David Bouley: I remember Liam Neeson was in the kitchen in my first restaurant. He came in the kitchen with his plate and he said to me, I don't know, this sauce, it tastes so complex and rich, but I know it's not. So how you do this? And I said to him that I realised that when I was at the first, on the farm, that story of me pulling the peach down with my mother and she put my hand on another one, pushed it up, and when she took my hand down, I said that's the peach you eat at seven years old. Growing up on a farm and learning the difference between something from only three days later, the value is better, the taste. And then just constantly looking for those gifts from mother nature. So let's say you find one, and I always say I take that vegetable or food or whatever for a very long walk. We have an intimate relationship. We do all kinds of testing together, all kinds of techniques and this and that until I find, wow, that's the best way. So when I put another one with it, which I've already done the same walk with, they're going to work together.
Dr Rupy: Welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast with me, Dr Rupy, where we discuss the most important topics and concepts in the medicinal qualities of food and lifestyle. These are some of the things that I've written about in my latest book, Eat to Beat Illness, which has now been released in the USA. You can pick up a copy of it in all good book stores, including Barnes and Noble, IndieBound and Amazon online, the links of which will be down below. Now as part of my trip to launch the book in the US, I caught up with Michelin-starred chef David Bouley. And let me tell you about why this man is so special. In 1987, Chef David Bouley opened his own restaurant, Bouley, in Tribeca, and among many accolades, he was awarded best chef in America by the Herald Tribune, TripAdvisor's Travellers' Choice Awards, the best restaurant in the United States and number 14 in the world. It was also the number one restaurant in New York City for many, many years. In addition to that, he's also one of the most health-conscious chefs in the world with a strong focus on research, particularly for diners with health concerns. Chef Bouley's approach has won him a lifetime achievement award from Dr Peter Green, the director of the Celiac Disease Centre at Columbia University, and a lifetime achievement award from Dr Barry Smith, president of the Rogosin Institute and professor of clinical surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College. Now there is a lot of evidence-based, safe dietary and lifestyle change that we as practitioners can be confidently discussing with our patients, but in order to translate that, we need people like David Bouley because he translates that into wonderful dishes that effortlessly nourish people's lives and can change healthcare for good. After studying in France at the Sorbonne, he did classic and nouvelle French cuisine with chefs like Joël Robuchon and Freddy Girardet, who were pivotal to his approach to cooking. Unlike many people who think he pivoted into health-conscious cooking, he has always been one to appreciate the medicinal effects of eating well. Chef Bouley shut down his flagship restaurant in 2017 to focus on learning more about Japanese cuisine and how they approach food and medicine. And that's going to come out in this conversation that we had today. I learned so much about different oils, different ingredients, things I've never heard of. And you can just tell he's so interested in this subject, so much so he has an immense passion for constantly learning new things. I really hope you enjoy this podcast. I'm going to summarise some of the things that we said at the end and make sure you check out the podcast notes because I'm going to link to a whole bunch of things, including his three-part series on Japanese cuisine that was aired on Japanese TV a couple of years ago. On to the podcast.
David Bouley: I have a French passport. I grew up in the States. I started cooking with my family. When they came, they had money, so they bought land, a big farm, and they bought a house right on Jamestown, which is right next to Newport, Rhode Island. I don't know if you've ever been in that area, but so we went out the house and the water is right there across the street. But I started with her, but when I went to the Sorbonne, I had already been working in restaurants for nine years or so. So I didn't start at the Sorbonne and we didn't study food at the Sorbonne, we were studying art. And I already had two and a half years of business degree and I wanted to take off, so I went to study something else. And I travelled around, that's how I ended up in France. And then France, I wanted to stay longer as a student because I was also studying other things and I started to work in bistros. So I worked in a bistro that was famous for all the chefs. And it was basically there where I met, I worked at Gaston Lenôtre, and then at Lenôtre was Vergé's chef. And then I went down to work with him in '77 and they moved me all around for several years to so many different three-star restaurants, including in Switzerland with Freddy Girardet, Bocuse, Chapelain, Robuchon, Vergé. And we went out and opened Bouley in '87 and it's been ever since. When I opened in Tribeca, I never cooked the food that I couldn't digest. A lot of times I couldn't eat in these fat French classic American restaurants, particularly in New York. It's too hard to digest, too much butter, too much cream, too much flour, too much roux. Everything was not for digestion, it was for stable food with a small staff and structuring high volume. So the logistics alone had to have that kind of organisation of to be able to survive through a long service and do volume without too many hands. Nouvelle cuisine, which started in the late '60s, early '70s, sometimes there's as many cooks in the kitchen as there were chairs in the dining room. So in New York, you had three or four people in the kitchen doing 200 covers, so it was a different structure. So that was part of it. When I opened Montrachet in '85 and Bouley in '87, we introduced the tasting menu. There was Barry Wine that did a few tasting menus, but he had more of a choice. So nouvelle cuisine was all about dégustation, and they learned that from the Japanese, because before that you had prefix, even the top houses, and you'd pick one in each department, but you didn't have a dégustation menu. So the French were going in the '60s and '70s to Japan and they learned a lot about the kaiseki. Certain kind of vegetables beginning to accelerate enzymes in your stomach, like crudité would be doing the same thing. And then how to warm the stomach with a broth, and then how to have your first protein with something fermented. And this series of kaiseki is only those rules, and you stay in season. Now you can do anything you want outside of that, but you have to follow the digestion, physiology or bioavailability. So that means you have to roll at different points, heating the body, you're going to have for instance your simmer dish, you're going to have your your tempura or fry, after that it's always the vinegar dish. And then you may have another warm dish or a vegetable dish without protein, and then you're going to have probably some form of carbohydrates, probably a rice dish or some soba, but not so much soba is independent, as you know. Have you been to Japan?
Dr Rupy: I have.
