Hi, welcome back. It's great to be here. My name's Emma Proctor-Legg and I'm the chair for this session. I'm really pleased to be joined today by Scott Bartholomew and Matt Wingfield. This session is entitled Learning by Evaluating Student-Led Formative Assessment. The session is 25 minutes and we're happy to take questions throughout. So please do use the chat to post questions and comments. I will now hand you over to Scott. Welcome, everyone. It's good to be joining you. I'm joining you from Utah in the United States of America. So just across the pond, but I'm very honored to be here. And I'd like to take a minute to introduce myself and then my colleague, Dr. Nathan Mencer. And then I will also let Matt Wingfield introduce himself. So I am a professor of technology and engineering studies at Brigham Young University. So primarily my role is in teacher education, training, design and technology teachers, or as we call them here in the United States, technology and engineering teachers. And I've been at Brigham Young University for one year now. Prior to that, I was at Purdue University for four years as a professor in similar department there. And before that, I was actually a middle school teacher teaching design and technology classes for three years and also taught high school as well. So my background is really in education and teaching. And that's where my passion lies in working with teachers and in classrooms. I want to introduce Dr. Nathan Mencer as well. He's unable to join us this morning, but he is a professor of technology and engineering education at Purdue University. He works in teacher training. Dr. Mencer is heavily involved in research and graduate student advisement. He has been a professor for more than 10 years at Purdue University. And his background also lies in education in that he was a high school teacher before he became a professor at Purdue University. And so both of us have that K-12 background and experience and that very much shapes everything that we do. I want to turn the time over to Matt Wingfield and let him introduce himself. And then after he's done, I'll go ahead and take us through some slides. Great, thanks Scott and hello everybody. My name's Matt Wingfield. I just to complete the set on the K-12 teaching front, I used to be a primary school teacher, but I've been in the education technology space now for about 25 years. I work as a freelance consultant, supporting technology providers, exam awarding bodies, universities, colleges in their use of educational technology. And I'm currently doing a piece of work with a company called RM, who's involved in the delivery of this project. And I'll talk a little bit more about them and how we've been involved a little bit later on. And then in my spare time, I'm also a chief executive of the assessment association, which is a not-for-profit organization to support and propagate the use of technology in and around formative and summative assessment. So that's me. I'll pass back to Scott. Perfect, thanks Matt. So let me talk a little bit about our agenda with the things we hope to cover today. We did introductions and then I want to talk a little bit about a scenario that we found ourselves in. In the spring of 2019 at Purdue University and what the challenge was on our hypothesis. I'll talk a little bit about the approach we took as we tried to tackle this challenge, the outcome and some of the next steps. So let's start with the challenge and the hypothesis. So myself and Dr. Mencer both taught a introductory design thinking class to freshmen at Purdue University. So all the freshmen in our college had to take this course. And as colleagues, we talked quite frequently about this course and how we can improve it and things we could do. And one of the questions that we tackled is the one that's here on the screen. How could we facilitate impactful formative assessment experiences that were scalable across the classes but didn't negatively impact the teachers? Oftentimes we found that we could do things that were helpful to students but they were very, very taxing for the teachers or the alternate would be we do something that was maybe easy for the teachers but it really didn't have this impact on the students. We wanted to empower our students to learn independently. We wanted them to know what good looks like. So in our field, we work in the design space which is a very, very muddy area. There's not a clear right and wrong answer. Usually there's lots of potentially right answers. We're tackling these ill-defined problems where we don't know what the right answer is and we really just want students to be very creative but we also can recognize as the teachers that there are better answers. So some students might propose a solution that's better than their peers and we wanted our students to be able to come up with that on their own to be able to improve their own learning by understanding what good looks like. So here's the approach we took. And I just wanna point out that because we were dealing with such a big group of students between five and 600 students, this required a partnership approach and I'll talk a little bit about this partnership that we have later on and I'll kind of circle back around to it but here's what we did. One of the assignments that our students had the hardest time with is called a point of view statement. And a point of view statement is the students identify a user, so a specific person that they're trying to design for, then they identify their need, what is the problem that this user has and then they identify a particularly interesting insight into that need that might shape their design thinking and their approach. So just an example, maybe the user is a university student and maybe their need is that they're having a really hard time finding parking and maybe the insightful approach is that there's ample parking on campus but they're not willing to pay for it or there's ample parking on certain parts of campus and not others. And so the students craft these point of view statements and that becomes the crux of their designing later on and what we discovered is that really this seemed to be the point where things were breaking down, where the students were having the hardest time and so we wanted to make this the focus of our efforts in this project. So what we did is we took all the students enrolled in this course between 550 and 600 and we split them into two equivalent groups. The way we did that is we split it at the teacher level. So every teacher of this course had two classes. One class was gonna receive the intervention and one class would not receive the intervention. There would be a control group and an experimental group and our intervention was very, very simple, it was very, very small. It was a around 10 to 20 minute experience where students would use a piece of software called RM Compare that I'll talk about and in this software they would have an opportunity to look at different items, to evaluate them side by side, to choose the one they thought was better and then they would view another pair of items. Now the items that they were viewing was point of view statements from last year's cohort of students and we hypothesized if we show them last year's work and we have them do this evaluation side by side, they're going to do better than their peers that don't give this opportunity. Even though this intervention was very, very short, like I said, 10 to 20 minutes, some students took the full 20 minutes, most students took only around 10 minutes and they simply sat down, viewed the items and then went on and created the point of view statements and then our plan was at the end, we took all the point of view statements from both the control and the experimental group and we had the teachers assess them and then we ran some statistical tests to see if there's a difference, meaning the students that had this opportunity did they do better than their peers or were we still equivalent? So let me pause and take a little bit of a break here to talk about the intervention or the opportunity where they were looking at point of view statements. The idea behind this really rests on the law of comparative judgment and the law of comparative judgment has been around for a really long time but the basic idea is this, people are better at making decisions between items or between two things than they are at making decisions just subjectively. For example, when you go to the eye doctor, if you have glasses, the eye doctor is gonna show you two different things and say which one is better. Rather than saying, on the wall, I have a poster, go choose the one that's the right one for your prescription. If we were asked to do that, that would be very, very difficult but when we compare item side by side, it becomes much simpler and that is the underlying principle in RM Compare which is the software that we used and so rather than showing students point of view statements from a previous year and saying how good is this, we showed them pairs of statements and said choose the one that's better and we found that this is a much easier way for students to learn and to develop a nose or to develop an idea of what good looks like because as they go through, they look at one and they look at the other and they say, oh, which one is better? Well, this one is better. Well, why is it better? And then as they have to think about why it's better, they start to articulate that and they start to really internalize those ideas. Okay, and the student experience looked just like this. Okay, all they did was they saw two POV statements side by side. They would read them both and they would say, okay, which one's better, A or B? We also prompted them and asked them to provide some sort of comment or rationale. You know, why did you choose A over B or B over A? What was it that made this thing stick out to you? And that was intentional because we wanted the students to articulate why they were choosing one item over another, okay? Once again, very, very short. We're talking 10 minutes of time, but that was a key part of this experience. So what'd we find? We had the control group students do class as normal, experimental group students did class as normal with a very small time in intervention. Here's what we found, statistically speaking, and then we'll talk practicalities after that. There was a significant difference between the learning by evaluating, which is the term that we've kind of coined around this experience. There was a significant difference between the learning by evaluating students and the control group, okay? And you can see the stats there, the T test. Seven of the top 10 students, okay? We're from the group that had this experience where they got to look at items side by side, the learning by evaluating experience. Seven of the top 10 were from that group. Also, some might say, well, there's a statistical difference, but what's the practical difference? Practically speaking, you can see I've got Cohen's D there, which is a term of practical significance, but two thirds of the control group that didn't have the intervention were below the average person from the RM compare group, those that had this opportunity to evaluate. So you can see that there's some practical significance there as far as boosting student achievement and helping them to do better, okay? So we were really excited about this, something as simple as 10 minutes of time, had a significant impact on our students, statistically and practically. And so then we said, okay, well, what's next? Well, what are the next steps? So the next steps were, we've started implementing this in our classes at Purdue, it's become part of the standard course experience, students have this, but then we also wanted to take it and make it bigger. So we applied to the National Science Foundation and we applied for what's called the