Transcript for:
Food as Medicine and Lifestyle Impact

i've had patients go from stage four cancer to stage zero So I have now seen where the end of cancer is coming from I've seen how the war is going to finish And here's how Dr William Lee is a Harvard trained physician and medical scientist whose work is revolutionizing the way we understand and fight some of the most devastating diseases facing our world today I'm going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer And this is shocking to some people to hear but every 24 hours there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body Each of those is a microscopic cancer But the reason that we don't become more sick from all kinds of diseases including cancer is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems But here's the problem We are presently seeing the fallout of some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s and60s and 70s For example people might consume as much as a credit card's worth of plastic every single week which is very worrying and I won't tell you why but there's also the foods you eat which contribute to taking your health defenses down But the good news is that you can actually put shields up as well So this is our experiment and we're trying to discover drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments So we said let's remove half of them and let's swap them out with food You know I I was a skeptic but when I saw these results it made my jaw drop because the holy grail in the pharmaceutical industry is to find something that can kill cancer stem cells And we don't have a drug that can do that Turns out mother nature beat us to the punch And there's more than 200 foods that I've studied that can actually starve cancers And if you had to pick five based on the science you've seen what would those top five be the good news is that it's food that we can eat every single day So number one this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show So could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button And my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week We'll listen to your feedback We'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do Thank you so [Music] much Dr William Lee if someone has just clicked on this conversation and they're asking themselves they're wondering what they're going to get out of spending this time with us for the next couple of hours what would you say directly to them that they will learn gain and how will their life improve i would say that you're going to hear about food in a brand new way that you didn't realize that a decision that you can make after this listening to this or watching this that you could put into action to your life immediately could actually help you for the rest of your life It could stave off disease help you feel stronger even help you with longevity Uh so there's no single moves that you can make but it's the beginning of taking steps that can actually allow you to live the rest of a long enjoyable life And what are the the key diseases that people are and should be most concerned about today based on their correlation to the food that we eat yeah if you look at the biggest health crises in the world today in developed countries um you know you're really talking about cardiovascular disease being the number one killer diabetes and all the consequences the devastating consequences that come out Listen your blood sugar is not being very well regulated That's the definition over time of diabetes But the knock-on effect of having high uncontrolled sugars is really underlying metabolic chaos There's a whole litany of terrible conditions that happens every downstream from that from eye disease to wounds that don't heal etc etc Cancer is another one Dementia is a big bigger and bigger problem as our population ages And a lot of people don't re recognize this but you know the the saying that inflammation is a root cause of chronic disease Scientifically correct but there are many many inflammatory diseases that are out there that don't get enough airplay that really take away the quality of your life as you get older And so I think all of these things it's not just about mortality it's about morbidity It's not just about living long it's about living well and feeling good along the way And where do you think we are as a society you especially as westerners as it relates to our relationship with health and food because when I look at some of the stats around life expectancy there's been a bit been a bit of a stagnation in I think it was 2020ish time But then also when you look at a lot of these chronic diseases whether it's diabetes whether it's cancer these things seem to be on the rise So as a nation it feels like we've got more information than ever before but when you look at the objective numbers for some reason we're not going in the right direction What's your your 30,000 foot view on it 30,000 foot there's more and more people in the world So once you get huge numbers uh the diseases that affect most people are going to magnify So just as a a matter of math we're going to see more of these chronic diseases Um but we're also going to be seeing two things that are happening that uh actually oppose each other One thing is that the lifestyle and dietary harms that have occurred over 20 30 50 years from the industrialization of food from the industrialization of health care from degradation of the environment Those are all things that take time to manifest And so to some extent we are presently seeing that the fallout of some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s and60s and 70s and so on and so forth So decades later we're beginning to see the consequences devastation of things that happened decades ago That's one side of elevating increasing the incidence and prevalence of of health conditions bad health conditions There's another side that is counterveailing and the other side which is the side I that's the team I play on is it really exciting because one thing that's different is that we have now have tremendous scientific power to get in there and probe diseases and also indeed pro probe health which is something we're not doing often enough and in so doing we're actually able to find solutions to the problems that that counter some of those harms So we're beginning to discover now how do we actually prevent diabetes how do we prevent cardiovascular disease can we reverse heart disease and even conditions that seemed like no-win situations And I like to talk about this is that in my career I never thought as a physician I would actually see the cure to cancer the end of cancer But actually I tell you I have now seen where the end of cancer is coming from I've seen how the war is going to finish because I've had well over a dozen patients and there are hundreds of people like this that are starting to form that can go from stage four cancer that's game over cancer to stage zero We can do this And it not for everybody yet but we're beginning to see where the light at the end of the tunnel is And it involves your immune system And some of the remarkable scientific breakthroughs are teaching us that our body heals itself against diseases as serious as cancer in ways that the pharmaceutical industry can't by itself do but it really relies on the body So when you talk about food as medicine or medicine as medicine none of them are as powerful as what the body is hardwired to do by itself When I think about something like cancer it's slightly terrifying because it feels like a game of roulette It feels like the the people that get cancer it's completely random and that our outcomes are also a game of roulette And this is someone that knows very little about cancer I hear someone that I thought was very very healthy get cancer and then their outcomes whether they they beat it or not also seem to be largely down to chance sometimes That's how it seems What do you think of that view yeah I'm going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer and that is that we are all forming cancer in our bodies all the time from the time we were kids you don't have clinical cancer you haven't gone to the doctor to get a diagnosis still start forming cancers And let me tell you why Cancers are like pimples in our body All right and this is shocking to some people to hear but our the human body is made up of about 40 trillion cells That's more cells in our body than stars in a clear sky All right and these cells have to divide uh to be able to reproduce themselves uh copy and paste Every cell has its own genetic material called DNA It's our instructions for how our cells are work So you got to copy and paste uh your DNA All right now copy and pasting is a tricky thing to do really well So if I gave you a sentence to write Stephen and I said "Copy it 10 times on a word document you'll do it perfectly." If I get told you to copy it a thousand times you're going to make a few mistakes Good thing that we have spellch check to fix it to catch it and fix it But if I ask you to copy a single sentence 40 trillion times you're going to make so many mistakes that your spell check isn't even going to be a to catch all of it Okay and that's what's happening in our body every single day as we are replicating ourselves We're going to make mistakes And whenever there's a mistake that's being made that isn't caught and fixed that's a mutation And so we have mutations that are forming in our body just as a matter just as an outcome of being alive and doing our thing and we're not sick from those mutations But every mutation is the beginning of a microscopic cancer Take a guess of how many mistakes in DNA of copying and pasting your own body uh are made every 24 hours Take a guess This has been calculated randomly Well you there's so many cells in my body It's going to be a big number A million Okay Every day every 24 hours there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body that your body doesn't catch that keep on that propagate in the document of our body as it goes on 10 10,000 Each of those is a microscopic cancer A microscopic cancer is just that It's microscopic It's too small to be seen with the naked eye but it's abnormal And that thing could turn turn into a big tumor that could eventually kill you So why don't we die from cancer all the time now this is actually something that I see as a physician I have a patient diagnosed with cancer They always ask me "Dr Lee why me why did I get breast cancer colon cancer pancreatic cancer brain tumor?" A very very uh natural question And I do my best to try to provide an empathic answer to that question But as a researcher I have a more interesting question Given the number of mutations that occur in our body every single day why don't we get cancer more often why don't we all get cancer as kids you know cancer can happen in children but not as often as we have mutations And it turns out this was the great unlock for me in terms of health The reason that we don't become more sick from all kinds of diseases including cancer is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems So that we've got these swashbuckling defenses that are firing on all cylinders All day long from the from the moment we're born until our very last breath these systems that are inside our body defend our health including the microscopic cancers spots them takes them out kind of like a police cruiser patrolling a quiet neighborhood sees a drug dealer on the corner pops them in the back of the police vehicle and takes them away cleaning up the neighborhood That's how our body naturally cleans up these microscopic cancers And so when you talk about cancer as a scary disease you're thinking about the person whose body has failed to detect and eliminate the microscopic cancers and it's become large enough to actually become a threat Now here's a question for you So we tell women to actually do a self breast exam when they're taking a shower You know look for lumps or bumps and you know if you find one you know certainly go to your doctor immediately for an exam The smallest cancer that you could feel with a trained person can feel with their with their hands in the breast is one centimeter in diameter A 1 cm breast cancer already has 1 billion cancer cells that have already multiplied That microscopic cancer multiplied a billion times That's the smallest one you can feel Now immune systems not taking that amount All right so you need a better immune system if you I want a shot at this and not just chemo or hormonal therapy And that's where some of these incredible advances are taking place But there's another one In order to feed a billion cancer cells you need blood vessels to feed them So the cancers as they get bigger they hijack our own circulation to feed themselves Okay it's kind of like terrorists kicking in the cockpit door to take over the controls of the plane They want to actually get your blood vessels to feed themselves Now normally the body knows how to control those blood vessels It's called angioenesis Angio blood vessels genesis how the body grows and controls them That's my area of research So naturally our body knows how to prevent blood vessels from feeding cancers and yet knows how to uh direct blood vessels to feed healthy tissues So guess what a one centimeter tumor with 1 billion cancer cells is fed by 100 million blood vessels courarssing into the tumor to feed them And we've studied this in the laboratory The moment that a single blood vessel touches a tumor tiny microscopic tumor it will grow 16,000 times in size in just two weeks Wow All right So I've told you some scary statistics but now let me kind of give you the where the breakthroughs are coming through Right So with this kind of knowledge what do we what can we do with cancers not just breast cancers but in general Number one we know that if you boost your immune system with foods with exercise diet lifestyle you're going to actually make your immune defense is a lot stronger to patrol your body to wipe out those microscopic cancers That's why healthy diet lifestyle lowers the risk of cancer That's why eating the right foods that boost your immunity can substantially lower your risk of cancer as well We also know that you can eat foods that support prompt up fortify your body's natural ability to control blood vessels Keep those blood vessels where they're supposed to be and get rid of those blood vessels where you don't want them to be which is kicking in the cockpit to take over your circulation to feed cancers So if you eat foods like that are anti-androgenic foods that like are unstable you've got um coffee and tea both of those contain natural substances that cut off the blood supply and starve cancers That's a good thing So that's why we know our what we do with our diet can actually help to lower the risk of cancer as well I'm assuming