David Bouley: All right, so, all right, so Japan, that's right, you said that. So you don't have a menu like in Europe, you know, it's not the menu that has everything on it. You go for soba, you go for this, you go for that, go for the other thing. So kaiseki is more engineered around, of course, the season, in and out of the wild, and digestion. And the goal is to give as much or more energy than when the client arrived. So, you know, samurai had a lot of influence on that, the emperor's stuff eating, these periods of evolution were, they were a feast, but they were more articulated for health very often. Kuzu, do you know what that is?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, it's a particular type of carbohydrate that's quite rich in fibre. Is that correct?
David Bouley: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a vine, not so much a root. So it goes in and out of the ground. So it has a lot to do with stabilising sugar. We wire people up and we'll do that. We used to bring them in from London, the constant glucose monitor.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, CGMs, yeah.
David Bouley: Yeah, well now we can get them, but you have to have a prescription. You can buy it over the counter in London. So we would put eight people and I would stabilise their sugar using kuzu in every dish. And no one could believe it. Usually when I start to work with a doctor, usually they had a health crisis themselves or someone in their family, but something compelled them to think out of the box. I didn't go through any of that. I didn't change my cuisine. When I opened in the '80s in downtown, it was always the kind of cuisine that customers were coming three, four, five times a week and they were bringing their family and their doctors, nutritionists, and they'd all want to know what the hell is going on here. He's eating this Frenchy restaurant, he's losing weight, colleagues would say he's much nicer at work. Everybody was like, what, how can this possibly be? Because, you know, America still thinks that, particularly then, that if it tastes really good, it must be evil, right? I mean, we hear that every single night. A lady last week, I just told my husband we're going to walk to 82nd Street and West End because I eat half this much food and fall asleep. And he said, yeah, you're usually sleeping on my shoulder in the taxi. She said, I always eat twice or more than twice as much food and have more energy. A lady here on Saturday night, she had a long menu, we gave her a few more things. She said, you know, I just feel like I'm satiated but I'm not stuffed and I'm a little bit hungry still. So all that is, it didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen in 33 years of practising food. In the '80s and '90s was to give digestion. If you digest the food, you're probably going to come back. So we put many vegetables on the market in the '80s and '90s. The fingerling potato with Rick Bishop, the crones, we put also the the corkscrew, tastes like artichokes. You have them in England. We put the rocket on, the cone cabbage, like Bavarian cabbage, tastes like lettuce.
Dr Rupy: Like a, we call it spring-pointed cabbage.
David Bouley: Yeah, well all those weren't here. I had to bring seeds in. I had to pay probably 10 or 15 things that we did before the mid '90s. So that was a big part of how food was functioning. And then I remember, I remember in '85, '86, there was a big Wall Street Journal story and they were asking me why was I writing everything organic on my menu. And I told her, well, you know, I grew up this way. We had a farm. We waited until it was time to eat things. We didn't buy off the farm for years and years. These people that I'm buying from, I told her, are following the same kind of principles. And also when I cook things, particularly with chlorophyll, I see that the colour maintains at higher temperatures. I can do things that if I'm making my juices, because I was obsessed with juices in the mid '80s, the chlorophyll would change really quickly. You would have oxidation. A friend of mine, Henry Mann, up at Yale University told me how to use ascorbic acid. So I started putting buffered vitamin C and then with that, I could maintain colour, taste and shelf life. That was a little bit earlier than this whole new movement, which always makes me nervous because it's most of the time it's going to get all messed up and
Dr Rupy: Well, this is one of the things I think because I think one of the reasons why we're seeing a lot more doctors move into this wellness space or appreciation for food as medicine is because of personal experience. That was, to answer your question, that was kind of my background.
David Bouley: They were compelled by their own health.
Dr Rupy: Exactly. Mark's was the same, a whole bunch of people I know in the UK are the same. My own experience was when I overcame atrial fibrillation when I was a junior doctor. And I think this whole chef doctor series here is super admirable and I can understand why you get a whole bunch of doctors wanting to join in this because it's
David Bouley: They were unwilling, no.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. They used to have to get them drunk. One of the, one of the things that I found most compelling, one of the sentences I picked out from the recent documentary you did in Japan, was science can't cook.
David Bouley: I watched it.
Dr Rupy: I watched all of it.
David Bouley: Wow, because it's only three hours here, but in Japan it was
Dr Rupy: No, three, three half-hour segments.
David Bouley: Yeah, the one there was three hours.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Um, one of the, the, the, the, the lines was science can't cook. I think it was from your colleague who's the culinary leader over there.
David Bouley: Oh yeah, Mr Tsuji.
Dr Rupy: Yes, Mr Tsuji.
David Bouley: Who I just showed you the photo.
Dr Rupy: Yes, you showed me his photos, yeah.
David Bouley: I was 24 years old.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Um, and I just think that's a very powerful statement because it's the same way doctors can't cook either. We don't have that sort of level of culinary knowledge. And in order to translate what we know about nutrition and lifestyle medicine, we rely on the experts in that, which are people like yourselves.
David Bouley: Well last year we did a symposium on fermented foods here. We were doing a soldier and we did, we had a few people from Vermont, they wrote a couple of books from, they're Indian, and they did a beautiful presentation. We had the biochemist from Nagano, we had Elad, who's been working on, it's from Israel, working on microbiome for 12 years with Dr Holly, the lab at Cornell. Holly won the Nobel Prize. So the laboratory there, he was a USDA scientist. The laboratory is run by USDA to fortify the American food system. And I met Ray Glahn about 13 years ago, so we've been working together. We did a collaboration there. And then we had a woman biologist, Japanese biologist, MD, I think, who we presented natto. Look at natto. It's in Africa for a thousand years and in Chinese for maybe a little bit more.
Dr Rupy: I don't think people know that natto is in Africa as well. They always associate with the Japanese.
