Kind: captions Language: en today we're going to talk about kiwis and the benefit of eating kiwi fruit every day so first what is a kiwi AKA kiwi fruit that's its proper name well you see them everywhere in the grocery store but in case you haven't or don't recognize them a kiwi is an egg sized fruit it's actually a berry that grows on a vine and it's actually called aidia deliciosa and it originated in China it's got br fuzzy skin on the outside but if you actually cut it open or peel it it's got this green or yellow flesh on the inside it's very beautiful that is sweet and slightly tart kind of like a strawberry and there's tiny little rows of black seeds that are edible now I love to eat kiwis and one or two to eat for breakfast is a great way to start your day now before we talk about the health benefits of kiwis I want to give a little bit of background originally in China kiwis grew Wild on the vine and they were collected by villagers for medicinal purposes so they were actually part of traditional Chinese medicine and in fact the first recorded history of a kiwi was during the 12th century I see 1100s during the Song Dynasty and basically it was called monkey fruit and back then and it would reason it got its name is because monkeys would pick these kiwi fruits off the vine and eat them now we know that monkeys from Recent research actually choose fruits and they eat them when they actually need to heal themselves from illness or to heal a wound this is actually new research that shows that uh primates actually are just like humans pretty smart and they figured out how to use Foods in a natural world in order to be able to improve their own health so monkeys were probably picking kiwis and eating them for some health benefit that they knew about before we knew about out now kiwis actually eventually became an Agricultural Product it's grown in New Zealand and that's actually how it got its name because monkey fruit became kiwi fruit U because kiwi is the national bird of New Zealand and so as the Kiwi fruits were exported they were associated with the country that they came from I.E New Zealand and I.E they were just named term kwi fruit now when you buy a kiwi you want it to ripen and in order to be able to ripen it faster you actually just store them in a paper bag and you keep them at room temperature and that they will kind of gas off gas and they let you ripen in that bag and what once they soften up a little bit and all you got to do is to pull them out and just squeeze them a little bit to see if they're soft um take it out and just keep them away from other fruit that might actually emit ethylene gas that can actually overripe the Kiwi you don't want them to be over ripened you'd also want them to be under rip and you want to be just rip when you eat a kiwi and by the way you just cut this bre brown furry big berry uh open you slice it right in half and you just open it up and it's this beautiful green inside or beautiful yellow inside it's a great source of vitamin C and vitamin C gives it some of the tartness that you get from the kiwi and vitamin C ascorbic acid lowers inflammation in the body and kiwi also has some vitamin A uh which is actually good for eyesight all right kiwi also has a little bit of protein and some dietary fiber in the flesh but vitamin C is when I go for when I actually want to eat kiwi if you want to get the fiber the benefit of the fiber a lot of people don't know this but the skin of the Kiwi is also edible now you wouldn't want to eat this um kind of uh rough hairy uh skin just you know biting it open like an apple but the little trick the the pro tip the hack uh for actually getting the most fiber out of a kiwi is to take off the skin and blend it into a smoothie and you won't actually taste it at all but you'll actually get a huge amount of edible fiber from the skin of the Kiwi so let's talk about the benefits the health benefits of kiwi benefit number one eating kiwis can protect your DNA now our body is filled with DNA DNA is our genetic code our DNA makes the proteins that are necessary for life itself so you don't want we don't want that our DNA to be damaged a lot of things can actually damage our DNA for example ultraviolet radiation can come in to damage our DNA off gasing from a carpet could uh uh damage our DNA D if you're filling up your car with gas or petrol and you're smelling the fumes well you're actually inhaling some of these solvents that actually can damage your DNA Ultra processed foods artificial preservatives artificial colorings all those things have the potential of damaging our DNA and it turns out kiwi can protect it now how do we know this well we know this from clinical studies that have been done because researchers from roit Research Institute in Scotland looked at the impact of eating kiwi on protecting d and the way they did this is that they recruited 14 healthy volunteers and they gave them kiwi to eat they gave them either one kiwi or two kiwi or three kiwis to eat um each day and then they drew their blood and what they were interested in doing is finding out compared to the very beginning when they also Drew their blood to look at how well the blood had an intrinsic ability to prot protect their DNA after kiwi eating they actually measured drew the blood again and they said well is there any differences well it turns out that eating any number of kiwis one two or three so even one could do this could protect DNA from damage in other