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Episode 6: Undiscovered Plant Molecules | The Ghost Plant and the Potential to Revolutionize Health

Posted by Manoj Perumal on

Listen to Episode 6 on Spreaker

Listen to “Undiscovered Plant Molecules | The Ghost Plant and the Potential to Revolutionize Health” on Spreaker.

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About Episode 6

Undiscovered Plant Molecules | The Ghost Plant and the Potential to Revolutionize Health

In this episode of Discover | Dr. Dan Proactive Health Dr. Dan one of his adventures on the island of Oahu looking for the Ahinahina plant. Dr. Dan is a plant hunter and is dedicated to helping find the natural molecules already on the earth to help increase health. This specific plant, Ahinahina is said to have molecules to help treat lung diseases. Listen to the full podcast below.

What is the Ahinahina Plant

Dr. Dan starts by explaining what the Ahinahina Plant is and why it took him to Hawaii. “One plant native to the Hawaiian Islands is Artemisia australis. It’s also known in Hawaiian as Ahinahina. Another common name for this plant is the Oahu wormwood. This plant grows on the rocky cliff faces in the cloud forest of the razor-sharp Ko’olau Mountains that traverse the island of Oahu.” Another name for this plant is the Ghost Plant because while it can grow in one location for a time, that location can change and the plant can no longer be found there. The reason Dr. Dan went hunting for this plant is that the Hawaiian people used it to treat respiratory diseases, even asthma. Because the plant can be hard to locate, there hasn’t been extensive research on it and the medicinal properties it has. 

Dr. Dan’s Adventure Plant Hunting

This lack of information and research on the plant is why Dr. Dan, with a team of people, went to Hawaii to search the cliffs for it. What started as an ordinary hiking trip turned dangerous. With a tropical storm approaching and the markers discerning their path lost, Dr. Dan and his group found themselves on the edge of a cliff face some 2,500 feet in the air. After realizing that they were lost and stuck, Dr. Dan shares, “I decided, like any good explorer, when the going gets tough to call for help. So I use my cell phone. We hiked around and not hiked, we shimmied around on these shelves a little bit to try to find a signal. We didn’t get a signal. It took about 30 minutes before we got signal.” After getting in contact with the search and rescue team and some skilled maneuvers by a Green Beret pilot, Dr. Dan and his team escaped death and were able to return to safety and eventually to their families. Dr. Dan notes that continuing to do plant research is so important. Species of plants are going extinct every day “and when these plants go extinct the secrets of mother nature, these treasures, are lost.”

The Benefits of Masks and Why Multivitamins Aren’t Necessary

As a final note after sharing his thrilling adventure to track down and research the Ahinahina plant, Dr. Dan addresses some common medical questions he is asked. First, he addresses the question as to whether or not masks actually help limit the spread of COVID-19. He makes an interesting point about the compounds of the virus and our masks:

A solid cotton mask or the fibrous masks that you wear are actually really good at absorbing viruses. So the outside of the virus is covered with carbon-based compounds. And the mask that we wear is based on carbon-based compounds. And so one of the basic chemical principles is like associates with like. … It chooses basically every single time to stay on the carbon [of our masks] and so masks are very effective at limiting the spread of COVID.

When it comes to multivitamins, they may not be as beneficial as people think. Dr. Dan reminds his listeners that in the United States, a lot of our foods are fortified with essential vitamins and minerals. Most people are not deficient in their essential vitamins and minerals. Individuals in third world countries are the ones that are the most deficient. To back up this claim, he quotes a study where half of the group took multivitamins daily, the other half didn’t, and they were observed for 20 years. “And they found that the multivitamin group versus a control group, there was no difference at all between instances of heart attack, stroke, cancer, other health maladies; exactly the same.” So while those marketing multivitamins are doing a great job, research is suggesting that they might not be as essential as the ads say. 

To learn more about the plant hunting adventures of Dr. Dan and research-based answers to common health questions, check out the Discover | Dr. Dan Proactive Health podcast episode below, and be sure to subscribe for new episodes each Tuesday. 


Transcription

Dr. Dan: Intro: (00:09)

Welcome to Discover with Dr. Dan | The Proactive Health Podcast. Today, and in other episodes, I’m going to be talking about my adventures, traveling around the world, finding plants with undiscovered molecules in them that have the potential to revolutionize how we take care of our bodies.

