269 Growing Your Brain Food Garden: Boosting Cognitive Health with a Plant-Based Diet and Lifestyle

Show Transcript

TRANSCRIPT Ep. 269 Growing the Brain Food Garden

Farmer Fred

00:00

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long-lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit smartpots.com slash fred for more information and a special discount. That's smartpots.com slash fred.

If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well, you've come to the right spot. It's stroke awareness month and Alzheimer's awareness month. And, interestingly, recent research shows that these two brain diseases are related. It's artery-clogging high cholesterol that's the common factor. Research shows that a whole food, plant-based diet, which includes brain food, can lower high cholesterol and artery blockages. That can slow and even reverse heart disease, strokes and Alzheimer's disease. And the good news for gardeners is: you can grow that brain food in your yard. So what are the best vegetables, fruits, legumes and grains to choose to keep your mind and body in good shape? That's our topic with Dr Laura Varich of FreshPhysician.com. Also on today's podcast, Master Gardener Gale Pothour talks about some of those healthy greens to grow that usually thrive in the cooler months of the year but also can survive through a hot summer. And, America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie Flower, tackles a question we get from Colorado. A listener wants to know: What perennial herbs can  grow outdoors  in USDA zone 5B? Well, there are some. This won't take long. It's all in today's episode 269, Growing Your Brain Food Garden. We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studio, here in the beautiful abutilon jungle in suburban Purgatory. It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let's go.

GROWING THE BRAIN FOOD GARDEN, Pt. 1

June is Stroke Awareness Month. It's also Alzheimer's Awareness Month And there is new research that shows these two brain diseases are related. And there's a common factor. It's cholesterol. You're probably aware that cholesterol buildup in our vessels causes blockages within the arteries to our heart which can lead to heart attack, heart failure or, in my case, quadruple bypass heart surgery. But also it can lead to blockages in the brain which can lead to a stroke. And recent evidence has shown that the same narrowing of our vessels is also associated with Alzheimer's disease. It seems that plaques and tangles that develop in Alzheimer's disease are likely not to cause the disease, but are instead the brain's response to the damage to that poor blood flow. Examination of the brains of Alzheimer's patients have found significant blockages in the arteries that bring blood to the critical memory centers of the brain. In other words, it's very similar to heart disease and stroke. High blood cholesterol is a major risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease.

So is there a way to reverse that? Yes, there is. It's the brain food diet. Maybe your mother or your grandmother told you about brain food and you thought yeah, right. Well, brain food does exist. A whole food, plant-based diet has been shown to slow and even reverse artery blockage in the heart, with 82% of people demonstrating a measurable reversal in blockages of their coronary blood vessels. And this is the only nonsurgical intervention to show such a reversal. And by simply lowering our cholesterol diet and exercise we can lower our risk of heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer's disease.

And that brings us to today's guest, a woman after my own heart, Dr Laura Varich of the website FreshPhysician.com. She has a new e-book out on brain health. She has a free monthly newsletter at her website, freshphysician.com. Dr Laura Varich, it's a case of what we've been saying for years: Shut your mouth and move your feet.  You can reverse a heck of a lot of diseases that run rampant throughout society. You've sent me some information about Alzheimer's that I found very interesting, especially the case of what's going on in Africa about the gene. A lot of people think that Alzheimer's disease is mostly a genetic disease. And, as you pointed out, it's actually only responsible for  1% of all cases.

Dr. Laura Varich

04:41

Hi fred, so good to be back with you again. Yeah, we think about a lot of the chronic diseases that we have. We think about it being related to our genes, but we do know that across the board, it's probably less than 20% that the risk of all the chronic diseases that we think about, like diabetes and heart disease, only about 20% is related to our genes.

But it's interesting with Alzheimer's disease that we think about the genetic component, but really, as far as a direct link from the gene to the disease, it's only about 1% of people that have Alzheimer's disease that it's directly caused by the genes. The gene that we know about and we all keep hearing about is that ApoE4 gene, and it's a susceptibility gene, which means it makes us more susceptible to having Alzheimer's disease, but it doesn't mean we're going to get Alzheimer's disease, and it turns out that our lifestyle is a huge factor in whether or not we will actually get Alzheimer's disease. So so you're right. There is some really interesting studies that have come out of studying the population of Nigerians, and what it showed was that this research, which came out in 2014, that in Nigeria they actually have the highest prevalence of that ApoE4 gene, the one that  makes us more susceptible to Alzheimer's disease. They have the highest prevalence of that gene across the world of any population ever studied, but they have one of the lowest risks of Alzheimer's disease across the globe.

Farmer Fred

06:16

That would indicate that there's something else going on. What is that?

Dr. Laura Varich

06:20

It's interesting because if we think about, we have to go back to what does that gene do? So this gene, this ApoE4 gene. We all have ApoE genes. One from our mom, one from our dad.

And this ApoE gene. What it does is it actually codes for a protein that carries cholesterol in our body. So this, this protein that we can have is one of three types. You can have the E2, the E3, or the E4 gene. Most people have the E3 gene. And so this is our cholesterol carrier. It carries the cholesterol in our body and in our brain. If you happen to get the E2 type, you actually are at a lower risk of things like Alzheimer's disease, but if you get the E4, you're at a higher risk.

This gene creates a protein that isn't as effective at dealing with high levels of blood cholesterol. So if we have a lot of cholesterol in our diet and in our blood and we have that ApoE4 gene, the protein cannot carry the cholesterol away and it ends up getting deposited in different areas. So this is actually why, in Nigeria, it isn't a problem, because they actually eat a plant-centered diet. Most of their diet is plant food. They eat very little animal food, and I think we've talked about this before. But cholesterol only comes from animal food. It doesn't come from plant foods. We think about it coming from something that has a liver. So we make cholesterol in our bodies as humans. It's made in our liver. And so when we eat animals, we're eating the cholesterol that the animal has made for itself, for its cells. So it only comes from animal foods. So if you're not eating a lot of cholesterol, you don't have a lot of cholesterol in your bloodstream. It doesn't matter if you have this gene or not. You're probably not going to get Alzheimer's disease.

