Heal Yourself from the Inside Out – Dr William Li – #599

Foreign.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to bulletproof radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that blood vessels built from your own cells might someday help you, even if you're doing something unusual like dialysis. Right now, they're running clinical trials on bioengineered blood vessels they install in the arm of dialysis patients that get successfully integrated into their circulatory system. That's kind of cool. You could get new blood vessels installed when yours start getting too old. Like, how awesome is that? What they did is they created a blood vessel by seeding a biodegradable polymer tube with vascular cells from. From dead people. In this case, I'd want to do it from my own cells, but, hey, that's just me. And they put inside a bioreactor tank that provides nutrients, and cells multiply, secrete proteins, and form an intercellular network. In eight weeks, the polymer scaffolds broke down, and what was left was donor cells. And they grew the vessel of only 6 millimeters across, put it in the patient, and the patient's own cells moved into the tube, and we're off to the races. This has never been done before. Before, they would do things like, oh, we'll just pull this blood vessel from your leg because you probably don't need it that much, and we'll just put it in your heart because you need that more than your leg. Seems like a kind of a nasty trade off, but compared to dying, it's a pretty good trade off. So I love it when we're now looking at these incredible new abilities to, at a very slow pace, turn on that Wolverine style kind of healing. So eventually you'll just grow new blood vessels like that, and, you know, you'll be able to have steel claws, too, one of these days. Well, adamantium, but that's just coming in the meantime. Bioreactors, that's all legit. This actually came out of North Carolina. It was published in Science Translational Medicine in March of 2019. That kind of stuff just gets me all excited about the future. Stuff that just seemed like science fiction a little while ago. Yeah, yeah. We just grew your new vessel in case you needed it. Now, since I'm a master of foreshadowing, you know that I'm probably going to talk about blood vessels with you today. And you might be saying to yourself, why do I care about blood vessels? Well, it turns out that one of the big four things that's likely to kill you is probably something having to do with Your circulatory system, your cardiovascular system. And that's why Today's guest is Dr. William Lee, who's a really experienced internal medicine physician and a research scientist, something called a vascular biologist, who's been working on something called angiogenesis that would be growing your blood vessels for more than 20 years. And he's been on Dr. Oz, he's an author and a guy who's really looking at what you can do to take control of that one aspect that what's going on with your blood. He wrote a new book that we're going to talk about today called Eat to Beat Disease, the new signs of how your body can heal itself. And he takes, like me, a systems based approach to health and prevention and even reversing disease diseases like cardiovascular things that aren't supposed to be reversible. So we're going to talk in practical terms about what you have to do in order to get your defense systems in order so you just don't have to grow new blood vessels in a bioreactor and stick them wherever your current ones fell apart. Dr. Lee, welcome to the show.

Well, thanks, Dave. It's a pleasure to be on and I really appreciate your set up on bioreactors because the body is the best bioreactor we have.

It's a, it's a great way of looking at it and it's completely true. We'll take anything that we stick in our mouth that can be digested and turn it into electrons or building blocks and poop or breathe the rest out. At least that's my model of it as pretty accurate.

Pretty much. You know, we are essentially, our bodies are like a, a universe that's, you know, a galaxy that's in formation all the time. Our trillions of cells are multiplying. They're actually keeping our organs in good shape. And you know, most of us are fortunate to be healthy and many of us are afraid to get sick. And so the traditional ways that doctors like me have been taught are to, is to sort of wait until you get sick, diagnose disease, and then write prescriptions to chase down the disease and see if you can cure it. But there's really now a new approach, really because the science has advanced to help us get an entirely new view of what health actually means. And I think this is where this idea of the body as a bioreactor comes back into play. Because our health is not simply the absence of disease like most people think. Our health is a result of our hardwired defense systems that protect us Through a bioreactor from the day we're born until our very last breath. And guess what? Food can actually activate those health defenses.

What are they defending us from? I mean, health defenses, is this aging, is this toxins? What, what is, what are, what's out there? That's so scary.

