Eat to Beat Your Diet with Dr. William Li

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Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD, dropout.

Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author.

Yes, I'm a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the Ask the Health Expert podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to betterhelp so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. So I get this book in the mail from my buddy, Dr. Will Lee. Eat to beat your diet. Burn fat, heal your metabolism, and live longer. Oh my gosh. So I immediately pinged him and said, you must come back on the podcast. So he came on before and I'll link to it in the show notes and with his Eat to be disease New York Times bestseller, the science of how the new science of how your body can heal itself. And he said, you know, I was really not wanting to do anything around diet, but so many people reached out to me after the fact, saying as I was eating the way that you talked about need to beat disease, I was losing weight. So he started digging into the research and it's really interesting, you know, when you look at this, because he came from a background. Let me tell you a little bit about it. The background he came from gives him such a different way of looking at food.

Food.

So he has developed more than 30 medical treatments and that impact over 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. He has a TED talk, can we eat to starve Cancer? That has had over 11 million views. He's the president medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. And so he just, he approached looking at food the way he created drugs. Like, what is the mechanism of action? How can this work? So imagine looking at food going, all right, how can this food help heal your metabolism? How can this food help you burn fat? And by the way, in this interview, yes, you are going to hear about foods that will help you burn fat and how it happens, how it works. Super exciting. So this is the book that I have been waiting for. I'm excited to share it with you. We go through a lot of really interesting stuff in this interview on which foods you should choose, how we damage our metabolism, etc and how he came to this Mediterrane Mediterrasan diet. And he's also giving you a great meal plan too, his Mediterrasian meal plan, which you're going to be able to get@jjvirgin.com beat diet. I know that's a little weird, but that was the easiest place to put it. So be sure to grab that and and enjoy the interview. I will be right back with Dr. Will Lee.

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Dr. Will Le. You're back. And you're back with like the book I'm more excited than ever about Eat to Beat yout Diet. Oh, my gosh.

Yay. I'm really happy to be here. And I, and I know we always have great conversations about really the topic about health. And I'm a newbie, I would say talking about, you know, diet and weight, but I wanted to come at this really from a unique perspective, which is really what is the science, the new science of the metabolism telling us about how we can actually control body fat?

Yeah. And I'll give you something because it will make it all. Tie it together with a bow. If you think about it, that, okay, so what now we 43% of the population who is obese and 70% overweight or obese, and now it's something like only 6% have no metabolic risk factors. I believe that we have to get metabolically healthy to lose weight. We have it wrong. We think we have to lose weight to get healthy, and it's the opposite. And so really, all of the work that you do, and I'd love you to start first with going back to Eat to Beat disease, just how you look at food so differently because now you're going to be able to apply it, like to apply it to this topic, especially in a time when everyone's going for the, you know, semaglutide and all these drugs. Right, right. We need you. So tell us. Tell, tell the audience. And I'm going to also put in the show notes the interview we did about Eat to Beat Disease, which is another book you definitely want to have in your, in your success library. But how did you, you know, how did you come to start food? And how do you look at this so differently than like the average nutritionist out there?

Yeah, well, listen, I started out life being very interested in food because my family, my mom cooked great food. I was, I grew up in a part of the world in Western Pennsylvania where there were lots of ethnic communities that really had pride over their food traditions. And so I was exposed to a lot of different things, more than white food when I was a kid. And I never forgot that. And in fact, I became more curious about that when I was in college because I began to study history and the history of humans, of society, is intertwined with the history of food. So when I finished college I did a gap year. And in my gap year I actually went to Italy and I lived in Italy and Greece specifically to try to learn more about how food and culture and health all kind of bound itself together to create the kind of the zeitgeist of just living in the Mediterranean. This is long before people were talking about the Mediterranean diet sort of on a broad level, went up to medical school. I learned drugs and bugs and surgery and chemo and all the stuff that we had to memorize. And I did it. But one of the things that I realized is that there's two things that were gigantic deficits in medical school. Number one, we learned a lot about disease, but we never learned about health. Number two, we learned how to treat disease, but we never learned how to prevent disease. And actually there's a third deficit. And that third deficit is that there's no doubt that medicines can be life saving. People used to live only 40 years old 100 years ago because we didn't have any medical technology. But yet one thing that we lost somewhere in the last 100 years in health care is this thousand year tradition where food was of course a tool in the toolbox for health and healing. And somewhere in my education as a doctor, like that just poof, disappeared. And so I was involved with and excited by and still involved with developing new treatments, new biotech treatments for cancer and blindness and diet complications of diabetes. And you know, I happen to be pretty productive on it. We've had 43 new FDA approved drugs. So to me I've had this, this long view that man, we are missing this opportunity. We're missing the opportunity to prevent disease. Number one, we're also, we're also missing the opportunity to. We're also missing the opportunity to use food while we're undergoing treatment. And we're also using missing opportunities for use for use Food for healing, which is, you know, like people just kind of assume people are going to get better about themselves, right? Well, it's not that simple. And we can use food to elevate that. So my first book was really about how the body protects itself and its health and how we can use food to strengthen our body's health defenses. And one of the things that led to my current book eat to beat your diet was something surprising. I got thousands of emails and letters and feedback from people and I would survey my community, my readers to find out what they learned and how they were doing. And I was really surprised. People were saying, I feel more empowered, I feel stronger, I feel healthier. I've come off my medications, things that I knew was going to happen. But the surprise for me was some people were telling me that in addition, they were starting to lose weight that they couldn't lose before. I heard this over and over again, and the first time I just blew it off. But when I got, you know, like, by the 20th one, I'm like, wait a minute, how can you be eating more food and losing more weight? Like, that's counterintuitive. You eat more food, you should be gaining more weight. That was, in fact, by the way, one of the concerns I actually had when I wrote my first book is, you know, I'm telling people to enjoy their food and eat. Like, how can you be losing weight? So that actually dovetailed with my own research to say, you know, what. What is actually happening? What's the science, the new science of the metabolism? And is there some surprises? Are there things that are myths or legends or urban legends that the new science is helping us overturn and have a better idea what the truth is? And that's what this book is all about.

