speaker-0: Thank you again everyone for coming both in person and online. We are here at Academy Healing Nutrition for our Food as Medicine talk. We're gonna be unlocking the secrets of longevity with healing nutrition today. And my name is Patricia Lopez and I'm the co-founder of AHN Global. And today I am gonna first start off with giving you a little bit of a background about us. We have... a lot of familiar faces, some dear students and alumni, but also a lot of new faces and a lot of new people joining us on Zoom. So we're Academia Heal Nutrition. We're the longest established holistic health and healing school founded by Roger Green himself in the 80s. ⁓ And we offer a 12-month certification program as well as introductory foundational courses. ⁓ And we're deeply rooted in ancient wisdom and tap into modalities such as traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. ⁓ the wisdom of cultures of longevity across the world and really tie that in with the latest breakthrough in nutritional science as well. So that beautiful blend of ancient and modern. And our motto here is for you to be your own doctor, for you to find and be an active participant in your health and your healing ⁓ with a real connection to your body, to its innate wisdom. We always invite the connection to nature as well, to natural healing. Yeah, so we get up to a lot of beautiful things in this school. A lot of what we teach is highly practical, so it's not just theory. We are a cooking school, so we teach everything, not just from the theory, but exactly how to do it ⁓ in your kitchen, so you know what you're eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. ⁓ And yes, that is, we want to empower you in your holistic health healing and to really take charge of your health to live a long and fulfilling life. And before I quickly introduce Roger, who will dive into 90 minutes of a lot of rich content. ⁓ really a snippet or a preview of what you can experience with us when you embark on either a foundational course or the certification if you should choose to. My name, like I said, is Patricia and I came across this school over 10 years ago when I was suffering from a lot of chronic health problems and very dependent on prescription pain medication. And I was told that was my only way, you know, there was no other solution. But then I found Roger and his teachings at that one year in training at Academy completely changed my life. am prescription pain and medication pain free since then and it has really empowered in me ⁓ the wish to share this ⁓ knowledge with as many people as possible. ⁓ So a few years after graduating I partnered with Roger and we launched the global online school that exists today and it is an honor to be leading this work alongside him and to be taking this next chapter of this school. So like I said today you will be hearing from Roger who founded the school in the 80s. ⁓ And he is definitely a pioneer and a visionary ⁓ in the holistic healing world. He's been studying and teaching Eastern and Western traditions ⁓ for 40 years and across 70 countries. So he was just in Prague last weekend doing some lectures. ⁓ And he started off by opening one of the first alternative health clinics in Sydney, but then has continued to teach across the globe. And we're so fortunate that he is deeply, obviously, involved in the school and in its mission and ⁓ is the lead teacher at Academy. And he also actively spearheads advancements in natural healing technologies, renewable energy. ⁓ It is always such a pleasure to hear from Roger. I have heard him speak and teach many, many times and it is always a complete gift. So I know you guys will really enjoy it ⁓ and there will be time for questions. Like I said, there's time for some gorgeous tea and for everyone online as well. This is recorded, so ⁓ know that we will be sending this to you. there's also a chat box for questions. ⁓ So with no further ado, Roger Green. Thank you so much.

speaker-1: So My background is in Chinese medicine and actually as a young man I actually ended up in ⁓ London in the punk rock days. I came here for punk rock and meditation in the late 70s. And ⁓ but my ⁓ health ⁓ really suffered because I was a product of the 70s. I think some of you might know what that means. I took every known drug that you could possibly take. And ⁓ by the time I got to London, I was I had chronic fatigue, and I thought I'd only stay here for a couple of months because I thought Why would you want to live here? Growing up in New Zealand. And then ⁓ I started on a journey f in natural healing. ⁓ I wasn't inclined to go down the medical way because of just my general interest in Philosophical things from the 70s, we were very ⁓ idealistic. So I started changing my diet. For instance, when I was in London, I I was eating bananas in your winter, right? And then I c I cut I started to learn that that wasn't making balance with London and the cold winter and and that bananas were actually better for when you lived in the tropical country, right? And So I actually started to change my diet over ⁓ a couple of months, and it my ⁓ condition just radically changed. I could now ride my bike to work, ⁓ my emotional life ⁓ changed, my outlook on London changed radically. I thought, wow, what an amazing, exciting city! I ended up living here for five years. ⁓ so and it just it it it it was just this incredible transformation from just doing a few simple things in my kitchen, right? I started to ⁓ you know started to take things that would alkalize my blood more. I started to read a little bit more about in those days you could access ⁓ material about cultures of longevity, but not many people were reading that material back then. You didn't have the blue zone diet books. That you now have. There was just some writings from the 1920s which influenced me strongly. ⁓ So, cut a long story short, I was amazed at how some simple things could radically heal me. And so then I got involved with the natural food movement that was just store pioneering in London. In those days, you know, we kind of had like two health food stores, and if you got there at 11 o'clock, all the organic food was gone. gone right and I started to make ⁓ tempe and miso here and and tofu and sourdough bread got involved with the natural foods movement right cut a long story short I went back to I'm actually a Kiwi but ⁓ in back in Australia ⁓ I got involved with Chinese medicine, quite you know, acupuncture and herbs, etc. But at the same time, back in 1986, I I get back pretty much to ⁓ Sydney, and I helped to form one of the first ⁓ natural health clinics in Sydney. Again, this is the pioneer phase. You know, that kind of like everywhere now. You've got your holistic health centers, right? But back in those days, it was kind of an original idea. To get a chiropractor, a naturopath, ⁓ and herbalist. And you know, we even had ⁓ like a functional doctor coming in once or twice a week. And but that's when I started the first cooking school because I had started to do nutritional ⁓ counseling ⁓ on the ⁓ energetics of Chinese medicine and cultures of longevity. And what of course what I discovered was when you're giving people advice around food, it's a big one. You know, that that this is their habit from their childhood. And there's lots of layers to our relationship with food, a lot of emotional, psychological layers. So ⁓ you couldn't just introduce people to all these new ideas and recipes and kind of talk about the ⁓ energetics in a like a two-hour session, I had to build the cooking school to actually put it all together. And you know, in those days we would run like a three-month program, a couple of evenings a week with the cooking and lectures and so forth. And I was working with people with you know cancer and in those days HIV was a big deal and just a lot of ⁓ conditions and ⁓ these people chose to take the natural path, right? So ⁓ the first couple of slides I'm gonna go through is some of my reflections on the mindset involved with taking this more natural path. I mean, in my perspective, we've basically got ⁓ like ⁓ two pathways in life. You can go down the you know the chemicalized artificial pathway and basically poison yourself, right? ⁓ with all sorts of things in our modern age, or you can go down a natural food. pathway, natural, you know, ⁓ and developing kind of like a natural philosophy of life. So ⁓ let's ⁓ I do that. So that's a little bit about my background. And so essentially ⁓ I put the program together based on my clients in those days, in the sense that ⁓ people wanted a more serious training. And quite frankly, all I did was I integrated ⁓ cultures of longevity, which you're gonna hear about a little bit, but we've only got like an hour and a half. I integrated traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic. So my thinking was I'm just gonna put together all the time-tested theories and philosophies around food as medicine. And so I did that 40 years ago, and I haven't had to change anything in the curriculum, in the sense that, as you know, nutritional theories, modern nutritional theories, they sort of come and go. You know, we we get the paleo diet. landing there and we get the vegan diet landing there and you know these kind of trends to an extent come come and go. All I did was I found the middle way, which is very much a Taoist theme, where I just sort of put together what I felt worked. And there wasn't going to be any dogma because in Taoism there's just no dogma, we just deal with energetics, right? And ⁓ I chose from all of the food groups, and then the ⁓ curriculum became ⁓ experiential in the sense that you know the students would learn about the energetics of the foods, right? And we'll show them how to do all these recipes and talk about the nutritional value and the energetic value. And then, of course, it was up to the student to become their own doctor. Which is a powerful motto of our school. And they would choose what would work for them. They'd learn how to ⁓ listen to their cravings and listen to the messages from their body. So that's what we've been doing for 40 years. I took the curriculum to ⁓ New York and we've been actively teaching in London and actively teaching in Prague. ⁓ And I have, as Patricia mentioned, I I have ended up teaching over seventy countries, doing sometimes just like a two-day events around natural healing and food energetics, right? But the strength of the ⁓ program now, as Patricia mentioned, is that it's gone completely global with ⁓ online experience. But we do do these live events as an old fashioned teacher I love I love being in front of ⁓ a group of people again instead of that ⁓ screen with all the little all the little people. So that's what we're that's essentially what we're talking about today, how to put all that together. I am going to make it so that ⁓ you've got some very tangible things to take home with you to consider actually how to spend your hard-earned money with some of the foods that you're gonna buy, some of the things you might consider for your healing. So it will be ⁓ tangible. We're gonna cover ⁓ a number of of these foods, obviously in the nutrient-dense foods and things like ⁓ high-quality fats, which is interesting for me because 40 years ago. You see, in c when you ⁓ study cultures of longevity, they all had high quality saturated fats. And ⁓ in Chinese medicine there's a concept that I'm going to teach you today. It's called the gene of the body, J-I-N-G, and this is the inherented constitutional force that we get from ⁓ not only our ancestors, mother and father, but also what we call heaven's force and earth's force. We're basically like an antenna between the wonderful energies of Mother Earth and the cosmic qi, which is a very, very powerful qi, which most Western people don't really think of the sky and the cosmos as being part of their energy, energetic system. But of course in Chinese medicine we've got the yin meridians. Which correlates and filters the energy, millions of frequencies from Mother Earth, and of course the cosmic qi that filters down through our yang meridians. So we have yin organs and yang organs in Chinese medicine. So ⁓ with the fats, it's as you could imagine, like 40 years ago. when I'm say I'm proclaiming guys this whole low fat diet is a disaster. Our ancestors never ate that way. It's been in a serious manipulation politically. You know, they had a a you know, because of our modern agricultural ⁓ industry, we had a lot of seed oils to sell and then we had the propaganda from the nineteen sixties that they could easily put on T V and then they could get doctors to support it. ⁓ because I was always trying to figure out why is it that at the turn of the century we had a very, very low, like it was something like one in two hundred that people had ⁓ cancer. Some people have argued with me, you know, well maybe they didn't have their, you know, ⁓ records very well and their statistics or whatever maybe it was just one in a hundred but now as you know it's like ⁓ when I was teaching this it was like more like one in four. Now we're getting close to one in two people getting cancer. So I was always curious like how is it that you know only a hundred years ago that we had hardly any Degenerative disease. And now our children, there's ⁓ something like 40% of our children have some form of chronic illness. And they're children, right? This is like unheard of. So I was always trying to figure out what's going on. So obviously, after the Second World War, we had a lot of changes in our food chain, right? During the Second World War, they kind of figured out really well industrialized food, you know, because of the troops, right? And then after the war finished they kind of went, well why don't we just keep doing that, right? Which they did. And then you had, you know, over 7,000 chemicals, legal chemicals that they can use in the food chain, right? So, and of course, as you've probably read, you know, we now as modern people we have a very, very high ⁓ level of sugar consumption. So it's kind of pretty easy to start to put half of the picture together that okay, people are just eating really chemicalized food. They're the there's a sort of a convenience now, you can, you know, get quick ⁓ meals and but they're s somewhat chemicalized. ⁓ the water's not as good as it used to be. But there were still a couple of factors that ⁓ I couldn't put together until I started to really read about how healthy saturated fats are and how