the opposite also applies I I could eat foods I can drink things that cause my body to malfunction I makes the blood vessels unregulated makes and starts to feed the cancer right yeah absolutely So let's talk let's talk a little bit about that So so I told you the body's hardwired with these defenses Shields up right that's what we want to do because shields are already normally up You want to raise them higher but what about and this is a brilliant question you're asking a very probing question What are the things that take your shields down right what are the things that turn off the smoke alarm in your house that unlock the doors can I take a guess is it this okay now I know the answer that you're setting this conversation up for which is a burger with meat Uh is that actually uh disease-causing and I would I would tell you that yes and no A burger is something that many people enjoy eating And I would say eating meat eating burgers even eating ultrarocessed foods once in a while is not going to harm you if your health defenses are naturally strong But if you make it a habit a regular habit of eating this at the expense of eating healthier foods more plant-based foods less processed foods Okay Um you are actually going to tip the uh your odds where the diseases are more likely to get you What that what that means is that over eating fast foods like burgers will actually contribute to taking your uh health defenses down shields down So what are those things then that bring the shield down you were saying okay excess sodium too much salt which can be present in a lot of restaurant foods People eat out a lot go to restaurants all the time You ever you ever go to the back of a kitchen of a restaurant to see how they're salting seasoning their food patrons love salty food It makes food taste really great There's a you know our brains uh respond very well to salty food That high sodium levels actually speeds up accelerates our cellular aging so we actually age faster But it also um is a huge wear and tear on our health defenses specifically our circulation our our blood vessels our androgenesis system is taken down by excess salt Okay I've got a question here Obviously there's a a big movement at the moment around hydration and electrolytes and these electrolytes have magnesium potassium they have sodium in them Yeah So a lot of people are now taking electrolytes to hydrate themselves Is there a a risk here so the great news is that the healthy body has got its own titration system for electrolytes If you drink a electrolyte fortified beverage you're your body's going to take everything it needs and it's going to pee out the rest You're going to eliminate through your urine All right However sodium uh is one of those electrolytes is present like you're not drinking electrolyte fluid all day long but sodium you're eating it in almost every food that you actually have except perhaps dessert but maybe even then And so this is one of the things that we realize is sodium is a high risk for hypertension high blood pressure inflammation of the lining of your circulation and that that sets up for a lot of badness downstream when it comes to your health and it takes down your circulation um health defenses that we talked about High blood sugar can also do the same thing So if you're eating an excess of added sugar we all have heard by now glucose spikes and glucose crashes I don't actually use those words by the way I don't like to actually cast our body's metabolism in terms of spikes and crashes I think those are fear words They get attention Uh they they do make you pay attention to it but in fact really our the healthy body sort of has you know smooth ups and smooth downs They're gentle slopes up and down of our blood sugar And that's completely fine All right and and it should be like that However if you have an uphill climb of your blood glucose and it continues to stay up that can actually happen if you're eating too much added sugar Okay added sugar ultrarocessed foods What happens is that your blood sugars your intake of the sugar glucose rises up up up and now your body has your metabolism to chase that blood sugar down and it's got to work harder and make more insulin And eventually you just wear out that system and then you have a high blood blood glucose and an insensitive metabolism and that's the beginning of sort of the the dominoes starting to fall apart in your body And so sugar high blood sugar added sugar is a problem You get it from fruit not a problem Okay no one's going to be eating a crazy amount of fruit This is why extremes aren't good Diversity Switch it out Keep it interesting for yourself This is what our human nature uh wants anyway Uh it's how we're hardwired You you'll actually be fine So salt sugar those are two offenders Okay Um alcohol is another one that actually can take down your health defenses over time You know people say "Well what about red wine isn't red wine healthy?" What I would say is that actually the fermented products the or the bioactives that come out of red grapes from the skin of red grapes that's found in red wine those there can be some healthful properties of the resveratrol and other polyphenols that come out of uh that are in wine but it's never the alcohol It's not the alcohol in the beer the wine the whiskey Nope None none of that is the alcohol is is a universal toxin Toxic to your brain toxic to your liver toxic to your heart Can't get away from that Your body will recover Shields up little It can take a ding It's like a you know like a drink is sort of like a driving behind a truck and it flings a little pebble right into your windshield You might get a little spider in the windshield Okay don't worry It'll repair itself You You'll fix yourself You'll bounce back It's not going to break your windshield But if you keep on drinking you're actually gonna smash your windshield And that's why alcoholism is so devastating to the health But you know regular a small amount of alcohol So alcohol itself is is a toxin Do you drink uh I I rarely drink and when I drink it's in moderation Mhm And I was thinking about stress as well Does that bring down the So besides the foods you eat other things that can compromise your health defenses uh and by the way there are five health defenses We talked about blood vessels We talked about immunity but there's three other ones uh that are core to functioning in the healthiest way possible If you want if you want longevity you need all five of your health defenses and more to be working in your favor But stress what does stress do lowers your immune system Shields down All right those microscopic cancers Whoa That's why stressful people are more vulnerable to de developing diseases like cancer All right stress also causes your blood pressure to go up and causes uh neurotransmitters hormones to be released from your brain and your kidneys your adrenal glands that ought to wear down your circulation Now your androgenesis system is also uh not functioning uh as well to protect yourself and keep good blood flow going where it needs to go Now your circulation is actually down Um so again stress also can actually damage the DNA We talked about naturally copying and pasting and having errors add some stress to it Now it's kind of like um you're trying to copy that sentence I was telling you perfectly Now I'm going to come in and just smash your fingers down every now and then and let's see if you actually make a mistake You will All right stress will actually do that It's devastating to have so much stress continuously Listen by the way I want to be really clear to anybody listening or watching this a little stress is actually good for you You know like just being coddled all day long and living in a happy bubble That doesn't that's not that's not good for our health either We kind of get laxidasical We let our guard down Little stress I mean anybody who's hardworking you know successful knows that you know it's not the no pain no gain It's that the that the grit that goes along with it which gives a little stress keeps us sharp you know uh which is a which is a good thing You want to be on you want to be on So a little stress is good but when that stress is unabated it literally sinks your health defenses It is just taking those shields down Yeah I've noticed that with myself I've spent the last 10 years running businesses a little bit more than 10 years now but probably the last 13 years running businesses And the only times when I really get sick where I'm like out for a week and I really really feel it is one week after two weeks of stress So when I say two weeks of stress what I mean there is when something happens in my life business where that it's kind of chronic and it's enduring stress I can deal with having a stressful day I can deal with having two stressful days in a row But when I've had like two weeks of an enduring issue like an enduring angst or a problem almost perfectly predictably a week later I'm sick And I'm extremely rarely sick because I think I sleep really well Like I think I eat really clean And so it's taught me something about if I zoom out on that and see what's going on in my body well eventually like my body's kind of my immune system is running out of energy almost more than your immune system So when you're super stressed it also interferes with your ability to sleep well Yeah When you're sleeping well you know sleeping is something that I was taught when I was a kid When you're sleeping you're resting And when you're resting you're not active right well that's just our physical self It turns out when we're sleeping even though our muscles may not be moving like we are during the day in fact a lot of other systems including our health defenses are being repaired renewed regenerated rebooted while we are sleeping So in those ideally eight hours 7 to n hours eight's the sweet sweet number you know our brain is cleansing itself detoxifying itself releasing Do you know about the lymphatic system in the brain not as well as you do Okay Well there's a there's a um sewer system of the gra of in our brains that's called the glimpmphatic system and it's shut tightly during the daytime when we're using our brain doing our work uh whatever we're doing and during the day we accumulate a lot of uh toxins in inside our brain during the day It's just a matter of functioning All right and what happens is that those toxins accumulate which is that you know at the end of a really really tough hard day You got if not a headache you've got your you feel like your brain is it's full It's the cup runth over Right All right So when you go to sleep guess what this sewer system it's like the sewers of par underneath Paris The grates open up suddenly and it drains those toxins out while you're sleeping And only when you get good sleep So when you're stressed and you're not getting good sleep you start to accumulate these toxins that are never quite cleaned up and your brain is not that cleaned up When your brain's not cleaned up you're feeling foggy So think about the you know when you're in college you pull an allnighter or you go to a party or whatever and you're and you're staying up all night you're never quite the same It takes a while for your brain to clean up itself When your brain is foggy you tend to not make as good decisions I'm too tired to work out I'm too tired I don't care what I eat I'm just hungry I'm going to eat anything You start to make bad decisions when it comes to diet and lifestyle You see so it's a it it the stress can cascade on your health like that Is there a certain stage of sleep where the glimpmphatic system kicks in yeah It's during like the deep REM sleep Okay That dreaming sleep Okay And that usually comes later in the night as well Correct Correct And in more qual quantity later in the night So you need to really be getting a lot of sleep Now the other thing about deep sleep is while you're sleeping really deeply your metabolism is also burning down fat So you think that you're not working out during the night you're right you're not actually exercising but in fact your metabolism is burning fat because while you're sleeping and your insulin levels don't need to be high because you're not eating insulin levels go down your metabolism shifts gears I I sort of give people the analogy It's like your your body is a race car sports car like a Ferrari During the day you are in gear to drive accumulate speed and and you're you're revving your engines At night you shift gears where you're actually burning down fat You don't need to accumulate more fuel Now you're burning down the fuel So when you're sleeping you're actually burning away fat But when you don't sleep well or you don't sleep long enough you're not burning down that fuel That fuel accumulates day or two of not good enough sleep that's that's okay Think about flying overseas getting some jet lag You got to catch up Once you get catch up you feel better All right but think about this like day in and day out Chronically stressed people are never getting good sleep Add a little booze alcohol to the to the equation You can kind of see the problems that are going to build up Your brain's going to be foggy your metabolism is going to be out of whack You're not burning as much fat from the calories that you ate during the day Now inflammation starts to uh rise in your body and that inflammation really takes down your health defenses and now you're much more vulnerable So in your own example of where chronic stress leads to poor sleep and then you get sick no surprise If we go back up the thread there we were talking about the sort of individual perspective on cancer And I was looking at some stats here and it says that the number one Google search related to cancer is breast cancer One in two people will develop some form of cancer during their lifetime That's according to the NHS Cancer is the second highest leading cause of death worldwide And by 2040 there will be 28 million new cases of cancer each year worldwide But one of the most shocking things that I saw was that globally early onset cancer incidents has risen by about 80% by 1990 and 2019 And there was an article which I'd sent to my team a couple of weeks ago It's it's called the worrying puzzle behind the rise of early onset cancer And it says that there are rising cases of breast collateral and other cancers in people in their 20s 30s and 40s And it posits the question what is going on over the last 10 years rates of colorctyl cancer among 25 to 49 year olds has increased in 24 different countries including the UK US France Australia Canada Norway and Argentina I mean what is going on yeah that's a big question So are we seeing the results of more harms in our environment that we're being exposed to that are more toxic and leading to earlier incidents of clinical cancer they're talking about clinical diagnosed