David Bouley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no one goes, no one really goes deep enough, you know. Even like you say, you have to have a professional cook. Often they do things that are healthy, but they don't know why they do them. So if you're not asking constant questions, it's hard for you to get on the health wagon because you have to deconstruct, which was what I did in the '80s, so that I could rebuild. What would that be like? There's the museum in Brooklyn right now about Chinese cuisine. And I had to do a demo over there because I had to do it for the University of Connecticut because we were working for the alumni. Two years ago, they had given me an honorary PhD and I had the commencement speaker and I became friends with a lot of the deans who were like, just looking for somebody to work with because they have a real struggle finding people that are deep involved in food. And so, I was getting ready and I heard that a group went through, well they went through, and through the museum, and the last wall where there were like 40 or 50 circles all pointing to a centre. And you know, they were saying like, well this one and that one and this one makes this and this one and that one. So the building blocks, the building blocks is my cooking since the '80s. And I would take things like asparagus soup, I would take the skin, juice it, put some ascorbic acid, vitamin C, it would stay beautiful. Take the head, blanch that, make the stem a stock, and the middle one, middle part of it actually make a soup with onions and garlic, some herbs. But then at the last minute, we would put in the chlorophyll from the skin and the smell was amazing. And on the way to the room, the dining room smelled like asparagus. So now if we were to made that earlier, just cooking it all the way, it would have lost some colour, wouldn't have the energy, the sweetness would have gone out. So a lot of these components you see in different cuisines, but they were more designed for health, hygiene, and preservation. So almost every country around the equator has some compound mass, call it miso, mole, curry paste, whatever. And these were there, they have their own physiology. They can kill antibodies. They make, I mean, bacteria, they build their own antibodies and kill invading bacteria, like nuka. Do you know what nuka is?
Dr Rupy: I don't know if you've studied nuka, but
David Bouley: Do you know what nuka is?
Dr Rupy: No.
David Bouley: Nuka is the rice bran hall. And they ferment it. And in Nagasaki, there's a university and they have it registered 200 years old. And in Bouley, we had a state registered nuka that was brought in from the chef's family that was registered 100 years old. So that would be another where it's invading bacteria, the mass does an analysis and will terminate invading bacteria, pretty much like you. So your function, so a lot of the cultures that we see, to answer your question, they weren't, their approach wasn't to medicate or supplement, their approach was to get the body to do what it's designed to do. This kind of cuisine, your question is, you know, the synergies, both current and ancestral, they've always been where the complexity of mother nature, you're not going to figure it out. So properly designed food, like this could be something that everybody's running after. They heard it's great. So they're going to have a lot of that and they're not going to understand compounds or other things that we need so we can have bioavailability. And they could even build antibodies because they eat too much of the same food. And they're eating it without the mass of other, call it whatever you want, you know, call it down to atoms if you want, but there are certain components that would give the transmission of these benefits. And this is the madness that I see constantly today, that they jump on something, they eat too much of something that they think is going to be the answer for health. They don't understand historically. It's kind of like New York when they went nuts over Japanese food. Wasabi was in every purée, anything that wasn't cooked had ponzu on it. Nobody understood anything about what they were doing. Or even now, this non-gluten, there was one of the top chefs in the country sent a bag of flour to everybody. And this was three years ago. I told my receiving guy, quick, run after, put it in the truck, get it out of here. Because it had like tapioca, rice flour, potato starch, corn starch, and a whole list of other things that were there. So we're not going to hurt them with gluten, but we're going to kill them with glycemic index. So the carbohydrate mass was ridiculous, off the charts. So that would be an example of the sort of the dark side of everything. People jump on the bandwagon. And that's why I say the business machine always complicates things. And when the popularity, as you mentioned, of this chef and doctor series, you know, I'm hoping that it actually would calm down because, you know, when the business machine starts to get involved, they don't look at the same values, they're looking at the bottom line. And there's a big part of that.
Dr Rupy: Well, this is what I think is very important to address because as humans, we're very binary, I find. And if we find something, a little snippet of information saying turmeric is good for this, everyone's going to go for the curcumin supplementation or vitamin E is good for this, then we're just going to take the supplement and without really getting to the root cause of why people are ill in the first place. You mentioned autoimmune issues. I think there's a lot of people just thinking it's all to do with cleanliness or it's all to do with the microbiota or it's all to do with pollution or toxins. In reality, it's a combination of all these different things.
David Bouley: Absolutely. It's a circle with hundreds of pies cut out. There's no and and also that circle on the diet is only one side. If you took a circle, you want to have an unbreakable health, put a line through the middle, you're probably going to have it split in half. 50% is going to be lifestyle, 50% is going to be diet. I really think bioavailability and digestion are the two key words to sort of stimulate the curiosity or these are topics that are so complex right now.
Dr Rupy: And I think you look back at traditional foods that you were just talking about, every single culture appears to have some form of fermented food as their base, like every, every culture I look at, whether it be Japanese, Indian, European descent, even Latin America, always have these sort of bases. And I think that's something that has been lost through homogeneity, through irradiation, through foods that are overly processed. And that's essentially why we're seeing, in part, one of the reasons why we see poor gut health. I mean, it's something I see all the time in clinic, gut issues is a big, big issue.
