We All Have Cancer (& How To Starve Cancer With The Foods You Eat).

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, it's not just about the weapon that we can design in the lab. It's really how the patient's body resists cancer as we know it. It's not just the food, it's how our body responds to what we put inside it. And among the responses that are important.

Is our microbiome, miso, natto, tempeh, you know, fermented soy sauce, any of those type of things. I'm a fan of performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. So I was recently talking to my friend JJ Virgin, and she told me I had to look up this guy, Dr. William Lee. So I did. It turns out he has this book called Eat to Beat Disease. And I see tons of books like this. It's like this superfood that superfood, blah, blah, blah. But this one was actually different. It's a really, really good book. I featured it in my weekly roundup actually several months ago after I read it, because I literally just devoured the thing in about a day after JJ told me I need to read it. Reached out to Dr. Lee and he was kind enough to agree to come on to show. So he's not just an author. He's also the chief executive officer. He's the president and the medical director of the Angiogenesis foundation, which is basically a foundation that studies how to grow and maintain blood vessels, which is what a lot of this book is about, although there's a whole lot more in there. U2 lead singer Bono has actually said that Dr. Lee is one of the top 10 people with the potential for changing the world in the next 10 years. I've had a chance to talk with Dr. Lee at a conference and he's just as smart in person as he is in his book. He's worked with the White House, the Clinton Global Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, ton of different Fortune 500 companies, a bunch of universities and medical institutions. He got his undergrad from the teeny tiny little old Harvard College. He got his medical degree from University of Pittsburgh and also did his clinical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, which is a teaching hospital of the Harvard Medical School. He has a bunch of peer reviewed scientific and clinical articles out there all over the place, from Science to the New England Journal of Medicine to Lancet to Nature Reviews. So this dude knows what he's talking about. Everything that we discuss in today's show you can access in the show notes which you will find in handy dandy form@BenGreenfieldFitness.com EatToBeat disease. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Eat2Beat disease. That's where you can also grab Dr. Lee's book. So, Dr. Lee, and tell me if you want me to call you William or Dr. Lee as we talk. Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you, Ben. It's a pleasure to be on. And I've enjoyed reading your books as well and hearing what you're doing. I think there's a lot of common interests that we actually have, and I'm really pleased to be able to talk about areas of common passion, which is how do we actually optimize our health?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Using all these crazy. Like, dude, you have so much in this book, from black squid ink to wearing sunscreen on airplanes. So there's a lot of places we could jump in. But the part of your book that just, like, initially made me turn my head and sit up and pay attention Was when you said near the beginning, we all have cancer. We all have cancer. And I'm curious if you could delve into why you said that and if that's actually true.

Yeah, well, look, so first of all, I'm a physician, internal medicine doctor. So I deal with young and old men and women, healthy and sick. And in terms of sickness, I actually have been involved with a lot of cancer patients, Often at end stages of disease. And in my day job with the angiogenesis foundation, I've been involved with really trying to help develop the real state of the art, the real cutting edge cancer treatments. One of the things that I learned about cancer itself is that it's not just about the weapon that we can design in the lab to treat the patient. It's really how the patient's body resists cancer as we know it. Cancer is a term that we're really frightened by. Nobody wants cancer. And yet when you actually look at the secrets inside the body, we are made up of 37 trillion cells, right? Those are the elemental units of our fit body. And these cells are dividing. They're multiplying themselves all the time. And what is cancer? Cancer is when there is a division that makes a mistake creating a mutation. Well, a few cells making divisions. You could probably quality control them and not have too many problems. When you get 39 trillion cranking it out like, you know, just furiously divining, you can bet that we have one or two mistakes being made all the time. So, in fact, little microscopic cancers are just sort of a natural Side effect of, you know, running our body's factory, our cell factory, at full steam ahead. In fact, even fit people, not to mention sick people, wind up actually, or people who are not so healthy wind up, you know, cranking up their cells and multiplying them as long as at furious rates. And so the side effect of running the factory at full speed. So think about whether you're making a tennis shoe or whether you're making a microprocessed microchip. You're going to make, you're going to make a few mistakes. That's okay. They come off the production line, right. And you just don't actually bring them out to the, to the public. But the body will, will naturally spot these natural mistakes and take care of them. So how, you know, so, so, so we're in effect forming these micro. We're having errors, which are mutations that are microscopic cancers forming in our bodies all the time. And our body defense systems naturally repel the cancer, take care of the problem, take the mistakes off the production, so they never actually get out into the public or cause a problem for us. And how common is this? Well, we started to realize that these natural errors occur at an invisible pace when there were autopsy studies done of women between the ages of 40 and 50 who died of car accidents, trauma, and they were having autopsies done. About 40% of women between the ages of 40 and 50 actually already had microscopic cancers in their breast. They were just accidentally discovered during a routine autopsy. And it's like, holy cow, we're finding these microscopic cancers and depressed 40%, and yet most of these tumors will never, ever pop up to become anything significant. But all it takes is for one of those things to escape our body's defenses. And yeah, it will become significant. They did the same thing for men between the ages of 50 and 60, men who died in car accidents and trauma. When they did the autopsy, they found 50% of men in that age bracket already had microscopic prostate cancers. Okay. But most of them will never become more harmful. And then above the age of 70, 70 and above, almost a 100% of men and women already have microscopic cancers in their thyroid. And yet that's not what most people in their 70s above diet.

Those microscopic cancers aren't an issue unless they sprout because of increased blood flow to those areas. Correct?

That's exactly correct. So tiny little microscopic cancer can grow to the size of about 2 to 3 millimeter. So if you take a ballpoint pen and you either just snip off the tip of it that's the size, the biggest size that a microscopic cancer can grow. Why? Because it doesn't have enough blood flow, it doesn't have enough oxygen, it can't just have nutrients. And so that sort of size limited to about 2-3 ML and then it'll just sit there. And the body naturally will, you know, prevent new blood vessels from growing to it. And their immune systems will spot it and take them out. So think about our immune system as kind of like your neighborhood cop a patrol, just like take all the criminals off the street where they find them. Is that when these tiny little microscopic cancers can hijack our body's ability to grow blood vessels. That's angiogenesis, how our body grows blood vessels.

