Author of the book “The Jungle Effect”, Daphne Miller, sits down with Dr. Oz to discuss the connection between ancient diets and their positive effects on health in modern times. She distills the wisdom of “native” foods that have been preserved by pre-modern cuisines and why, when it comes to the pursuit of longevity, what’s old is new again! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Fermentation really exists in all of these cultures.
And we in the United States eat the least amount of fermented food of anywhere on the planet.
Occasionally you'll get yogurt and half the time that's not even honestly fermented.
And pickles that you buy in the U.S., except for a couple brands, are not truly fermented.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz.
And this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll be right back.
We're talking to Daphne Miller, author of The Jungle Effect, and we're honored to have you on the show today.
Daphne, if you don't mind, we'll give folks a little bit of background on you.
You're a board-certified family physician, which means you're a real doctor in San Francisco.
She's on the faculty at the University of California at San Francisco, one of the prettiest places to practice medicine.
Her love for indigenous foods, quote-unquote, can be traced back to your childhood spent living in remote parts of the world with Peace Corps parents.
I always thought Peace Corps was a two-year gig.
Not for my parents.
They couldn't find anything else to do afterwards, so they were the longest living Peace Corps volunteers.
How many years were they in the Peace Corps?
My father, well, he was a volunteer for two years, but he was a career Peace Corps guy who was in the Peace Corps in one form or another for nine years.
Oh my goodness.
You ever meet Sarge Shriver?
No.
No.
He's the founder of the Peace Corps.
Oh, okay.
He's a wonderful guy.
Maria, his daughters, and Timmy Schreiber, a good friend.
I work with him a lot on HealthCore, which is a similar program.
But instead of sending people like your father off to Botswana, they put them in schools to teach kids about health.
Wonderful.
So tell me a little bit about The Jungle Effect.
The book is subtitled, A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World, Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home.
A very practical tome that does describe how folks have used food, which is a sacred product in most parts of the world, although we ignore that reality frequently in this country, and have used food for its own healing power.
What got you going on it?
And what is it, by the way?
Well, interesting story.
I've got to tell you, as a family doctor, what really started to impress me was people coming in and telling me about their great-grandmother or their great-grandfather from Russia, China, Japan, who lived to 100, and they were sitting there and wondering why it was that at age 40 or 50 here in the U.S., they're getting these diseases that their ancestors never had, like diabetes and high blood pressure and depression and obesity.
So that's one of the things that first got me started as a family doctor thinking about this issue.
But there was one story in particular that really catapulted me into the jungle effect.
And that was a patient, we'll call her Angela.
And Angela was like all my other patients wrapped up in one.
She came in in her late 30s with high blood pressure and prediabetes and she was severely overweight and was suffering from depression.
And Angela told me a fascinating story.
About six months earlier, she had gone back to her native village in Brazil, in the jungle, on the banks of the Amazon River.
And while she was there, all these miraculous things had happened to her.
She started to lose weight.
Her blood pressure got much better.
Her mood improved.
Her knees improved.
And the curious thing was she was eating more and maybe even exercising less than she was in San Francisco.
Then she came back to San Francisco and everything started to come back again.
And she came into my office wanting to know what had caused this transition.
Well, guess who ended up in the Amazon six months later?
Totally by coincidence.
I took a volunteer job for the summer at a little medical clinic there, basically because San Francisco is so freezing in the summer.
I thought it would be a great chance to get my family somewhere else.
And I ended up in a little tiny village that was about a two-day slow boat ride upstream on the Amazon River where my patient Angela had been staying.
And I started to notice a lot of these same transitions in my own body and in the bodies of a couple of the other volunteers that were down there with me.
We were all feeling better, losing weight, getting more energy.
You look in pretty good shape already.
Well, I have...
I came back and what I called this was, I decided to call this phenomenon the jungle effect.
