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you

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Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast I speak to Dr. Christine Houghton. She is a trailblazer in the field of nutritional biochemistry and nutridenomics. Christine's work sits at the intersection of clinical nutrition, molecular biology and lifestyle medicine. She's perhaps best known for her groundbreaking research in sulforaphane.

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the broccoli derived phytochemical with potent cellular protective effects. In this conversation, we dive into the concept of food as information, the role of nutrigenomics in personalized healthcare, and how phytochemicals like sulforaphane can upregulate our body's own defense systems. Christine brings decades of clinical, academic, and formulation experience to the table. This is a must listen for anyone wanting to understand the power of food,

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beyond just calories and macros. So Dr. Christine Houghton has enjoyed a fulfilling and varied career in nutritional medicine, spending more than 30 years. As a clinician, author, educator and researcher, she's internationally recognized for her pioneering work in the clinical application of nutridenomics, particularly the broccoli derived phytochemical sulforaphane, which is what our conversation is based around today.

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Christine earned her PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry and Nutrigenomics from the University of Queensland, where she's also an adjunct lecturer in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Science. She's the founding director of CellLogic, where she formulates evidence-based, nutrigenomically active supplements grounded in her research. And I've popped a link to Dr. Christine Hartan in the show notes.

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for you to find further information on Christine. And we talk a lot about the gut in this conversation, which I found super fascinating. Before we crack on into the interview though, I would like to remind you that the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform. That increases the visibility of Micopedia in amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to...

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hear from experts that I have on the show like Dr. Christine Houghton. All right team, enjoy the conversation.

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Christine, thank you so much for taking time to speak to me this afternoon about a topic which I'm just going to assume you're very passionate about. You've been in the field of Neutrogenomics and I've been learning from you about sulforaphane for years now, even if I can't say it correctly. It's something which I've been thinking a lot more about just with the...

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the, I suppose, our exposure to environmental toxins, actually, and I'm sure we'll get to that along the way. But can you just sort of kick us off by, I guess, giving a little bit of your background and what drew you to this area to research in the first place? Well, I started clinical practice a very long time ago, back in the mid-70s. And at that time, there were very few supplements on the market. So,

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I learned to work with food and I learned to trust food. And I'm sorry to say, as the years have progressed, a lot of clinicians have lost confidence in food, but I've never lost that. even though I use quite a lot of supplements selectively in practice, there was always a solid foundation in food. And there's a very good reason for that. Of all the vitamin and mineral supplements and accessory nutrients that are available,

03:57
They do not cover the plethora of phytochemicals, particularly in plant foods. There's something like 5,000 different phytochemicals in the plant food that we eat. And we know a little bit about a few of them, but really not a lot about all of them. And this interesting little molecule, sulforaphane, came to my attention the very year that I left clinical practice.

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I practiced for 30 years and I left in 2004. And it was just at the very time that the Human Genome Project had been completed and this word, nutrigenomics, emerged. Nutri, food, genomics, gene, food talking to your genes. And I was intrigued by this and I did a fair bit of research on it and the sulforaphane molecule wasn't...

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considered nutrigenomic at that time, but it became very obvious to me that that's what it was because this little molecule, it's readily absorbed and it gets into our cells and it basically activates some switches in the cell which then activate hundreds of protective genes. And so when we're talking about antioxidant enzymes and detoxification,

05:21
it's molecules like sulforaphane, it's not the only one, that activate this switch that turns on those particular genes. that is where the passion began and I've never lost it because we continue to find out more and more things that we can achieve by taking a nutrigenomic approach overall, but in particular

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this molecule because it's so readily absorbed and it's so potent in its activity. find what a couple of things I'm thinking about as you're saying that Christine, one is that you're absolutely right about the food supply. Like one, I think most people will agree food today is not what it was that we grow is not what it was, you know, 50, 60 years ago.

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There's just so much we don't know. There's this particular interaction of what's in food that then interacts in our body to produce some of those health benefits. What you say is interesting because you mentioned antioxidant genes and enzymes in our body. This is what makes, as I understand it, is that this is one of the features that makes sulforaphane, which is we're talking about, so special. It's like an indirect antioxidant. Would that be correct?

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is. One of the things I learned when I first started in this research pathway is that when I was in practice, and I think a lot of people still think this, we thought cells need lots of antioxidants to quench free radicals. That's true, but they don't get them out of antioxidant vitamins and such like. The reason for that is when our

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cells are under stress. So let's suppose we're exposed to extreme radiation. The body registers that threat and it registers that threat and says, okay, I've got to turn on my defenses, otherwise I'm going to be in trouble. that's the body naturally does. It turns on the switch that now starts turning out squillions of antioxidant enzymes and detoxification enzymes and literally

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hundreds of other protective things. So therefore, we don't want to drown the cells in antioxidants in our infinite wisdom. We actually want the cells to register there's a threat and let the body deal with it itself. Now where does sulforaphane get into the act? It's not an antioxidant. It's actually a weak pro-oxidant. And when you take it,

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it sends a signal to the cell that says, we've got some pro-oxidant stress here, better turn up your protective mechanisms. So if we take large doses of say, vitamin E or C or something like that, which is directly antioxidant and in quantities well in excess of what you could get from a reasonable diet, we've blocked that signal.

