In the latest episode of "Plant Based on Fire," we had the privilege of hosting Dr. John Lewis, a pioneer in plant-based nutrition and the founder of Dr. Lewis Nutrition. His journey from a traditional Southern diet to a plant-based lifestyle underscores the transformative power of mindful eating. His insights are particularly valuable for entrepreneurs and business leaders in the plant-based sector.
Dr. Lewis's transition from a meat-centric upbringing in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a plant-based diet over 26 years ago, is not just a personal victory but a testament to the changing perceptions around plant-based living. His approach, shying away from the often polarizing term 'vegan,' emphasizes inclusivity and understanding in dietary choices.
A significant takeaway from the interview is Dr. Lewis's staunch advocacy for dietary supplements, a view backed by his extensive research in nutrition and exercise training at the University of Miami. His stance challenges the common skepticism in plant-based circles about the efficacy of supplements. Dr. Lewis highlights that dismissing supplements outright is a sign of ignorance, underscoring the need for a balanced and informed approach to nutrition.
Dr. Lewis's company, Dr. Lewis Nutrition, focuses on dietary supplementation, providing an array of products designed to complement a whole food, plant-based diet. His work, particularly in the field of polysaccharides, offers intriguing insights into the potential of supplements in enhancing overall health and cognitive function.
For plant-based entrepreneurs, Dr. Lewis's journey is a compelling example of how personal experiences and academic pursuits can merge to create a successful business that's both profitable and impactful. His story emphasizes the importance of research, innovation, and an openness to challenging traditional norms in the plant-based industry.
In essence, Dr. Lewis's story is not just about dietary choices but about a broader vision for health and wellness, one that resonates deeply with the ethos of the plant-based business community. His journey from a traditional Southern diet to plant-based nutrition, underscored by academic rigor and entrepreneurial spirit, is a beacon for anyone looking to make a meaningful impact in the realm of plant-based business.
>Podcast episode’s transcription:
Bryan (00:01.442)
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Plant Based on Fire where we talk about plant based businesses and their inspiring stories to thrive in the industry. My name is Bryan and joining us today is Dr. John Lewis. Welcome to the show, John.
John E. Lewis (00:04.907)
So, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please like and subscribe. See you next time.
John E. Lewis (00:18.215)
Thank you for having me, Bryan. It's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today.
Bryan (00:24.19)
I love it. So tell us with the hit us with the name of your business and what brought you to plant based on fire today.
John E. Lewis (00:31.879)
Sure, my company is called Dr. Lewis Nutrition. I focus on dietary supplementation, which I know many people in the food world, especially plant-based, they don't necessarily believe in the usefulness of dietary supplements, but I have.
I think shown in my career, in my academic career at the University of Miami, many years of conducting clinical trials in nutrition, dietary supplements, and exercise training that dietary supplements are very important. So anyone who completely dismisses dietary supplements as being useless or ineffective is ignorant. I mean, there's no other way to describe it. They're either ignorant or willfully ignorant. And either way is bad for you. So...
Bryan (01:17.959)
I encourage people to get a whole food plant-based diet as much as they can but to know your own levels and know what your body is good at producing bad at producing what foods maybe you aren't getting enough of and to supplement that as needed. So you've been doing this for a long time. What inspired you to adopt the whole food plant-based diet? I think it was over 26 years ago now at this point.
John E. Lewis (01:27.634)
Thank you.
John E. Lewis (01:33.019)
That's right.
John E. Lewis (01:41.275)
Correct, my 26 year of eating a plant-based diet, a whole food plant-based diet. I don't know about you. I used to use the word vegan a lot, but vegan, as I'm sure you know, it's an inflammatory term. People sometimes associate it with almost like extremism. And I'm not an extremist. I mean, I'm definitely not the person out there like preaching, if you will. Although I guess I could be.
Bryan (01:59.123)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
John E. Lewis (02:11.489)
think that necessarily wins people over the best way. And so if anyone comes to me for advice, I don't really do a lot of one-on-one coaching in my business, that's really not my focus, but I do get people on that level if they're really desperate, they're really in bad shape and need it. But for me, growing up as a Southerner, I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where my family ate for taste. Health was not part of the consideration at the dinner table.
