very topic and uh, you're right, there's a big deficit of information, but there's no doubt that some of the polyphenol type um elements within spices, uh, which are, you know, and there's a whole range of various types of polyphenols, but these are the interesting molecules in spices and and herbal remedies generally, have a have their own effect on the uh population microbes there, which is sort of different from the fiber effect that you get with inulin and so on. So we are talking about another type of prebiotic. And that's where the notion of postbiotic comes in because what we're learning, I mean, let's take the average flavonoid molecule, which is the major group of polyphenols. Everyone's very happy to have more flavonoids in their diet for good reasons. But did you know that flavonoids get hardly absorbed at all?

Dr Rupy: Oh, really?

Simon Mills: They're a large molecule, very little of it gets into the body itself. And I remember decades ago being warned off this subject by a learned professor, I think in Germany, saying you're wasting your time, boy. Um, flavonoids don't get absorbed. There must be something else about all this. And that was before we learned that actually flavonoids routinely get broken into two very, a flavonoid is a polyphenol, which means essentially two small molecules called phenols lashed together. Um, the uh, effect on the microbiome, the cell, the cells down there convert flavonoids into simple phenols. And you want to know an example of a simple phenol? Aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid is a simple phenol. And some of us have been watching with some interest the parallel insights into the role of aspirin in healthcare and the role of fruit and vegetables in healthcare. And it's remarkable how parallel they are. And I've gone around saying just to be very simple, if you're eating fruit and vegetables, it's like having a healthy dose of aspirin. And that's because of the microbiome converting the flavonoids, the polyphenols into something active. Um, and they're doing that for all the other ones. And it's not just aspirin, you're getting lots of other very active molecules being generated as postbiotics because it's after the microbes have worked on it and they convert these ingredients in spices and so on into something that's healthy. And the more we learn about herbs and spices, the more we think, yeah, that's it.

Dr Rupy: Yeah.

Simon Mills: It's the microbiome stupid.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned um something earlier about spices having a beneficial effect on the the microbiome but also the intestinal barrier, I believe. Um so the sort of the mucus layer, the tight junctions, the the various points at which we pass nutrients that have been digested in the intestinal tract into the bloodstream. What what is actually going on in that respect? If you if we do know what's going on. What how is how are spices and and herbs and other sort of polyphenol rich ingredients having an impact on the intestinal barrier itself?

Simon Mills: Um, the the one we know about most is curcumin, turmeric.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: Turmeric is the spice. Curcumin is the yellow pigment that everyone gets excited about. And they all say, you know, if this is a supplement, my turmeric's got more curcumin than yours. It's a sort of badge of pride, isn't it? But again, curcumin does not get absorbed. One or two percent of it does. If you add black pepper, which everyone gets excited about, you might make it to two to three percent. But the vast majority of curcumin stays unabsorbed in the gut, which is just as well because it's not very safe.

Dr Rupy: Right.

Simon Mills: And if you were to take it, to inject it, it would damage you. So it's best where it belongs in the gut. We increasingly see that that's where it's most helpful because it again engages in this conversation with the microbiome. And one of the results is that it reduces inflammatory damage to the gut wall. And you mentioned mucin and tight junctions and so on. There's evidence to show that those defenses, the gut wall defenses are beefed up by curcumin. And there's definitely evidence of less absorption of damaging materials from the gut. We call them lipopolysaccharides, the inflammatory factors that we unfortunately get a lot of from our gut and which may be one of the main inflammatory factors in the whole body because there's so much of it around. And it does look as though curcumin in the gut could reduce the absorption of those damaging agents, partly by improving the defenses, the gut wall defenses. So I can tell you this is so exciting because we're this is stuff that's only been published in the last two or three, four years. Um, it's all so new and exciting. And it's sort of making my old life younger and younger.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, that's fab. So LPS, this lipopolysaccharide, sort of the coats of these bacteria, the gram negative bacteria. That that elicits quite a severe um immune response when it goes into the bloodstream. And so turmeric bolsters up your defenses by essentially being a little bit of an irritation. Does it have this effect or?

Simon Mills: No, I don't think it, well, no, I don't think I don't see it as irritating the gut wall. Um, no, there's the gut wall includes a a couple of a number of defenses, mucin, the mucus secretions from the lining is important because it holds the bacteria in a in a sort of state, like a jelly state, doesn't it? So, and some of the better bacteria actually live in the mucin layer and provide another element of protection. So basically saying, no, I'm here, get off to some intruder. So this is a lovely universe right up close to the gut wall. And it looks as though some of these herbs and spices are working on that zone close to the gut wall. So there's a whole range of protective effects coming on.

Dr Rupy: Uh-huh. Okay.

Simon Mills: I'm making this up, not entirely, but I'm sort of making, I'm putting two and two together and making four and a half here, but um, it's tantalizingly good, interesting work, increasingly supported by the evidence of how this might be working.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Do you on the basis of some of the spices and and the work um that they do in the body, do you supplement with some spices that you can't feasibly get into your diet every single day? Something like turmeric, for example, or or Yeah.

Simon Mills: I I with when when I'm working with patients, you know, I'm not going to say you're going to have curry for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Although I do have leftovers for breakfast quite often, but that's just me. I'm a bit of an outlier. Most of our people would find that challenging. Um, so to find a good quality turmeric supplement is often an easy way of filling that gap without the having to taste it even. And you while you're at it, you may as well find one that has concentrated the turmeric so that you in one of these small capsules, you've got a you've got a hefty dose of the original. So we call it an extract. Ginger is another one that because of its similar benefits, you know, and increasingly the evidence shows that works on the gut too. Um, you know, you don't want, some people love having ginger drinks all the time, but you know, you can have a supplement instead.

Dr Rupy: With that in mind, with regards to supplementation, uh, I've been hearing a lot about liposomal supplements. So supplements that are supposedly fixed in essentially a fat soluble coating to make it a lot more absorbable into the body. And what you just mentioned about turmeric actually having most of its effect when it's in the gut, sort of stands to in my mind is like, okay, well, is the liposomal capsule necessary in that respect? Is it beneficial for for other substances? Do you have any opinions on liposomal supplements?

