Essentials: Micronutrients for Health & Longevity | Dr. Rhonda Patrick

The conversation opens with temperature. Huberman notes that both deliberate cold and deliberate heat seem to produce overlapping effects, such as increases in metabolism and brown fat, and asks whether the discomfort of each might act through the same pathway. Patrick's answer reframes the question in evolutionary terms: before food delivery, humans hunted, gathered and moved, went through periods of food scarcity, and ate plants. Each of these was a form of intermittent stress.

We evolved to intermittently challenge ourselves.

Patrick explains that physical exertion, fasting, heat and cold all activate what scientists call stress response pathways. These pathways overlap heavily. Once activated, they do more than help the body handle the original stressor. Patrick says they stay active and help the body cope with the ordinary stresses of metabolism, immune function and aging. She calls this concept hormesis. Depending on the pathway, the response may be antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, the production of more stem cells, or autophagy.

Her main example is heat shock proteins. As the name implies, heat activates them strongly. But sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts activates them too, along with Nrf2, a detoxification pathway that helps the body deal with carcinogens. Cold also activates heat shock proteins, though Patrick qualifies that heat does so more robustly than cold and the overlap is only partial.

Huberman raises an online debate, pushed hardest by people on a strict carnivore diet, over whether plants are "trying to kill us." Patrick rejects generalizations like this as "just not useful." In her view they spread because they are easier and more sensational. She points instead to specific evidence that sulforaphane strongly activates Nrf2, which regulates many genes, including genes involved in glutathione production and in detoxifying compounds from food such as heterocyclic amines.

Her evidence comes from genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Patrick says people who lack a well-functioning version of a gene that detoxifies heterocyclic amines are highly prone to colon cancer and have higher cancer risk. In those people, she reports, eating a lot of broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables negates that risk, because sulforaphane activates glutathione transferase and synthase genes. She calls glutathione a major antioxidant in the brain and the vascular system. She also cites human evidence that sulforaphane-containing foods activate glutathione in the brain, and notes that broccoli sprouts contain up to 100 times more sulforaphane than broccoli.

Huberman says he finds raw broccoli aversive and asks about cooking. Patrick acknowledges that cooking somewhat lowers sulforaphane. She adds that a study from a few years back found that adding 1 gram of ground mustard seed powder to cooked broccoli increased sulforaphane fourfold. Asked whether she eats this regularly, Patrick says she has shifted to sulforaphane supplements. She also adds a moringa powder to her smoothies. She describes moringa as a related compound that activates the Nrf2 pathway in a similar way.