 Welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast. This week we're speaking with a critically acclaimed journalist, author, and microbiologist Eugenia Bone. Eugenia Bone, she's a nationally-known nature and food writer and author. I actually had her previous book, which is Michaelphilia. She's the author of a new book called Microbiata. Actually, Microbia. Sorry, I'm in the Microbiata Society, so it always just comes out of my lips. And your story is fantastic on how this came about and we're going to delve into that. And so if you guys want a fascinating story of almost reinventing yourself in midlife, which I did in midlife, this is another great story and I really want to get into that. So you've written in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine, you've had the Kitchen Ecosystem book. So this is a journey into the unseen world around you and it's out now, correct? That's right. Okay, so welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I think before we dive into Microbiology, I think your story on how you decided to get into this is just fantastic. So can you can you share that with us? Yeah. So first a disclaimer, I didn't get a degree in microbiology. What I was about is I found myself in middle age reading these headlines about all the new discoveries about the gut microbiome and plant soil microbiome and stuff like that. And I just felt like out of my element, I didn't really know. I really didn't even know what probiotics were and how they mattered to me. I really felt like I was at a loss when the scientific world was speeding along with all these fantastic new discoveries. So I basically went back to school to get my biochops so that I could be a better consumer of this news. And it really, you know, changed my life. But I'll tell you going back to school in middle age was not easy. But it was worth it and it opened my world in many ways. Not only about what I was capable of doing because as a writer, I thought my whole life that I didn't have the gene for science. But it turns out I have the gene for persistence. And that makes a big difference when it comes back to going back to school in middle age. So you went for a year at Columbia. Is that right? And you moved to New York City to do that? Or I'm a resident of New York City and I went to Barnard, you know, in the Reagan era, right? English major in the Reagan era. And I thought I'd go back to I knew microbiology would be tough no matter where I went. But I thought, well, if I go to Columbia, at least I'll know where stuff is. But that turned out to not be true. I didn't know where anything was. I was constantly asking the kids, you know, where classes were and how to work the water machine, the water distribution machines. I mean, everything was new. School in the 21st century is very different from school in the 20th century. But, you know, I muddled along and I got what I was after, which just was those chops that would allow me to to make sense of what was the headlines, the news that was coming in. So, you know, you have a background in fungus mushrooms. Yeah. Was your interest in mushrooms? Did that help prepare you for, you know, getting involved in, you know, that part of the microbiome and the biome? Yeah, that's a good question because it kind of did it in the sense that it wet my appetite to understand biology in a deeper way. Mushrooms were the window by which I came to understand nature in a more profound way than than just somebody who kind of admired flowers. And so, so, yes, studying mushrooms, wet my appetite, got me into it, but nothing could have prepared me for the course look, the amount of reading and all of the definitions that I had to study in order just to get through basic biology. Gotcha. I know that as doctors, like it weeds out all of these people when they put you through this like boot camp of biology. Well, that's true. You know, we do have to pass a few biology courses to get where we're going. Oh, yeah. But in fact, medical schools really like people who are, for instance, English majors because, you know, it broadens our horizons. And it's great to have a writer come, you know, kind of into into my world. And so there's so much we want to talk about. And I what I'd like to do is I know you're interested in the soil microbiology and that biome of the soil. And I'm going to start. I was at a meeting about a little over a month ago in Aspen and had the pleasure of simultaneously talking with Al Gore and Michael Mondavi, the son of Robert Mondavi. And we were talking about soil in the vineyards. And Michael was saying that his grandfather took him out as a young boy into the vineyards. And he dug up a handful of soil and he shoved it in Michael's face. And he says, Now, you look at this, you smell it. This is not your future. It's your children's future and your grandchildren's future. And you have to take care of the soil. And Michael was saying that they were addicted to chemicals in their vineyards for over 10 years. Yeah. And that the the soil had become sterile and that took them 10 years to wean themselves off of chemical addiction. Yeah. So for that, for the uninitiative, what's he talking about? Go. OK. So plants make their own food, right? Through photosynthesis, but they also need all kinds of micronutrients as do we phosphorus. Right. And of course, they need lots of water. So microbes in the soil deliver those nutrients to the plant, like nitrogen, for example. And they also deliver all kinds, not only nutrition services in soil, but defense services. So a plant can will actually recruit from the soil bacterial mercenaries to help that plant fight off a attack from a pathogen, like a fungus that's attacking or insect pathogen. When you, when we give, when we feed our