Covid-19 is Changing the Virus Game & Blood Vessels are Losing – Dr. William Li with Dave Asprey : 712

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Well, thank you, Dave. It's always a pleasure to speak with you.

You're also part of the Superhuman audio series that people got when they purchased, uh, Superhuman, my last book. So I just wanted to do a quick thank you for, for being a part of just sharing information about the endothelium. And if people didn't get that, didn't read the book, what is an endothelium and why do we care?

Well, endothelium is just a fancy word to describe the cells that line the lining of our blood vessels. And that's actually the lining that, that's a single layer, which is pretty amazing, and it lines 60,000 miles worth of channels that connect every organ in our body. And that's what makes it important. And the work that we've been doing is really trying to understand why people who are infected with COVID actually have all these weird problems that we didn't expect from a simple respiratory virus related to the common cold. And so that was sort of my invitation to put together a team of crack researchers from around the world and do a little biohacking of my own.

I have so many thoughts about what's going on with this stuff, but I'm a little bit obsessed now, uh, with the endothelium because I had Dr. Mansoor Mohammed from the DNA Company on the show. We talked about my DNA Company test results, and it turns out I'm in the 7% of the population with the highest risk genetically of having problems with my endothelium. In other words, if you were to say which of the four killers is the one that's targeting me most aggressively, it would be cardiovascular disease. But that's okay, killers can target me. I'm still not going to let them do it. So screw you, cardiovascular disease. But I am, I'm intrigued with ways to prevent damage to and even regrow or enhance or make more resilient this lining because cardiovascular is such a big deal. Are there things that you know about COVID and the lining of the arteries that maybe aren't well known. And then I want you to tell us what can we do that might work to protect our arteries, whether or not we have COVID.

Right, well, so that's— let's start with the beginning, which is that we are all formed from one blood lake when we're actually in the mom's womb.

I think I saw that in a vampire movie, right?

Pretty much, it's kind of vampire-ish. It's one kind of like, you know, that scene in the Terminator where there's like this ball of liquid metal?

Oh, cool.

Well, imagine that that was blood, and that's how we all start. And then there's a lining that forms around that, kind of like, you know, the covering of an egg, like an egg, beginning of an eggshell, and then that's the endothelium. That's the first lining that we ever have in our entire body, and then that starts dividing and bridging and turning into these different cool channels until we first form our circulation before we form any of our organs, 'cause otherwise the organs wouldn't stay alive. And we start at the beginning, it tells you just how important the endothelium is because it really is the connector. It brings blood, oxygen, nutrients, everything to every single cell in our body. And if we block those channels, we wind up actually having big problems that happen in the heart, happen in the brain, and then diabetes, it can actually happen in your toes, for example, and/or in your foot, and you wind up not being able to heal your wounds. So basically healthy endothelium means healthy body. By the way, that's how athletes grow as well. When your muscles grow, your endothelium actually also kind of flexes their ability to expand. And this lining literally is our cushion. So healthy endothelium, healthy body. Unhealthy endothelium and lots of parts of your body start crying out for help. For COVID, One of the things that we did, I started realizing that doctors and nurses were flailing in the emergency room and the intensive care unit shortly after the lockdown because as the cases grew, and you saw this in Italy and Spain, well, they could diagnose the disease, but there was no treatments. It was only support, and supportive care, which included the ventilator, which usually didn't work that well, led to a lot of bodies piling up. And as I was watching bodies being piled up in ICU, skating rinks in Madrid. It just sort of made me realize how medieval medicine can be. Our health systems can be basically incinerated with essentially a cough that brought civilization to its knees. And the only difference between medievalism and modern-day 21st century is the fact we've got some pretty good science. And so what I started to really feel compelled to do is to activate a research community that I know we got ahold of autopsy tissue from people who died of COVID and we decided that we would just take 21st century technology and do a deep dive, and this is truly the biohacking into what actually happened to these people so we can actually figure out what we could possibly do to save them. And here's a couple of things that we found. We found, of course, that the virus, which is a coronavirus, which is more related to the common cold than the influenza, like that was so much misinformation out there, Originally it was thought that, you know, people were saying, "Oh, this is like a bad flu." No, this is actually like a deadly cold, more like. But the cold doesn't kill most people, and the coronavirus, you get the, by inhaling it, it goes to your nose. Most of the battle for most people actually is fought in your nose and your mucus. You got a good immune system and you've got like the super soldiers of the body that normally protect us, pretty much you kind of end it right there in your nose. But if it figures out how to sneak in, in some people, not in all people, into your body, and by the way, it kind of affects your smell glands, your olfactory bulb, and gets down to your lungs, then it causes a pulmonary problem, a respiratory problem, a lung infection, and that's where all the action was. But actually what I saw, you had action in the brain, you had action in the kidneys, in the heart. People were having, feeling like they had a heart attack. They'd go in, they'd get dye shot into their coronary vessels and they were crystal clear, like there was no blockages, what was going on? And then you had the COVID toe, this big beefy red inflamed toe. What connects all those things? To me, it's the endothelium. It's the blood vessels that is what connects all these other unrelated organs. So that's what we dove in to take a look at.

[Speaker:DAVE_ASPREY] And we know that coronaviruses typically like endothelial layers. So the sinuses, the lining of the lungs, lining of the arteries, lining of the gut. Coronaviruses live in all of those things when you get a cold, depending on which variety, but those are the typical homes, and that's why they've found it in those things, you know, the, the renal tubes in the kidneys, similar tissues. They like to live there. The question is, are they what's causing the damage? Did you guys dig in to find out? Okay, just because it's present doesn't mean it did it. I, by the way, I'm gonna promote a conspiracy theory about coronavirus. Not whatever, like, I'm sorry, unless you saw them do it, you don't know the hell released it or if it was released or all that. That's not what I mean. but a medical conspiracy theory about maybe how medicine got it wrong. But first, tell me the evidence. How do we know that just because it's there, it did something bad?

Yeah. Well, so first, you're absolutely right. Coronavirus loves to live in these little cell linings in our body, in our cavities. But those are not endothelial cells. Those are epithelial cells.