cancer not the invisible microscopic ones that are forming all the time Um it's yes it's very worrying Are we be exposing ourselves to something that is more commonly encountered today than before number one Number two are our defenses being taken down by forces that we didn't appreciate are compromising us most likely both It's most likely uh I mean the human makeup hasn't changed and so it's got to be the fact a combination that we're being exposed to more harmful things and though some of those harmful things are actually that you know provoking more cancers but and we're also being exposed to things that take down our health defenses So the balance is being tipped against us and it's true I can tell you that when I went to medical school I mean colorectile cancer was something that you rarely saw in people even in their 50s it was for much older uh people Uh now to see uh I mean there's even teenagers that have actually developed colurectal cancer which was unfathomable So I will tell you one thing that's actually arisen in terms of like what are some of the clues of these things that could be happening right so we are talking about climate change and all the things that are happening in our environment That's a that's almost too big a conversation to have to answer a question like this But we I think we cannot afford to ignore the fact that the environment the climate that we live in has changed But there are other things that we're beginning to unearth that we didn't realize until just within the last few years And one of them is the is how many inflammatory microlastics we are ingesting When I was growing up uh my mom very uh well-intentioned would store foods in plastic leftovers Uh and we'd buy foods that came in plastic packages right we wouldn't think think second have a second thought about it A plastic cup styrofoam cup go to a picnic you're eating off of a plastic plate right i mean these are all common uh experiences that we all have uh in the modern developed world Well what if I told you that we now realize that the plastic touching food can shed the plastic itself as microparticles into the food and then we eat the food and okay we've known this for maybe more than a decade Maybe there's little plastic particles uh that come off but you know hey there's no harm right we we haven't been able to discover it I I used to say that Now just within the last few years we're beginning to pinpoint that number one it does plastics can actually embed themselves in our body We even know where we also know that these plastics uh are associated with inflammation That is a big red flag The claxon alarm should start going off And third is that the volume of plastics that we're consuming is crazy There was a study that came out recently that showed that in normal autopsies of people that didn't die of a brain problem that when they were doing the autopsies and looking for plastic that we could find them And the amount of plastic that was found in the average human brain is about the amount you'd find in a typical plastic picnic spoon just distributed throughout the brain This is like a normal this is a person who's died of something else Wow Does that mean that you know like you and I are actually you got a plastic spoon worth of plastic in our brain There's been some people that calculated and this has been the actual calcul math has been challenged but there was an estimate that you know some people might consume as much as a credit card's worth of plastic every single week in their food if they're not careful about it And let me just tell you where we're finding microplastics And you know I want to get to the point where we're talking about the healthy foods that can actually turn the ship around How do we turn the battleship of of unhealth back to health so we're back on the course that everybody wants to go to We want to go to that north How do we find our northstar for health so I do want to get to that but let me just say something about microplastics We've now found microplastics in the brain As I mentioned to you we found it in a bloodstream A group in Italy actually looking at men who had narrowing of the corateed artery That's the blood vessel feeding the brain from comes from the heart right to the brain the corateed artery Oh through the neck through the neck They found that the narrowing that can occur in some men can accumulate plastic They can actually find plastic particles There's photographs of the chunks of plastic the particles fragments of plastic in there And they followed them over a period of time Those men who had plastic embedded in their blood vessel lining had a four-fold increase in the chances of having a fatal heart attack or a stroke years later 400% Four four-fold Yeah Okay Now that's that's not kidding right so now you're now we're beginning to take notice of this but we're also finding microplastics in breast milk We're finding microplastics in testicles We're finding microplastics in human semen How does it get there and urologists who are doing surgery on the penis are finding that in in the human flesh when they look under the microscope we never used to look for this Now we're looking for it that there's even microplastics in the flesh of the penis Okay So if anybody listening this isn't taking notice about microplastics now it's time to start thinking about this So one of the questions is and I'm not saying that the rise in rate of cancers that we're seeing is due to microplastics What I what I am saying is that we're beginning to wake up to the fact So let's close off on microplastics What are the the easy wins in our lives do you think when you think about microplastics is it just removing anything plastic that I eat from or are there some sort of easy cheap wins is it my shampoo is it my frying pan is it a container yeah So I always tell people that the easiest way to lower your exposure to microplastics is to throw out your plastic cups your plastic plates and your plastic silverware Mhm Okay And get ceramic or glass Uh that's the best way to actually avoid those And also when you're buying food try to avoid food that comes clearly packaged in plastic All right Now I do want to point out one thing because right here on this table we are looking at a tray full of beverages and I can already identify the matcha and this looks like a cup of coffee and we've got English breakfast tea I've done a lot of research on tea All right but I'm noticing something that green tea which is universally healthy the polyphenols in green tea lower the risk of inflammation They actually improve your metabolism lower your risk of cancer They're heart healthy Before you take that sip though let me tell you I see a tea bag in there Okay and there's different ways of brewing your tea It turns out research from the University of Montreal have now shown that um tea bags can shed microplastics So you can have a billion particles of microplastic shed from a single teabag Okay All right So I just changed your mind right so look this is the power of awareness and understanding I probably should have stopped you What was you were like why didn't you save my life you let me drink it first but I've I sp as you were doing it I was like uh uh All right But look there's another there's another one there that's got uh lemon ginger tea This is like an herbal tea That's fine Listen um I I would also tell you with flavored teas just be cautious Like always check anything that's been machined to be a little bit more than nature Tea bags are supposed to be paper right well in order to prevent the paper from ripping the the manufacturers of the tea bag spray it with a small amount of plastic to have it hang together better And that's the plastic that comes off But what about the lemon and ginger in this lemon ginger tea that that sounds so appealing and calming right and and something that most people would find nice as an herbal tea Well listen you're you're relying on a factory to actually put that lemon flavor ginger ginger flavor Is it real lemon or is it real ginger always look at the ingredient label to know what's in there or just buy your own tea and squeeze your own lemon and and add your own piece of ginger These are ways to actually kind of avoid the uh potential exposures to toxins that come from ultrarocessed food So all this conversation about you know avoid ultra ultrarocessed foods and watch out for all those harmful things you know it's actually quite easy to dodge them if you just have in your mindset that you're just going to make it yourself And it's uh absolutely easy Now I will tell you in something interesting about English breakfast tea We did research at the Androgenesis Foundation the nonprofit I I looked at to look at um different types of teas different types of green tea Japanese tea Chinese jasmine tea uh English tea And we were always assuming again this is the power of food as medicine research We were always assuming that the green tea is going to be the best I'd always heard that Japanese green tea is going to be like the ultra best And what we found was that English tea specifically Earl Grey tea actually was the most potent when it actually supported your blood vessels your body's defense system for angioenesis to keep your circulation healthy Wow what a surprise that is And this spoke to me about the fact that we can't make assumptions We need to look at facts We need to look at data And so I'm a big fan of Earl Gray Now now what could what what might make Earl Gray give Earl Grey a superpower well this is where knowing a little bit about what you're eating is actually useful because Earl Grey is a fermented is a is a black tea It's got bergamut in it and bergamut is a kind of a citrus So maybe it's combining those uh ingredients that actually provides the superpower But I do see matcha on this uh uh tray I want to tell you about matcha because it is a matcha is truly a superenriched polyphenol enriched tea A lot of people don't realize it There's no tea bag in it So don't worry So a lot of people think about matcha uh as just another green tea but it's not another green tea It is made with green tea leaves the same kind of green tea leaves but uh as you would find in any green tea However it's what's the composition of matcha matcha is green tea that is before it's ready for harvest is grown under a shade that changes its chemical structure natural chemical structure a little bit So it's got a lot of potency to it And what happens with matcha is they take the tea leaf they take out the stem of the green of the of the green tea leaf and they ground up the actual leaf into a powder Now what's in that green tea leaf you've got not just some of the polyphenols that might steep out in the cup whether you're using a tea bag or or loose leaf tea you are getting all the polyphenols suspended in that So now you get 100% polyphenol okay in matcha So go ahead You're go ahead do it That one's good All right Okay For matcha and because you're getting the tea leaf ground to it you're also getting your dietary fiber The dietary fiber is good for your gut health your microbiome good for uh your metabolism good for lowering inflammation And the polyphenols found in green tea have also been matcha matcha tea have also been found in the lab to kill breast cancer stem cells What's a breast cancer stem cell what's a stem cell cancer stem cell Well look stem cells are these renewable cells All right and um cancers contain stem cells that help the cancers come back right if you got cancer you get it treated One the one thing you don't want it to do is to come back So um and by the way other foods can also do kill cancer stem cells Purple potatoes uh that you might have seen in the market They're um kind of purpley looking on the outside Slice it open dark purple on the inside All right Turns out that those purple potatoes have something called anthocyanins Purple potatoes have been studied in a lab okay at Penn State University and been shown to kill colon cancer stem cells which contribute to the colon cancer coming back So full disclaimer I am I made a very very big investment uh a seven figure investment into a matcher company a couple of years ago And if you look at the search trend data on the subject of ma matcher I don't know if you've seen this but that's I'll throw it up on the screen for anyone that's watching on video but you can see how it's just come out of nowhere It seems it's exploded And when you say that matcha cells have an impact on breast cancer cells what does that mean in reality does it because obviously the the the conclusion one might jump to is that if you drink matcha you're lowering your risk of breast cancer but that's not necessarily what you're saying What what I what I am saying is that drinking green tea in its most healthful form okay um raises your body's health defense systems And by having better health defense systems better immunity better control of your blood vessels better control over your DNA and those mutations and if you can actually kill some of those stem cells cancer stem cells that's going to be in your favor as well that is overall going to actually lower your risk of cancer And so I think that and by the way the other thing that green tea and matcha can actually do is improve your metabolism It's it's really pretty much all good I my great uncle by the way lived to 104 years old vital intact uh independent He told me that he attributed his longevity and his vitality to the fact that he lived at the base of a mountain that grew tea That every morning he got up and he walked up He walked up stone steps a stone path to a tea garden and he had freshly picked tea It's all organically grown and everything And he and he drank tea all day long He probably had 10 cups of green tea a day And this has been his whole life He sat with his uh uh close friends who are also very vibrant and and elderly Um social connection All right Watch the sunrise It's very calming Do you drink it absolutely Um I've got to just going up the the thread again a little bit You mentioned the word colurectal Where is the colarctyl all right So we have a little um model here cuz I'm asking this because I'm wondering why that type of cancer is increasing So is there is there a particular reason why well okay So let's do a quick uh medical school uh course crash course for podcasters Um the the gut we talk about gut health Most people think of the gut as sort of lower down in your belly or maybe even just your stomach But the gut actually starts in your mouth and it runs down down down about 40 feet worth of stuff organs u your esophagus your stomach your small intestines your large intestines By the way these squigglies are your small intestines All right This blue is your large intestines This is like a it's shaped like a horseshoe It's big thick tube that that's kind of framing your small intestines