Dr. Dan: The Need to Study Plants: (00:30)

Plants have been used since the dawn of time for food, shelter, transportation, and medicine. Not to mention, they produce the very oxygen we breathe. Plants contain molecules embedded in them from Mother Nature that have drug-like properties. In fact, 50% of anti-cancer drugs and 30% of all pharmaceutical drugs are from plants. The really stunning fact is less than 5% of the 600,000 species of plants on the earth have been studied for their bioactive compounds. This is an untapped area of science that if you have traveled, continued discovery of plants and their components are essential to improving the human condition and in fighting back against the plague of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and other maladies sweeping the earth. The study of plants needs to happen immediately as an estimated 30 species of plants go extinct every single day. Hunting for plants is always an adventure. Getting to the actual exploration location can be a task in and of itself. Finding a guide, trying to communicate, negotiating with people who want you to leave, traveling in the region, eating the food, being chased by wild animals, traversing rough terrain, and trying to find the plant of interest. These expeditions can in some cases bring situations where one’s life can hang in the balance; as I’ll mention in a minute.

Dr. Dan: COPD Treatment | Ahinahina: (01:48)

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, COPD, is a serious health concern. COPD accounts for 5% of all deaths worldwide. Aside from this disease, general lung health problems due to environmental conditions out of our control can compromise the health of this organ. Innovative products are needed to provide protective support to the lung holistically. There is a plant growing in the Hawaiian Islands that might be able to help with this. Hawaii is a mecca for a plant hunter. Geographically speaking, Hawaii is the most isolated place on Earth as you need to travel over 2,000 miles in any direction to get to the next closest landmass. 2,000 miles to the north, you have the Aleutian Islands. 2,000 miles to the west you have the United States. 2,000 miles to the south you have the Kiritimati Islands and 2,000 miles to the east you have the Northern Marianas Islands. Due to its isolated nature, the Hawaiian Islands contain a lot of indigenous plants that are not found anywhere else on the planet. One plant native to the Hawaiian Islands is Artemisia australis. It’s also known in Hawaiian as ahinahina. Another common name for this plant is the Oahu wormwood. This plant grows on the rocky cliff faces in the cloud forest of the razor-sharp Ko’olau Mountains that traverse the island of Oahu. This plant can be seen at elevations above 2,000 feet. Ahinahina is known as the ghost plant due to its propensity to disappear seemingly instantly. The plant grows only on certain cliff faces based on moisture, sunlight, wind direction, and other variables. The location of these plants are constantly changing. You’ll find it in one place and then six months later, the entire shrub will be gone. It will then show up in a random place that wasn’t there the last time you checked. In talking with traditional medicine healers called kahuna la’au lapa’au, I learned that ahinahina was used in Hawaiian medicine to help with respiratory infections. This plant was the first line of treatment for asthma for Hawaiians. Lung health was a problem among the Hawaiian people due to the very moist air that can be filled with both pollen and spores that can get into the lungs and cause irritation. The leaves of this plant were steeped in hot water and the tea was drunk at a temperature as hot as was tolerated. Before drinking, they would put their nose over the tea and breathe in the aromatic compounds evaporating off the water. It was said that the lungs would become clear and breathing easier. This plant was also used to ward off insects. Interestingly, this plant is closely related to the Chinese wormwood plant, Artemisia annua, from which the amazing antimalarial drug, artemisinin, was first isolated. Despite the amazing anecdotal stories of the health-promoting properties of this plant, no one had extensively studied the bioactive compounds in this plant. The only scientific work that had been done on this plant was in the 1990s. A group of botanists confirmed that the plant was on the island and tracked a couple of places where the plant grew. Starting in 2011, I decided to make a concerted effort to study this plant and find out where it was currently growing on the island of Oahu and see if I could determine what molecules in the plant might be responsible for the lung health properties reported by Hawaiian traditional medicine healers. After finding the plant in a few scattered places on the island, like on the northwest tip of the island called Ka’ena Point, I still hadn’t found the large populations of the plant I needed to find in order to do my studies. In carefully analyzing a map of the island and knowing the conditions in which this lung plant liked to inhabit, it was clear that the plant likely lived on the razor-sharp cliff faces of the Ko’olau Mountains reaching an elevation of 3,000 feet above sea level.