Discovery Research K-12 grant. And this grant was for to do a three-year study of taking this small, very small intervention and putting it into schools in the Cab County School District, which is located in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the biggest school districts in Georgia, very, very large district. And we wanted to explore if, well, what if we take this approach and we use this with high school students, grade nine, 14 year old students and what's gonna happen? Could this be really big? We received the grant for one and a half million dollars, which will allow us to involve a lot of students across a lot of schools and to collect a whole bunch of data to now see what are the potential possibilities for putting this widespread into a school district and the classroom schools across a county. And then hopefully, moving outward into a state and your region and the nationally to see what the opportunities are. I'm gonna turn the time over to Matt to talk a little bit about this slide here, which is another aspect of this experience and this software. This wasn't something that we used in this study, but this is something that we're dabbling with as we experiment down in the Cab County. So Matt, I'll pass the baton over to you. Thanks, Scott. Yeah, one of the challenges, of course, in taking this into the wild, if you like, and into a non-research scenario is being able to understand without having a control group of students who don't experience from it what the impact is. And which of the students are finer and have got this concept through this learning intervention and those who haven't and thus might need a little bit extra support. And one of the nice things that the software does in the background is it monitors statistically how the students are interacting with their comparisons and the judgments that they're making as they're choosing, in Scott's case, the better point of view statements. And it maps that out graphically for the teacher, which is what you can see on the screen here so that you can understand which students are sort of in kilter and gets, get the concepts that they've been trying to get their heads around and those that don't. And the student that you can see, so the blue dots are the students and most of the students are gathered in that sort of white band from 0.05 to 1.5. And that's the consensus group. And all of those students are pretty much in agreement with each other and understand the concept that they're studying. The student that's shown in the blue band is slightly different. And what the system is doing is statistically calling that student out and saying to the teacher, you might want to spend a bit of time with them just to make sure they understand what's going on. Because as I was saying, you can't have a control group in a normal circumstance when you're teaching. This is a way that the software additionally helps you to understand where students get the problem and which need a little more help to get their head around what good looks like in this context. I think the other thing that's just worth briefly touching on at this point is that also in a normal sort of classroom scenario, it may be more difficult to show students just good pieces of work in Scott's first experiment that he just talked about. They used good point of view statements as the exemplar work that they showed to students to help them understand what good looks like. But he then ran another project the following year where they used a mixture of good, indifferent and not so good pieces of work. And Scott, you found exactly the same effect, didn't you? That there was still a significant positive impact on the attainment of those students who were exposed to those scripts in this particular way as well. Yeah, so what we found is that students have the opportunity to go through this learning by evaluating, it becomes the chance for them to really internalize not only what good looks like, but also what we found is also the assignment itself. Sometimes students, as teachers, we give students an assignment, but they really have a hard time getting their head around, well, what is it that the teacher is wanting me to do? What are they kind of expecting? Students don't know where the bar is set. And this opportunity to compare items side by side helps them to start to internally establish, like, okay, well, this is where the bar is set and this is kind of what we're expecting and this is what my teachers is hoping to get from me. And so yeah, that's one of the great things that we found is this opportunity for students to take it and really be able to internalize that and understand it, so. Yeah, fantastic, thank you. Could we move on to the next slide, please? And then the next one again as well. I thought what might also be useful is just to understand where comparative judgment has been used, because it's not, as Scott was saying, the theory behind comparative judgment is it goes back to the 1920s when a guy called Louis Thurstone came up with this law of comparative judgment. But as a piece of software, we've been using this software-based comparative judgment approach or adaptive comparative judgment approach since actually since 2008 and there was a research project initiated by Goldsmiths, part of the University of London, and then in the wild in projects from 2012. And I won't go through all of them there, you can see the various organizations that have been involved. But I think it's worth calling out the two UK universities who are using this quite prolifically now to support this formative approach. It's not exactly the same as what Scott's described, they've been using it more for peer assessment, so using their own work and having that peer assessed and getting the students to provide feedback on that peer assessed work. And that's the University of Manchester who have now been using the software now for about six years. And Queen Mary University of London have been using it since last year, but are now set, they've just taken a new license for the product, using it with over 2,000 students in their School of Biological and Behavioral Sciences. Again, to support this formative peer assessment approach to eucalyse a better understanding of what good looks like and to capture and provide feedback to the students. So what I thought might also be useful, and we're gonna test the technology a little bit here, I thought it might be useful just to hear very quickly what a student thinks about this approach. So Scott, if we can go to the next slide, and if you can click plays, if you hover your mouse over the slide, hopefully the audio will come through. And it's not going to. So nevermind, thank you, Scott. I apologize Matt, sorry. Sorry, we should have tested it. We'll share the link to that video so that you can get some insight. So this particular student was from the University of Edinburgh where they were using this comparative judgment approach in order to facilitate this formative peer review and feedback type approach. And one of the comments that Brianna, the student makes is how it gave her such clear insight into what her tutors wanted her to do. So this sort of goes back to what Scott was saying earlier on about how the approach helps them to understand what they need to do, not only what good looks like, but what's expected of them in the particular context that they have, that they're being faced with. And I know that, as I say, if you get a chance to watch the video, it lasts for two minutes and we'll share the link. It's really insightful to understand what Brianna is saying around that because it's clearly quite revelational for her as a student at the university. And she makes the comment, she's a final year student, that she wished she'd had that experience earlier in her degree because then she'd have known how to write better essays and how to write better pieces of work. I think the last points I wanted to make before we turn over to questions is that the piece of software that we're talking about here, RM Compare, it's not the only piece of comparative judgment software out there. There are a number of other commercially available comparative judgment pieces of software. There are some that have come from university, so the University of Antwerp through a research project developed a piece of comparative judgment software, which it's now made commercially available to anyone who wants to use it. The University of British Columbia in Canada, likewise has created another piece of software. So it's worth just mentioning that there are other bits of software there as well. And Scott, I don't know whether you had any thoughts on why you chose to use RM Compare, because that might be something that people would be interested in hearing about. Yeah, that's a great question. And I've used all of them and they all function great as far as engaging students. My experience has been that at least so far working with teachers that RM Compare is the most approachable as far as ease of use, ease of understanding the different reports and statistical things that are come out of it. The interface is easy and intuitive for the students to use. And so, yeah, there's definitely lots of options out there. That's the reason that I ended up using the RM Compare software. It's just because it was a little bit more approachable for the teachers and the students to use. But the key is facilitating these judgments and making it such that it's not only is it a learning benefit to the students, but it's also not so difficult for the teachers that they choose not to use it. Because it's just, oh, well, yeah, I could do that, but it's just too much work or too much effort or something like that. Yeah, no, that's great. Thank you. I think if you just click on to the last slide, a number of links here, which will also pop into the chat so that you've got these more easily to hand. Scott's gonna be running an interactive webinar on the 30th of September. There's a link there to register. The big difference, I think, between what we've just shared with you and that session is that you'll be able to have a go and try it out as well. It was a bit difficult to arrange that through the delivery of the platform that we're using here today. There's a link there to the full research paper. So by all means, have a read of that if that would be of interest. A link to an overview video there. It's also worth noting that you can access the RM Compare software for free. It's a fully functional free version that you can use with up to three sessions, judgment sessions. So please feel free to try it and see what you think. And if you've got any questions that you want to ask us that you didn't get a chance to put in the chat, then you've got our email addresses there as well. And I noticed a comment come through from Anna, saying she's looking forward to the webinar. Thanks, Anna, for that. It'd be great to have you there. Please register for the session. And I think with that, Emma, we'll hand back to you. Thank you very much. Thank you. It was a really excellent session. Really interested to hear all about it. It seems like it's a really great piece of technology to use. And I'm already, my brain is going, oh, I could use it to do this sort of thing. So thank you so much for such an interesting session. It was really great. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you very much.


This work investigates the use of pomegranate peel extract as a functional dye for producing natural shades on wall and imparting durable antimicrobial properties, using metal salt mordants in optimal conditions, with structural changes characterised by SEM and FDIR techniques, and experimental results indicating small colour variation and improved fastness and durability of antimicrobial activity. This article was authored by Mohammed Shahid, Shahid-e-Dual Islam, Lukman Jamil Rada and others.


Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this NHGRI-sponsored symposium entitled Genome Exploration by Large-Scale Sequencing, circa 2007 and beyond. This event commemorates the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center, or NISC. I'm Eric Green, and I am NHGRI's scientific director, and also NISC's founding and current director, and I'll be serving as the host of today's symposium. But before we launch into our talks by our distinguished group of visitors, I thought it would be appropriate for me to provide a brief review of NISC's history and to also set a context for today's celebration. This is NIH from an aerial photograph of the main Bethesda campus. We're actually sitting for our visitors in this building right here, which turns out to be the world's largest clinical research hospital. The NIH's on-campus intramural program is a roughly $3 billion a year research enterprise that is carried out by about 1,200 principal investigators. The diversity of basic and clinical research programs represented on this campus alone is truly spectacular. Since its establishment some 14 years ago, the NHGRI intramural programs really has viewed one of its main reasons and mandate, if you will, is to include and to keep the NIH intramural program contemporary and cutting edge with respect to genetics and genomics. Now if we wind the clock back, say, by 11 years to 1996, you may recall that those of us in the genomics community were just figuring out how to sequence complex genomes with plans then being formulated to accelerate the sequencing of the human genome as part of the human genome project. At that time, it was already clear that DNA sequencing and sequence analysis was going to become central to many, many areas of basic and eventually clinical research. How could this outstanding research institution not have a state-of-the-art DNA sequencing facility? As a result, I was personally encouraged by the NHGRI leadership, Francis Collins, and then scientific director Jeff Trent, and also by the NIH leadership, then NIH director Harold Varmas and the deputy director for intramural research, Michael Goddisman, to consider establishing a large-scale DNA sequencing program at NIH. I personally had just been recently tenured at the time, and in fact, I was looking for a new challenge, and meanwhile, as many of you know, I have a bit of energy. And so I personally ran with the notion of starting a trans-NIH sequencing center and actually, and not surprisingly, setting a very aggressive timetable for its establishment. Enthusiasm among many of the NIH institutes and centers was actually quite high. And in a matter of months, we had resource commitments from 14 institutes and centers to start the NIH intramural sequencing center. Space is always a challenge at NIH, especially here on the main campus. And so we searched for space options off campus. Jim Batty, who's actually here in the second row today, was then the scientific director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders, and he generously offered us temporary space in their Gaithersburg, Maryland facility so that we could open NISC stores quickly in 1997. In short order, we got started, which meant we hired an initial staff of about six people and converted this storage closet into a room to house our six brand-new model, ABI model, 377 sequencing instruments. Of course, it turns out we first had to install an air conditioning unit in the ceiling to handle the cooling for a room that previously housed broken down equipment and other archived junk, but we were up and running. Within the year, we moved to our first real home in this refurbished building also in Gaithersburg that formerly was the home of the company BRL, which later became Life Technologies. More space meant more people, although we were still a modest sized group. From the beginning, NISC benefited from terrific relationships with our colleagues at the other major sequencing centers who generously shared their expertise and always welcomed us to visit their centers to learn about the latest technologies and developments. We've always felt to be a part of this community of sequencing centers. So even back then, we honored them in our lab by keeping track of their respective times at the University of Washington at Baylor College of Medicine, Washington University, Whitehead Institute and the Sanger Center. We even kept track of the dark side, Solarogenomics, although note our belief that there were routinely 20 minutes behind the rest of us. Now, as sequencing projects came in, mostly from NIH collaborators, we were able to expand our staff slightly. But we then earned the opportunity to participate in some major genomics projects, including the mouse genome sequencing initiative, the cancer genome anatomy project and eventually the mammalian genome collection. And as a result, our scientific efforts were able to grow and so did our staff and even our space. But eventually, we outgrew our first real home and so it was once again time to move on to get more space. In this case, to a building being constructed for various NIH groups in Rockville, Maryland, this ugly structure eventually became this beautiful building where NISC has made the top floor its second and current home. Now, our current space has the look and feel of a modern research facility and gives NISC the kind of long-term home that it deserves. Within this new building, we deliberately constructed a very large laboratory to house the NISC production operation, never imagining that we would actually fill it up. But guess what? We have, although we find this flexibility in this design extremely accommodating to the changing landscape of DNA sequencing, especially as technologies evolve. And with our additional space and the expanding nature of NISC's scientific pursuits, our staff has grown as well. And so shown here is the current NISC staff and some of the extended collaborative NHGRI family at a recent off-site retreat. Over the past 10 years, NISC has routinely acquired the necessary tools and technologies to operate a first-rate DNA sequencing program. Our abilities to stay at the cutting edge of large-scale sequencing have been aided by those interactions and collaborations with the other major sequencing centers, many of whose directors are among our featured speakers today. I wanted to include them in today's symposium, both because of the outstanding science they have to describe to you, but also because I want to personally extend my own thanks to them for their collaborative generosity and their remarkable spirit. It truly is a great community to be a part of. So here we are today, roughly 10 years, millions and millions of sequence reads and numerous projects, collaborations, and publications later. It has been a fabulous first decade for NISC. So what do you do to celebrate being 10 years old? Well, according to my two children, ages 7 and 11, there's only one thing to do. You have a birthday party. And that is what today is, a good scientific party to celebrate NISC's 10th and to celebrate genomics and DNA sequencing in the awesome future horizons associated with these areas of research. Coming up with a guest list for this party was relatively easy. First, I invited all the current and even some former NIS staff, an incredibly proficient and professional group. I wanted all of them to partake in this symposium as a tribute to their dedication and their accomplishments. And in fact, I would actually just like to start this morning by asking all the NIS staff, current and former to please stand up and get a round of applause. Second, we've invited the entire NHGRI family, the whole NIH community, and even various other local colleagues. I think as you will see as the day progresses, enthusiasm is really going to be quite high for this party. But of course, any good party requires good entertainment, and for that, we have the very best in the nine speakers that will follow. Collectively, they represent nothing short of an all-star group of genome scientists, admittedly heavily enriched for friends and collaborators of NISC, after all, who invites non-friends to your birthday party. So among the many things I expect you will gain from today's symposium is a profound appreciation of the exciting landscape that still exists in the arena of genome exploration by large-scale sequencing. So 11 years ago, when Collins and Varmas and Trent and Gottesman and even Green discussed the rationale for establishing NISC, it was very much predicated on the belief that the need for large-scale DNA sequencing would not end when the human genome project was over. Rather, it would massively increase in ways that we cannot even predict at that time. I hope that today's symposium will show you that our collective expectations were indeed correct and that the most exciting developments in DNA sequencing are still to come. So thank you very much. Enjoy the day.


