Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show . I’m Robinn Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK charity that wants to see integrative medicine, a rounded approach that addresses the needs of mind and spirit along with physical problems of cancer, available to anyone in the UK who wants it. So this show focuses on the extent and the benefits of integrative medicine, exploring all its many aspects and the way that these can impact the quality of life and the treatment outcomes of those with cancer. One of the topics that’s often given airtime on the show in one way or another is nature. Our relationship with the natural environment, our time spent in it, our connection with the food we eat, the benefits of exercise in nature and so on. One pursuit that brings many of these elements together is foraging, finding food in the wild and someone who’s an expert in this is Nadia Brydon. Nadia is extraordinarily knowledgeable and experienced in a very wide range of health disciplines and has at this point spent decades supporting those with cancer, following her own recovery from cancer many years ago. She’s trained in herbal medicine, both Chinese and Western, acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy. She’s a Hippocrates health educator. She’s trained in aromatherapy, nutrition, reflexology, burn techniques, sports, massage, Ayurveda. The list goes on and behind all of that she has a master’s degree in international public health. Her considerable experience has included a decade working at The Haven in London, providing support to women with breast cancer. She’s now based in Wales where she runs retreats and where foraging has become a key aspect of the experience of visitors.

Nadia Brydon
Well, Robin, thank you very much for asking again.

Robin Daly
So, last time you were on the show, you introduced us to your Welsh rural retreat, which is in a lovely spot deep in the Welsh countryside, which was a relatively new venture at that time. To give a bit of context for today’s talk, could you just say where you are, what you’re doing, and importantly, why you’re doing it?

Nadia Brydon
Okay, thank you. Well, I bought this property in the Brecon Beacons five years ago. It took me two or three years to renovate it, and that was all over the COVID and the lockdowns. And I’ve really been going now for a year with doing offering retreats. It’s not so much groups, but individual people who, you know, want to come on a retreat. And I offer all different types of programs like juicing, detoxification, and a low histamine program. I also do the Hippocrates Health Institute Rolled Food Program. So a lot of people like to be doing things like juice fasting, so that’s very popular. And so people can book up whenever they want, whenever to suit them. I have a website, which is www.cwmdu-retreat.com. so I’ve really been only going for about a year now here, but it is absolutely delightful. It’s in the middle of nowhere. People, especially people come by car, but I can always pick people up by train, but it is five miles from the nearest shop. So if people think that, you know, if they’re on a detox, they can quickly go and knit down the road for jam and donut. They can’t.

Robin Daly
Experience, right. Very good. And what about the why you’re doing it bit? What made you choose to do that? You know, you’ve obviously been practicing in health in various guises for many decades now at this point, but this is a radical decision to suddenly make off to the Welsh hills. What about that?