unhealthy ⁓ the seed oils are. And it's a very, very simple equation. Back in the 1920s, they discovered this with cultures of longevity. And the writer was actually a guy called Weston Price, which you can look up. And ⁓ he was able, he was quite academic when he traveled to over 14 cultures. of longevity, right? And he discussed the whole Omega-3 and Omega-6, that traditional people had a high level of really healthy animal foods and healthy fats, right? And the Omega-3 was very, very strong, right? And then with modern people with modern farming techniques and you know feeding grains to cows and and soy to chickens and and then all the chemicalized foods that you come across in the supermarket, that the omega-6, we only need a certain amount of omega-6, right? We need all the omegas, but when it becomes like a ratio instead of one to two or one to three, right, when it becomes a ratio of one to forty, that's very inflammatory. Right? And you're no longer nourishing what we would call in Chinese medicine the deep gene, which technically is your kind of your hormonal base, and it's what nourishes it, what stabilizes your blood sugar and all sorts of things. So this was ⁓ a big issue for me 40 years ago, and as you could imagine, I got a lot of flack from that, right, in the sense that ⁓ you know the ⁓ all the doctors thought I was mad, or the naturopaths thought was crazy, you know, bless their souls, right? Because people were totally obsessed with the low fat diet because of all the propaganda. But they didn't actually kind of read underneath all of that propaganda. Now, fortunately, you might have noticed in the last five to six years that the so called influences are starting to proclaim, ⁓ look, we really need to get back to some of our traditional fats and our ancestral fats. I don't know if you've no in particularly in the biohacking community, you know, which we're part of, doubt Taoism is a biohacking community from you know 6,000 years ago, just like Ayurvedic is, right? So you might have noticed that ⁓ a lot of the modern ⁓ n ⁓ nutritionists are saying, ⁓ no, it's ⁓ we really need to start to reduce our seed oils because of their inflammatory ⁓ nature and get back to our ancestral wisdom, what grandma and grandpa were actually eating a hundred years ago, right? And in the meantime, we're just having a lot of success with ⁓ our clients and our students by you know getting back to some of the traditional foods, using some of the wisdoms from our ancestors, and then learning the energetics. They were healing themselves no matter what people were going on about, right? In terms of all the different nutritional theories, right? So I do integrate Western nutrition to a degree. ⁓ I always say it's ⁓ you know, you can read up about, you know, what vitamin C looks like and how many amino acids we don't it's all very interesting, but it still doesn't tell you what to eat for breakfast. So the program has always been about the practical side. As Patricia mentioned, ⁓ our students would learn some new theories and energetics and then we'd always be putting it back into the practical recipes and experiencing with the tastes and the flavours and And that's something that ⁓ I've been doing for 40 years. We'd we'd be doing cooking classes on the back of a truck in a corridor in just about every I've built like four or five cooking schools in my career, right? And ⁓ and then ⁓ with COVID, all of that sort of ⁓ Disappeared overnight, as you can imagine, but we successfully put that experience of the practical cooking classes. Some some of the graduates are here that would ⁓ hopefully ⁓ collaborate that, that we successfully put it into an experience that you could do online as well, right? In the sense that we call them cook-a-fons and all of this. Where now, in in fact, it became even better for the students because, in a funny sort of way, all we're trying to do for our students is encouraging them to then start the recipes to replicate what they've learned in the cooking classes. In the old days we would physically do that for them. It would be like running a five-star restaurant, would have our students, we'll be ⁓ you know doing the cooking and then we'll be serving the food. And the whole idea was just to get them inspired around how you can use ⁓ these recipes and these new ingredients and how to put it all together. And then to c ⁓ get that across in terms of online, what happened was Now the students actually had to go and shop, and in their kitchen, they actually had to follow the mainly Inga, who's our principal ⁓ cooking teacher, and then put it together so it even encouraged them more to you know bring in these more positive ⁓ habits and to be inspired by these ⁓ new ingredients and the energetics, right? So it actually worked in our favor in a way, and also I didn't have to travel. So much right because I was teaching on all of those locations. We've got four major teachers in our program, but ⁓ that was ⁓ a blessing for me. Anyway, we better move on. We are going to cover ⁓ a number of these things, and I'm more than happy to take ⁓ questions towards the end. ⁓ what I mentioned ⁓ in my introduction, I really like to just start with a little bit of the mindset. Around a person that chooses to take the sort of natural pathway, so to speak. As you know, we're ⁓ you know ⁓ we're dominated by Western medicine and that and it's ⁓ it's an amazing medicine. We we we we all understand that, but as you know, people get a like a little ⁓ spellbound by Western medicine, right? And ⁓ they sometimes d kinda don't think things through. They don't do their homework. They don't un look under the surface. ⁓ I always think any problem you should be have some healthy scepticism. I don't know about you, but anything you should like, you know, do a double take and ⁓ but ⁓ I've noticed that that doesn't really happen much in our society. It only happens with certain individuals that for some reason they start to think, now hang on a minute. ⁓ you know, I want a bit more say in this. I want a little bit more control in this. My health is not going to be outsourced. ⁓ you know that they start to think, now hang on, the the body has this remarkable ability to heal itself. Quite frankly, guys, all you need to do is get yourself out of the way. Get the head out of the way. The body is phenomenally powerful to heal itself off anything if given a chance, because it is, it's self-regulating, it's adaptive, right? So instead of this whole idea that you know like the the war on cancer, you know, which is a really aggressive kind of thing, and we've spent trillions of dollars. And when you look at the statistics, we haven't really got, you know, yes, there's been some modifications and some microdosing of chemotherapy, and you know, there's some good things going on, right? But a trillion dollars, what where has it actually got us, right? ⁓ so instead of this attitude of like fighting it, ⁓ we're gonna start to understand it more and control and align ourselves and ⁓ we're gonna participate in it. And it's not ⁓ this Illness, this disease is not my enemy. It's a message from my body that's communicating to me that I need to make some reflections, I need to make some changes. And some of those changes need to be on a practical level so that the blood chemistry starts to change, that my biological self starts to change, that I can strengthen my immune system, I can strengthen my blood so that my body has a chance to heal itself. ⁓ So most people, as you know, with getting involved with natural healing, you know, they're ⁓ naturopaths and we've got wonderful Western herbalists, and we've got all s you know, we've got amazing folklore medicine. Now in the East, they actually maintain their folklore medicine really, really well. You know, ⁓ if you travel to Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore and ⁓ of course China and Japan, you know, that they still have a sense. Of their native medicine. And in fact, all of those countries, those doctors are actually allowed to recommend natural remedies and herbs and all sorts of things without getting all the flack from their medical association. Unlike our doctors, as you know, they have to stick to this very narrow protocol for that disease and they have to stick with it and if they think outside of the box or give ⁓ any kind of recommendation to anybody like changing their diet with a little serb or making some little as you know they can lose their job. You know, you've probably heard of or some of these brave doctors who have stepped out of that and have actually gone down the more functional medicine pathway into greatness. It's actually quite funny. I I in New York I go to some of these ⁓ meetings with the young doctors coming through. And there's a term that we call the functional medicine doctors. They're kind of like thinking outside of the box, and and look, I can tell you this hundred percent of them when they get up. And give their little talk. They always talk about how they healed themselves, and it's with yoga, with fasting, with biohacking, with Chinese medicine, with herbs, you know, and they're bringing in a new wave of East meeting West. You know, so there is hope, right? There is light at the end of the tunnel. We do need to start to think about this Western medicine paradigm and how to start to integrate better ideas. Anyway, ⁓ obviously, people with natural healing they start to get involved with ⁓ herbs and lifestyle and exercise. And you know, there's no single solution. We call it a holistic approach. You know, all of those layers need to be looked at. ⁓ a willingness to ⁓ make change, an openness to new ideas, and starting to think the body as, you know, ⁓ not just ⁓ the reductionist theory, you know, like Pretty much that was our Western education, like we would we would take something and then we'd just break it down, as you know, into its ⁓ components. And you know, that scientific methodology is fantastic and it's a language that we share with the whole world. It's amazing. I've personally got a background also in in physics and ⁓ science, but it's a reductionist theory where we just analyze everything and we can't we lose the forest. Whereas what Eastern medicine generally brings, and our own Western esoteric healing traditions, which we kind of forgot, right, what happens is we start to see how everything's is not separated, that there's a relationship between all of these factors, including the ⁓ symptoms that you have and the organs and the season that you're in and the relationships. All of this is taken into consideration. And Yes, this sort of healthy skepticism that it's not the one size fits all that basically we have from Western medicine. So as you can see there's quite a bit of a contrast. The in Chinese medicine we don't really have the germ theory, right? We have more like this sort of e we we talk where we use imagery from ⁓ nature and and the environment that people can really relate to. We talk about, ⁓ you're too dry, or you're too wet, or you're too hot, or cold has entered into your ⁓ body, and that's where the pain and this disruption in your cycle and all of these things come from. So we we we integrate these sort of natural metaphors that people can really understand. ⁓ we never had the germ theory, and what happens with the germ theory is which is actually still quite questionable. ⁓ but what happens if as you know, we've had ⁓ a lot of generations now where they've been totally ⁓ indoctrinated in the germ theory, and basically you need a drug for that germ or for that virus, and that's basically our level of ⁓ medicine, which ⁓ is of quite narrow-minded if you ask me. We we kinda need to break free of that because essentially we're Really need to think more about, you've probably heard this term now, the terrain, no, and it's ⁓ it's basically another word like you could use as the landscape. We need to really start to think about the landscape of our body, right? So that we can strengthen our immune system, strengthen our organic pathways, etc., so that the germs, if they do exist, I'm still not sure about that, but ⁓ they won't have a chance to take up. Because there's always this whole thing like one person has like supposedly a contagious disease, and if you put them in a room where they don't have that disease, those people don't get that disease. Right? So there's a lot of gaps in that theory when you start to read into it. So we kind of need to sort of break free of that, you know, the whole thing about the germ theory, or at least be skeptical and put it in and just start to put it into perspective more. ⁓ okay, so ⁓ there's a few other ideas there, but because of time, I think I think you can hear my emotions around this subject. I don't want to sound like I'm against that, or I'm saying is we need to rethink things, we need to ⁓ hopefully develop a better mindset around this. And particularly if you've got a health problem, then that's the kind of attitude you can take. You know, be open-minded, start to explore things, break out some of the spells of Western medicine, where there's this going to be this. magical little drug that you can take and you know all of these things we need to sort of really broaden our ⁓ social ⁓ thinking out around this. Okay just to finish off ⁓ when we develop new habits there's no willpower involved with what we teach. You know how some people get ⁓ you know ⁓ onto a new diet and then they're going to, okay, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna restrict myself from this and not have this anymore, and then you know, all they really want is to have that again after after about six weeks. Or they might radically lose weight and then they you know go back to their old patterns and because of, you know, and they put on weight again and all of it. You you we've all heard of those stories, right? In this way, that we avoid that. This doesn't require willpower, it just requires some education and some practical changes and some practical ⁓ recipes because your blood quality starts to change, and your qi and your blood, which is a clinical term that we use in Chinese medicine, that starts to change when you change your diet, right? And the ⁓ that's feeding into your ⁓ organs, your nervous system, your circulatory system. It can dispel the cold out of the body, which is creating all the heat. It's obviously going to get the acid and alkaline more balanced, all these factors that you need to get that homeostasis ⁓ back again. So those