00:00:00
I've had patients go from stage four cancer to stage zero. So, I have now seen where the end of cancer is coming
00:00:07
from. I've seen how the war is going to finish. And here's how. Dr. William Lee is a Harvard trained physician and
00:00:12
medical scientist whose work is revolutionizing the way we understand and fight some of the most devastating
00:00:18
diseases facing our world today. I'm going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer. And this is
00:00:24
shocking to some people to hear, but every 24 hours there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body. Each of
00:00:31
those is a microscopic cancer. But the reason that we don't become more sick from all kinds of diseases, including
00:00:37
cancer, is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems. But
00:00:42
here's the problem. We are presently seeing the fallout of some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s
00:00:49
and60s and 70s. For example, people might consume as much as a credit card's worth of plastic every single week,
00:00:54
which is very worrying, and I won't tell you why, but there's also the foods you eat, which contribute to taking your
00:01:00
health defenses down. But the good news is that you can actually put shields up as well. So, this is our experiment, and
00:01:05
we're trying to discover drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments. So, we said, let's remove half of them, and let's swap them out with food. You
00:01:11
know, I I was a skeptic, but when I saw these results, it made my jaw drop
00:01:16
because the holy grail in the pharmaceutical industry is to find something that can kill cancer stem cells. And we don't have a drug that can
00:01:22
do that. Turns out, mother nature beat us to the punch. And there's more than 200 foods that I've studied that can
00:01:27
actually starve cancers. And if you had to pick five based on the science you've seen, what would those top five be? The
00:01:33
good news is that it's food that we can eat every single day. So, number one,
00:01:40
this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
00:01:47
show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way
00:01:53
that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do
00:01:58
everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guest
00:02:05
that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so [Music]
00:02:11
much. Dr. William Lee, if someone has just clicked on this conversation and
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they're asking themselves, they're wondering what they're going to get out of spending this time with us for the
00:02:22
next couple of hours, what would you say directly to them that they will learn, gain, and how will their life improve?
00:02:30
I would say that you're going to hear about food in a brand new way that you
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didn't realize that a decision that you can make after this listening to this or watching this that you could put into
00:02:42
action to your life immediately could actually help you for the rest of your life. It could stave off disease, help
00:02:50
you feel stronger, even help you with longevity. Uh so there's no single moves
00:02:56
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
00:03:03
life. And what are the the key diseases that people are and should be most concerned about today based on their
00:03:09
correlation to the food that we eat? Yeah, if you look at the biggest health
00:03:15
crises in the world today in developed countries, um you know, you're really
00:03:20
talking about cardiovascular disease being the number one killer, diabetes, and all the consequences, the
00:03:26
devastating consequences that come out. Listen, your blood sugar is not being very well regulated. That's the
00:03:31
definition over time of diabetes. But the knock-on effect of having high
00:03:37
uncontrolled sugars is really underlying metabolic chaos. There's a whole litany
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of terrible conditions that happens every downstream from that from eye disease to wounds that don't heal etc
00:03:50
etc. Cancer is another one. Dementia is a big bigger and bigger problem as our
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population ages. And a lot of people don't re recognize this, but you know the the saying that inflammation is a
00:04:02
root cause of chronic disease. Scientifically correct, but there are
00:04:08
many many inflammatory diseases that are out there that don't get enough airplay
00:04:13
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
00:04:18
about mortality, it's about morbidity. It's not just about living long, it's about living well and feeling good along
00:04:24
the way. And where do you think we are as a society you especially as westerners as it relates to our
00:04:30
relationship with health and food? Because when I look at some of the stats around life
00:04:36
expectancy, there's been a bit been a bit of a stagnation in I think it was
00:04:42
2020ish time. But then also when you look at a lot of these chronic diseases, whether it's diabetes, whether it's
00:04:48
cancer, these things seem to be on the rise. So, as a nation, it feels like we've got more information than ever
00:04:54
before, but when you look at the objective numbers, for some reason, we're not going in the right direction. What's your your 30,000 foot view on it?
