 So I get to present after Rob Wolf or Chris Masterjohn, so CMJ and it's gonna be a tough show to follow So my plan my this plan talk I've been doing some research on botanicals for about three years I started at naturopathic medical school. I went to a little little tiny conference in Texas called paleo effects and Rob Wolf and Mark Sisson when on station said it's your turn guys So I'm gonna challenge you guys that if you guys are interested in furthering this ancestral movement It's your turn So let's try to get this information to as many people as we can and hopefully one day We can just change the world, but about a year ago I was approached by Tony Federico and Jay Brett Smith and that Tara and sorry Amber and Nick. We were part of a little podcast and the podcast was called our Plants paleo should we even be eating plants now? It sounds a little provocative, but I'm going to Try to dispel some myths Because there's a lot of memes out there and we often feel that plants are here for us You know like the children of the forest and game of thrones, you know They're just here to provide us with this nutrients and this phytochemical in order to make us healthier and I want to challenge you to maybe think of plants Not here for us, but here for themselves and trying to evolve just like we're trying to evolving and trying to Connect to their environment and avoiding the mismatch that they plants are presented So in this presentation, we're going to cover the mechanisms of evolution of plants Then we're gonna talk about how these mechanisms of evolution make plants more adapted to their environments And then how can we take and investigate these mechanisms of evolution and do something really cool and create new medicine? If you are in the ancestral movement, if you are in the paleo movement, you're not using botanical medicine You need to start using botanical medicine because it's so exciting. It's so Useful and it's going to in the future in the very near future. It might be one of the The ways that we're gonna save this world and then finally not only using this botanical medicine, but also respecting botanical medicine And understanding that not just because it's natural it's Safe for us. I want to start this presentation with a little story so as you might know Venezuela suffering an economic collapse and within this economic collapse, there's hyperinflation and With this hyperinflation people are basically not able to buy They have stacks and stacks of paper or worthless paper money that they cannot exchange for sustenance so people have a couple have resorted to foraging and When they go out in Forage they might encounter that root vegetable right there. That's actually bitter yucca and it's a close relative to the starchy staple yucca the difference is that bitter yucca has enormous amounts of cyanide and When people find this they're hungry they take it home They can't it's really difficult to differentiate between the yucca and the bitter yucca and they end up consuming it And then they die and the reason Now bitter yucca can be used in eight different types of breads, but it has to be properly prepared and there are bakeries and specialty shops that specialize in processing this bitter yucca But if you do to the untrained eye and someone doesn't understand the difference They can't poison themselves. Why bitter yucca being so mean to us. Well This plant is creating this compound or or or harnessing this compound in and concentrating it to defend itself it put it into the environment and it prevents it deters or Animals from eating this root and imagine, you know all your genetic information is in the plant Have you guys ever seen a plant get up in the leaf? You know away from the predator you can't so you have to create you have to adapt So this plants with this toxic compounds are in fact adapted for survival Let me show you another plant that uses this strategy to This right here's the tobacco plant and it produces this really cool alkaloid called nicotine Nicotine, you know, it's actually insecticide, you know, it kills insects So it's really good at creating this, you know, it defends itself from from predators by producing this insect insecticide But it also deters pollinators So you you are so good at creating this little that even the people, you know, the little bugs that help you reproduce are deterred they walk away and And not pollinating you're not being pollinated So it has developed two different strategies It actually in the past, you know, maybe thousands of years it evolved the ability to self-pollinate Because there weren't enough pollinators to help Pollinate plant so it actually became a self pollinator and then this alkaloid may be in higher-order organisms Is able to use this alkaloid not as an insecticide, but with Pretty cool effects, you know positive effects. It's a parasympathematic Meaning there's you know, there's not a lot of chemicals out there that induce a parasympathetic response and nicotine is one of them It's very addictive, you know, and there's stories about Different higher-order animals are coming in and using this plant because it's just you know They didn't know this nicotine. I've heard stories about deer Tobacco plants, but I couldn't find anything on the literature about deer You know kind of taking care of this plant in order to help it grow But I'm sure you're familiar with this