new habits and those new ideas they just gently dissolve old patterns. And after you know, several months of doing this, you're kind of like a new person. You transform yourself anyway. Every ten days your white blood cells are changing, and every 30 days your red blood cells, and you know, every every couple of years we've changed our organs and so forth. So you we're always in a state of transformation. We're all constantly ⁓ changing. So these are some of the foods that we get into. ⁓ You might have heard of the goji berries, and I will talk about the gynostema, the longevity tea that you're drinking, because technically it is the number one longevity tea on the planet. We'll talk about that. This to give you an idea here, this humble little herb here is called Romania. And ⁓ it's cheap as anything. And in Chinese medicine, that's the number one longevity rejuvenational herb, right? That you can basically get off the internet. ⁓ with lucky, you're lucky that you've got a really dynamic Chinatown here, very accessible. And this ⁓ herb is one of the strong jing herbs that starts to rejuvenate your kidneys. Now, when we talk about the kidneys, it's not a piece of meat, right? When we talk about the kidneys, you know, that's your seat of your vitality. It controls several things in the body, right? It has associations with the season, with colours, with shapes, all sorts of things. So this is called associative thinking that we didn't really get in our Western educational system. We got the reductionist theory, remember? We'll just get everything and break it down. Like we'll get a kidney and break it down under the microscope, which is quite fascinating. But for us, There's a whole world of energetic layers there, and being the seat of your vitality, right, you can make a simple coffee like ⁓ brew from this, and it's actually quite delicious, and you can sweeten it up with some ⁓ goji berries, right? And you've got the number one longevity ⁓ herb on the planet, you know, for just a handful of coins, right? So there's a whole lot of, you know, today's title was Unlocking the Secrets of Longevity. So I better nail some of those things as we go along because that is one of them, right? And it's spelled R-E-H-M-A-N-N-I-A, Romania. This is one of the lovely cacao warming ⁓ cacao drinks that we do and the superfood class that we ⁓ do in the curriculum. ⁓ and you might have come across the red dates. So these are the Chinese red dates. And we have a concept, as I mentioned before, the Qi in the blood. This is a concept of yin and yang, right? The the yang is the sort of the energy, qi level of the body, and the yin is the substance, the tangible, the blood, the fluids, the lubrication, the cooling aspect. Often people get what we call blood deficient in Chinese medicine. A lot of people that you see clinically so-called blood deficient. Now, in the West, you might call that anemia, right? But it's a lot more deeper than anemia. It's that the blood deficiency starts to ⁓ affect your sleep. For instance, you need a certain amount of yin-ness to be able to have really good sleep. And there's a lot of things that kind of burn out that. essence, that substance, that the fluids, the lubrication in the blood. And so this is what we would call a ⁓ blood-building herb, right? And that's ⁓ the kind of the our approach to a lot of ⁓ medicine is to build that blood up, build that life force up and build that qi up again in the body. So ⁓ let's go through some practical things. As I said in my introduction, we eat from all the food groups and as you know, ⁓ there's authors now who have s sold ⁓ millions and millions of books and they've gone like, Don't eat grains and don't eat beans And I'm going like, Are you kidding me? know, seven eighths of the world in terms of nutrition relies on complex carbohydrates and beans. And they're telling us, you know, not to eat it. ⁓ and ⁓ because they don't actually understand the traditional wisdom associated with those foods, right? They don't get it. They don't talk about how we actually do have to deal with the phytic acids. in the whole grain and in the brands and everything, and our ancestors figured out really good ways of doing that. In fact, your body, the phytic acid for those who don't know it, is b nature's very clever. It sort of has the chemicals there where it goes, Don't eat me You know, you're a bug, you're an insect, you're a bird. It's going like, Don't eat me, right? And generally there's the phytic acid, there's other chemicals involved, but let's just for now the major one is phytic acid. So you always have to kind of make foods, these traditional foods, more digestible. Otherwise, you will get into problems. You will get into digestive irritability, right? If you don't kind of do these preparations correctly. For instance, You know, I had I ran a cafe in Australia called the Wattle Sea Dilly, where we actually did Australian bush foods and whole food cooking. And I was ⁓ able to spend some time with ⁓ some Aboriginal ⁓ people and through food foraging, etc. And we have the bun bunion nut, and they would say we would put it in a sack and we put it in the river for seven days. in the creek and then it's digestible to cork and to pound and they'll make a lovely damper out of it, right? So yes, the grains, you know, a lot of them you do have to soak overnight to get rid of you and you might want to ⁓ you know, cook them fairly well, or you might want to begin with just some white rice, right? You don't always need the whole grain. And you might want to just do an easy preparation if you've got a set ⁓ sensitivity to to grains. Just do a soup or what we call a congee with a lot of like a rice ⁓ milk preparation, which is by the way, the number one convalescing food in Chinese medicine, is what we call a congee, or you might know the term juk, right? And then we add other things into it. ⁓ and it's the same with beans. I mean it's common sense that you have to soak them overnight and get rid of the ⁓ you know the the ⁓ soaking water. But we've got a few tricks, you know, we always cook it with sea vegetables. Now in the West and pretty much over the world now, or generally over the world, we're sort of chronically minerally deficient. And that's because of ⁓ modern agriculture with what we've done to the soil. Fortunately, we're all supporting our organic farmers now by buying mostly, I'm not a food purist, but mostly we're attempting to buy organic food, and that's supporting the organic farmers. And what are they doing? They're bringing life back to our soil, which is incredibly minimally deficient. So that's important. What's important is to have a minimally rich. Diet. Even if you're getting the vegetables and the food groups, often you're still missing out on a lot of trace minerals and to a degree the macro minerals. So an easy trick to take home with you is to start to use a few seaweeds a couple of times a week, and it's a world of difference to the biochemistry of your blood. An absolute world of difference. Now you've got the macro minerals that you need, full of magnesium, big time. You know, you don't with this, you don't hardly you don't need to take those kind of basic supplements. It's all in the food. Your body understands w those ⁓ nutrients when it comes from a matrix from nature as well. When often when you take synthetic ⁓ supplements, we'll talk a little bit more about but often the body just doesn't recognize it, doesn't understand it, doesn't absorb it. It's a real issue. And the trace minerals, right? So all you've got to do is get a little bit of combu seaweed, cook it up with your beans, which makes the beans a lot more digestible. Beans are mainly protein and some complex carbohydrates. And now you've added a whole spectrum of minerals that your immune system needs to begin with, right? Along with your bones need that, right? So, ⁓ hopefully that inspires you to start to explore the whole world of seed vegetables that you can get in all sacred sizes, readily available now. And your ancestors used to eat them all throughout Europe, all throughout Asia. You know, traditional people were trade in seed vegetables, right? They were it was a valuable commodity. ⁓ we love the whole idea of eating in the seasonal aspect because this is the way ⁓ for us the whole ⁓ definition of health is how to adapt to the changes around you. That's our definition. It's not an absence of symptoms that we have in the West. Do you know our definition of health in the West is like, ⁓ I don't have a problem. That's and that's that's where it stops, right? Whereas in the eastern tradition health is a whole spiritual personal development thing, right up to you know, like becoming one with the universe and nirvana and feeling God and the grace of graceful living and all these things, as well as starting to be more productive and creative and supportive for your community, and all of there's many, many layers to what we call health in the eastern traditions, right? But To do that, you need to be able to make changes and adapt with things that are changing around you. And one of the things is just eating with the seasons as much as you possibly can. Because that's what nature is saying. You know, during the autumn and the winter, the energy is back in the ground. It's back into the yin phase, right? And what's appearing at the marketplace is more root vegetables, right? Right? ⁓ not exactly, you know, bananas remember from Fiji. That's eating out you easily can get schizophrenic. That food doesn't relate to a ⁓ a wintertime. Get the idea? And then in springtime, all of that fresh yang is starting to take off again, right? Which in Chinese medicine we relate that to the liver and the gallbladder. And it's a time to heal the liver and the gallbladder. This is called the five-element theory, and I've got a little ⁓ diagram for those who are new to it, and I'll explain it a little bit more. But that's a time that you want to binge like crazy on all the fresh new growth that's happening because that's going to really strengthen your liver and your gallbladder, or what we call the water energy, right? ⁓ so it eating as much as possible with your ener your regional energetics without being fanatical, right? Do I cheat? I cheat all of the time. I eat avocado all year round, right? I love it, right? but some of the things you need to be careful of, like sometimes, you know, when it's really, really cold and winter time. People some people still eat a whole lot of fruits, right? Now, traditionally our ancestors only got their hands on fruits for what? Three or four weeks of the year, and then that's it. And you had to be quick because the birds would get there as well, right? ⁓ so This is where you start to learn some of the energetics that fruits are there's not much nutrition there. And of course, it's gonna fructose has a different pathway to glucose, right? Your liver has to deal with it. And yes, it does spike your blood sugars, right? Yes, they are delicious, and they will give you a like a quick boost of energy, right? But they're cooling in nature. And when that's snow outside, that's not the kind of energy that you need to deal with that climate, right? Now you can take something that's really Yin, like fruit, and then apply yang things to it like fire. So the two basic alchemical aspects is water and fire. Water is obviously more yin, fire is more yang. So, yes, you can take that fruit and stew it, and then add what? Some lovely warm herbs like cinnamon and star anise, etc. And then you've got something a lot more balanced than warming, and it feels good when it's snowing outside, right? So that's where the energetics come in. Some foods are warming, some foods are cooling. Generally, we need overall warming, tonifying food to keep healthy, to keep the circulatory system healthy, you know, otherwise we can get into problems by eating a whole lot of foods out of season that are very cold in nature. It starts that we start to call them, these are the thieves, energetic thieves that rob us of our vitality. Like the kidneys suffer from a lot of cold foods, right? Yes, do we love ⁓ like raw foods? Yes, that there's a place for raw foods, particularly in the yang months of what, the spring and the summer, when you want foods that are a little bit more lighter. I mean that's common sense that you start to eat a little bit more that way, yeah. ⁓ But having a whole lot of raw foods is going to put out what we have in the Ayvedic and Chinese medicine tradition. In the Aurvedic we call the Agni, the digestifier. And in the Chinese medicine, we call it the school of the stomach and spleen, which is a 6,000-year tradition where that solar plexus, the earth energy, the spleen energy, its job is to transform food. and qi into usable components of of blood and energy, right? Us components. It's efficient. In the sense that you're not building up ⁓ damp or sluggishness or congestion or ⁓ blood stagnation, right? So that's where the art of cooking comes in, and that's where we do go towards these sort of warming, tonifying, you know, we love soups and broths and and bone broths and ⁓ casseroles and these kind of foods, right? With a variet nice variety of vegetables and season, but then we can vary our seasonal ⁓ cooking styles, right? So you start to adapt and strengthen not only the internal organs with that, but you can adapt to those changes around you so much more easier. And it means when you go traveling, just knowing some basic energetics, you know when it gets really super hot, you know some of the foods that you can take to just naturally cool you down. For instance, in Japan in the summer in the ⁓ Tokyo, I've been to Japan quite a few times, they binge like crazy on a seaweed lolly. Because salt cools and descends, right? It takes the heat out. Or just like my uncles, they were in the African Second World War, all four uncles. And you know, you're chatting to them and they would say, ⁓ no, we used to, you know, take the salt tablets. Because i it would take the heat away, right? And that was one of my first lessons as a child of food energetics. I'm going like, wow, salt does ⁓ it cools takes the heat away from the head. You can survive in the desert. That's really, really interesting, right? So knowing some of these ba or going to a cold climate, you know you really need a lot of warming foods and cooking with, you know, some fats, right? And you you know, you need some animal foods to survive, right? ⁓ 'cause they are yang and warming in