The Rainbow Diet

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If you're ready to level up your practice with evidence-based root cause care, FMU is the place to start. Check them out at functionalmedicineuniversity.com. Hey everybody, Dr. Rob Silverman here, Proven Health Alternatives. I've got international superstar, a young lady who's written seven books, multiple chapters in other books internationally known. She is going to illuminate you. Hey, Dr. Rob, good to be here with you. So happy you had some time out of your busy day to come join us. I'm excited.

Let's dig in. The rainbow diet sounds like colors and the colors mean something in a diet. They do. You know, I've been a nutrition scientist long enough to see that things come and things go like everything in nutrition is like a pendulum swinging, whether it's low fat, high fat soy, no soy eggs, you know, kind of back and forth. So as a scientist, I'm always looking at like, what is the tried and true? What is this steady eddy? And what I have seen thanks to the research, even my master's degree was in this topic of plants, looking plant compounds.

And so they're doing a lot of things in our body that they don't get a because most people are focused on the macros. Most people. Are focused. On what I call the three musketeers, protein, carbohydrate and fat, and they kind of get stuck there. Some people come into vitamins and minerals, but very rarely do people start to consider the phytonutrients, which is the rainbow diet. I love it. The three Musketeer's. Let's argue about the macro nutrients, the fat carbs and the protein. You see it right?

I mean, people have wars about this. Constantly. But without question, plants come to the top of the list. So let me ask you a question. Maybe a little off track with the rainbow diet. Does that mean you believe in a vegan diet, carnivore is useless? Where do you stand on that within your rainbow-diet theme? That's a fair question. Most people would think that, oh, she's vegan or vegetarian. No, I'm about personalization, actually, and within functional nutrition. And if we look, we're in the 21st century.

The 20th century was all about diet patterns.

What the Rainbow Diet Is 3:34

Like, what are you? You're defined by your diet. the twenty-first century, thanks to science and a lot of the different developments, are all So I might be eating certain things one day and the next day, maybe not. So no, I mean, we need to move the conversation away from pigeonholing ourselves into a dietary structure. And even though the book is called The Rainbow Diet, it really refers to a philosophy and guidelines and looking at nature's intelligence. No, you don't have to be a vegan. In fact, carnivores Strict carnivores are also getting phytochemicals because a lot of plants are eaten by animals.

And so you're going to get very, very small amounts potentially in a carnival diet, not enough. You're not going get enough fiber. But everybody has to go with the way of eating that they're most drawn to for their genetics, their environment, they accessibility and their needs. Outstanding. It's funny you talk about plants and polyphenols. So they have a little bit of a bitter taste, correct? They do. And bitter is thought to be better, right? Bitter is better because we have bitter-taste receptors in our stomach and on our tongue, and that stimulates the GLP-1 signaling.

So I was watching. Somebody you know relatively well? I have a little sardonic joke with that, Dr. Jeff Bland, and he was talking about the GLP-1 stimulators and the bitter taste receptors, the polyphenols, really backing up what you're talking. It really goes to the idea, maybe you should eat by color, not just calories. Well, and it also goes to, you should eat by certain tastes. You know, certain colors impart certain taste as well. And you and I have traveled internationally. We see how in certain countries there is an honoring of all the different tastes at a meal.

I think for most Americans it's about sweet, salt, you know, kind of that kind pendulum swinging back and forth. But truly, if we were to honor traditional ways of eating, we would be looking at bitter, umami, sour, astringent, you now, looking traditional Chinese medicine and honoring all of those tastes that they're keying into certain receptors that are signaling throughout the body. And what's really cool is that bitter taste receptors are not just in the mouth and in a gastrointestinal tract.

They're in brain, they are in reproductive tract, They're in the respiratory tract. They are throughout our bodies. So in some way, I feel like perhaps they've been improperly named as bitter taste receptors. And perhaps there are other kind of chemical compounds that those receptors are keying into. But yeah, bitter is better for that perspective. I'm going to piggyback on the eat by color, not just calories, because I wrote some crib notes. Your book, yeah, I try, we want to get a good grade. We want- Gold star for you.

