The TOP FOODS You Need To Eat To Lose Weight & HEAL THE BODY | Dr. William Li

We are light years ahead in our refined understanding of not just calories, but how the body processes what you put into it. Here's what the science is actually showing.

This hypothesis that we've all been believing for the last decades and decades, which is this, if we eat less and exercise more, we're going to lose weight. In fact, that's what all of our dietary recommendations are about. That's what you'll hear from your doctor, from your nutritionist, from all the professional societies like the Academy of Nutrition, Dietetics, AMA, the ADA, American Diabetic Association. Pretty much, you'll also hear from, obviously, all the food industry experts because if it's all about calories, then 100 calories of soda are the same as 100 calories of almond. So it's just about the calories. And if you eat less and exercise more, you're gonna lose weight. And we were just chit-chatting about the shift in the paradigm. And this morning I was reading this article that our friend Dariush Mozaffarian wrote called Obesity: An Unexplained Epidemic. And obviously you can't read it. on Zoom, but we're going to put it in the show notes. It's available free. And it really challenges this notion that it's all about calories because in the article, he shares data. This is hard data from large government surveys that in fact, since 2000, 20 last 22 years, we have eaten less and we've exercised more. And yet we're getting more and more and more overweight and more and more diabetic. So how do you sync that up if it's not all about calories, it's not all about energy balance, I'm not all about eating less and exercise more? What do you think about this, William, and how have you come to shift your thinking around the idea about calories?

Yeah, I think you just set that up perfectly, Mark, which is that we've had this notion for decades. And in fact, I'll actually throw the stone even further back in time, back to the 15th century, 16th century, when, you know, the first people to even come up with the measurement of metabolism, they created the Sanctorium, you know, this guy, he created a chair that he could sit in with a dinner table in front of him and it was suspended by a chain and he could weigh what he weighed and how much food he ate and he actually collected his urine and his feces, and he was compared to what he was actually eating. So there are these great wooden engravings going back to medieval times with this like calories in and poop and excrement out. And it's not false. It's basically, it's a good basic principle, but where we are now is we are light years ahead in our refined understanding of not just calories, but how the body processes what you put into it. It's kind of like fuel. You got a nice car. If you're actually putting good quality engine oil in it, good quality calories in the case of your body, your car is going to drive a little bit longer. It's going to perform better.

Okay?

It's going to be happier and you're going to be happier with it for a longer period of time. If you take really crappy engine oil or look at your fuel tank and you put the cheapest quality fuel, into the best car that you want to actually keep for a long time. You know, it'll dry for a little bit, but the toll will be taken. And I think that's really one of the things that this research.

Wait, well, that reminds me of a story. When I was in residency, I lent one of my fellow residents my car, and it was a diesel car.

Oh, no.

And he put gasoline in it. It was the worst thing. That's kind of what we're doing to ourselves. We really are, you know.

Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, Just like the friend who you lent the car to, you have to be informed of what you're putting inside your chassis, your fuel tank. And I think that's really the biggest misconception that it's simply a number, like a calculator. Calories in, calories out. If you exercise, if you eat less, you're going to be all set. As a matter of fact, the quality of the calories makes a huge amount of difference. You could have the same number of calories in a can of soda, as you could actually have in a plate of fruit. And they would obviously be radically different because of the effect of the micronutrients on those aspects of your body.

Yeah, I'm telling you a funny story. So, I was on the Today Show years ago. and it was, God, I don't even know, maybe, I don't even know, 2006 or seven. And I was on about one of my books and after I was chatting with the producer, I said, I have a great idea for a segment. And she's like, what is it? I said, well, why don't we do a segment on 100 calorie? 'Cause at the time, 100 calorie snack packs were like, 100 calorie Oreos, 100 calorie M&M's, 100 calorie whatever. I'm like, let's do a segment on 100 calories and talk about, 100 calories of blueberries versus 100 calories of like Oreo cookies. And I had a whole table full of this stuff. And somehow it slipped under the radar and they were like, Yes. And I got on. And all of a sudden the host, and they get kind of briefed a little bit beforehand, realized what was happening. And the advertising for all the television is either drugs or junk food. You look at television advertising things and it was threatening all of their advertising partners. And so she tried to redirect the whole thing because I was like, listen, here's how 100 calories of blueberries affect your body and here's how 100 calories of soda affect your body. And then I got kind of excommunicated from the Today Show for years and years.

