[Bonus Episode] Eat to Beat Disease with Dr. William Li

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Hey, it's JJ and welcome to Ask the Health Expert. But this isn't just any old Ask the Health Expert session. This is your bonus session. Yes, it's the weekend. And because it's the weekend, we are gonna take some time with an amazing expert. So be on the lookout for these.

Saturday Ask the Health Expert bonus sessions.

Where we're going to go deep into an amazing subject with an incredible expert to give you actionable items that you can put into your life. Hey, it's JJ and welcome to the show. Now, today's show, we are going deep into food, but we're going to look at food in such a different way. So if you've been sitting here going, I don't know what I should be eating. Kale. No kale. And eat, not eat fast. You know, paleo, vegan. We have the guest of all times to talk about food. If you've been feeling at all confused, if you want to know what you need to do, if you want to know which food you want to be looking at, I've got the guy, I got the man. Here it is, Dr. William Lee. He's a world renowned physician, scientist, speaker.

And author of Eat Beat Disease.

He showcased this on the Dr. Oz Show. Hopefully you caught it there. I'll see if I can link to that one. But it's the book on the new science of how your body can heal itself. And he found this all because he was working in the biotech world and developing new products. I mean, this is finally, finally the guy who is now showing that all the things we've been looking at and dabbling with and finding that, wow, we do better when we eat blueberries or we do better when we put some, some citrus on things. He's going to tell you why because he has a totally new way of looking at food in terms of five defense systems, but also the research to back up everything and, you know, all the traditional foods we've been eating that we knew we were eating, knew they were making us healthier, but we didn't know why.

You're about to hear why.

So he's best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. You're going to hear what that is all about. He's got groundbreaking work that's impacted more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, heart disease and obesity. And again, that TED Talk he got asked to do, can we Eat to Starve cancer. He's going to tell you the story of how he discovered this has garnered more than 11 million views. He's appeared on Dr. Oz, Martha Stewart Live, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Voice of America.

And I think this is a first.

Here for someone on my show. He's presented at Vatican's Unite to Cure conference. He's the author of over 100 scientific publications in leading journals such as Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, and more. And you served on faculties of Harvard, Tufts and Dartmouth Medical School. And again, what is so cool here is I said all of the nutrition experts, all the nutritionists, all the dietitians are standing up and down cheering for you because you are doing the research. We've all been wanting to say, see, here's why you should be eating tomato seed. Here's what resveratrol is doing. And then linked it up into a system. So this is super cool. Now I want to do a shout out before we jump in today to my podcast listener, KC from San Francisco who says extraordinarily helpful. She gave me a five star review and Apple Podcast said, I've been listening to JJ Virgin's podcast for several years and I've learned so much. She's a launching pad to deeper dives into the resources she brings to us via her podcast and would love to learn how to find a good functional doctor network in San Francisco. Many thanks, JJ. Hey, if you want to find a good functional medicine doctor, we will put that in the show notes today. I'm going to put them at jjvirgin.com forward/eat to beat and that's spelled E A T T O B A T. We'll do that and we will put the link to where you can find find Functional medicine Doctors. There's a bunch of phenomenal ones in the San Francisco Bay area. So happy to help you there. And another great resource for that, the Institute for Functional Medicine. So we'll put all of that in the show notes. A lot of cool stuff in the show notes today. You're going to want to grab it. We'll also link to Dr. William Lee's will as he told me to call him, his book Eat to Be Disease and his TED Talk and his free guide. He's going to give you a guide, his Eat to Beat Disease Free guide as well. So lots of cool stuff as always in the show notes. Now before we deep dive into food and how to really know what you should be eating, I want to share this awesomeness with you.

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Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

Dr. William Lee, welcome to the show. I'm super excited to have you here.

Thank you JJ It's a pleasure and I'm delighted to speak with You?