higher And animal being able to pamper this plant in order to help it reproduce So who is controlling who is this plant? Actually creating this alkaloid for itself or for us Now it might sound a little bit crazy, but I'm going to show you another example of another alkaloid that we value Who's familiar familiar with? So that's another alkaloid That is that has this positive effects, you know, if you're not familiar with caffeine, maybe you should you are the wrong conference But this caffeine thing, you know, it gives you jittery, you know And it gives you a little bit of energy and it feels good tastes super good a little bit bitter It acts as an insecticide it deters predators it would be When the berry falls into the ground it kind of like scorches the ground and nothing else can grow in it So it's actually protecting itself by creating this alkaloid Now I'm going to show you another plant that creates the same alkaloid This is the cocoa plant Now what's interesting is that this is another plant that has convinced us to pamper it And it creates the same Chemical structure by a completely different mechanism. There's about 12 different ways that a plant can create caffeine and Camellia sinensis, which is tea The cocoa plant and the coffee plant all three of them create the same molecule in different ways So it's trying to create this insecticide repellent Attractant for other species in order to help its healthy both To do but that to its environment Now I can talk about alkaloids all day long But but something that interests me more than nicotine and caffeine is actually carnivorous plants And Charles Darwin, you know said that they are the most wonderful plants in the world This this is a whole subgenera of the plantate kingdom That was vegan and decided to become carnivorous so This the Sarsenia perpuriate grows in the northeastern part of the United States in Land that is very low in nitrogen And it has evolved the ability to digest bugs in Order to incorporate that nitrogen into its genome How cool is that? You know, this is a plant that on the face of adversity Developed the machinery to be able to digest proteins And my my lab actually became I work for a lab that focuses on the box virus at the University at the Arizona State University And we had this is before my time before I started working there They had no idea about botanical medicine or hippie medicine, you know They just wanted to know how to control the box virus And we came across this paper from the 1800s on the land set and it focused on the mcmack Indians and there was an outbreak of pox of a pox infection and On this article from the 1800s this This was able to control the outbreak of pox virus using a decoction of this plant Sarsenia perpuriate So now this is the the fork where traditional medicine Meets with you know our scientific methods So my lab decided to test if this is possible What we have here is some Healthy cells and you can see they're nice and rounded and they're close to each other and they're growing nice This is an in vitro assay and we decided you know This is that the assay that we use over and over when we're testing botanicals or when we're testing new interventions So what happens if you add some pox virus to this assay you can see how they're bubbling up This is a film of cells And as they die they Go away from the the the petri dish and they bubble up and then they up a toast and they die Okay, but what happens if we add the botanical when you add the botanicals Sarsenia perpuriate the cells survive Whoa, okay, so it worked and it led to the writing of this publication the use of a traditional method of medicine to Eradicate or prevent pox infections So after this paper was written this This whole lab has created a whole section of botanical medicine studies in conjunction with this Southwest College of naturopathic medicine and that's when I became involved in this in this research but Why does this happen? Why is Sarsenia perpuriate so good at killing viruses? Well, it's a really cool story actually Imagine you are a little bug and you're like floating around landing in you know different types of plants and You're going around and then you eventually land on your On the Sarsenia perpuriate on the pitcher plant and you're carrying some bugs and viruses Now if this plant is going to eat you It's also eating this viruses and this bacteria and this in this bad stuff So in essence this plant had to evolve the mechanism the endogenous substances To survive this viral infections. This plant is not giving us free medicine. This plant is protecting itself for survival And We wanted to test this hypothesis So remember when we're talking about forks, you know This so what we decided to do was look at the family of carnivorous plants and They have evolved over different periods of time and look for the intersection When the plant was vegan and decided to become carnivorous And that happens around here You can see Sarsenia perpuriate right there and then the different family that didn't become carnivorous is over here And we decided to test this plant against viral activity and this is what we found out So that's action. We tested the non carnivorous and we did this that you know, this is way We did hundreds of experiments. I'm just showing you like a snapshot We did it over and over and over and over and what we found out is that in every case if the