nature, right? Okay, ⁓ we got up to yes, ⁓ we eat from all of the food groups. ⁓ it's very, very important ⁓ to get high quality animal proteins, high quality animal fats. So this is where you you you do spend some a little bit more money for that high quality. It needs to be organic, it needs to be grass fed. And you're supporting a whole lot of really good ⁓ animal husbandry with that notion of supporting high quality they're looking after their animals. I know this is a ⁓ a delicate issue for some people, but I'm just talking about the energetics. Our ancestors ate quite a high consumption of animal foods before the industrial sorry before the agricultural revolution 15,000 years ago. So you know our hunters and gatherers they were eating like more like 70% animal foods and 30% vegetable foods. And we know for a fact that their bone structure was a lot more healthier, right? And they didn't have all those ⁓ diseases that we can see from investigating their bone structure like osteoporosis and a number of other things. And then the agricult the sorry the the 15,000 years ago we started to do more agriculture and Which is a good thing because now we have literature and movies and we don't have to run around like a caveman anymore. ⁓ but there were some issues with that, right? And there Bones density dropped down and they started to suffer from more ailments that we have good records of. So, do we like high-quality animal foods? Yes. Do we have a range of that? Yes. Do you need much of it? No. You just need small amounts, right? I always say that to get back into that blood-building ⁓ energy that you get from animal foods, just a little bit like our ancestors did. Put a little bit into a soup. It's one of the best ways of digesting it. And what have you got? You've got a good broth and you've got vegetables there to balance it out, right? ⁓ Or doing like a quick saute, you know, with lots of green vegetables and some animal foods, right? And it's interesting to again to get to know the temperatures of foods because. When you have a lot of heat in the body, there's a lot of redness and sweating, etc. And the the red meats can be more warming, so then you just need some fish, because fish has have you noticed that you don't get overheated when you eat fish? Sometimes it's not enough for you in the winter, have you noticed that? It's just not enough warming, right? But for somebody's got a lot of heat, then the the the the fish is very, very good, right? Somebody's got a fever, you don't give them chicken soup, right? For a cold you do, but not a fever because the chic the chicken is quite warming in nature, right? and of course the red meat is highly anti-inflammatory, big time, right? You might have heard of some people that have gone onto the carnivore diet, right? One of the again, one of the extremes, right? And it's a very, very young diet, right? But they said, you know, in three to four months I got rid of all of my inflammation. You can't argue with that, right? You can't argue with those facts that they got rid of all of the inflammation, right? Is the question now is is it sustainable? Do you want to eat that way for the rest of your life, right? That's the question. And and and if quite frankly, when you do, you can get into other troubles. Just like if you go vegan for three to four months, you can feel really, really good, right? Because you're no longer eating the junk food and all the other things and you're alkalizing your blood. But maybe in a year's time you might have a lot of cold things and your vitality might go, you might have diarrhea because of all the cold energy, you know, and you might look a little bit pale because you're not building your blood up, all of these things, right? So that's why we eat from all the food groups. We can look at the energetics and we can. Correlate it with the season. We love eggs. Really, the nutritional value of eggs is phenomenal. I don't have time to go into all the nutrition, but and it gives you the energy, the choline, all these things. And of course, our ancestors, this is what they went for to begin with. Right? There's a lot more easier down around especially around the coastal areas to find the eggs than hunting the animals, right? So we have a lot of affinity with ⁓ eggs, they're really, really nourishing. You just have to get the high quality eggs, right? And that can be a real challenge. You have to become a detective, a food detective, not the food police. No, no, I'm not gonna go there, right? But a food detective. Yes, I want the highest quality of the eggs and where I where I live. And I will search it out on it. If I do have to get into a car and go twenty miles, I will buy it from that farm where they're not feeding them the soy and the grain. They are eating some they're outside and fresh air and looked after and so forth. Yeah, you you need to you need to do that. And Where our ancestors, especially around Europe, and you know ska ⁓ Sard Sardinia is one of the ⁓ cultures of longevity, right? And you investigate their diet, and what did they have? High quality dairy food. Like the cows are up in the hill being looked after and poetry read to them every night. And it's raw. Not pasteurized milk and then they make a a cottage cheese out of that that when you eat it it just melts in your mouth and you feel it going into your body really easy. It's not creating mucus or heaviness, it's digestible because it's from the raw milk, right? Which as you know is a political issue, but but bit by bit we're breaking down those barriers. First of all, I don't think any kind of raw milk should be illegal. Like we've got so much better hygiene and transportation systems that some of the issues they might have had like a hundred years ago when hygiene wasn't great, you know. We've way beyond that. There's at least about ten states in America now that have legalized raw milk. I take my hat off to the Americans, their grassroots movement is very, very powerful when it comes to these kind of things. You know, they get things done, right? When they believe in it, they'll get it done. So they've actually changed a lot of those laws, and you can now get high-quality dairy foods that are made from raw milk. Quite frankly, I'd avoid the modern dairy foods, right? The processing, the heat treatment that happens, ⁓ and the hard casing. That happens, the liver struggles with that, it's quite inflammatory, so we want high-quality dairy food. And it's nutrient-dense and very, very nourishing. Yes, so it's part of the longevity diet. Whether it's your cup of tea or not, that's ⁓ for you to decide. A lot of people like to give up dairy food when they start this for several months, and that's a good idea because it just helps to clear out old stagnation and get some of the channels working again, right? That to bring it back in a very, very healthy way, but it's more cooling nature, very good for the spring and the summer, right? we're not talking so much about the heavier cheeses, but there's a place for that as long as from you can get some of the like in New York, I can I can get some of the highest quality foods on the planet. How do I do that? Just over the border in Pennsylvania. Guess who's doing the old fashioned farming? That's a horse, by the way. I'm I'm an Amish farmer. Organic farming, you know, using the wisdom of their ancestors, using raw ⁓ organic milk and making these wonderful ⁓ cottish cheeses and ⁓ Lots of really they do a lovely sourdough bread. Sourdough done in the traditional way is another way of breaking the grain down and the gluten down. And it's not from the high gluten ⁓ grains, it's from the more ancient grains, right? So you don't get that gluten ⁓ intolerance happening, right? It's all about the quality, guys. There's a way you don't have to be fearful of all these things, you don't have to be fearful of gluten for the rest of your life. It's about getting that digestive power back and having high quality, like you know, and which you can find here. You're lucky, you know, you can find that high quality here. ⁓ yes, of course, nuts and seeds, nutrient rich, ⁓ but again you need to soak them and sometimes dry roast them, right? And maybe season them, making make them more digestible. ⁓ now I have a few slides for fats and oils, so we'll get back to that. ⁓ and it's very important to get back to those traditional fats, right? They're very, very healing. ⁓ of course we're using a hot Lovely range of herbs and spices, right? Nothing's kind of restricted in the longevity diet. We celebrate it all, and we love celebrating all of those kind of traditional methodologies of cooking, you know, Moroccan and Persian and Asian and and some of the best foods I've ever had in England, and everybody thinks, ⁓ English food. No, the traditional English country-style food here. is incredibly powerful, right, in strengthening. You have to ask yourself, how did these guys conquer half the world, right? You really do have to ask those questions sometimes, you know. and of obviously spring structured water, every cell in your body is made up of not polyunsaturated fats, they're made up of, you guessed it, saturated fats, just like your brain is made up of saturated fats, just like the cholesterol that you need for healing is made up of colo saturated fats. So every cell in your body, ⁓ which is the way it's communicating with the mitochondria and the outside world, that membrane is where all the action is, is saturated fats and what we call structured water. You know, so some people like to not only filter their water but kind of energize that water again, right? And there's a number of great technologies that you can do ⁓ with that. Because the water comes out of the tap quite dizzy, so to speak. It's gone through all the electromagnetic fields, you know. So the interesting thing of course in this day and age is that we've got some lovely sort of technologies around us that can help with longevity and things like restructuring the water. And we're big into what we call tonic herbs and tonic teas. And that's a tradition more from my perspective, from Chinese medicine, but we also do it from the Ayurvedic. And this is where we make the teas and the particularly powerful soups with these single herbs. I'm going to mention some of some of them to you. And of course, ⁓ big time we use the mushroom family ⁓ in all shapes and sizes. But guys, just get your shiitake from your ⁓ fresh shiitake, right? And start using that. It's just a little bit more powerful than the the white mush ⁓ mushroom, which is quite nice. But if you want some real healing energy, you need to and then I suggest that you buy the dried shiitake if you have an experience. That's right now. The thing about the ⁓ mushroom family is not only is it sort of relating to our nervous system, but it's ⁓ full of what we call better glucans, right, and the polysaccharides, and your immune system just soaks that up. So if you want to strengthen your immune system. Just on a regular basis, celebrate you know, a couple of times a week, celebrate the fungi kingdom. We have this strong relationship to them. They basically, it looks like our nervous system. And nutritionally, you need to not only strengthen your immune system, but you need to make it intelligent. Right? So not just strengthening it with the Nutrient-dense foods, high quality fats, omega-3, of course, the macro and micro minerals that you get from sea vegetables. But now you and then the polysaccharides, better glucose from the mushrooms, but you you make your immune system clever. So that when there's new things appearing, like you know, a bit of the shock that we went through a couple of years ago. If you had the confidence of your immune system, personally, of course, I wouldn't want to poison myself with anything like a vaccine. I know it's controversial, and you know, we can talk about it in the pub later. And I'm not going to use this as a platform to say, you know, blah, blah, blah. But what I'm saying is I had myself and my family, we have the confidence and and feeling that our immune system is quite capable of dealing with new things coming around. And I'll leave it there for you to ponder that ⁓ reaction. ⁓ moving on. So some of you might recognize this. This is the rishi mushroom. This there's a little bit of a hierarchy in the mushroom family for us. I just mentioned, yes, you know, the fresh mushrooms, fantastic. And then you the next layer is things like shiitake, right? And some of the other things. And then the dried shiitake, remember, it's very powerful. All of our formulas for cancer in Chinese medicine, all of them involve the medicinal mushrooms. But then right up ⁓ on a higher level is the Rishi mushroom and the Shaga mushroom. You might have heard of. These are the tree mushrooms now. They take a lot longer to grow. They're very nutrient dense. They're like wood. Right? You you actually have to soar through them, right? And they give a lot of incredible nourishment and power. To the ⁓ human ⁓ body and soul, right? You see, we think of things a little bit more esoterically too when it comes to mushrooms, like the rishi. You know, I just said, ⁓ yes, it's full of better glucans and and and and the ⁓ polysaccharides and it's gonna nourish your immune system. But the rishi, we say, like when you start to take rishi, you it's a psychological event as well. You start to think differently, you start to it You're less accident prone. ⁓ you you become you meet the right people and you're in the right time. All sorts of energetic layers start to happen. So, yeah, we love the esoteric side, the folklore side. We love that. We celebrate that again because it got so suppressed and taken away from us from the reductionist theory. So, yes, we love all of that from the these traditions. That that's the way, by the way, the Taoists who have been using that this mushroom for thousands of years, that's the way they talk. About it. So it's not just me making this stuff that's part of this tradition. It's listening to those stories, listening to those energetics, those ⁓ into esoteric tales. Right? ⁓ I don't know about you, but that makes life interesting for me. ⁓ this is the ⁓ astragulus. So we're big time into making stocks. I always say the secret to your longevity is in the stock, right? The longest living people out of the ⁓ cultures of longevity were you might know this from Okinawa, right? And they were a fishing village, right? So I always say, look, let's study their diet, and then