All right guys. The next one I want to talk about, I love this. I use a lot of this, have really good luck with my patients with this herb. I use it in a form called black cumin seed. The actual product name is black cumin Seed Forte. You can get it as an oil, you can get it as a dry herb, which is the one that I use. But if you've ever heard of black seeded oil and all of the amazing things that it does, black cumin seed or black cumin seed forte that I'm using is the whole herb. It includes the oil, it includes all the other co-factors that are in there, and it has been used for well over 2000 years. You can find documents about it being used. Ngel Satia is the kind of Latin name of the plant for black coen seed.

(00:57)
It's rich, it's active ingredient, it's rich in something called quinone that has nothing to do with your thyroid, but quinone. Sometimes you'll see it abbreviated as tq, but quinone is what it's called. So if you've seen my blog post on berberine and how I made an analogy to berberine being like a multi-tool, I got to say black coup seed ends up being one of those as well. It has relevance for several different things, allergies, supporting cancer therapies, blood sugar, I mean wide ranging effects when you take black cumin seed. So let's talk about a few of these. So active compounds, I already said it has flavones and alkaloids, a couple different things in there, but thym quinone is the kind of ingredient that we use to standardize it. So you'll see you're taking black cumin seed or black seeded oil, standardized to have X amount of quinone per dose.

(02:05)
So if you want to check the strength of what you're taking, that's kind of how you would do it. You could take 500 milligrams of black cumin seed, but depending on the plant and depending on the preparation, that could be vastly different from one product to the next. But if you're taking 500 milligrams of black cumin seed that is standardized for the dose to contain, let's say at least a hundred milligrams of quinone, then you can look at another product that's only 200 milligrams of black cumin seed, but it's standardized to a hundred milligrams of thy. You've got the same amount of the active ingredient in there. That's how you kind of compare product to product when you're looking at herbal ingredients like this. Now the downside is in the US they don't have to label it like that. They don't have to put all that detail on there.

(02:48)
They should, but they don't. So it does make it difficult for you, but as practitioners, I mean we kind of deal in this all the time, so even if it's not on the label, we can call the company, we can find out what their standards are and so we can usually be pretty picky about what we're using. Alright, that being said, it's got some antioxidant anti-inflammatory antimicrobial properties. It inhibits NF kappa b, Cox two LOX, and it inhibits histamine release. All of those are things that would increase inflammatory response in your body, so it inhibits the messengers or the cytokines that would be increasing your inflammatory state. And then it activates A MPK much like berberine does, which is kind of an anti-aging molecule, and it's good for increasing your metabolic rate or managing your metabolism. So your metabolism is more like it was 10 years ago and less like it's going to be when you get 10 years older from now because all of that stuff kind of decreases as we age.

(03:57)
This starts to reactivate it and bring it back up again if you're looking for that effect. There are certain cases where you're wanting to increase a MPK activity. Sometimes it's nice to switch back and forth between something like berberine and black cumin seed. You could do berberine for a month or six weeks and then maybe do a month of black cumin seed and go back to berberine. You can go back and forth. Sometimes your body gets used to seeing the same thing all the time and its effect starts to fade. If you've got two different products that can both push that A MPK, you can kind of alternate a bottle of one, a bottle of the other and go back and forth or maybe do two bottles of the one that has the other effects you're really looking for, and then one bottle of the opposite one and then go back to two just so that you're able to continue keeping that effect kind of fresh in the body.

(04:48)
It has the effect of reducing fasting blood sugar over time. It can reduce your A1C numbers on your blood work by reducing how high your blood sugar spikes after you eat. It can enhance your insulin sensitivity. So again, your blood sugar won't be spiking so high because when you produce insulin, it actually works and it brings that down and it helps protect pancreatic beta cells. The beta cells are the cells that produce your insulin. So sometimes we have people that have been a type two diabetic long enough that their pancreas is starting to slow down and they're going to be become a type one diabetic. This would be a way to attempt to support those beta cells while handling the insulin sensitivity so there's less stress on the pancreas in general. Alright? It also has effects on your cardiovascular system, so it can lower your LDL, it can lower the total cholesterol, it can lower your triglycerides, which is an important one.

