Dr. Josh Axe is on a mission to transform healthcare with the power of food. He’s a bestselling author and and in this interview, he shares the details on his brand new book, “The Collagen Diet.” He reveals how you can find collagen in simple foods found in the grocery store and what he calls the next big trend in natural healing. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| I'm a huge fan of collagen. | |
| One reason being looking at the body, one third of the protein in our body is collagen protein. | |
| So our skin, hair, nails, bones, discs, ligaments, tendons, fascia, connective tissue, gut lining, and part of our arterial walls even, so much of our body is made up of collagen. | |
| *music* Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. | |
| Welcome, everybody. | |
| He is one of the most influential voices in integrative medicine and clinical nutrition, Dr. Josh Axe. | |
| He's on a mission to transform healthcare with the power of food. | |
| He's a bestselling author, and today he's exclusively given us the details on his brand new book, That Collagen Diet. | |
| Josh, I have adored having you on the show. | |
| Besides the fact that people think you're a GQ model, it is wonderful to see yours, wonderful to have us, and the insight is more on the outside. | |
| Bob, can you just bring everybody up to date on how you got interested in the power of traditional natural remedies in healthcare? | |
| It's not something that comes naturally to a lot of folks in the healthcare system. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| So for me, it really had to do with a health crisis in my family. | |
| Growing up, my family was into fitness, but I wouldn't say into health. | |
| So my mom was my gym teacher in elementary school. | |
| My dad was a weightlifter. | |
| And so we thought we were healthy. | |
| But at 40 years old, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. | |
| And she went through the conventional sort of system at the time. | |
| And she had a mastectomy and went through chemotherapy. | |
| And I remember to this day, I mean, I was in junior high at the time. | |
| I remember seeing her lose her hair and how sick she got. | |
| And, you know, praise God, she went through those treatments and was diagnosed as being cancer-free and healthy. | |
| But what the problem afterwards, she just continued to have more health struggles. | |
| She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. | |
| She had, you know... | |
| Hypothyroidism, gut issues. | |
| She was just kind of sick and tired all the time with thyroid and gut issues. | |
| And this went on for 10 years. | |
| And about a little more than 10 years later, I was in... | |
| I actually was training to become a doctor. | |
| I got a call from my mom. | |
| And she says, I've got bad news. | |
| They found a tumor on my lungs. | |
| And, you know... | |
| They're considering treatment. | |
| What do I do? | |
| And I flew home from Florida back to Ohio at the time where we grew up and we sat down and we prayed together. | |
| We felt really led to take care of her all naturally to start. | |
| And we were working with her oncologist who was in Columbus, Ohio saying, hey, We want to try doing some of these natural things first. | |
| And I said, okay, but we want you to come back in four months. | |
| We're going to redo scans. | |
| And we said, okay. | |
| And so with my mom, we radically changed everything. | |
| She started juicing vegetables. | |
| She started doing a lot of remedies like reishi mushroom and turmeric. | |
| She started getting a lymphatic drainage massage. | |
| The other big thing is she started reducing stress. | |
| Like my mom had so much fear and worry in her life. | |
| And she decided, hey, I'm going to let go of those things. | |
| She started... | |
| Horseback riding, which she did when she was, you know, a little kid. | |
| And so we followed this sort of natural program for four months. | |
| We went back and saw her oncologist in Columbus. | |
| And her oncologist called the next day and she said, this is highly unusual. | |
| We don't typically see things turn around this much, this fast. | |
| They said, but the tumor that's there went from 2.5 centimeters down to 1.2. | |
| What? | |
| Yeah, it was amazing. | |
| Not chemo or radiation or anything? | |
| That's right, yeah. | |
| And then she went back several months later and it shrunk again. | |
| And today my mom is 67. She never did any other treatments outside of taking care of her health. | |
