Dr. William Li
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
A classic American breakfast. You have oatmeal, maybe a huge Starbucks latte with like 30, 50 grams of sugar inside of there. You have people eating some eggs. Generally seems to be healthy. Depends on who you pay attention to. Some people say it's the devil. Some people say it's healthy. and a glass of orange juice.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Their job is to create stuff, you know, for their shareholders who are actually counting on them to create stuff. The responsibility comes to us as consumers to make those healthy choices, right? I mean, look, you get in a car every day and you drive to your work or whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Up to you if you're going to actually speed and endanger yourself and other people, or are you going to drive on the speed limit? And so these are choices we make. We make good choices and we can make bad choices. But if every day you choose to make a choice that puts you in danger, okay? And I think that's really where this...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Modern sensibility is just like all this stuff that we just thought was our lives, ultra processed foods. You know, there's a danger element to them. I think we're beginning to wake up as a society to ask questions about that. And at the end of the day, it's up to us to make those good choices.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And, you know, your convection oven, you know, ultra processed breakfast sandwich and all that other kind of stuff that, you know, we see this all the time. I'll tell you what I've seen. I've seen in some of the healthiest people that come from the healthy cultures, they live pretty simple lives.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, my wife cannot stop raving about our new Cozy Earth bedsheets. Since we've made the switch to these best-selling bamboo bedsheets that are not only cool, but free from toxic chemicals, she said that she's sleeping better than ever. Honestly, we both have.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, because high-quality sleep is so important, I'm always looking for ways to optimize my bedroom to give my body the best sleep environment it needs to recover and rejuvenate. And Cozy Earth's bedsheets help me do exactly that. Cozy Earth's
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
A great example is the people I've known from Greece, for example, they start their breakfast with bread. basically a simple cup of coffee and maybe a piece of fruit. And that's it. It's really, really simple. All right. And maybe some Greek yogurt. All right. And not a lot of it, like a little tiny cup of it with some crushed pistachios, maybe a little bit of cut fruit into it. And that's it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Take advantage of this amazing sale right now. I'd love to get your perspective on this. I was recently in Japan for the first time visiting. My wife had been there a couple of times.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And in reading a little bit about it, one of the things that you see in contrast is that Japan as a society, which also plays into this idea of your Mediterranean diet that you talked about last time you were on the podcast. Their population has, I think, like a 3% obesity rate compared to in America, we're like just right around or a little bit above the 50% like obesity, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And then if you talk about overweight, we're dealing with a population that's in the 75 plus category, maybe even 80%. I'll have to pull those statistics. And one of the things that they do in their country, when you look at the country of Japan, is on a national level, they really talk about healthy eating habits from a young age.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And in fact, many of the schools are mandated to have a nutritionist at the school and that meals have to be, they're mandated to be made from scratch each day. for the kids in that school.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And at the youngest of ages, it depends on the school district and where it is and what part of the country and what resources, but kids are often involved in the making of the process, washing foods, other things. So I think sometimes when people feel that there's something going on in America,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
they hear from organizations like the Eat Real nonprofit and that's in the Bay Area where they see that one of the trickery that sometimes happens is that you have an aggressive sort of food industrial complex that will lobby that they will come in with the cheapest prices in the schools
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And they end up getting the kitchens sort of shut down, not by direct pressure, but because the schools don't need a kitchen. And now the schools that actually have interest in making healthy food, they don't even have a kitchen in the first place and they can't even compete.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So it's not that it's one person's fault, but it's almost like a de facto plan of like, how do we have it so backwards over here when it comes to teaching our young kids and And then there's things like, oh, you know, what if it was the farm bill or something where pizza is considered a vegetable. Right. And so that that meets the requirements for a lot of schools.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So that's where I think that some people feel like is corporate pressure from just the idea of maximizing profit from every different direction. Is that sort of schoolwork? unintentionally, intentionally squeezing us so that from a young age, we have kids that develop these just incredibly unhealthy habits.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah. I mean, look, health starts when you're young, right? So the moment you're born, you're becoming exposed to the environment. Your epigenetics are starting to change. Your genetics are firing up. Your health defenses that you're born with have formed in your mom's womb. When you take your first breath,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Take your first suckle of hopefully breast milk and that formula, you're being exposed to the environment. I've been using the analogy, when we are born, we are all like laptops, brand new laptops you take out of the box. It's perfectly designed. They all look the same. You plug it into the wall. When you start it up, the operating system is supposed to work exactly the same way. Okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And yes, there are some genetic differences, of course. But lifestyle winds up being, you know, 80% or more dictating our fate. And our fate starts... when we were young. So a lot of these early exposures that we actually have wind up not only developing habits, but also developing cellular fingerprints that we carry with us to the decades that we wind up living. Now, the good news is,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I actually embarked upon that myself and found myself feeling so much better by not loading in calories and loading in additives and loading in all that other stuff. Listen, I grew up like most people who are probably watching or listening to this, you know, hey, it's really great to have a big thing, a big topping of whipped cream with like all these fancy things on it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's never too late to actually revert back to your own operating system, which is the, what do you, this is why I tell people, you know, if you're somebody who hasn't really paid attention to your health for most of your life and you feel kind of crummy and you're like, you know what, it's time to own up to this and I want to actually change myself. I want to do something. How do I do it?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Which diet do I take? You know, what supplement should I take? What should I cut out of my life? I mean, that's a typical thing that I often hear from somebody who's desperate to improve their situation and they're overwhelmed.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
especially in today's world uh and then they and then of course then they invoke like oh is there a big conspiracy around me and i'm trapped in a you know i'm trapped in somebody else's nightmare you know what what i say is that it's a very complex situation health and food all right and and you know you address uh you started to address some of the nuances and complexities what i say is that what you got to realize is that we all have it hardwired into in ourselves and
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
to be able to have that operating system to get back to health our metabolism knows how to actually be healthy we know how to lose body fat we know how to actually regulate blood sugar for the most part we know how to actually keep our joints healthy we know how to keep our brains healthy that's actually what comes out of the box that's our operating system now over the course of many years we derail our operating system you know it's like your laptop
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You keep it too hot, you drop it, you download crazy things on it. It's got some viruses on it. Listen, you might keep your computer, your laptop in perfect shape. If I'm careless and I drop it and I do all those crazy things to it, I don't have any kind of hygiene on it. At some point, I'm going to regret it. I'm going to say, you know what? My laptop's running really slowly.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I got all these viruses. My screen doesn't work so well. What can I do? I feel overwhelmed. And what I always tell people, like in your body, go back to basics, clean it up, go back to the operating system, all right, and start from there. And so simple things can actually get us back. And yes, there are lots of overwhelming considerations. You know, I mean, if...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
you are overwhelmed by messaging. That's not corporations, or maybe it's a media corporation, but listen, it's up to you, what you're listening to and what you're scrolling through. If you're overwhelmed by advertising on television or a billboard sign as, you know, they used to be, hey, listen, we're supposed to, you know, we're supposed to be smart enough to
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
especially as we get older, to make our own choices on these things. You can't tell people not to advertise, you know? I mean, you can try to, but at the end of the day, I always feel take responsibility, go back to your own operating system, do some simple things that can make a big difference. You can't fight the machine, okay?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Machine can be taken down by another machine to take it apart, try to put it back together. I think, you know, in our society and not just the United States, but I think around the world, we're seeing this in action. The old machine is being challenged by the people who are saying, should we take it apart and put it back together again? Sometimes you got to do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, if you're somebody who is really good with your hands and tools, sometimes you just got to take that lawnmower apart. Yeah. Okay. And put it back together and clean all the pieces. I think that's kind of what we're going through with the society and food is no different. I think that some of those questions that are being asked. Should we be having these additives?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Should we be having these dyes? Should we be having these preservatives? I think they're really valid questions. We don't know the answers to some of the suspicions in full detail. But listen, I'm a medical doctor. And when I took my oath at the end of medical school to become a doctor, you know, you get all these young guns, you know, with their stethoscope through.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Like it feels like holidays, you know. But to be honest with you, simple has always made me feel better. I start the day with a cup of coffee. And by the way, coffee, as I have continued to conclude, it's one of the holy trinity beverages, water, tea, and coffee.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We have to take the Hippocratic Oath. And along the way, we really are pledged to the concept of first do no harm. And I think when you go to Japan, when you go to Europe, when you go to many other countries, that's their first principle as well. We don't know what the harm is. Let's not let's not subject our people to it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And so there's a little bit more of a let's protect our people first, as opposed to let's make money first.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Sure. Totally. Important message. We have to have personal responsibility because at the end of the day, for our own situation, it has to be us realizing we have agency and start to make decisions in the right direction. You know, it's the law of responsibility. If it's somebody else's fault completely, not that they didn't play a role in it. then you are a victim.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You can't change anything about it. But if it was a little bit our fault too, then we can do something about it. And that's an important reminder for all of us. And along with it, as people get healthy, as a lot of people are listening today, they do care about like, what can I do to make the world a better place? First always is be an example. share education.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
If you like this podcast, your books, other things that people come across, share it with people, donate that book to a local library, you know, start a book club, maybe start a garden, whatever it might be, be involved in some advocacy, you know, those things also can play a role in it too. But I love the message of personal responsibility.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And it's one by one that I live by in my own life as well. I want to come back to this idea that you're thinking about a lot about right now, which is your approach to this world of longevity.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I think that a great way to set up this conversation is when you're spending time in Greece and Europe and some of these other places in Asia where you have these pockets of individuals who not only live a long life, lifespan-wise, as is related to what's possible for human beings, That could be a high concentration of centenarians or whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But even for the individuals that get, let's say, quote unquote, only to like 80 or 85 or 90, they're generally a lot healthier than people that we see as the average population here in the United States, for example. What are some of the things that they are or aren't doing that sometimes people are confused about? Maybe we call this myths around longevity.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So what can you share with our audience when it comes to this topic? We all know that getting a good night's sleep is super important, not just for our overall health, but for being a functional, happy, productive human being. I can tell you that when my sleep suffers, the next day is rough. That's why I'm so psyched about today's sponsor, Birch Mattress by Helix.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
No matter what field you're looking at, whether you're looking at cancer, whether you're looking at diabetes, whether you're looking at longevity, whether you're looking at overall fitness, coffee seems to be good for you. Okay. I was told in medical school, you know, coffee is not that great for the heart. You know, it could actually give you arrhythmias and there's too much caffeine in it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
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Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's a big one to unpack. And I'm in the middle of doing the research on it is sort of to say, what are we learning new about longevity that hasn't already been covered or isn't really well worked out? And what are some of the things that people believe about longevity that may not be entirely the way it actually is? So a couple of things. And I think that, you know, I'm a real practical guy.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm a pragmatist. So I like to explain things in ways that are easy to understand. So first of all, we all want to live as long as we possibly can. And to me, longevity is living as long as you're possibly able to, but as well and having a good quality of life along the way. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So everybody wants to live as long as they can, but you don't want to be living to whatever crazy numbers that people are spouting, 150, 200, 300 years old. You know, like you see, you hear these numbers from the sort of the people who are ultra biohackers, who are, you know, really dreaming of super longevity, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Like I've even heard the term, I think Peter Diamandis said this, escape velocity of aging. How do you escape? So you're just going to live forever. And I think it's an intriguing idea, but I think it misses the point of our humanity.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, I mean, we all just want to, you know, like if all you do is focus on the horizon, that distant point, and you don't focus on what is in front of your headlights, you're really going to be missing a lot of your life, especially and maybe giving yourself a false promise if you just actually give a promise.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm actually curious from your point of view, is that actually a healthy way to start the day? And contrast that with you were recently in Greece working on your next book. How do some of the world's longest living people start their morning off?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So some of the myths are like, for example, that your genetics determine everything about whether you're going to live long or not. It is true if you're
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
grandfather great grandfather your family members lived a long time you're probably gonna have a better chance hopefully with better genetics to you know drive your uh your vehicle for a longer period of time your vehicle being your body my great uncle for example lived to 104 years old completely intact and and cognitively clear i don't know i hope i got something from him
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
The bioactives in coffee, which you would find as a common denominator from Ethiopia, which is where we think coffee originally came from, to Greek coffee, which is actually Turkish coffee, is pretty loaded with caffeine. So you got to be careful about that. But it's also loaded with these...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Was he here in the States or was he somewhere else?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
He lived in China. Okay. Drank green tea, probably six to 10 cups of green tea every single day of his life. And he was very physically active and he was really plugged into his community, had a big support. He kept his mind really active. And so these are, again, recurrent themes of people who live a really long time. Could I interrupt you for one second?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You're such on a roll, but I'm so fascinated about your uncle. Yeah. obviously everybody's individual situation is different, but from your research end, from your food end, and obviously he was a family member. If you had to rank, obviously genetics play a little bit, as you mentioned, they're not everything.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
If you had to rank the things that he was doing that probably played the biggest role in his long, but more importantly, healthy lifespan, Even for somebody to live to 80 in America, but not be on prescription drugs and be healthy and their brain is sharp. That's even super rare. And meanwhile, your uncle, great great uncle is living to 104.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
What do you think were the biggest things that played a role?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know what? I actually asked him this.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I asked him this because I went to his 100th birthday, which he planned. He made the guest list. He selected the food. All right. And he hosted like as the talkative host. All right. It was an amazing event for me. The first time I had ever personally known somebody, in this case, a family member who turned 100 and I could see what it could be like.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And so before we actually got to the actual birthday party, I arrived a little bit early and this was in China. And I talked to him and I'm like, OK. You got to tell me right here, right now, like, what is your secret? Like, when you look back, what insights could you share? And I think the answer is pretty typical.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
He basically said, you know, I don't know if there's a stock answer I can give you that's going to work for everyone, but I'll tell you. But he told me, here's what was important for me. If I had to look back at it, he said, number one, I let things roll off my shoulder. I don't carry my anger. I don't carry resentment.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Things are just not that important for me to actually kind of get too wrapped up in it, no matter what it is. And he's like, he's always been that way.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So the mindset first, right? Mindset, psychology. Lower stress.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, and I think there's a little bit of self-care in there. Like, you know, he would rather pay attention to things that he cares about rather than what other people care about. You know, and he let a lot of a lot of things. And he specifically talked about anger. He's like, let the anger roll off. It's not a big deal. It's not worth it. OK.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
polyphenols like chlorogenic acid and chlorogenic acid does amazing things to your metabolism, to your blood vessels, to lower inflammation, and just tip the odds in your favor towards longevity with a simple cup of coffee in the morning.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I still to this day remember that whenever I get into a situation where I get riled up, I'm like, you know. Maybe it's not that important. Okay. And that's just been helpful to me. So mindset, absolutely. The second thing he said is he's like, you know, he lived at the base of this mountain that grew tea. And he said, I drink tea my whole life.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
He's like, I grew up in this house my whole life. I've been drinking green tea that is fresh from the mountain, freshly picked, seasonally picked. You know, he's like, I know the people who in all the places that were picking the tea. And he's like, and I just drink it, sip it all day long. And he was a big believer in drinking green tea.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And of course, the scientific evidence has shown the catechins of polyphenols in green tea are Actually, you get dietary fiber if you have the powdered tea like the matcha. If you actually have catechins from regular tea earlier in the season, you don't have as much caffeine because caffeine is developed by the tea plant as its own insecticide, natural pesticide.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Early in the season, there are not that many bugs around, so the caffeine is very low. But he would just sip tea all day long. So the third thing he told me was that he had to walk to the tea temple kind of place where he would sit with his friends every day. He had to walk and exercise to get to his tea place.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And those three things, mindset, you know, trying to be a little chill, a lot of green tea over many decades, many decades, and then exercising. And then he's hanging out with buddies, you know, like, you know, that classic idea you see like these old guys hanging around. playing chess or whatever it is they were doing or just having conversation or just sitting around and looking.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I remember there was a, cause I went up with him one morning, I got up at four in the morning and I walked with him cause I wanted to see what it was like, you know, like, okay, I want to walk in the shoes of this guy who's about to turn a hundred and see what he does to see if I could imagine myself doing that. So we walked up these stone steps. I mean, listen, the dude was like 99 plus, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
This was just a few days short of a hundred and, And he was walking up uneven stone stairs, okay, and probably the same way that people in Sardinia, in Ikaria, Greece, maybe in Okinawa, you know, in these old cultures where people are living really well. And I was having a chat with him the whole time, you know, and it was social, exercise, diet with green tea in his case, and mindfulness, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Actually, if you really bring it back down to the things that you hear everybody saying, what's the common denominator? Take care of your mind. Don't get hung up on things. You know, take care of yourself. Eat in healthy ways. Choose your weapon of health. Not weapon of destruction, weapon of health. You know, it's going to be your health defense that you're activating your body. Be social.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
exercise yeah and there's probably a lot of things within that that he also wasn't doing for example like my guess is not knowing your uh you know your great uncle but he probably maintained a healthy body weight throughout his life which is a part of it and obviously these habits and things like contribute to green tea and other things like that contribute to that and help support the natural metabolism that we all have he's not having you know ultra processed foods on a regular basis
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Is that usually what you have to start off the day?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, by the way, I do remember another thing he told me on a previous visit that I had with him before his 100th birthday. And I can't remember how old he was at the time, but I was so curious too. And I think we should all do this more if we're fortunate to be able to have elders in our family or our community that we can actually speak to just to get the wisdom of experience and age.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Every day. A cup of coffee. A cup of coffee. The stronger, the better. Now, listen, this is me, all right? And personalized nutrition, I always say when I'm on a podcast, the most useful thing I can do is to tell you the facts, like science, or I can just tell you what I do. And for me, a really nice cup of coffee straight up. I don't put cream. I don't put dairy.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, like I think that we're so focused on The ourselves in here now, like I think there's a lot to be gained from talking to other people just as examples, you know, good and bad.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
One of my favorite things to do. But when I do remember another sort of deep piece of advice he gave me, he always said, live a life of moderation, be moderate. even with moderation. And what he did is he say, don't be excessive all the time, but every now and then give yourself a chance to blow it out and do the things that you want to do, not moderately.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And so, you know, like I always thought, wow, that's a pretty deep thing. Like be reasonable most of the time, but every now and then give yourself the freedom to go do something that's a little extreme. And so anytime I want to do something extreme, I remember what my family member advised me.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
What's the sidebar before we get back to longevity and that, you know, great role that you were on? What's something extreme in Dr. Lee's world?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Oh, you know what? I love to explore new foods. Yeah. So sometimes I will just go, you know, so most of these, the travel you're talking about to Italy or Greece or Japan or whatever, I'm, I'm researching, I'm actively researching and I'm going to markets, I'm going to restaurants, I'm talking to people, I'm trying to find out something new. And I, and I listen to people.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So if somebody I meet in, in the Mediterranean encourages me to try a food, And it might have some animal fat in it. It might not look so healthy. But they really want me to try it because they're really proud of it. And they think that this is something that's important for me to know about. As I research it, I'll sit down and try it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I'll feel like I'm walking on the ledge a little bit because it doesn't look that healthy. And you know what? It's part of my experience. I'll get to sample it. I might not eat it again, but then I've actually tried something new. So I'm never afraid to try a new experience that can give me a better insight into the world, but also into myself and how I react to it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah, that's an important philosophy. So it may be hard to get back on track because I threw you off by asking about your uncle, but I had to because that's just sounded so fascinating. But you were talking about some of the myths that people think, and some people think it's genetics. Some people think that, you know,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's really that one day we're going to find a magic pill that everybody could take, which I want to say that I do appreciate some of these, what I call longevity explorers. I don't think it's how we all need to necessarily live our life, but I appreciate anybody in any category that's like looking for the extreme of something, because who knows what benefit might come to society for that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Do you agree with that?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah, no, totally. I mean, listen, I think that these explorers that are biohacking and trying supplements, inventing their own
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
formulation or doing like real bench research to figure these things out and then trying it for themselves they are the the the modern day kind of pioneers like not everyone's going to be right not everyone's going to and some people are going to meet a untimely fate you know they didn't expect That's all part of exploration.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I think that's the great, you know, one of the themes that I keep coming back to, particularly, you know, I'm writing my next book. I'm writing about a theme that will be very much involved with longevity. One thing that keeps on coming up is humanity. You know, like we want, we don't want to be inhuman. We want to like, and live forever. We want to be more human.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We want to actually be in touch with who we are as humans, as flawed as humans actually are. You know, there's a lot of shortcomings that I think we have as human beings, but you know, the courage to explore is one of those wonderful things. So let's talk a little about myths, you know, so, you know, genetics being a myth, you know, I do think that the search for a magic supplement is,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I also don't even put nut milk or, you know, any of those or oat milk or anything else. And I like my coffee is straight. Part of that came from the fact that when I spent time in Italy and Greece, I would just have like an espresso in the morning or a very strong coffee in the morning and It's a pick-me-up. It does not break my intermittent fasting from the night before.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I gave a I gave a talk recently, a keynote recently at a big conference of futurists and and with a theme of longevity. And I started out by saying that, you know, it's pretty cool that we have actually arrived at a time where we could even consider a legitimate quest to. to find ways to live longer. I think that's the science is there. I'm a scientist.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I get excited by where science is pile driving progress forward. All right. But it's not a new quest. In fact, the quest for longevity, immortality is what it used to be called, is one of the oldest quests of humans. OK, starting way back. And so I think about that. I gave this example of the first emperor of China.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
OK, who sent his people ambassadors on this expedition to find the magic ampoule with that liquid powder. Like he sent them to all these different islands to look for something that he could have that would make him immortal. Right. And this has been the theme of many myths and movies and books. And, you know, it's it's mythological. Never found it, obviously. And the guy died.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But as he recognized his mortality, his failed effort, you know what he did? He built the 10,000 terracotta warriors to look over his tomb. That was his solution at the time. to immortality. All right. Now, fast forward.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And, you know, if you look at Renaissance paintings, you see the fountain of youth and you find all these other stories about what we as humans have been trying to do to look for that magic potion, magic pill, magic fountain to really help us live long and maybe forever. I think things changed in the modern day when Google formed Calico, the company Calico, whose mission was to conquer death.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
All of a sudden, you know, you have capitalism, you've got investors, you've got people who are seriously going to try to tackle this impossible topic, seemingly impossible topic. And yeah, you know, I think that brought us in a way into the modern age to say, you know what, maybe we can actually try to take a crack at this, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So fast forward even more, and you've got the hallmarks of aging that, you know, I know you've had other people on the show talking about.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, the mitochondria, the autophagy, the inflammation, the gut, all these NAD, you know, rapamycin, all these really important bricks that are being built up to help us better understand what's going on with aging, what's not going well with aging and how do we how might we build it back up? It's like cancer research back in the 1930s. We're just starting to see the path of man.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It took a long time for us to be able to get to immunotherapy today. And we're still not where we want to be. So this is a long journey that we're actually on. But the myth is that we can still find. And it's so tempting to go back to that ancient quest. We still want to find that magic supplement. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And that's one of the things I would caution anybody is that there is no magic supplement. I don't care who it is. That's going to solve that problem. And if you just think buying a supplement, subscribing to a refill of your supplement and that's going to do it, not going to do it. All right. It might be part of the solution. I'd be supportive, but it's not the only thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Because as long as you don't put any sugar or anything else in it, you're just soaring through. Your metabolism is still... powering through, burning harmful extra body fat overnight and continuing into the day. And it's not until you actually eat something with real calories in it, which could be piece of fruit or yogurt, any of these other things we talked about.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And along the same lines, I would say another myth is that, you know, if you just follow longevity hacks, it's going to solve your problems. All right. And those longevity hacks are fantastic. you know, in a, in a kinder, gentler way, like if you don't want to use the word hack, you know, a lot of it is actually about being mindful, thinking about what you're doing, being purposeful.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
What's an example of some of those just so that, you know, getting enough sleep, sleeping at the right temperature.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, you don't want to be sleeping in a super warm temperature and you want to try to get, you know, seven to nine hours of sleep, eight hours being a magic window. This idea of, of a caloric restriction is, Hey, don't be a glutton, all right? Don't overload your body with calories and choose wisely whatever it is you're loading in as fuel.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Fasting or intermittent fasting, one of the most natural things that we do. When you're sleeping, you're not eating. When you're not eating, you're fasting and you're not sleeping all the time. You're going to sleep and waking up. So you're intermittently fasting all night.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So a lot of these sort of like trendy topics that wind up being, um, uh, hack hacks for longevity actually are things that are pretty reasonable to do fairly straightforward. And I encourage people, you know, like, again, I, um, I, I welcome and I, uh, respect in, in some cases, I admire people who are these pioneers of longevity and anti-aging, um,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I think it's really cool that there are people that are doing that kind of thing. Me, I'm a researcher. I know what I'm working on. But I also, you know, in trying to help educate people, right? Like if you know something, tell somebody else something that can be helpful.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I try to get people who don't have the capacity or the money to go buy all these things for themselves and who get stressed out hearing about how you got to monitor your glucose every single hour. You know, it stresses them out. And I basically say, listen, you know what? those things matter, but they don't matter enough for you to get wound up about it. And they're pretty common sense.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And so many of the hallmarks of aging fit with some basic mindfulness principles that anybody can actually manage. And so I sort of take down that
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
um that uh i think you can be ambitious if you want to actually aim towards living a long and good life and healthy life without actually having to jack yourself up in terms of like oh man do i have enough money to afford this do i have enough time to deal with this listen if you're super stressed out all the time because you can't fit another 10 biohacks into your day when you've got your job your family you know your your mortgage and everything else to deal with
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
that's that's going to take away as opposed to add sure it kind of goes back to your great uncle's message of like simplicity and how you started off this podcast so on that theme because you are in that you know there are people that live longer and healthier than the average population here in north america so what are some of those things that you found that make the biggest difference with that so what's really interesting for me
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
is as somebody who is a scientist and can tinker in the lab, as I have, but also as a food as medicine researcher, I believe the other end of the equation as a doctor and as an observer is equally important is to study what's happening in people who actually have lived a long time. All right. What can we learn from them? Is there some clue?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I do skip breakfast every now and then, but I like a simple cup of coffee as the anchor to how I start my day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We talked a little bit about the advice my uncle gave when I probed him for it. But objectively, as a researcher, as a scientist, what can we find that is a standout in people who live a long time? Not subjective, but objective. All right. And this is an area of interest that I think is so fascinating. 15 years ago,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
If you were to talk about gut health, a few people might have recognized it, but we didn't really have even the tools that were affordable to be able to study gut microbiome or gut health at scale.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Healthy gut bacteria, the 39 trillion bacteria that we know live inside our gut that actually help control inflammation, help control our metabolism, help signal to our brain, the whole gut brain axis that... I know you've talked about on the show, but now we have it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And because we have it, we're able to apply the measurement of the gut microbiome, not just to people in their 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s, but we can apply the same research tool, diagnostic tool, exploration tool to people who live a long time to ask the very simple question. And this is just an example of the research that I've been doing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
fascinated by people who live a long time what's different about their gut microbiome we know it's so important it's the tip of the iceberg but is there something we can just jump ahead and look at people who are 100 or even older to find out what's different about their gut all right this is looking for hypothesis looking for observations and we've discovered something and this is amazing
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
What about some of these other foods that you often see people eating here in the United States and contrasting those? Things like oatmeal, things like eggs, things like orange juice. What's your feeling on those?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
All right. So there's a group in Italy, in Bologna, who gathered people into a study that ranged across adult life from 20s to 40s to 60s and 70s to 90s to 100s to 114. Superagers. All right. Super centenarians, as I call it. OK, so we all think about somebody who's lived to 100. Like I brought my uncle up like, oh, man, that's really cool. You know, probably pretty rare to get there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I don't know too many people who live to 100. But do you know how many centenarians there are on the planet today? Actually, I don't know.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Take a guess. Okay, so the population globally is 8 point something billion, right? Around there. My guess is that there's probably... I would say that there's probably 0.5% of the population, 0.3%, maybe 0.2%. So I'm not going to do public math here, but let me just estimate from a gut feeling. I don't know. Are there like 200,000? There are, as of now, this year...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So first of all, let me take you back to my original exposure to the Mediterranean. This is long before people were talking about the Mediterranean diet. Okay. I had Finished college before going to medical school. I was very interested in understanding food, culture and health. And so I did a gap year. I went over to Italy to learn about food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
an estimated 722,000 centenarians on Earth. Almost three quarters of a million people are 100 years or older. So this is not a long shot. This is something that is happening on a planetary level more commonly than we thought. And the reason that I bring that up is because a lot of people will be surprised to hear how many people actually live to 100 every single year, all right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You're asking the right question, but I really want to frame it. I'm not going to actually tell you, you know, like oats are universally good or bad. Like that's the religion of food. For example, oatmeal, which is, you know, basically cooked or steamed or boiled oats, actually contains a lot of bioactives from oats. And this is recent research I've done.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Which is good news, right? I mean, it says something that, you know, with all the crap that we're afraid of, the climate, the pollution, the toxins, all these things that, you know, are...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
very appropriately, you know, should be front and center of what we're thinking about when it comes to policy and elections and, you know, the decisions that we make for our families and ourselves, totally appropriate. But it just goes to show you, in spite of that, humans are actually starting to live longer. And there's a lot of us, a lot of people who are doing that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Okay, so let me talk about this research study, because they gathered a bunch of people who are actually 100 and older as part of this big cohort. And they studied their gut microbiome using
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
standard tools that we are have available today that are affordable so again 15 years ago maybe a few people could know it but too super expensive and didn't have that knowledge base now they've applied it and the question that this study asked was what are the standout bacteria across people who are living at different age groups and then when you go to the centenarians and older
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Is there, are there any bacteria that pop out that go, oh my gosh, these bacteria are so high in these people. There must be something going on with these bacteria. And the answer is there's four bacteria in the super agers. Wow. A hundred and above. All right. So I consider this kind of like breakthrough discovery.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Like my whole career as a research researcher has not been to follow other people, but to Really look on the horizon for, you know, you know, like if you're in the old days, you think about those big sailing ships. Yeah. Right. So you're if you're in the crow's nest with the periscope and the parrot on your shoulder. All right. What do you do? You go like land ho. Right. Like that's the discovery.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I think I see something. So this research, I think, has seen land ho.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
in the gut microbiome of super agers and there's four bacteria that's him you want to know what they are yeah all right you'll i know you'll hear or have heard of one of them but three of them i bet you haven't heard of all right one of them is called odoribacter okay o d o d o r i bacter odoribacter all right a second one is uh called oscillobacter like like oscillation
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Third one is called, uh, Cristinella, Cristinella. Okay. Um, another bacteria. Now, if you haven't heard about this and I know you're, you know, you actually pretty, uh, uh, you're pretty seasoned when it's talking to my microbiome right now, even for me, I hadn't really heard about these and I spent some time like a decade looking at microbiome. I hadn't even heard of these. Okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Fourth one, Ackermansia. Okay. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Four bacteria, including one like our old friend acromantia that I know I've talked to you on the show before. Yeah. They are the standout bacteria in people who get to be a hundred and much older, the super ages. Okay. So what do they do? All right. Let's pounce on those four bacteria. What did they do?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Well, we don't know everything they do, but we do know that some of them, like the odorobacter, improves your immune system against E. coli, against other bacteria that might take you out as you get older. Okay. It boosts your immune system. It defends you against bacteria and viruses and probably cancer as well. But we don't know that. Like, again, this is all discovery.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We're putting together a picture. Cool. We got a bacteria that boosts your immune system. Another one, the ocilobacter helps improve your lipid, your blood lipid profile. It's like mother nature's statin actually lowers your LDL, your bad cholesterol, helps improve your HDL cholesterol, lowers overall cholesterol. Pretty cool. All right. That starts to make sense.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We presented at our medical conferences where we took Whole oats, the kind you have in amino skin cream and the kind you would have in oatmeal. We've extracted out the concentration of the bioactives. So what are the bioactives in oats? Well, one of them is called avananthramide. Okay. The other one is beta-glucan, which is the same thing you find in mushrooms and barley.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Also helps your metabolism, your blood sugars become more even out. How? Insulin sensitivity makes your body more insulin sensitive. All right. Doesn't mean that, you know, it's going to help you if you're pounding sugar and sodas into your body all the time. But let's talk about people that are making it and living, you know, a reasonably healthy life.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That bacteria could make a big difference, right? Other bacteria improve cardiovascular health. Of course, acromancy, we know, does a whole host of things for lowering inflammation, improving metabolic health, helping you fight off cancer, even showing like it actually plays a role probably in brain health and cognition, protecting cognition as well as some of the latest research on it. Okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So that's pretty cool. You got four players that have been newly discovered that all do things to your body's systems that help us live healthy. Live long, live healthy, live long and prosper, right? That old swap thing. Hey, if our gut microbiome is important for our health from where we're adults? What about when we're elderly? We're beginning to ask that question.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
This is the new conversation that's actually happening in longevity research. Okay. And then the coolest part, and this is what I'm working on. What are the foods you can eat that can actually support that? I'm not going to go like bacteria by bacteria, but I'll just tell you collectively.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Sure.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So give you an idea. If you're interested in these, in grooming, cultivating, raising these bacteria in your body this is what i'm finding out so far so remember odorobacter oscillobacter uh christina cella and acromantia all right acromantia we know right we've talked about this before pomegranates dried cranberries uh uh conquered grape uh the juice or the whole thing There's some more players.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Chili peppers can actually do it as well. Black raspberries can do it. If you've ever been to dim sum, you know, where they steam their soup dumplings, you know, it's like a treat. It's like these steam wrappers and a little bit of filling and like a big bite of soup that comes out. Absolutely delicious. Guess what?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
The vinegar that they serve in those restaurants along with those soup dumplings is Chinese black vinegar. Zhejiang vinegar. That vinegar grows acromantia in the body. Pretty cool, right? Wow. So I've talked about salsa, spicy dim sum, all right? Pomegranate, you know, like, I mean, think about all the Middle Eastern cultures that actually have used pomegranate in their cooking.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Cranberries, you know? turkey day, cranberry. All right. There's healthy ways of actually doing that too.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So again, you know, like these are, these are achievable ways to actually cultivate this one bacteria, which by the way, if you have it and you have cancer and you're getting immunotherapy, this one bacteria, Ackermansia mesinophila has been shown in the human studies to be critical for helping you respond to the cancer treatment. So this is not like a, Maybe I wonder if I should.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
This could wind up becoming a life and death decision. And this is like the kind of research I do as a medical doctor. You know, I'm not just sort of like a kale wheat leaf waiver saying, oh, like on a good day, eat some more veggies. Like this is the stuff that I do as a cancer researcher as well. Like what could we advise patients to do?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Two really potent substances. And we decided to do some medical research by testing what can these oats bioactives do. So people talk about inflammation and all that stuff. I'm a scientist, so I wanted to see it for myself. So we collaborated with a group out of the University of Arizona and a standard model to look at wound healing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
when they are asking their oncologist or oncology nurse, what should I eat? And the answer that's always given, often given is like, I don't know, or it doesn't really matter what you eat. It does matter what you eat. By the way, when it comes to cancer, if you want to live long, I mean, there's all kinds of things that you can actually do, but
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
One of the things I think that we should be focusing on that is going to be very, very effective as the science for extending life is being worked out is to curtail or avoid the things that will take you out early. Cancer being one of them. Diabetes, one of them. Obesity being another one. Acromantia. Other foods, by the way, that actually answer. Resistant starches.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
For acromantia or all these bacteria?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
For these other bacterias. Yeah. Okay. Resistant starches.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
day old rice cook rice steam rice put in the fridge have it the next day you've turned you've turned steamed rice fresh rice which is a starch into a resistant starch all right potato gonna roast a potato all right um if you're roasted healthily um if you don't eat it all stick your leftovers in the fridge guess what that temperature change changes the chemistry of the starch
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
The next day when you have it, even if you heat it up again, resistance starch, that grows some of these healthy, these four players, you know, these are like the four horsemen of longevity that we think we may be onto. Again, this is not a conclusion. This is an observation. Sure. But an exciting one. Very resistant, resistant starches. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Oatmeal also, you know, has some ability to grow some of these bacteria as well. So, again, you know, you sort of we're we're starting to reverse engineer. What can we learn from people who are super old that are in good health? What's in their body that's a standout? Gut microbiome, it's the undiscovered country.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Now we're beginning to just like, just to carve into it a little bit to figure out what's there. Now let's back it up. If those are important, are there foods that we can actually eat? Because as you pointed out, these are the early patterns. Like you can't be...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
you know sick when you're 70 and say oh man now i'm going to go back and start to grow these things all of a sudden you should start living a healthier life but these are patterns that actually probably support your overall health from the time when you're not thinking about your health you know follow-up question on this which is obviously super fascinating one of the things that we learned from you is acromancy which you've talked about before on the podcast numerous times
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
is not just a small strain but it's a pillar strain in a healthy gut it should make up i think you said last time about five percent of the total sort of bacteria a little bit less okay so around there so three four percent somewhere around there but anyways it's more than like a percentage point and there's probably not that many bacteria that make up that volume, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Because if you have 100% and acromancy has somewhere between 2% and 5%, there's only so many bacteria that are like that. Do you know for these other bacteria that you mentioned, were they able to find how plentiful they were? Were they also a large percentage in the gut?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Don't know that. And that's, you know, like you're asking the questions that the researchers are asking as well, including myself. All right, let's dig a little bit further. What is their prevalence? How common are they? What else do they do? Where do they grow? You know, like maybe they're not all in the usual place that got microbiome. We need to figure out other places they grow.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Are they environmentally influenced? You know, maybe smoking actually affects it. And if you don't smoke, you know, maybe food, certain foods, fermented foods might affect it. So there's so many questions that get asked. This is this is the bread and butter of scientists. You know, and I'm an honest scientist. And you can tell when you talk to a real scientist when a scientist says, I don't know.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I don't know the answer to your question, but they're really, really good questions. And are they affected by stress management? Are they affected by sleep? Are they affected by exercise? Right. These are all things. The other thing that I think I'm really excited by is new discoveries. that I think can lend to this idea that we can live well as we live long.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Now, I have a background in biotech and wound healing is a big problem in people with diabetes, in nursing homes, in the intensive care units. You've got skin breakdown, bed sores. People with diabetes wind up having wounds in their feet that lead to, they get gangrenous and they have to get amputated. So one of my...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So we know that exercise is pretty central, pretty fundamental to being able to extend your life as long as you possibly go within healthy. Extend your health span, you want to exercise on a regular basis, right? But have you heard of the HOPE molecule?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
