Cancer Can't Stand This Diet: Dr. William Li's Anti-Cancer Nutrition Breakthroughs

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

This is the beginning of a new understanding of our human nature because we're beginning to understand that the biggest nerve coming out of our brain called the vagus nerve communicates from the brain down to our gut. Our brain talks to our gut bacteria.

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He's a brilliant guy, and I hope you love it.

And let's get into the conversation with Dr. William Lee. William, so great to have you back on the Pharmacy Podcast. Welcome back.

Thanks very much. Always great to be here. Yeah.

So William and I go way back. And he is an extraordinary physician, as you heard from the intro. He is a leading scientist and, and an incredible Visionary about the future of medicine and health. He works in all sorts of sectors, changing the world. And what his passion is now is about food as medicine and how we use food to beat disease. And he's written a number of great books. We talked about eat to beat disease. He's, he's wrote, uh, you know, just an incredible book that I think set the stage for thinking about using food not as prevention, but as treatment. And one of the most impressive things I ever saw was at a conference we were out together, it was I think the Milken Institute, and you presented a slide and you showed here's the effect of these bioactive compounds in plants, really these phytochemicals, and here's the effect of drugs on the same pathway. And the phytochemicals actually seem to be more effective than a lot of the drugs, which was kind of blew my mind.

Yeah, no, I mean, listen, that's how I got into this whole area of food as medicine is I started with developing new medicines for cancer, diabetes, vision loss, cardiovascular disease, and really getting at the underpinning of how is our body being derailed from health. And the pharmaceutical biotech world is all focused on that derailment, you know, everything in healthcare that we've ever been trained on in medicine is about diagnosing the train wreck and figuring out how to tease apart the carcass of the cars that actually have run into each other and crushed and smoking hulks, right? And so for me, with the success of developing cancer treatments, I realized, you know, we should probably up our game and throwing foods into the same systems that drugs are being tested on. And that's the same slide that you were just referring to. 50% of the food extracts that I tested were as or more potent than the drugs we were testing at the time. And so to me, that was my Eureka moment. Yeah. That what we should be doing is taking a hardcore, scientific, evidence-based approach to thinking about how foods could benefit us, not just hand wavy, you know, like the, you know, look, the salad bar is great, but if you just pick up a kale leaf and wave it around, somebody who is critical is going to say, well, how do you know? Well, so that's what I do, is to figure out how do we know?

That'S incredible, William. It's great. You know, as you're talking, it kind of, you know, made me think about this patient I had who was so sick. She was 65. She had type 2 diabetes on insulin for 10 years. She had heart failure with an injection fraction of 35, which is sort of on your way to a heart transplant. For those who are listening, don't know what that means. It's basically how much blood your heart can pump out, and it should be over 50. And she had fatty liver. She had kidneys that were starting to fail with protein and urine. She had high blood pressure. She had a load of other things. She multiple stents in coronary artery disease and was 65 and on her way to a heart and kidney transplant. And she was seeing the best doctors at Cleveland Clinic. She was on the best medical protocols, the best drug combinations you could get, and everything was opt, quote, optimized, and she was still sick as you know what. And, and so she came into our group program, and I gave her basically an anti-inflammatory microbiome enriching low glycemic, high quality fat, good protein diet, just real whole food, got off all the ultra-processed food she was on. And it was a frickin miracle. But it wasn't a miracle, it's just science. In other words, in three days she was off her insulin, in three months she was off all of her meds, her heart failure reversed, which we don't see, her kidneys normalized, her fatty liver normalized, her blood pressure normalized.

In a year she lost 116 pounds and all those diseases went away. So there is no drug on the.

Planet that can actually achieve that effect. And it was food.

Because you gave her health care, while she was getting sick care.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That kind of goes for what we were chatting about before we started the podcast, which is what are the root causes of health? It's a really interesting question. And I don't think you had that class in med school, did you? I didn't.

No, no, listen. I'm sure you and I had very similar experiences walking down the corridors with a gaggle of students wearing the amateur white coats and carrying the stethoscopes clumsily, and you have the Professor towing you around, teaching you from patient to patient about disease to disease, and have to memorize everything and regurgitate it like the next week on a test, right? I mean, that's how doctors are trained. And so, what happened to me is that I always wondered, why do we even stay healthy? Why don't we get more disease? So, you know, here you're looking at cancer and lung cancer and kidney cancer and liver cancer and colon cancer. I wanted to know, and all the causes of those cancers, alcohol, cigarette smoking, eating red meat. What I wanted to know is, how come we don't get cancer more often?

How did I already stay healthy in the first place? Exactly right.

And when I asked my professors that question while I was in medical school and in residency training, I would get back this look like, what a silly question. If you're not sick, you're healthy, and why would you want to even ask anything more than that?

That's right.

And yet I found that to be the most unsatisfying answer to my driving question. So that's really what I've set out to do, is to figure out what are the common tenants, what are the common denominators of health, because we have to figure that out in order to be able to hack into our own body. You know, like you're gonna be a biohacker. There's so all these different ways to actually think about things. But at the end of the day, the average person, myself included, I don't want to have to think about everything. No. I just want to know that it's working by itself.

I mean, it's true. What are the biomarkers of health? We learned about the biomarkers of disease, right? Your kidney function tests are up, your liver function tests are up, your electrolytes are off, your blood counts low. We learned about the biomarkers of disease, but when you look at those tests, normally they don't necessarily always tell you if you're healthy, the ones we normally do. And so, you know, I created a company called Function Health, co-founded it, and we allow people to get access to all these lab tests that actually measure deviations from health.

And we look at optimal ranges and we look at things that most doctors don't because we want to say, okay, how how do we measure health? Right. Well, I mean, that gets at something really, really important, which is, you know, when you go to the doctor and they order blood tests, you get the standard panel of blood chemistries and maybe a complete blood count.

Maybe some lipid tests.

Maybe some lipid tests. And that's about it, right? So, like, whatever your dozen-ish, less than two dozen tests that haven't changed in 50 years.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly.

And yet our knowledge of how our body functions and the ways that we can measure things, like just are skyrocketing every day. We're making more discoveries. And so there's this gigantic mismatch in the mainstream medical system between assessing our health versus just looking for a couple of warning signs for disease. Right? Right. So this is where AI comes into play. This is where data gathering comes into play. This is where people, I think, you know, like you have been thinking about functional health for a long time. You know, you want to scrape it all together. and then figure it out on an individual level because there's no universal signature that works for everyone categorically, but everyone is their own control group, meaning everyone actually starts off with who they are. And then how do you make that better? Or how do you know when that actually gets worse?

Yeah, people call that anecdotes, but it's actually N of 1 research, which is the highest level of evidence that the NIH says is possible.

And so, yeah, and that's actually where real diseases like heart disease and cancer treatments are actually going. We now know that this one size fits all, the instruction sheet for doctors, the playbook, the rule book, it really is underestimates the power of one individual. We need to actually listen to the patient, the individual, for their own story. We need to appreciate they're coming from a context and we need to understand that we just can't pull a formula. out and apply it to everyone, which is how we were taught.

Exactly. It's embarrassing to admit this and I may be spilling the beans for the medical profession, but basically once you make the diagnosis, meaning once you label the symptoms with a name, it doesn't mean anything about the cause, right? You have heart disease or diabetes or cancer or Alzheimer's, autoimmune disease, it just tells you the symptoms, it doesn't tell you the cause. Once you do that, once you have the label, we call that differential diagnosis. Then it's all cookbook. You literally just look it up and here's the standard of care today and here's a set of drugs you use and here's the order you use them and here's the options you have. And it's really kind of agnostic to the individual. It's like this is just what it is.

Diner style medicine.

Diner style medicine. And so, you know, as you're saying, you didn't really take a course in the science of creating health. And one of the revolutionary ideas that I think you've introduced is this framework of not only eating for health, but how to eat to beat disease. You didn't say health, you said eat to beat disease. And that's a very important distinction because if what you're saying is true, it's revolutionary. If you can use food not just to prevent disease and stay healthy, but actually to beat disease, that's like a game changing concept. That's a paradigm shifting concept.

You know, what you're saying is so true from a paradigm shift. But I want to actually tell you, it's a paradigm shift because that's not how we view medicine today or how it has been taught. But I'll tell you, before the 1930s, okay? So go back only 100 years, all right? Before the development of antibiotics and all these, before pharmaceutical companies, the industry started to rise. What did we have? We only had really food, diet, and lifestyle in our toolbox. And this went back 10,000 years back to the beginning of humanity. We only had food and lifestyle as our medicine. So what's happened is that in the last hundred years, we've lost our way because we've over focused on just a few things. So we've lost the forest for the trees, literally. So now what we're doing is rediscovering how food, diet, and lifestyle can actually make a huge difference. But the difference is that we're not just back to the future and discovering past sort of wisdoms, the grandma's chicken soup kind of thing. we're now beginning to be able to take a look at what that chicken soup actually does. And at the cellular level, at the molecular level, at the genetic level, and that gives us power. The average person doesn't need to know what genes or what cells chicken soup actually adds to us. But for those of us who are trying to help people protect their health, regain their health, use food as an important health intervention while they're fighting disease, right? I mean, that's the distinction you're talking about. Doctors deliver sick care, but when you're at home as a patient, you're doing the healthcare yourself.