And that's exact. That's basically what the angiogenesis foundation is all about. You guys are trying to figure out anti angiogenic countermeasures.

Well, that's exactly. Turns out that until the 1980s, we really had no idea how the body grows blood vessels. But after that, we started to realize that angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels, is in fact a common denominator in diseases that are significant, ranging from cancer to blindness to heart disease to obesity to diabetes to stroke. These are all problems where you have either too many blood vessels growing to where they're not supposed to be, like a cancer feeding the cancer, bringing oxygen and nutrients, or on the other hand, not having enough blood vessels to be able to keep the tissue alive. We see this in heart disease and muscle atrophy, brain dementia, where you don't have enough blood flow to the brain. The body is critically dependent on having the right amount of blood vessels angiogenesis. And what the difference between a harmless microscopic cancer that we all have and a deadly one which would send it to the hospital and change our lives entirely, is whether or not these tiny cancers are able to hijack blood vessels, angiogenesis, tumor angiogenesis, in order to feed themselves. And an amazing study showed in the lab, showed that when you prevent blood vessels from hitting a tumor, it'll stay 2 to 3 millimeters. The moment the blood vessel, the first blood vessel touches that cancer delivers oxygen and nutrients. It's like injecting fuel and air supply. That tumor can grow 16 fat thousand times in size in just two weeks.

That's crass, just absolutely fascinating. You did a TED talk and in your TED talk, you talked about this head to head comparison that you guys have looked at of the potency of a whole bunch of different foods versus drugs on angiogenesis you had four different cancer drugs. You had seven different medications like anti inflammatory drugs and statins, and a blood pressure medication and an antibiotic. And then I think it was 16 different foods, like dietary factors that you studied to see what type of things would actually limit this vascular growth to these cancers that you just described. I'm curious what you found in that study to be most notable and also which foods you found to or which food groups or food components you found to be most effective and at limiting this type of growth. And I realize that that's kind of a complex question, but we got time.

I'll break it down really simply for you. So, you know, one of the things that I've done in my career is to really help develop biotech approaches to treating cancer. And the biotech approach that I've taken is really finding waste and all drugs that cut off the blood supply, feeding those cancers, thereby starving the cancer. So this actually led to more than a dozen now FDA approved new treatments for cancer that do not have the side effects of chemotherapy. Because you're really not poisoning the body, you're really just biologically snipping off the supply lines. Right. Okay. So in order to do that, I was part of a real international effort to develop the testing systems that would allow us to look at whether or not a drug or any substance you dump into the test system could inhibit abnormal angiogenesis. In other words, could stop those bad blood vessels from growing, starving a cancer. And so using this kind of gold standard test for drug development, we were really interested in testing, of course, cancer drugs. So we've, you know, tested a bunch of targeted therapies, these new cancer drugs, also some chemotherapies to see how they work. And we also threw in some common drugs, just, you know, for, what the hell, let's see how regular drugs work as well. And we also discovered these are all new discoveries that, you know, the drugs that you expect would work. Yeah, they work. But some of the common drugs, you know, also, like, also inhibit angiogenesis. Holy cow. That might be useful to find a cheaper, more accessible, safer way to actually do this as well. But then, and this is going back, by the way, Ben, like more than 10 years. We realized that. And this is, you know, my personal story, you know, being involved with drug development, I thought it was crazy that I could sit at a computer in the lab and go online and pick out a chemotherapy or a fancy biotech drug mail order, have to fedex to me the next day. I could pop it into this testing system, and within three or four days, I would know just how potent the medicine is. But yet I could call a grocery delivery service or even a pizza delivery guy and have food delivered in a half an hour to me, piping hot. A typical cancer researcher would have no idea how to study the impact of the food on cancer in the lab. It's crazy what I did. Recognizing that gap, I said, well, okay, so could we actually start to break down foods into their dietary factors by extracting them, finding really cool ways to just pull out the active stuff from whole foods and then can we just throw what's coming out of the food into the exact same system head to head against the drugs? And that's what we did. And that's what I talk about in my TED Talk. What's amazing is that we can see many foods are equal to drugs, including cancer drugs, in terms of cutting off the blood supply, tumors, but some are even more powerful. So the ones that really impressed me in terms of potency and I've got actually pulled up the list in front of me right now, soy extracts, when we extract it from soy, tofu, soybeans, fermented soy, I mean, I'll tell you, it shut down angiogenesis by almost 90% and much more powerful than some of the cancer drugs that are out there.

I'm going to interrupt you and we may rabbit hole as you go through a few of these, but soy is pretty controversial these days. I know in your book you do talk quite a bit about it being this ancient legume that came from eastern China thousands of years ago. But nowadays, although soy, and I have seen some of the data on this, has all these anti angiogenic bioactive compounds like the isoflavones and then a bunch of other ones that I think a lot of folks have never heard of, like genistein and equal and some of these glycolins. Like, the issue of course, is we hear a lot about the estrogenic potential of soy and the concerns about things like breast cancer or prostate cancer. And so do you differentiate between forms of soy, like fermented versus unfermented? Do you look at GMO versus non gmo? Do you look at estrogenic potential? Like, what's your take on soy?