I was working with a client probably 20 years ago, who couldn't lose weight, and she came to me and she said, my doctor told me that I just needed to count my calories, and it didn't matter if I was eating Snickers bars, Pop Tarts, as long as I just counted my calories. Right. And so I have a feeling one of your urban legends, the big misconceptions, hopefully, is going to be that, you know, all calories are not created equal because, you know, it's like, just logically, you know, that couldn't possibly be true. And you just said people were eating, eating more. And I'm guessing there's something very different between the salmon broccoli dish and the ultra processed foods that are, you know, hunger drivers.

Right, Right. Well, no, I mean, you know, there's a lot to unpack in what you were just setting up. And, you know, for me, let me just tell you that I have now found myself having these conversations with all kinds of people about metabolism. It's a subject that most people think that they know something about. And, you know, because I'm a scient, I approach subjects like, what do I know? But what. What's really interesting to me is, what do I not know? That's what scientists really spend most of their time thinking. Like, what are the unanswered questions. And the more I dug into this, the more I realized that, you know, metabolism is a still pretty new field. And counting calories, you know, that's very, very old school. It's almost a T shirt slogan, you know, a licensed bumper sticker. And it almost means nothing. Except that we do know that empty calories are. Honestly, I didn't even really understand where does that whole concept. How do you even come up with a term, according to term, an empty calorie? So I had to reconceptualize my own understanding as a doctor about metabolism, which I thought I knew a lot about from medical school. But here's how I've come to see it, and it sets up for my book, which is that the human body is like an automobile. It's got an engine. The engine needs fuel to be able to run. And in a car, you know, you've got your engine running and you've got a fuel gauge. And when your fuel gauge gets towards empty, it shows you the driver. You got to pull over to the filling station. You pull out the pump and you stick it in a nozzle, and you crank the. You push the button, the nozzle, and you fill up the tank. And you know, when the tank is full, it clicks and you stop and then you kind of go on your way, right? Well, in the body, it's kind of similar. Our body runs like an engine, and it needs fuel just like the car. And our fuel actually comes from food. The food that we eat. The energy comes from our food. We happen to call that energy calories. Okay? But the quality of your fuel makes all the difference in the world in terms of what that fuel is able to do for you much more than just run your engine. It actually helps to really set up the entire success of your entire vehicle. And that's your entire body, you know, head to toe. Every single function is. Is wonderful. Now, unlike a gas station pump, where when your tank is full, your. The nozzle will click and now it'll stop filling up. Unfortunately, when it comes to food, our bodies don't have that clicker, right? I mean, we wish we sometimes had that clicker. And by the way, everyone has that clicker. Everyone's sense of that clicker when it's too late, right? Um, so what happens is when you don't have that clicker, you just keep eating. And at some point, like, you. You realize, like, oh, man, like, I just ate too much. Classic situation Thanksgiving meal or one of these holiday meals, and you're like, Eating and talking and you know you're going back for seconds or thirds and before you know it, like you just had one more bite and you knew you crossed, you just know you crossed that line. Like you, you don't feel good anymore. And so that, so that's basically like the, like there's no clicker at the gas station. The fuel comes out of the tank, down the side of the car, around the tires, fools around your feet, and you are now standing in this toxic, inflammatory, flammable, dangerous mix. Right. With having too much fuel now in your body. What happens is that that extra fuel that we can stuff into our body has to be loaded safely into body fat. Our fat is actually fuel tank and it stores the fat. So a small fat cell gets bigger and bigger. The more fuel you put into it, the bigger the tank has to stretch to accommodate that. And so, you know, this is really the beginnings of metabolism. Our calories, the energy from the food we eat is fuel. But if you overload your tanks, your tanks are going to get big. And the bigger they get, the more deranged the, the, the, the entire ecosystem of your fuel tanks are. And that sets off inflammation and then that's it. Like once you actually start knocking down that domino, one after another starts following the dominoes start following and then your entire system, your metabolism, your biochemistry is a derailed and that's what leads to these chronic diseases.