Thank you. You are correct.

They are close cousins.

Similar. Similar. Yes.

But they, but they don't kiss.

Yeah.

Thank you. And so it's actually very rare that you actually find a virus or a bacteria invading an endothelial cell. Now, how do we figure this out? We actually took people who were at the end stage, obviously, it's a crime scene investigation, CSI, and we went down and did transmission electron microscopy. So this is actually using an electron microscope to resolve at the cellular level what we saw. And we actually saw for the first time viruses invading endothelial cells and filling them up like a gumball machine. And when we saw that picture, we saw these viruses were destroying the membranes of the endothelial cell from the inside out. So, they were literally like zombies getting in, infecting, and then basically pulverizing the membranes from the inside out.

[Speaker:Dave Asprey] Can you actually look at live tissues with electron microscopy though? I thought they had to be sort of dead and fried to do that.

Right, right. So that's the thing is that it's— that's actually— you have tissue that's been fixed, so it's dead tissue versus living tissue. We haven't yet figured out how to do living microscopy at that level, although we're close to it. And you're absolutely right. What you really want to be able to see is the actual crime taking place. We saw sort of the aftermath of the home invasion, so to speak.

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Did you see anything with red blood cells themselves? Did you look at those?

We did. We didn't see much invasion in the red blood cells. We saw them, we saw the viruses kind of hovering around them, kind of like flying like UFOs around them, but they weren't— we didn't see them actually getting into the red blood cells. That would be like malaria or, you know, some other —right, so invading.

The reason I'm asking is I came across an intriguing set of 3 studies from 3 different mechanisms and 3 different research groups that all said there's something going on with our hemoglobin. And are you familiar with that research?

There's been so much research.

Tell me which ones you're looking at. So these were all groups that said that there's damage to the hemoglobin that is— it's there to the extent that it's releasing free iron. Um, so essentially it's shredding hemoglobin. Uh, and one of them was, oh, here's the genetic propensity. Another, another one was, here's what it's doing. There are, there are different mechanisms and different groups who apparently weren't talking to each other. And they all, it's like when you see 3 of those that all say the same thing, I'm like, ah, it's probably happening. Um, and then I look at, at, at that and I look at what's going on with, uh, these, you know, walking hypoxic people. So you get one of these little SpO2 meters I've got on my finger now, if you're watching on YouTube. And it's funny, there's people who walk around at 90% blood saturation. By the way, you probably need to go to the ICU if you're at 90 or a little bit less. And I know about these things because I do intermittent hypoxic training and because I used to have actually pseudo-hypoxia issues throughout my body. Thank you, Lyme disease and toxic mold. So like, I feel like, oh, I, I see this. And the symptoms of hypoxia are extensive blood clotting problems with the endothelial layer specifically. Kidney damage, you get the most hypoxia in the toes, COVID toes, damage to the heart, damage to the brain, and symptoms of free iron are damage to the lining of the arteries and damage very specifically to the lungs where you see it the most, where there's oxygen plus iron. And I'm thinking, how much of this is hemoglobin and how much of this is actually just a direct attack on the lining of the pipes, so to speak?

Yeah, so I'll try to put it together for you as we know it. So this is, we're actually, trying to dissect apart a disaster, a natural disaster in slow motion. So I'm telling you, I'm giving you a picture of what we know today. It's cool. And I actually think it'll actually help make sense of all this. So here's what we saw. We saw the virus invading the endothelial cells, the vascular cells, the lining of the blood vessels, and shredding them from the inside out. Now, the endothelial lining is incredibly important. It's actually the slippery surface that all of our blood cells actually tumble along as our heart pumps you know, the liters of blood through our body every single minute. If you wind up having any disturbance of the lining of the smooth surface, slippery surface of the lining, so think about the normal endothelium being like ice skating rink after the Zamboni machine ran over it, right? So it's clean the ice, smooth slippery surface. You're gonna go out there and you're gonna skate like nobody else. If you wind up having scuffing up the ice, That's damaged endothelium. Now your skate gets caught and you start tripping and falling. That's— so that actually can start shredding red blood cells and causing blood clots. The more blood clots you have, the more shredding you have of the red blood cells, the more iron you start releasing. And there's one more thing that we found. Okay, so what—

before we go into the one thing, just to make sure I understand this, you're proposing that the damage to the lining of the lungs is causing damage to red blood cells and releasing free iron rather than things going on specifically with the red blood cells themselves?

You know, I can't exclude that. Okay. So this is, you know, I think we don't know enough about this to be able to say it's one or the other.

Oh, that's why you're proposing, but you're not saying you know, but you're hypothesizing and just sort of going on what you've seen, but not excluding other things.

We're not excluding other things, but I will tell you what we do know is that when you actually damage the endothelium, and we found this out by looking at these lungs, the blood clots were forming right exactly where the damaged endothelium is. So this is very consistent with the pathology of what you would expect. Now, here's the other thing that we observed that was really unusual. Blood vessels, when they're blocked in that intermittent hypoxia situation that you talked about, they normally have a response, an emergency response. So think about pulling a fire alarm in a building when you start seeing smoke coming down a hallway. That emergency alarm, which sets off the alarm, has blood vessels trying to divide so you can bypass blockages really, really quickly. This is a reaction. And we call it a reactive form of angiogenesis. It's got a fancy name called intussusception. And think about it as a single blood vessel, and you're in a car driving down a single-lane tunnel, and there's an emergency. So the tunnel now needs to divide into two, and you're driving down this tunnel. And what it does is the tunnel drops a sheetrock from the ceiling to the floor, and then it splits. Now you got from one vessel to two in an attempt to bypass. Now, if you're the car, red blood cell trying to drive through that, you can't get through now. And so now you tumble through and you get caught up in a damaged endothelium. Now it's even more clotty. And the second reason that blood clots are forming is intussusceptive reactive angiogenesis. This normally happens just for a few minutes. We found this happening time and time again over vast sectors of the lung. Now, even though you have this reaction, you can't do the bypass. And this, we think, also explains that happy hypoxia you were describing. Happy hypoxia really means that people that shouldn't be sitting up talking on a cell phone or talking to their family member or talking to the doctor in the emergency room shouldn't be sitting up with a pulse ox, an oxygen saturation of 85, 80, even lower than that. They should be unconscious. And what we think is happening—

Are you seeing people at 80 now?