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So that weak pro-oxidant signal then gets masked or blocked by taking exogenous antioxidants. So that was a huge revelation to me and that totally changed the way I look now at nutrition and look at using nutritional therapies to repair sick human cells. Yeah. And I imagine that, you know, as I said, I've been

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listening to you and learning from you for maybe 10 years now, maybe even 12 years, but it's still like such an emerging field, isn't it? This field of nutrigenomics. Well, it's just on 20 years old now. It takes such a long time for new science to filter down into the community. And in many ways, find that frustrating. But on the other hand, I love teaching about it and I love

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watching practitioners do the aha moment, when they start to realize this actually makes sense. We are trying to say, okay, how does mother nature deal with the things that happen to humans? And then we've been sustained on this planet for who knows how many years, decades, eons. So how does mother nature do this? So let's try to mimic that. And what we've learned over the last 20 years or so,

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is that we have a molecule called sulforaphane can assist us. However, if you'd never heard of sulforaphane, that's fine, doesn't matter. How does nature deal with this? Well, if we eat a well-balanced diet rich in these plant signaling molecules, know, rest and exercise and all of the good healthy lifestyle habits, we are activating those very same switches.

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It's just that using sulforaphane, we've got a shortcut and we can activate those switches, which is really helpful. If you've got a very sick person who, for whatever reason, can't exercise, has no access to enough healthy food, we can get them started on the road to recovery much more quickly. And as they start to feel better in themselves, they're prepared to go and seek out the right foods and cook the right foods and so on.

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It's almost like giving someone some sort of medication actually, isn't it? It's not that dissimilar. And then letting them find that even keel to then do the lifestyle stuff. And sometimes we expect or we expect people to do it the reverse. Like, come on, if you just did the exercise, got the recovery, ate well, then you wouldn't need this little cherry on top. But oftentimes with people who very sick, it's actually the reverse. They do need it to even

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think about doing the right things? mean, it can just be all too hard. If you are so unwell, you've got no energy, you ache all over, your digestion is not good. It's just too hard. So we're trying to provide tools of that kind, but always remembering that this isn't going to fix everything forever. At some point we have to say, okay, what is

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What does Mother Nature think a human body needs to sustain itself over decades in a healthy manner? So that's my food birth philosophy. And you commented before that food may not be as nutritious as it has been in the past. But there are studies, and there's one in particular that I often refer to, that shows that

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people eating 600 grams daily of non-starchy vegetables, register a significant reduction in inflammation markers in their bloodstream. And so I've used that 600 grams as the benchmark. Now you can eat starchy vegetables as well, but it's the 600 grams of non-starchy veg that have got these signaling molecules that

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tell the cell to switch on its defenses and keep itself protected. And over the years that I've been working with other clinicians, I've proven again and again that if people will actually do that, it makes a difference. And that study was done in 2010, a German study, and they didn't use organic vegetables, which is another important point to mention, I think, because much as

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we would like to all eat fresh organic vegetables every day, it can become cost prohibitive. And I think what's been happening is people who believe in the value of organic vegetables can only eat as much as they can afford. And if you've got a family of two to four, however many people, you can't necessarily feed all of those people 600 grams of organic vegetables a day.

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So I've been able to show clinically that any fresh vegetable, organic or not, seems to be better than having a tiny amount of the optimum organic food. That's amazing. So six, I remember this actually from one of your lectures that I attended and I remember you talking about that study, and 600 grams of vegetables. So is it, am I right in thinking that?

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it's considered that 80 grams is a serve of vegetables, is that? Roughly, 75 to 80 grams is the total. Yeah, so we're talking about, what, eight serves of veggies, did I do the math properly? Might not have actually. if we just sort of, yeah, well normally the health officials say five serves of veggies a day, so that'd be 400 grams. So yes, you need to kick it along a little bit. It's not...

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though hard to do, you get yourself focused on it because you can be saying things like, you know, I can add guacamole to something else I'm eating and I've got avocado and tomatoes and other things there. So, know, dressings and sauces and juices and soups, it's not as hard. It seems a bit daunting initially, but I normally say to people when you go home, you can scale that on the bench.

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and gather the vegies, the fresh non-starchies out of your fridge and put them in on the scales until you see what 600 grams is and then have a think about how you're to achieve that. Across the day, right? Totally. And for what it's worth, like I'm a volume eater, so I eat quite big meals in part because I focus on getting vegetables in and my

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and anyone that sees me on social media almost always comments on the color of my meals because they're... And it's just standard vegetables. It's like red cabbage, spinach, tomato, cucumber, might be some sauerkraut or something. It's actually nothing special, but over the course of the day, it's easier than people think. And if they get that message rather than... If they hear... And sometimes I feel like public health information almost does a bit of a disservice because...

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because we're told we need to eat five serves of vegetables a day and that barely anyone actually meets that recommendation. And so there's almost this sort of unconscious or subconscious thought of, well, if no one's doing it, it must be super hard. we don't really set a high expectation that people are actually going to achieve. What is actually, when you get into the habit, is actually pretty achievable. It is. And you mentioned hardly anyone achieves that.