Oh, my wife's banging the drums now. Your books centers on the idea that each color in a spectrum corresponds to specific phytonutrients and health benefits. As you said, very eloquently, a varied colorful diet supports diverse physiological systems. Taking it to the next step, seven systems, seven colors. Do you want to go through each one of those? Because I do. All right, go for it. I love that. You know, let me just first back up and just say when I was in graduate school way back in the 1990s, and I were studying these phytonutrients, they were just all bucketed as antioxidants.

And that was it. It was kind of like, oh, just get more antioxidants, functional foods. Let's add some lutein to prune juice or some lycopene into this functional food bar. But now we see that there's a lot more to these phytonutrients, and that is kind the genesis of a of this color code. What do I mean by the color-code within the rainbow diet? It's that every color seems to have a functional signature. So in other words, there's a reason to eat certain colors. So yeah, let's go through them. By the way, what is your favorite color?

Let's just get that off record. This probably won't be a surprise, but bull red. Okay, yeah. I think that hasn't changed since we last talked then. Okay, and everybody kind of has that color and that's such a great entry point into the conversation, right?

Red and Orange Foods 8:07

Like a five-year-old knows what colors they like and so does a 50- year- old and an 80 year old. We can all talk about color. So let's start with red. Red is the color of the immune inflammatory system. So think about it, when somebody's inflamed, they actually exhibit redness. It's part of a phenotype or the look and the feel of inflammation. But what is also really interesting is that certain foods that are red in color, cherries, strawberries, beets, there are certain things in these foods, namely certain phytochemicals that are polyphenols, phenolic acids.

Some of these red-colored foods are also higher in vitamin C, like acerola cherries, and even red bell pepper is pretty high. And so a lot of different nutrients that found in red colored foods would be helpful to the immune inflammatory system. Now, red is a little bit of a double-edged sword because some red foods can inflame people. So you're probably thinking in your mind, oh, but what does she think about the nightshades, the tomatoes, and some of the foods that people might be more reactive to?

So in the rainbow diet, I do talk about that. That red is a color where you have to look at both sides. It's not just eat more red foods without thinking about your individualized needs. Look at the red food and maybe they're perturbing inflammation in body for you. So red, inflammation, immunity based on these polyphenols, vitamin C. And when I think about red I also think the adrenals, which are those reddish glands that sit on top of the kidneys that help with survival and stress response which very much tie into the immune inflammatory cascade.

So what was the last red food that you had to eat? This morning, tomatoes, lycopenes. Did you have tomatoes? I did. I had them with my eggs, whole eggs of course, pasture raised. Okay. Tomatoes. And I don't think you would call it red, but it's in the red family. That's orange. It's the next category. Well, I'm setting you up inadvertently. My wife made some gluten-free cauliflower waffles. Oh, wow. Wow, that's really unique. Okay. Well, you know, in terms of red, it could be a lot of different things, right?

It could vegetables, It can be fruits. But keep in mind that even though I talk about plants, That category is not just fruits and vegetables. So it can nuts, seeds, edible flowers, herbs, spices. When we think of Red or any of these colors, just think expansively about those. Let's move on to orange since you mentioned locks. Right. And, you know, well, believe it or not, salmon and other kinds of fish are actually sometimes there are coloring agents to make them look even more orange. So when we think of orange, we of the carotenoid family.

So there are something on the order of 700 different carotenoids. This was the focus of my master's thesis, actually, where we were looking at lycopene, which is a red carotenoid, but there many, and some of them are orange, some are yellow. But the way that I talk about them in the Rainbow Diet is that orange is the color of reproductive health. and of looking at your fat soluble tissues. So like, you're fat, your brain, and your skin. When I was growing up back in the 1970s and my mom was a health nut, she had a lot of carrots.

What happened to her was her skin became orange, like an oompa loompah. A lot those carotenoids, they go right into the fat tissue. They're protective of the fatty tissue because we know that fat as Dr. Jeffrey Bland would say can be happy fat. or angry fat. We don't want the angry-fat because that kind of fat is filled with inflammatory cytokines, right? It's inflamed fat, that's the problematic fat so a lot of these carotenoids can be protective because they kind-of go into that fat tissue and act as a antioxidant protection.

There are also, I'm going to give you a tidbit that you may or may not know already But we also see a connection between carotenoids and ovaries in women. So specifically, there have been some research studies showing that within the ovary, you can find between 13 to 14 different carotenoids. They just kind of localize in the ovarie, and they seem to be important for things like ovulation. That's why I connect them to ovaerian health. Women that have more orange colored fruits in their diet may actually have less ovarian decline or a less early ovariant decline.