no i haven't all right so the hope molecule is a relatively new discovery that when you exercise your muscle it comes from the muscle when your muscles contract it releases hope molecules H-O-P-E, hope. What are the hope molecules? Well, they're things that when you exercise, your muscle contracts, it goes into your bloodstream, goes to your brain, and it makes you feel hopeful and optimistic.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You ever feel like after you exercise, you work out, you just feel pretty good? All the time. All the time. Hope molecules contribute to that. Not the only thing, but contribute to that. All right. What is a hope molecule? All right. It's called a myokine. Myo as in muscle, kine like cytokine.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's a natural chemical that's released by muscle during exercise, kind of like the cytokine of the muscle. But it has a brain signaling property that we didn't realize. And you see, the reason that that's so important is not only does it actually connect the gut brain, muscle brain. All right. And that's actually really important because we tell people to exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Some people go, ah, you know, I never exercise. I can't do that. Hey, you know what? We're making these discoveries that show that you can actually be influence your mindset by exercise. Did you know that like, again, you're hardwired, your body's hardwired to create these hope molecules. Who wouldn't want that? Right. So again, these are new discoveries that I think add layers of richness to
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
to what's already been discovered and will continue to be discovered in a lab on the building blocks of aging and how to actually counter aging. Let's also add to that, what can we do for a lifestyle that can affect our gut, that can affect our mind, that can affect our muscle?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Let's make some sense out of some of these recommendations that are there, you know, so that, well, my great uncle told me, like, he walks up, he hugs up to the tea temple to be with his buddies to drink tea. Now I'm thinking, all right, He's getting his muscles working and they're releasing hope molecules that actually influence his brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And now he's socializing in a more positive way with his friends. And we know social interaction is something that Dan Buettner from the Blue Zones has talked about so important. Or these countries where people live long, they're with other people, you know? And by the way, I think that is something that we need to really contend with as a society.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
passions but also areas of expertise is how can we support healing wound healing faster right so we talk about healing right so okay oat bioactives if you inject them into the wound in the border of a wound and this is a lab experiment we were so surprised it doubled the rate of healing it zipped the wound shut and then when we did the medical research to the food as medicine research we did a deep dive into the tissue that healed and we found
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I don't know if it's a policy issue, but it's certainly a public health issue is loneliness. No good if you're living to whatever age you want to live to, but you're doing it alone, isolated. And so how do we... address that? How do we hack that? How do we what can we do with that? You know, I don't I don't have the answer to that, by the way.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm just bringing it up as something that in this wide ranging conversation we're having about longevity and like, you know, we're sort of covering this gray space that a lot of the pioneers haven't yet covered. And but this is the area that I'm working in. I think it's really an amazing area to be able to flesh out for people the things that anchor them to their humanity as they get more years.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So when you look at movement and the brain muscle connection that you just talked about, the hope molecules, what's your thoughts on some of the longest living groups that are out there? You know, these 700,000 centenarians worldwide that are there and maybe discounted by a couple of percentage points because some of them were probably going to be genetic outliers in America who...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
are living long, but they're not very healthy or they've lost their sort of ability because of dementia, their cognitive ability. But for those people that are aging healthy and are living a long life, do you generally see that those individuals are having, compare their activity levels to the activity of
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
you know, Americans, like modern day sort of average person, which we know that just going by one measure, step count, a lot of people are getting 4,000 or 5,000 steps or less in a day, which actually I was surprised to find or not surprised to find that I think even the CDC says that is the definition of being sedentary as one measure of things.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So how would you look at, how are these people, how are your uncle, how are they getting that regular boost to that hope molecule, what's their activity level?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's really hard to do comparisons because, you know, we are kind of looking in the rear view mirror to, you know, when we are thinking about where we've come from as a society in terms of how inactive we are and how poorly we ate and all that kind of stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I think, you know, today people are actually, you know, their, their, their, their attention, their, their radars on, like we should be moving more. So people are actually moving more. So I think it's a little – I'm very cautious not to say Americans are like this and the grass is greener in another part.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I mean, look, if you go to the Mediterranean countries, there's plenty of unhealthy people there. Sure. That's the first thing that, you know, when I went to – when I first went to Italy and Greece and I was saying, oh, man, you guys are so healthy, they would say – You should see the people who have cancer. You should see the people who are smoking.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You should see the people who are dying of heart disease. And so, you know, I think that it's, I want to make sure that we don't oversimplify, but there are clues, important clues to actually think about it. Now, I don't know the answer of how people become more active. They may or may not be more active. And it's probably not one thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's a constellation of things that gives you that magic unlock to be able to live longer. The stress, the exercise, the healthy diet, the genetics, you know, all of those things. But I think, you know, from anybody watching or listening to this, you know, at the end of the day, this is not, you know, we're not teaching a course. We're not teaching a class.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We're trying to hopefully, in a conversation, leave people with some, tickle their brain to say, you know what? I could do that. And I think that if you can actually get yourself to walk, if you're not doing more already, just from not exercising to go for a 30-minute walk, as briskly as you can after dinner every single day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And if you can't go outside because it's too cold or raining, do it inside the house. Just stay in motion. And if you're like, oh, I'm going to be bored and I don't have a friend to do it with, put some earbuds in and listen to the Drew Perot podcast. Let's do this episode. All right. And you'll actually get it in. And just know that what you're doing is you're by working those muscles,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You are actually releasing substances that were recently discovered that actually affect your brain and makes you more hopeful. And I think that those are the concrete types of messages that are more helpful. And I don't know how we could make Americans more active. I think actually there's a subset of Americans who are very active, you know.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And by the way, you know, this whole 10,000 steps thing. Right. Like that was sort of like the mantra. You got to work at least 10,000 steps a day if you want to be healthy. Do you know that's an urban legend?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's an urban legend. And definitely like researchers just kind of made it up is what I heard.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
No, actually, it's a marketing company that made it up. A step counter, right? In the 1960s, a Japanese step counter, basically a pedometer company, developed, hired an ad agency and they created a campaign. Calling it 10,000 Steps. It was something that, you know, it was a jingle that worked for them.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Oat bioactives completely suppressed inflammation. Bingo, box checked, proven, okay? I saw it myself, number one. Number two, it generated more healing blood vessels. That's my wheelhouse, angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels. Oats can actually stimulate healing by nurturing those blood vessels that we need for healing and lowering inflammation.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And somehow that wound up becoming embedded in the public consciousness and passed around like the old game of telephone until we started to, in the medical community, quoting it. And, you know, in the health and wellness and fitness community, quoting 10,000 Steps. Actually, it's not as it doesn't have to be as high as 10,000. It's going to be very individualized.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's probably closer to between five and 7,000 steps to be able to be just generally healthy. But it depends on your age, depends on what else is going on in your body. Right. And so this is, again, where I think the goddess in the details, what we hear about and talk about. I mean, if I could make a, you know, an editorial comment here, because I am affected by the same thing.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We live in this incredible age where we can listen to podcasts like this one and many others. We can flip on a television and scroll through a million different options. We are able to use social media and get a lot of information all the time. How do you sort through all that information? And how do you know what's misinformation? How do you know what's urban legend?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I mean, I just told you that 10,000 Steps is an ad jingle from the 1960s that is still being bandied around. All right. And people, a lot of people believe those. All right. I think the key thing is try not to, you know, I think, again, this is a little bit of that self-reliance. Whatever you hear, if it's interesting. Have a healthy amount of skepticism. Check it out yourself.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, talk to other people. And a lot of things, especially in a health and wellness community that get talked about, Might not be ready for prime time. Might be a great idea, but not for you. It might be an urban legend. You know, oh, don't eat soy because it's going to cause breast cancer. Tomatoes have lectins. You know, you and I have talked about this before on your show.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
There's so many of these things out there. I kind of feel like my responsibility, and I know you've done an amazing job about this, is to have really level set conversations about what we know. And what we don't know, and wherever possible, bash a myth whenever you can.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I think that's what people, that's what's helpful for people, especially when you talk about these aspirational areas like longevity.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah, totally. And even then still, there might be things that we... get wrong, especially me. I'm not a researcher. I'm not a subject matter expertise. There might be things that we overprioritize. There might be things that we underprioritize, but that's also part of the human experience of learning along the way.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I think that a lot of the people that I talk to, that I look up to, yourself included in that list, It's always whatever you decide to do because there's people that are different in so many different ways. For example, you were talking about how they start off their morning in Greece and how you feel better eating lighter.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I've personally found that for me also to hit some of my protein goals of being under-muscled growing up under eating protein as a skinny Indian vegetarian kid who didn't really know about getting all the vegetable sources of protein that were out there. I'm making up for lost time for the goals that I have.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So I have a particular type of amount of protein that I'm trying to hit in the day along with, you know, working out and doing resistance training. And I also enjoy it. It turns my brain on. I feel good. Get your hope molecules in there. Yeah, get my hope molecules in there. I actually like eating and I do well with a big breakfast.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I recognize that doesn't work for a lot of people that are out there. So there's going to be that personal experimentation. Personal personalized nutrition is personalized nutrition. Best way to go. And regardless of what you do, whatever you do, anything new you try. And we all like trying new things, especially our hobby.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, for me, sometimes the world of health can be a little bit like a sport. I don't really watch sports, but I'm always curious about what's next. And I like to see what people are up to. And I might try something new. Because every so often you come across something that makes a huge impact.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And then something that was surprising to us is that in the lab when we did this, used extractive remotes, injected into a wound, doubled the healing. We also discovered that the wound that healed was scarless. And scarless healing is a holy grail for anybody, any surgeon, any medical device company, any pharmaceutical company. We'd never seen this before.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But, and this is the big but, what I've learned from you and other people that I look up to is never forget about the basics. If you just nail the basics, that's going to be more than good enough for the people that are listening out there. And even if you want to try something new or take something on, don't forget about those basics.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And the basics are not difficult to do because they bring you back to simplicity. Uh, and, and, but what, what it does take is being aware and being a little mindful and being very deliberate about how you live your life.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I mean, I think that, you know, you happen to like, if you believe that you can actually affect your own life as opposed to being, uh, helpless and life happens to you, that's that overcoming that barrier is one of the first steps to getting healthy. You know, you are happening to yourself. Life isn't happening to you. You're not a victim. You know, you are in the driver's seat.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I think that is a simple thing that I think everyone can benefit from, especially, you know, if you think about where we are in society today, we went through some huge historical events like the pandemic. We, you know, are in the midst of social transformation that's happening that not comfortable for many people. Myself included.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We're also in the middle of a technology and a scientific revolution where we're beginning to see, you know, new possibilities revealed, whether it's AI, whether it's gene therapy, whether it's longevity, you know, things that are really, really exciting versus things that are very scary. Got climate change. I mean, look, all these things are happening around us.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But at the end of the day, no matter how overwhelmed you might be or excited or depressed you might be on these things, you still happen to yourself. And that's, I think, something that's super important for everyone to actually take comfort in.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
One of the topics that I wanted to chat with you about, because I know you have some thoughts on this, is that it seems to be living a long, healthy life is about the habits that you do, but also, as we touched on, some of the habits that you avoid, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
like again not being overweight not relying on ultra processed foods as the foundation of your diet but increasingly there's a lot of awareness that part of what you don't do is you don't overexpose yourself to toxins in the environment. There's a certain amount of toxins that we're all going to be exposed to. Right now, we're recording in California, in Los Angeles.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
There's a fire burning just maybe 50 miles north of here. It's going to take down the air quality today. The score for the air quality is going to go down. We're going to spend some time outside. At home, I have air filters, but we're in a studio. There's no air filters. We're going to be exposed to some toxins that are there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
What is your point of view on toxins and the low stress way to avoid the biggest ones that you might have concern about? And do you have any perspectives that you've been sharing with your patients or your community on this topic?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Part of the privilege of being born is to be able to live on this planet. But the tax that we have to pay for being on this planet in modern society is that we're exposed to toxins all the time. Hard to avoid them. You know, and the toxins aren't just... in the fumes from the paint that, you know, I was on the wall that really stink or from bus fumes.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I remember when I was a kid, I became really acutely aware of toxins because, you know, like I was growing up in Pittsburgh and we'd be waiting for a bus or something like that. And like this bus would belch these fumes right into our faces. And oh my God, it just smells so bad. And I knew it was going to be bad for me, you know, and like, and so we learned to stay in someplace else.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But frankly, it's actually very difficult to avoid environmental toxins and harms. Obviously, if you smell something, you know, like you want to kind of avoid it. I always tell people, if you're filling up your car with gas, if you still drive a gasoline car, I say, do you stand upstream or downstream from the pump? And most people look at me like, I don't know what you're talking about.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And we wouldn't have discovered it if we didn't actually take what mother nature had, pull it out and put it into a standard medical test system. This is what I, you know, like people always, you know, talk about food as medicine. I'm one of the dudes that actually does it. And so when we looked at it, how could you get scarless healing? I mean, like we looked under the microscope
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Why would you even ask that question? And I said, well, if you can smell the gasoline when you're pumping your gas, you're standing downstream, okay? And that means that you're breathing in the fumes, right? you know, the solvents fumes from the gasoline into your lungs, which is going to mutate your DNA, which is something you could avoid by simply moving to the other side of the pump.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
All right. Or the nozzle. And that way you'll be upstream and you won't be smelling it the same way. Right. So those are some simple moves you can make. But the one that actually really grabs me, my attention now that I'm telling my community, I am trying to raise the alarm wherever I can. And I am making as many action, taking as many actions I can in my own house is microplastics.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Microplastics really are like the new smoking technology. Okay, we know smoking is bad for you. People denied it for a long time. We've also known that microplastics are everywhere. And I was, honestly, I was kind of blowing it off myself for a number of years. People would just say, well, what do you think about this plastic cup you're drinking from or the water bottle?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, I mean, look, it wasn't so long ago where... If you went on vacation to a sunny environment, you know, somebody would hand you a bottle of water out of a plastic bottle, and you'd probably drink it on a really hot day, and you want to stay hydrated, right? Now we know those plastic water bottles are shedding microplastics. There's a definition. It's less than five millimeters.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
of size of plastic, you might even be able to see them. They're like the tiny little plastic particles that get shed into anything that's plastic that just breaks down. All right. And then there's nanoplastics, which are less than one micrometer. That's like 10,000 times smaller. You can't see that at all. And they're coating everything.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Pantyhose, you put on pantyhose, not you, but if somebody puts on pantyhose, you're going to be spraying some of that stuff just by snapping the fiber into the air. It goes right into your lungs. It's so small, it gets absorbed into your bloodstream. And we now know that you can actually find microplastics in your blood We know that microplastics are in our food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
They're in our beverages, anything plastic bottle. They're in anything that you turn into a beverage or food that starts with plastic. Something I was stunned by is that a teabag, a typical teabag, and this was done by a research study, made out of paper.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I thought actually it was sprayed with a little bit of plastic on the outside by the manufacturer so that the paper doesn't rip and all the tea leaves come out. All right. That make, I guess it makes sense from a manufacturer's perspective, but you dunk that tea to steep the tea. It sheds a billion plastic particles into a mug of tea, 1 billion from one tea bag and you're drinking it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So how do we, how does this like add up? Well, the most recent estimates is that many of us in America are eating the equivalent of one credit card's worth of plastic in our body every week. Okay, so until recently, when somebody said, Dr. Lee, you know, like, is that bad? I said, you know, we don't have any evidence of what, if it's bad or not. It's something I'd like to avoid.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And this baby had this healed wound, had no scar, no inflammation, plenty of nourishing blood vessels, but it had no scar. When you actually looked at the collagen, and I know this is the topic that, you know, you've also talked about, and we can talk about it some more about collagen. Collagen is normally in tissue. It's a beautiful woven pattern.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Now we have the evidence. A study that was done out of Italy about a year and a half ago found in people who had cardiovascular disease. So they had diabetes.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
damaged blood vessels they had plaques narrowing of their blood vessels specifically the blood vessels feeding their brain all right and they found when they were doing the procedure the standard medical procedure to take out the blockage so you can go in there and fish out the plaque and open up the blood vessel they found microplastics in the blood vessels in the clots wow whoa
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
They're studying embedded in the clots. And then when they actually did the outcome studies, they found those people who had, not everybody had plastics, but a lot of people did. Those people who had plastic, microplastics embedded in their clot at a fourfold increase in the risk of having a fatal heart attack or stroke.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Crazy. I think they were even some of the things that came out of there. We talked about the study with my cardiologist. The people that had the highest exposure of plaque, there was some higher amounts of microplastics that were there along with it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Right. And think about the things that cause plaque, right? Ultra processed foods with unhealthy fats packaged in plastic that you might microwave, you know, and having all that stuff out there. So, I mean, look, I guess what I'm trying to tell you is that this is a new concern. A few other maybe data points that might be helpful for your listeners to say before.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I always try to take people's anxiety down when we talk about stuff like this. But I think there's a few more points that are worth floating out there because this is all relatively new information. discoveries and research about us. Like earlier, we were talking about the discoveries that are positive, like, okay, let's be fair. There are some things that we should be alert about.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And microplastics is one of them. We're now able to measure microplastics in your bloodstream. We don't do it routinely, but you can measure it in the blood. You can measure it in the plaques, the narrowing of your arteries. And they've also found microplastics in human brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So much microplastics, by the way, that if you could take a kitchen scale, you know, the kind you'd measure out for weighing dough for a cake. All right. And you can measure the weight of the plastic in the brain on a kitchen scale. All right. It's not the old type of scale with a chain, but a very sensitive scale. That's how much plastic can accumulate your brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It was my first exposure really to Europe way of life, you know, in a place where it eats Mediterranean cuisine. Right. And in culture. And then I went to Greece. which is a place I've come back to again and again. I'm fascinated by the elemental nature of the life in Greece. It's not fancy for the most part. It's very simple.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And that plastic has been shown to stimulate inflammation, not surprisingly. Brain inflammation, clearly associated with cognitive defects, brain fog, all these other things you don't want to have. And we're wondering, we're scratching our heads saying, hey, you know, why are we a society dealing with so much dementia? I don't know, maybe the microplastics are playing a role.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's not the magic bullet answer, but wow, this is another thing that we need to be aware of. Founded in testicles. All right. So if you're a guy and you're like, I'm like, I don't, I ain't scared of no microplastic. If I told you it's in your balls. All right. You might think twice.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, if you've ever had a beautiful oriental rug or tapestry on your wall or your window like that is that's weaving. And when collagen is woven perfectly, there's no scar. So we looked at this. It was no scar. The collagen was woven perfectly in the healed wound with more blood vessels and no inflammation. OK, and then we took it one step further.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
They find it in urologists who are doing surgery on the human penis have found microplastics studded in the tissue, in the muscle of the penis. How did it get there? I don't know. But obviously, it somehow got there from the bloodstream or some other way. You can guess on that. But the fact of the matter, they found it in the penis. They found it in human semen.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Well, I mean, one of the theories is, is that all this polyester clothing that we're wearing has microplastics inside of it. So when you're wearing polyester underwear, men or women, and all this athleisure that is so common, it's not like we're wearing organic cotton all the time or wool or cashmere or whatever. We're using all these synthetic fibers. These synthetic fibers, they shed.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Microplastics. And then we are also drinking tap water, a lot of us. Running through plastic pipes. It's running through plastic pipes, but also all this, in America especially, all these clothes that we wash, it's in the wash cycle. The microplastics go through the water system.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And from my understanding from EWG, we don't have the advanced filtration abilities, even in America here, to get rid of things like microplastics. This is why... I'm a huge fan of just having a high quality filter at home because, you know, thank goodness that we have access to clean water in the United States, which means it doesn't have bacteria.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We're not going to get typhoid or other things like that, which is how a lot of people were dying from poor sanitation previously in the world. But, Now we have this new problem. Like you said, it's the modern day smoking that we're dealing with and it's plastics. And so I had heard somebody, it's actually a great quote. I've shared it before.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I had heard a speaker a long, long time ago in the whole raw food movement that I was once part of. They used to say that either you get a filter or your body becomes the filter.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's a good way.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And there's a lot of good options that are out there. Don't get a Brita because that's mostly focused on just removing...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
chlorine for taste but get a good quality reverse osmosis what kind of filter do you have i have reverse osmosis okay now the criticism that people have is that oh well reverse osmosis takes out all the good minerals that are inside i don't know about you but i'm not drinking tap water to get minerals right you can add some trace minerals back in a few times a week you can add some electrolytes so you can get most of the minerals from the food that you eat
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not worried about that aspect. And occasionally I'll add in with my big, you know, 32 ounces of water that I'll take to the gym in the morning. I'll just put in a few trace minerals as a brand. I have no affiliations called trace minerals. Great. That's out there. There's plenty of other brands that are there. So I use reverse osmosis. I don't want that exposure that's there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I think that's one of the easiest things that people can do.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Well, look, I mean, this is a great conversation. It's really practical, right? So We all drink water. We all have water running in our houses. I mean, hopefully you do. And here's a simple way to address a concern, but it still surrounds sound with plastic, right? So what are the things that I tell people are really common sense? First of all, don't
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
eat off of plastic plates or use plastic silverware or use or drink from a plastic cup. Think about the summer picnic, you know, or the big house party that you actually have. And, you know, like, what do you go? You go and buy to go to the store and you buy the party plates and the party silverware. It's all plastic, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We found that the oats bioactives recruited stem cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Not only do you throw it away like that evening or that later the next day, but for the environment, but People are eating off of those and there's no doubt that they're shedding microplastics as well. So avoid plastic plates and silverware and cups.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
From what I've also understood, I don't know if you've connected with her, but she's an incredible researcher in this space and now advocate. Her name is Dr. Yvonne Burkhart. She is a toxicologist by training who got super sick by working in
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
the food and the fragrance industry with all these different additives and flavors and she developed a bunch of different illnesses removed herself from that exposure and started to clean up her life and became now an advocate for what she calls a low tox lifestyle all very basic things of how we can protect ourselves she said one thing that i want people to be aware of now that they're talking about plastics is that we have to also just be aware that even a lot of paper cups for example
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
for healing okay so i just took you through you know like over a year worth of research but i gave you the kind of the top line on this so that changed my view towards oatmeal okay did you have a negative view on it before i had a more neutral i had a neutral view okay um listen i grew up i remember my parents used to buy those pre-packaged oatmeal envelopes quaker oats
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
If we had this piece of paper right here where I have my show notes that I did for preparation of this podcast, if we turned it into like a little cup and we poured water, it would basically disintegrate, especially hot water. It would melt or it would at least start to break down. It wouldn't stay firm. Now, when we go to a coffee shop, and again, this is about doing our best, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's not about getting overly anxious or worrying. When we get a paper cup, we have to understand that these paper cups, the reason that they don't disintegrate is because they're coated. With plastic. And often that coating is plastic. Exactly. Exactly. So just very simply, you can get a mug. Many coffee shops, even here in LA, will give you a discount.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Metal, glass. Those are the ways to actually go.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Listen, I'm not always perfect. There's sometimes you're there in an airport and you're traveling and you want a cup of coffee and you don't have access and they don't have takeaway cup. They don't have, you know, here cups. But I would say 99% of the time, I'm going to be having a cup with me or going to ask for a cup.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's an easy thing to do. Listen, if you are athletic and you go to work out and you bring your water bottle, swap it out from the plastic one to one made out of metal or glass. Yeah. Okay. And that's a really easy fix. I also think that not buying food that's been packaged in plastic is really important. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I mean, and by the way, you can go to the produce section and buy lovely cherry tomatoes that are found in a plastic box with a plastic top. All right. And then you're going to wash it with unfiltered water in your house. And you're pretty much marinating this thing. It's been marinated and you're going to wash it more with plastic water containing plastic. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So again, I sort of try to be more selective of buying foods that are not pre-packaged in plastic. It's
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's tough. It is very tough. Because even like my wild caught salmon or my grass fed beef, even if you get it at Whole Foods in like, you know, or like an Air One or whatever in this sort of deli section where it doesn't look like it's touching plastic. If you go behind and you see when they're getting it initially, it's wrapped in plastic.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
This is actually a modern conversation, Drew, that I think needs to be had. And hopefully there will be people in government and people in the private sector and companies. They're going to want to come together and have this intelligent conversation to say, listen. This is a new discovery. We didn't realize this was happening.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
What do we do collectively to make better decisions so that the public is actually going to be less exposed to these toxins, even if it's impossible? If I ever have hesitation about the plastic thing, I just, in my mind, I'm picturing a credit card. Do I want to be eating that this week? No. So I'm just, you know, I'm going to try to make another decision.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But, you know, plastic food containers, you know, you've got leftovers. What do we used to do? You go to the, you know, Tupperware. I don't think that company is around anymore, but not good. Don't put your food in a plastic container. All right. And then you put it in the fridge where you may have had leftovers. foods that you cooked in glass or metal or, you know, cast iron or whatever.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And now you have just put it into a plastic container overnight to marinate with the plastic. And then you're going to heat it up the next day in the microwave. And now you're going to actually put more or cook it or heat it up, you know, in the plastic. No, don't do it. So I always say, toss out your plastic storage containers. I know they're cheap. I know they're convenient.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
packets or whatever the brand was. I can't remember, but you know, they had little dried fruit chips in it and they had flavoring and sugar, all sorts of stuff. God knows what else was in there. Okay. Cause I wasn't paying attention when I was a kid. Right now I do.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I know they're light. I know they're things that you can easily take to work for the next day if you're trying to heat up some lunch. But please, just get glass containers. It's okay if the top is plastic, honestly. It's not going to touch the food for the most part because it's really hard to find a glass top. Nobody's going to be carrying around a glass box everywhere they're going.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But minimize the amount of plastic. Those are avoidable things. And the other thing that I heard recently
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
sanjay gupta from cnn uh who who uh who i know uh say about microplastics he said change out your toothbrush i didn't think about this but yeah if you keep using the same toothbrush the whole time breaks down and now you are deliberately putting microplastics that are going to break down into your mouth and rinsing them around and you're going to be swallowing some.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And so just make sure you change out your toothbrush, you know, and don't change them out before they wear down.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's great. I have another low hanging fruit. Yeah. That's based on some research that we wrote about in my newsletter, which is that if you have Teflon pans that have scratches on them, um, Inside of those Teflon pans is basically a coating of plastic in the layers that are there. That's part of it. These PFAs, these microplastics that are there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And they found that just a single scratch on an average size skillet for a Teflon pan, because these pans develop scratches over a period of time, can leach up to 1,000 to 10,000 microplastics and nanoplastics every time you cook. So an easy solution that's also actually a cheap solution is that All the researchers that I've talked to say stainless steel is great, it's cheap.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Now there can be fancier solutions that are out there that are companies that sell ceramic and that sell this and that, but just stainless steel and it's gonna last forever. And you're not gonna have that same exposure So take a look at your pans, especially the ones that are Teflon, or even if they're the ceramic coating that has scratches on it, that can be detrimental to your long-term health.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So I, you know, like with my situationally aware approach to food, where I always tell everybody, please, if you're going to buy something in a box or in a package or a sealed envelope, Look at the ingredient label. Like I do that now, but I look back and I'm like, you know what? I don't know how good that prepackaged stuff was for me because it was an ultra processed food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So just go for a cheap solution. Stainless steel is the cheapest and easiest.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I will tell you, again, back to simplicity. If you want a pan that's going to last a long time, that is kind of a workhorse in the kitchen, just look at what chefs use. All right. I mean, I'm fortunate to have a lot of friends who actually are either cooks or chefs. They all use stainless steel pans. That's the workhorse in a restaurant and at home.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Like I have stainless steel pans or cast iron, which is heavier. It's a, and you get a little bit of iron actually from cast iron. If you're iron deficient, you know, like when you cook in a cast iron pan, you get a little bit of the iron and you can season and condition them. If you have a stainless steel wok pan,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
OK, if you condition it the right way and take care of your your pots and pans and and walks the right way, they actually make a nonstick surface. All right. So you don't need to have that NASA developed space age, you know, 1960s innovation in order to be able to have a real workhorse. And I think that's what people need to have.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, I, you know, I teach an online course called Eat to Beat Disease course and One of my favorite modules in my course is about rethinking your kitchen. And I tell people like, what are the things you should toss out that are not good for your house and swap in and keeping simple cookware. stainless steel pan, cast iron, skillet, and a wok.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That can, you know, and pots made of the same kind of material. That's actually how you get, that gets you the whole way in terms of like almost every situation for cooking.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I want to pivot here again and come back to the concept of food because, you know, that's really your bread and butter of which you're amazing. about educating people about.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And I always find that anytime people hear you talk about food and the power of ingredients, they get so excited to double down on going back to a whole foods diet, eat a little bit healthier that day, which makes a huge difference over a period of time. So on the topic of longevity, it's not just about living to a long age and being healthy, people also want to look good.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And one of the things that I've loved is that I see that one of the top videos that my audience has watched that you've made is on the topic of collagen and how collagen is an important part of keeping us looking young for a long time. So I want to ask you, what are the top ways that that we can naturally boost collagen in our diet?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And then are there other foods that you've found that also can help us not only live a healthy life, but stay looking young?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I have no problem with wanting to look as good as you can, right? And we all, I mean, you know, vanity and our self-image is super important. So there's no judgment there in talking about sort of figuring out how to keep yourself looking as youthful as possible, you know, and you want to look good. More power to you. I'm all for it. So number one, I want to kind of put that out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I didn't think about it that way. But so maybe I had a little bit neutral to questioning, a little suspicious about this. But now I know oats by itself has some really powerful things that could be unlocked in which we've done, but back to the oatmeal. How do you, you know, like oatmeal is an oatmeal. You could buy rolled oats, you know, in a canister and that's all there is to it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So collagen is actually an important way to do it because that's how your body does it. All right. By having this biomaterial that exists under your skin that provides structure so that you look the way that you want to look. wrinkles, different types of tissue that look sagging. It's usually due to some stretch or disruption of collagen or weakening of collagen.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And our body continuously produces collagen. It's a protein. And collagen, by the way, is amazing. It's a triple helix. It's kind of like taking three threads of protein. And you, you know, the old macrame thing you might have learned when you were a kid, you know, you weave them together.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's what your body does to make collagen that actually sits in lockstep with each other in a line, woven like an oriental rug into patterns that actually give us structure to our skin. Tensile strength, shape, structure, form. And then you've got blood vessels have to go through there. So you get nice coloring. All right. And so all these things are really, really important. Okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And by the way, there's one, to give an example that a lot of people don't know about, your cornea is the front of the eyes, which you put your contact lens on if you wear contacts. It's the crystal clear function, like the watch face in front of your eye. And it's completely clear. And that's made out of collagen too. And the reason that light can pass right through it, so you can see...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We can see each other is because the collagen fibers are oriented exactly in lockstep. And if you mess up the collagen in the front of your eye, it clouds up. And now you can't see. That's how important collagen is. So how do you actually keep your collagen healthy? How does your body rebuild? How can you support that using food?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Well, it turns out collagen is made with amino acids because it's a protein. So you want to keep up your protein. So something very simple. Like I try to keep things as simple and doable as possible. Okay. Make sure that you have adequate protein because the protein you eat puts amino acids to your body and your body's going to harvest some of those amino acids to build in part collagen.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So you want to keep on growing collagen. You're going to need to eat an adequate amount of protein to be able to just keep up that structure under your skin. Number one. Number two. An interesting co-factor is what we call it in science that your body needs to build healthy collagen in that lockstep woven way for good shape and form and structure is vitamin C.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So if you don't have vitamin C, your collagen will fall apart. And a great example of that is you probably, you know, your listeners probably heard about this. This disease is called scurvy, you know, which people, you know, on pirate ships and long journeys on the ocean used to have. There was no citrus, no vitamin C. You know what? Their teeth used to fall out.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And the reason is because the collagen in their gums couldn't be adequately remade because they didn't have vitamin C. And so the gums got weak, the collagen got weak, and their teeth came out. And their joints got weird. So this is really what you want to have is good vitamin C. How do you support vitamin C?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Well, you could take a supplement easily, but actually there's so many other whole foods that have so many other supportive elements for overall health. You might as well have them. Obviously, citrus, oranges, you know, in the wintertime, tangerines, tangelos, you know, a lot of different kinds of oranges and citrus you can actually have. But other less obvious sources of vitamin C are kiwi.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
red bell peppers, tomatoes, guava, all great sources of vitamin C. Broccoli, a great source of vitamin C. So you can get vitamin C from your diet. And I encourage people to eat diversely to get that vitamin C from whole foods because you get all the bioactives and polyphenols and a dietary fiber as well as extra credit for your effort. Whereas a simple tablet of vitamin C
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Please look at the ingredient label, which is what I do now. Now that I've made these research discoveries, I'm eating oatmeal every now and then, not every single day, but sure. Like if I had a choice, I'm going to make my own with just water. I still don't put dairy in it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
All right, it'll help the vitamin C, but you're missing out, man. And so I always think that getting from the whole foods, so vitamin C, getting enough protein for amino acids, getting your vitamin C. And then, by the way, and this is something that I used to think was bunk. But then I realized there's real research to it and real science. And I participated in some of it. So I know it's real.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
An example of where I changed my own mind with evidence and science is actually having collagen products. Okay. Eating collagen will actually build collagen. And so let me tell you why I was skeptical. Years ago, someone say, I'm going to have some bone broth and I'm going to have some collagen and it's going to make my joints better. And my first response back then was,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
is this is like 10 years ago i'd say that's bunk no no it's true what are you gonna say you're gonna eat some collagen little collagen worms those little eels are gonna swim out of your stomach and swim their way to your joint and and stick in your joint it's not gonna happen all right and maybe that's how it was marketed but actually that's what here's what actually happens so
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
When you have a dietary source of collagen, so what are some dietary sources of collagen? Bone broth. You boil up enough bones from things, it's filled with collagen from the animal, from the bones. It dissolves the bones. It always dissolves the joints. It is rich. I mean, if you ever had really good quality bone broth, it is delicious and it is dense. It's got stuff in it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Something a human being has been having for a long time. All right. Thousands of years. This is like your great, great, great grandmother's solution to health. And now we're rediscovering it with science. It's got collagen in it. All right. What's another source of collagen? Jell-O.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm not talking about like the atomic color jellos that we had when we were kids, you know, like bright green and bright orange, like colored stuff that you don't want to have. Like, I'm not talking about those jellos. Those jellos have all those additives that we talked about at the very beginning. We don't want to want to add sugar. Right. But I'm talking about you can get plain gelatin. Okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And then, you know, I'll take some dried fruits because I know there's other bioactives, dried cranberries to, you know, to get the elagitannins and anthocyanins. I'll, I'll get all that stuff or crushed nuts. Right. You need to get some dietary fiber, get some healthy monounsaturated fatty acids. Good for my cholesterol.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
If you look in the middle aisle of the grocery store, go look for Knox gelatin or whatever. It's just a plain box of just powder gelatin. And you can make your own gelatin out of it. And you can flavor it the way you want. You can make it sweet. You can make it savory. You can make it neutral. That's a way of actually doing it. Okay. Of having collagen as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But let me tell you biologically what happens. Okay. that actually helps your body build collagen. Collagen is a pretty big molecule when you eat it, whether bone broth or jello or whatever. Nah, on a chicken wing, okay, you're going to get some collagen in your system. It gets to your stomach acid. That collagen is busted up.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That stomach acid is a cauldron that digests any food that you have, including collagen, which breaks it up into a million pieces. And this is where I went wrong with my assumptions that you break it up to a million pieces, that little snake of collagen can't swim anywhere. You know, like, okay, so we've shattered that idea a long time ago.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Actually, the biology is now teaching us something different. When you digest collagen into fragments, right? those fragments get absorbed into your bloodstream. And collagen fragments are actually biologically active.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Those collagen fragments will circulate in your bloodstream, affect your joints, and collagen fragments will activate the cells that make collagen, like fibroblasts, special cells that can actually make collagen, and they will stimulate the collagen-making cells to make more collagen.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's why bone broth and Jell-O actually works for your joints, for your joint health and for skin health as well. It actually is true. So again, if you're going to actually buy product that is packaged, whether it's plain gelatin or bone broth, please look at the ingredient label because that's actually how you get the transparency to know whether or not there's anything added to it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
by the factory, the manufacturer that you might not be comfortable with. Get the pure stuff, get the elemental stuff. That to me is what you really, really want when it comes to bone broth. Don't have crazy chemical additives. If you can't pronounce it, you don't know what they were for in there. Okay. You wouldn't put it in your, you wouldn't add that in your house.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Probably that's something you want to avoid. And that's again, choice. Choose the one that's actually simpler, that actually doesn't have those additives or toxins that we're trying to avoid, right? This is where we're headed, I think, as a society. We're trying to raise our awareness of these things. We're trying to take action.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, I'm trying to think about, you know, this whole idea of how do you start your day? Back to the question you asked. How can one start one's day in the healthiest way possible? For me, cup of coffee. I don't adulterate it. I know what's in it. It's got chlorogenic acid. It's good for so many aspects of health and longevity. It adds to my quality of life.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Hopefully, companies and governments and educators and the medical community will all get together to say, you know what? It's like smoking. Not a good thing to do. Let's all work together in alignment to make sure we're not doing these kinds of things and we're not exposing to people. But at the end of the day, it's a choice that we're actually making. You still get a cigarette.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
OK, you can still choose to smoke it. Most people who care about health don't. And so but this is, again, amazing ways to actually take care of that collagen that's going to make your skin looks good. Structure, function, tensile strength. shapes your body in any way, shape or form that you want it to be. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You need to have good collagen, amino acids, protein, vitamin C and collagen containing products like bone broth or jello are simple ways that you can go to the store today. to help your body's collagen.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Incredible. Just what are your thoughts on whether it's a supplemental form, high quality, or whether it's something like a bone broth? Should somebody be thinking about having that a few times a week?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's a great part of having a diverse diet. And supplements, I call supplements supplements For what they mean, topping off, you know, like if you can't get it any other way, yeah, choose a supplement. Why not? You know, or you can't eat enough. Try some supplements. So I don't have a problem with collagen supplements. They actually work. You know, I mean, they work for veterinarians.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We tell they work for dogs with arthritis and actually human studies actually are showing that. For the reasons I actually told you that I had been skeptical about before. But in fact, the human evidence actually shows us now that the biology of collagen fragments activating the cells to make more collagen actually works in your body. So I'm all for it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, I have to tell you, you know, like I was a little under the weather like last week. And you know what I did? I made some soup. but I made it with bone broth.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Wow. Homemade, did you make it at home or did you pick it some up? I went out to the store to buy it because I wasn't- Making bone broth is a little tough and it stinks up the whole house. You know what?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I do it after like a Thanksgiving meal or whenever there's poultry or bones being available, like a carcass, I'll actually make it myself. Delicious, but yeah, it's work, you know? Totally. But I bought the bone broth and, you know, I'll just tell you, just end of one, myself, taking self-care. I felt so much better after sipping the bone broth soup. And it wasn't a placebo effect.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Like my sinuses cleared. I felt more relaxed. You know, like my headache kind of went down. I'm sure some of that is these peptides and fragments and things like that that are in the bone broth. And so, listen, I mean, grandma was right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Have some chicken soup. That's awesome. You know, on this theme of longevity is not just about...