Yeah, so it's a great question and it's actually something that I am really happy to have the opportunity to bring a little clarity to your podcast audience. So here's the thing. When it comes to food and health and food and disease, there's lots of ideas out there. Most of the ideas are well intentioned interpretations of very complicated science. And nowhere is this more true than with soy. And the whole issue about soy being dangerous for breast cancer is an urban legend, actually. And it's so widespread, even doctors actually tell their female patients, you know, to sort of stay away from soy if they've got, if they, if they are afraid of breast cancer, if they have breast cancer. So let me kind of clear things up. Soy is, you know, is a legume that comes from a plant. And there's a lot of these bioactives, naturally active chemicals, natural chemicals found in soy. It is true that soy has a phytoestrogen, that's a word that literally describes a plant based estrogen like chemical. And this is where I come from, which is science. You take a look at the chemical structure of phytoestrogen from soy and you were to compare it side by side with the chemical structure of human estrogen. You see that they look nothing alike. Nothing alike. And in fact, and this is, you got to know the chemistry to look at these things. And it is true that some human breast cancers are fueled by human estrogens. And the way that those human estrogen sensitive breast cancers are treated or prevented is by giving a estrogen blocker. And it's natural to think, well, you know, if you just kind of hand wave it and say, well, you know, you don't pay attention to the detail that okay, soy's got estrogen, so better stay away from soy. That's where this urban legend comes from. But actually real research shows that not only do these two, the plant estrogen, human estrogens, they don't look alike. In fact, when you test them in the same system, the plant estrogen blocks the human estrogen, it actually has an anti human estrogen effect against breast cancer. So on top of that, some of the other soy estrogens, phytoestrogens, including the genestein, which is one of these phytoestrogens, actually are also anti angiogenic. So they actually cut off the blood supply as well as directly block the effects of hormones. So all this sounds like scientific mumbo jumbo. How do we know this is actually true? Well, in my book Ethnic Beat Disease, I actually talk about, I try to put mostly human studies in there because at the end of the day, rubber meets the road. Not based on the theory, but whether or not we're actually finding this works in people. So when it comes to soy and breast cancer, I talk about a study of 5,000 women who already have breast Cancer. So these are the most vulnerable women. And the study was done over a period of years showing that those women who ate more soy, so breast cancer, women with breast cancer who ate more soy had about almost a 30% lower risk in dying from their disease, lower risk of dying from breast cancer. And if they had their cancer completely removed or treated, those who ate more Soy had a 30% reduction in having their cancer come back compared to the people who didn't eat much soy. So how much soy did they have to eat to be able to achieve that amount? Because, you know, the doses that are important, it's about 10 grams of soy protein per day on average in this study. And that's the amount of soy that you'd find in one glass of soy milk, just by example, pragmatic, doable. And so this is, you know, oh, and then, you know, critics say, well, that's just one study. Even 5,000 patients, that's a lot of people. Is it reproducible? Well, other people have done what we call a meta analysis. And this is where you take many different studies and just aggregate them together to see what the net effect is, because lots of repetition and reproducibility is very important for medical research. Well, there's been a study of 14 different a meta analysis of 14 different studies of breast cancer and death and soy consumption in every single study. And the meta analysis showed that in every single case, soy was associated with survival, and in no case was it actually associated with mortality. That's pretty convincing.

Yeah, I do know, because I think I talked about this on my podcast, like, two or three years ago. The isoflavones in soy, particularly, and some of the animal studies that show potential for activation of some genes related to cancer or growth of cancer. And I do know, if I recall correctly, it was massive doses of, like, isolated isoflavones that they were giving to these animals. I think that in this case it was a rodent model. But that's far different than, say, consuming whole, let's say a whole fermented soy product like natto or miso or tempeh on a regular basis. It'd be kind of like saying, you know, it'd be like if a study came out on rodents that showed that massive doses of the amino acid methionine cause cancer, and then everybody saying steak is going to give you cancer. I mean, it seems like that's kind of, kind of the type of logic being used here.

That's exactly true. And we all know that the dose makes the difference between the poison versus the cure. That's like an ancient saying. And it's true in medicine, right? Not enough doesn't give you enough. Too much could actually be fatal. And I'll give you the great example. And we know this can be very true for certain types of foods. Here's something super common in the Mediterranean diet, which we know is healthy. It's garlic, right? Allium garlic's related to onions, it's related to chives, everything else, garlic. Garlic is good for you. There's a lot of natural chemicals in garlic that actually lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, help your telomeres, those kinds of things. But if you have a ton of garlic, and I remember sort of when I was in college, I had a teacher who was super into garlic. You could smell them coming from a mile away. He ate something like 30 cloves of garlic a day, which is an unreasonable amount. And high doses of something like garlic actually can box your kidneys. So he went into kidney failure and died, like I said. And I think your point is well made, which is be very careful interpreting animal studies for the human thing. You want to always look at what dose they've actually tested, because again, doses between the cure versus the poison.

Yeah. And of course, a lot of people are probably trying to jump through the podcast right now and are shouting about all the anti nutrients in soy, like the saponins and the phytates and the trypsin inhibitors and the goitrogens. But basically, if you're eating fermented soy, and I don't know if you have any Comments on this, Dr. Lee, traditional fermentation pretty much destroys most of those antinutrients. I tell people, if they want to play it safe, yeah, don't grab the block of tofu out of the produce section of the grocery store. But I mean, miso, natto, tempeh, fermented soy sauce, any of those type of things I'm a fan of. I don't personally like when I go to sushi just because I am concerned about the anti nutrients. I don't eat edamame. I don't grab the bags of the soy nuts. They're good, crunchy soy nuts, but I just don't eat them. And even soy sauce I'm careful with, unless I'm actually consuming fermented soy. And I actually have. I went to Japan last year and made this wonderful batch of fermented miso that's in my refrigerator right now. And I've been having a big tablespoon of that a day. And it's fantastic, you know, full of wonderful bacteria. But yeah, I do think people should ferment soy. What's your take on fermentation?

Yeah, well, fermentation does a lot of things besides make the food taste different, better, richer, great, more umami. One thing that it does is it actually changes the chemical structure as you point out. And you know, one of the things that I what I what I think we're discovering in medical research when it comes to food, you know, the whole food is medicine research movement, there are people like me that, you know, just, we just go by the science, you know, so we try not to have any preconceived notions. Fermentation changes the chemistry. You know, it does tend to take down some of the, you know, less useful substances that might be naturally occurring and it tends to concentrate the good stuff. So in the case of, you know, genocide, as one example, fermentation concentrates the bioactive in soy. So you know, your instinct bed is probably pretty good when you eat edamame. Look, if you like to eat it, that's probably fine. But in fact, you know, getting fermented in annatto is like 10 sometimes more of that beneficial nutrients that you would actually have from the soy. So you get more with more fermentation. The second thing is actually you get bacteria which then turns the food into kind of a pro, having a probiotic quality which is also good for our gut, which then improves our immune system. So optimizing our bodies. Good natural fermentation, traditional fermentation as opposed to factory run fermentation is probably the way to go.