Farmer Fred

08:12

I would imagine animal food also includes dairy products like ice cream.

Dr. Laura Varich

08:18

Right, exactly, yes, when we talk about animal foods, we're talking about sort of all those animal products which could be meat, but also eggs and dairy products, like you said, ice cream and cheese and things like that.

Farmer Fred

08:32

Oh, I know.

Dr. Laura Varich

08:35

Nobody wants to hear that, but it's really a matter of degree, right? Our bodies can take care of some cholesterol, and we do. I mean our bodies are making some as it is, and we know how to take care of cholesterol. We use a bit of cholesterol and we know how to get rid of some cholesterol. But there are ways we can help our body out with that.

Farmer Fred

08:55

Yeah, you point out that people who eat no animal meat and that includes no beef, no pork, no chicken and no fish, they have half the risk of developing dementia.

Dr. Laura Varich

09:06

Right, and it probably is. This is definitely a part of that. There's other factors we're finding out about now, too, that have to do with diets high in animal products. Additional factors that we're finding out about that are determined by the way we cook our meat and things like that. That also can contribute to it. So probably one of the main ways that animal meats in our diet are affecting that increased risk of dementia is through the cholesterol.

Farmer Fred

09:36

But, as you point out, by eating more plant foods we could actually reverse that, unclog those clogged arteries, for example.

Dr. Laura Varich

09:46

Right, As you mentioned, there has been studies that we've known back from the 1990s that have some of that cholesterol, those plaques in our arteries, can be reversed. And again, medications don't do that. Like you said, only if you were to have surgery could you get rid of some of those plaques that actually we've shown that a healthy diet can do that. So eating a lot of plant foods can actually do that. It can help get rid of that cholesterol in our vessels. So that's pretty amazing.

Farmer Fred

10:16

To tie this all together with a nice, pretty little bow, you can grow those great plant foods in your own yard.

Dr. Laura Varich

10:23

Yes, there's some different things that we can do with our diet to try to lower our cholesterol levels. So of course one of those is going to be eating less meat and less animal products. Another one of those, which sort of ties in with that, is eating less saturated fat. It turns out saturated fat actually raises our blood cholesterol levels even more than eating cholesterol does. Surprisingly, that comes from unfortunately, i'm sorry to say this, Fred, that also comes from high fat dairy, like cheese.

We don't have saturated fat, really, in the plant world much, except in some of our tropical oils. So you see those showing up in some, such as  paleo foods and things now. But things like coconut oil and palm oil actually have a lot of saturated fat. Coconut oil actually has more saturated fat than butter does. So that's something we really don't want to be eating a lot of. Again, small amounts of cholesterol, small amounts of saturated fat are fine, but we don't want to get really high amounts. But then we can also do some things to decrease our cholesterol levels by eating, instead of eating animal foods, eating more plant foods.

There's a couple of things happening. So we talked about cholesterol getting laid down in the vessels that lead to our brain, right, fred? That can, similar to heart disease, decrease blood flow to our brain, to our cells in our brain, and that that can cause some changes to happen in our brain, like amyloid plaxtiform, and there'll be neurofibrillary tangles. but all that is a part of there being less blood flow to our brain, but also another. A second way that cholesterol works is that it actually remember how we said that if you have the ApoE4 gene, the cholesterol isn't being carried away, it actually gets deposited in the brain tissue It itself and causes inflammation in the brain. So a couple of things we want to do lower our cholesterol so that we don't block up our vessels and we don't get cholesterol laid down in our brain itself and cause inflammation, so we can lower our cholesterol levels. And the other thing we can do is add more phytonutrients. Now we know phytonutrients we talked about those before on your podcast and those are plant nutrients And they have an ability to decrease inflammation And there are certain types that actually can get into our brain and can lower inflammation levels And that can also decrease the incidence of Alzheimer's disease.

So you need a couple of things happening. You need these changes like lower blood flow and cholesterol being laid down in there, and then the amyloid that forms in our brain that we've heard about doesn't get cleared away, and both those things are causing inflammation. If we can attack it from two different points we can decrease the inflammation and we can improve the blood flow to our brain We actually can have a really good result and not end up with Alzheimer's disease. It's been shown that people on autopsy it's very hard to tell if people have actually have had Alzheimer's disease or didn't in their life, because they can have the same appearance in their brain. But it's gonna be a matter of how did your brain react to that? How much inflammation? So plant foods can really help lower inflammation.

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Farmer Fred

13:36

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GROWING THE BRAIN FOOD GARDEN, Pt. 2

15:25

Let's get back to our conversation with Dr Laura Varich of FreshPhysician.com and find out some more of those crops that you can grow in your backyard that are brain food. So let's talk about some of those crops that you can grow in your yard that contain brain protective antioxidants, and I would think the usual culprits would be at the top of the list things like leafy vegetables.

Dr. Laura Varich

15:53

You're absolutely right. Leafy green vegetables are number one for brain health and probably for our health in general. Right, there is leafy green vegetables kind of do it all. They have it all. We know that they lower our LDL cholesterol levels that we were just talking about, and they also have some of these special antioxidants that can make it into our brain. So leafy green vegetables, yeah, you know. And the good news about growing those too we talked a little bit about this last time too is when you grow those and pick them fresh, you get to retain all those antioxidants, all those anti-inflammatory chemicals that are in there that could be lost if this, if your food's traveling over you know thousands of miles to get to you and taking days and days. So you get to pick them fresh. They're going to have a lot of those antioxidants. So, yeah, leafy greens are one I like to grow as close as I can to year-round so that I can pick them and then eat them right away.