Nadia Brydon
Well, I mean, I think I’ve always such as dreamed of having a retreat, but never actually thought that it really would happen. But somehow another by the grace of God, it did. I’ve, you know, I’ve been under loads of retreats myself, particularly in America. Well, actually all over the place, really. I think that it is a particularly important way of helping people to really understand about diet individually for them, because I think for people, you know, who are wanting to change their diet, to change their life, it’s very difficult. I never recommend that people do a diet or have a particular diet or go on a particular diet without getting proper, you know, education or proper, such an experience on how to do it. So I always say to people, you know, there’s no one diet that fits all. And and I don’t promote any particular diet, really. But if somebody wants to go vegan, I say, well, eat your normal diet and let’s put some vegan foods into your diet and let’s slowly learn together, you know, how you how you want to do that best for you or a vegetarian diet, mediterranean diet or keto diet or whatever diet somebody wants. I mean, what I do offer here is is a vegan diet because it’s more of a detoxification place. So people will learn how to do things like raw food and juicing and sprouting and foraging and learning about how important if you’re wanting to do a detoxification, detoxing and vocalizing, you know, what kind of foods really one needs to use of plant based foods. So that’s why it’s it’s vegan based. And, you know, we can do it as strict or as not strict as anybody wants. It’s very much individualized. And I always have a free consultation with somebody before and for them to find out exactly what I do here and for me to find out whether it’s suitable for them and what results they want to achieve, how long they want to come for. You know, I have a really minimum of three nights and there’s no maximum. I get people coming for months and months and months, actually, but usually not. And, you know, I get people coming for just, you know, a long weekend. So it doesn’t, from my point of view, it doesn’t really matter. It’s it’s whatever somebody somebody needs. And I think stress is a massive, massive part of it. And I live literally back to nature. it’s a seven bedroom Welsh farmhouse in three acres. And but it’s in the middle of the Breckenbeeken. So I’ve got no near neighbors and it really is back to nature. And I live next to an Iron Age, an Iron Age fort. And and I and I live on an Iron Age settlement here. So, you know, and it’s all just sort of wildlife and fresh air and peace and quiet. that’s really what it’s all about for people to sort of get away from, you know, the noise of the city and get away from just just to be be at peace really. And I feel very blessed that, you know, we should float here all the time. And yeah, so that’s kind of hopefully in a nutshell what it is, really.

Robin Daly
Yeah, fantastic. So yeah, a real stress buster of a place. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting you there. A couple of years back, I think it was, I think probably 2022. Yeah. And one of the most enduring memories of that visit was lunch, actually, which over and above the adventure of finding you in the West Hills was an adventure into the unknown in itself. So foraging is an interesting idea for lots of people that, you know, kind of bought the book, but it seems that you’ve made it a way of life. Yeah. I’m looking to tie two things together today. You’re someone with a great deal of experience supporting those with cancer, and also of the benefits of foraging. So I want to tease out the synergies here. So would you give us the top line to start with, a bullet point list that we can go on to explore of reasons for our listeners to be interested in foraging.

Nadia Brydon
Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, foraging, it’s really important when you’re all foraging is to know what you’re foraging. So it’s probably better to go on foraging walks. And there are loads of foraging walks, whether they’re in the city or whether they’re in the countryside, you can go on, you know, foraging weekends. In fact, I’m offering a foraging weekend in July, which I can talk a bit more about at the end. But I do think it’s important, absolutely, to know what you’re foraging, because, you know, plants can be very similar, and something that can be edible and medicinal can be very similar to something that’s completely poisonous. So I would, I mean, I would absolutely not recommend that somebody just goes out in forages without knowing what they’re doing. The other point is, is if you’re foraging, you really need to be doing, to be picking whatever you’re picking away from dogs and cats and roadsides. And you need to be also safe, like, you know, not going into a field of cows, which is quite dangerous. These days, people seem to be regularly injured by cows rampaging. So, yes, I think it’s really important to be aware of those things first of all. Okay.

Robin Daly
those were caveats. Yeah. Okay, so now the pluses.