Simon Mills: If in doubt, I will always fall back on the ancient wisdoms and experiences which don't involve liposomal or nanoparticles or any such damn thing. Um, no, the uh, my instinct is to stick as close as possible to the original because you're you're creating an unknown effect here. If you're artificially, as we're talking about, bumping up curcumin levels in the blood, uh, what we don't know where that leads. As I said, there's evidence to show that curcumin is toxic in any dose. There are ways, and my colleague, uh, Kerry Bone, who also speaks eloquently on these matters, uh, is quite a keen um proponent of a, what is effectively a natural combination of turmeric and fenugreek, which appears to increase naturally the levels of curcumin in the blood. And there is some evidence that when you rise the curcumin levels a bit, you do get some extra benefits, particularly in the brain and the peripheral circulation. Um, so I'm certainly not ruling out finding ways of optimizing some curcumin absorption, but we're still talking about a small proportion of the whole.

Dr Rupy: Okay. Yeah, yeah. I haven't come across the turmeric fenugreek combination before. That's super interesting.

Simon Mills: Yeah, there's there's some some patented work, I think, on showing improved extra assimilation and improved absorption.

Dr Rupy: Really interesting, because that's a common combination that you find in Indian recipes, of course.

Simon Mills: You mentioned brain health or the effects on the brain. Um, one of the things that I think people are rightly so more aware of is the rise of dementia, Alzheimer's being the number one cause of death. Um, and staving off this as best as possible, you know, as well as the things like regular exercise, cleaning up your diet, ensuring you're getting tons of greens, vegetables, um, and fiber, herbs and spices potentially could provide yet another defense against uh one of the prevalent conditions of aging. Um, are there any particular spices and herbs that you're in favor of for their role?

Simon Mills: It is a very interesting area and again, we have to speculate a little bit about what's going on here, but we always used to think that the brain was somehow insulated from the world and we have this blood-brain barrier that is essentially reinforced capillaries, reinforced blood vessels. We now know that that is a very interactive interface between the blood and the brain and can sometimes go wrong and stir up trouble in the brain. And people are looking increasingly interestingly at the role of this blood-brain barrier thing in dementia, in Alzheimer's and in mental and psychological illnesses. The whole concept of neuroinflammation. So they're obviously looking at ways of helping the blood-brain barrier to be more effective at keeping trouble at bay. And so far, the best leads genuinely seem to be dietary. So green tea, for example, has stepped up quite quickly, not I think as an extract, but as simply a green tea drink. Ginkgo, which is a remedy that's was developed mainly in Central Europe and Germany for vascular problems, for circulatory problems and for old age, because that was its famously used as a prescriber for old age, is now looking very interesting in terms of its effect on the blood-brain barrier. My personal favorite, and I'll just tell it just you quietly, is rosemary.

Dr Rupy: Rosemary. Okay.

Simon Mills: Rosemary, that's for remembrance, Shakespeare has Ophelia saying, because they knew about it as something that was good for the brain. And I challenge you to pick up a sprig of fresh rosemary from outside your door and smell it and not feel it go straight to your brain. The aromatics in there, they do literally go to your brain because you've got the part of the brain actually emerges into the light at the top of your nose. It's called the olfactory lobe. And that is actually literally part of the brain. So when we inhale something, the molecules go straight in to the olfactory lobe into the base of the brain, the limbic system, the some people call it the reptilian brain. It's where our deep emotions and our feelings come from. That's where the scents go. And rosemary's got some pretty potent ones that seem to touch the buttons. As well as that aromatic quality, we now increasingly learn that it helps with that vascular, that blood vessel wall, um, interface I talked about earlier. And there's evidence coming out in places like Northumbria University, for example, which show that rosemary uh does improve cognitive functions. I myself helped to organize a clinical research study in the US looking at the effect of rosemary in um aged population. And it wasn't definitive, but it showed trends towards improved cognitive function in older people. Uh there's more better quality evidence that's been done since. Sage is another one, by the way, that has also ticked those boxes. But if I was to take one out of the whole pack and say I'm going to run with it, that would be rosemary.

Dr Rupy: Hmm.

Simon Mills: It could be in the form of a tea. It could be in the form of a capsule. It could be in the form of, well, you need a lot of cooking with rosemary to get the dose, I think. Um, but it's interesting, it was used for accompanying rich foods like meat. So there's some seems to be some effect on the metabolism we were talking about earlier there with fat metabolism in particular. But yeah, there is a a number of herbs. There's a lot of more difficult to reach traditional medicines that are coming up along the inside track here. But if we're talking about things that people have at home, I would just throw the old spices in because it seems to be growing the evidence in that way. But then add a few of these particular ones to the mix, green tea, rosemary.

Dr Rupy: Brilliant. Rosemary, it's interesting you were just talking about the olfactory um nerve there because one of the early signs that we look for in medicine is loss of smell in dementia. Um, loss of hearing increases your risk of dementia because it leads to sort of um isolation and not getting involved and less going out and loneliness essentially, but um smell is really interesting and you know, whether rosemary is sort of like firing up that system, it's hard to say. But you mentioned dose there and I wanted to come back to dose. Is there a recommended dose that you've seen in some of those studies that you mentioned in the form of an extract that rosemary should be taken in if someone was listening to this or watching this and and thought, you know what, I'm getting into my later years, I wouldn't mind trying to stave off dementia by just taking a rosemary extract every day.

Simon Mills: Most of the clinical evidence for the herbs and spices we've been talking about, um, are in the category of quite hefty culinary doses.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: So they're definitely achievable, but as we were saying earlier, you might if you really felt you needed to start thinking about a supplement to your diet because as Europeans particularly, we're unlikely to get the doses we need in the diet on its own. With rosemary because it's such a particular taste, I would find it difficult to quaff enough of it to have an effect. So there are ways you can do this. I mean, we haven't talked about preparing herbs and spices at home. Almost by definition, apart from the odd exception like fresh ginger, we're dealing with dried. The word drug comes from the old European word drogan, dried plant. So the original drugs were dried plants because when you dry them, you concentrate them and turn them into a drug. Rosemary is a classic example where this might be important because if you want to get your dosing to the reasonable level that you're showing in clinical studies, you're going to have to concentrate it and that dries it and it really does make it small. You could either then make a strong tea with it and quaff it at home, which, you know, is quite a strong taste. Or, and some people know how to do this, you can buy your own little capsules and make it fill up your own and make your own little home brew, home pills, so to speak. Um, and take those on a regular basis. As far as we know, this is all really safe. And what we're going to be talking about constantly today are plants that are safe to take. We're not talking about plants that are edgy.