And what it really became obvious to me is what it was is there I was eating foods that were very indigenous to that place, that were local, that were fresh, that went together as a diet.
That we're not an invented diet per se by someone who at one point in time decided to give us some specific dietary rules.
I mean, these were foods that had slowly evolved together over hundreds to thousands of years because they worked and kept us healthy.
And it just made me curious about other places around the world where diets were doing the same thing.
And I actually became particularly interested in places that might have a very low rate of one specific chronic disease, like high blood pressure, heart disease, and so on.
And so I actually went into the medical literature to look for studies showing me these places.
I call them cold spots.
And I launched myself on a trip to go to these cold spots and bring back lessons that we can use here in the United States.
Let me ask you, since you're a practicing clinician, how do you get away from your patients?
This is a very selfish question on my part.
Absolutely.
I'm just curious, how do you go away for like a summer?
Yeah, well, the way you do it is that you have a medical partner who's amazing and competent and who also has her own aspirations to do work outside the office and you balance each other out.
And you share.
And you share.
First of all, back to Brazil for a second.
What was it about the food you think that allowed Angela and you, if you needed to, to lose a little bit of weight, to have your blood sugars and insulin levels sort of corrected?
It's obviously that it's real food, but what about its realness do you think is making it so effective?
Well, I think there's a number of things.
And the problem, and I think we always get to this sticking point in the United States because we want quick fixes, is to try and reduce it down to that silver bullet.
And I can't do that for you, honestly, Mehmet.
But what I can tell you is that, first of all, all the carbohydrates that you're eating are things that I would call native carbohydrates or indigenous carbohydrates.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
That are rich in nutrients and fiber and actually proteins as well.
And they react in your body very, very differently than the processed carbohydrates that completely assail us here in our modern lives.
And many of which we don't even know.
People think of couscous as a native carb, for example.
People think it's a grain.
I think it's great.
Exactly.
Versus something like quinoa or whole barley or spelt or something like that, or even brown rice.
So that's one thing.
But then the list goes on from there.
It's the way the foods are combined.
I mean, things that everybody knows is if you eat your meat or your spinach with something acidic, you're going to get more uptake of your iron from that food.
That's something that I think is very popular, that people understand that.
But there's hundreds to thousands of food reactions or interactions that are very good for you and also make food delicious, which honestly, I care much more about delicious food than healthy food.
Which is why I do this work.
I was speaking to Daphne Miller, a physician extraordinaire, a family practitioner who's written a book called The Jungle Effect.
A doctor discovers the healthiest diets from around the world.
Go back to the spinach example.
Exactly.
Okay.
So how do you make spinach more acidic so you can get more of the iron out of it?
Well, no, it's what you cook it with.
So all of these traditional diets, when you look at them, was it dumb luck?
Who knows?
They all have these amazing healing qualities to them in the combinations of their foods.
For example, in Crete, which is one area, they always cook their greens and cover them with lemon or put a little vinegar in.
Or something that is going to increase the bioavailability of...
Bioavailability is a fancy way of saying just that your body's ability to absorb different nutrients from that.
But, for example, for the Tarahumara, who I visited in Mexico, they have a tradition which exists really all over traditional Latin America of preparing their corn.
And their corn, by the way, is truly whole grain corn.
You know, it's corn that's barely processed and it's...
From a hybrid of corn that's been around for hundreds of thousands of years and wouldn't win any awards at your local 4-H club because the kernels are all very heterogeneous.
The rows aren't equal.
The rows aren't equal.
Oh, I love when they're equal.
You can bite them one by one.
You sort of peel them off.
These are little, gnarly years of corn, but so much richer in nutrients than what we get in our highly processed corn.
And take that one more level, they soak it in a lime solution, which...
It actually helps increase the bioavailability.
Once again, that fancy word.
But of all these nutrients like niacin, it enriches the calcium content and increases your ability to absorb the protein.
Now that's the next level.
Okay, level after that.
