Building A Better Brain: Dr. John Lewis On Polysaccharides, Performance & Preventing Alzheimer’s
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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. My guest today is John E. Lewis, PhD. He's the founder and president of Dr. Lewis Nutrition. He's a past associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He's been a principal investigator in over 30 different studies, and he's published over 180 peer-reviewed publications. Amazing. So welcome. Thanks for coming. Thank you, Richard, for having me. It's my pleasure to be here today. Yeah, if you would tell me a bit about your current work.

research, it looks like, involving Alzheimer's? Well, we, my colleagues and I, were lucky to have gotten a family member of, well, a family member of four people who had died from Alzheimer's disease who had listened to a lecture of the colleague and mentor of mine who got me into this whole area of polysaccharide research, Dr. Reg McDaniel, who I really credit a lot of this, all of this line of work that had completely changed not just my career, actually, but my life when I think about how profound these polysaccharides are. But

Reg was giving a lecture and he had a lady in the audience who had four family members who died of this tragic disease, Alzheimer's. And so she and her husband made a donation to research. They only asked Reg to make sure that it was conducted in Alzheimer's disease because of their own personal connection to the disease. And Reg was not affiliated with any university or research institute at that time.

And so I was, I guess you could say, in the right place at the right time. And in South Florida, of course, we have a lot of elderly people, a lot of people with Alzheimer's and dementia. So it was a natural fit because he and I had chronicled

created a relationship based on trust and mutual interest and whatnot. And so we ran this study with this particular polysaccharide formula that up to that point, this is almost 20 years ago, up to that point, Reg had been at it for about 20 years, never had had any funding for a clinical trial, but just had just so many different anecdotal responses of just incredible effects, like just

you know, almost like not even believable to the point of people referring to it as miracles, which Reg always liked to correct people that nothing that the body does is a miracle. It's just the bioengineering of life. And if you provide the raw materials that it needs to function properly, then it will do so. And so there's nothing miraculous about that. It's just who we are as humans. But we ran this study and we looked at people with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease, which if you've had any of your own personal...

either effects or just exploration about this disease, you know, those are the worst folks. Those are the worst, most severely impaired folks. They have just terrible, terrible severity of disease. Well... What does that look like? What it's severe? Just put a point on it. Well...

Well, the best example would be the oldest lady we had in the study who was 93. She'd been diagnosed with the disease for about 12 years, which at that age and for that long of a period of diagnosis, usually you wouldn't even make it. Like, you know, normally people would have died before that. So clearly she was very resilient. But at that stage, she basically sat in a chair all day and couldn't speak. So...

You know, she was essentially like a piece of furniture. I mean, that's the worst, basically the worst level of severity before death, essentially. What caused people to pass away from Alzheimer's? Usually it's just, you know, you have systemic organ failure. Eventually the body just shuts down because you continue to have more loss of functionality and eventually your body just shuts down. So it's not just of the mind. I mean, I thought that maybe people would forget how to swallow or how to eat, even with care. So that's why they would pass away. But

You're saying it cascades from the brain to other organs at a certain point? That's right, exactly. I mean, eventually everything is, of course, connected to the central nervous system. That's how all the other major organ systems get their inputs. And so as those connections start losing their connection, then the entire body just starts shutting down. So it could be

I'd say in most cases, it's probably heart failure. You know, your cardiac system just shuts down or it could be liver failure, kidney failure. I mean, just, you know, take your pick of any of the major organs and as those start shutting down, you're not going to live very long. So again, we wanted to look at what we felt like were the most impaired group of folks that...

Big Pharma has no interest in. They don't study people with moderate to severe severity. They feel like at that stage, there's no pharmaceutical intervention that's going to do anything anyway. And

We put them on our formula that we now call daily brain care. We put them on this formula for 12 months. We assess their cognitive function at baseline, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. And then we drew blood at baseline and 12 months. Unfortunately, we didn't draw blood at 3, 6, and 9. We didn't have a huge budget. It was not a multimillion dollar budget that we had. But now, as I look back on it, I wish we had drawn blood at 3, 6, and 9 and just banked those samples in the freezer for later an

analysis when we had more money. But anyway, it is what it is at this point.

And so we wanted to compare within the blood, we wanted to compare a bunch of immune markers, immune function markers, inflammatory markers to what was going on cognitively, because we felt like based on a lot of Reg's previous work, that we would get, you know, a good indication of how the immune system and the central nervous system using cognitive function as an assessment as sort of a proxy for brain function would generate some interesting results. And sure enough, that

proved to be true. So at the end of the study, and this was after, you know, a couple of years, I mean, you're talking about a one-year intervention. We enrolled 34 people in the study. It's a very sick population. These people didn't just have Alzheimer's, of course. They had diabetes, depression, various forms of heart disease. I mean, these were really sick folks. On average, they were 79.9 years of age, so they were an older group of people as well. But

What we showed, Richard, was truly astounding. We showed at 9 and 12 months, clinically and statistically significant improvement in cognitive function. Now, that's unheard of. You can compare that to certainly the five FDA-approved drugs for dementia. They don't do anything. If you're lucky, if you're taking one of those drugs, you might have delay of progression of the disease for a few months, but then after that, you just continue progressing to death.