Dr Rupy: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Simon Mills: And if somebody goes online and types in rosemary uh supplements, they might get purified extracts of rosmarinic acid, for example. Uh, perhaps that's one of the phytochemicals that's been isolated as the reason as to why it might have these brain healthy benefits. I'm assuming when you're talking about the extracts, you're talking about the whole plant in its dried form and concentrated because of that entourage effect.

Dr Rupy: That's the medicine. Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Mills: Yeah. I mean, and there's obviously a temptation, particularly if you're commercially developing something to find the active principle. And of course, if you're a pharmaceutical manufacturer, that may be all you go with. And you start selling or or promoting rosmarinic acid. Everything we know about rosemary is that it contains a bucket load of things that are much more different to that. So let's stick with what nature intended, hey?

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah, let's do that. Um, you we've mentioned combinations here. Uh, I want to see if there are any others that come to mind. So, uh, I'm writing this down for my little uh tea book and uh and and and spice combination book. Ginger, cinnamon, we started off with that. Uh, turmeric, fenugreek. Green tea, I mean, I I tend to have that with a bit of cinnamon myself.

Simon Mills: Um, yes, not everyone likes green tea on its own.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon Mills: Um, I mean, it's got a very refined taste, but sometimes some people sometimes want a bit of flavoring. I mean, it works with mint for me. I like mint and green tea go down well together.

Dr Rupy: Fab.

Simon Mills: It seems to they seem to complement each other quite well. It's interesting, we were talking about the spices as warming, but mint, particularly peppermint, is universally classified as cooling.

Dr Rupy: Ah.

Simon Mills: And I'd like to come back to um simple home tips here. Um, we don't know ahead of time whether your digestion needs warming or cooling. You alluded that to yourself. Sometimes some of us have already got enough heat in there already. For those of us, we may actually prefer a cooling remedy for the gut. It's difficult usually to plan that ahead. So the first thing you do to anybody who's experimenting is to try separate times a cinnamon or ginger cinnamon tea, try that. And then at another time, try peppermint tea. Which do you prefer? And that may be all you need to know to start with. And that brings us on to the dosing thing because what you've just done there is what we call in the business titrating the dose, don't we? We start with a low dose and see how that is and then we ratchet it up. So if the result of your little experiment, which you might have to repeat a few times to be sure, is that actually you prefer a peppermint tea and you put one peppermint tea bag in there, then for heaven's sake, next time put two peppermint tea bags or three because at it's at those levels that you start getting the therapeutic benefits. Because one tea bag is just a beverage. But it's enough to give you, uh oh, this feels better. But once you've decided that's the one that you prefer, then do it properly.

Dr Rupy: Yeah.

Simon Mills: And it may then be that you're doing it at home because then you can get the concentration up and you get one of those little infuser type things where you can put a lot of the dried herb in there and make a stronger tea and treat that as a medicine.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Any other cooling uh teas and uh home remedies that you have given that we are going into summer? I want to save my air conditioning.

Simon Mills: Absolutely. And I think we need another three podcasts at this point. Um, there's a huge category of cooling remedies, otherwise known as the bitters.

Dr Rupy: Uh-huh.

Simon Mills: And everybody knew that bitters were cooling in every part of the world. And it was mostly in fever because as we've said, fever can sometimes go too far. What can you do to bring the heat of the fever down just so that it doesn't blow the fuse? And the always the first answer was bitters. And in a very simple way, we can describe the work of bitters as switching on the digestion, which is what we know they do. By the way, it's the taste buds that do it. So it's tasting the bitterness that has the effect. These are hardwired, the taste buds in the mouth. There's also further down the tube as well. Uh and they're switched on to release hormones in the stomach, things like cholecystokinin, gastrin and so on, which switch on the whole digestive apparatus, the whole processes, all the digestive juices, the movement of the stomach and so on are all controlled by these hormones. And they're switched on within a micro, within a second. Um, so what that does is it brings the blood into the digestion, you see, because that's what's involved in digestion, bringing the blood in, that's bringing the heat into digestion. And my favorite bit of magic in the old way of understanding medicine was that what bitters do is to convert heat into nourishment. That's magic. Because when you're running a fever, that's actually something that um you find um is a missing gap because fever often shuts down your digestion. Bitters will help to fire it up again. And by bringing the heat into the digestion, you're actually reducing, I mean it's a very picturesque imagery I'm using here. But it's something that people can understand and it's not far from the truth.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly when you explain it through the lens of the hormones that are switched on like cholecystokinin that you just mentioned or CCK, you know, it's it's very interesting, you know, these these sorts of remedies that you can explain through the lens of science, you know?

Simon Mills: And CCK, as you know, also interacts directly with the hormones responsible for blood sugar control.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon Mills: And with the liver that's responsible for managing all that. So there are all sorts of again, speculative, but increasingly reinforced mechanisms there for how this could work. However, the overall effect of bitters, and they were traditionally used by the way for liver problems, for those livery feelings, hepatitis and extreme levels, jaundice and so on. But you know, we all know what it feels like to feel liverish or to have had too much rich food or, you know, too much alcohol, for example. Um, that was an indication for bitters. Um, and we used to even have routinely at the end of a meal, we would have a strong black coffee. I know you've just had one yourself. And one of the effects of coffee is that it's a bitter. And we would have it after eating, if you're living in a desert and you've just eaten some bits of unrefrigerated sheep, you would really need that stuff. So that you would have this as a digestive remedy after eating. It's doing that by, as it used to be described, cooling things down.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Mills: So the short answer to your question is, yes, we have a lot of cooling remedies. I've mentioned peppermint as an an outlier there, but most of them are bitters.

Dr Rupy: It's really interesting you said that because I don't I've never really thought of my black coffee as a traditional bitter. Um, but then you look at the evidence for black coffee and its effect on metabolism, the risk of type two diabetes, and you can see, you know, a couple of cups a day, there's a reduced risk. Um, and yes.

Simon Mills: Not so much if you pile in on the lattes and the.

Dr Rupy: Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, we're not talking about good quality. Unfortunately, for many people, coffee is not such a bitter anymore. Yeah, we're not talking about your Starbucks Frappuccinos with extra cream and syrups and all the rest of it. But proper black coffee, which is polyphenol rich and has all this incredible flavor. Yeah, bitters. Are there are there any other drinks that I'm drinking and toward that that might be having this effect?