Yeah, well, think about, think, think about. Like the moment we're born, it's like being a wind up doll. We are released into a world that is designed to harm the body. You've got, even without pollution and chemicals and secondhand smoke and all that kind of stuff, you got ultraviolet radiation is beaming in from the, from the sun through the skies, you know, causing DNA damage in our skin. You know, you've got, you've got radon coming up from beneath the. Brutally assaulted from both the top of the top and below. And then now that we're in society, we're getting off gases from furniture and carpets and rugs. We're out there sitting in traffic with our windows down and breathing in exhaust. No matter where we go, basically life is pitted against our health. And so our bodies remarkably have evolved a series of kind of self defense mechanisms. Think about like, you know, aikido or kung fu, kind of like wired into our bodies that are set to really neutralize attacks, repair damage, and really try to regenerate and keep our health going at a high level. And that's, you know, and that's even without the things that we do to ourselves, not knowledgeably, that actually can take down our health.

So pretty much everything out there wants to kill you and eat you. If we're not talking about entropy, just the tendency towards randomness, every life form on earth, bacteria, fungus, higher life forms, plants, eventually the things that make us up, the carbon molecules and whatnot, they will get recycled and eaten by something else. And it's your ability to resist that as long as you can that sort of determines the quality of your life as well as the length of it, if you want to be dark about it.

Right, yeah, well, I mean, that's exactly that. That's exactly the point is that the moment we are kind of delivered onto this planet from our moms, our bodies are wound up like these toys and basically they function to allow us to live as long as we possibly can, defending our healthy organs and tissues and keeping us ideally optimally functional. That's why when you get started, when we get started, we're still developing and we're not quite optimized yet. So it's kind of like a butterfly, you know, coming out of A chrysalis. The wings are still wet, need to dry up before we can fully flush ourselves out. And that's kind of like adolescence, young adulthood. Then we wind up, you know, being these beautiful pictures of health. Most of us, some people do get sick, but then most of us get to that middle age, ish point where, you know, the, the pluses and minuses of life start to take their toll on us and our defenses start to get overwhelmed. And, and so the question is, what can we do to better ourselves? And the conventional thinking out there is, you know, juicing, jogging and yoga are probably good for us, and they are. But now we have really advanced knowledge. And, you know, I think this is something that your listeners will love to hear about. Like, what do we know from the frontiers of science that give us that insight onto how our body actually heals itself, repairs itself, keeps us going.

I'm glad you didn't write yet another book about juicing, yoga and jogging because it feels like everyone's been saying that for 30 years. Hasn't really worked that well if you look at death rates from cardiovascular disease or Alzheimer's or diabetes or anything else. In fact, it seems like sort of crappy advice because we aren't all getting healthier. What's missing?

Well, I can tell you that what's missing is a more holistic approach that's informed by science. I think that the confusing thing about foods and health that have, I think, reigned supreme over the last decade, maybe two decades, is that everybody's thinking about the superfood or the super diet that's going to solve everything. And you know, as a systems biologist myself, and I know I'm talking to somebody who thinks this way, we have to understand life's not simple. It's very complicated. Our body's not simple, it's very complicated. And one system works with the other either to help us or actually to take us down. And so the reality about health defense is that this is an intertwined system, biological systems. They're hardwired inside us and they help our circulation. For example, that's the angiogenesis system. They help us regenerate from the inside out. That's our stem cell system. Our microbiome happens to be an entire ecosystem inside our body that functions on our behalf until it's disturbed or perturbed. And then that system, which is thrown out of whack, needs to be put back into balance. And then our DNA is another system that needs to protect itself against assault or we wind up having mutations and diseases like Cancer. And then finally our immunity, which is another core, a pillar of our health defenses. You know, every grandmother said that, you know, your immune system teacher from getting sick. We know it's more powerful, much more powerful than that, that it is so hardwired to protect us. It can even protect us against cancer. Even when we have cancer. We need to keep that immunity fully functional. And so, you know, there's no superfoods, but really there's kind of a super body. And hacking into that, the systems that make that work well is what's going to give us the clues on how we can use food in the proper way going into the future to live longer.

You know, I like that perspective a lot. And you say something though, in the first line of your book that caught my attention. It's one of the reasons I want to interview you. You come from a place of learning and you've really spent 20 years on this. And you say we are at a turning point in the fight against disease. Big words from a licensed medical professional who spent 20 years on the problem. Why is this a turning point versus last year or next year? What's so special? What's happening?