Farmer Fred

16:51

Depending on where you live, that is a possibility for many gardeners. And even in coastal California you can grow most leafy greens, The lettuces, the cabbages, year-round. But if you have a hot summer climate it gets a little bit more difficult to grow leafy greens. And we talked about this with Master Gardener Gail Pothour recently about how to grow leafy greens in the summertime and which ones have the best staying power before they bolt. At the end of our little chat I'll be playing that portion of that talk we had with Gail about the leafy greens that can grow well in a hot summer climate. One of the keys is, if you do live in a hot summer climate, is to grow it in the shade. That really helps out a lot, And a lot of vegetables that are out there that help the brain out too are also in a hot climate considered cool season crops like broccoli, cauliflower and kale.

Dr. Laura Varich

17:48

Exactly, i'd probably put that as number two on our list for brain healthy foods. And you're right, a lot of these are ones we consider cool season vegetables. So again, it's going to be difficult to carry maybe growing those for us through the summer months for a lot of us. But yeah, i'd say  getting cruciferous vegetables in as much as we can, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, collards, all those things. They have a substance called sulforaphane which we may have heard of And it's been shown that it can protect against our brain's malfunctioning and our brain kind of our cognitive level decreasing over time. So they're really great for that. One way that I like to keep the cruciferous vegetables going and the sulforaphane, fred, is to grow microgreens, and I know you're a fan of this too.

Farmer Fred

18:37

Yes, indeed, we've talked about that in the past too. And I'll have a link in today's show notes about one particular episode we did about microgreens. But yeah, that actually can solve a whole heck of issues for gardeners who like to make salsa, for example, in the summertime, using fresh tomatoes and peppers and fresh garlic. Well, there's the problem with cilantro, which doesn't grow well in hot climates. It's really a cool season crop, but you can grow cilantro in the summertime by just growing it as a microgreen and using that as the cilantro in any of your salsa recipes, and it's just a matter of harvesting it when it's only an inch tall.

Dr. Laura Varich

19:15

Exactly, and it has a ton of flavor. It's amazing. And if people haven't tried it, one of my favorite things to do and I keep these on rotation is broccoli sprouts, because they have about 100 times the sulforaphane, that brain healthy and anti cancer ingredient. Then does the mature broccoli per weight. So it's amazing And it grows. You can have yourself some broccoli sprouts in about five days, ready to harvest. They're a really fast turnover, so that's a really great way to kind of keep them going.

Farmer Fred

19:46

There's an easy way to grow it too. Excuse me While I reach to the back and grab my box of seeds. I'm never far from my box of seeds. In this box of seed packets, from Johnny's Seed Company. They're a seed catalog, johnny's Selected Seeds.

I have two large containers of microgreen mixes that make it easy to grow microgreens from some of the best, healthiest greens available. There is this one here. It's called a kale-fetti mix for microgreens That contains many different varieties of kale that you're only going to grow to, like I say, an inch or two inches tall. The other is called a rainbow sprinkles mix for microgreens and it contains chard and beet seeds. Again, you'd sprinkle it on a surface, maybe in a 16" by 16" nursery flat, and on some seed-starting mix, water it in, put it in a shady location, let it grow and when it gets about an inch or two tall, just use your scissors, cut it off, take it to the kitchen. You can even grow it in the kitchen, for that matter.

Dr. Laura Varich

21:04

Yeah, absolutely, and those are going to be beautiful. I'm picturing this rainbow mix. That's going to make some beautiful, beautiful microgreens. You'll feel like you're in a fancy restaurant when you dig into those.

Farmer Fred

21:14

One of my favorite greens to grow and it does fairly well in the summertime here, in fact. And  in shady areas it does survive the summer without bolting. It is chard, Swiss chard, and chard comes in a wide variety of interesting colors. So it always pays to grow a wide variety of chard just for the great mix of color, and chard is delicious either raw or cooked And for a dependable year around green in hot climate areas. It's hard to beat chard.

Dr. Laura Varich

21:44

That sounds like a great idea, And I have one. Can I mention one of my favorites to grow in the summertime? I'm in Florida, Fred, as you know, and we have summers that are similar to yours in heat level probably, but we have a lot more humidity. But one that I have found that I can grow through most of the summer is that I use instead of a lettuce because lettuce is very hard to grow here. It's called becana cabbage. It's B E K A N A. It's a cabbage, but it's a loose leaf and it's a very kind of soft leaf and I can use it all summer long instead of lettuce and it grows really, really well. So we do want a little bit of shade. It probably couldn't take full sun all day long, but it's a great one to try. I try to recommend it to everybody because it was a game changer for me.

Farmer Fred

22:32

Yeah, it is an Asian cabbage and you may know it as Tokyo Becana and it's a cross between Napa Cabbage, bok choy and lettuce. And there are some good Asian seed companies out there that have a wide variety of healthy greens to grow that fall into the category of Chinese cabbages and, of course, bok choy, which is one of my favorites, also to grow in the cool season. But I'll have to try that becana or becana type of Asian cabbage. A couple of sources that carry the becana cabbage include Johnny selected seeds that I just mentioned. Also, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange carries the becana Chinese cabbage seed as well.

Dr. Laura Varich

23:03

Yeah, i don't know why, but it seems to me that a lot of the Asian varieties and maybe in some of these areas they have a lot of heat too, but a lot of these varieties seem to do well in the heat. I'm growing more and more Asian varieties of different things right now celery and, like you said, a lot of the greens and things and they seem to do much better here.

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Farmer Fred

23:35

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GROWING THE BRAIN FOOD GARDEN, Pt. 3

Let's get back to our conversation with Dr Laura Varich, a fresh physician dot com. And there's plenty of foods that you can grow in your garden that aren't greens, that would be considered brain food.

Dr. Laura Varich

25:09

Fred, i wanted to mention a couple of things you can grow in the garden, some of those we can be growing now. Beans are also really high on the list of healthy foods for the brain and really healthy foods for all around for basically preventing all kinds of chronic disease and for increased longevity. So beans and legumes are really great for that, and I know at least here I've just recently planted edamame. I also do field peas or black-eyed peas this time of year and they really like the heat, and so those are some that we can try growing also this time of year.

Farmer Fred

25:44

Edamame, of course, is soy, and that's particularly good at lowering the bad cholesterol levels, the LDL cholesterol levels. Another favorite I'm going to start harvesting, i would say in the next week or two, unless the robins beat me to it, are blueberries, and berries have been shown to decrease cognitive decline as well.