Yeah, and I love the way you explained it because it's like you start out with a healthy metabolism and gosh, if we could ask, however we got here, our creator, why didn't you do a good appetite switch? Why did you mess that thing up? And the thirst switch, we could have gotten a lot better. These could have solved a lot of problems. Maybe 10,000 years ago we were supposed to gorge so we could survive famines. I don't know, but it certainly could have made a lot easier. But you just talked about really how you damage your metabolism and kind of this bad snowball effect that then you have to crawl out of in order to be able to lose weight. Because in your book you talk about, okay, you have to heal your metabolism.

Right, Right. Well, you know, so to heal a metabolism, a great starting point is to really understand what the new science teaches is about human metabolism. Most people think, I got the metabolism thing down, I'm a biohacker, I got it down. Actually, amazingly, just 24 months ago, there was a brand new study published that completely upended everything we know about human metabolism. It was done by a guy named Herman Ponzer and a group of 90 other researchers, they published this in the journal, the prestigious journal Science, which is one of the top scientific journals. And it's the first major research study published. Research study on human metabolism. To give us a full understanding of what human metabolism is over our entire lifespan, here's what they did. They studied 6,000 people from 20 countries that range from 2 days old to 92 years old. And they studied them all in the exact same way they studied their metabolism. Here's what they did. They actually gave them a drink of water. H2O. H is hydrogen, O is oxygen, except their hydrogen and oxygen. Their water had a little label onto the hydrogen and the oxygen. You can measure their metabolism through their breath, through their urine, and in their blood. When they measured 6,000 people from 2 days old to 92 years old and measured metabolism from these labeled drink of water, what do you think they found? They found the metabolism all over the map, just like you'd think. However, this is the age of artificial intelligence and high power computing. What this group did that was absolutely ingenious, that we've never done before, is develop an algorithm to look at every individual who participated in the study and develop in the algorithm a way to correct what their metabolism should be if they didn't have excess body fat. Let me repeat that. They were able to put into an algorithm a correction factor. If you removed excess body fat, what would the metabolism look like when they did that? In this gigantic chaotic sea of data, the conclusions like, oh, my God, no wonder people are all over the place. Turns out once you remove the effect of excess body fat, all humans only go through four phases of metabolism in their entire life. Phase one is when you're born, you're synced up with your mom like a menstrual cycle. And then in the first year of life, your metabolism skyrockets much higher than an adult's. Phase two, from one year old, 12 months old, all the way to 20 years old, your metabolism is going down, down, down, down, down. This is teenage years. This is when the. When the kids are eating two dinners and they're bouncing off the walls and they're sprouting up like a beanstalk. And you're like, yeah, that guy's metabolism is clearly getting bigger or shooting up. Not the case now. We see that it's actually going down, down, down, down. Now from age, that's second phase. Third phase is from age 20 to age 60. Our hardwired metabolism is designed without fat, to be rock stable from 20 years old 30, 40, 50, 60s. It's rock stable, all right. That's how we're wired. And what that means is, incredibly, 60 can be the new 20. If you allow your metabolism, that should be that way. And after 60, your fourth phase, there's a little decrease, until by the time you're 90, your metabolism declines about 17%. You add the fat back in there, and you start to crush your metabolism. So that's what's interesting.

So a couple things there, of course, I'm just. You don't know this. I'm turning 60 in, like, two months. And my belief is we can offset all of this with the right type of exercise with, you know, maintaining muscle. So that is what I'm focused on. But when they were pulling, when they were looking at this and normalizing for normal body fat, because here's what I'm seeing with all the body fat measurements when I was in doctoral school, what they taught us for the norms of body fat and what the norms are now are totally different. What happened? It's like we got. We're starting to accept that people could have, like, 10% higher body fat and it's supposedly healthy. So what did they consider to be healthy norms for body fat?

Well, you know, one of the things that. That you have to take into account is not just the subcutaneous fat, which is the stuff you can see in the mirror, it's the visceral adipose tissue, the. The gut fat. Visceral means gut. So it's like the baseball glove of fat that's choking your organs inside. Discerning bodies.

Were they doing both?

So they were able to actually incorporate.

Wow.

Which is. Which. Which is part of the algorithm. Right. You need to be able to calculate how much. Because, look, somebody who's got a big body, and this is a point that I make in my book, is that body size is an assumption that has misled us often.