Bryan (02:36.895)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
John E. Lewis (02:41.129)
My dad thought a meal was not a meal unless it had three things. Some type of beef, a glass of milk, and a piece of bread.
Anything else could be anything else could be part of that meal, but those were really his three, you know Key components and if you didn't have one of the three he was not happy about it So that was the kind of environment I grew up in and you know As you well know we you know, we have obviously different depending on which part of the country you're from We have different preferences, but certainly Southerners, you know, they like their fried food. They like their animal food They like their fatty food. Don't get me wrong
Bryan (02:49.379)
That's right.
John E. Lewis (03:18.633)
fruits and vegetables as well, but there was definitely a cultural, a very strong cultural determination in terms of how we ate. And so as I got into my 20s, I played sports most of my life, and then as I got into college, I started getting into drug-free competitive bodybuilding. I became someone who was very fascinated with the body, and being very skinny my whole life, I probably overcompensated getting into bodybuilding. But you know, I went from kind of one to the other.
Bryan (03:39.938)
Hmm
John E. Lewis (03:48.573)
terms of body type and my body responded very well to weight training and bodybuilding so it was kind of a natural fit for me but I was never willing to go down the path of taking drugs I felt like you know what I've got a brain I don't need to rely just on my body to try to make a living and I didn't feel like I could make a living as a bodybuilder anyway but anyway that really kind of burned out in grad school but nonetheless I shifted to answer your question I'm sorry for being a little bit long-winded I shifted from being
Bryan (03:50.829)
Yeah.
Bryan (04:17.058)
That's okay.
John E. Lewis (04:18.473)
from a sports performance focus to a health focus. And it really dawned on me as I was in my 20s, as I was losing family members like my grandparents and other aunts and uncles and then eventually my father. They all ended up dying of mostly what was poor diet.
And I grew up thinking as a kid that I had genetic predispositions from heart disease. But as I began learning about the body and physiology and the way our body works and the way our cells work, it really dawned on me that I wasn't born with bad genes. I was born into a family that basically had bad behavior. So eating the typical standard diet, some of them smoked, some of them drank too much alcohol, most of them, their era from people that were born in the early 20th century.
Bryan (04:49.899)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (05:08.005)
They didn't know what a gym was, you know, they just worked for a living, right? I mean, their exercise was their job.
And so that was the culture that I grew up in as a young kid. And then again, transitioning into an adult and having my own sense of who I am and what I wanted. It became very apparent to me in my mid-20s that I was eating very badly and I was not eating the way for optimal health. I was eating more again for a sports performance effect, which, you know, compared to the general population certainly was much healthier and better. I was not eating a lot of processed food. I didn't really, you know, going to fast food restaurants.
was not my thing. I was all about a lot of protein and eating a very dense caloric diet.
Bryan (05:46.219)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (05:53.827)
But again, as I moved away from bodybuilding and really focused more on my health, and then even looking back on my childhood, like all these throat infections that I had, all these different things that I wondered, why in the world was I sick so much as a kid? All those things really were teaching moments, even though they came later in my life, they were not teaching moments at that moment, but as they accumulated over my life, and then I looked back on that, I said, okay, well, all this makes sense now.
Bryan (06:23.415)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (06:23.787)
And so until late 20s, early 30s, I really, you know, I took a total shift away from my cultural upbringing to say that as I started reviewing the literature, and this was nothing that I learned in school, this was all really just in hearing other people in the plant-based movement and looking into the science behind it and why people were saying, you know, humans shouldn't eat animals, they should eat plants. And then really looking at why that is true and, you know, why we should move to that direction.
Bryan (06:51.596)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (06:54.381)
for me it just was an easy choice to make. And you know, sometimes I'll occasionally get the question of well, don't you miss a steak or don't you miss cheese or you know, don't you miss whatever fried chicken, whatever the chicken would be. And at this point after, Bryan, after 26 years of not eating that stuff, my response is not that I miss it at all. In fact, I'm grossed out by it. It grosses me out to think of putting another animal's tissue into my mouth.
Bryan (07:07.831)
Yeah.
Bryan (07:18.454)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (07:23.621)
any kind, whether it's a liquid, a solid, you know, it just completely grosses me out. I don't even, there's no missing it at all. In fact, I'm so glad that I moved away from that.