Yes. So let's get into it, William, 'cause you're the kind of master of this. People wanna know, if you were locked on some island somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and you had only certain foods to bring with you to help you have a long and healthy life, to increase your health span in your lifespan, and to reverse and beat disease, what would you be bringing with you? Like if you had a cargo ship of food and you could bring it on the island, and that was your kind of stock, what would you bring with you?

I had a conversation at the National Institutes of Medicine with a bunch of astronauts, including the flight surgeons, to talk about what would humankind need to be able to bring on a ship to go to another planet. It's exactly the same thing. So forget about the desert island, because that might be too harsh to survive. Space is a lot worse, because you can't go back and have Amazon deliver anything to you. That's it. Right? So, what are you gonna bring? What are you gonna grow? Right? So, here are some of the things that come to my mind. And again, I always get asked, what are the top five things you recommend? There's no top five, but here are a couple of things that do come to mind. We need to stay hydrated. Water is absolutely critical, but you can make water do more for you if you're using it to brew tea or coffee. So, both are easy to carry around. Both are very natural products that contain bioactives, tea with the catechins and other polyphenols. Coffee has got its own polyphenols and a little bit of caffeine as well. You know, I mean, I couldn't have gotten through medical school without my hit of coffee in the morning. But both of those, you know, the chlorogenic acid and coffee and the catechins and tea have a range of benefits to our body's hardwired health defense system. So while you're hydrating, you might as well get a little extra out of it by having your espresso or coffee. I wouldn't put dairy in it if you can avoid it and definitely not added sugar. Same deal with tea. But there's a great way of actually having your beverage. Let's start with basic hydration. That's a great idea. So this is a twofer. It's really three if you actually talk about coffee and tea with water. You've actually taken the number one, number two, number three beverages in the world: water, coffee, and tea. Combine them into one. put it in your gunny sack and.

Take it with you. Yeah, that's great. Actually, you know, I was in Korea researching the blue zones, and I went to this guy who was sort of making goat cheese, and I was milking goats and, like, making cheese with him. It was kind of fun. And then after he's like, let's have some tea. And he serves me this tea. And I'm like, what is that? And he's like, it's had a different taste. I never had it before. Oh, this is the wild sage bush. It's growing everywhere here. I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. So I I saw this plant. I looked at, I looked it up, and it actually has higher levels of.

Catechins than green tea and.

And this is one of the longevity molecules, right? So it's quite interesting.

Well, I think that that's the other thing is that really Mother Nature has created a pharmacy with an F kind of in the spirit of how you do things. The pharmacy with an F actually is way more diverse than anything you'd find in a drugstore, in a hospital, pharmacy stockhouse, and we're just beginning to discover what some of these things are. That's the power of science. We can go in there, we can do mass spec, we can identify the different peaks, and we can put a label onto them.

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I'd bring tree nuts with me. Tree nuts. Okay. Walnuts, almonds, pistachios, macadamias, cashews. Number one, I love the diversity of the different types of tree nuts. But they're a great source of protein. We need protein to be healthy, especially as we get older. People are always asking, what's a good source of protein? Well, you know, tree nuts gives you some nice protein. but it also gives you dietary fiber, which is important for our gut health. And if there's one thing that I carry around with me now, knowledge-wise, that I know everyone needs to do better on, everyone can up their own game, is to get better gut health. I don't care if you're a super athlete, triathlon, every single person can do better the next day, tomorrow, to improve their gut. That is so powerful. I have colleagues who are, I mean, I do cancer research, but I also have colleagues who are doing gut microbiome research in cancer patients. So talk about life and death, right? I mean, you know, gut health, you have, you know, more regular stool or whatever anti-inflammatory it all comes in a sharp Focus. If you're talking about cancer patients, it turns out that the quality and nature of your gut microbiome can make the distinction between life or death. if you have cancer. And I've been talking to oncologists about this, cancer docs, and they're just starting to wake up to this idea. And, you know, cancer patients are going to flooding into the clinics every single day. Yeah. Getting chemo, worse, getting antibiotics for various things. Yeah.

Okay.

I mean, look, you might need antibiotics. Steroids, which are often used. Steroids, but you're not resurrecting, you're not protecting the gut microbiome. And if that makes a difference between life or death, that is something that everyone needs to focus on. So a study out of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, looking at people with one type of cancer, melanoma, that spread. So we're talking about metastatic melanoma, bad disease that responds well to immune therapies. Not chemo, it's a checkpoint inhibitor. Checkpoint inhibitors that actually explain to people listening, a checkpoint inhibitor is not chemo. It's giving you an infusion of a medicine that wakes up your own immune system to spot where cancer is. It actually helps your immune system do what it's supposed to do, find cancer and scrub it out. Think about the dry erase board. you know, if you've got some notes on there, just scrub it all out to zero. All right, clean slate. I did for my mom, I've seen many other patients who have actually had a complete response. It turns out not everybody responds. Only about 20% of people have a good response. 80% of people don't. And we're beginning to realize that 80% don't have the right gut microbiome makeup. Now, a few years ago, we talked, I remember we had this conversation at Milken about Akkermansia, which, you know, is everyone's talking about now. and good thing too, because it's important. But now we're beginning to realize other bacteria also important. It's about eight bacteria been discovered and dietary fiber matters.

So, yeah, nuts.

The study that my colleague at MD Anderson led on showed that for melanoma, given immunotherapy, for every five to six grams of dietary fiber, it decreases mortality from that cancer by 30% and you basically, I mean think about if you want to see.

By the way, people eat about eight grams of fiber a day. I was at the Hazda tribe in Tanzania, they eat 150 grams a day. And so, you know, we need to boost it up to about 50. But you think five, just five grams reduces by 30% and you can eat 25, 30, 50 grams. That's a lot of percent reduction.

And then you just order it in a bottle, right? I mean, order in a jar. I mean, I know we tend to eat in excess. You want it in food. You want it in food because the foods, fruits and vegetables, especially the whole foods, contain the polyphenols that are the prebiotics that work along with the fiber to feed the actual healthy gut bacteria. And you want diversity. So you want to eat that whole idea of eating the rainbow is, I always think about the rainbow being a nice visual allegory, but really this is a life and death thing. The more diversity you can put in your plate, the more diversity you're going to have in your gut when you're gut diversity is really rich, meaning you have a lot of different types of gut bacteria. It pays you back. Your health gets paid back by improving your immune system.

Yeah, that's so important. I was going to highlight that because the polyphenols, you sort of whiz by that. But, you know, we think about prebiotics and probiotics for our gut. But there's another incredibly important category of compounds that are called polyphenols, which are all the colorful plant compounds you see. that make your vegetables and fruit the colors they are. And those are medicines. And those seem to be fertilizers for the good bugs. Now, we were talking about the reduction in cancer from having more fiber. How does that work when you eat nuts? Well, basically, you can probably explain it better than I can, but there's an important compound that healthy bacteria make in your gut called butyrate. And butyrate has many effects on the body. It's anti-inflammatory it keeps your gut lining healthy. It's the fuel for the gut colonocytes, but it also suppresses P53 oncogene, which is essentially a cancer-promoting gene, which is why dietary fiber reduces colon cancer and many other cancers. So we actually now know the mechanisms by this word. So it's kind of amazing if you're geeky like us, it's like, holy cow, we understand how to get from A to Z and why it's happening, not.

Just eat fiber, you're not going to cancer, but we understand the linkages all the way along. I want to unpack something you just said, because it's so interesting and important, but also to bring a little bit of clarity to the audience. You heard the term oncogene, right? Like Mark, you just talked about oncogene. An oncogene is a gene, which which is made of our DNA that's associated with causing cancer. And a lot of people, including myself for many years thought that, and you've heard of BRCA and there's a lot of other oncogenes. It turns out that P53 is one of those oncogenes. But it turns out that P53, the way that it was, we're born to have P53, normal P53 is protective against cancer. It's only when P53 is mutated, when there's a problem with P53 that it actually sets up for cancer. So P53 normally actually protects us against cancer. It's basically, it's the bullets in our gun against cancer fight cancer normally. And it's only when it's actually mutated. Now, let me tell you how powerful this is. There are animals like elephants that rarely get cancer that have more than one copy of P53 in their genome. And so P53 is protective. What we want to do is prevent prevent those mutations that can occur. And this is the real purpose of this antioxidant story that's been floating around for decades.

Yeah.

