Dark chocolate. Oh, you're speaking my language now. Okay.
Can you eat too much dark chocolate? That's the question. You know, I have never seen anything about an overdose of cacao, but I will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream just by having two cups of hot chocolate made with 80% high flavanol chocolate. Dark chocolate.
Come on. Yeah, it's been done in people, 60-year-olds with heart disease. So wait, what happens when you drink or you eat this dark chocolate?
Okay. What happens? Yeah, the polyphenols in this dark chocolate, we know what they are.
They're called proanthocyanidins. So I'm a scientist. So my job is to actually know what the inside chemicals actually are.
These are natural chemicals, all right? Most people don't need to know that, but you drink it and it tastes good. That's all you need to know. But- I'll tell you, these natural chemicals found in cacao actually trigger a reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells. So it is literally like bees flying out of a hive.
It can double the number of stem cells. And what's the practical impact? Well, there was a study done at UCSF in San Francisco that looked at 60-year-old men with heart disease.
So these are people whose blood vessels were already not. doing so well and their blood flow wasn't going so well either and their blood vessels were kind of sick that's kind of the definition of heart disease by having the stem cells coming out they were able to actually double the resiliency the function of their blood vessels so they they got better rebound the better agility um their blood vessels are in better shape because their stem cells are regenerating their circulation wow so this is human studies right like most Most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice or cells. I'm talking about human studies. And that's kind of where we are with food is medicine. It's not the kind of like the guesswork.
Like we can do serious research to get down to exactly what's actually happening at the human level. So that's the second health defense systems. Okay. Third one. Third one is our gut microbiome.
Now people have been talking about gut health and microbiome. It's almost like a buzzword. these days.
And people are saying, well, we can actually scoop your poop and we can actually measure your microbiome and we can tell you what you need to eat and what you don't need to eat. Again, I'm a scientist. So I will tell you that there are 39 trillion bacteria in the typical body.
That's more stars than in a night sky. All right. So we barely understand the gut bacteria, but what we do know. is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism, communicates with our brain, actually can help us heal from the inside out.
And very importantly, our gut bacteria basically lives, if you think of your gut like a garden hose, it's a tube, and you were to cut a garden hose in half and you look inside it, there's a lining, okay? The bacteria is inside the hose, but inside the wall of the garden hose. That's where your immune system, 70% of our immune system lives inside our gut.
So our gut bacteria. So if you're feeding your gut a lot of bad foods, it's probably-You're poisoning your immune system. You're preventing your gut bacteria.
Now, I'll tell you what's interesting about the gut bacteria. Your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the walls of your gut. Immune system's in there, 70%, right? Like a jelly roll, like the jelly in a jelly roll and the gut bacteria is inside.
So think about like a college student in a freshman dorm. They are talking to their roommate by pounding on the wall. Right.
What do you want? What kind of pizza do you want? All right.
And they can answer you. And that's basically what our gut bacteria says to our our immune system. So we got to keep that gut healthy, by the way.
Interestingly, and I've done research on this, certain gut bacteria can actually signal to your brain. It's a gut and brain axis and cause your brain to release social hormones. Wow.
Okay. And can affect your mood. So, you know, when you've got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut, I guarantee you, like, it's not just because you're irritated.
It's affecting your brain as well. That's crazy. Yeah.
We had Dr. Emron Mayer on. He's got the gut. I think it's the gut. brain connection or the good immune connection or something like that so he's he's got a lot of great research on that yeah so well the key thing though is that foods can actually help right size your gut health think about like an ecosystem the great barrier reef so certain foods can support the ecology the ecosystem the great barrier reef and certain ones actually kill the coral all right and so our continuously want to keep it in good shape all the way through our lives and by the way even conditions like autism alzheimer's and schizophrenia are all now seemingly connected to our gut bacteria.
Really? Yeah. Now, is there a way if someone has those, are they pretty easy to reverse though?
Or is that hard? Well, listen, we're just figuring this out because right now, medically, we prescribe medications to try to treat those things. And a lot of times those medications just blunt the symptoms. Okay. They cover up the symptoms.
They don't get at the underlying cause. Now we don't know exactly how the gut bacteria communicates to the brain. completely yet but there's one giant nerve called the vegas nerve it's like a giant shoe it's about the thickness of a shoelace and it hangs from our brain all the way down into our gut okay goes right near wraps on our esophagus on the way down and we think the gut bacteria basically sends text messages up to the brain through this big nerve okay so the key though is that foods can actually influence our gut bacteria either good bacteria or bad bacteria you So that's important. So that's a third health defense system. Okay.
Okay. So with the first... Antigenesis, number one.
Yes. Stem cells, number two. Gut microbiome, number three. Okay.
The fourth one? Number four, our DNA. Now, if you watch CSI, DNA is just sort of like a genetic fingerprint, a code that you can find on a crime scene. Or...
if you're actually trying to do ancestry, look for your ancestors, you figure out how, how much of you is Neanderthal, right? I think I was 1% Neanderthal when I did it. Yes. So the, the, the key though is it's DNA is a lot more than our genetic code.
It actually protects us from the environment. Now, what am I, what do I mean by that? Well, you know how, if we are exposed to, we get sunburn, ultraviolet light.
You damage your DNA and what happens? Cancer, skin cancer, right? If you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant, it's going to actually damage your DNA in your lungs.
You get lung cancer, right? But think about it. If you are in Los Angeles and you're driving on the I-10, or if you're actually just walking on a beach, you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation. So how come we don't get skin cancer all the time? Because our DNA is hardwired.
to fix itself from damage. And so the DNA is a protective mechanism from the environment. I always tell people when you're pumping gas, if you still drive a gas vehicle, as opposed to an EV, I always ask people, do you stand upwind or downwind?
What do you do? Are you upwind or downwind? Do you know? Up, well, upwind, right? So you're not getting the fumes in.
Is that what you mean? Right, right, right. Well, if you're standing downwind, you can smell the fumes, right?
And if you're smelling the fumes, you are poisoning the DNA in your lung. So how come we don't develop lung cancer after pumping gas? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself. And so our DNA is sort of like a self-defense mechanism against the environment, radon from your basement, okay? Off-gassing from the new car you just got or the Uber that you're riding in, you know, or the furniture that you got, right?
So like it- This is this incredible defense mechanism against our environment. And then foods can actually speed up the repair, help fix holes that are in our DNA. And then the other kind of piece de resistance for our DNA's defense is that there's something called a telomere.
I don't know if you've ever had anybody on your show talk about telomeres. Telomeres? Yeah. Yes.
These are. These are. See if you're at the longer the telomere, the longer you can live or something. Right.
Well. Well, I'll tell you basically what the, you know, like to, to give a, to remind you, to remind your listeners and viewers, basically, if your DNA is like a shoelace, the telomere is like the little plastic cap at the end of the shoelace. And over time, that little cap kind of wears down just like on a shoelace. And you know, when they, when that cap is gone, man, that your shoelace just falls apart.
And that's what happens to our DNA. So we need that cap. That's called the telomere. And it burns down like a life fuse.
So, you know, like Mission Impossible, like the fuse, right? So this thing is burning down. And when it burns down, that's it.
Your cell's done. So what you want to do is to slow down your cellular aging. Harsh things that you do to your body, smoking cigarettes, being in a couch potato, being exposed to damaging oxidative stress, actually just being stressed out like we are now with this frigging pandemic. Those things all shorten our telomere. They burn the fuse faster.
Stress. Yeah. But foods can slow it down and some foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere, which is really cool from an aging perspective. What are those top three foods that help? lengthen the telomeres green tea is one of them coffee i gotta i gotta yeah it's amazing i got i got a little i used to live in italy and i just got into this habit of drinking espresso uh so i got a little cup here amazingly coffee actually lengthens your telomere come on i i kid you not it's it's quite amazing um uh and uh leafy greens some of the polyphenols and leafy greens can also um slow down and some of them actually look like they can lengthen the telomeres as well so the key thing is that we you know we are not just hapless ponds of aging we can actually do something about it and we can also fight against our environment um because look the the tax that we pay for being on planet earth is we're exposed to stuff all the time and we need to we count on our body's health defenses to fix it so that's a fourth defense And our fifth defense is our immune system, which, you know, after two years, over the last two years, we all know how important our immune system is.
But what have I told you that your immune system is so powerful that when it's in its best shape, even when you're 80 years old, it is strong enough to fight cancer. In fact, it can even wipe out metastatic cancer that's spread all over your body. That's how strong your immune system is if you give it the chance.
And so here's what the immune system does. It's like an army of super soldiers. So, uh, Rangers, SEALs, uh, you know, uh, uh, Marines, special forces, they're all, they've all got, these are all parts of the immune system, all cells of the immune system.
And like the special forces, they've got their own weapons, their own training, their own tactics, but they all work together for, you know, the collective good. And what happens is that. When you've got good, strong defenses, you can fight off invaders from the outside, bacteria and viruses, for example.
But it's not just outside invaders. You've got inside invaders as well. And those little microscopic cancers are inside invaders. And so our immune system patrols our body, okay?
Cops on a beat. And they're looking for things that don't look right. And you see that microscopic cancer that can't grow because it doesn't have a blood vessel, but blood vessels feeding it, androgenesis. Basically, the immune system goes there and takes them right out and takes a sniper shot and it's gone.
And so that's why we've got to protect our immune system. And there are lots of foods that can actually boost our immunity as well. What would be those top three that boost the immune system?