So they don't do anything. And then you can compare that to any other dietary supplement, any type of diet, exercise, hyperbaric oxygen, red light therapy, music therapy, acupuncture, you pick it, you name it. You will not find any other intervention that showed that type of an effect. And let me explain that for our listeners because...

I make a very important distinction between clinically and statistically significant. So as I mentioned, we had 34 people in the study. If you have hundreds or thousands of people in a study and you do multiple assessments across, you know,

you know, a whole host, a wide range of biomarkers and assessments. The law of large numbers says that you will show statistical significance at some point just by random chance. Using P, the threshold is 0.05, which means one out of 20, you would find something just by randomness or by error. So again, you could have statistical significance all day long, but it may not be clinically or practically relevant to...

in this case, quality of life for humans, clinically significant. We use the ADAS-COG, which is the gold standard for assessing cognitive function. And that's not my opinion. That's stated scientific fact. It's been published in probably thousands of articles at this point for the last several decades. So that measure, that assessment of cognitive function, if you have a change in your score of four points, better or worse, then that is deemed clinically significant. And that's based on, again,

you know, multiple decades of research using this particular measure. So we showed a change in the score of over four points at nine and 12 months in people that had moderate to severe severity of Alzheimer's disease, which is just unheard of. There's literally, in that first paper, we published four papers from our Alzheimer's study

And that first paper published in 2013, there's been nothing before or after that paper that showed a similar effect. When we submitted that paper to the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, about 30 days after I had submitted it,

I got a call from the editor of the journal. He's still the editor, Dr. Perry. And he was like, wow, Dr. Lewis, this paper is amazing. Your findings are incredible. As soon as I get the reviews back through from the reviewers, I'm going to recommend that we publish this paper immediately because of such profound findings. So I always, anytime I have an opportunity to be interviewed about

research. I always, it's not, you know, it's a friendly challenge. It's not, it's certainly not antagonistic, but I always friendly, you know, make a friendly challenge to any listener out there. If you can find another paper that's been published in the scientific literature showing anything similar, I, by all means, please send it to me because that would be the first paper that would show something just close to what we've showed. And well, let's see, uh, what's the mechanism of action that is the, uh, your protocol work, work, maybe

Anyway, a proprietor. Yes, of course. So that's the next part of this little story. So what, to your point, you know, you have this amazing clinical finding on cognitive function. So how do you explain that mechanistically? Well, you have several things going on. Number one, you had an improvement in overall performance.

immune function according to the CD4 to CD8 ratio. Your CD4 cells are your helper cells, your CD8 cells are your cytotoxic cells. That ratio is very important for all of us actually, not just for people with Alzheimer's disease. So we showed a nice increase in that. That's a general overall measure of how our immune system is functioning. We showed reductions in TNF-alpha and VEGF, that's vascular endothelial growth factor. Those two proteins

have been historically looked at in cancer and heart disease. Our paper was probably the first one that was published showing a reduction in those two proteins, those two inflammatory markers in people with Alzheimer's disease. We need physiological levels of both of those proteins, but when they get too high, then they're very good markers of chronic inflammation. Next, we showed an increase. Okay. So then you were able to reduce all these things.

Yes. And then in this first paper, the last really significant finding was that we showed an increase in adult stem cell production according to CD14 cells. We know through other research, not from our lab at the University of Miami, but through other research, CD14s can become neurons. So we showed in people that, as I mentioned, just under 80 years of age on average, they had just under a 300% increase in their adult stem cell production over that 12-month period. I

again, just unheard of. So put all of that together in one picture. You have the cognitive finding, the practical clinical finding supported by improvement in overall immune system functioning, reducing inflammation, and then increasing that adult stem cell production process. I mean, just we were beyond...

You know, we were optimistic going into the study based on Reg's anecdotal work, but really the findings blew us away. We were just so, so pleased with what we showed with our research. And we only, here's the other interesting thing about our study. We did not change anyone's medication. We didn't change their diet. We didn't exercise them. We didn't socialize them. We didn't change any other variable in the study. We just simply added our dietary supplement to their daily routine. But what is it?

