If you want to achieve optimal health and live a much longer life, prioritizing nutrition is the way to go. Zach Gurick is joined by Dr. John Lewis, Founder and President of Dr. Lewis Nutrition®, who explores how practical strategies, cutting-edge science, and simple lifestyle changes can greatly transform your body for the better. He breaks down the three main pillars of optimal health: a whole-food plant-based diet, the 40 different nutrients our bodies need, and regular daily exercise. Dr. Lewis also explains the ideal protein intake for the body, why sugar consumption is not outright bad, and how his product, Daily Brain Care, can help deal with neurodegeneration and cognitive decline.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Unlocking Optimized Health Through Nutrition With Dr. John Lewis
Welcome back to the show, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. I am so glad to be joined by you and by one of our amazing guests. This episode is one I think you are really going to appreciate because we are diving into something that impacts every single one of us. It is how we fuel our bodies, how we protect our brains, and ultimately how we extend not just our lifespan but our health span as well. Our guest is Dr. John Lewis, and he is a clinical researcher, educator, and founder of Dr. Lewis Nutrition.
Over the course of his career, he has published more than 180 peer-reviewed studies, and he has conducted extensive research on the powerful role that nutrition, supplementation, and exercise play in human health. What makes this conversation especially compelling is that Dr. Lewis does not just study this. He lives it. For over 27 years, he has followed a whole-food plant-based diet, combined with targeted supplementation and disciplined daily exercise.
You will hear from him about his story and his journey as a competitive bodybuilder, as well as a part of that journey. His work, particularly in brain health and Alzheimer’s research, raises a powerful question: how much of what we think is inevitable aging is actually preventable? We are going to explore practical strategies, cutting-edge science, and simple shifts you can begin making right away to take more control of your health and your future. Let us welcome Dr. Lewis to the show.
Dr. Lewis, thank you so much for joining us. I have learned a little bit about you, and I am so excited to dive into all things nutrition, optimal nutrition, and brain health. You are such an expert on this subject. I am excited to learn from you myself. I am excited for our guests and our audiences to learn from your expertise, wisdom, and experience. Thank you so much for joining us.
Zach, thank you for having me. It is my pleasure to be here, and I am looking forward to our conversation.
Dr. Lewis’ Journey To Nutrition And Human Health
I would love to start. You are an expert. You have done over 30 clinical studies. You have published more than 180 peer-reviewed papers. What was it? Can you tell us, take us back in your journey? How did you end up in this field of nutrition and human health? What led you to want to do the work that you are doing today?
I will take it in this example. I will take it all the way back to when I was probably four or five. It was before I started school. I started school at five. Let us say maybe about four, my grandfather, we would get out in the backyard of my grandparents’ house, and he started pitching me baseball. That put me on a path of playing just about any sport with a ball other than soccer. That was the only thing I did not play. I really just appreciated the camaraderie and the competition around playing sports as a kid. In college, I got into drug-free competitive bodybuilding.
That was my next phase of competitiveness. Some people call bodybuilding a sport. I do not. To me, it is more like an art form. I realized pretty quickly that I was not willing to take drugs. That definitely did not appeal to me. At that time, you are in your twenties, you think you are invincible, but I did not. I did not think that was the route for me to take, mainly because I could not see myself making a living as a bodybuilder.
I know some people do, but let us face it, if you ask the average person on the street, “Name me one bodybuilder,” probably the only person they are going to come up with is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Everybody else is pretty much irrelevant to the average person. Not that it is necessarily anything meaningful. What bodybuilding did for me was that it completely changed my point of view about food. Prior to that, I pretty much ate like any American does, which is to eat for taste. You eat because you are hungry. You are probably in a hurry.
You do not want to spend a lot of time thinking about it or certainly going to the grocery store and then coming home and cooking and preparing it. I completely changed my point of view about food because trying to become a competitive bodybuilder requires you to have a very systematic, professional approach to eating. That was a real milestone for me. Again, I did not necessarily look at it from a health perspective. This was more of a competition perspective just within myself, but it definitely changed my outlook about food, totally, completely changed it.
As I continued in my journey in education, as I was continuing to study and learn more about the human body and how the cells work, just all the different aspects of my training, as I got into my research career, I met a gentleman by the name of Dr. Reg McDaniel. This was when I had already started a little bit of work in nutrition, but I met Dr. Reg about twenty years ago. He started sharing with me his journey about the sugars from aloe vera.
At that point in my life, I really had no idea what he was talking about because up to that point, I probably had had a few lectures in biochemistry about saccharides in general. What I learned about saccharides was that they are fuel sources for the cells, which is still true. I had no idea the number of different polysaccharides or saccharides that are actually in existence that Mother Nature creates, mostly in all the different plants that are in the plant kingdom.
Specifically, this type of polysaccharide from aloe vera was something I had never even heard of. Most of the time, when you think of aloe vera, you think of using the gel as a topical solution for a sunburn or a cut. You do not really think too much about why it works. If your grandmother told you the same thing mine did, she said, “Your little sunburn, John, here, put some aloe vera on your skin and that will help you.” “Why? What is the mechanism of action?”
It turns out that aloe vera actually has lots of different nutrients in it, not just these polysaccharides, these complex sugars, but it literally has every nutrient that you can think of. I now refer to aloe vera as the plant of life. It is just this incredible plant that Mother Nature provides for us. Going back to Dr. Reg and my meeting with him, he is sharing with me all these incredible anecdotes about what he and his colleagues had done up to that point.
Aloe vera has every nutrient that you can think of. It is an incredible plant from Mother Nature.