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
how we you know how long we live and making sure we're free of chronic disease and that our brain is sharp but also part of that is looking good too and there's nothing wrong with wanting to look good in fact i think there's some data that's out there that i came across that actually like how you perceive yourself to look if you perceive yourself to look young you actually feel young Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm sure there's something in that dimension versus if you feel like you look old in your perception, like your look accelerated in your aging that can have some mindset, you know, impact on you as well. I don't know if that's true or not. I'll share with you what I came across and you can tell me and we'll add it to the show notes afterwards.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But on the topic of not only feeling young, but looking young, is there anything out there like collagen that you've seen that makes a difference in how we look?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So that's part of my health span and lifespan. Coffee, by the way, slows down the rate of cellular aging as well. So that's been studied in people. Phenomenal. I don't think too much about it. I just get my cup of joe.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
All right. So I'm going to give you some like cutting edge research that I'm impressed by, that I have become a believer in the science of, and it's leading to products that you can actually find on the market. Oh, wow. And have you heard of exosomes? Yeah, for sure. So- exosomes are these tiny little packages that are found in normal healthy cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And these little packages are more like when I say package, I mean like a box. Okay, they're a little box and they contain cargo. And the cargo is something, it's genetic material, special kind of genetic material called micro RNA. Okay. OK, and microRNA isn't like this BS topic that's just influencers are talking about. But in fact, it won the Nobel Prize in 2024.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So it's real science that's been recognized as profoundly important to our understanding of the human body. OK, and our human biology. And that's what's inside an exosome. And so what do these little cargo of micro DNA, micro RNA, what do they do? Well, it's a way of one cell communicating to another because they release these exosomes. So exo means going out.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And so these little particles that are inside the cell get spewed out, okay? And they hit the nearby cells. And those nearby cells, the microRNA in the exosome gives the signal to tell the cell next door, to reboot itself, to regenerate itself, to restore itself, to go reprogram itself. So it's pretty amazing, which is basically one cell telling the next cell to keep yourself a little bit younger.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
All right. Now, I could take that further and turn it into a marketing statement, which I won't because I'm a scientist, but you can tell where this will go because if you then take exosomes, which you can find from human tissue, where do you find them? You find them from body fat, fat that is sucked out by liposuction, usually thrown away. Okay. You can harvest exosome from there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah, you have it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You enjoy it. But I enjoy it. Okay. And that's at the end of the day, the most important thing. I know that oatmeal with this research could be beneficial, but it depends on how you get it and what you put in it. And so, you know, it's all in the details, right? So like the quality of the product that you're having. But for me, if I can get Greek yogurt, I might have it every now and then.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So companies are actually now harvesting human exosomes with these youth commanding
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
packages that tell cells to become to reset themselves and putting them into skin creams wow so um and there's actually evidence that it's making a difference okay so um i was at a private conference where i invited a researcher to come in to present some data and a product and clinical studies on exosomes um and she busted out a skin cream and showed patient after patient after patient case studies before and after before and after
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Okay. And I got to tell you, the skin looked a lot better. And for skin that was aging or not doing well or had a disease, The reset, reset it, clearly reset the skin, you know? And this is a trusted colleague of mine. So I, I know that like, I wouldn't, it would not, it would not be like, there's no hanky panky in the clinical data. All right. I mean, there was like real cases.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So what's really exciting is, is that is the sustainable potential for exosomes. Because it turns out, and I'm super excited about this because of my work in Buddhist medicine, you can also get exosomes from foods. Plants have exosomes. Wow. You can find it in aloe vera, which is a food source in Latin America. You can find it in ginger. You can find it in coffee grounds and coffee beans.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Isn't that amazing? And there's a huge overlap in the Venn diagram between the microRNA in the exosome of a plant compared to human fat. Isn't that amazing? Totally. I mean, think about how far apart we were evolutionarily, way back when, like, we looked nothing like a coffee bean or a piece of ginger. And yet our microRNA in our exosomes shares an overlap.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's incredible. That is incredible. You know, just because I know people are going to hit us up afterwards, right? Is your friend's product that he presented on, is that commercially available? you know, and you don't have to mention it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
The person who I invited to speak, which who you might want to have on this podcast at some point is Dr. Robin Smith.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Okay.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Okay. She's a physician entrepreneur. She's been involved with stem cells and all kinds of other things. I'm happy to make the introduction to you. And she started a company called exoceuticals, which obviously have to do focusing on exosomes and exosomes. As far as I understand, there is a product that's out there that's a skin cream that's actually for healing and for resetting the skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Okay. Interesting. We'll check it out afterwards.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Definitely check it out. I mean, look, I think in the same spirit, we're talking about the pioneers for longevity and anti-aging and, you know, or healthy aging. Like, look, this is what's cool. In today's world, what we didn't have... back in the time of the emperor of China, you know, creating those, you know, terracotta warriors. We have real science. We've got real technology.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
We live in a modern world where lots of smart people are coming at this topic in lots of different ways. How do we have longer? How do we live better? How do we look better? How do we actually stay healthier? What are the foods we should eat?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And of course, you know, what are the things we should avoid, including the environmental toxins and microplastics and things that we've actually covered as well?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Yeah, no, it's super important. And like you said previously, is that These things are fine to explore, but don't forget about the basics. You know, on this topic of looking young and feeling young as well, too, and having a healthy body. One thing anecdotally that I've generally seen is that I'm a fan. I have no affiliation. with this test called OmegaQuant. It's a fatty acid profile.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It breaks down your 369 and it also tells you how much exposure to trans fats do you have inside of the body. Because even though trans fats have been quote unquote banned, they're actually still in the food system and you don't have to declare them if they're under, I think like 0.5% or something like that.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I don't have every day. Other than the coffee, there's probably no single thing that I do every single day because I love diversity. And, you know, like in my books, I've written about 200 or 300 foods. I love to choose from them. You know, it's kind of like I feel like I'm the kid in the candy shop of health every single day.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And then there are some controversial thoughts that people have that some highly adulterated oils, especially seed oils, could become trans fats, especially if you're talking about like deep frying foods in a restaurant, not changing the foods. I don't know the research on that, but that seems to be a debate that's out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So anecdotally, I've seen from having recommended this test because it gets people
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Again, this is correlation observational data, but people who typically have the highest omega index, which means that they have a good fatty acid profile, low to no trans fats inside of their body, and they're getting plenty of omega-3s from the Mediterranean diet, you know, healthy fish in there, sometimes supplementally taking fish oil, high quality fish oil.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
There's so much research that those individuals have incredible cardiovascular health. But anecdotally, I've also seen that people who consistently score high on the fatty acid profile, I generally see that their skin looks a lot better than people who score lower. Now, that's an anecdotal thing. I only have maybe 14, 15 friends that have done it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But you got to figure that also how you eat plays a huge role. And if you're eating a lot of fish, And you're regularly having things like bone broth. You're probably having more collagen in your diet as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Well, yeah. And omega-3s also help support vascular health, blood vessels under the skin, bring circulation, which then make your skin cells healthier, give you better coloration, you know? So yeah, I would believe that, you know? I mean, I think that it's sort of like the... It makes sense that we, everything that you just said makes a lot of sense.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Whether or not the test is the best test or the only test or the valid test. I mean, I think those are things, those are the deep dive details that will be worth checking out. But I totally agree that, you know, like the idea of like looking at trans fat is something you want to avoid. Looking at healthy omega-3s is something that you want to add that, you know, these are
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
These are uncontested. Yeah, absolutely. You know, anytime you work on a new book, even with your vast level of knowledge, you always come back and you are highlighting something new that you knew about before, but you're sort of doubling down on the principles of this particular food. So in preparation, literally, you're in the thick of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You're in Los Angeles, you're writing, you know, you just came back from Greece, you were writing over there. Is there anything that you started to pay attention to a little bit more than before that has now become one of the foods that you're writing about? It's unique and beneficial properties.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, I go back to the things that I encounter. I make for myself every single day or I make sure that I'm putting it into my diet every single day, which is the benefits of coffee, benefits of tea. And keeping it elemental, meaning simple, unadulterated, like none of the crazy drive-thru stuff with flavorings.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
From the time I wake up and the choices I make, I just have a lot of fun picking things that I love that are good for me.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
But yeah, I mean, the more data I look at coffee or tea, I'm saying, oh, you know, this actually makes sense. And it's quite impressive that it also improves flavoring. the cognitive function in people who are older. It improves muscle strength and performance in people as they get older as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Like, you know, I haven't really been able to poke any holes or, you know, even as you're kicking the tires about coffee and tea. So it makes me double down on, you know, the pleasure I already get out of drinking coffee. I usually drink coffee in the morning and I'll drink tea in the evening.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
How many cups of tea would you have in a day and what's your favorite kinds?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I like green tea, but I also like oolong tea. I like jasmine tea. Jasmine tea is just green tea with jasmine flowers in it. And in my last book, I, you know, one of the things I wrote about is that it's a myth that you only have the green, only green tea is actually healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And this has actually given me an insight into healthy approaches to food because simplicity is,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
You know, I think that really the message of what you're sharing here is that it's not good and bad foods. Generally, when you're talking about whole foods, minimally processed, and actually it goes back to how processed is it? If it's super adulterated, you can take anything that actually could be a great food for you or a part of a healthy diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It turns out that black teas are also healthy and they also have theoflavones and other bioactives that are also beneficial that can help your metabolism. All right. And then the fermented teas, which is taking tea to a ultra rich,
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
extreme where it's black and it's fermented it becomes a probiotic tea wow cool i can actually drink tea that's also probiotic so i think i've expanded as i'm going through my research now i'm i'm i'm deepening my appreciation of the benefits of both tea and coffee I'm also thinking about drinking matcha more. I enjoy matcha anyway.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's a little bit more work to actually, you know, because it's powder, you got to dissolve it and, you know, you got to store it in a certain way. But honestly, matcha contains the fiber, right? 100% of the fiber of the tea leaf. Good for the gut microbiome, gut, brain. You know, I'm thinking about longevity and aging and cognitive health. Like, okay, maybe I should do some matcha now as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So yeah, these are the, I mean, it's a good question. Like, honestly, these are the day-to-day things as I'm researching and learning and thinking about and writing. I'm also encountering. I mean, I'm not writing science fiction.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm writing about science fact. That's amazing about tea. I definitely have increased. I was always a green tea fan. I never actually used to drink any coffee at all. I never really needed the coffee to have energy in the morning. But now I do one cup of coffee, which is... an espresso, just one shot of espresso, because I'm actually pretty caffeine sensitive.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I don't like too much caffeine at once. And I'll have like one to two cups of green tea later in the day. And that's directly because I feel like I've gotten excited about the benefits of green tea from listening to all your content over the years. William, as always, I have such a blast chatting with you.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm more excited than ever to focus on the simple stuff, the basic stuff, living a life based on whole foods, unadulterated foods, a little bit of excursions every so often, but largely focusing on the basics. And I just want to say thank you on behalf of our entire audience for coming on and sharing your latest information. I can't wait until your book is out on longevity.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And we'll invite you back on the podcast to chat more about it.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Well, thanks very much. And, you know, for people that actually are interested in following kind of like my research, I'm doing something new now that I didn't do before as I'm writing my book.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I'm actually putting out content on my YouTube channel, which I encourage people to subscribe to and hit like, and it's going to happen to start, start happening pretty soon where I'm actually going to be talking about the subjects that I'm writing about in real time. So you want to check out what I'm actually doing and what I'm learning and what I'm discovering.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
So if it's, if it's something I'm excited about, I'm going to share it. I encourage people to actually come up and check me out on YouTube at Dr. William Lee.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Amazing. We'll link to it in the show notes. William, thank you so much again for being on the podcast. Thanks very much.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
If somebody is largely eating whole foods, getting their steps in, doing some resistance training, and they want some oatmeal and that's their preferred way to get carbohydrates and it's not filled with a ton of sugar, but even if they want to put a little bit of honey or maple syrup and they're putting nuts in and other stuff, they're going to be a healthy person, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
It's only when we rely heavily on these ultra processed forms in all areas of our life. You mentioned how coffee can be great for us. And there's some people out there that are drinking coffee and it's truly maybe 30 grams, 20 grams of sugar every single morning, day in and day out. And that's not the only thing that they're doing. There's food dyes in there. there's syrups, there's other stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And then that leads to the next thing. They might have two lattes in a day. Then there might be a lot of processed foods in the diet. So it's really about how we approach these things.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's what I'm hearing from you. Well, you're right. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. But one thing I want to do for anybody listening to this is to try to bring a little bit of discipline and clarity to this idea of the use of the word processed and ultra-processed. Because I think it
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
is actually something that seems to be a recurrent theme in people who live long and live well you know and so you know i love the fact that you brought up this idea of like the typical breakfast where you know you're you're stacking the drive-through and you know we didn't even talk about like how you get your uh coffee you know with the with a pumpkin flavor and all the whipped cream and
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
I think we, you know, those of us who talk about it all the time, we understand what we're trying to say. But I think when people are listening, sometimes there's some confusion. What's, you know, what's processed versus ultra-processed? And what I tell people is that we very rarely eat raw ingredients one at a time. Maybe an exception is a salad bar.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
you know, or a fruit plate, you know, you're eating one, every forkful is like one thing, a little thing of lettuce, a little tomato, a little watermelon or a pineapple. Most of the time, the foods that we eat, the food I enjoy is cooked, prepared, you know, whether it's Chinese food, Indian food, Mexican food, Spanish food, Italian food. It's prepared.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
And that means that you're taking raw ingredients and doing something with it, which is processing it. So you ever see how they make homemade pasta? Get a big amount of flour, make a little hole in it like a volcano crater, crack a couple of eggs and just use your fingertips to start working it until it actually firms up and then you roll it out. OK, so that's like.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
That's like grandma in Italy making pasta the way it's been done for thousands of years. Right. That's processed. You're processing the food.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Minimally processed.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Minimally processed. But the point is that like homemade like that with fresh ingredients could be technically considered processed. But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about the foods that we should be more careful about. Now, you know, there's so much discussion about the food industry. And I want to maybe touch on that just a little bit. But ultra processed foods.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
are not the foods you make at home, you know, like manipulate at home to cook and to turn into a meal. Those are the ones that are made in a big factory and where machines are extruding ingredients and converting ingredients into forms and shapes like animal crackers, for example, that wouldn't naturally occur in nature and then add ingredients Lots of chemicals to them.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Emulsifiers, preservatives, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, added sugar. That's another one. Okay. And this is all transparently on the ingredient label, but hidden in plain sight to the consumer. And so ultra processed foods are a choice that many of us have been, I would say, conditioned to make, to reach for because of how we grew up in our society.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
Something out of a box that tastes really great and it's sweet and it's not very expensive. So maybe your mom bought a lot of it and it's in your pantry, maybe for months and months and months. Like food doesn't, it's not supposed to last that long. Okay. And it's all engineered for convenience purposes.
Dhru Purohit Show
The Healthiest Foods To Burn Fat, Kill Disease & Slow Aging with Dr William Li
shelf life longer at last better is for consumers so to speak that's what that's what they make us believe or certainly for the grocery store and and it's cheap and it's available right and then it's engineered to really be make you crave it right so I don't call it a conspiracy Companies do what companies do. That's what they're trying to do.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Great question. And again, obviously, I'm not giving medical advice here. But when you ask me, what does Dr. Lee do? I mean, I'm happy to tell you, number one, I really only learned to, I mean, I drank coffee when I was in college, probably not very good coffee.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
But then when I lived in Italy for a short time on a gap year after college, I really learned what coffee was all about and good coffee and how the different ways of brewing it and how to drink it and when to drink it. And I also learned something about the role that coffee can play in enhancing your life. So most of it, of course, when I was in medical school, I drank a ton of coffee.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
But so most of us think of coffee as sort of a morning brew, right? Either you make it yourself in a pot or you go by the drive through to pick up something and you get a little hit of caffeine and it wakes you up. All true. OK, and for me, I appreciate that. But I learned to appreciate the taste of coffee, which is actually quite sophisticated.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And as I sort of was learning more and more about my research through my research on what's in coffee that's good for you, you know, the caffeine. That can give you a little hit, a little surge. And that would be the reason why I wouldn't drink coffee late at night, because that could disturb my ability to get good quality REM sleep. When you disturb your sleep, your immune system suffers.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Even your gut microbiome actually suffers if you don't get good sleep. Your body, during good quality sleep, your body renews itself, regenerates itself. And so if you drink a ton of coffee, Late night, you know, and you don't have to pull an all-nighter, pretty much you're disrupting your sleep and therefore disrupting the rejuvenation, the renewal, the rebooting of your body's health defenses.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
So I don't drink coffee really, really late. Now, but actually caffeine is only part of the story. It turns out that there's other amazing bioactive natural chemicals found in coffee. One of them is called chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid actually is made by the coffee plant. Okay. So coffee bean is a plant-based food. It grows on a tree, coffee tree. And Mother Nature made chlorogenic acid.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Yeah, absolutely. So in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, I have a whole section called Exceptional Foods. And of course, you know, there's lots of things about individual foods that are amazing. But one of the most amazing properties is that there are certain foods that can really light up our body's health defenses.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
As part of the coffee trees, coffee plants self-defense system. So when bugs and pests nibble on the coffee leaves and stems, the plant views that as an assault, as an attack. And the little nibbles actually are wounds. So the coffee tree is getting wounded and it makes more chlorogenic acid to drive away the pest. It's kind of a natural pesticide and it's a wound healing response.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
All right, so that chlorogenic acid is therefore more present in organically grown coffee, okay? Now, what does chlorogenic acid do in your body? Well, chlorogenic acid activates your health defenses, lights up your immune system, lowers inflammation, cuts off the blood supply to cancer, helps to pull out and protect stem cells, and is also good for your gut health.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
So all of a sudden you got another grand slammer, right? Coffee. But now we know that when you compare organically grown coffee with conventionally grown coffee with pesticides, the organic has like three times more chlorogenic acid for that pest nibbling property that I talked about. If you use pesticides, hey, it doesn't need to make as much because, you know, some...
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
factory chemicals actually did the job for it. And so here's an example now where I learned that if I'm actually able to drink coffee that I grind myself from the bean and I choose an organic coffee, which I happen to do more and more now because of this new research, I know I'm going to get more chlorogenic acid, which is actually better for my health.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
which then could contribute to cancer. And, you know, so, you know, like, again, one of these things that we really wanna do is just, I think, make mindful decisions when we are putting things into our body. You know, like when you got a baby, you know, like you're teaching the kid what not to put in their mouth. Food, a spoonful of food, absolutely, put it in your mouth.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Lego block, don't put that in your mouth. Electrical plug, don't put it in your mouth. I think that as we get older, one of the big problems is when we just are distracted and start shoveling food into our bodies. I think that's where the new research is starting to
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
helped to bring us back to our past where people just became much more mindful of what they're putting into their body and giving some thought to, is this something that could be helpful or something that could be harmful?
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
We've got five health defenses, androgenesis, our circulation, our stem cells that help us regenerate from the inside out, our gut microbiome, healthy gut, healthy brain, healthy metabolism, our DNA, which protects us against the environment, and of course, our immune system. So those five You know, we can actually match one food with one system, but there are some foods that hit all five.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
I'm definitely not one of those doctors that basically gets up in a soapbox and waves a frond of kale to say, never mind your medicine cabinet, that's all BS. Just eat your plant-based foods and you're all set. No. Actually, the way I look at it is food is a tool in the toolbox. Medicines are another tool in the toolbox.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And just like a real toolbox, when you're actually trying to build something constructive, like your health, you want to be able to sometimes use more than one tool for a particular project. And so this is why I also find similarly the rejection that a lot of regular medical doctors have, MDs have, on the role of nutrition to be kind of like the wrong instinct.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Just because you didn't learn nutrition in medical school doesn't mean that it's useless. And so there's real evidence now that shows that food and medicine can work together. I'll give you a couple examples. There was a study at the University of North Carolina involving young, healthy people during flu season getting a flu vaccine, right? You get a flu vaccine during flu season.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And the thing about flu vaccine is that, you know, you want it to really work well. You want your immune system to rear itself up and basically, you know, be able to battle off the flu. And what they did, though, is they knew that there was a substance, natural substance, natural chemical in broccoli that is called sulforaphane. These are natural chemicals.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
They kind of give broccoli that sulfury taste, that characteristic taste. And so they were thinking about how can we give this to broccoli, this broccoli substance to people, because we know that sulforaphanes activate your immune system. So making them eat a lot of adult broccoli, grown up broccoli and stems, that's a lot of work. So they took broccoli sprouts instead.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Now broccoli sprouts, which you can get in most grocery stores these days, three to four day old baby broccoli, okay? They have a hundred times more sulforaphane than the grownup broccoli. So it's like when the broccoli seed sprouts, it's got all the sulforaphanes it's ever going to have. It just kind of distributes it, you know, into the gigantic mass, the big tree that it ultimately becomes.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
So then they made a shake out of these broccoli sprouts and they gave half of the subjects in their research. Everybody got a flu shot. Half of the people got the broccoli shake to have two cups along with a day with the flu vaccine. They did it only for four days, very short period of time. And then they looked at the blood, they drew their blood and they looked at their immune system.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And guess what? The people who, everybody who got the flu vaccine had some response, but the people who had the flu vaccine and were drinking the broccoli shake, sprout shake, two cups a day for four days, that's eight cups only, had a immune response that was 22 times higher. their natural killer T cells were 22 times more activated.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And then when they actually swabbed their nose to look for flu, there was absolutely nothing found in the people who had the vaccine plus the sprouts, whereas the people who just had the vaccine alone had a little bit of flu virus that they could actually find in their nose. Okay, so again, this kind of shows you that it's not food versus medicine.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And that's really where the term grand slammer come from. So you don't even have to be a baseball fan to know that if you have one swing of the bat and you can knock it out of the park and drive everybody home, that's actually what I'm talking about.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
I didn't say, you know, they tested broccoli sprouts versus vaccine. This is actually putting it together. So the next time, you know, someone goes to their doctor to say, hey, you know, what should I be eating? This is the kind of information that medical doctors should be sharing with their patients when it comes to improving their health.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
So one of the things that I said on my Instagram is that like, I want people to be able to just benefit from getting like, I've already done all the heavy lifting and all the homework to, What are all the Grand Slammer foods? And I basically told you, go to the link at the bottom of my Instagram and you can download this list.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
So it basically boils down into about a dozen and a half of foods that fit into fruit, vegetables, beverages, sweets, oils, seafood that actually hit the Grand Slammer category. So let's start with some of them that, you know, I think are important.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
common right so apricots and blueberries they actually amazingly hit all five of your health defense system good for your circulation good for your immunity and and good for your gut health at the same time so if you wanted to kind of find the shortest distance between two lines The line being you at the supermarket and picking out one of the, you know, the whole selection of things.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And you just wanted to be able to activate your health as much as possible. If you picked up a box of blueberries, that would actually do it. So, you know, like in the fruits and vegetables, it's apricot, blueberries, cherries. Kiwi is one of my favorite fruits. And the reason I love kiwi is because, I mean, it's this sort of innocuous looking fruit.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
You know, it sits on like your football in your house until it kind of shrivels sometimes if you don't eat it regularly. But if you cut it open, it's this gorgeous emerald green inside with this kind of starburst in the middle of it. And what I love about it, it's not very sweet. It's sweet, but not cloyingly sweet. It's not like one of my favorite things, like a juicy peach. It's not that sweet.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
and you get vitamin C and you get fiber, and that actually is also a grand slammer, which I think is a real delight. I love that.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Yeah, well, so look, I have, you know, my background is that I'm an internal medicine doctor and I'm also a research scientist. And my background for many years was primarily in biotechnology where, you know, we were developing really fancy, very sophisticated treatments for cancer and diabetes and vision loss. And I'm still involved with that, very much involved with it.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
But one of the areas that I was, I thought was super cool that I was involved with was gene therapy. So this is where you take a piece of DNA and you can actually stitch it to a cold virus and you inject it into a heart or you can inject it into a leg with the goal of that piece of DNA telling the body to grow more blood vessels, to grow better circulation. So it's a piece of the genetic code.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And I have literally like well over a decade of experience of doing gene therapy. Not ready for prime time yet. OK, there is one gene therapy that's actually FDA approved, but it's and it's for a rare congenital form of blindness. But all the other stuff is still very much in the workshop kind of being figured out.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
So we and of course, then you have your, you know, the 23s and me's and Ancestry.com where you actually can, you know, swab yourself and send it and see how much how much of you is Cro-Magnon or, you know, where your ancestors actually came from. Right. And the answers are always really surprising when you take a look at the code.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
what parts of you belong to, which came from what parts of the world. That's how most people think about DNA, right? Our genetic code, or maybe Jurassic Park, you know, you think about T-Rex or the velociraptor. But let me tell you, you know, so DNA, every one of our human cells, we've got 40 trillion cells in our human body. They're really small. You can't see them with the naked eye.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
You need to see them under the microscope. What most people don't realize is that DNA is, if you were to have a really, really fine needle and you go under the microscope and open up a cell, human cell, and pull out all the DNA, there'd be a six foot strand of DNA that you could pull out, all right? That's two yards worth of DNA, okay? Like how on earth could that fit into the cell?
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And it's all made of DNA, which is our genetic code. But do you know that only 3%
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
of that six foot in length is actually used for making proteins which is what our genetic code normally does so most of the other part of our dna is air traffic control and protection so dna is hardwired to protect us from the environment and i think this is what's really and this is how it relates to aging all right so when we're born when we're forming in our mom's womb
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Everything, you know, we hope is picture perfect. When we come out, immediately we start aging. So people say, well, you know, like I'm 60 or I'm 70 and I'm aging. Hey, man, you're aging like when you are one minute old. The clock is ticking the moment you like take your first. When you get spanked, you know, you're starting to age. You take your first breath. All right.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
So what happens is that our cells all are in this program. And that program actually will think about the mission impossible fuse, like the fuse, it burns down. Okay. When you burn that fuse all the way down to the bottom, like pretty much you've expended the life of the cell and the cell needs to actually replace itself. And over our time,
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
60, 70, 80, 90 years, we pretty much run out of our materials to actually keep renewing ourselves. And as our cells age, net-net, we also age as well. That's why a kid looks at themselves in a mirror and basically just sees the same image, same youthful, chubby image with the cheeks and everything else.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
When you're like in your teenage and your adolescence and your 20s, you're cut and buff, you want to look as good as you can. As you get older, you start noticing those lines and wrinkles and the gray hairs and the things that are like, wait a minute, that's not me. Well, actually, what you're seeing in the mirror is the reflection of yourselves wearing down.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Now, there's a lot of work about longevity of like, how do we slow down the aging process? Some people want to reverse the aging process. What I would tell you is that one of the triggers is our DNA needs to be able to protect itself better against the environment because our environment ages us. So what am I talking about?
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
We all know somebody who spent their adolescence and young adult life lying out on the beach. And then when they're in their 40s, man, they're like leather, right? And they look like their skin's pretty rough. That's aged skin, sun aging of skin, okay?
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Now that's what we see in the extreme, but I can tell you the same thing is happening when you're stuck in traffic in Los Angeles on the I-10 and on a sunny day and the sun is coming in on a windshield or your arms out the window, you're still getting that damage. So how come we don't turn into leather every single time we get stuck in traffic or go out for a run?
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
It's because our DNA knows how to fix itself and reverse that damage that's occurring. we got our DNA actually experiences a problem about 10,000 times a day. And if we didn't fix ourselves, we'd be aging a lot faster than we already do. And so one of the tricks to slowing down aging is to help support our DNA's ability to fix itself from the environment.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And so this is the ability for DNA to block the incoming missiles from the environment ultraviolet radiation from the sky, radon from the ground, off-gassing from your carpet, from your, you know, that new car smell, all fumes coming in, smelling that gasoline at the pump, which is now rising in cost, right? Because everything's going on in the world. All that stuff actually damages our DNA.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Thank goodness. our health defenses, our DNA is one of our health defenses, can fix itself to prevent that problem. Now, if there's damage in the DNA, a pothole, so one is prevent the potholes, if there's a pothole, the DNA can actually fill it. as quickly as the damage occurred. And that's where foods can also be coming in helpful to help our DNA fix itself.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
There was a study that she looked at kiwi, the fruit we just talked about, and they wanted to know like, if you had just one kiwi a day, would it help? How much would it help protect your DNA against incoming?
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
And they actually found that one kiwi a day, give somebody a kiwi to eat a day, take their blood out, expose it to environmental damage like ultraviolet radiation or some other kind of toxic, noxious exposure. And one kiwi a day will protect your cells with the DNA by 60%. So it's like putting up a 60% shield. One kiwi, all right?
