The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Mon, 24 Feb 2025
There is a significant impact of food on brain health and overall well-being, with great importance placed on nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory foods. Unfortunately, nutrient levels of modern crops are declining, but regenerative agriculture is helping to restore food quality. Specific brain-boosting foods such as leafy greens, small cold-water fish, and polyphenol-rich plants have an ability to reduce neuroinflammation, protect against cognitive decline, and enhance mental clarity. And, ultimately, identifying whole food sources of essential nutrients will support your entire body. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Jeff Bland and Dr. William Li, practical tips on choosing the most nutrient-dense foods and how to harness their benefits for overall health. Dr. Jeff Bland is the founder of Big Bold Health, a company on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature’s greatest innovations—the immune system. Through Big Bold Health, Dr. Bland is advocating for the power of Immuno-Rejuvenation to enhance immunity at a global level, often through the rediscovery of ancient food crops and superfoods. To get there, he is building a network of small farms and suppliers throughout the US that take a clear stance on regenerative agriculture, environmental stewardship, and planetary health. Dr. Bland’s career in health spans more than 40 years. A nutritional biochemist by training, he began in academia as a university professor. He then spent three decades in the natural products industry, working alongside other pioneers. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bland has traveled the world many times over in his role as the “father of functional medicine.” In 1991, he and his wife, Susan, founded The Institute for Functional Medicine. In 2012, he founded another educational nonprofit called the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Dr. Bland is the author of The Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life, as well as countless additional books and research papers. Dr. William Li is a world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author of Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. He is best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. His groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer? has garnered more than 11 million views, and he has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, Martha Stewart Live, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Voice of America, and has presented at the Vatican’s Unite to Cure conference. An author of over 100 scientific publications in leading journals such as Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more, Dr. Li has served on the faculties of Harvard, Tufts, and Dartmouth Medical School. Find Dr. Li’s Eat To Beat Disease Masterclass at drwilliamli.com/masterclass and get a copy of his book, Eat To Beat Disease at drwilliamli.com/book-li/. Full length episodes can be found here: Nourish Your Brain with These Powerful Superfoods https://drhyman.com/blogs/content/podcast-ep909?_pos=1&_sid=652901034&_ss=r How The Most Important Superfood You've Never Heard About Will Rejuvenate Your Immune System https://drhyman.com/blogs/content/podcast-ep176?_pos=10&_sid=652901034&_ss=r Cancer Can't Stand This Diet: Dr. William Li's Anti-Cancer Nutrition Breakthroughs https://drhyman.com/blogs/content/podcast-ep890?_pos=4&_sid=ec054bdd0&_ss=r This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show. Food is medicine, but then that begots the question of, well, what foods contain the most medicine and how do you grow foods that contain the most medicine? And it turns out that regenerative agriculture is that method. We've seen a 50% drop in lots of minerals and other nutrients in vegetable crops over the last 50 years.
So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's not as good as it used to be. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal... You know, I often remind people that sleep is not just a luxury, it's a necessity. It impacts your energy, focus, metabolism, and overall health.
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Today, I want to zero in on the research behind five specific foods that you can add to your diet for tremendous capacity to support your brain and health, and make us feel, think, and perform better. Now, some of you may be familiar with a few of these foods, but others may surprise you. So let's jump right in with the first food that can literally change the way your brain works for the better.
The first is dark green leafy vegetables and specifically a category called cruciferous vegetables, also known as brassicas, basically the broccoli family.
Kale, collards, spinach, arugula, Swiss chard, collard greens, mustard greens, bok choy, romaine lettuce, turnip greens, beet greens, watercress, endive, escarole, broccoli rabe, dandelion greens, radicchio, watercress, lettuce, chicory, pretty much anything green. What is the mechanism of green leafy veggies and the positive effect on their brain? Well, there's a lot of reasons.
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Chapter 2: How can food improve brain health?
I mean, gut health, you have more regular stool or whatever, anti-inflammatory. It all comes into sharp focus if you're talking about cancer patients. And it turns out that the quality and nature of your gut microbiome can make the distinction between life or death if you have cancer. And I've been talking to oncologists about this, cancer docs, and they're just starting to wake up to this idea.
And cancer patients are flooding into the clinics every single day, getting chemo, worse, getting antibiotics for various things. I mean, look, you might need antibiotics to live.
And steroids, which I'll mess up your life.
but you're not resurrecting, you're not protecting the gut microbiome. And if that makes a difference between life or death, that is something that everyone needs to focus on. So a study out of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, looking at people with one type of cancer, melanoma, that spread. So we're talking about metastatic melanoma, bad disease. that responds well to immune therapies.
Not chemo, it's a- Checkpoint inhibitors. Checkpoint inhibitors that actually, to explain to people listening, a checkpoint inhibitor is not chemo. It's giving you an infusion of a medicine that wakes up your own immune system to spot where cancer is. It actually helps your immune system do what it's supposed to do. Find cancer and scrub it out. Think about the dry erase board.
You know, you've got some notes on there. Just scrub it all out to zero or a clean slate. Yeah, I did for my mom. I've seen many other patients who have actually had a complete response. It turns out not everybody responds. Only about 20% of people have a good response. 80% of people don't. And we're beginning to realize that 80% don't have the right gut microbiome makeup.
Now, a few years ago, we talked, I remember we had this conversation at Milken about Ackermansia, which, you know, is everyone's talking about now. And good thing, too, because it's important. But now we're beginning to realize other bacteria are also important. So about eight bacteria have been discovered. and dietary fiber matters. So. Yeah, nuts.
The study that my colleague at MD Anderson led on showed that for melanoma, given immunotherapy, for every five to six grams of dietary fiber, it decreases mortality from that cancer by 30%.
Oh, wow.
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