Transcript: Herbal Medicine Expert Simon Mills on The Diary of A CEO Podcast

You were the secretary of the European Scientific Cooperative on phytotherapy. I was not able to say that.

SIMON MILLS: Word, which is the polite way of saying herbs. So it’s phytoplant therapy.

The Lost Wisdom of Plant Medicine

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think when people think about herbal medicine and using plants as a form of medicine, they think of tribes and they think of ancient Chinese traditions. And I think the modern Westerner thinks of pills when they think of medicine. What is it that we’ve lost? Is there like a lost wisdom? And how did that happen and what is it we’ve lost?

SIMON MILLS: When we lived in the countryside, when we lived close to nature, that was very much around us, and in every little community there’d be someone, usually a woman, who would know their way around the plants and would help you out when you had an illness and a sickness.

I’m not saying that there’s a golden age, but when we moved into cities, we lost a lot of. Apart from anything else, we were living on top of each other. We had to drink each other’s water, there was a lot of new illnesses, sicknesses, pestilences and so on that only came in cities.

In that world, the herbs couldn’t cut it, so we needed stronger stuff. So they started using minerals, they started using things that were poisons. And the original physician’s job was to be the only guy who could handle medicines that other people would not be safe to use.

And so you got your training to use these much more powerful medicines. And it was thought that the old plant things were too soft and gentle, and so they were generally discarded. And then you developed these medicines into pills, because often they were powders anyway. And then the pharmaceutical industry came in and branded and made proprietary materials from them.

And that drifted a long way from just going down to a hedgerow, going into the garden, going into the kitchen and picking up remedies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of cultures around the world still use plants as their first form of medication for a variety of different sort of illnesses and diseases, right?

SIMON MILLS: They do, yes. I mean, most do. I mean, if you were Inuit in Northern Territories in Canada and Alaska, you would probably not have very many plants to choose from. But for most other people, they’re surrounded by plants. That’s their world.

The Modern Disconnect from Plant Medicine

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think because I’m 32 years old, so I’ve not really grown up with the wisdom of plants and how they can be used to treat some of the illnesses that I have from a very young age. I’m taking cough syrup and I’m taking paracetamol when I have a headache and all these kinds of pills and medicines. But plants were never really a part of that conversation. And I guess that makes me think that they don’t work, or that’s what most people would now think.

SIMON MILLS: And one of the points of this conversation now is to point you to ways in which they can and to show you how you can figure that out within a minute or an hour. Most of these ones I’m going to be talking about have a pretty immediate effect.

So we now think, oh, if you take a herb, it may take months before anything happens. When I see a patient, my usual request to them is, “Can you call me tomorrow to let me know how it’s going?” Because things happen so fast, and if you’re up for it, you can do a couple of taste tests and you can see why some of this stuff already is powerful.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is it that you know from the 50 plus years of work that you’ve done working with plants as a form of medicine that the average person on the street doesn’t know?

The Inner Miracle of Health

SIMON MILLS: I think life is a miracle. And as I said in that early encounter, and we can realize the miracle within us if we just trust it. I’ve got a few guys to what I call health empowerment. Things that you can do yourself at home just to begin to understand what’s going on in here and to nourish it.

And the plants are, in my world, one of the most effective ways of supporting that inner miracle that we have to nourish our health, to empower us. I sometimes think that medicine is extraordinary. I mean, we now live with cancer, used to die with it. Almost all the major illnesses of the past have now had treatments for.

But if you’ve got a chronic condition and you’re still left with yourself and you’re maybe not feeling so good in yourself, I sometimes think that a lot of medicine is a bit like fast food delivery. You know, we have a meal brought in because it’s convenient, but that also de-skills us. We’ve stopped learning how to cook even.

I remember going to New York back in the 80s and surprised to find that so many apartments in New York didn’t have kitchens because everyone went out to eat. And I thought, gosh, you’re losing all those skills of making food and enjoying it and sitting it down over a table.

I think medicine, we use far too many antibiotics. We use these PPI things called omeprazole for our acid reflux, the most widely prescribed drug in this country. And I think us also mostly unnecessary. We use a lot of anti-inflammatories just because it’s sore without asking why is it sore? And why are we suppressing one of our body’s main defenses? Because inflammation is a defense.

So these are things that you learn as you get into this world that a lot of what we think are problems are solutions waiting for support.

Food as Medicine

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I think most people would think that is medicine and that is a food. That’s food. Medicine, food.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, you’re quite right. That’s medicine. That’s a food. What I’m saying is that there’s a spectrum. And we may talk about that raspberry because it’s red. And we might talk about the broccoli cause it’s green and there’s oranges colors there.

All of these colors actually have properties that are actually quite valuable properties for our circulatory health, for our gut health, our brain health. And the more the science is looking at it, the more amazing it’s looking. These things have medicinal properties.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re saying that this is medicine as well?

SIMON MILLS: Yes. “Let food be thy medicine” is what old Hippocrates said 2,000 years ago, two and a half thousand years ago.

Global Perspectives on Herbal Medicine

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it the Chinese that are particularly big on herbal medicines?

SIMON MILLS: Yes, almost any other anywhere. I mean there’s only five countries in the world that are not big on herbal medicine and I’ll tell you who they are and you can see if you can draw your own conclusions. UK is one, US is the second, Canada is the third, Australia and New Zealand.

Now can you think of something that combines them all together? They’re originally white English speaking countries. If you go across to France, the Channel here, go to any pharmacy. Most of the medicine stocks on the pharmacy are herbal.

If you go to some parts of Germany, you have to sit a herbal exam to get your license. And further east in the old Soviet bloc where they couldn’t afford the pharmaceutical industry, they had homegrown, primarily plant based medicines. Much more widely go into Asia, it’s the majority by far, and doctors and people working with plants and acupuncture in China work together without thinking about it. And many doctors use plants as their medicines.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How different because I’ve never really spent a significant amount of time in China. How different is the perception of herbal medicines there than it is out on the streets of London?

SIMON MILLS: They don’t think twice about it. It’s what they grew up with. They, like a lot of people we would say regretfully, do seem to want to do more things like the west does. So they adopt more Western habits.

And as soon as you earn a bit of money, you tend to adopt more Western lifestyles and think that the herbal thing is for your parents and grandparents. So there’s still that trend even in Asia, but they start from a much broader base of experience.

Why Herbal Medicine Matters

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why should anyone care? You know, I have ibuprofen at home, I have medicine that I can have in the cupboard. I have cough syrups. If I get sick, if I get the flu, I have some flu pills that I brought from the pharmacy. Why should anyone care about what we’re going to talk about today?

SIMON MILLS: I suppose the answer is in my practice. So I see patients three sessions a week. And these are people, almost most of them have been around the block. They’ve had treatments for their conditions sometimes for many years. They’re often living with chronic, complex conditions and they’re sore, they’re tired, their energy’s gone.

You know, they’ve been told that “we can’t just keep taking the pills, we’ve done all the tests, there’s nothing else we can do.” Time and time again, that’s when the cookie crumbles because then you realize the ibuprofen and the quick pills ain’t doing it anymore. There’s a bigger health need that needs somehow fixing.

And that’s when they come to me as a practitioner and I give them things that they can see improving their health, their sleep, their eating, their whatever it is that’s not their energy levels, whatever it is that’s not playing properly. I see myself as a fine tuning or upping the performance.

I’m not. When someone comes to me and they say “I’ve got whatever it is, arthritis or skin disease or whatever,” I will politely take all the notes down. But that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m interested in where that came from. What is the misbehavior, what is the poor performance that explains why all this happened.

And often you find they had pneumonia at the age of three or they had glandular fever at the age of 15 or 16 and things took a turn then and you can see the trail. And often what I’m doing is going backwards and fixing things that weren’t fixed back a long time ago.

Working on digestion, particularly, because that’s where we work. Kidney function, liver function, circulation, up to the brain when we’re dealing in that area. So we’re looking at the performance of the body. And it’s only when it doesn’t behave that you notice the need to doing it.

The Scale of Practice

STEVEN BARTLETT: How many patients have you seen in your career, do you think? Thousands of patients.

SIMON MILLS: I would say upwards of 10,000 each for an hour or so at a time to start with. So we get deep into the story and then rolling on any one time I’ve got 200 running, I’m actively treating a couple hundred.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what are the range of illnesses or conditions that those patients have had? And when you think about the most remarkable or most interesting case studies, the most reliable case studies that you have, what are the conditions that are at the center of those case studies?

SIMON MILLS: Have you got a medical encyclopedia anywhere?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to write down the key ones.

Complex Chronic Conditions and Treatment Approaches

SIMON MILLS: No, no, I mean, it’s literally. I don’t know if I’ve seen everything in the medical encyclopedia for you, but I’ve seen most things. I mean, literally everything comes in because mostly it’s chronic anyway, when they come and see me, and it can be anything.

I mean, about a quarter of my patients are living with cancer, so that’s one big group. I’m not treating the cancer. I’m helping them to live better with whatever it is they’re dealing with. About another, at least a third more living with chronic inflammatory diseases, autoimmune diseases, Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, things that are more complicated than you can shake a stick at.

And again, we’re not dealing with the end result. We’re looking at what may be leading up to that and seeing if we can improve underlying functions. But literally anything can come by.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there particular case studies of patients that you’ve worked with that stand out to you, that you’re most proud of or that were eureka moments in your own sort of journey?

Case Studies: Complex Healing Journeys

SIMON MILLS: Most of my stories are like journeys. So you see little steps and you’re with somebody often for a long time, and you just see changes in the way that they change over the weeks and months. So, you know to say, I’ve got an instant Eureka moment. I’ve pulled together a few stories just knowing I was to come to them, and they’re a motley mix.

And in fact, I made notes because it’s sometimes better to remind myself of the sort of things I did because each of these patients will walk out with five or six or eight different plants. And the reason I put them together is because they have a unique story.

# Heather’s Complex Skin Condition

So probably the one with the most complex one is someone. All the names are changed, by the way. Someone called Heather, who’s 65, and she had a really severe complex condition called erythema multiforme, which is a complex skin disease that’s really distressing, very upsetting.

What we know about it is, is that it’s linked possibly to other infections. So we actually spotted Mycoplasma pneumonia is likely implicated. She’d previously had a lot of lung damage in her youth. She had early pneumonia and she was diagnosed with a chronic obstructive pulmonary thing, bronchiectasis, as it happened. Then she got Covid badly, and most of her trouble started after that.

She also had vitamin B12 deficiency, pernicious anemia, we call it, which is a autoimmune problem for gut lining. Stops the vitamin B12 being absorbed. Those were, in her background story, the lungs, because it was the earliest and probably the main factor were first my focus, and the second was what was lining the stomach, because most inflammatory problems start down here.

So I ended up giving her something that was a combination of remedies for the gut lining and for the lungs. And almost within a week or so, the itching of her skin subsided. I just happen to think that was the reason. I remember it because it’s unusual to get such quick results in such a complex condition. But it’s a reminder that if you can find the right button, then quite big things can happen. I was lucky to find the right button.

And progressively over the ensuing few months, the skin problem disappeared. To the extent that she was my dream patient. She said, “I don’t need your herbs anymore.” That to me is my biggest reward, that they can move on, they don’t need help anymore. It sticks in your mind because it was a hugely demanding condition that got better without and had been going for a long time. They’d been going three or four years by the time she saw me. And it resolved very quickly with what seemed to be totally irrelevant treatments. But there was a rationale for them.