Take that corn, put it into a lovely whole grain tortilla.
We're not talking highly processed.
It is delicious tortilla.
And eat it with some slow cooked beans.
Right.
And all of a sudden you get this whole other magic because what happens is the tortilla actually slows down, the release of the sugar in the tortilla slows down to match that of these beans.
And so you get this other health benefit by eating those two things together.
Now why slow cook versus fast cook?
Well, fast-cooked beans means gas.
You don't want fast-cooked beans, believe me.
But doesn't soaking it overnight help with that?
Yeah, it does.
It does.
I actually, I tend to do my beans in a slow cooker because I'm a busy lady and I still cook every single night of the week.
So...
Don't get any ideas.
I like that.
I like this.
How many things do you have?
Two.
See, Lisa?
You just cook twice as much.
Just cook twice as much food.
Thanks, Daphne.
I'm so glad you came today.
I love to cook.
It's my transition between work and home.
Do you have these recipes in your book?
I do.
They're all in there, and they're all ones that I make all the time.
I cook myself around the world every two weeks.
Is there a problem?
I'm envisioning cooking every night.
If my husband were home, I would cook every night.
I'm envisioning cooking these delicious things you're describing.
Now, you say that they work because they're indigenous to the regions.
What happens if I use the spinach from Crete and the corn tortilla from Mexico?
Exactly.
So, you know, usually...
Within a certain meal, I like to stick to one part of the world.
You do.
Just because then I think that the whole meal makes sense together.
I'm not a big fusion gal.
Okay.
And I have to say that fusion diets, when I look at them, they don't make a lot of sense to me.
And I know there's restaurants that really hang their hat on that.
Curry sushi doesn't work for you?
Yeah, you know, it just...
And I don't want to become an enemy of the fusion restauranteurs.
And, you know, every once in a while, it's interesting to have this new wild way to eat wasabi with your, you know, Italian pasta.
But in general, my feeling is that these diets make sense because of the way that the foods come together.
So, theme dinner.
So, I do more theme dinners.
But one thing that people often ask me is, you know, let's say I'm from Turkey.
Let's just pretend, okay?
if I decide that the Okinawan foods sit well with me, is that okay?
Or is there some genetic disconnect going on here?
Should I just be eating Mediterranean my entire life?
And that's really what's going to keep me healthy.
And I was very plagued by this question.
And it was actually one of the reasons I set out to write the book, honestly.
And so I ended up spending a lot of time with nutrigenomics guys, you know.
You know, like Jose Ordovas, I talked to him quite a bit at Boston University.
He's the head of the nutrigenomics program there.
And just folks around the country picking their brain on this idea of, should I be eating my taste buds or my genes, basically.
Right, right.
And, you know, the message is genetics are a powerful thing.
And to a certain extent, yes, there are some things like lactose intolerance or G6PD deficiency, which is another genetic, or alcohol dehydrogenase deficiency, which affects the way that you process alcohol.
There are some select things that really...
Put a damper on eating certain foods.
But overall, genes play a tiny role as compared to just making healthy nutrition choices.
And I think that's a really important message for people to take home and understand.
The taste buds win.
Taste buds win.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
The Jungle Fuck's got a lot of very valuable recipes because she's been all over the darn place figuring them out.
So if you want Icelandic cuisine or Okinawan cuisine, you can feast yourself with the jungle effect.
But let's talk a little bit about specific medical issues.
So define a cold spot and a hot spot and give us a couple examples of a few.
Absolutely.
The reason that I started to look at cold spots and hot spots was that I was trying to find diets that matched up with areas that still had very low rates of specific chronic diseases that plague us here in the United States, like breast cancer and colon cancer and depression and heart disease and diabetes.
And the best place to look is actually in the medical literature.
And look at what epidemiologists, who are people who are kind of detectives for medical disease issues, look at what epidemiologists have discovered as they've looked at different areas.
