EAT THIS To Starve Cancer & Prevent Disease TODAY! | Dr. William Li & Mark Hyman

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. This is Dr. Mark Hyman and this is a place for conversations that matter. And I believe that today's conversation is gonna matter to all of you because it's about how to beat disease through food. And today's guest is an extraordinary scientist, physician, speaker, author. He's a guy I met a number of years ago and have been very impressed with and recently had the privilege of listening to him at a Milken Institute conference roundtable on food, which brought together all the leaders in thinking about food and health and disease, including food companies. And he gave a dissertation that was off the cuff that literally blew my mind. And in that, he elucidated the power of food in terms of treating disease. And he showed a slide that I pretty much have been blazoned in my mind, which showed the effect of drugs on various biological systems through very fancy chemical analyses and in the effect of foods on the same systems. And almost every time the food was more powerful than drugs. And really, that's why I wanted you to hear Dr. Lee, because he's not only written this book, which I want you all to get called eat to beat disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. And this is really the science of health as opposed to treating disease, which we all learned as doctors. He's best known though for his work leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. Now, those of you don't know what that is, this means how you grow new blood vessels. And particularly we focus on it around cancer because cancer needs new blood vessels to grow and they love to create new blood vessels to feed themselves. But we don't want that to happen. So, he's really done groundbreaking work on this, but not only around cancer, but 70 other diseases are affected by angiogenesis including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, obesity. He did an incredible TED talk called Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, which had 11 million views, which is impressive. He's been on the Oz Show, Martha Stewart, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Voice of America. He's been at the Vatican, talking at the Unite to Cure conference. He's authored over 100 scientific publications in leading journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Lancet. These are the top tier journals. He's been on the faculty of Harvard, Tufts, Dartmouth Medical School. and we are so lucky and privileged to have him here today on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome, Dr. Lee.

Well, thank you, Mark. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here. I know that we share common passions and really trying to understand health and that's what I'm all about and love to have this conversation.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. You know, we've got a guy like you who is steep in deep academia, who's been published in major medical journals, who's been at Harvard, Tufts, and Dartmouth, is leading the field in the world of angiogenesis, which is an extraordinary field of cancer treatment and reversal. And yet somehow you took a kind of sideways turn and realized that, wait a minute, we are in medicine focused on treating disease. But what happens after you do that? Or maybe there's a better way to actually reverse disease, which none of us in medical school were taught was possible. and actually create health. How did you make that sort of shift in your head? Or maybe it was your heart, I don't know.

Well, it's always a little bit of both. Look, I trained as an internal medicine doc, and so my DNA, so to speak, and thinking about patients is really young and old, healthy and sick, men and women, children to adults. And so that gives me kind of a more comprehensive view But the other thing about my background is that I'm a scientist. I'm a vascular biologist. And so I go a mile deep into really kind of significant science. And I wanted to bring those worlds together. 1994, so 25 years ago, I thought that a contribution I could make was to create a nonprofit organization called the Angiogenesis Foundation, whose mission would be to do something unusual, which is to look at common denominators of disease. So rather than take one disease and then just study it a mile deep, what I thought was, what are the things that unite diseases that are common? And could we find some interesting connections that would allow us to not just treat one disease, but maybe pull the bow back and send a single arrow through multiple diseases? Yeah. That turned out to be angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels. And that led me onto this journey where when I saw patients, I started to think through, Well, how do blood vessels normally keep people healthy? And then what happens when they go awry? And that unites 70 different diseases. As I practiced, I started to realize that, you know, we were mostly chasing sickness. And in fact, the work of my organization, we help to help lots of different groups come up with 32 FDA-approved drugs and treatments. all of which are important, but all add to the unsustainability of our model of healthcare, which is waiting until the end and then trying to kind of intercept with more expensive treatments for people that are sicker. And I thought, what if we use this common denominator approach to look at health? What unites health? And that's what led me to write the Eat to Beat Disease. And I realized that there was this remarkable new universe for health that we can actually explore?

It's quite a radical statement you just made. Instead of chasing disease, you're trying to think about the common denominators of health. And it's not something we learned about in medical school. How many of us took that class, Creating Health 101? I mean, it didn't exist in class. And so, your framework is a radically different one. It is so unusual in medicine. How did you actually sort of have that insight because that's a pretty big shift. I'm like, wait a minute, I don't want to focus on treating all these 70 diseases. I want to find out the common things that are underlying them that connect the dots and pull everything together to allow us to actually create health. And as a side effect, the diseases either get better, improve, or maybe go away entirely.

Well, look, most of us actually don't think too much about our health when we're going around, you know, getting as we're younger, growing up, going leading careers, et cetera, starting families. But in fact, you think about health when you lose it, right? So that's basically what we see as doctors when we see our patients. They're concerned when they've lost their health. And it seems to me that if we can help more people stay healthy, but really use science, not guesswork, not conjecture, not soapboxing, and I think this is where science comes in. You and I have talked about this before. There is good, hard science that can help us understand the body. And yes, we were not taught this in medical school, but we should be. because the science of health is really the future of medicine.

It's really powerful and that's what functional medicine is. Coming from your perspective, we've come at it from the clinical perspective, which is we're seeing these common things. We try to create health by changing the diet, by optimizing the microbiome, by improving the immune system, by improving your energy and your mitochondria, helping you detoxify, balancing your hormones, dealing with your lifestyle factors. These are the ways in which we create health. It's pretty rudimentary, I would say. I mean, functional medicine is awesome clinically, but we're just at the infancy stages of really understanding this. And you come at it from the deep science point of view. And you come to the same conclusions, which is pretty awesome. So let's talk about some powerful new drugs that have been discovered that can affect angiogenesis and that actually may be able to reverse many diseases. Now, these drugs are things maybe people have heard about, like Catechins, Genistein, Resveratrol, Lycopene, Icosapentanoic acid, Glucosinolates, Isothionates, Quercetin, Proanthocyanidins, Flavonols, Ellagic Tannins, Curcumin, MetacQuinone, Beta-Carotene, Brassinin, SilimarIn, or Organosulfur Al-DiSulfide. This are amazing drugs. And for those of you who don't understand what I just said, what I was talking about was green tea and soy and red wine and grapes and tomatoes and fish oil and broccoli and oranges and berries and pomegranate and curcumin and green leafy vegetables and papaya and Chinese cabbage and artichokes and garlic, right? These are the new drugs. And you write about this. And there was a beautiful article you wrote, it was in Journal of Oncology called, Tumor Angiogenesis as a target for dietary cancer prevention. Now, most people are going to have trouble reading it. I certainly was dense for me, but what you did was you mapped out the deep science around the power of all these different compounds and foods to help reverse disease.

So, as a scientist, what's nice about science is that it is truth and we follow truth wherever it goes. And basically, the the route that I took is there's a lot of research that leads to the discovery of new drugs by the pharmaceutical biotech industry. I've been there, done that, still involved with it, actually, and it's because we have more sick people that need better treatment. So, that's valuable by itself.

It's not either or.

It's not either or. And, you know, I'm certainly not one of those doctors that have sort of rejected Western biomedicine. Like, it's very important when you're sick to help save lives. On the other hand, what I realize is that there's a missing opportunity and that opportunity is what everybody sort of intuitively knows, which is that the things that we put into our body can affect our body and they affect our cells. And food as medicine is really not a new concept. It's an old concept. And if you go other cultures, whether you're in Europe or in Asia, indigenous peoples from all around the world, they looked at food as part of their health keeping scorecard. And, they viewed food as a precious substance. They didn't just need to survive, they ate because they were doing something good for themselves. We've lost a little bit of that. And, the research behind it actually resurfaces this in a new way that I think that we can all get behind, which is not, in fact, it's not really just about the food, it's about how our body responds to the How does our body protect its health? And that's what the health defense systems are all about.