It seems like every year somebody is talking about a groundbreaking, game changing breakthrough in medicine. And the media does point out things that are really cool, like the artificial blood vessel that you described. And there's so many other things. I actually think that the turning point that's happening now is coming from a number of different angles. First, I think that as citizens of modern societies, we realize that we just can't go along letting things happen to us. We need to actually use the knowledge that's available and turn our lives into our own favor. So that's kind of an empowerment that we didn't have before because the science now tells us what we can do to stimulate the healthy parts of our lives, not just what we should stay away from. So if I told you, basically stick away, stay away from the electric fence, your whole life will be patterned on fear and distance. If I told you, look, reach for this or that because it can activate your health defenses, it gives you something positive to do. And really the turning point comes from the positivity that we're able to lean into health in a way that we haven't been before. Based on the sophistication of science that's actually coming, by the way, from the biopharmaceutical industry biotech has delivered. The billions of dollars been used invested in biotech has really given us the knowledge that it takes to actually not use drugs, ironically enough.

So the metabolic understanding that came about from drug research will ultimately disrupt the drug companies themselves.

That's completely correct. And the other thing that's happening now that's tipping is the unsustainability of what we've always done, which is, you know, we're, we're healthy and we don't need to worry about it until we get sick and then somebody's going to be around to, you know, write a prescription or get you in a hospital or do a fancy procedure and throw, you know, a hugely expensive intervention at you. And yeah, listen, I'm a doctor that's had, I've been behind and involved with the successful development of 32 FDA approved game changing medications for cancer, diabetes complications and even vision loss. Things that we weren't able to do before, we can do with medicines. But, and so, and I know how powerful these medicines can be to treat disease, even in some cases cure it. But hey, you know, it's a lot more powerful if you could prevent the disease in the first place. And I think that's where the tipping point comes because when we think that we can prevent the disease or reverse the disease, we're suddenly in a completely different place that healthcare has been for 150 years.

So the big difference is that we have a sense of control that we have now that we didn't before, informed control. And it's interesting because the definition of biohacking is the art and science are changing the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your own biology, which includes health. But if your goal is, I just want to be healthy, actually I'd like to be immortal. Unhealthy is pretty good, it's table stakes. But I think maybe I could do better. And so you can have control, maybe you can get there, maybe not. You might die trying. It's all good. But I, I do feel like that's liberated a lot of people.

I totally agree. You know, I think we're at a point, this tipping point allows us to up our own game, right? So all of us who actually make an effort to be healthy, what's really cool is that now we actually can raise the bar even for ourselves, you know, for the, even for the motivated people. The knowledge that allows us to say, hey listen, you know, I've got, I don't have heart disease, I've got good circulation. Now we can say how do we get better circulation? Or you know, I'm growing my muscles, I'm working out, I'm in good shape. I'm body sculpted. The question is, okay, well, that's fine. So now let's supercharge what we're doing inside our bodies. Can we regenerate ourselves? Can we add stem cells not by injecting ourselves, but by using our diet to control the, to biohack into our bodies to get our stem cells to work even better? All these things are actually starting to come to light and to practical application.

That makes me really excited. And one of the other things I don't think I've ever talked about on the show, but you, you said something earlier. You said what we're doing now is, is not sustainable. And two things come to mind. One is. Well, was announced earlier today on the day we're recording this episode, that the US has the lowest birth rate in 32 years. And the birth rate in Japan's been plummeting forever. In fact, in every developed nation is coming down. And I've been forecasting since my first book on fertility that was published in 2011, that we don't have a global population problem. Don't even worry about that. That's a 50 year problem. Because infertility is climbing at such big rates, even if you want to have kids, you can't. So, like, we'll, we'll solve that one biologically. But aside from that, the sustainability of the current thing, okay, there's no young people around to take care of you when you're old. The amount of medical waste coming out of hospitals because of sterility requirements, oh, my God. You think you're a good person because you recycle. If you really want to reduce your environmental impact, throw trash everywhere for your entire life and then die in a car accident instead of a hospital and you'll still have less plastic burden on the planet. You agree with that statement?

I totally agree. And you know, the thing that is frightening is really how much medical waste. It's not just from the hospitals, it's actually even from your own medicine cabinet. Right? Like people that toss out old pills or other, you know, kind of discard biohazard waste, you know, that gets tossed around. Most of our water supply is actually contaminated. So here's another example of how our environment actually is set up and what we do in our environment set up to actually force us to work harder to keep our body's health defenses up. You know, you talk about infertility, you know, there's birth control in drinking water just from the stuff that leeches out of, you know, septic systems and stuff like that. So we've got drugs everywhere. You know, the antidepressant. There's like Prozac in drinking water as well. So, you know, sort of like, watch out, people. The fancier we get, the more at risk we get. And that's why we really need to be able to raise our own bar in some cases, just to get to the baseline of what we should be.