Dr. Dan: Research Mission of Ahinahina: (05:35)

So in June 2011, two intrepid explorers and I set out to hike the steep and dangerous cliff faces of the Ko’olau Mountains up in the cloud forest, to look at these plants, to find these plants. These plants live likely above 2,700 feet and so we were climbing up to the razor-sharp ridge of mountains. Now, if you’ve ever climbed in Hawaii, the ridge top of these mountains are only about 18 to 24 inches wide, and you have a 1,000 to 2,000 foot drop off on either side. So we wanted to climb up there, find the plants, geotag where they were growing, collect samples, and then safely descend. The morning of the ascent was cool and rainy, which is not uncommon for Hawaii. The first part of the trail took us through a grove of strawberry, guava, and pandanus trees. I collected a sample of pandanus, another cool plant used in Polynesian traditional medicine, and Papua New Guinea. And I collected a couple of lichens because lichens are really cool. We’ll talk about that in the future as well. On our way, as we were descending up through the cloud forest, the hike up the ridgeline was steep and it was made really difficult due to the rain which made the red Hawaiian clay-like mud more like an ice skating rink than a dirt hill. At some points, the hill was so steep that we needed to use branches of trees and use them as ropes and jump from tree to tree and hoist ourselves up. We also used our machetes to cut through the thick rainforest. One point about exploring the rainforest, tropical rainforest underneath the canopy is it’s very easy to get disoriented. It’s not like hiking on Alpine mountains or the desert where you can see landmarks and no direction in how to orient yourself. Due to the decreased visibility, it’s really easy to get lost. And so in order to maintain navigation and help you know where you’re going in these rainforests in Hawaii, they take little vinyl strips, pink or orange or green, and they tie them to the trees in certain areas, usually a hundred to 200 yards apart so that you can pick your way in finding these ribbons and find your way up. So we were following a trail, there were green ribbons all the way across. I had done the lower portion of this trail many times, and we were going up. It was raining really hard. We actually found out after the fact, we should have looked at the weather, that there was a tropical storm, actually a category 1 hurricane, that was going through the area and there was a tropical depression on the Island. So, hindsight is 2020, but it probably wasn’t the best day to be hiking. Anyways, as we got to about 2,000-2,500 feet elevation, we got to the top where there was a beautiful waterfall. We were standing there, the beautiful pool of water. We were standing right on the edge and you could see the water cascade out of this 2,000-foot waterfall. It was beautiful. The only problem was when we looked at that water, the pool of water above the waterfall, and it was raining torrential downpour, we saw about 50 to a hundred of these ribbons sitting in the pool. And we were struck with terror because those ribbons were gone off of the trees out of the rainforest and we had no idea where we were going. So that was bad. So we had to figure out what we were going to do. Our options were, we could hike down the mountain and we had been hiking for about four hours at this point. So we could hike down the mountain and take our chances there. We were already at about 2,500 feet, the top of the ridgeline, where we were going should be about 2,700 feet. So we were thinking, “Well, if we could just white knuckle it and get to the top of the ridge, then we should be able to see where we’re going, find a place to go down.” We were thinking maybe we were halfway, two-thirds of the way through our hike anyways. We hadn’t found any of the ghost plants up to that point so we were a little discouraged so we decided that we would hike up to the top of that ridge rather than going back down. And so in looking at which way to go, we could go to the left where it looked like it kind of veered down the mountain, or we could go to the right where it looked like it went up to the ridge top and it was looking, on the right-hand side, it looked like there was a trail there. So we wanted to go there. So we started taking the trail. After about two or 300 yards the trail was really nasty. There were branches growing all over. We had to kind of climb up and down and at one point we had to shimmy on our stomachs and it was really hard, but we were thinking if we could just get there, get to the top of the ridge, everything’s going to be fine. On the top of the ridge, the vegetation clears, we’d be able to see clearly and know how to get back to our point of origin. Well, after taking this trail, it actually turned out to be like a wild boar trail. We took this for about an hour and a half and it stopped abruptly. And as we cleared the canopy, we were shimmying on our stomachs and it cleared, we found ourselves, terrifyingly on a cliff face. The cliff face was about six feet wide, six feet long, excuse me, and 14 inches wide. And that was, we were utterly, utterly astonished. We were terrified. I was freaked out and we didn’t know what to do. So we looked up above us and about two or 300 feet, there was a– we thought there’d be the top of the ridge. And so we decided to climb from 14-inch cliff face to cliff face and try to get to the top. So that was what we wanted to do. And so we started again to climb. Again, we had these trees that were sticking perpendicular out of the mountain. And again, the pitch of this was about 80 to 90 degrees, pretty much straight up. And so we were hiking, we were jumping, we were helping each other up, we were kind of pulling on the tree to make sure it wouldn’t give out, because again, if one of these trees gave out it was death, right? It was about 2,500 feet or so all the way down to the bottom. So we were, we were hiking from a cliff face to a cliff face, a little crumbly ledge to a crumbly ledge. We got about a hundred feet from the top and the vegetation cleared, which we thought was a good thing. But then, so this wall was so smooth, was something you’d see on the Dawn Wall at El Capitan. There was really no way to get up there unless we were world-renowned climbers, you know, Alex Honnold, or world-renowned climbers with ropes in order to get up there. So we didn’t know what to do. We went to another area where there was some vegetation. We hoped we would be able to use that vegetation to get up and again, and it wasn’t working. So we didn’t know what to do. 