Yes. Well, I have been waiting patiently for you, my new friend, to have you on the show. I've heard so much about you and your work. It's incredible. Here you are, a doctor, a scientist, a speaker, you've done loads of media. You're just a disruptive innovator, which I always love that. And how did you especially coming into this and kind of really getting into the food part of all of this, how did this all happen?

Right, well, jj, I'm a physician, an MD and I'm also a scientist. And you know what I tell people is that for the last 20 years, I've been really doing what I was trained to do, which is diagnose diseases, which is the horse out of the barn and then writing prescriptions to chase the horses down and see if we can actually corral them and get them under control. And about 10 years ago, I actually realized that there was a much bigger opportunity that was much more important to try to get at, which is prevention. And when you're talking about preventing diseases in the first place, you can't talk about medicines or biotechnology. Now I, you know, I've spent 30 years in the biotech world and I've been involved with helping to develop 32 FDA approved treatments. So I really know what that's all about. But I realized that, you know, if you're talking about health, you have to talk about food. If you talk about food, we really need to think about how food interacts with your health. And that's where my research came back in, which is how do we define health itself? And, you know, it kind of took me back to my beginning to really ask the question, what is health and what do we know about it and what can we know about it as a way of under hacking into how foods impact our body?

So I just think this is so profound that I have to sit with it for a minute because the fact that you developed all of these therapies, you're working in biotech for like the biggest diseases we have out here, like cancer. And you come back and go, let's start to look at prevention. And it starts with food is so huge. And it seems obvious, but it still is like, you know, a big aha for so many people out here. Now your whole background when you got into this is, and I know you've got, you've led the Angio Genesis Foundation. First off for everybody, define what that is and why it matters so that we kind of build on this background.

Yeah. So angiogenesis is just a fancy Word that describes how our bodies grow blood vessels. And blood vessels are really kind of an unsung hero of the body. Most of us don't think of our blood vessels, but what if I told you that we each have 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies? You know, that's like a gigantic ball of yarn. And in fact, it's so huge that if you were to pull out all the blood vessels in our bodies and line them up end to end, you'd form a line that would go around the earth twice. These vessels actually bring oxygen and nutrients, so whatever we eat gets into these vessels, and they feed every single cell in our body. So it's really our lifeline, and it is incredibly powerful as a defense system of our body. Meaning if you don't have enough blood vessels, your organs die. And if you have too many blood vessels, you can have bleeding. The blood vessels can start feeding disease tissue. And so I got started looking at really, the powerful nature of blood vessels to maintain our health, and how can you actually tackle them for diseases? And the diseases that I looked at were, for example, cancer. Every cancer depends on blood vessels in order to grow. Without blood vessels, cancers can't get bigger than the head of the tip of a ballpoint pen. But once blood vessels touch those cancers, they can grow as large as 16,000 times in two weeks.

Wow.

So, you know, and then on the other hand, if you don't have enough blood vessels to feed your heart, you wind up having heart attacks and strokes. So. And you can't recover from them. So what I have always been interested in is balancing the body so that we have just the right amount of nutrition through our blood vessels. And that's, you know, really set the stage for me to think about balancing other health system health defense systems, really, that food can actually influence as well.

Yeah. And I know we're going to talk about those defense systems, but I want to bring up your TED talk. 11 million views and counting this idea. Because as you're listening to that, I'm like, all right, so how do we get the blood vessels to be going to the right places and not going to the other places, which would seem like that's some of what you talked about with your can we eat the starved cancer talk. Let's go into that and what you discovered and talked about in your TED talk. And we will link in the show notes for everybody. We're going to have have the show notes@jjvirgin.com eat2beat. We'll link to the Ted Talk there as well.