And then it goes down the poop shoot the rectal and the anus That's the end of your gut All right so the colon is really the large uh framing thick part of the gut It's near the very end All right so all this squiggly small intestines winds up here uh at the beginning of the colon The colon goes up It's called the ascending colon And then it makes a sharp angled turn right across your belly Kind of like a belt right across your belly This is colon here and then it goes to the descending colon Take the elevator down down down down down You see the blue down going down and then it kind of takes a little jog at the very end and goes down into your rectum and your anus Okay Right So the blue thing is my colon So this is where cancer incidence is rising in young people So you're talking about the rising incidence of colctal cancer That could be a cancer that's typically uh either on the right side of the colon either the going up up the upside up the elevator Yeah Or down the elevator On the right side of the left side Okay Okay It turns out that we've known for a long time that unhealthy diets are linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer specifically processed meats So the World Health Organization contains considers processed meats salami bologna ultrarocessed you know kind of deli meats delicates meat you find in delicates All right Um th those would be uh considered uh carcinogens and and they're they're they are uh highly linked to an increased risk of bowel cancers Now why would that be well it turns out that think about it If you're eating a ton of meat all right you're actually exposing the gut to a lot of those processed meat carcinogens that when it sits around in your colon not one not not once in a while go to the ball game have a hot dog enjoy yourself but if you eat it day in and day out you're giving a lot of exposure uh to your gut This term angiogenesis you talked about the link that that has to cancer Angioenesis from my um novice understanding is how the blood cells provide blood to different parts of our body Right and in the case of cancer there's this the angioenesis system is making a mistake Is that a simplified version of it yeah So angioenesis which is the field I studied study you break it down it to to what it's elemental parts of angio blood blood vessel genesis how the body grows and maintains them so androgenesis is how our body grows and maintains our circulation a lot of people don't know this but our circulation is one of our body's health defense systems and it's so extensive that in a typical adult there are 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our body These are the highways and byways that deliver blood to every organ and tissue But that means that they also deliver the air we breathe the oxygen we're breathing in and the nutrients that we're eating So we eat good things they're going into our bloodstream and our blood vessels our androgenesis systems develing to every cell in the body Now you eat something bad similarly or you breathe something in bad similarly those blood vessels are delivering something negative Now inside the blood vessels um is a lining It's called a the lining is like a clear like a plastic wrap inside the blood vessel called the endothelial layer That's like a layer of ice like on an ice skating rig to ensure that everything in the blood vessels are flowing smoothly without getting caught on the walls So when you have cardiovascular disease too much uh uh too much salt to hypertension When you have diabetes where you're actually wearing down the lining of the blood vessels endothelial layers being damaged It's like um damaging the lining of your angioenesis defense system has really deadly consequences because it's like scraping up the ice on an ice skating rink You know uh if you actually have a lot of ice skaters on a rink after a while it's unskatable right you can't get on it And what will happen in your bloodstream is then elements in your blood get caught along the walls and they build up and that's actually how blood vessels narrow up So that's one of the areas of of of so androgenesis actually is intended to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the tissues that need it for to maintain your health But because it's so critical it's also very very carefully controlled so you don't have blood vessels growing where they should not be growing like in your joints in your eyes or of course to cancers You don't definitely don't want to be feeding cancers by delivering oxygen or nutrients to them I've got this graph which shows different things that cause more or less angiogenesis If you've seen this graph but okay So you are showing a graph that I I generated my my organization generated And this is actually you're looking at the experiment that got me into food as medicine Let me explain to you the experiment Um I'll just put I'll put it over here So um so we were studying at one point drugs and we're trying to discover drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments So what we're looking for are drugs that could cut off the blood supply to tumors So we were screening uh lots of chemicals that biotech companies were developing and inventing and professors were inventing and said hey can you take a look to see if this could be a worthwhile drug that could cut off the blood supply to a tumor as a cancer treatment All right and at the time there were no such treatments So it was all discovery like this was you know like the like the golden age of discovery when it came to androgenesis We were testing oh my gosh this thing could really stop blood vessels Could we develop this into our cancer treatment ultimately yes The answer was yes But we were looking for them And we would f and so we developed a system where we could add a substance into a laboratory test system to see if blood vessels would grow or shrink And so here on this graph you can see at the very top a very long bar of blood vessels growing That's normal healthy blood vessels growing out as long as they can And then what we would do is we would throw drugs into it and we would see if we could actually shrink them up And so some of the uh shorter bars uh uh are uh cancer drugs Uh you can see them uh in this color in blue Not surprisingly some of the cancer drugs were making the blood vessels smaller Hey this could be a good candidate drug And we were also testing other uh drugs that were available not used for cancer to see if they would work Sure we discovered some of those too But I did something a little bit subversive and as you know you know if you want to be disruptive you got to sometimes um disrupt yourself in order to be able to do this So this is our experiment that we were doing at the Androenesis Foundation We decided to disrupt ourselves So we said we have a whole system of drugs to test Let's remove half of them and let's swap them out with powders that came from food All right just to see what would happen And when we actually tested foods in the same system used to develop drugs food as medicine tested in the same system that medicines are developed we found what you see on this bar chart in red we actually found that dietary factors stuff that's found in food could actually cut down the blood supply that would be growing to feed a cancer In other words there's anti-angioenic foods You can see the green tea You could see the onions and garlics and red grapes and strawberries Um it was really an eye openener to me for when I saw these results It made my jaw drop and I said "My god foods have potency just like drugs." I was I was a skeptic All right And I and it just made me realize like this is something that I had to pursue This was an area of research that I absolutely had to actually look further into A drug takes a decade and a billion or more dollars to be able to develop from uh from scratch to reaching a patient and then not everyone who needs a treatment can actually get the drug But a food has immediiacy If you discover something amazing about a food whether it's matcha whether it's purple potatoes whether it's a strawberry that could that that that immediacy could be used beneficially without toxicity All right uh and affordably And so I just saw this as this was this experiment is what brought me into the realm of food is medicine So I'm going to ask some stupid questions here So on here I can see that for example soy extract causes less angiogenesis which what I understand is the the growth of these blood vessels But does that mean that if I have lots of soy extract or arichoke or parsley or berries that it's going to cause other parts of my body not to grow blood cells so this is the great question that let let me kind of reframe the question as you're asking it If uh experiments are able to show that certain foods can uh prevent blood vessels from growing will that actually cause a problem with your body's health defenses to keep blood vessels from growing in healthy tissues yeah All right Answer is no And here's why as a health defense system Our androgenesis system is completely designed to yoke in the right number of blood vessels to give just amount just the right amount of blood flow Not too much not too little I call it the Goldilocks zone You know Goldilocks a fairy tale Um you know the bears were home invaders They broke into the house and they were looking for chairs and porridge and beds Not too hot not too cold but just right All of our health defenses including the androgenesis health defense is hardwired to keep the body just right So what that means is that eating foods like artichokes or strawberries or soy can actually help your body prevent extra blood vessels from growing towards cancer for example and and other diseased tissues but it will not override the body's natural ability to get the right amount of blood vessels to the right tissue So you don't have to worry about starving your healthy tissues You're just uh cutting off the bad blood vessels of the tissue I can I call it like a landscaper on a golf course that that breaks out the lawn mower to mow that uh the golf course so it's got a perfect level um of the lawn You're not going to actually uh carve out a bald spot uh in on in a country club You're going to get just the right amount Similarly and um we're not talking about this graph There's another graph that can actually show foods that you can eat that can grow blood vessels healthy blood vessels where you want them And it turns out things like fruit peel uh uh can actually do that And barley can grow new blood vessels And dark chocolate can actually help to support blood vessels as well And some of these things can also work on both sides of the equation They can prune away the bad extra blood vessels and it can grow them whenever you need them So your body is sort of like the gardener extraordinaire and knows exactly how to actually tend You give them the right ingredients they know exactly where to put the grass seed and they know exactly where to mow the lawn Have you ever had cancer in your family yes Um cancer's touched my family like it has for most people Um I had two uncles uh years ago that passed away One passed away from colon cancer one passed away from liver cancer And you know I was a doctor at the time And so I felt so uh helpless uh because as a doctor I could I could diagnose I could lay hands on I could feel the hard liver I could feel the masses and I felt at the time helpless even though I was doing the research cancer research and finding future paths I felt like this was we we're we're not there yet and we can't I couldn't help him I felt I felt powerless Fast forward we're now at a point where we're beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel And my mother when my mother had cancer so my uncle's sister my mother wound up having endometrial cancer she was 80 years old one day um had some bleeding went to the hospital found a mass she had a hyerectomy to remove her uterus and ovaries and they found in there an endometrial cancer That's a cancer the lining of the uterus The surgery and a little bit of radiation was supposed to take care of it Unfortunately in her case those little cancer stem cells and it was microscopic cancers that were present took off raced off in her 80-year-old body which you know weaker immune system when you're 80 Uh and within a few months after successfully recovering from the surgery she had stage four cancer everywhere All right and her oncologist told me uh Dr Lee you know you're a doctor as well You know this is serious and this is pretty much the time of game over And now times have changed Science had advanced Progress has advanced At that time when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer immunotherapy the latest and greatest I think advancement in cancer treatment had just broken through and become approved Imunotherapy is not chemotherapy It doesn't actually poison the cancer Imunotherapy is a medicine that you give a cancer patient that wakes up your own immune system Whether you're a young person or an old person it can wake up your immune system All right and my mother had imunotherapy She was one of the early patients that got imunotherapy And her own 80-year-old immune system woke up like a super like an army of super soldiers and went after that cancer Now we completely adjusted her diet to so that her body between treatments would be as strong as possible Shields raised as we've been talking about And we gave her a little bit of radiation to to to help the uh the her immune system spot the cancer Guess what happened three treatments of imunotherapy three three weeks apart So time zero is the first treatment Three weeks later the next treatment Three weeks after that the next treatment All right So we're talking about like total nine weeks of three treatments All right Of these three treatments we scanned her stage four went to stage zero and she never had chemotherapy Now chemotherapy can be helpful too with imunotherapy but this was where I saw firsthand close up in my own family the ability to harness your body's own health defenses in a way that I couldn't do for my uncle 15 years ago before And we lost them And we were to save my mom And I can tell you I literally had dinner with my mom two days ago and she's 90 91 10 11 years later completely healthy completely cancer-free And by the way this amunotherapy if we could only get this to work as well for everyone This is where we are in the history of medicine We can see an end We know how we can get to an end We've actually seen successes We just can't get it to work for everyone yet And there are different ways to actually wake up your immune system Another way that I'm working on now that um a colleague of mine in Germany is working on is also absolutely jaw-droppingly amazing Imagine this Somebody has cancer and you're going to they're going to get a biopsy