our plants, nitrogen fertilizers, for example, and phosphorus fertilizers, the plant doesn't need to recruit the microbes in the soil to provide those services, same with pesticides. And what the plant does is it gives up all this sugar that it makes from photosynthesis to attract the simulants that will bring them, you know, the microbes that will bring them these these nutrients they need. If we're giving the nitrogen to the plant, the plant says, well, I'm not going to give up any sugar, why should I? And so the fungal and bacterial symbionts, they decrease in diversity. When you have a decrease in diversity, of course, you know this very well, that when there's a decrease in diversity, there's less jobs. There's less microbial life available to do jobs that can help the plant in a pinch, like warming temperatures, drought, salt, inundations, things like that. So our our addiction to these fertilizers really undermines the health of the plant and the health of the plant is directly related to our health. So, you know, it's a there's a step. There's a, you know, an extra step there. But ultimately, we're undermining our own well being by feeding the plant and not letting soil microbes do that job. Well, yeah, I spent a lot of time talking to winemakers and, you know, not every one of them will tell you that great wine obviously comes from their terroir and that, you know, a great wine taster, which I'm not, can spot a terroir, you know, in the glass and can identify oftentimes the vineyard or the year. And it's fascinating that this terroir, what the plant is eating and what the plant is getting from the soil microbes is really essential to what the plant will eventually give us. Yeah. So, you know, I have a saying in my book that you are what you eat, but probably more importantly, you are what the thing you're eating ate. Exactly. And that's what the microbiology says. Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the things and as we go along, one of the things that has fascinated me, particularly learning about the the influence of the microbiome of the microbes on the plant root system is our gut. And we're going to we're going to head there in a minute. As you know, or hopefully, you know, our gut is the surface area of about a tennis court inside of us. And our gut is basically very, very, very, very, very tiny roots, which are our microvilli. And the analogy I like people to visualize, we know a plant's roots go into the soil and that soil is full of microbes that are literally assisting the plant in getting the nutrients it needs. And so we have a root system that actually goes into our soil and the soil is that's right, that our soil is made up of the food we eat, but also our microbes. Yeah. And so the more I can get people to realize that our root, we have a root system. Way to look. Yeah. And as you know, we have a very complex ecosystem in our soil that you so nicely point out has been marvelously destroyed. And I mean, it's it's been craziness. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's been destroyed. And before we head to our root system, one of my favorite subjects or least favorite subjects is glyphosate and roundup. And what it has done to that ecosystem in plants in the soil and then we'll we'll go into what it's doing to us. But you do write about glyphosate and roundup. Thoughts. Well, there's unfortunately, not a whole lot of information out there, to be honest with you. I think there might be some suppression of science going on about glyphosate. It's turning up in people's guts. What kind of effect it's having? I think I read a paper not too long ago that's suggested that there was some destruction of microbial populations as a result of the presence of glyphosate. But it's just what really kind of breaks my heart about this situation is it the science that can help us really understand what's going on and and lead to good legislation and regulation. I think it's not being made available or it's being it's it's hard for scientists to get in there and do the work and to get funding to do the work. So I think that ultimately it's going to have to be public indignation that says, no, no, no, you need to tell us what it is we're putting in our bodies. Supposedly it breaks down. But if it's showing up in your gut, then it's not. Gotcha. So let's let's go to the microbes in us and on us and around us. There's various terms that people use. I like holo biome to describe the whole mess on us, in us, around us. And I know you've learned about this wonderful bacteria cloud that we carry around us. Tell it tell me I've been fascinated with this in terms of personal space. And so tell me people are going to go, oh, come on, there's not a cloud of bacteria around you. I mean, I can see your aura and maybe it's cloud of bacteria. Tell me tell me all about that. How did you learn about that? I learned about it the way I learned about most of this stuff. You know, I got the basics in school, the biology basics. And then I read papers, scientific papers. So the the idea of this cloud of microbial microbes that we're shedding all the time is I think there's not a lot of papers on it, but it seems to be pretty good science that's backing it up. So we, according to this work, we work covered with skin microbes, microbes that are residents on our skin that are full-time residents. We need them. They're important. They help us not get an infection, which is why hand sanitizers are so crazy. We can get into that if you want to do some. Okay, let's stop right there. Yes. Everybody's going into the supermarket or wherever and they're, why is that really a dumb idea? Okay, and I know you know this. So I'm repeating what you probably know, but the Well, we're here for your audience and my