Bryan (07:35.986)
Yeah, and I tell everybody it takes it takes six months for your taste buds to change. It takes 15 times trying some new stuff to retrain your brain. But like that's the fascinating thing. I want to talk more about your business side of it a little bit. But the question I have is I was just doing a little prep work before we started talking here was just around you've got a pretty extensive background in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences, right? And how does that tie into some of your new plant based nutrition pieces of this?
John E. Lewis (07:49.329)
Thank you.
John E. Lewis (07:56.219)
Thank you.
John E. Lewis (08:06.475)
So the affiliation that I had at the University of Miami and the Department of Psychiatry actually was due to needing a job as a grad student when I was.
looking for, you know, I had an assistantship that covered me for the fall and spring semesters that did not cover me for the summer and I ended up working for a psychologist in that department who, you know, I then later met the chairman of the department and it just created, you know, it's just like opening a little door and then that door becomes bigger and then eventually that's where I found a home as a faculty member. But I'm actually a trained physiologist. I'm not a mental health professional of any kind, even though most of the people I was working with in our
department or either psychiatrists or psychologists but...
As I expanded my career over that 20 year period at the University of Miami, I really worked with people all over the university, actually not just in the Department of Psychiatry. And as you can imagine, I mean, if you know anything about the University of Miami, maybe you don't, it's not really that big of a school. It's a private school. So it's not a huge state school like say Ohio State or Michigan State or University of Florida. It's not a gigantic school by any stretch of the imagination. So we don't even have like a center of nutrition, a Department of Nutrition.
Bryan (09:05.294)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
John E. Lewis (09:20.225)
certainly don't have a school of nutrition, nothing that big. And you have pockets of interest of nutrition. And I left academics full-time over six years ago. So when I left, when I left full-time, the work that I was doing, kind of just, it didn't die like that, but it kind of over time, it just sort of trickled away to the point of, that line of research that I was doing in polysaccharides is no longer there. But basically,
Bryan (09:47.03)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (09:49.805)
I mean, I think, you know, at least one way to answer your question is I was able to create a niche for myself due to a couple of colleagues that I had there who had connections to other dietary supplement companies and other companies and had an interest in nutrition. And over time, I was able to grow that. I was able to build a pretty nice little group that we were doing all this work and it was a very exciting time. But unfortunately, after about 20 years of this, I realized that begging the government
and foundations and even individuals in some cases to do research, it's a very, very difficult and challenging way to do, you know, to make a living and to just to have a career and a profession. It was very, very challenging. I mean, I think a lot of times people think of, you know, professors and faculty members at a university being in the so-called ivory tower.
Bryan (10:29.047)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (10:41.691)
There's absolutely nothing more farther from the truth than this idea that you're in this protected environment where you don't really have to perform and you don't really have to do anything to justify your existence. That's absolutely nonsense. I mean, being a researcher is a very, very challenging career and you really are an entrepreneur. The university doesn't write you a check and say, here John, here's $5 million. Do great research and make us all proud. No, you're a fundraiser.
Bryan (10:57.068)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (11:11.765)
essentially. You have, not only are you a scientist and a teacher and an advisor to students and you know, an administrator if you're involved in committees and whatnot, you also have to be a fundraiser. So you're essentially an entrepreneur in an academic setting, not in the business world.
Bryan (11:12.984)
Hmm
Bryan (11:30.954)
Yeah. And so tell us how did Dr. Lewis nutrition come about? What inspired you to build this and create this? And I was been looking at your website, tell us some of the products that you have and why you felt like there was a need in the market for this.
John E. Lewis (11:48.387)
Absolutely. So I was very fortunate. About 20 years ago, I met a gentleman by the name of Dr. Reg McDaniel, who's a pathologist by training, but eventually became basically a nutritionist for lack of a better term. Dr. Reg was turned on to an aloe vera product by some guys that had HIV back in the late 1980s. And they were taking this aloe vera product and they had no viral load and their CD4 cells were normal. Completely, you know,
Bryan (12:09.547)
Thank you.