For him, his journey started around 1985 or 1986. It has been over 40 years for him. He is still at it. He still goes to his office every day, still fighting the good fight. Meeting Dr. Reg and experiencing this man’s energy, his passion, his motivation, everything that he was sharing with me, really taking me under his wing and mentoring me in this whole field of complex sugars, it just blew me away.
That was not only an altering event for my career, but it was an altering event for my life. That is really a big reason why I am talking to you here. Hopefully, we will talk more about the research that he and I ended up conducting together, and we are still conducting. It has been an evolution simultaneously. Somewhere between stopping competing in bodybuilding, which I still do, I still train as a bodybuilder, I just do not get on a stage anymore in my bikini in front of people, somewhere between no longer competing in bodybuilding and meeting Dr. Reg, I started also exploring much more about nutrition in general, way more than I had learned in my training and education.
That led me to eat only a plant-based diet. That is what I have been doing now for the last 27 years as well. Several things happened, big points in my life that led me to where I am today. I really have my own personal philosophy about health, which is eating a whole-food plant-based diet, taking certain supplements or nutrients that we do not get from the diet, like these aloe polysaccharides, and then daily exercise.
Those are really my three pillars of achieving optimal health. Obviously, other things go into it as well. From my own path and my own journey and my own research, these are the three things for me that are the most important in terms of creating optimal health for anyone. Anyone can experience this.
At what point in there, when you were a competitive bodybuilder, did you get your PhD in human physiology? Was that with Dr. Reg?
No, not at all. He was not affiliated with the University of Miami. We met through a mutual acquaintance at the University of Miami. Reg actually lives in Dallas. He was coming to Miami for a meeting, and this gentleman that we both knew introduced us. It was just one of those instances in life where you meet somebody, and you feel this almost instantaneous connection. The man was just so passionate and so inspiring about what he was saying and what he was telling me, and all the work he and his colleagues had done up to that point. It just sucked me in. I am blown away. I am learning about all this stuff so fast.
After he gets back to Dallas, I will never forget our first meeting. We meet, and we have these incredible two or three days together. He gets back to Dallas, and then he mails me this huge box of all these papers, articles, and documents. It was an incredible introduction to this whole notion of what aloe polysaccharides can do for health. It has just continued to grow. I do not want to spoil it. If you have a question directly related to the research on Alzheimer’s and MS that you would like to discuss, we can certainly get to that.
Reg did not have any impact on my training. I was already post my PhD. I was getting into the early stages of my research career at that point. I was already doing nutrition and exercise research. It was just when I met him that it went to a whole different level of looking at these polysaccharides.
I want to dive into that research for sure. I am curious before we do. Were you eating a whole-food plant-based diet at the same time that you were competitively bodybuilding?
I had not completely converted to a vegan or whole-food plant-based diet at that point. I had given up beef at that point. I may have eaten beef a couple of times a year, literally that much, hardly any. The only thing that I really ate, especially as I got close to a competition, was basically just a handful of foods. It would be something like tuna, brown rice, some greens, and baked potatoes. That was basically it.
It was a very bland, very monotonous diet for most people. To credit bodybuilders, even if they are taking drugs, you have to put in so much effort to do this. It is not something that you can just inject a needle in your butt and look amazing. You still have to work very hard for it, and you still have to have a very regimented approach to your entire life, not just the part where you are training, but your entire life.
I did not eat a whole lot of animal food at that point, but I definitely had not really, the switch had not flipped at that point in terms of diving into the research about all the problems associated with eating animal food, related to cancer, related to heart disease, related to diabetes, related to obesity, all these things that are killing us today. I have not had that aha moment yet. It was coming, but I was not quite there at that point. It was probably, I would say, after my last competition, maybe two or three years later, when I completely converted.
Why Nutrition Outranks Everything Else
Let us talk about nutrition first, and then we will come back and talk about the polysaccharides and the research there, because you talk about this idea of nutrition as the foundation of health. You just mentioned your three pillars of that whole-food, plant-based diet, supplements, and daily exercise. Why does nutrition outrank everything else?
It is incredible when you think about it. This is a great question. I am glad you asked me that way because when you look at the scientific literature, and you look at the enormity, I am talking about anybody can do this, not just a scientist, go to PubMed.gov. PubMed is the National Clearinghouse, the National Institutes of Health Library of Medicine. That is where every scientific journal that is worth its weight in salt will be indexed.
Anybody can access it freely. If the research has been actually funded by NIH or the government, then the articles have to be freely available. That was one of the good things our government recently did was to make it a law that if public funding supported this research, then any article that is published out of that has to be freely available to the public. Not necessarily every article will be freely available in terms of the entire article, but you will at least be able to read the abstract.
Again, do not take my word for it. Anybody can go and check this out for themselves. If you compare nutrition to anything else, even exercise, I have actually had a bit of a switch in that perspective as well. Thirty years ago, I thought exercise was the most important thing for us in terms of optimizing our health every day. With all of the research that we have now conducted on nutrition, especially these polysaccharides and a couple of other things, I have gone completely the other way now, and I say that nutrition is number one, and then exercise is number two.
If you look at the enormity of the research, across every type of research, let us look at preclinical research that is in cells, tissues, animals, then you have clinical trials, short-term human intervention studies like what I ran in my academic career, and then you have large observational or epidemiological studies where large groups of people are being followed over their lives. They are not being intervened in, but they are being followed. Every year or two, they have data that gets collected from them, and then these data are analyzed over years and decades.
When you put all of that together, by far, nutrition is the most important variable, either to our benefit or to our detriment, depending on how we use it, compared to anything else. The only exception to that, I will admit, is in the case of using cigarettes or tobacco when it comes to very significant risks of lung cancer, throat cancer, other types of cancers, and even heart disease. Smoking clearly has a very significant impact on a few different types of diseases from that perspective, but every other type of behavior, and I am talking not only a behavior, but a treatment.
