3 Foods that Support Your Vision and Brain | Dr. William Li & Jim Kwik

Some specific plant-based foods are actually able to protect our blood vessels, protect our vision, and what's good for our eyes are good for our brain. So you get a twofer, a double-barreled approach to overall better quality of life and protected function.

Can the right foods hold the key to unlocking a world of sharper vision, enhanced cognition, and optimal brain health?

Food is medicine is something that we do for ourselves. It's very empowering that we can actually use knowledge, modern knowledge, to be able to make those daily decisions that can actually Our guest today is Dr. William Li.

He is an internationally renowned physician and scientist whose research laid the foundation for more than 40 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases, including diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity.

We can eat to preserve our vision. There are foods that are now known to be very important to contain the secret sauce to helping us preserve our vision. What are some of those foods? Well, there are foods that are rich in antioxidants.

of the specific foods or nutrients that could have a positive effect on your vision.

Vision is one of these senses that is the most precious sense to us, but we don't think about it until we start to lose it.

He is the bestselling author of Eat to Beat Your Diet. This is about burning fat, health for your metabolism, and living longer.

He is president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. A world-leading specialist in blood vessels and preventative health. And the author of countless papers on the subject. His TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer? has garnered more than 11 million views. About 50% of the foods that we were actually testing were as or more potent than the drugs that we were developing.

Has your research shown that we could actually even reverse?

Our nutrition can help us keep blood vessels healthy, and that's really where eating to beat vision loss is a reality today.

Do you have 3 favorite foods that people should add and also 3 foods we should delete or at I'm going to give 3 grand slamming foods that I think are just winners. Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Today we'll be discussing this term angiogenesis, its impact on the brain and your vision, and how your diet can help manage your vision loss and build a healthier, better brain. functioning brain. Welcome to the show, Dr. Li.

Thanks very much, Jim. Thanks for having me on.

We have a lot of mutual friends. We spoke recently, not so relatively recently at an event together. We shared a stage and I really enjoyed your presentation. So I wanted to invite you onto our show because we get a lot of questions and we've never done an episode. I know we could go many different places in terms of burning fat, healing your metabolism. living longer. I wanted to focus on vision because out of the 400 episodes we've done, we've never covered this topic. So, my question for you today, and we could go different places, and I highly recommend people get your book. We know you read to succeed and our community loves to read. I think that reading is to your mind what exercise is to your body. I want to ask you, we have a question. So, we have a group called Kwik Success and it's our monthly and where I do the only place where I do live coaching. hot seats. And then we also have a book club on top of that. And one of our success members asked, what are the top 3 foods that you would delete from your diet? And also the 3 foods you personally would recommend adding to your diet? And that would probably be the last question, but we always ask kind of questions from that Kwik Success community. People could find out more about it and join in at kwiksuccess.com. But my opening question really is, Well, what I opened with is how can you manage vision loss? You know, I'm in my 50s. It's something that I'm concerned about. I know a lot of our listeners have reached out to our team about this specifically through your diet. And what's your paradigm or the principles or your approach towards that?