It's true. I remember traveling once in Hong Kong and I went out to dinner with this guy, I think he was part of Merrill Lynch, I gave a talk. And we had this extraordinary meal and everything in the meal was medicine, intentionally medicine. And I wrote an article about it called Eating youg Medicine: Food is Pharmacology. And then I went through all the dishes we had. And I went through the research and I was like, well, ginkgo nuts do this and, you know, this thing does that. And it was an amazing kind of experience because I realized that in this culture, we don't think of food that way. And yet that's, that's foundational for creating Health.

Well, that's why I wrote Eat to Beat Disease, is that, you know, why I do explain the science behind things. I actually lay out more than 200 different foods that are actually, some of them are real crowd pleasers. They're the things that we actually know that are supported by science and then figure out how can you incorporate that? Because, in fact, it becomes natural to pick the things that are good for you. It's something we've lost that we can bring, put back into our everyday lives. And for me, when I go out to eat or when I prepare a meal, that's what I'm doing. I'm actually assembling things that I know are good for me.

Absolutely. That's why this show is called the Doctor's Pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y because that's where you get your drugs. I go to drugstore, which is the grocery store. And that's where I find all the drugs. And I literally don't know as much as you perhaps about this because even though I've been doing it for a long time, but I look at all the vegetables and all the foods. Now, I didn't know razor clams, we're going to get into that, are so beneficial. I don't know exactly why, but I love them. But you can find out what are the foods that have various components that can activate health.

And how do you eat more of those things? Well, I think it's about having knowledge and then making it second nature. So, when we heat up something on the stove, we know it's going to be hot, we don't burn ourselves. So, we actually avoid certain behaviors. When we go out into the sun, we know to put on sunscreen, it becomes second nature. I think food as medicine is something that can become second nature. You have to be exposed to the basic information. And, you know, the science is important because that's what makes it real. But at the end of the day, this is something that school teachers should be teaching kids, that coaches should be teaching athletes, that doctors should be telling patients. And so, and I think family members should be sharing among themselves. This is the type of conversation that should be happening at every holiday meal, in every schoolyard. And, and I think that it's not so foreign. It's informed by science. We can all do it.

It's true. Now, the other thing I heard you say was at this conference was you showed a slide around immunotherapy. For those who don't know what immunotherapy is, essentially a way to get cancer by activating your immune system rather than giving a poison or cutting it out or burning it out. You literally give something that's gonna help your immune system get into gear and be like Pac-Man and eat up the cancer. And, you showed a slide and who would have thought of this? But, you showed a slide that people who respond to this immunotherapy and these literally can erase cancers actually have a certain type of bacteria in their microbiome, in their gut that makes them respond to this immunotherapy, whereas those who don't actually die. And this bacteria is called Akkermansia. It's one of the thousands and thousands of species of bugs in your gut. And you shared a story, if I may, about your mom who had basically metastatic endometrial cancer, which was treated with immunotherapy and was successful, but you added certain things to the treatment to make sure that her acrymancia were good, like pomegranate and cranberry and these polyphenols which come from food that seem to be powerful growers of these great bugs in your gut. So, how do we sort of begin to integrate these ideas into how we treat these diseases. Are we giving everybody like a smoothie with all these things in it and helping them with their immunotherapy?

Yeah, well let's take a step back to say, first of all, our bodies are working hard every single day from the time we're born to our last breath to defend our health. And these defense systems, and I've identified five of them in my book, is angiogenesis, stem cells, our microbiome, our ability for our DNA to protect our body, protect itself and our bodies and our health and our immunity. And all these defense systems work together in concert. They're like our security force in our body. They're patrolling, they're watching out, they're making sure everybody's safe inside and everything is functioning smoothly. And when you have a disease like cancer, for example, and it's not just cancer, it's heart disease, it's diabetes, it's Alzheimer's, it's obesity, but for specifically for cancer, it's really a few bad guys snuck in and they figured out how to get around the security force. It's sort of like TSA let somebody slip by and now we have to try to chase it. So, in the old days for cancer, what we used to do is just say, well, let's take a drug like chemotherapy and wipe it out. And that's a blunt instrument approach by trying to take something poison to kill something that you want to kill.

By the way, the rest of you gets poisoned too.

Well, that's right. And so basically it's a toxic approach to something that we don't really, it's one bad actor, but we don't want to poison the entire body. We've now changed our minds about this, and this is really what's making the impossible possible. We've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer, it's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancers. So immunotherapy, which is what you are just bringing up, is an entirely new approach of enhancing our own body's defenses. We don't use drugs to kill the cancer. We allow our bodies. We give medicines that allow our bodies to kill the cancer so our immune systems can find the cancer and reverse the disease back to health. That's what we've always been dreaming of and it's here. But here's the problem. Only about 20% of people actually have this incredible response to immunotherapy, sometimes a little fewer, sometimes a little bit more. But the response when it happens, it's exactly what we want. Dramatic, right?

Like your mom.

My mom had metastatic cancer and in 30 days, she had no cancer and never had chemotherapy. What makes the difference between somebody who responds like that and who doesn't respond like that? That's one of the mysteries out there. And, this is exactly where we need to consider more than the typical lab tests that doctors run. We need to think more holistically. And one of the things we know is that our microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria, communicates, talks to our immune system. And we need our gut bacteria to help coach our immune system to do the right thing, including getting cancer. So, a study done by a colleague of mine, Dr. Laurence Zitvogel, she's in Paris. She's an immunologist who who works with cancer patients, she looked at 249 cancer patients who were receiving immune therapies and separated them into people who responded versus people who did not respond. This, by the way, was published in the journal Science, which is one of the most prestigious journals. And what she found was that the difference between people who responded and didn't respond was one bacteria. Unbelievable. Akkermansia, right? So, well, isn't that easy? You can just maybe take some probiotics with Akkermansia, except that you can't. No. There's no akkermansia probiotics.

But you can feed them.

But you can feed it and you can actually change your gut to make your body grow akkermansia. And the way to do this is the food as medicine solution. So, turns out that pomegranates and cranberries actually have ellagic tannins, but pomegranates especially. And that natural chemical in pomegranate juice and what's been shown is that just one eight ounce cup of real pomegranate juice, not the flavored stuff, but the real stuff. Yeah. Actually, over the course of a week or two, we'll actually help change the inside of our guts so that that bacteria likes to grow. That bacteria grows in the lining of the gut, talks to the immune system, and that makes the cancer immunotherapy work better. Yeah.

And then there's other things too, like you said, cranberries and green tea.

Many things can actually feed our microbiome, right? So plant-based foods, you know, I think it's completely accepted now. It's not challenged that plant-based nutrition is actually the healthy approach to life. I mean, it's kind of- Eating more plants.

Eating more persons.

Right? But it's not just, we're not just feeding ourselves, we're feeding our bacteria.

Yeah.

Right? So we're feeding the 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies and after we extract all the stuff that we need on the human side, we're leaving the leftovers for the bacteria. this is the fibers, this is the bioactives. And, what's amazing is our bacteria can take some of this fiber and they digest it. So, it's kind of like giving a sculptor a block of wood and say, do something with it. So, the bacteria, our gut microbiome takes that block of wood and starts making sculptures. There's like these things called short-chain fatty acids or SCFAs that our microbiome make. And, it turns out that these short-chain.