Dr. Laura Varich

26:06

Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned that. They are definitely one of the top foods. They show up on the list for brain health really at the top all the time for these different lists, and berries really are super important for helping our brain out. They seem to have some. They, for one, have a lot of fiber in them, which is great, and they also have some of these phytonutrients or phyto chemicals that are brain protective. So, yeah, i recommend getting berries in every day if you can. They are just so good for you and for your brain. And blueberries top the list, of course, and but really all the berries are good in this way.

Farmer Fred

26:44

Every morning I start off as healthy as possible with a high fiber cereal and I'm topping it with  a cup and a half of blackberries, raspberries and blueberries as the sweetener with almond milk. I'm still alive.

Dr. Laura Varich

26:59

I think it explains a lot. Fred, you sound super sharp today, so you must have had your healthy breakfast.

Farmer Fred

27:06

Yeah, i did. Well, okay, What about herbs and spices?

Dr. Laura Varich

27:10

Yeah, herbs and spices, again, are super brain healthy foods. They are again good for us in all kinds of ways because, as we mentioned before, i think, when we were in our last podcast together herbs and spices have a really highly concentrated amount of these phytochemicals in them. It's those strong flavors that you taste are actually the phytochemicals, and so herbs and spices have a ton of them in them. So if we can get those into our diet, the more the better every day, and I think about when I'm making recipes if it calls for a certain amount of herbs and spices, i double, triple, you know, however much if you like flavor, keep adding it in, because those are really great for us And particularly for brain health. A couple that I don't grow in my garden, but saffron and turmeric, are two that have been shown to be really effective for brain health too. So turmeric though, i've grown. Have you grown that before?

Farmer Fred

28:09

Fred, no, i have never grown it. And saffron, I think is, you would need a lot of patience and a lot of time.

Dr. Laura Varich

28:17

Yes, you sure would. You sure would? You're picking all those little, those little stamens, out or whatever and collecting those. So yeah, saffron is a tough one to grow. You might want to buy that one, but turmeric you can grow in the garden. Turmeric is. It's a relative of the ginger plant. It grows very much like ginger. It has a tuber that grows underground that you can pick and you can, just after you, harvest them. You can just put them in your freezer if you'd like, and then, when you need some, you can just grate it and use it in whatever you'd like. So that's a good way to get that in.

Farmer Fred

28:48

Yeah, and it's pretty easy too with turmeric is to plant the tubers in the ground at about four inches, with one or more of the sprouted parts facing upward, And they do like you say. it's just like growing ginger.

Dr. Laura Varich

29:02

Makes a pretty plant. A couple other things to mention that we're probably not growing in our garden. Some of us might be growing some of these, i don't know. But a couple other things for brain health, that sort of, that sort of fill out, what we call the neuro nine, are whole grains really good at lowering cholesterol. We've probably all heard about oats being great for this, but really all whole grains are good for this. Nuts, particularly Brazil nuts, and pecans if we get those in our diet are really great And we know these are super heart healthy too. They're acting in the same way, i think, with our vessels that are predicting our heart and protecting our brain. Flax seeds good for everything. So we can get some ground flax seed in our diet really good for our brain. And also tea, the one real tea that comes from the camellia sinensis plant. That's green tea, black tea, oolong tea, white tea.

Farmer Fred

29:53

That's also good at lowering cholesterol and even acting in directly on our brain to lower cognitive issues And the flip side of all of this yes, you can certainly grow a whole yard full of very healthy crops is quit shopping in the middle of the grocery store and stick to the edges where the fresh foods are, because and we're learning more and more about ultra processed foods- Yeah, yeah, for sure, fred.

Dr. Laura Varich

30:23

See, yeah, that you're exactly right. When we think about improving our diet, a lot of times we're thinking about some of these. You know, we start talking about these whole food, plant based diets and things we're thinking about. Oh no, i got to get rid of the meat, but really one of the biggest problems with the diet that we have right now is all those ultra processed foods, like you said, we eat now. In America, adults eat. About 60% of our diet is ultra processed foods and for kids it's 70%. That's from age two on up. 70% of the diet is ultra processed foods. And so, yeah, it's becoming more and more clear in the research that these foods are extremely unhealthy for us. So, yeah, getting to more of these whole foods and actually doing some cooking is going to improve our health a lot.

Farmer Fred

31:06

People ask me well, who are these doctors that helped you out so much? I mean you in my case. It was a quadruple bypass surgery at the age of 61. This was about 11 years ago. How did they help you out? Well, i like to say that, yes, the general practitioner thought there was a problem. The cardiologist verified there was the problem. The surgeon basically, I don't know, I think he took a chain saw to my chest, but I was knocked out at the time. He took a chain saw to my chest, opened it up and clipped out the cholesterol filled arteries and replaced it with something else that's in there that supposedly, according to him, was a spare that we carry for such instances (a mammary artery).

But the person who really helped me out and made me see the light was a nurse. A nurse who was in charge of the cardiac rehab center at Lodi Hospital. And, by the way, if you ever go in for heart surgery and they suggest you attend rehabilitation sessions afterwards, take advantage of it. Don't settle for over the phone or computer sessions. Try to make it an in-person session. That is what really helped me out a lot. It was going three times a week for three months after surgery, doing some exercise on an exercise bike along with getting the A1C levels, blood pressure checked and a lot of other things.

But what really set this apart was the nurse who was in charge of this rehabilitation clinic was a big fan of eating your way to health. And her whole educational procedure to the patients was, instead of having that Big Mac or that commercial hamburger, try some other forms of meat that are made out of vegetables. Or, instead of salt, try some of these no salt combinations. Or, instead of buying bread from the bakery shelf, go to the freezer section and buy your bread there, because that's whole sprouted bread that actually has the fiber intact. And that's one thing about this whole talk about health is the amount of fiber in the food. And usually fiber can last in food despite its shipping as far as grocery store food. But, like you mentioned, phytonutrients, they're going to disappear in time because the healthiest food you can eat is the food you grow yourself, because it's going to go from your backyard to your kitchen and to your mouth.