Ranger Bill, warrior of the woodland, struggling against extreme odds, traveling dangerous trails, fighting the many enemies of nature. This is the job of the guardian of the forest, Ranger Bill, pouring rain, freezing cold, blistering heat, snow, floods, bears, rattlesnakes, mountain lions. Yes, all this in exchange for the satisfaction and pride of a job well done. This is a lazy day in Naughty Pine. Rangers are strolling down one of the town's shady streets heading toward the town's old general store. The old store is a landmark of the days when the West was wild and woolly. And it's run by Mark Daggart. Many of the town's folk visit the store to hear the old cowhands and prospectors, desert rats as they call them, swaps yarns. Let's join Bill and the boys as they head for the store. How do they know that they're heading for one of the most grueling experiences of their lives? Listen now for the story, Burning Sand.  It smacks of the old West. It sort of gives you a feeling that you're living back in those times again. Yes, Ralph. There's a lot of history centered in Mark's old general store. Now I get a kick out of listening to those old cowpokes and desert rats spinning their yarns, each trying to outdo the other. Yes, sir. There's a lot of competition there. You don't think that most of their stories are made up, do you, Bill? No. Essentially, there's a lot more truth in them than most people think. Of course, the old timers do add a little color to their yarns, like somebody else we know of. Now, see here, young fella. Don't look at me that way. Might have you know why I don't color up my yarns. Not even a little bit stumpy. Nope. Maybe the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Well, maybe you just put a little tint to your tails on stumpy. Well, maybe I should say I guess I do sort of tint them up once in a while, just to make them interesting. Quit picking on the old timer, fellas.  It looked like big crowd in store, and the old timers there. We will see some more hair-raising tails about the old engine days. Well, whoever has the floor, it's my guess that Stumpy will go them one better. Now, wait a minute, Clint. Give them a chance, boys. That's right, Stumpy. Five of them. Yes, five? What's the matter? Were you two fellas weak that day, or just plumb lazy? Now, you see here, you old cougar. I should have taken only one of you to finish five of them off. The other could have gone about his business. Yeah, is that right? Well, I ain't seen you do any better. You ain't. Freak is me and Big Jim Hansen had Hooker pass with a gang of disperadoes. Why aren't you and I... Hey, boys. Well, look who's here. Hi, Josh. Well, you've been keeping yourself, Joshua. Ain't seen you for a month of Sundays. Oh, I've been busy, Mike. Boys, you've been looking for gold again, huh, Josh? That's right, Ben Prospecton. What'd you expect from an old desert rat like me? When are you gonna give up looking for fool's gold, Josh? I expect when they dig your grave they'll find gold, Joshua. You got gold fever that bad? Fool's gold, eh? Gold fever? Let me show you fellas something that'll make your eyes bulge. There it is, boys. You think I've been wasting my time on the desert, eh? You haven't got gold in that sack, Josh? No, you know. What did you call this? Look at that!  Set me up some supplies and grab. I got some more work to do. Ain't nothing to get excited about. What do you mean, Joshua? Ain't gold findings like that something to get excited about? No, it ain't. This was just a small pocket and I cleaned it out. Where'd you find the small pocket, Josh? Now, that would be telling, wouldn't it? Why don't you go out and hunt your own gold like I've been doing for 30 years? fellas, that was big thrill to see Joshua pour gold nuggets out on counter and easy to understand how men catch gold fever. That's right, Graywell. But old Joshua's been prospecting for 30 years and this is only the fourth small find he's made. Not much reward after all, is it? A lot of work for a little pay, if you ask me. Almost like work for nothing. Yep, that ain't the worst part of it, young fella. When you think of a desert rat being on the hot sand in the cold mountain, year in and year out all by himself, never gets to see people who live like a hermit. Just him and his burrow? Why, it's awful. Ah, skin get like old horse hide from sun and wind. Get frostbite in cold winter. Not much satisfaction, I think. You fellas forget that these desert rats wouldn't have it any other way. And if that's the way Joshua wants to live, that's his business. The only thing is, I think he's flirting with real danger if he keeps going out there in the desert now. What do you mean? Is it any more dangerous now than it was before, Bill? For him it is. Joshua's getting to be an old man now. The heat of the desert is hard enough for a young man to take at this time of the year. Say nothing about a man of 70. Josh, better be careful. Well, it's kind of always die with their boots on. And there's not much you can do about it. What's on the docket for tomorrow? Hard work. That's all I can tell you now. Rest well tonight. We hit the trail for three weeks in the morning. Where are we heading first, Bill? Up the Long Ridge Trail, Ralph. We got some scrub to clean out of a virgin stand of pine. Then we head for the North Forks and repair the soil conservation dams there. Somebody on the road ahead. See, it looked like old Josh wore a whip. Hey, that only looks like old Josh. It is him. He must be going back into the desert. Let's stop and talk with him for a minute. Close time. Hello, Joshua. Howdy, Bill. Howdy, fellas. Howdy, Josh. Heading out into the desert again, Josh? Yep. That's what I'm doing. Why, you're not taking it easy for a while, Joshua. No, no, I can't do that, Grey Wolf. I get the itch of a set of spell. Got to keep going. You wouldn't hurt any to set a spell, would you, Ralph? Someday you're going to overdo it. You'll set permanent, six feet under. Never you mind, Stumpy Jenkins. I am old enough to take care of myself. I'm sure you are, Josh, but Stumpy's right just the same. It's awfully hot out there in the desert. You're not a young man anymore. You could at least stay in town until the summer's over. You fellas are trying to keep me from finding gold. Why don't you mind your own business? I can take care of myself. Well, get it. And I didn't mean to offend you, Josh. I only wanted to remind you that it's dangerous. It's 120 degrees out there at this time of the year. I don't need your advice, I tell you. All right. So long, Josh. Let's go, boys. Come on, Stump. Grey Wolf, we'll have to cut down this tree. It's too far gone. The disease may spread. Ah, good. You cut the fall guide, will you? I'll cut it out on the underside and cut away the trunk. Okay, Bill. This tree not too big. Not take long. That's right, Stumpy.  Yes, but my feet aren't dragging like yours, old timer. Not today, Stumpy.  Yeah, and the proof of it is that we're almost through our log, and they're only halfway. So, what do you say we race them, Stumpy? Let's see you get through first. Okay, sonny. That's poor little elbow grease this year, son. Our job is to trap some of these trout and put tags on them. You study their traveling habits, Bill? Right. Ralph, would you like to set out those water traps? Sure, I'll have them in there in a jiffy, Bill. And, Grey Wolf, you take motion pictures of the schools of trout swimming by. Me, too. What's that for, youngster? The idea is later we can set the projector on slow motion and count the number of trout that have passed the camera in a given length of time. That gives us the idea of how many fish in river to spawn and go back downstream. Yes. You see, we'll count that number that passed in a 15-minute period, multiplied by four to get an hourly figure, and a day, then a week, and so forth. Only approximate, of course, but the figure comes out amazingly close. Well, it sure came a long way since I first started working for Uncle Sam. The town seems kind of crowded after being on the trail three weeks, doesn't it, Bill? Sure does, Ralph. Say, I wonder if Joshua Webb came back. He'd been gone in three weeks, didn't have more than two and a half weeks' supplies with him when he left. I hope old timer will make grade. Hey, Mark's store's just down the road a piece. Let's stop by and see. No, Bill, I ain't seen Joshua, which ain't no surprise to me. That guy's got gold fever so bad he don't have sense enough to come in out of the heat. Hmm. Do you think he could stretch his supplies this long, Mark? It's three weeks now. Maybe he'd short-race himself, make the supplies last that much longer. Ah, that's all. It's possible that he could stretch his food and water a whole week longer that way. Yep. Oh, Josh could squeeze water out of a stone if he put his mind to it. All right, I'll buy that for two days, fellas. But if Joshua doesn't show up in that time, we're going out on the desert and look for him. Say, Bill, look hard for Joshua Webb, will ya? It's as much fun as I poke at him. I still like the old desert rat. And I hope you'll find him in time. Oh, storm. Easy, boy. Easy. Now, we'll find him, Mark. I hope we're not too late, though. We'll let you know as soon as we can what's happened. All right, storm boy, let's go.  Don't let the pack horses drag, Ralph. Keep them stepping along. Okay, Bill. I'll keep moving. Where do you figure to look first for Josh, Will? We'll follow his trail going out on the desert and watch for a back trail. Must be out on desert soon. It's plenty hot there now. Burning sand, Grey Wolf. Miles and miles of nothing else but. Plenty hard on man and animal. We better slow down once we get out of the sand. The horses couldn't take this pace and that heat. Hey, fellas, look.  There's something laying on the ground. Great scot. There's a burrow standing there, too. Come on. Clags and gold, fever. Finally got the old fella. Hello, storm. Yeah, Josh all right. He's still alive. We'll try to revive him as much as we can and get him to the hospital. How's our prospecting friend coming along, Doc? If you're talking about this old desert rat, Bill, he's doing fine. A week of rest, he'll be up and around. Bundy shouldn't go back out on the desert again for a long while. Well, you talk with him a while. I've got to finish making him around. I'll see you later, fellas. So long, Doc. Imagine him telling me I can't go back out on the desert for a long time. No man is going to tell me what to do. Why, you old buzzard, it would do you good to listen to some sound advice once in your life. You're too cantankerous. Remember, Josh, you're not a spring chicken anymore.  Aren't you going to give me a piece of your mind, too, Bill? I was just getting ready to, Joshua. Well, go ahead. I agree with my rangers and the doctor. You'd be endangering your own life if you went out on the desert again. But there's more to it than that. What do you mean?  Mix in with people more. No, I like prospecting too much to be bothered with people.  I ain't afraid to die, young man. When the good lawyer's ready to call me home, I'm ready. It's good, but think of the things in life that you've missed that every human being enjoys.  