Yeah, there's— it's even that.

God, I mean, I'll take myself down to 80 by breathing air with no oxygen in it on purpose, but man, you're seriously loopy at 80. I can't imagine driving in that state.

And what we're saying is that these massive reactive androgenic clotty lungs are forming in different geographies of the lung. So think about a lung like a, like a cherry pie, and you've cut it up into different segments, and now you're actually mashing different segments one at a time. You still got a little viable pie up until the last, last chunk gets like smashed down. So we think that what's happening is that the remaining pieces of pie in the lung that are still oxygenating are just hanging on, keeping you conscious, able to do your thing, and then suddenly you kind of tip over when you get that last piece of pie smashed down. That's it, you drop like a rock. And this is not something we see with H1N1. We're not seeing this. We didn't even see this with SARS-1 or MERS. So there's something very unusual about this. You've got damaged, infected endothelium, damaged endothelium, you've got reactive angiogenesis creating a more clotty thing. And then I'll tell you the other thing we saw is massive inflammation, your immune system trying to clear out the virus in the infected endothelium. So there's been sort of this slightly inaccurate term saying this is an autoimmune disease, you don't want a strong immunity. Actually, it's normal immunity trying to get rid of the blood, the virus that happens to be in your blood vessels. In that single endothelial layer. It's doing its job. Unfortunately, your blood vessels are in the way, and so it trashes the blood vessels now. Now you got a third reason to actually cause blood clot. And so as this is happening in the lung and starting to spread elsewhere in the body, we're thinking that this is the connecting piece between why we're seeing clots in the brain, inflammation in the heart, the COVID toe, the kidney damage, and yes, it's completely linked to hypoxia.

There's another compound a lot of people don't know about that you'd probably think is some kind of a weird vegan supplement, uh, VEGF. Uh, what is it? Is it a part of this whole thing? Do we need to suppress it in people with COVID Kind of walk listeners through that.

So we actually looked exactly at VEGF. So VEGF sounds like a vegan thing. Tell you what it is, it stands for vascular endothelial growth factor. It is is the natural fertilizer for the endothelium. Endothelium loves it. It's Miracle-Gro for endothelium, actually. And by the way, I was part of the team that helped to discover this back in the '80s, so I know quite a lot about it. Thank you.

It's been a long and detailed part of what's happened in my own biology. So, your work actually helped me to be a successful biohacker.

So, I am mad respect. Listen, it's totally cool that we're talking about it after so many years. It's more relevant now. So, Well, here's what we found. We not only looked at the pictures of the virus infecting the endothelium, we not only looked at the actual evidence for the clot, we also went— dove down to look at the proteins and the genes, and we found VEGF was elevated up the yin-yang like crazy.

Like crazy. It would have to be because it's what causes you to grow new blood vessels.

And that's exactly what's happening when you got all these damaged endothelium, the blood clots, the shredded endothelium, the, the shredded endothelium, but also the shredded blood cells, you got release of the iron, you got all kinds of problems mangled up into these tiny networks that are the gas exchange networks. And VEGF, your body's natural fertilizer, comes out. It's kind of like an emergency distress call. Please, we need more vessels, we need better blood flow, we need to clear up this, uh, this gigantic, uh, catastrophe that's occurring— hypoxic catastrophe. Unfortunately, this clotting phenomenon, you know, blood vessels can normally grow new ones to actually get around problems when it's really focal. But when you actually have large geography, you know, think about a campfire you can put out compared to a forest fire, not so easy to put out. Campfires are like, you know, little bits of inflammation, forest fires, COVID-19. And so this is what we're actually seeing that's actually happening. We are now diving into the brain, the lung, the leg, the kidneys, the other organs, try to figure out what, what else is going on in other organs.

A lot of anti-cancer drugs will lower VEGF because in cancer, they're— the Western medicine approach is, hey, since cancer likes to grow new blood vessels, let's stop blood vessel growth throughout the body with drugs to, quote, starve the cancer. You could also just not give it sugar, but that's a different conversation. That's a little bit more in the keto world. And there are many, many other cancer things we'll talk about on another show, or many other shows. But when it comes to this, should people be looking at any cancer drug that lowers angiogenesis if they're getting COVID? Have you guys looked at that?

Yeah, so I'll tell you, there are clinical trials using anti-VEGF, anti-angiogenic drugs for cancer that are actually being tried for COVID. I actually think that's the wrong way to go. I think that— and I'll tell you, because I think the blood vessels are good, I think the endothelium is good, I think we want to be feeding the endothelium. In fact, I think we should be— I think we should actually be replenishing it, and we need to do everything we can to actually coax the factors and the cells that rebuild the endothelium. I think we need to get the general contractors of the endothelium to be coming out to help repair what's going on at the same time the damage is occurring. And by the way, I also think, Dave, that after we get past COVID, like if you actually recover from COVID one of the things you'll hear from people is how long it takes for them to get back to their normal lung function or muscle function. Yeah, we think that's the residual trashing of the vasculature that is still slow to repair itself. So I think that one of the things that we need to do is to quickly do what we can to restore, replenish, rebuild, regenerate endothelium even after COVID. This thing ain't done with just the infection.

I love it that you're saying that. There's, there's a couple pieces of technology that I use at Upgrade Labs that are very, very powerful for that, that are changing vegF levels and nitric oxide levels and angiogenesis and all that. You can do it environmentally, and certainly there's pharmaceutical things that could be really interesting. So I'm I think we're gonna see a huge increase in research around the effects, just like of intermittent fasting, intermittent hypoxia. And I, as far as I can tell, we are the first recovery and like we invented that kind of recovery clinic thing like that, that industry category, but we're the first people to make that widely publicly available. So I'm pretty sure that this hypoxia thing is gonna work and if not, there's probably some breathing exercises that'll help. Anything that induces hypoxia is going to raise VEGF, right? Right.