Fiber can last a while. The problem with a lot of processed foods that say they have fiber, it's broken up fiber. There's two kinds of fiber. There's the insoluble fiber, that cleans out your innards, and then there's soluble fiber, which does a wonderful job of cleaning up clogs in your arteries. And soluble fiber can easily be destroyed by processing. And that bread that you buy, that frozen sprouted bread that you would buy from the freezer section, is going to have a lot of soluble fiber. So if you want to increase the fiber in your diet, make sure it is also has soluble fiber. Okay, i'm done.

Dr. Laura Varich

34:15

Yeah,  I totally agree with you. Yes, and that's where you know what we were talking about. Our whole grains and even our beans, both of those have a lot of soluble fiber in them, like you said, and soluble fiber is kind of interesting because it sort of forms. No fiber is absorbed by our body, It goes through our GI tract, our intestines and then exits, but the soluble fiber is really interesting because it actually forms this kind of a gel in our intestine and it actually hides things like excess sugar and excess fats and cholesterol and carries them out of our body. So, yeah, having a lot of soluble fiber in our diet is a great way to lower our cholesterol.

So, yeah,  more legumes and more whole grains. And there's a lot more whole grains out there now that we didn't used to see. A lot of these ones that we're hearing about. People are calling them ancient grains, grains that haven't been on our shelves, that are showing up again now. I don't know if you've tried some of these out, but we have lots of whole grain. People have seen quinoa, but we have millet and sorghum and amaranth and lots and lots of additional grains are showing up on the shelves now and they're really fun to try.

Farmer Fred

35:27

We should point out, too, that people who are concerned about their sources of protein may think that we  need meat for protein because we need protein. Yes, you do need protein, but there's a heck of a lot of protein in a lot of legumes like the edamame you're growing.

Dr. Laura Varich

35:42

Absolutely yes. Yeah, people who eat a whole food plant-based diet. If they are exclusively whole food plant-based meaning, i guess you might call that vegan. It's a little bit different in the ideology, but if you're eating only plant foods you do get plenty of protein in your diet. In America we eat about twice the protein that is recommended. People on a whole food plant-based diet eat a little bit less than that, but they get plenty of protein. And I like to think about have you ever seen Fred, the movie The Game Changers?

Farmer Fred

36:17

No.

Dr. Laura Varich

36:19

Okay, this is a documentary that I think you and your listeners may really want to see. It's a great documentary. It has people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan producing it, but it  talks to different kinds of athletes and a lot of them are plant-based and the movie shows basically how they upped their game by going plant-based. The world's record-holding strong man, his name is Patrick Baboumian. I'm probably not pronouncing that correctly, but somebody asked him. They said how can you be as strong as an ox eating only plant foods? He said have you ever seen what an ox eats?

Farmer Fred

37:01

What does he eat? Grass, right?

Dr. Laura Varich

37:05

That ox is eating plants all day long, so the important thing to know is that the meat is kind of the middle man right between the protein which is coming from the greens and us, and so we don't need to eat meat to get enough protein. Even a cow and an ox makes a huge amount of muscle right by just eating plants, so we can do that too.

Farmer Fred

37:27

Speaking of documentary films that can make a difference in the way you eat. I think many people are probably familiar with Forks Over Knives, which is a plant-based diet documentary, and Dr Caldwell Esselstyn was in that movie from the Cleveland Clinic, and he's in another one too, called Eating or Eating You Alive, which talks about his own personal issues of getting healthy and discovered that a plant-based diet can certainly make you more healthy. And we should point out too that it's not just diet alone, it's exercise. But, as I found out, you can't out-exercise a bad diet.

Dr. Laura Varich

38:06

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. They're both really important for our health. but you're right, If you eat Big Macs all day long and then go out and go for a bike ride, you're not going to be able to counteract that.

BEYOND THE GARDEN BASICS NEWSLETTER / PODCAST

Farmer Fred

38:25

In the podcast you're listening to, Dr Laura Varich of FreshPhysician.com is touting the benefits of growing greens year-round for better health, especially for brain and heart health. The problem is, as we discussed in the podcast, summer heat in many areas of the country may thwart your efforts at growing great greens like lettuce, kale, cabbage, spinach and other greens. It causes them to bolt, it forms seed heads and the leaves turn bitter. Well, there's a way around that. In fact, there are several ways to grow nutritious greens in the summer as well as in the cold of winter. In the latest Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast, several gardening experts offer their tips for growing cool season vegetables in the heat of the summer, as well as growing amazingly nutritious microgreens year-round.

It's all in the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. It's currently available and it's free. If you're already a newsletter subscriber, it's probably in your email waiting for you right now, or you can start a subscription. It's free. Find the link to the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast in today's show notes or at Substack, and you can sign up for the newsletter at the link at our homepage, gardenbasicsnet.

GROWING THE BRAIN FOOD GARDEN, Pt. 4

Farmer Fred

Let's get back to our chat with Dr Laura Verich of FreshPhysician.com. Let's talk about your story, because how did you get involved with this? We're a medical doctor and realize that maybe these prescriptions aren't such a great idea. Maybe there needs to be some other changes.

Dr. Laura Varich

40:03

Yeah, well, my story is that I actually practiced pediatric radiology so imaging for kids for basically my whole career, and then I was noticing, though, that in the last 10 years or so, i had noticed that the health of kids has really changed. You know, the things we're seeing happening to kids now. The diseases that they have are a lot of. The diseases didn't used to happen in kids. Really They were very rare, and now they've become a common place And these diseases are happening earlier and earlier. So, of course, we know about obesity and diabetes and things like that, but also things like autoimmune disease happening at much earlier ages in kids. So I wanted to look into what was causing that. I thought, well, if this has happened, if I've seen it happen over 10 years, it's obviously something that we're doing that we can change. It's not our genes changing that quickly, right?

