Dr Rupy: Herbs that heal is the title of today's podcast and I have the pleasure of talking to Simon Mills, a complementary health pioneer from the inception of the term in 1979 and later in the fields of integrated health, self-care and social prescription. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in medical sciences and has been a herbal practitioner in Exeter since 1977. He was a special advisor to the House of Lords select committee 2000 report on complementary and alternative medicine and in 2016 he was appointed as herbal strategist at Pukka Herbs, leading new initiatives, clinical research and most recently reducing antibiotic demand. Within herbal medicine, he established the first master's program in the USA, writing seminal textbooks and publishing research including randomized controlled clinical trials. I never managed to source the herbs to support my liver prior to my stag party, more on that on the podcast, so I can't really attest to those, but I will be diving into herbalreality.com to see ways in which to increase the phytochemical diversity of my own diet. It's a fantastic resource that we mention on the pod today as well.
Dr Rupy: Simon, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
Simon Mills: Thank you so much for having me. This is such a treat.
Dr Rupy: This is a treat. I get to learn about herbalism from an expert who's been in this field for decades. I'll be honest, I'm very new to the field. I had a conversation with Alex Laird a number of years ago, who's, I'm gathering you know her.
Simon Mills: Very well.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. She was wonderful, great. We were in my studio, this was pre-pandemic. We cooked a lovely meal together, using lots of different herbs and we just had a conversation. It was great. So that was my introduction. And now I guess this is moving on a bit, I think, in terms of your experience. So tell me a bit about how you got into this field.
Simon Mills: I started out as a medical scientist, did the degree at Cambridge and but I never thought I was going to be a doctor. I thought I might do some research or some other. And then I travelled as one did in those days. You didn't have to go straight into a job. We were baby boomers. So I travelled around the world and I was, I'd grown up on a fruit farm in New Zealand, so I sort of had a bit of horticulture in my background, a bit of plants. And I was travelling around North Africa and Central America and staying in places where I could see people treating themselves with traditional remedies and they're all plants. And that sparked a few thoughts in my mind. I came back and then ran a small holding in Cornwall and bumped into a goat, my goat called Emily. She was the she-goat, she ran the whole brood, but every day I would take her out on a long rope, bang the stake in the ground and she would have 50 yards of hedge, Cornish hedge to roam around. And I began to notice that she wasn't hoovering up the herbage. She was actually picking very selectively the plants. And she seemed to be really making intelligent decisions and no one had taught her anything, she couldn't read a book. And I was began to watch and there was already and I this is a herb nursery we were running there. So I someone had told me about growing herbs and I thought this was probably more fun than lettuces. So there we had the herbs in the pots, watching Emily choosing the plants very carefully. And it was only later of course I realised that she was choosing from a materia medica because all the plants she was using were medicinal. And then I realised that she was fine tuning her inner being, her inner metabolism through her nose and instinctively organising her affairs just by her innate intelligence. And I made a decision then, Emily, I would like to be like you when I grow up. She's been my teacher. And then I discovered that there's a herbal medicine program in, used to be in Leicester in those days. So I went and studied and because I'd done medical sciences, I sort of shot through quite fast. And then they saw me coming and began to put me in charge of things. And so I was around as herbal medicine emerged out of the post-war doom, gloom. And then complementary medicine came along. And I happened to be in a room in the late 1970s with a guy called Stephen Fulder and a couple of other people looking at a report he'd written on alternative medicine. And he said, we've got to have a different word than alternative. We can't have supplementary to medicine because that's doctor deferral stuff. Why don't we call it complementary medicine? And that was the birth of what we now call CAM. So I was at the beginning of that. I was the first chair of the Council of Complementary Alternative Medicine in the early 80s. And then we set up a university program in Exeter in the mid-1980s on the back of some conversations that we had at the Royal Society of Medicine. And persuaded the university authorities that this is worth studying. And then we set up this research and education program there. And then one thing led to another. But throughout I've been a practitioner. I've 45 years now seeing patients.
Dr Rupy: Wow. Wow. That's incredible. So, so tell us a bit about the education piece. What do you exactly learn when you go and do the course on herbalism? And how close are you to being like Emily?
