Summary:

Dr. John Lewis, a health and wellness expert, discussed his research on the use of polysaccharides, complex sugars found in aloe vera and rice bran, in treating Alzheimer’s disease. He emphasized that these polysaccharides are not a treatment for disease, but rather provide the raw materials cells need to function properly and allow the body to heal itself. His research showed that Alzheimer’s patients who took a polysaccharide supplement for a year showed significant improvements in cognitive function and a decrease in inflammation. Dr. Lewis also highlighted the importance of exercise and sleep for overall health and brain function. His polysaccharide supplement, Daily Brain Care, is available on his website and Amazon.

Full Episode:

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Transcription:

Megan Lyons:

Thank you so much, Dr. John Lewis for coming on Wellness Your Way. I am really excited to have you here today.

Dr. John Lewis:

Thank you, Megan, for having me here. It’s my pleasure, and I’m happy to talk to you and your listeners.

Megan Lyons:

Of course. Well, you have such an interesting background and I’ve read the formal part of your bio to our audience, but please fill in some of the gaps and tell us who you are in your words and how you wound up here.

Dr. John Lewis:

I’d be happy. To me, I’m all about credibility, face validity, which means that anything that I talk about anytime I’m lecturing or having an opportunity to speak to people, anything that I would recommend from a health perspective and nutrition supplementation or exercise is what I do for myself. And for me, hypocrisy is the last thing that I would ever want anyone to accuse me of being. That to me is, especially in the health and wellness world, that’s a known not him. And so I’ve been at this for so many years. I mean, it’s part of who I am really. It’s really in my DNA and my genes. And so I started from, as a very young kid playing sports. I got into drug free competitive bodybuilding in college. Didn’t really last too long at that because I discovered that if I thought I was going to make even dream of making a living in bodybuilding, I’d have to take drugs.

And I wasn’t willing to go down that road. It was just not a price I was willing to pay. And fortunately, I felt like I had enough of a brain that I didn’t need to just sell out and make a living off of my body as opposed to something a little more intellectual and hopefully to help better humanity. But as I got into really grad school and looking at nutrition and exercise and helping wellness more from say a sports performance perspective, shifting to a health perspective, that was really what took me down this long road that I’ve been on up to this point. And of course, I had almost a couple of decades in academics running clinical trials and nutrition and same story supplements and exercise, and leaving academics six years ago deciding I had had enough of that and wanting to go into business based on a lot of the research that I had conducted at the University of Miami.

But again, I’m somebody who I’m trying to spread a message. I think it’s so important today with all the epidemics of chronic disease that we have in not only our country, but really worldwide. It’s important that people can find information. And I’m not saying I’m a mecca of all knowledge either. I certainly don’t profess to know everything, especially about nutrition. As you well know, the field of nutritional science is just so immense. It’s impossible to know everything about nutrition. But I believe in a few key areas where I’ve focused my career, have a message and a voice that I can lend to people that are looking for help. I mean, we’re spending, what is it, four and a half trillion dollars on what we call a healthcare system. That’s a chronic disease management system, basically. And so just looking at that one metric, I mean, let alone anything else that you want to talk about or analyze, that one metric alone tells us that we have a big problem.

And it really all comes down to behaviors. It’s not bad genes. People, they think that they’re born with these genetic predispositions to cancer or heart disease or diabetes. That’s so untrue. I mean, for the most vast majority of people, it’s about bad behavior, not bad genes. And so again, I’m just one of many, but I do have, I think, an important message to share with people about health and wellness. And it doesn’t have to be difficult. I spent all these years training and educating myself and continuing to educate myself. But for the person who hasn’t chosen that path in life, I believe I have a message that is pretty digestible and pretty easy to understand. And that’s, to me is very important. So I’m just about, again, spreading a message and getting results for people and helping people.

Megan Lyons:

Well, thank you for being out there in the trenches doing the hard work, because you’re right, we have been heading in the wrong direction. We’re spending so much on sick care, and it’s clearly not working. So we need people like you to start turning the bus, and I’m grateful for your work in doing that. Thank you. Now, I think it’s probably impossible as an understatement to say that it would be very difficult to summarize all of the research you’ve done into sound bites, but I’m going to ask you to do the very difficult or the impossible thing. You’ve been the pi, which is kind of like the lead person on 30 clinical studies on exercise and nutrition and health and supplementation. I’d love for you to share with our audience some of your most interesting or your favorite findings.

