Dr. Layne Norton

There's some idea that by having less gut transit time, that the toxins that are in our digesta that wind up in stool, that they have less time to interact with those intestinal cells.

And so by getting rid of it faster, that reduces your risk of colorectal cancer.

Soluble fiber,

the effects on the gut microbiome, the production of short chain fatty acids,

and also the lowering of LDL cholesterol.

So we have an improvement in glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity.

We have those mechanisms.

In the food matrix.

And actually what's interesting is one of the first seminars I went to as a graduate student, there was a professor there talking about lycopene and tomatoes and all this kind of stuff.

And at the end, we're asking questions and he goes, you know what?

You have a really hard time beating Mother Nature's Kitchen.

And I really like what he said, which is, you know, whenever we try to extract these individual compounds out of food, we never, not never, rarely do we see the same beneficial effects as consuming the whole food itself.

To your point about the food matrix, right?

So yeah, there's a pathway there.

There's biochemical pathways there.

We may not ever be able to like really pick them out in terms of priority of what – but the thing to remember – and I tell this to people.

Every food you eat probably activates something positive and negative.

The question is not whether there are things in it that will activate positive and negative pathways and even that I get the heebie-jeebies about because –

You know, a pathway is probably only negative if it's dysregulated because your body evolved to keep you alive.

But it can activate good and bad things.