David Bouley: No, I mean, like you said, this is a certain healthy ingredient. It has to be designed, you know, we call them recipes, but I'm amazed at so long ago with people like Escoffier, Roger, China, of course, India, where I was eating Indian lunch three days ago with the owner of an Indian restaurant in Tribeca. And we were really getting into, he made a new dish for me because he likes to cook too, and it was shockingly good. And I felt great after I ate it. But we were talking about, you know, the benefits of the yogurt and the bacteria and how that supplies and then with the spice kingdom. And the different regions of India. And if you go back further when we weren't transporting food, we weren't even able to get from here to there very fast, food was more departmentalised. For instance, Jacques, the my baker, you know, we, he's got a book that we're going to get into English. You know, you're talking about migration of food that has a huge effect up until World War II. After World War II, the efficiency of feeding so many people, particularly in this country, the business machine did it so well, and they ran with it. And it's been so many concessions, but you know, if you look at the Mayflower ship, which launched in 1623, they're having a replica launching in Mystic, Connecticut next weekend. It's pretty much the same and they don't have blueprints. So they went by how many barrels could they ship, how many people could they ship. They had the measurement because the Mayflower, there were several of them and they were basically, you know, distributors and they were merchant ships carrying cargo. So with all that information, contracts and things, they knew the size of the ship and blueprints. But when it came to Cape Cod and to Plymouth, the wheat that came along with it, the soft wheat, it rotted on the way over. So only the hard wheat survived. So one of the reasons why we have such hard wheat, it started since then. And it was so prolific, it grew so fast because it's stronger wheat. You know, if you look at many of these kinds of of survivals, you know, they they nurture different nature and they have a different result in health. So, and if you look at even a soft wheat and a hard wheat, the Egyptian discovery of épeautre, these produce two different kinds of soluble fibre. So we want more soluble fibre and less insoluble fibre when you're making bread.
Dr Rupy: Well, this is why I think complex medicine actually starts with complex food and the improvement in the complexity of your food is going back to our ancestral ways of preparing them. So whether that be fermentation, whether it be looking at the whole plant rather than stripping it and refining it away, so you're actually getting that complex cataclysm of different phytochemicals and and and components when you consume an artichoke or taro or purple potato or whatever.
David Bouley: Prebiotics is so important. And I remember I did one, he put me in his book on the early group of chef and doctors and he really didn't know where the prebiotics were in food. And I felt so bad because it was a big part of his presentation. And you know, I did a whole prebiotic menu. You know, in Arizona not long ago, I was at a seed exchange for the Indian population in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and it flows right down into Mexico City and beyond. And they, they have a federal funded multi-country, not doing so well with any more funds, but they are collecting seeds going back 4,000 years. Now, they're in Indian reservations that no industrial farming has ever touched. I brought bags of white beans back and I would cook them and I hear the people like, because it's nice and watch the eyebrows move up. It's nice to hear, wow, honey, these beans, I haven't had any beans like this before. So when you're eating something like the épeautre flour, which was discovered in the in the tomb, and the Egyptian, and then the French government were the ones that pollinated it. When you're eating these kind of foods, you can almost feel the time. So how do we get back to that? This is the river people and the desert people in Arizona. When you eat that, it's as a chef, you're like, this is unbelievable. So what is it? Is it the ground? Is it the hummus in the ground? Is it the bacteria? Is it the environment? I mean, you don't know. And when we were up in Japan, there's a lot of stuff that didn't go in NHK. It's fascinating things like the benefits of the sea urchin with the fucoxanthin. It's a compound with binds with lipids and they, they're planning on developing a, you know, a totally natural, non-synthetic, looks like a brown aspirin from sea urchin. There's an incredible amount of awareness and transparency in terms of what we should be doing, but it goes back to the point of who's making the food taste great. There was a company that wanted me to work with them, huge. And I told them, we met many times. I told them, listen, if you can tell me what I do when I cook food, I think I might have mentioned this to Mark, are we contributing to high nutritional density where we can have bioavailability or are we maybe doing things in cooking, temperature, oxidation, acid, pH, whatever, that are damaging or we're not putting the right foods together. And then if you can tell me, that's one, and I said, if you can tell me what my customers need to eat as individuals, I'm signing right up tomorrow. And I said, or if you can help me find those people that can help guide me where they were doing things going back thousands of years. You know, there was one doctor that closed, it was beautiful. And he had four kinds of doctors. And it was the first, number one, number two, number three, number four. And the first one was a doctor who was trying to treat a patient, whatever, his approach. Number two is a doctor that is discovering a disease. Number three is the doctor that's treating the disease. And number four is the doctor that prevents disease. And on the bottom in Chinese characters and in English, it was 4,250 years ago. I think those same four doctors are outside right now. But most of the time, as we talked about earlier, a lot of, we need science, we need science. My uncles in France, you know, they're so obsessed with holistic, but they always say, you know, when it's time to take your penicillin, you better take your penicillin. And not long ago, I had a spider from a hike up in New England that bit my foot. I couldn't figure out what was going on. It swelled up. It was like so painful. And I couldn't figure out. So finally I had to go, I tried everything. I used my tea tree oil, I used black seed oil, I did all kinds of things.
Dr Rupy: Did you use black cumin?
David Bouley: Oh yeah, black cumin seed. Yeah, yeah, I take it every day. I tell a lot of people to, I found a few that actually biodynamic that have a better taste. So I, I got to have to, I'm studying now what are they doing to it because certain people are processing black seed oil and it tastes horrible. People don't want to eat it. I tell them mix it with manuka honey and so, actually a lot more benefits to it too. But then I found one that I'm drinking and it's delicious.
Dr Rupy: Really?
David Bouley: Yeah, it's really good. So I tried all that and I had to take a antibiotic. I hadn't been on antibiotics in probably 20-something years. So of course I went right into my, yeah, I took care of that. But you know, I saw already in a laboratory years ago with a big group of doctors that antibiotics create scars that will never heal. They're always there. So, you know, you always try to stay away from that. And I learned so much from my uncle that even when I was a student at the Sorbonne, a few times I'd run down, I was sick, and he would just call in a holistic pharmacist and I would go there and I didn't know what I was taking, but always within a day I'd feel great. No side effects. And that's where I first started to say, wow, food is really powerful.
Dr Rupy: I wanted to ask you actually, getting to your mind, when you are creating a plate of food, what is that process like for you and how is that shift? Because I can imagine that shifts every time you learn something new and you're learning stuff all the time.