Great. Well, listen, when I was asked to give a ted talk on my work, I think people were really amazed that a new approach to cancer could be starving the cancer by cutting off the blood supply. And that's really been the first chapter of my career, was figuring out, are there ways of developing really smart medicines that could target, like a homing missile, those bad blood vessels that are feeding cancer and knock them out. So cancers become starved most of the time. By the time we actually find a cancer, it's already bigger than the head of a ballpoint pen. It's packed with blood vessels in order to get that large. And here's a couple of facts. The smallest tumor that you can feel with your fingers, so let's call it a, a self breast exam, right in the shower, we ask women to just be vigilant about, is about a centimeter in diameter. A tumor that size already has 1 billion cancer cells. And in order to support the nutritional requirements of a billion cancer cells, somewhere up to 100 million blood vessels will have already been feeding that cancer. So you can kind of see even the smallest thing we can find is already fed. So what I set out to do at the very beginning is to say we have to find a really smart approach to snip those blood vessels and cut off the lifelines of those cancers. This was called antiangiogenesis. And when I got started with this in 1994, this idea was essentially fantasy. You know, people were saying, it's impossible, it's not going to happen. And lo and behold, by 2004, we had the first FDA approved drug. And, you know, it improves survival in colon cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, kidney cancer. It's one of these powerful new pillars of cancer therapy. And for me, that wasn't enough because I started to realize in developing, helping to develop these medicines, that the tools that we were being used, that we used to develop these medicines were so powerful that we could do more than study drugs. And here's what I always tell my friends. How did you get into food? If you went to the top cancer researchers at the national cancer institute, and you open up the Internet and ordered some chemotherapy powder to be fedexed the next day, they could the next day inject their animal systems, or tumor cancer systems, and within a few days, you'd find out how well the chemotherapy worked. If you actually picked up the phone and called in a pizza, that'd be delivered in 15 minutes. And no cancer researcher knows what to do with food. So I basically Then set out to figure out, how do we break down food into a way that you can study it using the same serious scientific systems that we use for drug development? In other words, if you really wanted to get at food as medicine, well, let's just study using the tools in which we develop medicine. And that's what I talked about in my TED Talk. And it caused a lot of jaws to drop because I showed a slide in which we first measured the impact of drugs, prescription drugs, against bad blood vessels. And, you know, remarkably, a lot of medicines actually were active that we were surprised on, and they worked against these tumor blood vessels. But when you actually then tested them with the same system with food, you could see that the activity of the food, the power of the food, stood head to head, side by side, and in some cases, beat the power of the drug. And so that's really what I was talking about in my TED Talk. Can we eat to starve cancer? Is that we can actually eat to feed ourselves with foods that can actually cut off the blood supply of cancers because of the natural chemicals that mother Nature laced into our food.

Well, and the bigger thing is then those foods not only do that, but they also have other benefits to the body. I doubt these chemo drugs are having, like, side benefits to other things.

Right, exactly. Well, you know, that's the great irony, right? So we invest so much in medical research and actually in the healthcare system to deliver what we believe to be the smartest treatments that are on the guidelines. And, you know, you get some benefits, obviously, but you get a lot of side effects. And food offers something completely different because you can get benefits and collateral benefits at the same time.

Well, what were some of the foods that you talked about in your TED Talk that you saw with certain cancers? Can you name a couple of them?

Oh, sure. You know, like, we looked at the red grapes because their skin is very rich with resveratrol abioactive. We looked at olive oil, which has a natural chemical called hydroxytyrosol. Really powerful. We looked at tomatoes, because there is lycopene in tomatoes. And we looked at a number of other things, like marine omega 3 fatty acids as well. We looked at something called limonene, which come from citrus fruits, all very, very potent. We also looked at allicin, which comes out of garlic. So, you know, it's interesting because most medicines, in fact, the oldest medicines that we use originally came from mother Nature. We discovered drugs originally out of plants and trees.

What's awesome here, too, is you didn't name one Thing that someone go, oh, no, I have to eat that.

Right?

So you just talked about having some fresh tomatoes with some olive oil and then maybe a little bit of wild salmon and washed down with a glass red wine, and away we go.