words a blood's ability to protect Shield DNA from damage uh was increased by 60% in other words kiwi has an antioxidant effect it protects against oxidative damage what's interesting is they actually found eating three qes actually could improve uh the DNA by 66% all right so you actually uh actually had DNA uh uh in brute rebuilding repairing by 66% now kiwi also has a bioactive called actinidin and this is an enzyme that's used as a meat tenderizer and it turns out in traditional Chinese medicine kiwi was yet once used to Aid digestion so hundreds of years ago there was this knowledge from a traditional healing perspective that kiwi which now we know has actinidin and that's an enzyme can actually help you with digestion all right now we don't really know uh exactly uh what the degree of benefit is uh but nonetheless this is a digestive uh enzyme benefit number two kiwi can help with uh lower GI issues like irritable bowel syndrome and constipation all right and there was another clinical study this time done in New Zealand that looked at um uh 58 people who had IBS irritable bowel syndrome and constipation so they actually had less than three movement so weak now that doesn't sound too bad to you if you also have sort of an upset crampy stomach you can actually see that you know you start to think about your lower gut and not and not having any more than three bow movements a week you notice it and it's kind of irritating so they actually uh gave the subjects the researchers gave the subject a kiwi extract all right that contains actinidin every day for one week so they got seven doses of actinidin and then they followed them up a week later to see see if there's any difference what they found is that the Kiwi extract eaters had improved bowel movements better regularity and less overall abdominal pain less cramping from their irritable bowel they also experienced less bloating and they were less gassy as well so you're actually keeping things moving all right and whether it's due to the actinidine or the dietary fiber or some other factors uh probably all the above now um the other interesting thing is that other research have show that actinidin uh can also promote wound healing and you know this is actually probably due to its enzymatic effect if you have a wound that's not healing one of the things you want to do to jump start the wound is actually to put some enzymes on it and that will actually kind of freshen up the wound turns kind of a chronic wound into an acute wound cleans up any of the bacteria and Slough that might be on this on the surface of the wound and that actually gives you a fresh layer for new tissue to he heal and grow back and that's actually something I've studied in the wound healing field because you need blood vessels and your Genesis in order to be able to grow so actinidin which comes from kiwi can actually be used has been used and studied to be able to help promote uh wound healing and speaking of that the third benefit is that kiwi actually helps to heal diabetic wounds now people with diabetes develop wounds particularly on their lower extremities so that's sort of below the knee could be in the uh calf the ankle or the foot and it can be on the bottom surface of the foot and the reason is people with diabetes develop something called neuropathy so when you have a constant state of high blood sugar and inflammation it damages your blood vessels and damaged blood vessels damaged circulation also damages the ability for nerves to function now you might not realize how many nerves are in the bottom of your feet but if you've ever walked on the beach in the sand and you felt that nice feeling of uh fine uh you know Crystal powder sand on the bottom of your feet and it felt really good that's because uh your nerve lay nerve endings on the bottom of your feet are actually being stimulated all right so we got a lot of nerves on our feet but in diabetes without a good circulation those nerves actually die back and they don't work quite as well and when your nerves aren't working quite as well guess what if you step on a nail if you step on a piece of glass if you step on a uh uh soda can top that's been thrown on the ground you won't feel it and if you don't feel it most people don't look at the bottom of their feet you can have a cut a small cut that winds of getting dirty because obviously the bottom of your foot is actually a dirty surface in contact with um relatively unclean areas even your shoe not clean but certainly if you're walk around Barefoot and you got a tiny little cut from stepping on a rock or stepping on a piece of glass and you don't feel it then you're going to pick up bacteria you're going to pick up dirt all right and in the condition of diabetes that little tiny crack in the skin which gets bigger and bigger because it doesn't heal the blood vessels aren't healthy so you diabetic wounds have a real tough time healing so it's the neuropathy the problem with the nerves that leads to the injury can't feel the injury so you keep on walking around on it it gets dirty it gets infected and normally a wound would actually you know the immune system would clean up in that wound it would cause a little inflammation clean up all the dirt and then it would stimulate angiogenesis angio blood blood vessel Genesis how they grow that's what I study and it turns out that in diabetes that process of of immune cleanup doesn't happen very well because the immune system of people with