Dr. John Lewis:

Great question. Yeah, you’re right. I mean, we could do a whole show just on talking about all those different studies from my academic career. But I think, well, the most significant finding to date for me, and I’m still actually working on this particular study, even though academic publishing is no longer really my primary focus, but it is definitely the work that we did with Alzheimer’s. And anyone who, I don’t know if you’ve had a family member or someone that you know were close to that had it. I didn’t either. It’s interesting growing up, my dad, my grandparents, my aunts, uncles, they all died of everything but Alzheimer’s. No one had that in our family. So I wasn’t personally affected by it, but I had an opportunity to work with one of my, I mean, he still, and in fact, he’s right in your neck of the woods in the Dallas area, Dr.

Reg McDaniel, who introduced me about 20 years ago to the concept of polysaccharides and how effective they can be. And we ended up running this clinical trial with this Allop polysaccharide complex. And so we ended up showing just some remarkable findings from this study. We discovered after giving people this formula, this dietary supplement formula for a year, and these were people with moderate to severe disease, which is the worst. I mean, you’re talking really sick people. They were on average 79.9 years of age. So very old folks. And then, oh, by the way, they didn’t just have Alzheimer’s. They had diabetes, depression, different forms of heart disease. So really, really sick people. But we put them on this product, and we chose these people actually, because big pharma is not interested in that. Big pharma doesn’t typically look at people at that level of severity as being worth studying because they feel like at that point, there’s really no hope.

And I think for many people, that’s really what they’ve come to when they have, and obviously it’s not the person, it’s the caregiver, either it’s the secondary or tertiary caregivers who are around the person with the disease, and they see this person declining to such a state, and they have very little hope from a conventional perspective. But we put them on the product for 12 months, and then we did the neuropsych cognitive testing at baseline 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. And then we drew their blood at baseline in 12 months due to a limitation in the budget. We didn’t have enough money to do the blood at three, six, and nine, but what we showed was just so profound. We showed clinically and statistically significant improvements in cognitive function at the nine and 12 months. Now, don’t you and your listeners, don’t take my word for it.

Go to PubMed, do your own literature search. That first paper we published was in 2013. It’s hard to believe that’s been 10 years ago. But whether you’re talking about the five FDA approved drugs for dementia, another nutritional hyperbaric oxygen, acupuncture, music therapy, sound therapy, whatever, nothing else has shown that. I mean, it just such an exciting finding. And it really was sort of my peak, I guess you could say, of my academic career where I was just so happy and so impressed with that. I mean, even had caregivers and even staff members while the study was running were calling me in tears of joy, saying my loved one is talking about things or doing things that he or she hasn’t done in some cases in years. So it was very profound. Yeah, it was very profound to have that kind of result in research. I mean, it’s wonderful to do great research and do it ethically and do it by the standards that we conduct research by.

But when you can actually make a difference in people’s lives, that’s where you really can do something special. And so in addition to the cognitive function, which again was beyond actually what we expected, even with the sort of anecdotes I was getting along the way in the blood, we showed improvements in inflammation, which as I’m sure everything today is related to inflammation on some level. I mean, you can’t really talk about any chronic disease without recognizing the importance of chronic systemic inflammation. So we were able to lower inflammation according to TNF Alpha and vegf, which again, we were probably the first group to even publish something like that in people with Alzheimer’s. And then second, we showed an improvement in immune function according to the CD four to CD eight ratio. So CD four is our helper cells, CD eight is our cytotoxic cells. We want those to be, we want that ratio to be as high as possible.

I mean, almost. And that’s not just true for people with Alzheimer’s. That’s true for all of us, especially as we get older. That’s very important to have that ratio as high as possible. And then third, we showed an increase in adult stem cell production according to CD 14 cells by just under 300%. So when you put this picture together, yeah, exactly. And then I’m sure many of your listeners are aware of all these. I think hyped. I mean, I think there is some decent science behind some of it, but there’s a lot of hype around stem cell treatments, mostly for orthopedic conditions. But imagine being able to use nutrition to turn on your own stem cell making production. I mean, that was just for us, again, a very exciting finding. So without having imaging data, without being able to look at the morphology of the brain or see what was going on with the tau or the tangles or plaque or whatever in the brain, we didn’t have that level of funding.