| But here's the thing I do want to say is, my mom changed everything. | |
| I mean, she literally, like, She was the best patient I've ever had in terms of reducing stress and sticking to her juice, taking her supplements. | |
| And I'm not saying this happens for everybody. | |
| I'm not saying this is a cure. | |
| But I do know with my mom, that's one of the things that's really empowered me so much. | |
| And now my mom ran a 5K with me a few years ago. | |
| She got second. | |
| It's so funny. | |
| My dad got third. | |
| So now she would wear her little medal around. | |
| Were you first? | |
| I got third, actually, in my age group as well. | |
| So she beat me too. | |
| So it was great. | |
| And she waters skis at 67. Her and my dad retired down in Florida. | |
| They live on a lake down there and just doing really amazing. | |
| So that's one of the biggest things that inspired me. | |
| And that's another reason why I started my website newsletter is we didn't know how to be healthy growing up. | |
| It really took my mom getting sick. | |
| It really launched us into searching for Searching for truth. | |
| When you tell a story like you just shared with your mom, which is, I know studying for a lot of the folks in the audience, it's apocryphal almost. | |
| How's it possible? | |
| First of all, the fact that she wouldn't even listen to her son, which I have to applaud you because most moms will not listen to their son, the doctor, even though they're proud of you. | |
| It's so true. | |
| And to realize that through diet and lifestyle changes, she immediately impacted her immune system and arguably changed the course of her life. | |
| These people think, well, I can do that just by itself. | |
| How do you balance in your own practice, with people you speak to, how much traditional medicine they ought to pay attention to, and when they should crutch on alternative approaches? | |
| Yeah, so my advice is always work with your doctor. | |
| Be honest. | |
| Talk them through what you're thinking with, and really keep open communication is number one. | |
| But I would say this, number one, here, my, again, an oath I took is first do no harm, and I know that To a degree, if you look at the studies, a lot of the conventional treatments do have more side effects than a lot of the natural things. | |
| And so what I tend to do is say, let's go at this as hard as we can. | |
| If you've got heart disease, let's do turmeric. | |
| Let's do Hawthorne. | |
| Let's do fish oil. | |
| Let's do CoQ10. | |
| Let's do exercise. | |
| Let's work on stress. | |
| I lay out a very comprehensive, here's a plan to follow, and let's do your best. | |
| But at the same time, get monitored. | |
| Get checked. | |
| Continue to... | |
| Have this relationship. | |
| And again, I never want somebody to go do things against their doctor's will, but in agreement with. | |
| And so again, I found that most of the time, doctors are really... | |
| Doctors want... | |
| They got medicine to help people get healthy, and they want that for people. | |
| But I do think... | |
| Here's the thing I do want to say. | |
| It depends on the condition as well. | |
| If we're talking about something like Diabetes, where it's less aggressive and you have more time versus, again, with my mom, there's a tumor. | |
| I think there's different things. | |
| I think with my mom, here's the other difference with my mom. | |
| My mom changed everything. | |
| Some people say, hey, I'm going to change 25%. | |
| That doesn't work. | |
| I mean, I think, again, if somebody... | |
| So you know that this is great. | |
| It's really hard and it's a big spectrum here. | |
| But my advice is always do everything you can naturally. | |
| But hey, there is a place for a medical system. | |
| We have the best medical system in the world. | |
| It saves lives on a regular basis. | |
| And so again, I do think there's great value in, you know, kind of both worlds depending upon the person. | |
| There's lots more when we come back. | |
| If medicine, you know, I think this is again, there are tons of benefits, but if you want food to be thy medicine, and obviously the but if you want food to be thy medicine, and obviously the converse is also true, give me the three items that you always want in someone's grocery cart, the items that you crush on | |
| Yeah, my advice, and I'll put these in one category, herbs and spices, vegetables, And then after that, I'm going to throw in a couple more. | |
| I mean, I love berries, but I also love things like bone broth. | |