David Bouley: I feel that I'm so fine-tuned with what I do now, all these years trying to put food together. I can almost, you know, my olfactory, my senses are helping me. You know, it's something that I think a lot about. My wife says I'm so sensitive now that I can feel a digestive issue before I even put something in my mouth. And she watches me. She's extremely healthy herself. She lost her dad young. He was in the network, you know, a lot of smokers and so she really took on an incredible challenge to learn how to heal him. And she's maintained that interest and that growth. So we work together on a lot of these things. But I remember Liam Neeson was in the kitchen in my first restaurant. He came in the kitchen with his plate and he said to me, I don't know, this sauce, it tastes so complex and rich, but I know it's not. So how you do this? And I said to him that I realised that when I was at the first, on the farm, that story of me pulling the peach down with my mother and she put my hand on another one, pushed it up, and when she took my hand down, I said that's the peach you eat at seven years old. Growing up on a farm and learning the difference between something from only three days later, the value is better, the taste. And then just constantly looking for those gifts from mother nature. So let's say you find one, and I always say I take that vegetable or food or whatever for a very long walk. We have an intimate relationship. We do all kinds of testing together, all kinds of techniques and this and that until I find, wow, that's the best way. So when I put another one with it, which I've already done the same walk with, they're going to work together. And I told him that and he said, wow, that's so interesting. He had just finished Schindler's List. And his response was, in my career, I felt like I've been giving a large piece of wood and I've been whittling it down and whittling it down till I get the simplest form and I found my power. And he said that Schindler's List was a real stretch for him. I never saw the movie, but you know, he's fascinating to have that kind of dialogue with someone. And then there was someone in the last week that we opened because you're, I'm answering, and he is from England. I can't remember, he's an amazing actor. I think he's a, he's probably running a school now, but he was, he had a great career. As soon as he opened his mouth, you could feel the projection. And he was saying, this kitchen has love in it. This kitchen is full of love. And that love is with mother nature. And he went on and on and on. This is not love with being a skilled cook and all my stuff, he stopped the service. And you know, I can feel it when somebody told us last week the same thing, you know, the two nights ago. So science is so powerful, but so is lifestyle and natural food, you know, it's just that people often can't make a kajillion dollars on it. They can't copyright it, they can't own it. And a lot of times those investments are going to come from big business where that has to be their, you know, that has to be their goal. So where are we today? Today is building from the silos of success, like I like to say, and break down the barriers and work together, like we're going to do tonight. You know, without having, I've never had a health challenge, so people always say, well, were you sick? Is that why? No, I've always cooked that. And the good thing is that most of the people that I've been feeding are still coming since the mid '80s. So they always knew, you know, they have, I have so much history about food. I remember I pulled out a New York Times story, it was a pretty big paper story, and it said something about this chef is obsessed with digestion. It was early '90s. Who was talking about digestion, you know? Yeah, so I didn't think about it. I found it in my barn and I was saying to my wife, look at that, I guess, I guess I've been thinking about it for a long time, but I know I didn't, I know I didn't use the word digestion. So the journalist used the word digestion, but somehow I must have been talking about how, you know, I don't want people to leave where they're taxed by the food, by the combinations we put together. But you know, where I'm at today, now that we finished NHK, is to study the synergies from one culture to the next. If you're going to look at Ayurvedic, you have a hot body, you have a cool body. You have many different things that are obvious where foods are, there's a correlation between that physiology. And so we have to learn more about those independent physiologies. And then we have to understand that in the composition of a dish, there has to be some engineering, the the we have to quantify the dish to service this physiology. And the challenge is that over the centuries of cuisine, communities constantly changing. Food was normally supporting those community changes. Until recently, maybe 10, 15 years after the last war, food wasn't the service so much. Food in this country took the back seat. Food had to be convenient, very fast, had to be mainstream. And then the impression, the influence of the business machine and the government, made people have error in judgment. Are we affected that much by business, you know, do we feel that a lot of people, that's what I call myths. And where do we get to the point, like when Dr. C, because this is something you would know a lot about. I think I said it before is when Dr. C, neurosurgeon from Cornell, he was really busy, I was really busy. We don't always talk together. I knew what he was going to talk about, so I prepared a menu. And I showed a whole bunch of oils and I showed the turmeric oil, sitting there. And, you know, in a few minutes, I talked about the soluble and insoluble, blah, blah, blah. And peppermint oil, I was so good from here down, not from here up. Acid reflux, not a good idea to have peppermint oil. And I try to get people, you know, you just can't jump on it because you're going to have a, if you're having a problem in this area, okay, that's going to help you, but if you're having another problem, this is going to be worse. So that's, you know, where do you get that information? And so eight or nine minutes into it, he was talking about how India has the lowest Alzheimer's disease in the world because you have a lot of curry and curry is turmeric and turmeric is curcumin that goes into ghee. Well, that could be a building block. It could be a really healthy oil, high metabolism, maybe some grape seed, maybe some avocado, maybe some olive oil. You make a turmeric, organic turmeric oil, and then you use it, you do a little research, you use it, but it's so simple. You boil the pasta, you throw it in a bowl, you put a tablespoon of that, you roll it around, the smell is beautiful, the colour, throw some pine nuts on there for protein, some good fats, a little bit of parsley, maybe a little bit more of a good hard cheese, sheep or goat, for maybe some good lactic acid bacteria, and you're going to sit down and say, wow, I'm a genius. I made this in eight minutes and I feel great. And I don't, I don't have to go lay down on a nap and watch TV to digest my meal. So the building blocks is where I want to go with the living pantry. But we'll have, and you're definitely invited, we want to try to close it up this year and have a mini podcast, one page about you and ask you five questions. And in those five questions are, what foods have you discovered are servicing with uncontroversial, you know, evidence that you're healing people through a certain food. My job is to integrate it and to make it taste good.
Dr Rupy: It's almost like a balance that you're trying to strike here. It's like, you know, you're trying to look after them. They have to trust you and then you have to essentially reflect what you're creating for them to suit their needs as well that they might not be aware of.