Nadia Brydon
Yeah, so the pluses are basically we really need to be eating and living as close to nature as we possibly can. It’s really how I healed myself way back, I don’t know how many years, 35 years ago when I had cancer. And the thing that was really important was to actually learn how to live and eat according to the laws of nature. our body is from nature and we need to align it with nature as much as possible. And I think what’s tragic is, especially in the cities, children are not growing up anywhere near nature and nature’s becoming less and less available. And if you walk into a supermarket and you look at somebody’s shopping basket, they have lots of tinned and processed foods, but very little fruit and vegetables. what vegetables they do have is very often knocked green. And green vegetables are the most important vegetables, they are the most nutritious. But not only is it important to have the greens, but we need to really understand which vegetables can actually help which vegetables contain which micronutrients, which vegetables will help particular conditions. But equally, when you’re foraging, you’re foraging for the nutritional value, you are also foraging because what is, in my view, the most important thing that we must be eating is electromagnetic food. A food with a life force still in it. And it’s not the food in your life, but it’s the life force in your food. And the thing is, is that anything green contains chlorophyll. chlorophyll is nature’s detoxifier, it’s nature’s cleanser. And many religions or every religion has a sort of detoxifying period within the year. And it’s either Lent or Ramadan or every religion has their detoxification in the weeks or well, weeks. But the thing is really and truly, we should be detoxifying on a daily basis. We should be eating at least three portions of dark green leafy vegetables every day, whether they’re from the supermarket or you’ve been foraging them. Now we are talking about foraging, so I do want to concentrate on foraging. And you know, there’s all through the year, you can forage for something. Although January and February are the more difficult months of the year to be foraging because everything has kind of died back. But if we’re looking at things that most people know about is they probably have heard of nettles, for instance. Well, nettles is first of all, it’s very, very high in chlorophyll, very high in iron. nettles are very easily identifiable, even if you can’t see them and you brush against them, you certainly feel them because they’ve got some formic acid, they’ve got a sting to them. And but when you make, in fact, that’s what you had for lunch, wasn’t it? When you came, you had nettles soon.

Robin Daly
Exactly. That’s one of the things.

Nadia Brydon
I remember what you had, you had nettle soup and you had chicken in the woods mushroom.

Robin Daly
Chicken in the woods was definitely new to me.

Nadia Brydon
So nettles, for instance, they’re absolutely probably one of the most important and easiest foods to forage for, and they’re very antioxidant, they’re extremely high in chlorophyll, but they’re very, very important for energy, for the kidney energy, for strengthening the kidneys, and they’re diuretic, they’re really good for joint pain, they’re really good for rheumatism. It’s one of the most important blood building herbs. And so the thing is, the Latin name for it is Erteca doica, and the only thing is with nettles, it’s like, you know, for everything, there is a time to pick something and there’s a time not to pick something. So for instance, you pick the top sort of two or three inches of the fresh leaves at the top and the new leaves coming out at the top. the thing that’s important is that we do not pick them when it’s flowers, you know, when a nettle flowers and it’s got those flowers coming down, because when a nettle flowers, it then changes its chemical structure, and it produces calcium carbonate, which is not very good for the kidneys. So we should always pick nettles before they flowered, but you can actually always find nettles without flowers. But the other thing is, is that nettle seeds are really, really good for the adrenals. And you can pick nettle seeds, and you can sprinkle them on your salads, you can put them in your soups, and they’re really good for adrenal energy. So really help the adrenals. so they’re very detoxifying, they’re very energizing, they’re lots of iron. And, you know, you can juice it as well. But if you’re juicing it, you probably have, you know, if you’re juicing it, you have about 15 mils of it a day if you’re juicing it. But really, if you’re juicing it, you juice it with other vegetables like cucumber and celery and maybe spinach and other things, or you can have it just as that. There’s also really good for asthma, and really good for allergies, particularly it’s very famous for allergies. if people have got any kind of, you know, skin allergy, or if they’ve got lots of mucus and sneezing, and it’s hate fever kind of allergy, it’s very good for that. Very good for asthma, for instance. I mean, there’s very little that it’s not good for, it’s really good for skin, hair and nails. we’re also talking particularly about, you know, what is actually good for people with cancer as well. The thing is, is that when I was healing myself from cancer, it wasn’t to put so much for me to fighting the cancer. It was about what can I do to make my body heal itself? What can I do to make my body as healthy as possible? So, I wasn’t trying to fight something. I was, you know, because I think whatever we focus on roams, and if you focus on health, and you focus on being as healthy as you possibly can be by boosting your immune system, by putting the right foods into your body, putting in all the micronutrients and the enzymes and the protein.