00:05:02
30,000 foot, there's more and more people in the world. So, once you get huge numbers, uh, the diseases that
00:05:10
affect most people are going to magnify. So, just as a a matter of math, we're going to see more of these chronic
00:05:16
diseases. Um, but we're also going to be seeing two things that are happening that uh actually oppose each other. One
00:05:23
thing is that the lifestyle and dietary harms that have occurred
00:05:31
over 20, 30, 50 years from the industrialization of food, from the
00:05:37
industrialization of health care, from degradation of the environment. Those are all things that take time to
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manifest. And so to some extent we are presently seeing that the fallout of
00:05:50
some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s and60s and 70s and so
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on and so forth. So decades later we're beginning to see the consequences devastation of things that happened
00:06:02
decades ago. That's one side of elevating increasing the incidence and
00:06:08
prevalence of of health conditions bad health conditions. There's another side that is counterveailing and the other
00:06:15
side which is the side I that's the team I play on is it really exciting because
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one thing that's different is that we have now have tremendous scientific power to get in there and probe diseases
00:06:28
and also indeed pro probe health which is something we're not doing often enough and in so doing we're actually
00:06:35
able to find solutions to the problems that that counter some of those harms.
00:06:40
So, we're beginning to discover now how do we actually prevent diabetes? How do
00:06:45
we prevent cardiovascular disease? Can we reverse heart disease? And even conditions that seemed like no-win
00:06:52
situations. And I like to talk about this is that in my career, I never
00:06:57
thought as a physician I would actually see the cure to cancer, the end of
00:07:02
cancer. But actually, I tell you, I have now seen where the end of cancer is
00:07:07
coming from. I've seen how the war is going to finish because I've had well over a dozen patients and there are
00:07:14
hundreds of people like this that are starting to form that can go from stage four cancer that's game over cancer to
00:07:20
stage zero. We can do this. And it not for everybody yet, but we're beginning
00:07:25
to see where the light at the end of the tunnel is. And it involves your immune system. And some of the remarkable
00:07:32
scientific breakthroughs are teaching us that our body heals itself against
00:07:37
diseases as serious as cancer in ways that the pharmaceutical industry can't
00:07:43
by itself do, but it really relies on the body. So when you talk about food as
00:07:48
medicine or medicine as medicine, none of them are as powerful as what the body
00:07:53
is hardwired to do by itself. When I think about something like cancer, it's slightly terrifying because it feels
00:07:59
like a game of roulette. It feels like the the people that get cancer, it's completely random and that our outcomes
00:08:07
are also a game of roulette. And this is someone that knows very little about cancer. I hear someone that I thought was very very healthy get cancer and
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then their outcomes whether they they beat it or not also seem to be largely down to chance sometimes. That's how it
00:08:20
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
00:08:28
is that we are all forming cancer in our bodies all the time from the time we
00:08:34
were kids. you don't have clinical cancer, you haven't gone to the doctor to get a diagnosis, still start forming
00:08:40
cancers. And let me tell you why. Cancers are like pimples in our body. All right? And this is shocking to some
00:08:46
people to hear, but our the human body is made up of about 40 trillion cells.
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That's more cells in our body than stars in a clear sky. All right? And these
00:08:59
cells have to divide uh to be able to reproduce themselves. uh copy and paste.