David Bouley: Any smart chef knows that there's two ways that you grow as a chef if you accept it. It's not about you and your jacket. Mother nature challenges you almost every day because she's different every day. And your customer challenges you. If you accept those two, you will definitely evolve and grow. And those of those who don't, sure, there's certain levels of creativity and they can have a prolific idea, but really their foundation is not going to be as solid as accepting the challenges of mother nature, learning how to adapt as she gives you different kinds of food. Maybe the weather changed, this changed or whatever. Fish has more fat, has less fat, you know, whatever. This animal ate more grass and this animal had more clover and alfalfa. And they're totally different immune system. You know, clover and alfalfa with the high omega-3 can change an animal's life in two weeks. So this animal was drinking just grass and didn't have clover and alfalfa. So you have to be, the more that you micro study mother nature, she teaches you. And the more that you accept your challenge, challenges from your customers, you, you're going to, if you accept those challenges, either it could be the most sophisticated palette or it could be the most, you know, jaded palette from a point of almost not even being, not even tasting things, but you can reach them. And those will build strengths. And then, then you start thinking about, you know, health from there, like we talked about the ascorbic acid, you know, that was a man that grew way too much basil and he made pesto and all his neighbours used to lock the door and pull the shades down. They had no more room to put any frozen pesto. So he bought a big coffin freezer, the, the, you know, the flat freezer, the chest freezer, and he told me that he discovered with buffered vitamin C that he could grate these ice cubes of pesto in February, it would snow outside, you open the door and the whole house smelled like basil. So I started doing that in 1989. And then I went from not just in green chlorophyll, I put it in everything. And it seemed to, obviously it was controlling bacteria, which is eating sugar just like we like. So then I started to realise, wow, flavours are growing, they taste better and everything looks cleaner. So we put it in almost everything we do.
Dr Rupy: Do you have some non-negotiables that you consume on a daily or you try and get in your diet on a weekly basis after all you've learned through all the different cultures?
David Bouley: I fast a lot. I haven't eaten yet. My last meal was in Chinatown last night. Everything that we ate was alive with a man from Taipei who is one of our best customers and it was from my bakers. And she is diabetic, so we made sure there was no sugar in anything. And it was that level of most sophisticated Chinese food. We had to be a little bit larger group because we were eating giant crabs from Australia and different things like this, scallops were just open, everything was super live, fresh. And they were so happy. And you know, she was monitoring herself, you know, so I, like we do that, we do that. We have to, we have to learn what, what is the reaction of our foods. That's why I love those constant glucose monitors.
Dr Rupy: Totally, because I have patients that will have oats, for example. Oats is perfectly healthy for some people, but for certain patients, it shoots their sugar right up.
David Bouley: Well, that's what we're learning. You know, like certain people, they can't have like, even green tea. The theine can create blood pressure issues, you know, or the caffeine at a certain temperature of water though, if you bring it really low, the lower the water with green tea, the lower the caffeine. You can get almost to no caffeine if you're using cold water. We learned this in laboratories in in Japan. So you have all the benefits, theine, amino acids, you have all these different things.
Dr Rupy: And you've got a lot of GABA.
David Bouley: So you have GABA there. And so you have, you have many areas that are going to calm, calm you down. So, you know, for me, it's basically I love to fast. If I felt that I've eaten food that my physiology struggles with for digestion or I don't feel the energy that I feel like I should have, I always have too much energy anyways, but I feel, okay, I'm going to fast. And I do take certain enzymes. I work with different herbalists. One guy is almost 80 years old, you would think he's 50. And he said, yeah, I unplugged a long time ago. But he has a whole bunch of PhDs and he's got about 75 acres. And I grew up with a 100 acre woman farm in Connecticut, who had actually two PhDs from Oxford and she never used them. 1925, she started an herb farm. She wrote 50-something books. And the reason I brought it up is because right now, she died about 20 years ago. She was married to a younger man, a professor to secure the estate, and then he's passed. So now it's being taken over by an executor. And I, she somehow put my name in there that I was her spiritual brother. She was about 50 years older than me. And, anyway, so all her intellectual knowledge is also for sale and they think I should buy it. And I really want to do it because, you know, in 1970s, she had 20 or 30 red basils and probably 40-something green basils. And she had the silver garden, this garden, that garden. She had travelled all over the world. She proved that she could grow almost anything like Elliot Coleman up in Maine. Have you ever heard of him?
Dr Rupy: No, no.
David Bouley: Elliot Coleman, amazing guy. Extending growing season in Maine four months. He, he's a genius. And he said, I'm not a farmer, I grew up in New Jersey, but he's the best farmer. I used to buy my Chantenay carrots from him in the first Bouley when I was in Vermont, and customers would come in and you'd see a little orange on the plate and they would say, could you tell us what that was? We were all like arguing, debating, is it squash, pumpkin, carrot? I said it's carrot.
Dr Rupy: So it was like, yeah.
David Bouley: Well, it was a, it's a, has an appellation on it. It's the only carrot that has an appellation. One of the few vegetables. Chantenay. And, um, then they would come back after and say, okay, we, we, we understand, but what were the spices? And then you tell them, we didn't put any spices in it. We just glazed the carrots to get the glucose up, the water's coming out. You see the shine on the carrot, it's starting to get soft. This is sugar, it's caramelising. It's that blonde caramel now. So we know about how much water to put in, and then we simmer it until we know we have enough water mass and the carrots. Then we blend that, we get a beautiful silky. We don't do anything, salt and pepper. And they, they wouldn't believe it. And they would say, well, I thought you're supposed to boil it and then we put it in a blender with heavy cream and butter and nutmeg and allspice and all these things. I said, yeah, that's one way to do it, but you know, it's not, that's not the way you want it.
Dr Rupy: Well, this is the thing, it's like healthy eating is about letting the great quality ingredients speak for themselves.