Amen. Makes me nuts. Yeah.

So think about it. If you look at the fittest people on the planet, every four years, it's the Olympians. And you've got the tiny little gymnasts, and you've got the gigantic shot putters, and you've got the tall, skinny javelin throwers. You know, they're all in great shape, but they've got different body sizes and the amount of body fat and lean muscle mass and, you know, their metabolism, their inner metabolism, you know, and how that's affected. It's different. Everyone, when we talk about personalized nutrition, think about that. Like, you can be really fit and have a different body size. And then I also talk about another great sport to think about, which is boxing. There's 14 weight classes, everything from ultra featherweight to heavyweight, and everybody's got a different body size, and yet there is a world champion in every category. I think that this idea that we should all be the same shape and we should all aim towards this ideal, it's a misleading idea. What we need to do is really try to personalize it to ourselves.

In that study, were they doing ADEXA.

To figure everything out?

Yeah. So I think they use calculations adapted from Dexa of all kinds of people, like we've now actually characterized. And this is something that I thought was fascinating. When does fat, you know, what is the natural history of fat? When does fat first form? Right, like in the womb. Actually, fat forms in a womb. First your blood vessels form, then your nerves form, and the third tissue that forms is body fat. Now, you had body fat before you even had a face you could stuff with food while you were in the womb. All right? And that's something that, like. And by the way, when you're born as a baby, right, Healthy babies, cute, lovable, adorable babies are chubby. They got the double chin. They've got, you know, the fat arms and legs that look like, you know, circus balloons that you twist. All right? And the thing is that if you saw a lean, chiseled baby, like, it looked like a fashion model with skinny.

Legs, oh, that'd be weird.

That'd be weird. Sick baby. Like, you'd be really concerned, right? So body fat actually has a very important, physiological, healthy role. And where fat goes wrong for us is actually when we have too much of it. And so really, it's about taming fat and extra body fat in balance with your body size and in concert with lean muscle mass, of course, especially as we get older.

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I love that you're bringing up this body size thing, because it is. It is unbelievable to me, will, that we still go to the doctor's office and get on a scale. Like, we stopped looking at total cholesterol as some kind of a marker and started looking at all of the different particle size and number and all. But yet we still get on a scale. Instead of looking at skeletal muscle, looking at body fat, looking at fat, fat. Like it just. It's just bizarre. It has to change.

Yeah, well, and by the way, the crazy thing is that if you, when you go to your doctor and you get your blood drawn, there's only like a dozen markers that are reported as healthy or unhealthy. And think about how much more information we have. I have been exploring different biomarkers of metabolism. How can you tell if you're burning fat or you're burning mostly carbs? I'm exploring all these things because it's high time that we start to use the technology that's available to get that information, that numerical information, and know how we're actually doing on a day to day level. Some people want to know minute to minute. I'm good with day to day. And that can be really powerful in guiding our decisions if you know, what's your incentive to actually do better.

So what are you looking at using. Are you using things like a lumen or what are you looking at to be able to.

Yeah, so I'm just starting to play with the lumen right now. And I think that for those of you who don't know this, I mean, lumen is a breathalyzer. And you know, instead of having a state trooper give it to you on the side of the road, you can do it yourself in the morning or in the evening. And what it actually does is it measures. It's a carbon dioxide flow meter. And it's not just the carbon dioxide, the carbon of the carbon dioxide, but it's also the flow, the rapidity that you're blowing out. And it's able to calculate. All this stuff goes into your phone in a cloud and it gives you back a number. It's very convenient. And again, I'm just starting to play with it right now, but it's actually a fascinating guide that shows you that if you allow your body to do its thing over the course of an evening when you're not eating, some people call that fasting, and when you're not eating, some people call that intermittent fasting. There's a lot of verbiage that gets labels that get tagged to things that are natural.

Yeah, like just, you shouldn't be eating at night, you should be sleeping. Don't eat. It's not fasting. It's. It's.

It's sleeping. It's sleeping.

Intermittent fasting's gotten. So I heard a podcast the other day, and it was like, okay, you stop eating three to three hours before bed. You wait a little bit when you wake up in the morning. That's normal. That's not intermittent fasting.

Right, Right. Well, you know, and the turn and to flip that around is I. I tell people who ask me about intermittent fasting, I say, you know what? Think about what that term means. If you're intermittently fasting, which means you're not eating, then you're intermittently eating too. It's really which side of the equation you want to look at. And we're always intermittently eating or fasting. The key is actually, how do you give your body. How do we give our body the greatest advantage to do what it's designed to do that actually then plays into the choices that we make, and not only what we eat, but how we eat as well.

So what were some of the things that you discovered, like, as you were going through this, in terms of what things could help with our metabolism and healing our metabolism, what things can help with weight loss, or we could actually halt it.