Blueberries are a food that definitely boosts the immune system. It's in young people as well as older people. They boost the natural killer cells, which is really cool.
broccoli sprouts can boost our immune system now these are the three-day old sprouts these are like the three-day old sprouts right okay um okay i mean okay here's something here's something most people don't know the big broccoli that when we eat broccoli we really you know our moms told us eat the treetops right those they're all the same you go to the freezer section of a grocery store and you buy some frozen broccoli and they all look the same they're all the same size That's not really what broccoli looks like. If you go to the farmer's market and you see a real broccoli is this gigantic stem with a little bit of tree top. Okay.
So what's in a broccoli, it's called sulforaphane. So that's what gives broccoli that unique taste of broccoli. It's a little sulfurous.
Okay. So you got to put a little olive oil, a little bit of garlic, you know, and you can saute it up. Okay.
So the sulforaphane, we've done research now. looking at what's in the treetops. And it turns out that these sulforaphanes can starve cancer, anti-angiogenic, help your body cut off the blood supply to cancer. Broccoli treetops have it, but guess what? The stock of the broccoli has twice as much of the good stuff than the treetops.
Eat the stocks. Eat the stocks. So man, like if you don't wanna eat, if you don't wanna saute the stocks, like a lot of cultures will just cut the stocks and saute them, stick it in a blender. You can make it into a smoothie or.
create make a soup out of it you know and so there's a lot of good things you can do put a little broccoli stem little oregano powder you know you can do lighter light it right up a little turmeric it'll be really good um a smoothie or a soup however here's the thing So imagine this adult broccoli having these sulforaphanes. Well, it turns out that these big broccoli plants used to be sprouts. And the sprouts pretty much were born or sprouted from the seed with all the sulforaphanes it's ever going to have. All right. So when it gets bigger, it just gets distributed with the stalk closer to the ground, having more of it, of course.
But the broccoli sprouts have 100 times more. Wow. of the sulforaphates, the good stuff, as a grown-up broccoli. So sprouts, broccoli sprouts. Now, studies have been done to show that if you give people a flu shot, people in the winter should get a flu shot so you don't get the flu, all right?
Just go to your drugstore to get one. Turns out that if you, people, they did a study looking at people getting a flu shot, and they gave half the people a little shake made with broccoli sprouts, and the other group just got a placebo. And the people who got the broccoli sprout shake and the flu shot, their beneficial response of their immune system is 22 times higher.
Huh? Like it totally rocked if they actually had a broccoli sprout shake. So that's not food versus medicine. That is food and medicine, which is really cool. Right.
Interesting. So we never want to throw out. We don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
We want to figure out how to make everything go work even better. Absolutely. How do people melt the fat, Dr. Lee?
We're living in a time now where half the population almost is not just overweight, but obese. How do we solve this? You know, there's a lot to unpack in that question. And I like to start by basically saying that my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, the title is a little bit of a trick title because it's not a diet book. It's kind of an anti-diet book.
to say how we can actually improve our metabolism, fight body fat, and actually elevate our health, which is the real goal, our inner health, without ever having to go on a diet. So saying that, I can tell you that the whole idea about body fat, it's loaded. The word fat is actually a real loaded term.
In our society, it's associated with a lot of negative connotations, right? When you think about fat, it's usually something not... that you don't want. Even if you walk by the butcher section of the grocery store, you see that rind of fat around a steak. Yeah, you know, you'd rather not have that, right?
But it turns out, and this is what I write about, that there's a new science to the body that gives us new appreciation of what fat actually does and how that connects to our metabolism in ways that we never thought actually existed. So that fat itself is not... a harmful entity when you've got too much and you've got obesity. It is harmful. But up until that point, actually, fat, believe it or not, is a human organ.
It's an organ as important as your pancreas, your liver, your spleen, your heart, your lungs. And it actually fulfills very, very important purposes for our everyday health connected to our metabolism. And most people think about fat as something that grows on you.
And when you see it, you don't like it. So we all went through this. We've all gone through this, right? Get up in the morning, take a shower, step out of the shower, out of the corner of your eye, you see in the mirror, a lump or a bump that you don't want to be there, right? That's what makes you think about body fat.
But actually, most people don't think about the fact that body fat actually existed before we were born. And that leads us, I'm a scientist, so I like to ask origin stories. Where does fat come from? And fat starts in the womb. Wow.
It starts in the womb. And certainly the fat that we are packaged with in utero, it's not bad in any way. It probably is performing a vital function for life. Yeah.
Let me explain that to you. So when your mom's egg met your dad's sperm and they got together, formed a ball of cells, it's going to be the future you, right? When they started to make tissue that will ultimately be your organs, the first tissue that got laid down Where are your blood vessels?
Because every organ needs circulation, so that gets laid down first, right? So this is like building a house. What goes down first? Well, blood vessels get created when we're created.
Second tissue that gets laid down are nerves. And why that? Because every organ needs signaling to be able to tell them what to do.
And so your nerves send those signals, right? Seems pretty fun. Like if you were creating a blueprint of a body, those would be the two things that you do. And that's actually what happens.
Third tissue that gets laid down, surprisingly, is fat, body fat. And they're called, the fat cells are called adipose cells. Adipose is another word for fat.
And they actually form around blood vessels, kind of like bubble wrap. You know, if you had a blood vessel and you were to wrap bubble wrap around it, that's what fat looks like. Now, what does fat do?
And why is it wrapped around? Because fat cells, adipose cells, actually are fuel tanks. Fat actually stores fuel and the fuel is absorbed from the blood, gets into the fuel tank. And so that makes total sense why they're actually located that way, right?
So then after that, the rest of our organs start to build all around that. This just tells you how important fat is. from the get-go. Fast forward nine months, baby is born.
What do you call a beautiful, healthy baby? A fat, pudgy, chubby baby, right? Big fat cheeks, round tummy. Think about it.
Their arms and legs are like those balloons in a circus where they make poodles out of it. Literally, yeah. The clown makes it, right? Literally, they look like that, right? So there's something great, important, and healthful about fat.
in utero, very important for survival, and also when we're born, right? But we don't tend to think about fat in that context. By sort of counter distinction, if you actually saw a baby when they were born, and they had chiseled cheekbones like a fashion model, and they had thin arms and long, thin legs, like on a runway, you would be taken aback.
You'd go, man, there's something wrong with that baby. Yeah. Right?
And you'd be right. Okay? So a fatless baby, a thin, baby, lean baby is not well. Okay. So this is my kind of reset for you to rethinking body fat is actually one of the things that I write about.
Like we need to have a complete reconceptualization and a new understanding of what fat actually does. Yeah. So what is the fat doing for the baby during that stage of life?
Okay. What the fat is doing for the baby is actually a continuum of what fat does for our healthy bodies for the rest of our lives. And so this is sort of the goodness of fat that's hidden beneath the kind of the perception of the badness and the actual badness. So I'm not denying that excess body fat is harmful. It's very harmful.
We're going to get into that in a second. But before we talk about the harms, it's so easy to jump into the demonization and the health and wellness space of things. I'm a scientist.
I'm a doctor. Let's talk about the good stuff first so we can understand, you know, when does good become bad? And that way we can know how to restore the good, right?
I'm with you. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, fat, as I mentioned to you, is an organ and it performs multiple functions.
As an organ, what kind of organ is it? Turns out to be an endocrine organ, produces hormones like your thyroid, like your adrenal glands, okay? Like your pancreas. And that's an amazing thing because we don't normally think about our fat as an organ. Most organs are just a chunk of something connected to tubes.
Well, fat's actually a kind of organ that is just distributed throughout our body. And what does the fat produce as a endocrine organ? It produces hormones, 13 different hormones that are known currently. Wow.
All right. And three of them I want to mention because I think it's important just to give some examples of what this hormonal function of fat actually is. Remember, we're talking about health.
We're talking about healthy fat, healthy body from baby to, you know, end of life. The first hormone is leptin. made by fat.
And many of you may have heard about leptin. Leptin is sort of the appetite controller, right? More leptin, less appetite, less leptin, more appetite.
So it's kind of like a volume switch for your hunger, all right? And that's important because when your fat actually is controlling your brain to go search for food so you can load up on fuel because the fat cells are fuel tanks. So you can kind of see how this all starts to fit together now, all right? Now fat So that's one hormone. Most people may have heard of leptin before.
Another hormone that people that have not heard about, or at least very few people have heard about, is called adiponectin. Adiponectin is another fat hormone, okay? It's a very important one, and it's completely concerned with helping your body gain energy from the food that you eat, all right?
In fact, it works as a partner with insulin, which is a hormone that helps energy. So let me tell you, if I were to take a vial of your blood, Send it to a regular hospital lab to analyze your hormones. Your adiponectin levels and mine would be 1,000 times higher than any other hormone in your body. Wow.
Higher than testosterone, higher than thyroid hormone, higher than cortisol, anything else. Now, why is that? It's because adiponectin.
partners with insulin to make sure that the energy that you have from the food that we eat is efficiently absorbed into our bodies. That's our metabolism. It's part of our metabolism. So good, healthy levels of fat perform this function to bring in energy along with insulin. It's very, very important sort of as a foundation for our energy.
Now, there's a third hormone I want to mention. It's called resistant. Resistant is like the brake. To adiponectin, that's the gas pedal. Gas pedal goes down.
Let's absorb lots of energy, fast, hard. Resistant is like, whoa, let's put on the brake here, a little bit less. All right. So, you know, most systems in the body are about balance.
Okay. Leptin up, less appetite. Leptin down, more appetite.
Adiponectin down, you actually have more efficient energy absorption. Resistant down, the brake, actually pull back on energy absorption. Makes sense because we want to fine tune our metabolism from day to day. So that's one very important thing that normal healthy fat does. It's a setup in the womb.