Well, I'll tell you what's interesting. So, I'm also involved with wound healing and tissue repair, which is the next-door neighbor to regeneration. All you got to do is kind of reach out and you'll touch regeneration. So, I've been very involved with those programs as well. Right now, in wound healing clinics, people with chronic wounds, diabetes, venous plumbing problems, or hardening of the arteries where their legs, their skin breaks down, they got chronic wounds. They, if they have COVID, they're being treated with hyperbaric oxygen, which actually, I'll tell you, I'll get to this for a second. It used to be thought that you're actually raising the oxygen and doing better for the body. And that does occur, but it's pretty transient. What's actually happening with HBO is that between dives in the dive chamber, the hyperbaric chamber, you're creating relative hypoxia. So in the chamber, you're oxygen happy. The moment you come out, you're relatively oxygen starved. The longer you do this, the more you're resetting your, your body's expectation for, for good oxygen. When you come out of the chamber, back to your normal life, you're relatively hypoxic. That is the trigger to a chain reaction in your endothelium to create more VEGF and to stimulate stem cells to come out of your bone marrow and rebuild your endothelium.

Well, I sure hope that we haven't lost listeners on this. I'll just tell you guys, if whether or not you have been exposed to COVID, whether you have any symptoms that are lingering afterwards, in fact, the odds are probably that you don't, you know, that whole 80% of people don't. Notice they got it. But if you're someone who noticed you got it and has lingering symptoms, you are going to have to learn a lot about VEGF and essentially how to restore your cardiovascular system. And funny enough, let's say, okay, you didn't get that. Are you over 50? Are you in one of the, the groups that's more likely to have cardiovascular issues because of your genetics, your genetic heritage? Certainly it is not distributed evenly across people from different parts of the the world, right? So you're gonna have to own that because the big 4 killers— if you guys read Superhuman, it's cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. And oh, wait a minute, is diabetes a pre-existing risk factor for all of the other 3? Yes, it is. In fact, if you have diabetes, you're going to get one of the other 3. Which leads me to my question: why do people who have diabetes keep getting sick and having all these problems? What's the link there, Dr.

Lee? Well, endothelium that's disturbed is a hallmark of all those conditions that you actually just described.

Do you mean high blood sugar fries your arteries? Is that what I just heard you say?

You know, there's any frying of the arteries actually does a gigantic disservice. And, you know, diabetes is one of these tricky phenomenon because, you know, high sugar definitely will do it. And also the byproducts of diabetes. So it's a metabolic disease, which means that pretty much all kinds of things get thrown out of your body as a side, as you know, Think about, you know, cleaning up after a dinner party. You got a lot of stuff to clean up. And if it's a small dinner party and things are done orderly, it's not too bad, it's an easy cleanup. If it's a big party with a lot of trashy food and all kinds of stuff, you got a ton of stuff to scrape off. And in diabetes, think about it like a trashy dinner party with tons of junk, tons of food to throw away. It is a metabolic waste. And not only sugar, But a lot of these other metabolic byproducts are also problematic for the endothelium. So while, you know, it's, it's oversimplistic to say diabetics and endothelial disease, in fact it is.

If you were invited to a dinner party that you had to attend and everyone there except for you had active COVID cases and you could eat either a whole bunch of popsicles made with sugar or a plate of French fries, which one would you eat?

Wow, that's the, uh, would you jump into a volcano or be eaten by shark? Um, well, I could imagine if I made the popsicle myself out of whole fruit.

I don't know, I'm talking like, you know, good old-fashioned artificial flavorings, corn syrup, sugar, all the— all the—

you know, that's a dinner party I wouldn't be going to.

It is indeed.

But the real question there is, okay, which is worse, like oxidative fried stuff or sugar during COVID You know, you could, you could, you could probably, uh, actually for COVID, I don't really know, but we don't know yet. But I'll tell you, sugar is definitely going to be a problem for the endothelium.

I, I feel like sugar would be the worst choice, and it's because sugar in the short term suppresses immune function in a, like, by 50%. So you're more likely to get sick from it. And of course there's arterial damage. But the arterial damage from the fried stuff might last longer, but it's not going to suppress your immunity as much even though it increases inflammation, I think. Well, I wouldn't want to flip that coin either.

Well, here's the thing. The sugar will also change, alter your microbiome, which then will lower, will lower your other defenses, including your immune system. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about it. Whereas you're right, fried foods, not good for you. It's kind of a longer kind of longer tail on that problem. And you probably have to eat more of it. You know, you can probably have a couple of fries and live with a little sugar. You know, it doesn't take much sugar to actually change your microbiome.

That's a, it's a good point. So if you're listening to this going, oh wait, what am I going to do? Well, look, you really shouldn't eat either one of those the rest of the time. But if it's winter and there's all sorts of viruses going around and you're susceptible and you're already pre-diabetic— by the way, that's just marketing for diabetic. Then you need to, uh, you need to pay attention to both of those. All right, so now let's say someone's got COVID, uh, and they're saying, I'm starting to not feel so good. I'm afraid my, uh, the, the microcapillaries in my lungs are basically dividing and dividing like Agent Smith in The Matrix. How's that for a visual image? Uh, now if they're doing that, okay, you have the entire arsenal of Western and, uh, functional medicine at your fingertips, and you're You're well-versed in both. You know, you're, you're one of those quote, you know, real doctors who also has, you know, E2B disease and has, has written a meaningful book talking about what's going on here. Okay. Everything's at your fingertips. No one at the hospital is gonna stop you from getting a vitamin C IV or anything else like that. What would you think about doing for yourself? So now it's okay to go out on a limb and say, I don't know, but I think this is a 51% chance and I don't care how much it costs, I'm gonna do it. So kind of go out on a limb a little bit here, but this is only for you. You're not recommending for patients, people listening to this, don't do what he says. This is what a doctor knows his own biology would do for himself, right?