Right. Well, so look, let me. Let me kind of come at this and explain it in a way that coming from a guy who's been involved with developing cancer treatments. Okay. And, you know, so you have to have mechanisms. You have to understand how it works. You need to understand dose, how much do you give over what period of time? And you have to be able to have some kind of measurement to know if you're actually making progress or not. Right. I mean, that's true for heart disease or anything else in medicine. So that's how I come at this, because that's my background. And one of the things that I realized is by understanding our basic metabolism, when we eat food, our insulin goes up. So that insulin is the hormone that actually helps our body draw energy into the cell. So, you know, the fuel tank, you put the fuel in the tank now that. Now that fuel needs to be put to use. And that's what insulin does. And what's interesting about insulin, people talk about insulin spikes. You know, it's real, it's important. But when. When. The key that I want to emphasize, when insulin is up, your body's hardwired, so the insulin's up means that you're absorbing fuel, so you can't burn fuel. You're trying to store it. And then when you're not eating, like when you're sleeping, okay, your insulin is down and it actually turns upside down, reverses the switch, okay? And now your body can actually draw into the fuel and start to burn, Burn fuel, burn extra fuel. And that extra fuel you might have eaten during the day, it might have been from yesterday, it might have been from the holidays. Doesn't really matter. It gives you that opportunity to burn. And so first I thought, okay, when you're eating, you're fueling up. When you're not eating, you're actually able to burn. And that's kind of a basic principle. So don't eat too much, don't eat too late, all that kind of stuff, all right? Don't eat too early. Give yourself more time. However, it gets much better than that. What I learned that was a surprise to me, that helped me make sense of why my readers from my first book were telling me they were losing weight while they were eating food, is that there are some foods that contain natural molecules called bioactives that actually, while you're eating them, will trigger processes in your cells that will actually allow you to burn energy, burn fat while you're eating. So there are foods that actually fight fat. To me, that was a big surprise, a really, really interesting one. And so what I did in my book is do all the homework to figure out which foods that you would find in a grocery store or in a village market that you might encounter that has human evidence that has been studied in people to show that something you can measure metabolism and not just bmi, but like actual weight loss, waist circumference, metabolic syndrome parameters, high blood pressure, cholesterol count, all those things that matter. And of course, most people don't have access to a dexa, but that would have been great to actually look at that. But I do mention some of the studies where that is there as well. But I take people on a tour as if you are. This is in the middle of my book, as if you are sitting inside my grocery cart and I'm wheeling you through the grocery store and just show you, talk with you, narrate what I'm actually seeing and what the evidence is in the produce section, in the seafood section, the beverage section. And then one of the things that I thought was long needed was that old adage shop, the perimeter, stay out of the middle aisles. I decided that I would take people right into the middle aisles. And there's a chapter I call Treasure Hunt. And in the treasure hunt, you want to look for the treasure, you want to look for the Real gold, while there's a lot of fool's gold around there. And so, yeah, don't get the crappy ultra processed foods and the snacks and the stuff that's going to destroy your metabolism and hurt your health defenses. But I wanted to show people, here's what you pick here. Here's what you pick here. Everything from, you know, apple cider vinegar to capers to dried mushrooms to chili peppers, the list of dried prunes. I mean, the list was going on and on and on. And I thought, this is what people need to hear. It's a message of empowerment. You can go into the grocery store, you can go into almost every section of the grocery store, and if you were aware of what you should choose that is supported by human evidence that could help your metabolism, feel free to add it to your cart. That gives you power.

Give us a couple highlights of the tour.

All right. Okay. So what happens when you go to the grocery store? First thing you see are, you actually see produce. Right now, one of my. There's all kinds of. There's so much produce that's good for you, dietary fiber. It's got lots of bioactives and polyphenols, of course, but there are foods that actually have evidence that they can actually shrink waist size, waist circumference, and help you decrease body weight. And one of them that I was so delighted by and to write about are pears. I love pears.

Pears.

Pears, Yeah.

I can't believe. First of all, I hate pears. That's the only pears I like. Are those Japanese. When I lived in Japan, I got hooked on those Japanese pears. Those are the only ones I like the pair that.

The Fuji pears that tastes like an apple.

They're. They're called a nashi in Japan. I don't know. They're. They're a Japanese pear apple. It's not an apple. It's a pear, but it's a pear apple.