John E. Lewis (12:18.461)
results they were getting and this was before antiretroviral medication where HIV at that time was basically still a death sentence. And so, Dr. McDaniel ended up looking at the product, talking to some colleagues of his at Texas A&M University and they ended up doing all this research on this aloe vera complex and it turned out to just be something truly...
Bryan (12:26.371)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (12:42.947)
mind-blowing, I mean for lack of a better term, and it ended up changing his life where he left his pathology practice and started practicing nutrition. And so when I met him about 20 years later, almost 20 years ago in my life, and he started telling me about these allopolysaccharides that I really knew nothing about. I mean, I could tell you probably in biochemistry in one lecture I had some information about the different types of polysaccharides and what they are and how the cells use them as
Bryan (13:10.818)
Hmm.
John E. Lewis (13:12.962)
stores.
But in terms of their biodynamic effects on so many other metabolic processes that our cells engage in, I had no clue. Probably my biochem teacher did neither at that point. But what, Bryan, what that ended up doing was completely changing my life and my career. So we ended up running clinical trials with these polysaccharides that opened my eyes to how powerful and how effective these things are. And I don't care if you're vegan or carnivore or keto or, you know,
Bryan (13:39.874)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (13:45.157)
plant, you know, whatever dietary preference you believe in or you think is the best, we don't get these things from our food. Do you know anyone who eats aloe vera? I don't.
Bryan (13:57.114)
No, not at all. I mean, I've seen the drinks here and there, I think, but they're an acquired taste to a degree.
John E. Lewis (14:00.871)
Exactly.
Yeah, they're not tasty at all. Well, in fact, if you mention aloe vera to anyone, 99% of the people that think of aloe vera are not tasty at all.
Bryan (14:11.138)
Sunburn, sunburn.
John E. Lewis (14:12.979)
Exactly, it's a topical application. It's not for something you would consume orally, and it's a fine application. Put it on a sunburn, a cut, a wound, anything to help the healing aspect of that damage. But in reality, aloe vera gel is about 98.5, 99% water. So you extract all that water out, and you're left with not just the polysaccharides, you have other materials as well, amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals. But when you concentrate those
Bryan (14:32.087)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (14:42.833)
saccharides, ace manna and acetylated polymannose, several different synonyms that basically mean the same thing. Man, I mean Bryan, you get such an amazing effect out of these polysaccharides. It's just incredible and by the way I should say to our listeners, you know, I'm not talking in any context here, I'm not talking about treating disease. Treating disease is using pharmacology or surgery or something else like that. Nutrition is far more powerful than that. Nutrition is
that Mother Nature gives us, providing them to ourselves so that our cells function the way they're designed to. Whether you believe in evolution or creation, that to me is irrelevant. It's the way our cells function, and of course oxygen is our first nutrient, but then after that we need vitamins, we need minerals, we need all these other elements and cofactors. And so this is about restoring, this is allowing the body to restore and repair itself the return to homeostasis. And when you provide these polysaccharides
Bryan (15:32.534)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (15:42.555)
Thanks for watching!
to the cells, I've just seen time and time again them do so many amazing things. So eventually when we ran this study in Alzheimer's and to a lesser degree in multiple sclerosis, the results that we got from this ala polyminoz complex that we called it at that time, just blew me away. I mean, we ran a clinical trial and people with, and I don't know if you've had any family members or close friends with Alzheimer's, but we ran this clinical trial with people with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease,
of the sick is these are people that big pharma cares nothing about and we put them complex this dietary supplement for 12 months. We looked at cognitive functioning at baseline three, six, nine and 12 months and then we drew blood at baseline in 12 months because we did limitation in our budget. But we showed clinically and statistically significant improvement in cognition at nine and 12 months. Bryan, that's unheard of. I mean, you can compare that.
Bryan (16:40.813)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (16:43.809)
Thank you. You can compare that to the five FDA approved drugs for dementia, any type of diet. I know Dale Bredesen is doing a lot of work with lifestyle and people with Alzheimer's today. But anything related to diet, exercise, another nutritional supplement, hyperbaric oxygen, acupuncture, music therapy, you name it. I don't mean to sound arrogant about this, but our results are unparalleled compared to any other intervention out there. In addition,
Bryan (16:54.414)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (17:13.449)
of TNF-alpha and VEGF. That was probably the first time, that first paper was published 10 years ago. It's hard to believe it's been a decade ago, but we showed a lowering of TNF-alpha and VEGF, which classically are looked at in cancer and heart disease. That was probably the first time those findings were published in people with Alzheimer's. We showed an improvement in the CD4 to CD8 ratio over that 12 month period, which is not only important for people with Alzheimer's, that's important for all of us. We want our ratio of our helper cells
toxic cells to be as high as possible. And then we also showed an improvement just under 300% of adult stem cell production, which again is unheard of. And these people were on average 79.9 years of age. I mean, just an incredible finding.