Yeah, and I actually, I'm going to derail you from your TED talk for a second because you only talked about one of the anti angiogenic foods that you found, soy. And I think we established that fermented forms of soy, preferably from a non GMO source, those are definitely not bad news bears for most people's diets. But of course you were just talking about the bacteria. And in the book I had folded over a page where you talk about this researcher, I think his name was Metchnikoff and he suggested that one secret to longevity was consuming healthy bacteria. And then, and in the book you cite this study, I think it was over 1000 ridiculously healthy people who had no health issues or family history of serious disease across all age groups. And the common denominator among them was their microbiome and specific bacteria that seem to induce profound impacts when it comes to health. So if that's true, are there and have you found this in any of your research. Are there specific findings, forms of bacteria that people should be looking for if they're going to supplement their diet with some type of yogurt or some type of probiotic or some type of specific bacteria?

Yeah. So what's really interesting is, you know, in my book Eat to Be Disease, I talk about when it comes to food and health, it's not just the food. It's how our body responds to what we put inside it. And among the responses that are important is our microbiome. It's one of five health defense systems. Androgenesis, good circulation is one of them. Our stem cells is another. The microbiome is the third one, our DNA protection mechanism the fourth, and our immune system is the fifth one. So these are five links of a stool that defend our health. And the microbiome is turning out to be much more important than anyone ever thought. So going back to this guy Mechnikov, his name is Ilya Meshnikov. And he's like from the early 20th century, like 19. You know, he was a zoologist and he was in France, noted, like, during the cholera epidemic, he was seeing, like cholera, like, just knocking people out, like killing people left and right. But what's odd is he found that there were, when he actually grew bacteria in a petri dish that contained cholera, this lethal bacteria, that some bacteria actually killed the cholera. So here, you know, like, so back then, it was like, all bacteria is bad, right? Like, that's kind of our normal thinking. And cholera really bad. But when Mechikov found that when you put some bacteria into a dish of cholera, some of that, those bacteria are good bacteria that killed the bad bacteria. So that, you know, kind of led us, those are the early roots back in the early 19th century, 20th century, 1900s, that lead us into thinking about the concept, well, maybe not. Maybe we've got good, some good bacteria. Fast forward. We know when I went to medical school, I knew for a fact that if you gave super powerful antibiotics that would clear out the gut bacteria, you could get this thing called C. Difficolitis, where you have an overgrowth of a bad bacteria called difficile, C. Difficile. And that could kill you. Actually, it turns out that the best way to treat this kind of infection, besides giving yet another antibiotic, which then knocks your body in the other direction, that's like, that's just treating a bad thing with another bad thing, is actually a fecal transplant. So if you actually put good bacteria in treating bad bacteria with good bacteria, you can actually calm down this entire, this kind of disaster of the gut with bad bacteria. So let's take a look at where we are now. We now know that our body contains 39 trillion bacteria on average. 39 trillion. That's more bacteria in our body than ourselves. And most of the bacteria lives in our gut. And there are so many different types of species of bacteria, tens of thousands of species, we haven't even figured them all out yet. So this is an undiscovered country jungle out there. We're figuring out, however, what's really interesting. And again, I'm sort of, I go by science and so I'm not going to tell you there's a match probiotic. But I will tell you that Metchnikov noticed that, that poor Bulgarian monks who lived in really crappy conditions where people are getting sick all over the place when they ate yogurt naturally, you know, natural yogurt, which is a fermentation product, they tended to live to like a ripe old age. And he thought that that bacteria might be important.

You should note, by the way, this isn't, this isn't dannon fruit in the bottom yogurt that's pasteurized or homogeneous like this is. This is full on natural, rich, full fat yogurt.

I would imagine that is completely the case. And it's also not sweetened yogurt, you know, with added sugar, you know, kind of like, you know, coating the whole thing. Because most of the commercial stuff you get there is like really, you know, sugary jelly stuff. It's got a big thing of yogurt put on top of it. So again, back to the theme of sort of like being important, here's what we do know. When you actually look in the stool of people who are really healthy, there is sort of this ecosystem that we're just starting to be able to characterize of, you know, 39 trillion bacteria. We're just beginning. We're just starting to have the ability to kind of pick out which ones are really good. But more deliberate research is finding some amazing good actors. One of those good actors is a common bacteria called Acheromansia, so specifically called Akkermansia mucinophila. Greek word, hard to pronounce. Let me just say that for your listeners that this is a healthy gut bacteria that makes 1 to 2% of our gut population, our gut bacteria population. And it lives in the mucus that naturally lines our gut. So our colon naturally secretes mucus on there. And, you know, like, when you have bad diarrhea, it's mucus Y that mucus is normal, and that bacteria thrives to live in that. Turns out Akkermansia has now been identified as one of the surveillance bacteria that helps keep us healthy. Just basically like a lawn mower. And it keeps the general tenor of our health normal. You need Akkermansia. And if you don't have akkermansia, which by the way, even common antibiotics you would use, you know that if somebody prescribed antibiotic for bronchitis, that will wipe out most of your Akkermansia. And all of a sudden your body's surveillance system for health goes down. And akkermansia, you cannot actually eat as a probiotic. The only way that you can grow Akkermansia back in your body, to our knowledge currently, it may change in a few years, but currently is actually eat the right kinds of food. So it turns out that pomegranate juice, full strength, full bore pomegranate juice that you would press yourself, actually contains a natural chemical bioactive called ellagitannins. Those ellagitannins don't do anything to the bacteria themselves, but they naturally prompt our colon cells, the goblet cells in our gut, to secrete mucus. Once you actually have a lot of mucus there, it's basically throwing fertilizer to the soil. Whatever tiny little Akkermansia particles are left, they'll start to bloom like roses in your garden and you can grow it right back up. Okay. And this has turned out to be the difference between patients with cancer who respond to the latest immune therapies that use the body to knock out cancer. And if you have akkermansia, you will likely respond to the immune therapy because akkermansia helps your immune system. And if you don't have Akkermansia, then how many cancer patients get an antibiotic as a. That's just a normal course of treatment. If you don't have it, you're likely not to respond. So here's one bacteria that science has pinned out shine a clique light on that seems to be kind of life or death surveillance of health. Very important that you can't eat a probiotic for, but that you can actually nurture with foods. Pomegranate juice, cranberry juice, even conqueror grape juice. They actually have those natural chemicals that prompt the secretion. So that's one of them.