Simon Mills: Ah, now that's a difficult question, isn't it? You can't Emily never read a book, so let's let's come to Emily later. So the current herbal medicine programs, and there's many of them, and they've changed a lot. I mean, the one I went on had been developed in the 1920s and the staples had rusted through the paper, I mean it was really quite embarrassing. So one of our jobs and I was working with a colleague, Hein Zelstra, and we set up the school of herbal medicine that in the late 1970s and that sort of developed a more science-based medical recognizable with a lot of botany and other sciences in as well, great fun. And that led that was a template for future herbal medicine programs. There was Middlesex and various other universities picked up that London, Westminster. And so for a while, herbal medicine has now been almost like another health sciences program. Where you learn your Emily skills is I don't think on the program. And that's when you get your, your feel for it and your gut starts coming in on the on the scene. And most herbal students are too full of data and probably takes a few years to settle into the Emily mode. But as you get older, and this is running, taking running forward, increasingly I practice like Emily. And so when I see a patient and I spend an hour or so with them and get the plan organized, and I'm a physiologist primarily, so I'm interested in how systems link up. So they come in with arthritis, but they walk out with something that's completely new and different. Everyone gets something different. And I put together something and you know, I've been around too long. I don't want to wait three months for something to happen. So I'll ask them to taste it first, and these are strong. So the first thing is to watch their face. Bloody hell, you know, I never knew this is this is herbs. So you whack them, Emily, you see. And then I say, ring me tomorrow and let me know how things are going because things can work really fast. It sets off things down here. I use a term acu-pharmacology. So I'm operating on receptors and signals in the gut and the gut is wired up in all sorts of wonderful ways as you know with the rest of the body. And so we can see changes literally overnight.
Dr Rupy: Within medicine, we have the same problem, I think. The ability to separate out the placebo effect and the pharmacological effect. And I'm very open-minded. I'm of the opinion, if something works and the patient's having a great outcome from it, that's that's the way forward. How do we deal with this conundrum of giving someone a substrate, whether it be inert or something that clearly has a lot of powerful value, whether it's a botanical, whether it's a herb, whether it's a supplement from the the very powerful placebo effect.
Simon Mills: I'd turn that question right on its head. I sat on a beach once in Greece reading a paper about the placebo effect, particularly in pain, and the calculation that in some situations placebo can account for 80% of the observed phenomena. And so first of all, my confidence went down the tubes. I said, why are we teaching people for five years to do something with placebo can do even better. And then I realized I'd turned it the wrong way around because placebo is simply the self-healing correcting phenomenon. And it doesn't take much nudging. And then I realized that's what we were doing. We're nudging self-correction. And I sat on that beach and said, you know what, I want to get better placebos. To find ways of breaking a slight blockage that, a blank placebo, let's say, might not break through. So I very much see the herbs at their most powerful, which is why it can be so quick, as I call it nudging. It just knocks the door a bit and just gets something moving and then the rest is placebo. And everything we do is placebo if you turn it that way around. So a pharmaceutical that has a receptor effect can overcome placebo in a head-to-head competition. But, as honest doctors will admit, the pharmaceutical doesn't heal. It'll break down a door somewhere, but the healing is what happens afterwards. And that's the business that I think I want to be in. I want to be in how to help the body to find its own innate healing capacity.
Dr Rupy: In the hierarchy of all the different interventions that one has available to them, so you have diet, you have mind therapies, you have exercise, you have a whole suite of different elements. And then you have, you know, pharmaceuticals, supplements, herbs. Where where do you see it fitting? And like you said, you know, nudging the door open and stuff. Is it is it purely a nudge or can it actually have those, you know, those those genuine therapeutic values?
Simon Mills: Oh, definitely. There's there's a lot of evidence to show that plants do cover the gamut, the whole spectrum from foods on the one hand, which is where we start, and we'll come back to today. I'm going to talk with great enthusiasm about how we can add value to our foods simply and cheaply, right through to things like digitalis, which is foxglove, for heaven's sake. And so some of the the the strongest remedies are plant-based or originally come from plants. You know, opium, you can't say no more. So there is a spectrum. And, you know, particularly when we talk about self-care and looking after ourselves, because we always focus on the gentler versions, but as you get increasingly practice proficient, you can use some of the stronger ones to break a stronger door, if you like.
Dr Rupy: Let's look at some of the different cultures that have introduced herbal medicine. So, I mean, I'm from an Indian background, so Ayurveda is sort of the oldest of them all, probably. Yeah, it's it's definitely been a guiding thread throughout my whole life, you know, the use of turmeric and ginger and all the rest of it. But there are a number of other cultures that use different things. Where abouts were you travelling when you when you went away?