Simon Mills: The obvious one is when you go after all this is over and go down to the local pub and say, can I have a pint of bitter, please? Because that's hops.

Dr Rupy: Right. Okay.

Simon Mills: And hops is another bitter.

Dr Rupy: Gotcha. Gotcha.

Simon Mills: And that's interesting because it has its own hormonal effects.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: Not necessarily the ones that the average bloke would like.

Dr Rupy: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Simon Mills: Because it was an interesting observation that hop pickers in southeast England, Kent, where hops used to be grown in large quantities, were often travelers, traveling women. Okay. who would be who would just move in with their caravans and so on on site for three or four months of the year and would pick hops nothing. During that time, routinely they would not menstruate.

Dr Rupy: Really?

Simon Mills: Oh, wow. Because they're their skin is coated with this resin that you get on hops. And it's at that level, it's contraceptive, it's an emmenagogue. It's female hormones we're talking about here. And I have sometimes mischievously wanted to see been to Australia especially, you know, there's a macho culture of, you know, drinking beer is a man's thing. I always want to write in pen, did you know that beer was feminizing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, but that's another, it's a particular one of hops as a bitter. And of course, you can have hops and we do, don't we? Um, but again, if you're using it medicinally, you would have it as a bitter tea. My favorite bitter at for home use, a long chalk, because it's so accessible is dandelion root.

Dr Rupy: Dandelion root. Okay.

Simon Mills: Which everybody can find. You don't have to go far to find that. And if you want to know what dandelion looks like, remember the original name comes from the French Don de Leon, the teeth of the lion.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: So you're looking for a leaf that looks like lion's teeth. That's your dandelion. Once you've recognized it, you'll see it everywhere. It's the root you're looking for. And most people can find it close to hand and a lot of people have it in their lawns or in their gardens and will just be able to pluck it from their front door. Um, it's the root, you pick it, you clean it, you chop it up while it's fresh because once it get dried, it's very hard. And chop it up in small pieces, then you leave it somewhere warm to dry so that it becomes a drug, a dried plant. And that's how you store it. By the way, if you're drying a plant properly, and that's includes the leaf as well, it should be crinkly, crush when you if the leaf should be crushable, but when it's fully dried, that's the time to store it. The best storage vehicle in my experience is brown paper bags.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: Because it they have just enough ventilation to stop the material getting moldy. If you put them in glass or plastic, you'll get condensation forming.

Dr Rupy: Ah, okay.

Simon Mills: So store your dried plants in brown paper or hessian, but brown paper is easier. Your your uh dandelion root becomes then your home bitter. Then what you do because, you know, when you're making a tea with a plant or a leaf or a flower or whatever, all you need to do is put the hot water bottle, hot water on it. With a root, that's not going to work because there's the the goodness is tucked away inside that woody material. So you have to cook it. And we call it a decoction. Uh, but essentially what you need is a slow cooker or some a range where you can just leave the saucepan on it for a while, an hour or two hours or three hours. Um, and and the the water is ready when it's a dark reddish brown color because that's the color of the tannins that are in the root.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: And it will tell you that the um and when you taste it, you'll see what I mean about the bitterness of it.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, tannins are I'm I'm I've got the flavor in my mouth right now of like a really sharp, dry red wine, you know, the the real sort of.

Simon Mills: Or a strong black tea.

Dr Rupy: Or a strong black tea. Exactly. So those, is it the tannins that are particularly.

Simon Mills: Yeah, they're another polyphenol.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: We were talking about them before in the terms of spices, but tannins themselves have, people used to call them antioxidants in the days when people thought that was a useful thing to say. We now know every plant is an antioxidant. But these are particularly seem to be particularly in reducing inflammatory activity.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: in particularly in the gut, but also in wounds. So, you know, if we have time, we can talk about wound dressing.

Dr Rupy: I was going to ask you about wound dressing actually, and you know, the the sort of traditional remedies that perhaps have fallen out of favor now.

Simon Mills: Exactly. But yes, just to finish off the bitterness first, um, uh, you then use your bitter drink, your dandelion root, and there are others that you can move on to once you've got the hang of that, which I'll mention in a minute. But to use that for instant effects, a bit like we were saying with the hot spices, you don't want to take it for weeks and see what happens. You take it and see what happens in the next minute or hour, because bitters work instantly. And if you've got a stomach problem, a digestive problem, a flatulent problem, a gut problem of any sort, and you want to try something like dandelion bitters, try it without trying anything else just to see how it works. And report back in within the hour.

Dr Rupy: Huh. With with um with bitters and their effect on uh blood sugar. Is this best taken pre or post a meal? Because there is a lot of sort of excitement around acetic acid or vinegar-based drinks prior to eating a carbohydrate rich meal, for example. Um, as it pertains to sort of driving the sugar from your bloodstream into your muscles and your fat cells and stuff. That's becoming quite popular. Do bitters fall in that same category? Should is it best consumed before or afterwards or does it not really matter?

Simon Mills: You've raised the acetic acid and vinegar one. So that's the sour taste, which has an analogous effect, but not quite the same. And definitely sours are best taken before eating. It seems that one of the things that they do is to prime up the liver bile function to perform better with a meal coming down the line. So we would always say sour ahead of a meal. Bitters most often also ahead of a meal. But we've also mentioned about digestive remedies you have after food, your black coffee and so on. So they also have a role afterwards. But like a lot of what we're talking about today, it's what you find out that's important. And so the best thing to do is experiment and see what suits you best rather than read it up in a book.

Dr Rupy: I see a whole market opening up for bitters after meals, you know, because I don't think I don't think people realize that. And I you know, you have your aperitivo, you have like this.

Simon Mills: Your vermouth, which is wormwood, which is a bitter.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon Mills: Yeah. Yeah. No, there's a lot of them about. And you can still buy if you go to a airport duty frees and so on, you can buy things like Underberg, which is a bitter you get from Switzerland.

Dr Rupy: Underberg?

Simon Mills: Underberg. Yeah. I don't think I've had that. Um, it's a it's a shot and it was I think designed for rowdy, drunken tourists because you'd have it after a heavy alcoholic meal.

Dr Rupy: Okay, yeah.

Simon Mills: But in more refined um society, um Underberg is used for as a digestive.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: And you would have it after a bad meal or a heavy meal to help. And that's a really powerful thing. It's got a few aromatics in it. It's got fennel and spices as well. But it's overwhelmingly a bitter. And there's a whole range of bitters. I think in the UK, we're really behind Europe on this. If you go to the average alcoholic off license or whatever in Germany or middle Europe or anywhere, you'll find lots of these digestive bitters available as a slug. You take after a meal.