Yeah, such a great question. And I'm so glad we're talking about vision, Jim, because that actually was one of my first passions as a scientist and also as a doctor. In fact, I wanted to be— at one point, I thought about becoming an ophthalmologist, an eye doctor, because I was so fascinated by this little ball. We've got 2 of them in our heads, and they are direct communications to our brain. So everything that we appreciate about the world and frankly about ourselves, you know, we associate with what we can actually see. In fact, vision is one of these senses that is the most precious sense to us, but we don't think about it until we start to lose it. it, or we need to, we start having problems, right? So if you think about general health as something that you, that many people take for granted until you start to lose it, and that's all you can think about. So too within health, our vision health is like that. It's just something we assume it's part of who we are every single day until you start having problems. Then you're like, wait a minute, what's going on? I can't see as well. So I'm a scientist. I'm what we call a vascular biologist. So I study blood vessels and blood vessels are connecting every single organ in your body, from your mouth to your brain, to your eyes, to your heart, to your lungs, your livers. And so the idea of food being something, our nutrients being delivered from what we eat through our bloodstream to our eye is absolutely vital for the ongoing health of our vision and to prevent vision loss. And I'll come back to that, talk about how do we do that. But the other thing is I'm a clinician, I'm internal medicine. And what that means is that I take care of men and women, young and old, healthy and sick. And because vision is one of my passions and brain health is something that I'm intensely interested in and have actually been working on from a dementia perspective, from a cognition perspective. Listen, anybody who's sort of our age range probably knows, if not our direct parents, then the parents of our friends, our good friends who are actually struggling with, you know, the cognitive and functional issues of aging. This is something that my research has actually been directly influencing. And because the eye is connected to the brain, in fact, the eye is the opening to the brain from a visual signal perspective. This is why what protects the eye also protects the brain. This is why the eye, in fact, is a window into some of the problems of the brain. And most doctors don't look in the eye. Only an ophthalmologist really does that. So, and again, I'm internal medicine, so I cover the whole gamut. And I became a food as medicine researcher because I have a background doing medical therapy development. As you actually mentioned in my intro, I was looking at blood vessels as a common denominator of disease. And by looking at ways to wrangle the common denominator, You know, like, what is it that underlies, connects all these different diseases from vision loss to cognitive dysfunction, dementia, to obesity, to diabetes, to cancer, to heart disease? Well, it turns out to be blood vessels. And so what I did is I did a deep dive into this space to ask what medical treatments, biotech treatments can we actually wrangle, can maneuver, help produce, squeeze out using innovation. And that became such a successful enterprise, I then started to ask, well, you know, what happens if we start throwing food into the same system? And what I discovered is that when we started throwing food and food extracts into these drug development systems to help keep blood vessels healthy, including vision, I found that about 50% of the foods that we were actually testing were as or more potent than the drugs that we were developing. And so I'm one of the OGs when it comes to food as medicine. And I love to talk about it because while treatments. You know, you write a prescription as a doctor for people. You know, it's the right drug for the right person at the right time, but not— it's not— not everyone can get the treatments they need. Food is medicine is something that we do for ourselves. It's very empowering that we can actually, you know, use knowledge, modern knowledge, to be able to make those daily decisions that can actually help prevent disease. So you don't need the doctor to do that intervention. Or if you're actually having the doctor do that intervention, you can actually do something for yourself in addition to what the prescription actually does. So this all kind of comes all the way, comes all the way down to the fact that our vision is a window to our brain. Our vision is a sense that we prize the most. You know, if you lost your sense of smell, yeah, you know, you're probably okay with it. Like you had a cold, you start losing your vision all of a sudden, like that sets off panic. And so we can eat to preserve our vision. There are foods that are now known to be very important to contain the secret sauce to helping us preserve our vision. And, by preserving our vision, as it turns out, the research is showing it also helps to preserve our brain function, our cognition.

Why don't we start by defining the term that I used in the intro, angiogenesis? And so, what is it and what role does it play in overall brain health and vision?