no matter what They're going to take some tissue out to look at it under the microscope What kind of cancer is it a brain is it breast is it a colon is it pancreas where is it coming from you're gonna get a diagnosis Right now up until recently that's all we did with the tissue the biopsy You just got a result and it's kind of like a death sentence depending on what type of cancer and you're supposed to then go to the guidelines and open up the the the the treatment book to say well what's the pathway we should what's the recipe we should follow for treatment Too often those recipes don't work very well for very long Now what if I told you that where we are headed with cancer therapy is a new frontier where you take the tumor with the biopsy sure look it under the microscope call it out uh uh define what it is and then you send it to a lab where you do complete full-on genetics You sequence the entire cancer genome All right right now we do sequence We take a dozen two dozen three dozen I'm talking about doing 20 30,000 genes right right now most people say it's not worth it We don't know what we do with all that information What if I told you if you took a tumor and sequenced all the genes you find every mutation every typographical error that we talked about earlier that's in that cancer Those are the smoking guns of the cancer Now what if I took a piece of a little normal blood normal cells and sequence that too all right Now people are be hearing me talk who are oncologists or scientists would say I don't know what you're talking about that's double the waste of effort because now you're going to sequence the human genome twice in a single patient what are you going to do with all that information ah this is where technology sits in artificial intelligence machine learning let's now have a computer compare normal cells with tumor cells back and forth and back and forth and back and forth subtract out all the mutations that are found in normal cells leaving only the smoking gun mutations in the cancer Couple hundred are going to be left Those are the smoking guns Those are the doers that led to this cancer Now imagine and I'm going to give you an analogy here Do you remember that Tom Cruz movie uh Minority Report So you remember like he was wearing these gloves and you have a glass pane and you can actually move the uh things around on the glass with your fingertips right so now imagine you can take these human uh the the the cancer mutations on the bottom of this glass screen and you can just randomly with your fingers pick out 20 random mutations and move them up on the screen All right now you've just picked out the mutations and now you can connect the mutations together I call it a pearl necklace Imagine every mutation is a pearl and you connect them together with the string that connects a pearl necklace Now now you get what I'm saying like now we've taken the tumor find out the doers the the the the uh the smoking guns Now we've strung them together Okay this is the most wanted sign that you would actually place out for the criminal And now imagine you hit print technology And now you have a protein printer that prints out those smoking guns as a protein as a protein full of your own individual cancer of that particular person Now you take that protein and you inject it under the skin and you're challenging your own immune system You're vaccinating yourself with the with your own cancer and you're c causing your own immune system to say "Aha this is a bad guy We're going to develop antibodies to go find our immune system We're going to get ratcheted up to go find that cancer." Well this is happening right now in clinical trials I have a a colleague named Saskia Biscup that is actually developing peptide vaccine treatments against cancer And if you want to see some amazing results um there was a paper we published in Nature uh communications about a year ago that showed in more than a 100 people with glyobblasto that is a game over brain cancer Nobody lives more than a couple of years with this All right That with this treatment we've been able to actually show that some patients with their own immune system woken up can actually keep them alive and cancer-free brain cancer Like that is no win-win situation Impossible to possible And actually somebody who I've just recruited as an ambassador to my nonprofit organization the Andrew Genesis Foundation I strongly encourage people who want to have a modicum of hope who wants to see what I'm talking about in real life on social media There's a woman named Rebecca Divine She's okay with me giving her name Her handle is that brainy blonde It's a it's a triple antandra She's blonde She's very smart but she had a glyobblastoma 7 years ago and she is thriving alive with his imunotherapy So between my mother Rebecca Divine I'm just telling you like I've had well I've known well over a dozen people who there's no way they'd be here today if it wasn't for the scientific advances that all shore up the body's health defense systems specifically the immune system But that's the drugs alone aren't enough you really can take advantage at home of your own diet and lifestyle to be able to tip those odds in your favor I've heard you say that amunotherapy is more likely to be successful if you have certain bacteria in your gut Yeah that is okay So in 2017 I helped to convene a cancer research conference in Paris uh and we called it rethinking cancer and we brought the world's best minds out there and one of the um researchers uh uh named Dr Laurance Zogle she's at the in Paris works in Paris at the institute Gustaf Rousi she is an imuninooncologist so she studies imunotherapy for cancer and at the time we had uh we we asked her to present uh some uh groundbreaking results that were embargoed at the time So our research our conference was the first time it was ever presented and she said in a 100 people who were receiving imunotherapy for uh different types of cancer that if you looked at the difference between people who responded lived did well versus people who didn't respond didn't do well died All right and that's the frustration with the types of treatments my mom had um you know some people do well some people don't do well We pull our hair out trying to figure out like what's going on how do we make people do better well it turns out that when you compare everything gender age coorbidities uh uh all the other genetic factors The research that was presented showed that there was no differences between the groups of responders people who did well versus people who didn't do well for imunotherapy except for one thing That one thing was one bacteria The responders had one bacteria called acromancia mucinophila So most bacteria have a genus and species First name last name first name is acrimancia last name is mucinophila Okay it likes to grow in mucus Mucinophilia Where is there a lot of mucus in the colon Where's the colon that's the on this model the blue area So acromancy grows right here in the seeum which is the pouch uh in the colon right at the beginning before you take the up elevator to the top of of the colon That's where it grows If you if the people had that acromancia they would respond to imunotherapy So what what the researcher did they she took out the acromancia and brought it to her lab of the responders from humans and and gave it to mice who were not responding to imotherapy Boom she'd recom she'd resurrect the immune response to kill the cancer So this is one of the first bacteria and there there may be many many that we haven't yet discovered All right So like my whole career has all been about discovery There may be more bacteria but we discovered at least one the presence of which seems to be absolutely vital if you are a patient receiving imunotherapy uh the type of imunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors uh if you want to uh uh tip the odds in your own favor of being a responder Now how do you get acromancia well at the time uh there was no acromancia probiotics Now you can actually find acromancia probiotics but but at the time this was coming out you you had to grow your own acromancia DIY acromancia All right So how do you grow it well it turns out that there are certain foods you can eat that grow acromancia What are those foods pomegranate Pomegranate juice Pomegranate seeds will grow acromancia Cranberries uh cranberry juice dried cranberries will grow acromancia Conquered grape juice or conquered grapes will grow acromancia Chili peppers will actually grow acromancia Chinese black vinegar You ever go to dim sum and have soup dumplings oh yeah The black vinegar sauce that they use for for as a condiment to the soup dumplings Chinese black vinegar That will prompt your body to grow acromancy as well So what is your diet of preference then there's so many different diets that we've people speak about when they talk about cancer and other chronic diseases Um as I think I said to you beforehand I'm on an extremely low carb diet which is like VG is on keto but I kind of bounce in and out of ketosis What What do you think of Let's start with the the ketogenic diet Do you have a view on on that kind of diet yeah So let me just give you my my perspective on diets Lots of different diets out there They're all designed uh with kind of a specific perspective and a particular goal in mind Often times diet whether you're talking about South Beach or keto or carnivore or vegan you know um they're all designed to achieve a certain kind of goal uh most of them are very very difficult to maintain for a long period of time Now people are vegans uh and vegetarians and they're that's something that because of the diversity of the food that you can you can actually maintain that but you know if you're only doing pure keto that's very difficult to do So most popular trending diets are short-lived short-term solutions and they'll kind of force your body to do something all right but you can't keep it up And so a diet that you can't keep up isn't to me a very practical diet because you're going to bursts of activity that you just can't do your whole life I find that it's much more healthy in the long run if you can find a sustainable way of eating that works for you personally that you can maintain and that you're going to enjoy your life as well Most people who are on really strict diets they're not enjoying their diet you know like people who only eat meat only eat carnivore diet or only eat raw food Listen you can't don't con me You can't you can't be enjoying eating raw food you know your entire life you know navigating through society and seeing other people you know eat a big steaming plate of pasta or something you know or going to a Chinese restaurant So what I'm saying is that trending diets are well-intentioned and they often are designed to do one thing but you can't keep it up So it doesn't really at the end of the day contribute to the ultimate uh goal What I prefer and where I think the science takes us where the next frontier for like lifetime health is tearing a page from the playbook of some of the healthiest cuisines in the world And I would say Mediterranean is the hot bed the crucible of a lot of healthy diets not just the blue zones might think but but there but there are blue zones in the Mediterranean also Asia uh there's a blue zone in Asia as well but you know look there's also a blue zone in Latin America if you take a look at the common denominator of what's going on in the Mediterranean and Asia is a very healthy plantforward fresh seasonal uh healthy cooking oils healthy preparation style absolutely delicious way of eating I mean come on Take if I were to take you to a Mediterranean restaurant or to a Asian restaurant I would find it hard to believe that you wouldn't you and I opening a menu couldn't find something that we would enjoy eating Right so Mediterranean is what how I tell people I actually eat That's my quote diet Why do the Japanese seem to do so well on when we think about the world's healthiest countries looking at some data here some a variety of different graphs that I have in front of me And Japan seems to continually seem to come out on top as it relates to health span Yeah Okay Well um there's no one single factor I think that was responsible for it but it is true Um the the Japanese uh demographics uh show uh consistently some of the uh oldest longest living people you know they tend first and foremost Okay before we talk about what they eat let me tell you what they don't do They don't overeat And I'm giving a purposeful pause there because overeating caloric loading okay uh is very damaging to our metabolism It actually counters uh our ability for long to to live long It actually speeds up our cellular aging It's it it sets up inflammation So by cutting down on your caloric intake every day that's one of the things is that the Japanese culture the the the culinary and gastronomic approach to food in Japan tends to uh favor modesty Uh uh uh undereating rather than overeating I've got a question here How do how do I know if I'm overeating okay So so there's a Confucian saying uh that's been translated into the Japanese that they that's a mantra which is harachi which means stop eating when you're 80% full I asked this question because I have a friend who was I think it was on this podcast so um don't think I'm revealing anything He actually sat next to me um when Peter was talking to him He's Jack who um runs production for us He had his DEXA scan done which looks at your visceral fat subcutaneous fat muscle mass bone density those kinds of things Yeah And he's a slim guy He's much slimmer than I am And the diagnosis that came back from the doctor basically said "You're overnourished." And when I look at him he doesn't look like someone that's overnourished And the the doctor essentially said to him that you need to reduce your calories Now I'm looking at this guy thinking "This is a slim guy This guy's like much much slimmer than I am yet the doctor's telling him that he's overeating Yeah So I wrote a whole book on this called Eat to Beat Your Diet which is not a diet book It's an anti-diet book that really um uh uh unccloaks the new science of your metabolism And what I try to say in terms of sharing that science is that first of all body fat which society is regarded as a bad thing We don't nobody wants fat right um is actually a good thing Body fat's an organ in the body Did you know that like it's it's one of our body organs Um our body fat it is distributed throughout our body And what does it do as an organ well it's got some cushioning effect So you know like if you didn't have any body fat by the way you tripped on the stairs and you hit the ground you might rupture your organs All right that's so that has a little bit of a cushion effect marshmallowy cushion effect But our fat also is a fuel tank to store