Bryan (17:56.974)
Mm-hmm. So you, this, yeah, I mean, this is just amazing. And so the website is drlewisnutrition.com, right? And this is where you can get the stuff that you, the pills and the powder and stuff that you were just talking about. And I think break it down for our listeners here that don't have the doctor degree like you do. I mean, like the thing that, I think I was just talking with Geoff Palmer about this, honestly, was the fact that like, I guess I, in my head,
John E. Lewis (18:06.683)
Thanks.
Bryan (18:26.446)
not being the doctor, I kind of say like the body is really good at producing certain things that we need. We have to figure that out better. Still science is still out. There's stuff that we definitely 100% need to ingest and get. And there's things that we ingest and get that our body is really good at like saying we might need this for later, keep it, store it, let's you know, hold on to this. And then there's things that
John E. Lewis (18:31.143)
Thank you.
John E. Lewis (18:36.09)
Bye.
John E. Lewis (18:47.326)
to the next story.
Bryan (18:51.222)
The body feels like, no, that comes in all the time. Don't worry about it. Or we can't retain it and store it and save it like a battery. And so to me, that's kind of like, we have to make sure people understand the body's good at producing our own proteins. If you put the right building blocks in number two, we're really good at storing fats and things like body and certain types of vitamins. And then there's certain things that are just water soluble and they're going to just go right through us.
and we need to recharge those every single day, right? So some of the things that you're talking about are really about like, you're finding the right things that the body needs on a regular basis that are just gonna help cognitive function and everything else in the brain and for other parts of your body, right? Is that a good way of summarizing it?
John E. Lewis (19:39.5)
That's a great point and it is a very good summary. And if I may, I'll just add on to that just in a little bit. And that is to say that, so these polysaccharides, they're not essential. So they're not like a vitamin or a mineral where we.
to obtain them from the diet, the body can reconstruct other simpler sugars and then put those polysaccharides together to use them. So in our cells we have organelles like the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi that are constantly doing their jobs to produce bioactive compounds that are guided by our genes to tell ourselves what to do to then all the way up to, you know, from the organs and the organ systems to the whole body to basically instruct us what to do through our bioengineering
Bryan (19:56.942)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (20:21.725)
But what we found is that when you introduce these polysaccharides from Rice Bran and Aloe Vera, the two that we've studied primarily in our lab, it's much more dynamic that way. So there's definitely something special and unique about these polysaccharides when you obtain them, either from the diet, which again, most people are not doing, or in a dietary supplement like daily brain care that we've created, that's much more powerful than saying,
John E. Lewis (20:51.585)
and sucrose and fructose into the system and then the body has to reconfigure those things. So the other thing I'd like to say too is that we've been conditioned so much as a society to believe that sugar is bad for us, right? You hear the word sugar and you immediately think bad. If I came on your show and said, hey folks, guess what? Sugar is great for you, people would say, that guy Lewis is a nut. Like what are you talking about? Sugar is not good for you.
Bryan (21:16.028)
Great.
John E. Lewis (21:21.445)
that I want to mention. First is the biochemical structure. So high fructose corn syrup and fructose being very simple sugars. Those are called monosaccharides and then you have more complex sugars like disaccharides like sucrose and then you have these poly or oligosaccharides like the aloe vera and the rice bran that I've mentioned that are so complex they're almost like looking at 5D structures. They're not even completely characterized graphically.
graphically, they're so complex and dense. So the first point is that a sugar is not a sugar based on its molecular structure. It gets much more sophisticated the more complex it gets. And then secondly, a sugar is not a sugar from its source. If it's processed corn versus aloe vera and rice bran, we're talking about two very different sources of sugars. And so anytime that someone makes the blanket statement, oh, sugar is bad for you, they're being very loose with our language.