Right. So antioxidants are neutralized, these harmful activated atoms that, that, you know, are in our environment that we eat sometimes with Ultra processed foods. And those can actually come in there and basically like a samurai Warrior, like slice and dice, like a ninja slice. our DNA. And when your P53 gets sliced and diced, that's when you run into trouble. So you need to protect it. Polyphenols can have antioxidant properties. They also activate all of these other protective aspects of our body so that we are more resistant against diseases, including cancer.

Yeah, it's quite amazing. Okay, so we got tea, coffee, water, nuts of all kinds. What else do you bring with you?

You. You know, I.

To Mars, let's say. To Mars. What are you bringing with you to Mars?

You know, I mean, look, perishable goods, the things we talked about, you can actually carry with you because they're, they're, you can put them in a tin.

Yeah, exactly.

But actually, you know, fresh foods, produce is really, really important. And, you know, I, and I know that everybody kind of rolls their eyes when they hear about another story about broccoli or kale. I like to present it as Brassica, which is like a gigantic class of green vegetables. Yeah. You can choose a cauliflower, bok choy, you know, broccolini. It's a lot of different types of vegetables you can actually get. Mother Nature's really smart. She actually created the same types of polyphenols and bioactives and put them in all this entire class of vegetables. And, and if you have any of those things, you know, what are some of my favorite ones? I mean, I like bok choy. Yeah. Go to an Asian market.

Chinese broccoli is my favorite.

And, you know, Chinese broccoli is a great one. Anybody that wants to change their mind about the same old, same old with broccoli just needs to step into an Asian grocery store.

Oh my God, yeah. I mean, the thing about Chinese broccoli, I don't know, it's sweet, it's got this sweet flavor.

Yeah.

She's almost like eating candy, but it's broccoli. It's like so good.

Well, and by the way, you know, 'cause I like to cook, so for me, talking about food as ingredients important because people like to nail it down in their heads. But really, Chinese broccoli, what do you do with it? First, you gotta wash it, you trim it, you heat up some oil, puts a little bit of garlic slices or chopped garlic in there, and then literally you stir fry it quickly, okay, not with a lot of oil, and then you can add oyster sauce, soy sauce, a little chili pepper, whatever you want to do to really light up your taste but food has to taste good.

Yeah.

Healthy food has to taste good. Yeah.

Nobody wants to eat sawdust and cardboard. Exactly. Okay, so we got the whole Brassica family. Collards, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, broccolini, broccoli rabe. I mean, there's a list goes on. You can look it up. They're called cruciferous vegetables. Brassicas. You can find them. We'll link to them in the show notes. But this is something I eat every day, and I try to eat a cup or two every every day of these foods, at least. So, okay, so you got water, tea, coffee, nuts, brassicas. What's next?

Well, I, you know, I didn't include water because I'm just saying that you're gonna have to drink water anyway to survive. So I put coffee and tea. Coffee and tea. Okay.

Coffee and tea. Brassicas.

Brassicas. Okay. How many do I have left? You can do as many as you want. You know what? So, so another thing that I personally love. And again, you know, this is my informed. opinion. I like this category of food called stone fruit, and it's seasonal. Ah, right?

Like so.

Plums, peaches, plums, peaches. Right. And those are very seasonal, and they grow in trees, and they have a little stone in the middle, like an apricot. But it turns out the flesh and the color of the, of these are very bright, and they're, they actually have a lot of sweetness to them, rich with polyphenols. And the skin of these fruits also contains something called ursolic acid, which actually is not only good for your immune system. But our soliac acid also helps your circulation. So you want to have good blood flow. As we get older, our blood flow naturally kind of slows down. Doesn't get as. Isn't as good as it should be. You know, it's kind of like an old set of piping, a plumbing. So you want to keep the plumbing working really, really well. That's our circulation. So our soliac acid helps us keep good blood flow, helps us regenerate our blood vessels when we need to. critical for brain health. So gut health and brain health, it's not just simply the gut-brain axis through the microbiome. The circulation is also really important.

Yeah, I mean, I think the problem with that for me, William, is that I love peaches, but like, it's like maybe a few weeks in the summer where you can get a really ripe delicious peach that doesn't taste million gross. Right, no, no, you're actually right. I love that. But you can get them frozen, which I use. And frozen, frozen.

But it doesn't have the skin usually. Usually not, but you get the polyphenols in it. And by the way, that's another kind of important practical tip for people that always ask me like, well, I can't get fresh food all the time. Should I just go for the frozen? Is it going to lose a lot of the nutrients? No, it's more, it's got more. More, yeah. Because people that create frozen fruit, they pick it, they pick it, they wait, that's really right. And they freeze it, and they pick it when it's super ripe, because it tastes great. And they skin it, and they freeze it right away. It's flash frozen. Frozen. It's got, it doesn't degrade, polyphenols degrade once on a truck. Yeah. All right. This doesn't have a chance to even degrade. So, I encourage people to get fresh fruit if they can. You know, my only thing is that I wish they would actually pack fresh fruit in something other than plastic bags.

Because now we're beginning to look at microplastics. Microplastics, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, it's always hard because fruit is something that degrades really fast. So, they pick it when it's not ripe. When tomatoes, they pick them when they're not ripe.

So, you're kind of not getting really the full explosion in polyphenols. Okay, so we got we got stone.

Fruits, brassicas, nuts, coffee and tea. All right.

And berries.

And berries.

I put berries in there because I'll tell you the amazing thing about berries, they are kind of the candy of nature, right? They're small, they're beautiful, they're sweet. You can eat a bunch of them. That's why candies, they're candies that are shaped like berries, right? So the thing about berries though is that they are a great source of vitamin C, they've got great antioxidants, they also have these polyphenols, sugars that are kick-ass. So like... And fiber. And dietary fiber as well, of course. The key thing is, people always say, well, is a sugar in berries gonna be harmful or fruit gonna be harmful? This is where not all calories are the same. Fruit contains so many other good things that along with the natural sugars, which for most people your body can actually tackle, you're getting all this other benefits that you wouldn't be getting if you had a can of soda with just added sugar to it. So that's the key thing. Sugar isn't all sugar. sugar because the thing that is contained in is going to be different. It's also when you eat the fruit.

If you eat it at the end of a meal as opposed to at the beginning, it's going to change your blood sugar, which is going to have an impact.

Exactly. So, it's not important what you eat, it's when you eat too. And how you eat it as well, right?

Because basically if you put sugar on.

Top of fruit, which is kind of an old school way of eating your great fruit. Your peaches and syrup, right? Yeah, exactly. So again, this is why I think when we talk about ingredients, it's easy for us to talk about polyphenols and dietary fiber. But at the end of the day, people eat food in context and together. And so how we eat what we eat is really, really important. How we prepare it is also really important. So like for fruits, I like to eat it just fresh, right?

Yeah.

Seasonal. And berries would be something that I would relish. You know, there's a study- so you're.

Gonna need a greenhouse on Mars, basically. Yeah.

Or Desert Island, right? I mean, you know, you need to be able to grow all this stuff. all that stuff. But, but dried fruit, by the way, is also a great way because you can get dried berries, you can get dried stone fruit. I can't, if you can't get apricots all year round, but you can get.

Dried apricots or dehydrated ones.

Or dehydrated ones. Exactly. That may be less sugar, right? Yeah. If you get dried fruits, you actually get the skin on it. Right. So, like, if I had to eat six apricots whole, I might have difficulty doing that on a regular basis, but I could easily eat six dried apricots. Yeah. You know, as snack. So if you want that fruit skin, but that brings up a whole other issue about organic versus non-organic. Because interesting thing that's been discovered by botanists, people who study plants, not doctors, not health and wellness people, but botanists have studied polyphenols and they found out that polyphenols are produced by most plants. The polyphenols are good for our body are produced by most plants as a wound healing substance for the plant itself.

Yeah, yeah, they're not for us, they're for the plant's own defenses and repair and healing and protection, right?

Right, so what happens is that when a plant is growing, vegetable, fruit, tree, bush, shrub, is growing in its natural state, right? We're looking at a planet now, we don't want to be adding the crap to the planet, we need to kind of let everything restore, we need a plant to go back into its homeostatic state.

Regenerate.

To regenerate by itself, okay? In that balanced state, plants that we eat or parts of the plants are growing with little insects. It's natural in the environment. And these insects are nibbling on the leaves and stems of these plants. And what they do is they produce polyphenols in response to the nibbling, in response to the injury as part of healing. This is what the botanists are saying now. So if you grow a plant in its natural state without pesticides, it's going to make more polyphenols because it's healing.

Itself all the time.

Under stress. Under stress. If you spray with pesticides, not only do you get the bad stuff on the skin that you can't easily wash off, a study at the University of Massachusetts showed that about 20% of pesticides gets absorbed into the skin of an apple. You can't wash that off. It's just in there. So if you're gonna get dried fruit, get the organic kind, and you're gonna.