Well, I mean, so that's really, you know, took me from where I was in my TED talk because, you know, a lot of people said, well, why don't you just write a book out of your TED Talk? And what I said in 2010, which is when I gave the TED Talk, you know, there is. We're really at the beginning of a new frontier. I really felt like there was much more science to be developed. And actually, frankly, I think in the ensuing, you know, period of time, society itself has opened up to really begin to recognize, including, thankfully, the healthcare community. Starting to realize we can't just keep on doing the same old, same old in medicine. It's unsustainable. So let's take a look at alternative approaches that are actually mainstream around the.

World, and that cancer is just one part of it. That's what I'm getting now, looking at what you've been working on is you started there, you found what food could do for cancer and then went, all right, let's take it further. Is that. And this moved into this book. So you talk about five key defense systems and the specific foods that can either activate or deactivate these. What are the defense systems?

Right. So, you know, when you ask somebody typically, what is health? The answer that you expect is really, well, health is the absence of disease. If I'm not sick, I'm healthy, right? You go to the doctor, you know, they listen to your heart and lungs or whatever, and then pat you in the back and say, hey, you're good. I'll see you next year. Well, that makes health seem easy, and it seems like it's invisible. But in fact, health is not simply the absence of disease. What I discovered is that health is in fact, the result of our body's hardwired defense systems that are hard at work to protect our health from the day we're born until our very last breath. These health defense systems are raring to go. They're firing in all cylinders. They are protecting our bodies in all kinds of different ways so that we don't get sick more often than we do. And because health is defined in that way, we can start to break things down. Because, listen, if health were just the absence of something, you can't operate operationally, do anything about that. You can't do something about nothing. And so what I wanted to do is to figure out, well, how do we operationally define health? So five health defense systems that are coming from the cutting edge of biomedical research. And that's the key thing, like in my book it to be disease. I'm really bringing the readers to the real frontiers of medical research. And a lot of the information I write about health defenses in fact come from biotechnology, because all that investment to treat disease is as a benefit, yielding information of how do we prevent from getting disease in the first place. So first defense system, angiogenesis. Our circulation, those 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels. We don't want too many, we don't want too few. We want just the right amount. And we do know that there are FDA approved drugs that can both grow blood vessels and stop bad blood vessels. Now, we also know that foods can do the same thing. Second defense system is our regenerative system. So what do I mean by that? Well, jj, when we were kids, I'm sure your teachers, like mine, taught us that starfish and salamanders can regenerate, but people can't. Right? That's kind of like what we always learn. But actually, the science tells us something different. Now we know that humans do regenerate from the inside out through our stem cells that live in our bone marrow, and they continuously replenish parts of our body. And in fact, you know, one of the reasons that we age and sometimes some people more quickly than others, is that our stem cells are actually worn down or beaten down or they're stunned by things that we do in our lifestyle, whether it's, you know, breathing secondhand smoke or, you know, eating fatty foods or eating too much salt or too much sugar. And so what's interesting is that I write about is that there is a whole new realization, and this is kind of jaw dropping, that foods can stimulate and activate our stem cells to help us regenerate. Third defense system, microbiome. Everybody's heard about this. It's, you know, the 39 trillion healthy bacteria that live inside our bodies, mostly our gut. And those bacteria, you know, in fact, are not only our friends, they're part of our body's ecosystem. And when you hear people saying, well, I've got irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease, or, you know, frankly, even people are talking about autism, Alzheimer's, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus. These now seem to track back to problems, disturbances, imbalances of the microbiome. And so what's interesting is looking at foods that can actually Help to rebalance our microbiome so that our immune system and our healing systems and even our brain, our psychological systems, because bacteria actually cause our brains to release the social hormone oxytocin. Fourth defense systems are DNA protection. So everybody thinks about DNA as our genetic code, but it turns out that our DNA is hardwired to protect us against the environment. Incoming damage, like ultraviolet light, secondhand smoke. You know, if you fill up your car at a gas station, you stand upwind or downwind at the pump, because if you stand downwind and you can smell those fumes, you're causing DNA damage inside your lungs. Fortunately, our DNA system can repair that, and foods can activate that repair and neutralization system. Then finally, our immune system is our fifth defense system. Sort of the fifth leg of this super strong stool called our health. And every grandmother's told their kid that, you know, your immune system prevents you from getting sick. But now we know that the immune system is more powerful than we ever imagined because it can even protect us against cancer. And foods can activate that too. Welcome to Walgreens. What can I help you with today?