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Every cell has its own genetic material called DNA. It's our instructions for
00:09:11
how our cells are work. So, you got to copy and paste uh your DNA. All right? Now, copy and pasting is a tricky thing
00:09:19
to do really well. So, if I gave you a sentence to write, Stephen, and I said, "Copy it 10 times on a word document,
00:09:27
you'll do it perfectly." If I get told you to copy it a thousand times, you're going to make a few mistakes. Good thing
00:09:34
that we have spellch check to fix it, to catch it and fix it. But if I ask you to
00:09:40
copy a single sentence 40 trillion times, you're going to make so many
00:09:45
mistakes that your spell check isn't even going to be a to catch all of it. Okay? And that's what's happening in our
00:09:51
body every single day as we are replicating ourselves. We're going to make mistakes. And whenever there's a
00:09:56
mistake that's being made that isn't caught and fixed, that's a mutation. And
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so we have mutations that are forming in our body just as a matter just as an outcome of being alive and doing our
00:10:09
thing and we're not sick from those mutations. But every mutation is the beginning of a microscopic cancer. Take
00:10:17
a guess of how many mistakes in DNA of copying and pasting your own body uh are
00:10:23
made every 24 hours. Take a guess. This has been calculated randomly. Well, you
00:10:28
there's so many cells in my body. It's going to be a big number. A million. Okay. Every day, every 24
00:10:36
hours, there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body that your body
00:10:42
doesn't catch that keep on that propagate in the document of our body as it goes on. 10 10,000. Each of those is
00:10:51
a microscopic cancer. A microscopic cancer is just that. It's microscopic. It's too small to be seen with the naked
00:10:57
eye, but it's abnormal. And that thing could turn turn into a big tumor that could eventually kill you. So why don't
00:11:04
we die from cancer all the time? Now this is actually something that I see as a physician. I have a patient diagnosed
00:11:11
with cancer. They always ask me, "Dr. Lee, why me? Why did I get breast cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer,
00:11:17
brain tumor?" A very very uh natural question. And I do my best to try to
00:11:23
provide an empathic answer to that question. But as a researcher, I have a
00:11:28
more interesting question. Given the number of mutations that occur in our body every single day, why don't we get
00:11:34
cancer more often? Why don't we all get cancer as kids? You know, cancer can
00:11:39
happen in children, but not as often as we have mutations. And it turns out this was the great unlock for me in terms of
00:11:47
health. The reason that we don't become more sick from all kinds of diseases,
00:11:53
including cancer, is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense
00:11:59
systems. So that we've got these swashbuckling defenses that are firing on all cylinders. All day long from the
00:12:06
from the moment we're born until our very last breath, these systems that are inside our body defend our health,
00:12:12
including the microscopic cancers, spots them, takes them out. kind of like a
00:12:18
police cruiser patrolling a quiet neighborhood sees a drug dealer on the corner, pops them in the back of the
00:12:25
police vehicle and takes them away cleaning up the neighborhood. That's how our body naturally cleans up these
00:12:32
microscopic cancers. And so when you talk about cancer as a scary disease,
00:12:37
you're thinking about the person whose body has failed to detect and eliminate
00:12:43
the microscopic cancers and it's become large enough to actually become a threat. Now here's a question for you.
00:12:49
So we tell women to actually do a self breast exam when they're taking a shower. You know, look for lumps or
00:12:54
bumps and you know if you find one, you know, certainly go to your doctor immediately for an exam.
00:13:00
The smallest cancer that you could feel with a trained person can feel with their with their hands in the breast is
00:13:08
one centimeter in diameter. A 1 cm breast cancer already has 1 billion
00:13:16
cancer cells that have already multiplied. That microscopic cancer multiplied a billion times. That's the
00:13:22
smallest one you can feel. Now immune systems not taking that amount. All
00:13:27
right? So, you need a better immune system if you I want a shot at this and not just chemo or hormonal therapy. And
00:13:34
that's where some of these incredible advances are taking place. But there's another one. In order to feed a billion
00:13:41
cancer cells, you need blood vessels to feed them. So, the cancers as they get bigger, they hijack our own circulation
00:13:48
to feed themselves. Okay? It's kind of like terrorists kicking in the cockpit door to take over the controls of the
00:13:54
plane. They want to actually get your blood vessels to feed themselves. Now normally the body knows how to control
00:14:00
those blood vessels. It's called angioenesis. Angio blood vessels genesis
00:14:05
how the body grows and controls them. That's my area of research. So naturally our body knows how to prevent blood
00:14:12
vessels from feeding cancers and yet knows how to uh direct blood vessels to feed healthy tissues. So guess what? A
00:14:18
one centimeter tumor with 1 billion cancer cells is fed by 100 million blood
00:14:24
vessels courarssing into the tumor to feed them. And we've studied this in the laboratory. The moment that a single
00:14:31
blood vessel touches a tumor, tiny microscopic tumor, it will grow 16,000
00:14:37
times in size in just two weeks. Wow. All right. So, I've told you some scary