| I love collagen. | |
| But those would be my top ones. | |
| And I'll say this. | |
| If you look, I read a book years ago called The Okinawan Diet, and I love the book. | |
| But they said American men consume one-eighth of the antioxidants and herbs and spices than Americans in the U.S. than Americans in Japan. | |
| And when our ancestors said medicine... | |
| They always were talking about herbs and spices. | |
| So I think if you look in the Middle East today, in India and Asia, they are consuming so many herbs and spices. | |
| You go into a market, it smells like herbs and spices and maybe fish. | |
| You go into a grocery store in America today, it smells like nothing or bleat, you know? | |
| But I think herbs and spices are probably the biggest thing we're missing. | |
| And I love the fact that you can hack recipes, avoid salt. | |
| You do a lot of things that make vegetables taste better. | |
| One of the biggest challenges I've always noticed, again, my wife taught me this, and Daphne's reinforced it, is if you eat food that you love, you'll do it all the time. | |
| Well, you can make vegetables taste so good, you want to eat them all the time. | |
| But if you're just eating basically the side dish of your steak, of course it doesn't taste very good. | |
| And God forbid you eat it only raw, which sometimes you're stuck to one, but my goodness, you're throwing away all the wonderful knowledge of humanity in preparing food. | |
| Oh, I couldn't agree more. | |
| And that's one of the reasons I was telling you when I was interviewing you how much I love watching Daphne's show, The Chew and the Dish. | |
| And then also, I know your wife, Lisa, is a cook. | |
| But that being said, Chelsea and I have these food nights with friends. | |
| And we're both more introverted, but we love just having a couple other couples over and doing some red wine. | |
| Ever since we came back, we did a trip to Italy like seven years ago. | |
| We were like, We're doing these food nights with our friends and we'll do it kind of all night. | |
| But people would ask me, and I'm not trying to boast, but they're like, why does your chicken or food taste so much better when you make it? | |
| And I'd be like, because I use like triple the herbs. | |
| Like when you use more basil and rosemary and garlic, everything tastes better. | |
| Yeah, I'll share a little secret with you. | |
| Daphne's sharing with me. | |
| You ask all the great chefs, the key to their success is extra salt and butter. | |
| But for you, it's terms, which is even better. | |
| All right, so I want to applaud you. | |
| Your new book is called The Collagen Died. | |
| And you argue that collagen is a missing key ingredient in many people's health. | |
| And a lot of people don't know much about collagen. | |
| And obviously, there's always arguments about how much collagen gets into your actual skin to make it look better. | |
| But what else does it do besides that? | |
| Give us a treatise on collagen and what it can do for folks. | |
| Yeah, so, you know, I'm a huge fan of collagen. | |
| One reason being, looking at the body, one-third of the protein in our body is collagen protein. | |
| So our skin, hair, nails, bones, discs, ligaments, tendons, fascia, connective tissue, gut lining, and part of our arterial walls even, and actually if a woman is creating a new baby, it's the placenta, is made up of mostly collagen. | |
| So, so much of our body is made up of collagen and Our body can create collagen on its own. | |
| Your body likes and needs things like vitamin C, a little bit of iron and zinc, and certain things to actually create collagen. | |
| But your body, it's easier for your body to create collagen when it has the direct building blocks, which is proline, glycine, and hydroxyproline, which are Something you're going to consume if you consume bone broth or a collagen-rich food. | |
| So sometimes people think if I eat collagen, immediately that collagen goes to the body and becomes collagen. | |
| It doesn't work that way. | |
| Your body has to break it down. | |
| But it uses those same building blocks to build collagen back up. | |
| And I've been so impressed as I've worked with... | |
| You know, patients in the past and people over the years looking at when they've used collagen, they'll notice their hair gets thicker, their nails are stronger, their skin starts looking better and more firm. | |
| And so, and there are some good studies on collagen decreasing, you know, the total depth of wrinkles and those sorts of things. | |