fuel So when we're eating calories our calories are our energy We're eating food we're eating calories That's our energy That's that's a fuel our body runs off of I always tell people if you have a car and you're filling it up with gasoline at the petrol station or the gas station um you don't even think about your gas until your fuel gauge starts to run low And the same thing for our our our bodies is that we don't think about our fuel until we're hungry And our our hunger in our brain and our gut is really as our fuel tank that signals you know we're getting towards that red line Better go fill fill up Now unlike a gas station or petrol station there's no clicker on our body We can keep stuffing food into our system We can very easily overload our fuel tank Okay that is you've got you got to cut back on your calories That's what you your your friend heard when the doctor was saying you got to cut back on your calories because you're overloading on fuel So where does so where does the fat build up it's there's different areas that fat in your body builds up Now the fat can there's white fat and there's uh uh uh brown fat White fat can be under your chin could be under your arms could be in your thighs and your butt could be your your the the muffin top you know around your waist But that's not where the most dangerous fat builds up The most dangerous fat inflammatory fat is a fat that builds up in the inside the tube of your body So if you think of your body like a poster tube okay inside that tube and all this gut is I'm sorry the the body cavity if you were to slice this body in half and look at a cross-section all right it's a tube You can fill all you any of these uh interstitial areas between organs you can pack with fat So think about you're going to FedEx something to somebody overnight mail uh a vase or or a glass or bottle of wine or whatever you're going to pack it full of peanuts and you're going to put it into a package Well look you can get a big box and put a lot more peanuts on or you can take a skinny box that would just fit it and you'll put it in So it doesn't really matter the size of your tube You could be a skinny person and you could pack it with a lot of peanuts In this case visceral fat And that's what you're talking about in a skinny person with too much visceral fat too many peanuts packed in there And that is a result of overconumption of calories that fat that energy the fuel tanks building up within a skinny body Yeah And that's what we call skinny fat I am still like mildly in shock about it because because I saw his results I I panicked So the next day I also went to the same clinic as him I had my Dexus stan scan done and it came back and said that I had quote zero visceral fat So my results from Dr Peter said I had zero visceral fat which he said was rare but I had subcutaneous fat which is the fat on the outside more than Jack did So Jack had visceral fat which is the fat inside us and he had he has like almost no subcutaneous fat and I'm kind of the inverse of that And I don't what like I was trying to figure out why is my body when I eat something putting the fat subcutaneously on the outside whereas Jack's body is putting the fat on the inside which is the the dangerous fat Here is um an interesting thing Let's look at the opposite of building up subcutaneous fat which is the external fat not the not the danger the external fat Yeah So okay So there's two kinds of body fat White fat and brown fat White they're all good They're all beneficial Um white fat can be subcutaneous Subcutaneous means under the skin under your jaw under the skin of your jaw under your arms on your thighs That's subcutaneous White fat can also be visceral fat That's deep inside the tube of your body And then brown fat is not wiggly jiggly like the other like white fat Brown fat is wafer thin and it's plastered around our neck It's behind our breast bone a little bit behind between our shoulder blades a little bit in our belly And brown fat actually is metabolically as a active and it fires up a process called thermogenesis to burn down harmful visceral extra body fat So you can use good fat to burn down bad fat which is the amazing thing Again fat is not universally bad It's actually quite good And uh so one of the things that I think is really important to know is that when you've got too much visceral fat you got too much inflammation but you can actually use your brown fat to try to um control that to try to burn it down Brown fat by the way is activated by foods and activated by cold temperatures So when you talk about your cold plunge brown fat can actually light up So you you've just handed me a card I'll describe this in which there's two pictures of a figure And one of the uh pictured on the left is room temperature And it's not cold It's regular room temperature And this is the same individual by the way And you can't see anything lighting up because the brown fat is just adjusted to normal room temperature Now on the right hand side is when you actually um lower the temperature in an ice bath or something No no This is actually just lowering the room temperature Really really cold Like a like a like a laboratory condition lowering the room temperature And boom you see all this brown fat lighting up Remember I told you it's it's plastered around the neck behind the breast bone uh a little bit in your belly And this is mother nature's adaptation in evolution to help animals survive cold temperatures So before we had thermostats and room heaters um uh uh think about a by the way brown fat was discovered in hibernating animals Um there was a zoologologist uh who was looking at plucked out a uh kind of a muskrat looking animal from hibernation and dissected it and found that there was this brown lump that was between its shoulder blades and nobody knew what it was They just and the more researchers and biologists and zoologologists looked at animals that were hibernating they they found this very consistently In fact they called that brown mass first a hibernoma Hyper hibernating a mass we don't know what it does Okay um a hybrer who in the beginning we didn't have microscopes and then we had microscopes and we had really great microscopes and all of a sudden in 1930s the researcher uh at UCLA said you know that hibonoma is actually made of fat cells and those fat cells are brown and the reason they're brown is because they have a lot of mitochondria in it Mitochondria being the fuel cells of our body like they're the batteries of our body They're packing the they're the energy generators in our cell And mitochondria are very rich in iron And when iron is oxidized it turns brown like a pile of nails that you've put outside your door and the outdoors Silver nails will turn brown Brown fat packed with mitochondria energy generating packed with iron oxidizes turns brown That's why brown fat is brown And and so what happens is that in cold temperatures like in hibernation in winter the brown fat fires up and that's what keep keeps these hibernating animals warm throughout the winter so they don't freeze to death Now humans we can actually use that to our advantage We can actually activate our brown fat Cold bath will do it U sleeping in cold cooler warms will actually start to activate it as well When that by the way that when those mitochondria fire up they are burning energy You know where they draw the energy from from your white fat From your visceral fat first So you want brown fat good fat to burn down bad fat visceral fat white fat You want to sleep in a cool room or you want to go into a cold bath And there are lots of foods that will also you can eat foods to activate your brown fat to burn down harmful fat Um and then the last thing is cortisol the job that we have I know this doesn't sound like a hard job to be a podcaster but the in Jack's role he's basically working seven days a week sometimes You know he's working early hours of the morning He's traveling around the world with me to come to these studios It is I observe it It's a stressful job So I was wondering if these if all of these factors play a role in in how our body chooses where to store things And really like the role of cortisol in determining fat storage is so interesting to me like the role of stress in determining where our fat is stored Yeah Well I mean cortisol is a stress hormone It actually snaps us into uh action It actually is also healing Cortisol is a got multiple job descriptions It's kind of like a Swiss Army knife of hormones Uh and uh in a in small bursts cortisol incredible like and it makes you feel good as well I mean it's a kind basically it's a it's a type of body steroid So cortisol is a very very useful hormone for all kinds of reasons But long-term stress uh will lead to excessive prolonged unabated cortisol secretion And when your cortisol levels are up up and and relentlessly that then actually changes your metabolism It definitely alters your the ability for your fat to actually conduct its metabolism I mean fat releases itself about 15 different hormones So when you mess up the hormonal structure the endocrine structure of your own body fat with something like excessive cortisol you'll actually begin to derail your own metabolism So it's not the short-term cortisol it's a long-term cortisol that's actually the most damaging Why is visceral fat dangerous because people refer to it as being linked a lot of chronic disease and cancers and stuff like that but what evidence do we have that it's dangerous and what why is it dangerous yeah because the tube of your body with all the organs packed into it just like we're seeing here Look at all these organs packed in You got your liver you got your stomach you got your your colon and your small intestines that's packed into the tube All right it is it's it's kind of like uh packing for vacation You know some people are really really skilled at packing They can actually uh fold their socks and underwear and their pants and it's like oh my you're a genius You're you're packing genius right now visceral fat grows between those folded shirts and pants and it and it fills all that space in there When you have too much of it not only does it fill up that the suitcase of your body the tube of your body but it starts to push on organs which is not healthy because it's all packing inside the between the spaces the potential spaces in there And then when they grow when it grows beyond its own blood supply the visceral fat um starts to starve It becomes hypoxic meaning it's not getting enough oxygen bigger than the amount of blood vessels that are growing in there And now you've got the center of the fat star of oxygen Uh the inflammatory cells start moving in And now you've got this fat that's outgrown its own blood supply that's now becoming very inflammatory And because it's packed all throughout your the tube of your body into the suitcase of your body it's leaking out that inflammation everywhere So think about it like if you have a neatly packed suitcase and you're like I'm you know I'm going to put um I'm going to put some uh uh lotion and cream canisters of lotion and cream I'm going to pack it everywhere in in between the spaces Okay look uh Stephen pack a few but but let's stop right there And you're no I'm going to pack like 20 or 30 of them And you keep on stuffing it Even though the suitcase it's a hard suitcase and you can you can put a lot in there Now you're starting to press on the the clothing you're going to scrunch up your pants And here in the body you're scrunching up your organs Now why don't we make those one of those tubes uh uh of of cream Let's break one of them open Now it's leaking All right and that's what's happening when your fat is so inflame so inflamed it starts to leak inflammation Now imagine that that cream uh starts to leak out into the interstites of your suitcase Now you've got a suitcase Looks skinny on the outside It looks like it just looks like a suitcase It's a could be a carry-on But now all the organs all the clothes you packed so neatly are squeezed and scrunched off and now the lotion is leaking everywhere That is the analogy of excess body fat in a small container spreading out compressing the organs and leaking out and that's why it's dangerous Oh gosh And that there's a link there to cancer Yeah So studies have actually shown that and this was a study uh done uh by Cornell in New York um looking at Swedish women who were normal body size or skinny So you've heard of skinny fat This is what they were studying And they looked at these women uh to see they did DEEXA scans as you described um to see how much body fat they had And then they followed them over 13 years and they actually found that women who did not have extra body fat had you know normal risk of breast cancer but women who had skinny fat remember all the women in the study and so 3,000 women actually were normal body size not I mean they weren't super models but they were they were just normalsized women some of them were slimmer than others but none of them were obese none of them were overweight u just normal size Um and they but they knew at the b baseline what the DEXA scan showed and what they found is that women who had excess body fat over the period of 13 years had a three-fold increase in the risk of developing breast cancer and it's linked to higher met inflammatory markers in their bloodstream which makes total sense The leaking body cream the leaking inflammation you know in a skinny tube all right or normalized tube normal suitcase Look the suitcase can't expand bigger It's it's got a finite size um but it's leaking out and and this is because cancer thrives in an inflammatory environment If you have inflammation without even a microscopic cancer like we talked about but a small tumor putting inflammation in the environment of a cancer is like pouring gasoline on the embers of a fire You ever go camping you have a campfire it's almost out at the very end Now if you pour some gasoline it boom whoosh you're going to have to create a bonfire all over again That's how dangerous inflammation is So that's why excess visceral fat inflammatory fat is so dangerous and linked to cancer And by the way not just breast cancer Turns out that excess visceral fat has been linked to 14 other cancers Increased risk of 14 other cancers Everything from colon ovarian lung breast prostate Uh it it's the it's a it's a growing list of cancers that seem to be at put you would be at higher risk if you had high levels of visceral fat And it makes total sense given the inflammation Don't you hate it when you have a good idea and then you forget for the last two years I've been writing my brand new book And my book writing process is a little bit atypical in the sense that I have all of these great conversations on the diio And I might stumble across a great idea while my guest is speaking to me