For example, something like acupuncture. Obviously, that has been around for millennia, but scientifically, when you look at it compared to nutrition, I do not really think it compares. Other things, for example, include different types of stress management programs, cognitive behavioral therapy for people who have cognitive or memory issues, physical therapy, homeopathy, and herbal therapy. There are a lot of different interventions that have been looked at for different types of conditions, be it cancer, heart disease, obesity, or diabetes, the leading killers.
By far, if you look at how strong nutrition predicts what can happen to us, nutrition is the most important factor. Every time we put something into our mouths, our genes initially recognize that material, that coded library of information. That is true when anything goes through our skin as well. The cells do not actually do anything until they receive instructions from the genes. Everything that goes into this system, whether it is through our mouth or through our skin, is first recognized by the genes, and then the genes take that information, and then they tell our cells how to function properly.
Every time we put something into our mouths or through our skin, our genes initially recognize that coded library of information.
That has been shown time after time when you take nutrition in the context of even chemical contamination or exposure. People get exposed to something like aflatoxin from a peanut contamination. You can manipulate whether or not a test subject ends up getting cancer, even with some chemical contamination or exposure. If you give them too much protein, too much animal protein, or you turn down the protein, or you give them plant protein, many different things can be done that can manipulate the outcome. Time and time again, it is all about nutrition.
Why Everyone Can Try A Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet
It is not every day that you get to talk to someone with your level of expertise in nutrition. You have obviously been eating a whole-food plant-based diet for 27 years. You are obviously very fit and healthy and optimized in terms of your health. I have heard different perspectives, and I am sure we all do. Is it particular to our genotype, our phenotype, our body makeup, or our genetic heritage what we eat? Do you think that everyone should eat a whole-food plant-based diet?
I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday. Every time we hear the word paleo, we have this idea, you can just imagine it, close your eyes, and you can imagine seeing this caveman archetype with a spear, and you can see a woolly mammoth or a buffalo close to him. He is getting ready to throw this spear at this animal to eat it. This is an almost mythical type of relationship that we have with someone from 10 or 20,000 years ago.
People associate that with that. “That means we are supposed to consume all of this animal tissue.” For me, it is almost like programming or brainwashing because you have been led to believe this. I know that there are places on the planet where humans have drawn themselves, and they have drawn an animal or two. Modern-day people associate that to believe that we are hunters and we are supposed to eat meat.
When you look at the actual research of where some of these archaeological remains have been found and examining things like poop, which I would not necessarily want to do for a living, and examining things like taking a skull and getting the teeth, there are actually remnants of food that have been stored there, and they are still able to analyze this stuff with very sophisticated technology. What these scientists have found is that actually the remnants of what these folks ate 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years ago were not all of this animal tissue. It was actually a lot of plants.
Unfortunately, there is no picture in a cave of a guy picking an apple off a tree or pulling a carrot out of the ground. I am being silly here. What science has actually shown about what people have historically eaten way before Western civilization is that it is actually a lot more plants, and it is not all of this animal food. People have been completely misled. I do not know where that comes from. I do not know if that is some, but we can talk about propaganda in the dairy industry. I have very good examples of that.
When you look at more of a historical perspective, I do not really know where that comes from, quite frankly. I would be interested in knowing. To answer your question, first of all, humans need about 40 different nutrients, compounds, and elements for our cells to function properly. Every single one of those is made by plants, with one exception. The one exception is vitamin B12, which is made by bacteria. I hate to say it this way, but if you want to talk about brainwashing or propaganda, the average person believes that you can only get omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil.
That segment of the dietary supplement industry has done such a great job of convincing people that you can only get your omega-3s from fish oil that they do not have any clue that those fish did not make omegas. They got the omegas from the algae they ate in the ocean. Fish cannot, just like humans, make omega-3s. We have to get it from the diet. If you eat fish or consume fish oil, that is just an indirect path from the algae in the ocean. The algae in the ocean are what created those omega-3s that the fish ate.
The fish were caught, processed, and then made into fish oil to give you those omega-3s. If you just went directly to the source, that is the way that you should be getting it. In my opinion, anybody can eat a plant-based diet. I do not see any reason why you cannot. If you tell me, “John, I just love my steak. I just love my grilled chicken. I just love my seared tuna. I just love my eggs and dairy.” If it is just because you love it and you are unwilling to hear the science or even hear a synopsis of the science, so be it. It is a free country. You can eat however you want to eat.
To answer your question, my opinion is that yes, everybody can eat a plant-based diet. There is no good reason that we have to consume meat. There is not. I do not care what the carnivore crowd says. These people, in my opinion, are way too extreme. You may remember Atkins. He wrote his first book in 1972. Atkins over the years morphed into this keto paleo. Now we have this really extreme carnivore group. Those carnivore people, in my opinion, are completely clueless. Everybody has their own opinion. The carnivore crowd certainly will not agree with me. They will try to shoot me down on everything that I am saying. You can get every nutrient that you need from plants. That is irrefutable, regardless of what the carnivore crowd says.
Everybody can eat a plant-based diet. There is no good reason to consume meat despite what the carnivore crowd says.
Why You Do Not Need So Much Protein
What about people often asking the question, “What about protein? How do you get enough protein?” Obviously, I had one time in my life for a few years ate a whole-food plant-based diet as well. There are plenty of protein options. You have to eat maybe a lot more spinach than you would if you ate a steak. Can you just give us your expert opinion on the breakdown of macros in your day-to-day diet, or what you suggest for people?
The protein question is always there. We have this hyper-awareness or arousal about protein, and certainly the new dietary guidelines that were just published a few weeks ago, in my opinion, did not do any favors because now the government is recommending that people should be loading up on all this red beef and dairy. This completely flies in the face of so much research that says Americans are already eating enough protein.