Fatty acids, these little tiny particles that they make, from our food that we feed them. They're like the fats that fuel the gut lining. They do that.

They're anti-inflammatory. They boost our immune system. They help regulate our blood sugar. They lower our cholesterol. Help re- Cancer risk. They also suppress cancer risk and they prevent blood vessels from growing into cancer as well, all tied together. And this is, you know, at the end of the day, why we need.

To take our food seriously. Yeah, essentially you write a little bit about, for example, how the microbiome plays roles in autism and cognitive function. And I remember recently seeing a study where there are undigestible things in breast milk that humans can't digest called oligosaccharides, and they feed the good bacteria in the baby to develop it. Formula doesn't have those things. And the kids that are breastfed have high levels of something called butyrate, which is one of these short-chain fatty acids, which actually turns off colon cancer genes. and is an incredible important anti-inflammatory and regulates the gut health. Whereas the other formula fed kids had something called propionic acid, another one of these short chain fats, but actually that in animal models can induce autism. And so what? It's like, whoa.

Well, you know, at the end of the day, we're just at the surface of uncovering the mysteries of health. And I think that's the kind of humility and awe and wonderment we all need to have, which is, you know, we know quite a bit about different diseases, but we're just at this new frontier of understanding our health. I mean, you've been working in this field for a while and you're deeply steeped into it. And what I'm seeing from my end of the table is that we can begin to peel back the layers of the onion. So it's all about balance. Yeah. You know, more is not more. You need just the right amount.

So in your book, A to B disease. You break it down into these very digestible bits. And you briefly touched on it, but I want to go deep in each of these five areas because what you're talking about is something that is our health creation, health defense system that we can activate, but nobody talks about. And you mentioned them, it's our angiogenesis system. It's regeneration, which is stem cells, and you're really involved in the stem cell world. The microbiome, the DNA protection, how we repair and keep our DNA healthy and our immune system. So let's talk about each of those and how we can activate those things. What are the things that harm them? For example, you talk about alcohol affecting stem cells, and I'm thinking, wow, I had a tequila last night. Did I screw up my stem cells? or then you say, well, red wine maybe helps other areas. So, it's a little confusing. How do you break down each of these? And, let's just go through them. Let's start with angiogenesis. And, what are those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system? And, what are those things we can.

Use to actually activate health within it? Great. So, angiogenesis is a term that actually talks about how the body grows blood vessels. Blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to.

Every cell in our body.

That's what keeps us healthy. But, there's 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. So, if you pull out all the blood vessels in your body, line them up, and then you can actually form a line that would go around the Earth twice. Unbelievable. So, that's one of this enormous organ system. So, you know it's going to be important. And, we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart, you wind up having big problems with cardiovascular disease. Clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes. And, if you don't have enough blood vessels, you can't heal your wounds. and if you actually have too many blood vessels, you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration, and you can grow cancer. So, this is a system that is required to keep every cell in organ healthy. It's a health defense system. And, if it's out of balance, you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels. You wind up having in trouble. So, what are the things that can damage angiogenesis? Well, it turns out high fat diets, any fat or just- you- know what? Actually mostly saturated fats, but I think that it's really high fat, overall high fat diets can be damaging and hypercholesterolemia, for example. If you have a lot of cholesterol floating around your blood, like the damaging bad cholesterol, LDL, it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels. If you have second cigarette smoke, tobacco, whether people shouldn't smoke, but even secondary smoke, can actually damage your blood vessel response. And then you think about heart disease, you think about cancer, things that are your blood vessels out of whack, out of balance.

The fat thing is interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils. And it's hard to separate out, are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil, or they're having trans fats and toxic fats and inflammatory.

So, the science actually says is not actually talking about what you actually eat. It's about what the net net, the effect that's in the body. So, if you wind up actually going from, the researchers have studied, for example, in the lab, animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemic. These are mice whose blood is milky. key because it's actually so filled with fat. That's a genetic thing for sure. Right? And those are the subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis. So I think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good. We know that, for example, that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good, the polyunsaturated fats are good for you. But I'm talking about after what the body actually processes it, what actually results of your body can be. So, what are the things that actually can help restore healthy androgenesis? Well, think about androgenesis balance like a lawn that's growing, right? Or a garden that's growing. You want to prune the garden, make sure things don't overgrow, pick out the weeds, and if you're mowing a lawn, you're kind of just getting everybody, all the the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height. Yeah. So you don't wind up having the scraggly lawn. That's what the body does to keep angiogenesis in balance. Not too much, not too little. And so the food we eat is actually like a lawn mower. It kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body. Not too much, not too little. So the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea, which is really good soy. Actually, genistein is a bioactive found in soy, is really good. Tomatoes are really good for helping to keep angiogenesis in balance. Many fruits and vegetables also can do that. So the brassinins are really good. So many of the things we already know are good for us, we know actually also help our blood vessels.

And now we know how.

And now we know how.

Yeah. Now what about stem cells and regeneration? This is a big topic that I think people are hearing about the news, they're confused about it, there's controversy about it, there's laws about it that prevent adequate research. I mean, it's really quite a messy area and yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in. And it's, I don't think something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells. That there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells. And what are stem cells anyway? What do they do? how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them?

Yeah, well, stem cells are really simple. We're made of stem cells. So, when our moms and dads got together and created, you know, us in the womb, we started out as stem cells. They actually made every single one of us.

A negative sperm.

A negative sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory. And then, pretty much, we formed out of our own stem cells. And after we, were born, a few of those stem cells stuck around, about 700,000 of them. They stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines. They hide out in our body and they help us regenerate. So, when you and I were growing up, right, in grade school, we learned from our teachers that starfish can regenerate, salamanders can regenerate, but people can't regenerate, right?

Yeah. You can't grow a new arm.

Yeah, well, it's true. You can't grow a new arm. But we do regenerate. We regenerate every day. We know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back. Our gut lining grows back. Our livers can grow back. If you actually remove part of your liver, it'll grow back. Our skin grows back. So our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells. Now, what can injure stem cells? High doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells.

So I'm okay with the one tequila I had last night?

Having a tequila every now and then is not bad, having glass wine. But, you know, the thing is on balance, which you want to do is people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells. Diabetes is another state, a metabolic state that it really impairs, it cripples our stem cells.

Sugar.

High blood sugar cripples our stem cells. So, the excess of anything can be harmful including to our stem cells. So what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells? This is where it's really become interesting. Before I talk about that though, let me just stress. Stress affects your stem cells. Stress can definitely affect our stems. High stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells. You know, it's just like stunning them. So they're like, wait a minute, what do I do now? You know, maybe I'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs. We got to rebuild our blood vessels. We got to rebuild our hearts. You know, our hearts turn around like we we actually have stem cells in our hearts and our brains and re-grow our nerves. Every single day, something in our body is regenerating. Actually, a lot of things are regenerating. So, what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies that you inject into the body. So, taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them. And someday, that's going to wind up becoming game changing in medicine someday. We're not there yet. I've been involved with some of those efforts and what I've seen is very exciting. But more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells. And here's the research. You can actually take a-- and it's a lot cheaper.

And it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable. Getting a stem cell injection is like.