# Taryn’s Anxiety and Metabolic Connection

Karen, 37, panic attacks, major anxiety problems. Heaven knows there’s a lot of that about it. Turns out that and when she was hospitalized, when she was 20 with jaundice, which is a liver problem, all the processing, all the detox processes are in the liver. It’s the gateway from the digestion. It handles emotions, it handles the immune system. It’s an amazing organ. It’s self correcting, by the way. So it fixes itself very quickly if you give it the right nudge.

She had jaundice. So immediately a little bell goes off because at a age when that could mean long term liver damage, hepatitis, she’s ended up with very little appetite. She feels full easily, gains weight easily, and often feeling nauseous, which is definitely a sign of liver distress. Still, menstrual cycle’s very erratic. She had early Covid, again another big hammer blow. And the COVID was before her main symptoms of panic attacks set in.

So I use that as an example of the way in which what goes on up here in the brain is linked with what goes on lower down in the gut. You know, interesting point. When we were living in caves, best place to be was in the cave because outside was dangerous. The only thing that got you out, hunger. And when we look at the way in which the cells are the machinery inside the cell, we find that the mechanisms managing anxiety are the same as the system managing appetites and food processing. So the idea of linking anxiety with metabolism is basic.

This was an exact answer. So the mix of herbs that I gave her had nothing for the anxiety at all. It was all to do with metabolism and so that included milk thistle, barberry, an Oriental herb called Buplurum, artichoke leaf, and an Indian remedy called gymnema, which is called Sugar Destroyer, which reduces your hankering for sweet.

First goal was to manage her sugar cravings, because that seemed to be a key part of what she was saying and to improve her liver functions. This was very quick, and she became more settled over several weeks and months. Then the next thing that happened was her menstrual cycles became clearly where the trouble was, and she was most likely to be distressed around the period.

So we shifted to include women’s remedies, which were then included in the mix to help manage the hormonal ebb and flow around the menstrual cycle. And three months, which is the normal time for cycles to begin to turn. Her cycles began to steady and so did the rest of her symptoms. Nothing to do with anxiety, just dealing with these core function.

So there’s a couple of examples of, you know, how we approach things differently. You know, if Karen had gone to most other practitioners, she would have had something for her nerves.

Women’s Herbs and Hormonal Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: I do really want to talk about. You use the term women’s herbs.

SIMON MILLS: Women’s.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, women’s herbs. I do want to talk about that. And I do also want to talk about fertility in the menstrual cycle and things like PCOS, because I’m super interested in that, which might surprise some people, but obviously there’s women in my life that struggle with those things, so I do want to get on to that. I think a second ago, you pointed at the stomach when you said that we treat down here.

SIMON MILLS: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that really the place to start to understand?

SIMON MILLS: Well, it’s what places to start. Plants. Because that’s where you. That’s where they go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So tell me, what do I need to know about this region, the stomach, the gut.

SIMON MILLS: Wow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In order to have a sort of foundational knowledge so that we can then start talking about ibuprofen, painkillers, fevers, all these kinds of things.

The Gut: Our Second Brain

SIMON MILLS: Well, very simply, we think our intelligence is up here. You know, we’ve got a brain. Yeah, yeah. As soon as you swallow something until it comes out the other end, we have no control over what goes on down there. Decisions are being made. As the food traverses down the tube and there’s a long tube, it’s about 20 feet of small intestine that has to go around and then like another 2 or 3 feet of large intestine. It used to take about 18 hours to go through. And we now, because we sit and drew it take longer.

But all that time, intelligent decisions are being made by the digestive system. What to do with this, what to do with that. And the lining of the gut is full of sensors, receptors we call them, that are picking up chemical cues and responding. So as the food changes, as it’s digested, as the bile from the liver comes in, it’s picking off these signaling devices and switching on a whole series of metabolic, hormonal, all sorts of other functions. All controlled major choreography going on here, you know, without us even knowing about it.

And then just when you thought this was wonderful, you add something called the microbiome. Now, when I was at school and it was a long time ago when I was doing medical sciences, oh yeah, there was the, there’s the bowel flora, they help with digestion, vitamin K, one or two other things, you know, they might be quite useful. Now the microbiome runs the show. It’s huge. We thought we knew what the kidney did, we thought we knew what the heart did. We thought we knew what the brain did. We know they only do it because they work with the microbiome. It’s running a show.

The Microbiome: Our Bacterial Partners

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the microbiome is the billions of bugs in our guts.

SIMON MILLS: Trillions, trillions. We’ve got more of those little critters than we have of our own cells. So much. They are huge. They’ve got about 100 times as much genetic capacity as we do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’ve got more bugs in our gut than cells.

SIMON MILLS: Yes. So we’re basically, we’re walking gut.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’re walking bacteria.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, yeah, there’s more bacteria than there are us. I mean, it’s a bit of a gobsmacking thought. And you know, obviously people want. No, no, I mean, the bugs will keep them there.

One of the big issues of the day are antibiotics, which we know are becoming a serious health issue. Now, the World Health Organization and others say very seriously that antibiotic resistance, antimicrobial resistance as they call it, is the biggest threat we have. Soon, going into a hospital and getting an operation will be a real risk because hospital borne infections are increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

You know, we’re piling them in to us, but also to the animals that we grow. A lot of them are full of antibiotics. And that means that the diversity of the microbiome is being reduced. We’ve losing, we call that biodiversity. There’s a biodiversity issue in here. But even with the diminished flora that we have, they still pretty much run the show.

And a lot of the fruits and vegetables, particularly the ones with colors in them actually feed those guys down there and help them to perform better. And one good reason to, as we say, eat the rainbow, just get those colors in. But yes, I mean, as you can see, if I start talking about the gut, I’m not going to stop for the next month.

The Antibiotic Crisis

STEVEN BARTLETT: On that point of antibiotics, they, the mechanism is that they kind of kill bacteria, right? So they’re killing good bacteria as well in the process.

SIMON MILLS: Often they have different range depending on the antibiotic. But yes, they will be cutting a sway through your gut flora for sure. Some more than others. I mean, the point about antibiotics, and we did a big project with this, ironically, just before COVID when I was working with Pukka, the herb tea people, we put a campaign together to find natural approaches to managing antibiotics or reduce the use of them.

Antibiotics are useless for anything viral. They don’t do anything for a virus. But unfortunately, people with viral problems will still be given antibiotics, mainly by a harassed doctor who just, you know, because they said, “Give me something, doc,” you know, for viruses mostly, you just have to wait for the body to get rid of it. But giving an antibiotic is actually of no use at all.

Don’t take my word for it. Everyone knows this. And you get NHS in this country posters saying antibiotics are no good for viruses. Please don’t ask your doctor for them. So for many of these things, colds and respiratory problems, for example, there are many spices. I mean, some of the things on that plate there are particularly good for colds and viruses up here.

And so we put that all together in the package and said we can encourage people not to ask the doc for an antibiotic and use some of these home, easy, free or sometimes treatments to use instead of the antibiotics.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say antibiotics are the most urgent health issue of the moment, I want to fully understand why you think it’s so urgent. Because we’re going to develop a resistance, which means that we’re more susceptible to disease.

SIMON MILLS: It’s already happening. And it’s not me that’s saying these are the guys who look after our healthcare for us, like the World Health Organization, who are really getting close to panic about this issue because already the number of people dying from antibiotic resistance infections is beginning to rise dramatically.

And new antibiotics, unfortunately, there’s less financial incentive to develop them because they’re often handed out free in various countries, so you don’t get the margins back. And the pipeline of new antibiotics is not good. So all you need to do is check on the World Health Organization to get the chapter and verse on that, it’s, it’s actually quite frightening.

The Antibiotic Crisis

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m on the World Health Organization site now and I found a definition of antibiotic resistance. It’s when bacteria stops responding to antibiotics and is mainly caused by overusing or misusing antibiotics. In 2022, US doctors gave out about 236 million antibiotic prescriptions, roughly seven prescriptions for every 10 people.

Studies show that at least roughly 30% of antibiotic prescriptions in the US aren’t needed, especially in places like doctor’s offices and emergency rooms. In 2020, about 30 million antibiotic prescriptions were given out in the UK. Children aged 0 to 14 made up 3.6 million of those.

And in 2023, the World Health Organization declared antibiotic resistance one of the top global health threats and estimated that it is responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to almost 5 million deaths.

SIMON MILLS: That was 2019. I can tell you that the figures have risen dramatically since then. So that’s what people think. And just on a personal basis you go and you need an operation and you know that that’s going to involve exposure to hospital infections, which is one of the most serious of them, the ones in the average hospital.

You know, they’re some of the most lethal ones there. Increasingly that is going to be a risk that you get something that you can’t treat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re not saying don’t take antibiotics?

SIMON MILLS: No, I’m saying take them carefully, use them when you need them and not otherwise. And again, it’s not me saying this is most responsible. Doctors would wish that their patients wouldn’t keep asking for them.

The Risks of Antibiotic Misuse

STEVEN BARTLETT: So there’s sort of three things that I’ve been able to ascertain as risks of misuse or overuse or inappropriate use of antibiotics, which is the impact on the gut microbiome that you’re contributing to the rise in antibiotic resistance.

SIMON MILLS: And those are the main things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess even with the diseases you get, you’ll be slower to heal because you’re less if you’ve got that resistance.

SIMON MILLS: That is one of the things that we do see, particularly those who are long term ill, you know, that they lose some of the healing capacity. And that’s so much of the work I do is to aim to put some of that right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there’s links to colorectal cancers.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, well, that’s it because we’re talking about the microbiome, you see. So those are the cancers in the lower gut. And we know that the microbiome is a major factor in how well the gut is. So things like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis and cancer of the bowel very closely linked to the state of the microbiome.

Natural Alternatives to Antibiotics

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so are there alternatives on this table or in the world of plants to antibiotics that I should maybe also consider instead of just jumping straight to antibiotics for everything that I experience?

SIMON MILLS: Yes, if you’ve got a serious gut or other infection, you may need the antibiotics. So let’s put that straight away. But if you’ve got a cold, flu virus, a viral problem, particularly the airways, A, antibiotics will have no use at all, and B, as we just said, they just add to the risk of more.

Because every time you take an antibiotic, you’re growing a small population of the species of bacteria that’s affected who are resistant to that. It’s natural selection. You have a thousand little bacteria, that’s a small amount by their terms, and you kill 999 of them. The one that survives will then become 2 in 20 minutes and 4 in 40 minutes and suddenly become a new population. And, you know, I duck that bullet.

And so that group of bacteria will already be resistant. So we’re creating resistance every time we use an antibody. So try. Let’s try and do something else, shall we?

The Power of Ginger: A Natural Remedy

So let’s say you’ve got a cold. Feeling the cold. It’s got a good name, by the way. So cold is one of the things you feel when you’ve got a cold. And that’s interesting because in former times we didn’t have tests, we didn’t have laboratories, we didn’t have paramedics, we didn’t have people poking things in you. All we could know is what it felt like.

And when you’ve got a cold, you often feel cold and you feel chills and you want to wrap up and you want hot water or you want to have a hot bath. All that in the old language meant that you were cold and what you needed to do was to heat up.