And as I started to delve through the medical literature and started to actually interview these epidemiologists who are working in areas around the world, I came up with a lot of surprises.
One of the biggest surprises was Iceland, because Iceland's a cold, dark place for much of the year.
It's a land of, you know, Viking myths of mayhem and ice flows and so on.
And yet, when you look at the data, Iceland has surprisingly low rates of seasonal affective disorder, which is winter blues, and low rates of depression overall, and even low rates of bipolar disorder, which is another flavor of depression.
And especially when you compare Iceland to other northern countries, it's quite striking, right?
And I was intrigued enough to get myself on a plane and go to Iceland and talk to the researchers there and spend time eating the food and traveling around the island and figuring out what the heck was going on.
Is it a nice place?
Well, I love Iceland.
It was wonderful.
And the people there are fantastic.
And they are all these poster children for happy people.
They are the happy people.
So why are they so happy?
What's wrong with them?
Well, a couple things.
The big obvious thing that kind of hits you in the face when you get there is that Icelanders do love fish.
Okay.
They eat more fish per person per year than anywhere else on the planet, even more than the Japanese who are sort of second highest in the fish consumption.
But the other, and what's interesting is Joseph Hibbeln, who's a researcher at NIH, National Institute of Health, has done this beautiful graph where he's mapped up rates of fish consumption and rates of depression around the world.
And Inversely related.
The craziness from the mercury poisoning.
You're happy, but you're nuts.
Well, we can get to that and talk about it, because I have my thoughts about that as well.
But one of the fascinating things was I got to Iceland, sure, I was bathing in fish, literally.
The char from the fresh water, the fish.
I love fish.
And what's interesting is Icelanders mainly eat small fish.
Which are way further down the food chain.
So aren't eating other fish and are alive less long in the ocean.
So lower in mercury for sure.
Also environmentally better fish to fish.
But don't they have the same diet as the Swedes pretty much?
And the Swedes are all depressed.
Well, isn't that fascinating?
So the Swedes actually don't eat half as much.
But modern day Swedes, if you look at the rates, it's much lower actually in terms of the amount of fish that's eaten.
Okay.
And the Finns are the ones you're thinking of who have horrible rates of depression but actually eat quite a lot less fish than the Icelanders.
Although there's an interesting study now in Finland getting people to go back to their traditional diet and they're doing a lot better.
Heart disease rates are going down, all these things.
As an aside, Icelanders also have some of the greatest longevity on Earth as well.
You go to the cemeteries there and tombstone after tombstone is people living to over 100. But...
What I discovered that was the big shocker for me in Iceland was after speaking to these researchers, they had been sitting around and scratching their heads for a while because fish was the operating theory.
But they started to study omega-3 levels in the blood.
And omega-3 fats are the fats in fish that are theorized to help improve brain functioning and decrease depression.
I mean, psychiatrists here in the U.S. are starting to use this as an adjunctive treatment for depression.
But as I started to study these omega-3 levels in the blood, they found that Icelanders who lived inland in an area called Igilsadir, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, It's actually a Turkish word.
Had very low rates of fish consumption.
So they were like, what's up with this?
These guys have the same high omega-3 fat levels as the guys living on the coast, much higher than people in the U.S., much higher than people in other parts of the world.
What's going on?
So they looked at what these folks were eating, and one of their favorite things to eat was sheep.
Local Icelandic sheep.
That's Turkish, too.
They are Turkish.
The Turkish tribes emigrated north through Hungary.
They went to Finland, as you know, and they actually took a left row in Iceland.
And then they took their sheep and went to Iceland.
So, well, there you go.
So you're going to have to go back to Turkey and measure some omega-3 fat levels there, too.
So what do you do if you're a smart researcher and you find that people who eat sheep have high omega-3 fat levels?
What do the sheep eat?
Well, you kill a sheep.
You kill a sheep and you measure its omega-3 levels, which is what they did.