It's kind of funny. If I'm feeling sad, I just go to New York and drink some tap water, and I feel much better. It's probably the Prozac. I'm just kidding.

Could be.

Now, in your book Eat to Be Disease, you talk about 600 studies or so, and you came up with a framework that I think listeners would appreciate where you talk about five defense systems that correspond to the sections in your book. And let's just talk through those so that when people are done listening to this, they feel like they got a little mini education in how to eat and what these defense systems are. Tell me about angiogenesis.

Yeah. So five defense systems really come out of this idea that when I started to think about health versus instead of disease, when I started to think about prevention versus intervention, started to think about food. And when it comes to food and health, here's what's really clear. It's not just about the food. It's about how our body handles in response to what we put inside it. And so I started to really start to delve into what it is that health is the result of. And I identify in my book 5 Core Health Defense systems, of which angiogenesis is one of them. And I know we'll go through them. So I'll start with angiogenesis. So angiogenesis is how the body grows blood vessels. You know, you talked about the bioreactor. I'll tell you something even more mind blowing than that. As adults, we have 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies that twist and turn everywhere, delivering oxygen and the nutrients that we need to every single cell in the body. 60,000 miles that is so extensive that if you were to pull out all these vessels and line them up end to end, you would form a line that would encircle the earth twice. This is one of our body's health defense systems in order to keep everything fed and healthy, not overfed. So we don't want to actually overfeed systems that can actually provoke diseases like cancer. If those vessels are. If there's too much overage, you can actually have bleeding and cause problems like blindness. And if you have too many, too few blood vessels, you wind up having the opposite problem. You don't have enough, you know, grass sprouting in your lawn. You wind up having bare patches and that when that happens, you're not feeding your heart, your brain, your nerves for erectile function. You can wind up having all kinds of problems like that. So angiogenesis defends us by feeding all of our cells. Too much or too few actually cause a problem. So we want to keep that. The body is hardwired to keep that circulation in perfect shape.

So we have these tiny little vessels in the body that are smaller in diameter than what a blood vessel is supposed to be able, or. Sorry, than what a blood cell is supposed to be able to fit through. Yet somehow they do it. How often does the lining of the super tiny vessels versus say, big blood vessels, arteries, how often does that lining turn over?

Yeah, so vascular cell line up the blood vessels, so they're kind of like the, they're kind of like the insulation. But on the inside of a blood vessel, those cells are pretty quiescent. So they tend not to replicate unless they're damaged or unless they need to grow. The slowest replicating blood vessel in the body is actually in the retina, which is the blood vessels feeding the back of the eye. And in fact, they tend to turn over just twice in your entire lifetime. Average lifetime, 88 years old. They, they only divide twice. But other blood vessels that need more turnover, like the blood vessels in your gut, for example, you know, that's continuously regenerated, renewed, those can turn over every couple of days. And so it depends on the location and how active the system actually needs to be in terms of the turnover of cells.

It's an interesting perspective. So I'm still seeing the world through young eyes, most likely, which, which encourages me. I feel good about that. But is there something we can do to change the rate of angiogenesis? I mean, don't you want some more blood vessels to grow, not less?

Yeah, no. So it's a great question. So here's what it is. With all of our health defense systems, we want just the right amount, and we want just the right amount at the right time in the right location. So more is not always more. Right. So this is sort of like a typical attitude that sort of, in a time of abundance, you know, we tend to think that more of something is going to make us richer, healthier, wiser, better. But in terms of blood vessels, you want just the right amount. Too many blood vessels can't fit Physically in that, in a certain space. So they kind of crowd and they wind up actually becoming. Because they're kind of fragile, they can bleed and have a problem. So a great example is, you know, people who are in aging, you want, you know, when they have too many blood vessels in the back of the eye in an area called the macula, you get macular degeneration. Age related macular degeneration is the most common cause of blindness over the age of 60.

That's too many blood vessels.