Now you take this fella. This is ginger. It’s grown widely around the world. In its original Asian form. It was made extinct around the time of the Romans, so popular was it. And ever since, all the ginger since of this species has got to be going from rootstock as it no longer seeds itself.

So this has been the most valuable natural commodity ever in its dried form, worth more than its weight in gold. And you know the reason why all those Europeans ended up in Asia, running India and south, the Dutch and Indonesia and so on is because that’s where these things came from, that’s where the spices came from. And so we decided, like good capitalists, to go and control the business.

So ginger became very popular over here because we don’t have nothing like it over here. The nearest thing we got is horseradish, which I promise you is no substitute for this.

How to Prepare Ginger Tea

So how do we use this? We’ve got a knob of ginger here, about the size of your thumb. That’s about a good dose. You grate it, fresh ginger into a mug.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can you do that for me?

SIMON MILLS: We’ve got a grater.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve got a grater for you.

SIMON MILLS: So we’ve got here a piece of ginger, the, as I say, about the size of your thumb. The thumb’s a good measure because it’s your measure. So if you’re a small person, you’ll have a small thumb. But I’m a bigger person, so I’m going to use. And you literally. It’s making a bit of a mess here, but in doing this at home, you don’t mind a bit of mess.

So you’re literally grating and grates nicely, doesn’t it, into a mug. And let’s say that was the whole thumb. I don’t want to take up too much time on this. And then the one thing that works brilliantly with ginger is cinnamon.

Now, this is cinnamon you buy in any shop. It comes in different forms. There’s one from China called Cassia, which looks like one big curled bark. If you look at this one, you’ll see that it’s tightly wrapped with lots of little curl, lots of little filaments in it. That’s the one you go for. It’s got. It’s more aromatic.

And you either grate that with if you’ve got a spice mill, or you take a teaspoon of it. Let’s say that’s a teaspoonful and you put that in your mug.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’s ginger and cinnamon.

SIMON MILLS: Ginger and cinnamon, that’s it. Then you add your hot water there. You’re going for real, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Going for the real one.

SIMON MILLS: Good on you. At this point, a sieve is useful.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

SIMON MILLS: Because it’s going to be. It’s full of.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, bits, bits.

SIMON MILLS: And then let’s say this is a nice Japanese green tea mug. But let’s say this is your mug and we’ll pour a little bit in there. You see all the stuff that you leave behind?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, yeah, okay.

SIMON MILLS: And if you don’t mind sharing a mug.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what’s in here?

SIMON MILLS: This is just ginger and cinnamon.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just ginger and cinnamon.

SIMON MILLS: It’s fairly weak.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, it is nice, though.

SIMON MILLS: It’s nice, isn’t it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It is nice.

SIMON MILLS: Now, can you feel it warming already?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes. Straight away? Yeah, it’s really nice.

How Ginger Works in the Body

SIMON MILLS: Yeah. Now you see what’s happening there. Is that you. I mean, ginger is an example of a group of remedies which includes turmeric, by the way. And that’s other root. The other root there, that’s turmeric. It’s normally seen in a yellow powder. I talk about that later. And black pepper and chilies. Got a chili here, which when you take them, you think you’re burning your mouth, don’t you?

The interesting thing is that there’s no burning. You can actually have full madras level chili and no harm will be done to your lining because there’s no burning going on. What you’re doing is you’re stimulating the pain fibers. So you’ve got pain fibers all the way through the lining of the mouth.

When you take a hot thing like ginger, it’s stimulating the pain fibers and immediately there’s a, what we call a reflex response which opens up the blood vessels. It’s called hyperemia. More blood. And the vessels lining these mucosa, the ones that you just swallowed and clean a little bit up in the nasal passages, are opening up, the mucous cells, producing mucus will loosen up and you get more runny mucus, which is helping to flush through the grot on the mucosa.

And the main thing you feel is the warmth. And if you’re dealing with something down here in the lungs, you’ll actually start bringing up more gunk up the airways. There’s a natural escalator that we use that the body uses to get stuff out of the lungs that’s stimulated.

And the mixture of cinnamon and ginger was created, I think, in heaven. I mean, I think that such a natural complementary and anybody can do that. And the point about it is that it’s warming. And in the old days that was the key thing. It didn’t matter if you had a headache or a joint pain or a menstrual cramp. If you wanted to put a hot water bottle on it or heat it up, then that was a cold problem and putting a heating medicine would begin to make difference.

So you can use the same thing if you have a headache and you want to put a hot pack on it. If you’ve got a menstrual cramp and you want to put a hot water bottle on it. If you’ve got a joint pain and you want to put a heating liniment on it, you can use the same thing, ginger, just because it’s heating. And that’s simple old medicine.

When to Use Heating Remedies

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when you are experiencing different types of pain or a cold, then cinnamon and ginger are good. I think my cough.

SIMON MILLS: Well, only if it responds to heat. Now, if you want to put an ice pack on, I mean, the old doctors, when someone came with a migraine, would say, “Tell me, would you prefer a hot pack or an ice pack for your migraine?” And migraine sufferers generally split 70, 30, preferring heat to 70. But a third of people with migraines actually want a cold pack. You don’t use ginger for that. You use cooling remedies, which we might come on to later.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. My girlfriend, she drinks ginger tea all the time, almost every day.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, she likes the heat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: She likes the heat.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: She drinks it before bed as well.

SIMON MILLS: Can help with sleep, if that’s the way it goes. I mean, people are different. And there are some people who can’t take ginger at all because their stomach objects or because it, you know, literally heats them up too much. They get stimulated by it, but that’s where the individuality comes in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so any condition where I might be looking for heat, ginger and cinnamon.

SIMON MILLS: First place to go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: First place to go.

Chilies: The American Equivalent of Ginger

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, you could, if you wanted to be Tex Mex, you can take the chilies as well as. Well, you know, that’s a. We think of them as a much more extreme version of the heating and, you know, remind ourselves it was only when the Europeans discovered Americas that chilies became used over here.

You know, can you imagine an Italian meal without, you know, without tomatoes and chilies? But in the old days, there were none of those because they all came from America. But, yeah, chilies were the American equivalent of ginger, used for the same purpose.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if someone comes to you and they say, “Simon, when should I use chilies as a form of medication,” what would you say?

SIMON MILLS: First of all, I don’t know yet. And, you know, if I’m dealing with someone at a distance, you know, online or on the phone or something, and they say, you know, “What should I try?” I said, “The first thing to do is, you figure it out. You could start with herbal teas.” You are dying.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to drop it into the. I’m going to drop it into here. Is that a bad idea?

Herbal Teas and Digestive Remedies

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, yeah, no, go for it. But you should notice that should be quite a hot one. I will suggest that they start with herbal teas, because herbal teas are a very low dose, but they’ll allow you to figure out what suits you and you can divide.

As I was hinting at earlier, old medicines were often divided into those that were more warming, that we would now call stimulating circulation and more cooling, which we would now translate as stimulating digestion. And depending on which of those you prefer, would really give me a clue.

So if you were looking at warming remedies, it could be ginger tea, it could be fennel tea, you know, that’s a warming remedy. Or it could be cinnamon or any of the spices. Cardamom is one of my favorites, by the way. This is. I use cardamom. This is the cardamom pods inside, a little black seeds. Absolutely lovely taste. Do you know cardamom? Have you tried it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not really, no.

SIMON MILLS: Oh, have a bite of that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do I just bite the seed?

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, just bite into it. You don’t just get a hint of the taste. In many parts of the Middle East, cardamom is one of the main flavors, things like coffee and so on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Reminds me of. Oh, I was going to say Indian food that I’ve had.

SIMON MILLS: Yes. Used a lot in India and in China. It’s a convalescent tonic. So they use it when people building up their digestion after being ill for a long time. They will often use cardamom. It’s one of my favorite remedies for that.

When people really run low, their digestion isn’t functioning. It was appeared in one or two of these stories I’ve got here because I prefer that to most of the other spices when they need warming, as I said before, but also sustaining and nourishing.

So you ask them, do you prefer teas that are warming or would you like something more cooling? Now, one of the most cooling remedies that people know about is this, which is mint, that spearmint. The best one is peppermint. Oh, it’s got a lovely smell, isn’t it? Yeah. That has always been thought of as cooling.

And it’s a simple test. Would you prefer ginger or peppermint tea? And already you’re beginning to narrow things down a bit. The main cooling remedies throughout history, from very beginning, and in every part of the world, you’ll find them saying exactly the same thing. The main cooling remedies, so called, are the bitters, and they taste really bitter.

Understanding “Cooling” Remedies

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say cooling, you mean I feel hot, so I want something to cool me down.

SIMON MILLS: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there’s certain conditions where I will feel hot.

SIMON MILLS: Fever, fever, fever. They were often used to fever, manage fever. And what you remember when we were young, we were told, if you’ve had a big meal, don’t go swimming. You weren’t told that I can’t swim. So there you go.

That was one of the things that some of us, in my generation at least, were always remembered. We were told, if you’ve got a big meal, it’s not a good idea to go swimming because the blood’s moving into the digestion and you won’t get many as much as you want when you need it in the limbs.

And that’s true when you are digesting a lot of blood, investment, shall we call it, is going into the digestive system. Because there’s a lot of work needed to break down this food, turn it into something useful. It is an investment. You put a lot in, get much more out.

But what it means is that digestion is all about bringing blood into the core. When you’ve got a fever, the blood’s all charging around and your body temperature’s going up, which is great because fever actually is a defense measure.

You know, when our body temperature rises by a couple of degrees, white blood cells, the ones that are doing the legwork, two or three times as active. So fever is what the body uses when it needs to bring out the big guys, bring out the fight.

There’s a site design problems. Almost as though, you know, the creators put a purposeful fault in the system because a lot of fever comes from the gut. You know, they get gut infections. You know, that’s one of the main places. And at that moment, all the blood’s going out here and you want more of it going in, more digestion, if you like.

So when you take a bitter. When you’re taking a bitter, you’re actually triggering taste buds up here. A bitter, a bitter. Something that tastes bitter.

Bitter Plants and Their Uses

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there any plants that are bitter?

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, bitter plants are very common and were highly valued in the old world. In our times. Probably the most bitter plant that people used in European terms was something called wormwood. Now, you may not be familiar with that word, but the French for wormwood is vermouth.

And you think of the use of a drink before a meal. The idea was it was. They used to call it an aperitif. Something that stimulated your appetite. So they would use bitters to improve your appetite. And a low level of wormwood would be one of them.

Dandelion and burdock of two other bitters, which we now have as a soft drink, particularly in America. And we know that bitters do switch on the appetite, so we sometimes use them when appetite is poor. And, you know, there’s all sorts of reasons why you’ve got a low appetite. But bitters can really help, particularly if you’re recovering from an illness. They can help with getting the digestion juices flowing and the appetite up.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because they bring blood to the digestive system.

SIMON MILLS: Well, they do all sorts of things, actually. When you switch on these receptors in the mouth, these taste buds, they’re hardwired and they produce hormones down here in the stomach that switch on all sorts of things and effectively increase digestive activity, which involves more blood coming into the area.

So, yes, let’s imagine you’re living in some part of the desert area in the Middle East. You’re eating a sheep or something that hasn’t seen a refrigerator, and it’s a bit dodgy, and you think after a meal, you turn to something easily available in that part of the world. It’s a plant called Caffea arabica. We call it coffee.