in the middle of a conversation Or I could be walking the dog I could be out and about with my friends I could be anywhere when I have an idea for my upcoming book This is why notion who are a show sponsor of mine now has been an incredible platform for me I've designed my notion so that I can pull out my phone super quickly and store the idea in the section about my new book and I can collect pictures images voice notes any type of media on the go which means I'm able to capture that point of inspiration in a flexible way and I'm no longer losing good ideas I imagine many of the creatives and entrepreneurs listening to my podcast already use Notion But if you want to try out Notion and you've never used it yourself head over to notion.com/doac That's notion.com/doac There was a a shocking study that I read about this a while ago in JAMAMA and it examined the impact of illness anxiety disorder which they call I a formerly known as hypochondriitis and the impact that being avoidant of health and illness has on your mortality rates And they the researcher analyzed data from approximately 45,000 individuals over a 24-year period comparing 4,000 patients who had this anxiety around their health and were avoidant And the findings showed that those with IAD that were anxious about health and getting checkups and those kinds of things had an 84% higher risk of death during the study period dying on average 5 years earlier than those without the disorder And again causation is hard to establish there because it could mean that being an anxious person means your cortisol's up anyway being an anxious person means you make worse dietary choices But I I've always remembered that and thought about how um how it's I find it much more much better especially as I age and I'm going to be now confronted with more risks especially things in men like prostate cancer Being on the front foot um is probably a better approach Well uh and if you take some proactive approaches using food as medicine where you got to eat three you know you got to eat every day Most most of most people eat three times a day Most people encounter food about five times a day Breakfast lunch dinner and a couple of snacks If you realize every time you're encountering food is an opportunity an opportunity to choose a food an ingredient that actually supports raises your shields supports your health defense systems and know that and trust your body trust your health defense systems that if you raise your shields you're less likely to actually have uh have problems later won't eliminate them Okay there's no guarantees in life but it'll lower the risk Here's an example Um Stephen you know research studies have shown that tomatoes are good for overall um health You mentioned prostate cancer So studies have shown that uh men who eat tomatoes regularly cooked tomatoes actually have a 29% lower risk of developing prostate cancer It's pretty good Uh what's the dose of the tomatoes that you need to cook tomatoes you need to eat two to three servings per week All right I can probably I can probably accomplish that How much each time do I got to eat a wheelbarrow of tomatoes each time no the the typical serving that this study supports is just half a cup of tomato cooked tomatoes is per serving How do they know this stuff because obviously how do they isolate that in a test so these are from largecale population studies In this case it's a it's a uh epidemiological study called a uh health professionals follow-up study where they looked at they developed hypotheses and they looked at outcomes over the course of 25 years and they looked for statistical correlations So they found that um tomatoes lowered the risk of prostate cancer based on people reporting their tomato eating Then they actually went back and look at the report within the data collected How much how much do they eat on average every week so that then you can actually back calculate the dose All right Now I I told you earlier about the way that I do research foods and medicine research Let's take it further Let's figure out what's in a tomato Well tomatoes have lots of it's got it's got sugar It's got uh some salt It's got uh carotenoids which are bioactives One of which is lycopine Well okay What does lycopine do guess what lycopine does lycopine in the lab will cut off the blood supply to tumors Anti-androenesis shores up your health defense systems Prevents cancer from getting a blood supply And in fact in correlative studies um uh they've actually taken the prostate cancer biopsies of men who did not avoid prostate uh cancer So they were tomato eaters who went on to develop prostate cancer anyway There's no nothing takes you versus zero And they looked at them and what they found is that those men who ate more tomatoes had fewer blood vessels in their prostate cancer and the prostate cancers were also less aggressive So people who ate four times and five times and six times had fewer and less aggressive blood vessels growing into their prostate cancer So that's an example where you know if I told you um consider having some cooked tomatoes a few times a week and you don't need a lot Even half a cup is enough Oh why cooked tomatoes well because it turns out lycopine is uh a natural chemical that in its native form pick a tomato off the vine and eat it that like an apple it's absorbed in your body but not avidly not as much as possible Um what is that that is coffee Okay And we've been talking a little bit about brown fat Yeah Is there a link between fat and coffee because I heard someone the other day saying that if you want to lose weight drink coffee And I wasn't sure if that was well So coffee is a beverage made with coffee beans Coffee beans are plant-based foods Coffee beans contain many polyphenols including chlorogenic acid Chlorogenic acid is anti-inflammatory Chlorogenic acid also turns on your brown fat So it activates it triggers your brown fat and it causes your brown fat the mitochondria to fire up undergo thermogenesis to burn down harmful white fat or visceral fat So cup of coffee a day or actually the dose is actually about three to four cups of coffee a day will definitely cause your brown fat good fat to burn down your bad fat your harmful fat your visceral fat What about fasting people people often talk about fasting as a as an intervention as a form of medicine for the body And I wondered if you had a take on that Yeah f listen fasting is beneficial Fasting is good and fasting is very old It's not just a recent trend uh if you go back thousands of years I mean if you look at some of mo some of the oldest religions of the world fasting was part of their ritual that would happen you know throughout the year Now people go "Well what about intermittent fasting how long should I fast?" I try to tell people there is no magic formula for success for fasting because we're all different and our bodies are different Our lifestyles are different There's no universal fasting protocol that's going to be one-sizefits-all However I will tell you an easy way to fast because fasting is very natural to us is just paying attention to what you do every day and be mindful So when you're sleeping you're not eating When you're not eating you're fasting So I try to be reassuring So guess what you're fasting every day anyway When you fall asleep you're fasting All right and the longer you're not eating and sleeping the more time your metabolism the Ferrari of your of your metabolism of your body can switch gears to burn down any extra fat that's accumulated Now if you've been eating whatever you want over time you probably built up a lot of extra fat Now from your scans apparently not You don't have too much All right but you if you you're fasting regularly you're burning down all that extra stuff Okay and so then how do you optimize that without having to calendarize your fast and figure out you know how to uh schedule your meals i try to make things um as scientific but as practical as possible And so I tell people you want to really get involved in intermittent fasting Easiest way is take advantage of what you're doing already And that is if you're sleeping try to sleep eight hours a day So how do you sleep eight hours a day i don't know I said if you go to bed at 11 o'clock get up at 7 o'clock you get to eight hours of sleep All right we know that that's the med the sweet spot for your brain for your metabolism for you know for burning out harmful body fat How do you get more out of that how do you turn that eight hours of fasting into more well what I say is that the night before when you're eating dinner let's say you eat from 7 to 8 o'clock in the evening what I say is that when you finish dinner and you put your dishes away in the sink or in the dishwasher that's it No more eating Stop eating Nothing until the next day Um if you're going to have dessert or whatever squeeze it in there Don't take a snack with you and sit by the television or you know absent minily gobble food and don't before you be you go to bed eat a big chunk of whatever Okay now you got 3 hours before you go to bed at 11 Again this is all a theoretical model 3 hours of not eating Your blood sugar goes down Your your insulin goes down because your blood you're not eating anymore All right Now your metabolism shifts gears three hours earlier Okay Now you've got those eight hours plus three hours you got 11 hours Now when you get up in the morning okay let's say you get up at seven in the morning don't do what our moms told us to do right so when if you were like me growing up my mom when I got up like hurry up and get to breakfast and eat something so you have enough energy to actually go to school and learn something All right so that's I I developed this instinct of actually just getting up and eating as quickly as I can getting some breakfast in What if I told you that what I do now when I get up in the morning I deliberately don't do what my mother told me to do I get up I take my time getting ready uh I get dressed Um I don't eat anything right away In fact if I'm dressed and I'm ready for the day I might go check it out I might go outside and take a look at the outside I might go for a quick walk or check my emails or I might read a chapter of a book or read a few pages of a book I wait at least an hour before I eat anything Now let's do the math Uh Stephen 8:00 stop eating 11 o'clock go to bed 3 hours 11 to 7 8 hours 3 plus 8 is equal to 11 hours I got 11 hours of fasting Now I get up and I don't eat for another hour Boom 12 hours of fasting Just like that Okay Now if you really want to do that 16hour fasting 168 just skip breakfast and get to lunch And as long as you don't overeat at lunch which does require a little discipline after you go for your fasting window that you don't overeat and you're eating the right foods that's how you actually get to do intermittent fasting in the most natural way possible So there's one part of the body that we haven't talked about which is and my little mannequin here inside its head the brain And I'm wondering how some of the themes we've talked about link to one of the most common brain diseases which people talk about which is Alzheimer's and dementia talked about I can't say that long word but um angiogenesis is there a link between angioenesis what we in the brain health dementia Alzheimer's yeah absolutely so I mentioned to you that the human body has got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels that are coursing through the entire body bringing the uh oxygen and nutrients through the highways and byways of health right 400 miles of those blood vessels are in your brain 400 miles of blood vessels are actually coursing through our brain And our brain is super metabolically active You know we're we're the engine of the brain is functioning all the time Regardless of your IQ regardless of what type of task you do our brain is very very metabolically active highly dependent upon a healthy circulation Now what we do know as people get older is that problems can occur with uh brain function And the reason I'm framing it this way is that it's quick to jump to a term that people use like dementia or Alzheimer's disease thinking it's one thing but in fact dementia is just a descriptive term for your cognition not working properly most commonly as you actually age Alzheimer's even though it is one type of diagnosis is probably several different kinds of disease as well And we do know that there are different types of dementia Alzheimer's is a subset of dement of dementia Alzheimer's dementia There's there's a more common type of dementia called vascular dementia and that's where those 400 miles of blood vessels in your body actually narrow get hard get clogged up and don't have good blood flow So you can imagine if you were to actually interrupt the sprinkler system the tubing the blood vessels the tributaries bringing oxygen to your brain within those blood vessels Okay over time your brain is not going to function very well So vascular dementia is is by far the more common type of dementia So what can we do to maintain healthy andogenic blood vessels throughout the course of our lives for anybody who wants aspires towards longevity All right you should be thinking about how to avert that path where your blood circula your blood vessels your circulation to your brain gets impaired the more uh vascular blood vessel healthy androgenesis supporting diet and lifestyle and medications that you take the better it's actually going to be Now here's what what's interesting What are some of those things turns out that dark chocolate plant-based foods the cacao actually um produces helps your body produce something called nitric oxide Nitric oxide actually widens your blood vessels so you get better blood flow So dark chocolate is one of those foods that actually can see seems to be able to promote better vascular health including in the brain Now there are other foods that can produce nitric oxide as well Beets beetroot actually can produce nitric oxide Spinach can do produce nitric oxide as well Those are vascular healthy Now here's the other thing When you produce nitric oxide like with these foods you know what nitric oxide does it recruits stem cells healthy stem cells not cancer stem cells but healthy stem cells from your bone marrow Stem cells are stem cells are primitive cells that can turn into anything you need them to be Turn into a brain heart lung liver skin hair Um our stem cells actually regenerate us from the inside out Now you know that one of the things that happens as we get older is our brain atrophies and can start to degenerate It shrinks Literally a scan of an older person the brain the brain matter the mass of the brain shrinks inside the skull It's like a like a cotton shirt that shrank and you see this actually in a scan And so in order to be able to try to keep the shrinking from happening