And I don't know, you've done this as much as I have.

Yeah, because I'm in microbiology, I think the best hint is that if you buy our seeds, they are not contaminated yet.

But in your house, 30% of homes have mold in their kitchens.

And so you might see some mold happening, but it's not from the seeds that you bought from us.

And then you can think of...

There's a hint and it seems simple, but basically, contamination happens like rain.

Wherever you're going to do those sprouts, let the room settle first because as you kick up things, the contaminants are on the dust that are in the air.

So John, you want to share about what's in that?

Once estrogen has done its job in the body, where does it actually go?

I always like to start off with the fact that there's two receptors, I think most people don't know that, estrogen receptor alpha and estrogen receptor beta.

And then there's a decoupled protein receptor that's also estrogen responsive.

So I guess that's a good place to start with is that it's complex.

And then estrogen also is metabolized, so it goes down a couple of different pathways.

So there's three estrogens and then three pathways, so there's a lot of metabolites.

And then probably the big distinction there that, at least in the cancer world, is that one of those metabolites for each of those categories has the capability of doing DNA crosslinks, the quinolated version of estrogen.

So what is concerning? Can you break down what is concerning about producing or pushing down that 16 OH pathway or even the 4 OH pathway? Why do women need to even be concerned what their body is doing with estrogen?

What made you interested in cancer, in sulforaphane, in the stability? Were you trying to solve a specific scientific question that kind of led you down this road?

Yeah, I think our, our stories are just about 10 years shifted and so my wife got breast cancer right while I was doing my postdoc on cancer metastasis and so I typically trained researcher and so because I wasn't really happy with what was being offered to me, if you really look at the statistics and stuff, I was like, "Well, I'm gonna do something different." And so that was when I started getting interested in natural compounds.

And I was doing the same thing.

I grew my wife's cancer in, in cell culture and started putting compounds on them and, and found a number of natural compounds and, uh, she fortunately is doing really well and...

But that's what changed my mind about natural compounds and how effective they are.

And so since then, I wanted to find natural compounds that could get to actually to the site of cells that could, um, change the physiology, the cell physiology, and that's been sort of my focus ever since then.

Um, so furophane doesn't have a problem with bioavailability, but many of the compounds that we were searching did have a problem with getting past the enterocytes, the lining of the intestine.

You know, I feel like this is a very big word that's in vogue right now, but I would love to know what the concept of detox actually means to you both.

Uh, the, from, from what I understand, the way that it's converted or assimilated in the body here is important.

Yeah.

It's a very unique molecule, even in the context of, you know, a whole bevy of other natural compounds.

It doesn't have a problem with bioavailability, so that's the first thing.

So if you, if you asked me that question about what, when did I become interested in it, uh, so my wife got breast cancer in 2003, and right within a couple of years of that were the first papers where it really got my attention.

And it was a series of two papers that make this really cool, uh, connection, and that is that the first, first one was a study done at Hopkins where they, they took this broccoli bev- beverage where they, they grind up broccoli sprouts, and then gave it to women right before they had breast reduction surgery.

And then they gave it, and one hour later took out, um, s- that breast tissue that they had removed and measured sulforaphane in the breast tissue and found it to be in between, um, one and two micromole.

So could you overdo it with sulforaphane, I guess is my first question, as far as it being a hormetic stressor agent?

Right.

One of, one of them of which is, can be converted into an estrogen that causes DNA cross-linking.

And so that's down an inflammation pathway.

And in general, if you improve your inflammation, you'll send the estrogens down a better pathway.

And so those estrogen metabolites go down a number of, of correct, um, versions.

You'll, you'll have a much better time with your estrogen and your breast cancer.

So that was very early on for us in being able to reduce the, the carcinogenic estrogens, and that those generally are either DNA cross-linking, um, estrogens or strongly inducing estrogen receptor alpha as a growth-promoting, uh, thing that goes through c-Myc.

Talk about those and energy and aging, so our listeners get the, the download.

From a clinical and research lens, when did you first recognize that detox pathways, not just nutrients, were going to define the future of chronic disease prevention?

So I'd probably go a little bit further back.

We had friends, um, that had a severely autistic kid in nineteen ninety-two, and just because I was, um, the person who knew sort of the physiology that they started, um, asking us a lot of questions, me and my wife.

My wife's a biology teacher, and a lot of times she comes along with me to, uh, interpret.

Um, and so this person sort of went down, um, a pathway that I, I understood from going to a lot of the autism conferences and, and for me, that was really surprising.

This, this new view of science was that, was that the parents who were frustrated with the science not asking the right questions were driving, um, gathering capital to fund researchers.

And so the researchers were directly, um, getting the information back directly to the parents that were asking it.

But, um, you know, mitochondr-- I'd love you to speak on mitochondrial function and a little bit about chronic immune activation, if that might be getting triggered a little bit or triggered in some way by these plastic particles.

That's self-awareness.

Yeah, I take a little bit of credit there.

Um, but I would say that when, when you're talking about all those things that you have to keep in tr- in, in mind in order to avoid it, that wasn't on her mind.

So she taught at a prep school and ate, um, you know, the food that they produced for the whole time before, before she, she had cancer.

So that was fifteen years or so, seventeen years of, you know, that type of food, where she didn't get to make a choice about her food, food choices.

And, and, um, then stress on top of that, um, being, being a very go-getter type person.

You know, she was, you know, top of her class and, um, always go, go, go.

Mm.

So fluorophane, what's the mechanism of action here? What is it doing to our genes, for example? Is it helping to turn on longevity genes and turn off bad genes? How does it work when you consume sulforaphane?

Yeah, so the well-studied mechanism is...

NRF2 is a transcription factor that's regulated in a pretty unique way.

It's held in the cytoplasm of a cell and it's basically hooked up to a system of degradation.

This ubiquitin proteasome system is the default state for this transcription factor is that it gets degraded.

The way that the transcription factor and its binding partner called KEEP1 interacts by disulfide bonds.

And unless you break or block those cysteines that are found on both NRF2 and KEEP1, it'll always be degraded.

Break down AMPK, John.