Get more polyphenols as a fringe benefit. I think that's a really incredible thing that most people probably never thought of. It didn't really occur to me, but you're right, when you have plants that are coddled, by pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers. They don't have a lot of stress. They're not getting attacked. They're basically kind of basically coddled. They don't develop any resistance to disease or stress molecules. And those stress molecules that they create are their protection, but they're also our protection. That's really the whole crux of what we're talking about here.

And by the way, let's dive a little deeper on that. Not only are they protection for our human cells, but now because they are also prebiotics, they're also protection for our gut bacteria as well. I was thinking that.

I was like, you are not only getting polyphenols for all these other benefits for your biology, but actually you're helping your microbiome.

You know, it's a grand slammer, right? Baseball analogy, you know, you hit the ball and you drive all the runs in. Okay. And that's basically what these polyphenols are. And it all starts with how we treat the plants. And I know you've written about this, you know, sort of like, how do we actually do regenerative agriculture? How do we cake? look, it's a bigger problem any one person can actually solve, but as a one person, we can make that decision of what we're actually going to feed ourselves when we go to the market.

All right, so I want to get into specifics of different foods and controversies and things, but first, what else would you bring quickly to Mars if you were going, that you absolutely need for optimizing your health and beating disease? I mean, I have my list. I'm curious about your list.

Yeah, I have to say, I'm assuming there's not going to be any, easily fishable oceans on another planet.

But you just have it there. Not you have to grow it or have it grown there, but it's just there. What are you eating?

You know, like, I think food, I think finding a source of omega-3s.

Absolutely.

Is absolutely critical because all- who's next on my list? Yeah, well, our body doesn't make them, right? And a lot of foods don't make them either. All the plants do make the precursor to omega-3s, but it's hard for most people to eat enough of them to actually get what they need. And so, you know, this is one of the instances where I do think that you should eat as much marine Omega-3s as you can get your hands on and you should eat plant-based sources of Omega-3s. But then, you know, if you still have struggling, then you should actually get dietary sub, a good high quality dietary supplement. And the key about Omega-3s, it's good for gut health, good for brain health, good for immune health. It's one of these strange molecules that has been discovered to have virtually no bad effects and almost all good effects. You know, it's, it's, I'm always cynical and it's a little suspicious when something does everything, but Omega-3s really kind of hit it out of the park.

All right, so basically your meal on Mars is grilled wild salmon, rich in Omega-3s and also polyphenols, so that's the yellow color, with a nice side of broccoli and a side of green tea to sip along with it, and dessert you're having berries and peaches and nuts.

Yeah, pretty much. I love that. And by the way, we're talking about Omega-3s threes. You talked about salmon, and it is a common perception. I'm not calling it a misperception. I'm calling it a perception that you need to have salmon and tuna, really oily fish like mackerel and anchovies, which not a lot of people eat. But it turns out, and I wrote about this in my book, actually, I do.

I got some right in my bag here.

Fish that are not commonly thought as oily fish actually also have omega-3s Cod, haddock, flounder. Chilean sea bass is high in mercury, so you don't want to eat that one.

You mean-- well, Chilean sea bass is.

Actually not really a bass. It's a Patagonian toothfish. Toothfish, right? Yeah. So it's not even, again, marketing, right? We get tricked on things. But it turns out recent studies have shown that sea bass, particularly the Asian sea bass, you'd get in a Chinese market, they'd steam it for you with a little bit of ginger and soy. actually it's been discovered to not only have omega-3s, but they contain a peptide, a protein, that stimulates better circulation and wound healing. So again, you know, this is the more we look into our foods, the more we're discovering that some of the things that we've been eating for generations actually contain good substances that can keep us healthy.

That's right. I mean, the Rockefeller Foundation is very much focused on this. They're spending $200 million to identify the phytochemicals in the plant kingdom that are regulating our biology and what they do. So it's really, it's pretty amazing. All right, so let's talk about some controversies. All right. Dairy. Is dairy good or bad? Because the government says we should be drinking three glasses of milk a day as adults and two as kids, and.

You can't get a school lunch if you don't have milk. So is that a good idea, bad idea? Look, you and I actually grew up in an era where we saw television ads on milk and we were taught in grade school about, yeah, the got milk campaign. And now we know better, but I want to just sort of- We know better. Well, we know better.

You and I know better.

But I want to maybe frame things out. As we talk about these controversies, it's sort of like good or bad, good or evil, right or wrong.

It depends.

Food is never that simple.

It depends.

It really depends. And so when it comes to dairy, and I think we'll come to this kind of like depends over and over again, when it comes to dairy, It depends on how the dairy is processed. It depends on what the cows who make the dairy are fed, right? Like cows that have our free range and grass-fed cows actually have Omega-3s in their milk, whereas factory cows don't or have much lower levels. It also depends on how the milk is treated. Some milk is turned into cheese or butter, all right? And some cheeses, when they're fermented with healthy bacteria become probiotic foods that are beneficial. And so, and what about yogurt? Yogurt's a dairy product. We know that yogurt is actually associated with longevity, better immune health. And so again, this categorical assassination of entire categories of foods. This is, I think, where we're getting more sophisticated.

What you're talking about essentially is focusing on the quality, the sourcing, and the nature of the source of the food you're eating. So you could eat broccoli that's bad for you. you could eat milk that's good for you.

That's right. And in that bad or good category, soy is a great example. You could have soy filler in a candy bar, all right? And that's not doing anything for you.

Or it may even cause cancer. The isolates may even cause cancer.

Or you could actually have soy's at a mom.

Yeah.

Right? And so, which could be really good for you. So again, I think that let's not character assassinate, but let's go ahead and define. So some forms of dairy coming from a good healthy source of dairy is really beneficial. Interestingly, by the way, when it comes yogurt. Yogurt is considered a healthy food, probiotic food. It's in the same category as kimchi and sauerkraut and all those other things.

That's kind of where the whole longevity thing came from. The Bulgarians and the Georgians. Bulgarians and the Georgians. And the Georgians who were living to be very long and living on yogurt every day.

The Bulgarian yogurts.

They found a bacteria that's actually growing.

I think it's called- Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Lactobacillus bulgaricus for the Bulgarian monks, right? Yeah. So the key thing though is, I only recently became convinced that this was true once I looked into it. So what have we done for years? Like, I mean, yogurt's been a healthy food for years, but everybody has been convinced to go to the yogurt section and pick the low-fat yogurt. And usually with a little rim of sugar on the bottom, the fruit. what a mistake, right? So basically what you want to get is whole fat yogurt that is good, like Greek yogurt. And the reason is, and this is something that surprised me, when you take the fat out of yogurt, it makes total sense. You're going to change the nature and the mouth feel and the texture of the yogurt. No fat, the thing is going to collapse like curdled milk, all right? Now, what do the companies do to sell it back?

They put emulsifiers. They put adma emulsifiers.

Which are highly toxic to your gut and cause leaky gut and cancer. And, you know, some people say, well, there's not enough fat. evidence. Let me just put it out there. Polysorbate 80, you guess whether or not it's good or bad for your body, but there's beginning to be a emerging sea of evidence that it's not good for your gut microbiome.

And causes leaky gut, which causes inflammation.

Which causes all diseases. And, it's not immunity. Now you've actually undone what you tried to do by having a probiotic food that's good for your gut. Now you've inadvertently done something to your gut that actually makes it worse. And so, this is why the you don't have to be a food connoisseur, but you just have to be selective.

Smart. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, your sweetened yogurt that you get and you think is good for you has more sugar per serving than soda. So that's crazy. It's like more sugar per serving.

Always pick up the thing of yogurt and hold it up and look to see if there's any sugar added. Of course, read the ingredient label as well. that thin layer of purple or red or whatever it is, it might have food coloring in it as well. Yeah, and our friends Walter Willett and.

Darsh Mazumdar, maybe David Ludwig published an article in New England Journal of Medicine called Milk and Health. We're going to link to it in the show notes. But it sort of breaks down the mythology of why we thought milk was good for us, how maybe it's not in some areas. And I think we even get more nuance than that. It's like, well, what's the source? Is it a highly hybridized cow that has A1 casein, which is potentially very inflammatory, makes you have people have gut issues and inflammation. Or is it A2 cow, which actually is an ancient sort of heirloom cow like the Guernsey or Jersey cows or some other cows you see in other countries. That may be better. And, is it grown in a filot factory farm? Is it milk while it's pregnant? Or, is it regenerative? is it living out in the middle of nowhere and eating grass? Or is it like in Sardinia, where I was, which was quite amazing, they know to take the animals, the goats and the sheep and to feed them on certain wild plants at different times of the year, not because they're thinking about polyphenols, but they know if they do that, the milk and the cheese tastes better. And so they live a lot. These are the little blue zones where people are very old and they were eating a lot milk and cheese, but it was goat cheese, it was sheep cheese, which is A2 casein. And then they found that there were these plants that they were eating that actually, like Mirto and others, that actually had high levels of these catechins. So when they measured the catechins in the milk of these goats, it's the same or more than you would get in the best green tea.