The babies start to do it right away and it continues throughout our lives. This is how we normally function. Now, a couple of other things that fat does as well, besides being an endocrine organ. It's a cushion.
Now, most people think that fat might be a like insulation, kind of like blubber on a whale. No, it's more of a cushion. Think about...
fat like peanuts that you might pack something you're shipping across the country in. Yeah. All right? If we had no body fat, all right? And the most important body fat for the cushion actually is inside our frame, packed inside our belly.
If you had no fat and you tripped on a rug and you fell on the ground, your organs would burst open. So fat actually has sort of a cushion role as well. Now, the other thing that fat actually has a very important role on that's fascinating.
is that it's a space heater and a space heater so this isn't just passive you know like again like the blubber is just passive the cushion is kind of passive but this is an active function just like the hormone instead of releasing hormones it releases heat wow now let me explain to you not all fat generates heat so the new science of the metabolism tells us broadly speaking there's two color two kinds of fat in our body there's white fat which is jiggly. The white fat that's under the skin, meaning close to the skin, we call it subcutaneous. That's the stuff you see under your arm, under your chin.
That's the muffin top, all right, around your thighs and your butt. That's the stuff that most people don't like, want to get rid of. And I have no problem with it. That's a good thing.
If you feel good by streamlining your body, go for it. That's an important thing. And too much of it is also bad for you. But the other thing that's really important is that another kind of jiggly fat is actually packed inside your body. That's the visceral fat we were talking about earlier.
Now, visceral fat doesn't care if you have a big size body, like a weightlifter in the Olympics, or a thin body, like a javelin thrower in the Olympics. It can grow inside. And that fat is sort of like the peanuts for packing that we talked about, except when it starts to grow excessively, it goes from being a packing peanuts into turning into a baseball glove.
that wraps around your organs and chokes your organs. And it can happen whether you're apparently thin or you obviously, if you actually have excess weight. All right, that's white fat. Both not so good for you. Visceral fat, deadly.
So both the subcutaneous fat and the visceral fat are white fat. Correct. Got it.
Right. Now the other kind of fat that's not white fat, the other kind, it's called brown fat. You know, you're starting to see and hear about brown fat, you know, and you see it online, you see some advertising for it, you know, a lot of people in the weightlifting world and bodybuilding world talk about brown fat.
I'm not coming from that sector. I'm coming at this really as a scientist and a doctor. And let me tell you something about brown fat.
It's absolutely fascinating because only recently have we discovered that humans have not just a little brown fat, but a lot of brown fat. And brown fat is different. than white fat because it's not jiggly. It's not lumpy, bumpy, jiggly.
It's not under your arm. And it's definitely not subcutaneous. You can't see it. It's not under the skin. Brown fat is paper thin, wafer thin.
So think about it. Fat is thin? Wait a minute. That seems to be a contradiction in terms. But yeah, brown fat are thin sheets.
And it's not close to the skin. We can't see it. It's close to the bone. All right?
It's deep. And it actually is plastered around our neck. plastered underneath our breastbone, around like a girdle around our chest under our arms, a little bit in the back, a little bit in your belly scattered.
Okay. And that fat has space heater function. Wow.
It's like a nuclear plant that can fire up when it's stimulated in order to burn energy. So it really actually activates your metabolism. And as it does that, it needs fuel, right?
The space heater needs power. It needs gas. It needs to get fuel.
Where does it draw the fuel? Where does brown fat draw the fuel from? Brown fat draws its fuel to burn from white fat.
So brown fat is good fat that can fight white fat. when it's bad fat, fat versus fat. Another totally interesting thing that you can actually think about fighting fat with fat. It's like a civil war happening in your own body.
Yeah, exactly. Except that you basically, they all started out being friends and all started out creating kind of a peaceful society. Yeah.
Well, they should, I mean, ideally, we'll return to that. So how do we then, you've mentioned what brown fat does and you mentioned where it tends to. uh, habitat in the body, how do we, how do we stoke that fire and how do we encourage its proliferation if it's so good for us? Can we even do that? Yeah.
Well, look, I want to tell you a little story about how brown fat in humans was discovered because it's so fascinating. I think that there's so much to be learned about the origin stories and the history of things, because it just gives us a better appreciation that this isn't just a trend or fad. This is something real that was discovered over time.
Okay. So in the, um, 1700s. There was a naturalist, you know, kind of somebody who studies nature named Conrad Gessner.
He lives in Switzerland and he was really interested in understanding animals and the anatomy of animals. So he was actually taking a look at a rodent that lived in the Swiss mountains that would hibernate and he would catch one. and dissect it. And, you know, like they do in the old school days, they would draw the organs.
And he found one organ that was between the shoulder blades, and he didn't know what it was. Brown colored, but didn't look like anything else that was out there. Well, fast forward, actually, a professor at UCLA took a look at that, I mean, over time, and started to really, we had, there were more sophisticated lab tools and said, you know what, that brown thing actually is made out of fat. And the idea of this is that they thought maybe it was something only in hibernating animals. So then they started to find it in bats and other kind of animals that actually hibernate.
And they said, well, I wonder if it's in humans. Fast forward a little bit further, they found it in babies, human babies. You know where they found it in human babies? Just like in this rodent in Switzerland, they found it between the shoulder blades. When babies are born, there's a little lump of brown fat that actually is there.
Wow. Now. What did they figure out that brown fat did in hibernating animals is that when the animals are surviving over the winter, they need a space heater. So brown fat fires up and keeps them warm. All right.
Now, what about human babies? Why do we have that? Is it a relic of evolution?
You know, look, babies are born in delivery suites. We can put them into incubators. You know, they're in warm homes.
Why do we need them? So the idea that was originally thought is, you know, it's just maybe vestigial, like an appendix. All right. Which we know now it actually has a function because it actually harbors gut microbiome. Right.
All right. So you don't want to be, or your tonsils, right? Like people used to say, let's whip out the tonsils, whip out the appendix. No, no, no. Like that's, they're actually formed, they're actually important components of our body.
All right. So brown fat in babies. Is it vestigial?
No. Actually, it serves a function. And what they've found is that, and they thought, well, maybe, maybe when the babies grow up, the brown fat just goes away, just kind of melts away.
Turns out that researchers in Boston were once looking at a woman who came in with a tumor in her chest and they did a biopsy, looked at the biopsy and it was made out of fat. Okay. And in fact, it was called a hibernoma because it resembled the hibernating animal's mass organ. Wow.
Okay. Oma meaning tumor. And it was a malignant.
All right. But what they thought they was really interesting is that when they scanned it using a PET scan, which captures metabolic energy, in other words, what you deem to generate heat, this baby in this tumor, this little tumor, hibernoma, this brown fat tumor lit up like a nuclear engine. Wow.
Okay. And it was only because we had PET scannings at that time that it could actually even be figured out. Hmm. So.
The researcher that did this in Boston, Ronald Kahn, actually went back and said, I wonder if this signal... that exists in other pet scans, metabolic scans in other people. So he went back and dug up thousands of other scans that were done and found, yeah, actually, there are people that are showing this brown fat throughout their chest. And we just missed it. Wow.
Like it was there, but we weren't looking for it. So we just kind of ignored the signal. But not everybody had it.
So what he then did is he said, went back and said, you know what? It was in hibernating animals that they saw it way back when, in the old days. right? Conrad Gessner.
So he said, let's go back and match the PET scans with the temperature of the day in which the scan was taken. So we went back to the meteorological record and found every time a patient had a PET scan that shown brown fat in the body, it was on a cold day in the wintertime and on warm weather days, it was cooler. So this space heating fat function that lives in a adults, as well as babies, as well as hibernating animals, truly has a physiological function to help generate heat.
It is a space heater. Wow. So much of your attention is focused on adding in.
You really want the audience to add in and the readers to add in. And I'm curious about that from your perspective of how you arrive there and how much does the balance come in terms of adding in? Versus as you were talking earlier with artificial sweeteners in the gut microbiome, that there's certain foods that just by taking them out, we allow the body to do what it does naturally.
How do you think about that balance? Yeah. Well, look, first of all, I'm like most people, I think.
When you tell me not to do something, my brain goes, well, maybe I'll do it one more time. Maybe I'll try it. And so there's a lot of human nature to.
how we respond when somebody says something to take something away from you. And human nature abhors deprivation. And so one of the things is, you know, I think most of us like to have our quote cake and eat it too.
And so I always felt when I was, you know, taking care of patients and trying to counsel them on things, rather than tell them to remove things from their diet, because that's really easy to do. And there's plenty of people out there, you know, scolding people, you know, fear, guilt, and shame is sort of like the building blocks of traditional counseling about nutrition, you know, and makes you feel bad, actually, when somebody tells you, you know, like you're a bad person for eating junky food. What I try to do is empower people, because I think people love to feel justified in what they love, like, and so in my book, I read about 200 foods that all activate the body's health defenses. And I used to say, I dare you to find in this 200 foods, something like that. I dare you to find, review this foods and tell me that there's nothing that you like.
And most people actually find something in 200 foods that they actually like. And I say, well, look, start with this because what you like is already good for you. So you're already way ahead of the game. And if you can start and keep on adding things that you like and just understand, this is that education knowledge piece. What you like is good for you.
Then you can love your food and love your health at exactly the same time. And then this whole idea of anti-deprivation is that if you spend more time thinking about what to add to your body that's good for you, you'll spend less time thinking about the bad stuff and more good things in your body kind of push out room for bad things. And if you spend most of your time fortifying your body's health defenses, those five health defenses, angiogenesis, stem cells, microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity with foods, honestly, every now and then you're going to fall off the wagon. You can eat something you really like, you really want to, or everybody's eating it around you, and it's not that good for you, that's all right.