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I did a seminar in New Zealand actually a couple of years ago and it was on well a whole range of different things but included a section on children and their vegetable intake. At no stage of a child's development from birth all the way up to adulthood did any eat more than 50 % of the recommended requirement of vegetables.

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The very first year was the best as they were being weaned and then going on to pureed, they'd use some salt. And then after that, it all fell apart. And this data for Australia, and I think New Zealand is about the same, like 96 % of Australian adults don't eat by the vegetables today. So out of that other 4%, we've got all the vegetarians in there.

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So how many people are, and five is not that many. So we have a major problem with food and you know, I keep harping on this because anyone who's ever listened to me will know, but I've proven it again and again. It makes a huge difference. It's a matter of just altering the mindset a little bit. I mean, I remember when I was in clinic and I'd be talking to patients, you know, what do you often have for dinner kind of question?

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that often go, oh, we have spag bol, which is spaghetti bolognese where they boil some noodles and they open a jar of tomatoey based sauce. And I would say something like, so do you have a side dish with that? Do have some cooked steamed veg or some salad? No, no, I said we had spag bol. I mean, there's a bit of onion and there's tomato and

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a smidge of perhaps carrot or capsicum in there, but that's it. That is not enough vegetables. I completely agree, Christine. And the other thing is, is there are people who almost bypass vegetables and head straight to supplements, don't they? Like, so it's almost like this is, can't, for whatever reason, the barrier in the head is that they can't do this. So they will do this particular thing here. And what I find interesting with supplements as well, there are some people who almost don't buy into it.

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at all because they don't understand how one particular supplement, I think sulforaphane would fall into this, how can it possibly affect so many different health outcomes? can we first sort of just broadly speaking, where, actually there'll be people who will not quite understand sulforaphane as a constituent. So how is it produced? Where do we find it?

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How is it that it's so potent? Yeah, and successful. So before I answer that, let me just address something you said earlier. You said a lot of people don't buy into the food thing. They prefer to take supplements. I can tell you exactly where that came from. being in practice in the mid 70s before supplements available, it wasn't very long after that.

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that there were big American companies coming to Australia and bringing their multivitamins and B vitamins in every other supplement imaginable. And I distinctly remember the marketing campaign that said something like, everyone knows there's nothing left in your food or soil, take our supplement. Now variations on that were common marketing. People believed it.

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And it's easy, isn't it? If I just swallow these couple of pills, I don't have to fiddle around in the kitchen for hours. So that's the answer to that question. And it is where it started. And I've grown up with that, if you like. Now, we have sulforaphane fitting into the egg. So you might call it a supplement. It's actually a functional food. And what we mean by a functional food, it is a food that is very concentrated in particular molecules.

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which had distinct biochemical effects. So it's a bit like a medicine, which is what you said before. So it's been known for a long time that vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, which is the broccoli, cabbage type of family, has been very protective against cancer. And for a very long time, no one knew why that was. So some research was done in the early 90s, and they discovered that this

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broccoli sprout molecule called sulforaphane, if it was given, this was initially in animals, in concentrated form, they could prevent cancer from developing in animals where they triggered off the cancer process and they could distinctly show that it was protected. So in the early 90s, this research went on and they found out how it worked.

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And it was a few years later that they realized there's this switch in our cells called NRF2. And sulforaphane is the most potent naturally occurring food molecule that can activate this switch. And that's the defense mechanism that then switches on hundreds of protective genes. So that's what makes sulforaphane different.

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There's two things that set it aside from a lot of other food supplements. I curcumin, the active molecule from the turmeric plant, is very well known and very understood. But what's little understood about curcumin, it's very poorly bioavailable. And what that means is only about 1 % of the curcumin molecule gets into the cells.

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Because it's a big bulky molecule and therefore it just doesn't fit through the cell membranes to get absorbed particularly well. Sulforophane is a totally different structure. It's just a small, long, narrow molecule that just glides straight through into the cell. So 80 % of the sulforophane gets in the cells, whereas about 1 % of the curcumin. So that's a major difference for a start.

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And secondly, when you compare the effect on activating Nrf2, sulforaphone is many, many times more potent than cucumin anyway. So that's what sets it aside from so many of these other food molecules. So Christine, what is the health impact of that physiology then? Because that makes sense, okay, so it can activate it much more,

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pathway much more potently. And it also suppresses NFKB. So, the lay person, what does it mean though? So, why is that even important? So, NRF2 is the switch that switches on the protective functions. NFKB is the switch that switches on inflammation. So,

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you were going to eat this healthy diet, you're going to be switching on Nrf2. That if your friend is living on junk food, your friend is activating NF-kB and therefore switching on the production of what we call inflammatory cytokines. So these inflammatory cytokines circulate all around the body. If they get into the joints and the muscles, you get pain, you get joint

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deterioration, if they get into your liver or your pancreas, you might get diabetes. Basically, disease of all kinds will have a higher level of inflammation. So, sick people in general will have high NF-kB activities, switching on inflammation, and healthy people tend to have high NRF2 activity. Okay. So, any

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Most disease processes have an inflammatory base, I believe. So does this mean that sulforaphane would be a helpful molecule for autoimmune conditions? It's a helpful molecule in that it switches on NRF2 and switches off NF-kB at the same time. When you're talking about autoimmune conditions, anything to do with the immune system.