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
Vitamin C, other bioactives in the kiwi all help our DNA to do that. Now, if you ate three kiwis though, now not only are you shielding yourself against that damage, now the DNA is inspired, geared, triggered to fix itself. You can fix holes 60% faster. So one, you can actually raise a shield.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
The second, you can actually put the construction crew to start to pave the road, repave those potholes as well. And there's a third thing that's really important for aging, to prevent cellular aging, right? So you want to prevent the damage, you want to fix the damage, and now you want to slow that fuse down. So that Mission Impossible fuse, when the mission is over, man, that cell's done.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
It's old and it needs to be replaced. So you can actually slow down the burning of that fuse, which is really amazing. So that's slowing cellular aging. And if you multiply that by 40 trillion, now you're slowing your entire body's aging. And foods can actually do that too. One of my favorites is actually what I got right here. Coffee will actually help you do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
12 Foods and Spices with Incredible Benefits and the Fascinating Research Behind Them
It will slow down the burn rate of your DNA.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. Is that actually disease-causing? And I would tell you that yes and no. A burger is something that many people enjoy eating.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And I would say eating meat, eating burgers, even eating ultra processed 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, then
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
more plant-based foods, less processed foods, okay, you are actually going to tip your odds where the diseases are more likely to get you. What that means is that overeating fast foods like burgers will actually contribute to taking your health defenses down, shields down.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 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. Our brains respond very well to salty food.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
That high sodium levels actually speeds up, accelerates our cellular aging. So we actually age faster, but it also is a huge wear and tear on our health defenses, specifically our circulation. Our blood vessels, our androgenesis system is taken down by excess salt.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So the great news is that the healthy body has got its own titration system for electrolytes. If you drink an electrolyte-fortified beverage, your body is going to take everything it needs and it's going to pee out the rest. You're going to eliminate through your urine. However, sodium...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 health defenses that we talked about
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 that get attention.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
They do make you pay attention to it, but in fact, really, the healthy body sort of has smooth ups and smooth downs. There are gentle slopes up and down of our blood sugar, and that's completely fine, all right? And it should be like that. However, if you have an uphill climb of your blood glucose and it continues to stay up and
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
That can actually happen if you're eating too much added sugar, okay? Added sugar, ultra-processed foods. What happens is that your blood sugars, your intake of the sugar, glucose, rises up, up, up, up, up. And now your body has, your metabolism chased that blood sugar down and it's got to work harder and make more insulin.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And eventually you just wear out that system and then you have high 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 gonna be eating a crazy amount of fruit. This is why extremes aren't good.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Diversity, switch it out. Keep it interesting for yourself. This is what our human nature wants anyway. It's how we're hardwired. You'll actually be fine. So salt, sugar, those are two offenders, okay? 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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
What I would say is that actually the fermented products or the bioactives that come out of red grapes, from the skin of red grapes that's found in red wine, there can be some healthful properties of the resveratrol and other polyphenols that come out of, that are in wine, but it's never the alcohol. It's not the alcohol in the beer, the wine, the whiskey. Nope, none of that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Alcohol 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
It'll repair itself. 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 going to 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 a toxin. Do you drink? I rarely drink. And when I drink, it's in moderation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Does that bring down the... So besides the foods you eat, other things that can compromise your health defenses. And by the way, there are five health defenses. We talked about blood vessels. We talked about immunity. But there's three other ones that are core to functioning in the healthiest way possible. If you want longevity, you need...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 developing diseases like cancer, all right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Stress also causes your blood pressure to go up and causes neurotransmitters, hormones, to be released from your brain and your kidneys, your adrenal glands, that ought to wear down your circulation. Now your angiogenesis system is also not functioning as well to protect yourself and keep good blood flow going where it needs to go. Now your circulation is actually down.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 you're trying to copy that sentence I was telling you perfectly. Now I'm going to come 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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's not good for our health either. We kind of get... We're lackadaisical. We let our guard down. A little stress.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 grit that goes along with it, which gives a little stress, keeps us sharp, you know, which is a good thing. 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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're sleeping. So In those ideally eight hours, seven to nine hours, eight's the sweet number, you know, our brain is cleansing itself, detoxifying itself, releasing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Do you know about the glymphatic system in the brain?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Okay. Well, there's a sewer system in our brains that's called the glymphatic system. And it's shut tightly during the daytime when we're using our brain, doing our work. whatever we're doing. And during the day, we accumulate a lot of toxins inside our brain during the day. It's just a matter of functioning, all right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 can 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And what happens is that those toxins accumulate, which is at the end of a really, really tough, hard day. you've got, if not a headache, you feel like your brain is, it's full, the cup runneth over, right? All right, so when you go to sleep, guess what?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
This sewer system, it's like the sewers of Paris, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
When your brain's not cleaned up, you're feeling foggy. So think about when you're in college, you pull an all nighter or go to a party or whatever 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 the stress can cascade on your health like that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah, it's during like the deep REM sleep, that dreaming sleep.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
That's right. 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Insulin levels go down. Your metabolism shifts gears. I sort of give people an analogy. It's like your body is a race car, sports car, like a Ferrari. During the day, you are in gear to drive, accumulate speed, and 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 okay. Think about flying overseas, getting some jet lag, you gotta catch up. Once you catch up, you feel better, all right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
But think about this like day in and day out, chronically stressed people who are never getting good sleep, add a little booze, alcohol to the equation, you can kind of see the problems that are going to build up. Your brain is 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now inflammation starts to 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So it'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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. Yes, it's very worrying.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Are we 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 – 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 –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Some of those harmful things are actually provoking more cancers, 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, colorectal cancer was something that you rarely saw in people, even in their 50s. It was for much older people.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now to see, I mean, there's even teenagers that have actually developed colorectal 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
That's almost too big a conversation to have to answer a question like this. But 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 how many inflammatory microplastics we are ingesting.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
When I was growing up, my mom, very well-intentioned, would store foods in plastic, leftovers. And we'd buy foods that came in plastic packages, right? We didn't 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 experiences that we all have in the modern developed world.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
What have 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 are still plastic particles that come off. But, you know, hey, there's no harm, right? We haven't been able to discover it. I used to say that.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah, if you look at the biggest health crises in the world today in developed countries, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now, just within the last few years, we're beginning to pinpoint that, number one, plastics can actually embed themselves in our body. We don't even know where. We also know that these plastics are associated with inflammation. That is a big red flag. The klaxon alarm should start going off. And third is that the volume of plastics that we're consuming is crazy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
is about the amount you'd find in a typical plastic picnic spoon just distributed throughout the brain this is like a normal it's 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 calculator math has been challenged but there was an estimate that you know some people might consume as much as a credit cards worth of plastic every single week
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 north star for health so i do want to get to that but let me just say something about microplastics
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 carotid artery, that's the blood vessel feeding the brain, comes from the heart right to the brain, the carotid artery. Oh, through the neck. Through the neck.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Fourfold, yeah. Okay, now that's not kidding, right? So 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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And urologists who are doing surgery on the penis are finding that in the human flesh, when they look into 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 to this isn't taking notice about microplastics now, it's time to start thinking about this.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 am saying is that we're beginning to wake up
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 downstream from that, from eye disease to wounds that don't heal, et cetera, et cetera. Cancer is another one. Dementia is a bigger and bigger problem as our population ages.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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, okay? And get ceramic or glass. 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, okay?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 tea bags can shed microplastics.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So you can have a billion particles of microplastic shed from a single teabag.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. You were like, why didn't you save my life?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
As you were doing it, I was like, uh, uh. All right. But look, there's another one there that's got lemon ginger tea. This is like an herbal tea. That's fine. Listen, 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. Teabags are supposed to be paper, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Well, in order to prevent the paper from ripping, the manufacturers of the teabags spray it with a small amount of plastic to... have it hang together better. And that's the plasticity that comes off. But what about the lemon and ginger in this lemon ginger tea that sounds so appealing and calming, right? And something that most people would find nice as an herbal tea.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Well, listen, you're relying on a factory to actually put that lemon flavor, 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 add your own piece of ginger. These are ways to actually kind of avoid the potential exposures. two toxins that come from ultra-processed food.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So all this conversation about, you know, avoid ultra-processed 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 absolutely easy. Now, I will tell you something interesting about English breakfast tea.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
We did research at the Androgenesis Foundation, the nonprofit I looked at, to look at different types of teas, different types of green tea, Japanese tea, Chinese jasmine tea, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 angiogenesis 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
We need to look at facts. We need to look at data. And so I'm a big fan of Earl Grey now. Now, what might make Earl Grey, give Earl Grey its superpower? Well, this is where knowing a little bit about what you're eating is actually useful because Earl Grey is a fermented, it's a black tea.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And a lot of people don't recognize this, but the saying that inflammation is a root cause of chronic disease, it's 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
It's got bergamot in it, and bergamot is a kind of a citrus, so maybe it's combining those ingredients that actually provides the superpower. But I do see matcha on this tray. I want to tell you about matcha because it is a—matcha is truly a super-enriched, polyphenol-enriched tea. A lot of people don't realize it. There's no tea bag in it, so don't worry.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So a lot of people think about matcha 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, 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,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 tea leaf and they ground up the actual leaf into a powder. Now, what's in that green tea leaf?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You've got not just some of the polyphenols that might steep out in the cup, whether you're using a tea bag or loose leaf tea, you're getting all the polyphenols suspended in that. So now you get 100% polyphenol, okay, in matcha. So 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 Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
That dietary fiber is good for your gut health, your microbiome, good for your metabolism, good for lowering inflammation. And the polyphenols found in green tea have also been, matcha tea, have also been found in the lab to kill breast cancer stem cells. Okay. What's a breast cancer stem cell? What's a cancer stem cell? Well, look, stem cells are these renewable cells, all right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And cancers contain stem cells that help the cancers come back, right? If you've got cancer, you get it treated. The one thing you don't want it to do is to come back. And by the way, other foods can also kill cancer stem cells. Purple potatoes that you might've seen in the market, they're kind of purpley looking on the outside, slice it open. dark purple on the inside. All right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
What I am saying is that drinking green tea in its most healthful form, okay, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
It's not just about living long. It's about living well and feeling good along the way.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 really pretty much all good. My great uncle, by the way, lived to 104 years old. Vital, intact, independent.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 drank tea all day long. He probably had 10 cups of green tea a day.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And this has been his whole life. He sat with his close friends who are also very vibrant and elderly, social connection. All right. Watch the sunrise. It's very calming. Do you drink it? Absolutely.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So let's do a quick medical school crash course for podcasters. Okay. 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. Your esophagus, your stomach, your small intestines, your large intestines.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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's kind of framing your small intestines. And then it goes down the poop chute, the rectal and the anus. That's the end of your gut, all right. So the colon is really the large, framing, thick part of the gut.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
It's near the very end, all right? So all this squiggly small intestines winds up here 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, down.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You see the blue down is 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So you're talking about the rising incidence of colorectal cancer. That could be a cancer that's typically... either on the right side of the colon, either going up the upside, up the elevator, or down the elevator, on the right side or the left side. Okay. Okay.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 considers processed meats salami, bologna, ultra-processed, you know, kind of deli meats, delicatessen, makes you find a delicatessen, all right? Those would be considered carcinogens.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And they are 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 your colon, not once in a while, go to the ballgame, have a hot dog, enjoy yourself.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
But if you eat it day in and day out, you're giving a lot of exposure to your gut.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah, so angiogenesis, which is the field I study, you break it down to what its elemental parts are. Angio, blood, blood vessel. Genesis, how the body grows and maintains them. So angiogenesis 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So we eat good things, they're going into our bloodstream and our blood vessels, our angiogenesis systems delivering to every cell in the body. Now you eat something bad, Similarly, or you breathe something in bed. Similarly, those blood vessels are delivering something negative. Now, inside the blood vessels is a lining.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 rink, to ensure that everything in the blood vessels are flowing smoothly without getting caught on the walls.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So when you have cardiovascular disease, too much salt, hypertension, when you have diabetes, where you're actually wearing down the lining of the blood vessels, endothelial layers being damaged, it's like damaging the lining of your angiogenesis defense system has really deadly consequences because it's like scraping up the ice on an ice skating rink.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You know, 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 of your blood get cut along the walls and they build up. And that's actually how blood vessels narrow up. So that's one of the areas of... So androgenesis actually is intended to deliver...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
oxygen and nutrients to the tissues that need it 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 definitely don't want to be feeding cancers by delivering oxygen or nutrients to them.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
30,000 foot, there's more and more people in the world. So once you get the huge numbers, the diseases that affect most people are going to magnify. So just as a matter of math, we're going to see more of these chronic diseases. But we're also going to be seeing two things that are happening that actually oppose each other.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Okay. So you are showing a graph that I generated, 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. I'll just put it over here. So we were studying at one point And we're trying to discover drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So what we're looking for are drugs that could cut off the blood supply to tumors. So we were screening lots of chemicals that biotech companies were developing and inventing and professors were inventing and said, hey, can you take a look to see this could be a worthwhile drug that could cut off the blood supply to a tumor as a cancer treatment. And at the time there were no such treatments.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So it was all discovery. Like this was like the golden age of discovery when it came to angiogenesis. 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And then what we would do is we throw drugs into it and we would see if we could actually shrink them up. And so some of the shorter bars are cancer drugs. You can see them 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And we were also testing other 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, if you want to be disruptive, you've got to sometimes disrupt yourself in order to be able to do this. So this is our experiment that we were doing at the Androgenesis Foundation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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-angiogenic foods.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You could see the green tea, you could see the onions and garlics and red grapes and strawberries. It was really an eye opener to me. When I saw these results, it made my jaw drop. And I said, my God, foods have potency just like drugs. I was a skeptic, all right? And it just made me realize, like, this is something that I had to pursue.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 scratch to reaching a patient. And then not everyone who needs a treatment can actually get the drug. But a food has immediacy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
One thing is that the lifestyle and dietary harms that have occurred over decades, 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 the fallout of some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
If you discover something amazing about a food, whether it's matcha, whether it's purple potatoes, whether it's a strawberry, that immediacy could be used beneficially without toxicity. all right, and affordably. And so I just saw this as, this experiment is what brought me into the realm of food as medicine.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So this is the great question. Let me kind of reframe the question as you're asking it. If experiments are able to show that certain foods can 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's no. And here's why.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
As a health defense system, our angiogenesis system is completely designed to yoke in the right number of blood vessels to give 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. You know, the bears were home invaders. They broke into the house and they were looking for chairs and porridge and beds.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 other disease tissues, but it will not
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 cutting off the bad blood vessels of the tissue. I call it like a landscaper on a golf course that breaks out the lawnmower to mow the golf course so it's got a perfect level of the lawn.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You're not gonna actually carve out a bald spot in a country club. You're gonna get just the right amount. Similarly, and 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And it turns out things like fruit peel 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 they can grow them whenever you need them. So your body is sort of like the gardener extraordinaire.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
It 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. Cancer has touched my family like it has for most people. I had two uncles years ago that passed away. One passed away from colon cancer. One passed away from liver cancer.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 were, we're not there yet.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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, had some bleeding, went to the hospital, found a mess.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
She had a hysterectomy to remove her uterus and ovaries, and they found in there an endometrial cancer. That's a cancer of the lining of the uterus. The surgery and a little bit of radiation is supposed to take care of it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Unfortunately, in her case, those little cancer stem cells and those 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. All right. And within a few months after successfully recovering from the surgery, she had stage four cancer everywhere. All right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And her oncologist told me, 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 has advanced. Progress has advanced.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
At that time, when my mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer, immunotherapy, the latest and greatest, I think, advancement in cancer treatment had just broken through and become approved. Immunotherapy is not chemotherapy. It doesn't actually poison the cancer. Immunotherapy is a medicine that you give a cancer patient that wakes up your own immune system.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
and so on and so forth. So decades later, we're beginning to see the consequences, the devastation of things that happened decades ago. That's one side of elevating, increasing the incidence and prevalence of health conditions, bad health conditions. there's another side that is countervailing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Whether you're a young person or an old person, it can wake up your immune system, all right? And my mother had immunotherapy. She was one of the early patients that got immunotherapy, and her own 80-year-old immune system woke up like an army of super soldiers, and went after that cancer.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now, we completely adjusted her diet 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 help her immune system spot the cancer. Guess what happened? three treatments of immunotherapy, three weeks apart.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 a total of 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now chemotherapy can be helpful too with immunotherapy, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 immunotherapy, if we can 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 a colleague of mine in Germany is working on is also absolutely jaw-droppingly amazing. Imagine this. Somebody has cancer and they're going to get a biopsy no matter what.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
They're going to take some tissue out to look at it under the microscope. What kind of cancer is it? Is it a brain? Is it a breast? Is it a colon? Is it a pancreas? Where is it coming from? You're going to 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 the type of cancer.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And you're supposed to then go to the guidelines and open up 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 or for very long. And what have I told you? That where we are headed with cancer therapy is a new frontier where you take the tumor with the biopsy,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 tremendous scientific power to get in there and probe diseases and also indeed 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 counter some of those harms.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Sure, look at it in the microscope, call it out, 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 20,000, 30,000 genes. Right now, most people say it's not worth it.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
We don't know what we do with all that information. What have I told you? If you took a tumor and sequenced all the genes, you'll 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 sequenced that too? All right.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now, people are 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. A couple hundred are gonna be left. Those are the smoking guns. Those are the doers that led to this cancer. Now imagine, and I'm gonna give you an analogy here,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Do you remember that Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report? Yeah. So you remember like he was wearing these gloves and you have a glass pane and you can actually move the things around on the glass with your fingertips, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So now imagine you can take these human, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Imagine every mutation's a pearl and you connect them together with the string that connects the pearl necklace. Now you get what I'm saying? Like now we've taken the tumor, find out the doers, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 with your own cancer and you're causing your own immune system to say aha This is a bad guy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
We're gonna develop antibodies to go find our immune system. We're gonna get ratcheted up to go find that cancer. Well, this is happening right now in clinical trials. I have a colleague named Saskia Biskup that is actually developing peptide vaccine treatments against cancer. And if you wanna see some amazing results, there was a paper we published in Nature
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
communications about a year ago that showed in more than a hundred people with glioblastoma 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 show that some patients with their own immune system woken up can actually keep them alive and cancer-free brain cancer.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Like that is no-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 Devine. She's okay with me giving her name.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Her handle is thatbrainyblonde.com. It's a triple entendre. She's blonde. She's very smart. But she had a glioblastoma seven years ago, and she is thriving alive with this immunotherapy. So between my mother, Rebecca Devine, I'm just telling you, like, I've known well over a dozen people who –
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah. Okay. So in 2017, I helped to convene a cancer research conference in Paris and we called it Rethinking Cancer. And we brought the world's best minds out there. And one of the researchers named Dr. Laurence Zitvogel, she's in Paris, works in Paris at the Institute Gustave Roussy. She is an immuno-oncologist. So she studies immunotherapy for cancer.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And at the time, we asked her to present some 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 100 people who were receiving immunotherapy for different types of cancer, that if you looked at the difference between people who responded, lived, did well,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Here's the problem. We are presently seeing the fallout of some of the not-so-good moves that we made in the 1950s and 60s 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. 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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Well, it turns out that when you compare everything, gender, age, comorbidities, 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 immunotherapy, except for one thing. That one thing was one bacteria.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
The responders had one bacteria called Ackermansia muciniphila. So most bacteria have a genus and species, first name, last name. First name is Ackermansia, last name is muciniphila. Okay, it likes to grow in mucus, muciniphila. Where is there a lot of mucus? In the colon. Where's the colon? That's on this model, the blue area. So Ackermansia grows right here in the cecum, which is the pouch.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
in the colon right at the beginning before you take the up elevator to the top of the colon, that's where it grows. If the people had that acromantia, they would respond to immunotherapy. So what the researcher did, she took out the acromantia and brought it to her lab of the responders from humans and gave it to mice who were not responding to immunotherapy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Boom, she'd resurrect the immune response to kill the cancer. So this is one of the first bacteria, and 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 Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
the presence of which seems to be absolutely vital if you are a patient receiving immunotherapy, the type of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors, if you want to tip the odds in your own favor of being a responder. Now, how do you get acromantia? Well, at the time, there was no acromantia probiotics. Now you can actually find acromantia probiotics.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
But actually, I have to 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
But at the time this was coming out, you had to grow your own acromantia, DIY acromantia, all right? So how do you grow it? Well, it turns out that there are certain foods you can eat that grow acromantia. What are those foods? Pomegranate, pomegranate juice, pomegranate seeds will grow acromantia. Cranberries. Cranberry juice, dried cranberries will grow acromantia.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Concord grape juice or Concord grapes will grow acromantia. Chili peppers will actually grow acromantia. Chinese black vinegar. You ever go to dim sum and have soup dumplings?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
The black vinegar sauce that they use as a condiment to the soup dumplings? Chinese black vinegar. That will prompt your body to grow acromantia as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah. So let me just give you my perspective on diets. Lots of different diets out there. They're all designed with kind of a specific perspective and a particular goal in mind. Oftentimes diet, whether you're talking about South Beach or keto or carnivore or vegan, you know, they're all designed to achieve a certain kind of goal.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Most of them are very, very difficult to maintain for a long period of time. Now, people are vegans and vegetarians, and that's something that, because of the diversity of the food that you eat, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. They often are designed to do one thing, but you can't keep it up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So it doesn't really, at the end of the day, contribute to the ultimate goal. Yeah. What I prefer and where I think the science takes us, we're the next frontier for 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 hotbed, the crucible of a lot of healthy diets.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Not just the blue zones, I think, but there are blue zones in the Mediterranean. Also Asia. 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, it's a very healthy, plant-forward, fresh, seasonal environment.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
healthy cooking oils, healthy preparation style, absolutely delicious way of eating. I mean, come on. If I were to take you to a Mediterranean restaurant or to an Asian restaurant, I would find it hard to believe that you and I opening the menu couldn't find something that we would enjoy eating, right? So, Mediterranean is how I tell people I actually eat. That's my, quote, diet.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah. Okay. Well, there's no one single factor I think that is responsible for it, but it is true. The Japanese demographics show consistently some of the 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And I'm giving a purposeful pause there because overeating, caloric loading, okay, is very damaging to our metabolism. It actually counters our ability to live long. It actually speeds up our cellular aging. It sets up inflammation. So by cutting down on your caloric intake,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
That's one of the things is that the Japanese culture, the culinary and gastronomic approach to food in Japan tends to favor modesty, under eating rather than overeating. I've got a question here. How do I know if I'm overeating? Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Okay, so there's a Confucian saying that's been translated into the Japanese that's a mantra, which is hara hachi ban mi, which means stop eating when you're 80% full.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 uncloaks 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 societally is regarded as a bad thing. Nobody wants fat, right? It's actually a good thing. Body fat's an organ in the body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Did you know that? It's one of our body organs, 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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So it has a little bit of a cushion effect, marshmallow-y 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 a fuel our body runs off of. I always tell people,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
If you have a car and you're filling it up with gasoline at the petrol station or the gas station, you don't even think about your gas until your fuel gauge starts to run low. And the same thing for our bodies. We don't think about our fuel until we're hungry. And our hunger and our brain and our gut is really our fuel tank that signals, oh, you know, we're getting towards that red line.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Better go 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. That is, you've got to cut back on your calories. That's what 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 the fat build up?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
There's different areas that fat in your body builds up. There's white fat and there's brown fat. White fat can be under your chin, could be under your arms, could be in your thighs and your butt, could be the muffin top, you know, around your waist. But that's not where the most dangerous fat builds up.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
The most dangerous fat, inflammatory fat, is a fat that builds up inside the tube of your body. So if you think of your body like a poster tube, okay, inside that tube, all this gut, I'm sorry, 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 any of these interstitial areas between organs, you can pack, with fat.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So think about, you're gonna FedEx something to somebody, overnight mail, a vase or a glass or bottle of wine or whatever, you're gonna pack it full of peanuts and you're gonna 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 overconsumption of calories. That fat, that energy, the fuel tanks building up within a skinny body.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Here is an interesting thing. Let's look at the opposite of building up subcutaneous fat. Which is the external fat, not the dangerous fat. The external fat, yeah. Okay, so there's two kinds of body fat, white fat and brown fat. They're all good. They're all beneficial. Okay. White fat can be subcutaneous.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 white fat. Brown fat is wafer thin.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
and it's plastered around our neck, is behind our breastbone, a little bit between our shoulder blades, a little bit in our belly. And brown fat actually is metabolically 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
It's actually quite good. And so one of the things that I think is really important to know is that when you've got too much visceral fat, you've got too much inflammation, but you can actually use your brown fat to try to 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,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Brown fat can actually light up. So you just handed me a card, I'll describe this, in which there's two pictures of a figure. And one of the picture 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now, on the right-hand side is when you actually lower the temperature. In an ice bath or something? No, no, this is actually just lowering the room temperature really, really cold, like a laboratory condition, lowering the room temperature. And boom, you see all this brown fat lighting up. Remember I told you it's plastered around the neck, behind the breastbone, a little bit in your belly.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And this is Mother Nature's adaptation in evolution to help animals survive cold temperatures. So before we had thermostats and room heaters, think about it. By the way, brown fat was discovered in hibernating animals.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
There was a zoologist who was looking at, plucked out a 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. And the more researchers and biologists and zoologists looked at animals that were hibernating, they found this very consistently.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
In fact, they called that brown mass first a hibernoma. Hibernating, oma, a mass, we don't know what it does, okay? A hibernoma, that's what it was known until 1930s. In the 1930s at UCLA, a researcher who, in the beginning, we didn't have microscopes. Then we had microscopes and we had really great microscopes. And all of a sudden in the 1930s, the researcher at UCLA said, you know,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
that hibernoma 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And so what happens is that in cold temperatures, like in hibernation in winter, the brown fat fires up and that's what 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. Sleeping in cooler rooms will actually start to activate it as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
When that, by the way, when those mitochondria fire up, They're burning energy. You know where they draw that 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And there are lots of foods that will also, you can eat foods to activate your brown fat to burn down harmful fat.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah, well, I mean, cortisol is a stress hormone. It actually snaps us into action. It actually is also healing. Cortisol has got multiple job descriptions. It's kind of like a Swiss army knife of hormones. And In small bursts, cortisol, incredible. And it makes you feel good as well. I mean, basically, it's the type of body steroid.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So cortisol is a very, very useful hormone for all kinds of reasons. But long-term stress will lead to excessive, prolonged, unabated cortisol secretion. And when your cortisol levels are up, up, up, up, up, and relentlessly, that then actually changes your metabolism. It definitely alters the ability for your fat to actually conduct its metabolism.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And this is shocking to some people to hear, but the human body is made up of about 40 trillion cells. That's more cells in our body than stars in a clear sky. And these cells have to divide to be able to reproduce themselves copy and paste every cell has its own genetic material called dna it's our instructions for how our cells are work so you get to copy and paste your dna all right now
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 colon and your small intestines. That's packed into the tube. All right. It is. It's kind of like packing for vacation. You know, some people are really, really skilled at packing.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
They can actually fold their socks and underwear and their pants. And it's like, oh, my God. You're a genius. You're a packing genius, right? Now, visceral fat grows between those folded shirts and pants, and it fills a lot of space in there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
When you have too much of it, not only does it fill up 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 between the spaces, the potential spaces in there. And then when it grows beyond its own blood supply, the visceral fat starts to starve.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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, start of oxygen, 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...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
all throughout 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 gonna put some lotion and cream, canister of lotion and cream, I'm gonna pack it everywhere in between spaces. Okay, look, Steven, pack a few, but let's stop right there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And you're like, 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 put a lot in there. Now you're starting to press on 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 one of those tubes of cream? Let's break one of them open.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now it's leaking. Okay. And that's what's happening when your fat is so inflamed, it starts to leak inflammation. Now imagine that cream starts to leak out into the interstitial of your suitcase. Now you've got a suitcase, looks skinny on the outside, just looks like a suitcase, could be a carry-on. But now all the organs, all the clothes you packed so neatly are squeezed and scrunched off.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah. So studies have actually shown that, and this was a study done by Cornell in New York, 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 to see, they did DEXA scans, as you described, to see how much body fat they had. And then they followed them over 13 years.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And they actually found that women who did not have extra body fat had normal risk of breast cancer, but women who had skinny fat Remember, all the women in this study, and so 3,000 women, actually were normal body size. I mean, they weren't supermodels, but they were just normal-sized women. Some of them were slimmer than others, but none of them were obese.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
None of them were overweight, just normal size. But they knew at the 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 threefold increase in the risk of developing breast cancer, and it's linked to higher inflammatory markers in their bloodstream, which makes total sense. The leaking body cream, the leaking inflammation,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
you know, in a skinny tube, all right, or normal size tube, normal suitcase. Look, the suitcase can't expand bigger. It's got a finite size, but it's leaking out. 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,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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, boom, whoosh, you're gonna have to create a bonfire all over again. That's how dangerous inflammation is. So that's why...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Excess visceral fat, inflammatory fat, is so dangerous and linked to cancer. And by the way, not just breast cancer. It 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. It's a growing list of cancers that seem to be...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Copying and pasting is a tricky thing to do really well. So if I gave you a sentence to write, Steven, and I said, copy it 10 times on a Word document, you'll do it perfectly. If I told you to copy it 1,000 times, you're going to make a few mistakes. Good thing that we have spell check to fix it, to catch it and fix it. But if I asked you to copy a single sentence 40 trillion times,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
you would be at a higher risk if you had high levels of visceral fat. And it makes total sense given the inflammation.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Well, and if you take some proactive approaches using food as medicine where you got to eat every day, 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, it's an opportunity. Yeah.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 problems later. won't eliminate them, okay? There's no guarantees in life, but it'll lower the risk. Here's an example, Stephen.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You know, research studies have shown that tomatoes are good for overall health. You mentioned prostate cancer. So studies have shown that men who eat tomatoes regularly, cooked tomatoes, actually have a 29% lower risk of developing prostate cancer. It's pretty good. 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
I can probably accomplish that. How much each time? Do I got to eat a wheelbarrow of tomatoes each time? No. The typical serving that this study supports is just half a cup of cooked tomatoes per serving. How do they know this stuff? Because obviously, how do they isolate that in a test? So these are from large-scale population studies.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
In this case, it's an epidemiological study called the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, where they developed hypotheses and they looked at outcomes over the course of 25 years, and they looked for... statistical correlations. So they found that tomatoes lower the risk of prostate cancer based on people reporting their tomato eating.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Then they actually went back and look at the report within the data collected. How much do they eat on average every week? So then you can actually back calculate the dose. All right. Now... I told you earlier about the way that I do research, foods medicine research. Let's take it further. Let's figure out what's in a tomato.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You're going to make so many mistakes that your spell check isn't even going to be able 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Well, tomatoes have lots of, it's got sugar, it's got some salt, it's got carotenoids, which are bioactives, one of which is lycopene. Well, okay, what does lycopene do? Guess what lycopene does? Lycopene in the lab will cut off the blood supply to tumors. anti-angiogenesis, shores up your health defense systems, prevents cancer from getting a blood supply.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And in fact, in correlative studies, they've actually taken the prostate cancer biopsies of men who did not avoid prostate cancer. So they were tomato eaters who went on to develop prostate cancer anyway. Nothing takes you from zero.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 their prostate cancer was 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...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 lycopene is a natural chemical that in its native form, pick a tomato off the vine and eat it like an apple. It's absorbed in your body, but not avidly, not as much as possible. What is that?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 a 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. I was a skeptic. But when I saw these results, it made my jaw drop.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah, listen, fasting is beneficial. Fasting is good and fasting is very old. It's not just a recent trend. If you go back thousands of years, I mean, if you look at some of the oldest religions in the world, fasting was part of their ritual that would happen throughout the year. Now, people go, well, what about intermittent fasting? How long should I fast?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 are made every 24 hours. Take a guess. This has been calculated.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 size fits 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. And the longer you're not eating and sleeping, the more time your metabolism, the Ferrari of your metabolism, of your body, can switch gears to burn down any extra fat that's accumulated.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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. But if you're fasting regularly, you're burning down all that extra stuff. And so then how do you optimize that without having to calendarize your fast and figure out how to schedule your meals?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
I try to make things as scientific, but as practical as possible. And so I tell people, you wanna 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
I said, if you go to bed at 11 o'clock, get up at seven o'clock, you get to eight hours of sleep. All right. We know that that's the sweet spot for your brain, for your metabolism, for burning a 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 Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
The night before, when you're eating dinner, let's say you eat from seven to eight 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
If you're going to have dessert or whatever, squeeze in there, but don't take a snack with you and sit by the television or, you know, absentmindedly gobble food and don't, before you go to bed, eat a big chunk of whatever, okay? Now, you've got three hours before you go to bed at 11. Again, this is all a theoretical model. Three hours of not eating. Your blood sugar goes down.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Your insulin goes down because 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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So if you were like me growing up, my mom, when I got up, was 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 I developed this instinct of actually just getting up and eating as quickly as I can, getting some breakfast in.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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, I get dressed, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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, Steven. 8 o'clock, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Just like that. Now, if you really want to do that 16-hour fasting, 16-8, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
angiogenesis is there a link between angiogenesis what we in the brain health dementia alzheimer's yeah absolutely so i mentioned to you that the human body's got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels that are coursing through the entire body bringing the oxygen and nutrients these are the highways and byways of health all right 400 miles of those blood vessels are in your brain
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
400 miles of blood vessels are actually coursing through our brain. And our brain is super metabolically active, you know, where 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Okay. Every day, every 24 hours, there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body that your body doesn't catch, that propagate in the document of our body as it goes on. 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Now, what we do know as people get older is that problems can occur with 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 dementia. Alzheimer's dementia, 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,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 by far the more common type of dementia.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So what can we do to maintain healthy angiogenic 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 circulate, your blood vessels, your circulation to your brain gets impaired.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
The more vascular, blood vessel healthy, angiogenesis supporting diet and lifestyle and medications that you take, the better it's actually going to be. Now, here's what's interesting. What are some of those things? Turns out that dark chocolate, plant-based foods that the cacao actually produces, helps your body produce something called nitric oxide.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Nitric oxide actually widens your blood vessels so you get better blood flow. So dark chocolate is one of those foods that actually 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 produce nitric oxide as well. Those are vascular healthy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 cancerous 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 matter, the mass of the brain shrinks inside the skull. It's like a cotton shirt that shrank. You see this actually in a scan.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 stem cells that are recruited by nitric oxide actually can help to also regenerate the blood vessels and keep the blood vessels healthy feeding the brain.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
That's the connection between Alzheimer's and... I mean, dementia and angiogenesis. Now for Alzheimer's, I worked with a colleague, Dr. Anthony Vagnucci, some years ago, and we published what was then an editorial in The Lancet, a very prestigious British medical publication. And we were connecting the dots between angiogenesis and Alzheimer's disease. And here's how it works.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 angiogenesis. They got problems, right, of their circulation, of course.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And that thing could 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 natural question.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And in fact, if you look at the blood flow studies, scans, brain scans looking for blood flow in Alzheimer's branch, 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, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
More blood vessels that aren't working well, so their abnormal androgenic blood vessels are not working well, so you don't get good blood flow, so the scans don't show them, just not 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So abnormal androgenesis 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 we published this as a hypothesis in an editorial in The Lancet, and now there's a whole field looking at androgenesis and Alzheimer's disease.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah. I mean, listen, before we had medicine as medicine, before we had pharmaceuticals in the 1930s, that's all we had. That's all humans had, our diet and lifestyle for medicines. And so I think that that's really... I think what's happened is that during the industrial revolution that occurred with pharmaceuticals, we put aside... a tool in the toolbox that we've always had.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 biopharmaceuticals 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 the bathwater. What we have forgotten about
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
is that tool in the toolbox that's been with humanity forever, which is what we do with our food. And what I'm saying is that what we can do now with the work that I'm doing in food as medicines, we can take the modern science, that deep probe, that extraordinary level of sophistication that we use for drug development, and we can use it, apply it to understand
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
And I'll first say my first off approach is that we should get most of the micronutrients that we need to be healthy from our food. Use your food to our advantage because single foods will have hundreds of different polyphenols and fiber and all kinds of other beneficial things, and vitamins and minerals. So our food is a much more efficient way to get all of our micronutrients. However...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
supplements can be helpful in that literal translation of the word 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 top off to actually use for a supplement.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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, I'd be personal. It's personal to them. But I, you know, we talked earlier about the acromantia, right?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So I do eat the foods that support acromantia, the pomegranate, et cetera, 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, and acromantia improves your metabolism, lowers the risk of metabolic syndrome. There might even be some clues that acromantia might also lower the risk of dementia development later on as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So, hey, this is a pretty safe natural bacteria. I'll take that probiotic. And another probiotic I take is called lactobacillus ruteri. L-reuteri, what does this do? Lowers inflammation, builds immunity. 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So, you know, why wouldn't I actually take that? And, oh, one last thing. Lactobacillus reuteri, the kind I take is chewable. Why wouldn't you just take a capsule? Well, it turns out that the same bacteria, lactobacillus ritori, it's good for the gut, but if you chew it up, this is the bacteria that kills the bacteria that causes cavities and gum disease.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
I haven't had a cavity in well over a decade, you know? And so again, this is one of these types of practical things that just knowing the science and knowing what I do and where I don't eat enough, it's hard to get enough vitamin D, hard enough to get omega-3s, I will actually top off on those.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
I would bring coffee because of all the polyphenols in coffee. I'd bring tea. I tend to drink coffee in the morning and I have tea at night. And I'm not caffeine sensitive, so I can have the tea at night. If you allow me, I'll actually lump those into my beverages. Okay. Under one category. I'll bring tree nuts. Tree nuts? Tree nuts. Walnuts, almonds, macadamias, pistachios. I love nuts.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Tree nuts. And... you know, not the prepackaged kind, but I like to, you know, kind of like toast them up myself and flavor them myself. I would bring that because of the dietary fiber, the healthy protein, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
I would bring tomatoes because I love tomatoes. It's a great source for hydration, good source of lycopene, which you talked about, good for metabolism. I would take berries. Berries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries are among my favorites. Raspberries, you might be surprised at this, but raspberries are pound for pound or weight for weight, one of the most fiber rich foods out there.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
They're light, they're hollow, packed with fiber. And they've got polyphenols that are useful for lowering inflammation as well. Berries are actually really good. And then, you know, I...
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
because I follow what I call the Mediterranean 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, chicory, escarole, you know, all of those types of leafy greens. So those would be the five I would actually take with me.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
You know, I think that one of the most important things 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 beat disease, eat to beat your diet, that I've done all the heavy lifting to help you figure out what foods are healthy that you could consider adding to your diet.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 want people to walk away with is that my humanistic approach to this is 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?
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
What do you enjoy? So if you could look at 200 healthy foods, which is what I have in my books, and just take a highlighter or a pencil and circle them. Soak all 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 be meaningful, a meaningful life having been lived. And if you look at the whole rest of my career and existence and how I spend my time.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
I want the work that I've done to resonate with others in a way that can improve their lives. 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 I've done my job.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So thank you. Well, thank you for inviting me. But I would say that 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
We have, you know, 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So for example, you know, we talked about how, you know, when my uncles had cancer and passed away and I felt helpless and my mother had it some years later and we had progress. We had the ability to be able to do something different.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Similarly for me, I look at my books, I look at my social channels, my YouTube 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Because the holy grail in the pharmaceutical industry is to find something that can kill cancerous 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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So we tell women to actually do a self breast exam when they're taking a shower, look for lumps or bumps, and if you find one, certainly go to your doctor immediately for an exam. The smallest cancer that you could feel, a trained person can feel with their hands, in the breast, is one centimeter in diameter.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
A one centimeter breast cancer already has one billion cancer cells that have already multiplied. That microscopic cancer multiplied a billion times. That's the smallest one you can feel. Now, Immune system's not taking them out, all right? So you need a better immune system if you want a shot at this, and not just chemo or hormonal therapy.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 angiogenesis, angioblood blood vessels, genesis, how the body grows and controls them. That's my area of research.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
So naturally our body knows how to prevent blood vessels from feeding cancers and yet knows how to 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 coursing into the tumor to feed them. And we've studied this in a laboratory.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
All right. So... I've told you some scary statistics, but now let me kind of give you where the breakthroughs are coming through, right? So with this kind of knowledge, what can we do with cancers? Not just breast cancers, but in general. Number one, we know that if you boost your immune system,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
with foods, with exercise, diet lifestyle, you're gonna actually make your immune defenses 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,
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 that are anti-angiogenic foods, like at Unstable, you've got coffee and tea.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
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 what we do with our diet can actually help to lower the risk of cancer as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about that. 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?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
And the one thing that I think is new is we are bringing some really deep science, which is where I come from. I'm a vascular biologist. The science is actually helping to illuminate a new depth of understanding. It's not just the what, but it's the was.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
You know, there's three things that I always tell people that are super easy to do. And again, it has to do with the biology and understanding your body. First, you want to kind of unburden your body's biology, let your health defenses work for you. So you want to cut down the things that actually um, kind of, uh, sit on or kind of squelch your body's defenses.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
Yeah, well look, when I set out to study food as medicine, The things that I reached for was what I knew was proven in the pharmaceutical world. We know that your blood supply is important. Think about what cardiologists spend all this time doing trying to get better blood flow or in oncology for cancer patients. treatments. They're trying to cut off the blood supply to cancers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
And so that was one of the things that I thought, well, maybe let's see what food does. So throwing food and food extracts and food bioactives into the same systems used to develop medicines used by cardiologists and oncologists yielded really like a whole new playbook of how to actually use foods to help improve our circulation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
which happens to be one of our body's health defenses, which is what I write about in Eat to Beat Disease. What I actually say is that when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food. It's about how our body responds to what you put it in.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
That goes to stem cells, that goes to our microbiome, it goes to our DNA repair mechanisms, and it also goes to our immune system, which is both, it's a double-edged sword. You've got the inflammatory side, you've got the you know, defense fighting the defensive side as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
And so when I think about how foods benefit us, I try to insert that lens into the thinking process to say, all right, so which of our health defenses does any particular food activate?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
Yeah, well, okay, so let's follow a piece of food that we're gonna put in our mouth, right? So we're chewing it up. Guess what? Our food actually interacts with the healthy gut bacteria that lives in part on our tongue. So our tongue has healthy gut bacteria as well. The gut starts in the mouth and it goes all the way to the anus. And so when we eat foods like a beet, for example,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
or a piece of spinach, and we're chewing and enjoying the beet. It turns out that the nitrogen that the plant naturally absorbed in the soil gets converted by our gut microbiome that live in the little recesses of our tongue. So think about it. You get up in the morning, and you're brushing your tongue. Okay, now it'll grow back, okay? I don't do that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
It's a thing. But people actually use this, like dentists give mouthwash. Yeah. And they actually kill all the bacteria in your mouth with the intent of actually preventing cavities. Well, look, if you have good, healthy gut bacteria in your mouth, which is one of the body's health defense systems, it actually works for you. It doesn't work against you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
Like let's start with a clear, clean playing field. So, you know, start to cut off things like sodas and, and ultra processed foods and, and, and, um, uh, lots of processed meats, things like that. It, it unloads your body and allows your body. It's kind of like taking, it's, it's kind of like taking all the dirty laundry off the floor, you know, and let's start with a clean room.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
And it actually suppresses cavities by itself. Yeah. Eat a piece of spinach or chew it up. The bacteria actually change the nitrogen into a form that when you swallow it gets absorbed in your stomach. We're still following the food along as a chemical form that is nitric oxide.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
Now, nitric oxide suddenly is absorbed in the stomach, in your blood, in your blood vessels, carried by the circulation, which causes vasodilation. Now your blood pressure falls. And why is that important? Because for every, I mean, hypertension, one of the big causes of stroke, for example. And for every single point, we can lower that top number in the blood pressure, you know, 140 over 90.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
We decrease our risk of stroke by 5%. So it's meaningful. So, you know, nitric oxide also.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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has other benefits for our body as well it actually calls another defense system stem cells to help us heal so um the stem cells live in a bone marrow i have nitric oxide now they fly into the bloodstream like bees in a hive looking for organs to actually repair so just eating a spinach or beet for example will immediately help our cardiovascular system help us our regeneration system and also can help grow blood vessels that we need to heal that's just one example of how we can track
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
It's like going on safari in Africa. You're in a Jeep with a camera and trying to follow on what's going on. And we're beginning to understand there's this incredible journey that happens in our body with foods that we eat, and they activate our health defenses.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
Well, and you know, when you treat the food with medicines, like putting pesticides on foods, for example, you might make it look a little bit nicer. But in fact, you know, I always like to talk about this example. I used to be a skeptic about organic foods. And the reason is because there was so much marketing on there. And I, you know, like,
The Dr. Hyman Show
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telling me to have less, less something bad doesn't attract me. I want to know, like, I want a different reason. And, and so I started talking to horticulturalists and, uh, and they told me something really important.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
They said, you know, that a plant like a strawberry or a coffee bean, uh, when they're existing in a wild, uh, and the pests, the little bugs, insect nibble at their leaves and stems, uh,
The Dr. Hyman Show
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Number one, number two, what I think is that, you know, find foods that you love, That are healthy for your health defenses. And that's one of the things that I did in my book is to create lots of tables and charts. I tell people, you know, you have my book and you flip open to the tables, take out a Sharpie. Okay. And literally start circling foods that you already love. This is not hard to do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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yeah they produce more chemicals they produce more chemicals because they view the little nibbles as an injury so in response as a wound healing response they create more electric acid in a strawberry or more chlorogenic acid in the coffee bean and sure enough
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
When you actually put pesticides on a strawberry or a coffee, which is conventionally grown, you wind up, they don't need to make more of those chemicals. And so what you wind up having is something that looks like a coffee bean and something that looks like a strawberry, but it's actually relatively deficient in what mother nature would have otherwise served up. That's actually good for our body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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And so, you know, I started to change my mind more good as opposed to less bad. Now that actually attracts me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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Well, and I totally agree because I think you and I were at a meeting once where we both heard there was like only 60 harvests left Left, right. In topsoil in America. Just think about that. You can count that off with a family member on hands and fingers and toes. That is truly scary.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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And so I think that the more we're alert to the fact that if we want to take good care of ourselves, we don't want to get more complicated. We want to get more simple.
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We want to actually follow our body's instincts to eat those things that are more natural, uh, that are less processed, uh, that are plant-based and, you know, ultimately, you know, you were talking earlier about, um, you know, animals eating plants, you know, even these, um, delicious seafoods, oily fish that people actually eat at the end of the day, it's big fish eating smaller fish, eating smaller fish, eating plants.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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It's super easy. It could be a tomato. It could be bok choy. It could be a mushroom. It could be whatever it is. So start circling it. And I tell people, take a picture of it with your cell phone, because the thing is, make it easy for you to remember what you love that's already good for you. You know, like that's a key thing. Start with things that are easy that you already love.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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And the concept of diversity, which you're talking about, is so important, right? Because we do want to protect the species and the diversity of species in our planet. But actually, this is how we're hardwired as well. We, our human body, loves diversity. Our gut microbiome wants to eat lots of different things.
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Our health defense systems, our five health defense systems, all crave different types of stimuli to activate them, to keep them kind of agile and active and in shape and working on our behalf.
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And here's, I think, the really good news for people that are watching this is that ancient cultures, ancient food cultures that revered, treasured tasty foods, mostly plant-based foods, actually understood this. And that's why so many of the foods from the Mediterranean or from Asia, if you go back and look at traditional foods, I mean, you and I talked about this before. Yeah.
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This idea of Mediterranean cuisine, like there's a lot of unhealthy eating that goes on in modern Mediterranean countries today. We're talking about traditional eating patterns. Same thing in Asia. We're talking about going back to basics. And so we're entering this era where we're – In a way, I think that we're all kind of shedding the artificial skin that we've grown over the last five decades.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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That what we are sold in media or in the supermarket is actually better for us. And when you shed your skin, you kind of get back to basics. The more authentic... instincts that we have about what we should eat happen to also taste better as well. It's so true.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
And then the third thing that's really important is to be physically active, because no matter what you eat, if you're sitting around like a lump, your body is going to be very unhappy about that. So physical activity, eating things that you love, and then just taking the laundry off the floor. Unburden your body, unpack that body, have a clean start.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
Yeah, well, so what is the first thing that doctors learn when they enter the clinical phase of medicine is that old adage, first do no harm. I actually think that's the wrong priority. I think the first thing we should do is to deliver benefit. And you flip that around to first deliver benefit. Why are we thinking about the bad stuff when we can actually focus our minds on the good stuff?
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If you're going to first deliver benefit, you have to think about food. And this is where the reliance on the prescription pad that so many people encounter when they see their primary care doctor. I think every patient knows that there's something that's not being discussed. There's something that is so important that isn't being part of the dialogue.
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Well, you know, I can tell you that my mind opened on food and medicine, not food versus medicine, right? So you got these kind of extremists who are, you know, the guy that quit clinical medicine, they stand up at a soapbox, they wave a frond of kale, and they basically say, you know, eat this and everything will be cured. And
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I think that that is as wrong as somebody who only writes prescriptions. Absolutely. We all need to bring to do first, do good first, deliver benefit. What we need to do is to think about all the tools in our toolbox we can give them.
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And so, you know, one of the studies that I thought was really interesting was done by the University of North Carolina, where they were taking young, healthy people who were just getting a flu vaccine. you know, wintertime flu vaccine. And they wanted to see if they gave them some food on top of that, it would make a difference in terms of how well their immune systems responded to the vaccine.
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So they actually took broccoli sprouts baby three to four-day-old broccoli plants, which contain lots of sulforaphanes. These are the natural biochemicals. A sprout, broccoli sprouts, contain 100 times more sulforaphane than the grown-up broccoli. And so you turn them into a shake, and they just gave them two... cups of shake, two shakes to drink every day.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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Plus they got the flu vaccine and they gave half of the people a placebo shake with no broccoli sprouts. Probably didn't taste very good. And then they measured they swabbed their nose to measure the number of bacteria or viruses that were present, flu viruses. And then they did a blood test. So this is just like you would do in a pharmaceutical trial.
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They took out blood and they measured their natural killer T cells, which is what your vaccines do. And here's what they found. They found the people who had the flu vaccine plus the shake had 22 times more of the natural killer T-cells. Wow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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Those are three really simple things to start with.
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And, you know, and we and we think about like how to make the medicine do its job better. Right. Well, look, here's the difference between foods and medicines, and we're talking about making them work together. Medicines don't give you joy. They give you some effect that you hope to have. Foods give you that can give you that effect and the joy as well.