It sounds a little brutal, I know, for you animal lovers out there, but that's science for you.
So they killed the sheep.
Actually, lambs is what they studied.
And they found that, sure enough, these lambs had quite high levels of omega-3 fats, much higher than the sheep that we buy here in the United States that's been raised on corn and processed grain and so on.
So then they took the next step and started sampling the little mountain grasses and very rich in something called ALA or alpha-linolenic acid, which is a precursor to the omega-3s that you get in the fish or that they found in the lamb.
So, bottom line, these animals that are eating Pasture-type grasses, fresh little pasture grasses, are getting a really rich level of omega-3s in their blood.
The milk from the cows, filled with omega-3s.
The little blueberries, the bilberries that you pick there in the mountainsides, filled with omega-3s.
Iceland, it seems like their number one export should be omega-3 fats.
Yeah.
I didn't realize that.
We've been talking a lot about omega-3s, ALA, DHA, different kinds.
We know they're associated with IQ increase.
They seem to influence depression rates, somatic affective disorder.
You mentioned that as well.
I did not know that there were regions of the world that had whole different outlooks on life, potentially because of their omega-3 fatty acid intake.
Well, I think that we can absolutely do that here in the U.S. as long as we start to go back to foods that have truly been raised, you know, on the land, either animals or fruits and vegetables, that haven't been corn-fed, that haven't been raised with tons of fertilizers and processing.
I mean, people think that the only way they can get these healthy fats is through fish, and there's many other ways.
I mean, people talk about flax as another option.
But there's many ways to get them if you really are eating a diet that's raised in soil that hasn't been depleted and isn't completely unhealthy.
You know, in raising the issue of animals, a lot of people ask me what my stance is on eating meat.
And most of what I say, I used to teach nutrition from a book because I spent years studying it.
I did a two-year integrative medicine fellowship where I learned nutrition.
Everything that I teach now about nutrition has to do with my travels because I feel like I can't break it down to nutrients.
I have to look at these rules that have just existed for hundreds of years and learn from them.
And when I see in most of these cultures, and there are rare examples like the Inuit, which I didn't visit, but most of these cultures truly treat meat as a spice.
Except for the occasional wonderful ceremony where you slaughter the cow and have the big hunk of beef and throw it on the barbecue or have it take up 90% of your plate and go at it.
Most of the time, they eat meat, they delight in meat, they use it as a flavor or a spice within a larger stew.
It's accompanied by things like beans and greens and grains and other things.
Right.
And that was a very profound lesson.
You were asking, what was it about the jungle?
That is another thing that I saw there and saw everywhere else I traveled.
You seem to be offering some options here.
There are some rules, for sure, that really unify all these diets.
Give me some of those rules.
So, I talked about the grains.
I talked about the meat being more as a spice.
The other thing is that sweet and salty are not out of whack, meaning that in our culture, everything has sugar or salt added to it.
Salt, when you buy salt, it has sugar in it.
When you buy sugar, it has salt, for God's sakes.
You know, everything is highly flavored, and high fructose corn syrup is the bane of our modern existence.
It's probably, of all the evil foods, it is the most evil.
And when you go to these cultures, they love sweet.
They love sour.
As humans, we love that.
We love sweet, salty things.
But they're sweet and salty that are in the context of the natural food.
For example, seaweed is a delicious, salty food.
And sweet is you get in your grains, you get in your fruits, you get in even your vegetables.
But it's a different kind of sweet than if you go for the Snickers bar, you So that's another rule.
Another thing that is quite fascinating to me was that fermentation really exists in all of these cultures.
And we in the United States eat the least amount of fermented food of anywhere on the planet.
Occasionally you'll get yogurt and half the time that's not even honestly fermented.
Pickles that you buy in the U.S. except for a couple brands are not truly fermented.
Most of these cultures, everything from fermented manioc and millet in West Africa where I spent time to in Okinawa the miso and all the pickles to Iceland ferments everything for goodness sakes to get it through the winter.