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We're with you all the way, Walgreens. Now, when you look at foods, because I'd love to hear some of your, your big powerhouse foods. I'm sure you mentioned a couple earlier with the cancer ones, but do you also look at when you're eating?

Right. Well, so this whole idea of the temporal nature of food is something that's really starting to be researched more carefully. For example, we know that the microbiome actually behaves differently at night than it is during the day. You know, it's kind of like animals in a zoo. They do different things at night, or in the jungle, they do different things at night, during the day, when we eat, which then feeds our microbiome. It depends on what they're up to and what times we are. And by the way, if we're not getting really great sleep, think about how many times, you know, you've. I mean, I'll confess because I'm a doctor, I've had to pull lots of all nighters. You know, being on call during training, man, your gut feels like crap afterwards. Right. So timing, sleep, exercise, all these things and the timing when you eat actually makes a gigantic difference into how your body metabolizes and how, you know, how what food does good for you. And probably by eating at the wrong times, you wind up doing, you unwind some of the benefits of the food.

Yeah, I think that is so key important is, you know, obviously we have to focus on what we're eating, but we also need to look at, there's been so much focus on how much and I look at and go improve quality and then look at when. So I'm glad that when is is also factoring in here. And I think that's really fascinating that the microbiome behave differently at night. I've never heard that. That's incredible. So what are some of your basics on meal timing and then what are some of your, like your big powerhouse foods that you found?

Right. Well, you know, I think that everyone's a little bit different in terms of their timing and everyone's life's different as well. One of the things that really is part of my philosophy of health and food is you have to adapt to the reality of your life. I mean, life's not perfect. People are busy, people are stressed, people are zipping around and we can have the best of intentions, but oftentimes the reality of our lives trip us up and we're not able to do everything we can do. What I tend to do is to say, you know, no matter what, follow your body's signals. And so it's better to eat when you're hungry than when you're not hungry. When you're hungry and eating, it's better not to eat too much, but it's better to, you know, need to eat more slowly. I don't think that it's necessary to eat three, you know, square meals a day. And while there is data to show that, you know, eating breakfast is actually associated with people who live longer, it turns out that, you know, really people who are vigilant about their diet and how and when they eat actually is tied to people being the same people being vigilant about other aspects of their life that are also health promoting. So, you know, I mean, I think eating regular smallish meals is really good. I think that eating really late in the evening is not good. And I think that if you're not hungry, there's no reason to force yourself to eat. You know, I mean, how many times have you gone through the day and you know, they're just like not into having lunch or a big lunch. You can snack on something healthy a little bit later and you don't have to force yourself to eat at any particular time of the day. So I think this whole, the temporal nature of food is something that, you know, I'm very interested in as it relates to the health defense systems. In fact, you're pointing out something that I'm actually working on next, which is how do all these defenses interact during the day or night? Blood vessels grow differently during the day and the night Stem cells, by the way, also behave differently. For example, stem cells in our brain actually cycle through our brain in the middle of the night in different ways to help us grow memory and do other different types of things. So that's why if you pull all nighters, you have a hard time remembering things. Your stem cells building those mem. You don't get you the same way. And so there's so many complexities related to the chronicity of eating and the temporal nature of eating. What I think my general rule of thumb is eat when you feel like it, don't eat too much and snack. It's better to snack if you're not hungry rather than gorge on anything. As it relates to sort of healthy foods and some of the most powerful foods, you know, I, what I like to do is plant. Point out that when you're looking at the foods and health, look at how they look at the healthbody's health defense system. So ask yourself what foods are really powerful for our blood vessels that can help us grow blood vessels. So for example, it turns out that as I mentioned, tomatoes are actually really powerful because among many different things that they have in them, they have lycopene, which is a natural chemical that is anti androgenic, cuts up the blood supply to tumors. Well, how do we know that? Well, we know that because it's been studied in the laboratory. So that's cool. Laboratory scientists know about it. But as I write about in my book, there's a study of 46,000 people, men who were followed over 20 years. And it was found that those men who ate two to three cups of cooked tomatoes, or cooked tomatoes two to three times a week, about a half a cup each time, so it's not very much. Tomato sauce actually had a 30% reduction in the risk of developing prostate cancer. Now why would that be? Well, when they actually did the biopsy of people who wound up developing prostate cancer, they found that those who ate even more tomato sauce had less aggressive and fewer blood vessels. And now it makes starts to make sense. You know, you have a lycopene and a tomato that cuts off the blood supply of tumors, prevents the tumors from growing. And we even have a dose that's associated with that. And it turns out from that study that it's a half cup, two to three times a day. We even have a preparation method which is that you want to simmer the tomatoes in order to be able to check change that lycopene, that natural chemical from the form that comes in mother nature. You pick a tomato off a vine and eat it like an apple, most of that lycopene will pass right through your body. But if you actually heat it gently and simmer it, kind of like the old Italian grandmas did, to create a sauce, you gently convert the chemical nature of that lycopene into a form your body loves to absorb.