You ground the coffee into a sludge at the bottom, pour a bit of hot water and drink that straight, that’s a bitter. So if you ever had an espresso without sugar, that’s a bitter. Okay. And that was used as a digestive. In other words, after you’re eating, it would help cope with some pretty rough food.

So bitters were always seen to be good for your digestion and appetite. And in fever, that actually meant lowering your body temperature. And we can see that happening. It means that some of the anger out here just gets sublimated into digestion. So that was where the bitters got their cooling reputation.

And we can now laugh at this is all medieval nonsense. But the point that I keep coming back to when I’m seeing patients, I start with that blank sheet of paper, is because the only test of what these do to you is to take it. And as you notice with your ginger and cinnamon, you don’t need long. You’ve got it there straight up. And if I give a bitter to somebody and someone is really bitter, they will know within an hour or so what effect is having.

Supplements and Natural Resistance

STEVEN BARTLETT: On this point of antibiotics I’ve heard you talk about vitamin D, vitamin C and zinc as a potential alternative.

SIMON MILLS: To jumping straight from not straight alternative, but in improving your natural resistance, particularly to viruses and such like. Then there is evidence for both vitamin D and vitamin C but also zinc as backups in supplement form that do seem to add to your resilience in the face of infections.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m quite concerned because, you know, I’ve got dark skin and in the weather that we live in here in the UK, when I am in the UK, I worry that I won’t get enough vitamin D. Are these “supplements” important, do you think? What are the supplements that you think are imperative?

SIMON MILLS: None.

STEVEN BARTLETT: None.

SIMON MILLS: Not for most, for everybody. But there are certain situations. I think vitamin D is a good one. And it’s not just people with dark skin that have a Vitamin D deficiency is pretty widespread in darker countries, if we can call our weather and that we know where there’s not enough sun.

Vitamin D deficiency is quite widespread and increasingly doctors do suggest you have vitamin D supplementation through the winter particularly even just having a 15 minute outdoors with the sun will give you a fairly hefty amount.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you supplement?

SIMON MILLS: Not myself, no, I don’t. I haven’t spotted a need. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t recommend supplements to people where there is a need.

Garlic: “Russian Penicillin”

STEVEN BARTLETT: And garlic? We’ve got garlic there. I wonder if that has an antibiotic role.

SIMON MILLS: Well, this is garlic. What used to be called “Russian penicillin” and after penicillin was invented because some parts of the world they used garlic instead of penicillin which was hard to come by originally, and it was used in places like the First World War to avoid some of the trench foot and other problems that soldiers would get in those lousy conditions.

Garlic, when talking raw now, is a very powerful prebiotic. In other words, it helps the gut flora. The good guys down here in the microbiome, and there’s evidence to show a lot of these other ones do as well. But garlic is particularly strong.

And when I’m dealing with a disrupted gut flora, a microbiome, I will sometimes refer to raw garlic as a treatment. But you need to do it with care because, you know, you don’t want to lose too many friends.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why, what’s wrong with gut? Is it pungent?

SIMON MILLS: It’s the aroma you give out afterwards. So, you know, your friends will be very polite, but they’ll rather wish you hadn’t. And some people find that it does upset, you know, when they swallow.

But I have a little trick which I call the “garlic intensive,” which is when everything is down, the gut is in the state, you maybe got a lung infection or whatever, and there’s a lot of need for, if you like, an antibiotic type of treatment, raw garlic.

What you do is, and for all sorts of reasons, Friday evening is the best time to do this because you’ve got the weekend ahead of you. You take one of those cloves first of all, on that day, you haven’t eaten so much, so you don’t have so much on the way.

Then you take one of these cloves, you peel it, chop it up, small pieces and swallow it with water. You don’t chew it, just chop it up and swallow with a little bit of water and wait for half an hour just to make sure that that’s okay. Your stomach’s okay to go ahead.

If it is, take another clove, chop it up, swallow it, another half hour later, take another clove. And if you start at 6 o’clock, by 10 o’clock in the evening, you’ve got eight cloves inside you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Eight. And what’s that going to do?

Garlic’s Powerful Effects

SIMON MILLS: Well, at this point, you usually go to bed, and I would suggest you go to bed alone at this point because you’re not very friendly at this point because you’re oozing garlic. The aroma of garlic is coming out of all your pores, incidentally. It’s also coming out of your lungs.

And there was an old trick where you used to be able to, if you had enough garlic, breathe on a petri dish in a laboratory with various pathogens and you could kill them just with your breath. The oil of garlic is a powerful antiseptic.

But what it’s doing in the lower digestion is it seems the good guys down there quite like it, but the bad guys – in the old days we had garlic was against the devil. And it looks as though the bad guys down there don’t like garlic. So just doing that over a weekend can make a big difference to the good guys in the microbiome. And if you’ve got a low level gut or lung infection that can be really helpful.

But that’s something you can do at home, but you don’t want to do that too often. In fact, I would suggest that one garlic intensity is probably enough for most people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So prebiotic effects. It has antimicrobial properties. Which is it good for pain? Called it Russian penicillin. Is it?

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, well, it depends where the pain’s coming from. But if your pain is a cough or a chest infection. Yes, particularly good for chest infections. Some people do use it for arthritic problems. It will depend on what’s causing the arthritis, and it’s very hard for me to say one of these things will do it for everybody. It won’t. It will do in certain situations.

And what we learn when we’re dealing with plants is that you’re the boss. You find out for yourself. All people like me do is say, well, give this a try. This is worth trying, this is valuable. Why don’t you give it a go?

Understanding Chronic Pain

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you think about chronic pain? There’s so many people living with a variety of different types of chronic pain. It affects 51.6 million people, I believe just in the US alone. And the most common forms of chronic pain are conditions such as arthritis or migraines or lower back pain or other types of nerve damage. Roughly 75 to 85% of Americans will experience some form of back pain during their lives.

When I think about this big array of plants that are in front of me and other plants, what is the first place to go in your mind if you’re dealing with chronic pain?

SIMON MILLS: It depends again where it is. But let’s take a look. Joints and back. You know where you’ve got a joint that’s causing and it’s because it’s inflamed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

The Science of Inflammation

SIMON MILLS: So when you have inflammation, you add “itis” to the name of the plant. So this is arthritis because it’s inflammation of the joint. You have cystitis, which is the bladder. You have bronchitis. If it’s the lungs, gastritis of the stomach. So “itis” tells us there’s an inflammation. And mostly with arthritis, it’s an inflammation.

And briefly it’s because there’s junk being dumped on the joint. The joints have got very poor circulation by design, because there’s surfaces being pressed against each other. And so the tissue in the joint is cartilage gristle, if you’re eating it, which is designed to survive with very poor circulation, because when you’ve got two things pressing in, there’s not much room for blood in there.

So if there is metabolic waste, let’s call it junk in the system, it’s more likely to come out in these places where there’s poor circulation. Sometimes things a bit like a U bend under a basin, you know, if there’s any stuff in the sink, it’s going to come deposit there. So I think of joints as a bit like a U bend.

So the first thing that people did with a joint pain, an inflammation of the joint, was to help to clean the joint, bring more blood into the area. And that’s what the inflammation is doing. It hurts like Billy Ho, but what it’s doing is bringing more blood in by brute force to do what I was just saying. But if you were to put on a mustard plaster or a cayenne plaster.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A cayenne plaster, which you simply.

SIMON MILLS: Put on on the outside, and you can buy these in pharmacies and so on. It’s called capsicum capsaicin. It’s a standard prescription dressing for a pain. What it does is it brings the blood in directly and that means the inflammation doesn’t have to do it and the inflammation is sore. What you’re doing isn’t. So by definition, you’re reducing the pain level. That’s an example of using plants in a creative way, which people always did.

Traditional Pain Remedies

STEVEN BARTLETT: They used to do that back in the day.

SIMON MILLS: Oh, yes, yeah. I mean, if you go to North America, the native populations would regularly use cayenne as their salve for bad joints. In Europe, it was mostly mustard. Then we’re talking the yellow mustard. The one that’s strong, uses a plaster over a joint and if you’ve got arthritis in your fingers, and this is something anyone can do with, you know, suffering the pain here, use a mustard bath.

Put your fingers into a dilute warm solution of mustard and it’s amazing how quickly they ease up. Or you could put a plaster on a hip or whatever. People always did this.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you seen this work in your practice?

SIMON MILLS: Oh, yes. And I often recommend it to patients and they keep reporting back. It really makes a difference, I think.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I worry about lower back pain because I spend so long sitting down and.

SIMON MILLS: I’ve got low back pain too. And I didn’t use herbs very much for that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did you do?

SIMON MILLS: Well, it was a long story, but there was a very good West African combo called OCBA which I saw back in the day when I had really bad back and I got the music got so into me that I loosened up and began to jive and dance around and realized that my back had gone and it stayed gone for decades. It’s just unlocked a knot. So that wasn’t any herb, that wasn’t any plant… dancing. Dancing. I mean, letting the music get into you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the difference?

SIMON MILLS: Well, you know, when you feel the music running through, you know, you’re just moving in with the beat, you know, that loosens up a lot of knots. You know, I don’t just do plants. I talk about breathing, I talk about exercises that you can do for yourself. And sometimes when you’ve got a joint pain, it’s all about, it’s locked and you can find ways of loosening that joint.

The Ibuprofen Problem

STEVEN BARTLETT: Ibuprofen.

SIMON MILLS: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: People reach for this all the time. I mean, I was looking at some of the search trend data for ibuprofen and it is absolutely exploding. Yes, that’s the search graph. Ibuprofen.

SIMON MILLS: But it’s one of the most widely used drugs in this country. It’s obviously because it works and it’s based on a plant substance called salicylic acid, which gave us aspirin. And we still use the basic molecule to create what we call non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs or NSAIDs. And ibuprofen is one of the most widely used of those. And basically they cut the inflammatory drug process, just cut it and the inflammation just diminishes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which is good, right?

SIMON MILLS: Well, if it gets rid of the pain, it is. But there’s always a follow up question, why was that inflammation necessary? Because inflammation is a defense. It’s one of our most powerful defenses we have in the body. And whenever someone is saying I need ibuprofen, my next question is what can we do to reduce the need for the inflammation?

So when I was talking about the arthritis, I was saying this junk, shall we say, being dumped on the joint, can we help to relieve that? Can we go upstream and reduce some of the metabolic strain people eat, sometimes the wrong food and sometimes increases arthritis. You can improve your arthritis by switching to more plants very often. But there are other things that we can give that seem to help reduce some of those pressures.

But the pain might be somewhere else. It might be linked to a full blown disease. And in that case using anti inflammatories is the only thing you can do. But if there is a way in which we can help reduce the need for that inflammation in the first place, I would much prefer to do that than just suppress a natural defense.

Rethinking Inflammation

STEVEN BARTLETT: We tend to think of inflammation as the enemy.

SIMON MILLS: We do. And I think we’re wrong.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We think of it as the disease itself.

SIMON MILLS: We are wrong. It’s the consequence of a problem and it’s inflammation itself is a healthy response. It’s when we bring out, you know, I sometimes use military language here and there’s a bunch of white blood cells that I liken to Marines. You know, these are guys who when they’re working well, they just go in and do the job. They don’t sort of figure it out, they don’t ask questions, they just go and do the job.

