A 2 minute 16 second hip-hop song about polyphenols. It covers what they are, why plants make them, what your gut microbes do with them, and which foods have them. Animated biology diagrams play behind karaoke lyrics.
polyphenols-song.mp4: the video, 1920×1080, with lyrics drawn on screen.polyphenols-song.srt: the lyrics as subtitles.
What the song says
| Part | Topic |
|---|---|
| Intro | A phenol is a ring of 6 carbons with an O–H group. "Poly" means many. |
| Verse 1 | Plants make polyphenols for UV protection and defense against pests, and they are concentrated in skins and peels. The four families are flavonoids, phenolic acids, stilbenes, and lignans. Apple skin has quercetin in all colors and anthocyanins (the red pigment) in red skins only. |
| Chorus | Polyphenols are the colors in food, and gut microbes break them down. |
| Verse 2 | Only 5–10% are absorbed in the small intestine. 90–95% reach the colon, where microbes cut them into smaller pieces. Walnuts and pomegranate become urolithins. Soy becomes equol, but only in the roughly 30–50% of people whose microbes can make it. Polyphenols in turn help Bifidobacteria and Akkermansia grow. |
| Verse 3 | Food sources: berries, apple skin, red onion, green and black tea, coffee, dark chocolate and cocoa, beans, olive oil, nuts, whole grains, herbs, and spices. Eating more kinds of plants is linked to having more kinds of gut microbes. |
Sources checked
- Apple peel versus flesh, and red versus green skins: 35 apple cultivars, red and yellow peel extracts.
- 5–10% absorbed and 90–95% reaching the colon, plus Akkermansia: Polyphenol-mediated gut microbiota modulation (Frontiers in Nutrition, 2021).
- Urolithins, equol, and how many people produce equol: Mechanisms of gut bacterial metabolism of dietary polyphenols, (Poly)phenolic compounds and gut microbiome.
- Food sources: Gut microbial metabotypes shape polyphenol bioactivity.
The examples on the family cards (chlorogenic acid in coffee, resveratrol in grapes, lignans in flaxseed, catechins in tea) and the claim that spices are very rich in polyphenols are standard textbook facts. They were not checked against a specific source for this video.
How it is made (src/)
lyrics.json: the lyrics, the bar each line starts on, the tempo (84 BPM), and the chorus melodies.build_audio.py: makes the voice with Microsoft Edge TTS (en-US-AndrewMultilingualNeural) and places each line on the bar grid, speeding up a line with ffmpegatempowhen it is too long for its bar. Chorus lines are re-pitched to the melody, one note per syllable, with the WORLD vocoder (pyworld), plus a harmony a third below. The beat (drums, bass, pad, and arpeggio) is synthesized with numpy. It writessong.wav,timeline.json(start and end times for every word), andsong.srt.scene.html: draws every frame on a canvas fromrender(t)andtimeline.json. Fonts are Fredoka and Inter from Google Fonts, plus Noto Color Emoji.render.mjs: rendersscene.htmlframe by frame at 24 fps with headless Chrome (8 pages in parallel) and pipes the frames to ffmpeg.build.sh: runs all of the above and writes the MP4 and SRT here.
CHROME=/path/to/chrome src/build.sh
It needs uv, ffmpeg, Node, and network access for Edge TTS and Google Fonts. Intermediate files go to $OUT (default /tmp/poly).