diabetes is suppressed you can have an inflammation but you won't have good immune response and then the ability to grow blood vessels and your Genesis is also impaired in diabetes now you've got basically The Perfect Storm of an injury that's not going to heal and that's actually can happen on the foot uh uh in the bottom of your foot could happen on your ankles Could Happen anywhere in lower extremity that's called a non-healing diabetic lower extremity ulcer or it's on a foot a diabetic foot ulcer also called dfu now why is that a problem well if you're diabetic uh foot ulcer gets infected you might not even know that you have a wound there until you start smelling the infection and by that time you might be on your way to not only an infected wound but a gangrenous uh foot and ganging is really where the tissue begins to rot and when that happens um not only much you need antibiotics uh but in fact in the most severe cases if you don't actually have good wound care uh that infected gangrenous foot that diabetic foot officer non-healing diabetic foot officers can lead to an amputation this is actually a really really serious problem uh it's kind of a silent uh epidemic because we know that diabetic diabetes is actually increasing we know that obesity is inre increasing we call it diabesity and so the problem of chronic wounds is also increasing now back to the Kiwi what they actually found is they took uh researchers again um uh wanted to study this so they uh researchers from rfh San uh University in Iran looked at people with diabetes and having a foot ulcer uh and they added a kiwi extract now remember kiwi extracts that contain actinidin and vitamin C uh they uh put it onto the wound the non-healing wound and they put a dressing on top of it and they actually found that the application of the Kiwi extract sped up wound healing stimulated androgenesis decreased inflammation clean up up the wound and sped up healing all right so this is not from eating a kiwi but this is actually showing you the benefits of what's in a kiwi because you can extract it you can put it right on top of a wound now I'm not telling you to do that for yourself if you actually have a diabetic wound that mean if you have one of those you should definitely see a doctor you might want to see a surgeon who can actually evaluate it you might want to see a podiatrist a foot and ankle surgeon and then there's wound healing clinics uh that can actually apply all kinds of really sophisticated um uh methods to be able to help that wound heal at all at all cost you want that to heal you don't want to let that one alone okay now benefit number four kiwi can heal other types of wounds like pressure ulcers you know what a pressure ulcer is an ulcer is a is a wound that occurs when there's skin on a Surface pressing down with a lot of pressure on it just body weight creates a lot of pressure think about a person in a nursing home who is lying on their back all the time all right uh and not moving around or somebody in the Intensive Care Unit who is kind of connected up to tubes and doesn't actually move that pressure of the body U presses on the skin prevents blood flow from getting to that skin and the skin actually breaks down we actually need uh to move around you have too much pressure in one area not good eventually that tissue will die like I'll tell you here's an example that you're going to relate to you ever Wai in line at a movie theater or for a concert you know you're waiting for the the doors to open up you're standing right with everyone else what do you doing actually with your feet actually what you're doing is you're actually shifting from side to side all right you might be walking back and forth rocking back and forth uh having one foot where you're actually tapping your toes or tapping your heel moving it around you know what that does that takes the pressure off all right if you actually stood on your feet all day long without moving EV that tissue would not get enough oxygen it would actually start to die so pressure ulcers okay the studies have actually shown that uh kiwi extract again with actinidin and this was done at the Isfahan University in Iran they did a study on 40 patients with uh sacral ulcers you know where your sacrum is your sacrum is where your tailbone is so this is actually a very common type of ulcer in people who've had lots of surgery and they're on their back or any Intensive Care Unit or in a nursing home where they're lying down and just the weight of the spine and the hips all right and and the belly the organs pressing down on the sacrum the tailbone which is very thin go ahead and feel your tailbone right now you'll see right that there's not a lot of skin there's not a lot of tissue between the skin and your tailbone that's why when you feel it you're you're feeling the bone the tailbone itself now you put a lot of pressure on that it makes it really easy with to cut off the blood flow and then the tissue begins to die when when the tissue dies the skin breaks down when the skin breaks down you have a a wound an ulcer and that's what is called a sacral ulcer so these researchers at Isfahan University looked at 40 patients with sacral ulcers and what they found is that putting a kiwi extract on that sacral ulcer improved wound closure now most likely what it did is that that tined in the enzyme dissolve some of the Dead not very viable tissue in it and it created a clean surface but uh the other thing is