I'm going to throw a wrench into the equation though, because I do know that biochemical individuality, or at least genetic individuality may play a role here as well with Akkermansia because there are some studies I've seen showing it to be associated with some neurological disorders. Right, Like Parkinson's or. I think Ms. Was another, possibly Alzheimer's as well. And I think it's unclear at this point whether high levels of Akkermansia in the biome of these individuals is something that predisposed them to disease or something that occurred post disease. But regardless, there's some kind of a correlation there. And for me, just from the data I've seen, if I had a high genetic risk for a neurological disease like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or ms, I might consider limiting akkermancy or at least perhaps looking into some of the data on it, because it's one of those. One of those weird kind of good bug, bad bug type of phenomenons. And I don't know, I mean, like, sometimes I wonder when I look at a whole bunch of healthy people from one specific area of the world that have a high amount of bacteria, a certain bacteria in their gut, I question if the logic should flow to therefore everybody should have that bacteria in their gut. Do you think that's an unfair thought or, I mean, should we proceed with caution with some of these bacteria?

Well, I think it's a fair point, which is that there's no single organism that is the magic bullet that is going to protect us. And so a little Akermancy doesn't mean a ton of akkermancy is good for you. What we know is that, no, Akkermansia is probably not good for you, and so encouraging it to grow is actually better. And that's really linked to the. Such the common use of antibiotics that will wipe it out. I'll give you a little. We'll deep dive a little bit into your nuance here, because that's actually important, is that some people metabolize the ellagitannins very differently than others, which can actually have a different type of effect in the gut and on the microbiome. And so I think, correctly, you point out the fact that not every individual metabolizes food differently. And so it's very, very important to look at yourself as an individual, look at what your individual risks are. And you know, some people won't tolerate pomegranate juice at all. You know, they just don't react. Their body reacts poorly to it. Our body actually is an incredible quorum sensor. You know, like it kind of knows when the neighborhood is good and whether. When the neighborhood is like, unhappy with things. So I think that with 39 trillion bacteria, we're just at the beginning of teasing this out. So research is actually showing another bacteria called Lactobacillus reuteri being really important and with some remarkable activities for our health. And this is a bacteria that actually moms give babies. And the amazing discoveries were come with about eight months pregnant, if she has this bacteria in her colon, the uterus actually sends a signal to the colonial. It's like calling an Uber. And the bacteria in the gut actually respond by hopping into cells called neutrophils. These are normal white blood cells, but they don't actually infect the cell and destroy them. They just like hop a ride into the cell. And they ride the cell from the colon all the way up into the breast. And then like an Uber, the cell drops off this bacteria and you near the breast ducts, the milk ducts and the breast kind of camp out there until the baby's born. And when the baby first starts suckling for breastfeeding, the milk ducts actually inject along with this Lactobacillus reuteri, which is one of the first bacteria to colonize the baby. So this is actually one way that mom's defenses and microbiome get passed on to babies and why maternal health and hygiene is actually one way to optimize the health of a baby. So this whole optimization starts really from the get go of life. What we found out about Lactobacillus rudai is it actually helps to boost the immune system. It actually speeds up healing of injury. It does this actually by prompting better blood vessels to grow for healing. It also helps to remarkably make hair shinier. So it actually improves even the quality of your hair. Like an end organ on your skin. It'll let you improve the optical quality of the hair. Animal studies. Okay, we're back in the lab now. It actually gives a powerful suppressor, probably by the immune system, to prevent tumors from growing in the gut like colon. And it also prevents tumors from growing in the breast as well. And so this is again sort of a growing that Lactobacillus reuteri is important. And unlike Akkermansia, with Lactobacus rutori, you can take this as a supplement. You can get them and they're often found in dietary supplements. And the other thing is you can get them in food. And it turns out that, you know, like, not all people have can tolerate dairy and too much dairy is not good for you. But you know, lactopysis rooter I found is used to make Parmesan cheese. Like originally the original Parmesan Cheese. It's also used to make the original sourdough bread. It's actually the bacteria that creates that sour taste.

Yeah. And there's a doctor who I interviewed, Dr. William Davis, who gave me his recipe for the Rooteri yogurt, which I began to make. And it's very simple. It's just coconut milk with some of the Biogaia El Reuteri tablets you can get on Amazon. You crush them in, like, a mortar and pestle, and then you can combine those with the yogurt, and you just ferment it for, like, 100, 110 degrees in your oven or in a food dehydrator for a day. And you get billions and billions more organisms out of than you'd get from just like taking the L. Rooteri capsule or the tablet in this case, that you get from Amazon. And then the other one that I like is I interviewed a guy from a company called Seed, and it's this probiotic called Seed, and they envelop El Reuteri and these other bacteria in an algal, like a protective algal layer. So it resists the acidic nature of the stomach and winds up actually, as the name implies, like seeding the actual intestine with El Retire or El Retire. So it's a very, very cool bacteria. And I've been using it ever since I interviewed Dr. Davis, either in supplement form, like with the Seed probiotic, or by making my own yogurt using that trick that he taught me with those tablets off Amazon.

And I'll give you one additional tip, since you're getting such great tips from the people who are guests on your show. It turns out that L. Rooteri actually competes with and destroys, in your oral microbiome, your mouth. It actually destroys the bacteria, strep mutants, that causes cavities on the teeth. So it actually combats tooth decay.