20 grand or something, right? Well, you know, I would say, why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table? Right? So, the Mediterranean diet, it's been studied by Spain, looked at elderly people on the Mediterranean diet, and those who were on a Mediterranean diet compared to not on a Mediterranean diet had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation, in their bloodstream. so again, it's not one magic food, it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating. Now, when you can actually do the research on specific things as well. So for example, tea, green tea will increase your stem cells, but guess what? So can black tea, right? So here's what the Japanese live forever.

Well, longevity.

All the green tea. You know, people in Asia drink a lot of tea. People in Britain drink a lot of tea as well. We used to say green tea is good, black tea is fermented, so it's not gonna be that good for you. we're changing our minds. We have to keep our minds open. Black tea can also double the number of stem cells. And then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study by UCSF in San Francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease, so they had kind of crappy blood flow, and they gave them hot chocolate.

Yeah, I was going to say the chocolate stem cell story.

I want to hear about that. It's amazing, right? So. The darker the chocolate, the higher the flavonols. These are the bioactives are naturally present in cacao. And, there was a study done.

This is the food is medicine. This is the food is medicine. There are literally these chemicals in food.

Called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties. They are made by Mother Nature, they're packed in the food, growing on a plant, and every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactive. So, in cacao, which is a bean, which then you process to you actually get, you know, kind of the cocoa powder. If you take the really dark chocolate, like 73% cacao, the really dark chocolate, and you make it into a high flavanol hot chocolate drink, and you have it twice a day, this was the clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having, drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month, they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't break hot chocolate, right? And so, okay, so the question is, is that important? When they measured their blood flow, what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which, you know, kind of like lowers the circulation of the blood, they let it go. They found that the blood flow was much vastly improved.

Wow.

So here's a functional result that actually means it makes a difference. So, who's going to complain about chocolate who's gonna complain about tea, who's gonna complain about a Mediterranean diet? I mean, you go out to eat, these are the things we love.

Yeah, well, it's interesting you talk about how drugs sort of block, interfere, inhibit some medical process, some biological process. And there's toxicity to them, there's side effects to them. You know, you can take too much, which will harm you, whereas foods don't work like that. But you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food. So food is medicine, what's the dose? one cranberry is it a thousand cranberries?

Right, well, so my book Eat to Beat Disease, I specifically have a chapter on food doses. It's important to me.

Which nobody talks about.

Well, I know that because when I read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale, I'm always asking, well, how much should I actually eat? And that always struck me as something that needed an answer. So, here's how we've approached it. you can actually get food doses. That's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health. The best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies, these epidemiological studies. There's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times, right? So in Europe, there's something called the EPIC study. EPIC study. And Haines is in the United States. Bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of patients. In Europe, they're studying 500,000 patients. over 20 years, and they're tracking everything they eat, and they're asking them how much are you eating? And then on the tail end, looking at what happens to their health, what's their cancer rate, what's their heart disease rate, what's their diabetes rate? And when you actually combine those two, the result that we want, lower cancer, less heart disease, and you go back into the research and you figure out what foods they ate, you can actually calculate how much they ate of it.

Yeah.

Right? So, and then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this. By the way, this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well. It's, you know, just having random amounts of stuff not gonna work. You gotta correlate what works with what actually the amount is. So, smaller studies, there was a study called the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study done at Harvard, which looked at 70,000 men, and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week, that's a half a cup of cooked tomatoes, not that much, you have pasta, lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39%. So that's a dose, that's an outcome, and that's a particular food. And, you can do that systematically, you got to hunt and peck for it, but it's there. And, it doesn't give you the exact answer, it's not like a med, actually frankly, even penicillin. You don't always get the right result, but you have a good approximation. So, that's the beginning of food doses.

Your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about the diet and eating healthy and reversing disease, but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that I didn't even know about like fish roe or razor clams or different kinds of Chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that maybe haven't been studied in large randomized controlled trials, but have clinical studies, have epidemiologic studies, and we can start to include these. And there's very little downside, right?

Right.

Unless you don't like clamps.

Well, look, what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another. And my approach is really a global approach. My work spans around the world. We're in Asia, Europe, Asia, I mean America and Americas. And here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods and no matter where you go, right? So what interests me is what are the common denominators? So for example, you mentioned razor clams. Well, that's actually a category of seafood. We know from most epidemiological studies, including studies in Europe and Asia, that people who eat more seafood, about three times a week actually have lower all-cause mortality and they just survive longer. Then you sort of say, well, what could be possibly responsible for that? Well, we do know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat.

What is the omega-3s in razor clams or something else?

There's probably other things as well. I can tell you another example that I was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually not only have some omega-3 fatty acids, but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune system. So, again-- so it's like the mushrooms.

Of the sea because polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms, they're anti-cancer compounds.

And now they're in oysters?

Wow, I didn't know.

And, you know, by the way-- these are long sugar chains. That's right. and, and your body digests them. They've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce. So, you know, the kind of sauce, the brown sauce you see in a Chinese restaurant, right? Chinese food that they study that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system.

Does that actually come from oysters?

It comes from oysters. Yeah. They boil them down and they caramelize them. So again, this is where food is medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat. side of things, really.

Yeah.

You incorporate the culinary side, the chefs get into it. Yeah. I mean, this is really, I think, us as a society coming together and saying, what do we love? And by the way, in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, it's really not about what to cut out of your life. It's about what to add to your life. Yeah. And what do we really enjoy? It's all about our preferences and making the right decisions.

So this is incredible. So stem cells are not some weird thing. You have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat. Right. maybe get it from some placenta somewhere. You can actually activate your body's own regenerative healing power. And, you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate them. That's so powerful and it's a very encouraging message. Now, let's talk about the microbiome. Now, this is a whole other world that most doctors really are not schooled in. That certainly wasn't part of my medical education. is something that I've been focused on for almost 30 years in functional medicine because we know the gut is where the seed of your health is. It's what ancient traditions like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, they all recognize this. We just were like, oh, well, it's just poop. It's this brown stuff that comes out as waste. Who cares? Whatever. And now we're seeing it linked to so many different conditions from autism to depression to cancer to heart disease to obesity to Parkinson's. I mean, the list goes on and on and we probably haven't even finished the list yet. And yet, we know very little about it. So, could you tell us a little bit about the microbiome and why it's so important and what we can do to protect it, to feed it, to help it, and also what are those things that we're doing that screw it up?

Right. So, the microbiome is an entire new discipline that's going to change humanity. I think that we've always thought of humankind as just humans. But in fact, we're 50-50 with bacteria is really kind of like- I think.

It'S more like 90-10.

Well, they've actually done some new calculations on this, right? So it's about 40 trillion cells, about the same number of bacteria as the latest calculation on this is sort of the up to date numbers. And it makes a lot of sense, right? So basically when we evolved as humans, we were hunters and gatherers picking stuff up, you know, nuts and fruits and seeds and picking stuff off of trees that had bacteria in it. There's more bacteria in a planet than living than animals. And when we ate those, the bacteria naturally colonized the body. And by the way, the gut, of course, but not just the gut. Our skin, our mouth, our nose, every orifice has got bacteria and arteria's a bacteria. Breast milk has bacteria. Even in the womb, which we, you know, when you and I were medical school, they said, oh, the womb is sterile. wrong. In fact, babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb.

Amazing.