How do you think that it caused all this? What are the negatives? It doesn't seem like anyone knows. And they talk about plaques and tau tangle, you know, that kind of stuff. How is this even formulated? Well, again, inflammation, chronic inflammation is related to every chronic disease at this point. You can't talk about any chronic disease without...

in, you know, recognizing the role of inflammation. So clearly lowering inflammation was very important. And then in increasing the adult stem cell production, I mean, it's a theory. We can't necessarily prove it because we didn't have the funding, excuse me, and I don't even know how good the technology was back then to actually look at the morphology of the brain. But

Our working hypothesis is that the CD14s were migrating to the brain to either repair damage or to, you know, improve synaptic function, increase the number of neurons. I mean, there could be a whole host of things going on there. We just, we can't conclusively predict.

prove that, but obviously some of that's going on. And then within our formula, we have a couple of different ingredients that are also detoxifiers. We have a product called ultra or an ingredient called ultra ultra terra clay. It's a very potent detoxifier chelator. And then we have N-acetylcysteine and citric acid. All of those are very potent metabolic detoxifiers. So again, there's another theory about Alzheimer's related to aluminum and other

other heavy metal exposure. I mean, that's another possibility. We didn't measure any kind of, you know, metabolite, like a DMSO push or challenge or something like that. We didn't do any kind of heavy metal or other chemical analysis like that in our testing. But again, you could theorize that some of that stuff was happening at the same time that they're being helped nutritionally. They're also being detoxified a bit. Has anyone done imaging? I mean, I don't know if you could do it with a live person, but

Can you image the plaque formation of the brain before and after your protocol, for example? Well, I'm pretty sure that technology is now available by CT scan. There are studies now looking at the morphology of the brain of people with, you know, everything, not just Alzheimer's, but other forms of dementia, stroke, people with TBI, PTSD, concussion syndrome, all those kinds of things. So it's... Imagine what that would tell you. Yeah.

You know the protocol works and it helps people, which is great. What if you did the imaging and they had X amount of plaque and then you did the imaging after and it was the same amount or even more, but somehow they were better off cognitively? What would you expect if you had X-test imaging before and after? What would you see? Well, you see, that's part of the mystery of Alzheimer's disease is that if you look at Alzheimer's, it's so heterogeneous. Even though, as you mentioned, plaque and tangles and beta amyloid, all this stuff has been

you know, one of the hypotheses of the disease. However, there is a subset of people who have that stuff and then they never get...

They never develop Alzheimer's. And then there's another group of people who have Alzheimer's, but they never get that kind of, you know, morphology. And then they have... And then there's the third group of people that do have Alzheimer's and do have all those things. So it's really... It's such a heterogeneous disease. It's hard to explain it just simply by the morphology of the brain alone. That's why it's so difficult to get a grasp on what actually causes this tragic disease. But I mean...

My goal, if I can do it at some point, is to have a second clinical trial where we actually do take images of the brain before and after our intervention. I mean, I think it would be incredibly valuable information to be able to look at that.

Yeah, we haven't had the funding to do a second study. Before I left academics full-time back in 17, which has been eight years ago now, I tried, after we published that first paper in 13, I tried two times with NIH and two times with Alzheimer's Association to say, hey, guys, look, look at what we publish, look at what we've accomplished. Help us extend this line of research. Help us, you know, really do something to help people. And I got crickets in response. I got accolades.

got absolutely nothing, which, you know, very clearly said to me that this isn't pharmaceutical, this isn't genetics. We're not interested because we can't make any money off of a dietary supplement. I don't know what's, well, in terms of Alzheimer's, I've heard it's called type 3 diabetes. So, you know, in terms of looking at metabolomics and everything, maybe various biomarkers can tell you where what's going on. And you've got a lot of data already, you know, stem cell production increased. But again, where else have you seen

two biomarkers. Well, so we published, as I mentioned, all of that information was published just in the first paper. We published three other papers. The two middle papers looked at brain-derived neurotropic factor, which is an interesting protein that's been shown to be very important for creating memories and sustaining memories. It's important for hippocampal function. It's important for overall neuroplasticity. So it's a very important protein that our brain needs to create. And we looked at

how BDNF related to, in one paper, all of the different cognitive measures and then in the other paper, all the different immune and inflammatory measures. What we showed in our study was that BDNF increased by, unfortunately, it was not statistically significant,

But it went up by about 11. It was between 11 and 12 percent. If we had had a larger sample size, I theorize it would have been statistically significant. But it's difficult to find anything else nutritionally. I think there might be a little bit of support for lion's mane mushroom improving BDNF. But other than lion's mane mushroom, I'm not aware of anything else that...