So when I looked into it, the research really makes it very clear that it is really about our lifestyle and primarily our diet, And that's what the cause is. And I told you that kids are now eating 70% of their diet is ultra processed foods, 30% is animal foods. That leaves really 0% being whole plant foods, and this is really where the problem lies. So that's when I left my practice and said I'm going to do all I can to try to get the word out because and I think there's quite a few physicians and allied health professionals that are doing the same thing just really trying to get the word out to people that we can make a huge difference with our diet. It really our food and what we drink are the only fuel of our body, right, they're just that important. So, yeah, that's how I made the change And I started a website and I tried to do some speaking as much as I can to try to get out and tell people about what we can do with our, with our lifestyle.

Farmer Fred

41:51

And one more note too. I mean for exercise you don't have to be like me and ride your bike 125 miles a week. I do it because it reduces the stress. It's the cheapest psychiatrist I know It's. I call it cycle therapy, But gardening is exercise. Gardening, doing things by hand, pulling weeds, shoveling, moving that wheelbarrow around with mulch, that's great exercise.

Dr. Laura Varich

42:16

Absolutely. And there's this these areas on earth. I don't know you've probably heard about Fred, the blue zones, We may have even talked about it before but the areas in the earth on the earth where people live the longest. And in those areas people are living traditional lives. So they're eating more whole foods, particularly whole plant foods, and they're exercising, but they're not going to the gym and they're not biking a hundred and 20 miles. That's amazing, But what they are doing is, like you said, they're maybe walking to their neighbor's house, they're out in the working in their yard and tending their garden, And that's the kind of exercise that if we get that kind of exercise into our life as much as possible, if we can get some of that kind of exercise into our life every day, it makes a huge difference.

Farmer Fred

43:00

By the way, if I ever run for president, and  I don't plan to, but if I ever run for president I think I would make my primary goal  building safe bicycle lanes throughout America to get people into a different mode of transportation to lead even healthier lives.

Dr. Laura Varich

43:15

Yeah, i agree with that. It can be very dangerous to be out on the road with cars on your bike, and we've seen that a lot, i think, particularly when I was living in the Bay Area. There's a lot of injuries that happen that way. So, yeah, i agree with you, we need to have safe ways to travel bike paths that aren't necessarily right there with cars or there's some protection between the two.

Farmer Fred

43:37

Exactly what America needs are more class one bike trails which are separate from roadways. But don't get me started on that. That's for a different podcast.

Dr. Laura Varich

43:47

I agree, because I could go down that road myself, so to speak.

Farmer Fred

43:50

Yes. Tell us about your website, freshphysician.com.

Dr. Laura Varich

43:55

Yeah, so I have a website that has a lot of great brain and otherwise heart and etc. Healthy recipes. I've got, like you mentioned, i have created a bunch of health documents by reviewing all the literature, the current literature, and I just put out a new brain health e-book that is available there, and I have a newsletter that's free. I encourage anybody that's listening, if you're at all interested in this sort of topics, to go ahead and sign up for the newsletter, because it comes out monthly and it's got a lot of the sort of latest and greatest research and ideas about how to improve our health.

Farmer Fred

44:33

And doing it as naturally as possible. I don't recall seeing any ads for vitamins or supplements on your website.

Dr. Laura Varich

44:42

Yeah, i really do believe in as much as we can trying to do get ourselves to health through healthy, real food. I don't believe in using supplements unless they're absolutely necessary. There are a couple that I think supplements nutrients of concern in our Western world, and probably actually even beyond that, are a couple of vitamins that we need to get in as supplements Probably our vitamin D, which most of us in America don't get enough of even if we're in sunny places, and also vitamin B12, which if you're on a completely whole food plant based diet, you need to have in your diet. But we even know that as we get older, we absorb that vitamin less and less and it's important for our nerves, like our brain and our blood cells, so super important. Most people recommend supplementing those two things But, yeah, no, in general I don't recommend supplements. I think we can get most of what we need through our diet.

Farmer Fred

45:40

FreshPhysician.com is the website. It's a place to grow your health. Dr Laura Verich has been our guest and Dr Laura thanks so much for your time today.

Dr. Laura Varich

45:50

Thank you, Fred. It was a pleasure, as always.

LETTUCE VARIETIES FOR HOT SUMMER CLIMATES

Farmer Fred

45:57

So what are the lettuce and greens that you can grow in hot summer climates? Let's revisit a chat we had with Master Gardener Gail Pothour, who talks about that very subject on a previous edition of The Garden Basics podcast. All right, now we come to number nine on the list of the 10 most popular garden vegetables, and it's a cool season crop. In California. If you live in a very mild climate or the Bay Area of California, you can certainly grow all the lettuce varieties you want lettuce And I can see why people grow lettuce, and I hope that you try something different than iceberg. Iceberg, to me, is the most nutritionless, tasteless lettuce that has fallen into mass marketing because there's a lot of leaf lettuce varieties that are so much tastier and also can withstand heat better than iceberg.

Gail Pothour

46:52

Yeah, I was going to say iceberg doesn't do that well in the Sacramento area. We're too hot. And so we generally recommend to try a loose leaf or a romaine or one of the butterhead types. But if you have to have an iceberg, pick that up at the store. Don't try growing it. It won't do that well here.

Farmer Fred

47:10

Yeah, it's a waste of space. As a matter of fact now I have been on a lifelong gardener search for a lettuce variety, a loose leaf lettuce variety that can take the heat. Some are better than others as far as getting, maybe through July, but it seems like when July turns into August they all start bolting.

Gail Pothour

47:30

Right, and actually several years ago we did an experiment two years in a row at the Horticulture Center, because we get this question a lot: Why can't I grow lettuce in the summer? So we thought, okay, let's find some varieties and grow them through the heat of summer and see how they do. First off, you need to start with some varieties that are heat resistant, like Jericho that was bred in Israel, so it's a little more heat resistant, and we tried half dozen or so different varieties. We monitored when we planted them how many weeks it was before they started bolting. Some did better than others, some did pretty well.