00:14:43
statistics, but now let me kind of give you the where the breakthroughs are coming through. Right. So with this kind
00:14:48
of knowledge, what do we what can we do with cancers? Not just breast cancers, but in general. Number one, we know that
00:14:54
if you boost your immune system with foods, with exercise, diet, lifestyle,
00:15:00
you're going to actually make your immune defense is a lot stronger to patrol your body to wipe out those
00:15:06
microscopic cancers. That's why healthy diet lifestyle lowers the risk of
00:15:11
cancer. That's why eating the right foods that boost your immunity can substantially lower your risk of cancer
00:15:17
as well. We also know that you can eat foods that support, prompt up, fortify
00:15:25
your body's natural ability to control blood vessels. Keep those blood vessels where they're supposed to be and get rid
00:15:32
of those blood vessels where you don't want them to be, which is kicking in the cockpit to take over your circulation to
00:15:38
feed cancers. So, if you eat foods like that are anti-androgenic foods that like are unstable, you've got um coffee and
00:15:44
tea, both of those contain natural substances that cut off the blood supply
00:15:50
and starve cancers. That's a good thing. So, that's why we know our what we do with our diet can actually help to lower
00:15:57
the risk of cancer as well. I'm assuming the opposite also applies. I I could eat foods, I can drink things that cause my
00:16:05
body to malfunction. I makes the blood vessels unregulated makes and starts to
00:16:10
feed the cancer, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, let's talk let's talk a little bit about that. So, so I told you the body's hardwired with these
00:16:17
defenses. Shields up, right? That's what we want to do because shields are already normally up. You want to raise
00:16:22
them higher, but what about and this is a brilliant question you're asking a very probing question. What are the
00:16:28
things that take your shields down, right? What are the things that turn off the smoke alarm in your house that
00:16:35
unlock the doors? Can I take a guess? Is it
00:16:41
this? Okay, now I know the answer that you're setting this conversation up for,
00:16:48
which is a burger with meat. Uh, is that actually uh disease-causing? And I would
00:16:54
I would tell you that yes and no. A burger is something that many people
00:17:00
enjoy eating. And I would say eating meat, eating burgers, even eating
00:17:06
ultrarocessed foods once in a while is not going to harm you if your health
00:17:11
defenses are naturally strong. But if you make it a habit, a regular habit of
00:17:20
eating this at the expense of eating healthier foods, more plant-based foods,
00:17:27
less processed foods. Okay. Um, you are actually going to tip the uh your odds
00:17:33
where the diseases are more likely to get you. What that what that means is that over eating fast foods like burgers
00:17:41
will actually contribute to taking your uh health defenses down, shields down. So what are those things then that bring
00:17:47
the shield down? You were saying okay excess sodium, too much salt, which can
00:17:53
be present in a lot of restaurant foods. People eat out a lot, go to restaurants all the time. You ever you ever go to
00:17:59
the back of a kitchen of a restaurant to see how they're salting seasoning their food? Patrons love salty food. It makes
00:18:05
food taste really great. There's a, you know, our brains uh respond very well to
00:18:10
salty food. That high sodium levels actually speeds up, accelerates our
00:18:15
cellular aging, so we actually age faster. But it also um is a huge wear
00:18:21
and tear on our health defenses, specifically our circulation, our our blood vessels, our androgenesis system
00:18:27
is taken down by excess salt. Okay, I've got a question here. Obviously there's a a big movement at the moment around
00:18:34
hydration and electrolytes and these electrolytes have magnesium, potassium,
00:18:39
they have sodium in them. Yeah. So a lot of people are now taking electrolytes to hydrate themselves.
00:18:45
Is there a a risk here? So the great news is that the healthy body has got
00:18:50
its own titration system for electrolytes. If you drink a electrolyte
00:18:58
fortified beverage, you're your body's going to take everything it needs and it's going to pee out the rest. You're
00:19:03
going to eliminate through your urine. All right. However, sodium uh is one of those electrolytes is
00:19:10
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
00:19:16
perhaps dessert, but maybe even then. And so this is one of the things that we realize is sodium is a high risk for
00:19:22
hypertension, high blood pressure, inflammation of the lining of your circulation and that that sets up for a
00:19:28
lot of badness downstream when it comes to your health and it takes down your circulation um health defenses that we
00:19:34
talked about. High blood sugar can also do the same thing. So if you're eating an excess of added sugar, we all have
00:19:40
heard by now glucose spikes and glucose crashes. I don't actually use those words by the way. I don't like to
00:19:47
actually cast our body's metabolism in terms of spikes and crashes. I think
00:19:53
those are fear words. They get attention. Uh they they do make you pay attention to it, but in fact really our
00:20:00
the healthy body sort of has, you know, smooth ups and smooth downs. They're gentle slopes up and down of our blood
00:20:08
sugar. And that's completely fine. All right? And and it should be like that. However, if you have an uphill climb of
00:20:15
your blood glucose and it continues to stay up, that can actually happen if you're eating too much added sugar.