Dr Rupy: Because I've had the juniper, I think, uh.

Simon Mills: That's of course the basis of gin.

Dr Rupy: Yeah.

Simon Mills: Which is a bitter.

Dr Rupy: Yeah.

Simon Mills: Juniper. Yeah.

Dr Rupy: And I've had, I mean, they tend to be alcoholic. Do they always need to be alcoholic? Or can you, are there a selection of.

Simon Mills: Why might change your career for you? I know, I know. I understand. No, they've traditionally come along with alcohol. Um, but of course, there are many who can't or won't take alcohol. And they can all be adapted to a non-alcoholic context. Um, the uh, other one that we haven't mentioned, which is particularly popular in France is artichoke leaf, the globe artichoke leaf, which is also slightly bitter, but was also used in France particularly for livery type symptoms of digestion.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Because they've got a long history, haven't they? In traditional medicine.

Simon Mills: They do. And in fact, most traditional medicine people would complain are based on bitters. Oh, right. They're so awful. But if you look at any way of understanding the world in Chinese texts, for example, or Ayurvedic texts, bitters are right up there in front. They're the ones that lead the charge.

Dr Rupy: Interesting. Bitters for your belly. That's a good way of remembering it.

Simon Mills: Very good memory.

Dr Rupy: Traditional remedies for cuts and wounds. These were things that obviously people needed to be aware of and they've fallen out of fashion over the last few years. What what sort of traditional ones have have you come across that could be useful today?

Simon Mills: As you say, um, people had to use them because we didn't have anything else. There wasn't the ambulance to call on or the paramedic or the nice nurses to stitch you up. Um, it was something that you had to treat at home almost always and treat it fast because if you didn't, you might die. Sepsis and so on. So, um, the old wound remedies you find featuring prominently in every part of the world before they wrote anything down, they would be using wound remedies as their primary tools because cuts and wounds and fighting and all the other things were sort of stock and trade. Of there was many, many plants that have been used around the world for this purpose. And it almost you think, well, you know, any plant has wound healing properties, but there are some that really come forward. And the first are those that are high in tannins. We've mentioned before about the tannins. But essentially they get their name because they tan leather. So people who are making leather where out of animal skins, of course, know that what they need to do is to soak these animal skins, which are likely to go off at any moment, aren't they? Because they're they're straight from a living creature. And you soak them in tannins and that converts the soft tissue into leather, which you can keep for years and years and years and it doesn't go off. And it becomes very hard. And what the best way of describing that is that living tissue has got lots of proteins in them that fit around each other in a sort of semi-fluid way. But what adding tannins do is a bit like adding eggs to hot water. The hot water coagulates the um protein and turns it hard. And when you think about it, could you reverse a hard-boiled egg? No. It's a permanent fix. And so adding tannins to, for example, an open wound eventually turns that surface into leather.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: which protects it. And you may think, I don't want my wound turned into leather, but I promise you, if you've got an open wound that's getting septic and infected and is draining and discharging, I'd happily put up with leather, which is what happens. And what the principles of washing a wound with tannins can be easily applied in emergencies now. So let's take a scenario. You've gone off trailing, hiking in distant places where the mobile phone perhaps reception isn't very good. And you fall into a fire or you fall down a crevasse or something and you've got a wound. And you're can't reach the emergency services. And you've got a wound that's dangerous. All you need, all you need to do, you best have a friend here. Yeah, yeah. Uh, is to find any broad-leafed tree.

Dr Rupy: Uh-huh.

Simon Mills: The one that is deciduous, one that leaves its leaves in the winter. And twigs or bark of these trees are packed full of tannins. So you strip down some bark of one of these trees, oak is still the best, but any of those will do. And you cook it for a while, as we said about dandelion root, you need to cook it for a while until that red, orange, dark reddish brown color comes through into the water. That's the color of tannins.

Dr Rupy: Ah.

Simon Mills: You let it cool. Very important point. Don't try this at home until it's body temperature. And then you simply wash the wound with it. And it forms this protective leather coat, which will save your life.

Dr Rupy: Yeah.

Simon Mills: You're left with a nasty scar, but at least you'll be able to enjoy it, won't you?

Dr Rupy: It there's some really interesting um techniques that are sort of being experimented with and coming into fashion now within um burns and um wound repair post plastic surgery or post um uh the disastrous effects of of of a burn. Um, using gelatinous and collagen rich products including fish skin. I don't know if you've come across these before. But this is something that people and even, you know, I mean, in the same way we're using medicinal honey uh in traditional medicine now, or traditional conventional medicine, sorry. Um, we're using these novel products. Well, I say novel, but.

Simon rediscovering them.

Dr Rupy: The rediscovery of traditional.

Simon Mills: Well, that the the fish oil, the the fish skins and so on, uh the colloids brings me on to the second principle of wound dressing, which is to use colloids.

Dr Rupy: Uh-huh.

Simon Mills: And those come in the form in the plant world of gums and mucilages. And there's obviously some plants richer than those and others. And we know about them when we chew them, we get that chewy mucilaginous feeling in the mouth. A lot of leaves have that mucilaginous quality. Uh, a classic one is uh one that you don't take internally because we know that it has um potentially toxic alkaloids in it, but it's comfrey.

Dr Rupy: Uh-huh.

Simon Mills: COMFREY, which is quite widely grown, found in the wild, particularly near water. And the leaf will do here very well. Um, uh, what you do is you, um, you can do use the fresh leaf for this. Uh, and other ones, the plantains, not the uh Caribbean plantains, but the ones that you get in the growing in the wild here. Um, in in the grasslands and so on. They all have these high mucilaginous content. What you do is you in this case, you chop them up into uh as fresh, perhaps put them in a muslin bag or something to as a as a bag to contain them. Uh and then pour some hot water out of the kettle onto that just enough to moisten it. And after a few minutes, the mucilage will ooze out and you can see it sort of coming out of the leaves. That is what you pack on the wound. What the tannins do, as we said, is they we call them astringe the wound, they form this leather coat. What the mucilages do is they buffer it and they soothe it and make it less painful and easier. And we see that in gums, seaweed gums, which are often used in wound dressings still. Um, agar, for example, a classic case of a seaweed gum that is used in wound dressing, still very appropriate. And if you've got access to seaweed, a very good source of mucilage anyway.