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we need to look at its action in the gut because in the gut there's a single layer of cells that might help the tube we call the gut epithelium and underneath that tube directly is most of our immune function, about 80 % of the immune function is under the gut. and we've actually done a lot of work on the role of stophorafane on gut function itself and also on the underlying

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immune system. So the immune system gets scrambled basically. if you've got some, let's say a person has a lot of gut problems, say lots of foods disagree with them. They might say they're allergic to foods. They're really intolerant to them. So essentially in those people, they will have a very inflamed gut lining and that gut lining now

26:13
is sending signals, the inflammation molecules get absorbed to the immune system underneath and they're sending signals that are giving the immune system the wrong message. the immune systems responding to this threat by producing a lot of inflammation, because inflammation is a natural response to something going wrong.

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You know, just in the exactly the same way, if you get a splinter in your finger, the finger swells up and gets red. And that's naturally occurring inflammation designed to stop an infection going through the rest of your body. So inflammation is natural. It's the unregulated, uncontrolled inflammation that does the damage. So when a person has an autoimmune condition, we have to start at the gut. We then have to look at the underlying

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immune function. And there are other molecules that I would use in addition to sulforaphane to get more deeply down into the immune system there. But we can rebalance the gut lining and the underlying immune system to sort out a lot of those issues. I mean, for example, psoriasis, that nasty skin rash that people have

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lots of scaly patches on the skin that they can't seem to get rid of. There's only 3.7 % of the population apparently have clarks or rices, but if people have it, it really can destroy your life if it's bad enough. So we have been able to clinically, and I've done this myself with a patient, restore skin function to normal by using sulforaphane. And in this particular

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patient, it was just the sulforaphane that did the work and diet. And the thing about it is he will be good for three or four months or so, he'll stop taking it and you'll get a relapse. So this goes back 10 years or more I've been working with this person. And the reason that it is never really cured is that it is a genetically underpinned disease and therefore

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If you can just keep those inflammatory genes suppressed, the symptoms will go away. So we can't call that a cure. In fact, we seldom use the word cure anyway. But he's happy with that. He manages it. He'll take it consistently for three or four months or so. And then it'll start playing up again. And he knows when it's time to go back on it again. He's a real estate agent. He wears white shirts every day.

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and was getting blood stained elbows on his shirt. And that was how he came to mention it to me. So that's just one example of an autoimmune disease that's visible. If you're dealing with skin conditions, you can see it's either getting better or it's not getting better. You mentioned a couple of times about people with joint pain and just that fatigue. And oftentimes, even though this is, not.

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meaning to focus on autoimmune conditions, but they're often symptoms of autoimmune conditions and I suppose mitochondrial function as well, right? Well, the way I look at human cell function now is I look at some core processes that are common to every cell in the body. And what I'm trying to do with sulforaphane is to improve the function of these core processes. And we can do this.

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because when we activate NRF2, we switch on these protective processes. So the processes that I mostly focus on are oxidative stress, is like free radical activity, inflammation, and these work together with each other, mitochondrial function, which is necessary to produce energy in the form of a molecule called ATP. So those are all important.

30:25
The other one is detoxification. if your body is or your cells are not getting rid of waste materials, nothing's going to work very well for a while. And then the final one is process called methylation, which has a number of overreaching factors in different areas of the cell. So my goal is to use sulforaphane to normalize those cellular processes, which are common to every cell of the body.

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This is the bit that I think a lot of people have trouble understanding when I talk about salt chloroquine. Because we're improving the function of every cell in the body, a person might have asthma and might feel they can breathe better when they take our treatment. The other one might be the one with psoriasis. There could be somebody else with metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes. In you go.

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You know, you're just going to tell me this is all too good to be true. How can you have something that looks like it fixes everything? And I know that sounds ridiculous because I'm not into the one size fits all model anyway. But when you understand that if we go what we call upstream to address these core functions of every cell.

31:47
Whatever the weaknesses of a certain individual, they tend to notice improvements in that area. So with the asthmatic, if it's helping at all, they're going to breathe better because that's what asthma is all about. When you know that sets things apart from, you know, taking a vitamin supplement where you might be deficient in vitamin C because you never eat fruit, let's say, it's a total different concept. was interesting, actually, I was just having a look at the

32:16
I can't, gosh, what is it? I'm going to get it wrong. It's ORAC. It's some sort of analysis of antioxidant. The ORAC. Yes. And it was talking about the antioxidant impact of different food polyphenols. And so I'm like, well, this is super interesting. don't see broccoli sprouts, as an example, being measured against blueberries or oranges. And then I went, oh, actually, it's because it works differently. This is why I'm not seeing that.

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direct comparison. I've seen something because you actually can't compare because it's very much a rapid rise in that antioxidant. When you take something like vitamin C, you eat blueberries, whereas it's quite different with the broccoli sprouts. This is sending signals to the DNA. By the way, the ORAC value was debunked about 2010.