Nadia Brydon
when I’m talking about protein, I’m actually really talking about amino acids, because what people don’t realize is they say, oh, I must have my protein, you know, I’m eating vegan, where am I going to get my protein from? if you think about it, a cow or an elephant or a giraffe is a big protein animal, and all it has eaten is grass and vegetation and vegan things, because in the greens are all the amino acids which actually builds a protein. So, we build our own protein from amino acids, and if we’re eating animal protein, our gut has to break down that animal protein into the individual amino acids in order to be able to pass through into the bloodstream and make up the body’s protein. so, I think that it’s a misconception that, you know, protein is really an almost unheard of deficiency, because as long as you’re eating enough vegetables in lots of different variety, you’re making up your own protein from that. the best protein comes from dark leafy greens, that people don’t realize is a little bit the same as people say, oh, if I don’t have dairy, how am I going to get my calcium? And I say, well, basically, you know, calcium doesn’t come from cows. The cow has made the calcium by eating grass, and the same as, you know, we need to eat the calcium in dark green leafy greens and green vegetables. for instance, nettles are really high in calcium. So, but it comes in what we call its free ionic form, which means that it’s not attached to anything. But when we drink dairy, for instance, calcium is attached to a fat molecule. So, really, what we need to be doing is to get our calcium is to be eating lots of dark leafy greens. the trouble is, if you cook dark leafy greens or overcooked dark leafy greens, you’re reducing their micronutrient benefit. So, where possible, juicing and smoothies is my particular specialty, is I teach people how to balance a juice, how to balance a smoothie. you’re getting all the micronutrients that you need, you’re getting the protein, you’re guessing the calcium and the potassium and magnesium and all the things that one needs. Because then when it’s raw, you are making sure that you are able to absorb it much better as well. I much prefer having nutrition in food rather than people taking it as supplements, because supplements are important if one is extremely deficient, but we really should be building our nutritional base from food.

Robin Daly
Well, look, your examples of fingernails are very interesting to go into a little bit of depth into one thing in my forage. I mean, of course, fingernails are basically nuisance for most people, but to see that they’re actually a great food, but also to see how much you need to know about that food in order to get the most from it and not to make errors in your foraging. So that backs up what you were saying at the beginning. It’s like they just go out and start doing it because you get it wrong. So, yeah, very interesting. Can we briefly touch on a side of foraging, which is the activity of foraging, which is kind of the opposite of sitting on the internet. And it has a lot to say for it in terms of people who are sick and people in over, maybe, chronic conditions.

Nadia Brydon
Absolutely. I mean, I am a great advocate of Dr. Kelly Turner, her radical remission. And I think you are too. She has recognized that it’s not just one thing. It’s not just a healthy diet. It’s not just exercise, but it’s a combination of a number of different things. She looked at a thousand people who had healed themselves from cancer and wanted to find out what the common denominator was. she found that there were nine things originally, although now it’s 10. And I’ll quickly run through those nine things. It’s changing your diet to a more plant-based diet because of the benefits of the chlorophyll, which is very detoxified. You’re getting lots of micronutrients. it’s really important to recognize that we’ve got to go steer away from processed foods and go much more towards nature and natural foods with the micronutrients in it. So changing your diet is important. And that’s partly where foraging comes in. Taking control of your health, which is actually deciding how you’re going to heal your body with what you’re going to be using. it’s just taking control and it’s following your intuition, which is believing in yourself. We often believe in other people and listen to other people and ask other people what we should do, but it’s actually really about following our own inner guidance. And it’s also using herbs and supplements. So it’s important to recognize how important herbs and supplements and micronutrients are. that’s also where foraging comes into it, which I’ll go back into in a minute. Releasing suppressed emotions, which is about not hanging on to a problem shared as a problem halved, if one wants to put it really simply. But there are things that we hold onto that block our emotional health. It’s increasing positive emotions, having a glass half full rather than a glass half empty. It’s also embracing social support, which is really important. It’s having a sense of belonging and belonging to a group and not isolating ourselves. I think it’s all too easy to isolate ourselves. And it’s really important that we do have a social network. Also, it’s deepening our spiritual connection to something greater than ourselves. I think that whether it’s hugging trees, whether it’s being in nature, it’s really it’s recognizing that there is something that has created this beautiful planet. And it’s having a strong reason for living. So having life purpose or looking for life purpose. it’s a combination of things, but a large part of it is connecting with nature, is being out in the fresh air and recognizing that we need to have you know, more oxygen in our life and whether that is by being outside foraging, whether it’s exercising outside rather than in a gym, for instance, but also recognizing that green plants has created our oxygen. the more raw green plants that we can eat, the more it’s going to help our body to heal because cancer is a process of glycolysis. It’s an anaerobic cellular metabolism whereby it doesn’t like to have oxygen.