Well, if I weren't sick enough to go into the hospital, because you lose a lot of control of your choice—

pre-hospital, you're not in the hospital yet, you don't want to go.

That's an even better— how about, how about this? I feel sick, I get tested, and I'm positive. Okay, now I'm going to stay at home and I'm going to try to— what— and here's, here's how I think what you mean by your challenge: what can I do to keep myself from getting into the hospital, from having to go to the hospital?

That's really— that is really what I mean, right?

So, so I mean, I can tell you because I've thought a great deal about this over the last couple of months. Number one, I would replete with supplementation the things, the factors that are critical for immunity, vitamin D, vitamin C, vitamin B12, iron. Those are like zinc. Those are key things.

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Backed by science. Well, hold on. You just said iron. Are you going to get enough of that from your broken arteries?

Well, you want to get it before your broken arteries. And I'll tell you, if you actually have good immunity, remember I told you the battle's fought in the nose. If you actually have a good strong immune system, your front gate, which is in your nose, your schnoz, ought to be able to tackle this as much as possible. So you want to actually sort of like lower that as much as possible, but that's just supporting your immune system. Secondly, you know, you can actually break down all the gateway points that this virus actually is screwing up your body. So the front door, that's where your IgA is. You can actually eat foods like mushrooms with beta-glucan and vitamin D that'll up your IgA in your nose. You can actually have cranberry juice that will actually upregulate another member of your immune cells. This is sort of the—

is that just D-mannose, the sugar that's in there? Because cranberry juice is actually— it's not that high in sugar, that's pomegranate. But cranberry juice, I guess you would just drink it straight, but it is— is it mannose or something else?

Well, it's actually the ellagitannins. The ellag— oh, okay, it's the red stuff in it and the anthocyanins, right, the dyes that are actually upping this. And what's happening is the ellagic acid Exactly. And I'll tell you, so if you think about your immune system as a group of super soldiers that are in your body, and different troops, different special forces do different things. Cranberries will actually up your defenses, not only with the IgA, but also these special cells called delta gamma T cells that are also the first responders in infection. So what I think about to keep myself from getting sicker is actually to ramp up the front gate. You wanna make sure, 'cause if you lose control of the door, That's it. Enemy comes, just comes pouring into your house, right? So that's one of the things I would think about. Secondly is that if you've got enemies in your house, you actually have to ramp up your super soldiers, your T cells and other types of cells there. So what's interesting is they've been, they've actually studied things like broccoli sprouts is interesting, can actually up your natural killer cells and your T cells. It was a really amazing study done at University of North Carolina where they took young, healthy people getting just a flu vaccine. And, and then they gave a group a placebo drink, and they gave another group 2 cups of broccoli sprouts just pureed into a shake and gave them the drink, just a cup a day. It's actually 2 cups of sprouts. And then they gave them the flu vaccine. And what they found is that in the people who had, uh, the placebo drink, they had a normal immune response. But in the kids who actually wound up having the broccoli sprout drink, their natural killer cells amplified by 22 times. That's like an order of magnitude.

Sprouts plus the vaccine was, was better?

Yeah, it's just like, well, the sprout—

well, it might be better unless that was such an explosion of immune cells that it might have been too much.

Well, except that they never got sick, and they actually measured the viral particles that were the nose and basically completely nuked all the viruses that were left in the nose of the people, whereas people that got the placebo still had virus hanging around.

Okay, so basically broccoli sprouts in general are going to be good for you. Now, will the sprout extract work, or do you have to actually— probably—

no, no, I think, I think a sprout extract would probably work.

Okay, there's some enzyme-activated stuff that I wrote about where it turns out there's an enzyme in there, or you could use a little piece of radish with an extract, and then the enzyme in the radish can activate the sprouts.

This is, this is the myrosinase. Right? Yes. Which, by the way, if you're actually having— so here's the thing about that. Let me explain for your audience. Basically, the stuff that's good in broccoli sprouts and in broccoli is trapped inside the plant cell. It's so powerful, it's kind of locked in, in these secret pouches. And because plant cells are pretty hard, unlike human cells, which are pretty soft, you need an enzyme to break it down so it's available, bioavailable for your body if you take it. So if you actually put the sprouts in a blender or a puree or a bullet, you'll actually essentially mechanically shear those cells and open them up. If you just actually eat it, you got to chew it. You're— the chewing motion will actually release the enzymes that will then break down the cell wall to release the good stuff. These are the isothiocyanates or the sulforaphanes. These are the chemical, uh, sort of the alphabet soup chemicals that actually will do the job on the immune system, the good job.

And if you cook the broccoli, you don't get the benefits? Right.

Not, not the same way. And in fact, you can destroy the benefits if you overcook it.

Uh, all right. There's another thing that's interesting that I wanted to ask about. So a lot of the functional medicine docs that I've been talking with about COVID and I'm, I am less stressed about it than a lot of people, uh, and at the very beginning said, I'm pretty sure we don't know how many people actually are sick. So all these made-up death numbers don't make sense, but But with the last SARS we had, they said it was going to be whatever, a 5% death rate or something. At the end of the day, it was 0.02%. So there was a 65x reduction after, you know, 2 years after the virus and they actually could figure out how many people really had it. So I'm thinking, well, given the history of track records from the WHO, CDC, when they don't know the population percentage who has it, they make up these numbers and they get a lot of funding in panic. I'm just going to guess that it's going to be a 65x reduction. And some early studies said 40, one of them said 40 times more people had it than they thought. Another one said 80. It might be around 60. That said, if you get it, this thing is worse than a cold. It's worse than the other SARS. Like there's, there's no denying that. I'm just sort of saying, okay, so this, this is something that I'm less worried about, but I've spent a lot of time like you, you sort of get sucked into it because all of the doctor people that you know and you talk with stuff about, that's all they talk about for 3 months. Your brain gets engaged. So most of the people that I know and respect have said quercetin, quercetin, quercetin, and I've been recommending that. Quercetin lowers VEGF levels, which is really interesting. So is that the reason? Also, so does green tea extract, which is another very common recommendation from the functional medicine side. So maybe if you have this stuff and you take those things, you're going to get a little bit less of this, or is that just me making stuff up?