33:15
So the United States Department of Agriculture had it on their website until then and they took it off. I don't know what's there now, but they took it off with an explanation to say that people were misinterpreting what it means, just as you're saying. So blueberries came up high on the list and a lot of other berries. Yes, they do have antioxidant activity directly and that's a good thing, but that is totally different from what we're trying to do.

33:45
We're not trying to say, let's find a food that's got antioxidants. We're saying, let's activate our body's antioxidant enzymes, which are literally millions of times per second more powerful in their ability to quench free radicals than any food molecule. Now there's one exception to that, and it is...

34:10
If you are having a barbecue with lots of Latin steak, which we would know is rich in free radical activity, if you marinate that steak, let's say in red wine or something along those lines, which is rich in polyphenols, you will neutralize the free radicals that are in the meat, which is a totally different thing from what I'm talking about.

34:39
Therefore, if you've marinated your steak first and then you stick it on the barbecue, those direct acting free radicals reduce the volume of free radicals you're going to absorb when you eat that steak. So that's the direct acting effect. If you don't want to marinate your steak, perhaps you eat a handful of blueberries while you're What about having a glass of wine with the steak? Does that do the same thing? That was the obvious next question.

35:08
In fact, it's interesting, Christine, I've seen studies and look, these are population-based studies and so we know that nutritional epidemiology has its challenges in being able to show cause and effect, which is not what I'm saying. But what was interesting was a study looked at meat consumption and mortality and found that the people who had the highest amount of meat, who also had the highest amount of vegetables,

35:38
actually had the better health outcomes compared to either the high vegetable group itself or the high meat group itself, which I just, which sort of speaks to your point there about having that, because you've got the minerals and the zoo nutrients, if you like, in meat, and then you've got the protective factor of the plant chemicals and vegetables. That's how I read that sort of the outcome of that particular study. So yeah, interesting, I thought.

36:07
what we try to do, we try to rewrite Mother Nature's instruction manual. We want to just cut all the meat out and just eat vegan foods, or now we want to cut all the vegetables out and just have a carnivore type diet. What happens to balance? Well, I'm interested Christine with, and I think the question that I

36:32
had in my head when we talked about people have a, that sulforaphane works on these three different pathways. I think three that you mentioned or four, I forgot. But does the, is there a triage sort of situation here? Does it help the thing that needs the most help first and then move on or does it sort of just systematically?

36:54
help all of those systems together? we even know? Everything at the same time, because it's on every cell simultaneously. And wherever the weak spot is, that's where you're going to notice the change. mean, if cells, if particular cells are functioning perfectly well, it's probably not going to do much at all. Yeah, okay. But wherever those weaknesses are, that's where you tend to see the improvement. Yeah, interesting. And is there a...

37:21
implications. And I'm thinking about the immune system and that suppression of some immune cells. Is that always going to be a good thing in all circumstances or are some people contraindicated by some of the functions of a molecule like sulforaphane? Not to our knowledge. I mean, it's out of nature's toolbox. It hasn't been tinkered around with in any way. mean, there are

37:44
cell chlorophyll supplements that are extracts and things have been added and subtracted and so on. I'm really talking about just a 100 % whole broccoli sprout that's just exactly as mother nature grew it. But then you've just dried it and conveniently milled it into a powder and either you take the powder or you take the capsules. So that's a functional food. It's a product of nature. Our cells are genetically adapted

38:13
to that kind of molecule, so it should not have adverse effects. Now, some people will say, oh, I'm hearing this word, sulfur, as in sulforaphane. I'm allergic to sulfur, I can't have it. That's a bit of a misunderstanding. What they're really allergic to in the strict sense of the word is sulfur drugs. So there are drugs like sulfur salazine, which are sometimes prescribed for their effects.

38:41
And some people do very poorly on them. They have a sulfur molecule, but it's a totally different molecule. And it has no bearing. And unfortunately, there are people who avoid sulfur in foods, foods like onions, asparagus, garlic, they're also rich sources of sulfur. Most of us don't have enough sulfur in our diets. The antioxidant glutathione is a very important, powerful antioxidant that

39:11
we produce within our own cells. It's based on sulfur. So many other molecules are based on sulfur. So the worst thing anyone who's sick can do is avoid sulfur. I mean, if they're intolerant to a particular food, let's say you can't eat asparagus that gives you diarrhea or something, there's something wrong with the intestinal lining when that's happening. Food intolerances

39:39
we can fix. That's an inflamed gut that looks at the asparagus molecule, sends a signal to the underlying immune system, and the immune system gets the wrong message. goes, oh, this is a poison. I'm going to treat it like poison. So I'm going to give my owner an attack of diarrhea and we'll get that asparagus out of the system as quickly as possible.

40:04
It's very unlikely a person is strictly intolerant to very, very many foods. And unfortunately, in these trends that we see now, people have decided on histamine intolerant, on oxalate intolerant, on lectin intolerant. I've seen people whose diet now is down to five or six foods because they've gradually cut them out. They've read this list. They've read that list.