the trick is how d how am I going to integrate that into my daily life running around in London? That's the trick. So first of all their stock was a a a fish stock, but by the way, people, all these cultures of longevity, and this was left out by the modern writers of the Blue Zone diets, who had a bit of an agenda, they were more vegetarian-oriented, all of these cultures had pigs. All of them. All of them, right? Because they're they're easy to domesticate, ⁓ you give incredibly nourishing, you know. So often the pig's bone was also used in that stock. But they were mainly a fishing village, so they had the the fish bones. The woman would fill it the fish, right, and then all the bones were kept, and guess what else they're putting in there? They're an island nation, so they're putting some seaweed into that stock and the leftover vegetables. And that stock, like a good French kitch kitchen, it just kept going and going and added to and added to and added to. And so what have you got in there now? Nutrient available, ⁓ you know, glycerine, glutamate, ⁓ the ⁓ omega ⁓ threes, ⁓ the Fat soluble minerals of A and K and D, vitamin D up to your eyeball from that stock, right? And then that stock would go into making their meso soup and their vegetable dishes. And of course they had ⁓ organic farms and they didn't eat rice. Rice doesn't grow there. What grew there was more like buckwheat and millet, you know, very hardy strengthening ⁓ grains, yeah? And that was their diet. So let's think about getting the stocks back, right? Maybe your traditional English stock, you know, like the oxtail soup. Very, very strengthening, especially in the winter time. But the reason I'm mentioning that is this humble herb here, again, very cheap and easy to buy down China off the internet. It's called a stragulus. You might have heard of this. Some people take it as a supplement, and that's okay, you know. But a lot more economic is to buy the ⁓ the the herb like this. It keeps forever, just keep it in a dry place, right? And you put two of these sticks into your stock. And now you've elevated that stock into something very dynamic because that is the number one herb for the immune system in Chinese medicine. Those are stragalides for, you can study that up in terms of your biochemistry, phenomenal for the telomeres of which are the kind of an aspect of your aging is the telomeres. They wear and tear, they break down. These are ⁓ being ⁓ studied to be the most active. component out of this for the telomeres comes out of a stragocyte 4 and it's called cyclorastrogenal and and they sell that for like a couple of hundred dollars a month right whereas well admittedly it is concentrated but if if if you just use this on a regular basis you really are sort of helping the telomeres you're helping the immune system and it's got it's multidimensional as well it's it's got a sort of like qi yang energy which gives you some lifting energy, ⁓ a bit of extra energy, these kind of things. It's called a stragulus. You put one or two s ⁓ of those into your bone broth, right? And you've got another dimension there, right? Particularly good for the immune system. And there's your ⁓ goji berries appearing. ⁓ this one here is called Cesandra. And I'll be talking about that ⁓ because it's a powerful ⁓ herb that's ⁓ the number one beauty herb in Chinese medicine. It's incredible for the immune system. Have you noticed? And ⁓ it has these other factors like it enters into all of the meridians, it ⁓ tonifies all five elements, that's called Cesandra, very readily available, you make a tea out of it. Our students go on a hundred day cesandra challenge. They have to drink it just a humble glass, ⁓ warm, ⁓ for a hundred days and let's see what happens. Obviously ⁓ I don't need to spend time on this, the dietary change, 'cause it's just common sense. You know, you just watch out for the poisons, right? And the ⁓ particularly the fried foods, say when you go out and about, those fried foods are gonna be on the most poorest oil in that kitchen that you can imagine. How often does that oil get changed? is it vegetable oil? No. If you're gonna if you if you can find a fish and chip shop that does lard, then I would eat there with you once a year. And that tastes better too, by the way. But yeah, so that's really highly inflammatory is the f the fried foods because the quality of the oil. It's like when you go traveling, like in places like ⁓ China, it's the fried stuff that they use is what gets you after six weeks traveling. You know, you kinda feel, ⁓ I feel a little bit like It's because of the quality of the oil. You know, they're using a lot of you know, when we used to go to Bali, the everybody like years ago, decades ago, they would be using coconut oil and palm oil, right? And now you go there and you look at the back I eyes look at the back of the restaurant, you know, where the rubbish tins are. Food detective, remember, full of the soy oil, the vegetable oil, really cheap oil now, right? ⁓ of the the cost of it. Hopefully they are eating the high quality oils at home because that will protect their health, right? Okay, so we we don't need to spend too much on the dietary dangers, but a a word of warning around the microwave. We're really into natural food, so we're into natural water. Like if you can get it from a spring or from Mother Earth, that's the best water, like, you know, in the Czech Republic, they have all you go to a village and they and it's just the older people there with their ⁓ gl glass bottles. You know, over there in the corner is the young people drinking Coca Cola, right? It's the wise old people getting that amazing water from that spring, right? So yes, we that's this kind of our perspective on these things. So when it comes to fire, we also need natural fire. Our DNA understands the spiral from the outside to the inside. It when we we have real fire, you're releasing basically the sun's energy, all that farm for red. Now you've heard about how effective maybe some farm infrared treatments are and some of the urban spas. I'm I'm all for it. It's incredibly healing. Just like when you're sitting around that fireplace with that log, you are healing your body. Did you know that? And it's anti-cancer. You're doing a really good treatment with that. And those vibrations coming into your body, your body understands that because our ancestors have been around that fire for millions of years, right? We really understand it. And when we cook with that fire, our DNA really understands it. So at least Stay away from the microwave. That's the complete opposite spectrum that what you need. You want the long rays of the sun, and that's called longevity, not the short waves of microwave, you know, which we call.

speaker-0: So.

speaker-1: Get a shovel, you can dig a hole at the back of your garden, you can lower that microwave down slowly, you can put a little cross there, you know, ⁓ 21st century. There's things you have to watch out for, guys, and that's one of them, right? So don't use it at the in the home, ⁓ even if you have to, you know, conveniently heat something up very quickly. It's ⁓ total opposite to what you want in terms of unlocking the secrets to longevity. That's the absolute opposite. The absolute opposite of the mindset that you start to develop around the energetics of all of these things. Yeah. Okay, and I think you know the rest. ⁓ we don't even use the protein powders. We get you know, ⁓ the modern protein powder, we basically get enough protein. It's always an issue amongst it's always a big debate amongst nutritionists how much protein we need. You know, on average we'd only need twenty percent, twenty-five. Some people need more, some people less, these kind of things. But there's some things in the modern kind of ⁓ health food industry that I would stay away from. You can always ask me questions. Here's the you know, Paul he he meant well. He was a really lovely guy, but he just got it wrong. Right? Making all of these salad dressings out of the vegetable oils, the canola and everything, you know. ⁓ no, you really, really need to avoid these kind of oils. now, hopefully you can see. I don't actually use this board today, so.

speaker-0: So.

speaker-1: What are the oils that we're using? Well, first of all, ⁓ we're using tallow and lard, right? Now you have to think our ancestors, that's all they had, right? That's for millions and millions and millions of years, right? Then later on We started to trade a little bit and the Romans came to town and ⁓ we got a little bit of olive oil, but it was only the rich people that were having the olive oil, right? It was still like you know, rennet fat from animals, right? The tallow, the lard, etc. And you can get high quality tallow lard. So, what I do is I just give you a spectrum of the healthy fats, and then you choose, right? Because some people are more vegetarian oriented. So, of course, what do we have? We have the ghee from the Ayurvedic tradition clarified. Butter. It's fantastic. And we use butter, guys, if you want to get that vitamin K and D back into the system, this is really, really important. And just like ⁓ in the wonderful French ⁓ cooking, you can use the duck fat, ⁓ chicken fat, goose fat. This is liquid gold in Chinese medicine. It develops the gene, the deep essence, right? For instance, if somebody was infertile, right? And they had problems conceiving after one year or sometimes less of getting rid of those unhealthy fats and having some of these gene foods and strengthening the kidneys and having some of these healthy fats again, they can become fertile again. That's how powerful this is, right? ⁓ Yes, we love ⁓ olive coal-pressed olive oil. We also use sesame oil as one of the you might ⁓ it's a seed oil, but no, sesame oil is very high in minerals, particularly calcium, and it's one of the traditional oils from ⁓ the Asian countries. Again, it wasn't the peasants weren't using sesame oil. You had to have some bucks for that. They were using what? Lard and tallow and all these things, right? then of course we love ⁓ If you can get fresh flax oil, but it has to be fresh, right? It's got a nice sort of omega-3 to it. The Germanic tribes would use flax oil, but they would grind it fresh and they would dip their lovely sourdough bread into it. So a lot of the Germanic farmers around Austria, South Bohemia, this was one of their traditional oils, right? And of course, you might have heard of mothers using cod liver oil for their children, right? And that's a fantastic idea. It's so good for everybody. The cold liver. Now you can get some lovely fermented cold liver oils now, and sometimes it has like a little lemon in it, because sometimes people get a little ⁓ disruptive from the taste. So there's some lovely products. ⁓ so you really, really want to get back to some of those traditional oils. So we got the the lard, And the tallow, the goose, the butter, the the olive oil now, the sesame oil, a little bit more vegetarian, the coconut oil. But I would suggest that you just use the coconut oil more in the summer months. It's from the tropics rather than the winter months, right? And then we have, you know, some of these boutique oils, a little bit of ⁓ flax oil, a little bit of ⁓ walnut oil, a little bit of avocado oil. These are quite ⁓ stable oils. They can ⁓ ⁓ have high heat, they can be delicious in a salad dressing. hopefully you will never buy a commercial salad dressing ever again after my lecture. And that's the only thing I ask from you. That you never buy that ever again. In fact I might appear behind you with a big stick if you do. Because it's so easy guys to olive oil and you know, mustard and lemon and salt and it's so easy. I you know, I kinda get ⁓ shocked when sometimes, you know, relatives and y ⁓ back at home and you have a dinner party and they bring a dish and then the relative brings a bottle of commercial salad dressing. It's like I'm going like, What? We we live in a society that people have no idea, guys. 99% still have no idea. Okay, I think you get the idea about healthy ⁓ fats. And this is what we need. We need the fat-soluble vitamin A. And you've all heard how vitamin D deficient we are. Phenomenally deep. Now, I would say to you, don't even bother with getting the commercial vitamin D supplement, right? If you want to get vitamin D back, you start to eat some of these tra because it's fat soluble. It's in a matrix. Your body understands it, it assimilates it. So you start to eat some of these traditional foods and all of those levels which are vitally important to your longevity and your health and for your children to be telling. And brainy and good rugby players, they need these foods, right? Big time. And they won't get sick. Called the fat soluble, right? Healthy bones. We need the vitamin K there to drive the vitamin D, and you might have read that, right? So even though I eat these foods, I I do take a couple of supplements. And one of them is the highest amount of vitamin K ⁓ is available from emu oil. You know, in Australia we have the emu, right? And you can buy this ⁓ supplement. So if you feel you can buy it over the internet, and it's ⁓ it's fat available. The vitamin K is in the the fat, right? It's not synthesized. So if you feel that you're vitamin K deficient, don't bother buying the commercial one in the shop. Start using those foods, but get the vitamin K, especially if you've got some bone problems, osteoporosis, because you really need to get those vitamin K levels back. So it's called emu oil, one of our national birds. And by the way, the Aboriginals would get a little bit bored ch hunting the kangaroo, right? They were always after the emu. It was a prize, sacred food for them. And by the way, did they bother eating the mussel? No. Traditional people only ate the organs, you know. The mussel meat was kind of basically given to the pets and the dogs, right? And of course modern people we just eat the mussel and we no longer eat the organs, right? And but if you asked your grandparents what did they have, it was always organ meat, right? So only two generations ago. So for a lot of modern people, they go, ⁓ organs, you know, that's common. And that's okay. You know, there's a lot of nourishment here that you can choose from. But just so you know, that the most nutrient-dense food on the planet is from liver. So when somebody is nutrient dense and ⁓ deficient, sorry, and they really need to get their energy back, once a week with a little bit of onion, right?

