The Dr. Hyman Show
Ancient Amazon Secrets That Activate Brain Healing & Reverse Aging | Alberto Villoldo, PhD
Wed, 26 Feb 2025
Dementia rates are skyrocketing, and cognitive decline is a growing concern. But what if you could actually grow a new brain? In this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, I sit down with Alberto Villoldo, PhD, a medical anthropologist and shamanic healer (and author of Grow a New Brain), to explore the powerful intersection of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge neuroscience. In this eye-opening conversation, you’ll discover: The Amazonian secret to protecting the brain from dementia and cognitive decline. How certain plant compounds can activate your body’s natural detox and repair systems. The surprising role of gut health in brain regeneration—and how to reset your microbiome. Why serotonin depletion is wreaking havoc on mental health and how to restore balance. How shamanic healing and modern science align to create lasting cognitive health. Tune in to learn how you can take control of your brain health and unlock the potential for true regeneration. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Big Bold Health, Timeline Nutrition, Paleovalley, and BonCharge. Receive 30% off Big Bold Health's Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat sprouted powder. Head to bigboldhealth.com and use code DRMARK30 at checkout. Support essential mitochondrial health and save 10% on Mitopure. Visit timeline.com/drhyman to get 10% off today. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to paleovalley.com/hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Order BON CHARGE’s Max Red Light Therapy device today and get 15% off. Visit boncharge.com and use code DRMARK.
Chapter 1: What is the Amazonian secret to brain health?
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So Alberto, it's so great to have you back on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Good to be with you, Mark. So for those people listening, we've been friends for 25 years. We've been to the Amazon together. We've taught workshops around the world together. We're now together at your house in Santa Fe here in New Mexico. And I'm recovering from back surgery, but we're not going to talk about my back today.
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Chapter 2: How do plant compounds activate detox systems?
I've written about it in my book on longevity because it's such an interesting concept that these stress molecules in plants, and the more stressed a plant is, the more it makes up these defense molecules. Precisely. The more it activates our body's own embedded longevity repair pathways.
And you've got to have... the ones that are bioavailable. Like the most bioavailable one that we know is sulforaphane, which comes from broccoli sprouts, five-day-old broccoli sprouts. You've got to chew them well. Imagine you're a rabbit trying to eat a broccoli, and then there are these toxins being produced, which is the defense mechanism that all plants have, that for us becomes medicine.
At the right dose. And that will switch on these very same systems because the body thinks that suddenly you're consuming a poison. And it'll mount a huge antioxidant defense. It'll start producing glutathione, which shuts down normally at about the age of 35. It'll begin producing superoxide dismutase. A massive production of these.
But if you keep eating those broccoli sprouts every day, it'll shut them down. Say, hey, this is not poisonous.
Right, because your cells upregulate and downregulate in response to the environmental cues. That's why you get... alcohol tolerance or opioid tolerance, you need more and more to have the same benefit, right?
Precisely. And this is what the Amazon indigenous people discovered without knowing what an RF2 stands for. They just know that these were the sacred plants that promoted longevity.
But there weren't any broccoli sprouts in the Amazon.
No, they have a bunch of other, uña de gato, cat's claw. There's 50 others that are extraordinary, but we can't get them in the West because we don't know the quality that we're getting and we don't know how accurate the dosing really is. It's all in the dosing. There's other ones like curcumin.
Curcumin is an amazing one, but curcumin is 5% bioavailable, whereas sulforaphane from five-day-old broccoli sprouts that you grow at home, you've got to turn your kitchen into your laboratory. Right. We're all going to be hippies and grow sprouts in our kitchen now? Totally. We used to do that in college. Five-day-old broccoli, homegrown broccoli sprouts are 85% bioavailable.
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Chapter 3: Why is gut health crucial for brain regeneration?
So Saccharomyces boulardii, and this is in my website, you've got instructions, it's in my books, is actually a yeast that competes with candida, brings balance to the gut, especially to this kind of dark area, this kind of black hole that we have in our guts of the anaerobes, the non-oxygen breathers.
And it brings balance to them and allows them to proliferate and it gets rid of the bad parasites. It gets rid of the H. pylori, for example. There's a really good science behind the use of sarcomycin. And it's been used with babies and children for 50 years to stop diarrhea.
Yeah, it's quite incredible. In fact, they use it clinically in medicine for people who have C. diff as a treatment. Precisely. C. diff, which is a clostridium bacteria that can kill you. I had it. It almost killed me. And yeah, it's a power-powerful compound. We call it a yeast against yeast.
And the beauty of boulardii, a saccharomyces boulardii, is that it doesn't stay in your gut. It doesn't colonize. It leaves after about six, seven days.
You know, one of the things we see a lot on our stool tests when we do stool analysis is a reduction in something called IgA. That's an antibody, the first line of defense of your immune system. Right. And when you say of COVID antibodies, those are the defense against COVID, right? So you have a system in your gut which interacts with the outside world.
And typically, with our guts being such a mess, we see a lot of people with suppressed IgA levels. And the Saccharomyces helps to bring it up. So you're talking about these sort of ancient organisms that we've symbiotically evolved with to help regulate our biology. and restart and renew processes that have been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, but we kind of messed them up.
You know, if you want to see animals in Africa, you go to where the food is. That's where the animals go. And that's what these bacteria did in our gut also. They went to where the food is. So they get to eat first. That's true. They eat first. They eat first. And then there's actually about 10 levels, 10 layers of probiotics in your gut.
And then we get to eat less because one layer, they begin to break down our foods. So, boulardii is an excellent remedy, and then you've got to feed the others. And what do they feed on? They feed on the stuff that you don't digest.
Yeah, one of the most interesting things I discovered in the last years, especially when I got sick with ulcerative colitis after C. diff, was this whole body of research, not just about fiber, not just about prebiotics and probiotics, but about polyphenols, which are the phytochemicals that you're talking about from these sacred plants that actually feed the good bacteria too.
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