Ah, that's right. Well, sure, Josh, you and me could go hunting and fishing together. We could set a spell over in Mark's store and talk with the boys of an evening. Now you got me thinking that I might like staying in town. Well, why not give it a try for a while? Well, I might, but I ain't got no place to stay. Why, you old walrus, you can stay at my place just as long as you please. Ain't nothing fancy, but it's homie. Thanks, dumpy. I think we'll take you up on that and try civilized life for a while. Then you're definitely going to give up prospecting for gold in the desert, Joshua? In the desert? Yes. You know there's gold in more places than the desert. Oh, sure. Well, Josh, let's come down to this, then. Are you going to give up prospecting? Or aren't you? Yep. Yep, I am going to give it up. From now on, I'm going to enjoy life. Josh, put it there. You've made a good decision. Fellas, we'll have to get packed as fast as we can. Tom says the Scotch Pine up at the North Forks have been hit by a strange new disease. They're wasting away. That beautiful stand worth much money. That's right. We can't afford to lose either the beauty or the money. Ralph, you finish packing the burrows. I'm going back to the office and get the portable lamp. You've got to make a thorough study of this new disease. Okay, burrows will be ready by the time you get back. And Gray Wolf, give me a hand with this diamond hitch, will you? Sure thing. He's coming in a big hurry. Plenty quick. Hey, it's Stumpy. What's wrong, Stumpy? Why all the hurry? I rode over to tell you about Josh. He ain't been home for two days. Well, why didn't you tell us sooner, old-timer? I didn't think much about it, Bill. The first night, he could have stayed at Mark Dagger's house. But when it didn't come on last night, I began to get worried.  I don't know, Ralph. Did he give you any reason to believe that you can't say he did, sonny? Nope. Marry a hint. What do we do now, Bill? Well, we're going out on the trail anyway. Let's stop at Mark's store and find out if Joshua bought supplies. If he did, the Scotch pine will have to wait until we find him. He's certainly in no condition to make a prospecting trip. I'm sorry I can't help you, Bill. Oh, and Joshua didn't buy supplies from me. Nor has he been staying here. You wouldn't be covering up for the old desert rat because he broke his promise to me, would you, Mark? Of course I wouldn't. It might cost Joshua his life if it did. I agree with you on the dock. Joshua's prospecting days are over. His heart being what it is. Maybe he got his supplies from some other store in town, Bill. Yes, Ralph. He could easily have done that. Let's spread out and ask all the stores if they've seen the old gent. Report back here in two hours. I haven't seen Joshua Web Stumpy. Sorry. Joshua didn't buy supplies from me, Bill. Joshua ain't been in my store for a coombs, age, Ralph. Ray Wolf, he hasn't been near here for six months. Yes, Joshua was here, Bill. He bought himself some grub in the burrow, also some prospecting tools. He was muttering something about it. He couldn't sit around and do nothing all the time. That's what I was afraid of. Thanks, Barry. Come on, boys. We're going after Joshua. You mean out on the desert this time here? Stumpy, you don't mean that. We're going to get Joshua before the desert gets him. I understand I'm not holding back, but with a hundred miles of hot sand out there, he's going to be mind-rugged. Friar steak in my saddle heart. This is terrible. How could Josh stand this year in and year out? I don't know, Ralph. I think you have to be made of rubber and rind. Let's rest a minute, fellas. Oh, strong boy. Thank the Lord. It's only a couple of more hours until sundown. You better wet our horses and burrow his mouths, huh? Ah, good. Let me take water bag and help Ralph. Yeah, hold this pan, will you, Ray Wolf? Don't you, fellas, take any more than that, either. It's better to drink more water at night to catch up on the dehydration that takes place during the day. How do these old desert rats stand this heat? I don't even care to keep my eyes open. It's so hot. 120 degrees. No wonder, Josh, look like prune. Okay, let's push on, fellas. A high wind could come up and wipe out Joshua's trail. Let's follow it while we can. Sand in my teeth, sand in my ears, sand in my eyes, and sand in my food and water. Why didn't Josh stay home instead of coming out here like an old fool? What's the use of complaining, Stumpy? Got a job to do. Let's do it. I'm sure glad for sundown, though. After three days in this heat, it starts to wear on you. Not only on us, Ralph, but on the animals, too. Better all get some sleep. I want to push on as soon as the moon comes up. Let's shake a leg, fellas. We want to gain time before it gets too hot. Hey, that's a rattlesnake. Watch the horses and burrows. I'll get those water bottles. Watch them. Get that snake before we lose horses. Get water bottles in. Oh, no. How many bags were damaged, Ralph? All of them. The only water we have is what's in our canteens. That's right. Uh, that's very bad. Yeah. Well, let's get the horses and burrows and be on our way. Here's to them. You guess the best thing to do is go ahead, Bill. Yes, Gray Wolf. There must be water somewhere close to Joshua's prospecting grounds. Yeah, but we don't know where that is. I'm beginning to have a notion as to the place. But we'll keep following the trail. Right now, it'd be more dangerous to go back than to go on. How far we must go to trail, Joshua. You must stop someplace and dig. Keep following the trail, Gray Wolf. We have just a little water for ourselves. Ralph, use your head. There's only a quarter of a canteen left. You must keep that for the horses. Even the burrows will have to wait. Far away gold, Bill. Maybe we follow a long trail. I don't figure Josh would have come all this way. Stumpy, let me tell you something. Remember when Josh told me all the gold wasn't in the desert? Yes. I remember. To me, that means only one place. Lonesome Mountain. There's water there. There's got to be. And what if you're wrong, Bill? It'll be my last mistake. There's the mountain up ahead for us. There's a piece of Joshua's gear for us. We're on the right track. Yes. But how much further? I can't go on. I forgot to, Ralph. One more day should do it. We'll leave the burrows here. All our gear. Travel as late as possible. Let's go while we can. I can't go. Don't talk, Bill.  Nobody talk. Just ride until the horses drop. And walk. And you can always die when you can't do nothing else. Stand there all day and pour this cool water over my head. And ruin your $10 church. I don't care. It's worth my life. Pellis, look over by that flat rock. There's a man's hand. Poor Josh. With water a hundred feet away, he lay down and died. Ah, here is not. Some gold nuggets. What's he say, Bill? Well, he says, Bill Jefferson, I know you were following. My heart gave out. All the gold in the world wouldn't buy me water when I needed it. Not sorry dying this way. Bury me on lonesome on lonesome. That's as far as he got. Well, he went just the way he wanted to go. Out on the desert in the mountains looking for gold. Ralph, Grey Wolf, get the burrows and the gear. When you get back, we'll have a little service for Joshua Webb. Just before we bury him. Do you think it was a gold fever made Josh break his promise? No, I don't. I've got a notion Joshua knew his time was near and all he wanted to do was go across the desert and up in the lonesome mountain to meet the Lord. Well, I guess that's the story, boys and girls. The story of Joshua Webb, Desert Rat, who just wouldn't stay where he was put. We'll see you next week for more adventure with


Sid's Widebomb with SFM Sports.net at the Green Turtle Classic with the victorious head coach from Carini, Steve Kulfer. Coach, you've had a couple heartbreakers against top six teams. What did it mean for you guys to get over the hump and get this win tonight? Yeah, it was big.   You know, the fourth quarter just it was a slow and steady methodical comeback from them and RIT was like the guillotine.  And so you're never sure how the kids are going to respond. And then we had to come home and play a really good Solvesbury team and that didn't go well and we didn't play with a lot of energy. So, you know, we had two good days of practice, you know, yesterday and what ended up being yesterday because of the snow in Thursday and they came down here and they just played hard.  So you guys are up eight to three late and third. You talked about all these games you've had that you've lost in different ways to good teams. When it gets to eight to six or 14, 10 to go in the fourth, are you referencing any of that to your team? No, absolutely. We've been here guys, so we had to do differently or? Well, I think, you know, I think deep down your thing, potentially, I mean, I'd lie to you say if it's not somewhere in my brain, but each game is his own entity.  You'll never get out of that last five minutes at RIT. So you have to really process that in a different way. We talk about when we make those mistakes, how we can correct them in practice. And if we're putting a situation to do it again, you know, tonight or tomorrow or next week that we're not going to do that, hopefully or coach them not to do that, I should say. And we did a little bit better job. We did make a couple of mistakes down the stretch and but we were able to overcome that, you know, and that's that was big for us. Your Cavaliers got out to a five nothing leads and a large part of that was on the defensive goalie Tyler Morel made two or three big saves early. What was it like having a freshman goalie kind of lead you guys out early in the game? Tonesetter. I mean, really, I mean, that's just something that, you know, we talked about it as a coaching staff, we need some positive plays early to build off.    Offensively, you guys had three or four situations where you got a one on oh one on the goalie. How did those plays break down and how are you able to repeatedly get those just quick ball movement, you know, I mean, just able, you know, we teach kids to, you know, scoop the ball, get it off the ground and move it one more, you know, and that's our language, move it one more, move it one more and until we can get it to four or five yards off the goal. If you scoop it up and run three or four steps and cradle it a couple more, you're going to lose those opportunities. So we really try to practice that as much as possible, you know, be get that get our heads up, get that ball to the one more guy and then he's going to hit it to one more and hopefully we end up in front of the goal. And so we were fortunate there. We guys made some good looks. They delivered the pass in the right place and we were able to put it away. You guys climbed the mountain tonight with an 86 win. How do you come down and get back up for tomorrow? I don't know. I haven't I haven't played in back to bad game since I think like a youth cockiesville tournament back in, you know, the somewhere in the mid 80s. So I don't know. It'll be unique. I think, you know, what I heard Paul say is like, there's not a lot of scouting in the second game. We watched a little film on NAS, but it's just so hard to teach your kids that without them overlooking tonight's game.  And if you do that, you know, we think good things will happen. So we'll do the coaching staff will do as best we can. We'll try to get in the kids ears tonight and tomorrow morning and show up and just play lacrosse.  Coach, congratulations on the win tonight. Thanks for joining us and good luck tomorrow. Thanks, man. All right, that was the head coach from Cabrini. Steve Kulfer, they win over Stevenson tonight. Eight to six. Thank you for joining us on sfmsports.net at the Green Turtles Classic.