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Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
And then when you put them together, you're getting more effect and you also get a little bit of the joy of life as well. And so that's one of the studies that I always refer to to say,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Encore: How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li
you know like we can't ignore um food as medicine and the other thing that i think that is you know i'm a cancer researcher i've done a lot of cancer research over my career and you know i've had cancer in my family uh i talk about my mother who actually you know um uh had all of her cancer successfully eliminated by immunotherapy using her own immune system to get rid of it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
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And we had given her pomegranate juice. We'd given her other foods that actually helped to grow good bacteria. Well, the latest study that I think is a jaw dropper
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was published in nature medicine it was done by the md anderson cancer center one of the top cancer centers in the world um jim ellison who actually allison who's actually one of the researchers for his work in immunotherapy yeah um that group is studying immuno the immune system the microbiome what you eat and
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and cancer like it's sort of like the the the the holy quadrinity of what we want to actually start to do in cancer research so what they found they took 200 patients who had malignant melanoma a deadly form of skin cancer yeah and uh these patients were getting immunotherapy um a kind of kind of infused immunotherapy that actually uh works when it works it works great the problem only about 20 percent of people respond
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to this type of immunotherapy. So they wanted to find out what the difference between responders and non-responders were. And this is starting to be the pattern of the kind of research done in this field. They found the responders who benefited from an immune therapy that jack up your own immune system to go after the cancer. And therefore you do better. Cancer starts to go away and you live.
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Had one bacteria that the ones who didn't respond didn't have. And that bacteria is a Ruminococcus. Now, on a past podcast, I talked about acromantia. Well, Ruminococcus is starting to pop up as another significant player in the microbiome space. Now, I started to take note of Ruminococcus about a year and a half ago during the pandemic. People were studying...
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Why did some people have more antiviral cytokines in their bloodstream if they weren't getting COVID? And it turned out that those people had more ruminococcus in their stool as well. Wow.
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Yeah. And so what was interesting is that in the study in China that found this during early days of COVID also asked, what were these people eating? And in China, the study for the COVID study showed that the people with more Ruminococcus and more interferon gamma, the natural virus killer, they were drinking more green and black tea, not just green tea, but black tea.
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And they were having more omega-3 fatty acids, both from plant-based foods as well as seafood. Now- Flip back over to the cancer.
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Exactly. That's the carryout. The cancer study is much more sober because now we're talking about a different kind of life or death. And the surprise with this ruminococcus bacteria, now what they did is they actually asked the people what they were eating. And because the microbiome, of course, is strongly influenced by the food weed.
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Turns out that they were that these people were eating many different, mostly plant based foods with tons of dietary fiber if they were getting room in a caucus, if they were responding. And so then they began to calculate how much dietary fiber you would need to get an effect. And what they found is that for every five grams per day of dietary fiber you ate,
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How much is five grams of dietary fiber? That's the average amount you'd get in a medium sized pair. A pair a day would give you five grams. And by the way, the average American eats about eight grams a day, which is terrible. But even five grams in this setting would actually lower the risk of tumor progression and lower mortality by 30%.
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so now they calculated out if you actually had 20 grams up to 20 grams of fiber you really maxed out your ability to actually respond to a medicine a cancer medicine and so every cancer patient always asks their oncologist hey doc what should i eat and oftentimes they say just eat anything go to mickey d's or whatever or they say eat ice cream and milkshakes and it's like terrible
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And we also need to think about foods that are sometimes regarded as snacks as important main components to our diet. So we can sort of deconstruct this idea you have to have three square meals a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And they have to be a particular way. You need an entree. You need an appetizer. Like, I think that, you know, let's let's appreciate food for what it does for our body.
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We, you know, this is where science is. Science is giving us the answer to those questions that patients want to have. And I think that this is what responsible doctors who are on, you know, who are current and who are forward going. This is where our society has to go. It's beginning to get those answers to be able to tell patients how they can help themselves.
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And how did they figure that out? You know, they were looking at mostly fruits and vegetables, and they considered mostly soluble fibers that were in this study. And so this is now the next layer. So real scientific research doesn't deliver all the answers in one fell swoop. You kind of go back and you get back into the batter's box and you hit another one out in terms of research.
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And so that's really, I think, a place to watch MD Anderson looking at this work that they're doing on the microbiome and diet and looking at the response to cancer therapy. So, I mean, look, these kinds of efforts are going on all around the world, but they underscore this idea of, that the food that we eat does matter.
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And it can matter a lot to help the medicines that have been the product of all this research to help get the result that we want to patients. So first, deliver benefit. And I think that that's something that is really important for doctors to hear.
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Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought up this whole issue of food dosing because if food is medicine, medicine always has a dose, right? So like as doctors, we're taught to write prescriptions. What is the name of the medicine? How much do you give? How often do you give it? And then what are we actually looking for? And so to do this for a drug, you design a clinical trial and you test different doses.
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There's a completely different way to come at this when it comes to food. And that is to look at the research studies that have been done And we talked about a couple of them. And then to look at the result and then to calculate based on the result, you kind of work backwards to figure out so where did we start from? So I like to talk about a study of 36,000 people.
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It's a health professional follow up study that looked at men who were ultimately or all men at risk for developing prostate cancer. And they wanted to find out for the people who didn't develop prostate cancer, what were they eating? And they had a hypothesis that lycopene in tomatoes might affect prostate cancer because it's antioxidant.
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It kills cancer cells and it cuts off the blood supply feeding cancers. And so when they did the study, they found that men who ate two to three servings of cooked tomato. Now, what's in a serving? You can calculate this. When you look at the study, it's a half cup serving size. So two to three half cups of cooked tomatoes now even have a way of preparing the food over the course of a week.
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We feel like we can feel the benefits. You know, I always talk about this incredible study that was done by mainstream oncologists, 14 medical center cancer centers. where they were looking at 826 people with stage three colorectal cancer. This is very advanced cancer, getting surgery and chemotherapy. And they followed these people out and they just wanted to see how well they did.
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That's not asking a lot. Two to three cups of half cups of serving the tomatoes lowered the risk of prostate cancer by 29%. And so now we have an outcome. And again, I don't think it's reasonable for to ask people, patients, healthy people to go into that medical research to dive into it. But for those of us who are doctors, and trained to do this, we have that ability.
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And so I think that, you know, you're absolutely right. What we need to do is to train up the ability for healthcare providers that patients are supposed to trust, to give them the tools to be able to actually go in and wade into that complicated stuff to make it simple for patients.
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So when somebody asked me about tomatoes and prostate cancer, I just say, look, you want to have, you know, something with tomato sauce and a two to three times a week, and it only needs to be a half cup. That's not a lot.
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I think you're right. Here's something in real time I can tell you that I'm in the process of working on. You're going to like this because this comes from one of your home-based institutions out of Ohio. There was a study that did a computational analysis.
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Artificial intelligence to take a look at what medicines might be associated with lowering the risk of some serious disease like Alzheimer's disease. And so here here is the Cleveland Clinic. They were taking a look at seven million people's medical records.
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and putting a computer program into mine and see like 1600 different kind of medicines that people are taking all these different disease states that people are having and trying to figure out what was there any connection interconnection of the pattern at the genetic level and what they found was truly amazing because at the end of the day and here's the punch line for the study they found surprisingly that men who were taking viagra sildenafil
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had a 69% decrease in the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Wow. Okay.
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Well, so here's the thing. How is it that Viagra, sildenafil, could actually be helpful for Alzheimer's disease? So these researchers went back into the lab. So sometimes we can take an observation, whether it's through dietary studies or through medicine studies, and go back into the lab and check it out.
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That's a very reasonable thing for oncologists to do, to look at their own track record to see who did better. Now, every oncologist will tell you that some patients do better than others. And when you ask them why, they don't always know.
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So what they found actually with the Viagra, which produces nitric oxide, the same thing that spinach and beets actually help our body produce, actually stimulates regeneration and nerves while she's about to sprout new nerves. Okay. And it actually down regulates the gene that creates a protein called tau that builds up and clogs up your brain and Alzheimer's disease. And so now you have a,
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going backwards to try to find an explanation for something that a computer helped us figure out now. And this is kind of like the wait for it moment. So what I'm trying to do now is to figure out on the basis of the doses of Viagra that create nitric oxide, can we then jump to a different silo to say, well, Viagra can create this much nitric oxide. How much can spinach and beets create?
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Because then we can actually kind of do that, take out the pH from pharmacology and put the F. Because they have natural nitrates that get converted to nitric oxide in the body. Exactly. Exactly. And so now what we can actually do is to try to figure that out.
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And this is, I think, those of us who are working sort of at an advanced area of food as medicine are really trying to break open new frontiers by doing this kind of research. And what I would say is that it's kind of like mixed martial arts. You don't want to just use one style of fighting, one technique. set of moves.
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You want to use every tool at your disposal in order to be able to, you know, kind of get that match, win that match.
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Well, so in this particular research study, which was presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, they actually did one thing that most oncologists don't do, which is to ask, what did they eat? and then use statistics to figure out if they ate, what they ate. I mean, look, I always ask my patients what they eat because when you do a history and a physical, that matters, right?
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Science is giving us the answer to those questions that patients want to have. Food and medicine, not food versus medicine. There are foods that actually can lower inflammation.
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Yeah, I mean, it seems like we've been mired in COVID and this pandemic for a long time. And yet when you really look at it, it's only been about three years or so that we've been kind of arm wrestling with this thing. And in three years, we've learned a lot from- It's only two years, but it feels like three years. Yeah.
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Well, the thing is that we started with zero knowledge, and I think that's what's amazing. And to speak to your point about food as medicine,
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I remember distinctly staring out the window at the very beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, realizing that as a medical doctor, as a highly trained medical doctor that actually develops medicines, that here was a moment in human history where we have all this technology, all these drugs, all this knowledge, but we were confronted with a new disease for which we had nothing.
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Hospitals couldn't offer anything. Doctors couldn't offer anything. Pharmaceutical companies couldn't offer anything. And it was just us. And the only thing that we all had to do as humans was to go out and get our food and bring it back home and to prepare it.
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And so this was that moment that I started to realize, like, okay, there is a real important mission for what it is that you do, Mark, and what I do, which is to get that message out. People need to understand. we could be confronted with something new around the next corner. And at the end of the day, we have the agency as individuals to make better choices on our own body's behalf for immunity.
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And so I will tell you the things that I started to look at. Now, I've also been involved with sort of like the vaccines and antivirals and all that fancy stuff that is in the realm of pharma for COVID. But here's some basic things that everyone should know. What does this coronavirus do when you have COVID? It causes massive inflammation in your body.
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There are foods that actually can lower inflammation. I mean, simple foods containing vitamin C, lower inflammation, strawberries, guava, tomatoes, red bell peppers. These are the kind of colorful foods that actually can begin addressing some of those things. We also know that people who had vitamin D deficiencies
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actually were more vulnerable to actually developing COVID or becoming infected with COVID and getting sick, well, you know, mushrooms are a good source of vitamin D. And if you actually take a mushroom and slice it and expose it to sunlight in the windowsill before you eat it, the mushroom will actually make more vitamin D. So give your mushroom a suntan.
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Not in a sun tanning salon, and don't rub any olive oil until you're ready to cook it. I love that. No sunblock.
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Well, the dried ones actually are also still good because not only do they taste great, they have a lot of dietary fiber. And if you take a look at dried porcini mushrooms, there's some caps of the mushrooms which are good, but the stems actually have more of that soluble fiber than the caps do. So you're getting... Again, go back to ancient food cultures. Porcini mushrooms.
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Why should you eat them? Because they taste great. And then let's talk about the other reasons that are equally important. So you can actually supplement, use food.
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uh to get your vitamin d levels up you can actually uh have a citrus and other foods to lower your inflammation and then the other thing we're beginning to realize too that what this virus does to your body is it actually does two things that need to be addressed and this is relevant to long covet yeah you know because so many most people actually recover from covet there's millions of people that have recovered from covet um but they're walking around
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I believe, and the research actually shows, potentially as time bombs, because even when the virus has left the body, it may not have left, it may have actually stayed hidden inside your body.
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We believe that people who continue to suffer from long COVID, which is this odd syndrome, more than 100 symptoms, they can't be easily explained, they can arise, they stick around for, and they can even appear a month after you recover from COVID, and they can last for months or years. They can be mild or crippling. We don't understand too much about it, but there are some common themes.
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Exactly. And that's where I think that we're at an inflection point in the whole training of doctors. The next young generation of people going to medical school, they themselves are beginning to have a more, they're more in touch with healthy eating themselves. And I think that's actually the only hope we have of being able to change the system from the inside out.
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Number one, it seems like there's chronic inflammation that's going on in the body. We think the chronic inflammation is due to auto antibodies that the virus stimulates. So this is like COVID kind of like tries to give you lupus by triggering auto antibodies. And then the third thing we do know that COVID does is it's very sneaky.
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It gets into your blood vessels and damages, scrapes up your blood vessels, cells, the endothelial cells, and damages them. Now, foods can heal endothelium. The Mediterranean diet has been studied with a cardioprev study to improve endothelial health. Dark chocolate can improve endothelial health. These are some of the foods that we need to think about.
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Oh, spinach and beets with natural nitrates and bok choy can improve endothelial health. These are important things to think about. That's what I'm having for dinner, beets and bok choy. There you go. Hydroxytirazole, which is actually one of the highest level polyphenols that are found in olives and in olive oil, actually has been shown to interfere with the binding.
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of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with human cells. And so, you know, again, when you stop thinking first about the food and start thinking about the mechanisms, the biology of health and disease, it allows us to kind of step back and look at what's going on and say, all right, If that's what's going on, how do we start to choose the foods to be able to put into play?
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And I think this is where we are in 2022. We have an opportunity now to take a look at all the science that's been done, all the research that's been done, and to realize that at the end of the day, the answers really are still, there's a lot of answers that are still in the hands of people and they involve food. Yes, amazing.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, some of the basic things that I think, um, very current doctors who are keeping up with the latest research. You know, this is where we are at the taping of this podcast. And things may change because that's the other thing is that things are things are changing. I've been changing very quickly over the last two years.
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But here's what we have that we didn't have two years ago. We have vaccines. But people still get COVID when they have to get vaccines. They just don't go to the hospital and die. But then when you have it, you don't want to have the autoimmune response. You don't want to actually have the vascular damage. So what can you do to get rid of the virus?
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Well, these antivirals like Paxlovid, which was just approved and authorized by the FDA, not too many months ago, was specifically designed to intercept the coronavirus and knock it out, decrease the ability of the coronavirus. It's literally the Z-Pak for COVID. And so that's now available.
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But so in this study of 826 patients, they actually found the people who did best were were those who ate two one ounce servings of tree nuts a week. And they wound up having a 57% improvement in survival when they follow them over six years. And so this is a meaningful improvement. Like basically two handfuls of nuts a week, basically, you know, and like one one ounce of tree nuts.
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And then the question is, if you really wanted to think as a prescribing doctor what you would do, what I've been telling people is that we do know that COVID, mild or severe, causes a lot of inflammation in your body. So In addition to the food and supplements, you know, take your take the things, the cold medicines that should make you feel better.
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Like if you have muscle aches or or headaches or fever, you know, the high dose of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories can be beneficial. And so I believe is that if you've got COVID, even if you don't have a lot of symptoms, it's still worth it to take high dose anti-inflammatories to lower body inflammation as much as you can. So if you take an ibuprofen, what's a high dose is like 800 milligrams.
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If you take that at the max that you can actually take it for a few days, that will actually help your body recover better. Secondly, if you take a look going further down the stream after you take five days of your CPAC for COVID, at the end of that, what should you be doing? we don't know who actually develops those autoantibodies, but I'm sure concerned about them.
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Like in pediatric and kids who have had COVID, there's a twofold incidence of developing type 1 and type 2 diabetes. They found this in people who didn't even get very sick. Autoantibodies are one explanation. So what could you do? And again, sort of as a thinking man's doctor to come up with a A MacGyver solution for that.
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Look, low dose prednisone, a short course that won't set down your adrenals, probably a good way to just kind of stamp out the fire. It's kind of like pouring water at the end of the evening after your campfire before you go into the tent. Go ahead and put a bucket of water on that. So a few days of low dose prednisone is an example.
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You know, like two and a half grams. I can't get medical device on the show, obviously, but two and a half milligrams is a baby dose. You don't need to actually kind of titrate off of that. For, you know, I would say until we think the virus goes away, which is like day 10 or maybe even a little bit beyond that.
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And then the other thing that I think for people, I've seen such a horrible vascular damage from COVID and recently. In Nature Medicine was a paper that looked at 11 from a study from the Veterans Administration Medical Center in St. Louis. They looked at 11.5 million people. Okay, that's a monster study. And they found that and they controlled it for people who didn't have COVID, had COVID.
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historical, and they found that there were elevated risk of heart attack, like by 75% of stroke, by like 85%, twofold increase of cardiac arrest one year later. And lots of atrial fibrillation and ventricular, lots of rhythm problems that were in the 70s at 80% higher in 11.5 million people.
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And so it's driving cardiologists crazy because they're suddenly seeing patients that shouldn't have these problems suddenly come up with these problems post-COVID. And so one explanation, and we're not 100% sure of this, but I'm pretty sure, is it's vascular damage, damage to the blood vessels, feeding the heart, in the heart.
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feeding the nerves to the heart and the brain that are causing all these kinds of problems. And so what can you do to repair blood vessels? And this is where going back into the food research, we knew that dark chocolate, cacao, actually is endothelial repair. We know the Mediterranean diet can actually do it.
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We talked a little bit about beets and spinach and bok choy as actually ways of actually inducing nitric oxide. Let's go back to that Cleveland Clinic study. You got sildenafil, Viagra. that can be given at low doses. And so this is when I went back in my research and I'm still doing it right now. So this is not medical advice, but it's medical research.
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And you and I are having a conversation about how researchers who are doctors think about this. In pediatrics, there are conditions involving high blood pressure and damage to the blood vessels in the lung. pulmonary arterial hypertension in pediatric patients. And they are using Viagra, Ludus Viagra to treat kids to heal up their blood vessels.
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So one of these servings is like seven whole walnuts, right? So it's 14 half pieces or could be macadamias or could be almonds or could be cons. Diversity matters. But now we actually can understand what it's actually doing because you've got healthy oils and healthy fats in the nuts. You've got some bioactives.
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So an interesting research question that's easy to put into practice is to say, well, can that actually be one of the ways to repair blood vessels as well? Yeah. Again, you know, it's sort of I think the whole this whole conversation we've been having is really about how important it is to activate the potential of the body for healing.
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Well, I mean, and I think that, again, we have just come through this really, really dark tunnel that we're starting to really get back to see the light that Again, this medicine, this form of medicine, food, is something that doctors are not prescribing for us because they don't need to. It's something that we can actually do for ourselves. This is the power, the agency of actually food.
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It's something that we can take control of our own lives. And that's one of the things that happened to me personally is that as I was staring out the window, realizing that
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that pharmaceuticals were not able to play a role at the very beginning of the pandemic i started realizing that the messages that we deliver you and i and many other people that work in our field out there is an incredibly important thing for us to be able to share with the community thanks for listening today if you love this podcast please share it with your friends and family leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
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For example, walnuts have a natural chemical that is in there that actually kills colon cancer stem cells, which is important for colon cancer patients for long-term outcomes. And that's just got a huge amount of dietary fiber. And we know... The fiber that we eat, it goes all the way down to feed our gut microbiome, our gut bacteria. When we feed them, it's like putting flakes in a goldfish.
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for your goldfish our gut microbiome thanks us for feeding them properly by producing short chain fatty acids this is another metabolite within our body that our bacteria make and those short chain fatty acids lower inflammation they boost our immune system they help us heal all those things that cancer patients need and they turn off the p53 oncogene butyrate actually shuts that off
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that all these things are so, at the scientific level, they make sense. And if you disguise the fact that it was a tree nut, that was doing this and you gave it an experimental drug name, investors would go after it. And here it is.
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Mother Nature has already given us the greatest return on investment we can imagine, which is that something that is these are medicines that are hidden in plain sight in our pantry.
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Yeah, well, so Mark, like yourself, you know, as an MD, we're trained to identify diseases, diagnose diseases, and write prescriptions and send patients to specialists to take care of the disease. But we all know that the ways that we have been trained in medicine fall short of what it is that patients really seek.
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And if you've ever been a patient yourself, you certainly know what we want is really to be healthy and to be well. It's okay to get sick once in a while, but if you are, you wanna kind of bounce back. And so that led me as an internal medicine doctor to ask the question that nobody in medical school ever taught me, which is what is health? Health is not just the absence of disease.
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That's an extremely unsatisfying definition. The absence of something, like what's a good day? It's the absence of rain. That doesn't make any sense. So you wanna actually have a definition. And the working definition that I came to emerged out of 25 years that I had involved with drug development. I'm still doing it.
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But the idea with drug development is that we have to understand the body inside and out. We have to identify those molecular pathways, those receptors, the kind of the Achilles heel of disease. Well, turn that inside up, up in that idea. You still need to know what the mechanisms are and the receptors are. But rather than looking at the Achilles heel of disease,
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Let's take a look at the struts that support the infrastructure that support health. And if you take a look at everything that is unpharmaceutical with a pH, you wind up actually with pharmaceutical with an F, which is why I love being on the doctor's pharmacy. Right. So look, I mean, like you and I have had many of these conversations before. And for me.
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I've been involved with developing treatments that help to control the blood supply of cancers and blindness in the eye. I've been involved with diabetes treatments for complications like chronic wounds and cell therapies and gene therapies to treat these really ambitious diseases that we don't have successful cures for yet.
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Along the way, what I realized is by going back and walking that path that I was on, that these same pathways, same receptors that, you know, drugs have a very tall reach for and most of them haven't actually climbed up the ladder yet. Mother Nature beat us to the punch. There are foods that already hit these receptors and usually not one at a time like we do with pharmaceuticals.
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Mother Nature actually basically puts a Gatling gun of these natural biochemicals that activate our health. So treating disease, you send a heat-seeking missile in. But activating health, you basically take this cluster of incredibly wonderful, blooming, health-blooming molecules to be able to make our bodies do what they want to do.
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Yeah. And honestly, this is actually how medicine was practiced back in the days of these ancient food cultures. I mean, I know that you have, like me, a great affinity for the Mediterranean and Asia. Both of us share lots of travels in that area. And you go back to
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3,000 years ago, and you go back to Hippocrates or you go back to Confucius, and the people who actually wrote the first kind of tomes relating to health and medicine, look, people cared about health going way back, but they didn't have pharmaceuticals. A lot of people don't understand how recently pharmaceuticals actually were.
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Before, all we had was the material around us, and everybody knew inherently. stuff that you eat, that there are stuff that you eat that your body doesn't agree with. It's gonna make you sick, right? A great example is just like poisonous mushroom in the woods. People learned how to actually avoid those.
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Well, somehow we've lost the defensive mechanisms to avoid the poisonous things on the grocery shelves, yet we could recognize that deadly ring mushroom, blue mushroom in the woods. And I think what we're trying to do now is regain our own natural instincts. So they've always been with us. We're just kind of bringing it to the forefront.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show. Food is medicine, but then that begots the question of, well, what foods contain the most medicine and how do you grow foods that contain the most medicine? And it turns out that regenerative agriculture is that method. We've seen a 50% drop in lots of minerals and other nutrients in vegetable crops over the last 50 years.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah. So what are these four steps that you talk about?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Today, I want to zero in on the research behind five specific foods that you can add to your diet for tremendous capacity to support your brain and health, and make us feel, think, and perform better. Now, some of you may be familiar with a few of these foods, but others may surprise you. So let's jump right in with the first food that can literally change the way your brain works for the better.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
The first is dark green leafy vegetables and specifically a category called cruciferous vegetables, also known as brassicas, basically the broccoli family.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And I think the point you made- And you now have created this fish oil, this Dutch Harbor fish oil, which comes from Alaska, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So this is some of the beneficial stuff that's in fish oil that reduces inflammation, but it's a separate class of compounds than just the omega-3s. They're called pro-resolving mediators. Basically, your immune system has a way, a break, a way of resolving the inflammation. And these are called pro-resolvents. And they come from these certain...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
the sources of omega-3s, and you've got those accessed from Alaska, and now you have a product that's called Dutch Harbor Omega-3 Oil, which you can get on bigboldhealth.com, right?
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Kale, collards, spinach, arugula, Swiss chard, collard greens, mustard greens, bok choy, romaine lettuce, turnip greens, beet greens, watercress, endive, escarole, broccoli rabe, dandelion greens, radicchio, watercress, lettuce, chicory, pretty much anything green. What is the mechanism of green leafy veggies and the positive effect on their brain? Well, there's a lot of reasons.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So aside from all the lifestyle factors, let's just sort of summarize, that help us to remove the things that are causing damage to our immune system and immunosenescence and age, In addition to sort of enhancing our immune system with like sleep and exercise and timing of eating and whole foods diets, there's some super hacks, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Things like phytochemicals from Himalayan tarwee buckwheat, pre and probiotics to help our microbiome regulate itself. and these pro resolving mediators that come from special kinds of fish oil.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Of the flour, which is pretty amazing. And by the way, I've used this flour, made best pancakes, chai Himalayan Buckwheat pancakes from my Buck's Peking diet. We made- we made soba noodles we made dumpling skins like for you know dumplings which are amazing and it tastes so good it's so good and it's and what's fascinating about it is that not only are you
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
developing a product or a series of products that take advantage of these phytochemicals and phytonutrients to rejuvenate our immune system. But it's tied into the bigger ecosystem in which we live. It's only important what you grow is how you grow it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So you could grow this in a way using chemicals and poor soils that are eroded, that don't have organic matter, and you wouldn't necessarily get the same product. What you're finding is that using practices that we call regenerative agriculture, which we've talked a lot on this podcast, it's a way of regenerating ecosystems, regenerating the soil, and building the organic matter in the soil,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
that you can not only help rejuvenate human health, but planetary health, that we can address the ravages of using all the industrial agrochemicals, the fertilizers, the pesticides, the herbicides, the high amounts of irrigation that deplete our water resources and the depletion of the soil microbiome through these chemicals and tillage and all these practices that have been so destructive and may account for a significant part of climate change.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
and that the soil itself is a sink for carbon and can draw down carbon through the power of these plants that suck carbon out of the atmosphere because they breathe carbon dioxide. but you can't do it if you don't use regenerative agriculture.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And the beautiful thing about the Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat is that not only are you growing it to produce these phytochemicals for human health, but the very way you're growing it is also helping planetary health using regenerative agriculture. And there's very few regenerative products out there on the market now, and this is one of them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And it's amazing, and it's gluten-free, it's organic, it's non-GMO. And what's really fascinating about this packaging, Jeff, and you can buy this now on bigboldhealth.com, right? Not only do you talk about the nutrient content, it's way higher in protein than most other grains. Way lower in its impact on blood sugar, so very low glycemic index.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Much higher levels of magnesium and zinc and iron and all kinds of nutrients. But what's amazing is that on the, and I've never seen this, is it says total polyphenols, which are the antioxidant levels. These are the phytonutrients, which is amazing that we now, you know, it's almost like a medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Antioxidants and protective phytochemicals. Now, we don't think of phytochemicals as essential nutrients, but they kind of are. They're protective foods, right? We know harmful foods like sugar and processed food and so forth, but they're also protective foods, and we want to eat more of those and less of the harmful foods.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
It's almost like you're seeing like a flour package that has a drug on it, which is like so cool, except these drugs aren't phytochemicals.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
It's so important. And I think, you know, as you've taught us all Jeff, food is medicine, but then that begets the question of, well, what foods contain the most medicine and how do you grow foods to contain the most medicine? And it turns out that regenerative agriculture is that method that we've seen a 50% drop in lots of minerals and other nutrients in vegetable crops over the last 50 years.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's not as good as it used to be.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Actually, you know, I was in Ikaria researching the Blue Zones and I went to this guy who was sort of making goat cheese and I was milking goats and like making cheese with him. It was kind of fun. And then after he's like, let's have some tea. And he serves me this tea. And I'm like, what is that? And he's like, it's had a different taste. I'd never had it before.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Oh, this is the wild sage bush that's growing everywhere here. I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. So I saw this plant, I looked it up, and it actually has higher levels of catechins than green tea. And this is one of the longevity molecules, right? So it's quite interesting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now, green leafy vegetables contain anti-inflammatory molecules and antioxidants, things like vitamin C and E, carotenoids, which are the green, orange things actually also, but they're in the green vegetables, lutein, which is great for your eyes, alpha-linolenic acid, which is plant-based omega-3s.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And steroids, which I'll mess up your life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So even if you're eating your broccoli, it's not as good as it used to be. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal... You know, I often remind people that sleep is not just a luxury, it's a necessity. It impacts your energy, focus, metabolism, and overall health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
They contain polyphenols, which are these plant-based anti-inflammatory chemicals, flavonoids, things like camphorol. All of these things reduce inflammation. oxidative stress, which causes inflammation, and then reduce, more importantly, neuroinflammation, which is inflammation of your brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
By the way, people eat about 8 grams of fiber a day. I was at the Hazza tribe in Tanzania. They eat 150 grams a day. And so, you know, we need to boost it up to about 50. But you think 5, just 5 grams reduces by 30%. And you can eat 25, 30, 50 grams. That's a lot of percent reduction in cancer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, that's so important what you said. I wanted to highlight that because the polyphenols, you sort of whiz by that, but we think about prebiotics and probiotics for our gut, but there's another incredibly important category of compounds that are called polyphenols, which are all the colorful plant compounds you see that make your vegetables and fruit the colors they are.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And those are medicines, and those seem to be fertilizers for the good bugs. Now, we were talking about the reduction in cancer from having more fiber. How does that work when you eat nuts? Well, basically, you can probably explain it better than I can, but there's an important compound that healthy bacteria make in your gut called butyrate. And butyrate has many effects on the body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
It's anti-inflammatory. It keeps your gut lining healthy. It's the fuel for the gut. Colonocytes. But it also suppresses P53 oncogene, which is essentially a cancer-promoting gene, which is why dietary fiber reduces colon cancer and many other cancers. So we actually now know the mechanisms by this word. So it's kind of amazing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
If you're geeky like us, it's like, holy cow, we understand how to get from A to Z and why it's happening. Not just eat fiber, you're not going to get cancer, but we understand the linkages all the way along.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now, oxidative stress damages your cells, and it can contribute to the formation and accumulation of something called beta amyloid plaques. And you might have heard of amyloid theory of Alzheimer's.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, it's quite amazing. Okay, so we got tea, coffee, water, nuts of all kinds. What else you bringing with you?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
To Mars. What are you bringing me to Mars?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And amyloid, just to be clear, is not the cause of Alzheimer's, although for many years thought it was, and we spent billions of dollars studying research to prove that it was, but we never could be successful. It's sort of a side effect of inflammation, and it's the body's attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Chinese broccoli is my favorite.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
I mean, the thing about Chinese broccoli, I don't know. It's sweet. It's got this like sweet flavor. So it's like almost like eating candy, but it's broccoli. It's like so good.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah. Nobody wants to eat sawdust and cardboard. Exactly. OK, so we got the whole brassica family, collards, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, broccolini, broccoli rabe. I mean, the list goes on. You can look it up. They're called cruciferous vegetables, brassicas. You can find them. We'll link to them in the show notes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
But this is something I eat every day and I try to eat a cup or two every day of these foods at least. So, okay, so you got water, tea, coffee, nuts, brassicas. What's next?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Oh, coffee and tea. Okay, coffee and tea, nuts, brassicas. Okay, what else?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
You can do as many as you want. All right, you know what?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So it's sort of a bystander in the process of dementia, and it does gum up your brain, but it's really not the issue, it's the inflammation that's driving the amyloid development. And some of these foods can be protective, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah. I mean, I think the problem with that for me... William, is that I love peaches, but like, there's like maybe a few weeks in the summer where you can get a really ripe, delicious peach that doesn't taste mealy and gross. Right. No, no, you're actually right. I love that. But you can get them frozen, which I use. And frozen for itself. But it doesn't have the skin usually.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So some studies suggest that polyphenols can inhibit the formation of beta amyloid fibrils, which are these plaques that are common in response to inflammation in the brain, and they gum up the brain that ends up causing dementia. Now they also promote clearance of these plaques from the brain. So these polyphenols actually help the brain clear amyloid, which is great.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, yeah. It's always hard, because fruit is something that degrades really fast, so they pick it when it's not ripe. And tomatoes, they pick them when they're not ripe. So you're kind of not getting really the full explosion in polyphenols. OK, so we got stone fruits, brassicas, nuts, coffee and tea. All right, and berries.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
It's also when you eat the fruit. Like if you eat it at the end of a meal as opposed to at the beginning, it's going to change your blood sugar, which is going to have an impact. Exactly. So it's not important what you eat, it's when you eat it too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, your peaches and syrup, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
You know, there's a study- So you're going to need a greenhouse on Mars, basically.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
This explains probably maybe some of their effects on the cognitive function that we're seeing. There's also other nutrients like vitamin K, filiquinone, that plays a crucial role in regulating calcium and activates proteins that help keep calcium out of areas where it shouldn't be, such as the brain's blood vessels. Vitamin K also has anti-inflammatory effects
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, they're not for us. They're for the plant's own defenses and repair and healing and protection, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
I think that's a really incredible thing that most people probably never thought of. It didn't really occur to me, but you're right. When you have plants that are coddled by pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, they don't have a lot of stress. They're not getting attacked. They're basically kind of...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
basically coddled right they don't develop any resistance to disease or stress molecules and those stress molecules that they create are their protection but they're also our protection right that's really the whole crux of what we're talking about here and by the way let's let's let's dive a little deeper on that uh not only are they protection for our human cells but now because they are also prebiotics they're also protection for our gut
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
I was thinking that. I was like, you are not only getting polyphenols for all these other benefits for your biology, but actually you're helping your microbiome.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
All right, so I want to get into like specifics of different foods and controversies and things, but first, what else would you bring quickly to Mars if you're going, that you absolutely need for optimizing your health and beating disease? I mean, I have my list. I'm curious what you're like.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now you have to grow it or have it grown there. But it's there. What are you eating?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And that can reduce neuroinflammation. It's also involved in the synthesis of important fats called sphingolipids. It doesn't matter what they call them, but basically it's a class of lipids that are crucial components of your brain cell membrane. So your brain cells have membranes and they have to be made of the right fats. And if they don't have the right fats, you end up with more inflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
All right, so basically your meal on Mars is grilled wild salmon, rich in omega-3s and also polyphenols, so that's the yellow color, with a nice side of broccoli and a side of green tea to sip along with it. And dessert, you're having berries and peaches and nuts.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
That's right. I mean, the Rocker Health Foundation is very much focused on this. They're spending $200 million to identify the phytochemicals in the plant kingdom that are regulating our biology and what they do. So it's really, it's pretty amazing. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now these lipids play a role in cell signaling and they maintain the integrity and the function of your brain cells. Really important. So what else besides... green leafy vegetables is protective for your brain. What's the second big group of food or foods that can do this? Well, small cold water fish. I'm gonna explain why. Now I call these the smash fish.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring. Now you might not like them, but they are the most nutritionally dense, the lowest in toxins, and the highest in omega-3 fats. plus trout and oysters are also great. Now, why is fish good for our brains? What does the research actually say?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Well, a new study published in the British Journal of Nutrition looked at the diet of 798 adults aged 65 to 97 And they looked at 102-item questionnaire using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Now, participants were categorized based on adherence to the Mediterranean diet. Now, we can argue, what is the Mediterranean diet? Is there a better diet out there?
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
But it's basically a whole foods healthy diet, right? And basically, what is the Mediterranean diet? It could be pizza and pasta. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about whole foods, right? Lots of veggies, fruit, olive oil, nuts, seeds, fish, whole grains, beans. That's a Mediterranean diet.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now the higher adherence to the diet was correlated with a 55% lower risk of depression symptoms. Increased fish intake was linked to a 44% reduced risk of depression overall and a 56% reduction in women. Now, each additional gram of fish per day decreased a woman's depression risk by 2%. And three or more servings of fresh fish a week reduced depression by 62%.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now, think of that in the context of our mental health crisis. I mean, we're all taking Prozac and being in therapy and doing all these things, but what if we just ate a can of sardines three times a week, right? You might have no friends because they might like how you smell, but maybe you won't be depressed. Now... I'm just kidding. I love sardines and they're great and they're delicious.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And I just came from Europe where they have fresh sardines. They're so good. Now, what they found was interesting. There was no effect with canned tuna. Now, tuna is also high in omega-3s, but it's also high in mercury, which can actually cause depression. And it can be a concern. So I would stay away from those big fish like tuna, swordfish, halibut. and so forth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now, you can use the guide from the Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, and you can see their guide on choosing fish for the lowest amount of mercury. So just go to ewg.org and you'll learn about it. So why is this so good for our brain? Well, the brain diseases that we see, right, whether it's depression, Alzheimer's, even autism and ADD, are inflammation of the brain, brain on fire.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And omega-3s are powerful anti-inflammatories. You see, up to 60% of our brain is made up of fat. So you literally are a fat head, right? Half of that fat, by the way, is omega-3 fats. So they're essential. These are called essential fatty acids. They're not optional in your diet, and yet most of our diets are deficient in these essential fatty acids. So they're like a vitamin or mineral.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
If you don't get them, you're gonna get deficiency, and it shows up as depression, dementia, and a whole host of other things. Now, as we expanded our brain, our cerebral cortex, and our executive function of memory and intellect, it seemed to coincide with the introduction of fish and seafood into our diet about 35,000 years ago.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Even hunted land animals had higher levels of omega-3s than industrial-raised animals. So like, for example, wild bison have higher levels of omega-3s than a feedlot cow. Now, it makes sense that we need these omega-3s to keep our brains functioning properly and that a lack of fish or omega-3s can lead to omega-3 deficiency and that leads to mood and memory issues.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now, the two most important forms of fish oil are EPA, or eicosapentaenoic acid, you don't have to remember that, and DHA, or docosahexaenoic acid, it just comes from the chemical structure. These come from fish. You can't get them really from plants. Alpha linoleic acid, or ALA, is also an omega-3.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
It's a plant-based form of omega-3, and it comes from things like walnuts, chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp, and some leafy greens. The problem is that only about 10% of the plant-based omega-3s, the ALA, is converted to the ones we actually need, the EPA and DHA. So if you're a vegan, you're not necessarily gonna be getting this, and it's a big risk for deficiency.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So you have to figure out how to get your levels up by taking fish oil, and there are concentrates of plant-based fish oils where they kind of jack up the amounts and convert it, and it's kind of a bit of a project, but there are some around. EPA and DHA, these essential omega-3 fats, play crucial roles in the body's inflammatory system. We learned this in medical school.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
This is not a new science. We know how they regulate eicosanoids, prostaglandins, all these inflammatory systems in our body. And they produce a whole class of anti-inflammatory molecules, also called resolvins and protectins, right? They resolve and protect you from inflammation. They resolve inflammation and they protect you. Now, these are great names. I love these names.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
But basically, a lot of fish oil, has this in it, but sometimes at low levels. I'm going to tell you in a minute about one you can get. There's high levels of these protective things. Now, when we're deficient in omega-3s, it increases our risk of inflammation in the body and the brain. And it can show up like depression, mood disorders, memory disorders.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
EPA specifically has been shown to reduce neuroinflammation, right? Remember the neuroinflammation is linked to memory issues, dementia, Alzheimer's, depression, anxiety, ADD, autism, bipolar disease, schizophrenia, all of these problems of the brain have been linked to neuroinflammation and EPA actually is inversely correlated with all these problems.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
So there are actually studies from Harvard that show you can treat bipolar disease by giving fish oil. surprise, or ADD by giving fish oil, or depression by giving fish oil, or dementia by giving fish oil. That's how powerful these are. And they regulate all sorts of compounds in the body, regulate neuroinflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Now, when you have low levels of EPA, it increases your risk of heart disease, not just brain diseases, but also heart disease, skin disorders, diabetes, and lots more. In fact, these fats are absolutely essential for life. We got to get them from our diet, but 90% of Americans are deficient in these critical fats. And I'm going to explain to you more where to get them and how to take them.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Bioptimizers even offers a 365-day money-back guarantee, so there's nothing to lose except another restless night. Practice. There's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale, and that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights.