Dr. Dan: The Rescue Attempt: (12:25)

I decided, like any good explorer, when the going gets tough to call for help. So I use my cell phone. We hiked around and not hiked, we shimmied around on these shelves a little bit to try to find a signal. We didn’t get a signal. It took about 30 minutes before we got a signal. And I called, 911, got the dispatcher, and told her that the signal was broken, right? She can’t hear me very well. I couldn’t hear her. Every two or three words were cut off and I told her we were hiking and we were lost and she said, “Well, you know, just call the division of wildlife.” She didn’t hear that we were lost. She said, “Just call the division of wildlife.” She was really rude. And she hung up. I’m like, “Oh man.” So we tried again and I got another dispatcher and she was having a better day than the previous one and we told her we were lost. And she was like, “Okay, this is serious.” Transferred us to search and rescue. We told them the situation, where we were, what slot canyon we were in, what part of the Ko’olau mountains we were hiking and she said, “Okay, I’m going to ping your phone so that we can know your approximate location.” I was like, “Yes, this is great.” She pinged the phone and it showed that we were in the Pacific ocean and I’m like, “Man,” which wasn’t too surprising actually. We were in an area that didn’t have good service. Obviously, we were in these slot Canyon. So the Ko’olau mountains have these razor ridges that go in and out these ridges form little canyons and you can actually take these canyons, some of them open up and you could go all the way into the center of the island. It’s kind of like The Narrows or Slot Canyons in Utah in the American Southwest. Anyways, it said we were in the Pacific ocean and we didn’t know what to do. She said, “Okay, we’re going to send a search and rescue party, a helicopter out to get you.” And so after about 20 minutes and at this point, we’ve been hiking for about seven hours. Well, we’re standing on this ledge, hiking for seven hours total standing on this ledge for an hour or so. So about 20 minutes after talking with Search and Rescue, we heard the low drone of the helicopter and we were, we were excited and I was able to call, search and rescue again. They put me on hold actually, and I was waiting there. And then the lieutenant over the search and rescue mission was transferred. He got on the line and we started talking and he said they were bringing the helicopter over. We could hear it. The helicopter veered around the Pacific ocean and started coming towards us and we were excited. Talking with them, I was telling him our location and the helicopter came and it came about 10 slot canyons from us. And about 300 feet below us. I’m like, “Man, this stinks.” And he said, “We can’t find you.” And I’m like, “I know we are 10 canyons over from you.” He’s like, “Okay.” He was relaying that to the helicopter pilot. The helicopter pilot went out, went around the Pacific Ocean just because the wind currents are so bad in these Ko’olau mountains, these slot canyons, so he had to come out and come back in. So he came back in and he was a five slot canyons away. And he was probably about a hundred feet below us. And again, we’re like, “No, it’s not working”. He said, “Okay, we’re going to do one more.” And I said, “We’re about five slot canyons away.” So he went out, came back in and we heard the drone and we’re like, “Yes, this is going to be good”. And it turns out that he went the other way on the opposite side. And he was about three slot canyons the other way. And at this point, we were getting frustrated and he was getting frustrated and he said, “Well, you know, there’s a tropical storm. Another bout of this hurricane category 1 hurricane is going to hit us in about 45 minutes and we need to get back to the base. We need to get the helicopter in.” So he said, “We have time for one more pass. We don’t have enough fuel, the storm is coming in so one more pass.” And I was starting to freak out the other people with me. We were almost in tears. It was bad. You know, sitting on that rock face. Now we’ve been sitting there for about an hour and 45 minutes, almost two hours. My legs were about to give out. You couldn’t sit down. You had to keep your legs straight. I didn’t want to move, right? If I moved, it was kind of crumbly had some dirt to it and this ledge