Welcome to the Dr. Gendry podcast, dark chocolate, olive oil, red wine. So what do these foods have in common besides the fact that I like them? Well if you guessed polyphenols then you are absolutely right. On today's episode I'm going to talk all about these amazing micronutrients, polyphenols, what they can do for your health, why my critics are wrong about them, and the best and worst sources of polyphenols out there. And I'll invite you to join me in celebrating all the wonderful benefits of polyphenols on National Polyphenol Day, a holiday my team created to educate people about them on July 11th, my birthday. So let's dive right in to discuss the power of polyphenols for feeling and looking your best.  So phenols are a chemical ring structure that's incredibly common in plants primarily. And polyphenols simply refer to lots of these phenol rings joined together. Now one of the things that I write about in my next book that will be coming out in March of 2022 is how plants protect themselves from harm. We often don't think about this, but plants have to harvest sunlight, the photons in sunlight, and their mitochondria, yes they actually have mitochondria, take sunlight and convert it into sugars and oxygen. And the process of that production is actually very damaging to the energy producing organelles in plants, and they literally protect themselves from this damage by manufacturing polyphenols. And polyphenols are actually the way the plant, actually if you will, sops up the damage from what are called reactive oxygen species, ROSs, some people know them as free radicals. So as much as a plant needs sunlight, it turns out the plant is damaged by sunlight simultaneously. So the polyphenols are the plant's method, if you like, of sunscreen. Now interestingly, the more a plant is stressed, for instance the closer it is to the sun, the higher the altitude, the more it's stressed by other factors like poor nutrients, not enough water, other harsh conditions, the more polyphenols the plant produces. Now fun fact, most plant polyphenols are actually in the leaves, where in fact the energy production is done. And if you've ever doubted about why polyphenols are so important to a plant, every fall you get to watch a beautiful color display of polyphenols. Now we often talk about the leaves are changing color. In fact those colors are actually the polyphenols in the leaves that you didn't see because all of the green chlorophyll was hiding those colors. But as the chlorophyll, the energy producing part of the plant dies off, the polyphenols remain. So in this fall, when you're looking at the brilliant color displays, you can actually in your own eyes see the power of polyphenols that the plant was using to protect itself during that exposure to sunlight. Okay, now I mentioned that polyphenols are concentrated in leaves, but the same thing holds true for the fruit of the tree, and the fruit can be damaged by sunlight. So many plants concentrate polyphenols particularly in the skin of that fruit to protect it from harm. And for instance, great winemakers have known this for a very long time, that the more the vines are stressed, the higher the elevation, the underwater they are, the more polyphenols will be present in the grapes of that particular vine. And great winemakers have known for some time that it was the polyphenols in the grapes that brought all the characteristics and benefits from the wine that the vintners were looking for. But getting back to the point, for instance, we're going to talk about olive oil. Olive oil happens to be a great delivery device for polyphenols. And the polyphenols were in the olives, and when you eat an olive, you're eating polyphenols, when you squish an olive and extract the oil, the benefit of olive oil is not oleic acid, which is a monounsaturated fat. The benefit is in the polyphenol content. And one of the best ways to assess polyphenol content in olive oil is that if it makes you cough as you drink it or eat it, that's a very potent sign of the level of polyphenol. But there's actually more polyphenols in olive leaves, and that's why olive leaf extract is actually an incredibly great source of polyphenols. And if you want to munch on a few olive leaves, be my guest. Okay, so polyphenols protect the plant from damage, from free radicals, from reactive oxygen species, and we eat plants and we eat the plant polyphenols, either in their leaves when we eat lettuce, believe it or not, we're eating polyphenols. When we're eating red leaf lettuce, we're eating more polyphenols than in green lettuce. In fact, years ago Rutgers University patented a red romaine lettuce that they showed had considerably more polyphenol content than regular romaine lettuce. I've forgotten the name of it now, but it was something red, but they received a patent because of the polyphenol content. Okay, so polyphenols protect plants from damage. Now years ago we used to think that polyphenols were primarily antioxidant, and for years and years and years, we measured the polyphenol content by what was called an ORAC rating, O-R-A-C, that's the Oxygen Radical Absorbing Capacity, and looked at whether these compounds could actually absorb free radicals. And for years and years and years, this was the standard by which we judged polyphenol content. Unfortunately, it turns out that these compounds, when we swallow them, are not doing that at all. And so if you hear people say that the reason to get polyphenols into your diet is that they are antioxidants, number one, don't believe them, and number two, that's not how they work. And I'm really excited when you see my new book. You'll actually see exactly the power of polyphenols, and it has nothing to do with their ability to absorb free radicals or as antioxidants, but their power is actually far more important. And one of the most recent findings is that polyphenols are actually prebiotics. In other words, if you remember, prebiotics are what your friendly bacteria, the probiotics like to eat. So first and foremost, whoever says that polyphenols are the plant defense system against being eaten and that polyphenols because of that are extremely damaging to your health, first of all, doesn't know what they're talking about. Number two, that's not how polyphenols work for the plant and they're not a defense system of the plant. That's what lectins are for, that's what phytates are for, not polyphenols. The second thing is people who say polyphenols are bad for you actually don't realize that polyphenols feed friendly bacteria. And there's a host of evidence that you'll see in my upcoming book about the incredible benefit of polyphenols in actually changing the gut microbiome for the better. In fact, I'll give you a little tease, there's a fascinating study looking at the microbiome and inflammatory markers in three trials in human beings. One group had to drink several glasses of red wine per day. The second group had to drink the same red wine that had the alcohol removed and you can go to a store and find non-alcoholic red wine. And the third group got to drink gin in the same alcoholic amount that the red wine drinkers were drinking. And lo and behold, what they found was that both the red wine with and without alcohol changed the gut microbiome to a much more friendly microbiome. In other words, it increased the gut buddies and the result was that multiple markers of inflammation fell in both of those red wine drinkers, whereas no effect was found in the gin drinkers. Why? Because the gin, even though it had alcohol, didn't have any polyphenols. So the idea that polyphenols are somehow a plant defense system is absolutely wrong and human studies back up the fact that it's the polyphenols, not the alcohol in red wine that is the beneficial effect. And its benefit is not the polyphenols directly, but it's the polyphenols being eaten by certain gut bacteria and basically fertilizing good gut bacteria. The other thing we know is that polyphenols in general, when you eat them, are incredibly poorly absorbed. Maybe only 10% of all the polyphenols that you eat are ever absorbed. But again, the good news is that these polyphenols are eaten by your gut buddies and it's the products that your gut buddies make from these polyphenols in the form of postbiotics that I talk extensively about in the energy paradox that is one of the main ways that polyphenols benefit our health. So that's actually the exciting new science of polyphenols and how they work. Alright, so let's play devil's advocate. Some critics, like Dr. Paul Saladino, say that the health benefits of polyphenols are overrated. And here's why they say that, because polyphenols aren't absorbed and that polyphenols are dangerous, they're a plant defense system. Well they're right that polyphenols aren't absorbed very well, but they're absolutely wrong because they don't understand what's now known about how polyphenols interact with our gut microbiome, how they feed our gut microbiome, how they change our gut microbiome to a friendly anti-inflammatory microbiome and who in the world wouldn't want that? I don't know, I certainly would. The other thing that's obvious when we look at any of the blue zones, those areas of the world popularized by the National Geographic journalist Dan Buckner and Loma Linda is the only blue zone in the United States, by the way, where I was a professor for much of my career. Blue zones are notorious for having an incredibly high intake of polyphenol-rich foods. And we could break them down individually, but let me assure you that each blue zone has its own set and different sets of polyphenol-rich foods. We'll just take one example. The Okinawans, the older Okinawans, 85% of their diet was a purple sweet potato and the purple sweet potato has an incredible concentration