They have fermented shark.
Now how do they ferment shark for example?
How do they actually do it?
In the ground.
What does that mean?
Just leave it there?
They bury it.
Yeah, I actually didn't watch the process, so I don't want to put myself forward as an expert.
When you ferment pickles, how do you do it?
Well, the way to truly do it is in a lactic acid solution that's kind of a vinegar solution.
Unfortunately, it takes brining.
It takes a long time.
You put them up the way that your grandmother used to make the pickles.
Get back over here, Grandma.
But the way that processors do it now, like the big industries, and I will not mention any of them, they just stick it in a solution that feels soury and pickle-y, and it usually has 90% more sugar than anything else.
So a lot of these steps.
Now, why does fermentation...
Why is it a healthy thing?
Well, those bacteria, when they get into your intestine...
Give you all kinds of wonderful benefits.
They help keep the lining of the intestine healthy.
They actually seem to play a role in preventing allergies.
In West Africa, when I was looking at the diet there and trying to figure out why it was that West Africans have such low rates of colon cancer as opposed to African Americans who have some of the highest rates in the world, and I was, you know, what could this be?
They're They're distant cousins, you know?
And, you know, there was a lot of differences that I noticed between the diets, but fermentation really seems to play a role in terms of these bacteria actually populating the colon and protecting it from polyp formation and so on.
There's a lot of where that came from, but first, a quick break.
So, Daphne, I want to go back to some of these hot spots and cold spots.
So Crete, Greece, cold spot for heart disease.
You say eat like a Cretan.
Yeah.
Did I pronounce it correctly?
Absolutely.
The reason I went to Crete, and Crete is already kind of a superstar in the nutrition world.
Everybody has heard something about the diet from Crete.
And I felt like I had a little bit to add to the discussion because most of these things I mean, we're...
It's...
It's a varied group of countries with very varied diets.
In some parts of the world, like Morocco, they hardly ever eat broccoli versus in a place like Italy where broccoli is a food that's used.
The thing about Crete that fascinated me is what was it about the Cretan diet specifically that was so associated with these low rates of heart disease that had been studied over and over again?
And so I went there, and I had this wonderful series of experiences.
There was a lot of people who were willing to be my ambassadors on the island, and I traveled around from one region to another on the island, tasting the foods, and everybody had their magic ingredient.
I met Giorgos, who runs the Biolea Olive Farm up in Astricas, and he told me, it's the olive oil, because you know what?
My great-grandparents both lived to be over 100.
They ate 50 kilograms a year of olive oil between the pair of them, and this is what kept them healthy.
I went to Canada for a while, ate a lot of meat, and needed a triple bypass as a result of it.
So it's the olive oil.
And then I met Stelios, who ran this organic food store in Hanya and sold whole grains there, the barley.
And he said, it's the grains.
Let me tell you, it's the grains that have kept the real Cretan bread, the kind you have to really, really use your molars to break.
That's what's keeping us healthy.
And the olive oil is good because you soak the bread in it, but that's the magical food.
And then I met a woman, Katerina, who runs a taverna that's in Mulatos, and she told me, no, it's the foraged greens that are keeping our hearts healthy, that are rich in antioxidants.
So I went with Katerina up into the mountains with my little knife, and we were digging for these foraged greens and brought them back and ate them with the olive oil and the Cretan rusk breads, and it was absolutely delicious.
And I was thinking, oh, this is my medicine.
I'm getting hungry.
And then I met this guy, Nikos, who worked in a restaurant, and he said, no, you know, it's none of that.
It's the reiki, which is our traditional eau de vie, our liquor, which is made from grape moss, which will literally, you know, take the roof off your head.
And you can drink, you know, three bottles of this a day, and this will keep you going.
You know, and I had a little glass.
I got up from the table, trying to make my way down the cobblestone streets, and everything looked really happy for a while.