has shown any type of similar effect. And what was very interesting about this BDNF relationship in our study was that if you, and this was based on a study that we had conducted prior to our Alzheimer's study, this was in people with HIV. We looked at the effects of HIV and the antiretroviral medications on cognitive function. And what we found was that people that were at a BDNF level of 5,000 picograms

or more, they had better cognitive function than those who were lower than 5,000. So we did the same kind of stratification in our Alzheimer's study, and we showed exactly the same thing. If you had a BDNF level higher than 5,000 picograms, then you had better cognitive function. The immune function and inflammatory markers were a little bit less, I would say, consistent with our first paper. They were kind of all over the board, and it was a bit more difficult to explain them. But

But anyway, we showed some interesting findings with BDNF in those two middle papers. And then the last paper I thought was really nice. And it was, in my opinion, on the level of the first paper in terms of its effect. We looked at what's referred to as the Th1 to Th2 components of the immune system. So generally speaking, Th1 is your pro-inflammatory side and Th2 is your anti-inflammatory side. And this concept or this model goes unbiased.

all the way back to 1986, where a group of investigators were looking at how to explain HIV and why it was killing people at that time. And so this group had come up with this concept of the Th1 to Th2 ratio to explain this out-of-balance or imbalanced relationship that people with HIV had at that time where they're

pro side was out of control and their anti-inflammatory side was basically non-existent. And so one of the things that I like to do anytime I write a paper is I like to go into the literature, and I use PubMed as my search engine of choice, and look at see what else has been published, you know, to help me sort of put together a framework or at least to help

understand what else has been done already. Richard, I could not find one other paper in the literature that had showed anything related to this concept of the Th1 to Th2 ratio in people with Alzheimer's disease. And I thought, well, that's good and bad news. The good news is we'll be the first people to show it. The bad news is, you know, you're kind of shooting into the dark a little bit. But anyway...

We showed something incredible with this fourth paper. First of all, the people with Alzheimer's, and we had another study that we had conducted with the exact same cytokines and growth factors that we used to calculate this Th1 to Th2 ratio. So we had a really nice comparison group of healthy adults on the one hand that had no active disease of any kind, and then these folks with Alzheimer's disease. The folks with Alzheimer's disease were so different.

incredibly TH1 dominant, like numbers in the hundreds. And then the healthy people, all of their values were like around 1.0 or something. It was just incredible to like, you know, see these numbers in black and white. And then over the course of the 12-month period, I didn't mention that we calculated six of these ratios. Over the course of the 12-month period, 5%.

five of the six ratios, they didn't go to unity by any stretch of the imagination. I call it a rebalancing effect, like going, you know, less Th1 dominant. Five of those six ratios went less Th1 dominant. And then the icing on the cake or the cherry on top is that

the rebalancing of the Th1 to Th2 ratio was correlated with better cognitive function. So this was also just a beautiful paper that, again, this information had never been published before. I mean, actually, our entire series of papers, our whole four papers, that collective amount of information just in Alzheimer's, and we haven't even talked about the multiple sclerosis study yet, but that collective body of information, there's nothing else like it in the scientific literature. I mean, there truly is, and I don't...

I don't mean to sound like an egomaniac or a narcissist when I say that. I mean, this is my life. Is there any microbial origination to this? Has anyone done a microbiome correlation of people that are healthy versus have Alzheimer's? Because there could be various bacteria that are making metabolites that are skewing these ratios in one direction or another big time. No question about it. I mean, there...

I read an article on... So the gist of all this, I didn't even really... I kind of jumped ahead. I kind of put the cart before the horse a little bit and not even giving your listeners some of the, I guess you could say, the goodies about why our formula is so just incredibly effective compared to everything else. But...

But the allopolysaccharide in daily brain care, that to me and the rice bran polysaccharide, those are the two most important ingredients along with the ultrateraclay actually. I mean, all of them are important, but the polysaccharides from aloe vera and rice bran, no one gets that from the diet or very few people do. And so to your point about the microbiome, yes, there have been other studies looking at the effects of these allopolysaccharides. It's referred to as acetylated polymannan, acemannan, acetylated polymannose. There are several different

synonyms for this particular nutrient,

but we didn't look, unfortunately, again, we were, I mean, we were only working with $150,000. If we had had a multimillion dollar budget like Big Pharma does for all of their stuff, I would have thrown everything but the kitchen sink into the outcomes. And hopefully at some point, if not sooner than later, I will be able to run a second study where we look at not only the morphology of the brain, not only the microbiome, not only the genetic profile and some of the epigenetic effects, but, you know, just a lot of different things. But

