Dennis McKenna: Dr. Cedric Baker is an ethnopharmacologist, food ethnopharmacognoist, medicinal food ethnobotanist, integrative oncology, medical herbalist, pharmaconutrition research scientist and medical botany, pharmacognosy and pharmacy historian. Uh I would like to welcome you Cedric, my friend Cedric, Dr. Baker to the Brain Forest Cafe.

Cedric Baker: Hi Dennis. It’s certainly a pleasure to be with you again and uh very excited for our dialogue and yes I wish I must make the biography like two lines because like John Milner said it’s long just means I’m old and it cuts into our time right so well

Dennis McKenna: You’ve done a lot you know and you’ve had a long career and you you’re you know by the very nature of what you’ve studied you’re highly interdisciplinary you know, and you have a more or less a specialist knowledge, I would think you say, on in Asian uh culinary practices and also Asian medicines, particularly Thailand. I was uh reviewing your uh your uh PowerPoint uh yesterday with Dr. Amanda Quave on the Thai ethnopharmacology. So, uh, I could call you Cedric. I guess other people should call you Dr. Baker because you certainly deserve that moniker.

Cedric Baker: No, no, you call me on time for dinner.

Dennis McKenna: You and I have known each other since plants and human affairs and uh, and that was a fantastic course. We, you were such a you were such an addition to that course. you know most of the students who came eager to learn but not really learning not really having any expertise and then this guy shows up you know from I don’t know where you were living then Alabama or something he’s like picture of uh what’s the uh the uh Colonel Sanders at that time you look more like the southern good old boy and you came with several suitcases is full of papers and books and everything. And I thought, “Oh, wow. This this guy, he’s a real keener and he probably knows a ton more about this than I do.” So, I felt quite intimidated. But as it turned out, you know, we struck up a good a good uh we he really he really participated in that class and we struck up a friendship and I that was the first time we encountered and we’ve our paths have crossed various times since then and I’ve always been impressed with your not only the depth of your knowledge uh and the breadth of your knowledge but also your commitment to teaching and you’re kind of like me. You’re a teacher at heart. You love sharing information with people and I think your students really understand that and they really respect that. So you have been a mentor to many students and we certainly need a new generation of ethnopharmacognoist and uh you and I have had a small role in bringing forth that new generation.

Cedric Baker: Well, wow, Dennis, you know. Um, so a lot to say, but let me just kind of break it up into chunks here because that was a lot. Number one, brother, I’m just I’m truly humbled to have first had the great good fortune to sit with you and our other ethnobotany mentors on the Big Island there. And you’re right, I did come in kind of a unique from a unique place for that. And uh one of them was I’d already traveled the world on five continents in over 30 countries studying uh the ethnobotany of food in and all these various subcultures and in different places and like you said primarily focused Southeast Asia um primarily Thailand and also studying uh the cuisines and um medicinal herbal practices which In a lot of cases in Southeast Asia are actually the foods themselves the preparation of it the whole diet it’s a preventive way of medicine and it the continuum is very blurred in Asia between food and medicine you know a lot of it just really sits right at the juncture of nutrition and pharmacy because uh as Dr. Pierce Salguero says and he’s probably the foremost American expert on traditional Thai medicine. He says the Thai diet itself, every dish is therapeutic, meaning uh could be preventative or it can be correcting a disease or it can be curative. Uh an example of that is Thai soups to cure colds and flu. I’ve used it for more than 30 years now. It’s you know it’s a surefire way to uh speed up the resolution of the cold or flu. These Thai soups with multi- uh constituents and many spice blends. A lot of those spice blends in Southeast Asia, you see this a lot also in the cuisines of Malaysia and Indonesia is the zingiberaceae family which we know phytochemically those are incredible anti-inflammatory uh food components you know and the chemistry and the phytopharmacology is really dense and also obviously antiviral. I I think I think the Thai uh cultural practices, the Southeast Asian cultural practices are a reflection of the perspective that many traditional societies have, which is their you know, I think it was Hippocrates who said let your food be your medicine. And these traditional cultures, you could correct me if I quoted the wrong guy, but somebody famous like that. I think it was Hippocrates said that. And for traditional cultures, this is just a given. This is an obvious thing. Our scientifically oriented culture makes a distinction between foods and medicine. But that’s completely arbitrary especially immersed in these cultural context where what you are eating for nutrition may be the same herbs that you’re taking for various problems such as colds and flu and blood pressure and the kinds of everyday maladies that people suffer. uh traditional cultures look to food first, look to their plants first and that that ethnopharmarmacopia in a way is the same pharmacopia that is also the basis of dietary practices.

Dennis McKenna: So, so you’re in a very uh interesting you bridge the you bridge these two disciplines. you’re in a very interesting place to unite these two things and bring this holistic uh perspective to your work which is what you talk about and what you educate people about.