Dr Rupy: Ah, gotcha.

Simon Mills: So those are the two wound healing principles, tannins and mucilages. And things like comfrey have both of them together. But there's lots of plants with tannins and you'll look up any old wound remedy in all the old herbals and they will all be tannin rich.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. It's interesting you said that about seaweed as well because I understand seaweed is quite high in these prebiotics and.

Simon Mills: That's another potential dietary supplement, of course.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We don't use that enough, do we?

Simon Mills: Unless we're living in a maritime world. I mean, in Wales, they had lavas and in Japan, they eat a lot of seaweed as we know. And I think if you're living close to the sea, you learn the value of seaweed.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. I was lucky to get some uh some lava bread from my my wife's extended family that live in Wales and they brought some along with them from the market. Delicious. Well, it takes some getting used to, I'd say, for certain people, but I mean, uh I'm quite easily pleased. I'm a I'm a gastronaut. I can appreciate many things. Um, I want to ask the the I want to talk about something that I think is quite contentious, which is, you know, and I want to make sure that I'm putting in as many caveats with this question as possible. I do want to talk about cancer and the impact of herbs and spices on reducing the risk of cancer whilst appreciating that cancer isn't just one thing. Whilst it is the uncontrolled growth of cells, there are multiple drivers of that, whether it's a virus, hormonal, um, there are lots of reasons as to why people ultimately suffer cancer and the various subtypes there are and different locations where you find the primaries can have, you know, different reasons. Um, that being said, are there certain spices and herbs that can reduce the risk of different types of cancers that we're aware of?

Simon Mills: As you say, it's a dangerous question because uh the evidence isn't very good to be fair. We have epidemiological evidence, which is studying whole populations. And there are some cancers which are less prevalent in spaces that eat a lot of spices and others, but they catch up in other ways. So on that basis, it's not a guarantee. I would add to your list of things that go wrong in cancer, the whole surveillance of the because we know that cells constantly go mutant. And uh if your immune function is anyway okay, they will get rid of them instantly. So something has slipped up somewhere in terms of our defenses against mutations. And sometimes when we're helping somebody, we're saying, we can see where that might have happened. And you mentioned viruses and there's other ways in which our immune systems can be compromised. Um, I have a practice. I see patients all the time and quite a few of them with cancer. I can never on my hand on my heart say that I can do anything more than help them through the journey in different ways. And it may be improving or reducing their side effects of chemo or other radiotherapy. Um, we would hope simply on first principles that if someone is found to have had a problem, there's often some primary causes. It could be their gut, it could be their sleep, it could be all sorts of things, the circulation and so on, that we can see has been a problem long before the cancer came along. And you can put two and two together and say, actually, that does look as though that might have been a a factor in all this. And while we're at it, why don't we improve that in ways that we can? But that's just rolling your sleeve up and getting on with it without saying, I've got a treatment for cancer. There are some plants that have been tested and found interesting and one or two of them have come through in terms of chemos. The Madagascar periwinkle is one of the classic one that's given us vincristine and vinblastine. Uh, interestingly done as a survey for antimalarial properties of the plant, but they found these two uh, synthetic isolates that have since proved to be useful in cancer treatment. And the other one, of course, is from the uh, U, Pacific U, the taxol, uh, used in ovarian cancer, comes again from finding something in a plant. There's a few others like that, but that's not quite the same. That's chemotherapy. There are people who have sworn by um, apricot kernels, for example, as a cancer treatment. I've often found that that's a misleading idea because what they've spotted is that some of these things, apricot kernels, almond kernels, bitter almonds and so on, the sort of thing that people used to make um, cyanide from. Um, uh, yes, can have a, what we call a cytotoxic effect. They can kill cells, including cancer cells. But that's because they contain a a toxin, cyanide, and the cyanide kills cancer cells slightly before it kills the rest of us. But to tout that as a natural remedy seems to be stretching it a bit.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Simon Mills: Yeah. So I I I I back off the idea that I'm helping cancer or helping get rid of cancer or reduce cancer because I don't really honestly know. And patients do die on my watch inevitably. So, um, all we can do is do what we can.

Dr Rupy: In terms of the preventative strategies that we might have in addition to the clear indicators of how regular exercise, a plant-focused diet, one that is inclusive of things like brassica vegetables in particular, um, stress reduction, sleep optimization, is there a role, do you feel, for herbs and spices in adding to that concoction of uh reducing the risk of cancer?

Simon Mills: I would like to think so and some of the evidence is that it reduces some of those provocative factors in ways we've already talked about. So in principle and theory, you would think so. As I said, epidemiologically, there is some evidence to suggest that there is some protection, but not entirely so.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah. Circulation comes up quite a bit. Um, cholesterol. Uh, are there any things, are any herbs or spices or perhaps even sort of novel supplements that you've come across that can help uh lower specific measures of of cholesterol or certain carriers of cholesterol, I should say. I'm namely talking about LDL cholesterol or low density lipoprotein cholesterol, which is the bad marker, uh biomarker. And also the more recent measures of apolipoprotein B that have come become more favorable as a measure of cardiovascular risk as well. Um, is there anything in that in the the herb and spice cabinet that can improve people's cholesterol?

Simon Mills: Again, there's some suggestions in the whole metabolic story we were telling that that includes fat and fatty acid and cholesterol metabolism, but the evidence isn't very strong yet. Um, interestingly, one of the strongest natural contenders emerged almost by accident. Um, I remember working with a colleague on some new product that had come down, which was a mold on rice called red yeast rice. And we were handed a bunch of stuff to work through. And my colleague rang me desperately to say, heavens, this contains statins. And of course, we're reminded that we've been talking about plants mainly, but of course, one of the main generators of medicines is the fungi, the fungal thing. And this is a classic example of a natural supplement that you can still buy in the states and various other things that is used for managing cholesterol because in fact, it is a natural form of statin. My argument against using it is of course, at least with statin, you've got your dose right. But the red yeast rice is a variable content of the uh active principle. So I wouldn't myself use it as an example. But yeah, it's an interesting idea. In our world, and when we're dealing with someone, as we often do with somebody who's helping to manage their cholesterol, we find ourselves drawn to working with the liver bile.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: Because as you know, the liver produces cholesterol all the time for all good reasons. We need cholesterol. Um, it's the over cholesterol that we are worried about. Um, and there's some, and we I see it in some of my patients whose cholesterol levels can be reduced without the use of statins. We know that certain dietary things you said can reduce it and even things like garlic and so on can reduce it uh in a dietary form. Um, but I I I'm intrigued by the prospects of shifting some of the liver causes of high cholesterol by talking nicely to the liver. And some of the remedies we use there are the bitter ones. So there's a line, a lead for future work.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, most of the pharmacological research is looking at liver receptors. And, you know, the new class of medications, PCSK9 inhibitors, they're they're super fascinating and, you know, other injectables. If there are ways in which we can boost uh the production of bile acids to to clear and.