But it makes sense to us that the only thing that can explain the clinical improvement on the cognitive side is that you had this increase in the adult stem cell production process, and while at the same time you’re lowering inflammation, so those stem cells would migrate out to the brain, neuroplasticity, of course, is commonly recognized today, 20, 30 years ago it was not. But now we know that the brain cells can actually have, parts of the brain can be regenerated. And so how in the world were these people able to start remembering things, functioning again, doing things that they hadn’t done in many cases for a long time without having something at the cellular level occurring? Otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense. So our working theory is that the body is sending these stem cells out to the brain, migrating out to the brain to repair damage, create new neurons, new synapses, whatever the case may be, to actually allow these people to function again.

So I mean, that’s a mouthful. I know, but it’s just, again, it’s really the peak of my research career and what we found, and we ended up publishing two more articles subsequent to that first one. And then we actually have a fourth paper that’s currently under review. In fact, I just submitted the comments back to the editor yesterday, so I’m not, again, I’ve been out of academics for six years now. I’m not focused so much on publishing peer-reviewed articles anymore. But I do think as a company, a health and wellness company, a dietary supplement company, it’s so important to continue having that foundation of science as really what I’m basing my messages on. And so this fourth paper is really exciting. I don’t know, normally I don’t talk about papers, but it’s actually something also very exciting. If you’d like me to mention that too, I would. But sure,

Megan Lyons:

Please go for it.

Dr. John Lewis:

Well, so there are some interesting concepts, and if I could, sometimes we say, well, what if you could do it all over again, if I could do it all over again? One of the things that I would really focus in my education that I didn’t focus a lot in would be the immune system. I just find the immune system so fascinating, and it’s so much more than just our first line of defense. It’s against infection or any other kind of insult. It’s actually, if you look at it from the analogy of an orchestra, it’s actually the conductor of the orchestra in the sense that it’s constantly talking with all our other major organ systems to help keep them in balance. And if our immune system is not in balance, then you can’t possibly expect the cardiovascular system, the central nervous system, the musculoskeletal, all the other organ systems to be imbalanced.

So I just find immune function in general, so fascinating. But what we looked at is two of the main components that have been studied going all the way back to at least the mid eighties, are the TH one and the two components of the immune system. There’s TH 17, TH 2333. There are quite a few different ones, but a lot of research has been looked at in the TH one to TH two balance. And so for example, with a one dominance, you may have something related to an autoimmune disorder like rheumatoid arthritis. If you have a two dominance, then you may have allergies to certain foods or environmental things. So it’s very important to have that one to TH two balance as close to unity as possible. And if your one are dominant or two dominant, then again, that’s where you can have these other issues.

So I was initially looking at something that I’d read in one article that the authors referred to as an inflammatory index that I thought was an interesting concept. I looked at that in our data. It didn’t really prove fruitful. But then as I was reading some of these articles about, again, different components within the immune system, it dawned on me, I thought, well, wait a minute. Let me look at this one to TH two ratio. So when I write an article initially, the first thing that I like to do is go to PubMed and do a lit search and see what else has been published. I kid you, I could not find one article where this had been looked at in Alzheimer’s disease. And I thought, yeah, exactly. That’s what I thought. I thought, wow, this is the sixth leading killer of Americans. We’re spending over 500 billion a year in formal and informal costs to this disease.

And not one person has looked at the TH one to TH two balance in Alzheimer’s disease. So I was like, wow, what a cool thing that I’ve kind of stumbled on here. So I calculated these ratios. There are actually six different ratios. If you look at these different cytokines and growth factors, these proteins that different cells secrete. And so the key ones for this analysis are IL two, interleukin two, interleukin four, interleukin 10, interferon gamma and TNF alpha. So I calculated these six ratios with these five different proteins. And oh my God, I looked at the data when I first made the calculations, and I’m like, wow, these people are so out of balance. They’re so TH one dominant. And it blew me away how badly they were. And we had another study of healthy people where we had the exact same battery of cytokines and growth factors that we collected.

I calculated the ratios in that dataset. Oh my God, the differences were just unreal. So in the healthy people, pretty much everyone is at unity. You might have just slight different values, but the ratios are all very close to one. In the Alzheimer’s people, you’re just way, way th one dominant. It’s like crazy how out of balance they are. And so what the paper ends up showing is number one, the first thing is that we’re characterizing these ratios. What we think is, again, for the first time, I had one of the co-authors of the paper also do a lit search. He couldn’t find anything related to this in Alzheimer’s previously. So we’re going to characterize this for the first time in people with Alzheimer’s. We’ve compared it to healthy people, which again, wildly different. I mean, it is remarkable, and it helps to create or paint the picture.