Cedric Baker: Well, two points to make there, Dennis. And first of all, let me say uh in my part-time academic career, you were a major influence sitting on the Big Island with you. First of all, seeing a program like the ones that were offered at the spirit center for spirituality and healing, Mary Joe’s incredibly innovative program, and then later from there looking at where that is in integrative health and where that has evolved. Now you’re seeing a lot of the focus of the therapeutics and integrative health is looking at food as medicine like you said a lot of quotes. uh there’s one famous saying on the Thai diet all sickness begins in the in the diet. Ibn Sina the famous Persian physician said food is the best medicine you know so all of these concepts together it’s been in cultures human cultures we’ve known this a long time and so now it’s really becoming formal. The food is medicine. And there’s a big uh international uh convention that’s uh Jan uh June 1st and 2nd in DC and it’s bringing up this whole coalition which is prevalent throughout the US and bringing uh this concept of food is medicine actually you know to to an everyday practice which is where something we need it’s old wine we need to get in the new bottles and consume it like we did before you know.

Dennis McKenna: Right.

Cedric Baker: Right, it’s interesting how it circles back around. So, and the other really important part of it for me and you hit it on the head with the education is all this traditional knowledge is very important and it’s also tied into the ecology and these are millennium of practical traditions of toxicology and therapeutics. And so the diets of these places where they have these longevity centers like the green zones and the blue zones, the blue zones are well known, but I call the rest of them that are not well known but are still there. I call them very green zones. And we can look at their dietary patterns and their whole way of life and see it as this exquisite adaptation to to the local environment, you know. And uh this traditional knowledge is a lot of the time dying with the elders as the youngsters move to the out of the village to the city to work. And uh that closeness with a plant-based world is really it’s something that’s rapidly changing and something definitely we need to this this worldwide ethnopharmacopia as you say it’s really a key to the future of our therapeutics and the existence of our planet and our food supply not being so toxic. All these things are interrelated in a sky way. You know Dennis I’ve just got to say this too. This is a just quick throw out to you as a major mentor and influence to me. I would have never published my first book chapter without your encouragement. And I think we sat together first in 2007. Then later John Milner, you know, as we were in dialogue and later my mentor at the NIH at the National Cancer Institute, John Milner, he says, “Cedric, you know, just because I told him what you say, just like Dennis said, you got to publish this. These are ideas that that can make a difference. You know, this is new stuff. This is stuff we really should be looking at.” And uh it’s tremendously exciting. So, so I’m trying to get together some education programs specifically focused for health care professionals to learn plant-based therapeutics. And they started their fourth year in uh undergraduate just to get a background. and then uh make uh graduate uh certificate courses specializing ones a uh integrative Phytotherapeutics which is you know nut functional nutrition functional nutrition integrative medical herbalism and then a couple of programs that focus on specific areas like cancer and aging. So, so looking at longevity in these places, Dennis, there there’s incredible things we that we see as patterns reoccurring. Each place is going to have its own unique diet based on the ecology, the plants that are there, the animals, what their diets are, etc. But one thing that we find uh among these long live places is they have some kind of caloric restriction instituted into their diet. So, for instance, in Sardania, even though it’s not really calorically restricted, it’s still 2500 to 2,800 calories a day, it’s very restricted for red meat. So, so a lot of the calories are probiotic, artisanal cheeses and yogurts and things of that nature, you know, which I think we’re going to find more and more in the future how important those kinds of things are. uh all these fermented foods that is also a whole uh folk practice you know that’s now become very important in in food technology is basically fermentation so many of these foods are fermented and all the bacteria and the other organisms associated with that process are very important for maintaining the health of our own microbiomes and our general health. But you make uh a good point.

Dennis McKenna: You made many good points in what you’ve been saying, but uh people need to understand, you know, people with a conventional background in in medicine, they do not get this information. They’re taught that, you know, the single drug, single target model and it has to be isolated and purified and administered that way. That’s the complete opposite of the way the traditional healers work. Traditional healers work within the context of the culture and they recognize that food and medicines are not the same. They recognize the importance of the ecology you know all of these things ecology, habitat, biodiversity.

Cedric Baker: Yes.

Dennis McKenna: The herbal medicines, the traditional knowledge which is being lost as the elders die off and the young people migrate to the cities. This is a whole world view of understanding of biology and human health that is in danger of being lost. and uh people like you are working to try to make the world of medicine, the world of science aware of the value of this knowledge. I mean, we’re both we’re both in the trenches that way, Cedric. We’ve been working trying to bring attention to of save the planet and save humanity, you know, and it’s not something separate. It’s all tied together. And uh you know this very good point you made is there is definitely there is a continuum. And so for instance ayahuasca is not a tonic functional beverage you would drink every day you know to prevent heart disease say or diabetes. It it’s got a different chemistry. Nevertheless, this is the point. There’s so many plants out there with incredible potential benefits from their components which might not be a single phytochemical and most likely is not. It looks more like it’s a mixture of everything in a kind of its own ecology, right? You know, and figuring out that recipe and also the dose for that individual, which what is that’s how traditional healers work, especially with plants. Start low and go slow, right? You know, it’s a good uh don’t start at the heroic dose. Let’s put it that way.