that the uh researchers found that in the wound there was increased blood flow more wound healing angiogenesis you need angiogenesis you need new blood vessels to grow in order to be a heal a wound and it's quite amazing that an extract from kiwi is powerful enough to stimulate wound healing and geog Genesis all right again this isn't from eating the Kiwi but this is showing you the power of what's inside the Kiwi when you extract from it and even apply it to to the skin all right now other Studies have shown that kiwis are also good for gut health so benefit number five is that kiwis can improve our oral microbiome now you've heard of the gut microbiome right this is the 39 trillion healthy bacteria that live in our intestines a lot of it lives in our colon in an area called the seeum which is actually where uh your appendix actually lives but the gut starts in the mouth and ends in the anus okay it's a about 40 ft long and it turns out that kiwi improves our oral our mouth microbiome now this was figured out from a study from Japan that looks specifically at the microbiome on your tongue all right and what they did uh is look at 32 healthy young adults and they looked at their tongue bacteria after getting a kiwi extract uh uh versus just brushing the tub like so good oral hygiene you should brush your teeth all right you should floss and then you should brush your tongue and brushing your tongue just kind of wipes off some of the bacteria and and cells that have accumulated on your tongue it gives a fresh layer and healthy bacteria can kind of grow back on there especially if you do this at night overnight now what they found is that these young people who had a kiwi extract tablet in their mouth actually had fewer harmful bacteria on their tongue they had a better tongue microbiome now tongue microbiome turns out to be really important for overall health all right because it can help control blood pressure this is actually quite an amazing thing because Studies have shown that if you eat foods like spinach or beets these are um vegetables plant-based foods that grow close to the ground they pick up a lot of nitrogen uh from the soil and the nitrogen from the soil gets into the plants gets into the spinach leaves gets into the beetroot and when you actually eat the spinach or eat the beets and you Chew Chew Chew Chew not just chug it down and swallow it it uh you know like in one bite but actually chew it Savor your food I love the spinach sauteed and a little bit of extra virgin olive oil a little garlic I like to add some golden raisins some pine nuts U maybe some chopped up Apple get this in sauté it right so you get this warm spinach um very very interesting spinach vegetable dish I like that or roasted beets um if you're eating foods that you actually Savor Chew Chew Chew Chew Chew guess what happens the uh the spinach in this case uh goes gets into contact with your tongue and therefore it gets into contact with your tongue microbiome the healthy bacteria on your tongue now what happens is that good healthy tongue microbiome and remember eating kiwi tablets the extracts containing the actinidin and other benefits from kiwi made for a better tongue microbiome and a good tongue microbiome will work on that spinach and and convert the nitrogen from the soil that's in the leaves into a form that when you actually swallow it gets absorbed into your bloodstream as nitric oxide n o okay and nitric oxide is it's actually technically a gas but when it's it's produced in our own body as I just told you but when it's in our body and it's produced it does a lot of amazing things one thing nitric oxide does is it actually relaxes and widens our blood vessels you widen your blood vessel guess what blood uh pressure Goes Down And by the way Nitric oxy is how Viagra actually works when you actually dilate the blood vessels you get more blood in the penis and that can help to maintain an erection so therefore eating spinach with good tongue microbiome uh helps your body produce and absorb more nitric oxide and relax your blood vessels and it lowers blood pressure that's actually really really important so spinach and beets will actually have that nitric oxide effect and having the Kiwi improves the tongue microbiome and it's that tongue bacteria that you need to be able to have this beneficial nitric oxide effect all right now the other reason you want to have a good oral microbiome including your tongue microbiome is because having a better mouth microbiome good bacteria in your mouth helps the fat fight bad bacteria now if you have bad bacteria in your mouth and it's not um countered by the good bacteria you got a problem you know why bad bacteria causes gingivitis gingivitis your gingiva or your gums right your teeth are slotted into your gums all right and if you have gingivitis the itis really stands for inflammation gingervitis is really inflammation of the tongue usually due to overgrowth of harmful bacteria so you don't if you don't have enough good tongue bacteria the bad bacteria overgrow they get into your gums they actually start to cause problems they cause a lot of inflammation and now you've got gingervitis interestingly in the past decade we begun to realize that gum disase disease gingivitis overgrowth of bad bacteria in your mouth on your gums is actually linked to the development of dementia all right and and also uh Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease and so now we're realizing that oral