Nadia Brydon
the more oxygen we can create in our bodies, the healthier that we will become. I’m going to tell you a quick story, actually, which really highlighted to me how, because when you’re eating a plant, you say, well, how will eating a plant create more oxygen in your body? And I worked for 20 years at Breast Cancer Haven as a therapist in London in Fulham. I had a client who had secondary lung cancer from breast cancer. And she had a carer with her, and she was normally on oxygen, and she hadn’t brought her oxygen with her, and she was really struggling to breathe. And at that time, we had planet organic across the road. I said to the carer, if you could just nip across the road and get a shot of wheatgrass, it may help my client to breathe better. And so she nipped across the road and got a fresh glass of a shot of wheatgrass, just one ounce shot of wheatgrass. And she drank the wheatgrass and she could breathe. I don’t really know quite what made me suggest that that would be a good idea, but it was what I maybe it was my intuition. I don’t know. But it was so profound for my client that she then went out and bought trays of wheatgrass and a juicer, and she juiced wheatgrass. And it really helped her reduce her need for oxygen on a tank, which was quite extraordinary. that showed me as well how amazing if you eat dark chlorophyll and leafy greens, but particularly wheatgrass was very good for that. It actually can make such a huge difference to our ability to breathe. So I was just wanting to say that to give an example of why of why greens actually has such a profound effect on increasing oxygen. So when you’re foraging, you’re exercising. exercising is a massive, important element in health. Now, also, while I was working at Breast Cancer Haver, one of the things that I really recognized is that the people who had done regular exercise before they had even bought cancer or even if they could while they were going through treatment, they were the ones who actually had less side effects from their treatments, believe it or not. I think it’s because we have better circulation. But the one thing that seemed to really help people reduce their side effects was actually to do exercise, to oxygenate their body, but to be healthy in terms of having done a lot of exercise beforehand. But even if we haven’t, we can start today. But exercise is absolutely vital. So foraging is a form of exercise. It may not be cardiovascular exercise, but you’re bending over, you’re picking these up. What I do also want to say about foraging, which is also vital information, is that it’s actually illegal to take the root of a plant. For instance, if you’re foraging for wild garlic, you can pick the leaves and the flowers, but you will be fined if you pick the root. when you are foraging, it’s very important to only take a very little of a plant and never, ever take the root out so that the plant can regenerate. And so in my important points in foraging, it’s essential that you don’t strip a plant of all its leaves or all its flowers or all its seeds or whatever.

Nadia Brydon
I never, never dig a plant up that’s wild. for instance, you can dig a dandelion root up. It’s not illegal to do that. But it is if you’re wild garlic, for instance, so you do need to know what is illegal and what isn’t. that is another aspect that is really important to focus on. I don’t know if that answers your question about how important it is to be outside as much as possible.

Robin Daly
Yeah, very much so. before we finish, you’re going to tell me what you’ve got on offer for would-be foragers.

Nadia Brydon
Okay, so would be foragers. it is on Friday, the 19th of July to Monday, the 22nd of July. we are going to be foraging or we’re going to be going on foraging walks. I’m going to be doing some foraging talks and recipe making with the things that we have actually foraged for. We are going to also make a tincture. for instance, we could make a tincture of, you know, nettle or for instance dandelion or something like that. we’re going to be learning how to make smoothies and juices and what we can put in them in terms of vegetables and what we can forage. And it is going to be just lots of fun with really healthy food. I am charging £500 for the really canned and that includes absolutely everything.