Cedric Baker: You know, as I was thinking about our uh what really man, I would say it probably started back in 2007 on that that magical time on the Big Island, we kind of started a dialogue that’s just been ongoing whenever we sit together, you know, and in my head it just continues to go on. I just ask for your feedback, you know, periodically. But it’s this thing that uh all of this is interconnected. All of life and all of it’s miraculous and all of it’s communicating with each other and uh all these systems are tied together. So there’s also definitely an aspect where chaos comes in and so biotic health is I think it’s absolutely necessary we retain and we integrate our traditional knowledge into our technology and our current knowledge and understanding and we come up with a fusion new view that that’s integrative that that helps not something that’s reductionistic and negative and you know kill the killing the environment with all the poison foods, the poison in the soil, poison in the air, poison in the water we drink. You know, one of my programs in the education too is how do we detoxify the planet? Let let’s start with every single component. One part of my education program and I have another model uh that I’ve developed for the medical students and health profession student’s dentists where it’s a summer program. we’re going to try to start in New York City uh this year is they mentor one to one a high school student who’s already interested has an interest in it you know in the field and we teach them plant-based health starting as a high school senior say who’s had chemistry and biology they’re mentored by the medical student but they’re also in the program so the graduate certificate program I mentioned this would be a high school certificate it’d be four weeks they’d have four labs and they would be mentored one-on-one with one of the the medical students or health profession students. Right now, I have five medical students mostly in the New York City area, but they’re scattered throughout the east. And we’re trying to grow it. I’m going to try to have meetings with uh uh Cornell and New York City and some other uh people and places and see if we can grow it. And also so one to one if we could have 20 students in the cohort from the health professions and 20 high school students that’s like building our yogurt for the future for this…

Dennis McKenna: …quite true.

Cedric Baker: …the uh the new generation…

Dennis McKenna: …that you’re trying to teach. That’s the I mean, basically, you’re trying to lead them back to the discovery of what’s long been known, but has been rejected more or less by mainstream so-called mainstream medicine. And, you know, and with that knowledge base, mainstream medicine is in my opinion, and I think you’d probably agree with this, much too driven by the corporate model. You know, one of the reasons, one of multiple reasons why, you know, we know that there are cures for a whole spectrum of human illnesses in nature to be found in nature. Probably there’s not a disorder that exists that somewhere in nature there’s not a cure for it or there’s not a treatment for it. Pharma is not interested in this. Why do you think? Oh man.

Cedric Baker: Wow. Well, this is just the real ocean of stuff, you know. And then the other thing is this incredible uh you might have noticed that table I sent you in that paper as I’m trying to get food ethnopharmacognosy established now as a field of study is uh the incredible amount that we know verse what we don’t and the potential of what we don’t know that could be used in the future. For instance, for food plants, uh there’s 7,000 approximately known edible plants.

Dennis McKenna: Mhm.

Cedric Baker: Uh there’s 350,000 known plant species. According to some models, if we knew how to process them, 250,000 of those plant species could be used as foods or food components. But just based on the 7,000 that we have that we know about uh each uh according to our old mentor Dr. Jim Duke, the great late great Jim Duke, uh each plant can contain probably upwards of 10,000 different phytochemicals. And the highest ones that have been uh that have been explored are somewhere in the nature of three or 4 thousand known in certain uh mints and uh and other and spices. Uh so this is incredibly complex. So if we’re only using less than 3% of what’s potential, good goodness knows what we could discover. But certainly historical ethnopharmacology is a great place to start and not ignore, not be ignored. This should be where we start. And I’ll give you for instance, Dennis, I was thinking about this today. What we would talk about and one of them is uh this whole thing about the fact that uh nothing’s a drug or nothing’s really a food until a human takes it. You know, it’s not nutrition till it’s being digested. It’s not psychoactive till the symbiosis of the brain, the environment, the soul and the uh you know the actual substance itself. It’s a just a whole connected nexus of reality here.

Dennis McKenna: Bioassay is essential.

Cedric Baker: Yes. Yes. And so um it’s incredibly interesting as you look at the most active and consumed uh well-known psychoactive is caffeine which is primarily in functional beverages uh coffee and tea worldwide overwhelmingly that that’s and why it’s for energy. It’s to get us going is to get us through the day. Well, okay. So as we look at that we know about 60 known plants that contain caffeine. If we look at the ethnopharmacological record as we look at human cultures and I wrote these numbers down let me give you the exact numbers here. 254 known coffee substitutes that are substituted in human cultures. 676 tea substitutes. Now so maybe they can those contain caffeine and haven’t been measured. Maybe they don’t. Maybe it’s other things but they should have similar effects when we look at the chemistry and the phytopharmacology looking at the traditional use. So, so this is a great place where the historical materia medica materia dietetica which is over 5,000 years old can be matched with the cultures in situ. So, so what we really have, I want to go back to this quote and kind of make this point of what food ethnopharmacognosy really means and it’s a quote from you from a quote you used in the book the screaming abyss the brotherhood of the screaming abyss from Faulkner where you say the past wasn’t so long ago and I’m paraphrasing in fact it’s not even past.