audience, okay? So it's a sort of rule of ecology that organisms will fill a habitat and the, and our skin is covered with microbial organisms, most of which are symbionts. They don't do any harm to us, right? But they, but they do good for us by filling all of the habitats on our skin. They're just covering us up like a little prophylactic layer. And what their presence done is make sure that there's no room for a pathogen to get a foothold. But when you use hand sanitizer, it's sort of like taking an antibiotic. You're wiping. You maybe you're taking, you're killing that little virus that you picked up in the subray or the little plague bacterium. It's, you know, we've gotten the soil. Maybe you're knocking that out, but you're also knocking out all of your defense services, all of the defense services that those microbes that are kind of semi permanent residents provide. So then if you do get exposed to a pathogen, it has a better chance of getting a foothold because you've cleared out the neighborhood and a squatter can move in. It's the same thing as C. Diff, to be honest with you. When you do massive amounts of antibiotics and you and you clear out all the microbes that are occupying your the interior of your intestinal wall, then there's once there's sort of empty houses in the neighborhood, there's an opportunity for squatter to move in and that squatter may very well cause disease. So the same principle, and this is what's so useful to someone like me who's not a doctor and needs kind of general ideas to navigate this stuff, the same principle that's true of microbial microbes filling habitats on your skin and that being a helpful protective force is also true of microbes living in your gut. Yeah, absolutely. That's consistent peanuts. Absolutely true. Okay, so back to the cloud of bugs circling around us. Yeah, okay, so you've got all these skin microbes and there, you know, you're shedding them all the time. You're shedding dead microbes, you're shedding skin cells, your microbial bits and pieces. I mean, we're, it's a sort of, you know, an odd thing, but we're actually, these are a lot of transient organisms, so they're coming and going all the time and the notion that, you know, when you were talking about space, you know, like space invaders, someone who talks too close to you, you know, you could say, well, maybe it's because you're getting a little too much of their microbial cloud, their presence on you, but doctor, on the other hand, our baseline as a species, our baseline microbial occupants are the same. Mine are basically the same as yours. We have some variation based on gender or like how often you bathe or something, but the truth is we're not that different, so it's, for me, been a little bit of a revelation in that respect, like I'm all about the hugging and kissing now, because I'm not so afraid of what other people have. It's not that different from me. You know, I used to not hold the subway pole, you know, hold it with two fingers like this, because I didn't want to pick up any, you know, germs or somebody else's microbes. The truth of the matter is, yeah, holding the subway poles, like shaking hands with a million New Yorkers, it's just that they're not that different from me. So it's a really kind of democratizing idea, this notion of microbial clouds and how we, we're ultimately, not only are quite similar, but in a, you could even say these clouds are a way of defining family, because a bunch of, you know, a family group living together, all those microbial clouds can homogenize, even creating a kind of identity for that family based on where they live and how they eat and the gender mix and if they have a dog and things like that. It's quite poetic, I think. Right, yeah, in my, in my book that's coming out in March, called the Longevity Paradox, it turns out that it's basically a story of microbes and the whole obiome and one of the things that's fascinating is families, as you were just talking about, share bacteria and then they share their microbiome and if they got a dog or a cat even better, dogs are better than cats, because I've had both, I have both, but dogs go, dogs go outside and bring in more microbes, but so when I take a family history from someone, I no longer am interested in their genes, because our genes actually are very minimal in our fate. It's actually this huge micro population of trillions and trillions and trillions of genes. We have far more microbial genes than we will ever have of us, but you're right, families share microbes and we know that microbes, depending on the bugs you have, are either going to make you fat or seek out fats and sugars, whereas other ones are not going to have you seek out. So one of the things that is intriguing, that is really hard to get people to grasp, and I agree with you completely, so that's too bad, but you're kind of saying that higher creatures maybe exist actually for these little single one-celled organisms, and that we maybe should rethink this. Can you go into that? Yeah, well there's definitely that question of the puppet master, you know, if you've got microbes in your gut that are manipulating the situation in your gut in order to get you to eat more sugar, then it does seem a little bit like a puppet master, but you know, when I thought about, and that's how it where I was going for a long time in my mind, but then I thought about the fact that, like let's you know, if you back up and look at the analogy, if our body is, if the organisms that live in them are an ecology, you know, different population numbers all living in either balance or imbalance, then our the analogy would be our body is the environment, and unlike a natural environment where weather and temperature is what affects the evolution of the