plant did not become Carnivorous it does not have the ability to kill So only the carnivorous plants have this endogenous substances and that's super cool Because if we can if we can use this evolutionary thinking We can trace back the How this plants have evolved and then we can look at ways of using this plants to our advantage But we didn't stop there We wanted to see how why we could use this plant and we decided to test it against a bunch of viruses and Of course it didn't work Because this is not a panacea of health and we found out that this viruses have the Sarsenia has no activity against this type of viruses But it did have very good activity against some DNA viruses and we wanted to see What is the common denominator between these viruses that it's allowing Sarsenia purporate to prevent their replication? What we found out is that these smallpox virus all require CDK cyclic So if this We can use thinking this hypothesis to try to figure out what other viruses Can Sarsenia purporate be helpful? Prospective thinking rather than retrospective so another virus that has CDK activity is the HIV virus So we decided to test it and this is what we found So if you use Sarsenia purporate against HIV so we use a tincture A tincture is a decoction of the plant material using ethanol if we use just the driver This is the blue lines nothing happens at any concentration, but if you use incremental Doses of Sarsenia purporate decoction you can see a decrease in the viral load So we were able to predict that Sarsenia purporate was going to be effective against HIV Because we knew the evolutionary between those viruses So what's happening what happens is the HIV virus comes in and over with the production of that virus over and over and over and over and over What Sarsenia purporate is doing is it blocks the CDK And it allows Doses and it actually stops the viral replication This is super because it creates a new way of combating a way that doesn't require you to suppress the system so Super exciting news, you know, we know that Sarsenia works on CDK and we can kind of estimate mechanisms of action on different plants And we can use What can we do with this information? Well, we know that Sarsenia purporate is really good and inhibiting affected cells just papilloma cells And the same in vitro experiment you unaffected cells, you know papilloma makes you replicate faster reports and if you In fact with papilloma the cells apoptose if you use papilloma and Sarsenia The papilloma and Sarsenia the Sarsenia blocks the papilloma virus and the cells survive this is a type of oncovirus and Something funny about oncoviruses is that they come into the cell they use up the machinery They mutate the cell the virus leaves and that mutated so the machinery is left behind the cell And that's how this this can cause different tumors, you know or growth We wanted to see if Sarsenia purporate Gains virally Transformed cells so the virus is gone. It's Sarsenia purporate able to come in and help these cells Basically go into apoptosis and this is what we found out This is a little bit more confusing. This is the p3 dish when we start on day one Because by day six this are transformed cells and they're Basically the process of cancer and they don't fighting and they just keep growing and growing and growing incremental amounts of Sarsenia purporate and Against the the vehicle you can see we see a reduction and read the reproduction cycle of the cells Which is good Sarsenia purporate works on transformed cells So I have a couple of Close-up shots shots you can see this are the cells, you know, they they look nice and elongated if you put a little bit of Sarsenia, you can see I'm getting a little bit of toxicity if you put a lot of Sarsenia diapoptosis and die and At this is this is a very cool way of addressing this disease process Because Sarsenia purporate is going to affect Preferentially those cells that are transformed because they're reproducing faster. So it's a very surgical approach You can see how the cells They fall and they just die Now We get a lot of Crap, you know About in vitro experiments. Oh, this is in vitro. Can you transfer it to humans? well turns out that in vitro experiments are a really good primer for topical applications and it's so it just so happens that the papillomac causes cervical cancer and the cervix is It's a good way of testing this hypothesis. So we actually Decay studies where we used an application of Sarsenia purporate over the cervix So this these are people that were diagnosed with CIN1 or another you know type of abnormal growth of cells on the skin and The way that that it works is if you if you get an abnormal pap smear You know where they find up normal cells they they do the pap smear and then they make you wait at the time before you either get a Croposcopy or you you repeat the the the pap smear So in that way period we decided to try to use this Sarsenia purporate to see if we could reverse those cells and We did we were able to use those cases. So in the case of topical applications There is we can reproduce the results and Sarsenia purporate could be a very good way of fighting this type of disease Now we can we can talk about other types of Deceased processes for example Epstein DD case Cancer all of them So but more like Processes and we don't have the pharmacokinetics in There's papers About the number one concern