Dennis McKenna: That’s true.

Cedric Baker: and uh this I actually had an ancillary quote to that about the past that the food cultures carry our past into the present day. Th this is an incredible amount of evolution in these traditional cultures and it plays with trade routes, what can be locally grown, what was learned from the neighbors, what was you know borrowed from the neighbors, how plants were hybridized and uh so as we look at this so we already have clues of looking for different substitutes for coffee and tea and maybe other things, right? So an interesting there’s tremendous I mean it’s surprising that there are no not more entrepreneurial people that see this as an opportunity to develop to develop new substitutes for coffee or tea that are often healthier and that could aid the preservation of the habitats and the environments where they grow. I mean it’s a win-win situation. I’m surprised that there’s not…

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, especially in the world more effort here that that is going into that you know another issue that I think uh comes up. So we talk about all of these foods and medicines that are used in traditional cultures and then then the issue of cultural appropriation and biopiracy comes up. I mean biopiracy has been around for a long time you know the I mean forever at least when is it piracy and when is it actual when is it borrowing, I mean that that’s something that that bothers me in a little in a way I mean the cult we do have to respect these traditions but if we fence them off if we send fence off these cultures then we eliminate the possibility for cross fertilization and sharing of knowledge and that that’s how it really should be. You know, I can give you a little anecdote about this. Uh you haven’t you haven’t met my wife, but my wife is a amazing hopefully soon like yours and uh like Sudo was when you were married to her. And she she’s a girl who grew up in Kamloops, British Columbian. She’s native to the Canadian to the core, but she’s gotten interested in all these different world cuisines, you know, and she works with them and she works with the spices and she really has educated herself about this. And I said, “Why don’t you write a cookbook, you know, because you know so much about this.” And she said, “Well, I feel guilty. I don’t feel I’m just a white person, a white woman. and I don’t feel qualified to be talking about other people’s foods.” And I’m my response to that is, you know, stuff. Get over it. Share what you know, you know, and don’t worry about that you’re revealing cultural secrets or anything. They’re not cultural secrets. The other thing, the fact that you could find the information means that it’s not a secret. It just may be hard to find.

Cedric Baker: Well, you know, I think this is a this is a moment where the fulcrum of food is medicine really sits now. And it’s a very important point you made, Dennis. There’s also this this uh unique aspect of fusion cuisines, molecular gastronomy, right? Blending traditions, cultural hybridizations. New York City is the best example I can think of in the world. And I’m including the night markets of Bangkok in that is there’s no other place in the world that much diversity in food culture in a major urban area. And this is a great place to teach and to study food ethnopharmacognosy because it’s all around us and even its experimental big experimental open medicinal kitchen lab if you want to look at it that way with the fusion cuisines. What and some chefs are now looking really healthy. Some of them at the real high-end places have even gone all plant-based. Uh I believe there’s one in New York City, uh Daniel Humm from 11 Madison. It’s a Swiss chef who’s undertaken this journey of and it was post-covid of exquisite vegetarian cuisine at the high end. So the other thing about that is what can we learn from that food science-wise etc about health about how healthy this stuff can be and uh so as we look at food cultures a great example of that I think is we look at spice use and how it’s reflected by these things cashmere chai is green tea as opposed to the black tea of Indian chai and it’s a little bit different spice combinations based on the trade routes going through there from you know hundreds of years. So for instance in the spice combinations and cashmere they add saffron which they learned they got from the Persians in trade.

Dennis McKenna: Mhm.

Cedric Baker: Whereas the Indians usually don’t include saffron in their chai’s. But look worldwide when you look at curries comparing the curries of Thailand within itself, each region has its own different bases and based on you know what grows there and culinary traditions and history. In the north of Thailand, they use locally available plant oils and there many different ones. In the central part of Thailand, they use coconut because they’re just so ubiquitous coconut oil base and the curries. In the south, they use different ones, tamarind, and other ones like this based again on mainly the plant geography. And then the other thing is is this chef goes down there for a vacation, taste it, and comes back. And then now everything’s a fusion cuisine. And if we start looking at our molecular sciences and apply them to functional food science, which we had this discussion once, that’s already kind of what molecular gastronomy is laying the groundwork for. Um, then uh there’s so much potential. You look at the moles in in Latin America and Mexico. Well, Oaxaca itself has hundreds of Mole, but a main ingredient is chili and chocolate. both incredibly uh healthy phytomedicines and these are just main components. It’s a multi-co component phyto food poly pill because it’s having many health effects that are beneficial based on the density and the uh and the actual specific phytochemistry. the moles to jeans in Morocco which are spice combinations and stews cooked in these clay pots and the curries of Southeast Asia just almost infinite variety and different combinations and a lot of them are specifically for health those kinds of things.