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
But I think at this point in history, unless you want to poison yourself with mercury from eating a lot of fish, you're going to need to take omega-3s from supplements. I mean, unless you want to eat sardines every day, which most people don't. Himalayan tartar buckwheat is
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
of over 130 of these phytochemicals, some of which are found nowhere else in nature, that have powerful properties, regulate our biology, and rejuvenate our immune system. So talk about how... And again, there are many other compounds that can be beneficial for health. There's 25,000, as I mentioned.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
And in my book, The Peak and Dot, I talked about the role of these compounds and how powerful they are. But the Himalayan Tardive Buckwheat, how does it work on these chip cells?
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Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, so Michael Pond called nutritionism is the reductionist approach to studying nutrients. That's why we have saturated fat and salt and this and that, instead of looking at the whole composition of the diet. It's so important. So basically what you're saying is these compounds in the Himalayan tarry buckwheat help to...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
get rid of all these old cells and rejuvenate our immune system through this process of autophagy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Yeah, you're kind of cleaning up your energy system. It's like cleaning your carburetor.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
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The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
Amazing. This is an incredible story. So you've written a lot about immunorejuvenation and you talk about a stepwise process to help rejuvenate your immune system. Can you kind of break down a little bit these four steps of immunorejuvenation program that you've developed? And by the way, all this is on bigboldhealth.com.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Can Food Really Heal Your Brain? | Dr. Jeff Bland & Dr. William Li
You can read about it, you can listen to podcasts, read the articles, read the science. It's just fascinating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So you've heard of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. No, I hadn't. That is a condition where you overeat, the fat flows out of your fat cells because they can't hold anymore. Like you've strained the storage capacity to the limit. The fat leaks out into your cells, gets trapped in your liver, and your liver becomes replaced by, liver cells become replaced by fat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It used to be alcohol and hepatitis were the biggest causes of liver transplant. Yeah. Now, livers are failing all around the country because of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So this is the silent epidemic. It's nasty because when your liver fails, that's your detox. People talk about going to detox, going to the spa for a cleanse, detoxing. Your liver does it every single day.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So we need to do that. The good news is all of this, the extra body fat, the leakiness, the inflammation, the clogged up liver, That's still gonna fail on you. It's all reversible. If you make good choices, even if you have a lifetime, decades of making bad choices, you can actually work your, swim your way back to your baseline operating system.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That is completely true. And that means you can offload that fuel. Okay. Okay. So if you exercise and you're burning more fuel, that's basically throwing some of the tanks off the pickup truck. So you're lightening the load.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Let me give you some really simple tools that anyone can actually use that they probably even heard about. One is called intermittent fasting. Okay. But I'm going to debunk that too.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Let me tell you, first of all, intermittent fasting is thought of as a health fad, a trend that everybody does. And you got to go, oh, what is it? Like 16 hours of not eating and squeeze everything in eight hours. Hey, listen, that would be very hard for someone like me and probably like you running around all the time. Okay. It doesn't work very well, but let me tell you, uh,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That there's more than one way to get at it. And the best way to intermittently fast is to take advantage of the fact that when you're sleeping, when we're sleeping, we're not eating. Okay. We're not eating, we're fasting. Okay. So sleeping is intermittent fasting because we don't sleep all the time. And when we get up and we break our fast, which is called breakfast. All right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And that's the best way to get intermittent fasting. But I got to give you a little understanding of this. Okay. Because... After you eat the last bite of food the night before... All right, your body is like, okay, is that it? That's the last drop of fuel we're going to get tonight?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The moment it realizes you're not going to put any more fuel in your body, your metabolism recognizes, it goes from fuel storing mode. Come on, give some more. Let me put in my fat. Oh, no more food. Let's now switch gears. Okay, like literally like a gearbox in a car. If your body's a Ferrari... All right. And you're going to switch gears when you're no longer eating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It switches into fuel burning mode from fuel storing. Let's load up that body fat to fuel burning. So when you're sleeping and not eating, your body's burning down fuel from your fat cells. You're actually losing weight, burning fat while you're sleeping.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So this is actually the important part. We know that eight hours of sleeping is the healthy amount of sleeping for all kinds of things, brain health and metabolic health and anti-aging and everything else. You want to sleep eight. It's more like seven to nine. Eight's right in the middle. Eight hours is where you're going to start to get that benefit.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
But let me tell you how anybody can expand their body's own hardwired fat burning period. Okay. What you do is you expand it on both sides before you go to bed. And when you get up in the morning, let me talk about the night before. All right. So like if you eat, sit down at seven and you're done at eight, when you put your dishes away, No more eating, all right? There's no midnight snacking.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Don't take a bag of chips with you and sit on the couch and watch the game or whatever else you might do, all right? Don't be nibbling. No last minute before bedtime, open and get that piece of pie. When you're done at eight, when you put your dishes away, that's it. Now, let's say you go to bed at 11 o'clock. I'm just gonna give an example. Eat dinner at seven. Stop eating at eight.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Put your dishes away. No more food until the next day.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And no drinking. Actually, tea is okay. All right. As long as you don't put milk in it. No drinking for sure. Okay. Anything with no more calories. Okay. Eight o'clock. Let's say you go to bed at 11. Okay, that's three hours between eight and 11 o'clock, three hours. You just bought yourself three extra hours of fat burning time. 11 to seven in the morning, that's eight hours.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay, so that's three hours plus eight hours. That's 11 hours of fat burning that you've given your body just by not eating after you put the dishes away. Now, When you get up in the morning, this is like a super little easy tip that I tell anybody. I practice it myself. Get up in the morning. Don't do what your mom told you to do, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So when we were growing up, get out of bed, get down to that breakfast table, eat something quickly so you can actually go to school and learn something. Don't be hungry. No, we're adults. And it turns out you don't need to eat right away in the morning. Get up in the morning, take your time getting ready. And for me, before I eat anything, I will go for a walk.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I'll open the door, get some fresh air, maybe read a book, check my email, whatever. wait at least an hour from the time you wake up until the time that you put the first thing in your mouth. Now, that's one extra hour. So three hours the night before bed, eight hours, that's 11 total of fasting, meaning fat burning time. Now add one more hour, okay, by not eating right away.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And you've got 11 plus one is 12 hours. 12 out of 24 hours, 50% of your day is You've had your body burning down harmful body fat, extra body fat. That's the simplest way to use intermittent fasting. 12 hours. Now, you might say, is 12 hours enough? Yeah, because eight hours is enough. 12 hours is a little bit better.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Clinical studies have shown that 12 hours of fasting, in the way that I've told you, actually is plenty of time to actually lose weight over time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You don't have to break into a sweat doing that because it's all very easy. I mean, plenty of people are already doing this. But the key thing, Mel, is that you want to make sure that when you finally do eat, whether it's breakfast or lunch, you don't overfill your tank.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Right. So it's all hardwired inside us. And the problem why we miss the cues that our body sends us that we have actually filled up our tank is because we eat too fast. All right. So when you eat quickly, right, busy people tend to eat really quickly. Distracted people tend to eat quickly. If you're Just checking out social media, you're not paying attention and you're eating by yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You're just shoveling food in your mouth. You're paying attention to something else. That is a common mistake that we all make is that we're distracted and we're used to just shoveling all the abundant food that's placed in front of us. Let me just tell you something that I learned before I went to medical school to be a doctor. I did a gap year.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And in my gap year, I went to Italy and Greece, the Mediterranean. And what I was interested in studying there was the connections between food, culture, and health in those places. Now, this was long before people were talking about the Mediterranean diet. I came from America. I landed in Italy. I was staying with a host family.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Within a day or two, I began realizing, wow, the way that people eat in the Mediterranean is completely different than what I grew up and what I'm used to. We in America sit down and we're gobbling food. We're complaining about things. We're eating with somebody else. We're kvetching about, you know, some problems going on. We're eating fast. There's way too much food in front of us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Or we're eating alone. Yeah. And you're eating alone. You're doing you're distracted by something else. And before long, you know, you've cleaned the whole plate. You don't even realize what you've eaten. It might taste good, but you're not thinking about it. In the Mediterranean, in Italy specifically, and it's as clear as day for me, you'd sit down for food. You would never eat by yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You would always eat with a friend or a family member or a co-worker. You would take the time to order the food. And when the food comes, you're not kvetching or complaining about your boss or, you know, the family or the weather or the sports team. You are sitting when the food arrives full of gratitude and talking about the joy of the food. Man, this pasta was just like my mother made.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Is this the right season for it? Yeah, you should see the mushrooms that we have. How do you make it? People would talk about their food. The food that was not just something that was shoved in front, you would engage with the food. And when you're eating the food, you would taste the food and talk about the food. And people would enjoy the actual part of eating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The enjoyment of the food, the mindfulness was completely different. And by the way, they never over-serve you. So do you have a rule for that?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So here's what I always tell people. Whatever your eye wants to actually put onto your plate, right? So think about a, this is the classic meal I always talk about, this Thanksgiving meal. Like you're all getting together, maybe you haven't eaten all day, and now it's all this great food that reminds you of all the happy times. You're going to load your plate up, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
What I tell people, that's a mistake. Whatever your eyes tell you you want to put in, only take two thirds of that plate. Okay. Okay. Okay. Two thirds. Leave a third back. Okay. Never go for seconds. All right. You will actually, and just eat those two thirds and really enjoy the taste, savor the taste. You know, if you're a foodie like me, you enjoy great tasting food. All right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Doesn't have to be fancy. It could be super simple. It could be comfort food. Eat it slowly to savor it, okay? That savoring the food is something I notice is always done in the Mediterranean and also in Asia, you know, two of the healthiest cuisines in the world.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah. Okay. So wherever your starting point is, this is the key thing. You can always begin a healthier life and get over your own body fat. Like you can win that battle easily by doing a couple of things. I tell the first thing you do is to do an assessment. A food diary is what I'd call it. Okay. Don't try anything. Just do what you're going to do for a couple of weeks.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Take out a piece of paper or maybe even notes on your mobile device.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And just record what you're eating and how much you're eating every single meal.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Because a lot of us don't realize what we're eating and how much we're eating. Every time you snack... pop out that piece of paper or your notes section and write it down. No guilt, no shame. This is all about just recording it. Okay. Now, after two weeks, go back and look at it. And most of us will be surprised at what we ate, how often we ate and how much we actually ate. All right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
By having that self-realization, by documenting it, You know, it's kind of like you're trying to develop an allowance. You're teaching children how to spend money responsibly. Write down what you spent and then add it up at the end of a couple of weeks and then you'll know exactly what you did.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Well, I would say first, the amount of food that they ate and how frequently they ate. Man, I had no idea that I ate that much and that often. All right. So the second epiphany is by identifying what kind of food most people go, Jeez, I kind of eat junky food. All right. Just documenting that for yourself. Again, no judgment. This is just so you can see where you are. And that's the first phase.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I think then you go on to the swap in phase.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Swap in, right? Because basically people like go, oh, so now the part, now's the part where I actually have to deprive myself, right? Nope. I'm saying, listen, you know, when you're not eating good stuff, let's talk about swapping in. Take something that you love to eat that's healthy and swap it in. Okay. And there's all kinds of things that we love to eat that is healthy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And that's in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. I give lists of 200 different food items, ingredients that are all delicious that you can swap in. The reason I call it swap in is because when you're eating something, you're displacing something that is not so good for you. The more good stuff that you swap in, less room you're just going to have in your life for the stuff that's not so good for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Exactly. That's the other thing. But you might also find you'll be a little bit more mindful. So do an assessment. Step one. Number two, swap in. Okay. Number three is then do the intermittent fasting part that I told you. Now, the key though with this, don't overeat when it is time to eat. That's the two-thirds rule. Two-thirds rule.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And one thing I'll tell you that's a Japanese saying that came from Confucius is called stop when you're 80% full. Now, I'm going to tell you how you know this. But there's a Japanese saying, it's called hara hachi banmi. Hara hachi banmi really means just listen to your body when you're about 80% full. How do you know when you're 80% full?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Well, okay. By the time you feel... full yes you've already passed 80 it's true you know like i just i kind of just feel that sense that oh but i just there's just one more bite and it's not ever as good as the one that came before here's an here's an example mel you know like when you're parking a car like in a in a parking lot and there's like those little cement things in front right yes
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Like you're pulling it up a little bit further, a little bit further. You know, like when you start hitting that, when you see that grating sound in your car, you've gone too far. That's what happens when you have to unbutton your pants. So, but if you eat slowly and then listen, this is a very important point. You want to stop eating when you're satisfied, not when you're full.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
When you feel, oh, that was pretty good. Not when you're full. We're so trained to look at the volume of our stomach, the pouching. We're looking for, we're trained to unbutton our pants.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
But really, if you eat slowly and mindfully and take your time and savor your food, at some point when you put your fork down, you're going to go, that was pretty good. I like that. That's 80%. I love that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay, so a lot of people don't know this, but there are certain foods that will fire up your body's extra fat burning machinery. Now, we didn't talk about this yet, so I'm going to quickly slide this in. You've got white fat, which I told you is the wiggly, jiggly kind you see in the mirror. Yep. It's under your chin. It's under your arm.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The muffin top, the thigh, the butt. That's white fat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And it's also in the tube of your body, the visceral fat that expands your waistline. What do you mean in the tube of your body? Look, our body's a tube, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Right. And inside the tube of our bodies, our organs, our fat can grow inside there. Got it. Our guts are called our viscera. So visceral fats, the fat that grows around our guts, the more you load up that extra fuel, the more that fat grows, starts to strangle your organs. And when it becomes inflamed, it's really dangerous. That's a dangerous kind of fat. So you want to burn that fat down.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Now, it's called brown fat. Brown fat is not wiggly jiggly. We love brown fat. Brown fat is close to the bone. It's not even near the surface. It's around our necks, plastered around our necks, under our breastbone, a little bit between our shoulder blades, and scattered in our belly a little bit. Brown fat is not white fat. Brown fat is a kind of fat that when you activate brown fat,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It fires it up like a space heater. Actually, another analogy I forget that's even clearer is that if you've got a gas cooking range in your kitchen and you want to heat up some water to make some soup or some tea, what do you do? Go to the gas range. You turn the knob. Click, click, click. Whoosh. That's what brown fat does. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It burns away the jiggly fat. Shut up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
When you turn on brown fat, you burn down the white fat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay. So we originally evolved brown fat for hibernation. Cold temperatures trigger brown fat and the brown fat burns down the white fat to give energy and heat. It's a process called thermogenesis. So when you hear about cold plunges being good for your metabolism, indeed it does. Indeed it does. Because cold temperatures in our body will trigger on our brown fat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So listen, I'm a medical doctor, so I am very careful to tell people that before you do something that could create a shock to your system, like cold plunge or super cold shower, you should probably talk to your doctor about it or a health care provider to make sure that you're not making a move that's not good for you. You might have a high blood pressure. You might have a heart rhythm issue.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So please don't just solo this on your own. All right. You really need to be able to do this. But if you want to actually, if you get into a warm shower, turn that temperature down until it's cooler. All right. So now you're not endangering yourself. Yep.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
you know i think if you're in there for 10 minutes 10 minutes cool i'm not saying freezing oh okay turn it down cool then turn it so it is hard to stand it okay yep and you'll start feeling it like you start feeling it like look go out to the winter without a coat on you can go out there for a little while stick up your mail at the end of the snowy driveway all right
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And at some point, you're like, oh, man, this is getting a little bit... When you start feeling this is getting a little bit too, stop.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And that's why it's true. Some people will get these ice baths they're going to do, their cold plunges in the morning. Please, when you start feeling like you're going down with a Titanic, you better get out of there, all right? But the brown fat turns on. Now, here's the cool thing. Besides cold temperatures, it turns out that certain foods that you can eat...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
will trigger your brown fat to turn on and to start burning down fat. Food, eating foods, can turn on your good fat to fight bad fat to burn down excess fat and lose weight.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You can find this in any grocery store, in the produce section, in the middle aisle. Let's go to the produce section, take a look.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So apples, it turns out that apples have something called chlorogenic acid inside the flesh of the apple, right? And that chlorogenic acid turns on your brown fat. Wow. And it'll start to burn down your white fat. Okay. What else is in there? What about broccoli or kale or bok choy? I love bok choy. I like to cook.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You know, you cut off the bottoms, you wash the leaves, take a wok or a skillet, a little extra virgin olive oil, a little garlic, saute that up, a little oyster sauce. Boom. That's a two-minute meal. The sulforaphanes in your greens. trigger your brown fat to burn down extra body fat. Now, obviously, how you cook makes a difference, right? I said olive oil. I didn't say butter, okay?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Because if you actually use olive oil, guess what? Olive oil, which you find in the middle aisle, extra virgin olive oil has bioactives, like people like me who study this. So I tell people, please don't try to memorize all these terms. Just trust the people like me who do the research. We know what they are. And extra virgin olive oil, you've got hydroxy tyrosine, oleocanthal.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You know what I always tell people is that it's possible to love your food and love your health at the same time. So you don't fear your food. You lean into it and you get to really enjoy your life finally. Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
These are two mother nature's natural brown fat triggering, metabolism activating, fat burning substances. You saute that with olive oil. Now you actually have the greens and the olive oil that will trigger your brown fat to turn it down.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You know what, by the way, if you check out my YouTube channel, I actually did a video where I went to markets all around the world, New York, and I went to one in France to show people what I'm looking at and why I'm looking at it when I'm actually shopping. But it's easy to do. The things that you think are gonna be healthy for you tend to be healthy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And then sometimes there are things that you're not sure would be healthy that are actually turned out to trigger brown fat, like a can of beans. can actually do that as well.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay, so let's just dive right in. One of my favorite all-time foods are tomatoes, okay? And I think most people like tomatoes, you know, not just in a garden salad, but think about your grandmother's tomato sauce, or you go out to Italy and you're eating some pasta or Italian restaurant. Who doesn't like some tomato sauce? Well, it turns out tomatoes contain a natural bioactive called lycopene,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Lycopene is found in nature. It triggers your brown fat to burn down harmful extra body fat. And a study in Portugal showed this in a totally clear way. It took young, healthy women who are grad students, okay? Normal body size. Okay. And they told them, just go eat and exercise the way you normally do. Don't do anything special for this research study.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The only thing they did is they gave them one ripe tomato to eat an hour before lunch every single day. That's it. And they measured their body composition. So they put them under a scanner to look at how much visceral fat. They measured their waistline. They measured their blood cholesterol and their blood sugars and all the parameters, inflammatory markers.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And they found after a month of eating just one tomato a day, This is the only thing. They were able to lose one pound with just one tomato one hour before lunch. What? That's the power of the lycopene in the tomato. You don't have to do extra exercise. You don't have to limit your calories. Just eat the way you want. That just shows you how powerful a food actually is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Now, lycopene is what's doing this. If you want the lycopene to really fire up... Now, lycopene... Pick a tomato off a vine and eat it like an apple. It's going to be good for you. It's going to do its thing. If you want the lycopene to be supercharged, what you want to do is you want to heat it up, saute it, 190 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes, okay?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
We'll amp up the power of that lycopene by 250%. because the heat will change the chemistry of the lycopene into a form your body loves to absorb. So this is why Mediterranean food, whether you're talking about Spain, Greece, Italy, heating up, cooking up that tomato sauce, simmering it gently, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay. Oh, by the way, lycopene likes to dissolve in body fat. In fact, this has been studied at Tufts University. You actually feed some young people a tomato with lycopene or foods that contain lycopene. They are able to track where that lycopene goes. You know where it goes?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It goes, they found it goes right to your butt, right to your thigh. It goes, homes in.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Right into the body fat where it triggers your brown fat to fight that fat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay. Pomegranates. You can have the pomegranate seeds on a salad. You could have a pure pomegranate juice. Okay. And pomegranates, pretty sweet. So you got to not drink too much of the juice. Actually, you just need about eight fluid ounces, one cup. All right. Contains a natural substance called Elijah tannins. Again, don't worry about trying to spell check it out. It's a complicated word.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Mother Nature's pharmacy is found in the juice of a pomegranate. And what that does is it activates your gut to secrete mucus, healthy mucus. How do you move stool? How do you get regular? You want to keep it all moving, right? So you need mucus. Mucus slip slides a thing all the way down your other end.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah. And by the way, it's not about giving permission. It's really about allowing our own human nature to take over our being because we're all hardwired. Part of our humanity is based around food. That goes back to history. And what I try to do is to bring it right to the present because we all have it inside us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Mucus, that healthy mucus will grow a bacteria, a healthy gut bacteria called acromantia muciniphila. Muciniphila means it loves mucus. Acromantia, this is the name of a gut bacteria that everyone who's listening to this and watching this should pay attention to. A-K-K-E-R-M-A-N-S-I-A, acromantia. Turns out acromantia is a guardian of our metabolism.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Acromantia activates our immune system, lowers inflammation. And this is smoking hot research, Mel. All right. I'm just telling you. I love how you talk about this. A piece of acromantia. So think about acromantia like an armadillo. It's got kind of a hard shell on the outside, little pieces on it on the outside. One piece has just been discovered. It's called P9. P as in Peter, nine.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That fragment of acromantia, whether the bacteria is alive or blown into 100 pieces, that bacteria, that piece of that bacteria causes your body to produce its own GLP-1, which is exactly what Ozempic and these prescription drugs are trying to do. So pomegranates grow acromantia. Acromantia will cause your body to create GLP-1. And what has GLP-1 done? It lowers your blood sugar.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It helps you lose body fat. Wow. Okay. That's actually these discoveries that are being made. Food is medicine, right? Like that's what I do. It's super cool. But if you're going to drink pomegranate juice, be very careful. Here's a practical tip. Go to the grocery store, look for pomegranate juice. I tell people, Make sure it's pure pomegranate juice.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Always, always, always check the ingredient label to make sure it's not really apple juice. It's got a little squirt of pomegranate and red food coloring. Don't do that. Get the real deal. Or just buy the pomegranate. You know why? Because when you have the whole pomegranate, you're going to get the dietary fiber from the seeds.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And those seeds, the dietary fiber, feed your gut microbiome, making the acromancy even happier.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Because I see kiwi. Kiwi is amazing because number one, kiwi is a great source of vitamin C. C is in Charlie. All right. What does that do? That lowers inflammation. If you're carrying around extra body fat, you're inflamed. No doubt about it. So just having a kiwi, one kiwi a day gives you a big dose of vitamin C to lower that inflammation and you will feel the difference. All right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You feel just less... razzed up inside now the other thing is kiwi has a lot of dietary fiber and that dietary fiber can change your healthy gut bacteria if it's not so healthy it'll start to grow the healthy stuff in 24 hours a kiwi a day in the next day you will start seeing those beneficial effects what wait the next day 24 hours so i eat one kiwi One kiwi.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You'll start feeling the beneficial effects. It'll take an unhealthy gut bacteria colony, start to make it a little healthier just in one day. After four days, you're going to get even more. All right. So this is why it's so important to think about this. A kiwi a day for breakfast is super easy. I love kiwi. Oh, by the way, the skin of the kiwi... Amazing source of dietary fiber. You eat that?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Who would eat that? I don't know. Not me. I wouldn't do it either, but you know how you do it?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Make a smoothie. Oh. Okay. Eat the kiwi with a spoon. Toss the skin into a blender to make the smoothie. It'll disappear and you'll get a huge amount of dietary fiber.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Matcha. All right. Matcha is one of my favorite ways of having green tea. Now we know green tea. It looks like you're drinking some green tea in front of you right now. You know, you have it in a tea bag.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So the tea leaves are steeped in the hot water and the polyphenols, the catechins come dissolving out of that into the water and you sip it and you get the good stuff, the catechins, which by the way, turn on your brown fat to trigger down and burn harmful white fat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Have a sip. All right. Now, but I got to tell you, matcha is a heck of a lot more powerful than tea in a bag because matcha is the entire tea leaf ground into a powder. Now you get 100% of the polyphenols. There's nothing left inside a tea bag. The whole shebang is in there and the dietary fiber. Good for your gut microbiome. So you want a dose of the polyphenols from tea. Drink matcha.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You get the fiber. You get 100% of the polyphenols. It's super, super powerful. And that's been shown to burn down harmful body fat. How do we know it burns down harmful body fat? It's because it actually shrinks your waistline. You could actually lose an inch of a belt. You drinking matcha. By drinking matcha. And that's been studied by researchers in Japan in clinical research.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
All the foods we're talking about.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I would not. I would not. Listen, if you have a, if you are struggling with the taste of matcha, which is, listen, the reason it tastes like grass is because it's the old damn leaf in there. Okay. Here's what you do. Make a smoothie or a shake with it and just pour it in there and it'll disappear right in the background. All right. Dr. Lee, you're a genius. It's the simplest way. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Now, so matcha is really good. All right. Dark chocolate. Dark chocolate. Who doesn't like dark chocolate? Who doesn't like chocolate? All right. Well, it turns out a lot of people get confused. They're like, Dr. Lee, you're telling people to eat chocolate. Yes, I am. And the reason is because chocolate is actually a plant-based food. What?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Well, chocolate is made with what makes chocolate chocolate is cacao. Okay. And cacao comes from the cocoa bean pod that is growing from a tree. And you take these pods, which are shaped like a football. They're heavy. All right. You cut them open. You peel off the outer skin. You dry it. You ferment it. You crush it up into a powder. And now you mix it into make chocolate.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So chocolate is a confection, but it's made with a plant-based food. What's in that seed pod? polyphenols up the yin-yang. One of them is called proanthocyanidin. Let me just tell you, the more cacao you have in your chocolate, the higher percent cacao, right? You've heard about this 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 100%, right? So the higher the percent, and what you want to look for is 80% or higher.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You're getting a ton of these polyphenols in your chocolate, all right? And those polyphenols trigger brown fat to fire off and burn down your harmful white fat. All right. Dark chocolate does it. Now, the darker, the more bitter it's going to be. So what I like to do, what I tell people, like, just get a little square of it and have it with coffee. You've created mocha.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Bite of chocolate, sip of coffee, you've created your own mocha. And guess what coffee has? Coffee also has polyphenols, chlorogenic acid. Oh, didn't you hear me say this before with apples? That's right. Coffee has chlorogenic acid. So coffee, a cup of coffee will fire up your brown fat to burn down the harmful white fat every single morning.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yep, that's a double-barreled approach.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah, well, look, losing weight is a natural goal. Most of us think about losing weight in terms of the number on a scale or maybe the size of your clothing or fitting the comfort of fitting into your clothing or maybe how you look in the mirror, right? It's pretty crude.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That's right. And so does edamame. You have a little thing of edamame on this plate here. Edamame, soybeans, it turns out that soybeans have been shown to trigger on the burning of harmful body fat by triggering your brown fat. And so this is actually, if you think about the foods that we talked about, These are not like crazy things.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You got to spend a lot of money ordering on the internet from some crazy supplement producer. You don't have to be a bodybuilder. You don't have to be a fitness champ. All right. The foods that we love to eat can be really healthy for us. As long as you don't overeat, don't overfill the fuel tank. As long as you're keeping on moving around. So you're burning some of the fuel. All right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And when you're not actually overeating the bad stuff. Now, we haven't spent time talking about the bad stuff.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Listen, my whole philosophy is that if you spend more time putting good things in your body, you're just not going to have as much room for the bad stuff. But let's talk about the bad stuff. Look. We all know that there are foods that are very common that we've all grown up eating that aren't so good for us, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And one of the things that I got to say upfront is I don't do what a lot of social influencers do. I don't food bash, brand bash. I don't try to shame people for what they eat. Listen, I love some snacks every now and then as much as the next person. And it's totally fine because if you spend most of the time...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
activating your body's healthy systems, the hardwiring, you can afford to take a hit every now and then. It's like just putting some of that crappy gas in your tank every now and then. You're going to bounce right back. We're very, very resilient.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That said, I do think it's important for people to understand that, you know, we're beginning to understand why certain foods that are not so good are really bad for you, okay? And a great one that I always pick up with is a soda. Okay. Whether you get the blue can or the red can or whether you have regular soda or diet soda, any soda is really not healthy for you in the long run.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Especially those. What do you mean, especially the diets? The history of soda goes, I think, back to France, where they were serving fruit juices and somebody came up with this entrepreneurial idea. Let's bubble some things into the fruit juice and see if we can actually have a crowd pleaser. All right. And I think that was the birth of soda. All right. The soda fountain and everything else.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Right. You got to actually put the gas in there. Fast forward 20th century. Now you've actually got mass production of these sodas. Turns out that regular soda, regardless of what kind of what brand it is, actually contains a can of regular soda. It contains seven to nine teaspoons of cane sugar. Wow.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You come to my house and I offer you a glass and I put nine teaspoons of sugar in it and say, here, have this, Mel. You'd go, that's disgusting. I'm not going to do that. That's what's happening when you're actually drinking soda. That amount of sugar overload, carb overload. We talked about carb overload earlier. All right. Now you're like really flushing out.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And it turns out that if you care about your health, if that's really your priority for losing weight, you want to burn down the kind of fat that you can't see.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That tank's filling up real fast now and spilling over. But on top of that, you're overloading your metabolism and Because remember those hormones that have to collaborate to be able to really bring in the blood sugar to make sure you've got enough energy? When you flood that system, your system doesn't go so well. It doesn't function so well. It starts to derail a little bit.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Listen, a single can, even two every now and then, you're going to be just fine. All right. Your body's not going to love you for it, but it'll get back to itself pretty quickly. But, you know, when I was in medical school, I remember distinctly there was a classmate of mine.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So future doctor at the time who was bragging that he would have two six packs of soda every single day to get through the day. I mean, you know, that's 12 cans of soda. Wow. geez, think about the amount of sugar that that person was actually putting into a system every day.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah, right? I mean, just think about the big pile. Now, I will tell you that the reason that the zero version, the sugar-free version was developed is because, well, in the 1970s and 80s, we started realizing that sugar causes you to gain weight. So Let's come up with something else. Well, classic to the industrial food mindset. Let's go invent something.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Let's go invent artificial sweeteners, right? Non-caloric sweeteners. You can eat them. They taste sweet, but they don't actually add any calories. That must be better, right? Well, we thought so, except that research has shown that people who drink a lot of diet soda, they actually gain weight too. They also gain weight, all right, even without sugar.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
and fat that you can't see is not wiggly jiggly it's actually located deep inside the tube of your body our bodies are really if you stand up straight you know and you were to do a scan across our body it's like a tube we've got a oval our organs are inside there and really really harmful body fat that expands, it's called visceral fat, and it wraps around our organs like a baseball glove.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Exactly. You're right about that. However, we also talked about the fact your gut microbiome helps you have good metabolism and burn fuel. And it turns out, and Mel, this is pretty new, like within just the last few years, the discovery that our gut bacteria is very sensitive to artificial sweeteners. And so artificial sweeteners actually kill off some of the good, healthy gut bacteria.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So something that's well-intentioned, non-caloric sweetener, goes right down. We don't absorb any of it because it's not a calorie. Goes down and feeds our gut microbiome, remember? And so what happens is the gut bacteria start to revolt. They don't do so well. Some of the gut die off. And now, guess what? Your metabolism isn't functioning normally. You're derailed from that hard wiring.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And now you start to gain weight. So... Food number one that I think that you should stay away from are sodas, regular or diet. That's one of the ones that you want to stay away from. All right. Second food that I tell people to try to stay away from are these packaged health foods. Now,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You go to the airport and you go to, you know, you see the bar and it looks like it's got granola and all that kind of stuff in it. It seems like it'd be a healthy bar. Take a look at the ingredient label.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And you will find that there are all these emulsifiers, the glue that holds the things together together. Sometimes artificial flavorings that are actually in there because, you know, the healthy stuff doesn't have enough sweet hit for you. Sometimes artificial coloring. So it doesn't look so looks a little bit nicer. Or here's another one besides the bar.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
you know, like tree nuts are healthy, right? So you like almonds, macadamia, pistachios, cashews, right? You go to the airport, you go to the convenience store part. Oh, let me go look for some in the health food section. There's nuts in a bag, right? And they're barbecue flavored. Well, There's no such thing as called barbecued flavored. Take a look at the ingredient label.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Those are red food coloring, yellow food coloring. They've got artificial seasonings. It's not even real chili pepper. It's like artificial stuff. It's designed to light it up. Anything that's manufactured like that to be healthy, please read the ingredient label.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
If it seems like it's Greek or Latin or you can't pronounce it quickly, it's probably an ultra-processed ingredient that's going to harm your health. It's going to increase oxidative stress. It's going to stress out your body. It's going to cause inflammation, maybe damage your gut microbiome.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
So again, I think stay away from that ultra-processed stuff that's got... If it looks like it might be nuclear-colored... All right. That's probably not good for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Nuclear for your gut. Don't nuke your gut.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
All right. Another thing that you want to actually be really, really mindful of are processed meats. Now, look, we all grew up with processed meats. I can remember, you know, one of my earliest memories is like going to school with a paper bag with a sandwich my mom made with processed meats. You go to the deli. By the way, do you know why they call them a delicatessen or a deli? No.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And when it grows, it expands everything inside the sack of your, the tube of your body, which is why your waistline increases, right? So the more visceral fat you have, the bigger your waistline has to be. The belt is just being expanded more and more and more. That's different than the fat that's under your arm.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It's short for delicious. And it was actually coming from the people that were trying to figure out how to actually sell leftover meat products in a way that would be delicious. So a lot of these salamis, bolognese, all the stuff that you would actually see in a deli are all... put together from little scraps of meat that come as byproducts of the food industry.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
First, I'm going to come back to that, but first let's talk about why it's not so good for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That's right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah. Do you think that a turkey comes in a square?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah. I'm talking about the kind that, you know, like the at the deli, they move them back and forth. Well, it turns out that the World Health Organization has identified that these processed meats. All right. And we're not talking about like freshly butchered, you know, prepared at home or a restaurant.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
But these processed meats contain all kinds of chemicals to be able to actually get them to where they are. And they have been classified as a class one carcinogen by the World Health Organization. All right, we're talking about bologna, salami, pepperoni. And by the way, I remember I had a patient once who was a former USDA inspector. Okay. And he was retired by then.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And I would love to talk to my patients about their jobs, like things that I didn't know, like the lobster guy would, well, what happens in a lobster boat? Well, this guy, USDA inspector, I would say, spare no details. Tell me everything about the inspection, meat inspection.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
He's like, well, you know, let me just tell you, I had to change my boots, my rubber boots every four months because the stuff on the floor, the liquid from the places that made processed meats would dissolve my boots. Oh, my God. And so that made me... That kind of cued me in that there's probably stuff in the meats that are not so good for you. And it's not just the nitrates.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I mean, it's like the synthetic nitrates that they put in there, other preserves and coloring. But... Class 1 carcinogen, abundant evidence that it's likely to increase our risk for cancer, especially colon cancer. Not surprisingly, right? You're eating a lot of this stuff and it goes down to your gut.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
But I learned something recently that, you know, when you go to the deli and let's say you're ordering bologna or salami, right? It's a meat in a cylinder and animals don't come in cylinders like that. But again, this is the meat scraps. And I learned about this, by the way, from a podcast called Science Versus. It's a really good podcast.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And what I found out, and I'm learning about this, is that originally the meat scraps are all put together. And then the U.S. military invented a meat glue that would take scraps that you could pulverize and stick in there. You know, like the particle board that we actually have for wood?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
These deli meats are basically the particles are meat particles that are glued together and then molded into a cylinder.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I would just say, okay, look, listen, by the way, I'm a reasonable list. So if you, if your favorite thing is a bologna sandwich, knock yourself out, enjoy it, but just take the time to really savor it and don't do it very often. Got it. You know that it's not good.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Listen, we are, you know, not to speed on the highway, but we all do it every now and then, but don't speed all the time because that's what's going to lead to car crash. So I'm not endorsing people to go out to eat deli meat. What I'm saying is that just like the soda, just like the nuclear snack foods, processed meat ain't good for you. All right. It tastes good.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
