Breast Cancer & the Importance of Vegetables | Dr. Sara Gottfried & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | I recently gave a lecture on breast cancer risk reduction, and I was sad to find that
00:00:11.000 | intake of vegetables, polyphenols, is such an important predictor of future risk of breast
00:00:17.680 | cancer, like when you're 50, 60 plus.
00:00:20.620 | And the most important time is when you're a teenager.
00:00:24.180 | Now I have one daughter that eats vegetables, she loves them, and I have another daughter
00:00:27.720 | who eats food that's beige.
00:00:30.200 | And it's very hard to get her to eat the volume of vegetables, you know, five colors a day,
00:00:35.520 | which is what I do.
00:00:37.680 | And if you have evidence that you could show a 17-year-old that they've got micronutrient
00:00:45.800 | gaps, I think that would be a motivator for them to eat differently at a time when it's
00:00:53.000 | so critical.
00:00:55.160 | Even though it's, you know, 25 years in the future, that it's going to potentially change
00:00:58.840 | this arc that they're on.
00:01:01.000 | What do you do for a young woman who doesn't like vegetables, or is not somehow able or
00:01:07.520 | willing to get those five colors a day of vegetable to help support the microbiome?
00:01:15.600 | Are supplements a useful tool in that case?
00:01:19.100 | What other sorts of tools, behavioral or otherwise, are useful?
00:01:22.560 | Such a good question.
00:01:23.560 | So here I'm going to invoke Rob Knight at UCSD.
00:01:27.220 | So I think his gut project has really been helpful in terms of understanding what kind
00:01:34.040 | of modulators are going to be important.
00:01:37.440 | So what I try to get that person to do, and I don't see many teens anymore other than
00:01:42.120 | MBA players, what I try to get them to do is to have a smoothie.
00:01:47.080 | Very hard to get them to have a smoothie every day, but if I could get them to have a smoothie
00:01:50.260 | three times a week, and to throw some of these vegetables in, that makes a huge difference.
00:01:55.400 | I mean, we know that makes a difference in terms of microbiome change.
00:01:58.400 | So you'd be blending up broccoli or kale.
00:02:01.560 | Cauliflower.
00:02:02.560 | So cauliflower is great.
00:02:03.560 | Peppers even, they're putting things into the smoothie.
00:02:05.520 | Yeah, I don't know if you can get a teenager to do that, but they often will use, like
00:02:09.520 | I have them do steamed broccoli that's in the freezer because it's got very little taste.
00:02:14.780 | So that, they could do that in a chocolate smoothie.
00:02:17.320 | They could add some greens.
00:02:18.500 | I like greens.
00:02:19.500 | Powders are super convenient.
00:02:22.580 | So that with kind of a taste that they like, whether that's chocolate, which is what most
00:02:27.740 | of my clients want, or vanilla with berries and that sort of thing.
00:02:32.520 | So that can go a long way if you don't like vegetables.
00:02:35.860 | And short of that, I would say some supplements, but I would say that's a distant second to
00:02:39.900 | making a smoothie.
00:02:41.140 | I've got one patient that I have to mention because he took this to the extreme.
00:02:49.500 | So he is a retired physicist professor at UCSD.
00:02:54.240 | He found out that his microbiome was a hot mess and developed autoimmune disease.
00:03:00.860 | And so he became hell bent, like only a physicist could, on changing his microbiome.
00:03:07.400 | And he dramatically shifted it by having a smoothie every day with 57 vegetables and
00:03:15.320 | fruits in it.
00:03:16.640 | 57 independent.
00:03:18.240 | 57 independent.
00:03:20.160 | So I mean, this just warms my heart, the way that he did this.
00:03:26.080 | But he would go to the farmer's market.
00:03:27.860 | He would just get a bunch of this, a bunch of that.
00:03:31.080 | And he would go home, make the smoothie, and then stick it in the freezer.
00:03:34.720 | So he'd have a serving every day.
00:03:37.020 | But he became a completely different person based on this microbiome change.
00:03:42.820 | His autoimmune disease is in remission.
00:03:50.120 | He dropped a huge amount of weight.
00:03:52.720 | He went from being kind of this phenotype that I know you know well of a professor,
00:03:58.240 | high performing, traveling around the world on so many boards, so much innovation, so
00:04:02.880 | many great ideas, super computer guy, to being someone who gets up in the morning, gets in
00:04:08.200 | his hot tub, exercises for like one to two hours a day, and then does a little work.
00:04:14.900 | He completely shifted the way that he lives.
00:04:17.380 | And his microbiome shift, who knows what's the chicken and what's the egg there?
00:04:22.620 | But he had a huge change in his physiology.
00:04:25.940 | Glucose went from being quite high, he had, and he tracks all of this, of course.
00:04:30.540 | It's like on a Jupiter.
00:04:33.060 | Right.
00:04:34.060 | And retired, I suppose, might have had.
00:04:35.500 | And he's retired, but he's got the longest time series of anyone I know.
00:04:41.940 | And he's tracked his glucose and insulin going back 20 years.
00:04:45.900 | So he can show you, okay, here's where I started having my smoothie, and here's how my glucose
00:04:52.000 | and insulin changed as a result of that.