Uh, nope, you're actually saying the right thing. It's just that quercetin is much more complicated than just doing one molecule doing One thing, the other thing, the other thing that quercetin does besides being a great antioxidant is that it actually coaxes out your endothelial stem cells. So quercetin also helps to rebuild your endothelium. So while it does inhibit VEGF in sort of a bad sort of way, it actually coaxes out your bone marrow-derived endothelial progenitor cells. It's kind of like, it's kind of like waving a flower in front of a beehive. You think about your beehive as your bone marrow with all these stem cells in it that that have the capability of regenerating your endothelial lining. So when the quercetin is kind of like the daisy you're waving outside of the, across the street to the beehive, those bees will see it and they come flying out and they just basically start to rebuild as well. So I think quercetin is actually, and foods containing quercetin are actually a good bet. That's what I was gonna say. That's the other thing that I would do to try to keep myself from getting to the hospital is I would start eating foods that have quercetin. You know, of course, what's a great example of that? Capers is one of them.

Oh, come on, how many pounds of capers you can eat to get one quercetin tablet?

Well, you could eat a quercetin tablet, but the thing is, I, I love tasty food, so you can—

Capers are good, but man, that's a lot of salt. I'm trying to think, how many capers can you tolerate? Well, you can—

you don't need to actually eat all the same things, and there's a ton of other foods with, with all these molecules. And so I think, you know, one of the things, I, I guess is I started off by saying supplementation to really kind of shore up your immunity. And then actually, you know, having a diverse diet of things that you love that actually also help ramp up the super soldiers that actually at the choke points that you can intercept the virus. By the way, you also wanna clear the virus out of the body, which is also an important thing that you wanna be able to do.

Oh, how do I do that?

Well, there's a bunch of things that you can actually do 'cause natural killer cells can actually, assist with that. It turns out that some of the natural killer cell substances— I'll give you kind of an odd one that is pretty cool, most people don't know about this— is oysters. Oysters actually contain a polypeptide polysaccharide, protein and polysaccharide. Not, you know, it's not like, you know, going oysters on a half shell, you just like, you know, shuck an oyster and suck it down. This has been studied in Asia where, you know, Most of you almost never go to— when you're in Asia, you very rarely see, you know, people have these fancy platters of oysters. Most of the time they're cooking the oysters, or if they're not grade A oysters that are suitable for shucking and opening up, they cook them down and they cook them into foods or they make them in oyster sauce. So this— so what researchers have done in Asia, they've looked at these super concentrated, boiled-down, caramelized oysters And they found that actually out of them comes peptides and polysaccharides that naturally exist within the oyster. And these actually enlarge the immune organs when you feed them to animals. They naturally get bigger thymus, they get a bigger spleen, they get their lymph system actually expands. That explains everything.

Sorry, medical jokes, I couldn't help it. The expansion, right?

Well, what I always say is that this is the one case where where you can be sure that bigger is better because when they actually studied for cancer, but this is— oyster extracts are one way to actually expand your immune system, your anti-cancer immunity.

So oyster extracts are interesting. Um, there's a whole market in China for very specific types of oyster extracts for erectile dysfunction. All right, so you are now taking your quercetin, your vitamin D, vitamin C, eating course-enriched foods, eating oysters, and eating broccoli or broccoli sprouts, and you're feeling like you've, you've got this handled.

You know what, I'd add some blueberries. Yeah, one of my favorites. Blueberry powder or fresh blueberries or frozen blueberries have been studied. What I think is really cool is that they've been studying young, healthy people because that's really where the action is at, you know. Most medical research is aimed at studying throwing stuff, chemicals, at sick people. But I think we really need to be able to do in the 21st century, as we, you know, like really step up into the present day and going into the future, is really start studying the stuff, throwing healthy stuff at healthy people to really see what we can actually do to enhance natural functions, right? So blueberry powder has been studied, and we know that actually you enhance your immunity just by having a handful of blueberries pretty much every day. We also know that when you drink blueberry, like a blueberry smoothie before going into athletic activity. So if you're— when you're working out, you're actually building your immunity and you can actually cause a quick peak of your immunity. And when you stop and you're recovering, the immunity that you're having during workout plummets kind of down, back down to baseline pretty quickly. But if you have blueberries before you work out, you get a tail of your immunity, like it goes up up with exercise. This is food plus exercise. That makes total sense. Go— your immunity jacks up, and then with blueberries, it stays up for a few days. So you get, you get a longer tail on the immunity from your exercise and your blueberries.

You know, I use several different kinds of blueberry powder and extracts in the formula that I made for Bulletproof called Polyphenomenol. I, I'm a huge fan of those things, but I do worry a little bit about just sugar. Yeah, if you're eating a lot of blueberries I've noticed— I mean, I'm wearing my continuous glucose monitor. You can see an effect from a couple handfuls of blueberries. Do you worry too much about that or it's worth it? Here's—

here is the thing. Added sugar has got no added value. Sugars that come in with fruits, they have their downsides, but you're actually getting this other stuff that come along with it as well. The scenario you gave me is that, you know, I want to sort of try to fight the COVID I would say from what— from the research that I know, The good stuff in the blueberries outweighs some of the risk of the fructose that's actually in it. And by the way, if you're going to actually eat— here's a great example for vitamin C, right? You want to get vitamin C, you can get from a lot of different sources. Tomatoes have got a ton of vitamin C and orange is a lot of vitamin C. Orange got a lot more sugar in it. But you want to— but a guava, for example, actually has a ton more vitamin C, like 9 times more vitamin C, but it's got a lot less sugar than an orange. And so, you know, like you have to kind of balance, you know, sort of the scale of which— what are you looking for, what else can it be found in, and how do you actually minimize the stuff you don't want?