Unless you are a drug-using bodybuilder or if you are some other really competitive athlete where you are placing incredible demands on your body, or if you are over 70, or if you are a severe burn victim, or if you have wasting disease from HIV, those are cases where probably the average person needs more protein. For the vast majority of us sitting around in buildings all day, not engaging in a lot of activity, and unfortunately, now it is something like 75% or 80% of Americans are almost entirely sedentary, why do you need all this protein when you are basically sedentary anyway?
Your body does not need more than about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Again, this is debatable. When I was trained, it was 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Now, some people are saying it should be one gram per pound of body weight, which is basically double. I do not know that I agree with that because of how sedentary the average American is. Why does he or she need all that extra protein? As far as protein’s risk of what it does to you, eating copious amounts of protein every day, there is a gentleman I would love for you to have on your show.
I do not know him personally. His name is Valter Longo at the University of Southern California. Longo has done a lot of research on longevity over his career in his lab. What he has shown in study after study across all different types of species is that if you eat too much protein or if you feed too much protein to a test animal, you are turning on your insulin resistance. You are turning on all these growth factors. You are turning on all these things that lead to early disease and death, especially if those proteins are coming from animal sources.
Animal proteins are higher in the branched-chain amino acids that contain more sulfur, which contain more methionine, which is a precursor to something called homocysteine. We know that an elevated homocysteine level raises your risk of cardiovascular disease. Longo’s research has shown that protein is actually the key macronutrient that we need to be consuming less of. It is not about fat. It is not about carbohydrates. It is about controlling that protein because if you are gorging yourself every day on all of this protein, you are turning on all of these inflammatory and growth signals that lead to earlier disease and earlier death.
My advice to anybody out there listening is that it is relatively easy. There are online tools today that you can use to get an estimate of what you are eating. The accuracy of the result depends on the accuracy of the data that you put into it. If you do something like that and just give yourself an idea of your macro and micronutrient breakdown, I would say stick to around 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, which for me means around 60 or 70 grams of protein per day.
About 60% of your diet, 58% if you want to be exact, should be carbohydrates, most of that complex carbohydrates. About 30% from fat, and no more than 10% of that should be saturated fat. That has been the American College of Sports Medicine’s recommendation for many years. There is a little bit of change in the protein requirement, but not significant unless you fall into some of those other categories that I mentioned earlier.
Can you just break that down again? I know if I am tuning in, I am going to capture that. For you, 60 to 70 grams of protein, 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, and do that calculation. What percentage of their macros or intake is that?
That is about 12%. You said 58% complex carbs and 30% fat.
Those are the ideal ratios.
Look at people that are saying that they eat their beef, their chicken, their pork, or fish every day. They are saying, “If I am going to start shifting from animals to plants, how do I get my protein?” Very simply, beans are an excellent source of protein, not only protein, but fiber, calcium, magnesium, and lots of other nutrients that we need to function properly. I would definitely recommend beans as a significant cornerstone of the diet. Along with that, you could look at lentils.
Lentils are also an excellent source of protein, iron, fiber, nuts and seeds. My goodness, you can eat a few handfuls of different types of nuts and seeds every day, and you are going to drive up your protein intake pretty quickly. Tofu or different types of soy, other fermented soy, is an excellent source of protein. Do not get misled by this movement. I do not know where this movement came from, but the idea is that if we, as men, eat soy, we are going to have boobs.
That is ridiculous because there is a phytonutrient called phytoestrogen in soy. It is in almost every plant. It is in apples. It is in broccoli. Phytoestrogen is not estrogen biochemically. They are totally different. Do not be misled by that. I eat soy and tofu, probably on average, two times a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Buy it organic. That way, you know that it is not genetically modified and has not been treated with a bunch of herbicides and pesticides. Finally, greens. You mentioned you would have to eat a lot of spinach compared to a steak, but still, greens per volume per weight have a lot of protein in them. If you are doing this throughout the day, by the end of the day, you are the average person who is probably not very active, and you are going to easily get your 30 or 40, maybe even 50 grams of protein. It should not be that big of a struggle.
The Body’s Incredible Metabolic Ability
That is a shift for people to think that if you only need 40 or 50 grams of protein, if that is 12% of your total intake, it is really not that hard to get. Is it also true that for our bodies to digest a steak, does that not take significant energy that could be used for other things? If we are digesting and trying to get amino acids from a different source, say fruits, if it is a lot easier to digest, it takes less energy. Our cells can be doing other things that are more productive. Could you talk about that a little bit? I do not know if that is true. That is something I have heard.
I would not just attribute that to a steak. I would say that if you eat a meal with a thousand calories, that is a lot of material that your body has to process in that moment. Anything that we do metabolically from the gut through the liver and then all the way out the other side, breaking all that down and then utilizing what we need, and then the rest passing out, all of that activity literally takes cellular energy to do all of those metabolic functions.
Whether that is taking away from something else, obviously, there have been points made about not eating a meal too late at night because you do not want to have metabolism going on at the same time your body is getting ready to shut down for the day and start clearing out metabolic waste, especially from the brain.
There could be something to that. If you are just going through your day, your body is so incredible. This machine that we call our body is so incredible. You have the capacity to do many things at once. Literally millions of things at the same time. I would not be too caught up in that notion unless you got trauma, like you ate a big meal and then you were driving home from the restaurant, and you had trauma. Now, obviously, that is a different set of circumstances, and your body has to immediately shift from metabolism to inflammation, repair, and healing.
The machine we call our body has the capacity to do many things at once.