Just one other point I wanted to make about our Th1 to Th2 finding was that, how do you explain these folks with Alzheimer's having such an incredibly Th1-dominant profile? My theory, again, we didn't collect infection data, but my theory about that is that, and it aligns with one of these newer theories of what causes Alzheimer's disease, is that you get infections earlier in life, whether it's herpes, hepatitis, God forbid, HIV, something that will kill you, but

something less lethal like herpes or cytomyelitis. Yeah, it creates probably a background inflammation that elevates for years, decades. Exactly. So you have this ongoing chronic viral load of something that doesn't kill you, but it's enough to keep your immune system dysregulated. And so my suspicion is those folks that had Alzheimer's had, you know, probably pretty high titers of, you know, you pick it, any kind of virus that

normally is pretty latent, but when you're stressed out and you don't eat well and you don't exercise, then those viruses become more activated. So that's my theory, but that would be something else that we would add to the outcome assessments in a second clinical trial that hopefully we'll conduct one day. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. You know, in the literature, are there strange, seemingly unassociated effects or sequelae that happen with Alzheimer's that no one has any idea why? Well, the one that I mentioned about

You know, the lack of correspondence or the lack of consistency related to the morphology in the brain. I mean, to me, that's the biggest one. And you mentioned this new thing, type three diabetes. To me, that's a very oversimplification of what's going on. I mean, I think we as humans, we like to put labels on things, especially things that we don't totally understand.

But I think the lack of consistency in the morphology of the brain, that's, to me, that's the real kicker. That's the one that nobody can figure out, like why some people with Alzheimer's don't have any of that stuff, why some people with Alzheimer's do have some of that stuff, and then why other people with some of that stuff in the brain don't get Alzheimer's. I mean, it's just, it's such a wild soup of unknown. I mean, it's really just crazy. But

One of the things that I also think that is completely ignored and neglected and it's completely counter opposed to this recent rising movement. I mean, it started actually started many, many decades ago with Robert Atkins and his work.

whatever his first book was called in 1972, pushing all of that fat and protein. And then it morphed into the Atkins lifestyle diet, whatever, in the 90s. And then you have these, you know, keto, paleo, now carnivore people pushing all of this protein all the time. I don't think there's any real understanding of how all of that

just massive amount of protein because the average American is already eating plenty of protein anyway. These people that are pushing all this protein, they act like the average American is protein deficient, which is not even true. The average American actually is already eating too much protein. But I have a suspicion because of these proteins that at least are contributing to some of the people with Alzheimer's, again, not all of them, but at least some of them, I have a suspicion that too much protein in the diet could ultimately be contributing to

and other forms of dementia. I can't prove that. That's just, that's an opinion statement. But I do wonder if there is some of that going on as well. No, you said other organs are

Are organs or other body processes affected only later on? Or is there one that seems to, like, so is there an organ, first of all, that besides the brain that seems to be affected with Alzheimer's more often than any other organ? Or are there things that happen very early on and only very, very late in the game? Maybe it could be a clue as to the mechanism of actual Alzheimer's. That's a great question. I mean, if you subscribe to the theory, which I think most of us do today, that the gut is the second brain, we know that metastasis

many of the neurotransmitters are predominantly made actually in the gut, not in the brain, like serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine. I mean, these things are all primarily made in the gut, not the brain. So you would think that with this relationship between the gut and the brain, that there's clearly an early ideology of gut, what

whatever you want to call it, leaky gut, dysbiosis. I mean, things like really distinct, like inflammatory bowel disease or ulcerative colitis. You would expect those people would have a greater risk of having dementia or Alzheimer's later down the road. So to answer your question, I would say that definitely there has to be some connection between the gut and

and the brain in terms of, you know, one having dysfunction and then whether or not, you know, depending on the chicken or the egg, which one's happening first. But my suspicion would be definitely the gut. I mean, I, you know, the kidneys, the liver, the heart, these are the metabolic, the endocrine system. I mean, these are all obviously everything's interrelated, right? I mean, you can't, you can't isolate one organ system and then say, well, it lives or it functions separately from all the rest of the others. There's no such thing as that. But

inherently as connected as the gut and the central nervous, so let's call it the gastrointestinal system and the central nervous system to be very specific and clear. I would say that the gastrointestinal system would be the one other major organ system most likely to be simultaneously negatively affected as you're going down that path of, let's call it,

You know, brain pathology, for lack of a better statement. Oh, you know, it factors into my mind is how people call gut the second brain. So it also now makes sense that as Alzheimer's is a brain disease, it affects maybe second brain choice of that primary brain. It's a very general thing to say, but it seems like...