40:32
And then they find that being off them for a while and they try and put them back in again, they can't. The problem goes, right, you're a poison, we can't eat you. So these are tricky cases and unfortunately modern fans are generating these problems. And so Christine, in your view then, if this, because I think people will be listening to this and they, what you're saying will resonate with them because there are so many people who do have

41:02
gut related issues. I know you can't give medical advice and just so we're clear, I'm not asking that you do that. What I am actually asking is, is there a bit of a path out for these people? Is there a protocol that they can follow that will help improve the tolerability, help heal the gut? Obviously, you mentioned sulforaphane as...

41:28
a component of that, but there's more than just that. Yes. In 2019, I launched what we call the GEM protocol. That's gut ecology and metabolic modulation. Basically, we start by sorting out gut issues and we find that when we do that properly, we sort out metabolic issues.

41:56
blood pressure issues, cholesterol problems, type 2 diabetes, and so on. A whole host of conditions. If we start with the gut, gut ecology, and we get to the metabolic modulation, we can solve that. So we've trained thousands of nutrition-based clinicians over the ensuing years to know how to do that. In some patients, it requires that precise

42:25
professional assistance, the ones who've gone so far down the track that they can only eat half a dozen foods, they probably do need to go and see a clinician. However, for those who want to just go, I'm just going to see if I can help myself with this. What we suggest is this. So if you're going to take a sulfuraphane supplement, would want 100 % whole broccoli sprout powder or capsule.

42:53
So if you think you have a lot of food intolerances, I'd start with the powder because sometimes you have to start off at a very, very low dose. And I've had people who are multiply food intolerant go, oh, I can't take that stuff, it makes me sick. They can't take it at the normal dose. So what we do, we get something like a steak knife and that sharp

43:20
point on a steak knife, you might take that much powder, put in a little bit of water, so have that in the morning. Monitor how you feel, if you feel all right, do the same at night. The next day, double the dose and gradually increase that. And the reason that people who have severe food intolerances and gut inflammation can get a bad reaction is this.

43:45
The problem going on in the digestive tract of those people is they have a severe imbalance of the wrong bugs living in the gut. So our microbiome, and I'm going to call them bugs, the bacteria and so on largely. So we've got good bugs that look after our health and we've got the bad bugs that tend to promote disease. So what sulforaphane does is it gets into the cells lining the gut.

44:12
And one of the functions of those cells is to produce natural antibiotics. So these are natural molecules that kill the bad bugs without touching the good bugs, which is perfectly what you want. This is what nature does. This is completely in contrast to taking an antibiotic that just wipes everything out. And some people will take plant ingredients like oregano oil that wipes everything out.

44:42
By harnessing the power of nature to optimize the function of those gut lining cells, nature will go right. We're going to gradually get rid of these bad bugs. Now, if you do that too quickly and you have a really high population of the bad bugs, those bugs are going to die in the gut and then they're going to release all their own waste materials.

45:08
And those waste materials can make you feel quite ill. They can get absorbed. You can feel headache, tired, listless. In addition, you might have diarrhea or cramping and so on. So that's a perfectly normal function of the gut, except that if we do too much too quickly in super sensitive people, they can get a bad reaction. Look, I would say it only happens to about one in

45:38
40 people however you need to be aware of that. You're to start it on your own and the tip of the steak knife blade is usually the right amount. So in the jar of the powder that we use there's a little scoop, it only holds about a gram and ideally you'd want to be able to take at least one gram a day or one scoop a day of that powder to then start.

46:04
doing the good things that you want it to do without having any adverse effect. So that's where we get started with the GEM protocol, largely. And for people who try that and they simply find it's just not working for them, something's going wrong, they ought to consult a GEM accredited practitioner. Because there's all sorts of other things that we do, different steps and so on that...

46:31
that we can use to overcome that in certain people because we're all unique creatures and our genetics are different in each one of us as well. Yeah, you mentioned obviously food intolerance, histamine and mast cells. Have you seen people with mast definitely, we get rid of it. We get rid of that. So there's an enzyme called GAO, diamine oxidase, which is produced by the gut lining cells and that breaks down histamine.

47:00
If you've got a very inflamed gut lining, you can't produce that enzyme. You can't produce digestive enzymes and you can't break down histamine proplet. So a lot of the people who are getting these bad histamine reactions have an inflamed gut. And step one is we have to get the inflammation out of the gut and we have to get rid of the bad bugs which are contributing to that inflammation.

47:25
So histamine intolerance, MCAS, and those conditions which are often spoken of now and very poorly treated will correct if you get rid of the inflammation first. Yeah. And it's on my mind right now. was at a conference, Melbourne actually, a PCOS Indo conference. there was a lot of talk of histamine mast cell activation and things like that.

47:55
Neutrogenomics and Sulforaphane, I believe came up, but I remember on another, because I've done the GEM protocol course, was maybe one of the first times you actually did it as a course here in New Zealand, maybe 2017 or something, 2016. 19, it was. Oh, 19, there you go. it's, yeah, so I can, so that's super interesting. What timeframe should...

48:19
Is there a timeframe really, Christine, or is that itself as individual, I suppose, given, depends on the level of inflammation? It's how long it takes to stream, really. Look, it depends on the individual genetics of the patient. And some of our clinicians do a gene profile on their patients. And by doing it, they can get a little window into the patient's ability to detoxify.