Right? Well, so pears like apples. So both of them can be looked at together. Both have a lot of. A good amount of dietary fiber. Okay. And that dietary fiber helps your gut health, meaning that it actually feeds your gut microbiome. And because the gut microbiome controls your metabolism, helps your blood lipids, helps your insulin sensitivity, anything that feeds your gut actually is actually improving. But there's something more. In both pears and apples, you actually have something called chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid, which is, by the way, a lot of these natural chemicals that can help us are not found in a single food, which is why I always kind of shudder when somebody says, here's the superfood, the one superfood you need to eat. Chlorogenic acid, by the way, is found in apples and pears. It's found in coffee. It's in a lot of different foods. Right? Yeah. Like, I got. I got a cup of coffee with me right now. And the thing is that chlorogenic acid actually prevents your fat from growing. It actually slows down the growth of fat. And then the other thing it does, that's really interesting, and we didn't have a chance yet to talk too much about this, but it stimulates your brown fat. So brown fat is something. Okay, so let's talk about the different kinds of fat. Three main kinds of fat, jiggly fat, subcutaneous fat, meaning under the skin, near the skin. You can see it in a mirror under your arm, under your chin. It's the muffin top. It's on your thighs and your butt. All right, May not be the most attractive thing, but it's not the most dangerous thing. The most dangerous thing is actually that visceral fat, the vat, as you call it, and that can be stuffed inside your body frame, whether you've got a big frame or a small frame. And always tell people, are you talking about skinny fat? And I'm like, yeah, I am. But I want to tell you what skinny fat looks like. Imagine you went to the FedEx station and you're going to ship a long fluorescent light bulb, and you don't want to break, so you buy a thin box. And now you've got to actually cushion it, so you add peanuts to it, and you could just pour some light peanuts. But let's say you really stuff that thing full of peanuts now, it's like bursting at the seams. You close it, you tape it shut at an arm's length, it's still a skinny box, but it's actually being crushed on the inside. That's what that visceral adipose tissue, this visceral fat actually does. And it's highly inflammatory. It's very destructive. So those are the two main kind of fats that we battle with usually, but a lot of people don't realize is there's a third kind of fat, and it's called brown fat. And it's called brown fat because it actually looks brown. It's packed with mitochondria. Mitochondria is, people might have heard about this term, are the kind of like the fuel cells of our body. And in brown fat, the mitochondria are so dense and they contain little iron particles. They need iron. It's kind of like having a flint in your lighter in the striker. They're brown, and that's why they call brown fat. But brown fat actually is not jiggly. It's not lumpy, bumpy. Brown fat is paper thin, wafer thin. And it's not close to the surface, so you can't see it. It's close to the bone. And where is it? It's around your neck. It's behind your breastbone. It's a little bit under your arms. Like the girdle, like a girdle of a bra. A little bit in your back, a little bit in your belly. And it's hidden, it's silent. Unless you're in really cold temperatures in which it fires up in order to warm you up without shivering. Okay. It's another way of protecting the body. Or if you eat certain foods. What are some of those foods that light up brown fat? Well, foods that contain chlorogenic acid that we talk. But also chili peppers. Not just the dried ones, but also, you know, the poblano peppers, the serrano peppers, those Thai peppers that you see Tim loves.

Tim eats so many of these peppers. I personally can't stand them. However, I cold plunge every day. But I was like going, I don't know, I think I could trade that cold plunge for those peppers.

Well, you know, but the interesting thing is we bet you figured out how these. The chile mechanism works, which is that when the capsaicin in chile lights up, that gives you the heat on your tongue. That's like a switch, like an on switch in your tongue. When that happens, your tongue sends a text message to your brain, and it tells your brain to release a hormone. And the hormone is norepinephrine. And you can actually feel this. If you actually eat something spicy, take some sriracha sauce or take some chili flakes, and you nibble on it, you will feel your brain will start sending this little. You'll feel tingling going right down.

I feel it with wasabi. When I do, I love. I love wasabi like I love wasabi because I love that brain rush. I love it.

Yeah. That rush is the signal. You are feeling the wave. Okay. That's going to activate your brown fat. When that brown fat is. And when your brown fat is turned on that wave, I'm telling you, I have this demo in front of me.

Because I'm having sashimi tonight. That's it.

Well, when you have that brown fat turned on, it starts turning on the space heating properties of brown fat. And you show this is like a torch, right? So it goes like this boom. Once you get a flame going and that fuel, that flame, this is the brown fat has to draw that fuel from someplace, and it draws it from other fat stores. So this is good fat that can burn down bad fat and burn extra energy while you're eating. That's like the really cool thing. And so when I show my book and I take people around the store, mushrooms will do this, onions will do this, scallions will do this, garlic will do this, broccoli will do this. Bok choy, broccoli rabe. You know, like when you start going around the thing, it's kind of like if you're shopping to cook, you know, a Mediterranean or an Asian meal, like it's the same ingredients that are actually used. And so that's really how I really began realizing that, you know what, these ingredients that are good for our metabolism have been core ingredients in the recipes from the Mediterranean and from Asia, two of the oldest, most delicious cuisine food traditions in the world, but also recognized, at least the traditional versions, as two of the healthiest cuisines in the world. And now we have an explanation. Good for the metabolism.