Well, but I think that these points that we're making, are so fundamental. And I would say anybody watching or listening to this is going to recognize that, you know, there's, it's almost like a truth that if you just count your calories and you go to the gym, you're going to actually lose weight. You're going to be fine. And it's clearly not the case. What's actually happening? I mean, you know, if you, if you take a look at what our body does to maintain healthy function, let's, let's talk about function before we get into the depth of metabolism. Yeah, look, we've got our circulation fuels our muscle, brings blood and oxygen to our muscles. You know, our immune system controls inflammation and allows us to actually combat all the attackers that are coming to us from the outside and also the inside of our body. We're exposed to environmental pressures like ultraviolet radiation and radon from our feet. You know, like it's amazing that we're actually not sick more often, but fortunately, all of those myriad of environmental influences are defended against by our body. And so when we feed ourselves, it's no different than walking into a cloud of something. If you walk into a cloud of chemical, synthetic chemical junk, all right, and you're breathing it in, you know that you're going to come out of it feeling sick. I mean, that's the 9 11 effect, right? This gigantic pile of stuff put up dust everywhere, and people got sick. Yeah, there's no surprise. And I think that what we're now realizing, I think this is a wake-up call that, that the public is actually having in the scientific Communities digging into it now, is that when we actually feed ourselves good quality calories and we actually do the things that we're supposed to do, which is stay physically active, you don't need to work out, you need to be active and get good quality sleep and actually lower your stress. All of these things converge to really help our metabolism actually right size itself.

Yeah, it's so true. Your book, Eat to Beat Disease was so important because it really took the macro framework of what Hippocrates said 5,000 years ago, which is like, could be that medicine and medicine for that food, and made it very granular, very scientific, and very specific, and showed exactly how different compounds in different foods, and I'm talking about actual food, not processed food, affect your body and regulate every single biological process. And so that's such an important idea that food isn't just calories, it's actually information, that it's medicine, that it is instructions or code that regulates everything that goes on. It's so important. Now, I can imagine that there might be some physicists out there listening to this and saying, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Lee, you guys are smart and all that, but you're not physicists. You don't get this basic thing called the first law of thermodynamics. Well, guess what? We had to take physics going into medical school, and I know what that law is. And that law, if you read it really carefully, says that energy is conserved in a system, in a closed system. So yes, if you take a thousand calories of soda and a thousand calories of broccoli and you put them in a lab, they will actually release exactly the same amount of energy. And a calorie is, all a calorie is, is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one liter of water, one degree Centigrade. That's it. Okay, but if you take, for example, another example, if you take feathers and lead and you drop them in a vacuum, they drop at exactly the same rate because there's no air. If you drop them off a bridge, the lead goes boom and the feathers kind of float down in the air. Well, it's the same thing when you eat. Your body has something called metabolism. It has the microbiome, it has an immune system, it has hormones, it has neurotransmitters, it has peptides and messenger molecules, all of which are being influenced not just by the caloric intake of what you're eating, but by the informational quality of what you're eating. And so it has profoundly different effects on everything and it's not the same. So yes, the first law of dynamics is true. I'm not disputing that, but it doesn't hold in a system called the body.

And because our body is actually made of different systems that are interconnected, and it's not just a system in a snapshot of time, but over a period of time. So it's not a Xerox. It's not like a. It's not like a. Like a. A photocopy. It actually, our body is. Is shifting over time as we age, and there are all these little gears and parts are all moving and responding to that information. So here's the thing that, you know, like, I, you know, listen, I'm a. I'm an internal medicine doc like you. I'm a vascular biologist, and I've been involved with biotech development, so for me, I've always been curious on the mechanisms. What do we understand about a molecular or cellular process that drives a disease? And if we understand that, could we apply the science to come up with a solution? And that's really how immunotherapy and anti-angiogenic therapy and all these growth factor therapies, this is modern medicine at its best from a technology perspective. However, what really drew me into the nutrition world was I realized that, you know, when we're diving after disease, including obesity by the way, we're already kind of looking at what caught, you know, we're trying to figure out what causes the hurricane while we're in the eye of the storm. Everything is blowing around us, the roofs are coming off, you know, ducking for cover. And so one of the things that I think is so fascinating to me as a scientist and a doctor, is really going back to take a look at, well, what happens before you're sick? Like, what's the basic function of the body like before we're trashed, you know, at any age. And so this is where a profound study was published in 2021 in the journal Science, one of the most credible scientific journals by a guy named Herman Pontzer, who's a professor at Duke University. He worked with colleagues from 19 other countries to look at 6,000 people and ask what was their metabolism like? And so, you know, the 1s and 2s and the 3s studies that have been done on metabolism or people that are doing sports strengths or athletes doing research studies. That's one thing. But what they did is they took a look at, it's amazing, they took a look at people that were just a few days old to 95 years old. Yeah. The exact same measurement system, which uses a form of water that has an atom that you can actually measure in a room. So talk about a closed system. So you put these people into closed system and you give them this cocktail to drink and it's just water.

It's like radioactive water kind of, but not really.