Dennis McKenna: If you if you look at the at global supply chains and foods that have been developed as world foods, you know, inevitably they have a cultural context. They come out of a cultural context and yet I was you just said a while back like you mentioned mole and you said people have an idea about mole you know but you said there are hundreds of moles you know and few have actually been achieved any kind of global recognition. What do you think the dynamics are that underly a traditional food that is used in a culture? Suddenly it explodes on the world stage and suddenly it’s a global food and uh food companies and herbal companies are putting hundreds of millions of dollars to develop these foods and yet there are just as many that are completely neglected and uh it and overlooked. It’s it’s a very peculiar I guess side effect of capitalism. You know certain way capitalism is going to focus on the foods that it can develop most easily for the least investment for the most profit. you know, and certainly if they have to give back to the indigenous communities or the local communities, that’s actually a disincentive to develop them, you know.

Cedric Baker: Well, I think it should be part of the ethics, you know, going forward.

Dennis McKenna: It should be. Yes, it definitely should be.

Cedric Baker: I mean, for me and you, it’s mandatory, man. It’s a matter of the heart, you know…

Dennis McKenna: …and the other thing is what as we’re doing equity sharing, what does that mean? in the Amazon. Do those people need piles of money? What are they going to do with it? You know, what resources can we actually get to them to make it e equitable? What is it that they really need that can help them? And maybe it’s not just piles of cash which can bring their own problems just like the gold mining, you know.

Cedric Baker: Right. Right. No, it’s not it’s not direct financial support. They need they need better relationships. They need actually they need the first world if that’s a term to come to the table with a dialogue with these developing countries and particularly these indigenous communities and say what do you really need you know we’ve stolen everything from you for 500 years now we’d like to give something back what do you want back I mean we can’t the as far as the foods the cat’s out of the bag you know the foods are global the foods are global commodities.

Dennis McKenna: How can we in a way make amends for our legacy of biopiracy? How can we somehow give something back that’s meaningful to the community that’s not piles of cash? Because we know what happens to piles of cash if it goes to these developing countries. The officials take it all. The people don’t get anything from it.

Cedric Baker: You know, you know, actually, Dennis, you just a thought just occurred to me as you said that and there’s first of all, you know, the heirloom seeds, the these actual plants have been developed by these cultures either wildcrafted, semi wildcrafted or horticulturally and agriculturally produced for a long time. So you have out of the 7,000 edible plants, you have these, like you say, these anomalies in different places that are known locally, mangosteen, durian, uh, the fancy food show always have a what’s the plan of the year. One year it was stingless bee honey, and of course cannabis has been an all-time bestseller everywhere for a long time. Uh but uh the things like stingless bee honey, man, here you go. Here’s a honey that the actual bee can get deeper into the flower and the chemistry of the honey, it has unique amino acids which actually can benefit or help a diabetic patient because a lot of times, you know, honey’s uh not touted in diabetes because of the amount of sugar and so on. And uh actually, and that’s a good point about other plants, things you say are bad when you’re not looking at the complete chemistry of the of the of the plant. For instance, coconut used to be touted as terrible just for fat content. It doesn’t matter that it’s excellent, great health fat content. What you want, not what you don’t want from, you know, 10 McDonald’s cheeseburgers per sitting.

Dennis McKenna: What was the movie? Uh, the guy that lived in McDonald’s, you know, with a consequent health Super Size Me.

Cedric Baker: Yeah, there there’s a example of that. But man, just getting back to plants, the amount we eat, but like you say, it’s this traditional knowledge is also how to use that plant sometimes. There are incredible home remedies if you look throughout the worldwide pharmacopeia that are amazing. The use of pomegranate vinegar in Armenia and the Middle East as a condiment and as a medicine. And then in Thailand they take the pomegranate and they boil the hulls for dysentery. So they’re making a this herbal tea which is quite bitter you know just like the bitter melon teas hence the name. So you really got to use a stingless bee honey. But the other thing is how our knowledge can actually take theirs and make it something healthy for the whole world and get back to the culture. Let’s say in Morocco a lot of young men the age of 30 40 years old die from diabetes type two. And if you ever had Moroccan tea man half of that small cup of tea is sugar. So you know there could be some linkages there modifying the diet but it’s taking knowledge and applying it back in that culture maybe to help them you know where the science can be of benefit looking…

Dennis McKenna: …yes Michael Heinrich…

Cedric Baker: …uh Dr. Heinrich you know at the University College of London one of the world’s really well known and mentoring ethnopharmacologist has said, Michael Heinrich he said uh this is an opportunity for ethnopharmacy to actually also make the herbal medicine safer for that culture and globally. So maybe something in the processing of it, it it’s pathogenic for creating certain kinds of mold or something and they happen fast and then then we could take our technology and use something simple like spice oils in there to preserve.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah. History has shown that uh you know science and traditional knowledge are really complimentary to each other. You know, traditional knowledge of these food plants and medicinal plants. It’s a tremendous uh uh body of information, not necessarily acquired scientifically, but scientific methods can look at that information and evaluate it in a systematic way. So, it’s not uh disrespecting it. It’s actually respecting it, an acknowledgment that there is an undiscovered body of knowledge that within its limit’s science can discover right can draw something better health you know. I mean it never will discover everything there is to know.