(05:48)
It can raise HDL, and again, if you watch the berberine video, this is going to sound like a broken record and then it enhances endothelial function and reduces your risk of atherosclerosis. Endothelial function is the lining of the blood vessels or the lining of the arteries, and by reducing atherosclerosis it can keep the blood vessels more elastic and that can head off some blood pressure issues over time. As far as allergies go, it does provide some relief to allergies and asthma. It's a natural antihistamine and mast cell stabilizer. So lemme explain what that means. Mast cells, if you're old like me, you remember Pacman the old video game. So a mast cell is a white blood cell, kind of like pacman when it comes in contact with bad actors, bacteria, virus, parasites, pollen, dust, trash, whatever. When it bumps into those, it kind of eats them up.

(06:46)
Well, when it eats up enough stuff, it swells up and then it ruptures, and when that mast cell ruptures, it releases histamine. Well, that calls in another a hundred thousand mast cells and they start eating and they start rupturing and they release histamine and now it calls in a million more mast cells and you get this exponential reaction of histamine and inflammation. So when something acts as a mast cell stabilizer, it takes that Pac-Man and says, look, you can eat five times as much before you rupture. So it slows down that cascade of having millions of mast cells going off and creating that much histamine. So it's an anti-histamine, meaning it kind of blocks the histamine receptors and then it also slows down your release or production of histamine because it stabilizes the mast cells. It can reduce IgE, which is the antibody that causes an anaphylactic reaction.

(07:41)
Now, that doesn't mean that this takes the place of your EpiPen, but if you're taking this regularly and it calms down the amount of IgE that you have circulating, it makes you less likely to have one of those really dramatic reactions. So it reduces IgE, reduces histamine, it reduces eosinophils, which are something in the blood that types of white blood cells that show up when you've got allergic kind of issues going on. And then symptomatically, it helps with nasal congestion, obviously allergic rhinitis, asthma, eczema, those kinds of things that tend to be mediated by histamine and IgE antibodies, those kinds of inflammatory reactions. It also has good effects inside your gut. It is supportive to your own natural gut microbiome. So it does that by being antimicrobial, meaning it's not conducive to these microbes flourishing, right? It puts pressure on them so they can't just blow up and do their thing.

(08:47)
H pylori, candida and all of the gram-negative bacteria. You do have several of those that tend to cause trouble in the digestive tract. It improves the integrity of the gut lining. Again, if you watch the berberine video, I talk about tight junctions between those intestinal cells where they can break and you can get stuff going in between the cells from your intestines into your bloodstream, and yes, what's in your intestines and it can leak into your bloodstream and cause lots of immune reactions if you lose that integrity in the gut barrier. So this helps improve that gut barrier Integrity reduces oxidative stress overall, and it may benefit people that have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We already talked about leaky gut, IBS, things like that. So it calms down the intestines, supports the normal flora and supports the health of the cells that line the intestinal tract.

(09:43)
Now, anti-cancer properties, obviously I have to be very careful what I say here. So let say this is not meant to take the place of traditional cancer therapies. It is made or this discussion is going to encourage you to use it as an adjunct to those therapies to help make those therapies more effective. If someone is trying to kill cancer and you can do something that puts cancer at a disadvantage, it makes it easier for the normal stuff to kill it. So if you're doing chemo or radiation or something like that and you can take a supplement that makes the cancer less healthy, it would make the chemo and the radiation more effective. That's what I mean when I say it's an adjunct to normal therapies. Right now, legally there are no cancer therapies except for pharmaceuticals, surgery and radiation. That's it. No nutritional supplement or anything like that can legally be considered a cancer therapy, and I'm not trying to say that this is, however, if I had cancer and I was going through those cancer therapies, would I take something like this so that hopefully those would be more effective?

(10:55)
Yes, and there is a long list of items, supplements, herbs, nutrients that would fall into that category. This is one of them and it's one of the better ones. It has anti-proliferative effects. It slows down the rate of replication of the cancer cells. It has what are called pro apoptotic actions in the tumor cells. So apoptosis is a term that or that's talking about when a normal cell in your body would get to a particular age and say, you know what, I've had a good life. I'm getting old. I'm going to time out, go retire, replace me with a new cell. That happens in normal cells in cancer cells, that mechanism is generally turned off or vastly extended, right? If your normal cell would give up and go out to pasture after five years of being active, maybe the cancer cell has a 15 year timer on it, right?