Yeah, exactly. People then become Spider-Man, all right? But what wound up happening is that they could actually measure from their breath and their urine how their body was using metabolism. And what they found it was, of course, everybody's metabolism was all over the place. So information, right? So put information in, they're eating and drinking information out. They're measuring it looks like a mess, except one of the things that they did is they corrected, they developed back to the physicists, they used mathematics to kind of correct for age, size, sex, and, and this is really kind of the mic drop here, they corrected for body fat. So what they realized is that everyone's going to have a different level of body fat from the time they're a baby to their time they're in their 90s across the age span. And when they did that, this chaotic data set suddenly clarified itself into four phases of human metabolism as we age from a few days old until we're in our 90s. And that really changed my mind. when I saw that data to go, this is like a eureka moment that humans all are hardwired, and it makes total sense to go through the same stages of cellular metabolism as we age. And so there's four phases, zero to one is one phase. So when you're born, we're corrected for body size, we have the same pace of metabolism as our moms did. That makes sense. we were synced with our mom's metabolism, corrected for size. But from zero to one, our metabolism soars to about 50% higher than what we're going to have when we're an adult. That's why neonatal nutrition, what we feed our babies in the first year of life is so profound. All those cells are taking in those calories, the nutrients, breastfeeding, everything counts in the first year of life. so from the get-go what were the fuel that we're giving our bodies actually can make a huge difference going Downstream from, from one years old down to 20. Our metabolism actually starts to go down to adult levels. And so when you're a teenager and you're seeing teens eat two or three dinners and their group, bring up a tree, right? What do we always say? Like, you know, like, oh, man, our kids are like sprouting like trees. Our metabolism is going crazy. Actually, the metabolism is going down, heading down towards adult levels. Surprise. Right. And then from 20 to 60, that's during college age, your first job, you know, your marriage, if you get divorced, your menopause, all those kinds of things, right?

Where people, what does divorce do to your metabolism?

Well, it's stress. It's stress, right? So, menopause, all those kinds of things. Yeah. Actually, it's a straight line of how our bodies program. And only at 60, at 60 years old, in our six decade dose, our metabolism starts to decline very, very slowly so that by the time we're 90, our metabolism at 90 years old is 75% what it was when we were 60. so as adults, but that's change.

That's not inevitable, right? I mean, that, that can be modified.

So, so that's a key thing. You can modify it up or you can modify it down.

Because I, because I noticed, you know, my metabolism is faster now at almost 63 than it was when I was 40. And I actually have to work to keep the weight on because I've sped up my metabolism by knowing what to do to activate the right Pathways to. do what I wanted to do.

Exactly. And so this is the perfect segue into thinking about if there's a set pattern that humans are programmed to be able to have over the course of the lifetime in terms of this pattern that we call metabolism. And this is again, corrected for age, sex, size, and body fat. Now let's start to look at what good things you can do to raise your metabolism. Right? So what are the things, your microbiome, your epigenetics, your circulation, there's your inflammation, there's all kinds of things you can do to support and elevate to get to that next level of metabolism. Yeah. But the same token, there's a lot of things, put that wrong fuel into the engine and now you squash the human metabolites as well. This is actually a eureka because now we've taken it way far away from calories in calorie out. yeah. What we're saying is that the quality matters, the systems, and how we live our lifestyle matters. And so for someone like you, Mark, I mean, and look, you and I have known each other pretty well. You're, you're somebody who practices what you preach. And all of these things that you do, choosing the right foods, getting the right exercise, lowering your stress, managing inflammation, getting the right sleep, all of these things actually help to elevate and get your metabolism above what the average human should have.

Amazing. All right, so everybody talks about metabolism, but what the heck is metabolism? We have slow metabolism, fast metabolism. What does metabolism mean? And what do you mean when you refer to metabolism?

Yeah, well, you know, like, I think we have to take a step back to essentially say that metabolism is really the process that our cells used to extract energy from food, if we're feeding ourselves, and from within our body to be able to power up and feel all of the functions from the molecular to the cellular to the organ to the organismic level. That's basically what metabolism actually is. And we don't think about it that way, but I think science is telling us that there are all these layers to peel back to understand how the engine runs. So, you know, if anybody who's actually sat in a plane, right? You get your boarding pass, you get onto the plane, you buckle your seatbelt, you settle back for the flight, you know, it's kind of like getting into a plane is kind of like trying to understand metabolism. It seems kind of easy, you can settle down into the seat, you know, and just enjoy the ride. But in fact, there's a lot going on from the cockpit to the engines, to the fuel tanks, to the weight of the passengers and the weight of the luggage, to the delays, to the air traffic control. And so that analogy really tells us that we, you know, somebody needs to be in charge of understanding this. And I think that's where folks like you and I, Mark, are really trying to play our role in digging into what the science is that you're showing and connecting the dots with what everybody already understands. And whenever there's a misconception, we can try to clear that up. Yeah.