was pretty crumbly. So I didn’t want to move. If I moved, that could be sure death. It’s interesting what you think about when you think you’re going to die. I thought about my wife and my children, how I would leave my wife a widow with my three daughters. I thought about — kind of had a reckoning with God. If I’ve been living a good enough life. There were a lot of things I wanted to change and it was –I really thought that I was going to pass away. I thought I was going to die, fall off the cliff, or something like that. Anyways, they came around and they were coming; heard the drone. The drone was super loud. It was a few trees above us, but it could hear it really well. I was like, yes, this is it, this is happening. And actually, the helicopter was coming and I could see it was one slot canyon away. And man, the feelings at that time, I was like, “We are literally going to die.” Again, talking with the lieutenant, he was like, “If we can’t find you, we’re going to have to wait overnight and we’ll come back the next morning.” I was like, “Well if you’re going to come back the next morning, I might as well jump off this cliff because there’s no way that I could stand there for another 16, 18 hours.” So it was coming, it was going in the wrong slot canyon. and I thought, “Well, if I’m going to die, I’m going to go out swinging.” So there was this one tree that was sticking out of the cliff face and it was hanging out about ten feet. And I thought, “Well, here goes!” I was going to shimmy up that tree, sticking a little bit above the canopy and I thought that if I could shake that tree, I don’t know, maybe something would happen. So the helicopter was coming, it was going into the wrong slot canyon. I shimmied up this tree. I could feel it bowing and I was looking straight down at 2,000 feet of sheer death and I shook the tree and they actually saw it. They saw the shaking, they pivoted around and they found us. The lieutenant said, “Well, we found you and that’s good, but we don’t know if we could pick you up because we have to come super close to the cliff face. And you basically have to bring the helicopter in 90 degrees to the cliff face to try to get to you.” He said, “We’re going to try it.” And a helicopter came up, it pivoted, kind of shimmied a little bit. I’m like, “Oh man, they’re not going to be able to do it.” Got in closer and shimmy just right so that he was hovering there. He was hovering there and then someone in the helicopter with a rope jumped out in a harness, came down, he was talking with us. He was — we were able to push through the vegetation. We had to cut a little bit of it with our machetes, which is kind of scary standing on that cliff face and he was able to pick us up, hooked us to a harness, pulled us up and flew us down to the beach park actually where the rescue operations headquarters. Dropped us down there and man, I can’t tell you the feeling of relief that I had. When I got down on the ground, I literally knelt down. I liked it. I don’t cry very much. My family will tell you when there’s something emotional I never cry, but I wept. I thought I was going to die. I wept; the lieutenant was like, “What are you doing, wuss?” It was really scary. In talking with the lieutenant he said, “Well, you’re lucky because there’s not many people that could do this 90 degree maneuver on a cliff face on a razor sharp slot canyon with wind gusts that go in and out about 40 miles per hour in a tropical depression.” He said that the only guy that he knew was the guy that was flying that day. The guy that was flying that day, the helicopter, he was a Green Beret and he actually did a lot of missions, top secret missions and dropping Green Berets in different areas in different situations. And he said and that helicopter driver, that this Green Beret – former Green Beret pilot, he wasn’t working, he wasn’t going to work that day, but it turned out that someone else canceled and he was kind of a special ops type person that would come in once in a while when they needed help. And it just so happened that he was on duty that day. So that’s my story. Didn’t find the plant. Since then I had some PTSD, right? For 6 months or a year. I didn’t want to go back there. When it came to roads going around the island, I actually chose to go the other way, which was about 45 minutes longer, just because I didn’t want to see that area. 