We’ve got a whole bunch of white blood cells that are bit like that. They’re just, we call them neutrophils and there’s various others of that group and they just go in and whack them. Inflammation is bringing those guys out faster and harder. So we’re bringing in more of the Marines if you like to finish the job. What’s wrong with that? You know, that’s what we want to do.

It happens to be sore then if they don’t do the job and the junk or the problem keeps piling in, then the marines become the problem and then we use the ibuprofen to shut them up. But as I said, there’s always a question why are we, what’s the consequence of stopping this internal cleansing process then is so important. So inflammation is not the enemy. Inflammation is the defense measure that can sometimes overstay its welcome.

Acute vs Chronic Inflammation

STEVEN BARTLETT: I had an injury in my ankle a couple of months back because I pulled some of the ligaments down there and my ankle swelled up and I was getting conflicting information from people about the inflammation. Because I had this big football game coming up for this charity match called soccer aid at Old Trafford and I had one of my physios telling me to apply the ice thing and take anti inflammatories. And I had another one telling me something else about the inflammation that actually I didn’t want to combat the inflammation because it was doing its job. And so it’s quite difficult to navigate whether one should let inflammation stay or if I should be taking anti inflammatories or ibuprofen.

SIMON MILLS: Well, if you’d got a match to, you know, sometimes need something just to get your match fit or match acceptable. But if it’s a short term, we call it acute inflammation, then overwhelmingly the advice is don’t suppress it because in the short term we get a cut, get a bit of dirt, it gets swollen, maybe a bit of pus and so on. And after a while it sorts itself out.

That’s this miracle I talked about earlier. The body heals itself all the time. That’s inflammation doing its job properly, cleaning out. The marines go in, clear all the stuff out, back to their barracks, back to normal. That’s great. It’s only if, as I said, the junk keeps piling in and the job doesn’t get finished. And we call that chronic inflammation. That’s when you sometimes need a bit of help.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And chronic inflammation is often caused by something further upstream, right?

SIMON MILLS: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you try and think about what’s causing it upstream.

SIMON MILLS: Exactly. So.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what tends to be the perpetrator upstream?

The Gut Connection

SIMON MILLS: The gut is where most of these things begin. Because when you think about it, that’s where we take most foreign material. Almost all of it has to be dealt with by the gut. So that’s where most of our immune system is. We talk about the immune system, but the majority of the immune system is a few millimeters away from the lining of the gut because that’s where the action is, that’s where all the foreign stuff is.

So if there’s a disruption there, that’s the first place to begin because it’s usually the best place to begin. And if we add what we talked about, the microbiome as another big factor, then there’s plenty to work be done with down there. So if it’s a chronic inflammation, I will spend a lot of time looking at what might be going on down there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s the typical suggestion if it is a gut related problem?

Gut Health and Plant-Based Nutrition

SIMON MILLS: Well, the first thing you do is to get the best food you can down there, which is mostly plant based. I mean the reception to that. But if we’re looking at restoring your good health down here, the gut does seem to like plants at this point.

So we talk about having a wide range of plants. The current advice from one or two people is that you would aim to have 30 different types of plant per week, just to get the diversity, because we don’t know which one you need. So I don’t give as much difference as you can.

And people think you can’t afford to eat healthily. All I would suggest is that you go and travel to somewhere like India or anywhere in Asia where they eat pretty much a lot of plants, mostly plants for pennies. You can make a healthy meal by, if you know how to cook, by just mixing some of these simple the dals and the root vegetables and the other vegetables easily mixed together, a few spices in there, absolutely delicious. And your gut and your microbiome will be jumping with glee.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talk about eating your rainbow.

SIMON MILLS: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

The Power of Colorful Foods

SIMON MILLS: Means as many colors as you can fit in, literally, because each color is produced by a constituent of plants. Many of them we call polyphenols, which we know have a range of effects on all sorts of. Mainly on the microbiome. Again, because they’re all in different ways prebiotic. They all help good guys prosper down there.

But then after the microbiome is processed them, which is interesting, the microbiome is important, is critical for processing polyphenols. They don’t get absorbed unless the microbiome breaks them up already. So the benefits of the colors depend on the good guys down here.

When they get into the blood, they start doing all sorts of wonderful things to the lining of the blood vessels. For example, up into the brain, where we got what we call blood brain barrier, which is actually a very exciting interface. The polyphenols, the colors all have well established mechanisms that improve the health all around the body. So simple. If you’ve got a child who used to say, “eat your greens,” we now say “eat your rainbow.” The more different colors, the better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I wonder if that’s why they put so many artificial dyes in junk food.

SIMON MILLS: Well, I wish they wouldn’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: To try and trick our brains into thinking it’s. I don’t know.

SIMON MILLS: No, there’s nothing quite like the original.

Recommended Fruits and the Purple Deficiency

STEVEN BARTLETT: In terms of fruit. What are your favorite fruits to sort of recommend people to eat and why?

SIMON MILLS: Probably if you wanted to have a top list, the darker the color, the better. So we talk about purples and I’m pleased to see that your team has found a purple carrot there. We remind ourselves that most vegetables were purple once upon a time.

If you think of maize, the sweet corn and the maize that you grow in the Americas, that mostly was originally purple. And we bred the purple out because it didn’t look so appetizing. And we’re probably purple deficient. I think we could do with more purple in our lives because the purple and blue color is something called anthocyanins.

These are types of polyphenol and they’re particularly powerful, particularly with the blood supply. We’re talking about things like eyesight and brain health and circulatory health, blood pressure control. And all those sort of things can be improved just by having more purple in our lives.

So we’ve got beetroot, that’ll do. We’ve got the berries. Red grapes are probably more. We’ve got the red grapes here, that’s got more of these than the yellow. The grapes do. So I would start with the reds and purples.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said you think we’re purple deficient.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, I mean, just think of something interesting to say, but there’s probably something in that.

Essential Vegetables for Optimal Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: And in terms of vegetables, what are your favorite? Go to vegetables that you’d recommend I eat.

SIMON MILLS: Start with the roots, the root vegetables, the carrots, the beetroots, the parsnips, the various other root vegetables out there, not all of which are people’s favorites, but they have fiber, sort of starch in them, which is particularly prebiotic. And some of the most powerful prebiotics are the root vegetables. So those are definitely worth having.

The greens, obviously, and broccoli. And interestingly, I found a purple one which are easy enough to get. So you can get the purple or the green. Obviously there’s a value in the purple there. But any broccoli, any of the cabbage family is full of all sorts of other ingredients that have their own benefits in all sorts of ways. Metabolism, gut, hormonal, blood supply.

So greens, roots, and the big one in most people’s lives are the grains. Wheat, for example, but cereals, lentils, dahl peas and beans, all of these have their own benefits, particularly for the microbiome. Again, I don’t know exactly what even I need, let alone what anyone else needs. So the best thing to do is to have as much diversity as possible.

Personal Diet Philosophy

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is your diet?

SIMON MILLS: It’s a mix. Vegan.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you eat meat?

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, I just have a broad range of what most humans have eaten, which is a mixture of things I do. Obviously many of my patients are vegans and you can live quite well with them. You have to add a few extra things just to cover your back on a few areas. But you can live perfectly well, at least when you’re a grown up, an adult on a plant only diet.

But who am I to say that an Inuit in the Arctic who never sees any vegetable ever and only lives on traditionally only lives on seal and whale meat and blubber is any less healthy than someone in Thailand who lives only on rice and vegetables. We’re all, we can cope with all sorts of variety of foods. There isn’t one food for everybody.

The Keto Diet Discussion

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think we were discussing before we started recording that I’m currently on a ketosis diet, the keto diet.

SIMON MILLS: Keto diet? Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which basically means that I’m extremely low carb in my diet.

SIMON MILLS: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Basically consuming no sugar. What do you think of the keto diet? What’s been your experience with it?

SIMON MILLS: They can be and I think you’re one of those that would get a lot of benefit from it because it, I mean sugars are, they’re in a lot of vegetable material and of course unfortunately we have sugar now as an added to our diets. They tend to slow down various parts of your metabolism. They tend to make metabolism a bit more like hard work.

And so if you take those out and some of the more sugar producing carbs then you’re freeing up a lot of energy. So a lot of people on keto diets find that they’re sharper, that’s probably what you do.

But there are potential downsides. Interestingly, the first thought was well, that can’t be very good for your microbiome because they rely on vegetable material to a large part. But when we’ve looked at the microbiome of keto after keto diets, it’s not as it’s actually there’s some good guys that re emerge with a keto diet. So it’s a mixed bag.

The only thing is that when you don’t have as many plants in your diet then there’s slightly more strain on things like liver and kidney function. So someone who’s taking keto for a long term is always a good idea to check that they’re okay. And some of the more long term concerns have been around kidney because if there’s a lot more of the animal based material in food then that’s can be more hard work for the kidney. So it’s always worth checking that those functions are doing well.

But I come back to the point there is no one size fits all. We are omnivores, we’re designed to eat almost anything.

Keto and Women’s Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: My girlfriend, she’s doing keto as well and she noticed that her menstrual cycle became more regular.

SIMON MILLS: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which she was like shocked by it. And she’s really done a lot of AB testing over the last couple of years. And whenever she’s in a ketogenic diet, very low carb, very low sugar diet for six weeks, she was shocked that she could predict the day when her period would come. And outside of that, sometimes it’s really varying.

SIMON MILLS: Well, there’s a very good point about keto. One of the most effective things that keto does is it reduces insulin resistance, which is something that most of us suffer as we get older and larger, as we get through our life. Insulin is the hormone that packs sugar away into the tissues and into the liver. And thank God, because if we didn’t have insulin, we would have diabetes.

Insulin resistance is growing and that leads to diabetes increasingly. And so diabetes is, in many, most parts of the world now, is becoming another big health issue. And it’s mainly because we have too many carbs, too much sugar in the diet, because whenever we eat sugar, particularly sugar, there’s more work for the insulin to do. So it gets more likely to get run down and tired.

When you’re on a keto diet, it’s been observed that you get more insulin sensitive. So in other words, insulin works better. So you can reverse early stages of diabetes by switching to a keto, for example.

Now, interestingly, many menstrual problems are linked to insulin resistance. And there’s something called PCOS which affects quite a lot of women now, in which the ovaries basically produce more hormone producing cysts, Polycystic ovary syndrome. And that is increasingly linked with insulin resistance. So it affects people who are more likely to be in the pre diabetic phase, putting on weight and that sort of thing.

The insulin resistance itself switches the hormone balance. And the menstrual cycle is a wonderful choreography. I mean, when you think about it, all around the world is this, it’s a pretty predictable cycle and it runs itself. But if there’s something on insulin resistance getting in the way, then that can disrupt the hormone. So someone like your girlfriend might find that switching to a keto diet abolishes or reduces that disruptor.

PCOS, Insulin Resistance, and Fertility

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I was just reading some stats on that. Said 80% of women with PCOS have some degree of insulin resistance, even those who aren’t overweight. And my girlfriend does have PCOS, which she’s talked about publicly before. So it’s no surprise that when she comes off, she takes sugar out of her diet. Her menstrual cycle seems to fall back in line. And I think there’s also links to insulin resistance, PCOS and I guess ovulation infertility.