And, you know, I would just sort of add to that. I mean, some real defined metabolism is a sum total of all chemical reactions going on in your body as a whole field of metabolomics, which we can now measure at least thousands and thousands of things going on in your body at the same time. But when I think of it as a doctor, i'm thinking about, like, how do, how do I optimize my patient's health and how do I work with their metabolism to make it work better so they can. get the energy they need to live lives so they can optimize all their biological functions, how they can use food as medicine. And when I've come to realize there's so many things that influence it that are far beyond calories and energy. So one, you talk about the quality of the calories. There's the macronutrients, which is protein, fat and carbohydrate. And what's the quality of the protein? Like if you eat steak from a grass-fed or a wild, let's say a wild kangaroo versus a feedlot cow, very different effects on your inflammation and metabolism. If you eat a carbohydrate from refined high fructose corn syrup or from asparagus, very different. If you eat a fat from Crisco or omega-3 fats, very different calorie for calorie. Everybody understands that. It doesn't take rocket science. So there's the macronutrients, there's a fiber also, which is very complicated in terms of how it affects the microbiome. There's the vitamins and minerals. And there's all these phytochemicals that you write about in your book, Eat to Beat Disease. And these phytochemicals turn out to have profound effects on all kinds of regulatory pathways that have to do with how we burn calories, how our mitochondria work, how our immune systems work, what happens to our microbiome. And then, of course, there's all the other things we have to deal with, like all the toxins that are around that affect our metabolism. They're called obesogens. They literally interfere with our metabolism. Actually, I was in the White House. You'd be interested in this. I went to Washington. I was in the White House this week and was talking to the head of the White House Conference on Hunger, Food Nutrition. And she said, yeah, what do you think about this whole thing about toxins and I'm like, yeah, it's a thing. I wrote an article about it like 15 years ago and it's real and I see it in my patients. So there's so many different factors that influence the system because our body's not a closed system. And of course, there's effects of stress and our beliefs and epigenetics. And so all these, it sounds like super complex and there's hormonal effects. How do our hormones affect it? How do our sex hormones affect our insulin, our cortisol, are all these things that happen? So in a sense, it's kind of complicated. But when it comes down to it, the to-dos are actually pretty straight, straightforward on what to-dos.

So let's- before we dive into the do's, I also want to maybe just to bring it home to people who are listening that are not really into the learning about all the different aspects of the science and keeping up with all the very important things you just said. Here's what what boils down to. Most people realize that their body's metabolisms connected to their weight, right? That's one of the, I mean, even a kid in grade school learns that pretty early on. And here's one of the things that I think, you know, for metabolism, it's so complicated what we're learning. Maybe it's simpler to help people understand what we're learning is not correct. Like, what are the myths of metabolism? One of the myths we just talked about is the fact that calories are calories, just count your calories and exercise and you're going to be all set. That's not true, obviously. The second thing, and the quality obviously matters. The second thing that's really interesting is that, you know, how many people have you heard say my sister or my sibling was really lucky because he or she was born with a fast metabolism and look how skinny he or she is, right? And then, and then of course, then the other line is that, well, look, I wasn't so lucky. I was born with a bad metabolism. And that's why I have so much struggle with my weight. I can't tell you the number of patients I've actually heard from that. And actually, honestly, when I was in medical school, I kind of, I drank that Kool-Aid too, you know? Yeah, for sure. Right, with the good, this is stuff that we learned. It's almost, and yet you don't really.

Find that in a textbook.

That's just the populist belief. Here's what the science is actually showing.

Yeah.

In fact, our fat, our body fat is our most important gland, endocrine organ in our body. Yeah. And most people don't realize this, but before you could stuff your face to get fat, your fat formed before you even had a face. So here's a sperm and egg meat, your bulb cells, some of the first organs of the form are your circulation and your nerves. They form this kind of like these lakes and these little tributaries. The third cell after blood vessel nerve that forms in your body is adipose cell. Wow. Fat forms. And in fact, your fat forms before any other organ. So you gotta ask yourself a question, which is what I'm doing now, like I'm diving deep into this stuff, really like a scientist trying to understand what's going on. This adipose tissue communicates with your circulation, communicates with your nerves, and is actually an endocrine hormonal organ. It produces at least 15 hormones that connect to your brain, to your stomach, to your immune system. All these other things, a dipanectin is one of them that certain foods can make. You have make more your fat. You want to feed your fat good stuff so it makes better hormones for you. Yeah, but fat, like any other tissue, has to be tamed. And so I think that's another kind of myth to be busted is that fat must die wrong.

Yeah.

Fat keeps you, keeps us alive. It's when it gets.

But you want, you want smart fat, not angry fat.

That's right.

Because, you know, I think our friend David literally talks about how the way we have eaten with these refined carbohydrates and starches has created hungry fat. So our fat cells are very hungry. And he challenges the myths that overeating causes obesity. I mean. I mean, I don't think there's probably except a handful of people who understand the science who don't believe that overeating causes obesity. What he says is it's the other way around. If you start to accumulate weight, it's the fat cells that make you hungry that cause overeating. It's actually being obese that makes you overeat. Really, very different. It also makes you exercise less and the way it affects your body.

The question then is- It's a domino effect. Yeah.