of one particular polyphenol called an anthocyanin. It's actually the same polyphenol family that gives the dark blue color to blueberries and blackberries. This is just concentrated in the flesh of a purple sweet potato. And luckily we're seeing purple sweet potatoes in a lot of our grocery stores now. They're now being grown commercially. So 85% of the Okinawan diet was a purple sweet potato. It wasn't beans, it wasn't rice, it wasn't soy, it was a purple sweet potato. So to think that that horrible, dangerous polyphenol was somehow impacting the health of the Okinawans in a negative way certainly goes against the evidence. Okay, so that's probably the strongest, if you look at societies who have great health and longevity, that's probably the biggest signal argument about why we should be getting more polyphenols in our diet. And I could go on and on. The famous Predomed study from Spain, which some of my critics say is just one of the worst studies in the world and they're usually low fat critics. The Predomed study from Spain that I've written about in most of my books took 65-year-old people who had a heart attack and they randomized them into three groups. One group got a liter of olive oil per week. It's about 10 to 12 tablespoons a day and they actually had to pick up their liter of olive oil once a week, use it, take the empty bottle back to the clinic and get it refilled. The second group had to have the same number of calories in mixed nuts and most of the nuts were walnuts and hazelnuts and if you're guessing walnuts and hazelnuts are great sources of polyphenols, you're correct. The third group had a low fat Mediterranean diet. Now all three because they lived in Spain ate a Mediterranean diet. What's impressive is that the walnut and the olive oil group had a 30% reduction in new events, new heart attack, new stents compared to the low fat group. The women in the olive oil group had an 87% reduction in breast cancer rate. What I talk about in the energy paradox is that the olive oil group and the nut group actually had improved memory after five years compared to the low fat group who had actually decreased memory. The evidence that I present in the energy paradox makes it pretty clear that it was the polyphenol content in the olive oil and the nuts that was responsible for those effects. Again, another stake in the heart of people who say polyphenols are bad for us. Now maybe you're wondering, okay so what are the best dietary sources of polyphenols? Well it turns out that leaves are great sources of polyphenols. So if you're thinking tea for instance, it turns out that tea is a great source of polyphenols and whether it's green, whether it's black, whether you grind up tea leaves like in matcha, and just an aside please if you're going to use matcha tea buy it from Japan not China. The Chinese matcha tea is unfortunately full of pesticides but that's another subject. Polyphenols are concentrated in fruits so olives are loaded with polyphenols, cacao the fruit and the bean are loaded with polyphenols, coffee believe it or not coffee fruit and coffee fruit extract is available. We use it here at Gundry MD. You can buy coffee fruit powder but the coffee bean is another great source of polyphenols. Yerba mate tea is another great source of polyphenols so anytime you can get leaves you're in great shape and then when you start looking at most of the spices that we think of as leaves like parsley, like sage, like rosemary and thyme, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, Simon and Garfunkel. So if you go down to Scarborough Fair you're actually buying polyphenols. In fact the Romans were so impressed with the ability of sage to improve their health that the Romans named sage salvia as in salvation and so when we look at these spices particularly the leaves we see that it's the polyphenol content that people were after. Now vegetables, the darker the vegetable the more the polyphenols and polyphenols in general have a very bitter flavor and some of you remember from my first book Dr. Gundry's Diode Evolution that one of my favorite phrases was more bitter, more better and that's because the bitterness is actually the polyphenols and so if you look at countries and cultures with longevity one of the fascinating things is that they have a preference for bitter foods and one of the most interesting things about chocolate is that anybody who has had cocoa nibs or 100% dark chocolate knows it's profoundly bitter and it was actually the Dutch that figured out that people would consume more chocolate if they took away the polyphenol content by treating it with alkali. So if you see on a label of cocoa powder dutched process or alkali process you've actually removed the polyphenols from chocolate and so run from those. There's a number of candy companies particularly Nestle and Cadbury and Mars who have actually patented ways of adding polyphenols back into chocolate that they have taken away. In a way it's kind of like looking at fortification of cereals where all the vitamins and minerals have been removed from cereals and breads and they're now fortified with eight essential vitamins and minerals. So they're actually patents to add back polyphenols. Why have they done this because both animal trials and human trials have shown that the polyphenols in chocolate are actually responsible for improvement in cardiovascular flexibility. I've published papers about polyphenols increasing the flexibility of blood vessels in humans. I've published papers about the ability of polyphenols to stop making blood vessels sticky on the inside and again these are human studies of polyphenol extracts improving both vascular health and in other human studies improving brain health. So what a great thing. What else should you look for? Okay, talked about olive oil and probably more than you want to hear. More bitter, more better in olive oil. If olive oil makes you cough you're on the right track. Red wine, if the grape vines are made to suffer, to work for a living by being planted in dense rows, by underwatering them, what's called dry farming, by being planted in rocks, by being planted in high elevations, you're going to increase the polyphenol content. So please, if you can, look for organic grown wines, look for biodynamic grown wines. There are a number of wineries now in the United States, particularly here in California, that are biodynamic wine growers. I'll mention two of my favorites, Beckman in Santa Barbara County, Ampelos Vineyard in Santa Barbara County, and also Spears are organic and biodynamic, the first two biodynamic. A great number of wines in France and Italy and Austria are now biodynamic and a huge number of them are organic. I just had an organic wine from Sicily last night as a matter of fact. Look for the label you're knowing that believe it or not you're going to get more polyphenol content and that's the bang for your buck. Same thing with seasonings. We've had Chef Jimmy Schmidt, three times James Beard Award winner on our podcast, and he will assure you and he assured us that seasonings are going to be loaded with polyphenols. And again, all the great spices of the Middle Ages were actually pursued because of their polyphenol content. And here's a fun fact. What's the highest polyphenol content of any spice? Come on, think about it for a minute. I'll give you a clue. You probably studded your Easter ham with it. If you said clothes, you're correct. Clothes have the highest polyphenol content of any food. And if you think I take clothes supplements, you're right because of that. If you saw it, I put all my supplements in the longevity paradox and there's clothes. And it turns out that clothes was one of the highest sought after spices in the Middle Ages right behind black pepper, which is loaded with polyphenols, and cinnamon, which is loaded with polyphenols. In fact, as you start looking at the Middle Ages spices, you'll notice that people were willing to pay huge amount of money for polyphenols. And I got news for you. People don't pay huge amounts of money just to make food taste better. They were looking for the health benefits of polyphenols way back then. And we're only now beginning to realize what the ancients knew that we're only now discovering. Okay, are there foods with high polyphenol content that I don't recommend? Yeah. It turns out that there are some really interesting polyphenols in soy. And I do talk about them in the upcoming book. You can make soy safe in two ways. Number one, you can pressure cook it. Number two, you can extrude it under high pressure and high heat as texturized vegetable protein, which is TVP, one of the favorite kind of fake foods of Loma Linda cuisine. Or you can actually use soy isolates, soy protein isolates, or soy protein hydrolysates, which will eliminate the polyphenols in the latter. Beans, pressure cook your beans, soap beans. You'll still get the polyphenol content in beans, but you won't get the lectins. So those are the two provides of. The other thing that's interesting, believe it or not, whole grains have polyphenols. But as those of you know, the problem with whole grains is twofold. Number one, the lectin content of whole grains, you cannot pressure cook the lectins in oats or wheat or rye or barley. I'm sorry, they can't be destroyed. The other problem with whole grains is that so much of our American food supply in whole grains has been sprayed with Roundup. And glyphosate is one of the biggest disruptors of your gut and your energy that we could have ever invented. So long story short, polyphenols were designed to protect the plant from damage. Polyphenols were the sunscreen for the plant. Polyphenols were not insecticides. They were not toxins or poisons. They were to protect the plant's energy factories. And when you eat plant polyphenols, lo and behold, you're not eating antioxidants. You're feeding your gut buddies the food that they need, and they in turn turn those polyphenols into health promoting compounds that I can't wait for you to learn how they work in the upcoming books. So stay tuned. All right. Before we close, I'll mention at the top of the lecture, I want to invite you to join me in celebrating National Polyphenol Day coming up on Sunday, July 11. It's also my 71st birthday. So wow, National Polyphenol Day and Dr. Gundry's birthday all in one. As you probably know, my favorite source of polyphenols is olive oil. So to celebrate, I'm going to ask you to do a shot of high quality olive oil and share your video or photo of taking an olive oil shot on Instagram by tagging me at Dr. Stephen Gundry, all one word.  