SIMON MILLS: Yes, it is. So I think, I mean, the modern woman, the modern man for that matter, has a whole string of burdens to carry because we have too much sugar. I mean, when you think about it, sugar only emerges a common ingredient. 140 years ago, 150 years ago, up till that time, only very rich people could afford it.

Then we had the industrial sugar production and a lot of slaves over in the Americas producing vast amounts of cane sugar. That is a modern phenomenon. And our bodies were designed to deal with the amount of sugar that we now feed it. And it does put a strain on the system. And insulin is one of the guys caught in the mix.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if you’re trying to have kids, which we are now, I guess you want to remove the.

SIMON MILLS: If that’s a factor, I would be looking at reducing your sugar intake at the very least. Yeah, I mean, we spent. I spend a lot of time with women who are having difficulty conceiving. And I think I have about 13 herb babies, in other words, babies who were born with women who were having challenges getting pregnant. And that was mainly, I think, because we were stabilizing the menstrual cycle and making the fertile phase a bit more productive.

Herbal Medicine Practice

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what do you, what do you say to those women? You, you, what do you prescribe?

SIMON MILLS: I guess I do. I mean, that’s my business. I will be prescribing. So you see there’s some bottles there. These are the sort of things that we use in the practice. So I’ve got a couple here that just the sense, the smell, sense that this is fennel, which we all think we know. But these are very strong extractions that only practitioners use. So these are practitioner owned supplies. And when you smell it, you realize that they are strong. So a teaspoon of that is really powerful.

Now, if you really want to realize the power of herbs, this is a remedy called echinacea. And lots of people know about echinacea and it’s a major supplement. This is a root extraction from a variety of species of echinacea called angustifolia. And I’m just going to put a little bit in there. I’m going to test it myself before I give it to you. So I’m not poisoning you. So you just take a little.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can I put it on my skin or put it on, or did you want me to shot that?

SIMON MILLS: Just lick it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Whoa. Wow.

Herbal Medicine for Women’s Health and Fertility

SIMON MILLS: So these are the sort of things. This is just a particularly striking example of the sort of things that we use in the practice. Some of the women that come to me, for example, with fertility or menstrual problems will go out with a mix of herbs drawn like this from about 100 or so different plants that I have on the shelves.

They are often, as I said earlier, remedies developed by women. Incidentally, North America is a prime site for some really powerful women’s remedies. When you look at them, you find they contain plants equivalent of steroids. They’re not steroids, but they seem to interact with our own hormone mechanism.

Some of them were particularly good at recreational timing, the menstrual cycle. One or two that we’re particularly warned women should not take unless they wish to be pregnant. So effective, were they? What’s that doing to your tongue?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s still right on the edge of my tongue. It’s more… So basically, for anyone that can’t see what we’re doing, because you’re listening on audio, he put a little drop of this solution, Echinacea on my finger and I licked it off my finger.

At first I was like, there was this sort of taste journey which was interesting. It kind of tastes like Maggi seasoning some kind of food seasoning. I’m now 60 seconds later and I can still… It’s like got more intense.

SIMON MILLS: It’s a bit like fireworks going off.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, it’s like fireworks going off in my mouth. And all it was was a little lick of it.

The Power of Echinacea for Immune Support

SIMON MILLS: Now you see, getting soft. What we use that for is for infections or problems at the mouth and the throat particularly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s he doing?

SIMON MILLS: Well, you know, you have to use a bit of unscientific language here, but remember I talked about the Marines, you know, the guys who do all the battling for us. A lot of them hang out, their barracks are in the throat. We’ve got tonsils, we’ve got adenoids, we got the glands that run down our neck here that sometimes get swelled up if we’ve got an infection in this area.

You have to take something. You take the taste of my life. It sometimes gets in the way of talking as well. I was hesitating before giving it to you. Didn’t want to stop you in your steps.

But what’s that, that tingling cut? As I said, a rather confusing story short. Those are constituents that almost seem to talk directly to those white blood cells and make them more active. So echinacea in that form particularly works primarily on the front line, shall we call it, of our immune system, these battlers that sit up there.

Often that’s where you want to start the job. You might have an infection somewhere else in the body, but if you can work up here with these guys, you can kick off all sorts of benefits. And as you’ve just discovered, it doesn’t take long.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So who should be thinking about echinacea?

SIMON MILLS: Certainly if you’ve got an upper respiratory problem and you do need to get that tingle if you want to get that particular effect. I mean, you can have echinacea in other forms, pills and tablets and so on. There are some which don’t have that tingle effect. They got other elements to it.

But for the tingle factor, it’s anything to do with an infection that has a link to what’s going on up here. That could be for lower down in the gut as well, because our gut begins up here as well. But it could be a sinus problem, it could be a middle ear problem, it could be a throat problem, it could be a gum problem.

We’ve got all sorts of gum problems and all sorts of problems we have with mouth. We’ve got a microbiome up here as well. This can with one or two other things. Some of the plants we use in this form contain resins. An example is frankincense. We got some tablets there.

Ancient Wisdom: Frankincense and Myrrh

STEVEN BARTLETT: These ones.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah. Otherwise known as boswellia. This just comes in the form of tablets. They just look like any other tablets except they’re sort of greeny yellow color because that’s just ground up resin.

Now what’s resin? Resin. We know about that because it’s the sort of thing you get out of pine trees, you know, that very tacky stuff. All we need to do is remember the Bible story. There were three gifts that the baby Jesus got, didn’t he, for his birthday from those wise men. One was gold. Fair enough. The other two were resins. Myrrh and frankincense.

This is the frankincense. I use myrrh in a liquid form. You almost like you’re lining the mouth with this resin when you put some myrrh on the mouth, you definitely feel the mucosa firing up. It was most widely used medicine.

The reason why it was so valued in those days by the three wise men is because myrrh was first of all. They had to bring it out of Africa, which is where it comes from. Remember the Queen of Sheba who married Solomon in the old Bible story? Queen of Sheba had the trade routes of East Africa sorted.

So Solomon married wisely by marrying the Queen of Sheba because she had the monopoly on myrrh particularly and on frankincense and echinacea maybe would do the licorice to help it. That work well are amazing at reducing infections in this area in the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and the areas around.

The Power of Fasting and Natural Rhythms

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think that things like water fasts, people are doing a lot of these sort of water fasts and these sort of seven day prolonged fasts are effective medicines?

SIMON MILLS: My usual answer when I’m faced with a question and someone needed an answer from is to think back a bit. What did humans evolve to do? When we were hunter gatherers, which was three or four hundred thousand years, we were hunter gatherers. Now what we’re doing now is a tiny…

We evolved to eat intermittently. When you’re a hunter gatherer, there are times when you’re not eating at all, especially off season, and you get very hungry and then you eat a lot and you have a big feast. So I think our systems were designed to be intermittent fasting. Fasting is probably part of our gene makeup. That’s what we were in a sense meant to do.

So the fundamental principle of fasting is probably right on issue is, is that sometimes if your metabolism, your digestion, your hormones or other functions are not prime place fasting, particularly if it’s extended, can actually be damaging. So you do need a bit of advice if you’re going down that route, just to make sure it’s okay for you.

Supporting Cancer Patients with Herbal Medicine

STEVEN BARTLETT: And at the start of the conversation, you referenced that you deal with a lot of cancer patients. I think you said one third, about.

SIMON MILLS: A third of my quarter, maybe a quarter to a third. Yeah. Living with cancer. Living with cancer, which is something that’s relatively new, remember? Because I mean, that is a testament to what modern medicine has done.

When I started out all those decades ago, most people died with cancer. We’re increasingly getting people living with cancer for extended periods of time. The cancer is not… I mean, there are things we can do to help and there is evidence to show that we can help reduce the risk at least, and if not sometimes the virulence of cancer.

But mostly what we’re doing is helping people to function better while they’ve been through chemo or various other treatments while they’re still recovering from the cancer and its effects. It could be digestion, it could be things like sleep, it could be all sorts of other things that we can do to help.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So there’s the preventative element which is doing things within your sort of lifestyle choices, your diet, to reduce the likelihood you’ll get cancer. But then once you have it, there’s ways you can use herbs and other sort of remedies to better deal with life. Life generally. When you think about cancer prevention, is it… Do you think that one of the most powerful things we can do is to focus on what we’re putting inside our bodies?

SIMON MILLS: Yes. We’ve learned about cigarettes a long time ago and there are other foods that have got a higher risk of cancer. We talk about processed meats, for example. That’s increasingly being seen as a cancer risk.

But I suggest that the main risk in cancer is just poor diets generally. Too much fat, too much carbs, too much sugar all at once usually. That strains the body in a way it wasn’t meant. There is evidence to show that by correcting poor diet you can prevent cancer. Increasingly that’s accepted.

Cardiovascular Health and Natural Prevention

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m pretty sure that the cardiovascular diseases are the single biggest killer still cardiovascular.

SIMON MILLS: In the west we’re talking about. So in developed countries catching up, I’m afraid in other parts of the world where they adopt more western lifestyles. But that’s a combination of food and poor, low level of exercise that we’re putting our finger on there.

There’s also cardiovascular diseases is another form of long term inflammation. Increasingly that’s been understood. It’s not just fat or cholesterol or blood pressure. It’s an inflammatory mechanism going on that’s causing the harm. That’s increasingly accepted by cardiologists and such.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I’m trying to reduce my chances of having some kind of heart related issue. Are there any herbs or any products here that you think are beneficial?

SIMON MILLS: Mostly it’s the food. When we’re talking about long term cardiovascular health, we have plants that we use to manage cardiac or cardiovascular problems. I mean the classic that a lot of people know about is the hawthorn or the mayflower.

But the hawthorn, particularly the flower and the leaf, used to be a regular home remedy that people used to use and drink as a tea for all sorts of reasons, managing fevers and all sorts of things like that. But we can now see regular hawthorn consumption, hawthorn leaf consumption as a preventative for some of the problems of cardiovascular.

Just as an example, I would use spices as my main go to to help to fend off cardiovascular problems because they have vascular benefits.

The Anti-Inflammatory Power of Turmeric

STEVEN BARTLETT: Spices as in, as in the ginger.

SIMON MILLS: The cinnamon we talked about. But here’s turmeric. This is something we don’t usually see in. But if you can see there’s in fact, if you cut that with your knife there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve just cut it open.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, you’ll see it’s bright. Yeah, it’s bright orange. That’s the curcumin that people use as a supplement.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve got curcumin at home. I was advised to use that when I pulled the ligaments of my ankle. Yes, it’s an anti inflammatory, isn’t it?

The Power of Turmeric and Curcumin

SIMON MILLS: You can see a little bit why I don’t like using anti-inflammatory because I like inflammation as a friend. So what I prefer to talk about is they modulate or support or manage inflammation. But turmeric is an extraordinary remedy.

And here’s an interesting story we talk about. We need curcumin from turmeric and you’ll get a supplement saying, “my turmeric’s got more curcumin than yours and it’s more available.” The interesting point is that curcumin is not absorbed by into the body at all. About 1 or 2% maybe. The rest stays stubbornly in the gut.