I got to share something I heard the other day because I'd love your take on it, because I was so perplexed as to how someone would have drawn this conclusion, because as I'm hearing this, it's just such a shout out for traditional foods, right? And, you know, and if you look at the diet industry of the last 50 years, it's like all these diet foods and low calorie butter buds and air pop popcorn and, you know, snack, well, like all this garbage. And I was listening to that 60 Minutes interview about semaglutide. Did you happen to hear that?

Yeah, Yeah.

I was so upset about this, so I didn't even know about it. Someone DM'd me on Instagram, said, did you listen to it? So I found it. And hear this. Doctors say that 50 to 85% of our obesity is genetic when in the 1900s, half percent of the population was obese, and now it's 43%. So clearly we didn't have a massive gene shift in 123 years. We had a massive food shift in the last 20.

Right.

So, I mean, you know, everything you're saying just, just, just gives, shows you.

Just eat real food in ways that have been time honored over generations, you know, and I think that's the key thing. Because if you were to go to a, a real authentic Italian restaurant or a real authentic Chinese or Japanese restaurant and have them cook some of the original dishes, I mean, they're delicious. They, and, and they're actually quite healthy. And, and I think that, by the way, I wanted to, I want to just comment on the semaglutide thing for a second. It's a drug, it's approved for obesity. It actually works. Okay, and why, which is why there's like a rush now for everyone to be on it, you know, and, and I, I sort of, when I hear semaglutide, I kind of think of fentanyl. You know, like, it's kind of like, wait a minute, that's not something you want to be rushing towards. This thing is, it's a real pharmaceutical and it has real side effects and it's costly and it shouldn't be used for everyone. So there are people for whom morbid obesity is indeed a life threatening situation.

Where, oh, and it's, thank God we have these things for that.

Thank God we have.

Right? No question.

So let's acknowledge that first then to say that how these drugs work is by blocking the appetite center in your brain. So you don't enjoy food, so you don't feel hunger for food, you don't crave something delicious. Now, I don't know about you, but if I lost all interest in looking forward to something that is tasty, I'm not talking about volume, I'm talking about taste, the sensation, the sensuality of food, that'd be a big bummer for me. That'd be like a sense that you're missing. Right? And that's what these drugs do. They work because you lose interest actually in food. And it's really completely contrary to what I believe, how food should play a role in our lives in modern society, which is we should not fear our food, we should embrace our food, we should love to taste our food, we should savor our food. And we should use our food to help our health, not to take it down. And so it really is sort of there are people who are real foodies who will be able to sit down at a restaurant. And I always admire these people. They just happen to know I have friends like this who just know exactly, just what the right thing is to eat, what kind of things to put together. And when the order comes, it's like, wow, that's really a great combination. It's kind of like somebody who just has a natural fashion sense, whatever they do in the closet. It always comes out looking great. And I think everyone should really aspire to become more in touch with this natural whole foods done in traditional ways that are going to allow us to, let's say, take a leap, move forward into the future by in a way leaping backwards over the era of processed foods and media and marketing and brainwashing. All those crazy artificial colors and preservatives and flavors back to those really, it's our dowry, it's our inheritance that we've had from humans that came before us. That's what I think we should be focusing on.

I just hear this when I hear hear how that works, I wonder, did we have to create a drug to counteract the fact that we created foods that were hyper palatable and not satiating?

Right. Well, the other interesting thing that's remarkable about our metabolism is how interconnected everything. And it's a, it's, you know, there's a systems based approach to helping to heal your metabolism from inside. So not only do you want to choose the right foods, but you also and any of them at the right, right times, but you also sort of want to be able to savor your food and enjoy the flavor. Right. So busy people, you know, in a, in a frenetic society, you know, and I've been through this myself, you go there, you eat in order to live as opposed to live to eat. You wolf sound something. And you keep on going to your next thing or you're eating on the move. Right. No wonder we overeat, because we put more fuel in our body than the fuel gauge can actually measure. But if you take the time to chill out and really start to experience the food in ways to tell you if you really enjoy it or not, take your favorite food. You know, you can, you can shovel spoonfuls or forkfuls. Yeah, okay, you'll fill up your belly. But you know, you would actually get the same and probably more enjoyment if you took your time to eat it. Which is why in a lot of traditional Mediterranean and Asian cultures, you know, that's why I call this Mediterranean. It's sort of like the way that I actually eat along the traditions of all this is you sit with people, you talk about the food, you enjoy the food, and you take the time to get to know your food and savor your food, it's more satisfying. And it's not about just shoving stuff into your face and keeping on going like it is a important part of your day. And so I don't think that people should Consider healthy eating, avoiding food, quite the opposite. I think we should actually bake it in to our life mindfully and really try to find ways to enjoy it. And that's really why I take people through the grocery store. So hopefully showing them things that they might not have thought about that actually could be really good for their health and for unfamiliar ingredients. What I tell people is, you know what, we're so lucky we live in this Google world where you could take something you might not know what to do with. Capers, for example. It's not something everyone knows what to do with. Type in capers in Google recipe and then. And then click video. And then all of a sudden you'll see videos popping of people that really love it, that really know what they're doing, showing you how to do it and describing at the same time.