Wow. Wow. Cool. All right, well, everybody, every one of my listeners is going to be taking over at this point because I've talked about it now on enough shows. So we, and I'm sure some people are wanting me to come back full circle to your TED Talk, because we basically, we talked about soy, and then we took a rabbit hole into fermented soy, then we took a rabbit hole into Akkermansia and El Reuteri. What would be another food that you found to be highly antioangiogenic and control some of this potential for cancer growth from the cancer that we all have, but that really needs to have blood vessels growing to it to become an issue?

Yeah. So you know, I think something that helps make things that impress me that make a lot of sense are berries. So it turns out that different types of berries, the tartness of the berries is often due to ellagic acid. And that tartness, that acid, natural acid, actually is a powerful effect to inhibit angiogenesis. In fact, you know, it is, you know, more powerful than the drugs we actually tested. When you go head to head in our system, from my TED talk, another and by the way, sort of black raspberries, choke berries, those are all, you know, these. There's a. Most people just think about berries like blueberries, strawberries and blackberries, the common things you see in the supermarket. But it's really worth going out there and hunting for other edible berries in markets. Like, I wouldn't go into the Wista hunt, but I would say, you know, in farmers markets or just reading about indigenous berries that, you know, even people from in Latin America eat, there's amazing properties that we're starting to discover from them.

Yeah, I was blown away by what you, what you noted on chokeberry. Sorry to interrupt the chokeberry. I hadn't seen that much data. Obviously I knew about blueberries and what I consider to be an even better form of blue blueberry, the bilberry and you know, some, some of the cranberries and some of those that are high in the tannins that kind of have that little bit of a bitter tart aftertaste. But I hadn't really done much with chokeberries and I underlined that in your book and wrote a note to myself. I have yet to actually find a good local source for chokeberries. I found on, I think it's nuts.com you can buy like dried chokeberries. But if, if anybody who's listening in, I'm saying this out of pure selfishness, you live in the Inland Northwest and you know of a good chokeberry source, let me know because it appears based on Williams book that they're pretty potent in terms of their anti angiogenic properties.

Well, and also the other part that is amazing is that some foods activate multiple defense systems at the same time. And in the case of chokeberries, which you know, by the way, if you're having trouble finding chokeberries, like that's a name that, that's one way that it's called. Another name that sometimes they're found is called Aronia A R O N I A. And if you look at Aronia berries, that's what it is.

I didn't know that then. I've had chokeberries Never mind. Okay, cool. And I know you can, you can buy those like frozen on Amazon. Aronia berries.

Exactly.

That's great. Okay, cool. Good to know. Awesome.

And they're used like in Eastern Europe for, you know, traditional jams and jellies and things like that. So this is not a kind of like a new genetically modified superfood somehow. This is actually a traditional berry that has different names to it that actually is not that difficult to get. But what's really interesting is some researchers take a look at young, healthy people and again, trying to optimize health. They actually found that exposing the chokeberry extracts actually can protect your own stem cells, our natural stem cells, against stress. So we're all subjected to stress. Yeah. So it actually makes them more resistant to stress.

Okay, now when you were talking about chokeberries, you started to bring up something else. Before I interrupt you, I think you said parsley. Yeah.

So parsley is another food that has antiangiogenic activity. And you know, most of us don't eat, you know, big bunches of parsley like you would eat another. You know, some people, you know, you can eat a lot of plant based foods at one kind, but parsley is really kind of a, kind of a condiment, the flavoring. But you can actually blend it into a smoothie. You can actually get quite a lot of it and actually get some green color. It's kind of a strongish plant like taste. But that's actually remarkably. The leaves of parsley actually have this remarkable antiangiogenic, which would be tumor starving effect as well. So small plant, small leaf, potent flavor. And if you think about how parsley is actually used, again, I think our food, our healthy food, as we're discovering or perhaps I should say rediscovering healthy food, we're realizing that fresh, whole, well grown, well processed or cooked things, that the techniques actually have a lot of sense. So how is parsley used? I mean, you know, the traditional cooks used to have a bunch of parsley growing by their kitchen. And whatever they're making, they would actually pick some of these leaves off and throw them into the meal. Right. So you're just adding and adding an enhancement of something that not only tastes good, but actually be good for you, but you can actually then take parsley and really do something with it as well. So that's another impressive anti androgenic food.

And then now when you're talking about some of the tannins like the chokeberries and some of these foods, I know you guys did some really interesting studies on not just wine, but a few different beverages, like the angiogenesis foundation. You guys studied teas, you researched wines, and I think you also looked into, like, a hot chocolate, chocolate, or a cacao. Can you dig into what you found when you were looking at different beverages?

Yeah. Well, so let me tell you, kind of we'll go by tea, wine, and chocolate. So everybody knows the green tea is good for you. I'm a big fan of green tea. My great uncle, who lived to 105 independently sharp of mine, drank. You know, he lived at the base of a tea mountain in China. And so he drank tea his whole life. And it was quite amazing how healthy he actually was. But you know what we tend to do, I think in the health community, when we're talking to people, it's so easy to leave the impression that, like, okay, so green tea. That's an answer. And all cream teas are the same. We wanted to challenge that, to say, is that true? Are all teas the same? And by the way, some people say black teas aren't so good for you because they have been fermented and they've destroyed all the healthy polyphenols. So we said, you know what? Let's let science tell us the answer. So we studied two different types of green tea. Japanese sencha, which is often regarded popularly as the most powerful. It's Japanese green tea. It's super powerful versus Chinese jasmine tea. And we said, what's stronger, the Japanese or the Chinese tea? Well, the assumption would have been the Japanese tea. It turned out that the jasmine tea is actually more powerful than the secha, the Japanese tea. And then we found a surprise, the black tea. We looked at Earl Grey, that the black tea actually had even more power than the green tea. Now, what is Earl grey? It's black fermented tea, but it also contains bergamet, which is a citrus, which actually contributes to its antiangiogenic activity as well. And then the real kind of like jaw droppers weak, combined Chinese and Japanese tea, each of which was less. They were powerful, but less potent than the Earl grey black tea. And we combined those two Japanese and Chinese teas. So these are two teas that culturally would never be combined together. You would never just think of doing that. The people in Asia would never combine.