Okay, so we're beginning to rewrite the Playbook of understanding how bacteria get in our body. The next thing about bacteria, I'll tell you about in terms of the microbiome, is in the Middle Ages, bacteria was responsible for the plague. And so we sort of developed this fear. Fear and repulsion to bacteria. Fast forward to the 1940s, it discovery of antibiotics that really was a medical revolution. And then everybody went willy-nilly with antibiotics, which can be life-saving. Let's be clear about that. But the overuse of antibiotics, not just in humans, not just in children, but.

Also in our animals. Yeah, which is where most of the antibiotics are. We have 24 million pounds of antibiotics that are used every year. 19 million are used in animals for.

Helping them grow and preventing infections. And getting into our drinking water.

Right?

So, we've sort of invisibly impaired our environment so that we're exposed to antibiotics. That changes the ecology, the coral reef, that delicate ecosystem between bacteria and human cells in our body. So, that's one thing is antibiotics. The other thing that actually can really injure our microbiome really is our lifestyle, you know, physical activity. We know that if you're not active, your microbiome kind of suffers. We exercise on the outside, the bacteria.

Get the benefit too.

They get that workout, right? Stress can change our microbiome. How many times have you, I'm sure you and I have done the same thing. We stayed up all night, we've had to pull some all-nighters. Next day you feel like crap. Your gut doesn't feel so good. That's because of microbiomes having a riot. They pulled the all-nighter too. So, what we're realizing- Diet, obviously. And our diet plays a huge role.

So, putting in pounds of stuff every day in that, too.

Yeah. Well, you know, there's something really interesting, right? So, when I look at the ingredients of any food that I actually get, and I try to do fresh food, whole foods, but every now and then, you know, you have to take it something and you look at all the ingredients. The stuff you don't recognize you can't pronounce. those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria. You pick a mushroom and you eat it, you know that the fiber in that mushroom is going to feed us and the bacteria. The pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria. What we need to worry about is what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm our gut.

There are 3,000 food additives in the market that are FDA approved and we don't know what most of them do. Very few have been tested. and it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect our microbiome.

Well, and you know, we all know people that are super healthy, right? So they never get sick. And then we know people that seem to get sick all the time. The difference is probably in their microbiome. In fact, it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy super agers. You know, these are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s. almost without any disease at all. And then they looked at young healthy athletes and they found when they compared their microbiome, they were remarkably similar. They were almost identical. Amazing. So health is clearly governed by our microbiome. So what are the things that we can actually eat that can affect them? Well, we talked about this a little bit earlier. It turns out that pomegranates actually can make a big difference. Cranberries can make a big difference. Nuts, walnuts, pecans, cashews, things that we actually know. almonds. Yeah. Okay.

And so I had almonds for breakfast.

I want to make sure I got. Well, you know, we should all, we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think the nuts are one of the, one of Nature's most healthful snacks. I don't know if you saw this, but about two years ago, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the big cancer meeting, they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer, stage three colon cancer, undergoing treatment, whatever the treatment might be, that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually had a 50% lower risk of death from their disease.

Now, you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction, everybody's jumping up and down, it's a billion dollar blockbuster drug, and you're talking about a couple handfuls of walnuts for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost $100,000 is actually better?

Well, it's not an either or, it's together. And again, this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors. Not just you and me, but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment, if you look at that data, it's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies, I would actually strongly advise patients to have nuts if they can take it. and what do they serve in the hospitals? Again, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's slow but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine.

And we're going to be able to map this out. We're going to be very soon in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence, big data analysis, microbiome assays. We can actually look at what's growing, what's not growing, how different things affect it, check it over time in a serial way, modulate the effects. I mean, it's fascinating, you know, wow, maybe if you give this cocktail of acrymancia smoothie, then your acrymancia grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy. I mean, this is really radical stuff. And yet, there are very few people talking about it in a clinical way like you are. You're saying, okay, wait a minute. We don't know everything, but we know a lot and we know enough to actually start to integrate these strategies. And the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because It empowers people to say, okay, wait a minute. I don't have to set a wait around to get disease and hope some drug saves me or, you know, try to fix it then. But I can actually start to build the foundations of my health for my whole life by understanding. And it's these are a little bit technical, you know, stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff, but it's actually doable and you make it so practical in your book. You have this five by five by five plan, which we'll get into. But let's go next to the DNA thing because we talked about angiogenesis, regeneration, stem cells, microbiome. Let's talk about the DNA because we think, oh, wait, we got our DNA. There's nothing we can do about it. We get hits to our DNA from toxins and stress and different things, but.

What can we really do to help our DNA? Right. Well, so in my book, I should talk about how most people hear about DNA these days as relates to our ancestry. Who are we related to and how.

Much of us is Neanderthal?

I'm about one and a half percent. But in fact, our DNA is our genetic blueprint and that part of that Blueprint is our blueprint for health. It actually is designed to keep us healthy, our DNA. We need the, our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health. We need the right proteins made. We need the right molecules made at the right time from the time we're born to the, to our last breath, really. And so we know that DNA can get mutated. And so some of the things that can mutate our DNA is actually Wait, stop there.

I just want to go back a minute. What you said was really important. You said, Our DNA makes proteins that regulate all of our biology. And so they can actually make good proteins or if they get damaged, they make bad proteins. Bad proteins. That's right.

And the good proteins help you create health and the bad proteins cause disease. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. And by the way, the DNA is part of our hardwiring, right? It's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an auto-virus system and actually checks it out, finds problems and erases them, really just deletes them. So on average, we know that there's about 10,000 mistakes that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day, right? So think about it. Where else are there in the sunlight? Sun ultraviolet radiation damages us. You sit in a car in a highway on a traffic on a commuting to work, that sun shines right through the windshield, mutating your DNA, secondary smoke. You're filling up your car and I guess, I mean, some of us drive electric cars, but most people still wind up filling up their gas.

Right?

So, do you stand upwind or downwind of the fumes?

I just hold my breath. I try to stuff the cap in the thing because they have the automatic ones. I run away.

So, here's a way to protect your DNA. When you're filling your gas, figure out which way the wind wind's blowing and stand upwind. If you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents, the gas, and you're mutating your DNA.

You're like a little wood block. You can just stick in and hold.

It and then go. Well, but this is the kind of situational awareness that we want to have. Like I was saying, when you're at the stove, you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire. These are the things that we know we should be doing at sort of the health level. So, our DNA is, and there's some things we can't do anything about, like radon coming out of the earth. that just mutates our DNA as well. So, we have to take proactive steps to protect our DNA. And, some of the things that we can do are pretty simple. For example, we know that an elemental vitamin, vitamin C can actually do it. A really interesting clinical trial or clinical study that was done in people who were drinking orange juice. their scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice and they took the blood out and they measured how well their DNA protected itself in a lab test. And then they gave them orange juice to drink. It's one and three quarters cup. So it's kind of a tall glass of orange juice. And they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their DNA's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by 20%.

Is it the vitamin C or is it the naringenin or quercetin?

Oh, we think it's vitamin C because actually they've actually studied vitamin C in isolation. But, it's almost certain that there's other factors in there.

Because, you know, you're getting a lot of sugar with that much orange juice. Could you then just take the vitamin C pills?

So, what's interesting is that the placebo that they gave to a group of people were just sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice. It's not the sugar. We know that's not good for you, but it was really the other stuff. So vitamin C is what they were focusing on. But I think it's probably the naringenin and hesperidin and other things in orange juice as well. You know, the pulp's got a lot of good stuff in it. And, you know, by the way, the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits, it's the peel, the.