And also looking through your book and seeing some of these different ingredients. Like, you know, my husband hates capers and I love them. So I, whenever we're at a restaurant, if there's a dish with capers, I'm getting the dish, you know, so you can start testing some of these things out at some of the different restaurants too, right?

Yeah.

That you never think of. Plus they'll be able to test them because you are giving everyone a meal plan. Your meta may say it correctly. Your Mediterranean meal plan. Give me a, give me example of a dish or two in this.

Well, okay, so. So I always get asked this question. I mean, I know that when we've been together at my share, like I get frequently asked this question. Dr. Lee, you study food as medicine. Tell me, what is your diet and what do you eat? And you know, I always tell people, first of all, I don't have a diet. I don't have a fixed plan that I have to robotically follow. I have a way, an approach to eating. And my approach is really. And this is what I publish in my book, I just spelled it out. I eat Mediterranean style. Mediterranean style because I'm Asian. I grew up with an Asian background. I love Asian food. And I also love Mediterranean food because I lived in a Mediterranean before in Italy and Greece, and I like to cook both. And when I am trying to decide what to eat, whether it's at a restaurant or whether I'm shopping or planning a dinner party, I naturally gravitate towards the sensibilities from both cultures to figure out what I should choose from. By the way, what I read about my book is that the Mediterranean go ahead and take a look at a map of the Mediterranean. It's not just Italy and Greece and Spain. It's like 27 different countries. And Asia is not just Chinese food and Japanese food and Thai food and Vietnamese food. There are 40 some countries in Asia. We're really talking about a, you know, a blockbuster, A number of different types of recipes and cuisines you can choose from. And I love them. I love to explore all of them. I'm really a believer in finding your new favorite foods by actually by. By trying different things that appeal to you. So something that would be typical for me, Mediterranean doesn't necessarily fuse the foods together. That's fusion cuisine. I like fusion cuisine. But as an example, like I will, I wanted to cook a little gnocchi the other day, but I got these mini ones and what did I do? I use some tomato paste like I have here. I use a little extra virgin olive oil. I use some chopped up black olives. I use some capers. I just mix them all together, two seconds. These are mediterra, classic Mediterranean ingredients. Put them in a pan, heated it up, and man, it was such a umami bomb. Like, it was so tasty. And, you know, like, the thing is to eat it slowly and mindfully. So that would be something like I ate for lunch, but you know, another time that I've actually done something on the Asian side but actually added some Mediterranean ingredients. I actually will sometimes stir fry bok choy, baby bok choy, with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil. Right? So they tell you, oh, well, olive oil is in for high heat. Also a myth. Olive oil actually in canola oil, which is usually used for frying. They roughly have the same smoke point. You can actually use olive oil. I wanted to get a little bit of extra Mediterranean style flavor in this bok choy. Now, you don't want to use too much oil, but you want to use it lightly. And then you flavor it with garlic, for example. And there's all kinds of ways that you can kind of blend things together. And so by the way, the other thing that I always tell people about Mediterranean, although it is how I eat and it's very authentically how I eat, I've done. I've eaten this way for like 30 years more. The reality is, is that it sounds new, but in fact, it's very old. In fact, it's so old, it's about 2,000 years old. Because Asia and the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago was connected by the Silk Road, the greatest trading route in human history. You know, this was a caravan road of different paths that camels walked around that people traded silk and other things on the Silk Road between these lands, but they also traded recipes, they traded ingredients, and they traded actual food. And so in a way, again, back to this whole idea about just revering the past and respecting the past and thinking about is there something we've learned from the past that we can actually bring forward again to make something valuable new again is really this idea of blending ingredients and blending cultures. It's not necessarily fuse it, but can we share in the course of a day a little of this from this country, a little bit that from that country and make it up yourself too. You know, adapt. Adapt to what you actually can have. And anyway, that's my basic approach to Mediterranean food.

Cool. And everyone's going to get some your meal plan too. So I'm going to put that. I'm not going to make people try to spell Mediterranean. I can hardly say it. So I'm going to put it in JJvirgin.com beat diet because I think I already have a Dr. Will Lee in there. So JJvirgin.com beat diet and that is for eat to beat your diet, burn fat, heal your metabolism, and live longer. Like, who doesn't want all of those things? And it's just by changing what's at the end of your fork. I love it so much. Thank you so much for being with me and for writing this awesome book and for all the work that you do.

Thanks, jj. It's always a pleasure to speak with you.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and more importantly, that you're built to last.

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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 take 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.