Cedric Baker: Oh yeah my god just contemplating how complicated what we know is brother but you know you hit on a good point here and that’s the dichotomy of the physical health versus spiritual and mental health, you know, and that’s something I was kind of alluding to in that in that one paragraph in my paper when I’m talking about the work of you and Terrence and this is important. A very important aspect of food ethnobotany and toxicology are the components of the plants and their effects. A lot of plants have hallucinogens and we know a certain number in plants and mushrooms and what they do and it’s a matter of doses to the effect like everything right and there’s so many things that are CNS active if you just look at spices alone when they look at these curries places like India and Southeast Asia they have very low rates of cancer and dementia and it’s almost a foregone conclude inclusion. It’s the spice combinations that are uh showing this epidemiological uh you know reality is that lifelong intake of these anti-inflammatory and many other acts you know uh molecular target components of these diets and the spices uh really it’s a long-term preventive medicine system. And so if you can live to be a hundred, then overwhelmingly I’ve looked at this data over and over, there aren’t many cancer patients that get to 110. You know, in that subgroup, man, their health has been good all their lives. And usually, they’re not they’re definitely not on a McDonald’s diet. You know they they’ve some of its genomics but a major extent of it and John Milner said anywhere from uh 40 to 80% of it is epigenetic that epigenetic dietetics and environment can uh really affect longevity and of course you know it’s there’s a common sense but there’s also as you peel back the layers of the onion there’s a lot of data to support this. Now, the thing is if if you’re eating this dense plant-based diet with all these different beautiful wonderful fruits and vegetables, they can’t come from toxic soils. So, so the problem is for that’s my concept of seed to therapeutic outcome. If we could take the seed and follow it all the way through even in a university like say Cornell where the agriculture and the food science is this tighten a nexus, follow it all the way through. Challenge it. stress the plant like they do traditionally. You know, they let some weeds grow. Use that tradition. Then analyze the phytochemistry. See if we can look at patterns because I think one thing when you look at the dosing of food dose and this is something that isn’t often looked at is uh you know if you’re doing an in vitro test use a dose so high no way a human would ever take it in a lot of these tests. So it’s hard to correlate that. But if you’re taking a plant-based product, there are parameters between uh what’s beneficial for you, what’s toxic, what you’re going to quit ingesting just because of taste or you know other effects from it. So there’s this built-in toxicology.

Dennis McKenna: It seems that uh what you’re saying basically, and it is common sense if you think about it but what you talk about these blue zones and these green zones and the places where longevity is people that it’s are noted for their longevity but the important thing is they’re living in a chemical ecology that supports that actually a biocultural context. So the people’s knowledge recognizes the value of the diet and the medicinal value.

Cedric Baker: That’s what I was trying to say with all those words…

Dennis McKenna: …they’re a part of the ecology. A person outside of that culture, if you said I’m going to eat like a person in the blue zone eats and I’m going to live to be 110, probably it won’t work because you don’t live in that culture. You don’t have the cultural support. You don’t have the other factors. You can’t separate these things out. It’s multifactorial. Right.

Cedric Baker: Absolutely, Dennis. You know, there’s a great example of that and it’s in Nicoya in Costa Rica where you have one of these dynamic blue zones and what you have are the Costa Ricans that move out of that area, their epidemiology goes straight to the general culture. Their cancer rates skyrocket. The other chronic diseases and it’s at least I think anywhere from eight to 10 year difference in life expectancy from Costa Ricans who leave Nicoya. The ones there have the longevity and even the ones just living in Costa Rica still have us beat by several years as a life expectancy. It’s still good I believe it’s in the low 80s, but uh you know when you get to Nicoya and that’s another place these longevity zones the men to women ratio is usually one. So, so it definitely the whole environment, you know, uh when you look at longevity worldwide, it’s very significantly female compared to male. So, it’s really interesting in real focal blue zones or as I call the other ones very green zones. You have a one to one ratio. So, the oldest living males are in Sardinia. The second oldest living ones are in uh Nicoya, Costa Rica. The oldest living people are in Okinawa. And uh Okinawans have the oldest living females and I believe Nicoya Costa Rica has the second longest. And uh if you look at those diets, specific things in Okinawa, 70% of the diet of the longest lived is purple sweet potatoes. They have this incredible amount of anthocyanins, but it’s not one component. It’s all of it. But having that is most of it probably has a lot to do with setting the epigenome of the gut, you know, through all these uh millennium. The other place it’s interesting as far as the uh looking at the specifics diet is uh Loma Linda California where it’s this the best longevity in the US is in this this uh subgroup here this community and Loma Linda which is primarily Seventh-day Adventist and they’re mostly vegetarians right and uh they have the lowest rates of chronic disease in the US as a group. So it’s really interesting to look at specific diet. And um the other thing is, man, it’s fun to make the fusion diet and make it healthy, you know, and you ain’t got to just put 80 pounds of sugar and everything like sweet tea in the South, which is diabetes in a cup, you know, right?