So it seems like what I'm hearing here is so many of the things that we sort of intuitively knew or found over years but didn't know why you are now finding, like, the reasons why are starting to show up.

Exactly. And that's so important because, you know, the what is something that winds up sometimes becoming confusing. Right. I mean, how many I get as confused as anybody else. Like one day some super food comes out or super diet, and then the next week, you know, I get whiplash because now the news reports say it's terrible for you. I think we ground ourselves in science and evidence. And this is where, you know, I was telling you I started to use the same serious scientific methods that, you know, are using drug development, frankly, to begin study food, studying foods. And that's how you get a real anchor point. Like, you know, science doesn't lie. It can change. Our knowledge changes. But the, but the data is the data, and I think that's, you know, a great example, is really making sense of some of the long known wisdom that we've had in different cultures.

Right. That's what I'm really, you know, things that we've done for hundreds, if not thousands of years, it's like, okay, here's why. And you're making everyone in the nutrition field who have been doing this excited because now we have the research to back it up. Because that's always been one of the biggest challenges with nutrition and supplements for that matter, is, you know, who's got the money to put into it to really study these things, to show them for what they can do. As you were talking about tomatoes, I thought, my gosh, if that was A drug every single person would be. And it was cost the amount of money it costs, and it was delicious. It would be on every prescription pad.

Well, let's dive a little bit deeper. So, you know, I'm sure, jj, you go to the market like I do in the summer, how many different varieties of tomatoes are out there? Right? You get baskets and bushels and all these different choices of tomatoes. So one of the things that we're doing now is asking what type of tomato is most powerful for your health? Which ones have the most lycopene, for example? So I can tell you, you know, there's a type of Italian tomato called a San Marzano tomato. Kind of thick skin, great for sauce, comes originally from the mountains of the volcanic mountains of Vesuvius near Italy. But you can. Anybody can get them in the form of a tomato paste or even a canned tomatoes, peel tomatoes, so they're easy to get. Almost anybody can find them almost anywhere. Cherry tomatoes, remarkably, you know, kind of tomatoes seem to have the same amount of lycopene. So when you get a smaller surface area, like a tiny little, you know, cherry tomato that'll just like, pop and explode with flavor in your mouth, a lot of bang for your buck in terms of the lycopene. And then, you know, I've been noticing over the last couple of years, you start seeing tomatoes that are kind of like black tomatoes almost. They're kind of brown, black, reddish tomatoes. Those are really packed with lycopene as well. And so, you know, what's interesting is that when I go out to the store myself with this knowledge, I naturally start looking for, well, what. What's the variety of tomato? And. And can I find a San Marzano? Or maybe I should try cherry tomatoes? Or, hey, look, those black tomatoes, I know they're going to be good for me. I'm just going to get those instead.