Simon Mills: North Africa, so that's Islamic, and then Central America, which is a combination of indigenous American and Spanish traditions. So you have this and and it's often a blend. We put together an ethno map once of the world and there are there are a couple of three main centers of independently springing up cultures. Ayurveda is the oldest, India, China close behind, and then what we call Galenic, the European tradition, and they blend in the middle with the Urdu, in the Pakistani world, which is essentially Galenic, and Islamic is Galenic. But then you see the overlaps and particularly when you talk about North America, you get the translation over the Atlantic and from Asia from Asia the other way. So there's it's a it's a blend and some melds and what I practice is sort of global. I practice some, I use Chinese remedies and Indian remedies and North American remedies, a lot of North American remedies.
Dr Rupy: And are there like a a spice palette, are there particular standout members of all those different families and and cultural traditions that that are most prominent?
Simon Mills: Yeah, I was brought up a lot on the North American traditions. That was a historical, the the the post-industrial British, very interesting story. You know, Britain did industrial revolution more than anybody else. And within a generation, the countryside had emptied and we were moving into Halifax and Bradford and Leeds and Manchester and so on in large numbers. And these were country people and they were normally looking after themselves, mostly by women in the villages. They moved into back-to-back housing in in the working class areas, proletariat, and they changed gender. The herbalists and they they were blokes who set up shops, the herbalist shop. One of the first was a man called Jesse Boot in Nottingham, who was the co-founder of the National Association of Medical Herbalists. Well, Boots might have another connotation to you because that was he was originally a herbalist shop. And that was the way it went. It was it was became a functional medicine for the working people. But they didn't have a legacy to fall back on. They just had polyglot, village traditions. Along came an American who had rediscovered the principles of Greek medicine in the far in the Midwest. And it was all about hot and cold and using cayenne and which is a Native American remedy. And so he came back with this new idea, Thomsonian medicine, no one's ever heard of it now, but it was the basis of a new tradition of herbal medicine as a profession in the in in in the UK. And I inherited that tradition when I studied in Leicester in in the 1970s. And so half of my medicine materia medica was North American. Echinacea, you know, the native ginseng, golden seal and a lot of very exciting gynecological remedies come from North America.
Dr Rupy: Let's talk about inflammation and herbal remedies because inflammation, as we've talked about many times on this podcast, seems to be the root cause of a number of different issues. I think everyone is aware of that these days. And if there are things that can enhance our inflammation balance, it stands to reason that it would be overall beneficial for a person. So what sort of herbs do you utilize in that respect? And and how do you further personalize it to to the individual?
Simon Mills: The we can start very simply with what we eat on the plate. So we are very interested in what we're calling phytonutrients, which are the added value that many plants bring to the plate. We know about vitamins and minerals and so on, but there are many other things that plants produce which have value, like polyphenols, we call them, or the volatile oils, the things that give the aroma. And I'm working with Pukka on this one again. We're articulating a campaign to bring phytonutrients on the plate alongside fruit and vegetables as a value. One of the things about phytonutrients is they're colourful. So one of the quick is eat a rainbow every day because the reds and the blues and the yellows and the greens all denote different important pharmaceutical, pharmacological agents. So just eating a diversity of colours is a start. Spices are stacked full of these phytonutrients. So eat Asian for heaven's sake. You know, we've heard about the Mediterranean diet, let's start eating Asian diet. And I'm personally convinced that, you know, in a world full of deprivation where it's difficult to for many people to afford healthy food, to have cooked lentils with turmeric, a dal, maybe some spinach and potatoes, can save your life because of the spices. You don't need to spend, I mean, how much does that cost? A few pennies. You know, we don't need to spend a lot of money to eat healthily if you eat in an indigenous fashion, the same foods that people have always eaten, particularly in Asia. And so, yes, I we I see that we can build on our plant knowledge very easily, simply at home, starting with the food that we eat.
Dr Rupy: Is there a collection of spices? You mentioned turmeric a couple of times. Is there a collection of spices that are like must-haves you think in most people's cupboards that you could refer to?