speaker-0: you

speaker-1: You can bring somebody back from the deafbed. The second most nutrient-dense food is actually sprouts. The vegetarians in the audience will be happy to hear that. And because nature starts to transmute the elements from the sun, the oil, you know, you start off with a seed, and but once you sprout it, it's phenomenally dense. And the most nutrient dense ⁓ vegetable, can anybody guess what it is? The most nutrient dense vegetable. So we went the organ meat is the most nutrient dense, full of th all of those ⁓ factors, big time. The ⁓ does anybody know the most nutrient dense vegetable? Watercress. Watercress goes this phenomenal you know, it grows on the side of the creek and it it goes through this phenomenal transmutation, it's most nutrient it's got all the most ⁓ nourishment within that square inch then eat out of a vegetable. And guess what ⁓ you guys in London used to eat up to your eyeballs a hundred years ago? Watercress. You know, not only did they have oysters, you know, which we, you know, now it's like, yes, ten ten pounds for one oyster, but the locals here were getting oysters with one of the most nutrient-dense foods, right? And they were eating ⁓ watercress. And in fact, in London you had huge farms just outside of London making watercress. You have to f sort of flood the fields. It was it was a whole big deal, right? ⁓ and then of course with modern economics and all of that they took it away from you, I think before the this happened before the Second World War. So if you ever get your hands on watercress, it's ⁓ not only a wonderful taste in the salad, but it's incredibly ⁓ nutrient dense. So, yes, ⁓ all of these factors we need the vital there's some key things you need to think about in terms of nutrition. That's the K, the A, the D, and pretty much you only get that from a bioavailable source right ⁓ and that's that the fish eggs fish living

speaker-0: Cod liver. ⁓

speaker-1: You know, as you know, some people also in the Asian countries, if you ever traveled around like Indonesia and Thailand and Cambodia and these sort of countries, what do you find in the marketplace? Insects. Right? Incredible no it's not our cup of tea, and that's okay. But it's the nutrient density that's it's full of not only the minerals, but it's actually full of these nutrients. Okay. And yes, it's used in the cell membranes, the immune system, the heart function. All of these things can't function without saturated fats. And the liquid vegetable oils are associated with one huge nutrient disaster that we've suffered from for the last 60 to 70 years.

speaker-0: ⁓

speaker-1: And ⁓ associated with a lot of ⁓ diabetes. The on a mundane level, guys, when you start to you use some just some nice healthy fats again into those vegetable dishes, into those sir ta stir-fried vegetables, etc., what you will notice is that your blood sugars will get so much more evened out, right? You and you you eat less. you own you can get to two meals a day, which is pretty much what our our ancestors didn't have three meals a day. That's that's the industrial revolution that happened, right? That's that's a new phenomenon for us, right? You can pretty much, if you want, get it down to two meals a day. You have to work at it though, don't do that overnight. You know how a lot of influences say, ⁓ you know, start to do the fasting and start to do the intermittent fasting. That for a lot of it looks good on paper, but when you talk to people like I talk to hundreds of people, it's a disaster. They can't do it. They feel they can't sleep, ⁓ they're uncomfortable. This which is why we need the middle way, something that's easy to use, exciting. No extreme. I don't like extremes in this subject anywhere. I like the middle way, right? So when it comes to these things like ⁓ intermittent fasting, well first of all we do you can do that quite naturally just by extending that first meal in the morning. It's better that you take the kids to work ⁓ and go to the post office kids to work. Kids to school. Well that's well, you could do that actually. ⁓ kids to school, you know, do some and then have breakfast a little bit later in the morning if you can, because you know, your blood sugars are generally quite good in the morning. and then and then have an earlier meal and then you've got quite a nice ⁓ extension of just natural ⁓ you know fasting right? Yes, y you know, you don't eat late at night, right? You know, and you're it it's different if you're socializing, you're out at a birthday party, that's gonna happen, whatever, you know. But nor your normal life, that's a kind of a nice pattern, right? There's no extremes there, right? And all I'm saying is you will notice if you get these healthy fats in, fats don't spike the blood sugars, right? And you can have the complex you know how the the influences they say I don't have any carbohydrates. You can have And I agree with the simple carbohydrates, yes. You wanna, you know, watch out for too many of them, right? Because they're always gonna spike your blood sugars. When that happens, the free radicals are gonna be triggered, the inflammation is gonna be triggered, all of these factors, right? ⁓ so when you get those l lovely natural fats in there, you're not gonna be spiking the blood sugars. It's quite easy to do. For instance, I'll give you one simple example. So we celebrate oats in this ⁓ ⁓ country, you know. My my ancestral background is Scottish. My grandmother was from Scot Scotland. ⁓ And ⁓ she came to New Zealand. And ⁓ so we always had oats in ⁓ my family and they were delicious. And now some people argue now, ⁓ but oats are going to spike your blood sugar and all of this. Well they forgot to put the butter into the porridge. That's the big difference. So you could do this experiment. You just have your oats and you know, you can put some superfoods into that, you know, the you know, the goji berries and things. And then eat that, but then you'll be hungry in like two hours, right? And you'll need to have lunch. Whereas if you do like, you know, soak your oats overnight. Cook you always soak your grains, right? So soak them overnight. Don't add salt ⁓ that night, right? Because you want the phytic acids to come out. Always use the sea salt and a range of sea salts, right? ⁓ so cook your oats. ⁓ I always put the chia seeds in at the end. I always put the goji berries in, the nutri again, incredibly nutrient-dense, right? ⁓ and I do use berries. Remember, I cheat all the time. So ⁓ I use berries throughout the year, right? ⁓ nutrient-dense, phyto ⁓ you know, all the kit lovely ⁓ nutrients that you get from berries, right? They just happen to cost a fortune, have you noticed? Like in Manhattan, it's like you know, ten dollars for a little punnet of of blue ⁓ blackberries, but it's worth it, right? And then I put a nice big scoop of butter in it at the end. And I'm not scared of sacred ⁓ saturated fats. I I need saturated fats. I celebrate them. I don't OD in it, but that's a way of getting, and it tastes really, really good. And I will go for several hours now without feeling hungry. So if you learn how to really, you know, satisfy yourself, integrate those lovely traditional fats, you'll notice that your blood sugars get that you're eating less, you feel satisfied, and all sorts of things start to happen. You've you regain your vitality, right? You lose weight. All of these things, right? Okay, moving on. So here's the wonderful Inga making a Cesandra goji berry drink and ⁓ cacao drink and using some of the tinctures that we have from our superfoods. There's definitely a big place in superfood. This is the sort of the style of broths that we often make. That's your classic miso soup. That's if anything brings you back to into your body as a good old miso soup. We're doing all the fermented, lovely foods here. ⁓ here's a good example of the porridge that I was talking about. And so getting into the food energetics now, ⁓ we We talk about what's referred to as the the three treasures. I don't have too much time to explain the fullness of it, but I have introduced one term already, ⁓ which is the jing. We also have a concept called the the qi in the blood, and the third tre treasure is called the shun or the consciousness, right? And so we have foods and herbs and superfoods, in fact, that nourish all three treasures, right? And so we have these certain categories in food energetics that we ⁓ work from, including the ⁓ herbs. This is a fun place to start with though. This is called the Doctrine of Signatures. You might have heard of this. I call it the Kindergarten School of Food Energetics. And it's a wonderful place to start for all of us, right? And it's ⁓ really activating your right hemisphere thinking around food, which is what you should, because ⁓ quite frankly that's the way we think about food. ⁓ you know, we we don't think really like, ⁓ for dinner I need vitamin K and vitamin C and you know I need my you d you don't think that, do you? You think you have an image Of what that dish is going to look like and with the people that you're sharing it with and the the flavor that you want to get out of it. So it's very right brain thinking. And this is a very right brain idea of ⁓ kind of getting to know the energetics to begin with. And this is what all traditional with this one category that we share with every culture of longevity, an indigenous tribe on this planet, and it's This concept of the doctrine of signatures. When you are with married people in New Zealand and and and Aboriginal people in the bush, this is what they're using. They're saying, ⁓ this is what we use to heal the knee. And this is what we use, we'll call like a good brain food. Because it looks like the brain. It's the concept of like treats like, right? And you know, to a degree we can follow that up with science, you know, because you know, this is full of ⁓ omega-3 ⁓ and the walnuts, and that's good for the brain, you know. So we would say the ⁓ leafy vegetables, what they're doing all the time is interchanging gas with the sun and the environment, and that's their job. They they're inner and outer, that's what they do. They are the lungs of the vegetable kingdom. So when you eat them, they strengthen your own lungs. I risk my case. And ⁓ you know when you have a kidney bean soup, that's very, very strengthening to your kidneys. Because you've just got to ask yourself, why is nature using that shape? And why are my kidneys that shape? What's going on in terms of the electricity, the voltage, which you can study in terms of sacred geometry and modern physics, about that shape, right? And so when you take that shape, it's going to strengthen and resonate with the kidneys in the body. So yes, we would say that if you've got weak kidneys, start to have kidney bean soup. But you can also have all beans because they relate to what we call the water element in Chinese medicine. Just like ⁓ all every whole cereal grain has been associated with every religion, every philosophical pursuit since the beginning of time. You know, ⁓ Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, the staff of life, which is our wheat, right? Or why? Because it actually looks like the nervous system. This whole cereal grain is, by the way, the most evolved ⁓ plant on the planet. And it's incredibly nutrient dense. You know, when you look at wheat and barley and oats and rye, very nutrient dense, right? And it looks like our nervous system, it looks like our spine is spiraling right deep into that midbrain, where that midbrain is receiving all of those frequencies from heaven and earth. There's a huge vortex of energy in our midbrain. Which you might call consciousness that we all share vibrationally. So ⁓ that's the playfulness of the doctrine of signatures. So next time you go shopping and see the vegetables and the shapes and the colors, that's something to exercise. And by the way, this is a great way of getting your children involved with their. dietary preferences with ⁓ starting to understand food and the environment and where food comes from because children love this idea. If you ever teach a class about food energetics, at the kindergarten or early school, just use this and you have the kids in your your palm, they love it. You know, you get them to draw shapes and what part of the it looks like and it's a great ⁓ way of beginning your food energetics journey where you start to think about colours and shapes and resonances. Yeah. I'm not too sure. I didn't do this. I didn't do this graphic. What's this?