There was one study that was looking at that. So persimmons, mangoes, tangerines, oranges, very rich in certain carotenoids that seem to be protective for the ovaries. Fascinating. Let's talk about some of the other colors. Right. It's your least favorite. You know, that's so interesting because, uh, you know there have been studies on the psychology of color and most people are actually drawn to the color yellow. It is the Color of Optimism. Its the colour of happiness. it is kind of that happy color.

I mean, look at, have you ever seen the smiley face where it's just like a yellow circle with, two dots for the, I just took a picture of a Yellow daffodil yesterday because it was like, spring is here and it just feels like warm and inviting, but you don't like yellow?

Yellow Foods, Fruit, and Sweeteners 13:55

Yeah. I'm not a yellow guy. Okay. There might be something here for us to talk about then. So yellow in the rainbow diet is about digestive health. It's the seat of your digestive fire, right? So you've got bile coming out. You've stomach acid, you know, your squeezing out things that are hot and catalytic and transformative. So it is you know and for some people they've got too much heat they have got to much Digestive activity so yellow is kind of like red you can go to either side and there is a lot of processed yellow Like let's just name a couple of them right waffles cereals breads pastas Cookies cakes pizza crusts.

I mean a a yellow out there already and we could say Yellow has a spectrum of tan, brown, and I do talk about that in the Rainbow Diet, how it's not just yellow, but I actually address tan and brown separately, within that whole yellow chapter. Yellow, we might have a little bit too much fire symbolically speaking, so we're kind of burnt out. So how do we get nourishing yellow? When I think of yellow, I thing of detoxification, like good healthy liver activity, good, healthy bile formation through things like whether it's, you know, kind of, yellow green.

I'd think about citrus like lemons, the bioflavonoids. Right. And I would think pineapple full of protein breakdown enzymes. So, a little bit of pineapple with a meal is so good. Especially like a high protein containing meal. just for the natural breakdown that pineapple is capable of. And I wonder if you knew this, when there was a study published in the 1980s that looked at about 80 different foods to look at their serotonin content, and they found that the top three foods that they studied were all yellow.

So plantain, banana, and pineapple were up on that list. They're all high in serotonin. But what we don't know, let me just clarify, because we know that eating more bananas will actually increase your seratonin and make you a happier person. That is the missing link. We don�t know. Look at how a banana is like in the shape of a smile. Or you could say it's in the shape of a frown if you're getting too much in a way of processed bananas, right? And like very ripe bananas and overdoing it. So a smile can easily become a Frown.

And so that's why, you know, yellow is one of those colors that it is a little bit double depending on how you are seeing it in your life. You know, you changed my diet, and I'm a little provincial when it comes to that. So when we were down in Colombia, we had the opportunity to die multiple times. And you were like, Rob, You don't need a lot of fruit for somebody who's healthy. Why aren't you eating fruit? And I was like fruit fructose can't do it. You know, and we know now you can eat fruit at the end of a meal, you know decreases glycemic response, decreases insulin response et cetera.

And you're like, do you realize that the fruits are made in the shape of the organ that it helps? So, I was like- Mostly. Yeah, like walnuts and stuff like that. You were like yeah. So I mean you made a indelible mark on my thought process. I'd love you to expand upon that a little bit because, if you move me, You're not going to get anybody who's more obstinate and listening than I am when it comes to food. That's true. You did kind of have an aha moment when It comes. To fruit because you were asking like in all of the information circulating was about fructose and isn't that bad, but a fruit is more than just it's sugar.

In fact, nature has created it in the perfect way with fiber, different phytochemicals, and so we're taking in a whole of it, hopefully. We're not just having the processed formats of that. So I think from that perspective, it's beneficial. There are also studies, this is really interesting, showing that root. Intake of fruit is correlated with rates of and risk of depression in different mood states. So with greater fruit intake, we see on average lower risk for depressive symptoms. It's not just vegetables.

We see there's something very specific about fruit. So I think that that's important to acknowledge. And if people are craving sugar, one of the best things would be to have fruit sources of sugar. So having that banana, having the date in the context of what you just said, at the end of a meal, in a mixed meal so you've got protein and other things in it. When I was doing a lot of clinical work with people on the elimination diet, They would really struggle with withdrawing from sugar, because I'd have to move them away from processed sugar.