(11:56)
So functionally it's immortal. What this can do is it helps restore some of that apoptosis mechanism so these cells will time out earlier and more easily. So anti proliferation, pro apoptosis, and then it tends to inhibit angiogenesis, which is having a tumor that makes new blood cells to supply it like a new Amazon warehouse goes up and they make new off-ramps and new roads around it. That would be like angiogenesis, it halts that, or at least inhibits that around the tumors and it makes metastasis more difficult. Think of a tree throwing out seeds and those seeds just land on concrete. It's more difficult for that tree to propagate other places versus if it was surrounded by nice soft top soil when it threw out seeds, a fair amount of those are going to be able to take root and grow, right? So this makes it more difficult for that process to work well.

(12:59)
Also, it supports chemotherapy by protecting some of the healthy cells so they aren't damaged as easily by chemotherapy. It's been studied for those kinds of effects, mostly with breast cancer, pancreatic, colorectal, prostate, and leukemia. So it is useful in those cases. Again, to be clear, I'm not saying it's a replacement for chemotherapy, radiation or surgery. It's simply going to potentially make those more effective. And then if it supports your healthy cells being resistant to damage by those, the healthier your cells stay, the better you're going to feel and the longer you're going to be able to tolerate your treatment. Many times when people are going through conventional treatments, they have to pause that treatment because the white blood cell count gets too low or they get too anemic or whatever. This would likely mean that they can go longer before they have to pause that treatment, which means they can continue to kill more of the cancer cells.

(14:02)
So hope I was clear about that. Immune modulation, it regulates certain cytokines and cytokines are inflammatory messengers telling your body to create more inflammation or call in more gang members to add to the attack. It regulates or downregulates, TNF alpha, and I'm saying an abbreviation, TNF like Tom, Nancy, Frank, TNF, alpha, interleukin one, interleukin six. Those are the ones that are downregulated by this, and then it inhibits chronic inflammation without suppressing your immune system. So you can still fight off infections and bacteria and tuberculosis and viruses and whatever else, but it calms down inflammation and that's rare. You don't normally see much of that. If you were to take a steroid like a Medrol dose pack, yes it calms down inflammation, but you also lose a good chunk of your immune function, which is why they have all those warnings about let us know if you're going to take a vaccine, let us know if you have any chronic infections or Lyme disease or tuberculosis or whatever because those things can all of a sudden crop up when your immune system stops paying attention to them.

(15:21)
It also has possible benefits in autoimmune situations. Obviously when we talk about calming inflammation without suppressing your immune system, I mean that's almost like a perfect mix for helping calm down autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's, ms, lupus, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis. The list is long of autoimmune conditions that can be calmed or somewhat subdued by this. Now, I had a big discussion to this in the berberine video. I'm going to say it again here. You may not watch that one if you're going after an autoimmune disorder. First of all, I don't treat autoimmune disorders. I treat patients that have them, but I don't treat the disorder and I know that sounds like I'm just being technical, I'm not. It really is a different philosophical approach.

(16:21)
If I used something that decreased inflammation like black kupin seed, that can definitely calm down your system. It can limit the damage that's being done. You can feel a lot better, sleep better, that's going to help your immune system work better. You can heal better. It does a lot of good. I don't want you to misunderstand me, but until I find the root cause that underlying problem that kind of confused your immune system to start going after your own cells in the first place, then I'm not really getting to the job that I'm trying to do. So if I can deal with the underlying trigger that set off the autoimmunity, and while I'm doing that, you're taking black kupin seed or berberine or turmeric or something like that to calm down the inflammation and to limit the damage, now I'm using it appropriately. But if I just dose you up with enough of this that you feel good and I say, there you go, have a nice life.

(17:18)
I haven't gotten down to the root cause. I haven't gotten down to the underlying problem. The food reaction, the intestinal problem, the hormone imbalance, the latent infection, the nutritional deficiency. I mean the list is long, but once I get that handled and you stop triggering your immune system to do dumb stuff, then calming it down actually has a more permanent effect and eventually you can get off of that supplement. You don't need that constant calming effect. So I just wanted to be clear that it's not a treatment for autoimmune disorders, but it certainly helps turn the volume down on it and make it more livable while we are trying to get to that underlying cause. Let me also be clear. The autoimmune condition itself, if that's all you are treating, it's smoke and mirrors, right? You're going after the wrong thing, alright? Long story, but I'll condense it.