Total tea bastardization, right?

Exactly. But when you combine those two teas, sencha and Chinese jasmine tea, you wound up creating a hybrid tea that is more powerful than the Earl Grey. So all of a sudden, you jumped even you sort of, like, had tea Synergies. And so this tells us that food combinations are super important to understand and that not all teas are the same.

I'm going to interrupt you real quick because I guess maybe it's the entrepreneur businessman in me wondering this, but has anybody actually branded like a Japanese China Chinese tea combo that's like essentia jasmine tea tea, like, and marketed that as an anti angiogenic type of tea?

Yeah. So, you know, my organization, the Angiogenesis foundation, we worked with Harney teas. You know, they're a tea distributor and we use the research because they had donated the tea, we actually created that hybrid tea. So you can, you can search on Harney teas and look for Angiogenesis tea, and you actually get exactly the product that we actually discovered. But this is, but, you know, as an entrepreneur, I'll tell you, this is, this is the beginning of, I think, a future of entrepreneurism opportunities to be able to take a look at these, you know, really use objective research, hardcore research, and really just explore these combinations. I mean, some combinations might make things weaker, others might make them super powerful. What happens if we combine these Chinese and Japanese tea and combine it with, you know, another tea, you know, like an Assam tea from India? Could we get even more. So this is the future. Like, I'm super excited by what is going to happen in the future. And so even with tea alone, we know that's powerful for wine. We know that red wine can be good for you, and we know that it's not the alcohol. So that's why moderation is really important. You know, drinking more than a couple of glasses of wine a day, you know, starts to veer into, you know, damaging your potential, having potential to damage your liver and having more effects of the ethanol alcohol than the bioactives that the fermentation of the wine, again, natural fermentation is pulling out the color of the red wine. But one of the things that I wanted to find out is that are all red wines created equal? So we wanted to study this. But how do you study red wine head to head? You need grapes that are grown in the exact same climate. So we went to Napa and we talked to a grower that had Merlot, Pinot Noir, Cabernet, Saverneur, Petit verdot grapes. And they were all making the wines. We got the same vintage from the same year. I think it was 2012. And we basically said, give us your commercial versions of the Camp Savre, Cabernet, Cab Franc, Petit Verdot, Merlot and Pinot Noir. Now, if you were to ask typical, healthy, you know, health person who loves wine, they'd say, well, Pinot Noir is going to be the most powerful because it's got Pinot Noir grapes have the highest amount of resveratrol. Right? That may be true, but we wanted the output, the cellular output, like how powerful this for inhibiting angiogenesis. And what we found when we just did head to head, side by side, same terroir, same climate, same factory, same pickers. The only thing that was different is actually the species of grape, the varietal. We found that the three most potent wines from that vintage year with a Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and the Petit Verdot. And in fact, the Pinot Noir was one of the weaker wines that we found. So, again, you have to sort of just look at the data.

Yeah, yeah. And I would imagine, by the way, I mean, before everybody runs out and buys a big California cab or even gets like a Petit Verdot, like the organic biodynamics, nature of the wine is pretty important too, because, you know, I have an article about this I can link to in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com eat2beat disease. But I mean, everything from the type of irrigation used in the crops to herbicides, pesticides, and I think that 80 plus different synthetic or derivatives or preservatives or chemicals that are allowed in wine these days influences my wine choices. Like, I always look for organic. I look for biodynamic. I subscribe to that dry farm wine company's wine where they ship bottles to my house. And in that article I wrote, I talked about how. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of research on the protective effects of regular alcohol consumption. I think it's about two to three glasses of wine for men, one to two glasses for women, for longevity, for dementia, for glad lymphatic function, for decreased stroke risk, decreased inflammation. And I even think that some of it might be a little bit of the hormetic effect of the alcohol as well. I think even though people consider alcohol to be a toxin, I suspect a little bit of it is actually providing a hormetic effect, just like sunlight or heat or cold or anything like that.

Totally agree with that. And I support and I practice the same preferences of wine choices you do. Organic, biodynamic, all great. And some of the more progressive vintners are actually growing it that way. If you like California wines, as you said, French wines, which are very traditional, the most amazing biodynamic organic growing is in the south of France at a place called Chateau La Coste. Fantastic wines to choose from as well. And I also, by the way, agree with the hormetic effect. Hormesis is a concept that is almost foreign, almost rejected by most of the medical community that is used to saying more is more. And we're really looking at is this bell shaped curve which is to try to figure out what's that magic sweet spot where a little bit might not be enough, but just the right amount gives you exactly what your body needs to optimize itself. And then you go too much beyond that, you lose all the benefits and you might get some of the bad effects. So I think exactly that that's where probably wine falls into that hormetic effect at the ethanol level. And then, you know, chocolate we talked about is something we also looked at was really interesting. There's a couple of different types of chocolate research that we've been looking at. The most recent one, which I didn't write yet in my book because we hadn't actually done the experiment, but we just presented this earlier this year at the American Society for Nutrition, the ASN meeting. This is brand spanking news. Not even in the book yet, I will tell you. We looked at dark chocolate cacao and we looked at greater than 80%. So that's pretty dark. And it's the same kind of cacao that's used to make really dark hot chocolate. And we said, well, can we make the assumption that 80% cacao is the same as long as the percent is the same in terms of activity? And that's really what we're doing. You're hearing me talk about is challenging common knowledge or is challenging the assumptions that most people have that 80% cacao will be the same no matter where you got it and how it works. So we looked at a Dutch chocolate and then we looked at a Swiss chocolate, both 80%. And we found something amazing. First, both are antiangiogenic. We also found that both dark cacao types would actually, this is a brand new discovery, would actually kill lymphoma cells, like directly kill cancer cells and liquid cancers. Now here's what's interesting. What's even more interesting, we found that the Dutch chocolate actually had twice the antiangiogenic activity as a Swiss chocolate. So in other words, even though they were both 80%, like there's something different about where these, you know, where the, where the cacao came from or how it was actually handled.