Well, I mean, this is the whole thing, the whole idea of you are what you eat, you are what your food ate.

Yeah, it's the quality of the food. So it's just you have to think of what's the sourcing, where did it come from, how is it, raised so many layers. But at the end of the day, I have goat and sheep cheese, I have goat and sheep yogurt, and I have goat and sheep, well I actually have goat whey. That's how I usually have my protein shake, my healthy aging shake as a goat whey in the morning. And I really find that's great. If I have cow whey, even as grass fed, sometimes I notice it makes me congested and have symptoms. So there's ways around it. Okay, what about soy? Because that's a big one, right? Yeah. You're Chinese and so soy is a big part of Chinese diet. diet and, you know, tofu and, you know, and Tempe and many soy products.

Let's put it out there. Processed soy is very common in ultra processed foods. It's a filler. It, you know, has got a source of protein that they can put onto the label. It's been used in, in lots of different ways by the, by the food industry for, for manufactured Ultra package food products. that's not the soy that's good for you.

No.

The soy that's good for you is closer to the original soy picked off the ground as soybeans. Think edamame, you go to a sushi bar, you have a little steamed edamame or just a bag of it from the frozen section, you can steam it at home, put a little salt on it, it's a great source of protein. Or if you ferment the soy, as they do in Asia, to create tofu and tempeh, and there's hundreds of different.

Types of naturally fermented soy products. Yeah, okay.

Miso, natto, soy sauce.

Exactly.

All of those staple foods which add diversity, add different gut bacteria to your system have been taken for, been eaten for hundreds of years, thousands of years, and they're actually delicious. They're really part of that Asian diet. And we now know when you go back into soy, in addition to fiber, in addition to protein, you have different types of polyphenols and you will have other phyto-sterols including genistein in equol. These are really beneficial. They improve your circulation, they can help your body fight cancer by cutting off the blood supply to tumors, they can improve your metabolism by activating your brown fat to burn down harmful white visceral fat. There's all kinds of, there's a whole litany of good things that soy products can do, but let's talk about where the mythology of soy being harmful for women comes from.

Yeah, I love this story when women with breast cancer come to see me and say, my doctor said I can't have any soy boy, what do you say? And they didn't tell me not to drink, which we know is a huge risk for breast cancer. In other words, just seven drinks a week increases the risk of breast cancer by 40% in women. But they don't say don't drink, but they don't eat soybeans.

Tell us about that. Well, I mean, listen, it's worse when a doctor says it because it carries this, the idea of authority to it. But let me, can we back up a bit?

Basically, if you hear nutrition advice from a doctor, run the other way, except.

If it's people like us who've been studying this. Or the younger generation that actually interested in themselves. I mean, you got to be able to walk the walk before you can talk the talk. And that's the key thing. But here's the thing deal about soy. Soy beans do contain a plant chemical called a phytoestrogen, phyto meaning plant estrogen, meaning that it's a category of steroid. It's a plant steroid. And so some well-meaning individual, I'm going to track it down at some point who it was, but some well-meaning individual knew that some human forms of breast cancer are stimulated by human estrogen. And so when they heard that soy had estrogen, they naturally, and again, I'm ascribing good intention to it, saying, Ooh, estrogen in plants must be bad for estrogen in humans because it's the same thing. But this is where we step in, you know, as questioning critical thinkers. If you look at the chemical structure of estrogen, of the plant estrogen, phytoestrogen from soybeans, and compare it to the same picture of human estrogen. They don't look anything alike. And in fact, soy estrogen blocks human estrogen. It's Mother Nature's tamoxifen, which oncologists give to their patients.

I was just gonna say that. It's like we call this selective estrogen receptor modifiers, right? Right. So, or SERMs. And these are drugs we give to people with cancer to prevent the effect of the estrogen. So, I would think of these as as a sort of a modulator of estrogen in a beneficial way. In fact, it reduces the risk of breast cancer as a CIRM.

Yep. And what I can tell you, there are, there was a study of 5,000 women who are at the highest risk for breast cancer. It's called the Shanghai Women's Breast Cancer Study that found that those women who ate the most soy, 10 grams or more of soy a day, so that's just the amount of soy protein you get in a tall glass of soy milk, the more that they decrease their risk of mortality by 30%. Boom. And if women had their breast cancer completely treated for recurrence, those women who had the most soy actually had almost a 30% decrease in recurrence of the cancer as well. And in Asia.

Yeah, and this is in our opinion, folks. This is literally, the literature is so abundant on this that it's not an issue, but it's in the zeitgeist. And so all the oncologists are saying, don't eat soy.

14 studies back to back analyzed have shown that women who eat more soy live longer. And in no case has a study shown that women who eat soy live less for a shorter period of time. So you got to just look at the evidence. And so this is where urban legend needs to be differentiated from what's true versus what people would like to think is that's true.

So, so those are controversial things. Um, what about the things we should really be avoiding, like inflammatory foods? What are the things that are the most harmful to us that we're eating that if we avoid it, we just take the pressure off our health and, and, and disease States?

Well, look, our, our body is, is, is enriched with health defense systems that Ward off the harms that we just have. Look, you wake up in the morning, you walk out, in the sunlight or take a walk on a beach, which is good for you, have some exercise, that ultraviolet, radiation actually damages damage your DNA and damage your skin. I'm not even talking about going out to lay out for a long time to get a sunburn. Yeah. But you get into a car and you're inhaling the fumes when you're filling up the gas tank. Like, that's also toxins.

So I hold my breath. I don't know. I use it as a practice.

How long can I hold my breath? You know what? I always ask people. I said, do you stand upwind or.

Downwind from the gas tank? And people, people are like, don't know why I'm asking. And now they have those things where you can't, like, make it lock and walk away. So I actually usually jam something in there and I walk away.

That's what exactly. I stand upwind so I don't have to smell it and I walk away from it exactly as you do. But here's the thing, our body is pretty resilient and defends itself, swashbuckles against just the harms of everyday living. And so when you talk about inflammatory foods to avoid, it really goes to the idea why should you stress your body out more by making a conscious decision to eat something that's going to provoke more inflammation in your body that's already fighting against inflammation just to be alive? Why would you want to do that? Put more stress in your body. Now look, anybody wants to eat a bag of chips or some kind of snacks like neon colored snacks that we all grew up with, artificial preservatives, coloring, flavoring, there's nothing good about that.

You're not really eating food by the true definition of food.

Right. Right. Snacks. snack. All right. Ultra processed snack. You know, that's not going to be good for you. If you ate it once in a while, you know, your body will, will be resilient. It'll bounce back. But how many people do this on a regular basis? And what that does, those inflammatory foods that you would categorically Ultra processed foods, snack foods that you'd find in the middle aisle, very common. Those. And also a lot of those candies that we grew up in the Halloween trick-or-treat you know, which put in your pillow sack or the pumpkin, those are packed with things that spark inflammation, not something you want to be able to regularly expose yourself to.

So the ultra-processed food category, I think, is becoming one of the most concerning areas. And I think it's the new smoking. I think we're understanding how do we define foods, and there's debates about how do you classify foods and the classification, is it perfect? Is it better systems? But at the end of the day, we know what we're talking about. industrial agricultural products, corn, soy, wheat, and some dairy, and how that's processed, broken down, altered chemically, deconstructed to be reassembled into things that actually aren't food. And I'm looking up the definition here of food in the dictionary, and it's very clear. It basically means any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink, or that plants absorb in order to maintain and this is the key part in order to maintain life and growth. So by the definition of food, ultra processed foods, Cheetos, Doritos, junk food, these are not actually food because they don't maintain life and growth. They do the opposite.

That's right.

They impede life and they impede health and they impede growth.

They slow you down.

Right.

Right? I mean, and by the way, then you actually take the ingenious food chemistry to add things to them that addict our brain to the flavor or the taste to it. And now you've actually diverted the purpose of food for life and growth, right? So this is what you're talking about. So I think soy is perfectly safe to eat if it's in its whole or naturally fermented forms, as they do in Asia. The issue with breast cancer is a risk. Increasing breast cancer risk is a complete urban legion, not something that people need to know. Obviously, some people have soy allergy. So you always got to actually, by the way, this is true for dairy as well. And any other controversial food we want to talk about, it's. There's a real individual component to it because every individual is going to react to any specific food differently, even broccoli, you know? So listen to your body. That's the other thing that we've kind of gotten away from 100 in our busy Society is we've just, like, learned to drown. out our own sensation, that listening to how you feel.

100%.

Introception.

Introception, yeah. I mean, the whole idea that.

We.