Your body's got you covered. Your health defenses are there as a shield. So again, I think that there's just a healthier way to navigate through your life.
These strict diets don't work for a long time. They're unsustainable. So I'm all about how do you actually get people to feel like they're in control and what they like to do already is actually good for them.
That's a great explanation. You're crowding out the quote-unquote bad. I mean, there really is no bad because the beautiful thing about it is that there's this term that's coming out now more with blood sugar and continuous glucose monitors.
And the idea is metabolic flexibility, that when you have a diet that is maintaining a healthy blood sugar on an average basis, then… You go somewhere, you want to enjoy something, you enjoy that thing. You're not having the stress of this thing is going to completely throw me off because your foundation is so healthy, so resilient that you can enjoy some of these things because food is not just about fueling our body and avoiding disease. It's all about the joy, social aspects, breaking bread together, so to speak.
And that adds a lot to life, including severely reducing. stress. And I find that the healthier that I become with the foundation and having a ton of plant foods inside of my diet by volume, I would still say most of the calories by calorie, it's still probably a little bit heavily reliant on the healthiest quality animal foods that I can find, wild caught fish, grass fed steak, things like that, that'll throw in.
But by volume, it's still plants. When I have that base, I also have less desire for these other things. So instead of eating the whole croissant.
I was in Mexico city recently and we came by an incredible bakery. I just wanted a little taste. I wanted to get the idea of it.
I had a little bit and I was like, that's cool because I never feel deprived. I never feel that I have to use willpower to say that I can't eat something or that it's bad for me. No, this is something that I can enjoy.
I get the point and then I can move on from there. Yeah. You know, I, I, I, I know there's this, you know, Japanese saying Harahachi Bunmi that basically says just eat 80%, uh, and then leave, you know, like like quit the clean play club and don't eat you know and just eat 80 of what your body would want i have another which i think is really healthy it's kind of like your own way to actually have caloric restriction which we know scientifically is good for you but i have another story to tell you um please i i traveled to asia after college and i was in china in beijing and uh this is you know soon after china not too long after china opened up for for tourism.
So, you know, this is many decades ago. And I went to visit the Summer Palace. And I've been back a few times. Obviously, this is way before the pandemic. And you can actually visit the Summer Palace where the Dowager Empress lived.
And basically, this royalty of China basically is fed by imperial chefs. And it was a restaurant. So I was honored to be able to dine there. And they wanted to serve an imperial meal to show you what it was like back then. So I'll tell you, most of it was plant-based, but they had 30 different types of dishes that came out in a dinner.
30, okay? And there's no way you can eat 30 dishes, right? I mean, think about it.
You go to like a steakhouse, there's no way you're going to eat 30 meals. Or you go to a vegetarian restaurant, you're still not going to eat 30 meals. So what I learned that never left my mind was that food is pleasurable.
And the way that- The approach was not to put a lot on the plate, have a lot of different variety to really be able to stimulate the taste buds, get the enjoyment of the food, make people feel like they could indulge and enjoy their meal. And the Dowager Empress would just eat with the chopsticks, just take one bite out of each plate. OK, and just get a sampling. And so that's what I realized when you're talking about the croissant. I, it brought that back, my memory back to me, you know, like you don't have to have the whole hog of whatever it is they're serving.
You can actually satisfy your indulgence by having a taste of it, savoring it, like really try to enjoy it. And that way, you know, if you, and if it gives a little bit of time, you don't, it's not going to make you want to go back and just pig down on the whole thing. Like learn how to enjoy the taste of something allows you to experience more.
without having to stuff yourself. It's well said. And I think for a lot of people who are listening here, you know, just like you gave the example about the broccoli and the broccoli sprouts, they know food is powerful and we're all creatures of habit.
We get into buying the same sort of five, you know, vegetables that everybody ends up having corn, potatoes, you know, all those classic examples, tomatoes, which obviously have a lot of healthy properties as you highlight inside of your book. But when we talk about variety and getting inspired, that's what I really love about what you guys are doing with your course and kind of extending out the book is you're giving even more inspiration, more education so that people can get excited about wanting to go try something new so that you go into Whole Foods, you go into Trader Joe's, you go into your local supermarket, wherever it is, or shopping online. And you're like, wow, I'm actually going to pick out this other food that I kind of overlooked. You know, what's an example of one of those things that isn't?
underrated food, something that people overlook and might not have as part of their normal routine, but can have such a profound effect if they start including it into their diet. Yeah, I'll tell you a great one. Kiwis, right?
So these sort of, I don't know, baseball-shaped, little smaller baseball, furry little brown things. You cut them open, they're beautiful and green with seeds, starbursts on the inside. I didn't used to, I always liked kiwi, but I'd never really ate them very much.
But I started doing the research on them, and kiwi is pretty amazing. First of all, it's a great source of vitamin C and fiber. And the vitamin C actually has tremendous antioxidant effect and it can protect your DNA. And studies have been shown that actually if you eat one kiwi a day, it'll protect your DNA against damage by about 60%.
If you ate three kiwis, it would actually help your body build any damaged DNA back by about 60%. And so here's something simple that you can peel, cut up, chop it into a yogurt or just eat plain. It's delicious.
You can put it into a smoothie. that actually has this amazing ability to actually protect your genetic material. Like, you know, that's so fundamental, and it tastes great, and not too sweet, and it's got a little citrusy flavor. Then the other thing that's great about kiwi is that it's packed with fiber. Now, fiber is basically, a kiwi is essentially a prebiotic food.
Its fiber feeds our gut microbiome. And studies have shown, there's a study done in Singapore that showed that just eating a kiwi, even one kiwi, overnight, can help you get rid of the bacteria that are in the fruit. will start to change your gut microbiome, favoring more healthy species of bacteria. And so, you know, like I always tell people, like, if I tell you something like that and you try a kiwi, you know, you can't unlearn what I just told you. Every time you see the kiwi, you're going to say, you know what, I know there's something good about it.
And then if you remember what that is, that's really what I try to do with my course is really try to teach people how to make it second nature to make great choices. and to be enthusiastic about it. I think most people are kind of intimidated by, this is kind of like the whole philosophy behind my course. People are intimidated by diets, right?
To begin with, they're a little, yeah, maybe I didn't do so good in my life. I should do better. It's always people go into a diet in order to try to get better.
And what I try to shift that paradigm is, look, if you're serious about getting healthy, and this is the time you want to actually do it. It's not that difficult. You just kind of dive in, engage.
You do want to be awake. You need to be alert. And you got to realize it's not about somebody feeding you a super food or a super supplement and that's all you got to take every day. You know, it's really about understanding more about you, self-knowledge about how your own body works, right?
Like at some point, we all figured out how our eyes work and how our lungs work and how our prostate works and our uterus. Figure this out. This is like the cutting edge science. You want evidence. You want food as medicine.
And you want to know that it's not about memorizing food. It's about memorizing how your body actually works. And then recognizing our bodies actually work really well to complement certain foods. And so what does a tomato do?
Well, tomato can play its lycopene. What does lycopene do? Actually protects our prostate. Man, that's a really good thing. Also protects our breasts.
That's a really great thing. You don't need to remember all the chemicals. You just need to remember. that that's the way to do it.
And then I try to get people to be passionate about cooking because, you know, one of the antidotes to unhealthy eating is really trying to get back into the kitchen and preparing your own meals. You don't have to be a fancy chef. You don't even have to have a fancy palate.
You know, if you can fry an egg, you can actually cook healthy food. And that's what I try to do is to try to make people feel like, lower your guard. It's not a problem. You know, you can actually learn how to do this and, you know.
there's nothing more satisfying to me than to actually go out and, you know, find some great looking, healthy, fresh foods, figure out how to cook them and taste it myself. Like, it's like, you know, like back in woodshop when you're in junior high school and you created your own toolbox, like, man, that's really cool. I made that.
And that's how I want to get people to feel excited about, about food as medicine is this is not hard. It is not a burden. It's not an onus.
This is something that you can do. You can make for yourself. It's powerful because, you know, we started off this interview by talking about how, again, well-meaning, well-intentioned researchers, practitioners, you know, people that we look to as the voice of authority in a lot of key areas. Sometimes it's not the absence of evidence. It's just the lack of awareness of the evidence that's there.
But also, we as individuals call us consumers, people that are in charge of our own health, that are just trying to live a happy life. take care of our families. We have to take on some of that burden.
I think in a way we have, and there's a lot of layers to this, but we expect a little bit too much from are doctors. We expect a little bit too much from the healthcare community. They're just doing their best, right?
They're just doing their best that they can. So we have to remember that, you know, where we need help and thank the Lord for all the incredible medicines, many of which you've been a part of, you know, developing that have given us healthier lives and extending lives as well too. But on a day-to-day basis, us getting educated is so key and central because if you don't know or care enough, then...
you become a victim of sort of the marketing. And the marketing could be in the health world, in the wellness world, or the marketing could be towards big food companies. Again, all primarily well-intentioned.
We used to be a society that was dying of not enough food. And that's where a lot of that marketing comes from. But now we're dying of having too much food and too much of especially the wrong foods that are there, the ultra processed foods. So empowering yourself, empowering yourself with that knowledge.
It actually is the thing that makes the difference. What would you say would be like five tips that you could share with the audience on how people can improve their diet quality? Yeah, happy to give you the five tips.
