The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
We Can Now Reverse Stage 4 Cancer & These Foods Are Spreading It! Dr. William Li (Chronic Disease Expert)
Mon, 19 May 2025
Is your daily diet secretly fuelling chronic disease? Dr. William Li reveals the shocking truth about what you're really eating. Dr. William Li is a world-renowned medical scientist specialising in chronic disease and blood vessel growth. He is Founder & President of the Angiogenesis Foundation, and his groundbreaking research has led to 44 medical treatments that target over 70 diseases. He is also the bestselling author of ‘Eat To Beat Your Diet’. He explains: The number one common food that feeds cancer cells The surprising link between salt and accelerated aging How poor sleep is connected to belly fat The hidden health risks of microplastics in your diet How sugar quietly fuels chronic diseases 00:00 Intro 02:28 What Will People Out of This Conversation? 03:14 What Key Diseases Correlate to Diet? 04:35 Where Is Our Society at with Health and Food? 08:06 How Cancer Works in Our Body 14:50 How to Lower Your Risk of Cancer 16:09 Foods That Fuel Cancer 17:56 Debunking “Superfoods” 18:39 Risks of Electrolytes 19:46 Lowering the Body's Defenses: Risk of Consuming Added Sugars 21:26 Alcohol 22:08 Risks of Drinking Alcohol 22:43 How Does Stress Impact Immunity? 24:50 The Relationship Between Stress, Sleep, and Sickness 26:30 Why Lack of Sleep Contributes to Stress: The Glymphatic System 28:00 Deep Sleep Clears Your Mind and Burns Fat! 30:01 Why Are Cancer Cases in Young People Increasing? 32:54 Microplastics in Our Bodies 37:15 How Can I Lower My Exposure to Microplastics? 37:53 Benefits of Green Tea—but the Danger of Teabags! 40:17 Which Tea Has the Best Health Benefits? 41:32 Is Matcha Good for Me? 42:32 The Link Between Cured Meats and Cancer 46:10 My Personal Story with Cancer 58:50 Groundbreaking New Studies with AI 1:02:38 Successful Cancer Treatment Linked to Specific Gut Bacteria 1:09:01 What’s the Best Food Diet? 1:13:04 Why Is Japan Considered One of the Healthiest Countries? 1:16:29 The Different Body Fat Types and How They Affect You 1:29:41 Visceral Fat: Dangerous for Cancer 1:38:32 The Link Between Fat and Coffee 1:41:43 Is Fasting Good for Fat Loss? 1:46:28 Brain Diseases 1:52:45 Food Is Medicine 1:54:20 Should We Use Food Supplements? 1:57:15 The Superfoods Helping Our Body 👀 28.05.2025. Be the first to know: https://bit.ly/circle-mp Follow Dr William: Instagram - https://bit.ly/4krzrR2 Website - https://bit.ly/3SaLlmb Youtube - https://bit.ly/4doaaox You can purchase Dr William’s book, ‘Eat To Beat Your Diet’, here: https://amzn.to/44HiE7Z Research Document: https://bit.ly/3SaYwUg The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Get email updates: https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt Follow Steven: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Notion - https://notion.com/doac Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What shocking truth does Dr. William Li reveal about cancer?
I've had patients go from stage four cancer to stage zero. So I have now seen where the end of cancer is coming from. I've seen how the war is going to finish. And here's how.
Dr. William Lee is a Harvard-trained physician and medical scientist whose work is revolutionizing the way we understand and fight some of the most devastating diseases facing our world today.
I'm going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer. And this is shocking to some people to hear, but every 24 hours, there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body. Each of those is a microscopic cancer. But the reason that we don't become more sick from all kinds of diseases, including cancer, is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems. But
Here's the problem. We are presently seeing the fallout of some of the not-so-good moves that we made in the 1950s 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.
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.
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.
And if you had to pick five based on the science you've seen, what would those top five be? The good news is that it's food that we can eat every single day. So, number one.
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you.
If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love.
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Chapter 2: How can food influence cancer risk?
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.
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.
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.
It's not just about living long. It's about living well and feeling good along the way.
And where do you think we are as a society, especially as Westerners, as it relates to our relationship with health and food? Because when I look at some of the stats around life expectancy, there's been a bit of a stagnation in, I think it was 2020-ish time.