for the world in 2050 In the hell is not going to be autism. It's not going to be cancer It's not going to be You know the rheumatoid arthritis It's not going to be gluten sensitivities. It's going to be Because we are using up our antibiotics we we have abused them and we etch my Release that the journal of evolution is bacterial Botanicals we were able to create bacterial resistance using botanicals and it's scary that with meant in the promotion of of plant Antibiotics or antimicrobials that we might not be using them judiciously so to make sure to not make the same mistakes and so we have to respect Just to This at all of the But money and and really at try to advance botanical medicine because answer is out there Just think about how many plants we know and how many plants we don't know and how we could harness There are mechanisms to fight infections If you are interested in botanical medicine a good Into starting a botanical medicine at your house with the help of Tiffany Turner and Billy Mitchell. We created an ebook called the top It's it encasers a an oops moment you can use this natural supplementation to get away from maybe using too many pharmaceuticals, but it's a Using some botanical medicine and and if you haven't please download my podcast that there is very health show And that concludes my presentation. Do you guys have any questions? Yeah Microphone if you have a question, could you could you go to the microphone and yes Okay, so if anybody wants the microphones live now if you want to come ask questions here. Yeah, Mo. Thank you. That was pretty wonderful Especially for someone who I'm only used to using Metronautism and drugs so Was curious you bring up this concept, and I don't know mechanistically. Thank you my back loves that I'm like sitting here in the back thinking do these plants have immune systems. Oh so my Langley actually did part you know, I I was looking to step out and and she did a Plant physiology and she was kind of like upset that she had ended up in this course and After the course was done. She just loves plants because they are so Imagine you know we think that we look at plants and they just sit there and and we think you know just a plant but A good analogy that I heard from Diana Rogers is that imagine if like there were aliens that are moving like closer to these To the speed of light and they're looking at us and we're like barely moving to them. So we're like really boring organisms It's the same way. You know plants have communicate Have immune systems and have all this you know adaptive responses just like we do All right, I think that's gonna be your presentation next year Just saying thank you. Dr. Abbott Thank you. That was fascinating at one point you mentioned. I think how you made an evolutionary connection between a certain plant and a certain virus and I completely missed that how you did that. I was wondering if you could say that again. Okay, so That's the intersection of like your traditional methods of medicine Silly the law the laws of similars, you know, like oh Thankfully with science we can test that and it turns out that maybe by chance, you know, someone did think that you know I'm not taking from along and then you know thousands of years of trial and error Then we But the way we we made that connection was because of that 1800s paper that were the mcmack Indians were using this plant Traditionally for this that's type of skin eruption. So we just decided to test it. Yeah, I see. Okay. Thank you. Thank you I'm Marty Hey Guillermo loved your talk. You had put together like 30 different medicinal plants that are helpful and which reminded me It is a Terrible thing that you're talking about so many of us are talking about about the problems with antibiotics and Bacterial problems that are on the horizon. What are like the three things we can do? With kind of a paleo or ancestral template that we can do to strengthen our bodies So that we don't fall prey to a lot of the problems that are coming up And I suspect some of those 30 items are you're like top three things we could do well you know Using an evolutionary approach to eating to take away, you know Things that we do other than breathing, you know, that's the most probably the most oxidative thing with it eating would be like number two and eating a less inflammatory diet to try to you know move your immune system doesn't have to concentrate on you know bad stuff and You know, let you know laying low and then concentrating like things and more important things like cancer It would be useful to eat a better diet just for immune system concerns, you know and then stationary tail, you know it just respecting the plants I Really shy People not going to a practitioner when they have an infection they just go into their local health food store and just buying Whatever combination of antimicrobial and then using it you wouldn't do that And it turns out that a lot of this antimicrobials have structures really similar to pharmaceutical antibiotics and That's a story that's developing and I have a couple of papers We're gonna publish in the very near future making a very clear Case for that. So just like we are scared of penicillin, you know, we should be scared of Antimicrobials and then thirdly, you know, a really cool thing that we found out, you know, that if you have a cough We found this double blind placebo controlled