But let me kind of frame this by saying there is so much negativity associated with food. I'm coming at this from a completely different perspective. I would say negativity was out there and also misperceptions and lack of accurate information.
So I like to kind of turn the entire formula around and come at this with how do we not fear our food, number one, and number two, how do we actually use the facts and the science to really be able to inform how we can embrace food instead. And, you know, this has to do with my background as a physician, as a scientist, and as somebody who's actually been involved with biotechnology and developing cancer treatments and diabetes treatments and treatments for blindness for almost 30 years. The reality is, is that food, in fact, is really one of the most powerful health care interventions that we can do for ourselves.
And five tips I will give you right up front that could be really useful is, and this is sort of, you know, really across the board for anyone who has to eat, which is everyone, I would give you the five general principles. Number one, stay hydrated, because dehydration actually makes everything in your body work harder. And so if you want your food to work for you, You actually want to make sure your body has enough water content to be able to keep all those metabolic processes functioning really well. Number two, I would say eat what you like, but make sure that most of what you eat and the priority of where your head goes when you're choosing something, making good choices, really falls in the category of what we call plant-based foods, which is pretty broad. I mean, there are hundreds of foods that are plant-based and doesn't have to be broccoli and kale.
It could be beans, it could be mushrooms, it could be onions, it could be garlic, all the things that you think hark back to those traditional delicious recipes that came from the grandmothers of the Mediterranean, whether it's Italy or Greece or Spain or France or Asia, whether it's Japan or China or Thailand. I mean, all those delicious things that you might see in a menu. I want people to think about healthy eating as when you look at a menu or when you actually are shopping. Look for the things in the produce section first, or look for the things that actually have vegetables in them. They don't have to be the only thing.
But if you use that as a kind of a filter, you're going to be doing something really good for you. That's the second thing. Third, I would say, to the extent possible, avoid ultra-processed foods. And we all have things that we like, that we grew up with, that are snacky type of foods.
And we all have lives that take us in different places in our communities or around the world even. And we can't always get... the healthiest food.
But what I want to kind of like emphasize is if you can cut down, if not cut out ultra processed foods, things that actually have lots of artificial preservatives, artificial colorings, artificial flavorings, you know, those are the things that actually taste pretty good. And we're kind of addicted to from marketing from our childhood. So you've got, we've got legitimate reasons why we like these things because they taste pretty good. If you can cut down, if not cut out those things, that's actually going to tip.
your dietary pattern in your favor. The other thing that I would actually say that would be really helpful is to try to avoid foods with added sugars whenever you can. This is your regular soda. This is actually even your diet soda, which actually has artificial sweeteners added that mess up your gut health and your gut microbiome and actually throw your metabolism off kilter.
But stay away from added sugar because we can get plenty of sugar from the regular foods we eat. But if you start stuffing candy bars, you know the... Habit we'd had as kids, right?
Halloween, get that pillow and stuff it like a gunny sack and go out there and peg out all night long. Look, that's a lot of artificial sugar. And even as adults, we wind up actually snacking that way unconsciously and it actually overloads our metabolism. That's a fourth thing.
And the fifth thing I would actually say is that I want to come back to beverages for a second. You know, besides water, there's two other beverages that I think are go-tos for health. And one is tea.
It could be green tea. It could be oolong tea. It could be black tea. And the other one is coffee. Remarkably, you know, water, tea, and coffee are both good for you.
are the go-tos for beverage and health. And what you add to them can make a big difference. But those are five general rules that I think will take anybody health towards a path of health.
And by the way, you'll notice that I didn't give any absolutes and I didn't say things that are really unreasonable. So that's probably a good place to start this conversation. Yeah, I love that.
And I would imagine that the five tips that you shared probably go in line with what you would recommend for somebody as far as a dietary pattern to follow for longevity. So I guess outside of making sure you're consuming a lot of plants, drinking plenty of water, limiting ultra processed foods, what are a few other like staples that you think people should include within like a dietary pattern if they want to increase their longevity? Right.
Okay. So longevity means not only having more birthdays, but also having good quality of life along the way, right? So we want a good, healthy lifespan, not just a long. lifespan.
If you're gorked out at 100 years old or you are blind 100 years old, that would not be worth it. So I think the key to longevity, and this is such an important and popular topic, I think, and it's really driven by science. There's a lot of really exciting things about longevity.
I want to make sure people don't forget that we want to actually be able to enjoy our lives even as we live longer. Nobody wants to add more miserable years to their life. So having said that... What are the things that are important to us? And I'm going to give you some concrete food things, but what you're going to hear me talk about is the framing.
Because I think a lot of times when we hear about nutrition or food as medicine, we hear about individual substances, individual foods, individual recommendations without getting the context. So I think context is important. How do we actually maintain good later years in our life if we want to expand them? Our brains need to work. We need good cognition.
What does that require at a minimum? Our brains need to have good... blood flow. So we need to protect our circulation.
So foods that can actually help protect our circulation, keep our circulation going, are really helpful. Research has shown there's actually a natural chemical that's found in a lot of foods called ursolic acid that actually helps our blood vessel system stay healthy so we have better blood flow. Where do you get ursolic acid? It comes in chestnuts.
It comes in fruit peel, which is found on dried fruits, which are a healthy way to actually get... a lot of dietary fiber, which feeds our gut microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria in our body. And healthy gut bacteria text messages our brain and helps us release social hormones.
So we're happy to do the things and see the people that we happen to see. And so this is sort of like a little bit of a contextual idea of some of the foods that we can eat. And the reasons why, in order to be able to have a good, long, healthy life, I think number one would be actually a good having a brain working really well.
Second one, just tell you is, you know, we want to be able to move. We want to actually, you know, you don't want to be wheelchair bound or paralyzed or so weak we're unable to be independent or as independent as we possibly can. So we need our muscles to be able to function properly. Now, muscles are built and broken down on a daily basis, which is why, you know, young kids are so active and teenagers are working out.
And, you know, why we actually try to encourage people to actually exercise is that. Use it or lose it is really absolutely true. So we want to use it. Well, in addition to just physically exercising, we need to be able to actually build our muscles.
Now, how does our body build our muscles from the time we're born all the way until our advanced ages? Use the stem cells. Now, these are not the stem cells you would get at the strip mall, injected into your knee or for your tennis elbow or your shoulder. These are stem cells we were born with.
And a lot of people don't know this, but humans do regenerate. We're actually formed with stem cells when our mom's egg met our dad's sperm. And we were just a ball of cells, all stem cells.
And these stem cells that you will want from your jaw and our face and our ears and our livers and our hearts. And we have a bunch of leftover when we're born, about 70 million leftover cells. They're packed away.
kind of like on the shelves of Home Depot, you know, extra cans of paint. You can draw on them when you need to. And these stem cells actually will participate in building our muscle over time. So what are some of the foods that actually help us build, help our stem cells come out so they can help to regenerate things?
Well, it turns out that extra virgin olive oil turns out to be really helpful for our stem cells. It protects our stem cells as we age. And not surprisingly, in the blue zones, those parts of the world where people live really to healthy, ripe old ages, over 100, for example, centenarians, they tend to eat olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, which, by the way, comes from a plant. It's a plant-based healthy fat. Number two, there's another fat that you should know about that's found associated with protein.
That's in seafood, and that's omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3s also help our stem cells regenerate. They prompt our body to stay renewed.
which is important for aging. Where do you get omega-3s? Well, besides salmon and anchovies and mackerel and sardines, you hear about that a lot.
It turns out many, many, many different kinds of seafoods and even seaweeds, actually edible seaweeds actually have omega-3s. So one of the things that I write about in my new book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, is leaning into that seafood section of the grocery store, which... Some people already like seafood, but some people aren't familiar.
And I want to take people's apprehension away to say dive in there because there's a lot of great stuff. That's a secret to longevity as well. It turns out in many of the blue zones and in many places where people live to a ripe old age, they eat reasonable amounts of seafood regularly.
And not surprisingly, this omega-3 is found in there. Now I'm going to throw one last kind of delight and surprise that can help your stem cells. help to rebuild your brain and your heart and your muscles actually is dark chocolate.
Turns out chocolate's a candy. Okay. It's a confection, but to make dark chocolate, you have high amounts, 70%, 80%, 90% cacao.
Cacao is actually from a seed pod, the cacao plant, and that's a plant-based food. It turns out there's natural chemicals, bioactives in cacao made in dark chocolate at high concentrations. that help our stem cells come out and rebuild our muscles, our circulation, many other parts that need to be renewed. And as we get older, one of the things we want to do is we want to continuously be renewed rather than broken down. These are some of the ways that we think about diet and longevity.
Those are some great tips and some great foods. As you were naming those foods, I was like, yep, definitely eat that. Yep, definitely eat that.
And it just seems like it's pretty consistent too with the Mediterranean dietary pattern, right? Would you say that that's pretty accurate? Absolutely.
And here's the thing that I think is really important to understand about the Mediterranean diet. As you said, it's a pattern. It's not a single recipe or a single commercial package. The Mediterranean is not just Italy and Greece and Spain, which people can pick out in two seconds.
But in fact, it's made up of like 27 different countries that all surround the Mediterranean Sea. And most people don't realize this, but Tunisia and Israel, Croatia are all Mediterranean countries. And what that means is that there's a really rich diversity of traditional foods that people have enjoyed.
So, you know, for people that say, well, you know, I'm not really into Italian food or I'm not really, I don't know, wouldn't be into Italian food. But, you know, some people are very picky with their food. What I say is that if you want to look at Mediterranean pattern, you have to appreciate this is more than 20 different countries that have something to offer for you.