Simon Mills: Yeah. Turmeric is a must-have. No, just end of that conversation. You know, you can shoot me later, but no, turmeric has to be on your plate. It's almost ideally suited for the modern ills. It deals with so many issues, the blood sugar issues, the obesity issues, the metabolic syndrome issues, the inflammatory issues for heaven's sake. The gut microbiome issues are all, you know, on its plate. So turmeric definitely, cinnamon is very much for the whole insulin resistance, the blood sugar, metabolic syndrome issue, lots of evidence stacking up that it talks directly at that insulin resistance interface. Ginger. Is there a certain type of cinnamon that you recommend? People vary as to which I my interest is my my favorite is what we call Sri Lankan or um uh uh Ceylon cinnamon as well or Cinnamomum verum if you give it its Latin name. Cinnamomum zeylanicum. But there's cassia from China and there's Indonesian cinnamons as well and you'll find them all on the shelves. But if you look if you buy the quills, it's the one with the multiple quills that seem and you can smell them. Yeah. Emily, do an Emily. Yeah. You can you can immediately tell what is good. Ginger, I mean, you know, just step back a bit. It has been the most valuable commodity in human history, weight for weight. And you know what? It was made extinct in the wild 2,000 years ago. All the ginger we've had since has had to be grown by rootstock because it's lost the capacity to live in the wild. And that's human. We were doing ecocide two two millennia ago. Really? So valuable was ginger in people's mind because it's the antidote to cold and damp. And cold and damp were the main metaphors for infection. Particularly lung and joint infection. So ginger was the go-to remedy for most sort of infections, frankly. And we think we have a lot of it about, so let's use it. And a simple take-home remedy that I would offer anybody living in this benighted climate in the UK and during the winter when you get in the colds and the sniffles and you're feeling the cold and suddenly, you know, you get the cold in your kidneys and you know, uh oh, something's coming along. Get some freshly ground ginger, powder some cinnamon, make a hot tea, sip it. And in fact, get a thermos flask, put that in there and keep sipping it through the day and you'll get instant healing. You'll feel your passages clearing and we know why that's happening. Simple home remedy. You're not going to kill yourself, you're not going to damage yourself, but it'll and you'll realize how fast these things can work. It's literally in minutes. So these are, you know, it's making what we're talking about here cheap and accessible and available to anybody really is my passion.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And the the the full spectrum of spices out there, cumin, fennel seed, coriander, yeah. Cardamom. Cardamom's huge. Yeah. Yeah, one of the best spices for recovery from in convalescent care and when you're weak and enfeebled and you know, you can't eat very well and you know, you need to build yourself up. Cardamom. Chinese were using it up to here, very fond of it in India. Yeah, yeah. So when when as a strategy, uh, of trying to increase your polyphenol content, your phytochemical content, is is it a machine gun approach? Is it trying to get all those different ones on top of having a few sort of regular favorites like your turmeric, ginger, garlic?
Simon Mills: So yeah, you start with a shotgun approach, just have everything, pile it on. Get a good cookbook in which they don't do this, but they they don't sprinkle it on, they heap the spices on. Good proper aromatic tastes. And then do the Emily thing. Try out a tea or a a spice on its own and, you know, how does that feel? Yeah. And we sometimes divide people in the old times, they used to divide them into hot and cold. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. My mom always tells me about this. She's always like, yeah, you're too hot, you shouldn't have too much ginger. Yeah, and she's right as usual. We don't argue with mom. But there is another side to it because sometimes you heat up because you're in a fever. And that's a defense measure against what people used to say was the cold. And so sometimes you need to support that. And so one of the standard ways of helping someone in a fever would be to warm them up with some ginger and cinnamon again, you know. We went to India um some many years ago, my wife and she'd just come out of a really deep bronchial infection and I promised her India would be wonderful, you know, lovely weather. We hit a downpour and it was just damp coming down the walls and her bronchitis went really bad and she was in this hotel in Delhi. We went downstairs, she was barely walking. There was a guy in a suit and you know, big tuck behind this chrome and steel bar, obviously waiting for the party to start. And you know, he was about 17 or 18, took one look at her and and said, I know what you need. And he went and got the cocktail bar out and he ground fresh ginger, fresh black pepper and cinnamon and made a cocktail of it and gave it to her on me. Yeah. And I thought, this is saying a lot. This is a 17-year-old street kid who knew what she needed. And it's, you know, it made all the difference. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? The whole warming up stuff when you have an illness because we're actually changing our opinion on the use of antipyretics um in uh common colds and fevers and virus viral illnesses. So the traditional sort of approach is you give antipyretics, you give paracetamol, you bring that fever down straight away. And whilst you need to be careful, particularly in kids who are at risk of febrile convulsions, in a lot of cases, you might actually be prolonging the severity of your disease because the increase in temperature is actually a protective measure. So there's a few things that we're doing in medicine that I think we're coming round to a different way of thinking and it's very in line with like things that my mom says actually, which is always quite amusing whenever we talk about it.