Are eating these foods that are driving disease or food-like substances, not actually food, is something that is probably one of the most important issues of our time. We talk about climate change, we talk about politics and war and all these things, and this gets second and shift, and no one's really talking about it. But what's encouraging to me, William, is I see now in the media, in the press, and in the zeitgeist, this concept that people are understanding that ultra processed food is the thing that is causing most deaths in the world today. And it's an easy fix. If you don't recognize what's on the label, don't eat it. Minimally processed food is fine. A can of tomatoes, a can of sardines. salmon jerky. I have salmon jerky in my bag. I can have a can of mackerel. That's okay. That's just processed, right? It's in a can, it's altered in some way, but it's very minimally processed. Minimally processed. But what we're talking about is these deconstructed science projects that are Frankenfoods that are ubiquitous, that are now 60 to 65% of our diet, 67% of kids diets, and that are responsible for 11 million deaths a year, and there are things that we should be addressing. And I was just in Argentina and Chile and South in America, they label their food. It's like black box warning. It's like a cigarette box. It says, this will kill you. Don't eat it. And people know now. They don't really know. So, one of the things we talked about, I want to kind of get into now a little bit is this concept of the root causes of health. And in your books, you talk about foods that activate and deactivate our body's five key defense systems. And I would say you could also call them the root causes of health. What are these systems in our body? that if they're optimally functioning, create health, and if they're not, create disease. So what are those defense systems quickly and how can these systems help maintain our health and heal us when we get sick? And what should we be eating to kind of nail these five health defense systems that you talk about? And you have a five by five by five plan. So kind of take us through that.

So five health defense systems are birthright, our health defenses were hardwired in our body when we were still in our mom's womb. so dad's sperm met mom's egg, we were just a ball of cells. Our health defenses started there. They started forming. And the health defenses actually are our circulation, we call it angiogenesis, how the body grows and maintains blood vessels. 60,000 miles in an adult delivers oxygen.

And nutrients to every single organ, every.

Single cell in your body. How many times around the earth is that?

60,000 times.

If you were to pull out all your blood vessels and line them up.

And then it'd form a ball of yarn, you'd run out of yarn. That's amazing. Inside every single human.

So you can imagine how important that is. to be healthy.

And that's what COVID is messing up. We don't have time to get into all that, but we talked about it.

On a previous podcast, but that is.

Ripping up your circulation. Ripping up your circulation. It damages the lining of the 60,000 miles. And we have a podcast that we.

Talked about that on, so I'm going to link back to that and people can find in the show notes. But yeah, so we want to protect that circulation. That's first health defense. Second health defense is actually our stem cells, because when that ball of cells that we started out as started to grow a face and started to grow arms and legs and our organs started to form, form before we were born at nine months, we were all composed of stem cells. And we had so many stem cells that form who we each individually are that we had. We. We had an overage. There's more than we needed. So when we were born, all the extra stem cells that no longer needed to be used to form us actually got packed away. It's kind of like, you know, extra supplies. Yeah. And the stem cells that we were born with get packed. into our bone marrow, packed into our skin, even packed into our heart, into our body fat. And they just sit there ready to regenerate us from the inside out. So, this is a new definition of healing that hasn't been talked about a lot, is that our stem cells heal us from the inside out. I'm not talking about going to the strip mall to get your knee injected. That's not really ready for prime time. As somebody who's been involved with developmental therapeutics for stem cell therapy, not ready for prime time yet. However, what is ready for prime time is what we were born with. Our stem cells continuously regenerate. How do we know we generate. Our hair grows back, our skin grows back, our gut grows back. By the way, surgeons know this. If you cut off two-thirds of your liver, it grows back. It grows back over two years. If you cut off the tip of.

Your lung, the tip will grow right back. We do like a salamander when you.

Cut off a limb. Well, we can't do a limb yet, but we can do many other organs. We just don't do it very, very quickly, so. But that's an internal health, a health defense that we don't feel and we don't see. Okay, we don't see our stem cells, but. there. All right. By the way, if you cut yourself paper cut or you scrape your knee and, you know, if your scab comes off, you see all this bright red bubbly stuff underneath the scab, those are your blood vessels are growing. They're also regenerating five, two to five percent of those cells that are, that are in underneath the scab are stem cells that are regenerating that. That's right. That wound, that tissue right there. That's your second health defense. And, and just like the circulation, there are foods that you can eat for your circulation and your stem cells that boost it. And the idea that we can eat foods that stimulate our regeneration to me is one of the most mind-blowing, exciting things that are out there. And one of the best foods is actually cacao, plant-based food cacao that's actually used to make chocolate. Yum. Right? So dark chocolate, obviously.

So, wait a minute, this is a big one. Chocolate regenerates stem cells.

Cocoa, cacao. Cacao. So the plant-based polyphenols, the flavanols in this plant-based food. So if you were in South America.

So you were in Ecuador. We literally cracked open this big thing. We ate the thing raw.

It was amazing. So let's demystify it. It says you and I both know. Look, if anybody has heard about, you know, think about chocolate is made, dark chocolate's made, all chocolate has some cacao in it except for white chocolate. Cacao actually comes from up plant. It's a football like shaped thing. It could be brown or yellow. When you shake it, it's white cacao. And it's kind of heavy. You shake it, you can feel something inside it rattling around. When it's ripe, you cut it open, there's all these little chestnut like looking things inside it. Each nut, each bean actually has a little white rim of kind of sweet sour fruit. Yeah, it's yummy.

You can eat it.

Oh, it's delicious. Yeah, absolutely delicious. You can mail order it. or the cacao right to your home. Okay. From places like Miami, I think there's a place that sells it. And then it's that nuts, the seed in there, the bean, that actually is.

Dried and turned into chocolate.

It's like a coffee bean, but it's like a chocolate bean. And then roasted. And that turns into what is the core ingredient that goes into making chocolate. And dark chocolate has more of it.

The flavanols, the polyphenols are in that bean. It's plant-based. You know what a great hack is? What? Coco nibs. okay. Roasted. So they basically kind of break up the cocoa bean after it's roasted into these little nibs, and you can put them on anything. You can eat them as a snack. They're a little bitter, but they're really amazing.

And they're just pure cocoa. Yeah. Okay, so studies have been done to show that the flavanols in cocoa stimulate stem cells to come out of your bone marrow, like bees in a beehive in your bloodstream, and they go out and they find wherever needs to be. prepared. If it's in your heart, they'll fix it. If it's in your liver, they'll fix it. If it's in your skin, they'll fix it. And so we can eat foods like high flavanol cocoa in order to be able to actually get the stem cells to work a little bit better. Now, how do we know this, this actually functions, it works in people? Well, clinical studies have been done with high flavanol cocoa to show that in, like, men who are in their 60s with heart disease, they could actually eat, just have two cups of dark chocolate, hot cocoa a day for a month, and they doubled the amount of stem cells in their bloodstream and their circulation improved measurably. And then what's even more important and impressive is that there was a study called the COSMOS study that was completed recently that showed that eating high flavonoid cocoa decreases the risk of cardiovascular death.

Over a period of time.

Like a statin. Exactly. Except made with the, by eating the same thing that you use to make chocolate. So we're not telling people to go out to have chocolate, which is a confection. It's got a lot of sugar and all kinds of other stuff in it.

Yeah.

But it's the stuff underlying it.

Underneath it, the core of it. It's so interesting. I met Frank Mars once who is the chairman of Mars, the candy company. I'm thinking, oh man, this guy's like selling junk food and he's gonna, he's like, oh my God, Mark Hyman, I love your stuff. Like food is medicine.

Food is medicine. He was like going on and on about how all these phytochemicals and we're so on it. Mars has got a research program on this as well. So listen, I think it's really great that the smartest food companies are paying attention to the things that people like you and I are talking about and finding ways to invest in doing more research. Look, you know, we're not telling people you got to go, you know, pick everything yourself to eat it. You don't have to go to the farmer's market. If one day we can get the food industry to evolve from making only ultra processed foods to making healthier foods, better foods, and taking the planet along the way, then we all win. Then we all win. Okay, so what are the next to health defense systems?

Okay, stem cells, and circulation, stem cells.

We talked a lot about this already. Your gut microbiome is a third one. 39 trillion bacteria in our gut, not just in our gut, but it's also in our skin. All the orifices will have some defense.

Sure, it's not 40 or 39 and a half trillion.

Yeah, hard to count. more than in a clear sky that you can see stars. But, you know, a lot of people don't know this. And I, I only learned this in the last year where, what part of your gut most of the microbiome actually lives. In the large intestine. In a large intestine, which is the colon. So think about the intestines as a 40-foot tube. It's as long as a school bus. All right. And you got the front end, which is actually your mouth, and that mouth is a microbiome as well. Sure. Healthy mouth bacteria. look like it protects your brain against dementia. All right? Like Alzheimer's disease now linked to unhealthy mouth bacteria and gum disease. But the. But when we talk about gut health, we're usually talking about what's in the colon, which is the last several feet of the gut before the tailpipe.