We grew up with it, but it's not good for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
All right. I'm going to tell you something you're going to be surprised by, and this is new research, and that's bottled water.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The water isn't the problem. It's the bottle. And we're beginning to realize that these bottled waters... I mean, come on. I used to carry around bottled water all the time with me. You're supposed to stay hydrated, right? Right. Okay. Any vacation you go to, you're getting a bottle of water in your hotel room.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Turns out that now we realize that the bottled water, the bottles of plastic bottles are shedding microplastics into the water. So while we don't taste it, we're actually pouring plastic into our bodies. All right, little tiny particles, plastic particles. And you know how much plastic we are ingesting on average every week?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
A credit card's worth of plastic.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Every week, we're ingesting it. Now, listen, we've known this for some years, but I used to be asked this all the time. You know, what's the consequence of the plastic? And I used to, I mean, just only a few years ago, say, we don't really know. It seems like it's probably okay. Our body must get rid of it somehow. Now we know just in the last 24 months, so this is new, all right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I'm telling you a bunch of new stuff, that microplastics are detectable in the human body and they're associated with badness. Let me tell you, it was a study that came out of Italy with neurologists and cardiologists that looked at people with clogged blood vessels, cardiovascular disease, in the large vessels that feed their brain. And they were narrowed down.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And what they found is that when they took out the clog, right? So it's kind of like calling a plumber in to clean the drain. When they cleaned the drain and removed the plaque, the clogging of the blood vessels, they found that they could detect plastic particles embedded in the narrowing of blood vessels that would be feeding the brain. More importantly, they found a correlation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The people who had plastics embedded in their blood vessels had a fourfold increase, four times increase in having a fatal heart attack or stroke. Whoa. Okay. That's serious stuff. Subsequently, we've actually discovered you can actually find plastic in the brain. In fact, you can take a kitchen scale and measure two human brains and you know which one's got more plastic in it. It's heavier.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You can measure it. Like, you know, like you're measuring flour for making cookies or whatever. You could actually measure the amount of plastic in the human brain. And we found plastic... In the blood circulation, we never looked at it before, but in a blood, vile blood in a doctor's office, if you look for it, you can actually find plastic circulating in it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And we've actually found plastic in human testicles. We found it in human semen. Don't ask me how it gets down there. And it's also found by urologists who are actually doing surgery. They've actually found it in the flesh of the penis embedded in there, probably from years and years and years of being exposed to plastic.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay, so number one, this is, let me just give you some real practical stuff. Water, if you want water, put it in a glass container. Okay. Not a plastic container. And for those of you who are bringing your bottles, the water bottles to the gym, get a metal one or get one that's lined with glass on the inside. Take the plastic ones, toss them out immediately. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And when you go back to the kitchen, go root around your drawers and your cabinets and anything that you might have once used to store leftovers, the plastic stuff, plastic containers, the plastic top, out it goes. All right. Replace it with ceramic or glass. Okay. Cups in your cupboard. You've got the ceramic mugs. You've got the glasses for your guests. Some plastic ones are not there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah, well, look, body fat isn't all just what we think it is, right? So look, we've all done it. You're taking a shower in the morning, you step out, you're drying yourself off, you're naked. Out of the corner of the aisle, you look in the mirror and you see a lump or a bump that you didn't like to see. And you're like, ugh. And then what's the next thing you do? You step on the scale.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You got it at a ballgame or whatever. Out. Throw it out.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Don't listen. I mean, I'm telling you, microplastics are a big deal. Now, I'll tell you, it's almost impossible to get away from microplastics. They're everywhere in the environment. They're in the new carpets. They're in the HVAC systems.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
We breathe it in and it gets into our body as well. But you're right. What I'm trying to say is that for foods that you want to avoid, you want to stay away from plastics whenever you can. That means don't microwave something with a plastic top or with a saran wrap on top. That means don't buy food that's pre-packed in plastic, those kinds of quick-eat meals that you could actually have.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
All right. It's got a big plastic thing you nuke in a microwave and you put a fork to let the steam out. All that stuff is just coating it with plastic.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And we believe that those... By the way, people have been talking about this for years. Maybe these microplastics are endocrine disruptors. And that's why we're actually having problems with our hormones. I don't know. I haven't seen enough data on that. I mean, listen, I'm a scientist. So here's the thing about scientists, like a real scientist. And I know you've talked to a bunch of them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Real scientists will tell you what they know, but they'll also tell you when they don't know something. And I don't know enough information about hormone disruptors and microplastics, but I do know because I'm a vascular guy studying blood vessels. I do know that the little particle bits that are stuck in your blood vessels are. are linked to real serious health outcomes and badness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And so for me, one of the things besides processed meats and, you know, nuclear foods and, you know, and sodas, I would say stay away from water in a bottle that's water in a container that's plastic because you have a choice. You can get one out of glass.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
On an airplane?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay. Well, listen, to do my research and to work with my colleagues, I do travel quite a bit. So I know a lot, as I'm sure you do, about sitting on a plane. And one of the things about planes that's kind of crazy is that, you know, we're instinctively served beverages and foods.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And, you know, if you're like me, I'm working on my laptop and somebody comes by and hands me something, my instincts is they take it. Right? I mean, and you know, it's free. What kind of thing? Well, nah, you paid for it. But it seems like it's something that I should eat. Well, there's a couple of things that I don't do. I don't drink coffee or tea on an airplane.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And if that number isn't the exact number you were hoping for, damn.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And the reason I don't is because a lot of people don't know this, but the water...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
from your coffee or tea comes from a tank in the airplane right and they don't clean that tank but once or twice a year ew and so you know what happens when you actually have a container you don't clean very often it's pretty disgusting and i don't even want to go into the the chassis of an airplane to take a look at the rusty old tank with all the crud that's in the bottom and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
that they are actually using and pouring out. Now, listen, the place where the flight attendants are actually making the coffee looks pretty clean. The coffee looks okay. I can't taste anything, but I'm somebody that
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I know enough that I care about what I put into my body and I would rather get a glass container of water or coffee or bring better yet, bring your own thermos, metal thermos or glass thermos, fill up your own coffee. All right. After security and bring it on. And now, you know that you're actually have something reliable that doesn't have weird stuff.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And I listen, a rule of thumb for anybody listening to this, keep weird stuff out of your body. Any chemicals, anything you can't pronounce, anything you have no idea why it's there. Now that I told you about meat glue, it's stuff that you just kind of don't really want.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Even if we grew up with it, listen, there's so many things that we're getting smarter about things that are good for us, but we're also getting a little smarter about things that are not good for us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Well, but then, but then you say like, man, I got to do something about this, right? Like it's a realization, but the fat, the body fat you can see is not the part that's harmful to your overall health. What? Okay. Because fat is, comes in two different types of fat. You've got white fat, which is what you can see, and you've got brown fat, which you can't see.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Yeah, you know, that's a big question. I would sort of, I'm a pragmatic person, practical person. So I say, you know, if you're going to buy food, buy the best quality food you can within the most convenient place that you can as well.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Like whatever makes, whatever you're able to get access to, you know, like, again, I try to be very careful not to make people feel bad that they can't go shop at a fancy organic farmer's market. A lot of people can't.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay. So when I go to the grocery store, I go to the produce section first. It's usually in front of the store. And I'm looking at the stuff that they put closer to the entrance, which happens to be, if you read this little signs that they put near the foods, if it's grown locally- like local apples or local strawberries, whatever. It's seasonal.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That's the seasonal stuff that hasn't taken an airplane ride from South America. I've been sitting in the back in a box for a couple of days. That's the stuff that's a little fresher coming in. And local, when food doesn't have to travel... It's going to be fresh. I mean, think about when you get on a plane and you fly someplace far away, you're not fresh that same day.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You got to take a shower, get a good night's sleep. Same thing with the food. So local, you're fresher. So I look for that. Even in a regular grocery store, usually the stuff they put closer to you, if you read the signs, is going to be closer. But that doesn't mean that the other foods that they have aren't so good for you. A lot of greens are grown in places where you can get
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
you know, produce grown and farmed and picked all year round. That's fine. I go to the middle aisle, by the way, and you're supposed to stay out of the middle aisle. That's also a myth. I will tell you the middle aisle has some really, really amazing healthy foods.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay, you got to actually put your filter on so you're not looking at the chips and the candy and all the ultra processed stuff that you might snacks you might get there. But you think about it, you get extra virgin olive oil is there. Lentils and legumes are there. Cans of beans are on there. You know, one of my favorite beans are actually simple can of white navy beans. I love them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I don't know why. When I was a kid, I must have had a nice soup or stew with them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
They are. How? So studies have been done by the University of Toronto looking at people that have metabolic syndrome. So they already had a little too much body fat. And it turns out that by giving people the equivalent of one can of beans to eat five times a week, so not every day, five times a week,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
They could actually shrink the waistline of people by shrinking body fat in the tube of the body, visceral fat, by an inch over the course of a month. Now, how does that work? Well, it turns out that there's fiber, dietary fiber, in beans. How you cook them matters, obviously. How you serve it matters.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Use a traditional recipe and you get like bean stew with the rosemary and olive oil and chopped shallots or onions in there. I mean, it's going to taste really good. All right. Trust me on this because I can make that myself. And what it does is that that dietary fiber feeds your gut microbiome. You're a healthy gut bacteria. Thank you for doing it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And they release substances that help to streamline your metabolism. So you use your energy more efficiently. All right. So middle aisle. Oh, another group of foods in the middle aisle that get bypassed. Obviously, dried fruits. You can actually get cranberries, blueberries, apricots. You can get in the middle aisle. But here's something that a lot of people don't pay any attention to.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
But I got to explain a little bit further.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And that is tinned seafood. What? Tinned seafood.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Now follow me on this, right? When I was a kid and I saw a round can of tuna fish. Yep. Now I've been to my friend's house often enough when I was a kid. One of those things get opened up, it smells fishy and it smelled just like wet cat food. Yes. All right. So I'd stay away from that stuff like my whole life. Then when I was doing my research, I realized that I was wrong.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The word fat immediately stimulates kind of this negative reaction in our minds, right? That's how we've been trained in society, right? But there is a situation where body fat is actually good and it makes everyone smile. And you know when that is? When? Babies. Yes, that's true.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And that tinned seafood is a delicacy in the Mediterranean with really healthy diets. And they call them conservas, like they're conserving it. They're preserving it. They catch fish on a boat. It could be squid. It could be mackerel. It could be sardines. It could be tuna. It could be a whole bunch of different kinds of fish. They cook it right away. They steam it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And then they pack it in extra virgin olive oil. So now the fish has got omega-3, healthy omega-3 is good for your metabolism, helps you burn harmful body fat. Now they're packing in olive oil. Now it's nice and moist. And olive oil has got the hydroxytyrosol and oleocanthal that helps activate your brown fat. Then they chop up little herbs and flavoring seasoning and they put it into a tin.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And the reason they did that in the Mediterranean is because in the months they couldn't go out fishing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
they would actually want to have omega-3s. Now, they didn't call them omega-3s. They just call them protein, and they call them delicious local foods. But if you go to Spain, Portugal, south of France, Italy, Greece, and you go look at some of their little food stores by the shore, they will actually, you'll have stores packed with these conservas and they are delicious.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Fastest lunch I've ever had, okay, is you get a hunk of sourdough bread. Sourdough because it's a fermented probiotic food. The sourness of sourdough bread comes from a bacteria called lactobacillus, makes lactic acid, which gives you the tangy sour of sourdough bread. It's great for you. Hunk of sourdough bread, reach into my pantry, pull out a tin of conserves, pop it open with a fork.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And I've got myself a really delicious when I open some pickles or something. Now you get some more fermented foods. That's a way of getting a really tasty mouthwatering lunch. And what I do, by the way, at night, If I'm so busy, I don't have time to cook dinner, but I'm hungry, right? And I'm like, oh, I got to eat something, but I didn't plan dinner or I missed dinner. What do I do?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
I will take, I'll take a pot, boil some water. I'll look for some good pasta, ideal organic pasta. I'll boil it up. Okay. I took a stainless steel pan and you know what I do? I heat it up with a Crack open a tinned seafood thing. Might be mackerel, sardines, could be anything. Okay. Mussels, clams, squid. And I will just cut those up real briefly and I'll throw them right into the cooked pasta.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Heat it up. Take a little tube of double concentrated tomato paste, a little squirt in there, flip it around a couple of times, and man, my whole house smells great. And now I've gotten like a gourmet meal. I just made myself with conservas you find in the middle aisle of the grocery store.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
When you see a big, fat baby, pudgy, cute, you want to pinch its cheeks, all right, and big balloon-like arms and legs, everyone smiles. And that's how we know that fat can't be all bad, right? In fact, if you saw a baby that had chiseled cheeks and long, thin arms and thighs, like a runway model.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
and they're not expensive. Yes.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That's right. So again, middle aisle, it's got lots of good stuff. You got to filter out all the bad stuff, but go for the good stuff that you can actually find. That to me is really the important thing is that my message is that you should really try to align
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The foods that you love to eat, that research has discovered, can help you burn body fat, improve your metabolism, help you stay healthier, get to that next level of health, and eat reasonable amounts of it, prepare it with the other ingredients that are actually going to light up your health, and just enjoy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It's going to be a lot easier than you think. Great. First thing is for your beverages, don't drink anything except for coffee, tea, or water, okay? Now, I drink coffee all day long. Don't put dairy milk in it. You can use nut milk, okay? It's fine.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Dairy contains saturated fats, but more importantly, those saturated fats bind to the good bioactives in coffee and tea, and then you don't actually absorb them. They just kind of get flushed down your system. So for beverages, eliminate all the beverages for water, coffee, and tea. That's one thing that you can do immediately.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The second thing that I would actually say is cut down or cut out on ultra processed foods. Now, ultra processed foods, basically foods made by a factory containing 20 or more ingredients, most of which you can't pronounce and you don't know why they're in there. It's, you know, that old saying that your grandmother wouldn't recognize them as food. All right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And they don't look like the original food that they were. It sounds like it's not punitive. It's just that if it comes in a box or a can, it's got to read the ingredient label. If it seems like it's not the kind of food that you'd recognize, you couldn't make it yourself. You can't make animal crackers yourself at home. Most people can't. That's an ultra processed food.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Cut down or cut out those. All right. And instead, swap them in with what I would say plant based foods. I'm not telling you to be a vegan. I'm saying just start adding some things that are more in the veggie side of things. And it doesn't have to be even green. Green's good. Definitely eat green. But, you know, it could be colorful vegetables. Red, eat the rainbow, as they say.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That's a swap in that is actually in with the good stuff and then cut down or cut out the other stuff. That's the second thing. And the third thing I would actually say is don't eat too much, all right? Eat slowly so you can actually pay attention to your body's signals. Eat what tastes good to you, like your preferences, but don't eat too fast.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Let your body signal to you when you're satisfied, but before you're full. I'm good. We've had that, right? I mean, you're eating with friends and they want you to keep on eating and you're like, no, no, I'm good. I'm good. That's what you want to aim for. Not that I'm full. I'm full. I'm good. Thanks. I'm good. Aim for that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Because that actually limiting the volume that you eat is going to be a big start for helping your own hardwiring start to burn down that extra body fat, along with the plant-based foods, along with a coffee and a tea. And by the way, even water, cold water can actually help you burn down body fat by increasing your metabolism. You know why?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay, so the fact of the matter is that our body fat is really, really important. It actually releases hormones. It's one of the endocrine organs. Our body fat's actually an organ in our body.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Because cold water in the core of your stomach, the core temperature, guess what? Triggers your brown fat. Oh, it's cold. That must be hibernating. Let's go ahead and fire up that brown fat. So you'll start to burn down some extra body fat just by drinking cold water. So those are good food related things.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And then I would say, and this is a topic for a whole other conversation is like, get in motion. I'm not telling you don't have to hire a trainer. You don't have to, you know, go to an expensive gym. You don't have to buy workout equipment for your, you know, basement when you've got other things to do with your money, but stay in motion, go for a walk. Got a bike? Go for a ride. You got a friend?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Go out and gossip with your friend and go for a walk outdoors. That's the thing you want to do. Those things burn down energy. They take energy. They consume your fuel. Food by alone is very, very helpful. Food plus movement, exercise, really good. Those are two things, a double-barreled approach that anybody can do very, very easily.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Listen, if you felt that some of the foods I was talking about made your mouth water, then you know that following this kind of advice is going to make you appreciate your food. So, okay, here's a... And by the way, when you appreciate your food, your quality of life automatically increases, right? So this is what I always tell people, like... oh man, I don't know if I could eat healthy food.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And what I tell people is go to your local Mediterranean or Asian restaurant and just get the menu. Come back home with a magic marker. Probably don't steal the menu. Ask if you could borrow one at home and just circle the foods that you actually like.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And then I will tell you, it's very easy to find the ingredients in those foods that light up your metabolism, that can help you burn down body fat and don't eat too much of it. Just savor it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
The same words I started with. Love your food to love your health. That's my big belief. I think that everyone can have joyful eating if you follow your preferences and just be mindful that you should just really enjoy and savor the healthy food that you already love.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Body fat's an organ. It actually produces hormones. And these fat-produced hormones actually help our body absorb blood glucose. So the fuel tank actually produces the stuff that our body needs to run the engine, glucose, so we have energy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Thanks for having me.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Whenever you drink your tea, you never put the tea nearby it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Don't nuke your gut.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And the more you actually put... Sorry, I laughed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
That's a medical term.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And in fact, one of these hormones is called adiponectin. All right. Now, you might not have ever heard of adiponectin. Actually, a lot of doctors never heard of adiponectin. But what have I told you? Adiponectin works with insulin. And we know insulin basically helps your blood glucose, takes all that energy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And people talk about glucose spikes and high glucose and low glucose and insulin insensitivity. Look, insulin is the hormone. That is made by your pancreas in order to be able to draw blood glucose into your muscles so you have energy, so you can run. If you've got problems with your insulin, that can lead to diabetes, right? Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
But do you know that insulin can't do the job by itself very well? No. Okay. Insulin needs a partner. It's like two cops on a beat.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
It is adiponectin is the hormone that insulin, which is made by fat, helps insulin do its job. Adiponectin is so important, by the way, Mel, that if I were to take a sample of your blood and send it to the lab and ask it to measure every hormone in your body, Everyone, okay? Estrogen, thyroid, hormone, you name it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
1,000.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Tells you it's important. Fat, made by fat, by body fat. So body fat actually is good. It actually helps us, not surprisingly, use our energy. Now, if you have too much fat, Guess what happens? The fat gets really, really big. It gets really, really inflamed. And now the hormone engine doesn't work anymore. You're not producing the right amount of adiponectin.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Now insulin is not going to work very well. Now you're going to have a metabolic problem. And this is why overeating and overeating, especially low quality food, is so damaging to your body. But because it's all hardwired into us, if we... Take the, you know, realize we have the agency to be able to make those choices for better quality fuel. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And don't eat too much and get a little more active.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay, so I like to think about it in a much simpler way.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Metabolism is how your body gets energy and burns down energy, just like if you were a car, okay? Human metabolism is really about just putting fuel in your body. Right. Once you're done eating, okay, it's kind of like you've stopped filling up your tank. Now you're driving back on the road about your way, you're burning fuel. And that's what we do when we finish eating.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
We're loading up in the fuel, we're finished, now we're burning the fuel. And basically that's how we live day in and day out. That's how we work. And the quality of fuel actually matters. Now, I want to say one thing about besides quality of fuel, it's quantity of fuel. You fill up your tank. It's a metal tank. All right. And you fill it up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
When a gasoline reaches a certain level, it'll force the nozzle go to click and no more gas will come out.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Okay. Well, imagine what would happen. And this is what happened used to be in the old days within filling stations. No click. What's going to happen? You're going to easily overfill your tank. If you're not paying attention, the tank's going to overflow. The gasoline comes right out of the car, runs down the side of the car, around the tires and pools around your shoes. Right.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Now you are standing in the midst of a dangerous, toxic, flammable mess. Right. Right. OK, now that's what happens at the gas station. at the dinner table or the pantry or the drive-by convenience store, if you don't actually control the amount of fuel that you put in your body, because we don't have a clicker, just as you said, we can keep filling it up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
What happens is that our fuel tanks are our fat cells. Our metabolism uses body fat. Body fat's very, very important. It's healthy. We want our fat cells to be, they serve as our fuel tank When you eat, you use some of the energy just to run around, but the rest of it is stored in the fuel tank, which is our fat cells. We call them adipose cells, adipose tissue.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And when you add up a lot of little, tiny little fat cells, you get a chunk of fat. Now, because we don't have a clicker, the more you eat, you're going to fill up your tank. Oh, you're still eating? Let's fill up another tank. Fill that one up. And by the way, each tank... car is metal and fixed. It won't expand. Body fat, fat cells can expand to three times, 300%.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You can really blow up a fat cell with fuel, meaning food that you eat, up to 300%, like a balloon, like a water balloon. So now you're still eating, let's blow up another one. Oh, you're still? Another one. One more piece of cake, one more second helping, another one. Oh, and by the way, once you run out of fat cells, guess what?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
Your fuel tanks are set. your body will look for stem cells to create brand new fat cells. And now you can keep on loading them up. Now think about this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
More fuel tanks, exactly. Wow. And this can happen over the course of your whole life. Now, excess body fat in this situation is exactly the overfilling of your fuel tanks. So if you follow your hardwiring, if you fill up your tank only to what it's supposed to be and don't overflow, you will actually follow those four patterns.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
But how many people do you know who control their eating in a way that's mindful so you're not overflowing your fuel tank? And the reason I'm actually saying this is that over the course of the year, You pick the holiday, all right? Right. You could talk about the winter holidays. You can talk about Easter. You could talk about the summer, 4th of July.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You could talk about any holiday you want, all right? Thanksgiving. You're talking about the experience we've all had, which is sitting down with family and friends with incredible food in front of you. And what you want to do is fill that plate up and eat it and then go back for seconds. Right. Okay. And how many of us have felt this? Every one of us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
You have one more or two more forkfuls after that second plate. And you're like, wait a minute. I shouldn't have done that. You know that you've actually overfilled your tank. Absolutely. Right. That's like not the click. That's the leak. You're now you're sitting in this toxic, flammable mess. And in fact, by the way, that extra fuel will indeed leak out of your fat cells eventually.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Eat THIS to Lose Fat, Prevent Disease, & Feel Better Now With Dr. William Li
And when I use the word flammable, it is very inflaming. So in other words, when you overeat too many calories, you blow up your body fat, it will eventually, like a water balloon, like it can't hold anymore, it starts to leak out. And now you've got fat that leaks out all throughout your body. You know the organ that actually picks up all that fat? No. It's the liver.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And the actual bacteria is called Lactobacillus plantarum. So I'm just sharing with you discoveries about the brain. And so what I got interested in terms of longevity, I'm not a neuroscientist and I'm not a dementia specialist, but I am somebody that is sort of really good at framing out.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If there's a connection between gut and brain, maybe we should be looking at the connection between gut and longevity. Interesting. And that's where some of the really exciting new stuff is coming out as well.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So first of all, people who live to 100 are called centenarians, right? Cent like 100. And we think that if you could live to 100, like that's 100 candles on your birthday cake. It's a big deal. That's a big deal, right? That's the big birthday. That is. All right. Now, I have to tell you, my great uncle lived to 104. Wow. Okay. I was at his 100th birthday party. Come on.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And I saw 100 candles on his cake. That's impressive. Yeah. So I know it can happen in my own family.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Not only did he have the energy to blow the candles out, he planned the party himself. Wow. Okay. He invited the guest list. He actually, I mean, he made the guest list. He planned the meal. He hosted the thing. So it's possible. Yeah. Okay. Now, most people think that, you know, living to 100 would be like a crapshoot, a long shot.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Like, oh, if I could, in a healthy way, live to 100, it would be great. But, you know, because I've been doing some research on this, it turns out today, you know how many people are 100 years old now? I think you said it was close to a million or over a million people. Today, there are 722,000 people who are centenarians living in the world.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Almost a quarter, three quarters of a million of people that are 100. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. A lot more than most people suspect. And what that means is that it is possible to actually get to there, which means that we can begin to study these people. And that's where I think some of the most exciting and provocative stuff actually is, right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah. And now we can actually study the poop in the microbiome of people who are 100 and older. So centenarians are people who live to 100. But it turns out that there's something called a super centenarian. or an alternate super ager. And these are people that live to 114, 115 years old. All right. Um, and like, they're really interesting.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So a research study was done out of Italy, looking at people across the lifespan from young adulthood, you know, like 20 to 40, 40 to 70, 70 to 90, 90 to a hundred. And then, and then like the super agers, okay. Like a hundred to 115 or under 14, um, And in today's technology, believe me, I think that wearables are great. I think that biohacking devices are quite amazing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But I think it's even more amazing that we can actually study the gut microbiome of these super-agers. Sure. So the question is, is there something in the gut microbiome in super-agers, 100 and above, that pop out as important. It's not present in people who don't live that long, okay? It turns out there are four bacteria that are standouts in people that live to 100 and beyond.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
They have more of it. Gotcha. They have more of it. Like for them, it really stands out as super big spike. Okay. These four bacteria, you want to hear about them? Yes. All right. They've got names that, one of the names you might've heard of, I think we talked about it my last time I was on a podcast, but there is four bacteria. One of them is called odoribacter. Odoribacter? Odoribacter. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
One of them is called oscillobacter. Um, one of them is called Kristin Sonnella. And then the fourth one is our old friend, Akkermansia. Okay. And we've talked about Akkermansia before, which, you know, it's sort of in making the rounds as a important gut bacteria.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I think the last time I was here, I was telling you that there've been discoveries that if you have cancer and you're on immunotherapy, which jacks up your own immune system to attack the cancers, not chemo, It's one of the most natural ways of approaching cancer. It's resulting in complete responses, meaning stage four to stage zero. Okay. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Turns out acromantia, having this gut bacteria may wind up being one of the critical pieces that you have to have to connect the dots for that to happen. Okay. To really get a great response. To help you reverse cancer. Yeah. Help your own immune system reverse cancer. Wow. Okay. Interesting. Gut bacteria talks to your immune system. 70% of your immune system lives in your gut. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And so you've got the right bacteria. They know how to speak the right language to your immune system to tell it to do what it's supposed to do.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah, exactly. Where's the other 30%? scattering different tissues in your body. Really? Wow. But you know, by the way, you know where the immune system lives in the gut? It's actually in the wall of the gut. Think of your gut as a garden hose. Cut that garden hose open and look in the cross section. There's a little empty stuff in the middle. That's where the bacteria live.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
That's where your immune system is. Your immune system lives in the wall of the garden hose. Inside the wall. And the bacteria is... And the bacteria live inside the cavity of the garden hose. Wow. And they talk to each other like college students shouting at each other through a cheap wall in a dorm room.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
The immune system lives in the... The walls. In between the drywall of the house. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Plants, whatever, yeah. Exactly. So what do we eat that affects our gut microbiome, the healthy bacteria, directly affects our immune system.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
More than we think. More than we think.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And I do know that there are people that are working on this. So, you know, you laid it out the right way, Lewis. You eat something, it goes into your mouth, it tumbles down through. Yeah. Whatever our human body, our human cells don't absorb goes on to feed our gut bacteria. Okay. Or poison our gut bacteria in the case maybe.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So, you know, you put something good in your system, it's going to do something good. Put something bad in your system, it's going to like mess up the bacteria. All right. And then our bacteria then begins to talk to our immune system, our brain. It helps to work on our healing mechanisms as well. I study antigenesis, how our blood vessels grow, that circulation. I've done research.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
There's one bacteria called Lactobacillus ruderi. Okay. And we found that if you have a wound in the lab and you feed these animals with a wound, this probiotic in their drinking water, you actually double the rate of wound healing from the inside out. Really?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Well, it's a, you can, you can, you can, it's a tablet or you can chew it. Chew or swallow. Lactobacillus ruderi. So Lactobacillus ruderi, by the way, is an amazing bacteria because it, it's normally in the gut. It's a healthy gut bacteria. So, you know, like we pulled it out and made it in something, but it's normally in the gut. Used to be present in everybody.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
after the 1930s and 40s with the advent of antibiotics coming out like it became maybe it's there maybe it's not not surprisingly okay and so a lot of people don't have it um but this bacteria lowers inflammation improves your immune system and by the way we do know for a fact this is one bacteria that text messages your brain to release a social hormone called oxytocin
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Oxytocin is the social hormone that your brain releases when you are super happy to see somebody. Go to the airport to meet a friend or a relative you haven't seen for a long time. You give them a big hug. You feel great. Yes. Oxytocin. Wow. Oxytocin is what your brain releases when you have a kiss. I'm not talking about like peck on the cheek. Passionate kiss. Deep, passionate, like French kiss.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yes. Oxytocin. Oxytocin is also what your brain releases when you have an orgasm. Okay. So this is a very important brain hormone. This bacteria makes your brain release it. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
This is just like a- No, this is like, I'm just telling you a normal- Well, I'm telling you, this is a normal physio- I'm telling you about the physiology, like how does it normally works. Okay. By the way, moms would- give the babies, her babies, this bacteria because, and this is like a crazy story, that normal gut bacteria at around seven or eight months of pregnancy
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
There'd be a signal sent to the gut. Hey, you know, the cake's almost done. All right? Bun's almost ready to come out of the oven. Right, right. All right? And then these bacteria would hit your ride on a blood cell. It's like calling an Uber. Send it to the baby. And then take the bacteria, your normal blood cells would take the bacteria, drop it off at the nipple, right? Uber, okay? Destination.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And then when the baby takes their first suckle, They get a rush. They get the rush of the bacteria. That's another way that moms actually give babies there. They get the injection of bacteria, including lactobacillus reuteri, right? Okay. Now, this bacteria- So it's important to do breastfeeding then? Oh, yeah. It's part of the reasons.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You also get immune cells and a lot of other good stuff from breastfeeding. Side note, how long should a mother breastfeed a newborn? You know, I think it's very individualized based on the mom and the baby. But like, I would say that the categorical yes, unless there's a medical reason not to do it, is you should definitely breastfeed. That's like the non-controversial thing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Because mom, I can tell you that the companies that make formula, they can't mimic mother nature. They cannot. They can try, but they can't do it. Not anywhere close. Right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah. I mean, there are legitimate medical reasons where, you know, it's impossible. There's complications, all that kind of stuff. And I totally get it. Like, then you got to make accommodations for it. But still, you know, it is always better for the baby, for the mom to actually breastfeed. By the way... So, I'm, you know, diving into all this stuff.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You find all this, like, fascinating stuff out about the gut microbiome. And from the beginning of life, like babies, all the way to the far reaches of life, like these super-agers. These four bacteria, by the way, you know, the odorobacter, the ocilobacter, the christinella, the acromantia, they all do... They all play functions in the body, and we're figuring them out.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
They improve your metabolism. They lower inflammation. They help your immunity. They lower your cholesterol. They help your brain health. Wow. So all the things that we know are important, these bacteria... seem to be doing the job in the super-agers. And there are foods that we can eat to grow these bacteria, to cultivate these bacteria.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So, you know, among all these four, let me kind of just throw a few out there for you. It turns out pomegranate is really good. It's got bioactives like elagitannins that actually help your gut nurture the akkermansia. Okay. It turns out that chili peppers can do the same thing. Black raspberry turns out can do the same thing. Oh, by the way, for acromantia, here's like a new discovery as well.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I'm all about like my science background is all about discovery and like pushing the frontiers of things. Hewn acromantia, it's a bacteria. A bacteria has a shell around it, like a beetle has a hard shell around it. Recently, they've discovered that around acromantia, the shell of acromantia, there's a piece of the acromantia that they gave it a name. It's called P, as in Peter, P9, acromantia.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
All right. They've now discovered that that P9 bacteria, the P9 fragment of acromantia, actually causes your body to secrete its own GLP-1. Which is the fat burning. Which is the same thing that we use for prescription weight loss drugs. Your bacteria has been doing this. Your healthy bacteria has been doing this behind the scenes this whole time. Interesting. Right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So this is what I'm saying is like, you know, we learn a lot from pharmaceuticals, but we might actually learn a lot more from what the gut bacteria are doing. Mother Nature is kind of like.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, probably a good number of our neurodegenerative diseases like dementia. I think that a lot of diseases of aging, for sure, the chronic diseases. We do know that- Diabetes is from- Oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Probably cancer, probably cardiovascular disease. The big ones, all the big ones are diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases, probably even lung diseases.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
More, it's a new frontier. It opens up the avenue for more solutions. And by the way, because the gut also connects to other parts of our body as well, you know, again, remember I told you, like I'm all about the common denominator. Pull that bow back and send a single arrow through as many things, many problems as you can.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Imagine if we could actually tackle mental health, mental wellness, and physical wellness all at the same time. And gut bacteria clearly plays a role. It's not the only thing, but it is the undiscovered country.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Exactly. Well, this is what we're beginning to really, I would say, unravel and take, you know, go into the layers of the onion to say, All right. If gut health is important for you in your normal active adult life, which we now know it is, what role could it play towards actually fostering, supporting, maybe even triggering those signals for longevity?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Listen, I mean, so I always talk about our body like this. We're all different. You know, we've got different genetics. We've got different, you know, like, of course, most people say they've got different metabolisms. But it turns out that when we are born, it's like taking a laptop out of the box. Our operating system is all set.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
When you and I are born, my operating system and your operating system, pretty much the same. Our OS was exactly the same. Yeah, exactly. All right. And so why is it that our, I mean, maybe your metabolism and my metabolism are closer than more different, but, you know, because we take care of ourselves, but why is it that people develop such divergence, so different?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Metabolisms, for example, or maybe longevity patterns. And it turns out, you know, just like your laptop, you know, if you take care of your laptop, you turn it off at night, you clear the case. Yeah. Yeah, you update the software. You make sure that you pad it when you're traveling. Clean it. Clean it, all that kind of stuff. And let's say I'm not so careful. I drop it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It gets really hot in the car. I spill coffee on it or whatever. What do you think is going to happen to our operating system? Or I download all kinds of stuff. Let's go break. Well, what's going to happen is that your computer operating system and mine are going to diverge. You're going to go this way. I'm going to go that way.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And actually, definitely for our metabolism, but probably for our longevity as well, You know, that's actually what happens. We start to diverge our patterns. We're all born the same way. And the reason I'm bringing this up, because I think for anybody who's listening to this or watching this, people tend to think I'm the fate of my genetics. You know, there's nothing I can do about it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So screw it. I'm just going to do whatever I want to do. Do whatever, drink whatever. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what I want to really emphasize is that we are all hardwired to actually heal. We can get back to that healing. We can heal to get back to our original state, which is designed like the laptop to function its entire life of the device with an intact operating system.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, what do you do with your what do you do with your computer? You know, hopefully you don't have to reinstall the operating system. Take good care of it. But if you don't take good care of it, clean the cache, do a virus scan, you know, like clean it up. Yeah. Take good care of it. And that's kind of how I think people should think about longevity is that it's not like just set a number.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Okay. This is not like booking a seat in a movie theater online. I'm going to get that number and that's what I want. Okay. Good luck. You know, I think that, you know, it's a journey. We need to focus on today and keep focusing on as far as we can actually see and keep doing that. You know, it's like longevity. You know, there's a quote from E.L.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Doctorow, who is a novelist, who once said, like, writing is like driving at night. You can't see beyond your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. And that's kind of how I think about longevity, living as long as you can go. I mean, you know, but you want to actually make sure that you're enjoying yourself and you're fully aware of what you're doing along the same line.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Good to see you, Luis. Thanks for having me.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
First of all, I think that We're able to recover a lot of our health and heal ourselves by making small moves. And this is really important. Not extreme moves. Big moves are... Some people can do them. Most people can't maintain big moves. All right? Small moves, almost anybody can actually do. And of course, people are very complicated. And the scenario you described is somebody who's like...