That would certainly be a conflicted state. In general, for most people, you eat a meal, and then you use your recommendation, for example, I might have a banana, a protein bar, or something 20 minutes before I work out. That is, if I have not had any meal for the day. If I have already eaten a meal, I am probably going to wait two, three, maybe even four hours before I get in my workout. If I have decided I am going to work out first thing in the morning, which, because of our schedule with our kids, I usually am not able to do, I am usually working out sometime in the middle of the day.
I might have, like I said, a piece of fruit or maybe a protein bar or something, about twenty minutes. I do not normally like to work out on an empty stomach. I know sometimes people recommend that for people who need to lose weight, and that is probably true, but I do not need to lose weight. For me, that is not really my strategy. I want to make sure that I get through my workout with the right intensity and complete it properly. Sometimes, if I am fasting, that may make it a little bit more challenging to do that.
I know a lot of people work out fasted. It is just for me, I know my own body and I know how it responds and what it likes. I do not normally like to work out fasted, but I would just say that I would not be too tense. Your question, I would not be too concerned about what you are giving up when your body is going through all that metabolic activity, unless, again, some extreme situation occurred right after that.
Maintaining Healthy Levels Of Testosterone
Another question I sometimes hear or think about is for guys, especially about our testosterone levels. Would you be willing to share? I am assuming that you have measured your biomarkers, hormones, and things like that. How do you speak to us about that a little bit? How do we maintain healthy levels on a base?
I do not remember now. It has been four or five years since I had testosterone checked for full disclosure. I am not really too big into all these repeated tests. I do like to get my vitamin D level checked once a year, but in terms of a very elaborate hormone panel, I have only done that maybe a couple of times in my life. Without question, regardless of what you are doing on the nutritional side, weight training, strength training, high intensity interval training, those are your best methods, especially for men, at keeping your testosterone level high. That is something that I engage in pretty much every day.
Unless I am in an airplane or I am really sick, which fortunately I do not get sick too often, I am going to be doing at least 30 or so minutes of high-intensity exercise, which is the best thing to my knowledge to keep our testosterone level high. Now that is a great question. I may have to do a little homework there myself. I cannot think of any study that I have read that would say, if you are not getting at least this much protein or carbohydrate or whatever every day, you may have a testosterone deficit because testosterone is so, when you test it, and then you repeat it, you need to have very similar conditions when you are testing.
If you are trying to find out if something is going to help you, you want to make sure that the testing conditions are as similar as possible because it is so wildly fluctuating. For example, if you are stressed out and you go get your testosterone checked, very good chances are it is going to be lower than it probably normally is when you are not stressed out.
Certainly, things like smoking, too much alcohol consumption, or any alcohol consumption, insomnia, not managing your stress well, having interrupted sleep, being sedentary, these are the kinds of things that will put your testosterone in the basement. I would say those are the kinds of factors much more important than necessarily what your nutritional strategy is. I am just going to bail out on that one and say, from a nutritional perspective, I would need to do my homework because I am not sure.
That is fair. That is helpful, though. The best thing to do is resistance training, strength training, high intensity interval training.
Maybe take your creatine. I take 5 to 10 grams of creatine every day. I am a big fan of creatine. I cannot think of the top of my head of any study that shows that daily creatine intake has any relationship to testosterone. That is an interesting question. After our conversation, I am going to look and see if there is any literature on that.
Why Sugar Is Not Bad For Your Health
Sounds good. Let us talk more about the polysaccharides. That is a big word. I know poly means many saccharides. You talked about complex sugars, but can you break that down for the audience? What is a polysaccharide, and tell us about what they are, how they work, and what the research is showing that you have spent so many years developing?
One of the things that I also like to do in my journey and helping to educate people is bust this myth around the word sugar, because for at least the last half century, as long as I have been in the world, every time we hear the word sugar, we immediately are conditioned to think bad. There is just no possibility that “It is a sugar, could it be good for me?” You just cannot even imagine that.
In fairness, I guess most of those people are really referring to sweeteners. They are not referring to polysaccharides. If they did not understand or take away anything else from this conversation, I really want people to focus on this part of the conversation, because this is very important. Mother Nature creates all kinds of sugars in the environment. There are four basic structures of sugars. You have monosaccharides, that is, one molecule of sugar, like high fructose corn syrup.
You have disaccharides, that is, two molecules of sugar, like sucrose or white table sugar. You have oligosaccharides, which are about 8 to 10 molecules of sugar. The best example of that is breast milk. These are very important for the baby to get from its mother when it is nursing. These oligosaccharides are very important for the baby’s development.
Finally, you have these polysaccharides, many sugars. Zach, literally thousands of molecules of glucose units attached together by these very sophisticated glycosidic bonds. They look like nothing else in Mother Nature. They are so sophisticated that you cannot even draw them on a piece of paper. They are literally like 5D structures.
Going back to what I was saying earlier in our conversation about how the genes interpret information from the environment, this is mine and Dr. McDaniel’s and some of our other colleagues’ working theory is that why these things are so beneficial is because of all of that coded information, because they are providing such a dense source of library of information that our genes interpret that then tell our cells how to function properly.
The two that we have really focused on, I have not even mentioned the second one yet. The first one I mentioned was from Aloe Vera, and the second one was from Rice Bran. These things I would put up against anything else in Mother Nature that it provides for us for a potential healing effect. The takeaway for this part is that number one, if somebody is out there saying all sugar is bad for you, that is a factually incorrect statement. That is being ignorant at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, because these things are sugars. They are not fructose or sucrose, but they are sugars.
By definition, all sugar is bad for you is a factually incorrect statement. It depends on the four types of sugars that are in Mother Nature, and then their source. Those are very important distinctions and characteristics that people need to make. As a scientist, as a writer, as somebody who I consider to be very particular about my use of the language, just please remember that. The word sugar needs to be put in a proper context.