48:47
their ability to break down inflammatory cytokines, their ability to produce energy. So that's the value of doing a gene test first. You don't have to do it. It's not necessary, but it does give you that extra bit of information. So if I were to find a patient who had very poor detoxification capacity, for example, I would know that I'm going to have to prepare them for the fact they could take

49:17
six months to solve a problem that somebody else might sort out in three months, let's say. Yeah, interesting. And I have been thinking a lot about sulforaphane in light of microplastics, actually. I feel like microplastics in the people that I'm listening to on podcasts and information that I'm engaging in, it's much more of a... People are becoming more aware of just the potential toxicity.

49:46
microplastics. Obviously, we can't measure, as far as I am aware, levels of microplastics until autopsies or whatnot. But I'm an athlete myself. I see a lot of athletes and we are exposed to a lot of those plastic drink bottles and having warm liquid and warm bike bottles. If you're out there for hours on a bike, that's not me, but that's some of my clients.

50:14
And I imagine that something like sulforaphane, because it's got a role in detoxification, could actually help in that instance. What do you think? Look, I haven't seen any particular studies on microplastic detoxification. I haven't looked either. But detoxification in general for a whole host of other materials.

50:38
But what I would suggest is whatever damage those microplastics are doing to the body cells will be producing waste products from those cells. So we do know sulforaphane will sort out that cellular damage and clear that out. Whether it actually eliminates those microplastics, I don't know. It will get rid of heavy metals. There's one of the genes that gets switched on with sulforaphane.

51:07
produces a molecule called metallothionine and metallothionine is nature's heavy mental care later. So, the metallothionine binds to whatever it is, aluminium, lead, whatever, and pulls it out of the system through some pretty complex detoxification processes that are involved. Christine, like we've talked a lot about people who may have some gut dysfunction or who might not be well.

51:36
Is there a role for something like sulforaphane for people who just want to remain well and who may not have any obvious signs of dysfunction or ill health? What's your protocol? Do you take sulforaphane? Yes. There are a few studies that are being done on aging and longevity, mostly animal studies, because we live too long to measure anything effectively.

52:04
Definitely there are researchers, there's a group in the US, there's another group in Korea that have published papers on longevity and the ability of sulforaphane to activate nRF2 as we age. Now the reason that that's important is nRF2 activity slows down as we age, so too does the ability of the body to activate a lot of these protective enzymes.

52:33
It's a pretty good insurance policy to make sure that your cells are operating at their best. Now, it's not going to be exactly as it was when you were 25, but we're just trying to optimize the function that we have. A lot of people talk about resveratrol as an anti-aging molecule. It was never proven. The studies that were done by David Sinclair at Harvard 10 or more years ago

53:00
were done on worms and fruit flies and mice that were never done on humans. And the thing about the mouse studies that I found intriguing is if you started the mouse on resveratrol from birth, you could demonstrate some sort of longevity factor. But just if you started it at middle age, it made no difference.

53:25
And that's about the time a human would think, oh my goodness, I'm getting old, I better do something about it. So it's no point taking it from middle age. And the other thing about resveratrol, it's like tucumin. It's a big, bulky polyphenolic molecule that is very poorly bioavailable. It's out of the gut into the bloodstream, but it has a very difficult time getting from the bloodstream into the cells.

53:52
I often see people writing these extraordinary alleged findings from resveratrol. They're just not there. There is a plant called Polygonum cuspidatum, which contains 20 % resveratrol. There have been some studies done on that that looked like they had decent outcomes. But what you don't know is, was it the 20 % resveratrol doing the job or was it the 80 %?

54:20
polygonal other components that were doing the job. So the studies don't report that. And so it's very easy to draw the wrong conclusion. Yeah, absolutely. And I've definitely heard that about resveratrol. Sort of, it was a lot of hype, but the research didn't necessarily live up to it. And then of course, you mentioned just even the form or the bioavailability of resveratrol. And I think it's important maybe to finish off by, you you've obviously mentioned the,

54:49
you'll tell us a little bit about the supplements that you work with because I think you've studied it, you've designed them, but there are actually quite a number of broccoli sprout extract supplements out on the market. So what is it that people need to look for? So I mentioned before that I'm looking at 100 % whole foods. So basically what you do, you take the seeds, you

55:13
create sprouts out of them and then you harvest them after a few days when they're at their peak, you dry them and so you've got everything that was ever in that plant, you've captured it. So the thing about the sulforaphane is, surprisingly, there's no sulforaphane in broccoli sprouts. What is in the broccoli sprout is two little stacks inside the plant cell. One contains a

55:42
a precursor molecule called glucoraphanin. The other spec contains an enzyme called morosinase and they just mind their own business sitting there. When you bite or chew a piece of broccoli or fresh sprouts or put water in the powder, that enzyme morosinase acts on the glucoraphanin. It cuts off the glucose molecule and the bit that's left is the sulfurophane. So you're actually producing it

56:12
as you eat it. What the extract companies do, they don't even grow sprouts, they just take broccoli seeds, they deactivate the morosinase enzyme entirely. And what you have in a tablet or a capsule, often a tablet, is just the glucoraphanin precursor. So they will tell you that you don't need the morosinase enzyme because your gut microbiome

56:39
has the ability to act like morosinase and take the glucose off to give you the sulforaphane. That's true, but it has a couple of conditions. The first one is it only produces eight to 10 % of the sulforaphane you would get if you ate the whole sprout, which is not much. And it also presupposes the person has a healthy microbiome.

