#011 CHORIBar: Micronutrients, Fiber & Polyphenols in a Bar

Rhonda Patrick (0:00)

Hello, fine ladies and gentlemen. I'm super excited about today's podcast because I speak with Dr. Bruce Ames, Dr. Joyce McCann and Dr. Mark Shigenaga about so many interesting topics. This is the first time that I interviewed three people at once and I was a little nervous about how it would turn out, but I must say this is a fantastic discussion about general health. There are so many nuggets of gold in this conversation because Bruce, Mark and Joyce are all fabulous scientists that contribute a unique perspective. We talk about so many different things, including the different types of HDL and LDL cholesterol and what they do in the body. We discuss a low-calorie micronutrient and fiber-dense nutrition bar, referred to as the Cori bar, that Bruce and I briefly touched on in a previous conversation.

We discuss how each of the components of the bar, from the vitamins and the minerals to the fiber and polyphenols, are all really important but have separate functions in the body that can work together in much the same way that an orchestra play their individual parts to create a symphony that is larger than the individual roles themselves. We discuss how the Cori bar raised HDL in lean adults in just two weeks, how eating the Cori bar raised HDL lowered triglycerides and small LDL particles and improved insulin sensitivity after eight weeks in overweight obese individuals, all without them changing their diet.

We discuss so much more that if I tried to summarize it all, it would take another hour. Please keep in mind that the Cori bar is not available for consumers yet, but you can keep up with the Cori bar updates on bruceames.org.

bruceames.org forward slash Cori bar. But before we get started, I wanna take a moment to remind you guys of just two quick items. If you're not on my email newsletter, you're missing out on a golden opportunity to have sweet, sweet health, nutrition, fitness, science, and other lifestyle information transported straight to your brain via your eyeballs. I send out awesomely comprehensive articles approximately once a week. These emails are usually the perfect companions to these podcasts. I'm not ashamed to say that I really outdo myself on these emails. So go to my website at foundmyfitness.com right now and sign up for my newsletter. The second thing I wanna bring up is that this episode of the Found My Fitness podcast is brought to you by super awesome people, probably much like yourself. Over 500 people have now pledged to support my podcasting related efforts via patreon.com. Do you like this podcast? You can show it by pledging anywhere from $1 to $20 or more, whatever you like. Learn more about that on my website or skip the nonsense and head right over to the support page at patreon, patreon.com/foundmyfitness. And now onto the podcast.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick here. Today I have the extreme pleasure of sitting with my mentors, my colleagues and my friends. Dr. Bruce Ames is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Center, and he is the director of the Nutrition and Metabolism Group. Dr. Joyce McCann is a staff scientist and the co-director of the Ames Nutrition and Metabolism Group. And Dr. Mark Shigenaga is a scientist at CORE and is also an expert on gut health. Today we're going to be talking about an ongoing project that Bruce, Mark and Joyce have been working on over the past several years, involving a low calorie micronutrient and fiber dense nutrient bar, also referred to as the CORE bar.

So I was thinking maybe we could start by talking a little bit about how the idea of the CORE bar came to be, what precipitated this idea to make a low calorie micronutrient fiber dense bar.

Bruce Ames (3:58)

Well, I was interested in vitamins and minerals. There are about 15 minerals that you need in your diet, and about 15 are the essential minerals, and about 15 vitamins. So there are about 30 substances you have to get the right amount of in your diet to work your metabolism. Because what these compounds mostly do is they're cofactors for enzymes. Enzymes are proteins that do all the work in the body to do your metabolism. And if you don't have zinc, you inactivate 2,000 enzymes. They're enzymes with zinc fingers and they're p53, which is mutating half of human tumors. Anyway, each one of these vitamins and minerals is a component of many proteins. And so maybe a quarter of your metabolism, not exact numbers, a little fuzzy, but will be inactivated if you don't have them. And in a way, our definition of a vitamin is if you don't...

you need it in your diet to help your metabolism, and if you don't give it to a rat it dies, then it's a vitamin. It's somewhat different... people will give you different definitions. And my field was DNA damage, what's causing it and how do you prevent it. And DNA damage leads to cancer, as you all know.