But what I started to realize after I sat down and looked at these studies by a very famous researcher, Antonia Tricopoulou, Where she actually gave all these foods an individual score and tried to figure out herself which one was the healing cretin food in terms of decreasing rates of heart disease and so on.
And she thought that what she was going to find is like sweets and meat and foods that we consider not so good for you would give a negative contribution and that the olive oil and the lemon and the wild greens and all of that would give positive...
And guess what?
Her research showed that there was actually none of these foods in and of their own right did very much at all.
And what it was is it's actually the combination, once again, of all of them, this fabulous synergy that happens when you eat your beans with your olive oil and your lemon and what we were talking about earlier.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's the whole diet.
So guess what?
You can't go home and say, damn it, I'm just going to switch to olive oil and that's going to change my life, you know?
Which is, I think, a very rational approach to the whole process.
It also gives you the insight that you have and the need for multiple nutrients from multiple different sources.
However, everything you mentioned, the reason it was so tasteful to Lisa as she heard you say it, was because they're all real foods.
Yes.
Then it brings me back to the fundamental question, how do you have time to make the food?
Because if Orta is spending her whole time making the food, and Lisa's complaining about not just my absence from dinner, but her...
That's it.
That's it.
I could gladly spend the time to make dinner if you were coming home.
But how long does it take for you to make a different meal every night?
It takes...
Now, this is my routine because I'm a family doctor.
I've got a big practice full of patients.
My husband works full-time and I have a 9-year-old and a 13-year-old who, by the way, have learned to cook and love to help me cook.
So that's a great thing.
And usually even eat my food, which is quite amazing.
But the way that we work it is that I do a lot of slow cooking, which means that I put my beans in.
I usually cook beans a couple nights a week, and I put them in my slow cooker in the morning.
Ratio of one cup of beans to three cups of water, you turn it on the six-hour setting, you come home that evening, they're all ready to go.
And then you can just cook them up with your spices.
The book has many recipes at the end and are really easy to follow, and none of them take terribly long.
In the jungle effect recipes, on average, are these our recipes?
Are they 45 minutes to prepare?
They're everywhere from 15 minutes to 35 minutes.
Now, there's a couple feasts for each region that take longer, and I call them feasts because they take longer.
Okay.
And you do those on the weekend.
And by the way, I'm a big believer in feasting.
Mm-hmm.
I think our problem in our culture is we feast every day.
We do.
We do.
And then real feasts don't really happen.
I've been to Thanksgiving dinners where people sit in front of the TV and have their Thanksgiving dinner.
And you have to eat three times as much to make it seem significant.
Exactly.
And whereas all of these cultures, what they do is every day is very much of a simple meal.
Delicious, but simple.
And then once a month, once every couple months, you have a fantastic feast and you really get into the I think we need to go back to that, giving our food real meaning within our lives.
And eating as a family, whatever your family, orthodox, unorthodox in its configuration, eating as a family.
Alcohol.
What role does that play?
Yeah, well, I think that alcohol is a delicious thing, personally, if it's a well-developed piece of wine or liquor.
And so I would be a hypocrite to say anything otherwise.
There are studies that show that a glass a day of wine is beneficial, and, you know, its equivalent in a small bit of alcohol would also be beneficial.
It differs from all over the world, right?
There are different sources of alcohol.
Do you think it makes any difference?
You know, moderation, which really is about one serving a day, is really what it is.
After you go beyond that, it really does seem to be a point of diminishing returns.
Now, once again, I would not be presenting the facts correctly if I didn't tell you that in every single culture I visited, when they're having a feast, they go overboard.
But it really is once a month, and it almost leads me to think maybe that isn't So terrible for you.
And I know that's heresy to say that as a doctor, but maybe that's not so terrible for you if on most days you really are having none to hardly any at all.
If you're not driving, you know, these are smart things.
Absolutely.
Don't drive.