It helps to complete the picture of why people with Alzheimer’s are so sick. And then over that 12 month period where we put them on our formula, they actually start rebalancing five of the six ratios, start going toward unity, which is very nice. And then finally, the cherry on the polysaccharide cake is that, excuse me, the change in the ratios over the 12 months is correlated with the changes in cognition over the 12 months. Cool. And so exactly, it’s such a nice link between immune function and cognitive function, which is kind of a proxy, if you will, for central nervous system or brain function. I mean, obviously, again, we don’t have any morphology data on the brain itself, but using cognition as a proxy, again for brain function, it’s so nice to be able to make that link between those two organ systems. This is just a beautiful paper, and I’m hoping just literally any day now, we’ll get the acceptance notice because I’ve responded to all the questions that the reviewers had.

So it’s a really cool paper that we can now show with our particular polysaccharide formula that we can actually help to rebalance the immune system in people who are very one dominant, which is very important to help prevent these ultimate autoimmune conditions that are not even necessarily in the same realm as Alzheimer’s. But as you know, all these different chronic diseases are so interrelated. And then the other thing that occurred to me that I point this out in the discussion section is, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there’s a new theory about Alzheimer’s that there are perhaps people, not necessarily everyone, but there’s probably a segment of people with Alzheimer’s who actually have gotten Alzheimer’s due to viral infection. So whether it’s herpes or hepatitis or HIV or whatever, there’s a segment of the population that they have these underlying viruses. And then just dealing with the body, dealing with these over, excuse me, a lifetime, eventually it has a negative effect on the brain.

And so it makes sense because if you look at how some of the other literature talks about when you have a viral infection, your TH one goes very high. And so I’m just thinking, well, unfortunately for us, we didn’t collect viral infection data in our study, but it’s a nice way of theorizing maybe once again to help complete this picture. I mean, if you look at Alzheimer’s in general compared to say, cancer or heart disease or diabetes, those other diseases have very solid and clear explanations for why people get that. Then you go over here to dimension Alzheimer’s, and it’s like this hodgepodge, there’s no such thing as scientific consensus on what causes this crazy and tragic disease. And so maybe our study, our article is helping will help to stimulate more research along those lines and help to again, put some context behind why people get this disease. But it’s just a really, really nice paper, and it’ll be more useful information that we can use to share with the world. And hopefully, again, I mean we’re not even remotely close to completing the painting, but at least a little bit more on the palette.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, that’s absolutely incredible. And again, I can tell your passion for this research. It’s truly so exciting to be having these breakthroughs when the traditional medical community is saying, no, there’s nothing you can do. And I think it’s heartwarming and amazing that you’re working with these people in many of these studies who are not even the interest of most of these larger clinical trials. So it’s very fascinating what you’re doing. I’d love to just try to summarize those two trials for the audience to make sure that they’re all caught up to where you are in the first one back in 2013, you’re using this polysaccharide formula, which we’ll talk about in a moment, to both lower the inflammation and increase the stem cell production of patients with Alzheimer’s. And by doing that, you’re able to show statistically significant reversals in cognitive decline. So actual cognitive improvement after nine to 12 months. I know, again, a summary is tough, but is that an okay summary of the first one?

Dr. John Lewis:

That is a great summary. And let me just point out too, I don’t want to get us into any regulatory issues here. We’re not talking about using nutrition to treat disease, right? Yes. The FDA disclaimer is nutritional products do not treat, manage, mitigate, prevent disease. So actually this is way more fundamental. What we are doing is with our polysaccharide-based formula, we are providing the raw materials that the cells need to function properly and to allow the body to heal itself. That’s not treating disease that is so fundamental to a life and to the bioengineering of life. And so I just want to make sure that we’re clear that our listeners are not thinking that, oh, hey, this guy Lewis is talking about treating Alzheimer’s disease. No, we’re not saying, we’re saying we’re providing the raw materials to the body to heal itself way more powerful. Thank

Megan Lyons:

You for that. Yes, both from a regulatory standpoint, we’re checking that off. But even more importantly, I think so many people are appropriately hungry to let the body heal itself, and they really do believe that the body can heal itself. I believe that fully if it has the right materials. Unfortunately these days, our bodies are getting a lot of the wrong raw materials, but if we can correct that and give our bodies what they need, they’re super powerfully and amazingly made. So thank you for that caveat or that clarification. And then the second one, just to summarize, you were looking at the imbalance between this TH one and TH two, which is out of balance in a lot of different conditions, one of them being Alzheimer’s. And you found that by giving the body the raw materials, again from this polysaccharide supplement, the body was able to correct some of that imbalance, which then resulted in improved cognitive function. Is that an okay summary of the second one?