Okay. Angiogenesis. Angio is blood, blood vessel. Genesis is how the body grows them. So, angiogenesis is simply How our body grows and protects blood vessels. And what's really amazing is that we've got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed into our adult bodies, under the skin, through all of our tissues, all the way down to the bone. And even inside the bone, we've got more circulation. And our blood vessels are the highways and byways that bring the oxygen that we breathe and the nutrients that we use to feed every single organ, including our eyes. And especially our brain. Okay. That's really the connection. So when we have healthy blood vessels, very good circulation, our vision is actually good. When we've got good circulation in our brain, our cognition is actually good. And guess what happens when we start to have problems with our vision? The most common causes of vision loss and cognitive loss is actually interference with the circulation of both our eyes and our brain. Not surprisingly, both are in our heads and our skull connected to each other. And so this, you know, sort of like what feeds the brain feeds the eye, what ails the brain also can ail the eye as well. So let's, you know, use that as kind of a jumping off point to thinking about what research is teaching us. The most common cause of vision loss over the age of 60 is diabetes. For people with diabetes is diabetic blindness. All right. High blood sugars kind of marinate in your bloodstream, all of the blood vessels. And when blood vessels are overly marinated with high blood sugar and all the consequences of what high blood sugar can do, including to your insulin and all the other hormones and metabolites in your body, you know what the blood vessels do? They actually start to shut down. And when the blood vessels shut down, it sparks new blood vessels to try to heal the shutdown areas. And when that happens in the eye, it causes a big problem. And here's the reason why. Your eye, my eye, eyes, I should say plural, are crystal balls. Okay, think about them. They're a little bit smaller than a golf ball. And they're crystal clear. From the front of the eye, you get light. Wake up in the morning, you see the bright sunlight. That's light entering your eye, going through clear liquid. All right, it's like a fish tank with an aquarium. The light goes right in, goes through a hole, the pupil, and then goes right to the back of the eye. And the back of the eye, which is connected to the brain, there is a carpet of nerves. The carpet of nerves is called the retina. You may have heard of the retina, but it's really literally a carpet of nerves that can— that is made of neurons. Okay, brain cells effectively interlaced, woven, stitched together with a circulation because the power it takes to process the the definition that we want for our vision requires a lot of blood flow, a lot of oxygen, and so the nerves and blood vessels are laced together. Okay, like a like a beautiful old-fashioned tablecloth, and when the light signals hit that nerve signal, and it's powered by the blood supply, it allows that nerve signal to go straight into our brain. Okay, right to the back of our brain. And basically, that's how we actually see. Now, the circulation, when it has to grow to overcome damaged blood vessels from a disease like diabetes, or there's something called macular degeneration, most common cause of blindness, vision loss in people over the age of 60 without diabetes. So it's when blood vessels are unhealthy and they do the same thing. They react to their unhealthy state by trying to grow more of themselves in order to maintain the blood flow that is actually not adequate. And when the blood vessels grow in the eye, listen, this is a crystal clear ball, when blood vessels have extra blood vessels have to grow to compensate for problems in circulation. That's where there's not a lot of room for growing new blood vessels. And so when those new blood vessels grow, they grow abnormally from diabetes or aging, they leak. Now, I told you there's fluid in the eye, it's crystal clear, but when blood vessels leak, they're leaking cloudy fluid or they're leaking blood. Now, immediately we put blood into this crystal clear aquarium. It's kind of like dumping, you know, ink. Into your fish tank. What do you think is going to happen? You're not going to be able to see through that ink, right? And all of a sudden you are losing vision. And so the most common causes of vision loss in the world are due to abnormal blood vessels, unhealthy blood vessels. And that's why some of the real breakthroughs that have come through the work I and other people have done is to develop anti-angiogenic blood vessel taming Think about the lion tamer in the circus. Down, boy. Okay. Down blood vessels, back to normal, beat them back into shape, prevent that leaking. That is actually the biggest breakthrough in the treatment of vision loss to prevent diabetic blindness and blindness from aging, from macular degeneration. Okay. Now, to get those treatments done, Jim, you got to inject in the eye. You got to put a needle in the eye, which nobody volunteers for. It works really well. So the question is, how can you avoid getting there to begin with? As you were just saying, at your age, my age, we don't want to ever get that needle in the eye. What can we actually do to help protect it? And this is where diet comes in, because our nutrition can help us keep blood vessels healthy. And they can also help to tame those blood vessels that might think about acting up. And that's really where eating to beat vision loss is a reality today.

