I recently gave a lecture on breast cancer risk reduction, and I was sad to find that intake of vegetables, polyphenols, is such an important predictor of future risk of breast cancer, like when you're 50, 60 plus. And the most important time is when you're a teenager. Now I have one daughter that eats vegetables, she loves them, and I have another daughter who eats food that's beige.

And it's very hard to get her to eat the volume of vegetables, you know, five colors a day, which is what I do. And if you have evidence that you could show a 17-year-old that they've got micronutrient gaps, I think that would be a motivator for them to eat differently at a time when it's so critical.

Even though it's, you know, 25 years in the future, that it's going to potentially change this arc that they're on. What do you do for a young woman who doesn't like vegetables, or is not somehow able or willing to get those five colors a day of vegetable to help support the microbiome?

Are supplements a useful tool in that case? What other sorts of tools, behavioral or otherwise, are useful? Such a good question. So here I'm going to invoke Rob Knight at UCSD. So I think his gut project has really been helpful in terms of understanding what kind of modulators are going to be important.

So what I try to get that person to do, and I don't see many teens anymore other than MBA players, what I try to get them to do is to have a smoothie. Very hard to get them to have a smoothie every day, but if I could get them to have a smoothie three times a week, and to throw some of these vegetables in, that makes a huge difference.

I mean, we know that makes a difference in terms of microbiome change. So you'd be blending up broccoli or kale. Cauliflower. So cauliflower is great. Peppers even, they're putting things into the smoothie. Yeah, I don't know if you can get a teenager to do that, but they often will use, like I have them do steamed broccoli that's in the freezer because it's got very little taste.

So that, they could do that in a chocolate smoothie. They could add some greens. I like greens. Powders are super convenient. So that with kind of a taste that they like, whether that's chocolate, which is what most of my clients want, or vanilla with berries and that sort of thing.

So that can go a long way if you don't like vegetables. And short of that, I would say some supplements, but I would say that's a distant second to making a smoothie. I've got one patient that I have to mention because he took this to the extreme. So he is a retired physicist professor at UCSD.

He found out that his microbiome was a hot mess and developed autoimmune disease. And so he became hell bent, like only a physicist could, on changing his microbiome. And he dramatically shifted it by having a smoothie every day with 57 vegetables and fruits in it. 57 independent. 57 independent.

So I mean, this just warms my heart, the way that he did this. But he would go to the farmer's market. He would just get a bunch of this, a bunch of that. And he would go home, make the smoothie, and then stick it in the freezer. So he'd have a serving every day.

But he became a completely different person based on this microbiome change. His autoimmune disease is in remission. He dropped a huge amount of weight. He went from being kind of this phenotype that I know you know well of a professor, high performing, traveling around the world on so many boards, so much innovation, so many great ideas, super computer guy, to being someone who gets up in the morning, gets in his hot tub, exercises for like one to two hours a day, and then does a little work.

He completely shifted the way that he lives. And his microbiome shift, who knows what's the chicken and what's the egg there? But he had a huge change in his physiology. Glucose went from being quite high, he had, and he tracks all of this, of course. It's like on a Jupiter.

Right. And retired, I suppose, might have had. And he's retired, but he's got the longest time series of anyone I know. And he's tracked his glucose and insulin going back 20 years. So he can show you, okay, here's where I started having my smoothie, and here's how my glucose and insulin changed as a result of that.