Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, dark chocolate, olive oil, red wine.

So what are these foods having common besides the fact that I like them?

Well, if you guessed polyphenols, then you are absolutely right.

On today's episode, I'm going to talk all about these amazing micronutrients, polyphenols, what they can do for your health, why my critics are wrong about them, and the best and worst sources of polyphenols out there.

And I invite you to join me in celebrating all the wonderful benefits of polyphenols on National Polyphenol Day.

A holiday my team created to educate people about them on July 11th, my birthday.

So let's dive right in to discuss the power of polyphenols for feeling and looking your best.

Alright, what the heck are polyphenols?

So phenols are a chemical ring structure that's incredibly common in plants, primarily, and polyphenols simply referred to lots of these phenol rings joined together.

Now, plants protect themselves from harm.

We often don't think about this, but plants have to harvest sunlight, the photons in sunlight, and their mitochondria, yes, they actually have mitochondria,

take sunlight and convert it into sugars and oxygen.

And the process of that production is actually very damaging to the energy producing organelles in plants.

And they literally protect themselves from this damage by manufacturing polyphenols.

And polyphenols are actually the way the plant actually, if you if you will,

soaps up the damage from what are called reactive oxygen species, ROSs, some people know them as free radicals.

So as much as a plant needs sunlight, it turns out the plant is damaged by sunlight simultaneously.

So the polyphenols are the plant's method, if you like, of sunscreen.

Now, interestingly, the more a plant is stressed, for instance, the closer it is to the sun, the higher the altitude, the more it's stressed by other factors like poor nutrients, not enough water, other harsh conditions,

the more polyphenols the plant produces.

Now, fun fact, most plant polyphenols are actually in the leaves, where in fact the energy production is done.

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