trial in humans Where instant coffee with honey was more effective at treating a cough than dexamethasone than steroids So how cool that you can use some coffee instead of using steroids for your cough, you know And something that's tasty and it you know, so it you know, just Investigating and and not being scared of of using I'm being very careful in having respect for them That reminded me and one of my big things have come up for me is recognizing the problems that flora-clinolones have Yes, and it's we're just more people are beginning to realize. Oh, just wait until the papers drop It's gonna make people like oh, yeah, thank you so much Guillermo awesome talk So as someone who is part of the evil Empire in my previous life and that is a pharmaceutical industry How concerned are you that the pharmaceutical industry is gonna swoop in and co-opt some of these and it I mean And is it even a concern? Well, would it be beneficial? Okay, so Really funny story, you know, I've gone, you know across the ocean to present this research and The inch and come up to us and they're super excited just like you guys and they're like dude This is awesome. Whenever you purify it and you make it into a pharmacologic You call us and then we'll fund you. No one has any interest in working with plants and you can have you know There's many reasons, you know, a Little tagline that I like to say is that it's hard to patent the plant so I Has okay, so we do use botanicals. We do put evidence behind them But now we're going towards trying to isolate the active constituent And creating Pharmaceutical side of them because there is no money and unless we pass the hat around in crowds like this This stuff is not going to get funded It has its advantages because for example when you when you standardize it and you purify it It's going to be way more effective. This are organic materials that change from season to season So somehow so being able to do those things are important for consistency in treatment But at the same time once you purify something and you in you Get it to the least common denominator. Now. There is a chance of creating Of creating assistance because virus can create resistance like bacteria the advantage of using Botanicals is that if you use this strategy of using Evolutionary theory to try to figure out mechanisms of action now you can create synergistic blends with different botanicals that act on viral activity from different points and now you have less of a chance of creating Resistance for example, you can have a plant that is Directly antiviral and then you can have a plant like echinacea that it elevates your mechanisms of action that are acting in completely different ways But are truly synergistic if we investigate this mechanism of action and we find two plants that are act on the same mechanism of action Then we try to avoid combining them too because you're just repeating the same process and the chances of becoming resistance elevate so an easiest strategy without having to go into a lab and creating your own tinctures and in vitro experiments Just think about that fork where plants grew apart if you if you were making an antiviral tincture with something like Sarsenia don't put another Put someone from the asteraceae family someone from the Lamiae family because chances are that their adaptive mechanism is completely different than that of the first plant But yeah, it is it is great talk. So your focus was on Believely or whatever Induce up regulation of our phase one and phase two antioxidant enzymes and can promote better You know immune health and detoxification processes Have you some thoughts on that and just your lab look at that kind of interaction, you know, we are in nature Traditional methods so we do look at okay. What is good against killing staff? We ask a hundred or Test them and we figure out So we're not doing anything. But yeah, I do like for example milk Help with liver detoxification. It's So yeah, this phytochemicals have this almost like little toxic effect and if it can it can add add and add and if you break that camel's back You're gonna get into big trouble So if you if you have if you accidentally took too much Tylenol and you have liver toxicity Do not take milk thistle because it might just you completely So we yeah, but it is a positive stress Okay, well follow up with the last question. It's a comparative question. I'm a comparative scientist So it's gonna sound very odd to many people here probably but Can a carnivorous plant be wired to eat bouncing off of Rob Wolf's talk in the sense that do they have decision-making Processes about diet the insect component of their diet, you know, I had I've heard of things were like Oak trees, I think they create different Chemicals to you know scare away beetles and stuff like that So I can't imagine that these different plants have a preferred diet and they probably do create new Indulgenous substances to attract different different so it it's not completely unplausible It'd be interesting to create a plant that became obese or metabolically broken by giving it a hyper palatable diet And they can't say no to foods and then As an evolution as a model Principles that we're talking about here, and then I would tell that plant you need to stop eating gluten plant. Yes Everything a moderation. Yeah All right, thank you. Let's put our hands together for Guillermo You