I think your suspicions are right. The two are very close to connect. They are. No question about it. Yeah, there's so much to look at. Like, I guess they're signaling between gut and brain. That's all another area, too, is what does the signaling look like if someone has Alzheimer's? Is that just, you know? Absolutely. I mean, just there are not enough years in the rest of my life to uncover or

or even to start attempting to uncover some of these questions. I mean, we have, we actually still have, speaking of samples banked, we actually still have all of our samples, all of our serum frozen in the repository at the university. So, I mean, I have the opportunity, even without running a brand new clinical trial, I have the opportunity to look at things selectively as I have the funding to do it. For example, I think

It would be very interesting to look at some of the epigenetic effects over that 12-month period to see what happened at the gene level.

and really start to better understand how nutrition has such a profound impact and role on, in this case, improving cognitive function, improving immune function, lowering inflammation, improving adult stem cell production, improving BDNF. I mean, we have a whole host of questions that we still... Richard, if I had nothing better...

to do in my life than just mine our data from that first study. I mean, I could probably spend the next decade just doing that, but I'm now running a business, so I'd

I'm not in the, you know, I don't have the ability to spend all of that time doing that. But there are so many questions. You're absolutely right. I mean, there is an unlimited number of questions that need to be answered around this disease because at the end of the day, we're talking about now 6 million Americans with Alzheimer's, another 8 or so million with different forms of dementia. It is costing us somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion per year in direct care.

care and indirect care costs combined. It's the sixth leading killer of Americans. It may even be a little bit higher than that. I mean, it's just a tragic disease. It's just absolutely horrific. And any of your listeners who have had a family member or someone close to them that has had it knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's horrific. I think it's the worst way to die, actually. Yeah. Not even nice to think about. No. It's awful. So, well, you were able to still make formulation, even with your limited budget and everything. So what, I mean...

You're able to say what's in the formulation and what do you think the mechanisms of action are, the ingredients of the formulation. Maybe start with the polysaccharides. Well, again, the polysaccharides, I mean, we kind of put the cart before the horse talking about the research before the formulation, but the polysaccharides. So when I met Dr. Reg, again, this is almost 20 years ago, he gave me a very fast education on these polysaccharides from aloe vera that, you know, like most people, you mention the word aloe vera, you think what?

It's the gel for your sunburn or a cut or a wound or something topically. I literally had no clue what door that man was opening for me in my life. But Reg was a practicing pathologist in the Dallas area. He was running a pathology unit at a hospital in Dallas about 40 years ago. And he had 10 guys with HIV come to his office and say, hey, we're taking this aloe vera product.

We have no viral load and our CD4 cells are normal. Back in the mid-80s, if you got HIV, it was essentially a death sentence. This was way before, this was like a decade before antiretroviral medication. And so Reg had no interest in nutrition. He had no interest in dietary supplements. He thought he was basically being pranked, but

Fortunately, those guys would not take no for an answer. And so Reg ended up getting together with some of his veterinary friends. He couldn't get any of his physician friends interested. They thought it was nonsense. But his veterinary friends at Texas A&M got interested and they started conducting research on what this...

aloe vera polysaccharide was doing. And it turned out it was just antiviral. It was antibacterial. It was immunomodulatory. It was anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidative. I mean, it had just all these incredible effects that they were finding and mostly in animals, some in humans. And it went from there. I mean, he ended up leaving. He basically stopped practicing pathology and started practicing nutrition. But

I don't know of any, I don't know about you, and we have in Miami, we have aloe vera growing in our backyard, but I'm not out there every day snipping the leaves off and sucking down the gel. Number one, it tastes nasty. You couldn't even do it. Most people wouldn't. They would think it tastes disgusting. And number two, you could, because it's 99% water, you never could possibly get the concentrated amount of polysaccharide in that.

very diluted gel that you can in what we have in our formula because, you know, again, it would just make you sick trying to get that much. So almost invariably, every time I give a lecture about this research, somebody says, oh, I'll just drink the aloe vera juice. I'm like, no, you can do that. That's okay. But it's not going to be the same effect. So we've dehydrated the gel. We've taken all that water out of the gel.

We've concentrated the polysaccharide down into a few hundred milligrams that the body can actually recognize at a therapeutic dose to really have this physiological, all these physiological benefits that I've been describing to you today. And so that to me is the most important thing, again, because, you know, humans don't eat aloe vera. I mean, you may again rub it on your skin when you have a topical issue, but nobody's eating it.

So that to me, if you twisted my arm and said, John, what's the most important ingredient or material in your formula? I would say it's the aloe vera simply not only because of its effect, because of that, again, people are not consuming it. Now, as far as the rice bran goes, for those of you who like to eat rice and I eat brown rice pretty much every day, brown rice has the rice bran on top of the white endosperm.

The white rice, unfortunately, is what most of the world prefers to eat. That's, I think, like 70 to 80% of the rice sold in the world is white rice. So you have rice basically has three primary layers. You have the outer layer that's like cardboard. You can't eat it, the husk or the hull.

And then the next layer, that gets obviously stripped off first. And then the next layer is the bran. That's the real magic to this plant that, again, most of the world is not eating. It's either getting thrown away or fed to livestock. So ironically, animals are actually getting the most valuable aspect of rice compared to most humans.