And similarly, Mediterranean is one pattern of healthy eating. But the other pattern of healthy eating is in Asia, because Asians live, there's a long pattern of longevity, it's traditional patterns, lots of seafood, lots of plant-based foods. And here's the cool thing, Doug, is that the Mediterranean and Asia.
If you think about restaurant menus, it might look like there couldn't be more differences, but then two different types of cuisine. But in fact, the pattern of eating and the things that are in them could not be more connected. Because 2,000 years ago, there was something called the Silk Road.
And it was a series of dusty trails that linked China to the Mediterranean. And the traders that did trade silk, but many other things as well, also exchange their ingredients and recipes. And so when you want to think about healthy patterns of eating, please do think about Mediterranean eating and realize that Mediterranean is much more than Italian food.
It's a lot of different foods. But now I want you to actually... Open this up to a kaleidoscope of cuisine that includes Asia and the interconnections between Mediterranean Asia. And I actually, in my new book, I call this Mediterranean because it really is something that is not new, but thousands of years old. And now it's time for us to kind of really go back and tap that well of culinary genius that's always existed.
And the stuff tastes great, too. What myth around eating for a healthy heart most annoys you? You know, as somebody who studies blood vessels and circulation, which is what the heart is all about, the thing that really irritates me is when people think that just simply working out, whether it's jogging, going to the gym, lifting, that that'll actually guarantee that you're going to be heart healthy. In fact, that's only a bit of the solution.
Oh, that's fascinating. All right. We're definitely going to talk some more about that.
Will, what are your three tips for living longer? Three tips. Number one, get good quality sleep.
I'm a doctor. I went through training. I was deprived of sleep for years.
That subtracts years off of your life. So get some good rest. Second, eat healthy.
And what that means is going to be different for every individual. But bottom line is that listen to your body because your body knows what actually is not so good for you when you feel badly. And there's a huge literature of studying what's actually good for you, mostly plant-based foods.
And we can talk more about that. And then the third thing really is to stay physically active. That doesn't mean you have to jog, swim, run a marathon. What it means is that you have to actually move.
Brilliant. I think everybody here knows that their heart is really important, right? Anyone for the last 100 years has been told about that. I think most of us, and I'm included, have never really thought about our blood vessels.
And I know that... blood vessels have been the center of your research. Can you start maybe by explaining why our blood vessels matter?
Yeah, well, you know, I'm a physician, I'm a scientist, I'm a vascular biologist, which means I study blood vessels and the cardiovascular system. And here's a little fact that most people don't know. First of all, when it comes to your heart, which is about the size of your fist, that's the best kind of surrogate measure of what it looks like in your chest. This heart, this beating muscle is connected to 60,000 miles of blood vessels that course throughout your body. 60,000 miles.
60,000 miles. Now, if you were to pull out all the blood vessels in your body and line them up end to end, you'd form a thread that would wrap around the earth twice. Now, you can imagine how important blood vessels are when they're connected to the heart this way, because your heart, every beat, every pump.
Jets out blood through these highways and byways that bring the blood, the nourishment, the oxygen you breathe, all the growth factors to every cell in every organ of your body. I've suddenly discovered that there's 60,000 miles of blood vessel inside me, which is amazing. Wraps around the earth twice. Not something to try at home, I guess.
How does it link then from these blood vessels to actually impacting? you know, our heart health, which I think is the thing we think about. What's going on and how does that link? Yeah, well, you know, I'm sort of trying to give people a view that they may not have thought about, right? Because most people think of the heart, you go jogging, you hear the lub dub in the background, the soundtrack of your heart beating.
But here's something most people don't know, is that when we were all in our mother's womb forming, one of the first organs that we formed is in your brain. It's in your liver, it's in your bones, it's actually your heart and your circulatory system. And they all form pretty much at the same time. And they form with these things called stem cells. So imagine just dropping a group of marbles on the ground and just, and they randomly kind of fall on the carpet, they roll around and they don't look like anything.
Those are your stem cells that say day five, day seven after conception, when dad's sperm met mom's egg. Over the course of the next weeks, Those marbles coalesce together and they begin to organize themselves to form these channels. They call them first lakes, blood lakes, before they form tributaries, before they form streams.
And that's basically, at the end of the day, they're left with one additional area, which is the heart, that is special because it actually has muscles, special muscles that will actually pump, and its own electrical system. And so basically... When you think about how your heart and your blood vessels are actually connected together, they were formed together at the very beginning, all right?
So what happens to your heart? will impact your blood vessels, your circulation, and therefore your organs. And what happens to your blood vessels actually impacts the heart as well.
So if you have very stiff blood vessels, now blood vessels are actually very elastic. So basically when your heart pumps, they will stretch to accommodate the blood. All right. Because the normal capillary, the smallest blood vessel at the very, like just getting into your organs to feed your cells, that's the thinness of a human hair.
That's a human capillary. Now, to jet blood through that, in fact, that diameter of that blood vessels is smaller than a single blood cell. So even for a healthy blood cell to get through that end channel, it has to stretch to allow things through. Oh, wow. So everything I think about is like these tiny little elastic things that are opening and closing to squeeze through, like, literally my blood cells.
That's right. And without my blood cells, my organs are in trouble. Is that right? Without your blood cells pumping through, delivering those. oxygen-carrying, oxygen-rich red blood cells very quickly.
And I'm talking about within seconds. Your organs start feeling starved. Think about getting choked.
You can't breathe. All right. And then soon it turns blue, just like you would be blue in the face. And shortly after that, your organs stop functioning properly.
And when they actually stop functioning properly, they start to malfunction. The ultimate malfunction whether it's in the liver, whether it's your kidney, whether it's your brain. I mean, the ultimate brain malfunction is you have a stroke. And this, by the way, everything I'm talking about in your organs also can happen to your heart.
So when there's a malfunction of your heart, because it's not getting enough blood flow, it can also happen. The heart has its own circulation, which is pretty amazing. Not surprising, but amazing. When the heart's own circulation gets clogged or too stiff, and it blocks blood flow, then you have a heart attack. And so the things that we hear about, heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, these are all problems of that giant system, that 60,000 mile system that formed, was one of the first organs to form in your mom's womb.
And so I need this stretchiness in order to deliver down these capillaries. And I think we've all maybe heard a little bit about this idea of it being blocked. How does that, is that the same as not being stretchy? Or is that actually something different, Will?
Right. Well, think about this. So think about a big sock that you put it in your foot through, right? So the sock has to stretch like the stock you pull out of a drawer is actually pretty thin.
It looks too thin for your leg to go through, but because it's stretchy, you can actually put your foot and then your ankle all the way through it, right? Yep, I'm familiar. I fought with my daughter this morning to do exactly that, as I seem to end up doing many mornings, because it turns out that... It's a lot easier to put your foot through the sock when the other person is helping rather than pulling it in the other direction. So I understand the analogy.
Now, when that sock is no longer stretchy, it's stiff. Imagine spraying concrete around that sock or maybe even pouring concrete into the sock. OK, and and now try to put your foot through it. It's not going to go through very easily. Right.
It's stiff. There's no stretchiness. And that's actually what happens as we naturally get. older, and particularly when we're eating what is the so-called Western diet. We can talk about that in more detail.
But we eat a diet that's not so good for our circulation. What happens is that a blood vessel, let me just kind of give you a little more detail about the stretch. The reason a blood vessel can stretch has to do with how it's designed.
A blood vessel has got different aspects of its wall. Cut a blood vessel in half and look at its cross-section. And you'll see there's a thin lining on the outside. There's a little muscle beyond that, so the muscle can allow it to stretch. And on the inside, there's a lining of cells, very special cells called endothelial cells.
Endo, because they're on the inside. Endothelial cells, these are the liner cells of a blood vessel. So think about saran wrap.
That's how thin it is. Okay, a lining inside of your blood vessel. Cling film for those of us in the UK. Yep, clear film. That, by the way, so basically that's the blood vessel.
The muscle helps it stretch. The wall helps it stretch. The clear sheet on the inside, that is a special layer. That layer is slippery. It's like the surface of an ice skating rink that's been polished and buffed before the first skaters get on it.
And the reason that endothelial slippery layer is so important is because blood's... cells slide right along it. They don't stick. Got it. So I'm sort of thinking now, but it's like you're in a tunnel, but all the walls are covered in like a bit like Teflon, I guess, on my pans or something, right?
Like something very nonstick. Is that a way to think about this? We'll have to talk about the Teflon in your pan from a healthy eating perspective. But yes, that's exactly what it is.
And I use the idea of an ice skating rink because many people have, you know, spent a winter holiday looking. It could be outdoors. It could be in sort of as a skating rink or just think about the Olympics, right? So when the ice is fresh and ready for the first, the day's first skaters, it is slick.
It is smooth. And everything just starts at one end and goes all the way to the other end. Yeah.
Take off your sweater and throw it on the ice and it'll go all the way across the rink, right? Now, as long as that lining is perfectly smooth, everything will glide right along. Now, what happens? when you actually smoke a cigarette, okay?
The nicotine, the chemicals, the harsh chemicals, it damages that Teflon layer. It damages that liner, that transparent liner. Going back to the ice skating rink analogy, it would be like if you took a rake and you just raked the ice and scuffed it up.
Now try to throw a sweater on it. It's just going to stick right there. It won't slide.
And so that roughening up... of the inner lining can actually make blood cells clot, stick and form a clot. That is the beginning of the end.
When I say the beginning of the end, that starts to narrow the blood vessel. The blood vessel starts to get stiffer. You don't actually have that stretchiness.