That's too many blood vessels. And when too many blood vessels are packed into an area like underneath the carpet of the eye in the most sensitive part and they are really fragile, that extensive overage of blood vessels tends to leak. And when they leak, think about, you know, the plumbing leaking underneath a carpet in your bathroom. You wind up soaking up that area and you wind up destroying that carpet. And that's, that's what causes blindness mostly in elderly people. And so we now know through some big breakthroughs that have occurred out of my field of angiogenesis, that you know, if you can start cutting off the proteins that are actually fueling those blood vessels from growing underneath the eye, you can try to halt the process. And in some cases, about 30% of cases, you can actually reverse vision loss to some extent. So, you know, this is an example of good blood flow through most of our lives in an area of the eye that doesn't have a lot of turnover where when you have too many blood vessels actually it causes a huge problem that you know, medicine, medical doctors are trying to revert or reverse that disease by stopping that overage. But if we started early, you know, my father has age related macular degeneration and he's getting injections to try to stop it. But listen, I probably destined to follow his fate if I don't actually take control of my own blood vessels to try to keep those vessels in the right place, in the right number, at the right time for as long as I possibly can. And diet is a great way to do it.

My father also has AMD and he. Granted I'm a weird biohacker and I've been talking with him for a while. He's been running a small micro tens current across his eyes around acupuncture points. Interesting. Actually reversed his, his disease that it got smaller, which is cool. He also eats a diet that probably mirrors a lot of the compounds that we're going to talk about in a bit here. And it's not like you can do just one thing. But I Was blown away because, you know, you read about stuff but healthy skepticism. But he, he definitely saw this and his doctor too, like, oh, it's much better than it was. What did you do this? Put it, you know, 10 minutes a day with your eyes closed.

That's pretty amazing. You know, I mean, I will say that using energy for healing has now kind of moved beyond the woo woo that used to be there. And you know, really serious scientists like I was at, I heard a TED talk literally, you know, about using infrared light to be able to image and then, and then be converted to destroy brain tumors, for example. This is the kind of stuff that is, you know, I would say it's no longer science fiction, it's moving into the realm of science fact. So I, you know that what you just described is super interesting. I'm actually going to look into it myself.

The interesting thing there is I have this book, it was like $800. It was from the, the highest ranking executive, probably president of the Karolinska Institute, which is where my wife Dr. Lana went to school. And in 1984 he published this book saying everything that happens in the body is electrical. But I'm publishing this on the year or the day I'm retiring because I know that you'll probably want to take my license after I say this heretical stuff. But it was, I couldn't even understand half the book. I'm pretty good at reading medical literature. I mean he went really deep on subcellular things. It was a compelling, shockingly well researched, heavy duty medical tome with this entirely different way of thinking about. It wasn't a chemical problem, it was always electrical. And that's just open my mind, something interesting is going on there. We barely know anything about it. But when you talk about it being a tipping point, I'm happy that you're open minded about such things because it feels like there are some things we can do even for blood vessels with infrared light. Have you ever played with things like ultraviolet blood irradiation or using lasers for either not just ablation, but to cause healing in veins and arteries, Is that real?

It's something that I'm actually actively investigating now is really the power, power of energy. So a project that you know is not ready for prime time yet, but it's something that's actively being explored is how do you use light and then going to the other side of the wavelength, how do you use sound, you know, to actually influence cellular behavior. And it's real, I mean it's there. The, the real question is you know, how much more do we need to know about it to understand how to control it? And so that we can use sort of the principles of biohacking in order to be able to, you know, get things moving in the direction that we want to. So I think, you know, it's a very exciting future ahead. But it's really all the secrets are inside our body, and then we can figure out what to use from the outside to actually, you know, kind of guide and manipulate that inside stuff.

Tell me about a couple foods or supplements that are really good for having not too much and not too little angiogenesis. Stuff that people can read about in your new book.

Yeah. So a really good antiangiogenic food is really a beverage is green tea. Now, everybody knows that green tea is good for you, it's antioxidant and does all kinds of other things. But the research I've done has actually shown through the same type of laboratory assays used for drug development, that you can actually stop blood vessels, the same type of blood vessels that would grow into a cancer. So you can. Right. Size the vascular system, the circulation by drinking green tea. The other thing that's really interesting about green tea, as you know that one of the big problems is obesity, and a discovery that was made about 20 years ago is that tumors are abnormal cells that grow to a large size. And fat adipose tissue are normal cells that behave abnormally and grow to a large size. And guess what? To sustain the growth of both fat and tumors, which normally stay microscopic, you need new blood vessels to bring oxygen and nutrients. And so this whole idea of antiangiogenic therapy, which is delivering drugs to cut off the blood supply to tumors, is now being explored for fat. And a super interesting area is using antiangiogenic foods or foods that contain antiangiogenic activity like tea, to actually treat both tumors or to actually prevent tumors, but also to lower obesity. And there's some interesting work done looking at truncal obesity, which is really the belly fat, and finding that green tea can actually reduce that as well by starving those fat cells.