you want to make sure there's good blood flow going which actually helps to keep the brain growing in a healthy and maintained in a healthy sort of way So um stem cells that are recruited by nitric oxide actually can help to also regenerate the blood vessels and keep the blood vessels helping healthy feeding the brain That's the connection between Alzheimer's and and I mean dementia and now for Alzheimer's um I worked with a colleague Dr Anthony Vagnucci some years ago and we published uh what was then an editorial in the Lancet uh you know very prestigious uh British medical publication and we were connecting the dots between androgenesis and Alzheimer's disease and here's how it works most people assume that if you've got Alzheimer's disease or someone has Alzheimer's disease they don't have very good blood flow they're not going to have a lot of androgenesis they got problems right of their of their circulation of course and in fact if If you look at um the blood flow studies scans brain scans looking for blood flow in Alzheimer's brain Indeed you see poorer blood flow in people who have actually Alzheimer's disease But it turns out the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease have more blood vessels more blood vessels that aren't working well So their andro abnormal androgenic blood vessels are not working well So you don't get good blood flow So the scans don't show them just don't creating blood flow Guess what those blood vessels are doing those abnormal blood vessels they have been discovered to secrete a neurotoxin that kills your brain cells So abnormal androenesis in Alzheimer's disease grows blood vessels that don't create blood flow but they secrete a toxin that kills brain cells and they also secrete the precursor to build up the plaque So uh we we published this as a as a hypothesis and an editorial in the Lancet and now there's a whole field looking at androgenesis and and Alzheimer's disease It's crazy how this all stems back to this idea that food is medicine Yeah I mean listen before we had medicine as medicine before we had pharmaceuticals in the 1930s it's all we had That's all humans had our diet and lifestyle for medicines you know And so I think that that's really I think what's happened is that in during the industrial revolution that occurred with pharmaceuticals we put aside a tool in the toolbox that we've always had In fact that's the only thing we had before And we focused myopically just on what pharmaceuticals can do Now I'm telling you as somebody who has developed biioharmaceuticals and who is still very much involved in that new medicines can be life-saving Old medicines can be life-saving And so you never want to throw out the baby with a bath water What we have forgotten about is that tool in the toolbox It's been with humanity forever which is what we do with our food And and what I'm saying is that what we can do now with the work that I'm doing in food is medicine We can take the modern science that deep probe that ex extraordinary level of sophistication that we use for drug development and we can use it apply it to understand why our foods help us which foods help us and what types of outcomes we're actually looking for And so food is medicine Bringing it back into the fold is just replacing a tool in the toolbox But now we are actually fortifying it with the knowledge provided by science of what we should choose and when and why Supplementation Are you a fan of supplementation because I take a couple of supplements every morning Things like creatine and omega-3 and vitamin D Do you take supplements yep Yes I do And I I'll I'll first say um my my first off approach is that uh we should get most of the micronutrients that we need to be healthy from our food Use your food uh to our advantage because uh single foods will have hundreds of different uh polyphenols and fiber and all kinds of other beneficial things So and and vitamins and minerals So our food is a much more efficient way to get all of our micronutrients However supplements can be helpful in the literal translation of the world supplement which means topping off So if you can't get everything that you need from your food then feel free to top it off And that's what I actually do as well But vitamin D vitamin D I do it as well Omega-3 fatty acids another good uh top off uh to actually use for a supplement And by the way there are some probiotics that um I feel that it's prudent to actually get have in my body So I'm not giving a general recommendation I'm just telling you what I do right that's what we're talking about Everything's personal It's personal to them But I you know we talked earlier about the acromancia right so I do eat the foods that support acromancia the pomegranate etc and the chili peppers But I'm going to take the supplement because I've seen the data that shows how important it can be Oh an acromancia improves your metabolism lowers the risk of metabolic syndrome There might even be some clues that acromancia um might also lower the risk of dementia development later on as well So hey this is a pretty safe natural bacteria I'll take that probiotic And another probiotic I take is called Lactobacillus rutery Lutery What does this do lowers inflammation builds immunity It actually text This is the bacteria that text messages the brain We talked about the brain and it causes our brain to release social hormones like oxytocin That's a social hormone that makes us feel good So you know uh why wouldn't I actually take that and oh one last thing Lactobacus ruti has been I the kind I take is chewable Why wouldn't you just take a capsule well it turns out that the same bacteria lactobacus ruterides good for the gut but if you chew it up this is the bacteria that kills the bacteria that causes cavities and gum disease I haven't had cavity in well over a decade you know And so again this is one of these types of practical things that um just knowing the science and knowing what I do and where where I don't need enough It's hard to get enough vitamin D um uh uh hard enough to get omega-3s I will actually top off on those I'm wondering you know you've I've got these two great books in front of me Eat to Beat Disease which is a New York Times bestseller and Eat to Beat Your Diet which is really about burning fat healing your metabolism and living longer I know that you must have some f people use the term superfoods all the time but there must be some foods where you look at them and just think they are little miracles in their own right So I wanted to a little challenge for you is if you had to pick five of your favorite foods based on the research that you've done the science you've seen what would those top fives be i would bring coffee Okay Um because of all the polyphenols in coffee I'd bring tea Um I tend to drink coffee in the morning and I have tea at night Um and I can I'm not caffeine sensitive so I can have the tea at night If if if you allow me I'll actually lump those into my beverages Okay Under one category Um I'll bring tree nuts Tree nuts Tree nuts Walnuts almonds macadamia pistachios Um I love nuts U tree nuts And you know not the pack prepackaged kind but I like to you know kind of like toast them up myself and see flavor them myself Um I would bring that because of the dietary fiber the healthy pro it's a good source of protein some healthy fats in it as well and can kill some cancer stem cells while we're at it Okay so tree nuts are actually good I would bring tomatoes because I love tomatoes Okay it's a great source for hydration good source of lycopine which we talked about good for metabolism I would take berries Berries blueberries strawberries raspberries are are among my favorites Raspberries You might be surprised at this but raspberries are poundfor-pound or weight for weight one of the most fiber richch foods out there They're light they're hollow packed with fiber Um and they've got polyphenols and that are useful for lowering inflammation as well Berries um are actually really good And then you know I because I follow what I call the Mediterranean uh style of eating I love to have those vegetables that are actually used in both the Mediterranean and Asia Mediterranean style cooking the bok choy the kale chory escarol you know all of those types of um of of leafy greens So those would be the five I would actually take with me And what is the most important thing that we didn't talk about that we should have talked about you know I think that uh the most one of the most important things that that I want people to walk away with is that there's more than 200 foods that I've studied and I've written about in my books eat to be disease and eat to beat your diet that you know I've done all the heavy lifting to help you figure out what foods are healthy that you could consider adding to your diet But if you notice I didn't actually give you a formula or a set menu on what to do for health Because the most important thing I I I want people to walk away with is that my humanistic approach to this is um you should love your food to love your health And if you could actually do both at the same time you have to find out what are the foods that resonate with you What do you prefer what do you enjoy so if you could look at 200 healthy foods which is what what I have in my books and just take a highlighter or a pencil and circle them Circle the ones you already love Start and stick with those you're already way ahead of the game And that builds confidence that you're actually doing the right things And that's what I love about this book in particular Eat to Beat Disease is that it also comes with lots of great recipes um inside the book And um I think that's super helpful because there's a lot of information here but this makes it actionable It's a it's a really iconic book It's such it's sold so incredibly well because also it's so unbelievably accessible to people who aren't scientists and that are trying to find some things that they can add to their plate Um and I think that's essential to the approach that you take as well You're not someone that's telling us we can't eat nice things and enjoy our life You're talking about the things that we should be adding to our plate to make our lives more um healthy and increase our longevity which I'm very excited about actually because you're writing a book about longevity I hear And um I'm very much awaiting that book which when when do you think that'll be due and ready i don't uh I'm working on a manuscript so I'm not ready to give a release date yet but you'll be the first to know Okay good We have a a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for And the question that's been left for you is how would you be able to tell that your time here on Earth has been successful that you've achieved what you set out to achieve wow I think I would have two sides two answers for that that represent different sides of the coin For me I think if I'm able to have made my immediate community my family better that would uh be meaningful a meaningful life uh having been lived And if you look at the whole uh rest of my career and existence and how I spend my time I want the work that I've done to resonate with others in a way that can improve their lives I'm you know what I do I kind of say I'm taking one for the team The team being the rest of the world And if I can contribute even a small piece that makes other people's lives better then I feel like you know I've done it I've done my job Well that's what you're most certainly doing my friend because you when I was looking through what you've accomplished in your life um whether it's the all of the FDA approved treatments for over 70 diseases including cancers diabetes chronic wounds and blindness that you've helped to develop um more than I could possibly count or whether it's the work that you're doing through your foundation which I think people should uh check out which is a nonprofit organization which helps develop treatments for chronic diseases that are based on angioenesis You've most certainly done that and you continue to do that But even maybe more importantly of all because there's so many billions of people out there that are starved of the information that you have and that you find in your research laboratory is you've come out into the world into the public forum and you're helping to articulate and demystify these incredibly confusing things that people like me who didn't go and get a PhD or didn't go to Harvard don't understand And you're masterful at it You really are masterful your ability to break down You know I sit here week in week out speaking to very very smart people and not all of them have the very important skill of being able to turn something very complicated into something understandable And that is a skill you have It's a real real gift and especially your use of like metaphors and analogies which really cement these ideas in our brain in a way that we can all understand That for me is a really really important gift So long may you continue to continue your work of public communication as well because for people like me it it can cause a penny drop moment that then leads us to change our lives for the better So thank you Thank well well thank you for inviting me But you know I would say that you know we also live in a time again this is about going into the future I'm always about moving into the future Well we have the platforms We have you know I I went on to I developed a YouTube channel because I realized it was a place for me to take to drink from the fire hydrant distill it and figure out how I can deliver it in swift fashion which would have been impossible 10 years ago So for example you know we talked about how you know uh when my uncles had had cancer and passed away and I felt helpless then my mother had it some years later and we had progress we had the ability to be able to do something different Similarly for me I look at my books I look at my social channels my YouTube um uh platform as ways of being able to actually solve a problem that I felt like needed to be solved but I wasn't really sure how to do it until now Dr William Lee I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your YouTube channel because it is fantastic and that's a great place to get more of this information but also I'm going to link the YouTube channel and all of these books below for anybody that wants to continue their journey of learning Thank you Thank you I really appreciate you being so generous with your time and wisdom This has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribe to the show So could I ask you for a favor if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button And my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week We'll listen to your feedback We'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do Thank you so much [Music] [Music]