In terms of what we have shown with the formula that we have studied, which I mentioned, Dr. Reg and I started this research on Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis. We use this formula that we now call Daily Brain Care, that included the aloe polysaccharide and the rice bran polysaccharide. I guess I should mention, too, the polysaccharides in rice bran. Rice is a staple for so much of the world. Humans have been eating rice just like they have been using aloe vera for millennia. Rice has three major components. You have the outer husk or the hull. That is basically inedible.
Underneath that, you have the bran. That is the brown color, the material that gives brown rice its color. Unfortunately, that gets stripped off because most of the world is eating white rice, which has had the rice bran stripped off. The white endosperm is the white rice that has no rice bran in it. If you are eating rice bran, as I do, I eat rice bran 2 or 3, maybe even every day, a week, you are getting some rice bran content.
I would argue that if you are past middle age, if you have an existing health challenge or more than one, you probably cannot get enough. You would have to eat a pound of brown rice every day to really get the same amount of content in our product. The same thing is true with aloe vera. Sometimes when I mention this, when I talk about our research, at least one person will say, “I will just eat aloe vera gel.”
I do not know about you over there on the West Coast, but here in Miami, we have aloe vera growing in our backyard. Let me tell you, I am not out there snipping leaves every day, sucking the gel down. Number one, it tastes nasty. Number two, it is 99 point something percent water. You could not possibly get enough of that gel into you to have a therapeutic or physiological effect, like when you dehydrate it and then extract the polysaccharides from the other materials.
Dr. Lewis’ Significant Clinical Trial Results
You concentrate it into a dose that we know is effective. We use this formula in two different trials. The first one in Alzheimer’s, we looked at people with moderate to severe severity of the disease. Basically, the worst case of this tragic, horrific disease is now roughly the sixth leading killer of Americans. It might even be higher than that now. We put them on this formula for twelve months. We assess their cognitive function at baseline, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. We drew their blood at baseline and twelve months.
Zach, we showed something completely unparalleled in the scientific literature. If it sounds like I am bragging at this point, I probably am a little bit because I am so proud of our work. We showed clinically and statistically significant improvements in cognitive function at 9 and 12 months in people with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease. These people, by the way, did not just have Alzheimer’s. They had diabetes, they had depression, they had different forms of heart disease.
They happen to be 79.9 years of age on average. These were quite old folks, and these were very sick folks. We showed something in the scientific literature that nothing else has shown. Period. You can compare that to the five FDA-approved drugs for dementia. You can compare that to any diet, any other dietary supplement, exercise, hyperbaric oxygen, red light therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, acupuncture, you name it.
Try to prove me wrong. I would love for somebody to show me some other study that is just remotely close to what we have shown, because there is nothing else to my knowledge that exists. That first paper we published, four papers now from the study, from the Alzheimer’s study, we published four papers. That first paper was published in 2013. How do you explain that clinical practical finding? We had three very important findings at the cellular level in that study.
First, we showed an improvement over the twelve-month period in our CD4 to CD8 ratio. That is simply a marker of our overall immune system’s functioning. Our CD4 cells are helper cells of the immune system. Our CD8 cells are our cytotoxic cells of the immune system. Second, we showed reductions in chronic inflammation according to two proteins called TNF-alpha and VEGF. Those have been classically looked at in heart disease and cancer.
Our paper was probably the first paper showing that in people with Alzheimer’s. Finally, we showed a 286% increase in something called the CD14 cells. CD14 cells are adult stem cells. I am sure you and all of your audiences have heard of all these stem cell treatments, mostly for orthopedic conditions. In our case, we were able to turn that thing on by 286%. We know through other research that CD14s turn into neurons.
That did not come from the University of Miami. That came from another lab. When you put this picture together, and this was all published in that first paper, it is unparalleled. There is nothing else in the scientific literature like that. That goes all the way back to your question about what some of the effects of these polysaccharides are, and that is why I would put them up against anything else in Mother Nature to help us be optimally healthy.
That is amazing. Congratulations on that. You published that in 2013. This is not new. This has been around for thirteen years.
We have published three more papers since then. The last one was in ‘23. Even though I am not in academics full-time anymore, I am still looking at the data, still looking at other relationships across all the different cellular data that we have related to the cognitive functioning data. If I had nothing else better to do, if I were not trying to run and grow a business, there literally is such an enormous amount of data in our database that I probably could just spend the rest of my life looking at different analyses and coming up with new papers.
That is not really my mission. My mission is to, and thank you. I am grateful for the time we are spending here to help me do this. My mission is to talk about this and to let people know that there is something out there. There is this really practical tool that you can use every day called Daily Brain Care that can help you achieve these effects. It is not just for people who have neurodegeneration. I also want to make that clear. Every cell in the body uses these polysaccharides and the other nutrients in the formula.
You do not just have to wait to get sick. Prevention, in my view, is more important than treatment. It is terrible when you get diagnosed with something. Let us try to prevent something from happening to us in the first place. Thinking about that for just a second. Number one, our immune system is so crucial not only for preventing infection. That is what people most commonly think our immune system does, which it absolutely does. It is also like the conductor of the symphony orchestra.
I like to use that analogy. Whereas if you think of the conductor as the person up there doing this with their little wand, and I do not know what all that means, but you have the symphony out there, and you have the different musical sections. The conductor is basically talking to the musicians, keeping the music playing, keeping everything in harmony and balance. That is exactly what our immune system does to all of our other major organ systems.