speaker-0: Cut it.

speaker-1: The and you know how people say that they're always good for the eyes. Yeah. So just like walnuts are good for the eyes. Look like the eyes. And then of course we have yin and yang, which is where we start with food energetics as well. ⁓ these are two broad categories though. ⁓ we use several categories in the study of food energetics. So yes, the doctrine of signatures is where you start. Then ⁓ a little bit more deeper investigation now into the the qi of the food for instance. It's about comparing things is a good way of learning ⁓ yin and yang. So we would say coffee is more yang than milk. Milk is more relatively yin. Why do I say that? Well, coffee is very activating, it's drying, it's warming, and it doesn't hydrate you, and it doesn't build up your blood. So if you've got dry symptoms and insomnia and blood deficiency and these sort of things, you don't coffee's not your medicine. I always say you've got to be healthy to have a cup of coffee, right? And Whereas in America they have to drink a pint of milk every night, straight out of the fridge, coal, not a good idea, to get a little bit of sleep happening. Because they've drunk so much coffee and had so much junk food and running around in the car and they're so hyped up that the only thing that will get them slowed down, buffering that acid that built up into the ⁓ stomach, etc., is that pint. Of milk because of its yinness. So then I would say to you, based on that little storyline. Everything becomes medicine now. Sugar is your medicine. You know, drugs are your medicine because that's where you are energetically. That's what you're using to try to make balance. It just so happens that you're going from extremes to extremes. You know, 16 cups of coffee during the day and then three pints of milk to try and get at least two hours' sleep. So it's the yin-ness of milk that we compare to the coffee. So that's where we start with yin and yang. And of course, that's a big study that we do with our courses. We use it for understanding symptoms. Somebody can be too yang, somebody can be too yin, too hot, too cold, too deficient, excess, these kind of ideas. Seasonal cooking, I've talked a little bit about. This is the temperatures of foods that I've mentioned before, that we have a range of foods that are like a little bit more on the center. We have herbs that are more warming. We have foods that are more cooling. It's an immediate response to foods affecting your ⁓ how you're feeling. It's a very good direct system to get to know. And this is the five-element theory where yin and yang is broken down. We use five elements a lot in Chinese medicine. It pervades everything, guys. In acupuncture, we have the five element points here and here. in ⁓ we can use it for you know ⁓ mapping the environment, ⁓ but Internal medicine, the way we use it is that we have these organ groups, which are yin and yang paired, organ groups, and then we have ⁓ a season, a time of the day associated with it. We have colors that are very, very healing, and we have ⁓ Tastes that are very, very healing as well. For instance, the sour taste is very good for clearing out the gallbladder ⁓ channel and ⁓ strengthening the enzyme ⁓ activity of the liver. Bitter foods are very strengthening to the heart and to the heart muscle that you come across like in the Mediterranean diet, all those lovely bitter foods. ⁓ Sweet taste is something that we really want to celebrate because that's the center. That earth energy I mentioned before is your digestive power. You know that term agni that we use in ⁓ Whereas we use that the yangness of the spleen energy to transform things. So that's a very regulating, harmonizing taste that you want to get from natural sweet flavors, not the sugary things. ⁓ the pungent spreads the energy of the lungs over the body and the salty ⁓ taste that we use in a very cohe covert way, you know, we put the ⁓ seasonings into cooking, right? To bring out the sweetness in the other flavors. So it's very rare that you'll have something, you know, salty, salty, right? Unless you wanted a quick action of reducing the heat. And of course a lot of the seasoning agents are very minerally rich. Things like tamari and shoyu and miso, etc. Right, and of course good old sea salt. So all of those tastes actually go in and strengthen those organ groups, right? Quite frankly, everything that we do in this system is geared up to strengthen the organs, right? Because that's your emotional and psychological life, right? In Chinese medicine, they all have these associations. For instance, when the liver is out of whack, there's a thousand and one symptoms there, but a person's temperament becomes very angry and impatient, and you know, red eyes and constant migraines going on. When somebody has a spleen energy deficient, there's digestive problems happening all the time. With kidneys, when they become deficient, there's no forward movement, there's sleeping problems, there's fatigue problems. kind of things you know so it's all kind of geared up to strengthen the organs So this is the three treasures. I'm kind of starting to run out of time here, but this is the Jing. I do have a list of Jing foods in the slides for you to take home because that's your constitutional energy, and today's subject was unlocking the secrets to longevity. And one of those secrets is to start to study and understand the foods of that rejuvenate that deep ancestral energy that we call Jing. This is the qi in the blood, and of course the shun. So this is some good Jing foods. ⁓ We've talked a lot about this, but for instance, the good old, you know, the Jing is held in the bones in the animal. So bone broths are very, very good for rejuvenation, for digestive problems, for getting out inflammation from the body. ⁓ Anything that's colored black. Like black beans, black seeds, black ⁓ cummon seed oil, these are all very good for the gene. Seaweeds are a black food, they will strengthen your gene, they strengthen your hair, ⁓ also and they strengthen your reproductive energy. raw milk, things like ⁓ royal jelly, these kind of things. And here's some ⁓ other dishes from our ⁓ group. This is ⁓ Nan Singh, he's one of the faculty members. And he has this incredible background. ⁓ he's African American, but he kind of grew up in Taiwan for the first ⁓ few years of his life, you know, five to seven. But then every summer his grandfather would bring him back to Taiwan, because his grandfather Was a trader, I think, from Ethiopia, and his grandfather got sick when he was in Taiwan. And the Western medicine couldn't heal him, so he went to a Chinese doctor in Taiwan and ⁓ healed himself with Chinese herbs. And so his grandfather actually ended up studying with that Chinese herbalist and actually ended up taking over this practice when that herbalist died. And so He came back every year to a Taoist monastery in Taiwan, which quite frankly they don't exist anymore. In those days, this is back in the 60s and 70s, Children could still go to these monasteries where you learnt all of the Taoist arts, acupuncture, cosmology, meditation, of course, martial arts, cooking with the herbs, food as medicine. ⁓ And so he learned all of that, right? Unfortunately, now parents in Taiwan want their kids to learn computer programming, and the school doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately, right? But he was there, and his passion was always cooking with the herbs. So we train our students with you know the basic level of the ingredients that I've sort of mentioned today, the energetics, but then the next phase is start to cook with the herbs because it takes your Health dynamics to the next level, and we call that radiant health. It means you know we have a common level of health, right? Which you need to maintain. But then when you get into radiant health, you can deal with so many more challenges, take on a lot more challenges, deal with a lot more stress and not get stressed out, all of these things. When you start to use the herbs in your cooking, they take you to the next level, right? And we're the only curriculum that trains people in the herbs. There's no we're we're unique in many, many ways what we do with this curriculum compared to our other course courses. And ⁓ don't forget we're we're still standing. After 40 years, I've seen other schools come and go and we really are one of the longest running food as medicine curriculums in the West. And hopefully we're still standing in a hundred years' time, Patricia. So ⁓ I've mentioned the medicinal mushrooms. ⁓ I'm also gonna mention the sugar. And by the way, you can buy these little nodules of sugar off the internet. ⁓ you drop them into ⁓ simmering for like 35 minutes, you've got a really healthy brew. As far as everybody in Russia and Siberia, this was their folklore medicine to cure just about everything under the sun, including cancer, right? Big time. Very, very powerful, delicious brew, by the way. Don't throw it away, just it keeps adding, it keeps giving, it keeps giving. ⁓ this is Mr. Hoshu Wu, who lived a very long, healthy life. It's one of those ⁓ tonic herbs that I've mentioned, like Romania, very, very similar energetics. ⁓ this is the in our introduction, we Patricia said that I'll introduce you to the the the longest ⁓ Sorry, I should reframe that. To the the tea that's considered the most ⁓ beneficial to longevity. ⁓ we have it back here if you haven't tried it. It's called glynostema, and it's from this area of China where historically they lived 20 to 30 years longer, right? And ⁓ nobody like when they discovered this in the West, they there was a Japanese English research ⁓ group that went into this region in the 1970s to try. and figure it out. Why why are the this particular region? Why do they live 20 to 30 years longer? And then you know when you study when you go to China, you know, pretty much people, you know, there's variations like swan cooking and so forth and a little bit different to catanese, but there's a lot of similar things there. So it wasn't it wasn't the diet. they looked at the water. It wasn't like glacial water, you know, like they have in the Some of the other valleys. ⁓ And then one day one of the researchers asked, you know, well, what are you drinking? You know, ⁓ when you f when I first went to China, everybody was walking around with a glass jar, and they would make their tea in the morning and take it to work with them, you know, like their green tea and all of that. And ⁓ he said, Well, what are you drinking? He said, ⁓ that's poor man's ginseng. Well, what do you mean by well, this is what we've been drinking here for the last, you know, thousand years? And they put it under the microscope and gyneistema. Has a hundred and more than a hundred and twenty sapinins. So sapinins are let's just say for the our time that it's one of the ⁓ biochemical activities that make a plant quite medicinal. Now, ginseng, you know, has ⁓ it's quite medicinal. You might have heard of ginseng, it's sort of yang in nature, good for fatigue, cold symptoms, good to have in the winter, good for brain chemistry. It only has 30 sapinins. Humblegrass tea has over 120. And it's now developed into what we call spring dragon tea because the gyne stemmer is actually very cheap. ⁓ You can get it from Chinatown. And by the way, they extract some active components out of this and biohacking and sell it to you for $500 a month, right? Don't go there, just drink the tea, right? And spring drag and it's got a few other little herbs in it to make it a little bit more palatable. This is very palatable, but it's not as tasty as green tea, right? But it's still quite good. At least put some goji berries with it and it it tastes good. So that's called gyneostema. It's the number one longevity tea on the planet, right? And it's an adaptogenic, it has no caffeine in it, gives you a little bit of buzz in the morning, it can mellow you out at night, you know, towards sleep. And this is what we mentioned before, Cesandra, again, readily available, a powerful herb, ⁓ strengthening in those three treasures, the five elements, enters all 12 meridians. There's not many other herbs that do what Cesandra does just in one take, right? It's phenomenal. Easy to purchase, start drinking it. It's got a it's got a ⁓ an acquired taste, somewhat stringent, but after a while you really get to know it and love it, right? I highly recommend it. Really, really strengthening. And so we do do biohacking in the curriculum. We're up to speed. I always feel that I I want to be on the cutting edge of everything in life. You know, nature is very interesting on the cutting edge. Have you noticed that highway, right? And then you look at the weeds that grow along the highway. Well, that's where I am, right? Because that's where all the interesting things happen, right? On that edge. So I am up to speed with all of the I do go to the biohacking conference. Some of them I'm not going to anymore because I'm not learning anything new. But I've integrated a lot of that into a module that we do use where we go do go through. Yes, there is a place for supplements. There is a place for the technologies that you might see at these lovely urban spas that are developed. I mean that's a it's a multi-billion dollar industry, biohacking, you know. So yes, we're up to speed with that. We teach our students with that. We want to be on that cutting edge always. So there's