And I talked about kind of the rainbow of sweeteners, right? We're going to have stick to the natural sweetener. It's not that you never have sweet. Sweet is part of a regular palette of tastes. But you want the whole food sweetness. You want what nature provides, not what we create through white powdery substances, so I'm a huge fan of honey. which belongs in the yellow category. In fact, if you were to ask me, and we kind of got talking a little bit more, I would divulge that, gosh, i'm really into cocoa and different chocolate sources, which will get into brown.

And I'm also into honey. I think that honey has so many benefits. People have dismissed it and wiped it just because it's sugar. But actually, if you go a little bit deeper into the literature and look at how people use honey and what would be best practices, honey is loaded with a lot of phytochemicals. So I love things like propolis. When I'm traveling, I bring a combination vitamin C and propolus product. Propolis is very important to help with immune support. And just honey in general, it is, again, honoring nature's types of sweeteners.

which really backs up what you just said, one of your tenets in your book is food is information, food isn't just fuel. Right. And actually, it's a lot more than that. Food is inspiration, food is connection, foot is community, fruit is memories, good is love. food Is so many things to so Many people because we connect it to our life experiences. So in functional medicine, we definitely do talk about food as information. In fact, Dr. Bland was one of the first to start talking about that and how certain food I would say phytochemicals or even macronutrients, micronutrians speak to our genes and create an output, right?

We get communication back from our body based on that food. But I feel like food is more. When I started working with people, And connecting into their emotional connections with food, they're vast. Goodness, I'll give you a short list. People have such emotions connected to bread, to desserts, two different savory meals. It's really hard sometimes, again, if you're doing an elimination diet and you've got to give up this family casserole because it has gluten. So it's kind of like food is connected to who we are as people, which is why it creates so many arguments with people online.

Because people say, no, eat this, not that. And it is very polarizing. It's like we have so much invested physically, emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually in our food choices. So I think it it information, but it beyond information too. So I'm going to ask you, because I know that you wrote your PhD dissertation on omega-3s, am I correct? Well, essential fatty acids in general, which would be the omega 6 and the Omega 3s. Ah, so I can really delve. Uh-oh, he's going ask me about seed oils.

I am feeling it.

Food as Information and Oil Quality 22:08

Oh, it's coming. You know, I'm personally against processed seed oils. That's fine. And how do you define those? Just give me, because there's a continuum or a spectrum of how we talk about seed oil. So would you want like, like canola oil, oils of that nature? What are some of the others that because again, there is a continuam. Would you see flaxseed oil as part of it? Well, I had you do Erasmus, and to be honest with you I thought he was great, but I think that the flax seed oil, yes, is a processed seed.

So process from its non-natural state. So the ones that I would cook with would be extra virgin olive oil, coconut oils, avocado oil things of that nature. And you can get duped because it could be not a hundred percent. But I'm looking more at like the canola oils the rapeseed oils. The grape seed oils things like that. Where are you on that topic? Well, it's much like anything else. Like even meat, It's about the quality. It is about degree of processing and you could have You can have different levels of processing and it's also how people use those oils.

And what I think is problematic is how we cook with oils because fats break down in heat, light and oxygen. So if you're storing your fats in a plastic bottle, in clear bottle already you are going to have damage. You can actually be creating inflammation just by the dietary oils that you taking in. And then when you go and cook with certain oils you can further lead to greater oxidation of the fat and then you start to create these inflammatory byproducts. So I think that there's so much focus on seed oils and the processing.

I mean, this is, again, it's just another shiny object within nutrition. It's something for us to pay attention to, but I that I there is a lot more nuance because in nutrition it just feels like people just do a yes or a no, a good or bad. And I don't think This is one of those things where it's just, you know, he just toss all seed oils into the no basket. I think it is really a nuanced conversation. We have to look at storage, preparation, cooking. You know I was interviewed for a cardiology type of summit some years ago.