| So, there's definitely some, not a lot, but there definitely are some good early studies. | |
| What are the best sources of ecology, in your opinion? | |
| And I'm curious because, ideally, if it's so valuable for humans, we would be able to get it from our food at some point. | |
| Yeah, number one is bone broth, by far, is your highest source. | |
| After that, it's going to be eating the skin of animals. | |
| Historically, when people ate fish, they would eat the skin. | |
| Also, chicken skin is full of collagen beef. | |
| And then the other thing is, which we don't get much today, the next highest is organ meats. | |
| Actually, liver has some collagen in it. | |
| The thing is, today, we just eat the chicken breast or the flesh, which is muscle-building proteins. | |
| It's branched-chain aminos and methionine. | |
| Today, we don't drink near as much broth. | |
| We don't eat the organ meats. | |
| And that's really where all the collagen is. | |
| So as you go... | |
| Spend your time running around. | |
| You get exposed to the newest, most cutting-edge ideas. | |
| And I'm wondering what the next superfood is. | |
| What's the next big tradition with food itself? | |
| I'm going to move to some Catholic categories beyond that. | |
| Yeah, so I think, again, I'm going to jump back to herbs and spices. | |
| I think adaptogenic herbs are going to continue to be popular. | |
| You look in traditional Chinese medicine in Asia today, the amount of mushrooms people are eating is absolutely huge. | |
| I mean, especially today, the benefits, and there are, now if we're talking about U.S. studies, there's some good studies, but if you go over and look at the Middle Eastern and the Asian studies on mushrooms, they're incredible, especially reishi, number one. | |
| I would say lion's mane. | |
| You know, lion's mane has been shown to be really good for the nervous system and for the brain. | |
| And then I also love, you know, maitake and cordyceps. | |
| But I would say reishi and lion's mane are absolutely two of my favorites. | |
| And then I think some other adaptogens. | |
| There's one called hiwushu, which is called Foti. | |
| There's an ancient, and I love all the ancient legends. | |
| Just one again, Foti, F-O-T-I? F-O-T-I, yeah. | |
| So faux tea, the legend goes that a male doctor's hair turned gray and he started supplementing with faux tea, everybody, and it turned it from gray back to black. | |
| But anyways, all that being said, it's one of the most, it's, in Chinese medicine, it's known to restore your jing, which in jing is essentially you're strengthening your DNA. It's sperm, it's testosterone, it's those sort of things. | |
| And men, it's a more gentle form of It's kind of in the ginseng family, but that's fantastic. | |
| I think schisandra for anti-aging is another one that's going to be popular. | |
| You know what's funny? | |
| Like ashwagandha, nobody knew what it was 10 years ago. | |
| Right, that's right. | |
| But now everybody's talking about it. | |
| So I think we're going to see more of these adaptogens, the photis, the schisandra. | |
| I think dong quai, especially for women around their menstrual cycle, it's the top blood builder. | |
| In fact, if you taste it, it tastes like iron. | |
| But it's... | |
| I think more of these Chinese and Ayurvedic herbs are going to keep creeping into our system. | |
| More questions after the break. - So I'm going to China in November, and I end up going to China at least once a year. | |
| I went the first time in 1992, if it were not, my father-in-law. | |
| Wow. | |
| And back then, everyone was wearing Mao suits, and there was no electricity after sundown. | |
| It was a fascinating experience for me. | |
| And I really adore the culture, but especially the traditional Chinese medicine offerings. | |
| How have you learned so much about them? | |
| You know, actually, I learned it through an acupuncturist here in Nashville. | |
| His name is Dr. Gil Banami. | |
| And he was in the Israeli Army. | |
| And he studied under a, you know, she was known as a master Chinese acupuncturist who lived in Israel. | |
| He trained under here. | |
| He moved to the U.S. And he's one of my best friends. | |
| And so him and I, for the past seven years, to ten years of really, actually, about seven years, I've spent a lot of time just picking his brain, doing lunch with him, talking, and then he recommended some Chinese medicine textbooks. | |
| And I just read a lot, you know? | |