Dr. John Lewis:

You got it. Perfect. Great.

Megan Lyons:

Okay. So if the listeners have been paying attention very closely, they will know what a polysaccharide is. But let’s just pretend that we’re starting from a blank slate. Could you please tell them what a polysaccharide is and what are some of the most potent that you’ve decided to include in your formula?

Dr. John Lewis:

Absolutely. I would be happy to. In fact, maybe I should have done this prior to talking about the research, but that’s okay. It’s perfect. Now, the word polysaccharide is so funny to me, and I’ll tell you why. Because as you know, in the media, I mean, for many, many years now, we’ve been led to believe that sugar is evil, right? Sugar is such a bad word. And if I came on your show and the first thing out of my mouth was, Hey folks, guess what, sugar, good for you. You’d been like, oh my God, why did I bring this on my show? Right? But is so important for people to understand, as we say, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sugar is not sugar. It depends on the sugar, it depends on the molecular structure going from a monosaccharide to a disaccharide to a poly or oligosaccharide, which is what in the latter category, what I’ve been working with, and also not just the molecular structure, but also the source of it.

So when we’re talking about things like high fructose corn syrup and sucrose people, the average American is just gorging him or herself on those simple sugars today. And no wonder we have all these diseases. Absolutely. I’m right there with you a hundred percent. Those are not the sugars that we want to be consuming even a little bit, let alone attempting to avoid. However, polysaccharides are sugars. They are very complex sugars. In fact, they’re almost like five D. They’re so complex that they cannot even be entirely characterized. That’s how complex they are. And they actually, compared to say, amino acids and fatty acids, they have way more coated information in them because of that complexity. They have so much more information that ultimately at the end of the day, when you consume these things and it gets down to the genetic level down to our genes, they actually have much more information to direct and guide our genes than amino acids and fatty acids do.

So these polysaccharides, particularly from aloe vera and rice bran, which is a lot of the work that I’ve focused on over this last 20 year period of my life, those to me, I would argue, I mean, I know there are lots of good polysaccharides that come from other things, like different types of mushrooms, different types of seaweed. I’m sure there are plenty of plants that haven’t even been discovered yet. I mean, obviously the earth is a very big place and there’s just no possible way we can know every plant and what its potential health value is. But nonetheless, compared to anything else that I’m aware of now, I can’t claim to be an expert on the different types of seaweeds. And I haven’t really, in full disclosure, I haven’t really looked into too much into the different mushrooms. But again, from what I’ve studied my own work, the work of other investigators around the world that I’ve read on the aloe vera and the rice bread side, I mean to me, Megan, I’d put those two up against anything else.

And that includes anything. I mean, any type of nutritional, I don’t care if you want to talk about curcumin, ginseng, anything that you think. And certainly both of those are very effective and very good. But I have yet to see anything else that touches, especially the allo polysaccharide, which is, if I had to rank them, they’re kind of like right here with each other. But I would rank the AOE just slightly a little bit ahead of the rice brand. But so again, these polysaccharides for our listeners, if I use the word complex sugar, that’s also a polysaccharide. And again, we’re just talking about the particle size, the molecular structure, all the different carbon bonds, and then the source. And that really is how you would distinguish between something that’s a sugar that’s good for you versus a sugar that’s not.

Megan Lyons:

I think our listeners can get right on that page. And certainly, I might’ve ended the podcast early if you were telling everyone to drink more high fructose corn syrup for their brain health. But we can get behind the fact that a sugar is too general of a term, just like a fat is too general of a term. Our listeners are very familiar with the spectrum of different types of fats, and I know they can understand the spectrum of different types of sugars. And some of these polysaccharides that you’re mentioning are widely known as healthy foods or healthy compounds in other areas. For example, aloe vera, many people have heard of putting it on their sunburn. I use it a lot in my practice for constipation and GI issues for clients. But honestly, I’ve never heard of it before. Reading your articles and looking into your work for brain health. So how in the world did you stumble across this, and do you think this is just a super potent superfood for everything that ails us, or what