Robin Daly
It’s all your accommodation and everything, so you’ve just got to get there.

Robin Daly
yeah amazing well it does sound like a very interesting weekend and it sounds like it’s going to be packed full so you’d be going home knowing how to find the stuff harvest it how to make it into a decent meal even make it into some medicine

Nadia Brydon
Absolutely, yeah. In terms of books that people can buy, I’m a great fan of James Warren. He’s a great forager and also Richard Maybee. there’s another book, Roger Phillips, which is a very sort of honorable book, which I’ve been relying on a lot. you can learn all about mushrooms foraging for mushrooms. certainly if you’re foraging for mushrooms, you really need to know what you’re doing. I would not recommend anybody go looking for mushrooms if they don’t know what they’re doing.

Robin Daly
Right good advice. Okay, so now give us your website address once more before we finish

Nadia Brydon
It is www.cwmdu-retreat.com. you can learn really all about all the different programs that I offer and what is on our thing here. But it is very beautiful, as you can see. It is. it’s got lots of log burners and it’s very cozy. we always have lots of fun.

Robin Daly
even without the foraging if you just weren’t there for the weekend you’d be a mighty good stress buster so yeah great well thanks very much for telling us about all that fascinating stuff and for that little window into the world of foraging possibilities really appreciated

Nadia Brydon
Yes. But, you know, we’ve got so many amazing, really simple herbs that one can, make such a massive difference in one’s life. Like balthorn, I put that into smoothies, I put plantain, nettle, chickweed, dandelion, pennywort, wild garlic, all of these sort of things. And they are all really important for like the micronutrients and vitamins and all the vitamins and minerals and enzymes and, you know, phytonutrients and really healing and focusing on how we can get healthy.

Robin Daly
Great. All right. On that uplifting message, thanks very much.

Nadia Brydon
Thank you very much, Robin.

Robin Daly
if foraging is one of those things that’s always sounded attractive, but you’ve not found your way to getting started, Nadia’s weekend in Wales could be just the ticket. She’s offering listeners a 10% discount off the cost if you use the code YTL10. I guarantee you’ll love your visit and you will learn a lot.

Robin Daly
Booking is open for our twin conferences for this year. Yes To Life has an online one-day event on the 22nd of June and an in-person one-day conference in London on the 28th of September. You can book for both of these separately at extremely accessible prices. We do our very best to make these highly educational events as affordable as possible. But there’s an even more affordable offer on the table if you book both events together. They go under the combined banner of Pushing the Boundaries, which is a fair description of the nature of integrative medicine in contributing to better treatment experiences and outcomes for those who cancer. We’ll be showcasing many of the biggest names in the field as usual, with more of an international focus to the online event and a homegrown UK focus of the in-person autumn conference. The events are being developed jointly with Cancer Options and Patricia Pete. apart from Patricia, you’ll be hearing from such luminaries as Dr. Nasha Winters, Michael Lerner, inspirational leader of the movement for integration, Dr. Olivia Leslar, expert in psychoneuroimmunology, Dr. Penny Kechagioglu, senior NHS consultant oncologist, Dr. Michael Castro, expert in drug repurposing, Rob Verkerk, a scientific director of the Alliance for Natural Health, and many, many more. These events are not to be missed. Many people have described our conferences as life-changing, as they have massive potential to open up new avenues of healing and connection. The best place to find out more, and of course you can book there as well, is the dedicated website, that’s yestolifeannualconference.org. by the way, if you’re not that familiar with our website, then you may well be missing out on a wealth of resources to help you, from our international online directory of therapies and providers, to both in-person and online wigwam support groups, and so much more. Do take a look. That’s all for this week. Please do join me again next week when I’ll be back with another expert guest for the next Yes to Life show.