So the question is how do we then change our diet to address this? Because the predominant theory has been about energy balance, which is what we talked about, calories in, calories out. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Food Fix, because it was really a very political thing that Coca-Cola funded to the tune of $20 million aspects of this energy balance idea and trying to get scientists to prove that it's all about calories in, calories out. And David has come up with a different framework called the Carbohydrate-Insulin Hypothesis. And this paper that was published by him and other leading scientists and heads of societies was called Competing Paradigms of Obesity Pathogenesis. It means what are the different paradigms of why we gain weight? Energy balance versus carbohydrate-insulin models. And what they say is it's like the quality of the calories has a profound effect on your hormones. what happens to those fat cells? What hormones do they produce in response to different calories? So if you're eating starch and sugar, which is the predominant foundation of our modern diet, you're triggering all the wrong messages that literally slow your metabolism. So when you eat a bagel, you're slowing your metabolism down, which people don't realize. When you eat fat and the right fat, you're speeding it up. And he did this crazy study, which you know, where he took overweight people and he gave a crossover study, which is kind of the best kinds of experiment you can do, where you take the same people and feed them different diets in different time periods. So you're testing, you know, sort of has integrity. And he basically gave them, you know, a high carbohydrate, but healthy, like low fat diet for a period of time, measured their metabolism, their metabolic rate, how many calories they burned, how many calories they ate. And then he gave them a high fat, good fat, but very low starch, sugar, carbohydrate diet. And he said, the ones who are overweight and insulin resistant, they eating a high fat diet, burn 400 calories more a day. Now, if you multiply that times seven, that's 2,800 calories in a week. To lose a pound, you need to burn an extra 3,500 calories. That's almost a pound of weight loss a week by eating the same amount of calories. So this is not Some kind of hypothetical in the lab experiment with a bunch of rats or mice. This is with actual humans eating the right food in a controlled environment, which is these are studies that are very expensive, very hard to do, like $12 million, which nobody wants to pay for because, you know, who's going to pay for that kind of study? It's not a drug company, but there were some plant therapists who funded it. And it was just groundbreaking. So when you, when I, when you hear that, you're like, wait a minute.

We, we need to rethink all this stuff about metabolism because our old ideas just don't work anymore. well, and I'll tell you just jumping into there that it even gets deeper than that when you look at those micronutrients, those bioactive. Yeah. Yeah. Mostly in the foods that we already know are healthy, right? Whole plant-based foods, nuts and legumes, healthy oils. So the things that, you know, like you and I have written and spoken about frequently, they, those, those natural chemicals, the lycopene, the quercetin, the hydroxytyrosols, They are now surfacing as players, these same natural chemicals that are found in healthy plant-based foods, whole foods, actually are players because they can help sensitize our cells to absorb energy so they improve insulin sensitivity. They can also help us switch that bad fat, undesirable fat, hungry fat, into good fat, the brown fat that actually can crank up your energy burn, which is really cool. And also, by the way, certain bioactive can intercept stem cells. So, our body is these fat stem cells to make more fat. Certain foods can intercept them and take these baby pre-fat cells called preadipocytes and make them stay there. It's like a traffic cop, telling somebody to stay right, tell that car to stay right there. We can eat foods that can actually direct the traffic of fat, which I think is really remarkable. That's unbelievable.

So, I want to go deeper on what you just said because we're staying at a high level, but you're getting into the granular aspects of the, you call them micronutrients, bioactives, these are phytochemicals. In your book, Eat to Beat Disease, you map these out and how they affect different body systems, immune system, microbiome, to your blood vessels and all these things. So in terms of metabolism, what are the ahas, what are the take homes that people listening can use to start to upgrade their diet and optimize their metabolism?

Here is a really basic one that teaches us that Mother Nature is really clever. Very rarely does she have one system do only one thing. Usually, if you do, systems will do multiple things. In my book Eat to Beat Disease, I talked about the microbiome actually helps you speed healing, communicates to your brain, your social hormones, helps influence your immune system. Well, the microbiome actually is a critical regulator of metabolism, helps metabolize lipids, blood floating on your bloodstream, and how your body uses glucose as well. Now, not surprisingly, and some people may have heard me talk about this, in fact, on your podcast, We're now discovering cancer researchers are discovering that there's certain bacteria that when present allow your body to respond to cancer treatments so you have a better outcome. And one of them is Akkermansia. You and I've talked about this before. Pomegranate juice, Concord grape juice, cranberry juice actually helps to grow more Akkermansia. It has to do with the ellagic tannins, these natural chemicals that cause your gut to secrete more healthy mucus that this bacteria, Akkermansia, loves to grow in. Now, what's interesting is that when this is a big study done like 10,000 people in China, people who actually are heavier going into overweight to obese actually have less to no acromancy in their gut.

Wow.

People who are thinner, leaner, lean body mass just because you're skinny doesn't mean that you don't have body fat. But people who have low body fat actually have more acromancy. So acromancy seems to be sort of this conductor of metabolism, body fat regulation, glucose homeostasis as well.

Immune function.

Immune function and inflammation, cancer development. I mean, you know, just so profound. And so this is just one example of a single bacteria. And they're, you know, we've got 39 trillion bacteria. So we gotta, we're just at the tip of the iceberg. But this is, but this is actionable. so, you know, certain foods that contain ellagic tannins, like pomegranate, pomegranate juice, Concord grape, cranberry, those polyphenols that are found, those natural chemicals found, polyphenols found in those fruits actually stimulate the growth of more acrymancia.

But you don't want to be in grape juice.

But you don't want to be eating.

A lot of great.

Well, that. So that's the other interesting thing, is that, you know, this is another interesting metabolism. dig in. So, if you can actually have orange, an orange, should you have a lot of orange juice? Well, you know, there's fiber and oranges, there's vitamin C, there's a lot of hesperidin, narigen, and a lot of good bioactives, but there's also a lot of fructose in orange juice. In fact, to make, you need two large, juicy, ripe oranges to make, sorry, you need eight of them to make two cups of to two glasses of oranges, a tall glass, right? Now, when would you sit down to eat eight oranges? You wouldn't, you would eat one orange and get all that other, the healthy stuff along with the orange. And so this is why, you know, fruit juices as a general rule are not as good a choice for your metabolism than going for the whole food. And this goes back to the whole food because juicing itself, it's a kind of processing, right? And you filter it, you're filtering out all the good stuff too.