(18:20)
Years ago I was a firefighter. Before I did all this, we made a fire in a restaurant. So got there lots of fire inside the restaurant, first couple of rounds of hose teams go in there and start spraying water on the fire and I mean, it's a little better. It's not doing what it normally does, right? Something else is obviously wrong In our search around the building when we got there, by the time things we were figuring out, the two hose lines weren't having the effect we wanted. Someone made it around the back of the building and saw that a car had gone into the back of the building and taken out that big commercial gas main for a restaurant. So we had probably, I don't know, a four inch gas main, something like that, just wide open and blowing in the back of the restaurant.

(19:01)
So that was feeding all of that fire. We could put water on that till the cows come home. We are not going to put that fire out, we're just not. But as soon as someone goes back there and turns off the gas supply, now we can make pretty quick work of the fire and then someone can come in and repair all the damage. Restaurant can get back up and running. The water on the fire initially was kind of symptom control. It kept it from doing much more damage. Maybe it put out some of the stuff that had been ignited by the original fire, but until you got to the root cause and turned off the gas, you weren't really going to get better. So in autoimmune conditions, it's the same way. You've got to find the broken gas Maine and deal with that.

(19:55)
Then the autoimmune condition kind of goes into remission right now, is it cured? No, because if you turn the gas Maine back on, it's all going to happen all over again, right? All you did by dealing with the gas Maine is provide an opportunity to go without a fire for a while until something else feeds a fire. So that remission could last forever or it could last until the next time somebody hits the gas Maine. But if you hit the gas Maine again, same thing's going to happen again. So not to get off track, I know we're talking about black couping seed, but anytime I talk about autoimmune issues with something anti-inflammatory like this, I want to be clear about its role in all of this great supplement, great herb, tons of great properties. But for something like an autoimmune condition, you need to do more.

(20:47)
You need to dig deeper. You need to find out what's going on because again, we don't treat the autoimmunity, we treat the underlying cause that led to it. That's how you get long-term resolution, alright? Generally safe every once in a while, like all the other ones, you can get a little GI upset because of what it does for blood sugar and certain things like that. If you're taking a medication that already lowers your blood sugar, if you're taking a medication that already lowers your blood pressure, you want to be a little bit careful, just kind of keep an eye on things when you're taking this because it may add to that effect and lower the blood sugar or blood pressure more than you would've expected. And you don't want to get caught off guard by that. But as long as you're keeping an eye on things and to stop it, if your pressures get too low or your blood sugar gets too low, then you can deal with it.

(21:41)
And again, if you were, let's say, taking a blood pressure medication and you started taking black cumin seed and your blood pressure got even lower and that was a problem for you, you have a choice. You can call your prescribing doctor and say, Hey, I'm doing something a little different. It seems like I'm overmedicated. Could I cut my dose of blood pressure medication in half and just stay on the black cumin seed and see how I do? Or you could get off the black cumin seed and get rid of all the other beneficial effects of it and just stay on your blood pressure medication. Both of 'em are legitimate options. Obviously I have a preference, but that's how you would handle that. You would contact the doctor that prescribed you the medication, explain the situation and say, am I okay to go down to a half dose or maybe get off of it and just see how I do for a little bit?

(22:27)
That would be the approach if you run into a situation like that. So blood sugar support, cholesterol management, health of the lining of the blood vessels, decreasing, decreasing atherosclerosis, asthma and allergy relief, good for the gut and the microbiome. It can regulate your immune system and then it can be an adjunctive support while you're going through cancer therapy. If that's not a multitool, I don't know what is so very good supplement to be on. You can be on it long-term, no problem with that. Or like I mentioned, you could swap it out with another supplement that has a similar profile like Berberine. They're not twins by any stretch, but there is significant overlap between the two as if you listen to both videos. You'll hear me say the same thing both times in several places, but there are differences between the two. So, okay, hopefully that helps you out. Black seed oil, black co, and seed. Same thing. Quinone is what you're looking for when you're taking that. So if you have any questions, give the office a call or email us. Otherwise, I'll see you next time.