And there’s a very good reason for that because in any high dose curcumin is toxic. So there’s a good reason for it staying in the gut. But there’s a lot of work on making more bioavailable, getting the levels up in the blood. And if you add pepper, you might get from 1 or 2% to 2 to 3%, but it’s still small beer compared with the amount of turmeric that we take, the amounts of curcumin that we take in an ordinary curry.

So what’s going on? And what is going on is that curcumin and in turmeric is one of the best remedies we have for microbiome. There’s a conversation going on. The turmeric is encouraging the good guys. The good guys are breaking turmeric and curcumin down into more available materials which are active.

It belongs in the gut and its inflammatory modulating effects come mostly from the products of the microbiome working on the curcumin and moving through the body that way. So it’s a wonderful lesson in that the medicine actually relies in this case almost entirely on a good microbiome. An effect that is reduced, by the way, if you have a lot of antibiotics.

The Microbiome as Your Processing Center

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So my microbiome is really the processing center for many of these things. And if I have a bad gut microbiome because I’ve been eating the wrong foods and I haven’t had diversity of plants, then even if I take some of these herbs that are good for me, I won’t be able to process them properly anyway.

SIMON MILLS: Not as well as you might. Yes, that is true. We talk about probiotics, which is the yogurts and the kimchis and the kefirs and so on, which are actually living organisms. They have to get through the stomach, by the way, which is quite a hard deal because the stomach’s job is to sterilize foods. But some of them will get through.

Those are the probiotics, the prebiotics of what we’ve been talking about here, the foods that will encourage the good guys in the microbiome. We’ve got a new kid on the block called postbiotics, which is now an industrial term used for killed bacteria, which are then given as a medicine.

But technically a postbiotic is anything that the bacteria produce. And we’re learning that more and more of what we eat, particularly from the plant side, is converted by the microbiome into medicines. And all those polyphenols and the colorings and so on are in that group. So a lot of the benefits of polyphenols are postbiotic benefits.

Research on Curcumin’s Benefits

STEVEN BARTLETT: There was a study done in 2012 that showed…

SIMON MILLS: Curcumin.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That shows curcumin upregulates antioxidant defenses and down regulates oxidative stress. There was a study done in 2016 which is a meta-analysis of random control trials, found curcumin comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief.

SIMON MILLS: Answers your earlier question, doesn’t it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there’s lots of studies that show that it’s effective for people that have things like arthritis and joint pains.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, that was leaving the best to last. Yeah, there’s a lot of work on curcumin and turmeric. As I said, a lot of people get confused because they think it only works if you absorb it into the blood. And I’m saying that actually you don’t. What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it useful.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there’s early pre-clinical studies taking place around the impact it can have with cancers. And there’s promising, but early studies showing the impact that curcumin that comes from turmeric can have on brain health.

Understanding Pre-Clinical vs. Human Studies

SIMON MILLS: Yes, well, that’s definitely a big story. But just on the… when you say pre-clinical, that usually does mean laboratory. So that’s A, test tubes and B, rats and other animals. None of those tell us what happens…

STEVEN BARTLETT: When we put it in a human.

SIMON MILLS: Put it in a human. So all the preclinical study will do is point to a possible effect. And time again, pharmaceutical companies will tell you this. A promising pre-clinical lead doesn’t lead to a medicine because it turns out to be toxic or doesn’t agree with humans. So we take preclinical evidence with caution and personally, I’m mostly interested in human studies because that’s the only thing that makes any sense.

Brain Health and the Blood-Brain Barrier

But you mentioned brain health, because here’s one of the big gaps we have, don’t we? Because we’ve got a lot of brain health issues right now. Dementia is still going in the wrong direction. It’s a very distressing thing if you have any in your family. And increasingly there’s people saying, “what can we do to prevent this?”

And Alzheimer’s is all about there being the wrong sort of protein and deposits in the brain. But increasingly the focus is switching onto the blood supply to the brain, what we call the vascular effects on the brain.

And there’s something that we used to call the blood-brain barrier, which you’ve probably heard of, which is seen to be the place where the barrier that stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it. We now know this blood-brain barrier is a very dynamic, interesting interface between the brain’s tissue and the rest of us. It’s now called the neurovascular unit NVU. And it is so exciting.

And the more we look at it so far, the more we find that the things that help the neurovascular unit, the blood-brain barrier up plants. And we have green tea and if you really want to help brain health, regular drinking of green tea has been shown to be really useful. Not the supplement, by the way, is the drink that you have.

The Benefits of Green Tea

STEVEN BARTLETT: So as you make that, can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea?

SIMON MILLS: Because it contains a number of again, polyphenols. And polyphenols are those colors?

STEVEN BARTLETT: These colors, yeah.

SIMON MILLS: In this case it’s green, obviously. And green tea is just the unprocessed part of the tea leaf. So it’s a plant called Camellia sinensis. So this is a nice Japanese teapot. That’s the sort of thing you’d have green tea in. And these are the mugs, but we’ve filled these off already with ginger and cinnamon. So let’s leave it for a moment, but we can, while it’s sitting there.

There are a number of these polyphenols in green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier that we talked about, the neurovascular unit between the brain and the rest of us. And there’s all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What sort of trouble?

SIMON MILLS: The dementia type problems, cognitive decline as you get older.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do they find that in cultures where they drink a lot of green tea they have less dementia?

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, but that doesn’t mean there’s a cause and effect. So you need a few other things to establish that. But what we’re finding is that other plants have very likely powerful effects in this area. And I mentioned the rosemary. Now all you need to do to appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff.

Rosemary for Memory and Cognitive Function

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, it smells so good. Really nice.

SIMON MILLS: That’s not just nice, because what you’re doing there is you’re inhaling volatile oils, the things that give the smell. And when you’re inhaling, they’re literally going into your brain, because part of the brain actually reaches the outside world. It’s called the olfactory lobe, and it’s right at the top of the nose here.

And when you inhale something, it literally moves into the brain and from there into the limbic system. Remember there’s a line in Shakespeare play called Hamlet, Ophelia, the young lady says, “rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” Because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions.

And when I was working on our campus in Maryland, we actually did a clinical trial with rosemary in people with struggling with their crosswords as they get older and found that although it wasn’t a conclusive study, there were pointers to it improving cognitive performance in those people. And there’s been other studies since that reinforce that.

I would say that rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health. There’s another remedy called ginkgo that a lot of people know about, which is used as a prescription medicine in Europe for cardiovascular problems. And that’s been shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as we’ve seen here and with the green tea.

Check it here. Yeah, that looks all right. You see, it’s more yellow than green. And this is flavored with a little bit of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favorite taste.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Green tea is rich in polyphenols, which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention.

SIMON MILLS: It’s got a nice minty flavor. Yeah, you could live with that, couldn’t you?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah. My girlfriend again, she’s all over this stuff. She’s always bloody right.

SIMON MILLS: Well, you learned that lesson a long time ago.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know, right? I say it all the time on this podcast, but she’s always two, three years ahead.

SIMON MILLS: Of what?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Then someone really, really smart comes and tells me, and I spend those two or three years in denial. I’m like, “what the hell is she like?” Don’t get me started on cacao. If you start talking to me about cacao, I’m going to leave.

Dark Chocolate as Medicine

SIMON MILLS: She’s been telling me I’m going to nail this because there’s a lot of people listening who will want to hear this. Cocoa, chocolate, dark chocolate is a medicine. End of. One of the best medicines around is 50 grams, 100 grams of 75% or more dark chocolate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you know what I’ve just realized? My girlfriend, she’s going to live till she’s 150 because she eats 90% or something, 80% dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day. She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day. She eats the full rainbow.

SIMON MILLS: She should be stepping in for you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know.

SIMON MILLS: Exactly. No cocoa. Seriously, brain health as well, cardiovascular health. I mean, they do studies where they’ve put cocoa into volunteers, that means students, usually so young kids. And they were able to show changes in the blood flow within minutes, certainly within an hour of eating cocoa. Beneficial changes in your blood flow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They call it the heart medicine.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah. Heart, circulation, brain.

The Spiritual and Physical Benefits of Cacao

STEVEN BARTLETT: So she’s… my girlfriend’s very spiritual. She runs a business called Bali Breathwork. I have to say that. But in her business, one of the things she does at the very start of the session with women all over the world that come to her retreats is she makes cacao for them. And you notice instantly how people change when they’ve had a hot cup of cacao and she says it almost brings out their heart. And I guess that’s because of the circulation reasons.

SIMON MILLS: It is. But it also, of course, we know it contains a few other beneficial, stimulating things, sort of similar to the effects of the coffee, which, incidentally, as I’ve already said, is a medicine as well. But cocoa and chocolate does have an uplifting effect, which is why we love it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So, and we have to be clear here, we’re not talking about hot chocolate that comes from a packet or something necessarily.

SIMON MILLS: We would like it to be as dark as possible. Okay, so the less sugar, the less fat. So we talk about 75% cocoa solids, so it’s dark chocolate and it tastes a bit more medicinal, doesn’t it? It’s not as sweet, but I’m saying to many of my patients, take 50 grams a day. There’s some medicine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Damn. She’s right. My fridge is full of dark chocolate. I tend to avoid it. But the drawer of my fridge has all of her dark chocolate in and it’s… she likes it 90%. If she can get it 90%, she’ll take it.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah, 90% is quite a bit. Yeah.

The Hidden Truth About Chocolate

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was in Peru and I went to a chocolate making lesson and that chocolate making lesson changed my life. And it changed my life because I didn’t realize how much sugar goes into chocolate, but specifically white chocolate. Oh my God.

They said they gave me this big beaker which was, you know, this big, like a foot high and a foot wide. And they were like, “Right, pour this sugar in.” So I poured some in. They laughed at me. They were like, “No, fill it like 70% with this white sugar.” And I was like, “There’s no way.”

I poured about 60 or 70% white sugar into this massive tube. And they’re like, “Okay, now put a little bit of this in, a little bit this little bit oil, whatever.” And I couldn’t believe that. It’s literally like the white chocolate is literally all sugar. Then milk chocolate was like 50% sugar. And then when we made the dark chocolate, it was a tiny amount. Like a tiny, tiny amount. And from that day onwards, white chocolates left my life.

SIMON MILLS: This is once upon a time, a few years back when the European Union, I think before we joined, it said that we shouldn’t call dairy milk chocolate at all. It’s “chocolate flavored candy” is what they described it as, literally.

Green Tea and Brain Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So this is. So we’ve got some green tea here.

SIMON MILLS: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’re talking to me about the association between green tea and Alzheimer’s, which is really exciting.

SIMON MILLS: Yes. There’s quite a lot of work being done now on these and they’re obviously looking for medications as well. But so far most of the data coming in relates to plant based materials. So it suggests that there’s other reasons why having plants and again, spices come back into the mix seem to be helpful for brain health.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Having a look at the green tea, there was a study done in 2008 which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory, attention, accuracy and long term consumption is associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease according to the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in 2011.

SIMON MILLS: It’s nice to have somebody else just say what you said.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, but it’s exactly. I didn’t realize that. I had no idea. I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me.

SIMON MILLS: You can’t say sorry.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve literally. Literally, I’ve got a. Wow. Heart health, brain function, fat burning and metabolism. Cancer prevention, early evidence, blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, gut and oral health. What about Matcha? I’m a big investor in the biggest Matcha company in Europe.