Simon Mills: That's what we're doing, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and we see that in the output, which is what comes through the other end is bile. And we see the changes in because the bile is our natural laxative. And the content or the makeup of the bile, which is determined by the liver, has enormous range of impacts on things like bowel function. And to give an example, you know, I I can often find myself dealing with someone who's been constipated for months or years, tried everything, all the fiber and all the rest of it, still can't make it work. And all I've done is to give one of something that tickles the liver in a different way and often often including bitters. Um, and just like that, the bowels start moving because the bile has become a little bit more useful in its work. Now, on that level, liver bile, hepatobiliary, to use the technical term, uh, I think there's a lot of prospects that we can actually get to if we could just narrow down our focus a bit. And I mean, we come back, I we've been talking about ancient wisdoms here, but of course, nobody knew about cholesterol. And probably didn't know many, not many people had a problem with cholesterol because they didn't have the sort of foods that generate cholesterol. They ate a lot of meat, but they were running it off. And meat really does need to come with exercise, doesn't it? You need to have that physical activity. Everyone walked a lot every day. Uh, that's what meat does. It provides the fuel for that. And the cholesterol comes with it is part of that tiger in the tank stuff. It's when we sit on our chairs all the day that we have the problem with meat and other rich foods. Um, but people didn't have that experience in the past. So it's it's difficult to ask them, our ancestors to come up with a treatment for cholesterol when it's something they never knew. Same with high blood pressure. They wouldn't know about it.

Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a very good point. It's it's not like a uh an ancient uh condition that that we we've been.

Simon Mills: This is a modern problem. So we've got to find some, we've got to tweak the system a bit to get it helping us and we're still on the we're we're still learning. That's the answer to that question.

Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Gosh, there's just so much to to lean into. There's so many different herbs and spices uh that we're learning about and the mechanisms by which they work as well. It's it's a fascinating area. Um.

Simon Mills: This is what my colleague Kerry Bone and myself in the Mills and Bone Academy do is that we we devote ourselves to reading all that literature, you know, every morning I spend an hour or so just reading the latest medical papers simply because I'm sad. Um, but it allows one to keep on top of where people are going. And as we've been finding in things like the microbiome and the blood-brain barrier and other places, the science is coming in really thick and fast. And increasingly seems to support some of the ideas we've been talking about here.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. That's fab. Um, well the molds and bones.

Simon Mills: Mills and Bone.

Dr Rupy: Mills and Bone, sorry. The Mills and Bones Academy. Um, we'll definitely link to that. And that's where.

Simon Mills: That's for professionals though. It's really meant for healthcare professionals and particularly those who use plants and herbs. So it it you need to get be equally nerdish um to um get the most of it. But there's some content there, you have to sign up as well. So, um, but for those with an interest in what in the mechanisms we've been talking about, Kerry and I really focus on mechanisms to see what we can learn. Because I'm a physiologist originally, Kerry's a biochemist and between us, we're sort of eat and drink this stuff.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, I love it. Right, this has been phenomenal. Um, we should definitely make a cinnamon and ginger tea of some sort just to sort of round off this conversation for sure. But, you know, we've covered so many different topics. I'm sure we're going to get a bunch more questions to dive into the next time. I mean, the first couple of conversations we've had have been really enjoyable for folks. So hopefully we've answered some of their questions, but um, I I suspect this won't be the last time we chat about herbs and spices.

Simon Mills: I could slip a couple of more in while we're at it.

Dr Rupy: Why don't we finish off with a couple of extra things? Coughs and headaches. Um, so coughs, what what what do we have in the uh the the herb and the spice cabinet for coughs?

Simon Mills: Well, coughs, we're picking up with what we were saying earlier about colds. Okay. Um, so much because of course the lungs are part of your airway system, your respiratory system. And a cough is a natural defense against congestion building up or some other irritation in the lungs. We know it can sometimes be sinister, but most often a cough is a healthy attempt to get rid of something that shouldn't be there. And in northern climates like ours, the most common cause of that is catarrh, mucus, congestion build up, bronchial congestion, typically was found in working people, you know, particularly working outside, exposed to a lot of damp and cold. Um, and so they would typically get this bronchitis build up of mucus in the lungs. So the obvious conclusion from that is that you need that warmed up in the same way we were saying for the colds. And cinnamon and ginger is a good place to start because they both seem to help bring up the mucus from the chest. And it's the first thing I would do is to start with a particularly strong and regular dose of cinnamon and ginger tea when you've got that cold congestive lung. The other star performer which we must never overlook because people will complain if we did is fresh raw garlic.

Dr Rupy: Fresh raw garlic. Oh gosh, I think people are going to be complaining on both sides.

Simon Mills: Not if they do it properly. So I have a garlic intensive up my sleeve.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: Um, which means you lose a weekend, but hey, um, for the purposes and the benefits, um, a small price to pay. So on the on that day, the Friday, let's say, uh, you eat less than you would normally do. So there's less in the way. You have bought from your favorite retail outlet some really fresh, juicy garlic. Okay. that has full of juice and bite and vim in it. Um, what you do of the of an evening is you peel one of the cloves from the head of the garlic, you peel it and chop it up in small pieces and simply swallow that clove with some water.

Dr Rupy: Oh gosh. Uh-huh.

Simon Mills: Don't chew it. You don't need to do that. Just swallow it. Half an hour later, you do another one. Why half an hour? Because we've got to let the stomach decide whether it's okay to proceed. Because some people find garlic, raw garlic challenging or difficult on the stomach. Most don't. Um, but I always say allow half an hour between the clove. And another half an hour later, repeat again.

Dr Rupy: Gosh, so I've got three cloves now.