Right.

Okay. So now within the colon, the colon goes up on one side of the body, ascending colon, goes across your body, left to right. Okay. Right. Right to left. And then it comes down and then it. And then it actually empties out. It turns out there's most of the gut microbiome lives. in a part of the colon called the cecum.

It's the bottom of it.

The bottom of the ascending part of the colon. It's kind of a baggy part of the colon. It's where the appendix is. And most of the gut bacteria live right there. And in fact, we're beginning to realize that the appendix probably plays a role to help the gut microbiome stay healthy.

I mean, it's not just vestigial ornament that we need to take out.

You don't need it.

Take it out. Your tonsils, you don't need them to take them out.

We were taught this in medical school. The one organ you don't need is the appendix. And it's totally not true. Or in the tonsils as well. The fact of the matter is that some people are beginning to think that the appendix is like the Pez dispenser for healthy gut bacteria.

To reload. To reload the Pez dispenser. That was something I ate as a kid. You basically have this little Pez thing with a cute little character on top.

And you pull it back and this little candy pops out. Exactly. It's like, oh my God. The appendix is like the Pez dispenser. So you wanna keep your appendix. But listen, I took part in a gut microbiome transplant, FDA approved, for a cancer patient. We can't give the no name or any details on it, but I will tell you we were trying to help a cancer patient who had been bombarded with antibiotics and steroids, was not responding to immunotherapy, needed better gut bacteria in order to be their health defense. And so we got stool from a super responder who really responded well, had healthy stuff.

Healthy poop.

Okay, yeah, kind of like Navy SEAL level gut bacteria. Okay. And, it's hard to find these days. I was scrubbed in. We actually were able to put through colonoscopy, put the colonoscopy back in right down to the cecum, and then just injected in a syringe the healthy microbiome right into the cecum. That's where most of it lives. So that gut bacteria talks directly to your immune system, which is also inside the wall of the gut. It lowers inflammation. It creates not only butyrate, as you mentioned, but other short-chain fatty acetate, propionate, and probably more things that we haven't yet discovered yet. It text messages your brain. The gut-brain axis, a lot of people talk about it as if it were a simple thing. This is the beginning of a new understanding of our human nature. If the brain is a black box, the gut is also a black box because we're beginning to understand that the biggest nerve coming out of our brain, called the vagus nerve, which comes down the side of our neck and then like a horse tail kind of ramifies all throughout our gut, that that nervous system communicates from the brain down to our gut. Our brain talks to our gut bacteria. 100%. And then our gut bacteria go get to SMS. They're listening. They're listening. They're like, you know what? I'm gonna talk back to the brain upstairs. And so they text message our brain back and forth all over again. So the bottom line is how we treat our gut defense. Not only is good for immunity, lowers inflammation, helps us heal wounds faster because I did research on this, but also helps us with our mental mental health, mental health, depression. You know, amazingly, autism seems to be linked to the gut microbiome.

A hundred percent. I treated so many patients with autism, and the first place we started was fixing the gut. And they all have stinky, smelly, sticky poops. They all have gut issues. And somehow the psychiatrist just ignored it. Oh, I don't know, that is just whatever.

And it's the key to helping them.

I had a kid once who was autism.

He had giardia. Wow.

And we figured out as Giardia fixes.

Microbiome, the kid woke up.

Well, so look, but let's take that. And by the way, just so people are seeing, it doesn't mean that all cases of autism are caused by that. And I think this is really a fundamental flaw in medicine, which is that we think if you have a disease name, then the same treatment applies to everybody with that disease name. There is no such thing as autism. There are autisms. There's Alzheimer's, there's diabetes, there's cancer. There, you know, Cancers. There's breast cancers.

There's not breast cancer. Exactly. And by the way, you just mentioned something important. By treating the Giardia, the Giardia was not the cause of, but the Giardia disturbed the healthy defense system, the gut microbiome, so was unable to do all those complex things that the gut microbiome does that we're just starting to discover. So that's the third health defense system. Obviously, we talked a lot about prebiotics, probiotics that actually improve. females. Fourth health defense system is our DNA itself. And the thing is that, you know, our DNA, it's about three feet of our DNA wound up into every single small cell in our body. And it's our genetic instructions. But most of our DNA is not instruction. Most of our DNA is actually coding for how to actually protect our health. Yeah, right. The part that we understand that codes for proteins is, you know, making, making pieces of ourselves, but the regulation of how the software of our bodies, the rest of the DNA, and so so what we realize is that when you actually allow that software to operate properly, your health is pretty good and your body needs to protect all that. When you actually insult that or try to mutate that or damage that coding DNA, it's basically like downloading viruses onto your laptop. Okay, it's running a little slower. Oh, now it's like, it's. It's. It's frizzed out. Like, you can damage your DNA and ruin your body's ability to protect its own health. And this is where antioxidants really come in to protect our. help our DNA build itself back up. So, like, if you have a damaged DNA, that's no problem. By the way, DNA damage happens every single day.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, it's just a natural part of 100,000 hits, death by a thousand cuts. 10,000 hits to our DNA every single day. Our body can fix it, but when it misses a repair, that is where at the beginning of the trouble that can lead to cancer and other problems can occur.

So we want to have foods. That's our, that's another defense system. And I wrote a lot about this in my book, Young Forever. These are the hallmarks of aging. One of them is dysregulated DNA repair. And, we have a whole built-in repair army that's activated by sirtuins. And, we know various things activate sirtuins from NAD+ to various phytochemicals, there's ferrochelatase. So, there's a whole way we can learn how to activate our DNA repair system.

So, we're just going through it at a high level. But, yeah, this is all in E2B disease. It's a great man. So, we talked about circulation, stem cells, gut microbiome, DNA. And, the last one is probably save the best for last. Well, this is not really a best, but it's powerful. And that's our immune system. And if you think about it, our immune system had to evolve from the time that we crawled out of a swamp, because the earliest form of life lived surrounded in an ecosystem of bacteria, viruses, fungi. You ever look in pond water, under the microscope, it's pond scum. scum, right? Okay. And so from the earliest time that we evolved as the Lale form on this planet, we had to have some form of immune defense to protect us against the creepy crawlies that might get into us, right? So it's not just about COVID it's really about everything. And this immune system protects us from invaders on the outside of the body, like bacteria and viruses, but it also protects us from invaders inside the body, like cancer cells that are just abnormal mutated cells, they betray us and our immune system is like the police force that conducts surveillance. The cops on a beat to look for mutant cells and put someone back in the paddy wagon and takes them away, kills those little cancer cells. So good immunity is good health, bad immunity is bad health. It's pretty simple. And something that gets confused a lot is inflammation. Everyone thinks that inflammation is bad. Here's what I say, inflammation is part of our immune system. It's sort of the immediate part of our immune system. If you cut yourself, your immune system springs into action to make sure bacteria are killed wherever the wound is, the injury is. All right, that's inflammatory cells. So it's good. And then it shuts off when it's no longer needed, and then healing occurs. But inflammation becomes bad when it doesn't go away. Yeah, right. It's the campfire that is keeping you warm. That turns into a wildfire.

That turns into a wildfire, burns the entire forest.

First step.

Yeah, exactly. So that's amazing. That's such a beautiful map of the root cause of health. And none of those things you talked about were things you really focus on as ways of treating disease. But the key is how do you keep those healthy and, and basically those foods that you took to Mars with you. And second is how do you actually understand that they're the key to reversing disease, to beat disease. So as you discussed, and I think this is such a revolutionary idea that we can actually have these built-in repair, regenerative renewal healing mechanisms that are already hardwired into our biology that we really never learned about in medical school, that we know a lot about, and we know a lot about how to activate these through lifestyle, diet, various phytochemicals, certain supplements, avoiding toxins, all these ways we can modulate this healing system. And I think this is really what we're now understanding as the key to increasing our health span, our lifespan. This is what I wrote about on Young Forever. This is really the the fundamental frame shift in medicine from focusing on disease to focusing on health and understand why we deviate from health and how do we create health through understanding these five basic defense systems. And there's other ways of talking about them, talking about hallmarks of aging. Everybody's talking about the same stuff. You just have a different frame of it. But this is so critical and your work is just so important, William, to kind of help us think about this, to make it simple, fun, easy. And you also talk about the dose, which is real important. So if food medicine. Okay, which drug? What's the dose? What's the frequency? How long do you take it? Right? So it's like, it's that nuance. It's not like just eat broccoli. It's like, okay, you need this much. I think one of the foods we didn't remember to talk about that I would have probably taken tomorrow is mushrooms. One of my favorites. One of my favorite mushrooms. So just to close, can you kind of walk us through what Dr. Lee eats and what he takes as supplements every day? to eat to beat disease and to increase your health span on your lifespan.