And before we get into some of these foods, our show is very, very, very tactical. And my promise to everybody is, you know, we keep it, we keep it, you know, to a certain amount of time, but then also give people practical, pragmatic things that they can do. And it's simple and easy. I just, I want to get clear then. So, you Your eye, which has these also neurons, it's kind of like a— like part of almost a part of your brain that's outside of your skull. And as the foods could potentially protect and maybe prevent or mitigate, like even it gets— they're neuroprotective. And we've done a lot of episodes on certain foods that are good for your brain or, you know, neuro nutrition. It could also be protective to your eye. Have you— has your research shown that we could actually even Not even just protect, but even reverse? Has that been seen?

Yeah. Well, actually, by actually taming blood vessels, remarkably, for people who have lost vision, we can actually, in some cases, reverse vision loss and restore lost vision. I have a patient, and this is about 10 years ago when these breakthrough treatments, these are the injections came out. Before that, there were no treatments, okay? I had a patient who was in her 80s, Her favorite thing was playing golf. You know, that requires good vision to hit that ball and good coordination. And she was so bummed when she had macular degeneration. She couldn't see the golf ball. I got her in treatment, and in about 2 months, I got a call from her out of the blue. And she's like, guess where I'm calling you from, Dr. Lee? I'm calling you from the golf course, and I am playing my game and really scoring and doing really well at it again.

Wow.

You took me from not being able to see my ball to being able to see again. And in fact, I'm like, how did you get there? Her name was Gloria. And she said, you know, because I knew she couldn't drive because of the vision loss. She was like, guess what? I drove myself as well. I got my license back because I could see again. So this is dramatic stuff when you actually tame and keep blood vessels healthy. And by the way, the same foods and approaches that actually maintain vascular health, this is what we're talking about. Blood vessels that you wouldn't normally look at. When you look in the mirror when you've had a late night out, okay, and you see your eyes are bloodshot, it just, it's an example of how many blood vessels in your eye. The ones that count for vision, you can't see in the mirror. They're behind the eye. You know, when you go to the eye doctor and they dilate your pupils and they put your chin on and they look deep, they're really looking at part of your brain. They're looking at that tapestry, the neurons that are there interlaced with blood vessels. We can see it all. Now, what the— so the key thing is that the foods that actually can be used to protect the approach, protect that carpet of neurons interlaced with blood vessels, keeping those blood vessels healthy, taming those abnormal blood vessels, also turn out to be protective for the brain as well. And so here is sort of a twofer, right? You were talking about like the eye. And the brain being outside of the skull. Here's a better way to think about it. The brain, like your skull, is really a 2-level house. Okay. The brain is on the upstairs, on the 2nd floor, and underneath the brain, underneath the floor, which is the bottom part of the skull housing your brain, on the 1st floor are your eyes. So the part of your brain that's on the 1st floor are your eyes. And then you go walk upstairs and now the brain's right there. And so this connection Just like in your house, of the circuitry and the circulation between your eyes and your brain suddenly makes sense. And what we eat can be good for the brain, good for the nerves, and what's good for the brain, the blood vessels and the nerves in the brain, also good for blood vessels and nerves in the eyes. So this is a perfect topic for your audience. It's really, really interconnected and very practical too.

I love that. I want to remind everyone who's listening that this episode's not intended to be, to to diagnose or to treat any kind of medical condition. Obviously, talk to your qualified health practitioner. Just, I'm not only— I'm saying this to protect people who are listening and, you know, obviously for us also as well. So, let's get into it. What are some of the specific foods or nutrients that could have a positive effect on your vision?