Dr. John Lewis:

Great questions too. So I have to always credit Dr. Ridge McDaniel, a gentleman right there in your neck of the woods in the Dallas area, who I met about 20 years ago. And Dr. McDaniel is a pathologist by training. But about 40 years ago, he met a group of people that had HIV, which was way before the antiretroviral medications were approved by FDA, but they were taking this aloe vera product. They had no viral load, and their CD four cells were normal. Now, imagine that we’re talking like mid to late eighties, and these guys have basically no sign of the virus. And so they came to Dr. Reg, they wanted to understand, they needed help understanding why this aloe Vera product was so beneficial, and reg’s study was being pranked. He thought it was a joke, but eventually, thankfully for me and lots of millions, literally millions of other people that he has touched, they wouldn’t take no for an answer.

And so to make a very long story short there, he eventually left. He basically stopped running his pathology practice and started practicing attrition. I mean, this was how profoundly it changed his life. And so he and a bunch of colleagues at Texas a and m, he couldn’t get his physician friends to even show any interest, but he had several friends who are veterinarians, who unfortunately veterinarians tend to have more of an orientation toward nutrition than physicians do. But anyway, it completely changed his life. And then fast forward about 20 years later when he and I met what I learned in graduate school about polysaccharides, maybe was a half of a lecture in biochemistry. I don’t even think it was a full lecture. And the only thing I knew about saccharides, much like what you’re describing about your own, what you know about them is that I thought they were basically an energy source.

I didn’t even think of saccharides or polysaccharides being anything beyond that. And so when he and I first met, and he’s telling me about all these different things that he’s utilized this allop in different formulas for, and again, we’re not talking about treating disease, but in different conditions. Like again, anything neurodegeneration, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, bone disease, liver disease, kidney disease, 50 different gene defects in children. I mean, the list is just enormous at this point, but all these different things would respond when giving these polysaccharides in the diet. So to answer your question, I think sometimes when we hear the word, well, it’s a cure all or it’s for everything, and it is kind of like the old saying, too good to be true, but in this case, it’s actually not. And the reason why is because of our 30 plus trillion cells in the body, every single one of these cells needs nutrition, right?

I mean, no cell is alive in our body without nutrition. I mean, of course oxygen is our first nutrient. But then beyond that, we need vitamins, minerals, all these different co-factors, elements, all these different phytonutrients that supply our cells, the materials and the fuel that it needs, that they need to function properly. So again, it doesn’t really matter if you’re in perfect health or if you’re at some terminal stage of cancer or something else in between. You still need nutrition to function. And what we’ve showed, again, and I’m saying me, I’m including a lot of other people, my colleagues and friends that have been at this for a long time, is that these polysaccharides, it is really true that regardless of what your current health status is, you can utilize these things. And to me, the most interesting thing, and of course, as you well know, I don’t care if you’re vegan or carnivore or keto or Mediterranean or Zone or Atkins or South Beach, I don’t care what your dietary philosophy is, you’re not getting these things in the food. I don’t know who eats aloe vera. I mean, there are aloe vera juice drinks out there, like you were saying for maybe GI purposes or whatnot. But I can tell you that’s about a hundred percent water and maybe a smidgen of polysaccharide. You’re not getting that from those kinds of products.

Megan Lyons:

I know, because I try to get my clients to actually consume the real aloe vera from the plant, or the pure 100%. And at least 70% of them come back and say, I just couldn’t do it. I literally could not get it down. I’m like, it’s not that bad. Come on. You can do it. But I know, I think you’re right. Our audience is super familiar with me pushing the power of plants to so many people, and I truly believe that almost everyone would feel better with eating more plants regardless of their dietary philosophy. That said, I think you’re right. Some of these polysaccharides, I don’t know anyone who’s sitting around eating just a mix of rice, brand oil and seaweed and aloe vera. These are just really hard to come by.

Dr. John Lewis:

Exactly. And remember, I mean, even with this therapeutic value that the Avera gel has, I mean, it’s not just polysaccharide. It’s got amino acids, fatty acids ans vitamins, minerals. I mean, it’s loaded with all kinds of nutrition, but what I’m referring to is taking a source where, first of all, you strip out all the water, which the gels, 98 point a half, 99% water, get rid of all that water. Then take the polysaccharides, a manin, acetylated, poly manin. I mean, there are a lot of different synonyms for it. Get that thing in particular, and then concentrate it into a dose of a couple of hundred milligrams. Actually, you don’t even need, and especially for people that have really serious health challenges, you don’t need a hundred grams of this stuff. I mean, literally, you give the body a few hundred milligrams per dose, and man, it’s like supercharging your fuels and turning on all of these corrective mechanisms that will get you back to homeostasis and hopefully back to health.