I just wish I like cherry tomatoes cooked. That's the only bummer. I was listening to that going, oh, yes, I love little cherry tomatoes in a salad, but you really, really want to cook them. So there you go. Bummer. But maybe we can put them in sauce.

We'll try. Well, besides nutritionists, I'll tell you that the interesting thing is that I'm actually finding a lot of chefs are coming back to me that read my book, and they're super excited because when they see something like a cherry tomato, I mean, look, maybe you and I would have trouble finding a way of making cherry tomatoes the way that you like them. But I bet a Chef could figure out, figure it out. And so one of the, one of my missions, you know, I wrote this book not to sell a supplement or anything. I did this as a man on a mission because I spent my whole career really leading the nonprofit world, trying to figure out what can we do to generate solutions for people that are real, like practical that we can get today, not tomorrow. The promise of research is always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. And I wanted to do things that we can actually benefit from today. Food has immediacy, and when you get the nutrition community, when you get the chef community, and hopefully we'll eventually get the medical community to come on board as well. I think, you know, we're looking at a, like a kind of a brave new world. Hopefully a better one and a tastier one.

Well, and what's nice about it is it's also a world that's available to everybody because this is one where you can go down to the farmer's market and you can buy a cherry tomato. Someone's not going to be able to go do stem cell therapies, but they can do stem cell therapies by deploying the food tactics in your book. Right. So it really makes this democratizes health as it should be. It makes it easier for everybody to do this. Because I look at this and I go, if we just increase the quality of our food, ate whole unprocessed food and started to exercise, had real meaningful relationships, got good sleep, had some kind of mindful practice, most of what we're dealing with would go away. You know, so you kind of took it back to where we all have been sitting here going, well, if we just ate better food. Now you're actually giving the rational, scientific research based foundation for it. And it's like, we have been waiting for you.

Well, you know, listen, this is important work because I'm trying to get other people to be involved in it. I'm also trying to teach people that in the dialogue about food and health, there's been so much attention on what we should remove from our diet. Right. So that's why it becomes a bummer for most people to think about healthy food is like, oh, God, I got to eat, you know, celery sticks or whatever, or only kale. What I'm trying to show using scientific evidence is that we can lean into our diet and the science has advanced now so we can for the first time think about what to add to our diet and focus on that more decisions mean there's less room for making bad decisions. And if we're mostly activating our health defenses. You know what, our bodies are probably strong enough to take a couple of hits from, you know, some indiscretions that we're all going to be doing every now and then.

Right. So you don't have to get an A. And I had a great mentor early on who said ADD before you take away. That was the first thing is if, if you just start by starting to add, you read this book and I know we've got a great Eat to Beat disease guide. You read this book, we'll put it all in the show notes. You start adding in quality foods, it starts to push out that other stuff. And then, you know, every once in a while if you have a little birthday cake and you can have a gluten free one, you're fine. That's not the problem. People always seem to worry about their, their birthday will. And I'm like, well that's once a year. I'm pretty sure that's not what's creating the issue here.

You know, that's total, that's totally the fact. And you know, honestly, you know, I was taking care of people in the Veterans Administration Hospital once, you know, and I felt a duty to really try to give back to the people that put their life on the line for, for us, you know, protecting our country. And you know, these guys had all kinds of bad habits, you know, as they got older and you know, a lot of doctors would scold them, but I would never do that. I would always tell them my philosophy is life is for the living. You gotta enjoy your life. What we need to do is to really figure out what are the good things we should add to our, our lives first. Do that exactly as your mentor said and then think about then things that we might be able to adjust to be able to have mostly good decisions made. And that's just a reasonable way to.