You know, you're, you're bringing up a really important point, which is one that you make in Eat to Beat Disease, your, your big book where you, you cover this kind of a thing. I, I struggle with this. People go, oh, you should eat bananas because they're power-packed with potassium. And you're like, actually, there's a lot of foods that have more potassium, but these are— it's the same kind of thing as saying you should eat this bowl of cyanide because it's power-packed with potassium. They never look at the downside of anything. I'm not saying bananas are cyanide. I'm just saying that you look at the sum of the parts of a food and you say, what's it going to do? But the idea that, oh, you should eat, you know, whole wheat because it has fiber, like, yeah, but there's a lot of bad stuff in that lining that has the fiber, and you can get fiber from green beans, you know. So I feel like that's almost missing from health literature when we dumb it down. So what you said there was really nuanced, like what else is in there? What are some other top vitamin C things that you would recommend that people eat?

Well, I think guava is a sort of a, is one of the most highly packed. Do you eat the seeds? I do. Okay. I do. I think, But cherry tomatoes are another way of actually getting a lot of punch, like bang for the buck, because they tend to have a lot of lycopene for the small mass that they're in. You can get as much lycopene, for example, which is not vitamin C, but it's another kind of passenger in a tomato that's actually good for your prostate, for example.

I take a ton of that stuff in pills because tomatoes are gross, by the way. Not everyone agrees with that. It's probably like a— a lectin thing. Either you like tomatoes or you don't.

But, uh, well, and when I also look, I mean, this is the thing about that I wrote about in Eat to Beat Disease. There's so many foods that have so many elements that are good for you, exactly as you were just saying. You get to pick your weapon in terms of what foods you're actually putting in your body. And the weapons, you know, like most foods, actually double-edged swords, you know, like they've got some bad stuff, they got some good stuff. You gotta— you have to sort of navigate knowledgeably, minimize the things you don't want, maximize the thing you do want, mix it up so you're not just like going after one thing pounding it down your system. That's not how nature designed us, you know, like otherwise, otherwise it would be like, you know, like a fruit bat that only eats one kind of fruit, you know. We're not that way.

And so, like me as a kid, just Pop-Tarts, nothing else. Now you're right. It's, it's a fascinating way of thinking about, okay, you know, during a pandemic, what would you do that's different? Supplement. And, you know, the idea, okay, you might not be able to get guava, but you can certainly do a supplement if you have to. You could probably get some tomatoes, but you sort of do your best, but perfection is not required, which, which I think is, is a really important thing.

Dietary fiber for your microbiome is also really important because pretty much, you know, there's an air traffic control system, your gut bacteria in your, you know, in our intestines that really helps to air traffic control your immune system. Right? So that 70% of our immune system is actually in our gut, not elsewhere. When I went to medical school, that's not what was taught. Now we know that pretty much, you know, like gut bacteria and immune system, they're like old college roommates with a thin wall, which is your gut. Bacteria just knock on that wall and the immune system can hear it and basically respond to it.

I, in the early days of the pandemic, I said, all right, let's look at the cytokines. IL-6 is the cytokine that's happening So I have, I know a lot about IL-6 because it gets elevated when you have toxic mold. And I did a documentary on toxic mold and it's, it's been a big part of my, uh, losing 100 pounds. So I'm like, here's 40 things including blueberries and quercetin and green tea extract. And in fact, everything but oysters we've talked about lowers IL-6. So if you want to stop the cytokine storm, well, it seems like you could take a whole bunch of that stuff, uh, and you're much less likely to get the overwhelming inflammation. What's the connection between your arterial lining and the cytokine storm? All right.

So, when we dove down into these tissues of people who had died of COVID-19, we specifically looked at the cytokines. And the general belief, the one that was— that's in the media and actually most medical community thinks this, is that the cytokine storm is your immune system pretty much emptying all its luggage onto the bed. We showed that the virus actually manipulates the cytokines in very specific ways. Yes. And this virus actually turns up certain cytokines and turns down certain cytokines. It turns on the ones that helps it grow, and it turns down the ones that actually are harmful for it. So it's a diabolical thing. It's more of a— it's, you know, it's, it's not so much sort of like this wildfire, which is how people think about cytokine storms. Big inflammation in the lung, can't stop it, runaway, you know, freight train kind of inflammation. Now this is more like a Bond villain hiding in a volcano with a diabolical plot to take over the world. You know, it is—

it's very interesting when you get deep into what bacteria and apparently some viruses do. They don't just randomly wantonly kill stuff. There's a reason they do it. And some of the, the bacterial things like Bartonella, which is a Lyme co-infection, and Babesia itself they're causing cytokine storms because when they can blow up a cell, they eat the guts of the cell to grow more of themselves. They're doing it strategically, not to give you love handles or, you know, to make you feel bad. And so it's hard to imagine that a virus would evolve in bats and all that stuff that was going to just spend its, its, you know, genetic cycles. It's not really alive to have ATP and all that, but why would it do that if there wasn't an evolutionary benefit over time. Exactly. I mean, it's—

so we don't understand it fully yet, but I will tell you, Dave, you know, the, the classic cytokine storm is basically like a guy going into a town square with an explosive vest blowing up everything. That's not what's happening.

You can trigger that chemically, but you get very different cytokines. In fact, you can trigger with hypoxia and you get different cytokines. But if it's, if it's a thing, and since you're measuring the specific ones, you can know it's a smoking gun. It's like a fingerprint almost. In fact, I bet Yeah, you could tell, oh, this is COVID just on which cytokines were in what ratio.

If I could show you the data, it looks exactly like a fingerprint. You know, when you map out all the whorls and arches of actually what's actually happening with the cytokine, it's clearly— there's a pattern. It is. And by the way, we also compared this with, uh, people who died of H1N1, uh, from the first SARS, and it's completely different. There's some overlap, but it's completely different.