Rind that actually has a lot of the stuff. Well, they say, you know, if you're taking statins or certain drugs, you should have grapefruit. especially the peel, like the white stuff, because it actually affects the metabolism of drugs. Exactly. And so, if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit if you're taking a statin.

Well, so, you know, that's pretty interesting. But just a point of clarification on that. So, it's, if you have grapefruit, it can slow down the metabolism of the liver. So when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels and the liver has to clear that, that's when you call it toxicity. But in point of fact, think about it another way. If you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods, you raise the levels of the healthy things in your bloodstream. So here's another amazing food that can protect our DNA is kiwis.

Kiwis. Oh my God. I just came back from New Zealand where my wife is from. and I ate a lot of kiwis.

Listen, I love kiwis, right? Kiwis used to be in the jungle. I think monkeys ate them and they were grown in New Zealand and then shipped to America.

And.

I think they were called Chinese gooseberries originally. And they were just named kiwis. So anyway, there was an interesting study done in Scotland that looked at whether you ate one, two or three kiwis a day and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your DNA. Turns out even eating one kiwi a day can help your blood protect the DNA from damage by 60%.

That's amazing.

One kiwi a day.

And what you're talking about is learning about in your book all the various foods. You might not like razor clams, but there's a lot of options. And it's not just that you're going to eat kiwis all day. It's you add all these different creative foods into your diet. as much as you can and you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about.

Right. Well, I mean, look, here's the thing about most health diets, right? If you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only eat one food, you're not balancing your body. It's not natural to do that. I think it's the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable, that's supported by real science and real evidence, and that allows you to do the things you enjoy. So in my book, my emphasis, you need to beat diseases. Number one, look for foods that you eat, the foods that you enjoy that are good for you. And so I present a whole list of food, 203 foods actually, and you get to choose. Pick the ones, circle the ones, take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off. That's your shopping list. You've started off, you've had a great start already. You're already identifying the foods that are good for you. I've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good. Now you just choose them. Secondly, besides doing the things you like, be moderate. And that's the other thing is that, I think most researchers, most research has shown that if you cut down your calories by 15%, 30%, actually you improve survival, at least in lab animals, but also in people too. People that eat somewhat less, the Japanese have the same-- Ari Hitoshi Boo, right? Exactly. Eighty percent full.

Don't push yourself away from the table before you're so stuffed that you can't.

Leave the party before it's over. That's basically what it is. It's better for your body. It doesn't put metabolic stress. When you stuff yourself to the gills, your body is really stressed out. Even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress your cells, if you eat slowly and moderately, your brain will sort of say, hey, you know what? It's enough.

Well, it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain you're full.

Exactly. So, you know, here's, here's, and this is, by the way, why eating with other people, which is what most of these Mediterranean countries do, the blue zone, you know, where people live a long time, they eat with other people.

It's good for you. And you're talking, so you can't be.

Stuff in your mouth the whole time. Exactly. And you're not distracted. You're not watching television. You're not looking at your phone. It's, you know, eating social. And so that's another important component. And then finally, it's got to be sustainable. you got to do something that you can do your whole life. And, that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can explore on. You were talking about razor clams. In my book, there's a lot of foods that most people may not have heard about.

Bitter melon.

Bitter melon, it's kind of a staple in some Asian countries, but great to try. I wouldn't cook it yourself for the.

First time because it's not that easy to cook. Go to a Chinese restaurant. Yeah, let somebody who knows how to cook it. I love it.

It tastes really bitter, but it actually.

For diabetes, it helps lower blood sugar.

Absolutely. And, you know, what the interesting thing about bitter melon is, again, this is the culinary side, right? So, here we were talking about the doctor's pharmacy, but in fact, we could be having a chef having this conversation as well. When you have bitter melon, which is a little bitter, it actually makes other foods taste more intense. So, it actually, the way it was designed in cuisine, is actually to help you make you enjoy other foods even more. So again, it's not either or, it's not an extreme, and it's about different cultures and finding what we love to do.

Well, it's fascinating. We bred food and vegetables to be more disease resistant, to be drought resistant, to be easier to be shipped without spoiling, to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols. In fact, the flavor comes from these phytochemicals.

Exactly.

So, we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables. That's why I say eat weird food because those typically haven't been screwed with. And there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast, Chef Boulay from New York, who actually has quit his world-class restaurant and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like curcumin and turmeric oil and various things that he's done. And Dan Barber is also going to be coming on our podcast and he's created a new seed company to design seeds, not to be heirloom necessarily, but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor. nobody was breeding for flavor. People were just breeding for all kinds of other things, pest resistance or GMO, whatever, instead of saying, well, how do we create more of these medicinal foods? And which is a whole new thing that chefs are starting to think about food as medicine. I remember when I was at Canyon Ranch years ago, probably like late 90s, and I got up in a meeting. There was the executives there, the owners, the doctors, the dieticians, the chefs. And I got up and I said, you know, we need to this is a health resort. We need to start thinking about how to design our menus to use food as medicine. And the head chef got up and he screamed to me, this is not a effing hospital. I'm like, oh God, I guess I'm a little too early on this one.

Well, you know, listen, being ahead of the time is something that you're known for. And I think that we're now starting to appreciate it. I mean, think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food. Not only hospitals, by the way, but restaurants would be a great place. Theme parks would be a great place. Airlines would be a great place. I mean, there's so many places we can have an impact.

Well, it's just frame shift. Getting people to think about food as not just calories, but information, food as not just energy, but actually instructions that regulate your stem cells and your DNA and your microbiome and your immune system. and your angiogenesis. I mean, these are things that are, are not things people think of.

This is the new science of nutrition. Right. So Beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff, we're now combining food science with life science. You know, the life science is what we learn in medical school. Food science, you know, not so much. Right. So the average, it's only, like, 20 of medical schools that require any nutrition. Yeah. You know, I can tell you part of what got me into this is that I used to be a doctor. VA hospital. And I felt a duty. Well, I felt a duty to really try to help people that committed their lives to help protect our country, right? So, what was interesting, and I'm sure you know this as well, the veterans that come to the hospital, they have a lot of health problems. Some of them are obese, diabetes, they got diabetes, bad heart disease, cancer, you know, that's the sort of every day in the clinic, you see people that are really, really dealing with a lot of illness. And what I noticed was I said, you know, this is odd because these people, when they were in their 20s.

Were healthy, were fit.

They were that they couldn't get into the military if they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness. Right. So what happened to them over the decades? And I realized it wasn't just medicines. It had to be their lifestyle. And when I kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses, oftentimes really bad diagnoses, you know, and then they would ask me, what's the treatment? How long do I have? Doc, you know, how bad is it going to be? They put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door and almost all of them would turn around and ask me one question. They said, Hey, Doc, what can I do for myself? What can I eat? And I didn't have the answer because I wasn't taught, we weren't taught to give that answer. And I thought that was wrong. And that's what led me on this journey that led me to write this book, Eat to Beat Disease, because I think that we need to know that people want to know that. What can we do for ourselves to eat to beat disease?

And in a way, there are really no drugs that work as well when you look at the spectrum of over your lifetime inputting all these powerful foods, compared to what the effect of a medication would be. And, studies have shown this, that the diet and lifestyle works better than statins, for example, for preventing heart disease. Mediterranean diet, the big study that was done, the PREDIMED study, which gave people a liter of olive oil a week or a bunch of nuts every day, the effects were equivalent or better than taking a drug and tastes much better.