And I that, uh, we got to the question about cooking with oils. and I said, I don't actually like to cook with oil.s I like too cook it with water. You know, one of the best conductors of heat is water. So I usually, my husband laughs at me because, you know he's like, You burn our pans sometimes if you're not paying attention. You've got to pay attention when you just use water and not oil because it'll evaporate, right? And then you are just left with heat. And that's how good it is with conducting that heat So steaming and getting everything perfectly cooked and then adding in the oil at the very end is kind of how I tend to do it.

So I'm not damaging oils, but yeah, I like your choices of oils. I also think that diversity is important and I talk about that in The Rainbow Diet. how important diversity of all things would be, like even fruit. Don't have the same fruit every day, don't eat the exact same vegetable, the very same spice, same herb. You've got to diversify. The American Gut Project found that people that were having greater than 30 plant foods per week fared much better in their short chain fatty acid production, which is a marker in the gut of things like immune status and just promoting a healthy gut compared to people that had less than 10. And the average American kind of shuffles between probably like five to seven different recipes So they're very limited.

And also the amount of plants that we have access to. We go to the same grocery store. You know, we don't even really think and find ourselves with intention at the market, right? So we just kind of buy the the stuff. Diversity is important. In fact, what you actually, I think ideally want to aim for is about 50, five zero unique plant foods in seven days. That's not a lot. I've actually done this in a whole group setting. In the book, in the Rainbow Diet, I actually provide the tracker so you can categorize, and I got all the different categories.

Let me give you an example. If you had an herbal tea and it had seven herbs, that's seven unique plants right there. Terrific starting point. That's your starting point, but if you had that same herbal tea on day two, you can't count those same herbs. Now you need a different tea to give you different types of plants. So that's why I tell people, don't get the same green tea. If you get green, which is very popular, sencha, genmaicha, do the different kinds of green teas so that that in and of itself is diversity.

if your wanting an apple, Don't buy the big bag of apples at the store and just feel like, okay, now I don't have to think about it. Just take one minute and grab the different varieties because each of them counts as their own unique variety. You know, I live in Washington state, so we have a lot of Apples here. Right. I know not everybody has that same diversity, but that's one way to get more diversity is you can get variety even within one species of a plant. So just keep that in mind. That counts is diversity.

You covered a lot of terrain there, so let's go over a couple of things. So I agree with you, May May cooks with water, rice cooker, Southeast Asian approach. Okay. She'll use the George Foreman grill and if she puts anything other than water on it, she use lemon and onions. Another way of it not sticking. I really love your ideas of, and I just wrote it down, of course I have to go to her in a very, kind way and say you know what instead of giving me the red apple can I have a red can have green can i have this can't have that I mean you make a great point if you switch the type of green tea every night and you had five to seven different types of nutrients in each you basically are almost at 50 before you and obviously color means something but I'm curious what about like a color deficiency equaling a nutrient deficiency are there really more nutrients in the colors you know the red the green and the oranges well the number one color that gets overlooked in The Daily Diet is blue purple there was a survey done in 2009 and basically what the survey showed was

Blue, Purple, and Black Foods 28:38

that 88 percent of Americans did not meet their blue-purple color intake. So that would be like blueberries, figs, raisins, also grapes, eggplant, purple varieties of foods like purple broccoli or purple kale, Purple potatoes. The thing is purple is pretty rare in nature. It just is. I say purple as precious. So choose purple whenever possible. In fact, I'm giving a talk in the beginning of next month. There is a conference on cognition and I am talking on the power of purple actually because purple This color aligns to brain health, and if we're getting too little of it because of the anthocyanins, the proanthocynidins the different types of polyphenols in those foods that actually go and localize into certain parts of brain that are responsible for learning and memory, then we are missing out.

So to answer your question, yes, a color deficiency can equate to a phytonutrient deficiency, which can lead to functional insufficiency in some way. So color is function, right? We think of functional medicine. Color is not just to make something look pretty. It provides some functionality. Blue, purple, black. In fact, in the rainbow diet, I include black in that category. You're wearing black today. I'm wearing blue. So, you know, it's to emphasize whenever I am lecturing on the brain, I try to wear a blue or a purple dress just to drive home.

Like we really need more of this color. Now I live again in the Pacific Northwest. In our yard, we even have blueberry bushes. I really try to make sure that I'm intentional about getting blue, purple, black. Blackberries, wonderful. You know, I think the deeper the hue, like if I was stranded on a desert island, if somebody just told me you can have three different foods, what would they be? One of them would be not blueberries, but blackberries. Blackberries, look at how they're structured. They have more fiber.