| So I'll just spend time talking to him and reading, and I dove a lot into the five elements. | |
| But really, it was through his mentorship. | |
| Well, this next trip I'm taking, we're having a summit at the Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. | |
| And there are some wonderful physicians there who are trying to explain so that the Western mind can understand it, some of these traditional Chinese remedies. | |
| And again, they're interrelated with the Ayurvedic solutions as well. | |
| But just for everyone listening, there's thousands of years of experience, right, on these herbs. | |
| So there's something there. | |
| It works in a... | |
| Actually, explain how you see Chinese herbal therapies in particular working. | |
| Yeah, so here's what I think that people need to realize is I think a lot of times, and listen, I think there is a lot to be said about a double-blind medical study, and we have a great system today for studies, but I don't think that should discount, you know, 3,000 plus years of Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine to where they weren't doing these double-blind studies in the way we do them with large populations. | |
| But over time, what they accumulated together as a society really accumulates to millions of individual case studies on patients. | |
| And some of the doctors using the herbs on themselves to see how the body reacts. | |
| And so the way that most Chinese medical physicians look at the body is, it's not mostly based on, hey, you have this gene, so it affects us. | |
| Of course, we know genes have to be turned on, but they'll say, It's based on your body's internal environment. | |
| Is your body too hot or is it too cold internally? | |
| Is it too damp or too dry? | |
| Is there too much movement called wind, too little movement called stagnation? | |
| So for instance, why do we call it a cold today? | |
| That stems way, way back from Chinese medicine where they said, well, your body is cold because it's cold internally. | |
| So you need to do warming spices. | |
| All the warming spices are Help you get rid of a cold like ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cayenne pepper. | |
| These are all warm, spicy oregano. | |
| These are all warm, spicy herbs. | |
| I used to take care of a pastor here in Nashville. | |
| And I was like, he had a cold. | |
| I'm like, hey, what are you doing right now for your cold? | |
| I want to give you a few recommendations. | |
| He said, well, I always go home and do a hot toddy. | |
| And I'm like, what? | |
| What is that? | |
| And I wasn't from Nashville. | |
| I came from the North, so I had no idea. | |
| And he's like, well, I take whiskey. | |
| And let me say this. | |
| I don't think that's the best recommendation, but it's the hottest of all liqueurs, and it's better than beer, which is cooling, according to Chinese medicine. | |
| So all that being said, Chinese medicine, they look at what's going on internally. | |
| For instance, candida and most digestive issues are caused by dampness. | |
| And the foods that drive dampness are bitter herbs. | |
| Today it's all sweet and salty, no bitter and sour. | |
| Bitter and sour are what activate your liver and bile to dry up dampness. | |
| So anyways, that's the way that Chinese medicine practitioners look at healing your body. | |
| It's by changing your internal environment and strengthening your system to beat disease. | |
| No, Josh, just an explanation, which again, you summarized 2,000 years of human wisdom in about a minute and a half. | |
| It's reflective of why you're so good at what you do. | |
| Your passion seeps through all your pores. | |
| You're incredibly insightful, and some of these really cool things are happening in life. | |
| And I've got to say, it's been a blessing getting to know you over the 11 years of my show, and I know we'll do lots more fun stuff together. | |
| I want everyone to recognize that you can hear lots more about Josh's latest book. | |
| It's hitting the stores this December. | |
| It's called That Collagen Diet, a 21-Day Plan for Sustained Weight Loss, Glowing Skin, Great Gut Health, and Young You. | |
| In the meantime, just... | |
| Search A-X-E. He comes up first and he's all over the place for good reasons. | |
| Josh, I wish you the best, my friend. | |
| Awesome. | |
| Well, I want to say thanks so much, Dr. Oz. | |
| It's an honor. | |
| Again, I love what you do. | |
| Love your mission. | |
| So thanks so much for having me on. | |
| God bless you, Josh. |