Navigate and very doable. And that's what's most important. So again I want to remind everyone, here's where I'm going to put this JJvirgin.com, eat2beat and you are going to get Dr. William Lee's eat to Beat disease guide. I'll also have a link straight to your book and to your TED Talk. The book is Eat to beat disease. New science of how your body can heal itself. Like I have been hearing such amazing things throughout our health community on you. I'm super excited to share this with everybody. I'm thinking a bunch of the health coach and chef schools that need to have this as well. Thank you so much. I mean, this is such important work and I, we all appreciate you taking it on.

Well, it's a real pleasure to share it. I think the most important thing is I want everybody to be as excited as I am that we can actually start to lean into the healthy food that we all like. And if you start with things that you already prefer and that you love, then you're already ahead of the game. It's not actually hard to eat really well.

Yeah, that's so important because I think people look at, I have to get healthier, so I have to eat kale and then they're out, you know, so none of the foods you mentioned here would be anything. Someone go, oh, darn. So it's totally doable. And I thank you so much. Now, after the break, I'm going to share some top takeaways from this. I'm going to take, take what Will said, give you some actionable things to do right away. So be sure to hang in and I'll be right back. All right. Welcome back. You know, I kind of put Will on the spot there when I asked him because we were talking all about which foods and then I asked the when question. And I've been very personally obsessed with food timing. Like when should you eat? Fasting, intermittent fasting or time restricted eating, late night eating, whether you should eat breakfast. So I like was like, heck, I got an expert here. Got to find out what he thought about this. So I want to give you a couple key takeaways. Number one is to of course go to jjvirgin.com forward/eat2beat and get the eat to beat disease guide that he gave you and grab the book too. My goodness. Let's like focus on the foods that make a difference. And focusing again, I keep stressing, improve your food quality. I loved what my early nutrition mentor Robert Cran told me was like just number one, apple add before you take away. First step, improve the quality of your food. Start to eat healthier foods. It's going to crowd the other stuff out. So I loved what what Will had to say about when to eat. And there's a couple key takeaways that I want to stress here. This whole idea that we needed breakfast, a snack, lunch, a snack, and dinner. These three squares, let's just blow that up. I love to first eat when you're hungry. I find for me that I'm hungry about an hour to sometimes even three hours before I wake up. After I wake up in the morning, that would be A real feat before I wake up, after I wake up. So eat when you get hungry in the morning. And generally I like to see that within an hour, two or three of waking up, some people can go a little longer and then I'm not a big fan of snacking. If you've been around my community, you know that when you snack you raise blood sugar. If you raise blood sugar, raise insulin. I like to give you some good time in between meals. So you're eating every four to six hours and stop eating three to four hours before bed. And I find that, and I think what we're going to find when you start to talk about the fact your microbiome behave differently at night, that you've got stem cell regeneration in the middle of the night and the stuff going on, I'm like wow. So a lot of the stuff that we see, see if you are overeating at night, it creates a lot of issues. Now we're going to find out why. So I really still follow that rule of stop eating three to four hours before bed. Get yourself a 12 hour overnight fast on basically every night. You know, there might be a couple changes here and there, but that should just be your regular. And then a couple times a week, ideally get into time restricted eating where you're eating during an eight hour window. The more you can do that the better. And then we can start to look at adding in maybe some 20 to 24 hour overnight fasts or multi day fasts, especially when working with a physician because those can really help with one of the key systems, defense systems, he talked about the regenerative system. And so those are the big keys. And then I loved what he said, if you're not hungry, don't eat. The old days of dieting that clearly didn't work. You know, they failed were you needed to eat whether you were hungry or not eat every two to three hours. And we all know that that is not the case at all. So that's the big takeaway. I'm going to pull out from there. I want you to grab the foods by grabbing the guide in the books. And one more thing to do before you leave, if you've not left a review yet, boy, I'd love to do a shout out for you. And while you're there, make sure you subscribe and I'd love you to share it with someone who's health you care about or maybe a couple. All right, see you next time. Bye.