The deeper the hue, typically the greater the phytonutrient density. It's so black and it's it so deeply hued in a lot of these pigments that are medicinal for the brain. the others I would say would be turmeric and I probably would Say broccoli or some cruciferous vegetable. We didn't cover green, which is my favorite color. I have a question for you. Please. We all know that longevity is the insightful conversation in the last three years. we've both been at different longevity symposiums. How would you say your ideas, your qualified ideas in The Rainbow Diet aid to longevity, health span, lifespan, and vitality?

Colorful foods make for vitality, and that's what we see even in the blue zones, right? These people are eating whole foods, plant foods. And we need the whole spectrum. It's not like we just need blue-purple for vitality and longevity. In fact, I've seen some discussion about that, like, oh, resveratrol is good for longevity, just get your grapes and your foods that have resVERATrol. I don't think that the body works like that. The body is a system web. We need the red for the inflammation, the immune system support.

because that helps us with hormone health, right?

Longevity, Rhythm, and Intermittent Fasting 32:28

We need the yellow to enable our digestive tract to work to its optimum. We needed green for the cardiovascular system. we need blue-green, which is with seed plants and minerals and iodine to help the thyroid. the good, healthy, unprocessed white in order to help us as well with just overall detoxification. And also when I talk about white and the rainbow diet, I talked a little bit about fasting. I took about the cleansing aspects and how that's also important for longevity. So when think of longevity, and I love your question because it's very topical, We need to honor the entire spectrum within in order to radiate.

Because if we just focus on one food, we don't get that diversity. We're not creative. The other thing we need honor is to eat in rhythm. Seasonal eating, honoring circadian rhythm, lunar rhythm... We even have a special month of birth rhythm meaning that I think your birthday is when? In November? September. I'm a Virgo. September, that's right. So for you, you know, there was this study and it was actually done in New York. It was done a hospital in new York where they looked at hospital records, they look at birth dates and then what people died of.

They found patterns and they found that if you're born during certain times of the year, You might have greater risk for certain things later in life just based on these associations that they saw. So, I think that March was a big month and November was big, and there were different things in between, but there is this sense of rhythm to eating. And if we pay attention to the colors that manifest in foods per season, we're going to be guided into even the chrono rhythm that food presents and maybe you ask me a little bit more about that because it's a bigger topic of that.

Food can help us to actually be in connection with nature in the seasons. So chrono rhythm, chrononutrition. Correct. Wow. Yeah, and chronobiotic effects of foods. So some of those polyphenols actually, this is newer research, have been shown to help us to really support our circadian rhythm. To modulate that circidian rhythm they seem to have hypothalamic like brain effects where they're helping us stay in sync. Now, it's not just the polyphenols, but if we're eating cherries out of season, so cheries are more like a spring food, and if you're starting to eat cherires all throughout the year, we might start to change our physiology a bit.

I used to work, I think you remember Dr. Jack Kornberg. We would sometimes see clients together at the Functional Medicine Research Center. And I remember him telling a patient, something about eating oranges out of season and he said if you keep eating orange is out-of-season it's like telling your body it summer when it really winter and that you need to store fat. Now there's some truth to that right like if we are. You know he's no longer with us he passed on and I loved working with him he was so animated and had such great points and i think there is some wisdom to doubt we don't do we really want to be eating or just in the winter.

You know, oranges are a summer food. They have certain phytochemicals that are different from oranges grown in certain other places, right? There was a study looking at, this was an animal study, but having these animals kind of like changed in their summer or their winter presentation based on their light rhythms, giving them oranges and then finding that there surely were changes in Now, I don't wanna scare anybody from eating an orange in the winter and say, oh my gosh, she said I'm gonna get fat and I am gonna change my metabolism and no, not necessarily, but again, it speaks to diversity.

If we're honoring diversity and we are changing up our foods and eating things in season and per the location that we live in, then chances are we going to have a better, more optimum outcome, especially when we think about longevity. I love your answer. I've got two takeaway points I want to go with you. Number one is, what are the four main principles of your book, The Rainbow Dye, to reiterate so everybody knows in an epigrammatic fashion, my New York style? Let's do it, doc. Okay, color, creativity, diversity, and rhythm.