a place for that. ⁓ Now to put it all into perspective, we want to obviously reduce stress, we want to protect our our jing. So obviously reducing stress, you want to, you know, have some lifestyle factors, you know. I personally don't think ⁓ a need to ⁓ have alcohol just to feel relaxed or human. I drink alcohol but that's a sociable thing, you know, and I don't think you should be drinking alcohol every day. You know, that builds up a lot of liver stress, you know, what like one Once a week or something, you know. but you know, you need to have some other things to you know, like a a walk, ⁓ you know, Plot time with the family, you know, what lovely music, all of these things. You need to get clever. ⁓ obviously reduce ⁓ you know the negative things goes without saying. Get natural fibers around your house and your clothing. Watch out for those electromagnetic fields, including, you know, ⁓ your phone charged up right next to your head. Not a good idea, guys, right? reduce the screen time, unplug where you can. remember what you're gonna do with your microwave now. Right? Yep, bury it in the garden. And a healthy s ⁓ skepticism yeah around some of these things right up to you that's up to you And ⁓ at home, clear out some of the triggers. You know, it comes down to these fundamental things that ⁓ you see around your kitchen and the imagery, you know. And so if you want to get some healthier patterns in there, have have those things lying around now. And you know, and just don't buy that food anymore. You you're still gonna get it because you go to your friend's place or you meet your friends for a cup of tea, and of course you're gonna have a chocolate cake, right? But you know, just don't buy it and have it at home. Right? And it's important for your kids not to be around that as well. And if they need ice cream, they can go off to grandma's place, you know. Don't give them ice cream, maybe once or twice a year. Or don't be the police force, you know. Yes, go to your birthday party, eat as much ice cream as you want. Just don't come back and complain about your headache and how ill you feel. But your kids need to learn these things because they're exposed to just a toxic world out there with junk food and fast food and advertising so they actually need to learn these patterns at home with just by what you do, right? I don't talk to my kids, ⁓ healthy grown daughters, but we didn't really need to talk much about this, right? We just did it. And that pattern is what they took into their life and they have they have healthy children, right? It's just a pattern, right? That you it's just a way of life and kind of a mindset, remember, that you don't have to force, right? but they can subtly pick up on all of this. But they do need education around all these negative things, you know? It's really important. ⁓ Strategically, you know, plan a a menu. Make a stock once every two weeks. Because that's all you need like on an afternoon, Sunday afternoon, make a stock and then you can keep it in the fridge and then freeze half of it that you can take out for the second week. And then that's gonna go into your porridge and your soup and your jolks, your vegetable dishes, and you're gonna remineralize and get those enzymes back and heal that. digestive track which is where you want to start. You don't want that digestive discomfort. That's the first thing you want to knock on the head, right? To move ahead in your ⁓ life journey. Okay. Do something for your immune system every day, which pretty much means I always say have a pickle a day, right? Or you could add have ⁓ medicinal mushroom a day or use the fungi ⁓ family every week, right? ⁓ and get to know your soul group, guys. You know, remember when w I've talked a little bit about the ⁓ cultures of longevity and their dietary patterns and what they did. Remember, these people had no degenerative disease, they lived to over a hundred, they had healthy children. That's what we're studying from cultures of longevity. So we have to learn more how did they go about doing that? And of course, the other factor that I didn't mention was that they had wonderful communal co community support. So when you're In the ⁓ London, and you're you're sort of disconnected from just that whole tribe doing this, right? Which is what they did. It was a no-brainer for them. It was quite easy for them to do. That was the only food that was available, right? What you guys have to do is find each other, you know, ⁓ find friends that are going to support you, ⁓ partners that are going to support you, relationships that are going to support you, that aren't going to resist to you making healthy changes in your life. Right. And if those people don't, then say goodbye. Right? Really. You don't want the negative energies holding you back. Life is too short. So you have to find your soul group, right? And of course, that's another thing about our training is that we get a whole bunch of people together and we put them together and they they get to know their friends and they're supporting one another and doing the Facebook thing and we have QA and all of that. So but either way, you have to find your friends that help you with this. And one way of doing it, this is what I did when I started this in London ⁓ forty-seven years ago or whatever. ⁓ I did dinner parties. That's and by the way, that's how I learnt how to cook. Well, I'm still a lousy cook, but that's the way I learned to cook. And that's what we still do back ⁓ back in Sydney on a regular basis. Once a week we have dinner parties. Just the fact of enjoying food and and and not eating out at expense of restaurants whenever people want to meet up. Have you noticed they just want to go to a restaurant? Because people kind of lost the art of cooking. And home cooking, you know, and how healing that is. And it's more fun, it's more economical, instead of a row loud restaurant, which by the way, loud music takes away your jing, right? It's one of those environmental stresses that burns your jing out. So get to know your your ⁓ soul group. Very, very important, guys. So just some other basic guidelines, you know, keep the conversation light at dinner. Remember, I love that, you know, no politics, no religion, no this, no that. Just, you know, really light conversation so you digest your food. Then you can argue after dinner, okay? ⁓ practice ⁓ gratitude, practice letting go. That's the highest spiritual aspiration that a human being has. And it's the toughest one to do. To be able to energetically let go of all that trauma that happened, that argument, that desire, you know, that all of that's the largest one to do. But when it happens. You lighten up, you become a more spiritual person to be able to let go. Now, the interesting thing here is when you get into the longevity biology, you're actually what? You're clearing your channels. So that emotional, psychological stagnation is not blocked in there anymore. You're clearing that out on a physical level, and then it's it it starts to become an emotional and psychological level that you can clear out and just essentially become a free. human being and your love is expressed for your cooking and nourishing and if the only way I gauge spirituality in a person is their not what they're wearing but that's part of it of course and what they're saying is part of it but their sense of hospitality. It's amazing when you go to traditional people's, you know, you travel from Morocco and you're in the country and then they take you in and they're feeding you and they don't want you to go home. That's incredible spirituality. It's phenomenal. That's the way I gauge ⁓ hospitality. So always look after strangers, feed them, clothe them. Hopefully they move on. And So we get into some diagnosis in our training, the body types, just like an Ayurvedic. We have the body types in Chinese medicine, these are constitutional types. All of this is also get up for your constitution, really understanding your constitution. Natural medicine is all about just looking after your God-given constitution. That's it in a nutshell. So but you need to sort of study it. There's these all these dynamics that are quite interesting. There's certain food groups that help to. Like in the Ayurvedic tradition that you might have read about, you know, there's certain food groups that are good for the pitter type and the kuffer type, etc. Some foods that they need to avoid more. These are some of the deficiencies that we get into. I've mentioned this one to you this evening, ⁓ blood deficiency, but that goes deeper into the body, into affecting the you know the foundations of your health that we call the yin deficiency. And those symptoms are a lot more chronic. And we do a little bit of ⁓ facial diagnosis in our training. Here comes Patricia because I'm running out of time. We've got these lovely testimonials that you can read about on our website. And I'm gonna hand it over to Patricia. Thank you very much.

speaker-0: Thanks, guys. Thank Okay. I'm just gonna go one forward. Okay, thank you everyone for listening. I know we've been past the time, but there's just so much that we can discuss. So thank you for your patience and your contribution by being here and for everyone online as well. We, as always, love hearing from Roger. And this is, like I said, just like the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more that we would love to discuss with you and teach you and inspire you to do. And we do have something exciting that we're launching today, and we want to share with you in cases of interest and in case it resonates. here are a couple of our testimonials. Just a lot of what you'll hear throughout anyone who welcomes and enters our space is transformation, transformation in health, transformation in the way that they're feeling and how their life is aligned. And I was certainly a testament to that. know, before I came across this training, not only was I like I shared suffering from a lot of chronic health issues, but I was in a path that was deeply unfulfilling. And through this work, I was able to not only recover my health and really change and transform my life, but really come back into my own knowing, into the path that I really resonate with. And that is, like what Roger was saying, that is the definition of health at the end of the day. Like, why do we want to be healthy? It is to be able to pursue our dreams. It's to able to really do what we're meant to do here in this earth. So that's why we're so passionate about this work. And today ⁓ we are launching a short course or an introductory course, foundations course, that will be accessible if you shall choose to. So it is the Longevity Diet Foundations course and it is everything that Roger has taught you here in a very digestible form with study guides with all of the supporting information. And what's really unique about what we've done is that we have then created 10 mini modules that accompany that that are condition specific. ⁓ So if you are suffering with migraines or fertility or you want support in pregnancy or longevity science or you're feeling burnt out and fatigued or there's digestion issues or weight loss that you're looking to achieve or blood sugar issues. So all of that we have filmed with all the protocols that you can support yourself with. Again, very holistic, all based on the beautiful wisdom that we shared today. ⁓ And because it is on presale, you guys are literally the first to find out about it. We do have a special offer to share, which will be normally the foundation's course is 150 and every mini module is 100. So in USD, I, someone please, the transition for gross British pounds. But basically we're offering you $100 off so you are able to get the foundations course and any module of your choice. And if you want to get more than one module, sort of one condition specific module, then do email us. We can also accommodate and give special pricing for that. But there basically is all of those different tracks that I mentioned. You can scan here. However, if you are a guests. There is a goodie bag for you and there will be a leaflet available for you to take home. If you are a student or alumni, there is different pricing for you. So wait for us, wait to hear from us on that. But this is for the public. ⁓ And we do also have our 12 month certification. A lot of folks here have gone through that certification. That is a beautiful journey as well. ⁓ And we will be ⁓ enrolling for that, opening enrollment this fall. It is currently closed, but you can join the wait list and we will also have different opportunities for you ⁓ to get involved. So, you know, we share this because we're deeply passionate about this work. We want to make it more accessible to as many people as possible. So we have these free workshops and we'll continue to have them. So you'll be added to our newsletter if you aren't already. And otherwise, there is a way to get involved through this longevity diet fundamental course ⁓ and the coaching certification if it resonates. But other than that, we, I think, are fully finished. So we say education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. We really believe that knowledge is power. And we're so grateful that you took some time in the afternoon of your busy schedules to come and enrich yourself with this important information that is life-giving and life-changing. ⁓ And we look forward to connecting with you.