Bryan (21:52.933)
Mm-hmm.
John E. Lewis (22:21.225)
terminology and they're simply being ignorant and they're throwing the baby out with the bath water because that's an absolutely untrue statement. You cannot just blankly say sugar is bad for you. I've got many years of documented published research to pack up what I'm saying. So this is exactly what you're saying to the to the point of the body's intelligence. Our own inherent intelligence knows what we need and when we provide it, it knows how to utilize it when we do provide it.
Bryan (22:37.246)
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
Bryan (22:48.926)
Yeah. Salt and sugar are not bad. They're building blocks of life in the right way. And so high fructose corn syrup, avoid that one for sure. But I've got a couple, I mean, the time is just flying by chatting with you here and I'm learning a lot. So I hope others that are listening are as well. I got a couple of quick questions as we try and wrap this up. So the question for me, what's the future? Like you've got something published 10 years ago. What?
John E. Lewis (22:57.959)
Exactly.
John E. Lewis (23:09.959)
Thank you.
Bryan (23:17.943)
New research, are you looking to explore? I'm curious.
John E. Lewis (23:20.372)
Thank you.
Great question. So we published from our Alzheimer's and MS studies, we've already published five papers so far. We published three from the Alzheimer's study, two from the MS study. I didn't even talk about MS, maybe if you'd like to have me come back another time, I can talk about the MS part. But we actually, it's a very appropriate question because we just got a fourth paper published from the Alzheimer's study just within the last month. So we looked at a new way of characterizing the balance between the TH1 and the TH2 components
Bryan (23:34.655)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (23:52.301)
system. So there are lots of different components to the immune system and of course there are a lot, you know, in terms of like pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, you know, this balance between the two. So for your listeners, very grossly, TH1 is the pro-inflammatory side, TH2 is the anti-inflammatory side, and we need those things to be in balance as much as possible. And I had an idea about a year ago when I started working on the data analysis to look at this into more detail in people with Alzheimer's.
Bryan, this had never even been characterized before. So we had groundbreaking results that we presented 10 years ago. We're going to have more groundbreaking results that we're presenting now, where for the first time we're characterizing these TH1 to TH2 ratios being people with Alzheimer's are very TH1 dominant, meaning they're very pro-inflammatory either due to viral infections or bacterial infections. We don't really know exactly why yet.
John E. Lewis (24:52.201)
people that we compare them to, the numbers are just radically different. And then over the 12 month intervention, we're showing that daily brain care helps to rebalance those ratios. And then the cherry on top of the cake is that the rebalancing of the TH1 to TH2 ratio is correlated with improved cognitive function. So it's a really elegant paper to say, not only for the first time, here are the TH1 to TH2 ratios in people with Alzheimer's, but that daily brain care can help to rebalance
ratios and it also links once again the immune function with brain function which is kind of a proxy by using cognitive assessment it's not really a true brain function per se you know it's not like looking at an EEG or something like that but nonetheless you know we have cognitive function as a proxy of overall brain function so it's really exciting paper for us if I had more money than I had common sense I would already be funding these tickets
Bryan (25:50.894)
Yeah.
John E. Lewis (25:52.301)
full-time. I actually tried a couple of times with NIH, a couple of times with the Alzheimer's Association to get more funding to extend our research. Unfortunately, I got crickets in response. I got absolutely no interest in these folks to help us extend our work. And in fact, the only reason we had the money to run the first study was the generosity of a family who had lost four people to Alzheimer's disease. And the wife had Dr. McDaniel give a lecture. He was talking
Bryan (26:17.751)
Mm.
John E. Lewis (26:21.801)
that he was doing in people with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And so she and her husband agreed to give us money to do research for that first study. But Bryan, I tell you, it's really challenging, as I'm sure you know, to do any kind of research in nutrition, because the money is simply there. And it's very expensive to enroll human beings in research. I mean, it's a very, very expensive way to get answers to questions. So,
Bryan (26:32.757)
Mm-hmm.
Bryan (26:45.806)
Absolutely.