ecology, in our case it's our choices, our choice is the analogy, so we're the environment and our choice is like weather that affects the ecology of the organisms inside us, so ultimately we are in charge. No we're not. No we're not. And so I'm going to throw that right back at you because in your book you get to talk about toxoplasmosis, and I've been fascinated by toxoplasmosis for most of my life thanks to Robert Sapolsky, and I hope you've watched his video on toxoplasmosis, and if you haven't and any of our viewers, please look at the YouTube video of Robert Sapolsky from Stanford on toxoplasmosis. So you've written about it, so I'm going to let, I'm going to set you up to tell us how a single cell organism can control you. Yeah, okay, well this is pretty cool, so it is pretty cool. It is pretty cool, so in toxoplasmosis what happens is that the organism, which I believe is a protist, was that right? Yeah. And so it it's it's life cycle involves the cat, so what it does, and mice, so what it does is it needs an intermediate host. It was an intermediate host, right, so the the cat, I'm trying to remember exactly how it goes, but the the rat gets infected by drinking water that's been infected by cat feces. Right, right, so then the protist gets in the rat or the mouse, and it does a strange kind of little neural job on the rodent, making it less fearful of cats. It's actually not freaked out by the smell of cat urine, which is one of the triggers that makes the mouse say, oh, I mean the wrong place, that better go in my hole. So the mouse wanders out and then boom, the cat grabs it, the cat eats the mouse, and the protist is able to go through the cat's digestive system and back through the feces and back out via feces, so that's the process. But the reason why pregnant women aren't supposed to clean cat boxes is that we can, if a woman gets infected with the the protist, which is, which can cause like flu-like systems, I believe flu-like, but the problem is it can also be really problematic to the developing feces. The taxoplasmosis can is also been shown, and I think it's kind of limited the studies, but it's pretty provocative, to lower the, to cause behavioral, to cause behaviors in men and women that actually increase their risk of death, and the behaviors are really intense, they're gender specific, so a man will become more aggressive, and that would lead to potential death scenario, you know, if he starts fighting with people or doing road rage or whatever, he becomes more reckless, that's what happens to men who suffer who, not all. Yeah, a great number of motorcycle deaths have taxoplasmosis in their brain. Yeah, it's completely wild, and then for women, they let down their, their, their carefulness about sex, you know, about they become more, you know, so sexually out there, more flamboyant, more flirtatious, and that of course can lead to trouble for women, big trouble. So it's interesting how these inhibitions get suppressed just in us that cause, that can potentially cause a death, just as they do in rodents, and yeah, there's like, there are lots of cases, and you can totally call me on that, where the microbes, you know, I just read today this, this study about how germ-free flies, right, flies without their back, their gut bacteria are more likely to be hyperactive than flies with their normal gut bacteria, so there's this connection, these are neural connections, it's pretty, yeah, so I don't know, to be definitive, for me to be definitive about anything is stupid, oh, it's like there's all of, right, this is incredible variety, and so yeah, you're right, it's, we, we are also puppets, puppet masters and puppets. So in, in your, in your research, did you ever get into the controversy with Louis, Louis Pasteur and his arch-rival Beauchamp, did you ever have an opportunity to get into that? Yeah, about it, but I didn't really report so much on the, I reported, I report in microbex, it's really interested in the idea that why do we think about, about bacteria and other microbes in terms of germs, as back, you know, where does this negative thing come from, and so yeah, I address a little bit the fact that we learned about bacteria based on disease, really, and that, and viruses and so on, and, and so when disease is the way you understand something, it's really hard to shake it off and say, but they're good, yet the truth of the matter is if, if all bacteria are bad for us, we probably all be dead. Oh, absolutely, and going back to your, your germ-free model, we know that germ-free rodents really have much shortened lives compared to rodents that have a normal microbiome and you're right, these bacteria are actually responsible for making a lot of our feel-good hormones, like serotonin, like they're, they're responsible for making melatonin, the, you know, relaxing, go to sleep hormone, and so with, without these, we're pretty much of a, of a mess. Yeah, we don't do so well, right, without our symbionts, but we evolved with them all along. Now people, you know, not people like you, but you know, normal sort of not so well educated in science, people like myself, it's really easy to think of evolution as being this linear thing, but the truth is, is that we never stopped being bacterial, I mean that's always been a part of who we are, and so this, this notion that, that you would want to get rid of symbionts that are actually key to who you are, I mean think about it, if we could get rid of every bit of bacteria in us, we wouldn't or every bit of bacteria DNA, we wouldn't even be able to go, because we wouldn't have mitochondria anymore. That's exactly right, and so, and we talk about this in the plant paradox, but also in the longevity paradox, and for those, you know, viewers, tell us all