I have a hard time looking at angiogenesis, this ability to grow new blood vessels. If you have cardiovascular disease, your body will grow new blood vessels around a blockage, right. Like it's necessary. If you're going to put on muscles, then you need to have some blood supply to the muscles in order to regenerate and to sort of grow and contract and shrink. We definitely need this. And I've always been a little scared when someone says oh, we're going to turn off angiogenesis because it might cause cancer. Like, well, what about the rest of the cells that needed blood vessels and repair that weren't cancer cells? Are we going to starve them, too?

Yeah. So listen, you're asking the fundamental question about angiogenesis that has dogged the field from the very beginning. If you're a cardiologist looking at it, you're saying, hey, we want blood vessels to grow into the starving heart. Oh, but we don't want cancer. And if you're an oncologist or tumor biologist, you're saying, hey, we want to get rid of those bad blood vessels, but, hey, how do we actually not cause a problem in the heart and provoke a heart attack? Right. Well, it turns out that mother Nature, or evolution, as the case may be, was a lot smarter than we are. The trick to angiogenesis that really answers the question you've asked is that our blood vessels are continuously supported by this ecosystem of angiogenesis. Stimulators to help grow blood vessels where they're needed and inhibitors that naturally stop them from growing where they're not needed. And so whenever you need it in the heart or, for example, a wound, if you cut yourself or scrape yourself or fall off your bike, you're going to see after the scab forms. If your scab ever came off early, you'd see this bright red, bubbling red stuff underneath the scab. That's an eagle's eye view of angiogenesis. But guess what? When your wound heals over, those vessels, by the way, are bringing oxygen nutrients to heal that wound. When your skin grows over that, the inhibitors of angiogenesis that are naturally in the skin take over and they shut it right back down to the normal levels. And this is actually how you can actually cut off the blood supply to a tumor and prevent a cancer, adding more inhibitors and overcoming the effect of the local stimulators. But also for the heart, how you can grow them when they're needed. And when you have just the right amount, the inhibitors take over and just shut the whole system back down, down to baseline. It's a balance.

All right, that's cool. Now, I'm going to ask you a really controversial question. So you talked about the oncology view, which certainly you've worked with. You talk about the cardiovascular view, the heart doctor versus cancer doctor. What about oral nicotine? That was one milligram of oral nicotine. It promotes angiogenesis in what seems to be a really beneficial way at low doses and prevents alzheimer's disease, according to Dr. Nicotine from Vanderbilt University, who's been on the show. But my God, you say nicotine, people freak out. We're talking about 5% of what's in a cigarette there. And that's about all I'd recommend. But I recommend for myself anyway. Nicotine, oral, not smoking, good, bad. Everyone knows smoking sucks it for everything. But is there room for this as a drug for angiogenesis or anything else?

Or not? So here's the thing that we do know about nicotine. And again, I look at the clues within the body. It turns out that our blood vessel cells have the receptor for nicotine. They've got a nicotinic acid receptor. And this has been both studied by people who look at lung cancer who can tell you that if you have high levels of inhaled nicotine and there's a tumor growing. So we've got cancers growing in our body all the time. The, you know, that is one of the triggers that can actually help pull the trigger on blood vessels growing to feed a lung cancer. That's not good. On the other hand, a cardiologist, nicotine.

Just to be really cardiologistic, if you have cancer, nicotine is the worst thing you could possibly do that I know of, other than just jump off a cliff or something. It's really dangerous, right?

Yeah, that's absolutely the case. Now I'll tell you what's interesting is a cardiologist, there's a cardiologist named John Cook at Stanford who was at Stanford when he discovered this. He discovered the nicotinic acid reflection receptor on blood vessels feeding the heart. And so exactly to your point, there's been a lot of research looking at how do we actually kind of tickle that nicotinic acid receptor for the cardiac blood vessels in order to be able to actually feed the healthy blood vessels or prompt them to actually do things that receptor would normally do. So it's a very clever way of thinking about how do we hack into this body system and kind of tip off the vessels that are wanting to do good things to help support the healthy functions that we want and also to prevent that. Because that nicotinic acid receptor is also a target to be able to antagonize, you know, things that blood vessels might feed a cancer as well.