microbiome when your mom told you to brush your teeth when your dentist told you to brush your teeth and floss your teeth I can tell you they they really knew what they were talking about so the better the oral microbiome which is a part of your gut microbiome the better your brain health uh as well so that's really really important to be able to um have that and kiwi extracts can actually do that okay so now let's talk a little bit about um the gut microbiome itself because I started with the mouth and the tongue well the other thing that kiwi does this is benefit number six is that kiwi benefits the lower gut microbiome as well in your colon now this is actually a study uh that was shown uh by looking at eating kiwi and looking at what happens to your gut micro biome by checking the poop all right because you can actually take your poop now and do a swab it's you you kind of like a little swab like the kind you use for a covid test but you swab your poop you put it in a tube you send it to the lab and the lab will actually sequence the bacteria to check out what kind and how much bacteria is actually uh uh in your stool and what they actually found is that by eating a a kiwi it changes your gut microbiome for the better within 20 24 hours so one kiwi in 24 hours will change your gut microbiome your gut bacteria for the better and if you actually uh uh wait four days uh you'll see other bacteria that are also continuing to improve even more so the effect is fast even within a day but over the course of a week you actually get even further Improvement the bacterias that improve are like lactobacillus uh ruide that's actually an important uh bacteria uh and the bacteria this good bacteria in the gut also lowers inflammation and it improves your immune defenses Shields up inflammation down that's what I'm talking about when it actually when you want to have good gut health and good gut health by the way is good brain health and so a kiwi actually can contribute its own role in doing this and this is actually a great thing to actually eat during breakfast it's one of my favorite times to actually sample a kiwi hey there I want to share another resource with with you it's my free guide on your body's five Health defense systems these five systems androgenesis regeneration your gut microbiome DNA protection and Immunity are your Shields against disease and they're responsible for maintaining your health every single day of your life by knowing about how these systems work to defend your body you can tap into their healing powers to live a longer better and much healthier life I explain each of these defense systems to you in my free guide and as a bonus I've included some of the best foods you can eat to activate each defense system get my guide for free right now in the caption below now back to the video now I got to tell you um uh one of the bacteria that improves is sop bacillus Rai in the gut by eating a kiwi and I did research on lactobacillus Rai I have a I had a colleague a collaborator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology um uh she was studying animals uh studying gut microbiome and what we actually found is that lactobacillus ride when you actually just put it in a drinking water of lab animals all right you know you know if you ever had a hamster right in a cage you know you put a bottle of water up there's a little Noz hole in the and a hamster will go up there and start licking the bottom of it to drink water well if you put lactobac ruai okay which is actually increased by kiwi uh in your body if you just put that in drinking water and and the lab animals actually lick that guess what it does it the the la of a in drinking water prompts the brain to secrete oxytocin oxytocin is a social hormone released by the brain it's a hormone that actually makes you feel really great uh when you see a friend at an airport you haven't seen in a long time you run up and give him a a big hug uh uh and you feel good that's what lactobac rudite can actually do uh and lactobac R increases when you actually have have kiwi right now the other thing that better bacteria that kiwi can actually prompt the Improvement of your gut microbiome is a good healthy bacteria in your gut produce a metabolite so they actually produce their own um products they're called short chain fatty acids short chain fatty acids so it's you know fatty acid is is like Omega-3s or other kinds of fatty acids but I can tell you that bacteria will produce them and release them healthy bacteria will produce short chain fatty acids there's there's three of them acetate butyrate proprionate those are the three short chain fatty acids and all of them go to work and to our benefit all right when we feed our gut microbiome oil like giving them a keyway our gut bacteria pays us back by releasing these short chain fatty acids right into our bloodstream and when they're in our bloodstream which we can actually measure they lower inflammation in our body they boost our immune system so we actually have shields are actually up and the gut bacteria also text messages our brain and helps our brain release these social hormones like oxytocin now let's talk a little bit about uh uh buying a kiwi at a store right because at the end of the day so not you told me all about kiwi what am I supposed to do well listen go to the grocery store you're almost certain to actually find kiwi there it's it's become very very popular and you buy them uh ideally you