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
you know, been super unhealthy their whole lives and, you know, not done the right things and are overweight and they're alcohol. I mean, I think you were stacking, you know, I mean.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
How about this? Like the typical person who hasn't taken care of themselves for most of their life. Maybe not too extreme. What can they actually do? You know, and maybe it's not 90 days. I would say, you know, like, hey, you know, I think you should take a look at things that you can actually do in a month or two. give yourself a little runway. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Take it easy on yourself because, you know, stress and, you know, putting too much pressure on yourself doesn't actually help. But some of the principles I will tell you that is supported by evidence, scientific evidence and clinical evidence is, number one, I would say switch to eating more of a plant-based diet with whole foods. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So I just said a mouthful there because what I'm saying is that Eat more foods that you are buying whole and fresh and cook them yourself. Not processed. Not processed. Okay. So you can cut down on your ultra processed foods and focus more on your whole fresh foods. Immediately, you're going to be flooding your body with more of Mother Nature's pharmacy. That's pharmacy with an F, not a PH. Yes.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
All right. And that's going to start healing and prompting your gut to start doing it as well. But you're going to start getting a lot of stuff that is not prescription.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
First of all, I think that this idea that the word, I mean, we're now beginning to have this conversation about ultra processed foods as a society. Right. And it's damn well time that we actually did. All right. Because we do know that ultra processed foods aren't good for you. But the word process and ultra process often gets confused. So let's start there. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So raw foods are, I mean, whole food ingredients are like going to the grocery store and just eating the food without doing anything to it. Banana, apple. Exactly. Spinach. Oh, right. Carrot. Right. Single ingredient. Yeah, single ingredient. The salad bar is a great example of really just like whole individual ingredients that you put into a bowl and just eat them one by one.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Most foods that we cook, by cooking them, we're processing. Okay. I don't know if you've ever seen. So anything that we do to manipulate food is processing. So if you've ever made pasta by yourself, you take a big pile of flour and you crack some eggs in it and you just take your fingertips and work it and you then roll it up and roll it out and cut it up. And OK, so that's processing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So that's different than going to ultra processing, which is having a factory extrude the ingredients, shape them into animal crackers or whatever, and then Adding flavors, adding coloring, adding stabilizers, adding emulsifiers, and then throwing in all these like chemical ingredients that you can't pronounce. You have no idea what they do in there. That's ultra-processed.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah. And I'll tell you what we know as it relates to longevity. So first of all, I try to break it down really simply. Our body is like your car. When you put our food is our fuel. When you go to the filling station, you get a choice. You're going to actually put in like you got four different kinds of fuel you could put in. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If you put in good quality fuel, your car is going to drive better. Over the long haul, it's going to drive better. Every now and then you put in some crummy cheap fuel. It's all right. You're not going to notice. But if you do that day in and day out, You're going to notice it for sure. All right. So you put something good into your body, your body's going to respond really well.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You put something bad in your body, your body's also going to respond accordingly in a negative way. So simply, in simplest terms, that's actually what the difference is between ultraprocess, which isn't really good for you, and your body's going to revolt. And it's going to trash your body from the inside out in ways, some ways we know and other ways we don't even know yet.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
By the way, the whole conversation about ultraplastics, microplastics. All right. Hey, you know what? If you ever see the amount of machinery and plastic that has to, you know, the machines that the processed food has to go through. Who knows how much microplastics that you found in ultra processed foods. It's like leaching through. Yeah. That remains to be seen, you know.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And so what I say is that the least amount of processing you can have for your food, the more you can be assured that it's going to be a quality food that you're actually going to put into your body and your body will react well. So what's going on when you feed your food minimally processed whole foods? Your body is going to extract immediately as many of the polyphenols as it can out of it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It goes in your stomach. It's absorbed into your bloodstream. Those polyphenols go to town. The effect of a polyphenol, of eating polyphenols, and there's a lot of polyphenols in foods, strawberries, blueberries, an orange, an apple, broccoli, all those polyphenols basically get into your bloodstream. And think about it like starting the symphony of effects.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If you ever go to listen to a symphony orchestra, it's not just usually one instrument that goes off. The whole orchestra goes off, and that's what happens when we eat foods with polyphenols. The dietary fiber tumbles down. We might absorb some of it. Some that we don't absorb goes tumbles down all the way to your lower gut. What does it do? It feeds our gut microbiome.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We've got 39 trillion hungry little baby birds in a nest waiting to be fed, okay? And the dietary fiber we eat actually feeds them. How important is this? And we know it's really important, not only because dietary fiber seems to be, eating dietary fiber lowers the risk of diseases like dementia, diabetes, cancer, improves outcomes for cancer.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But for cancer, for example, there was a study from the MD Anderson Cancer Center that that looked at people with melanoma, okay, deadly form of skin cancer, getting immunotherapy. So they're getting the state-of-the-art treatment, requires their own immune system to go to town. That's the 70% in your gut, requires the gut bacteria. Gut bacteria need to eat, okay? Got to feed them.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Turns out for every five to six grams of dietary fiber, it decreased mortality by 30%. Mortality, death. Okay. Death. Decreased it. Decreased it by five to six grams of dietary fiber per day. Now, what does that look like? Dietary fiber, five to six grams? You get a medium-sized pear has five to six grams of dietary fiber. Not a big ask. Okay. You do one of those a day.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
One of those a day or the equivalent to get the dietary fiber. Of course. All right. So, and again, now you get all the polyphenols. And so like powerful effects. How quickly does it actually, does dietary fiber and these polyphenols, how quickly can they change the fate of your gut bacteria? Yeah. Within 24 hours. Come on. You can start getting changes.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So, and I wrote about this in my book, Eat to Beat Disease. You have kiwis, okay? And you measure the gut microbiome. And you can, within 24 hours after eating one kiwi, you can start to grow more healthy gut bacteria in the first day. All right. By four days, you start growing other bacteria that are healthy as well.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So, you know, you're asking me, what about the what about the dude who actually hasn't been taking care of himself? Look, this is what I'm telling you. Go eat some whole fresh foods that you prepare yourself. OK, cut down some of that ultra processed stuff. I'll talk about what the ultra processed stuff does in a second. And you'll start to get these changes. You're hardwired to do this.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Your body wants to do it. You know, let it do its job.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Well, the changes start fast. And so, you know, definitely within a few days, you will start to feel much better. I mean, listen, you ever go on like a crummy food bender and then, right? Don't feel good. Don't feel good. And then you say, you know what? This sucks. I'm going to actually like eat healthy now. You start getting it back pretty quick.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You're like, I am so glad. I'm doing this, right? So the changes happen fast. So I think, you know, so number one, it is within everyone's power to be able to actually make these moves, okay, that count, simply by shifting to whole good healthy foods.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Because, you know, the bad stuff with the artificial preservatives and artificial coloring and all that, you know, the simplest way to think about what they might do besides dump chemicals into your body is they can kill your gut bacteria, right? That's not what you want to do.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, killing the gut bacteria, by the way, is like, we're talking about the symphony, Beethoven's fifth, you know, where Handel's Messiah, big choir, you know, in a big concert hall, you know, like hurting your gut bacteria, like ultra processed foods and all these artificial things. It's like sending in, um, uh, uh,
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It's like sending in hooligans from a British football game screaming into a concert hall and kicking over all the instruments.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Great questions. Okay, so first of all, I am a cancer researcher, but I will tell you how I got into cancer research and then ultimately into longevity research. I'm interested in common denominators of health or of disease. In other words, in academic research, you see people taking an inch of a territory and diving a mile deep, and they're super experts in this stuff.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Well, alcohol will do it. Smoking also can affect it. Not getting enough good sleep, not getting exercise can also affect your gut.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Oh, yeah. Vaping is also, I mean, look, cigarettes, vaping, cigars, pipes, it's all part of the same continuum. There's nothing better about vaping. In fact, research has actually shown that the flavoring that they put in vapes are actually probably even worse than some of the stuff that you have just in a plain cigarette.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
No, not at all.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah, it impacts it in a negative way. Really? Yeah, because guess what? All those chemicals, instead of eating them, now you're inhaling them and they go right into your bloodstream. Instead of from your gut, your stomach, it just goes right into the bloodstream for your lungs. And now, you know, everything is affected.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
That 60,000 mile channel of highways and byways is delivering whatever the menthol flavor or the whatever flavor you've got all over the place. You really don't want that.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
In fact, it's so significant that some of the researchers looking at environmental toxins have been even looking at not only smoking and vaping, but looking at even cooking. Think about the line cooks at a restaurant.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And all the fryer smoke.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Listen, you and I- That was good. We probably have spent more time, we've probably done our time standing in front of a grill in the summer, right? Of course. And we're- flipping the burgers or grilling the steaks. Hey, you know, like that's part of the, you know, that's part of growing up, you know, and doing our thing, all right? Think about all that stuff that we're breathing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Okay? Fortunately, you know, like most people aren't grilling everything. It's minimal, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're a line cook, in a restaurant. You're going there doing that- Eight hours a day. ... at the station eight hours a day every day. Okay? So what I'm saying is that what we expose our bodies to makes a big difference. So these are choices that we make.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And researchers and public health and policymakers, I think that there's starting to be a convergence And recognizing that, you know, if we want a healthier society and healthier individuals, all right, we got to just be a little bit more alert to the fact that what we're exposed to can have like a really, really big impact in ways that we didn't think about before.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Now's the time to think about it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Less ultra processed.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
No, I think that's probably a good first step. I mean, of course, there's a lot of little bitties. Second thing I would tell you is don't overeat. Don't overeat. Look, we live in a culture of abundance. The more there is, the more you want to eat, right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Easy excess, okay? And easy excess is the cheap stuff, which is the ultra processed stuff, which is definitely the bad stuff, right? So not the good stuff.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, honestly, I would tell you, don't even, don't even, don't even overeat the good stuff. And here's the reason. Really? Oh yeah. Because the fact of the matter is, is that our bodies are designed to take in food as fuel. All right. Like remember I gave you the analogy, the gas, the car at the filling station, getting your tank filled up. Right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So that's basically how we interact with our food. We're just like in a car. You don't really think about your fuel until the meter runs low, the gauge runs low. Then you're like, shoot, where can I find a gas station? That's all you can think about. And that's basically how our body works. Like we don't think about eating until, you know, our fuel tank goes, you know, your tank's running low.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Now, like, OK, I got to get something to eat. OK, so that's the same way. And what happens is that when we. go to the filling station with a car, we put hopefully high quality fuel into our gas tank, which is a metal container in the side of the car. We fill it up, right? And what happens when the gas tank in a car fills up to the top, it goes click, and now no more gas comes out.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I took a different approach. I wanted to figure out how everything was interconnected and what are the common denominators between cancer, heart disease, blindness, arthritis, Alzheimer's. If you could drain the Pacific Ocean, how do all those islands connect?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We get out, we put it away, okay? And then we drive off, right? Our tank's full. Our body doesn't have the clicker.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If we had a clicker?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Don't burn it now. Don't run. I'm going to tell you what the, we kind of do have a clicker, and I'm going to tell you what it is. If you eat slowly, you will actually feel satiated, full, and if you stop there, stop. Before you're full, you're satisfied before you're full. Now, this requires a little bit of finesse for you to know yourself, okay?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And you want more and more.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So that's the key thing. Feeling satisfied, knowing you're satisfied and stopping no matter what else. Like, I don't care if you haven't cleaned your plate. Stop. Stop. Quit the clean plate club. Yeah, that's good. Okay. You got to quit it. All right. In that case, you shouldn't have put so much food in your plate to begin with.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Right. So this is my overarching second piece of advice for somebody who wants to take better care of themselves. Don't put too much food in the plate. Don't feel like you have to clean the plate. Take your time eating so that when your stomach starts to get full, you'll start feeling that you're satisfied. You don't have to feel full. Like we're trained to eat until we're full. Yeah. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But you know, like, listen, anybody who's been at a big Thanksgiving dinner will know this, right? So you've been hungry all day. You can't wait for that meal with all the amazing food and all the amazing family. Look forward to it every year. And you go there and it's time to eat and you pile your plate up.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
and you're eating okay and you're like oh my god i gotta go back and get more right so you go back and get more you take one forkful of that second plate and you cross that line you got all this food left over yeah and then you feel like oh man i don't think i can eat anymore and then you are on the couch feeling crummy for the rest of the day that's crossing the line you ate so fast you didn't pay attention right so second piece of advice for people don't overeat okay
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And my feeling is that if you could get an economy of scale of knowledge, if you could figure out those connections, you could pull the bow back and send a single arrow through multiple conditions at the same time. Really? That was my approach, which is why I started the Angiogenesis Foundation. It's a not-for-profit organization. It's focused on the common denominator of blood vessels. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Third thing is something that everybody can do. By the way, Lewis, I'm telling you, all things don't cost a lot of money. Exactly. In fact, they will save you money.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
All right? That's the key thing. You don't have to be a super wealthy person and buy all this and order all these supplements and do all this crazy stuff and track your glucose and all that. You don't need to do all this stuff. This is a simple way to heal yourself and get started because your body's got the operating system already hardwired into you. Yes. It's an easy first step for anybody.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Now, third thing is every now and then skip a meal. I do it about three times a week, two to three times a week. Easiest meal for me to skip is breakfast. OK, I get up. I take I take my time. If I if my workday starts early, I've got a ton of stuff I got to do. Sometimes I'm so busy, I just don't even have time to eat breakfast. And that's totally okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We were told by our moms, we got to eat breakfast in order to learn something at school, have enough energy. Totally not true. By not eating breakfast, what we are immediately doing is, It's extending this fasting period from overnight when we weren't eating after, you know, when we went to sleep. Now you're still not eating until let's call it lunchtime.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You've extended your, quote, fasting period. Yes. Maybe 12 hours. OK, that's the easiest way to do intermittent fasting. You don't have to like go into a schedule and do anything else. I always tell people, like, don't bother going into these crazy plans. Just skip a meal or two.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And even if you don't do it every single day, which, you know, it's probably hard for everybody to skip breakfast or skip lunch every single day. But if you do it two or three times a week, OK. You'll be fine. Yeah. These are the easy steps. This is the third thing I would do. Fourth thing I would do is say, get on your feet and go for a walk after dinner. Yes. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And by the way, when I'm saying a walk, I'm saying like a brisk walk. Like, you know, don't drag your feet. Walk until, you know, like you're feeling it, you know, like you're feeling like you're getting some good exercise. If you can do it with a friend or a family member, even better. Catch up on things. If you don't have anybody to walk with, hey, there's something called podcast. Yeah, exactly.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Listen to School of Greatness. Yes. Okay? Listen to an episode. Listen to this episode. All right? And by the time it's done, you'll have actually gotten some pretty good exercise and movement. If you can, squeeze it in to do a workout plan or join a gym or go swimming or cycling. More power to you, but I'm saying you can do it. Walk. The really, really easy way anybody can do it is just walk.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Unless you're in a wheelchair, okay, this is something you can do to actually start to gain your health back. All right? That is the next thing. And then the final thing that I think is a start, because you can't stack too many things on, is try to get some good sleep. Yes. Just get some good sleep. And by the way, you know why?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Because when you sleep really, really well, and look, even if you don't sleep well now, there's at some point in your life you did get good sleep. So we all know how to do it, all right? When you get good sleep, deep REM sleep, dreaming sleep, what happens is that your body... regenerates itself. Your stem cells start to regenerate, your brain cleans itself out.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
By the way, have you heard of the glymphatic system in the brain?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Okay. So there is a hidden sewer system in our brain called the glymphatic system. You've heard of lymphatic system, but the glymphatic system, they say glymph because the cells in our brain are called glia. G-L-I-A. So glymphatic system is a sewer system that's normally closed during the day.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We've got 400 miles worth of blood vessels in our brain. And that's a fraction of the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our body. And it connects every organ, every cell. And so these are the highways and byways of health. And when they're messed up, compromised, diseased, that becomes the common denominator of disease.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And so, you know, like here we are during the day, you know, we're doing this podcast, we're doing other things. You know, you prep before, you got to do some stuff afterwards. Me too. All right. You know what's happening? We're building up toxins in our brain, oxidative stress, all kinds of stuff that's going on in our brain. When we sleep, two nights, Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Hopefully I'm going to get some good sleep and hopefully you too. Yes. All right. When we get good sleep and only when we get good sleep, the glymphatic systems open up. It's like the sewers of Paris, drains the toxins from your brain. All right. And that's how we regenerate the freshness of our brain. That's why they say, get a good night's sleep before an exam. All right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And if you don't, by the way, you get brain fog. You know why you get brain fog?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Okay. Now, I think in general, what I would say is that I have an opinion about alcohol, okay? And my opinion about alcohol is this. From the time that humans started to grow grains and ferment them, all right, we've been having alcohol, and alcohol is part of human ritual. We celebrate birthdays and funerals and wakes and holidays with it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So to me, I think that, you know, drinking some wine, having some alcohol is really part of our humanity. All right. The problem becomes when we actually start really abusing it and drinking too much of it. And here's a reason. The alcohol. in all alcoholic beverages, the ethanol, okay, which is present in all of them, that's a toxin.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So whether you drink a little or a lot, you know, the bottom line is it's still a toxin. So the more you have, the more toxicity your body's... The more toxin your body's got to purge. Yes. Every now and then, it's probably not a big deal. Like, sell a... have a great glass of wine or bottle of wine on your birthday. Don't drink the whole bottle. Sure, sure. Enjoy it with some friends, okay?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Like social drinking in that context, I think is okay. But if you're doing it every night, just one glass. What I would tell you is this, you know, your body's got to work against that to clear it. And everybody's body is different. You know, your liver might work a little bit more efficiently than mine. So you're going to clear a little bit better.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And the faster you clear it, the better the sleep you're going to get. And by the way, alcohol itself is a brain toxin. So it knocks out a few neurons. You got to regenerate those. So you're going to regenerate them when you're sleeping. Right. So it's all interlinked. And so I don't like to character assassinate any food, really.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I think, you know, like, you know, you got to you got to enjoy if you're going to want you want to live for a long time. You want aiming for longevity. You know, life is for the living. So you've got to live your life. I'm a big believer in that. But just but you got to be aware of what it is you're putting into your body and how your body is responding to it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah, there's more for all these bacteria. Let's not go through every single one because this is still a relatively new area of research for me. But I'll tell you, I was surprised to discover that resistant starches can grow some of them as well. You know what a resistant starch is? Starch, right? It's a carb, right? Like rice and all this other kind of stuff. Banana, all right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
When you actually change the starch so it becomes a little harder to digest, like you refrigerate day-old rice, okay? It becomes a resistant starch. A potato. You're going to roast some potatoes. All right. You stick them in the fridge. The next day, the natural chemistry of the potato, the starches changes. You got some resistant starch.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So that's really kind of like my unique angle to look at diseases, anything from cancer to blindness to wound healing. And now I'm looking at aging, you know, in a slightly different way, which is I've had a whole career of building brick by brick, looking at what are the hallmarks of, hallmarks of cancer, hallmarks of diabetes, hallmarks of aging now. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Resistant starch can grow some of those bacteria that are found in ultra agers, super agers. Okay. Also some natural foods, green bananas, resistant starch, plantains, resistant starch. All right. So any roasted potato, stick in the fridge, have it the next day. You actually have created your own resistant starch. So those actually also can help grow some of the healthy gut bacteria as well.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Amazing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We don't know, and it's going to be different for different medicines. I will tell you that some medicines might actually be very harmful. And I think that we're just still at the beginning of discovering. Our consciousness has only been recently raised as researchers to think about the gut microbiome. There's a lot more work to be done. A few years in. We're just a few years in.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But I'll tell you, there are some surprises. And I know that on your program, you've actually had people coming in to talk about longevity drugs like rapamycin and metformin. You know that metformin has been discovered to improve your gut microbiome. Really? Yeah. So medicines aren't always bad. Some of them might actually be good. We're just starting to figure this out and understand it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We don't really know yet. And I think that's really part of this new frontier. I'm really excited about because I think that, you know, when I went to medical school and I was learning and studying and reading all these books and, you know, like we're digesting 4000 years of medical knowledge. You graduate medical school with your stethoscope around your neck, figuring that, you know, like, OK.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I probably know most of what there is to know. Heck no. We are still discovering new cells in the body, new organs in the body, new pieces of our physiology and how our body works that we didn't even imagine. So that's what's exciting to me as a medical researcher, as a physician, as a scientist.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And then, you know, like part of what I do is, you know, as I write books, I like to translate some of the most exciting but also pragmatic, like practical things. We're discovering that you can actually do something about.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Oh, I think it's huge. As it relates to the gut, we do know that it's a two-way street. So if we're depressed or, you know, like some other thing is going on in our brain, inevitably the gut's going to be affected in some way. Really? As I said, like we don't have it all figured out yet. But it's impacting it. Probably not for the better.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And it may actually, it may be a... A gut signaling the brain? Signaling back to the brain, you know? Like two people playing pickleball. Interesting. You know, like batting, you know, like nastiness back to each other. That could well be happening, okay, with brain and gut. We do know that it can be good, but... You know, there's beneficial gut-brain interactions.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So it makes sense that there might be some negative ones. But I can tell you that I think that too often we disconnect mental wellness with physical wellness. We call them two separate things. You know, the psychiatrist or the therapist deals with this. And, you know, medical doctors say, oh, well, I deal with the liver or I deal with the kidney.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
you know, what we're beginning to realize is there's all this interconnectivity. And again, back to what I do. I'm all about the common denominator of health and the common denominators of disease. And we can actually take a science-based approach to look at, you know, how everything is connected. It's that idea of like draining the Pacific Ocean and seeing how the islands are connected.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And that is actually how we advance the science. That's how we advance our understanding of ourselves. And the quest for longevity, immortality, okay? I like how you said the quest for immortality being an ages-old enterprise, okay? Suit. I think it's part of our humanity. Like we always want to know how we can actually go beyond our own limitations.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We get a lot more mileage out of that than just taking an inch wide and going a mile deep and thinking that you've got the answer.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And that's connected to longevity because one of the goals that we all want to have is we want to be clear in mind. We want to have good cognition. It's not just about memory. It's really about decision-making. What am I going to do today? What am I going to do next week? And making good decisions, right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I mean, you know, like I just think that rather than pick a number, you know, I'm going to do 150 or whatever. Let's think about this whole journey and everything we need to do to enjoy life. where we're going. You want to go on vacation, right? You want to really plan your vacation. Where are you going to eat? What are you going to pack? You know, what's the weather going to be like?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I can only tell you what I do. Okay. All right. Because I don't think I can really fairly address, this should be for everybody, the non-negotiables. But I'll tell you for me, I know that it's hard for me to get enough vitamin D. So I'll take a vitamin D supplement. I know it's, even though I enjoy seafood, And I like plant-based sources of omega-3s. It's hard for me to get enough.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So an omega-3 supplement is good for my brain, good for my heart. It's good for my muscles. So I take an omega-3 supplement. I think those are, for me, non-negotiables. I just don't get enough. And I think most people don't get enough either, honestly. Because I do work in this area, you know, I have an unfair advantage of seeing the results of research and thinking, oh, wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Why don't I do this if I've been seeing this? So I do take some probiotics, and it's all based on the research that I've actually seen. So that bacteria I told you, Lactobacillus ruderi, you can find it in food. Sometimes it's in yogurt. It's in sourdough bread, but I don't want to eat too much sourdough bread. It's a carb.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Lactobacillus is what makes the sourdough bread tangy, which people like, but you can't eat that much sourdough bread. Lactobacillus ruderi is also in... the Italian version of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. It's so good. Big. Yeah. You know, orange wheels. Okay. It's a starter bacteria for it. You don't want to be eating too much of that. Shave a little bit on. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But you're not going to be eating like mouthfuls of it. So I can't get enough of that. And I've seen enough research from what I've done to know that it's good for my immune system. It lowers inflammation. I've seen really good data in animals from the lab that it reduces the development of colon tumors and breast tumors. It also improves your metabolism, your lipids.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It text messages your brain for that oxytocin. What's that one called again? Lactobacillus ruderi. And by the way, it's lactobacillus ruderi. It's spelled R-E-U-T-E-R-I. I'll give it to you so you can put in the show notes. Yeah, please. Lactobacillus ruteri. And I'll tell you, I actually order the kind, like this is stuff you get on Amazon. I get the kind that you can chew. Okay, I like that.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Children's chewable version. You know why? Because there's other data in humans that this healthy bacteria in the gut, remember I told you the gut starts in the mouth, actually kills the bacteria that causes cavities. Really? I brush my teeth. Now I'll chew up a couple of these babies. I'll swish them around and then I'll swallow it. Good for the upstairs, good for the downstairs. I'm in. Right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And remember I told you, we're beginning to see links between gum disease, gingivitis, bad bacteria in your mouth, and dementia. Okay. So, you know, I didn't have to convince you very hard on that one. No, I'm in. All right. I'm in.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I think that's probably ultimately what has led this interest. And of course, it's a huge interest now. I mean, if you look at the success of books like Outlived by Peter Tia and David Sinclair's books, people, you know, they go gonzo over these like incredible books written by really amazing people.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I do. And then, you know, and then I happen to be involved with the research on acromantia. And I know that there are people say it's been so talked about on, you know, on social media and YouTube and podcasts. I like, I do the research on it. Okay. So I, and my colleagues are doing the research on it. So I I'm looking at it and this bacteria actually is really, really important.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And I'm a cancer researcher, so I know just how important that can be. So I do take that probiotic, but I also don't rely on probiotics. From my acromancy, I also drink some pomegranate juice and I'll have dried cranberries. I use supplements as a top-off. which is what supplement means. Yeah, yeah. All right. But I try to get most of my- Of foods. Things from foods, yeah. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Acromantia. A-K-K-E-R-M-A-N-S-I-A. That's the probiotic name or not? That's the name of the bacteria and the probiotic. Oh, it is? Okay, cool. Yeah. Okay, gotcha.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Those are the main ones I do. Gotcha. I mean, look, everyone's going to be different. Everyone's going to have different needs. I might add some, you know, based on research that's coming out. So, you know, I try not to create a little, you know, a box of things that to say, you have to do this. Of course. Or, you know, you're not going to be healthy.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
This is what I do, and people always ask me, so I'm happy to share it with you. That's great.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah, three times a week. And then we actually add more content whenever I can. And the way that I train my YouTube is that I look really closely at what people, my audience and people who hear about me, they want to ask me. So I get lots of, I could collect information, like what are the questions that people want to know?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And then I create my YouTube content based on answering what people want to know.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, confusion about what they should do. They get so much misinformation, it becomes confusing for them. And so what I always try to tell people to do is I'm trying to give you information that's based on science that I know to be true as well as we understand it now. You can count on me to be a trusted source of information.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I'm a scientist, so if I don't know it, I'm going to tell you I don't know. That's okay, because we can't know everything. And just like what we talked about today, I'm a pragmatic, I'm a practical person. Do what's practical. You don't have to do what's expensive. Health is not elitism. Health is universal. It's something we can all do because we're all hardwired to actually heal.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We're all hardwired to have good metabolism. We're hardwired to have our health defenses. So if you have been off the path, don't worry. You can get back on it. Just follow your own signals with a little bit of guidance and you can get there.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But I'll tell you, the first emperor of China, okay, set off to try to find that little elixir, the vial. Remember that Indiana Jones movie where they're looking for some like vial of immortality? Hey, you know, this has been going on for a long time. And the first emperor of China didn't find it. He wound up dying.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah, it's so exciting what we're actually finding out in terms of how to live long and live well. To me, that's the alignment. You want years and quality at the same time. That's what I'm focused on like a laser beam.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Thanks for inviting me.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And before he died, he built like the 10,000 terracotta warriors to look over his tomb. That was his ultimate solution to immortality. That was before science.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Before Google's Calico to try to conquer blindness, before all the amazing work that's going on right now to build up those brick by brick by brick, you know, and putting in the grout in between to be able to build up that wall of understanding. So we are still looking. We're beginning to have a better understanding.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But my approach to it is to say like, all right, so what are the common denominators of people who live a really long time? What are we finding? And, you know, my friend, and I think yours is Dan Buettner, you know, from the Blue Zones. The guy is amazing because he found like, oh, it's place. It's where you live and what you do in terms of where you live that actually can contribute. So
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I'm a researcher, so I ask that same question from a slightly different perspective. Right, right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
All right. So let me take you on a little bit of a journey into our gut. Now, everybody knows that gut health is important for overall health. And even the people who are the experts, you know, and I've gotten into this space now, we don't know entirely. We don't have the whole answer. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And you know, you're talking to a real scientist when because real scientists tell you we don't know everything. Right. All right. So but what's good scientists do is they observe. We take a look at what's going on and we see what is common, what we've come up with ideas.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And so what's really interesting is to think about gut health, not just in terms of somebody in the middle of their life, you know, like a 30 or 40 or 50 year old person who, you know, has inflammation and how do I actually get over my autoimmunity? That's important too. But I got interested in it because we're beginning to understand that people who have dementia
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
actually have problems with their gut health. And what is the connection between your gut and your brain? Well, that's a gut-brain axis. But what if the problem with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, vascular dementia, what if the common denominator actually isn't the little sticky plaque or the little single molecule that people have been diving on and billions of dollars have been spent?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
What if there is another factor that has been hidden in plain sight? which is our gut bacteria.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
The brain, yeah. And until recently, we didn't have the tools. We didn't have the tools in the toolbox to be able to look at it. But today... And this is pretty new. We can actually take a sample of poop, okay, send it off to a testing machine, and I'm oversimplifying, obviously.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And get the lab details, and we are able to do the crime scene investigation of our poop to figure out what bacteria are in there. And we get a pretty good approximation, and we can find out what are the standouts, okay? So, look, there's 39 trillion bacteria. You can't count every single one. 39 trillion? Yeah, in your gut microbiome. Wow. So we can't get every single one. But...
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If there are standouts, oh man, you've got like four or five really bad guys that are like popping out in high levels. We know you got a problem. Or if you're missing a handful of really good guys, all right, we're beginning to say, maybe these good guys are playing a bigger role. And this is the story that's emerging on dementia, that your gut vector, and by the way, it's not just in your poop.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
your gut starts in your mouth and we're beginning to realize that gum disease and bacteria that are either growing or not growing in your mouth might actually be one of the trigger points for dementia. Gum disease. Gum disease.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
For food, yes. But all throughout, from your mouth all the way to your tailpipe, you've got bacteria growing. Yes. By the way, so the two biggest concentration of bacteria, when you talk about gut bacteria, one is in your mouth. Our mouth is packed with bacteria. Good bacteria.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
When bad bacteria overgrow, you get bad breath, you get cavities, you get gum disease, you get all the things that, you know, like, you know pretty quickly, right? Or your bed partner actually knows. Sure, sure. Okay. So there's a big concentration in your mouth, and we're still beginning to figure out what those are.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Your lower gut, which we classically think as gut bacteria, your gut microbiome, you know where it is in the gut? Do you know what part of the gut, anatomy-wise, what section of the gut? The lower gut? Yeah, lower gut. I have no idea. So imagine your gut from mouth to end, anus, 40 feet long.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
The last 25% is your colon- Uh-huh. Right? You've heard of colon cancer and everything else, or colonoscopy. So that's the last part. It's basically where everything gets, all the stuff gathers before you get rid of it. But that's actually where the gut bacteria is. And it's in a particular part, a little sac in your colon called the cecum, spelled C-E-C-U-M. And you know what's in the cecum?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It's the appendix. Now, a lot of people have had their appendix out. Okay, we used to think it's an unnecessary organ. Maybe, just maybe, that appendix plays a role that we didn't suspect. What's that role? We don't know, but we suspect it might play some air traffic control role for your gut microbiome. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
All right, so what I get excited about is new discoveries about our body that we didn't know. By the way, we're talking about gut brain. Do you know that recently- We've discovered that your brain has its own microbiome. We've got bacteria that grow naturally, healthily in our brain. Wow. And it's 20% of the same bacteria that's in our gut that's actually found in our brain.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And we're beginning to sort of ask new questions about what might be some of the contributing factors, not just the tiny little plaques in Alzheimer's disease, because by the way, We've actually made a little bit of progress in that area, but after billions and billions of dollars, like we haven't made enough. Really? Right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I mean, if you think about it, like if you want to return on investment, you would not actually call Alzheimer's research to be good because for the bang for the buck that we put in there, we're actually getting very little bang.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Not really, but I'll tell you that what I'm excited by is this idea that maybe there could, this is the theory, could there be some bad bacteria or the absence of some good bacteria in your mouth even, okay, or the lower gut that actually is a trigger for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
By the way, there is a bacteria, a probiotic that's been researched to show that it can actually really slow down the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. It's called Lactobacillus plantarum, and it's a probiotic called PS-128. And, you know, it's surprising that a probiotic could have such a profound effect on the brain. What is that called again? PS, like Paul and Sam, 128.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
More, it's a new frontier. It opens up the avenue for more solutions. And by the way, because the gut also connects to other parts of our body as well, you know, again, remember I told you, like I'm all about the common denominator. pull that bow back and send a single arrow through as many things, many problems as you can.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Imagine if we could actually tackle mental health, mental wellness, and physical wellness all at the same time. And, you know, gut bacteria clearly plays a role. It's not You know, it's not the only thing, but, you know, it is the undiscovered country.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, this is what we're beginning to really, I would say, unravel and go into the layers of the onion to say, all right, if gut health is important for you in your normal active adult life, which we now know it is, What role could it play towards actually fostering, supporting, maybe even triggering those signals for longevity?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I mean, maybe, listen, I mean, so I always talk about our body like this. We're all different. You know, we've got different genetics. We've got different, you know, like, of course, most people say they've got different metabolisms. But it turns out that when we are born, it's like taking a laptop out of the box. Our operating system is all set.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
When you and I are born, my operating system and your operating system, pretty much the same. Our OS was exactly the same.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
All right. And so why is it that our, I mean, maybe your metabolism and my metabolism are closer than more different, but, you know, because we take care of ourselves, but why is it that people develop such divergent, so different metabolisms, for example, or maybe longevity patterns? And it turns out, you know, just like your laptop, you know, if you take care of your laptop,
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You turn it off at night. You clear the case. Yeah, you update the software. You make sure that you pad it when you're traveling. Clean it. Clean it, all that kind of stuff. And let's say I'm not so careful. I drop it. It gets really hot in the car. I spill coffee on it or whatever. What do you think is going to happen to our operating system? Or I download all kinds of stuff. Let's go break.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, what's going to happen is that your computer operating system and mine are going to diverge. You're going to go this way. I'm going to go that way. And actually, probably for our definitely for our metabolism, but probably for our longevity as well. You know, that's actually what happens that we start to diverge our patterns. We're all born the same way.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And the reason I'm bringing this up, because I think for anybody who's listening to this or watching this, people, people tend to think I'm the fate of my genetics. You know, there's nothing I can do about it. So screw it. I'm just going to do whatever I want to do, whatever, drink, whatever. Yeah. You know, what I want to really emphasize is that we are all hardwired to actually heal.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We can get back to that healing. We can heal to get back to our original state, which is designed like the laptop to function its entire life of the device with an intact operating system. You know, what do you do with your what do you do with your computer? You know, you know, hopefully you don't have to reinstall the operating system. Take good care of it.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
But if you don't take good care of it, clean the cache, do a virus scan, you know, like clean it up. Yeah. Take good care of it. And that's kind of how I think people should think about longevity is that it's not like just set a number. Okay. This is not like booking a seat in the movie theater online. I'm going to get that number and that's what I want. Okay. Good luck.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You know, I think that, you know, it's a journey we need to focus on today and keep focusing on as far as we can actually see and keep doing that. You know, it's like longevity. You know, there's a quote from E.L. Doctorow, who is a novelist, who once said, like, writing is like driving at night. You can't see beyond your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And that's kind of how I think about longevity, living as long as you can go. I mean, you know, but you want to actually make sure that you're enjoying yourself and you're fully aware of what you're doing along the same line.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
The rise is important, but honestly, like, so is what's directly in front of you.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
First of all, I think that
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
we're able to recover a lot of our health and heal ourselves by making small moves and then this is really important not extreme moves big moves are some people can do them most people can't maintain big moves all right small moves almost anybody can actually do and of course you know people are very complicated and you know that the scenario you described is somebody who's like
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
you know, been super unhealthy their whole lives and, you know, not done the right things and are overweight and they're alcohol. I mean, I think you were stacking, you know, I mean.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
How about this? Like the typical person who hasn't taken care of themselves for most of their life. Maybe not too extreme. What can they actually do? You know, and maybe it's not 90 days. I would say, you know, like, hey, you know, I think you should take a look at things that you can actually do in a month or two. Give yourself a little runway. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Take it easy on yourself because stress and, you know, putting too much pressure on yourself doesn't actually help. But some of the principles I will tell you that is supported by evidence, scientific evidence and clinical evidence is, number one, I would say switch to eating more of a plant based diet. with whole foods, all right?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So I just said a mouthful there because what I'm saying is that eat more foods that you are buying whole and fresh and cook them yourself. Not processed. Not processed, okay? So you can cut down on your ultra-processed foods and focus more on your whole fresh foods. Immediately, you're gonna be flooding your body with more of Mother Nature's pharmacy. That's pharmacy with a F, not a PH. Yes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
All right? And that's going to start healing and prompting your gut to start doing it as well. But you're going to start getting a lot of stuff that is not prescription.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
First of all, I think that this idea that the word, I mean, we're now beginning to have this conversation about ultra processed foods as a society, right? And it's damn well time that we actually did. All right, because we do know that ultra processed foods aren't good for you. But the word process and ultra process often gets confused. So let's start there. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So raw foods are, I mean, whole food ingredients are like going to the grocery store and just eating the food without doing anything to it. Banana, apple. Exactly. Spinach. Oh, right. Carrot. Right. Single ingredient. Yeah, single ingredient. The salad bar is a great example of really just like whole individual ingredients that you put into a bowl and just eat them one by one.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Most foods that we cook, by cooking them, we're processing. Okay. I don't know if you've ever seen. So anything that we do to manipulate food is processing. So if you've ever made pasta by yourself, you take a big pile of flour and you crack some eggs in it and you just take your fingertips and work it and you then roll it up and roll it out and cut it up. Okay. So that's processing. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So that's different than going to ultra-processing, which is having a factory extrude the ingredients, shape them into animal crackers or whatever, and then adding flavors, adding coloring, adding stabilizers, adding elucifiers, and then throwing in all these chemical ingredients that you can't pronounce. You have no idea what they do in there. That's ultra-processed.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
When you put our food is our fuel. When you go to the filling station, you get a choice. You're going to actually put in like you got four different kinds of fuel you could put in. All right. If you put in good quality fuel, the car is going to drive better over the long haul. It's going to drive better. Every now and then you put in some crummy cheap fuel, it's all right.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You're not going to notice. But if you do that day in and day out, you're going to notice it for sure. All right. So you put something good into your body, your body's going to respond really well. You put something bad in your body, your body's also going to respond accordingly in a negative way.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So simply, in simplest terms, that's actually what the difference is between ultraprocess, which isn't really good for you, and your body's going to revolt. And it's going to trash your body from the inside out in ways, some ways we know and other ways we don't even know yet. By the way, the whole conversation about ultra plastics, microplastics. All right. Hey, you know what?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
If you ever see the amount of machinery and plastic that has to, you know, the machines that the processed food has to go through. Yeah. Who knows how much microplastics are actually found in ultra-processed foods. It's like leaching through, yeah. That remains to be seen.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
And so what I say is that the least amount of processing you can have for your food, the more you can be assured that it's going to be a quality food that you're actually going to put into your body and your body will react well. So what's going on when you feed your food minimally processed whole foods, your body is going to extract immediately as many of the polyphenols as it can out of it.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
It goes in your stomach. It's absorbed into your bloodstream. Those polyphenols go to town. The effect of a polyphenol, of eating polyphenols, and there's a lot of polyphenols in foods, Strawberries, blueberries, an orange, an apple, broccoli. All those polyphenols basically get into your bloodstream and think about it like starting the symphony of effects.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
If you ever go to listen to a symphony orchestra, it's not just usually one instrument that goes off. The whole orchestra goes off. And that's what happens when we eat foods with polyphenols. The dietary fiber tumbles down. We might absorb some of it. Some of it we don't absorb. It tumbles down all the way to your lower gut. What does it do? It feeds our gut microbiome.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We've got 39 trillion hungry little baby birds in a nest waiting to be fed, okay? And the dietary fiber we eat actually feeds them. How important is this? And we know it's really important, not only because dietary fiber seems to be, eating dietary fiber lowers the risk of diseases like dementia, diabetes, cancer, improves outcomes for cancer.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
But for cancer, for example, there was a study from the MD Anderson Cancer Center that that looked at people with melanoma, okay, deadly form of skin cancer, getting immunotherapy. So they're getting the state-of-the-art treatment, requires their own immune system to go to town. That's the 70% in your gut, requires the gut bacteria. Gut bacteria need to eat, okay? Got to feed them.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Turns out for every five to six grams of dietary fiber... It decreased mortality by 30%. Mortality, death, okay? Death. Decreased it. Decreased it by five to six grams of dietary fiber per day. Now, what does that look like? Dietary fiber, five to six grams? You get a medium-sized pear has five to six grams of dietary fiber. Not a big ask. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
One of those a day or the equivalent to get the dietary fiber. Of course. All right. So, and again, now you get all the polyphenols. And so like powerful effects. How quickly does it actually, does dietary fiber and these polyphenols, how quickly can they change the fate of your gut bacteria? Yeah. Within 24 hours. Come on. You can start getting changes.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So, and I wrote about this in my book, Eat to Beat Disease. You have kiwis, okay? And you measure the gut microbiome. And you can, within 24 hours after eating one kiwi, you can start to grow more healthy gut bacteria in the first day. All right. By four days, you start growing other bacteria that are healthy as well.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So, you know, you're asking me, what about the what about the dude who actually hasn't been taking care of himself? Look, this is what I'm telling you. Go eat some whole fresh foods that you prepare yourself. OK, cut down some of that ultra processed stuff. I'll talk about what the ultra processed stuff does in a second. And you'll start to get these changes. You're hardwired to do this.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Your body wants to do it. You know, let it do its job.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, the changes start fast. And so, you know, definitely within a few days, you will start to feel much better. I mean, listen, you ever go on like a crummy food bender and then, right? Don't feel good. Don't feel good. And then you say, you know what? This sucks. I'm going to actually like eat healthy now. You start getting it back pretty quick. Yes. You're like, I am so glad.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
I'm doing this, right? So the changes happen fast. So I think, you know, so number one, it is within everyone's power to be able to actually make these moves, okay, that count, simply by shifting to whole good healthy foods.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Because, you know, the bad stuff with the artificial preservatives and artificial coloring and all that, you know, the simplest way to think about what they might do besides dump chemicals into your body is they can kill your gut bacteria, right? That's not what you want to do.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
You know, killing the gut bacteria, by the way, is like, we're talking about the symphony, Beethoven's Fifth, you know, where Handel's Messiah, big choir, you know, in a big concert hall, you know, like hurting your gut bacteria, like ultra processed foods and all these artificial things. It's like sending in, it's like sending in hooligans from a British football game. Greymane.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
screaming into a concert hall and kicking over all the instruments. Wow. That's what processed foods do. Ultra processed.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Well, alcohol will do it. Smoking also can affect it. Not getting enough good sleep, not getting exercise can also affect your gut. What about vaping? Oh, yeah. Vaping is also, I mean, look, cigarettes, vaping, cigars, pipes, it's all part of the same continuum. There's nothing better about vaping.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
In fact, research has actually shown that the flavoring that they put in vapes are actually probably even worse. than some of the stuff that you have just in a plain cigarette.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
Yeah, it impacts it in a negative way. Really? Yeah, because guess what? All those chemicals, instead of eating them, now you're inhaling them and they go right into your bloodstream. Instead of from your gut, your stomach, it just goes right into the bloodstream for your lungs. And now, you know, everything is affected.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
That 60,000 mile channel of highways and byways is delivering whatever the menthol flavor or the whatever flavor you've got all over the place. You really don't want that.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
In fact, it's so significant that some of the researchers looking at environmental toxins have been even looking at not only smoking and vaping, but looking at even cooking. Think about the line cooks at a restaurant. The smoke, you mean? And all the fryer smoke. The grease and everything coming up. Listen, you and I- Smells good.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We probably have spent more time, we've probably done our time- Oh, yeah. Standing in front of a grill- Oh, yeah. In the summer, right? Of course. And we're- Flipping the burgers or grilling the steaks. Hey, you know, like that's part of the, you know, that's part of growing up, you know, and doing our thing. All right. Think about all that stuff that we're breathing.
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We know that grilling meat puts carcinogens into the meat. What do you think we're breathing in? Oh, man. Okay. Fortunately, you know, like most people aren't. It's minimal. But if you're a line cook. in a restaurant. You're going there doing that- Eight hours a day. ... at the station eight hours a day, every day. Okay?
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
So what I'm saying is that what we expose our bodies to makes a big difference. So these are choices that we make. And researchers and public health and policymakers, I think that there's starting to be a convergence in recognizing that if we want a healthier society and healthier individuals, all right,
The School of Greatness
How To HEAL Your Gut Microbiome for Better Mood, Weight Loss & Disease Prevention
We got to just be a little bit more alert to the fact that what we're exposed to can have like a really, really big impact in ways that we didn't think about before. Now's the time to think about it.