Plaques, fat can actually build on the inside of the wall. And what is a plaque, Will? A plaque is a thickening.
You know, like a plaque on your teeth is anything, any kind of a thing that builds up on your teeth, right? So a plaque in a blood vessel is similar to what you would find in your teeth, but it's on the inside layer. And what it does is it makes it stickier, it makes it narrower, it makes it stiffer. All the things you don't want in a healthy blood vessel.
That makes sense. And I can see if you're trying to deliver, if I'm trying to deliver anything through this and it's starting to get more and more constricted, I mean, it doesn't sound sort of obvious to a layman, right? It doesn't sound good.
If I try to push something through and the pipe is getting more and more, more furred up. So is there a is there, you know, I have a toothbrush for my teeth, right, for this situation with plaque. Is there is there a is there a toothbrush in this situation or is this a sort of one way direction?
This is just going to get worse and worse as we get older and we we fur up these blood vessels. Well, well, this is actually the most exciting thing. When I went to medical school, we thought it was a one way street.
Meaning once you start narrowing and stiffening the blood vessels, the only way you could do it, we used to think about it like a clogged toilet, right? Like we've all experienced that. Toilet is supposed to flush. All of a sudden, it's not flushing anymore.
It backs up. Terrible. What do you have to do? You actually have to like plunge it.
Call the plumber. Or you have to snake something down it to clear it, right? Yeah. And so that's what I was taught when I was in medical school. You got to call the heart.
plumber, the cardiologist, the interventional cardiologist, who basically will stick a roto router, which is like a coil in your groin, snake it up through the blood vessels in your groin into the blood vessels in your heart, and literally roto router, like basically drill out that clog to clear the toilet. So it is a bit like brushing your teeth. Fancy technology, but...
Exactly. Well, and then of course, it would clog back up. And so what they then...
invented in the medical world are stents, which are literally little Teflon or metal coated stents that would strut the blood vessel open, right? So sort of like a thin, like think about Mission Impossible. You get this little thin thing, you put it into the blood vessel and then boom, it opens up. And now it's actually stenting open, forcing open the blood vessel. Now.
That sounds good because you solve the immediate problem of the lack of blood flow, but actually gets out what? That actually also damages the natural elasticity, stretchiness of the blood vessels. So now you've got basically an iron tube stuck inside your blood vessels.
That's not normal and that's not good. So then we developed statins, which are drugs aimed at actually lowering the amount of stuff that could clog. fatty deposits that can clog the plaque on the walls.
Statins actually work pretty well. They work by metabolically lowering the amount of cholesterol and other lipids, fatty things that float around in your blood. If you've ever cooked bacon, You know that, you know, after the raw bacon starts frying up and the wonderful bacon-y smell is in the air and you take the bacon out, you know that you're left with a pan of grease, right?
Now you're going off eating your brunch or what have you. You come back to the pan after breakfast and what do you actually have? You've got this congealed mess.
Imagine that congealed, white, creamy, thick stuff, the bacon grease. Imagine that is actually sluicing through your... blood.
Doesn't sound good, right? Nobody's going to suggest that this sounds like a good thing to be going on inside you. No.
And that's what statins were designed to do, is to sort of try to cut through that grease like a detergent and lower the levels in your blood. Sounds like a good idea. But here's the problem. Statins, which are capable of actually preventing the buildup to some extent, have a lot of side effects, actually.
I mean, it's a billion-dollar blockbuster area of pharmaceuticals, and many, many people are on them. But, you know, statins can damage your muscles, can damage your kidney, can damage your liver. There's all kinds of things.
Every drug has an effect and the potential for a side effect or an unwanted effect. So not particularly a great solution and, frankly, not a you know, people shouldn't take medicine. Look, I'm a doctor. I was trained.
to write prescriptions. But my own practice, my own mindset of how to help a patient is really to try, if you are forced to give somebody a prescription, my goal has always been to figure out from the beginning when you're going to take the person off the prescription so they no longer need the drug. Now you need to find a different solution.
And so this is different than writing a prescription and putting somebody on a drug for the rest of their life, right? Like how many of us know people like that, or even doctors who actually think that way. My view is that medicines can be life-saving, but if you put somebody on a medicine, the goal, ideally, is to figure out how you're going from the beginning, when you're going to take them off it. So now research actually has then discovered that there are foods and lifestyle issues that can actually reverse all the things that damage the elasticity, the flow that can block your circulation.
I mean, we started at the very beginning, right? We just started saying, drop those marbles, they're stem cells, they haven't formed, and then they form and they work perfectly when you're a baby. And over the course of your life, over age, during aging, and over the course of maybe less than salutary dietary habits, you're eating foods that are not so good for your circulation, you get the clogging, gets a cigarette smoke, damages that smooth ice, and now it's sticky.
All right. You know, can we avoid stents? I think we can. Can we use drugs? Yeah, I think we can.
But can we use diet and lifestyle to reverse that clogging? That, prevent and reverse, that is actually what's remarkable because science has now discovered it's possible to not rely on the drugs or the hardware that I was taught, that doctors, the medical community has to use. about the impact of the gut microbiome and how that can be tied to body fat. And specific to that one particular organism that is starting to, we're starting to hear more about acromantia. Can we talk about the interplay between the gut microbiome and our metabolism and this very important, you know, organism that many people may be unfamiliar with?
Okay. Everyone's probably by now heard about gut health and thought about gut health. If this isn't something that you've heard about.
Ask a friend or a family member, they'll start rambling on about everything about it. Okay. Here's the thing.
Gut health in scientific terms and medical terms relates to, relates a lot, refers to, you know, our gut microbiome. And our gut microbiome is really the bacteria that is mostly in the last part of our gut. It's an area in the colon called the cecum.
And although not all of our body's healthy bacteria is there, a lot of it is. What's a lot? 39 trillion bacteria.
That's a lot of bacteria. Our body is only made of 40 trillion cells. So we're about 50, 50 bacteria and the other 50% is human. All right. And so what we realized is, and again, I'll confess this as a bona fide MD who went through medical school, is that when I went to medical school, and you probably had the same thing, Cynthia, is that I was taught that bacteria are bad, must kill bacteria, and now must memorize all the bacteria you must kill with prescription antibiotics that are necessary in order to stay clean and healthy.
Well, it turns out that's all like a little bit missed. emphasize because most bacteria that we encounter throughout our lives are good bacteria. Almost all of them are good bacteria. And we do encounter a few bad guys.
I mean, think about it. It's like saying that the way that the medical community was trained is like, everyone's a terrorist, must kill terrorists. But in fact, actually, most people are good guys. Most people are ordinary, peace-loving citizens.
And yeah, there's a few bad actors out there. We do want to make sure that we're keeping an eye out for them, right? So it's really...
What's amazing to me is how modern science is teaching us to upend a lot of the traditional teachings that the medical community actually has been saddled with over the decades. So gut microbiome are healthy bacteria living in our gut. There's a lot of different bacteria, not only bacteria, by the way. There's also viruses.
There's also fungi. There's also another type of small organism that most people don't talk about, don't even know about, called archaea. That's another kind of... member of the gut garden that's out there, but let's not go there right now.
I'll tell you about the bacteria. We're just beginning to understand the importance of the gut microbiome. And we do know that the bacteria in our gut talks through the wall of our intestines because they're living inside our intestines. They talk to our immune system and they talk to our immune system right through the wall of the bacteria.
It's like they're... I would say it's like college roommates in a dorm with really thin walls. And basically the bacteria, which is one roommate, pounding on the wall to the roommate, basically say, hey, what kind of pizza do you want? All right. And then the roommate can hear on the other side and shouts back, I like mushroom or olives.
And basically our bacteria and our immune system talk to each other that way. And good, healthy gut bacteria give good instructions to our immune system. And this is really kind of an eye opener to realize that.
our immune system is so tightly connected. And when our gut bacteria is not healthy, not only is our immunity, our defense is down for immunity, but our inflammation, which is another part of our immune system, goes up. And the gut bacteria not only influences our immune system, it also influences our metabolism.
It influences our lipid cholesterol and lipid levels in our body, the inflammation. actually is really important to control because if we've got extra body fat, basically we've got a four, we've got, um, uh, we've got actually, um, a smoldering fire burning in our body. Okay. And it's our healthy gut bacteria that puts out that smoldering fire. Like we put out that fire fires prevented from become a wildfire.
We need good, healthy gut bacteria. And, you know, most people have not until recently paid attention to their gut. So, and we're all, we've all been through this before, you know, like when, when you're Feeling okay, and then one week you're not feeling okay, you're gassy, you're crampy, you're not regular, or you're having loose stools, and you're just not feeling that good.
You're not talking about it to people mostly, okay? That means that you don't have good gut health. And most likely, there's something going on with your gut bacteria.
We are just beginning to actually understand that we got to pay attention to that. Now, a lot of people out there say that they've got a solution. Do my stool test and get my probiotic. And what I will tell you is that we don't. understand enough about it yet to come up with a definitive solution.
However, there are certain bacteria that are very, very interesting. One of them is called acromantia mucinophila. Acromantia, A-K-K-E-R-M-A-N-C-I-S-I-A.
That's the first name, the last name, the genus and species is mucinophila. Mucinophila, because it actually likes to live in the mucus of your gut. Now I learned about acromantia mucinophila, not...
in a metabolism setting, not in a diabetes or an obesity setting, but actually in a cancer setting, because I do cancer research. A few years ago, I was with a colleague of mine, Dr. Laurent Zipfogel, who discovered in cancer patients getting immune therapy, treatments that actually activate our body's own immune system to fight the cancer, that the people who responded well, whose immune system could be coached by the treatment to go out and destroy their own cancer, people who survived, actually had acromantia. And the people who unfortunately didn't respond, meaning their immune system did not respond, couldn't be coached by the immunotherapy, lacked this one particular gut bacteria, acromantia myosinophila.