So, it's okay. So, there's all these different foods. We write about them. I want to talk about something specific because I'm writing this book on longevity called Young Forever. We've both been to the blue zones. You just came back from Greece not too long ago. So did I. And, you know, there's all these different hacks. Now, we know that calorie restriction, meaning eating a third less calories, can make you live a third longer. And that's been proven in animal model after animal model. But who wants to do that? You're going to be grumpy and irritable and not the best friend. But what you've discovered in your research is that there are hacks, there are food compounds that mimic caloric restriction. We call these adversity mimetics. They mimic adversity, but you get to eat them. So if you're not really having adversity, can you talk about that? Because it's such an interesting area of research where we're actually using the intelligence of plants to help us regulate our biology and so many good ways that extend life. And I don't know if you've read the book How to Change youe Mind or seen the new Netflix series by Michael Pollan. I've been watching that and I'm like, wow, the intelligence of these plants. Think about it. You take a dose or two of psilocybin and it literally relieves depression and OCD and all these things that you could struggle with for years and years. and is revolutionizing psychiatry from these molecules that have been embedded in plants that regulate our biology. Now, not all of them are psychoactive, but they're all bioactive. And that's what you write about.

Right. Well, you know, I mean, I think that that's such a good point you're bringing up, which is in many ways, if we think about ourselves as a species living on a planet and that we're constantly communicating with things around us and plants, and animals are also communicating back to us. It's this continuous feedback loop that's actually going on. So, you know, this is, this is, you think about these bioactives in, in, in, in Whole Foods, they are Mother Nature's way, a plant's way of communicating to our bodies. Right. And so that's really quite profound. And what's interesting is that many of those healthy plants that we already know about tomatoes, so for, you know, the Brassica family. Broccoli, bok choy, kale, they all have these sulforaphanes. Then sulforaphanes activate your white adipose tissue, the bad fat, that, you know, that hungry fat, and actually starts to slow them down, shrink them down, and direct them, traffic direct them into a different direction to become more brown. Brown fat actually, by the way, you know, so big bulging fat, right? This is the life preserver you throw off the boat to rescue somebody. That's the stuff you don't want around your waistline. Well, it turns out that the healthy fat, the brown fat, the burnable fat that burns that energy is not a lump. It's very thin and it's woven like a seamstress between your muscles. Wow. Amazing. Right.

And so, brown fat is woven between your muscles.

Yeah, it actually sits.

I thought it was just between your shoulder blades and your back, but it's everywhere.

You know, there's, there's a, this. Oh, man, this is such an interesting story. I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, your viewers, listeners. So way back in the, I think, the 1800s, 18th century, a biologist, a naturalist in Switzerland, Conrad Gessner, was finding these, these rodents in the mountains of Switzerland and dissecting them, and they were hibernating animals. And he found this thing between their shoulder blade, and he called it a, a. he said, is neither fat nor flesh, but it was, it got bigger in the winter because he was catching these guys when, during, you know, while they're hibernating.

Oh, wow.

And what he, what later on was discovered in the early 1900s is that, you know, actually it's a kind of fat. It resembled a sort of a fat. And then when they jumped forward and found it in babies, they actually found that. So in these rodents, it was right between the shoulder blades. You get bigger during the winter. and it would actually shrink during the summer. And people are saying, well, how come these animals don't starve when they're hibernating? It's because if they're building up these things, and this is a heat generator, this is their space heater, and it was actually fueling up their metabolism. Babies have it to be right between the shoulder blades.

And for a long time, the medical.

Community thought, you know, this brown fat's like an artifact from evolution. It's like an appendix. It doesn't have any real use. Look, we have sweaters, we've got indoor heating. We don't need that brown fat to heat us up anymore. Turns out, this is a super fascinating story. There was a 67 year old patient that came to a Boston hospital, Mass General Hospital, and had a tumor in her chest. And so they were doing a PET scan to look at it. So a PET scan, for those of you who don't no, it actually measures the metabolism of a tumor. And so cancers will light up because they're really active, fast dividing cells. When they scan this patient's chest, the tumor lit up like fireworks. So when they biopsy, get what they found, they didn't find cancer cells, they found fat cells. And when they looked at the fat, it was brown fat. Okay? And they were like, whoa, this is crazy. So they actually called it a hibernoma. all right, there's a whole tumor category that's based on Conrad Gessner's little rodent discovery of hibernating animals. So, pathologists used to call this hibernomas, okay, when they used to find them. Wow. So, this radiologist went back, okay, and looked at a thousand PET scans taken from adults in Boston for different reasons, all kinds of different scans, and he found that people were lighting up, that this brown fat was lighting up in different places in different times. It goes one step further. Remember I told you these rodents are hibernating in the cold, right? In, in, you know, Central Europe, like around Switzerland, it's pretty damn cold in the, in the wintertime. Yeah. What he found when he looked at the date of the, when he looked at the dates of the, of the scan, when did the scans, the scans that lit up with brown fat were all done during the winter months in. Oh. cold temperatures light up your brown fat.