If our immune system is not functioning properly, it cannot possibly be doing its job to help our cardiovascular system, our central nervous system, our musculoskeletal system, our endocrine system, and all of our other major organ systems function properly. Please remember that it is important for all of us, not just people with Alzheimer’s. Inflammation, again, is a very important topic that people need to understand. If we have acute trauma, if we are involved in an auto accident, God forbid we have a heart attack or a stroke, or if we get infected with something, we need inflammation in those instances.
That inflammation, all of those signaling mechanisms, actually help us to survive. We need inflammation acutely. The chronic inflammation type is when you resolve an acute issue and then, hopefully, the other part of your immune system, your anti-inflammatory signaling, turns all that off. If it does not, now this is what we refer to as transitioning into chronic inflammation. This is where it becomes very bad for us because now we know that it has been related to all these diseases that are killing us.
Inflammation actually helps us survive acute trauma, an auto accident, stroke, or infection.
We want to be able to keep that under control, which is again what these polysaccharides do. Finally, with our adult stem cell production, that is a hallmark of us literally living every single day. Unfortunately, like so many other things in the way our body works, as we get past 25 or 30 years of age, things like that start to shut down. They start to become less effective. They do not work the way they did when we were children or even an adolescent.
To be able to boost that adult stem cell production process, where the body is repairing and restoring itself like it was when we were much younger, that is also very important. These are things that we can all benefit from. Again, we do not have to be old. We do not have to be sick. We do not have to already be diagnosed with something to be able to enjoy these benefits.
Thanks for unpacking that, and thanks for the work that you have done to get to that place. Daily Brain Care. You mentioned to me before we started recording, too, that this is like a cradle-to-grave tool. You have given it to your own children once they turn six months old, you and your wife take it every day, and your mom takes it every day. This is like a daily tool that can really give you that, like you mentioned, the right dose of those polysaccharides.
For me, this is such a crucial tool in your health toolbox that you should utilize every single day again, to keep your immune system functioning the way it is supposed to, keep that inflammation down, and boost your adult stem cell production. We are really only scratching the surface of all these different effects, but for the average person out there tuning in who may be saying, “What do they do for me, or how can they help me?” Again, these are some of the most significant effects that I can mention briefly and at a high level.
You also mentioned rice bran. A lot of people eat white rice. If you are at Chipotle or something like that, choosing the brown rice is a healthier option. Is that what I am having?
No question. You are getting the rice bran with the brown rice. If you are only eating white rice, unfortunately, the bran has been stripped off.
Any of those white varieties, like Jasmine rice, have no rice bran. No rice bran.
If it is white, the bran has been stripped off of it.
A Glimpse Into Dr. Lewis’ Daily Routine
That is helpful to note, too. I know we are approaching the end of our allocated time here. Walk us through your day. What do you eat? When do you eat? You mentioned you exercise for at least 30 minutes every day. I love that you gave us two primary pillars for optimal health. The diet, hopefully a plant-based diet, supplements, and daily exercise. Can you just walk us through how you live this out in your day-to-day life?
We have a sixteen-month-old, so my sleep is not what it normally should be, but he will grow up, and then I will get back to baseline on my sleep here, hopefully in the next six months or so. I wake up and first of all take my supplements, including Daily Brain Care. I take my first round of supplements in the morning. It totally depends on his schedule. That could be 7:00 AM. It could be 9:00 AM. It is not exactly a set schedule at this point. Nonetheless, I take my first round of supplements.
I drink water all throughout the day, by the way. I probably drink a gallon, but I definitely drink at least three liters of water every single day. I take my supplements. I am very intuitive. Some people are very strict or very regimented about their time-restricted eating or their intermittent fasting schedule. I do that a little bit, but I am not so rigid about it that I am constantly looking at my clock or wondering, “I only have five more minutes to eat.”
I am not that rigid. I am very structured, but when it comes to stuff like that, it is already so ingrained in who I am that I just do not, for me, that is not a priority to be that regimented. If I am hungry right then, I will go ahead and make a smoothie. My first meal almost every day, unless I am truly fasting, is a smoothie. I make a homemade smoothie. I usually use almond milk. It could be oat. It could be water, some kind of non-dairy base as my liquid. I mix a wide range of stuff in it.
You are talking about everything from any green that you can think of to bananas, apples, every berry you can think of, mango, papaya, dragon fruit, and passion fruit. I am big into all those different things. Cherries. I have a wide variety of nuts and seeds. That could be pecans, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flax seed. Again, a wide variety of those guys. I put in a little bit of cinnamon. I blend that all up. That is at least, and I am guesstimating here because it has been a while since I actually made an entire nutrient breakdown of my smoothies.
I will say from what I am eating now, because I definitely do not eat as much as I did twenty years ago, that is probably somewhere between 600 and 800 calories. Because it is so dense in fiber and all the nutrition, I am full on that for a long time. It will last me throughout the day. I am really down to eating basically two meals per day. I might have a protein bar or an orange or some handful of nuts or something a couple of times during the day, and then I will have dinner.
We have done something the last few years that has been really nice, even though my mom and I go grocery shopping every week. We also have a meal service called Green Chef. I do not know if you’ve heard it. They send you two to four meals per week. It comes with all the ingredients. It is not cooked. That is the part that you do. You get the ingredients in one bag. It has the recipe, the menu.
I love to cook every day. We are supplementing because there were five of us, plus the babysitter, who may or may not sometimes eat with us. We have lots of people eating. I will make a Green Chef meal. That could be something like a pasta dish. It could be penne pasta with a coconut cream sauce or with a tomato sauce. That may have some veggies mixed in with it. It could be something like black bean enchiladas. It could be something like some kind of baked tofu with a veggie dish, a stir-fry veggie. It could be like an Asian stir-fry mix, like a Pad Thai or something. My wife, unfortunately, is not a big fan of leftovers.
