I’m 42. These 11 Biblical Superfoods Make Me Feel 28 Again

0:00 There's a list of 11 foods that kept people alive in the desert. Not thriving at the farmers market, no refrigeration, no supplement, no pharmacy. All 11 are still available to you this week under 40 bucks and you probably eat almost none of them. Look, I'm 42. I used to be 80 lb overweight. I had 34% body fat. I was physically classified as being obese. That was 18 years ago. Today, I play basketball almost every single day and I feel better at 42 than when I was 22. These 11 foods are a big reason why. Number one is the one that nobody sees coming. I always say on this channel,

0:48 your body is not broken. It's blocked. There's interference. Remove the interference, the body heals itself because God put this inner physician within every single cell inside of your body right now. There's nothing external, a supplement, a shot, a pill, a surgery, you name it. Nothing external can replace what God put within your cells right now. Remove the interference, the body heals itself. Modern food didn't just add junk, it subtracted signals. Every food here on my list does something that calories can't. It sends an instruction. The bitter foods on my list tells your gallbladder to release bile. Certain plant compounds on my list tell your

1:33 cells to take out their own trash. It's called autophagy. Your body's waiting on these instructions, these signals. Let me give you all 11 right now. First food on my list is black cumin. This one kind of surprised me. Isaiah 28, the prophet stops mid warning to describe a farmer who never crushes this seed under a threshing sledge. You beat it out gently with a stick. Most modern translations of that render it back to black cumin, Nigella sativa. Somebody recorded the harvest technique for a tiny seed in the middle of prophecy. You don't protect what doesn't matter. If your energy falls off a cliff 90 minutes after lunch, this one's yours. A 2020 meta-analysis in phytotherapy research

2:23 pulled 50 randomized trials on this seed. Fasting glucose came down about 15 points. A1C just half a percent. Now, most of these trials used concentrated capsules or oil, not a sprinkle on your eggs. They were small trials with widely different doses, but it gives you a direction. So, if you're somebody who struggles with high blood sugar, high A1C, insulin resistance, I would take a quarter teaspoon, ground fresh, and I'd put it over my eggs. Eggs with the yolk, always. The second food are bitter herbs. This is the missing flavor in most people's diet. Exodus 12 specifies the Passover plate, lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs. And what were they eating with it? Roasted fatty lamb,

3:11 the heaviest meal of the year. You see, your bitter receptors aren't only in your tongue. They run throughout your gut. Bitter hits them, and your gallbladder contracts and pushes out bile. If you're watching this thing, "Okay, great, Ben. I don't have a gallbladder. Mine was removed." Well, then the liver produces that bile still. Bile emulsifies, digests, breaks down fat, and it helps your body absorb those really important fat-soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K, and it helps with detoxification. If a steak protein sits in your gut 2 hours after eating like a rock, you don't have a fat protein problem. You have a bile deficiency. And that's established in physiology research, not just outcome trials. It's

3:57 a mechanism here, not just a promise. When you have bitter greens before a fatty protein-rich meal, you will notice a huge difference. So, my favorite bitter-rich foods are arugula, artichokes, vinegar, apple cider vinegar, lemons and limes. Remember, bitter is better for the liver. I've written about this in my New York Times best-selling books Keto Flex Revise and Metabolic Freedom. The third food on my list is pomegranate with a twist that nobody mentions. They carved this fruit into temple pillars and stitched it into the priest robes. This was sacred architecture. But the compounds inside aren't the active ingredient. Your gut bacteria have to convert them into urolithin A, and urolithin A triggers something called mitophagy, which is

4:47 your cells finding their own broken-down parts, broken-down mitochondria, and recycling them. You see, those little mitochondria power plants need to be replaced instead of limping along. When they limp along, they produce little energy. When they get restored, you have more energy. So, if you're sleeping 8 hours but still dragging across the day and and you crash around 3:00 p.m., that's a mitochondrial dysfunction issue, not a caffeine deficiency. A 2022 trial in JAMA Network Open gave urolithin A to 66 adults aged 60 to 90 for 4 months. Muscle endurance improved significantly versus the placebo. Even walking distance improved

5:33 from baseline, but not against placebo. And it's important to note that this study was industry-funded. But now, the twist. In a separate study of 100 healthy adults, only about 4% could make urolithin A from pomegranate at all. So, it isn't whether pomegranate works, it's whether your gut runs the conversion. You could have the same fruit, same different outcome in two different people. The food isn't the variable, you are. And when it comes to pomegranate, go with seeds, not the juice. Food number four, onions and leeks. My mom loves to cook with onions and leeks. This is the most, let's say, disrespected food on the list. Numbers 11, the Israelites are in the wilderness