For vision, one of the most profound clinical studies, biggest clinical studies on food and health was run about 20 years ago, started 20 years ago by the National Eye Institute. So this is sort of the, you know, from the National Institutes of Health, like a very credible group of researchers wanted to find out, could we prevent vision loss, right? Very important in an aging population, right? Because, you know, people are working at an older age now. And if you can't see, you can't work. And so your productivity and quality of life go way down. And by the way, the other reason to protect vision has to do with the fact that Our eyes allow us to be independent. As we get older, we all want to be independent. We want to do our own thing. And the problem is that if you can't see, you can't be independent. You can't even take your own medicines, right? And if you need them as an older person. So protecting vision was a big priority. So what was discovered is that there are dietary supplements that are made of the same things you can find in foods, zeaxanthin, lutein, carotenoids, okay? And I'll come to the foods in a second, that when given to people, in their 60s and 70s and 80s can dramatically reduce the risk of vision loss from macular degeneration. Amazing, right? So here's a dietary supplement that actually works. There's so much hubris about the salesmanship of dietary supplements. If you ever wanted to find one supplement to trust, it's the one that had the largest clinical trial to preserve your vision. It's called AREDS, A-R-E-D-S. I don't get paid by any companies doing any of this stuff. I'm just telling you the facts. Data is really convincing. So, Arids is recommended for people, frankly, over the age of 50 to take once a day in order to be able to protect their vision. But here's the thing. The stuff in Arids is really, you know, some vitamins. There's lutein. There's zeaxanthin. These are these chemicals that I just mentioned, zeaxanthin and lutein. These are natural chemicals that Mother Nature has laced into foods. What are some of the foods? Watercress, kale, broccoli, red bell peppers, persimmons, tomatoes. You get these same type of natural bioactives just from the foods that we can eat. So, you know, this whole idea of plant-based foods, which is a generalization, we can be more specific of carrots, red bell peppers, kale, Leafy greens like watercress, those actually contribute to blood vessel health for your eye to lower the risk that you might have blood vessels going out of control. They tame the lion. And the other thing that they actually do is they also, because you're eating them, they go into the bloodstream. They also affect your brain. They also protect and tame circulation to ensure better brain circulation as well, better blood flow to the brain. Now, I'm going to tell you, not only has that sort of been shown by the dietary supplements that translate to food, by the way, the other thing that's really cool is that there's some evidence that's starting to develop that these supplements for eye disease also protect against dementia as well. Isn't that cool? All right. Now, foods are really important because we can also protect the blood vessels directly. So there are foods that, there's a substance in strawberries called ellagic acid. That we know actually can prevent abnormal blood vessels from growing. They're blood vessel tamers. And when you actually have ellagic acid from a strawberry, ellagic acid is what makes strawberries tart. Okay. And if you get organic strawberries, they actually have higher levels. And the reason is because the strawberry plant naturally makes ellagic acid as a response to being nibbled on by bugs in the environment. So this is Mother Nature's wound healing response. So when you grow naturally, the strawberry is going to have more ellagic acid. When you eat an organic strawberry grown naturally, you're going to get more of this blood vessel protective response. Recently, it's been shown by a group at University of Cincinnati that eating just 1 cup of ripe strawberries per day for 6 weeks, this is published in a research journal, actually in middle-aged people who had mild cognitive deficits, right? Not full-blown end-stage dementia, but mild, you know, like, where are my keys? I'm sorry, what is that again? You know, the thing that you're starting to develop the symptoms. It actually improved memory, improved memory, strawberries, 1 cup against a placebo. It reduced the depression and frustration of not being able to remember things. Okay. And it actually improved the score, the cognitive executive functioning score, all because of the ellagic acid and another bioactive we think called anthocyanin as well. So again, you know, we're beginning to tease apart, like I always tell people, don't worry about the chemical names. Don't worry about remembering all the details. Like people like me who study food as medicine, and I write about this in my book, let me do the heavy lifting for you. Let me tell you that what we're beginning to understand is that some specific plant-based foods are actually able to protect our blood vessel, protect our vision, and what's good for our eyes are good for our brain. So, you get a twofer, a double-barreled approach to overall better quality of life and protected function.