That is why I cook pretty much every day, because she likes to eat something that is freshly prepared. It is a very wide range of different kinds of vegetables and grains. Again, supplementing it with things like tofu or maybe a veggie burger or something like that. It is baked potatoes. It is basically anything that you can think of in terms of just about every kind of vegetable out there that we would eat. The only vegetable, actually, in full disclosure, that I do not like is asparagus. I find the smell of it to be very pungent for me, but other than asparagus, I will eat pretty much any vegetable.
All About Daily Brain Care
That is basically it for the day. Tell us about Daily Brain Care. How can we find out if someone is interested in utilizing that as a tool? Do you have other supplements that you have produced as well?
We do. In addition to the Daily Brain Care in the study, we used a powder version of it. When I launched Dr. Lewis Nutrition five years ago, we occasionally got feedback from people saying, “I do not like the taste. I do not like the texture.” We encapsulated it, too. We now have it in a capsule version in addition to the original powder. Exact same formulation. It is just your preference of powder versus a capsule.
Under our Dr. Lewis Nutrition brand, we also have three products that we have recently launched. One is vitamins D3 and K2 because about 70% of Americans are either insufficient or deficient in their vitamin D level. You need to be taking vitamin K2 along with it because they work synergistically to help push calcium into the bones, not leave it floating around in the bloodstream, where we do not want the calcium.
We also have a curcumin product. I am a big fan of curcumin. I would put it up there just about on the same threshold as the polysaccharides. We also have EGCG. EGCG is the primary polyphenol in green tea. Green tea has been consumed by most of the Asian countries for literally millennia. It has all kinds of amazing antioxidant effects. Now, what the science is showing is that it is really because of the EGCG, the primary polyphenol. With all three of these products, we have a liposomal technology that my manufacturing partner and his dad created.
His dad, before he died, was a pharmacist, and they created this liposomal technology to enhance the bioavailability and the absorption of natural materials that typically have low bioavailability, or they do not get absorbed well. What does bioavailability mean? Just simply think of bioavailability as here is your hand, and if your hand passes through something and it still looks like your hand, it is 100% bioavailable. If it passes through a material and now it comes out looking like this, that is something less than 100%.
You want the active ingredient to maintain its structure as close to how it is in nature as possible. That means it is mostly bioavailable. Absorption simply means how much of it is actually getting into your bloodstream. Both of those two factors are very important for things like curcumin and EGCG and fat-soluble molecules, where they have a difficult time getting through the intestine into the bloodstream to actually do their job.
That is super helpful. Dr. Lewis Nutrition, is that the website as well?
Yes. Dr. Lewis Nutrition is our primary website, DrLewisNutrition.com. You can find us on all the typical social media channels under the Dr. Lewis Nutrition handle as well. We have a wealth of information on our website. You can call us, you can email us. We are happy to answer any questions that are not answered under the FAQs. This is my message of helping people achieve optimal health primarily with these polysaccharides, based on the last twenty years of my life and all the research that my colleagues and I have conducted at the University of Miami.
Get In Touch With Dr. Lewis
That is DrLewisNutrition.com. This has been your life’s work, and this message that you are sharing is so helpful. I know many people tuning in want to optimize their health. Do you have anything on there, just kind of last question, about building a nutritional plan, or building a meal plan, or eating a whole-food plant-based diet to make that more simplified?
There is a little bit of information on our website about that. Quite frankly, it is mostly geared toward the research around Daily Brain Care, but we do have some general information about nutrition as well. If somebody is really interested, I do not do a whole lot of one-on-one work just because it is so time-intensive. If somebody is really desperate, they really need a lot of help, I usually will make time for those folks because my heart goes out to people who are suffering. Nutrition is such a powerful tool. I just hate the fact that people do not recognize it, and then they do not even know how to utilize it. If somebody really needs help, I will be happy to do that.
Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. Thank you for putting in the time and effort and energy to create the products that you have, to do the research and the background. It is very helpful. I appreciate the work that you are doing. I hope that we can all continue to optimize our health as a result of your great work. Thanks for being with us. Go enjoy the workout, enjoy your young kids, and your lecture later this afternoon at the University of Miami as well.
Thank you, Zach, for having me. It has been a pleasure, and I am happy to come back anytime if you like.
Sounds good. We will look forward to it. Have a great day.
Thank you. You too.
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What a fascinating conversation with Dr. Lewis. I know we covered a lot in there. A few key takeaways for me. He talked about his three main pillars for optimal health. That was a whole-food plant-based diet, which he obviously is an advocate for. He talked about how we need about 40 different nutrients to have optimal health, and we can get all of those from plants, essentially supplements, and then daily exercise. Those are the three core pillars that he practices every day and practices what he preaches. We talked a lot about protein and how much protein intake.
His recommendation, 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, does not amount to a huge portion of our overall intake. Maybe only about 12% is an ideal ratio of our caloric intake could come from protein. We can get that from things like nuts and seeds and beans and lentils and tofu. 58% should come from complex carbs, and then 30% from fats. We talked a lot about the polysaccharides and the research and the amazing work that he has done for the last twenty years on that.
The amazing results and impacts that his supplement and mixture have on our Daily Brain Care is the name of the product. The impacts that he mentioned there, which I think are amazing, are clinically and statistically validated, reducing inflammation and increasing our immune system’s ability to function. Also boost our adult stem cell production. Pretty fantastic product, Daily Brain Care.
He has a few other supplements that he mentioned as well. You can find all of that at DrLewisNutrition.com. I would encourage you to check that out and do a little more research, which he has there on his website as well. Thanks so much for tuning in. Thanks for being a part of our show’s community. We hope you have a great day. We will see you back here next time.
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