Yeah.
This is what Okinawa.
Here's a country that I've been fascinated by.
You mentioned the Okinawans actually, by the way, it's a cold spot for colon cancer.
Well, no.
West Africa was that.
Okinawa is a cold spot for breast and prostate cancer.
So interesting to me.
Why?
Well, first of all, breast cancer is so rare there that they still don't do screening mammograms in older women because it's not cost-effective.
They're just...
Now, as people are changing their diet and trying to eat like us here, all of a sudden breast cancer is emerging as a real public health problem.
By the way, I saw that in all these cultures.
Younger people want to have what we have here, and they're going for it, and they're getting sick young, just like we are.
So it's another proof positive that it really is the diet and not genes.
But in Okinawa, I spent the summer there as a visiting professor at Chubu Medical School last summer, and it was fascinating because I really got led into the local culture and especially the medical culture there.
And doctors were as intrigued as I was about why there was such low rates of breast cancer amongst the older women.
And as I got out into the community and started to look at the diet, it made perfect sense because, first of all, they eat tons of greens and vegetables, things that we know are good and healthy for us.
They have alcohol very much in moderation, the older folks there.
But soy is so fascinating, the way that it's eaten in Asia versus the way that we eat it here.
Believe it or not, as Americans, we probably consume more soy per capita per year than most Asians at this point, if you look at it.
But most of the soy that we're eating, we don't even know we're eating.
It's in processed in our energy bars and in our tofurkey and our tofu dogs and so on.
It's also fed to all of our livestock.
We're fed to all our livestock, so we're getting it second generation.
And it's in this highly processed form.
Most of it is soy isolates.
And genetically modified.
Genetically modified.
Everything Lisa is saying is exactly right.
Whereas in Okinawa, in Japan, they eat their soy, but they eat it as honest-to-goodness soy.
It stands up as soy.
Often fermented, which gets back to that whole fermentation issue, but in whole soy form.
So tempeh, miso, even soy milk I feel qualifies, and tofu if it's well made and truly fermented.
Edamame.
Edamame, thank you.
Soy sauce if it's made correctly.
Most of our soy sauce is not made truly in a fermentation whole soy process.
It's soy extracts and caramel flavor and blah, blah, blah, salt.
You start to read these ingredients.
It breaks your heart.
So what is it about the way they're eating soy that seems to help protect from glandular cancer, which are what breast and prostate cancer are?
It probably is that the way soy plays a role for them is as a gentle mixed agonist antagonist for estrogen.
Meaning that it doesn't highly stimulate the estrogen receptors and at the same time doesn't highly block them.
And there's a whole bunch of scientific reasons for why that actually might be protective against these cancers.
Versus the way that our isolated soy, our highly processed soy, seems to act much more as a true agonist.
So exciting the receptors on the estrogen receptors in these glands and contributing to breast cancer.
Of all the countries you've visited, Daphne...
Which is the cuisine that you find for yourself most comfortable to eat day in and day out?
If you're just going to pick one and stay on it the whole rest of your life?
Or better stated, if you're going to move to one place on the planet, where would you move?
Interesting.
I would probably stay in San Francisco because I have a farmer's market down the street and I can eat from everywhere, you know, seasonally.
And by the way, you can cook all these foods with the same...
I have a shopping list at the end and really you can find all these foods anywhere in this country and cook these foods just from your local markets.
But I'm not trying to evade the question here, but honestly, they all appeal to me.
I think we've become incredibly spoiled in this country in that we expect a whole variety of things to hit our taste buds in any given week.
I mean, what's interesting is most of these cultures, that's all they eat is that one diet.
They're not eating Japanese one day and Mexican the next.
But we've become very spoiled.
If I had to sit down and really commit to one diet, I think I would get back to one that's closest to my ancestry, and I come from somewhere around the Mediterranean, Russia, Caspian Sea area, so it would probably be the Cretan diet.