Simon Mills: Well, we talk a lot, I talk a lot about fever management, which is just that, is it's incubating because at 100 at 99 or 100, you've got three times the whack from your white blood cells. They're charging around crazy things and poor germ at that point. And so you don't want to abort that. You don't want to stop that. You want to incubate it. So it's all about keeping the temperature and you can we got a thermometer, we can do this. So we cool we let some of the sweat out and we we cool it in simple ways and you can do it quite easily. And then you let it break the fever to break. And I've often said one good fever, you're fixed because you've killed your first line, you know, your white blood cells are now the the innate immunity is firing on now and all of a sudden any germ that pokes its head in the door is going to get whacked. So a fever management and sometimes about warming you up at that point because you want to keep the temperature right. You don't want it to sink too prematurely. And people used to do this without too much advice. People instinctively understood this principle.
Dr Rupy: So we've talked about food, we've talked about the inclusion of spices there as the first line of inflammation balance and and defending against excess inflammation. Um we're about to move on to specific herbal remedies.
Simon Mills: Yeah. Well, it depends on where we want to cut it. So one of the main areas inflammation starts is actually in the lining of the blood vessels. So what we call the endothelium. And endothelial dysfunction has been implicated in most inflammation as the startup of most inflammations. So a lot of the herbs and spices actually work there. So all the spices I've mentioned, we have evidence to show that they work on that front line, the blood vessel wall. Uh but there are many other herbs that we use in practice. I mean, you know, people have heard of ginkgo, for example. It it that works specifically at blood vessel walls. And uh we can go down the list of many other remedies we use, hawthorn, which we use very much for circulation and heart support, directly on the blood vessel walls. And long list. Um but you will get that from the colours. Yeah. So they will all also work at that endothelial level. The spices definitely work. So that's one front line. The major front line, of course, is the gut wall because we know that most of our inflammation, the main challenge we have is in here, in the gut. And so we need first of all to look after our diet and then we look at prebiotics and probiotics and various other ways of protecting our what we increasingly now see is important guy down here called the microbiome. Make sure that's in good shape. And sometimes after antibiotics, you need to support it in different ways. Uh but there again, many herbs that we know have evidence for. And you know what they are? Turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, you know, I keep coming back around. It's like a stuck record. Yeah. Are there any others that perhaps? Oh yeah, there's almost too many to list, but uh we use a lot of mucilages, for example. Okay. So if you've heard of gum arabic, that's a classic remedy for healing the gut. Slippery elm is another one that people have used from North America. The tannins, you know, tannins are the things you make leather with, you know, so you they basically curdle or coagulate protein and you make leather out of it from soft tissues. If you swallow tannins, which could be a strong black tea, but there are many other herbs that deliver them more accurately than that, you will temporarily leatherize, if you like, the lining of your upper stomach and that will reduce inflammatory activity. So anything that comes from up here and the gullet and the stomach, uh can be reached directly with the appropriate tannin-containing herbs. So meadowsweet, a good example of one of those that would we use a lot for healing at the stomach level. But here's the thing, meadowsweet is where aspirin came from. The old name for meadowsweet was Spiraea. And there was a German chemist who was wandering down the river bank one day trying to find an alternative to the stuff from willow bark, salicylic acid, which works very well to reduce inflammation, but drills holes in your stomach. And he was looking for a gentler way of doing it. And he picked up, he saw the meadowsweet on the river bank and he smelled it and realized it was it was wintergreen smell, you know, it's that's salicylate. And a little idea came because he knew that meadowsweet was used for healing the stomach. Right. So he went and synthesized what we now call A-Spiraea, aspirin. Yeah, yeah. Specifically because he thought that that would be um gentle on the stomach. He was wrong. But the meadowsweet from which he got it actually has tannins and mucilages in it, which probably protect the gut and allows you to have a modicum of aspirin without the damage to the stomach. So this is the sort of magic that we play with, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Any others? I've I've heard of uh lemon balm and peppermint. Um what other sort of? Well, those are both great because you can make them as teas. And they are peppermint's a good example of what I was saying earlier about hot and cold because most of the spices are warming. And I don't know usually to start with, I can sometimes tell a bit from looking at the tongue and so on, but I don't know which is going to suit any particular person. So I'll simply say, here's some fennel or here's some ginger and here's some peppermint. You tell me which you feel better with because peppermint is cooling. Fennel is warming, ginger is warming, chamomile is sort of cooling. So you can choose, do an Emily, you know, just pick the one that you feel good with the next day. Yeah. And then go from there and then you can stack it up. If you find that peppermint is helpful, there are other cooling things you can use. We call them bitters. Yeah. Which are one of the, you know, people associate with herbs, they taste awful. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But there's some that are really effective as bitters. Dandelion is a very simple one. Uh but we can go right through to wormwood, which you, you know, the the French for wormwood is vermouth. So, you know, it's it's one of those cultural things. Coffee, black coffee without the sugar, that's a bitter. And you those are cooling. And always been understood all the way around the world, they cool down heat. And so innately anti-inflammatory. And they do that mostly by working at the gut level. Yeah. You you mentioned um we were talking earlier about using teas and and that and that sort of like first level of like how to test what works for you. What are the next sort of stage, what are the next steps in terms of how do you slowly increase the dose? And is it that sort of activity that you would recommend doing alongside a medical herbalist?