Yeah, certainly what you eat matters, especially for your gray matter and your eye health and performance. We'll put a list to the studies also as well at our shownotes as we always do at jimkwik.com/notes. I do want to ask you this question from our Kwik Success community. Again, people could go to kwiksuccess.com to be able to join. So, so I believe we want to, we always want to be able to give people the option to be able to change behavior, right? Because information alone isn't going to change our life. It's the acting and the application, right? And, you know, there's always these choices we can make. And there's really only 4 choices to make change. You either stop something, you start something, You do less of something or you do more of something, right? And so, let's talk about the question that we had in our community was if you could identify 3, and I know there are much more because you talk about a lot of different foods, which is amazing to have options in the book, and I highly recommend people get their copy. Do you have 3 favorite foods that you think people should add and also 3 foods we should delete or at least reduce? And I know there are going to be more than 3, but maybe we could start with the 3 you would avoid, or at least, you know, do your best to be able to manage and do less of. And then maybe we could talk about 3 that would be specifically, you know, wonderful, not just for eyes, but just in, just in general, your favorites. Are you a high achiever constantly seeking that next level of success? Welcome to the Kwik Success Program. It's a deep dive into and support system to master your life and scale to new heights in personal and professional achievement. Included is our exclusive monthly book club where we process transformative ideas from amazing books to level up your learning and your life. We also bring the author to the club to answer your burning questions. You can also participate Participate in monthly live coaching calls with me where your questions meet my decades of expertise. Simply go to kwiksuccess.com. That's kwiksuccess.com and choose the plan that works best for you.

Sure. Listen, this is, as you pointed out, this is a big area.

Yeah.

In my 2 books, Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet, I actually talk about more than 200 foods that have all been vetted And actually float to the top as super healthy. And I also identify a number of foods to cut down or cut out. But let's start with 3, right? Because people can remember 3s. And I love kind of like your framework of the 4 choices that you can actually make. So here are 3 things that I would actually tell you as a food is medicine researcher and as a clinician who wants to put rubber on the road to help people get started to do something for themselves. 3 things to actually avoid. All right. Cut down or cut out. Let's call it that. Let's put it that way. Soda. I would say drinking soda, which is really popular. I grew up drinking soda, you know, like most other people. Something to cut down and cut out. Lots and lots of added sugar to it. Okay. And even the diet sodas, which actually have non-nutritive artificial sweeteners, they actually can also damage our circulation and damage our brain function by interfering with our gut health, which we're now beginning to realize is connected to our vision health and our brain health and our overall body health as well. So cut down, cut down or cut out sodas, whether it's diet or regular, number one. Number 2, cut down on ultra-processed foods. And when I— and I'll give you a concrete example. Anybody who follows sports, you know that the big events, whether it's the Olympics, Or whether it's the Super Bowl, you know, people get together and what do they do? They bust out the chips. Chips actually are a great example. You know, those nuclear-colored chips are a great example of something that everyone loves. Okay. But they're ultra-processed. They take whole foods like wheat and other types of whole grains and they machine them and extrude them and then paint them with colors and then put artificial preservatives and flavorings and seasonings.

Right.

All to do something that really might be addictive, you know, because it's hard to eat just one. But the bottom line is that those ultra-processed foods, of which I think snack chips are a great example, you name your favorite ones, cut down or cut out because those actually harm our overall health defenses. They take down our shields, including for our vision, including for our brain. Eat them every now and then if you want, but honestly, they're not good for you. Cut down or cut out. The third one I would actually tell you is processed meats. Processed meats, by the way, by the World Health Organization is classified as a carcinogen. All right. We do know that actually eating processed meats increases the risk of colon cancer and esophageal and stomach cancer if you eat them a lot. Now think about the grade school cafeteria or maybe the mom's lunch made with that sliced bologna or whatever you got at the deli. So common, right? Like we probably grew up with that kind of stuff surrounding us. We now know with modern research that those types of ultra-processed meats, bologna, salami, pepperoni, all the stuff that are made, I'm not talking about the old world, old school things that are air dried and minimally no preservatives put in them. Those are a different type of product. I'm talking about the stuff you can buy cheap at the deli that are found everywhere. They're sliced onto your pizza. cut down and cut out. That is definitely, if you're filled with added nitrates or added coloring, added colorings and seasonings, you get a lot of stuff on there. By the way, I had a patient once who was a USDA inspector. And he was specifically inspecting the factories that were making processed meats. And he told me, he lit up my awareness on this because he said, you know, some of these sausages that are made, he's like, you know, they They make the sausage in a casing. They drop them into a vat, a swimming pool filled with artificial chemicals and preservatives and flavorings and just leave them there for months. And then what happens is that, you know, the casing wrinkles like your fingertips in a bathtub or in a swimming pool. And it's like, and that's basically what you're actually eating. And he's like, and I said, oh, really? That's alarming. And he said, let me tell you something that's more alarming. He's like, I used to wear rubber boots to go into this factory to inspect them. And he said, I'd have to change my boots every few months because The liquid on the floor would dissolve the rubber in my boots. And I'm like, all right, that's it.