But I think it’s so important that we, I guess, acknowledge or recognize the benefit. I mean, this plant. And to your point, initially you said, oh, well, if you have a sunburn or a cut or a wound, it’s great to put on your skin. I mean, historically, we know humans have been using aloe vera for thousands of years, and of course, the average person thinks of it as a topical solution. And that’s fine. I mean, I think the FDA even allows claims around topical wound healing. It is wonderful. However, that is just the little tiny little tip of the iceberg of what these polysaccharides will do for you when you consume them orally in a concentrated dose. And so again, it’s been such a motivating thing for me these last 20 years of watching people heal themselves when they introduce these polysaccharides into their diet, into their body. It’s just incredible.

Megan Lyons:

That’s amazing. I know, and we can caveat it by saying this would be conjecture. I don’t think you’ve done studies on this yet, although please correct me if I’m wrong. Do you believe that these polysaccharides have preventative power as well, or even cognitive enhancing power for those of us who fortunately don’t have Alzheimer’s right now? Or do you see this just as a treatment?

Dr. John Lewis:

No, no question about it. Prevention is so,

Megan Lyons:

Oh, and it’s not a treatment. I shouldn’t have said that word, but you can No, it’s okay. You can correct me.

Dr. John Lewis:

Yeah, it’s okay. No, there’s no question about it. I mean, in fact, somebody was asking me about this earlier today, this notion of prevention. And to me, the only, well, I mean, if you’re destitute or you have severe extreme financial difficulties, maybe you can’t eat well, maybe you can’t supplement. I understand that. I mean, there are definitely people that are really struggling out there financially, and they just can’t commit to that kind of prevention or protection for themselves. If you’re not in that can’t, to me, prevention, what’s the old saying? A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure or something like that. Maybe butcher the same. But as a scientist, if I put my scientific hat on and say, okay, well, how would we measure prevention? How would we give people a dose and then follow them all of their lives, and then at the end of their lives, they didn’t get Alzheimer’s, or they didn’t get diabetes, or they didn’t get cancer.

You’d say, okay, well, prevention worked. He or she just died of old age, right? It would take a long time. In other words, to answer that prevention question as being a very looking through very rigid eyes as a scientist. But I’ve been taking this stuff for 10 years. I mean, I’ve been on it for a long time. My mother’s been on it for even longer than that, 15. My wife’s been on it the last couple of years. We have a three-year-old. I started her on it when she was six months. She’s now three and a half. Smart is a horse, or healthy is a horse, smart is a attack. So I look at prevention as like, you should do whatever that could possibly help you not get dementia, not get diabetes, not get cancer, not get heart disease. If you have the possibility of putting that tool in your toolbox, why would you not do it unless it was just financially not doable for you?

But I know for a fact, I mean, again, these are anecdotes from my customers, people that I work with who will tell me, I started taking your product. My mind is sharper. I’m clearer. I have more energy, I’m stronger, I sleep better. My gut works better. I just spoke to a lady today, her IBS completely cleared, taking this polysaccharide. So again, it just depends on what your perspective is on prevention. But I look at this as a very important tool in my toolbox, not just like some, oh, well, it’s kind of important. No, it’s very important to me. Again, and it doesn’t matter what your dietary philosophy or preference is, you’re not getting these polysaccharides from food. So you really need, I mean, along with your vitamins, along with your minerals, along with your fatty acids and your amino acids, you really need these polysaccharides.

I would love to do more research. Unfortunately, as you may know, research is very expensive. And I used to be in this mode of looking for people to make donations to research. I’ve given up on that. I tried that for a few years. I’ve just decided I’m going to make my business as successful as I can to fund my own research at some point. And that will be my strategy for answering some of these other questions like what you just brought up around prevention. But yes, I’m sorry to be so, but I do believe that prevention is just as important as treatment or attempting to help rehabilitate or treat someone once they’ve gotten some really tragic and sad diagnosis. I want to help people not even go down that road. I want them to prevent that in the first place. And of course, there’s no cure for mortality.