Simon Mills: Yeah, but that's we're only we're starting at six. By the time you get to 10, you might have got eight cloves inside.

Dr Rupy: Oh my word. Okay, eight cloves.

Simon Mills: Well, that's I'm just you stop when you feel ready.

Dr Rupy: Okay. Uh-huh.

Simon Mills: But I've had people saying getting to 10 o'clock and they're looking at their watch and saying, time for bed. I've still got some of that head of garlic left. Oh, well, you know what? I'll take the last. And then of course, um, you have to go to bed alone.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, I can imagine.

Simon Mills: Yes, so you've got the spare bed or the floor. Um, and you need to wrap up warm because your garlic is doing that heating we're talking about earlier. And you will be getting almost like a fever.

Dr Rupy: Gosh.

Simon Mills: And that's purely the effect of the garlic. And as we've seen earlier, the the fever is a is a defense measure. But the other thing that's happening is that you're literally fumigating your lungs. Uh, someone reckoned they'd got someone eating a lot of garlic to breathe over some petri dishes in the average path lab and killed most of the contents simply by breathing on them. Um, so you can imagine the poor in bacteria in your gut in your lungs thinking, what on earth and heaven is this? Because of course, it's coming through the pores and everything. Um, and um, it does seem to do the job because one of those intensive, you need to give over Saturday to recovery time. You're probably not that hungry. You do need to drink a lot because this raw garlic is dehydrating. As is fever, of course, as you know. So you just drink a lot of water on Saturday, you hang around in a like a useless slob, um, in your slippers and close to bed and generally aren't much used to man or beast anyway, you're too rank smelling. Uh, and then on Sunday's cleanup time, you wash your sheets, you've uh brush off. It's all gone. Um, and your lungs will have been cleared. And here's an interesting point. Garlic used to be called Russian penicillin because people used it internally for in particularly gut infections. We think, and there's some catching up going on here, but we think that the good guys in your microbiome quite like garlic.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: But the bad guys don't.

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: It's the old garlic and the devil thing.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon Mills: And so we're sort of beginning to, well, more than been thinking about it for a while, that raw garlic is actually a really effective prebiotic. So that you could use this garlic intensive if you've got a disrupted microbiome also. And again, people report that their gut issues are resolved by that intensive. I call it an intensive because you don't need to do this more than once.

Dr Rupy: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure. I don't think my wife would let me do it once anyway, ever. Yeah.

Simon Mills: But I put it out there for those with a stronger stomach. But I'm seriously, I find that people find real value in doing that.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, I'm sure.

Simon Mills: So I've got that on the on the tape anyway.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, you got that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon Mills: So that's uh a cough. The the other side of cough briefly is that we've talked about cold coughs, but you can also get the hot, dry, sticky coughs that you get in, for example, in children who tend to have this irritable, unproductive cough. And of course, people with asthmatic symptoms get that. And then you need a more mucilaginous effect. And we have mucilaginous remedies like aloe and slippery elm and so on that people have used um to soothe a tickly cough.

Dr Rupy: How do you take the aloe? Is it straight from the plant or is it?

Simon Mills: Yes, with mucilages, you mustn't cook them because it'll destroy them. So the best thing to do is use warm water or cold water even. And you get a sort of gloopy drink out of it, which doesn't please everybody. But that's the best way of taking a mucilaginous remedy because it's got a slightly thick quality to it.

Dr Rupy: And should it be fresh? So I know you can get aloe and you can grow aloe or you can.

Simon Mills: Remember with aloe that the skin of aloe is an active. So you don't eat the whole thing. You just need the gel.

Dr Rupy: Okay. And into some warm water and then drink it.

Simon Mills: Just a little bit of warm water to allow the mucilage to expand a bit because it's a bit like a sort of polyphenol type thing and it expands with water. So you want some of that. And the effect of the mucilages is very interesting. It's nothing, mucilages get doesn't get anywhere near the lungs by definition. It's just mucilages, polysaccharides that just get broken up in the stomach. But as it goes down, it soothes the lining of the gullet and the esophagus. And in embryos, the lung and the esophagus branch off each other and it looks as though the nerve reflexes are shared. And soothing the gullet has a reflex effect on soothing the muscles in the airways. And that was always the principle of explaining why people use mucilaginous remedies for coughs.

Dr Rupy: Ah, okay.

Simon Mills: It's a reflex from the gut again.

Dr Rupy: Gosh.

Simon Mills: Yeah, it's very interesting.

Dr Rupy: That is fascinating.

Simon Mills: So that's a brief summary of you you first of all divide your cough into cold and wet and hot and dry. And you use different remedies for each.

Dr Rupy: Brilliant. So that's cough. You mentioned headaches.

Simon Mills: And again, I'm going to apply just for simplicity, the same principle. So if someone gets a headache or migraine, my first question is, if you've got the migraine and I offered you a hot water bottle or a pack of cold frozen peas, which would you put on your head?

Dr Rupy: Okay.

Simon Mills: And there's usually a one or other. Sometimes people have to think about it, but they will usually go instinctively for the hot or the cold. And in the old way of understanding the world, that was all you needed to differentiate it into a hot symptom or a cold symptom. If you need a cold pack, it's a hot symptom. If you need a hot pack, it's a cold symptom. And that goes for pains anywhere else, but headaches are a good example. Now, a lot of people have heard of feverfew because there was a story a long time ago of some woman who had migraines for years, nothing touched it, but someone had told her to eat a feverfew leaf every day. And she religiously did that for 10 months, which was persistent. But then she found her migraines had gone. And for some reason, that story struck a chord. Everyone wanted feverfew. Supplement manufacturers jumped to it and provided a lot of stuff that wasn't actually feverfew, unfortunately. So there was a lot of confusion. But the evidence suggests that feverfew actually does have anti-inflammatory properties. I was caught off guard. I was already in practice. People were saying, where's my have you got feverfew? And I'd never used it. So I went and looked at what people used to use fever for, for fever management by definition, because it's a warming remedy. So I immediately remember the old trick and said, well, is it a headache or migraine that is improved by hot pack? And roughly 70% of migraines are improved by hot pack. Give feverfew a try. If it's a cold pack, the universal view was that that was work of bitters.

Dr Rupy: Okay, back to bitters.

Simon Mills: So again, using those old experiential, what it feels like to guide you seems primitive. But it all comes down to what happens in you as an individual rather than being told what to do by somebody who hasn't seen you.