Yeah, I know that.

Yeah. So, so this is, so then fast forward. So we now know that we've got a pretty substantial amount of brown fat. And when they look at where it is, it's not just behind your shoulder blades, it's around our neck, it's around our girdle, it's up behind our chest. There's some in our belly and cold temperatures and certain foods will light it up. And that's kind of like the cool part, the bioactives in food. Yeah. will mimic these temperature and other factors to really help us burn fat.

That's amazing, William. You know, I actually just in my book research on longevity was researching about hormetic therapies, which are stresses that don't kill you but make you stronger and better. And, and this whole idea of cold plunges and ice baths actually is one of those things. And that's one of the things I discovered is about the activation of brown fat. which literally speeds up your metabolism. That's right. But also discovered this concept of phytohormesis. Now, you see these plants develop these things that work with us. I think that we need to frame it a little bit differently. There's more of a symbiotic adaptation that we've had to these plants. They didn't make these chemicals for us. They made them for themselves as their own part of their defense mechanisms, their pests, to deal with heat, to deal with sunlight, to deal with drought, I mean, just to be stronger. But we borrow them for our own use because we're lazy biologically. Like, we don't make vitamin C because we can get it from the food we eat. So we actually don't think of these things as essential nutrients, but I think they are. And they now can mimic these things that we need that are little stresses in our body. So high dose, for example, will cause potentially some toxic effect. But if you eat them in the right dose in your foods or in the right dose of supplements, they can actually activate these pathways in the right way.

So this whole idea of food dosing and hormesis, I love that you bring that up because that is such an important construct that, you know, anybody in the medical community will know that the teaching of the drug companies is that a little bit's not enough and then you want to increase the dose until you get the maximal tolerated dose. That's how drugs are developed. That's how chemotherapy is developed. How much can you elevate? How high can you make the dose? until you basically make the person croak. That's really how drugs are developed. And yet that's not how biology is. When we eat those, when we have that symbiotic relationship with plants, which I totally agree with. And by the way, humans aren't the only ones that do this. Bears go out and forage for berries, for specific kinds of things. Insects go out and look for specific types of plants and pollen to be able to service their own systems as well. So, you know, we've been, we, we're, you know, we're we're all taking the page, tearing a page from the playbook of every other living species on the planet. And at the end of the day, those goes back to the plant-based foods. But here's, I think, what's really cool. We can actually think about this hormesis concept is so important. A little might not be enough. A little bit more might be better. Even more might actually get you on to be. And then when you go way overboard, you actually get less of an effect. And by the way, this is a lesson I think that people need to hear about dietary supplements, right? Because you get your quercetin, you get your chlorogenic acid, you get your molybdenum, you get your whatever it is. And, you know, the thinking is for a lot of people who are not savvy to the idea of hormesis is that more isn't always more. At some point, more is less. May not be toxic, but you might actually move away from the benefit that you would get.

Yeah, it's really fascinating. It's like, what's the Goldilocks dose of all these things? And we can actually start to use these things to regulate our biology and our metabolism in ways that you're discovering through all your research, which is so important because I think as a doctor, we don't think about these things. I don't think we think about the power of these compounds. And in fact, in your book and in our conversations, you've talked about this incredible incredible sort of way in which often these compounds work better than drugs. And I remember this one slide we were at a Milken conference together, and you were presenting to, like, the food companies and everybody, it was great. And you threw up this slide and said, here's a drug for high blood pressure, and here's this food, and here's the effect. And I'm like, wait a minute, I've never seen that before. And it was, it was, it was so profound. And and we see that, we see when I use Fibus medicine with my patients in my practice and understand, you know, like any pharmacology, you have to know the right drug in the right dose and for the right person for the right problem. And it's literally that specific. When you do that, you see results that are far more profound than what you see with regular medication. You reverse diabetes and heart failure and kidney failure and liver problems and autoimmune diseases and digestive disorders and and I saw it myself. I mean, I had a, you know, incurable autoimmune disease, which I developed after getting C. Diff, which is a terrible infection. I developed ulcer colitis, and I was having 20 bloody bowel movements a day. I lost 20 pounds. I was in bed. I couldn't work. And. And I was like, this is terrible. And actually, in. In part, due to our conversations and. And what I learned from you about the power of akamansia and other things, I tested. I had, like, zero akamansia. like zero. And so I developed this acromansia shake, which I did based on a lot of things I learned from you and research. And I started taking it and actually reset my whole system. And I did a bunch of other things, but we now can use these compounds as part of a therapeutic framework and understand that food really is medicine. It's not just like medicine.