I mean, we’re all going to eventually expire, but why not have a beautiful quality of life in the years that we have as opposed to just kind of monkeying along and not taking care of ourselves. And then we end up going through really tragic, painful, and difficult years at the end where we have a lot of suffering and our family suffers along with us. Who wants to do that? I mean, I witnessed all of that. All four of my grandparents died very badly. My dad died very badly. I don’t want to end up that way, and I believe I can prevent that with what I know with nutrition and exercise, and that’s what I do every day. I don’t compromise on my health.

Megan Lyons:

That’s incredible. I was hoping you would come out on the side of yes, for prevention because pro prevention over here at Wellness Your Way, and we also understand, I know all my listeners understand because I go through studies all the time and try to help them understand the flaws and the benefits and all of this. They understand that preventative studies are very hard. We can’t lock people in a cage for 80 years. We wouldn’t want to do that. There are too many factors, but just the fact that you’re seeing anecdotally these benefits and you believe based on the science that it has the power for helping our body fight against these things, that is incredible. Now, I want to close by giving the audience the full information on where to get Daily Brain care, which is the supplement. But before we do that, I would love for you to share two tips with them that can help them protect their brain health that are not related to the supplement. Anything that you do to protect your brain, that’s not the supplement.

Dr. John Lewis:

Well, stepping outside of the nutrition world, number one has to be exercise, right? I mean, the brain, we don’t think of the brain as the same as our heart, our lungs, our muscles, our bones. But the brain absolutely responds to physical activity just like every other major organ does. So man, you’ve got to move every day. I mean, I don’t care if it’s just for 20 or 30 minutes, you have to move every day. So exercise for me is just, again, it’s within my DNA, it’s what I do every day. So that would be, well, number two, nutrition is number one, but exercise is number two. And then just to keep it to two points, I’d say probably a little bit less important than that, although very important is sleep, right? I mean, we have to sleep. We have to go through 6, 7, 8 hours every night of allowing our body to regenerate.

Even the brain. That’s when the brain, that’s when the microglia clean out all the garbage from our brain. If we’re not sleeping, our microglia cannot do their job. So we have to get our brain clean. We have to allow our lymph system to pull all of that stuff out of us so that when we start the next day, we’re refreshed, we’re revived, we’re regenerated, and we have the capacity to take on a day. I mean, when I just came back from a trip, I’m dealing with some jet lag. I’m not sleeping well the last few days and I’m waking up not a hundred percent. I’m closer now. I was really bad two days ago. I’m better today and hopefully tomorrow I’ll really be a hundred percent. But man, sleep is just so important. So exercise and sleep would be my non nutrition go-tos for brain health and overall health.

Megan Lyons:

Amazing. So helpful. Now, I know many of the audience members will want to learn more and hopefully purchase Daily Brain Care. And I’ll put in a plug on your website, which we’ll link in the show notes. You have a lot of really great articles for people to learn more if this interview peaked their curiosity, but they still have some more questions, so we’ll definitely link to that. But please tell the audience where they can get Daily Brain Care and where they can learn more about you.

Dr. John Lewis:

Sure. So my best informational website is www.DrLewisnutrition.com.  And we have Daily Brain Care, both in a powder and a capsule version there. We have, as you mentioned, a lot of articles up. We’ve got product testimonials, our video testimonials, we’ve got links to all the papers that we’ve published. And I say we, I’m not a one-man show. I mean, I’ve had a lot of amazing collaborators and colleagues over the years helping me run these studies. And if anyone’s interested in actually getting the PDF of the study, I’m happy to share those with you. They just need to email me. They can go down to the footer on the website. It has the email address, phone number for customer service, and I mean, there’s again, lot of information there. They can also buy Daily Brain Care on Amazon if they prefer buying on Amazon as well. So that’s also an option for people. But I’m happy to help anyone. I’m happy to answer any questions. I’ve been open book. There’s nothing here that I is really a secret. Again, as I mentioned starting out, I just really want to help people. And I think it doesn’t have to be as confusing or as difficult as people think it is, but I do believe Daily Brain Care will be a valuable tool for you and a lot of your listeners. And I’m happy to answer any questions that anyone has about it.

Megan Lyons:

That’s incredible. It is truly the culmination of your life’s work all in a product that is helping so many people. So I hope that feels good. I know the audience are excited about it and grateful for you sharing your time today, and so am I. Thank you again, Dr. Lewis, for coming on Wellness Your Way.

Dr. John Lewis:

Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure. I really enjoyed our conversation.

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