John E. Lewis (26:47.163)
For the first years after I left academics, I was still kind of in the fundraising mode of asking people for donations or even from a business perspective, some kind of a venture game, if you will. I decided recently to forget all of that. I mean, my business financially is nowhere I want it to be yet, but my goal is ultimately to have enough money where I'm gonna fund the research down the road myself without needing to ask for,
donations or you know looking for investors or whatever. I'm just I'm tired of you know trying to get people to see the light here but we've got something that's very special and very unique specifically in the brain health area. I mean the polysaccharides are used by all 30 plus trillion cells in our body. The name daily brain care is really marketing not science and meaning that one we have our own research that we use to support the claims on the label but two because
John E. Lewis (27:47.017)
spectrum of society, whether it's children with autism and ADHD versus, or not versus, but all the way to elderly people with neurodegeneration and then all of us in between with, you know, mood disorder, concussion syndrome, PTSD, TBI. I mean, there's literally not a segment of society that doesn't have an issue related to the brain. And so, and then unfortunately for all those people, the conventional approaches to trying to help them is not very effective. You know, they're just...
Bryan (27:56.449)
Yeah.
Bryan (28:15.574)
Yeah, I think it's, it's that thing like, I guess the wrap up I have is, is like, there are so many plant based businesses out there that are bringing strong ideas like what you're talking about here on today's show to the table. And so that's where I'm so glad you reached out and you're on the show. And I hope that the community that's watching and listening to this takes a few minutes to look at.
John E. Lewis (28:16.495)
vacatacy.
Bryan (28:46.322)
the website and check that out. And you know, we're heading into the holidays here. So let's make sure you get that order and get a bottle of this to some of the family members that you think might need it the most on that front. I guess, John, just wrapping up here, tell us one more time, how do we get in touch? How do we get connected with you and the website? And then what can our plant-based business community that we're building here do to help support you?
John E. Lewis (29:13.135)
Thank you, Bryan. So yes, anyone can go to drlewisnutrition.com. That's D-R-No-Period-L-E-W-I-S-nutrition.com. I have a lot of information there. I've got blog posts, I've got podcasts, I've got video testimonials, product reviews, a lot of information that I've written for laypeople that not copying the exact PDF of the published studies, but summaries that don't violate copyrights and whatnot with my journals.
John E. Lewis (29:43.049)
extensive FAQ section there, but you can buy daily brain care both in powder and capsule form. It's again completely scientifically based. There's nothing, you know, that I went to PubMed and just started creating formulations. This is based on, I mean, this, Bryan, this is my baby. I mean, I have a baby. She's three years old, but this, you know, this is my professional baby, if you will. And by the way, we started giving our daughter, when she was six months old, we started introducing solid food to her. I've been giving her the
Bryan (29:59.022)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
John E. Lewis (30:13.389)
She's now three and a half. My mother, who's elderly, she's been taking it for over 15 years. I've been on it for over 10 years. My wife's been on it a couple of years. So I say all that to say that from cradle to grave, this is an appropriate product for anybody. And prevention is just as important as rehabilitation. So go to drlewisnutrition.com. You can find me on social media channels with that name as well, Dr. Lewis Nutrition, on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. We're doing a little bit on TikTok, although politically,
know that that's the best.
That may be something to consider. And then you can find daily brain care on Amazon as well. We have both the powder and capsules on Amazon as well. So I appreciate you having me here and helping to spread the word. It's very important. I think the success of what we're doing is gonna come down to spreading the word and making people more aware of that. There are options for people that, again, need a boost beyond just eating a plant-based diet. There are still certain things that, these polysaccharides, once again, I'll sound like a broken record.
Bryan (30:46.668)
Yeah.
Bryan (30:54.888)
soon.
John E. Lewis (31:15.337)
you just don't get them in the diet. So something like daily brain care gives you a boost that most people are not gonna get and they're not even aware of at this point until they actually hear me or someone else talking about our research, they wouldn't even be aware of it. So it's a great opportunity to optimize their health.
Bryan (31:31.118)
Absolutely.
Bryan (31:34.986)
Well, thank you very much, John. That's all the time we have for this episode of Plant Based on Fire. Again, thank you, thank you, Dr. John Lewis. Check out drlewisnutrition.com and thank you again for joining us and sharing your insights and experiences with the community. Until next time, everybody, keep those fires burning.