know you buy them they have a little bit of give to them so they're not unripe you want to get ones that are on their way to uh ripening and you store that kiwi in the bag like I told you until it gets a little bit softer but not too soft and don't put it in your other fruit once it starts to soften up you can keep a kiwi about a week or maybe two uh but you're going to watch it so you don't want to wait for it to over ripen it won't taste really good it'll be kind of mushy but when it goes from being uh like U solid like like really hard to being slightly uh soft I would actually just eat it right then and there it's absolutely delicious um what I like to do is just kind of cut it in half you take a spoon you can scoop out the fruit it's actually delicious um uh uh you can actually again I mentioned this to before if you want to get all the dietary fiber benefit go ahead and cut up the Kiwi include the skin pop it in a blender and puree it you won't even taste the skin it just disappears all that fibers disappeared right into whatever it is you're making and of course fiber if you have uh the fiber from kiwi skin in a smoothie that'll supercharge your gut health because that's a lot a big load of beneficial uh fiber all right now uh I like to eat kiwi for breakfast um uh you know if you have whole yogurt and you want something uh sweet to put on top I never buy the yogurt in a store that uh you know has pre-sweetened or has that layer of jelly in it nope buy a whole yogurt plain whole yogurt all right it's good for your heart trust me because whole yogurt actually is probiotic it's good for you helps to lower your lipids in fact um and then you want something sweet take a ripe kiwi cut it up and just throw it right on top of the uh whole yogurt you want to kind of give it a little bit of texture take some pistachios or walnuts and crush them up sprinkle it on top um and you know just take a spoon and eat the yogurt amazing really really amazing flavor the uh the the sweet and slight tartness of the Kiwi um really balances out the uh richness of the uh yogurt which is a dairy product a probiotic dairy product um and the nuts give you a little crunch a little extra texture uh that's also uh great so that's how I eat that's how I often like to use kiwi for breakfast but you can also eat kiwi as a dessert think about it you take a kiwi that's nice and ripe sight in half all you need is a spoon at the end it's not too sweet it's not like eating you know a cake piece of cake with really sweet and icing nope this is actually the most natural mildly sweet and slightly tart uh uh fruit that's good for breakfast or good for dessert some people say that kiwi tastes a little bit like strawberry I would say yeah um uh that that's a good way to uh describe it now um I'll tell you something I've seen kiwi drinks in a can all right it's not soda it's kind of a fruit juice with kiwi on it you'll see this frequently it's very popular in Asia and you'll see them in an Asian grocery store these are kind of like tall cans of kiwi drink and by the way they actually taste really good there is real kiwi in it but I will tell you that most of the time just please look at the ingredient label they add sugar in it so added sugar which is not something you need and not something you want added sugar overloads your metabolism all right but even worse it can actually contain artificial flavors to actually enhance the the Kiwi taste artificial sweeteners like Xylitol G that is absolutely not what you actually want um in a beverage all right so what I I have to say I was disappointed I thought maybe there would be um a fruit drink made with kiwi that would be great so far most of the Kiwi drinks I've looked at actually have artificial sweeteners artificial coloring they call them natural flavors but they don't tell you what it is makes me very very suspicious but you don't want any type of artificial sweeteners you know why because artificial sweeteners can damage your gut microbiome so Xylitol rol sucrose saccharin all of those things aspartame so far the researchers not uh giving us good news they actually damage microbiome when you actually damage the microbiome which which is normally keeping inflammation down when you damage that function guess what inflammation in your body Rises your gut microbiome helps you process lipids here evens out your lipids your blood cholesterol so when you damage your gut bacteria what happens your blood cholesterol can actually start to rise so these are all kinds of things that you don't want to have happen you don't never want to damage your gut microbiome and you can avoid it so unfortunately I can't recommend uh a kiwi drink uh it would otherwise be something that I think would be really really cool kind of an exotic uh drink I mean I guess you could juice your own kiwis uh that would be kind of a cool thing uh to do H so you might want to try that you can add the Kiwi to make a smoothie add some other fruits maybe strawberry strawberry and kiwi probably go together pretty well all right I hope you learned something new about kiwis today something that you can actually put to use breakfast for breakfast or even for a dessert uh this is actually something that I enjoy eating kiwis every single day if I can get my hands on them thanks for watching this video and I will catch you next time hi there if you enjoyed watching this video I know you'll love the next one stay here and check it out and I'll see you there