But then also when you look at a lot of these chronic diseases, whether it's diabetes, whether it's cancer, these things seem to be on the rise. So... As a nation, it feels like we've got more information than ever before. But when you look at the objective numbers, for some reason, we're not going in the right direction. What's your 30,000 foot view on it?
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What is the surprising connection between microplastics and health?
Chapter 4: How does stress affect immunity and overall health?
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.
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.
So we're beginning to discover now how do we actually prevent diabetes? How do we prevent cardiovascular disease? Can we reverse heart disease? And even conditions that seemed like no-win situations. And I like to talk about this is that In my career, I never thought as a physician I would actually see the cure to cancer, the end of cancer.
But actually, I 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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What role does sleep play in cancer prevention?
When I think about something like cancer, it's slightly terrifying because it feels like a game of roulette. It feels like the people that get cancer, it's completely random, and that our outcomes are also a game of roulette. And this is as someone that knows very little about cancer.
I hear someone that I thought was very, very healthy get cancer, and then their outcomes, whether they beat it or not, also seem to be largely down to chance sometimes. That's how it seems. What do you think of that view?
Yeah, I'm going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer. And that is that we are all forming cancer in our bodies all the time, from the time we were kids. You don't have clinical cancer, you haven't gone to the doctor to get a diagnosis, still start forming cancers. And let me tell you why. Cancers are like pimples in our body.
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
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,
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.
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.
Randomly. Well, there's so many cells in my body, so it's going to be a big number, a million.
Okay. Every day, every 24 hours, there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body that your body doesn't catch, that 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.
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Chapter 6: Which foods are scientifically proven to fight cancer?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I've noticed that with myself. I've spent the last 10 years running businesses, a little bit more than 10 years now, but probably the last 13 years running businesses. And the only times when I really get sick, where I'm like out for a week, and I really, really feel it, is one week after two weeks of stress.
So when I say two weeks of stress, what I mean there is when something happens in my life, business, where that it's kind of chronic and it's enduring stress, I can deal with having a stressful day. I can deal with having two stressful days in a row. But when I've had like two weeks of an enduring issue, like an enduring angst or a problem,
almost perfectly predictably a week later i'm sick and i'm extremely rarely sick because i think i sleep really well i i think i eat really clean and so it's taught me something about if i zoom out on that and see what's going on in my body well eventually like my body's kind of my immune system is running out of energy yeah more than in your immune system so when you're super stressed it also interferes with your ability to sleep well yeah when you're sleeping well
You know, sleeping is something that I was taught when I was a kid. When you're sleeping, you're resting. And when you're resting, you're not active, right? Well, that's just our physical self.
It turns out when we're sleeping, even though our muscles may not be moving like we are during the day, in fact, a lot of other systems, including our health defenses, are being repaired, renewed, regenerated, rebooted while we'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.
Do you know about the glymphatic system in the brain?
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Chapter 7: Why is the rise of colorectal cancer concerning?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
And now the lotion is leaking everywhere. That is the analogy of excess body fat in a small container spreading out, compressing the organs and leaking out. And that's why it's dangerous.
Oh, gosh. And there's a link there to cancer.
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.
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Chapter 8: What innovative treatments are emerging for cancer?
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.
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?
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.
And that's what I love about this book in particular, Eat to Beat Disease, is that it also comes with lots of great recipes. inside the book and I think that's super helpful because there's a lot of information here but this makes it actionable.
It's a really iconic book, it's sold so incredibly well because also it's so unbelievably accessible to people who aren't scientists and that are trying to find some things that they can add to their plate. And I think that's essential to the approach that you take as well. You're not someone that's telling us we can't eat nice things and enjoy our life.
You're talking about the things that we should be adding to our plate to make our lives more healthy and increase our longevity, which I'm very excited about, actually, because you're writing a book about longevity, I hear. And I'm very much awaiting that book. When do you think that will be due and ready?
uh i'm working on a manuscript so i'm not ready to give a release date yet but you'll be the first to know okay good we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for and the question that's been left for you is how would you be able to tell that your time here on earth has been successful that you've achieved what you set out to achieve
Wow.
I think I would have two sides, two answers for that, that represent different sides of the coin. For me, I think if I'm able to have made my immediate community, my family better, That would 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.
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