So for color making sure that you're getting all the colors every day. The creativity we didn't talk as much about but being a little bit more creative about your food choices and food combinations. The diversity is key in making sure that you're choosing diversely through the week. And it's not just your food choices. You know, we get into food ruts. To me, that means that we're in a life rut. So when you start changing your foods, you may actually start to change your life. The fourth one is rhythm, which we touched on just at the very end there, talking about circadian rhythm.

Seasonal rhythm and even lunar rhythm kind of looking at what we are eating throughout the course of even a month, especially if we I think it's important to look at menstrual cycles and just even hormonal cycles. So those are the four. Wow, great takeaways. Here's my other takeaway. I have a friend of mine, he helps me a lot with the podcast. He's in Switzerland, and he watches and listens to them all. And he always says, Rob, at the end of the day, I need three takeaways to implement to make my life better based on the guest's expertise.

The stage is yours, Doc. Okay, three takeaways. Number one, colorful foods will make for colorful moods. So if you want to feel better, not just live longer and not reduce your risk of chronic disease, then I would say eat colorfully. And I don't mean the colorful, synthetically colored candies and cakes. I'm talking about the real food colors, right? Number two, I would say shake up your ruts of all kinds. It's so important to be very creative, right, about how we live life, what we're doing. So as much as possible, try one new thing a week with food.

Maybe that means trying a new food that you haven't tried in a long time. Like I try to do that for myself. Just recently I was thinking, oh, So how do I bring that in, right? So get creative, get a little bit more open and try new things. That'll be better for your brain too. And number three, I would say honor the light and dark rhythm as it relates to your eating. to focus on eating mostly when it's light outside, not in your house, but when its light, outside and try eating less when It's dark or dim outside.

I think that if we look at the work of Dr. Sachin Panda and a lot of the different studies on chrono rhythm, I Think it is not only what you eat. It is when you Eat that we need to consider for best outcomes. Wow, outstanding, thick with key takeaways.

Key Takeaways and Closing Thoughts 39:58

So I gotta ask you one more, I can't let you go. You talked about eating dark light, intermittent fasting. How does intermittent fast intertwine in a synergistic way with the rainbow diet? Well, intermittent fasting comes in as we were talking about white. It's like clean slate. Sometimes we need an inner reset. We need to clean up ourselves. So if we are going to cleanup ourselves, we to give them a break from all of the food that we take in. And when it's not light outside, when its dim, this is when your melatonin is starting to go up, your hormones are changing, you're not going to be as metabolically fit to digesting that meal and then to have good sleep.

So that's where intermittent fasting comes in. For everybody, that is a little bit nuanced. That's not for everybody in the same way. Some of us need a bit more, some of need less. But I think it's just a good guideline to think about two to three hours before bedtime. Don't be having that big meal. Try to scale it down so that you can digest and rest and actually have some healthy sleep. I want to give some clinically relevant talking points from the rainbow diet. I admit, I AI'd this, so you gave me the big thumbs up.

Good! Number one, color is code. Number two, colour diversity equals microbiome resilience. Yeah. One that we really didn't cover, food mood colour axis. You also, you talked about it and I'm really happy you talk about detox, a personalized pathway to detox. You clearly, if people didn't understand it, you were really bridging Eastern and Western medicine together. You are without question the bridge. I'm a little unleveled. And color as a coaching tool. Did I miss anything on you? I think for the most part, you got it.

I mean, I would say keep it simple. Food has become so complicated. People think about grams and calories and counting, and I will say enough already. Analysis paralysis, things come and things go, but what is tried and true is truly looking at these colors, looking the phytonutrients, which I call the underdogs of nutrition. The macronutrients, protein, carbohydrate, and fat, those are the three musketeers. They always get a lot of the limelight. But the underdogs are thousands of these different phytonutrians.

So what I would say is keep eating simple. Don't complicate it. And make sure that the foods that you're eating are relatively simple in their origin, staying away from processed foods. A lot it is just very basic intuitive wisdom. Outstanding. I had a great time. We have to do this again. Look forward to seeing you. And I promise you when we dine, I will eat from the color rainbow. No politics, no sports, No complaints, just happiness. Well, bring more yellow into your plate too. My question about it.

It was rhapsodic and then I met you and I need to change. Thank you so much. Ruben health alternatives, everyone.