David Bouley: The potato fingerling when we put it on in '87, by 1990, when we give the dessert menu to customers, like I think I said that to Mark, it's just to make people realise, so many of the waiters would say to me, Chef, they don't want dessert, but they want another bowl of that fingerling potato. And then when you go to Peru and you see what they're doing with the potatoes, you eat a potato down there, it's like, wow. I just have to go sit down and think for a while. I thought I knew what a potato was. That's what we're learning from the Indians. So, yeah, I mean, with due cause, we've done things to food where we've had to feed a huge population. I'm reading a book right now, you should read it. It's called Eat Like a Fish. It's this guy who was a fisherman, had a really rough life as a youth from British Columbia. He's fished everywhere. Dropped out of high school, but he's kelp farming now. And his statistics are so interesting. Kelp, because you know, we were in Hokkaido, we did a lot of studies in Hokkaido. You saw a little bit in NHK, but we were with them for a week. We could talk about that till next weekend. But the, the kelp removes a multiple more of carbon dioxide out of the climate than trees do. It also reduces nitrogen in the ocean. It also is a great area for fish to repopulate within the kelp because fishermen can't go in there. So he's got 2,000 ocean acre. I'm only in like chapter seven. I got to get moving and figure out where he's going with this, but the beginning was so amazing. And it was such a scintillating introduction to the future where 2055, we will have to produce as much food as we've ever produced to feed the population in 2055.
Dr Rupy: It's a scary thought.
David Bouley: Seems crazy. How could that be? But many people have told me that's probably true. We've reduced the pure water down by 60, 70%. Seems like you're going to have some real challenges. One thing I learned from centennials, because we studied the blue zone now, not just in Japan, but most centennials will run a journal and they will start with their day with gratitude. They will continue with empathy and they will know that they have to service someone. It could be a smile. It could make a face that looks like they're suffering from the load of life. Just have a smile for a minute. So those I've seen. And I told one doctor not long ago, he's a dean. He said, David, if gratitude was a supplement, it'd be a trillion-dollar business in two weeks. I said, wow, you really think so? Yes. And we were, you know, we were at the Japanese embassy, they had given me this, this Washoku award. And I was the first one outside of Japan.
Dr Rupy: What does the Washoku mean again?
David Bouley: It's the, it's the food, the evolution of food. Their, their, their culture of food, food culture for Japan. And, um, so, uh, there were a lot of photographers there and, uh, because they had never done that and Japan is reaching out, not just in food, but in many other, they feel that there's pressure to identify as China is now reaching out and a lot of things are Japanese. So they feel that, you know, they want to make sure that there isn't an identity crisis. But, uh, it's a really an interesting program they've initiated about 10 years ago. They have a lot of support, government, educators, businesses. And, uh, we talked to the, one of the chairmen of a major company, trillion-dollar company. And, uh, my wife was saying, wow, look at, he's so impeccably dressed. And when he came to us, because he was being brought to us by someone we knew, and we had a Japanese woman with us. And, and my wife and I were like, so I wonder what we're going to talk about now, because we've been talking about, you know, um, gratitude and things like this. And just enjoying food. And he started talking for a minute, he said, yes, David, you know, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing that we do as Japanese, before we open our eyes, we thank for air. And then we thank for light. And then we thank for water. This we do every morning. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. He's a businessman at the, you know, under the mega lifestyle and this is so beautiful. But in the time that we spent, I learned a lot about these things and how they come, cortisol, adrenal, just breathing, which we do a lot as well. You know, like that's why I love when Andrew Weil's going to introduce, which is pretty much global now, his 5-7-8. You know, we'll get people that we know have blood pressure based on cortisol, not blood pressure from plaque or calcium or other issues, but just cortisol. It could be just because they think too much or they're busy and they, they're the kind of minds that are running all the time. So we've learned that that's a, that can stimulate blood pressure. But if you take that person, and I'm one of them, and breathe, just six or seven minutes, you can drop blood pressure down 30 points.
Dr Rupy: And I think that's one of the beautiful things about doing a chef event here in this space, in this room that we're in right now, because you see the chef and people are sat around a table, the simple process, the simple event of sitting around a table with people, not looking at your phone, calms everyone down.
David Bouley: Oh yeah, they exactly. No, that's a good point. Um, you know, they're blue light and just the constant habits that we're running to and these are great services to our lifestyle, but they're also, you know, they're a double-edged sword. And when Dr. C comes from Harvard, he's helping astronauts sleep and soldiers in combat sleep, he's a sleep specialist. I look at the people and they, they look like they're, they want to run home and change their life, but then they realise there's a six-course menu. And it's like, should I stay or should I go? It sounds like David Byrne's song, you know. And so we, we look at these guys and, and he has given them such clarity and statistics that they, they feel, wow, I have a takeaway. And that's what we're doing, you know, the last doctor that came in, brilliant, but he more than halfway was pointing where all the problems are. And my issue was, you know, people need takeaway, they need solutions. You know, maybe we could put some people on there that they can talk to on the end of the screen, some websites. People want to be active too. They want to engage in changing things. They want a takeaway when they hit the sidewalk. And he said, that's great. Um, I want to write a book called Solutions. He's written like 15 books. And, and I think he's going to do it. Or another doctor that we were talking to a week before about how certain people have reactions to certain kind of foods while other people don't. Caffeine would be one. So how do you metabolise caffeine? And can you still enjoy caffeine if you can't metabolise it? So, yeah, we've learned that there's foods that can first nurture the ecosystem. Can we restabilise an ecosystem that started with a handicap? I don't know. But I know that I did, um, I cooked for the China study, you know, a few times, those folks. And, uh, there was a woman that used to come down from Rochester that won a marathon, a doctor. And, um, you know, she was focused on was, of course, children. And, uh, because, you know, my story, you're going to understand. And, um, what's interesting because we studied in Kyoto bacteria, microbiome, the natural birth versus C-section. And I told her, and actually my uncle was always telling me because, you know, it's illegal in France, you have to have a real cause. It's not a cosmetic, cosmetically it's not available to you. So, actually many countries. Um, so, uh, I told this lady at one of my projects called Upstairs where it was a tiny little room, I'm cooking on a French stove and my Japanese chef is with me, who was my age, a little bit older, who was the first one to get a four-star review in the New York Times 33 years ago, a real master chef. And we had a ball because we could talk to people, we never talked to them. And, uh, I was telling her what I had just learned and she made me feel that I didn't understand any of what they told me and that that just is not correct. And I went home and told my wife, wow, I'm going to have to study this more. So on the next trip to Japan, maybe I can learn more about the natural birth versus C-section. Next year she comes back and, uh, I don't know if I told this on Mark's, but she came back and, uh, she was looking for me because we had four corners, four restaurants, and she found me and she said, wow, I have 20,000 babies in our database and we see a direct synergy to immune weaknesses from C-section versus natural birth, natural canal birth. And, um, then, uh, I went to cook up in Rochester for the, I can't remember the doctors from the China study.