Dennis McKenna: Well, that’s the thing. I mean that’s interesting that you say Loma Linda is the hot spot of longevity in California and it’s associated with the Seventh-day Adventist approach to uh to diet and these sorts of things. So that’s a classic example of how cultural expectations and sort of cultural values overlap into food pharmacognosy basically. I mean that’s the thing you know uh someone coming from outside the culture it’s very you can eat all the right foods but you don’t have the cultural support, you don’t have that cultural history nor are you immersed in this ecology you know because it’s just a complex thing.

Cedric Baker: And uh oh man absolutely you just hit on a major thing. If you look at Mormons, you look at the Amish, you look at the Seventh-day Adventist, this is a very tight community.

Dennis McKenna: Somebody gets sick. Several families are there. They gather around. In Sardinia, one thing that’s uh where the oldest living men and among the second oldest living people in the world um at least the last time that I checked, they all eat together three or four generations together every day. All these families are and you know you have the grandchildren being raised by the grandparents. The grandchildren are giving the grandparents joy. It it’s a it’s a whole like you said it’s a biocultural ecosystem for health versus disease and there’s many aspects to it. There’s psychosocial and uh psychological and you know spiritual all of these things man we’re uh we’re humans we’re not we’re not beast in the field we’ve lost all that. I mean a lot of the data on these uh long longevity populations note that the social dynamic you know because older people in those societies, in our societies older people are often abandoned. They’re alone. They live by themselves. They don’t have extended families anymore. You know, they’re eating meals on wheels. It impacts the elder generation and the younger generations because the younger people don’t get the benefit of the elders’ knowledge. The elders do not get the benefit of younger people looking after them, making sure that they’re looked after and they’re healthy as long as they can be. So, so it’s the sociological uh context as much as the dietary and phytochemical context that…

Cedric Baker: …absolutely, brother. Absolutely. You know, I was I was thinking about a lot of things. You know, uh you asked me to give a talk a while back when we hadn’t seen each other in in in a long time. And we a couple of years back we met up in New York City, September 11th. I think it was 2022 or 2023. And uh so you asked me to put together a talk and I did and it was on uh kind of food psychedelics or the psychopharmacology of food in a way and the fact also for something to be a psychedelic it has to go through a human brain. So the title was “We Are Psychedelics” because it’s not a psychedelic till we take it. It’s the same principle as uh you know Dali when he said “I am drugs.” Of course he was probably a prime example of that.

Dennis McKenna: He probably was and certainly a hallucinogenic one or a psychedelic one. Well, I I hope that you’ll talk about this. That’s right. We did you did give a very interesting talk on this. I hope you’ll address this at our upcoming ESPD60.

Cedric Baker: Well, that’s I was trying to that’s exactly I was trying to get the plug in here.

Dennis McKenna: So, we are reasonably sure we’re going to pull it off and I think this your talk will fit right in. I mean, this is this is an important thing to be talking about. So, you know, we’re planning that. I believe we are going to pull it off. So, you know, we’ll keep you in the loop on this. I want to deep deeply explore uh the psychoactive content of traditional beverages. Like it’s way beyond just um tea and coffee.

Cedric Baker: Oh, absolutely. Chocolate, chocolate. Absolutely.

Dennis McKenna: And even if you’re looking at the other end of the spectrum, right? And we haven’t even touched on the on the topic of psychoactive animals and the way they’re used and of course this you know so there’s a lot to a lot to unpack here. There’s also yeah there’s a lot of therapeutics in animal therapies man especially when we look at marine animals you know.

Cedric Baker: But uh I was thinking I’ve kind of come up with a a second part to the “We Are Psychedelics” line because the other thing and maybe this is a topic we can do another podcast if there’s an interest somewhere down the line and that’s me talking about my uh my near-death experiences you know and how that’s impacted my journey since that wreck seven years ago which we haven’t explored but but it also gave me the insight to come up with the “We Are Psychedelics” concept right as I apply it to food and as I thought about it I thought to myself you know life itself is an NDE.

Dennis McKenna: That’s right or as somebody said life is a disease whose prognosis is always bad because it Maybe all of life is an NDE. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Cedric, it’s always good to talk with you. We’re coming up at the top of the hour, but we…

Cedric Baker: …yeah, you too, brother. Um, we’ve touched on a couple things and barely scratched a whole bunch of other things. Oh, yeah.

Dennis McKenna: You know, uh, there’s always more to talk about. You’ve got a very active mind and, uh, it’s always good to conversation.

Cedric Baker: Is there anything professor? My dear professor, it’s always great to sit with you indeed and I’m sitting at your feet getting drops of wisdom. That’s how it is.

Dennis McKenna: And in your in my case, it’s I mean I think we’re mentors to each other. You know, there is no you know we both have uh handles on certain knowledge and they complement each other. So it’s always good speak with you because you know we get past a lot of the assumptions but we share these mentors. I mean one that was uh so uh meaningful to you is Eloy Rodriguez.