Dr. Dan: Finding and Studying the Ghost Plant: (21:24)

A year later, I went up there. I faced my fears. I was able to find the plant. When we were hiking up there, where we got lost actually if you took the left-hand trail and you went up a little bit more, it led to this area, the cliff face, and right down off the cliff face in this crazy little canyon, it had a little ledge, but there were 20 or 30 of these ghost plants. So I collected these plants, later on, took them to my lab, analyzed them, and in these plants, I found that there was a compound called eucalyptol, which had amazing lung health properties. And so I was able to isolate it. I was able to use it. I incorporated it into a formula and found that it was amazing at helping with respiratory issues, asthma, and other lung health issues, as well as general lung health. So it was amazing. One thing about traditional medicine and plant hunting that I’ve always found fascinating is how did these traditional medicine healers, 500, 1,000, 1,500 years ago where they’ve been using these plants, how do they know that this plant, Ahinahina, this ghost plant could help with lung health? Always found that fascinating. They didn’t have any chemical instrumentation. They didn’t have any methods that they could use. And so I wondered, is it divination? Is it trial and error, right? Did they give it to people in the village? “And well uncle died so let’s give it to someone else or try something else.” I’ve always found that fascinating. So there’s not too many people doing this plant hunting research. We need more people doing this. Mother Nature has so many secrets left to unfold and we need to go out there. A lot of people think that science is stagnant, that everything that’s been discovered has been discovered. And there’s nothing really new out there, especially when it comes to plants. Botanists have maybe found everything. People have been to the Amazon looking for things, but not very many people are studying plants with the purpose of pulling out molecules and studying these bioactive compounds and what they can do for human health. So we need more people doing this. We need people to study plants before these plants become extinct. Like I said earlier, 30 species of plants go extinct every single day. And when these plants go extinct the secrets of Mother Nature, these treasures are lost. So that’s my story. 

Dr. Dan: FAQ’s: (23:49)

Let’s now answer some questions. During this area of COVID, there are a lot of people asking, do wearing masks actually work with COVID? And this is a really interesting question. It’s very polarizing, right? When you look at the scientific research, it’s clear that wearing masks does definitely help limit the spread of COVID-19. Especially people wearing masks who have COVID, very effective at reducing the spread and aerosolization of the virus. People wearing masks as well. People wearing masks are– it’s 70% more effective, more efficient at warding off COVID. One of the cool things about masks; people say, “Well, you need to wear N95,” or different things like that. A solid cotton mask or the fibrous masks that you wear are actually really good at absorbing viruses. So the outside of the virus is covered with carbon-based compounds. And the mask that we wear is based on carbon-based compounds. And so one of the basic chemical principles is like associates with like, and so this virus molecule is spewed out of our mouth and it has to decide, is it going to go through the air where there’s nothingness there? I mean, there’s air there’s oxygen, there’s nitrogen, or it has a choice to hang out with the carbon on our masks. And it chooses basically every single time to stay on the carbon and so masks are very effective at limiting the spread of COVID. Another question I’m often asked is what’s the best multivitamin to take? Everybody wants to take a multivitamin and the marketing on multivitamins has been amazing, right? The multivitamin is a classic proactive wellness compound. You take it every day in order to ward off bad health effects both now and in the future. And so what’s the best multivitamin to take? Actually, when you look at the scientific research, unless you’re nutrient deficient in certain vitamin and mineral, which is rare when you live in developing countries; obviously people living in third world countries can be deficient in several different vitamins and minerals; but if we’re living in a developed country, a classic multivitamin isn’t effective at all right. You look at foods, fortified foods like Lucky Charms and Twinkies and you look at the side of the package, they’re fortified in vitamins and minerals. A hundred percent, a hundred percent, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And so we really don’t need vitamins and minerals. There’ve been a lot of clinical studies studying 600,000 people. One group took a multivitamin, the other group didn’t and they tracked them for 20 years. And they found that in the multivitamin group versus a control group, there was no difference at all between instances of heart attack, stroke, cancer, other health maladies; exactly the same. So what’s going on here? No vitamins and minerals, they’re not needed. Well, we’ve been talking about compounds in plants. It’s the compounds, the bioactive compounds, the drug-like compounds in plants that are actually the beneficial components. And we’ll talk more about what some of these bioactive compounds are and about how we can develop a multivitamin-like compound of product that can really help to support health. It can have the same properties and the same health benefit that a multivitamin should have. This is a really fascinating area of research, and we’re going to have a whole episode devoted to multivitamins; how they work, if they’re effective. We’re going to talk about the studies and we’re going to talk about the most important alternatives to multivitamins. 

Dr Dan: Final Words: (27:25)

So thanks for your support. It’s been great talking with you. I feel a connection with you guys, and that helps me feel comfortable sharing really sensitive and harrowing experiences like this near-death experience, trying to find the ghost plant on the island of Oahu. So thank you. Take care. This is Dr. Dan signing off.

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