Well, that's, that's a very nuanced view of it. And I. What I took away from that, that I want everyone listening to hear, don't smoke. It's nasty. And vaping is also inhaled nicotine. And they put the Same addictive stuff in that that isn't nicotine that they also put in cigarettes. It's a bad habit to start. So I just want to be like, super clear. If you're young and you think vaping's cool, yeah, it's better than smoking. But seriously, it's not good. Let's not say there isn't a role for nicotine, but you're probably using too much if you use it. So I don't want to, you know, be on the record as telling people to go out and start vaping, because that's bad news. All right, so we talked a lot about this blood vessel maintenance thing, and green tea is a big recommendation there. I use it in some of the supplements I formulate and I drink green tea. And when I'm making a health smoothie instead of my normal bulletproof coffee, I will sometimes take 2 ounces of brewed black coffee, throw in a whole bunch of horrible tasting herbs, and two big scoops of Matcha with the oil and everything. I'll blend it up, so I'll hold my nose and chug it, and then I'll drink a cup of bulletproof afterwards to get that horrible taste out of my mouth and for pleasure. But, yeah, there's green tea. Absolutely. I love that recommendation. And you talk, you know, about the hundreds of studies in the book. Next up, talk to me about regeneration. Stem cells.

Yeah. So I'm sure when you were growing up, just like me, you know, our grade school teachers told us that salamanders regenerate, starfish regenerate. People don't regenerate. Well, you know, the science now tells us that. Not true. In fact, we're continuously regenerating at a pretty slow rate in most cases. But in some cases, like our gut or even our hair, our skin, we're regenerating at a pretty furious pace. And some organs that we didn't think could regenerate actually do regenerate. I mean, we know the liver regenerates. You can cut off two thirds of your liver and then the rest of it will grow right back. As long as the rest of your body's healthy. And even the lungs, by the way, you know, if you look, lop off the top of your lung, the apical part of your lung, the cap of the lung at the very tip, kind of like near where your collarbone is, that part will also grow back. And so, you know, this is the cool thing about science, is that as we continue to kind of forge our way forward, we're challenging some of these old Notions. For example, the body doesn't regenerate. It does. So where do stem cells live? Well, they live everywhere. Where do they.

In salamanders. Oh, sorry.

Well, you know, even in salamander. So the stem cells live everywhere.

Yeah.

And if you. And they come from the inside out in humans anyway, they love to live in our bone marrow. So if you've ever, you know, seen a bone, kind of a cross section or a bone cut in half, there's.

On Facebook, there's actually a picture of my bone marrow. I had to take themselves. All right.

Yeah, that's cool.

It's cool. It looks just like butter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so, you know, you've got the hard core of the bone on the outside and you've got this, like, open tube, like open cavity on the inside that's filled with, you know, buttery, like stuff. It's a lot of cells. And most of those cells are stem cells. And most of those stem cells, by the way, we were all originally made of stem cells when we were in our womb. When we were in the womb developing, we were all made out of stem cells. It's only later that those stem cells wound up differentiating or maturing into the different organs. A finger, a toe, a heart, a brain, limb. And so what's interesting that we now know is that our body retains the ability to keep these stem cells around, to regenerate when we need to, behind the scenes in ways we didn't even know. But you can actually prompt and stimulate this regeneration. So people who, you know, and I'm, by the way, I've been one of the people in the early days working on stem cell therapy. You know, you take out cells from your bone marrow or you can mobilize them in your bloodstream. You remove them, you kind of concentrate them or help them grow by giving them some natural fertilizer, usually proteins that stimulate their robustness and their numbers. And then you can, you know, they're being used to inject back into different tissues, whether it's a joint, whether it's a muscle. And, you know, there are clinical trials now that are quite amazing to deliver stem cells to the heart. I've also heard of a clinical trial giving stem cells to young kids with autism. And the preliminary findings is that you're actually able to get these early undifferentiated cells that could be anything. And they kind of reboot the brain to reverse even autism.