Okay, first of all, I recognize my body's already hardwired to stay healthy and to reverse disease every single day. And I think this is an important message is that, you know, our body's already doing its job every single day. I try not to actually take down my health defenses and whenever I can, every decision I can make to shore up, to boost my health defenses, raise my shields, I try to do it. smart. You know, it's locking the door before you leave the house, turning off the stove before you go out. I mean, it's a basic defensive mechanism. When I make a decision, it becomes second nature to me. Now, I strongly believe, and by the way, just I want to say one thing about this disease reversal thing. You know, we used to think that you could not reverse heart disease, you could not reverse cancer, but we're seeing it today. You can.

I see it all the time.

And it can be done with with the help of food.

Yeah, if you know how.

If you know how. And, you know, we're not saying, you and I are not saying that this is a done deal. We know everything there is to know about it. There's a magic bullet to it. But this is where we're going as a healthy forward society. We're beginning to figure this stuff out and we can all take simple steps to move it. So, what do I eat every single day? I look at getting my nutrients in through eating mostly plant-based foods. I want to get enough protein, I want to get enough fiber, I want to get my polyphenols in. And, the choices are so myriad. If you go to the market to get stuff that I enjoy eating. So, in my books, I have hundreds of lists of food. So, it's diversity too. Diversity is so important.

You know, like listen. So, within each category, there's a lot of diversity, right? So, protein, fat, carbs, phytochemicals, fiber.

There's a lot of diversity where you can kind of mix and match. Mix and match. And, by the way, this is what two of the healthiest societies in the world have done in Mediterranean society and Asian societies, they have such diversity in their repertoire of recipes. And people don't eat the same thing every single day. There's no dog kibble that everyone's actually feeding themselves. It's seasonal, day to day.

Okay, take us through what you had like maybe yesterday or the day before when you're at home cooking. What does it like an average day look like for you?

You know, I like to have legumes as a core, so beans and spices and herbs to light it up. I like to have leafy greens of different types. I told you I love bok choy. I love mushrooms as well. You know, recently I cooked a Chinese New Year dinner where I got fresh shiitake mushrooms, kind that have the little hatch marks on the top. And I just sliced them in half, and I sauteed them with some soy sauce, and I found some shrimp paste to light them up, and they put a little bit chili pepper in there as well. It just created this incredible umami taste to light up the mushrooms. Mushrooms contain beta-D-glucan, which is really good for gut health. It feeds the gut bacteria, but also lights up your immune system.

Yeah, anticancer.

And it's got anticancer approach. And I want to make one thing distinction between culinary mushrooms and medicinal mushrooms, because mushrooms are so popular now. People are thinking, well, you know, reishi and turkey tail and all the cordyceps.

And all that kind of stuff.

You can't cook with those. most societies don't come with.

There are some.

Maitake, you can. There is an overlap of culinary mushrooms and medicinal mushrooms. Yeah, what are they? There's two of them.

Shiitake mushrooms.

And maitake. And maitake. Yeah, those are the ones I use all the time.

I eat those all the time.

I love them. By the way, a little pro tip for you. If you're getting maitake, which they're still farm for maitake, they're all, they're head of the woods. They're foraged, you know, and some of them are huge. They're delicious. They're like, you can substitute a steak. Put maitake on a grill. It's amazing. But if you get maitake from the forager, I, I can, I really urge you, everyone who tries to do this, to clean it really well, really well, because it comes out of the woods and it's a kind of a compact mushroomy thing. It's got a lot of little, little Frills and things in it. But salamanders like to live in them. So what you want to do is to make sure, make sure there's no salamander.

What do you mean? A little extra protein is not going to kill you. I love that. Yeah, it's so good. And what about something supplements.

What do you take? You know, people always say, well, Dr. Lee, you're, you're into food as medicine, so you probably don't take supplements, right? Wrong. I do take supplements. And, and I, but I take it in a very specific way. Supplements I Define as topping off. Topping off whatever you would not normally supplement. Not a replacement. Supplement and not a replacement. So I like to get everything I can get out of Whole Foods. I like to prepare them myself so I know exactly what's in it. I try to avoid Ultra processed foods, so I get the good stuff and not that stuff. But there are some things that are just hard to eat enough of. Right. Omega-3s is one of those things. You know, I, I travel around. I don't cook fish all the time.

Yeah.

I don't eat chia seeds all the time. So, listen. So Omega-3s at the dose that is really good for you, you really need to eat a lot of it. So I take Omega-3 supplements. Vitamin D. Yeah. Deficient in a lot of people, you know?

Yeah. So that vitamin D. A lot of herring where you have to have, like, 10 servings of portini mushrooms, which I wouldn't mind doing because when I go to Italy, I order giant plates of portini mushrooms because you can't get I'm here and I just ordered, that's what I have for dinner. It's like a giant plate of portobello mushrooms.

Delicious, right? By the way, here's a little pro tip on mushrooms. If you get the lowly white button mushroom that you can get anywhere, it's got some vitamin D in it. But do you know how our skin gets vitamin D? You gotta be exposed to sunlight. If you want your mushroom to create more vitamin D, you slice it, put.

It on a plate and stick it in front of the window with the.

Sunlight coming through it. You'll actually get the mushroom. You do a couple of hours of mushrooms a suntan. Okay, that's a new one.

That's a new one.

You get more vitamin D. really great, right? And so these are look like culinary tips. Like you gotta make your own cooking fun and useful.

Okay, so vitamin D fish oil.

Vitamin D fish oil. And then I do take some probiotics, but here's how I think about my probiotics. I look for human evidence and human studies. All right? And I'm a researcher, so I'm a little, I have an unfair advantage because I'm looking at this stuff all the time. But when I see that Lactobacillus rhamnosus R0012, for example, is good for oral microbiome and good for lower gut microbiome, and I've done a research show it improves internal healing. It actually causes, you know, helps the brain secrete oxytocin, which actually improves your mood. I'm like, you know what? I'm going for some of that. So I do some lactobacillus fructani. Because the other natural sources, sourdough bread. I enjoy sourdough. I don't eat it all the time. It's in Parmesan origiano cheese in Italy. When they actually make the real Parmesan Wheels, they use lactobacillus fructani. That's too much. I enjoy Parmesan cheese, but too much salt, too much saturated fat. I'm not gonna eat it all the time. But But, you know what? The L. reuteri, I take the children's chewable version of it. Oh, interesting. Because I want to also treat my gut microbiome. It fights gum disease and it kills the bacteria that causes cavities. Really? Right. So, double hit. The acromancy we talked about before, it happens to be one of the guardian gut bacteria. Very important. There's a lot we don't know about it, but we do know enough that like, gosh, why wouldn't you take it? Because, and by the way, I bet actually done research looking at gut microbiome, I know that the acryl mancy you buy will actually take in your gut.

Like, I've been able to triple the amount. Yeah. In the gut. It's important. I mean, I, and I honestly, I do a lot of stool testing, and they used to call me Dr. C every poop. And I, and I look at acryl mancy on everybody, and it's amazing how many, you know, people have low acryl.

Mancy, and particularly the sickest patients. Yeah. Tend to be the ones with autoimmune disease, with cancer or heart disease. It's quite amazing. It's a correlation right. But it's a pretty compelling correlation. And if you go back and reflect on what we've been talking about, our gut bacteria communicates to our brain, communicates to our immune system, communicates our inflammatory system, helps us heal, probably many other things that we just haven't uncovered yet. You know, anyone listening to this, what you got to realize is that the medical researchers, like me and others, that are doing the hard work of peeling back the layers of the onion, so to speak, to figure things out, We're doing more work, we're excavating this whole field of food as medicine every single day. We haven't uncovered the whole Tyrannosaurus skeleton yet, but it's coming.

It's infinite, it's infinite.

It's super interesting for us to do this, but we don't have the complete answer yet. And the more we uncover, the more questions that we have, and the more discoveries we're having about just how good our food as medicine actually is for us.

And I think that's a great stack, vitamin D, fish oil, and probiotics. I take those as well. really part of the core way you can activate your defense systems, your healing system, your repair system. So your work is just unbelievable, William. Everybody needs to check it out. You've got so many resources. Your book, Eat to Beat Disease, Eat to Beat Diet, our bestsellers are fantastic. You have a course called Eat to Beat Disease Course, Elevate youe Metabolism. A masterclass that's free, I think a free masterclass, drwilliamlee.com/free-masterclass. And we'll link to all these in the show notes. So his social media is Dr. William Lee LI, and you can get him on everywhere. You can find social media. He's just a wealth of knowledge, information, a brilliant guy, a good guy, a good friend, and everybody should check out his stuff. Thanks for being on the Dr. Twins podcast again and again. And you're gonna be back.

I know. We have more to talk about. Thanks very much. It's always a real pleasure. I mean, look, it's hard. It's a lonely world for people that are really trying to communicate and get the message out. And I think we both have this mission of really trying to scale out the impact that the simple things can have a huge impact on individual lives. Amen.

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