That is fascinating. All right, one more question for you before we end the interview. I have been an outspoken proponent of microdose nicotine— not smoking, not tobacco, but nicotine itself— as we age, because of the 30, 35 years of research showing that it reduces Alzheimer's disease, in, in increases something called PGC-1 alpha, the same way exercise does, and and encourages angiogenesis. So we're talking 1 milligram in your 40s, 2 milligrams a day. A cigarette's like 20 milligrams. So just like one little spray, half a little tablet here, a little bit of gum here, as well as it makes you feel good and you, you know, you can write books and stuff like it's good for the brain. And some studies are saying, oh, people who smoke don't get sick. But other studies say, oh, nicotine increases number of ACE2 receptors and the spike proteins are going to come and get you. And so two questions for you. One, nicotine, not smoking, good, bad for your, your arterial lining? Or, or during coronavirus, is the answer the same both times? Is it different at some times? You know, would you, would you start nicotine? They're hoarding it in France right now.

You know, such a sophisticated, sharp question you're asking, and I'll try to boil down what I know about it. And nobody, by the way, nobody knows whether it's the right thing to do for coronavirus, but I'll tell you one thing. We started off this interview talking about the lining of your blood vessels, the endothelial cells, and it turns out that one of the receptors, the cellular receptors on endothelial cells, is called the nicotinic acid receptor. It loves— endothelial cells love nicotine. This is, by the way, this is, this, this developed before cigarettes were developed. So let's remember that is that we evolved, you know, from the time we dragged our knuckles on the ground until the time we lifted it up before any cigarettes were invented. Nicotinic acid receptors are on endothelial, they actually respond to them. And in fact, if you actually tickle the nicotinic acid receptor as we do during development, so growing up in the womb, developing as a kid, exercising our muscles, those receptors are being stimulated and they help endothelial cells endothelial cells become active. Now, things get more murky and convoluted when you start mixing smoking in it.

No, no, smoking is bad. Smoking's bad, right?

So you're not talking about smoking. Yeah, I think so many people confuse smoking and nicotine as going hand in hand, but it is possible to separate nicotine. And in fact, there's one camp of angiogenesis researchers that were actually exactly looking at nicotine or nicotine analogs for stimulating endothelial receptors, those nicotinic acid receptors, in order to make the endothelium more healthy. And so, it's a really, really interesting thing. It also stimulates different— you think smoking itself actually causes vasoconstriction. Nicotinic acid actually helps to control the expression of nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator. And so, it's not quite as simple as black and white, good guy, bad guy, connected to cigarettes, therefore must be bad. I really think that as we think about these triggers and signals in our bodies, we need to understand, we need to recognize if our body is designed to handle it, it's probably designed it in a way that's got its own rheostat, its own volume switch. It knows how to actually turn on and turn it up, turn it up and turn it down. Pretty hard to flood the system to kill it, okay, unless you use pharmaceuticals, which then it's really easy to write a prescription to kill something. But natural compounds and supplements can generally help the body coax those systems along.

The scary thing with nicotine is that when it's extracted from tobacco, it is a pharmaceutical compound. And it's— I mean, a little vial of stuff will kill you if you were to drink it. It's pretty potent. And I do know there are studies that show very high doses of oral or smoked nicotine, they cause negative effects on blood flow in the penis, as in erectile dysfunction and hair loss. So, there's a dose-dependent curve here, but it sounds like you're saying the answer is it's complex. It might be good, it might be bad, but it's a complex system.

We don't really know. Well, actually, I'll try to simplify it even more. There's something called the bell-shaped curve or a little bit does nothing, a little bit more starts to show an activity, more is better, more is better, then you get the optimal amount. And then, after that, whatever that peak is, then you start losing the goodness until you get sometimes the badness. And so think about these natural compounds as really a volume switch. If it's too low, you can't hear. You bring it to just the right amount. That's kind of how the body works. These receptors, these, you know, stimulators. And then if you turn on too much, this is why I think when you really take a look at leveraging and enhancing how your body wants to work, you want to upgrade your body, you always want to figure out where that optimal set point is because more isn't always more. Sometimes more gets you less. And so, that's I think one of the important adjustments of thinking. There is a scientific term for it. It's called hormesis, and that describes a U-shaped curve. Very important. I think, frankly, most people trained in the pharmaceutical world, that's not even part of the vocabulary. Most people don't understand U-shaped curve and yet so fundamental. It's basic biology. A little bit's not enough, too much is bad. You want to find that Goldilocks zone. You know, where's the porridge just right as opposed to hot or too cold?

So, you're at home, you're not feeling that great, you might have COVID, maybe you tested positive. Do you use 1 milligram of nicotine or do you not use 1 milligram of nicotine?

You know, I, I don't know because I hadn't really thought about it until you brought it up, but now I'm going to actually think about it.

All right, there's some interesting stuff coming out of, uh, France at first, and then I think in China they also found that. And you think people who smoke generally are unhealthy, but if you're smoking and diabetic, you're seriously in trouble. But if you're smoking and not diabetic, you had a— you might be more likely to get it but less likely to go to the hospital or have any other effects from it. Who knows why, but yeah.

Well, I mean, I will tell you, smoking does damage the endothelial lining, uh, for lots of reasons besides the nicotine. And so those people are more likely, gonna be more likely to have the kind of injury from COVID because they've already got compromised endothelium. So that's the one thing that I can tell you that if you smoke and if you're in this COVID-19 era, now's a good time to quit.

Absolutely, well said. Dr. Lee, thanks for coming in and talking in detail. I think we shared everything that's understandable And if, if you're listening to this show and you're saying, I'm not quite sure I got that, uh, all the transcripts are there on the blog. There's posts about all this kind of stuff. I would encourage you to read Dr. Li's book, which is called Eat to Beat Disease. And look, don't be perfect, just do a few more things to be more resilient. Don't eat so much sugar, don't eat the really bad junky fats and things like that. And if you just did that, you've probably moved move the needle in a meaningful way. And if you get a little bit higher up the curve, you'll be better. But fear of not being perfect, fear that, you know, you might have not, uh, you know, lysol the edge of your mask or something like that— the fear is more dangerous than that little bit of hand sanitizer you forgot to smear. And, uh, by now hopefully you've probably already forgotten about this because you realize we have much bigger, more expensive societal issues to deal with.

Thanks, Dr. Lee. My pleasure, Dave.

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