There's so much legitimacy there. I've done several episodes on it, and I've probably had the Most stem cells introduced in my body in a single instance of anyone on the planet. I did a four hour procedure with three doctors where they took a whole bunch of stem cells, half a liter of bone marrow and fat derived and put em in every joint in my body and did them with a, what do they call it, a cannula inside the spine, along the spinal sheath and into the cerebral spinal fluid. I've had V cells pulled out of my blood and activated, which are pluripotent and put back in. And, and I got to tell you, there's some stuff that works there. Another family member went in for just a fat, you know, a very basic procedure intravenously, not planning to treat the valve defect or damage that was going to necessitate surgery. He was just doing it for wellness. And when he went in for the scan before the surgery, they said, your problem's gone. What happened? And he said, I think it was the stem cells. I said, nah, it wasn't the stem cells. It's okay. It wasn't, it was a miracle. You know, it was a unicorn that did it. Whatever it is, there's something going on. I'm younger, I'm more resilient, like on all sorts of different ways I sleep. Like I, when I was 20, if I knew how to sleep when I was 20. So I, I'm with you there. But most people still, it's a $5,000 an up procedure. What do people do in your book with food or with lifestyle to get more stem cells without having to do that crazy stuff I just did? That was at the Docera Medical Clinic in, in Park City where I did it. But actually some of that, the other stuff was at bioreset. But where, like, where do I go on my plate to get even 5% of those benefits for no additional money?

Well, listen, this is, this is the rem. Until recently, we were always focused on stem cells that we remove from our body, inject back in. And I'd love to hear more about your experiences because it's fascinating that you did this and it's really amazing to think about what the positive effects might be in terms of rebooting your system. But I can tell you the other thing that's really amazing is that we're using the same systems that, that stem cell therapy developers have been using to test the process, the proof of concept for years. And now we're actually studying the impact of food and diet. So for example, they probably, Dave, measured your baseline stem cells somewhere just to kind of get an idea of how many were around. And then after they removed your stem cells, they were able to count them. And this is one way to monitor the number of stem cells in your bloodstream. So, so this is classic kind of regenerative medicine therapy stuff that biotech companies are doing. What's really amazing is now dietary interventions are being explored to see what actually happens. And the most surprising thing that I found was that foods can actually do much of the same things as stem cells do. And a great example is chocolate, specifically dark chocolate, specifically cacao. So the study was done at UCSF Very Credible Medical center looking at older men who had cardiovascular disease. So these are people who we know have kind of crappy, worn out blood vessels. They have the problem and they need to reverse it. They need to improve their blood flow. And there was an intervention study where they studied these men over 30 days. They drew their blood at the very beginning, on day zero, counted up their stem cells just to figure out how many were floating around. Usually men with cardiovascular disease have smaller numbers of stem cells. We know in fact that the fewer that you have, the more likely you're going to wind up having a fatal cardiovascular event a year later as you get older. And then they measured and then they gave them an intervention. The intervention is hot cocoa. In this case hot chocolate made with really dark high flavanol chocolate, 70% or more. And then they drank this just twice a day. So two 8 ounce cups of hot chocolate twice a day, probably with sugar.

In it too, which is not good for.

Yeah, but it's okay.

It still worked, right?

Yeah. And in this case, you know, I think the emphasis was on, on spiking the high flavanol chocolate and hopefully, you know, I mean, listen, I, I don't know if you ever had like really, really dark chocolate, but you can actually put other things into the chocolate that, that's not sugar actually make it palatable.

But we, we make bulletproof, has a 78% dark, you know, single estate high origin with a little bit of brain octane in it. As well as zero sugar, we use a, a proprietary xylitol process. It actually chocolate people would want to eat most. Zero sugar. Chocolate's kind of crystally and weird, but it's powerful. But even Eminem Mars makes a supplement which is the flavonoids from cocoa, which has really good clinical studies behind it. You have to take four fat pills a day. And I kind of like to eat my chocolate, but it seems like there's great evidence here. So you're saying to improve that stem cell function there. You might want to look at eating.

Some chocolate right dark chocolate specifically and what they found in this research that doubled the number of stem cells in your circulation in a single individual. So basically over time wherever you started day zero you had up to a doubling of the number of stem cells. So then the question is like who cares right? The skepticals say well so that's fine you get more cells in your bloodstream. Well then they did this test a classic medical test called flow mediated dilation. I don't know if you know about this but basically it's the equivalent of putting a blood pressure cuff around your arm and pumping it up and so you're cutting off, you're squeezing the blood flow down and you want to see how resilient your blood vessels are. That's what stem cells do they make your vessels more resilient, they make your body more resilient and then they let go the blood pressure cuff and they just measure how fast the.