about mitochondria and what they actually are. I think, I think this is the best story. I know it's such a great story, and a lot of people don't know, but so about this, at the same time that MTV went live with 24-hour music videos, that same year, Lynn Margulis, biologists, published a paper and it became pretty much established science, that the mitochondria in our cells are the descendants of bacteria, and so what mitochondria are, is they are, they're like, they're energy makers in our cells. Mitochondria use oxygen that we breathe in order to turn the food we eat into energy to make us go, right? So I'm going right now, here I'm going, and to that point, if you are a runner and you need more energy, your mitochondria divide individually, I mean, separately from the cell itself. So that was one of the indicators that, wow, they're a different organism. Well, it turns out mitochondria have their own DNA. If you broke open a cell and the body in your mitochondria leaked into your bloodstream, your immune system would attack it, recognizing it for bacterial DNA. So the idea of the endosymbiosis theory is that a certain cell type, maybe an archaeal cell, which is like a bacteria, but not like a bacteria, it's single cell, cellular prokaryote, it engulfed but didn't consume a little, maybe a little oxygen-respiring predator bacteria, maybe one related to Rocky Mountain spotted fever, the bacteria that caused Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and that cell type, archaeal cell with a little oxygen-respiring bacteria that it enslaved, the master cell enslaved to produce energy for it, is the type of cell that we are in fungi and plants, we're all that, and then plants went off in their own direction when they acquired yet another bacteria, the cyanobacteria, that's the bacteria that oxygenated our planet in the first place, they're a photosynthesizer, that cell type that we are, which is archaeal cell type, presumably with a little oxygen-respiring bacterium living inside, not really living, having given up a lot of genes, but it's like a, it's still doing the job it used to do when it was free living in oceans itself, then engulfed yet another bacteria, the cyanobacteria, that evolved into chloroplasts and are still photosynthesizing for their master cell today, it's like we're essentially bacterial, I love it, that's exactly right, we're just a big giant bug, but I think it's really so poetic, you know that the most humble, the most smallest, the thing that we try to kill every day is yet, you know, is part of who we are, you know, it kind of opens my mind to a much more, as I said earlier, democratic idea of all of us, all critters in the same, we're all living here in the same world together, so how, you're a cookbook writer, how, so how did this, you know, year change how, what your approach to food is? Yeah, well, quite a few ways, for me personally, like one thing that I really learned from writing this book is the importance of fiber fermenting organisms living in my gut, so you know that the saying, which I'm sure you've heard many times, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, well the new microbiology is saying because it kept, the reason why an apple a day keeps the doctor away is because it helps those fiber fermenters stay, and that's such an important thing, you feed those fiber fermenters in your body and then they produce these little molecules, it's kind of like bacteria poop, that we need to build serotonin and melatonin as you said earlier, and that provide this prophylactic role protecting our gut wall so that we don't suffer from leaky gut and inflammation and all those chronic diseases that people have now, so I'm all about the fiber, I'm all about the fiber and I really have, I pay attention more to that fact, so I'm eating lots of apples, for example, I also understand probiotics now and how they're transient microbes that play a role, they drop off good molecules on their way through, in one end and out the other, but since... Yeah that's a really good point and as you've probably found out, the vast majority of probiotics that we take as a capsule or even eat in food are not resonant microbes, they're on vacation for a couple of weeks and then they leave, yeah, was that a surprise to you? Well yeah, I mean doctor every single step of the way has been a surprise for me with this process, learning microbiology is just so gorgeous and complex, but in terms of the kitchen, I realized, all right, the supplement thing is really how alive are these critters in your probiotic supplements, they have to be, they're supposed to be live organisms, probiotics are microbes, live bacteria or fungi, so I make yogurt and sauerkraut and I don't can it, I don't sterilize it, keep it in the fridge and I just sort of fold these foods, these fermented foods into my diet, it's not like I'm dogmatic about it, but I eat them regularly just as a part of my regular diet and so that was a big thing and also if something falls on the floor, I scoop it up and eat it right away, no problem because it's not that the microbes that are on there are not that different from the microbes that are everywhere. So the five-second rule doesn't apply anymore? That's what I say, five-second rule, no it really doesn't, it has more, the truth of the matter is how porous the food is, the ground has more to do with the accumulation of microbes from the floor and you know I really just don't sweat it, silverware falls on the floor in a restaurant, you know I want to pick it up, I put my napkin on it, you know I wipe it with my napkin and I eat it, I use, you know it's just not, I'm just over, you know, can I tell you a little quick story? Sure, do you mind? All right, this happened after I wrote my