Yeah. Well, so I'm working on my next book right now, which will come out next year. and what I'm doing is taking everything that I started my first book and diving a lot deeper into how these many of the same foods and some new ones actually can actually alter our metabolisms as well. But the, but the big eye-opener for me as a scientist, and, and by the way, you know, for people who are not scientists, the fun part of being a scientist, we get to discover new things that open our eyes, drop our jaws and make us actually kind of jump for joy because we've discovered something new. And so what I'm actually realizing is that this idea of reversing disease, which is what you've just described for yourself, which sounds miraculous when one says it actually isn't that miraculous at all. It's really helping our body reset. It's like having that spinning wheel of death and you do a hard reboot. You got to do different things to actually get your operating system to go back to what it wants to do. I mean, at some point, you can actually go over the edge and you can't rescue the system. You got to get a new, get it to get a new laptop. But actually, more times than not, we can actually do daily things. This is the food is medicine. The medicine we take three times a day that put the right stuff into our bodies, the right type of calories, the right type of micronutrients and macronutrients. And by the way, not to understate the fact that food isn't a cure-all. this whole idea of lowering stress. Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And by the way, you know, right now, post, you know, kind of like this whole pandemic craze and all the political and, and Military of upset that's going around the world now, you know, the monkey pox and it doesn't. We, we, you know, we live in a doom scrolling Society.

I tried not to go in there.

And what, what happens, though? And I think this is so important to hear. is that, you know, it's one thing that I found it helpful for me because I was getting, as a researcher in different diseases, is I started to find myself looking deeper and deeper into what's going on, just like a researcher. And I inadvertently found myself doom scrolling. And so that's something that I think that we can knowledgeably not do. You can undo that by taking some time away. I'm sure, you know, I, so here's what I did. I I went to the Mediterranean to do some research on food. It was a complete reset when I was just with sea, sky, rock and elemental foods. Yeah. You know, I'm sure the same way with you.

Totally.

Yeah. Yeah. It was a great excuse.

I'm writing a book, I like to have to go to Korea, one of the blue zones. And, you know, I ate all the wild greens they had, the wild mushrooms. I ate their wild sage tea, which has the high levels of that we.

Were facetiming back and forth, and I I was so amazed. But you know, like when you share that experience with others because you actually know what it's like. What I'm trying to say is that stress is something that we have to live with now. It's possible to unplug and find simple ways to go back to a simpler sort of regimen in our life. And some of that's just unplugging from information.

It's true. I mean, I literally, Don't really, I mean, I think if some big news thing happens, you know, I'll hear about it and I'll, like, look at it if I need to. But I just sort of unloaded my nervous system and, and, you know, it's like, it's like junk food for the brain and for your soul. And I try to, like, stay away from it.

Ultra processed news.

Ultra processed news. Not even news. And all the good stories don't get told. So there's a lot of hope out there. And, you know, I just, I just want to spend the last two minutes kind of getting a little bit granular on how you would tell your patients to take this information about metabolism that you've learned. How do they begin to incorporate it in their lives on a daily basis? How can they accelerate their healing, speed up their metabolism and reach their health potential?

Yeah, no, listen, I mean, there's, because I'm, this is my new deep area of research. I'm not going to go into the complex. I'm going to go through the simple things. Turns out for your metabolism, that what you eat and how you live can actually help to restore the metabolism that you are destined to have born with, which is the same as everyone else. All right, so you're, you're, you're, you're not doomed by your genetics. You're, you're capable of actually storing your own healthy metabolism. And if you listen to the Dr. Mark Hyman of the world, you can actually elevate them as well, which to me is a, is an is an inspirational message that you can actually not just claw your way back to where you started, but you can actually even get better. To me, how do you do that? You do that by actually a lot of the common sense things that we over and over we've been saying, eat mostly plant-based foods, whole foods, you know, fruits and vegetables, nuts, legumes, healthy oils, avoid excessive unhealthy fats, all right? Omega-3s, which come from seafood and seaweed, are also great compliments. And look, I'm somebody who really enjoys food. I don't love to eat, but I enjoy food and I love the traditions of food. It's okay to, you know, you don't have to be a vegan to enjoy your life and you should live your life. But what you need to do is that you're tending your own body's garden. So you need to make sure you're taking care of it most of the time, taking care of it of not only eating well, cooking it the right way. So, you know, Omega-3 healthy, a piece of salmon, okay? If you deep fry it and turn it into fish and chips, it's, you know, like what we do to our food, even at home, actually can make the difference between turning something that's good and making it better versus taking something that's good and taking it less good for you. So that's something it's in your hands. And then, of course, the simple things like staying physically active, getting good quality sleep, managing stress, you know, those are all the composite things that those systems, we started at the very beginning of this podcast talking about all these molecular systems in the microbiome. Look, you don't need to memorize all the things that, you know, that folks like you and I are uncovering. But what you do need to understand is that how you schedule your life, how you run your life has a profound effect, this domino effect, on all the things inside. So do good things for yourself. Do a good deed for yourself every single day, three times a day. And while you're sleeping at night, that's the secret to actually helping your metabolism.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. So we need to include these in our diet. So when I go to the grocery, I'm gonna get asparagus, artichokes and onions because I know these are prebiotic foods are gonna help my microbiome. I think about it, or I'm gonna buy Hickam and put in my salad because it's a prebiotic food, and I want to actually increase the food.