Dr Rupy: T. Campbell.
David Bouley: Campbell's. Right. So, uh, she was there and she introduced me to her husband and she introduced me in front of other people that were all, um, gastroenterologists. And, you know, uh, it was fascinating. But when she, this years ago, when she told me that was correct, I went home and told my wife that night, I said, well, I don't know if we should be happy or more upset because I can't believe a cook told this. Like, what is going on? I mean, come on, this is ridiculous. So at that point, it was right within that year, I decided, look, I got to start the chef and doctor series because we have to get people understanding, uh, you know, and like I said earlier, a lot of them said, well, I had 24 hours of nutrition, but I don't know what to talk about because, you know, we basically were trained, most of them in the '70s, antibiotics were so, you know, powerful and everything else and the eye was on science. And, you know, we also know that doctors in general die at three to six percent younger than their sex normal.
Dr Rupy: This is the same across all healthcare staff in the UK as well.
David Bouley: You too? Wow. So that's, I mean, obviously they want to heal people. They probably don't take care of their schedule of eating, they're not eating properly. They probably have no circadian rhythm. Uh, the list goes on.
Dr Rupy: It's one of the things I, I remember I wrote my, my first book about how we, we are not the pillars of health to look up to. But, um, I'm fascinated by this doctor series and, uh, I don't want to take too much more of your time today.
David Bouley: No, no, it's just that your question was very interesting in terms of, uh, are there other cultures where we see a movement pretty much. Um, having spent time with, uh, these French bakers, you know, going back 1650, uh, all only always organic. I learned a lot from them. And, um, you know, I learned so much about, uh, how not just the ingredient, but how we present the food, how we execute the food. For instance, if you take bread and you freeze it and then you thaw it properly, and with a little bit of toasting, you reduce the glycemic index. So if you take fried rice and keep it two days old before you cook it, you reduce glycemic index. So I started reading all that and I read that this one young Chinese chef, he says, yeah, if you can't do that, freeze it for at least two or three hours and you reduce it. So it's the, the carbohydrates.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, you're forming resistant starch molecules that make it, they blunt the glycemic.
David Bouley: Well, they explode as well, so the water is, you know, the whole protein transition, everything's happening, sugars. I mean, that's fascinating because in China they were probably always using several day old rice, right? Now they're in a rush, they're using fresh rice. And people maybe they put their bread outside in the wintertime, who knows, but yeah, yeah. So that's, you know, there's so much to learn.
Dr Rupy: But it's also fascinating how many doctors have been coming in now who are sitting there and saying things like, oh, I didn't know you do that. That's how you cook the mushrooms or or you know, you're giving them different things to taste and they say, oh, I thought I can do, I can do that. Then they come back and they're doing it and they're telling you, you know, I do it better than you now. So, you know, that's when it works. But like this book will be available to them. And what I like about, I haven't, I looked at it really fast because I haven't had time, but I like about it is, um, you know, you're getting into some, you're articulating exactly what they hear everybody's talking about. And this is, you got into sleep.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Every section has got a dietary section but also a lifestyle section as to support that particular function. So for immune health, you know, I'll talk about sleep, for, um, I don't know what chapter that is, but, um, you know, I dissect what things you should be eating to support certain things, but the final chapter brings it all together.
David Bouley: Right.
Dr Rupy: Um, and that's what I'm, uh, I'm a big fan of.
David Bouley: Oh, the final chapter.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, the final chapter in the front section.
David Bouley: Oh.
Dr Rupy: It's the, the principles of
David Bouley: The introduction to the performance of food, right?
Dr Rupy: Exactly, yeah. You're going to find, I'm going to essentially talk about the final chapter tonight for tonight's thing. Um, but eating a living for ultimate health, this is something to support every aspect of your, um, your wellbeing. And then I, I use these sort of scientific, these healthy eating principles and what concepts are supporting those. So nutrigenomics, chrono-nutrition that's fasting, phytochemicals, inflammation balance, all these different things that come into this. And this is when I create a recipe, I'm thinking about, okay, where's the fibre? Where's the quality fat? Where's the colour?
David Bouley: Yeah, that's great. Because one doctor was brilliant one time, came back again and, uh, she impressed me so much, but the second time it was, eat a rainbow of colour. And I went home and told my wife, you know, either we're learning too much or they're not articulating because, you know, you talk to the guest who come in regularly and they say, you know, we already know we should be eating a rainbow of colour. But what does that mean? What do we do when we go home, eat a rainbow of colour? Okay, we already do that now. But if you don't have the proper fats, carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, you know, and what is fibre? What kind of fibre? You know, the, the language is not clear. And everybody hears the new thing is pretty much what everybody's saying. They recirculate so much material. But like, where do you, what do I do as a consumer?
Dr Rupy: Exactly, which is why I chose to zoom into different topics and go through what the literature says about those individual topics and then zoom out and then look at the ultimate principles. So when I'm thinking about, okay, how do you build your plate, you know, you're getting all these principles in. And then you, if you complement that with a lifestyle, then you're creating a particular, a medicinal package. Um, which is, yeah.