And less side effects, right? Right, right. Well, as we've been talking, about food as medicine is very natural in most parts of the world. And I think just sort of in our society, we've lost touch with things. You know, earlier we were talking about chefs getting into this, you know, this whole farm to table movement. Yeah. Well, that's what it used to be for everybody. We only ate stuff that was growing around us, and we ate it because it tasted great, because it was rich with these polyphenols and flavonoids. And by the way, you know, these bioactives that are natural chemical and foods, what do they do? It's really interesting when you think about health defense. Most of the bioactives that are found in foods evolved in the plant, plant-based foods, to protect the plant. So either they were natural insecticides or they helped to attract bees and other insects so they'd pollinate so they could reproduce.

Or protect them from elements.

Or protect them from the elements of damage, make them stronger. So then when humans started to eat the these plant-based foods, then these natural chemicals had another job description, which is they interacted with our human cells. And because they were already engineered to be protective, the ones that were useful to us and we developed this relationship with our plant-based foods also help us. And so there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view of what we're finding out. What we need to do now, though, is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves. And, if you're interested in the science, it's there. It's an evolving science. Yes, we have health defense systems. Health isn't the absence of disease. It's our body working full steam, cranking along, and you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent, treat, or even reverse them by activating your defense systems using food. And, whether you're healthy or sick, every person can take a decision three times a day. to really enhance their health and you don't need a doctor's prescription. It's true.

And I just want to loop back to what you said because it's a concept that I don't think most people really understand about food. There was a recent study that was published, I think it was over 60,000 people looking at people who ate organic food and cancer rates and they found a lower risk of cancer. Now, is it the avoidance of pesticides or is it something else? when you're an organic plant, life sucks. I mean, it's hard. You gotta work to protect yourself. You've gotta produce more phytochemicals. You gotta produce more nutrients. And it depends on the soil and all these other things. But organic foods have higher concentrations. Wild foods have even more. Like wild blueberries are better than organic blueberries, which are better than regular blueberries, right? So this is the science we actually know. And then I thought about this for a long time. I'm like, why are these molecules in plants so smart that they know how to upregulate this enzyme or protect our DNA or enhance our immune system or improve angiogenesis or help our micro, how does that happen? And I came up with this idea called symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is the idea that we evolved in symbiosis, in collaboration, cooperation with plants to actually activate many of our body's essential functions that we're too lazy to do. For example, humans and guinea pigs don't make vitamin C. Many other animals make vitamin C. Well, we like, why should I make vitamin C if I can eat some whatever and get vitamin C? So, there's so many of these pathways that aren't, we don't think of these as essential nutrients like vitamin B12 or vitamin E or whatever. We actually use these to activate these health systems that you're talking about, this defense system. and we don't think of them as essential, but they really are essential because without enough, for example, glucosinolates, you can't upregulate glutathione, which detoxifies all the chemicals or you can't, you know, reduce inflammation if you don't have enough curcumin or. So you, you actually have these available to you every day in the grocery store, and we're going to become smarter.

And smarter about this. And it's such an amazing. Well, that's what I love about the title of your podcast, you know, Pharmacy, because it literally when you walk into the grocery store, it's like walking into a pharmacy, literally. You know, recently I was, I had the privilege of actually being invited to attend a celebration at NASA, at the Kennedy Space Center, celebrating Apollo 7. And a bunch of astronauts got up there who had actually been in space. And these are flighted astronauts. And they basically said when they looked at the Earth from the International Space Station, they realized that the only thing that separates us from any other cold, dark, dead planet is this thin blue line of atmosphere. And underneath that thin blue line that we have to protect, we're all the same. We're all one species on the planet. And this is getting to your symbiosis idea, which is that however life got created, we all live together, we all adapt together, we think about a lot of things that don't work well together. It's usually us versus them is not helpful. It's us together that's really helpful almost in every situation. Figuring out how things work in harmony, in balance is really the leads to a better solution.

And the silos and the reductionism in medicine also spreads across everything else. So we don't think about how do we produce energy and how does that affect climate or how do we grow our food, how does that connect everything? So it's connecting the dots. you know, you heard that saying you have a butterfly flap its wings in China and the hurricane in the Caribbean. I don't know if that's true, but that idea that everything affects everything else, that we're one interconnected organism, right? Yeah.

No, I mean, I think that's absolutely true. And so the great thing is that we are now able to benefit from all the research that's been done over the years directed, you know, to develop new drugs and pharmaceutical companies. and we can use those same tools in a toolbox to study food. And, when you do that, you start to really begin developing the answer why something works, not just that something works. So, that deepens our knowledge. I think it helps us feel more confident in what we're doing and it allows us to bring more people together. We need to bring more people into this field, which is partly why you're doing this.

Yeah, it's amazing and your work is so Before we end, I want to sort of touch on the last of the five systems, which is immunity. And the same question, what messes it up? How do we fix it? And what foods can we eat to fix our immune system?

Okay, so immune system is... And all.

That in three minutes or less. No, I'm just kidding.

No, I'm just kidding. Well, no, I mean... Take as long as you want. When we, you know, I think even school kids know that the immune system is important, right? bundle up, don't get sick, you don't want your immune system to be down, have the chicken soup, all the, which.

Turns out has a lot of things that actually do help your immune system.

Well, it turns out the chicken soup actually does actually influence inflammation in your body. But, our immunity is our first and best well-recognized defense system, right? Nobody would challenge that. And, we've always assumed that, you know, if your immune system is working, you're going to stay healthy. If it crashes like you see in HIV or an AIDS, it's a terrible situation. You've got an overactive immune system like autoimmune disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, I mean, lots of people suffering from that. Even celiac disease, for example, food triggered immune responses, people really suffer. And so balanced immunity is what's important. I don't know if you remember this, but I certainly do. when I learned about the immune system in medical school, it seemed infinitely complicated. You know, you got this system, you get that system, they break together and there's like 50 different parts and they work together. And I thought it was an alphabet soup, honestly.

A lot of molecules involved in the immune system.

But here's at the end of the day, what we know is that the immune system acts like a security force in our body. They patrol our system to make sure any invaders that might get in through our eyes, our nose, our mouth, our ears. I mean, every orifice is an entry point. You cut yourself, bacteria can get in there. Our body basically, our immune system goes, hey, wait a minute, we're gonna go to the site of action and we're gonna secure the zone, so to speak, clear it up and make sure everything can be not disrupted. That's essentially what our immune system does. And yeah, there's a lot of complexities in there, but we do know that things can lower our immunity. We know that infections can, if you have a lot of infection, you can lower our immunity. We also know that, again, smoking, aging, you know, stress, sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is a big one, right? So there's some new studies coming out that show that, you know, pretty much if you don't get like six hours, at least six hours of sleep, your health is seriously in jeopardy, right? And we know this again, that all-nighter phenomenon that every college student and definitely, anybody who's gone to medical school or done a residency training has, right? Yeah. It takes time to recover from that and our immune system needs to come up along with our microbiome and all these other defense systems.

I used to feel like I had fibromyalgia after every night on call. He was achy, tired.

Now imagine it never goes away. Okay, that's so what do we now know about food? We know that foods can actually boost our immune system. I mentioned oysters. It's quite amazing that actually oysters have polysaccharides, these long sugars and proteins that.

Actually can help boost our immune system.