SIMON MILLS: It’s probably more beneficial than the basic green tea because it’s more, shall we say, pure, it’s finer quality. So the chances are that Matcha will do more than we’ve just said the green tea will do. But there’s evidence. Lack a lot of these things. We need more evidence. But it would point to Matcha being particularly helpful.

Understanding Cholesterol

STEVEN BARTLETT: We haven’t talked much about cholesterol.

SIMON MILLS: No, you haven’t brought it up.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cholesterol is a type of fat made in your liver which travels in your blood and can be found for anyone that doesn’t know cholesterol, what it is and why is it, if it’s a good or bad thing. What do I need to know about cholesterol? And is there anything in front of us here that can help keep my cholesterol in a healthy state? I did, I think a doctor did actually tell me at one point that I had high cholesterol a couple of years ago because of my diet at the time.

SIMON MILLS: Keto, of course, will tend to. Well, it’s interesting again, keto, you think would push up your cholesterol levels, but actually there’s a mixture of effects. So it’s not a done deal that it will raise your cholesterol.

Cholesterol is part of a range of fats the body has. Most of the fats that are in the body come from the food and they come in as heavy fats, we say. And what the digestion does is strip down the heaviness and it becomes more what we call high density. Liverpool liposite HDLs. My tongue is twisting around it and cholesterol is sort of in the middle of that as one of the elements within that spectrum of fats.

Cholesterol is actually secreted by the liver for very good reasons. It helps with all sorts of things. It’s the basis of some of our hormones. There’s all sorts of reasons why we need cholesterol I sometimes have referred to in the past as “the tiger and the tank.” That it sort of helps to fire up some of our get up and go. And if we were physically active during the day, working on the land or whatever, you need a certain amount of cholesterol to motor.

We’re sitting in chairs and cholesterol becomes increasing a problem. We have a high fat diet that tends to put in more of it. And the point is that many of us, our cholesterol levels increasingly rise and that is a risk factor, as we know, for cardiovascular disease, which we said was still one of the biggest killer. So cholesterol is up there as a risk factor.

And so the usual thing that a doctor will do is to hand you something, a statin basically that will reduce your cholesterol levels. They also know that there’s more pushback on that prescription than almost anything else because the word is out the statin. Statins can do this, that or the other, interfere with their muscle strength and all the rest of it give you little aches and pains.

Most people have statins without a problem, but the impact of statins is still modest in terms of the overall scheme of things. The numbers of people’s lives it saves is probably fairly minimal. So probably the better conversation is to have what can we do to recontextualize the cholesterol so that it becomes more like it should be a good thing rather than a risk.

And the first thing is to have a more, apart from the keto, have the more vegetable based, plant based diet, because that in itself will tend to mop up and reduce cholesterol. Exercise becomes important because by physical activity we can manage it better.

And then where we come in with the work I do is to look at high cholesterol as potentially a sign of liver distress. And we like working with the liver. And there’s a number of remedies that we use to help reduce cholesterol levels, mainly by getting more out through the bile and so on. So there’s not a straight answer to your question. The statin sounds like a simple pill that fixes it. The reality is that we need to look at a much wider range of things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re a fan of artichokes for cholesterol?

SIMON MILLS: Yes. You must have read my mind. The artichoke leaf is the one we’re talking about, which is used in France a lot for basically fat, liver related problems. A lot. I use it a lot in the practice as a juice, actually. Just as a pressed juice? Yes. It’s one of them Dandelion root is another old familiar, which seems to be helpful here mostly by, as I said, flushing stuff through the bile. And there is a range of other things that we use.

Cost Barriers to Healthy Eating

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that, you know, many people are concerned about when they’re thinking about changing their diet is just the cost of it. They think it’s super expensive to buy all these fresh fruit and veg and, you know, is that the case? Is that a barrier to entry to the stuff we’ve talked about today at all?

SIMON MILLS: My usual answer that is eat Asian, because as I said, if you can make a meal with vegetables and spices and things like lentils and so on, beans for very cheaply. It’s just that we got out of the habit or we haven’t got into the habit of doing that slightly slow cooking. We will buy Indian meals sometimes from places that put more fat in than they might. So some of the meals we buy that are Asian, bit too fatty. But if you make it yourself at home, which means learning how to cook, but you can eat very cheaply.

The Omeprazole Problem

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the most important thing that we didn’t talk about that we should have talked about?

SIMON MILLS: Well, I suppose I didn’t mention much about the omeprazole because that I’ve never.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve never heard of this before.

SIMON MILLS: Omeprazole?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I’ve never heard of it.

SIMON MILLS: They are increasingly a minority. Omeprazole is the most widely prescribed drug in this country, and I believe in the US also. And it’s for acid reflux. It’s what the Americans call GERD and what we call GORD because we spell esophagus differently. So we spell esophagus with an OE and Americans spell it with an E. So it’s either GERD or GORD, depending on which country you’re in. And that means gastroesophageal reflux disease.

GORD and acid reflux is a real issue with a lot of people. And they find that when they go to a doctor, the doctor will routinely prescribe omeprazole or something like it. And GORD is actually diagnosed as a condition which is made better by omeprazole. I mean, it’s literally a disease that is diagnosed by the treatment.

And what omeprazole does is shuts down the acid production in the stomach, so you don’t get as much damage by reflux. The problem is that the acid’s doing a job. It’s sterilizing your food, which is important, isn’t it? It’s also helping to break it down so that it becomes not an immune threat. If you have a blood transfusion or something in the wrong blood, you get a problem. We’re eating foreign stuff all the time. We rely on the stomach and the juices to make it safe. So the acid is there to protect us.

When we’re getting acid reflux, actually, it’s not because you’ve got too much acid, it’s because you’re refluxing it. It’s going back up into the gullet, the esophagus. But omeprazole will put an end to that.

The problem with omeprazole, two problems. First is that the list of problems accruing from long term omeprazole use is beginning to grow and is serious. Cancers, dementias, all sorts of things are beginning to be downstream problems associated with long term omeprazole use. But the other thing is that once you’re on it, it’s really difficult to come off it and you get a famous rebound effect. So you come off the omeprazole and wow, you get much more trouble. So the only thing to do is take more omeprazole and people find it really hard to come off it. So you have to do a lot of hard work to wean people off and do it in sorts of different ways.

So what do we do instead? Well, one simple thing to do, and anyone can do this, and you don’t need to go very far, is to use what we call “the raft principle.” So there are some plants that have got a lot of mucus in them. Mucilage, the classic example from North America, slippery elm. It’s a sort of powder that looks like you make polyfiller to fill a crack with. You know, it’s a white powder. When it’s mixed with water, it forms this paste, this mucus stuff. You want to have it as a tablet because you don’t want water to swallow that stuff. But when it’s in the stomach, it produces this mucus layer.

You don’t need to go to slippery elm. There is a product here in this country called Gaviscon, which is essentially seaweed gum with. I don’t have shares in it, by the way, but it’s seaweed gum with some minerals in there. And they advertise it when you see the television ads as “the raft.” So what they’re doing is you’re putting a layer of mucus on top of your food. So you have it after you’ve had your last mouthful, you have a bit of that. And then as the food pushes up back into the gullet, you’ve got this nice mucus coating, a raft to stop it.

That carbohydrate, it’s what it is. Gets digested within a couple of hours, end off no problem. It’s not even a medicine. It’s just a physical barrier. So you could have Gaviscon, you could have slippery elm, you could have aloe vera. There’s a number of other mucus type plants that people use and that can, without any other complication at all, be one step. And I use it regularly when I’m weaning people off omeprazole. And I will use the raft principle to help prevent some of the harm you get rid of. Reflux. The simple example.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re very fond of these plants. They are living organisms, aren’t they? Are you concerned about how we treat them?

The Importance of Wild and Organic Plants

SIMON MILLS: I’m concerned about the world that they come from. Because, of course, increasingly we have to produce these industrially, which sometimes means in monoculture form. So they’re grown in rows and rows, and they put weed killers down to get other plants out of the way, and so they become less natural.

And we talked about the polyphenols. You know, Pukka, the company I worked for, was all organic. And we were able to show that a plant that grows organically that doesn’t have pesticides, needs to fight its own battles more. Because if you’ve got a pesticide, you don’t need to worry about so much the pests and the attackers.

So a plant that’s grown in wild or organically without chemicals has more polyphenols because the polyphenols are part of the plant’s defense mechanism. So the more you can buy, or, I mean, that’s where foraging comes in. You know, my colleague Devon is a forager, and he can walk through a hedgerow and show you you can make a whole meal out of plants that people just walk past, because people used to do that.

So that’s real wild eating, which must be one of the best ways of eating. But the more close to nature you can get your plants, the better we have to live with what we’ve got. And most plants are grown without that. But they’re still better than having them, not having them at all.

Closing Question: Keeping Up with a Changing World

STEVEN BARTLETT: Simon, thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. The question left for you is our world is changing fast. How do you keep up?

SIMON MILLS: I think the world is, we all know, getting pretty scary out there, isn’t it? There is a truth which is you and the people around you are actually the only things that matter day to day. Aren’t they closest, dearest? The ones that we have invested most.

One of the reasons that I’m increasingly happy to spend my time working in the practice in Exeter rather than chasing around the world is because as the world gets more frightening, the more you realize that it’s the connections you make with each other you put back to back, if you like, you know, face the world out there back to back.

And I think it’s reconnecting with those who are closest to you that is the best antidote I know. And that also includes reconnecting with the nature of the world around it. So that would be my answer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And who is that in your life? Who are those people?

SIMON MILLS: I have family. I have now 10 grandchildren between us, Rachel and myself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Congratulations.

SIMON MILLS: And so the electronic calendar comes into its own to keep track of all that. So, yes, we’ve got a spread around the globe, so it’s a widespread thing, but we’ve got people close by and, you know, obviously your closest and nearest are the ones that matter.

Final Thoughts and Resources

STEVEN BARTLETT: Simon, thank you so much for doing what you do. I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your work. I’ve never had a conversation with someone that knows so much about plants and herbs in my life, so I was so excited to learn more. And you have changed my opinion on so many things. I can’t wait to go and tell my girlfriend that she’s right about everything.

SIMON MILLS: I’ll slip her the tenner.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I highly recommend people go and check out your website and go to your herbal, which takes place once a month. I’m sure there’s going to be lots of people getting in touch with you to try and come and see you in person as well, which is fantastic. Is there anything else that if my listeners want to take a step forward from here in this direction and understand more about herbs, I’ve got your books here, which I’m going to link below. There’s the Herb Hour on your website. Is there anything else that we should be aware of?

SIMON MILLS: As I said, the website does link to this wonderful resource. That’s not, I mean, I contribute to the Herbal Reality one, which is where you’re going to find almost anything you want to know about using plants. So that’s stop there. But you can step through my website to get there because you’ll find a few other things on the way.

There is resources out there and it’s increasingly reliable. These are not dreamt up, you know, for a TikTok video. They’re well thought through and based on a lot of human experience. So there is stuff out there if you’re looking for it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you. You’re very much leading the charge to bring us all back to being human beings, and I’m a big, big fan of that.

SIMON MILLS: Thank you, Steven.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a journey I’m on myself. So thank you so much for doing the work that you do and being a champion for nature in all its form. And I really, really hope that more people, more podcasters host you so that you can get the message out there.

SIMON MILLS: Thank you.

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