57:06
So the sort of people we're talking about with all these gut issues who might want to do something with sulforaphane may get practically no response whatsoever. And I've never heard anybody say that you need to slow the dose down when you take an extract. I don't think it's potent enough to do the job that we do with ours. And that's why we have to caution people.

57:33
It is very powerful in its effect and start off with a knife blade chip and build up if you're sensitive to it. That doesn't happen with the extract. Yeah, no, that's a really great explanation and that's as I understood it as well. I also remember hearing once that if you took broccoli sprouts and froze them, it increased the content of glucoraphanin.

57:58
Look, I don't believe that. know the research. No, don't. I know the researcher who says that. And the problem is when you freeze them, you break up the little membranes of the cell as that plant then thaws out later. So you're not doing anything. But if you let that plant thaw, that frozen broccoli thaw out, the enzyme is converting the glucoraphanin to sulforaphane. Sulforaphane is not very stable.

58:28
So if you wanted to eat the whole ice block full of frozen sprouts, that's probably going to be okay, but it's no better. mean, there's no advantage in doing that. And the real problem I think that people should understand is we go to a great deal of trouble to select seed, which is very high in the precursor, the glucoraphanin and the morosinase enzyme.

58:58
You or me, just as a citizen going to the health food store or wherever you're going to get a little bag of broccoli seeds to sprout, they're not tested. They won't be high glucoraphanin. I know they're not. And so you don't know whether you're going to generate much sulforaphane or not. There's roughly a 20-fold difference in the amount of sulforaphane you can get from a high

59:26
blue carotene seed versus the low one. There's nothing wrong with eating fresh sprouts. I don't want to deter anybody. It's probably the freshest green vegetable you'll ever eat if you've grown it at home and you're eating it while it's still alive. And you will get a whole host of nutrients, B vitamins and folate and so on, but you may not get enough cell forafame to be therapeutic. So the way I see it is

59:55
If the person just wants to add it to their diet because it's good and they'll get some benefit, fine. If you have a particular condition and you're looking for a therapeutic response, I think you need to get a supplement that's being produced in a standardized manner that can give you a therapeutic quantity of sulforaphane. Otherwise, not much happens. Yeah, no, I agree. And it's really just

01:00:23
false economy to look for something that's a little bit cheaper and all the rest of it, because you're just not going to get what you want. Christine, what's the name of your, what are the name of the products that we should be looking for? Our broccoli products are under the brand name Enduracil, E-N-D-U-R-A-C-U-L-L, and our company is Celllogic. Nice one. And I'll pop, I'll definitely put links to those in the show notes. Can you tell people where they can find

01:00:51
more information about you and what you do. I have lot of practitioners and health professionals listen to my podcast. So if this is all just emerging information for them, I'm sure that they're going to want to seek out some more. So you go to our website, is celllogic.com.au, C-E-L-L-Logic.com.au.

01:01:15
There's plenty of information on there if you browse around the website, lots of self-correcting information. If anyone's interested in either training to do the GEM protocol or as a consumer who just wants to understand what this is all about, if you go to our learning center, there's a drop down menu there that says GEM introduction. In that section, there are four videos. The first one's just the

01:01:44
brief intro from me. The second one is myself and one of our clinician educators just discussing the principles and it's visual, the slides are there, it'll make it lot easier to follow. And then following that, we've got video interviews from two clinicians who've started using the GEM protocol and just giving a little bit of background on their experience and

01:02:09
you know how they used to treat SIBO for example in a particular way and now they use GEM and it's much easier and more effective and so it goes. What we're trying to do with GEM is we're trying to mimic nature's principles. That's really what we're trying to do and understand how nature works and how our food talks to our genes and then try to put that into a...

01:02:36
convenient program. Nice one, Christine. And I know just from learning from you, you do such a great job of being able to distill information that people don't necessarily need to know, but it's really good that they understand just why it is so different and why it is so effective, so much more than potentially other things out on the market. So I will put links to selllogic.com.au with a little hyphen between sell and logic.

01:03:05
And then also just a couple of other resources which I found really helpful of different interviews and podcasts and seminars that you've done. Because I think that people will be interested in that. So thank you so much, Christine. I appreciate you taking the time. It's been an absolute pleasure, Meggie. Thank you so much.

01:03:37
Riley, hopefully you enjoyed that and it was a real pleasure to talk to Christine after attending two or three of her courses over the years and really appreciating her food first approach despite the fact that she develops supplements, albeit they are, you know, it's nutraceuticals more than anything else and I just found her to be, or I found her over the years to be so genuine and authentic in her passion for helping people.

01:04:06
Next week on the podcast I speak to a fan favourite and I've just gotten so many requests to have her on the show so I'm super excited to be chatting to her Dr Stacey Sims. Until then though you can catch me over on Instagram threads or x @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com book a one-on-one call with me. All right team have a great week see you soon.