I get it.

And so those are the 3 things to cut down or cut out. Soda, regular diet or diet, ultra-processed foods like snacks and chips that are so common. And the 3rd thing is processed meats. Look, if you want to have a little bit every now and then, it's probably fine. But this is, these are the things that definitely cut down.

Now that you have room because you've eliminated or greatly reduced that, you subtracted, what are 3 foods that are your favorite that you would add?

Okay. Now, if you want sort of what I call grand slammer foods, these are foods that do not just one thing, but they do multiple things to light up your life, okay, light up your health, including vision, including brain health, including heart health, including muscle function. If you're trying to be fit and you're working out and you want better muscles, you need to regenerate your muscles, you need better blood flow. So, I like to— I'm going to give 3 grand slamming foods that I think are just Winners. Number one, tea. All right. Tea is the second most commonly drank beverage in the world. I have one as well. Okay. And we used to think that green tea was like the best. Probably is. But recent research has shown that green tea, oolong tea, black tea, even super fermented tea like pu-erh tea, which is a tea from southwest China, all light up your health. Better for gut health, better for circulation, better for brain health, lowers depression, improves your blood pressure. Amazing, but scientifically shown and clinically shown benefits. So, tea is one category to add in your life. By the way, don't add sugar to your tea. All right? Drink it as straight as you can. And if you're going to add sugar, be— if you're going to put sweeteners, you can use honey, you can use sort of more natural sweeteners. Just don't Dump, chunk lots and lots of cane sugar into it. And dairy too. I'm giving you some fine points here, but they're practical. I think people like practical things.

Absolutely.

The British tea is actually to use milk in your tea, the afternoon tea, have a little milk or cream to your tea. A lot of people like that. Look, the polyphenols in the tea, the catechins that are good for us, that's what lights up your life. They get caught in the little soap bubbles that dairy, cow dairy actually forms in tea. These are invisible soap bubbles. You can't see them, but chemically they form soap bubbles. When you drink it, actually the good stuff, the catechins, actually are still stuck in the bubble and they just go right through your stomach. And so you only absorb maybe 30% of the good stuff. Rest of it just kind of tumbles out of you. All right. And so if you want to get the most, I always talk about getting the most out of whatever effort you're doing. If you hold back on the dairy, Nut milk is okay. It's the cow milk that actually forms those bubbles. So almond milk, soy milk, although those are fine if you want to cut it. That's a tea, something to include. Second, berries. I'm using berries as a category, so you get to choose your own. All right. Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, lingonberries. You pick your huckleberries. Pick your own wherever you are. They are tiny but powerful because the bright colors, The blues, the reds, the oranges are all made with, are all caused by, and the amazing flavors that pop out of a ripe berry is actually made with, is caused by these bioactives, but polyphenols, the ellagic acid, the anthocyanins that really, really light up your health in all kinds of different ways. And by the way, for berries, here's something practical. Look, I'm a big believer in going to the farmer's market and buying the seasonal fresh berries. But here's the thing. You can actually get frozen berries, which are less expensive, and you can buy them in bulk and store them in your freezer, easier to deal with. Okay. And they have the same bioactive value. They're picked from the field, flash frozen, and you're good. So second, berries, choose your own. They're all good, fresh or frozen. I'd still recommend that you go for those now that you have some room because you removed other things. Third thing that I would actually tell you is brassica. Which is a category of vegetable. All right. If you're in Asia, that'd be bok choy, gai lan. These are all the kinds of very common. If you go to your local Asian grocery store, almost all the fresh greens in the produce section are going to be brassica. All right. But if you're on the other side, the Mediterranean, which you also know is a super healthy way of eating, you're talking about your broccoli. You're talking about your black kale, the Tuscan kale, the cavolo nero. You're talking about your cauliflower. All kinds of different types of greens of different sorts. Great source of dietary fire, great source of bioactives that actually light up your brain health and light up your blood vessel, your vascular health, and light up your immune health while lowering inflammation. And you get to choose from the repertoire of Mediterranean recipes going back generations or the repertoire of Asian recipes to be able to find ways to take the salad bar, which I find one of the most boring things that you can actually encounter, and to turn it into something that you would actually look forward to eating to, look forward to eating, because it really, really tastes great. So the 3 things I would say, tea, berries, and this whole brassica side that you'd find in the produce section of either the Mediterranean market or grocery store or the Asian market. And now there's no excuse Not to be able to find something green that you'd like to eat.