But what we found is you need to mulch heavily to keep the moisture in, keep them well watered, shed during their entire lifespan in the summer and then be prepared as soon as one starts to bolt, take it out and then replant with another transplant. So kind of a succession planting It is possible, but it's a lot of work. Let's say it takes a lot of water and shading and monitoring. Not sure if it's worth it. Or grow it in the shade if you have a shady location, but often it's not just the sunlight, it's the heat, and even in the shade in Sacramento we can be fairly warm in the summertime, so it's a tough thing to do.

Farmer Fred

48:51

The closest green I've found that can be grown year round and especially if you do it in the shade, it does okay here, is Swiss chard.

Gail Pothour

48:59

Right, yeah, that can be grown year round. I have done it in an area of my yard where it got some afternoon shade in the summertime And it was able to over summer. But yeah, any of the other leafy greens are going to be a little tough. One of my favorites oh absolute favorite lettuce is called pomegranate crunch. It's a red romaine and it is very good. I get it as pelleted seeds, which makes it a little bit easier to germinate. Lettuce can have a difficult time germinating. Lettuce does need light in order to germinate, so don't plant the seed too deeply. Red seeds don't have that problem, but I think if sometimes people have difficulty getting lettuce to germinate because maybe they buried it too far, it needs light. It's one of the few vegetables that needs light to germinate.

Farmer Fred

49:55

And I believe it's one of those seeds that will not germinate in heat period Right right If you tried sowing lettuce seed in the summer, maybe for a fall crop.

Gail Pothour

50:05

if your soil temperature is too warm, the lettuce seed can go dormant. So if you're also starting it indoors, whereas I use a heating mat to get a lot of my seeds to germinate, you don't use a heating mat for lettuce, because the soil will be too warm and lettuce seeds will go dormant in heat.

Farmer Fred

50:23

Some of the varieties that have been recommended as heat tolerant lettuces that I've grown over the years and they're barely heat tolerant are Black Seeded Simpson and Deer Tongue. They're pretty good but, like I said, they do eventually bolt, and if you're so, if you're looking for a first of all, i think one good rule to remember is, if you want lettuce to last in the yard as long as possible, grow loosely varieties, not head lettuce.

Gail Pothour

50:51

Right, and of the ones that we did in our heat tolerant trial, the ones that did well. besides, Jericho was Year Round Bronze. it's an oak leaf and it was late to bolt in the summer, so it actually did very well. Red Cross is a red butterhead, Merlot a dark red leaf lettuce and a Paraday, a red oak leaf. That's one of my favorites but I can no longer find seeds for it. And then Nevada, it's a green loose leaf, kind of a semi-heading type. So all those did well, as well as can be expected in our summer heat. So they did better than a lot of other varieties.

Farmer Fred

51:29

I'm glad you mentioned Nevada, because I have grown that one before and it was pretty good. But I think if you want a dependable green for heat, do the Swiss chart.

Gail Pothour

51:38

Right, i agree, all right.

FLASHBACK EPISODE 191 “PRUNE TOMATO FLOWERS?”

Farmer Fred

51:44

Ah, springtime, when the prevailing question among some backyard tomato growers is I wonder if I should prune off those first tomato flowers. I see, maybe I'll get more tomatoes that way. The answer, well, it depends. It could be "no" or it could be "perhaps". Master Gardener Gail Pothour will tell us why. That answer, according to her, is  "it depends". I still say "no," i'd rather spend that time riding my bike. But if you  are wondering about the pros and cons of this time consuming tomato flower pruning task, then this is a flashback episode worth listening to. It's episode 191, "Prune tomato flowers and tips for a sustainable food garden", originally aired back in May of 2022. It's our flashback episode of the week. Look for this informative episode number 191 on the Garden Basics with farmer Fred podcast in the podcast player of your choice, or you can click on the link in today's show notes or go to our homepage, gardenbasics.net.

COLD CLIMATE PERENNIAL POTTED OUTDOOR HERBS?

Farmer Fred

52:53

We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, has joined us. And we will tackle your questions. We love it, especially when you send them in via Speakpipe. It's great audio quality. You go to speakpipe.com, slash gardenbasics. And then it will instruct you to yell at your computer into the built-in mic on your computer. You ask the question and voila, we have your question. No phone charges are incurred. That again is speakpipe.com slash gardenbasics. Debbie, let's check in with Derek. He's in Colorado, and I don't know if we're going to have an answer for him or not. Let's find out.

Derek from Colorado

53:34

Fred and Debbie. This is Derek from Fort Collins, Colorado, zone 5b. I was wondering if y'all could talk about any perennial herbs that you can grow in pots. I'm interested in growing mint, but I couldn't really find any information about cultivars that would be able to survive zone 5 in a pot outside. So yeah, i figured  if we could just talk about that in addition to any other herbs that might be tough enough, cold-hardy enough to survive a zone 5 winner in a pot.

Farmer Fred

54:08

Thank you for asking us, Derek. And here's Debbie Downer with the bad news.

Debbie Flower

54:14

Well, one rule of thumb for any plant that's going to live its whole life in a container outdoors is that it should be hardy to 2 USDA zones colder than you're going to get in your location. So he's in zone 5. 5b, which is the warmer half of zone 5.

Farmer Fred

54:35

Yeah, and you want it to be hardy to zone 3?

Debbie Flower

54:38

Right, If it's just going to live outside. I think of the ones that are outside of big buildings, office buildings, hotels, whatever that live there permanently in containers. The reason is that the container is has much less media or soil in it than would surround the roots if the plant were in the ground, and so the plant roots are not as well insulated And, believe it or not, the plant roots are the part of the plant that is most sensitive to cold. So that's what you're trying to do is insulate those roots in the wintertime. Fred came up with a list of herbs from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange And there are two on there that will survive.

Zone 3. So that's chives and echinacea, or is there another name for echinacea? Yeah, there is, and I don't remember what it is. Okay, echinacea is used sometimes for cold control, and I don't know how to prep it. I don't know which cultivar species, so I'm not up on that, but it says it will survive. Zone 3.