Now what, what about, what about South America? Because a lot of chocolate, a lot of cacao. Like I drink this stuff called my cacao tea. I've talked about it on a podcast before. It's. It's basically this, this blend where they take the cacao bean and they blend. I think it's like the shell with the nibs and a, it's Ecuadorian is where they source it from. It's like this hit of dopamine and theobromine and it's wonderful. It's like an alternative to coffee in the morning. But again, it's South American, it's not of Dutch origin. Did you guys look into South America at all?

Yeah, yeah. No. So I'll tell you. So when I mentioned Dutch source, we've sourced it from a cacao distributor in the Netherlands versus Switzerland. But in fact, beans actually come from Ecuador, they come from Latin America, Mexico, they come from Africa. That's really where, that's the sort of, of the areas where cacao, your chocolate, cacao beans are actually grown. So that's what we're doing next is actually tracking back. So research is sort of like laying brick by brick and then doing, you know, kind of like CSI investigations. So the next thing we're doing, because what I'm telling you is like brand, like hot, like steaming out of the oven kind of discovery, we're actually going to go back and track down exactly those beans came from as well.

Okay, awesome. Very cool, man. I've got this whole list of foods. It's kind of funny because I this summer did a lot of podcasting on the carnivore diet. And although I adopted a very kind of like nose to tail approach to eating all my meats, I now consume a large amount of bone, broth, liver, heart, kidney, even things like the testicles of the animal and some of the suet, you know, the fat around the kidneys. I never quite gave up on things like my wine, that cacao tea that I talked about, my coffee in the morning, a little bit of dark chocolate here and there, and then a lot of these, like, I get like concentrated vegetable powders from Dr. Tom Cowan. And I supplemented my nose to tail carnivore ish diet with a lot of these compounds. And I've just had a very hard time, especially after reading your book, finding many anti angiogenic compounds that are naturally found in meat or meat alone. And this might be a little bit of a curve ball. I don't know if anybody's ever asked you this question, but have you ever seen any evidence that if you're eating a nose to tail carnivore type diet, you would still be getting some anti angiogenic compounds. You even if you weren't eating things like chokeberries and wine and coffee and chocolate and things like this.

Yeah. So here's. I wouldn't call it a curveball question. I'd call it a very sophisticated question which is what has been done to discover anti androgenic properties in meats? Right. So it's not in the flesh that I can tell you. It's not in the skin even, I don't believe. And not in the fat, but it's actually in the cartilage and the collagen, because collagen actually in the body. So think about an athlete, right? Our cartilage is naturally avascular. It doesn't actually have a rich blood supply by itself. And that's important because it's actually not intended to be kind of like swollen and packed with blood, but really to create tensile strength, to give us more strength by what they're connected to. Right. So they're like the spelunker's rope with a mountaineering rope is what our tendons are mostly metacollagen and collagen is naturally avascular. So how do they stay avascular when the whole body and the muscles that the tendons are connected to are actually so vascular? Right. Muscles are super vascular. So just connected to them, it's completely avascular. It's that tendons and collagen contain naturally occurring anti androgenic substances that are found in tissues.

Okay. So if you're eating, let's say bone broth, you would get some of those collagen peptides. I know. Or if you were like chewing the knuckles off of like the ends of some of the long bones of let's say a whole roasted chicken or something like that. I would imagine you might be getting a little bit if you're kind of digging into some of the grisly bits, if you're eating over by steak or something along those lines. But I would imagine that it's probably primarily bone broth and maybe supplementing a diet like that, as I know a lot of carnivore forks do, with some type of collagen powder or collagen peptide or something like that.

Yeah, well, I mean, like this is the beginning of a new era of era of research that I'm looking into. It's super interesting to figure out, like, are those. They come out in the broth, if you swallow them, will they actually have A biological effect, you know, and if you look outside, like I'm somebody who appreciates food and culture. If you look in some Taiwanese, for example, favorite dishes, there's like beef tendon noodles, right? And so they're actually cooking the tendons actually to flavor the broth and the whole tendon. The tendon is actually digested. So, you know, it's super interesting to think about, you know, like how those identify what's in them, you know, how available they are to your body once you eat them. And then to really start thinking or maybe even rethinking, you know, what are the benefits of these different types of diets, including the carnivore diet.

Yeah, it sounds to me like just if, because I know a lot of my listeners now are trying this like nose to tail carnivore diet approach, you know, just supplement that with, you know, either homemade bone broth or a couple of cartons. I use that organic kettle and fire stuff, the kettle and firebone broth, some. Something like that to get these anti angiogenesis factors that would inhibit the growth of blood vessels. Even if you're not eating a lot of vegetables and some of these other tannic foods that you've talked about. Sounds to me like that would be at least a smart thing to do, getting some kind of collagen fragments in your diet.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Okay, got it. You know, we only scratched the fricking surface of some of the stuff that you talk about in this book.

Book.

It is absolutely fantastic. And again folks, the name of the book is Eat to Beat Disease. Eat to beat disease. Dr. Lee also has a fantastic TED talk about eating to Starve Cancer. Kind of covers some of the things in the book, but the book takes an even deeper dive. So I think it's a wonderful read and again, I'm going to link to it and a lot of the other stuff that we talked about over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Eat2Beat Disease. As I do when I read, I tend to do a lot of like Kindle highlights as I go through the book and I'll share a few of my biggest, most notable takeaways and some of my Kindle highlights over there too, which I sometimes do when I do a podcast like this. And Dr. Lee, dude, thank you so much for coming on and sharing this stuff with us, man.

Super, super pleasure for me to talk to somebody who is so incisive and passionate about figuring out how do we optimize our health and getting that information out to people and doing it in a super intelligent, super practical and super exciting way. Thank you.

Oh, thanks, man. Thanks. I appreciate that. And yeah, again, so for all you listening in, BenGreenfieldFitness.comeattobeat disease, and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. William Lee signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.