That's absolutely fantastic. I know our listeners really appreciate that, and I want to remind our listeners that every day you have a, you have a chance because you can make new choices. Dr. Li has given you like 3 things that you could reduce or eliminate, cut down or cut out, and then also 3 delicious options because this can be delicious and nutritious, right? To be able to add for your, for your family, for your team. People could implement this. We have a lot of people listen to this at corporations that can help decide the food track of what they're feeding their employees also as well. And I just want to say that we've just covered a small fraction of what's in your book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, which is about burning fat, healing your metabolism, and living longer. Dr. Li, where can people get more information about you, your Your work, your books, where do you recommend?

First of all, my books, my 2 books, Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet, they can be found anywhere books are sold. Just go online, do an online order. There's nothing better to me than to hear about a book and then have it tomorrow at my doorstep. So you can do that. You can follow me on social. My handle is @DrWilliamLi. Li is how you spell my last name. @DrWilliamLi. I'm on all the platforms. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, you name it. And then, you know, come to my website. It's drdrwilliamlee.com. I put out a free newsletter. Sign up for it because what my mission is, is to really absorb all this explosion of information. And I sort of put it through the truth filter, the data filter. I filter out the BS, the stuff that kind of like is rumor, hearsay, urban legend. And I try to take the good stuff, the gold. And then I want to— my mission is to get it out to as many people as possible. And because I like to cook, I like to do things in ways that people can actually put into their kitchen and do something with the same way that I would every day, every day.

I love that you're a foodie also as well. So I challenge everybody right now to take a screenshot wherever you're consuming this episode and on social media, post it, tag Dr. Li, tag myself so we get to see it. And in that post, I'd love for you to share what you learned. A couple of key takeaways. So that way your followers, your fans, your family, your friends get to benefit because you learn something for 2 reasons. You know, one, how you could be rewarded for it, but also you learn it on how you can help other people. And when you teach it and you share it, you kind of get to learn it twice. So I challenge everyone to be able to do that. As always, we'll put all the highlights and the resources here, including links to Dr. Lee's website, his socials, and some of the studies at jimkwik.com/podcast. This episode, if you're listening on audio, is actually much longer. We put the extended version. We limit all the audio to 20 minutes or less, but on YouTube, make sure you subscribe and you could get so many more gems and treasures there. Join our 1.4 million subscribers. We post daily there and we'll put the extended version of this episode if you're listening to this on audio on YouTube. And please always share. share and leave a review. It's the greatest compliment you could give. So, Dr. Wim Lee, thank you so much for being on our podcast. And we really appreciate your time and your talent.

Thanks, Jim. It's a real pleasure to speak with you.

Awesome. All right, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Share this episode. Make sure you subscribe because if you miss something, you will absolutely miss a lot. We have some big things coming. And until our next episode, remember to be limitless.