6:19 eating manna, literal miracle food, and they complain. Listen to what they miss, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, garlic. They walked out of slavery and they grieved onions. You see, onions are one of the richest sources of quercetin, which sits at the center of senescent cell research. A senescent cell is like a zombie cell. They are too damaged to work. They refuse to die. They leak inflammation inside of your tissues and they infect other cells like a zombie. It's a big part on why skin thins and recovery slows after 40. Now, let me be straight with you cuz a lot of this gets butchered online. The human senolytic trials, they used quercetin at pharmaceutical doses paired with a

7:06 leukemia drug in sick patients. Nobody has shown that eating onions clears senescent cells in a human being. But what I can say, onions deliver quercetin in a form you handle very well and they're at $4. Eat them raw, like my mom does, I don't like that, or just barely cooked. Don't over peel them because the outer layers concentrate the quercetin. Number five, I mentioned this earlier, eggs with the yolk. I said the yolk, not the very sad egg white omelet. In Luke 11, an egg is an example Jesus uses as a good gift that a father gives to his son. This is ordinary everywhere food. But inside it, I I call eggs Mother Nature's multivitamin, God's multivitamin. Inside of the egg, you're

7:54 going to find lutein and zeaxanthin. They physically deposit into the macula at the back of your eye and act as an internal blue light filtration. Here's what separates the yolk from something like spinach. Lutein is fat soluble. And in the yolk, it arrives prepackaged in the same exact fat matrix you need to absorb it. If your eyes are being blasted by white lights all day long, have yourself some eggs that are runny with the yolk. The runnier the yolk, the more nutrients preserved, the healthier for you. We've heard the old adage, "One apple a day keeps the doctor away." I would replace that and say "Eggs a day keep the doctor away." Food number six, figs. First Samuel 30, David's men find

8:41 a man abandoned in a field. 3 days, no food, no water. They give him water, pressed figs and raisins. The text says his spirit came back to him. Figs carry both fibers, insoluble for bulk and movement, and soluble pectin that ferments into your colon, feeding the bacteria that feeds short-chain fatty acids. That's what your colon cells run on. So, I would recommend figs before fiber supplements like psyllium husk. Food number seven, barley. In the books of Ruth, she's gleaning barley behind the harvesters, the grain of the poor and the laborer. And it does what oats get all the credit for. Barley carries beta-glucan, a soluble fiber that turns viscous in your

9:30 gut. It's thick. It slows how fast your stomach empties, which slows how fast glucose arrives, which could flatten the glucose spike, and stretches satiety, so you stop white-knuckling it in between meals. It keeps you fuller longer. The FDA amended its soluble fiber heart claim to include barley in 2006 at 3 g a day. Now, I want you to know that regulators don't do that casually. If you're finding yourself hungry in between meals, you might want to consider barley. Number eight, olive oil. Olive oil isn't just one thing. It's a spectrum, and nearly everything on the supermarket shelf sits at the dead end of it. The part doing the work are the polyphenols, oleocanthal, hydroxytyrosol.

10:16 They are fragile. They degrade with time, heat, light, oxygen. Oil pressed 2 years ago in a clear bottle is technically still olive oil, but chemically, the part that you wanted could be completely gone. A 2021 randomized trial gets at this directly. 40 patients with cardiovascular risk factors headed for coronary angiography. Same volume of oil daily, about 5 tsp for 6 weeks. One group got high polyphenol extra virgin. The other got refined olive oil. Same food, same amount, basically the same word on the label. LDL dropped about 9 and 1/2 points in the extra virgin group. In the other group, it went up about nine in that refined group. Now, caveats to the

11:06 study, 40 people, 6 weeks, and the comparison was refined oil, not a normal diet. But, what it shows cleanly is that polyphenol content isn't a detail, it's an active ingredient, which is why I stopped buying my olive oil at the grocery store many, many years ago. Because after seeing this research, I realized I don't just want olive oil. I want the part of the olive oil that made me interested in it in the first place, The polyphenols. The polyphenols are sensitive to heat, time, light, and oxygen. So, if I'm going to make olive oil one of the 11 foods that I'm actually going to use, freshness matters. And that's why today's video sponsor is the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. This is what I personally use because their entire model is built