Cedric Baker: Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis McKenna: Of course, he and Neil Towers, my supervisor at UBC were great buddies. They went to South America a number of times. God only knows what they got into, but I think a lot of it was fairly edgy and uh but Eloy is another one of these, you know, giants of ethnobotany like Jim Duke for example, the same he was a mentor to you and me.

Cedric Baker: Oh my goodness. Hundreds of people.

Dennis McKenna: So, uh, this is this is something that comes up all the time that, you know, mentors are more important than education than where you get your education, you know,

Cedric Baker: if it’s just me myself, brother, I’m just an just an idiot, you know, an ignoramus out in the hayfield. But I’ve been blessed with such incredible teachers, man. It’s just like even a little bit of it rubbing off, you know? It’s given me this unique vision that I can just all I can do is just uh life itself man it’s always such an interesting exciting and unpredictable journey. I started to make the topic of our talk uh the road map and the road. So here’s what we’re gonna start talking about. Let’s see where it goes. Yeah.. You know, and uh you’ve been a major mentor to me. Eloy, my goodness, you know, he’s and you guys, it’s not just that you’re the leading ethnopharmacologist and medical ethnobotanist of all time. You’re in that in that Mount Rushmore, but you’re great human beings even more. And that’s the really important thing is my mentors have all showed me how to be a better human being. And for instance, just thinking about the planet and all of life and all the children and all the humanity in the world uh versus making piles of money and letting that be the end of your existence. It it’s uh I don’t know, man. It’s overwhelming to even talk about it. But uh you guys are both kind of I’ve been following the ghost of Neil Towers here because you and Eloy are both incredible mentors to me and John Milner, my own father was my major one teaching me botany at the age of five. Yeah. Harry Henry Barrett Baker Barry Baker.

Dennis McKenna: We’ve both been blessed in terms of the people we’ve been able to study with and work with. So, uh…

Cedric Baker: …hey, I want I want to ask you a question before we cut off, Dennis. When you were growing up, growing up with Terence, did you ever have much of a turn to talk?

Dennis McKenna: Did I? What?

Cedric Baker: Did you have much of a turn to talk at all?

Dennis McKenna: Uh, yeah. I held a I held my own definitely. But yeah, it was it was it was it was good and bad. I guess like any sibling relationship in some ways it was great because Terence was such a smart kid and always interested in many things. Of course, you know, one of his main hobbies was torturing me and he was very creative about that, but we’re not going down that path right now. That’s another conversation. People can read The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss if they want the low down on that.

Cedric Baker: There you go. There you go. Another plug. Plug.

Dennis McKenna: Good. Good to talk with you. Is there anything we have to say that we haven’t said yet?

Cedric Baker: Uh, you know, I think you tempered Terence’s scientifically you tempered his peregrinations through the cosmos. You scientifically tethered him. Uh the only thing I would say man is I’m really looking forward to the future. Um if I get this school going in New York City, I hope I can entice you if we can get you back in the US to come give a talk to the students there when we get it going or at least maybe a Zoom lecture.

Dennis McKenna: Happy to after the administration is gone. I’m supporting the Canadian travel boycott.

Cedric Baker: Okay. Okay. But sooner or later I’ll come to New York probably and I’ll see you there.

Dennis McKenna: We’ll do it virtually in the meantime. And the last thing is this big 60.

Cedric Baker: Man, that’s a big deal. I sure hope we’re there in England.

Dennis McKenna: We’ll be talking about that.

Cedric Baker: That’s a That’s a big deal. Yeah, it is. Think of the old days with uh who’s the guy from Switzerland? The old guy. You went to see uh him and Norman…

Dennis McKenna: …Farnsworth and Tony Schwan. Uh Hoffman. Hoffman. Oh, Hoffman, right?

Cedric Baker: Yeah. Yeah. So, boy, he lived to beyond and something. And you saw him?

Dennis McKenna: He died. Yes, I saw him. He was uh 102. Uh and shortly after that I was in Switzerland in 2008 and we visited him at his home and he did not seem like a person who was 102. I mean he was on it you know he never missed a lick. He was completely focused very happy you know it was it was great to see it. I mean it was a good example of well this is what you can be yourself maybe if you take enough LSD. I don’t know, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt him.

Cedric Baker: No, I think I think a major part of it is living in Switzerland, brother. You know, again, we go back to clean environments.

Dennis McKenna: Well, that’s another thing. Yes. Living in Switzerland, it’s a pretty healthy place to be. So, yeah. All right. No, we could go on and on, but Oh, yeah. the top of the hour, so I’ll say goodbye for now. And, uh, thank you for coming on. Great to see you. We will run many links to your materials, PowerPoints and so forth. We have it all. We’ll put them up there for the episode and people can really delve into your work and your thinking and uh they’ll be able to reach you through the McKenna Academy. So, uh absolutely. I hope you and I can do a…

Cedric Baker: …lot more together and I can actually help the academy going forward.

Dennis McKenna: Well, I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. Well, this is going to help us right here. So, we’re very grateful for your contribution and it’ll drop. I’ll let you know when it’s gonna post and uh let your friends know about…