Farmer Fred

Is that coneflower?

Debbie Flower

Yes, thank you. Echinacea is coneflower. And chives. I have chives in my garden and I'm a zone 9.

And it looks crappy in winter, but it comes back every spring. It doesn't die to the ground completely, so that's something to expect even from a mint in a pot in winter is it could die to the ground, you may have disappeared. You might be all sad about that. Give it time to warm up in spring and grow again. If you want to grow mint, mint is a perennial in zones 5 and above 5, up through zone 10, according to this chart, and so that means you would probably want to give it some winter protection. That would be certainly up against a building, a house, let's say, under a roof, like a porch roof, in the garage in the dark. It won't matter that it's in the dark, but it'll get some degrees of protection in there, and that's what it would need to potentially live the winter out.

A thicker pot. There are not a lot of ceramic pots that are going to survive the winter without cracking. There are those. Made of what? are they made of? fiberglass or fiber something? fiber pots, right, lighter weight, look like ceramic. They apparently survive hard freezes, according to their advertising. You could use that as the planting pot. Make sure it has draining holes, or you could use it as an insulating pot. So put that, the grow pot, inside of the fiber pot and put something between them. Yeah, mulch, mulch, right, something to add insulation. You could put a, let's say, a tomato cage around the top of it. I had a neighbor here in California but he would put a tomato cage around his plants, plant them very early, wrap the tomato cage in plastic which has problems in my book but and put a garbage can lid on top of it to trap heat. I wouldn't use the plastic because if you get a nice sunny day, even in winter when it's very cold, it'll get very hot inside that and you could burn the plant. I would use probably frost cloth.

Farmer Fred

57:48

I can attest to that just by looking at my greenhouse thermometer, which is up here on a shelf. It's telling me that the interior greenhouse right now at two o'clock in the afternoon is 99 degrees, even though the day itself is in the 73.

Debbie Flower

58:03

Oh, that's indoors.

Farmer Fred

58:04

Yeah, so 73 in here, it's probably in the upper 70's. Yeah, it's a nice day.

Debbie Flower

58:08

Right, and the greenhouse door is open and the vent is open, yeah, so you're getting airflow through it. And the fan is on inside. It gets very warm under plastic, so I wouldn't use plastic. So whenever I grow something outdoors in a pot, i try to put it on one of those rolling bases. I have to say that if you can find one with really good wheels, or put wheels, really good wheels, on your own pot, that would be really nice. The ones I find at the big box store last a couple of years and then the wheels no longer turn. I have two words for you. Yes, furniture dolly, furniture dolly. There you go, yeah, yeah, it works. Yeah, put it right under your pot. Then you can roll it under your into your garage or roll it under your porch roof up against the house for the winter and you will be able to grow mint.

Farmer Fred

58:56

Do you grow marjoram Have you ever grown marjoram?

Debbie Flower

58:59

Marjoram, that's an interesting thing about this list. I have marjoram, Which says it's a perennial in zone 10.

Farmer Fred

59:06

10. And we see it last year to year here in Zone 9.

Debbie Flower

59:08

I've had it for many years and it just keeps taking over across bigger and bigger and bigger. I have it and a California fuchsia in the same bed, and the two of them are competing for space.

Farmer Fred

59:19

Well, in that case, then, let's expand Derek's horizons a little bit here and maybe consider some of these herbs that, even though they may be hardy down to zone 5, at least he could plant zone 5 herbs and hope for the best. Right, or at the very least grow them as annuals.

Debbie Flower

59:37

Right And grow them. start early in the season and grow them so they have a good root system when they're going into the fall.

Farmer Fred

59:44

So the mint, of course, lemon balm, oregano, lavender, that's it.

Debbie Flower

59:52

Well, it's more than two. Feverfew, catnip, if you have a cat, which I do and some like it and some don't.

Farmer Fred

01:00:01

Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, that's true. The zone 4 herbs.

Debbie Flower

01:00:04

There's some zone 4 herbs sage, the sages, Feverfew. I've had trouble growing sage in the ground here, I think. I don't know if we get too hot. Have you had trouble growing it in the ground?

Farmer Fred

It's a weed here. It's a weed.

Debbie Flower

I can't get it established, So it's in a pot at my house now.

Farmer Fred

01:00:22

Yeah, i like the idea just to expand his herbal collection in Colorado. Is that the pot in the pot theory?

Debbie Flower

01:00:29

Yes, and having something between the two pots.

Farmer Fred

01:00:32

If you've got your herb growing in  a one gallon, you'd want a bigger than a one gallon container, maybe a five, and put that inside a 15 and then fill in the space between the two with some bark.

Debbie Flower

01:00:44

That's going to give you a lot of protection in both the  coldest seasons and the hottest seasons, because a black pot will heat up to 140 degrees and a half hour. That kills roots very quickly, and so the second, having the second pot and the insulation in between, will prevent that from happening. or choose the 15 gallon outer container that isn't black right or paint it.

We did that in school. I had the students paint them white with spray paint. You're not going to mention aluminum foil. Well, you can use aluminum foil. People seem to not like that. I just don't get it.

Farmer Fred

01:01:17

I don't know. I kind of like the idea of having a backyard full of pots wrapped in aluminum foil next to tomato cages covered in row cover with a garbage can lid on top. There you go, a beautiful garden. There you go, The Sanford and Son Garden. Yes, but they will get food, yeah, exactly. All right. So there you go, Derek. Hope that helps and you can expand your herb collection this year with that advice. Call us back.

Let us know what happened. Just don't swear when you call back. All right.

Farmer Fred

the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast comes out once a week on Fridays, plus, the newsletter podcast that comes with the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter continues and that will also be released on Fridays. Both are free and they're brought to you by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery.

The Garden Basics podcast is available wherever podcasts are handed out, and that includes our homepage, gardenbasics.net, and that's where you can also sign up for the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. That's GardenBasics.net, or you can use the links in today's show notes. And thank you so much for listening.