But I would still argue that even if you ate a half a cup to a cup of brown rice every day, if you are middle-aged or older, if you have neurodegeneration, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, you know, any of the significant killers, you're probably not going to get enough of the rice bran just eating brown rice every day. You really need to have it concentrated down into a dose. So we have a powder and a capsule version of our product. It's a two and a half gram serving. So...

You know, again, when you're talking about the average American eating 3,000, 3,500 calories per day, I'm not even sure what the average American is eating at this point. It's a lot. You're talking literally not even 10 calories of material that can give you this really impressive benefit. We also have in there things like fiber.

like flaxseed. Flaxseed is the plant that has the highest known content of lignans. Lignans are a phytonutrient that kill the crap out of cancer cells. Now, I want to be very clear. I'm not talking about using nutrition. In our conversation today, I'm not talking about using nutrition to treat disease that's not considered FTC compliant or appropriate. What I'm referring to

is that we use nutrition to provide the raw materials that the genes recognize. And they recognize everything we put into our system. It's not just food. But the genes then guide the cells in how to function properly. And through that bioengineering, the cells then repair, restore, and heal itself. And that's essentially a return to homeostasis. That is not treating disease. Disease is taking a chemical, a synthetic substance,

you know, compound and then trying to alter a metabolic pathway to eliminate or ameliorate a symptom of a disease. That's the disease paradigm, and that's not where I live. So please, no one leave our conversation today and say, Lewis said you could treat disease with nutrition. I'm not saying that at all. But again, lignans are very high in flaxseed, and they are very effective in counteracting any kind of transforming or cancerous cell. We have

sunflower lecithin in daily brain care, it's very high in choline. Choline is very important for brain function. It's not a vitamin, although typically you will see choline grouped in with the B vitamins, but it has very important effects on our nerves, on our entire central nervous system and our brain. It's a very important nutrient for brain function. N-acetylcysteine is a hybrid molecule of cysteine, the amino acid cysteine. It's the precursor, the metabolic

precursor to glutathione, one of our key, most important antioxidants. It's difficult to get glutathione orally. You can take it through an IV. It's very effective that way, but most oral applications of glutathione degrade very rapidly in the gut unless it's properly encapsulated in a liposome or a micelle. So with NAC, N-acetylcysteine, you can take that and then that helps to boost your glutathione level.

We have tart cherry. Tart cherry is a nutritional powerhouse. That stuff is loaded with literally hundreds, if not thousands of different nutrients in it. It's also a natural source of melatonin. That's a lot of the reason why many people who take daily brain care notice that they sleep better because it is a natural source of melatonin. We have a material in there called dioscoria. That's a wild yam. It's got phytochemicals.

phytonutrients in it that help to regulate all of the hormones in your body, the endocrine system. We have another material in there called IP6, inosityl hexaphosphate. That also is very anti-carcinogenic. It has incredible potent effects against transforming cells. I mentioned earlier citric acid and ultrateraclay. The citric acid is important in the Krebs cycle for generating cellular energy or ATP.

And then the clay is a very dense source of micronutrients as well. And as I mentioned earlier, it also helps to chelate and pull out things like heavy metals, arsenic, PCBs, PAHs, all these things that unfortunately get trapped in our body and we don't have a good way to pull them out. But ultrateraclay does a very good job of that. So I say all that to say that, you know, as you can tell, this is not...

This is not a centrum or a multivitamin. This is a complex source of micronutrition that helps our cells to function the way they're designed to and the way they're supposed to. It's not meant to be a multivitamin, a mineral sometimes. People ask me that. It's meant to provide uncommon materials in the diet that are typically devoid of

in the average American or average person, wherever they are in the world, diet today. And so all of these different nutrients, but with the cherry on top being the polysaccharides from the aloe vera, and then probably secondarily the rice bran, gives you this incredible nutrition that fuels your cells and how to function properly. And our genes just eat this up. So polysaccharides is an interesting term. I'll just finish with this quick point.

It's a complex sugar. And I know we as Americans for at least the last half century had just been bombarded and pounded to believe that any kind of sugar is bad for us. If you hear the word sugar, you immediately think bad. But that's actually a very ignorant statement simply because not all sugars are the same. There are lots of sugars in Mother Nature. You have monosaccharides like high fructose corn syrup.

Then you have disaccharides like table sugar or sucrose. Then you have oligosaccharides, the type that come from breast milk or kimchi, different types of fermented foods. And then you have the polysaccharides that are found in lots of different things like the aloe vera, the rice bran, other vegetables, other grains, mushrooms, seaweed. I don't speak to all of those other types because there's just too much information out there, Richard. I don't claim to be an expert in all these different foods. I don't even...