Oysters and oyster mushrooms. And oyster mushrooms, yep, exactly. And then, you know, our microbiome talks to our immune system. So here's the pomegranates and here's the mushrooms again that help our microbiome to actually boost our immunity. And then we do know that there are other foods that can calm our immune system. So tea, for example, green tea can not only help boost our immune system, but it can calm it if it's overly active. So people talk about inflammation, right? And sometimes we use inflammation in sort of this broad sweeping statement. Inflammation, a little bit of it, the ability to have it is good. You need inflammation a little bit. but you just don't want too much of it. And so there are foods that can calm and quell information, inflammation as well. And that's important if you have autoimmune disease.

Like?

Well, so again, tea is one of.

Those.

Foods that can actually lower your immunity, not your entire immune system, but just the inflammatory component.

Yeah.

Because those catechins actually can actually help to quell things.

So I was talking to a gastroenterologist from Harvard. He was saying, yeah, they use curcumin and green tea extracts as ways of treating colitis.

That's right. Well, I mean, so curcumin is an interesting one because when you eat this yellow natural spice powder, which is delicious, by the way, it can be produced from curry, from curry powders, it tends to go right to our system out the other end unless you have it with fresh cracked black pepper. I don't know if you know about this, but basically if you have fresh cracked black pepper, you actually help your intestines get activated so it absorbs more of the curcumin from the turmeric. So, again, this is- and also traditionally.

Like in India, they used to make oil with the tea and turmeric.

That's right.

In fact, I'm writing a cookbook called Food, what the Heck Should I Cook? And I've invited chefs to contribute recipes and David Boulet created this amazing thing called Turmeric Oil. And it's a special infused oil with turmeric that actually helps to activate all the inflammation fighting properties.

And, you know, it's so interesting you mentioned that because combinations of foods can be really important. You know, for example, tomatoes which contain lycopene, most people don't realize that if you pick a tomato off a vine and you eat it like an apple, you get the vitamins from the tomato, but the lycopene actually is in a natural form that the body doesn't really like to absorb. It's called the transform. If you heat the tomato and cook it, you gently change the chemistry into another form. That's why tomato sauce. I love to absorb. But, it's still fat soluble. So, if you actually cook the tomato slowly with olive oil, a healthy oil, it's fat soluble and then you eat that together, now your body really loves to absorb it. Sounds good. So, right, like and again, back to the Mediterranean. or in Asia too, there's combinations that work. Let's go back and look at what the people from olden times knew. I think that we're forward looking. I'm a researcher, so I'm always looking at the latest new thing, but I think there's great value in looking back at the ancient cultures, the ancient recipes. We've probably forgotten more than we have to learn, but we still have a lot to learn. That's true.

I'm going to send you that article I wrote called Eating youg Medicine: Food is Pharmacology. In fact, you're Chinese. And in Chinese, the word for take your medicine is chī yào, which means to eat your medicine, which is a very interesting way of framing it. It's that they don't take medicine like a pill, they eat their medicine.

That's right. In Chinese medicine, traditional TCM, Chinese medicine. You kind of view food and medicine and herbs all sort of in continuity. You've got hot and you've got cold, you've got balance, all the things that, you know, we're now rediscovering using science. And, you know, I think that there is so much to learn about health and we need to have the humility to recognize that while we know, you know, quite a bit about disease and we've we've got some good medicines to treat them. When it comes to health, we need to keep our eye on the ball. We need to focus on what we're learning and we need to think about that ourselves because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health. What you need to do is to make that part of your life in a natural way.

Well, if we can get food reimbursed by health care, it's a game changer. I'm actually working on that at Cleveland Clinic with the food pharmacy, which is the idea of actually paying for food for people instead of drugs to get them healthy reverse disease. actually will save your lives and money.

And insurance companies are starting to recognize that as well. So, we should all work together, find ways to apply our knowledge so that everybody can benefit from the most advanced knowledge possible. And, you know, actually honestly for the average person, they shouldn't have to think too much about it. It should be natural all around them. They should be doing the things they like, be moderate and actually be do.

It for a It's tough because we're not educated about it. We don't learn about it. The environment of our food is so toxic. We live in a nutritional wasteland where to try to find something that's good for you is really tough.

Well, that's what we've done for ourselves. But I'm saying that the health is an invisible thing. And that's why we need to think through what our health actually means. And because we're against really a brick wall almost every single day in modern society with everything we've done to the environment and to the stress that we put ourselves in just living life in general, the odds are kind of stacked against us unless we take our own control.

It's incredible. I mean, for a guy who was sort of steeped in traditional medicine, who's probably one of the leading scientists in the world around angiogenesis, who understands the deep biology that we all learned in medical school and has published 100 plus papers in major journals, you're sort of coming around to this idea, this paradigm shift that the way to get people well and reverse disease is not by treating disease, but by creating health. And that is a massive paradigm shift. And that's really what functional medicine is all about. And it's really now becoming more accepted and mainstream.

And you're leading the way. And I think most of us who go into medicine, started out by wanting to create health, right? I mean, people don't go to medical school to treat disease. They go to medical school because they want to help people stay healthy. So, you feel better, yeah. Here we are. We're at the precipice of a new era in society, not just medicine, where we can actually do something for ourselves.

Amazing. So, if you were in charge for a day, king maybe, and you could change something in healthcare medicine and make a sweeping change, what would it be?

Well, there's so many things that I can think of, but the one thing that I think is closest to my mind is I'd make it mandatory that every doctor in their training and actually in their practice, so they have continuing education, has to learn about food and health and how foods can be used for health. And I think that they need to have nutrition that is state-of-the-art nutrition. And this should be as important as learning about diseases and treatments and like, you know, the pharmaceutical treatments that all come out. Like, we all have to certify, we have to take board tests again, we have to learn what the latest treatments are. I think that if I could mandate something, it would actually be learn about food and health, learn how to talk to our patients about it because they want to know. Well, that's a great, that's a, I.

Think a great strategy. In fact, a colleague of ours, Darsh Mazaferan, who's the dean of Tufts School of Nutrition, policy said, we just need to change the licensing exams for doctors to include questions that are about this. And when you do that, that changes the medical school curriculum, that changes what people study, it changes the incentives, and it's a sort of a domino effect.

Exactly. And by the way, because every doctor sees thousands of patients over the course of their lives, it's scalable. It's a ripple effect that we can have. I mean, and you know, there are people that are not in medicine who are equally passionate and they're working, you know, really hard to come up with really great ideas. But those of us who have medical degrees, we have a unique privilege, right? So we learned and I've been given the opportunity to impact people's lives by the nature of our profession. And I think this is an area, you know, the food pharmacy, food is medicine. that it's an idea whose time has come. And, there was a quote that said, no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.

That's so great. And, for those ideas, I'd encourage everybody to go check out Dr. Lee's new book, Eat to Beat Disease, the New Science of How youw Body Can Heal Itself. You can find him at drwilliamli.com and learn about his book. You can get it on Amazon, anywhere you get books, bookstores. this is going to be one of the most important books as we look back in history that creates that benchmark from where we go forward and rethink health and medicine. I encourage everybody to check it out. I'm excited about the book. I've read through it. It's really something unique. And, there's a lot of health books out there. I mean, I'd give away all my books and just read that one. This is really the book you should look at for what to know about your health, about how to activate these healing systems, and how to actually enjoy food because we're talking about it's fun, it's delicious, it's yummy. So, thank you so much, Dr. Lee, for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy, a.

Place for conversations that matter.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, I appreciate you being here. And, if you love this podcast and you like what you heard, please leave a comment on the review section, sign up wherever you get your podcast and share with your friends and family on social media, wherever you want. We'd love to hear from you and we'll see you next time. on the doctor's pharmacy.