I'll be sure to repost so we can help others know about the power of polyphenol. This is actually going to be really fun. So I hope you'll join me, get your shot of olive oil ready on July 11, my birthday bottoms up to your health, to my health, National Polyphenol Day. So this is going to be really fun, hashtag polyphenol day. Okay, it's time for the audience question. This week's question comes from Ryan on iTunes who asks, what is your opinion on nebulizing hydrogen peroxide? Dave Asprey has it as a tool for one of his hacks. Well, there are others, including Dr. Joseph Mercola, who have really gotten in to the nebulized hydrogen peroxide as a treatment for COVID-19 and also as a potential preventative for COVID-19. I'm not going to join in the chorus one way or another. I don't recommend it to my patients. Often some of these advocates say that there is a slippery slope with the use of this and I think I'm going to leave it at that. There's far better ways to protect yourself than I've talked about before. The number one way to protect yourself is to not have a leaky gut and inflammation. The number two way, which goes along with that, is to get your vitamin D levels up, folks. Number three way, if you're going to take high dose vitamin D like I do, please take vitamin K2 with vitamin D. It will actually take any calcium in your system and put it in your bones, take it away from your blood vessels. If you believe that coronary calcification is scary, you certainly want to take the calcium out of your arteries and put it into your bones. That's the way to protect yourself. Review of the Week. This week's review comes from Debbie Weiss on iTunes who wrote, I have a very large podcast library but Dr. Gundry's is my absolute favorite podcast. I never miss an episode because I learn so much from every single one. Well, thank you very much, Debbie. And I also saw you asked a question that I hope to answer in a future episode. You know I love getting feedback from listeners and I especially love seeing all of your interesting questions. So if you have a question you'd like me to answer, please rate and review us on iTunes and then drop your question into your review. You know I can't wait to see it because you guys really have great questions. Why do I want all these and why do I do this every week? Because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you. See you next week. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.


That's cool. I mean, you just try to get better every day, like I said, and it just comes with it. You keep doing something, pedaling, you start to learn and pick up new things and just help yourself out. I'm from Georgia. It ain't too much hotter. I mean, just trying to continue to grow and get better every day, listening to what the coaches have for me and just try to improve and bring my teammates with me. I saw Ryan Tannehill out there early on. We're kind of explaining some things to everybody with the card back there. What was that all about? What was the explanation out there? He's just explaining the concepts we were working on and what we expect out of the receivers and just getting them to understand where we're coming from and how we look at it. It's pretty cool. How's the on-field relationship with Ryan going so far? He's been good. I mean, he just continued to, you know, try to help me out when I ask for it and just, you know, go to work every day and that's all you can ask for.


Generous community members are overwhelming a local nonprofit with hundreds of donations a week. The thrift store could not keep up with a surplus of items until now. A newest reporter, Anthony Scott, has more. I hopped in my car this morning and headed right down. That was the feeling for a lot of Crosslake residents this morning as the common goods store was flooded with customers for their grand reopening. We were first seen at the seams with our donations and our processing room. So we just needed a little bit of room to spread out. Just two months ago the store ended here, but thanks to community members coming together they are able to knock down the wall, renovate the space and now common goods is looking better than ever. It looks so clean. All the shelves are clean because during the construction it was really hard to keep things clean so now hopefully we can do it better but it's just wonderful. It's a great place. The renovations included a new floor space for the sales section of the store and the back was also remodeled with an office, break room and more storage space. Common goods is excited about their extra space but what's more important is the work they do for the non-profit group, Bridges of Hope. Bridges of Hope has always struck a chord with me. I've actually been helped from Bridges of Hope from the past so working in the store is a way that I can give back to an organization that has given so much to our community. The profits go to help native people in Crowing County so that really makes a difference for me. It's really easy to donate when you have such great reasons to donate. The common goods store cannot be possible without the hundreds of donations from community members and the volunteers that helped with the renovation. I come in two hours a week and I help sort clothes and I clean and I sometimes tag clothes and I just enjoy it. The organization depends on many local volunteers to get the work done. So yesterday and the day before was all hands on deck, store closed down and everybody just worked hard to get it ready for today. It was a grand day for customers and store owners alike. Reporting from Cross Lake, Anthony Scott, Lakeland News. The Bridges of Hope Foundation has been serving local families in times of crisis for over 15 years. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Okay, Nick Carbone, the mile champ today, you're in a 446. That's right, that's right.  Yes sir. There's only, I think, one or two college wrestling programs in Florida? Uh, yeah, right now, the guys are just starting, they're southeastern, so. Yeah, so two, right? Uh, you look at it, and Florida's getting a lot of love. You know, Lake Island Prep, the excellent program, right, in Florida, and then you also have Artelona, he was, you know, from Tampa, he's pretty good, the Brandon teams of old, so there's guys, you know, coach Bono's from Florida, but you know, people are getting recruited in Florida, but probably not as much as you should. What are you looking for when you come to the C3, and what do you want to get out of coaching, and out of getting recruited? Well, as far as being recruited, it's tough, because we're in Florida, and a lot of the coaches are from up north, and so it's tough to get a hold of coaches, but here at the combine, everyone is here, you can talk to them face to face, and you can really reach out to a lot of coaches, and the biggest thing for me about the recruiting is I want a coach to see, not just who I am as a wrestler, but me as a person, like, I have a fight, discipline, like with my diet, grade, everything like that, so it's a lot better, because you're face to face with them instead of just shooting them an E-Map. You're really fast too. I know it's not track and field, it's wrestling, but listen, a lot of that translates even with the competitiveness, right? How much fun are you having? I have a lot of fun. I get to meet so many coaches, I get to wrestle with the best kids around Florida, and some from Georgia all over, I'm learning a lot, getting better along the way, so it's good. Alright, what are you thinking right now? Give me, like, if you were wanting to go, where would you want to go and IDLA wrestle? What's your list? Like, what specific school? Yeah, like, Thomas and schools. We've got Ashland University in Ohio, Non-Union, Southeastern Life, I just met Hunter College from New York today, Maryville University in Missouri, Listen, so most kids I talk to, literally every kid I talk to, everybody's like, it's D1 or nothing. I really like that, you know, you're like, you're very open. Yeah, it's not, I mean, Division I, obviously, I want to be in Division I, everyone wants to go to Division I, but a national championship, but you have to consider not just the athletics ten-point, but the academics ten-point as well. So like, I'm looking for a place where I'm not only can I be successful on the map, but that will help me prepare, will help prepare me for life after wrestling. Good job. Stuff like that. Can we bottle and solve your mentality to people? Because, you know, that's like, ultimately, what most people should be thinking, and I think a lot of people get disappointed when they go and fail at a Division I, but like, you've kind of got the mindset that I like to hear, it's refreshing. Yeah, I'm different. I'm different. I like that. Alright, skills toss, coming up, you got anything else for me? No, sir. C3, Porto, glad to be here. Thank you.


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