11:51 around getting you fresh pressed olive oil from the current harvest instead of leaving you guessing how long that bottle has been sitting around. They source it from small family farms. They ship in a dark glass bottle and they get the oil to you within months after pressing. And there's something I want you to do when it arrives to you. Taste it. Compare it against the olive oil you might already have. Good fresh olive oil should have that peppery kick in the back of your throat that's associated with polyphenols like oleocanthal. And once you've tasted like real extra virgin fresh pressed olive oil, you'll understand why freshness matters because that's really the theme of this video. Our ancestors were not eating food that was engineered to sit on the shelf for months. They were eating the actual

12:37 food. And if olive oil is one of the foods from this list that you're going to actually start using and consuming, I'd rather you start with one where you know what you're getting. And the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club has given my community, you, an exclusive deal. Grab two bottles of their olive oil and you'll get a third bottle completely free. So, you can put one in your kitchen, keep one ready to go. You're essentially getting the third bottle on them. Simply click the first link in the description box right below this video or grab your phone, open up the camera app, and scan the QR code on the screen and click that little link that pops up. And because these are fresh batches produced in small harvests, this current offer has limited availability. So, it's first come, first served. Plus, they back it up by their 100% money-back guarantee. So, if you try it and you're not satisfied, you're protected. First

13:25 link down below or scan the QR code on the screen. Buy two, get one free. And when it arrives, do the taste test yourself. Because after everything you've just learned, I don't want you leaving this video thinking, "Olive oil, check." I want you thinking, "Fresh, polyphenol-rich extra-virgin olive oil." That's the signal we're trying to bring back. And food number nine was once considered so valuable that one cluster had to be carried by two men. Food number nine, grapes. Whole grapes with the skin and seed. Numbers 13, the scouts came back from the promised land carrying one cluster so heavy two men sling it on a pole between them. That's the image they chose to prove the land was good. Almost everything valuable in a grape is in the

14:14 skin and seed. We bred that out. Modern table grapes are seedless, thin-skinned, and they're a lot sweeter because that's what sells. We selected for sugar and threw away the pharmacy. Those compounds support the endothelium, the single cell lining every vessel you have, and its ability to make nitric oxide, which tell the vessels to relax and open. If you have cold hands, cold feet, winded on stairs you used to take two at a time, that's a circulation issue. Getting nitric oxide in grapes might help with the nitric oxide to help with circulation. Number 10, lamb. For anybody over 40 like me, this might be an urgent food here. The most ceremonial loaded animal in scripture, the Passover

15:00 lamb, the ram caught in the thicket for Abraham. Nutritionally, it contains a complete protein high in leucine, that's the amino acid that flips the switch on muscle protein synthesis. It contains heme iron that you absorb several times better than plant-based iron. It has usable zinc, plus creatine and carnitine, which you get from red meat and essentially nowhere else unless you're supplementing with it. And here's what nobody tells you after 40. You don't lose muscle because you got old. You lose it because the signal got weaker. After 40, you need more protein per meal to trigger the same response as when you were in your 20s and 30s. If you see the same number on the scale but look softer in the mirror, you didn't just gain fat. You lost muscle. So, I

15:48 would recommend getting at least 30 to 40 g of at every meal and put lamb at the top of your list. Food number 11, pistachios. I'm closing out here because I need to correct something you've probably seen. Genesis 43, Jacob sends his sons to Egypt to face a man holding all the power. And he sends the best products on the land, balm, honey, spices, myrrh, and pistachios. The only mention in the whole Bible on a list of gifts valuable enough to carry into a negotiation for your family's lives. Pistachios are the some of the richest sources of melatonin. That part is true. But there's a claim going around that a handful is basically like taking a

16:33 natural melatonin pill. And I'm going to correct that right here on camera cuz I'd rather be accurate than go viral. Measured pistachio melatonin runs around 660 ng/g. An ounce gets you roughly 18 micrograms. A standard supplement of melatonin is 1 to 3 mg. An ounce of pistachios is about 1% of a supplement dose. So, why are they on the list? Well, because melatonin was never the mechanism here. An ounce gives you real magnesium and vitamin B6. And B6 is a required cofactor in the pathway running tryptophan toward serotonin and then melatonin. Pistachios don't hand you the hormone melatonin. They hand you the raw

17:20 material for your body to build its own. That's the difference between supplementing a signal and restoring a signal. Those are the 11 foods, the 11 signals. You could choose all 11 starting right now or choose the one that resonated with you the most. I'm actually curious like what's the one food on this list that resonated with you the most that you're going to have every single day. Look, your second prime of life is ahead of you. The good days are not the old days. They're in front of you. I don't care if you're 45, 75, or 85 watching this. Restore the signals. Remove the interference. The body heals itself. I gave you 11 foods to help you accomplish that. Share this video with a friend. Hit subscribe and hit the like button. And if you enjoyed this lesson, you're

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