So that's really interesting. One bacteria could make the difference between whether you lived or died as a cancer patient with a particular kind of treatment. To me, like my, my... Radar went up right away like, oh my gosh, we got to figure out more about this.
And the more we actually discovered about this, so what Lauren Zipo could do, she took out the acromantia. from these responders, cancer patient survivors, and took them to the lab and gave them to lab animals that were developing cancer and gave those lab animals immunotherapy. And so they would respond if they had the acromantia from the patient. And then she gave them antibiotics to wipe out the acromantia and the cancer grew right back and killed the animals.
So just like the patients. And so this was, you know, this was, I think, 2017. And now the research has continued to evolve. Now we're finding that it's not just cancer, okay, which is not about cancer.
It's really about the immune system, our own health defenses. But another defense is really about able to tame our adipose tissue and our metabolism. People with good metabolisms have more acromantia.
People with, and this is actually a really strange observation. So I'm a scientist. So, you know, one of the important things about scientists is you can tell somebody's a real scientist when they tell you they don't know something. All right. So here's what we don't know, but what we observed.
People who are suffering from obesity actually have hardly any or no acromantia in their gut. People that are lean with good metabolisms actually have acromantia. So this is an observation that we need to pay attention to. How come one group doesn't have acromantia? Is it a cause or an effect?
What is acromantia doing? Well, it looks like acromantia may be... controlling the lipids, might be influencing inflammation, you know, really, really being helpful.
And so then the question is, how do you grow your own acromantia? Okay. Well, it turns out that there are certain foods containing polyphenols, like pomegranate juice, that contain elagitanins as the bioactive. That doesn't act directly on the bacteria, the acromantia.
It prompts your gut to secrete more mucus. There's more soil. for the acromantia to grow. So it's basically like a gardener saying, how do I put more fertilizer for my flower bed to bloom, my annuals to bloom? So pomegranate juice, Concord grape juice, cranberry juice, they all have the selagitanin.
More mucus, the more mucus there is, the better the acromantia grows. And I can tell you, I had a patient I once was treating who had cancer. She was about to get an immunotherapy. for her cancer, multiple myeloma.
And I told the oncologist, hold off for a second, because let's test her stool to see if she had acromantia. This is as a result of my knowing, you know, my work, my knowing about Law and Civil Ogl's work. And so we tested her stool. She had zero acromantia. Why?
Because her kids had had bronchitis. It went right through the house. She'd gotten some antibiotics from, you know, a walk-in clinic. And she had no acromantia. So...
I said, wait, let's grow some back. So we gave her pomegranate juice. We tried to really give her some fermented foods to really make her gut health better. We needed more mucus. We needed more gut health, more probiotics, some prebiotics, probiotics.
Then we tested her again a few weeks later and she had six times above the population, general population's worth of acromantia. So if you're missing it, I'm telling you, diet can actually grow it back, which is a wonderful thing. And when we actually gave her the...
the immunotherapy, she actually responded completely, like one of the best responders ever seen in history. So I'm telling you, this is not food versus medicine. In this case, it's food and medicine or food before medicine. And it's really about the body and the wonderful things that we can do to feed our body's health defenses, feed our body's metabolism. It's all stuff that's inside us.
Well, it makes so much sense. And I love that it's tangible. It's not an unusual thing that people have to go purchase to be able to support their gut microbiome.
Now I want to be respectful of your time, but I would love to kind of focus in on some of your favorite foods. You do a beautiful job in the book, really talking about specific foods and compounds that can be very, very beneficial for helping support metabolism. And then briefly touch on the Mediterranean, you know, kind of concept, which is so aligned.
I grew up with an Italian mother and, you know, food was savored and it took, you took long meals. There was no rushing around, but let's touch on those things. And the other piece that I want to compliment you on is that I read so many books for the podcast and sometimes there are intangible things, but you do such a nice job of describing the food item in exactly the amount that you need to consume.
So you're not wandering around saying, are you talking about a cup of something or is it a tablespoon? You're very specific about your recommendations. Yeah, no.
Well, thank you for your kind words. Look, I'm somebody who really grew up like you around really delicious food. I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where there's a lot of ethnic communities. And I went to these folk festivals where we got to sample a lot of things. Look, we all come from different places.
We all have our own origin stories in terms of every culture in the world has its own food story and food traditions. And I love that. I really respect that. And one of the things of my research, you know, I talk about that in our food ingredients, there are these compounds that might be tongue twisters for people to pronounce, lycopene, chlorogenic acid, zeaxanthin, you know, betacryptoxanthin.
I could go on and on. you know, allicin, hydroxytyrosol. They're all in the book if you want to read about them. But what's important is that they're all found in our foods. They're found in things like tomatoes and apples and pears and garlic and scallions and garlic scapes and lots of seafood as well, including the omega-3 fatty acids.
And what I try to do is sort of take away some of the mystery. Look, Mother Nature is very clever and incredible. She has gifted us with So many healthy natural chemicals that activate our body's health defenses that help us tame our metabolism and fight body fat. So they're in there. So what are some of the favorite foods?
Well, in my book, I wanted to do something that I know a lot of diet books don't. And I wanted to take people on a tour of the plain old grocery store, the way that I go through it, and point out, take them on a tour to point out the things that I see as you go around. go to the produce section, which is usually the first section. What am I seeing?
I'm seeing tomatoes. I'm seeing brassica vegetables. I'm seeing the broccoli, the kale.
I'm seeing the bok choy, the baby bok choy. Then I'm seeing the mushrooms and I'm seeing the red onions. And I talk about all these things and trying to provide a little bit of, you know, underneath the hood, give a little clue into how do we know it's good for you? And one of the things that I really do that you just pointed out, Cynthia, is I point out the human evidence. What is the clinical study.
The lab study is interesting, especially the scientists, but the human study is what people care about. And in the human study, you always have a dose, an amount, a frequency, just like any medicine, which is food is medicine. So I published that around. So every food that I talk about, or almost every food, I should talk about the doses. So what's interesting is like pears.
Pears actually have been able to reduce waist circumference. How does it do it? By shrinking the visceral fat. The harmful fat, the gut fat, it's kind of like a baseball glove that's like packing or squeezing your organs. And in a study that was done to show that you can lose like two belt, two inches around your waist circumference by eating pears.
How much did they give? Two medium sized pears before lunch for 12 weeks. And they even tell you what kind of pears. OK, there were Bartlett pears and Anjou pears. Hey, these are the things that you see in the grocery store.
So I literally take people to the produce section. And I go to the seafood section because this is a whole other podcast, probably like things that people are not comfortable with fish and seafood. You know, like I didn't grow on fish.
I don't like fish. Look, there are so many incredible, delicious, amazing seafoods to enjoy. And I'll come back to that with Mediterranean.
But I actually spent a whole chapter diving into things that you'd recognize and a lot of seafood. I'm willing to bet you don't recognize like the. mitten crab or the mantis shrimp. These are things that are out there.
I really want to punch through the brick wall and show you that there's a lot of stuff that you haven't discovered yet. I want to demystify that and tell you the dose of that to eat as well. Then, of course, the forbidden middle aisle.
I wanted to people to say, you know what? It's time to grow up and get out of this elimination thing. Don't even go to the middle aisle.
Wrong. I call my chapters in the book Eat to Beat Your Diet is called Treasure Hunt. Go into the middle aisle with your bucket, your cart to a hunt for the treasures that help your metabolism, like navy beans, like lentils, like extra virgin olive oil, like apple cider vinegar. They're like dry prunes, like dried mushrooms and chili pepper powder and turmeric. I mean, there's all these things that.
I'm trying to let people know that this is every day. Anybody can do this. This is not mystery.
And this isn't about elimination. This is actually encouragement to dive right in and find the thing that fits you. So what fits me? I always get asked this question, Dr. Lee, you write about food and health.
You're a foodist medicine researcher. What diet are you on? And I tell people I'm not on a diet, but I do have a way that I eat.
In my way, I call mediterranean. I'm Asian. I grew up in a Chinese family.
I had lots of Asian food. I also spent a gap year in the Mediterranean before I went to medical school. I lived in Italy. I lived in Greece.
And then after that, I went to China. And what I was interested in doing on those gap years is to study food, culture, and health. And so to me, what's really wonderful is that there is a beautiful way that these natural ingredients, whether you know the chemical names or not, have been incorporated into recipes.
And they're easy to find on the internet. Many of them are traditional. Your grandmother and her grandmother were making these foods.
Okay. natural, fresh, local, seasonal, all that stuff that you hear about that sounds trendy, and cooking them and sharing them and eating them that contain fiber, they may be fermented, they have these polyphenols, in ways that everyone can enjoy and savor without wolfing your food down. And, you know, I mean, if you went to a traditional household, eating like in Italy or Greece, and somebody watched you wolfing food down, they'd hit you with a spoon.
You're not supposed to eat that way, right? And I think that this is really what I talk about. Meditation is going back to the basics, becoming reconnected with the traditions of some of the healthiest cuisines in the world and appreciating the fact that these are delicious foods that you can really love your food to love your metabolism and to love your health all at the same time.
That's what my book is about. Hi there. If you enjoyed watching this video, I know you'll love the next one.
Stay here. And check it out. And I'll see you there.