Simon Mills: Yeah, so I'm all for giving people tools for doing it themselves. You see medical herbalists as the guys you turn to when you can't figure it out. Yeah. And you want a bit more. And this is a very extensive field. I wouldn't be able to figure it out myself even. So you start at the beginning. You start with the teas, answer the question, was it the mint or was it the ginger that you liked? Because that'll set you down a particular path. If the mint, you can start with a few bitters. If it's the warming that you need, there's all the spices to go for. Then if you think I'd like some more turmeric, but I don't want curry for breakfast, which is, you know, what you have in India, you have curry every meal of the day. But you don't want to do that, then you take a turmeric supplement. And you can go and check them out and places like herbal reality, you can find out where what the dosage you can aim for and where to go, you know, what what you need to get. And then as you get more and more intrigued and particularly as you're getting the feedback here, you can say, oh, I'll go and consult someone who knows about this stuff and go and consult a herbal practitioner.
Dr Rupy: Personal question. Uh, I'm about to go on my stag soon. And as you can imagine, uh, I've racked up quite a bit of bad karma along the last couple of decades with my friends. I'm going to be drinking alcohol, uh, hopefully not too much, but I'm probably going to need some support. So considering I'm generally pretty healthy, I generally sleep well, uh, are there particular medical herbs you think I should include in my self-care kit whilst I'm away?
Simon Mills: You should. Especially if you're going to a hot and steamy climate. Because this is where the bitters come into their own. Okay, uh-huh. Uh, they are primarily liver remedies. And we can distill a lot of stuff that they work on basically getting the liver working better for you. So they make themselves ideal hangover cures. So start with dandelion. There's another remedy that the French are very fond of called artichoke leaf, which you can get. But any bitter can be used and the more hot and steamy it gets, the more they're effective because they're cooling and drying. So they're anti- so if you if the result of having too much alcohol is you feel hot and steamy and you want to loosen your collar, that's when you need the bitters. Okay. Wormwood's another one, uh, you know, and you can buy them, you know, especially in in in airport duty frees, you can buy these little bottles of bitters that you're meant to take after you've been out for a party. Okay, uh-huh. So artichoke leaf, wormwood. Wormwood, uh, dandelion, uh, gentian root, uh, if you if you buy these bitters, you know, they're called bitters, uh, you'll see a long list of basically spices, but a lot of these bitter herbs as well. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's would be my stack for a stag would be a bottle or two of those bitters, yeah. Brilliant. Okay. I'm going to I'm going to stock up on those before I go. This has been brilliant. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And your website is fantastic. We're going to do a deep dive into uh some of the other topics that we haven't uh had enough time to talk into like the chronic illness uh and the ways in which you can support that with medical herbs. So that's brilliant. No, I look forward to that because that's what we do most of our working day is with people with chronic illnesses, yeah. Yeah, I can definitely get behind that uh that campaign as well to get spices on the plate. Well, we'll call on you, Rupy, because we're looking for everybody who can broadcast this as widely as we can. It's such an easy target, it's such an easy message. Yeah, absolutely. Eat your spices, Rupy. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you.