Won't even go there. But the... Just a quick question. Is this some medical food or is it over-the-counter? No, it's over-the-counter. It's a dietary supplement. And so these polysaccharides are literally hundreds and thousands of glucose units attached together by these very sophisticated glycosidic bonds that are like 5D structures. You cannot even draw these things on a piece of paper. They have more coded information in them than anything.

anything else known to nutritional science, much more so than amino acids, fatty acids, certainly vitamins and minerals. Those are very simple structures. These things are so dense with information and that's why these things work because they are providing all, it's like a library that you go to the library, you're looking for something, you know, how to do something. You go to the library, you read several books and you get that information and then you learn how to do something.

It's exactly the way our genes function. Our genes look at all this information from these polysaccharides and these other nutrients, and then they put that information together to tell our cells how to function properly. And then that's why our cells start functioning the way they're supposed to. And that's why you get health effects. Okay, well, we're close to wrapping up. Where can people get this formulation? Is it okay if they take it without showing any signs of cognitive decline? No.

No question about it. I've been on this formula for over a decade. I've had my mother on it for over, mom's been on it for 13, 14 years. My wife started taking it about six years ago when she was pregnant with our first child. We now have a baby number two. He's seven months old. Our daughter's five years old. Our son just turned seven months. I started them on it when they were just

five, six months of age because, again, these polysaccharides are so important. Prevention is, in my view of the world, prevention is just as important as treatment. You want to use whatever materials you can that are the most effective and efficacious to help you prevent disease in the first place, not just wait till you get something and then, you know, try to treat it. But

But yes, I mean, I would be a hypocrite if I was not using my own products and then, you know, telling everybody else to, oh, hey, take this. And then meanwhile, I don't even believe in it. But now that you've been my review, you're all families in a waterfall.

What have you heard from people? What are the effects that they experience? Oh, man, we have such... So if anybody's interested, drlewisnutrition.com is our primary website. That's D-R, no period, Lewis, L-E-W-I-S, nutrition.com. And then we're under Dr. Lewis Nutrition on all the typical social media channels, YouTube, TikTok, and...

Instagram, Facebook, you name it, we're there. But you can, I mean, you and your listeners can go to our website. Primarily, we have maybe not as much on the social media channels as in terms of, you know, product reviews and testimonials, but we've got some incredible reviews on our website, even actually on Amazon, although I don't like driving business to Amazon any more than I have to. But, you know, like,

everything else today. People expect to see products on Amazon, but we've got some incredible reviews on Amazon as well. But to answer your question specifically, I mean, people notice just a wide range of effects. I mentioned better sleep earlier. People talk about having more energy. They feel more focused. They have better recall. A lot of people have better gut function. Going back to that question,

question you had about the microbiome earlier. People feel stronger. They feel sharper. They feel more energized when they wake up. They have less pain. I've got a gentleman in Michigan who he was a former soccer player. He had several injuries in his leg. One of his legs started taking it. The pain went away. And then he said, well, I'm going to do a little experiment. I'm going to stop taking daily brain care and see what happens. Sure enough, when he stopped taking it, his pain came back and

And then when he started on it again, his pain went away again. So I thought that was a great validation of how it helps to lower inflammation, deal with those types of neuropathologies that sometimes from a conventional perspective are difficult to deal with. We get a lot of people reporting better glucose control, better blood pressure regulation, just generally overall better well-being. And then people with different types of diseases. I mean, again, I really am kind of cautious about

how I talk about those, because again, I don't want people thinking or, you know, somebody from the FTC listening to our interview and then saying, oh, Lewis is, you know, again, he's saying he's not talking about treating disease, but there, he just talked about disease. So, you know, I don't want to go down that road too much publicly, but there are some incredible people

anecdotes that we've had from, again, all the major killers of Americans that if you provide these materials to the body, it will respond accordingly. And in many cases, people have very positive effects from that. So it's a wide range, Richard. I mean, the question really is not what can it help?

The question now is what will it not help, quite frankly? And I don't mean to sound glib or flippant. That's actually true. And this is not just Reg and myself, but all of our other colleagues. I mean, you're talking collectively a couple of hundred years of combined experience, both in the research setting and in the clinical setting of looking at how these polysaccharides, primarily the ones from Aloe Vera and Rice Bran, have helped so many people with so many different health challenges or health conditions. Okay, very good. Well,

Well, John, again, so let's just restate the website where people can get it. That will wrap. So what is that? Very good. It's drlewisnutrition.com. That's D-R, no period, lewisnutrition.com. And Daily Brain Care is our flagship product that originated out of all of this hard work that my colleagues and I have done over these last couple of decades from our two studies in Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis. Well, very good, John. Thanks so much for your passion and for all your time invested in this formulation as well. Appreciate you being here. Thank

Thank you so much for having me. It's been my pleasure. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs. If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com.

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