appropriate, but I was in the, I was in this train and that takes you from downtown Denver to the, to the, it was a bus that takes you from downtown Denver to the train station where you go to the airport and this homeless guy or, you know, kind of like down and out guy sits next to me, right, and he hits me up for a little bit of money and and so I gave him a dollar and he turned to hug me and at first I was like, like this and then I said, what am I doing? It's like everything I have learned made me realize he's just not that different from me and so I hugged him back and you know everybody else in the bus was like looking at me like I was crazy but you know I didn't get sick from it, it was, you know, in a way learning about microbiology has made me a little bit of a better person, to be honest. Interesting, yeah, so have you changed your soaps, your shampoos, have you changed your personal hygiene routine? Yeah, I don't really wash my hair, I get it wet when I shower but I don't put soap and stuff on my hair, I don't bother with it so I always have a little bit of a kind of bedhead which you can put a brazen to achieve but I don't have to, I just like get out of it. So I don't do that, I don't, I don't use, I'm very not careful but I'm more suspicious of creams and things like that because I want to encourage a nice diversity of microbes on my body and scalp so they can do more jobs, I mean I don't want that diversity to become truly complex because an ecosystem can become quite complex and you can get spiders in your hair, I don't want to go that far but I'd like to have, I'd like to have all the microbial components that that can keep my health at its optimum place. I need my symbiotes, I'm encouraging them to colonize me. Perfect, all right now what do you say to the folks who are gonna maybe think about your book and say wait a minute, this is a crazy person with wild hair and she doesn't bathe, she's just a nutcase. Why aren't you a nutcase and quite frankly you're not a nutcase but in my humble opinion, how's that? Thank you because I came out of science, you know I read the science and it was totally convincing. I'm not, it was not a problem to make decisions about my own health based on good science but reading the science is the problem. That's what's so difficult for people like me. If you don't have the background you're kind of screwed, sorry about that but you know it's really. Yeah no it's pretty nerdy stuff. And the jargon is really intense so that's why I wrote the book was because it's kind of like a primer, a microbiology primer so yeah, is it chewy in places? It is which is why I try to lighten it a little bit by telling these silly stories of how embarrassing it was to be middle-aged back in college with a bunch of 20-year-olds, younger than my own kids. All right, so as part of my podcast I always get an audience question and so I'm going to leave you hanging for a second to answer this question but it's actually almost apropos so and then we're going to come back and sign off, okay? So the audience question today is from Limie Bean, that's a cute name. I read that much of the olive oil we get in the US is either fake or cut with cheaper oils. Do you know if that's true? And in fact it actually is true that much of what you're going to find in a supermarket is probably not all olive oil. Also you should know that most olive oils that say product of Italy legally can be brought from any other country and put in a bottle in Italy so that's no guarantee either but there is several great American olive oils, one which is incredibly reasonable which is California Olive Ranch and it's on almost all stores now. This has been really checked out by a researcher that it's the real thing. If you go to Costco they have a square tall bottle that says Toscana, it's Kirkland brand. I've actually been to the plant in Tuscany, I was there about a month ago again. It has a seal and a stamp that it comes from that plant and it has to come from Tuscany. There's another great California olive oil called Biryani, so it is possible to get reasonably priced olive oil so don't be afraid of that and as you know the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. All right so this has been great and I think it's been really good because you're obviously a writer but you know didn't know about this stuff. So Eugenia how do how do they find you? Where do they find your book? Wherever books are sold but certainly you know Amazon, Barnes & Noble, in the you know all the online sources where they can also buy my other books like The Mushroom Book that you read. Great book, I love it. Thank you and then you know in various bookstores too you know the independent bookstores we got to support them so if you can buy your books there you have to pay a little more but you're supporting independent booksellers and we love them as authors as you know. Absolutely. So this is this is a really particularly if you're if you're curious and want a layman's introduction into a deep subject this is a great way there is some funny stuff particularly if you're in middle age and wondering what's next this is a it's a wonderful story. So get get the book and you know thank you again for joining the Dr. Gendry podcast for more information about this week's episode. Take a look at my show notes below or at drgundry.com. In the show notes you're going to find a survey I'd love to find out more about you. Take a few minutes to fill it out so that I can do my best to provide information like this show. We try to find guests who are amazing people who have an amazing journey and this is a great one today. So thank you very much for watching, thank you Eugenia for being on and remember I'm Dr. Steven Gendry and I'm always looking out for you.