00:20:22
Okay, added sugar, ultrarocessed foods. What happens is that your blood sugars,
00:20:28
your intake of the sugar, glucose rises up up up and now your body has your
00:20:34
metabolism to chase that blood sugar down and it's got to work harder and make more insulin. And eventually you
00:20:40
just wear out that system and then you have a high blood blood glucose and an insensitive metabolism and that's the
00:20:46
beginning of sort of the the dominoes starting to fall apart in your body. And
00:20:52
so sugar, high blood sugar, added sugar is a problem. You get it from fruit, not a problem. Okay? No one's going to be
00:20:58
eating a crazy amount of fruit. This is why extremes aren't good. Diversity. Switch it out. Keep it interesting for
00:21:05
yourself. This is what our human nature uh wants anyway. Uh it's how we're hardwired. You you'll actually be fine.
00:21:12
So salt, sugar, those are two offenders. Okay. Um alcohol is another one that
00:21:18
actually can take down your health defenses over time. You know, people say, "Well, what about red wine? Isn't
00:21:23
red wine healthy?" What I would say is that actually the fermented products the
00:21:28
or the bioactives that come out of red grapes from the skin of red grapes that's found in red
00:21:35
wine, those there can be some healthful properties of the resveratrol and other polyphenols that come out of uh that are
00:21:41
in wine, but it's never the alcohol. It's not the alcohol in the beer, the wine, the whiskey. Nope. None, none of
00:21:47
that is the alcohol is is a universal toxin. Toxic to your brain, toxic to your liver, toxic to your heart. Can't
00:21:53
get away from that. Your body will recover. Shields up little. It can take a ding. It's like a, you know, like a
00:21:59
drink is sort of like a driving behind a truck and it flings a little pebble right into your windshield. You might
00:22:06
get a little spider in the windshield. Okay, don't worry. It'll repair itself. You You'll fix yourself. You'll bounce
00:22:12
back. It's not going to break your windshield. But if you keep on drinking, you're actually gonna smash your windshield. And that's why alcoholism is
00:22:20
so devastating to the health. But you know, regular a small amount of alcohol. So alcohol itself is is a toxin. Do you
00:22:27
drink? Uh I I rarely drink and when I drink it's in moderation. Mhm. And I was
00:22:33
thinking about stress as well. Does that bring down the So besides the foods you eat, other things that can compromise
00:22:40
your health defenses? Uh, and by the way, there are five health defenses. We talked about blood vessels. We talked about immunity, but there's three other
00:22:46
ones uh that are core to functioning in the healthiest way possible. If you want, if you want longevity, you need
00:22:53
all five of your health defenses and more to be working in your favor. But stress, what does stress do? Lowers your
00:23:00
immune system. Shields down. All right? Those microscopic cancers. Whoa. That's
00:23:05
why stressful people are more vulnerable to de developing diseases like cancer. All right? Stress also causes your blood
00:23:12
pressure to go up and causes uh neurotransmitters, hormones to be released from your brain and your kidneys, your adrenal glands that ought
00:23:19
to wear down your circulation. Now your androgenesis system is also uh not
00:23:25
functioning uh as well to protect yourself and keep good blood flow going where it needs to go. Now your
00:23:31
circulation is actually down. Um so again, stress also can actually damage the DNA. We talked about naturally
00:23:37
copying and pasting and having errors. add some stress to it. Now, it's kind of like um you're trying to copy that
00:23:43
sentence I was telling you perfectly. Now, I'm going to come in and just smash your fingers down every now and then, and let's see if you actually make a
00:23:49
mistake. You will. All right? Stress will actually do that. It's devastating to have so much stress continuously.
00:23:56
Listen, by the way, I want to be really clear to anybody listening or watching this, a little stress is actually good
00:24:02
for you. You know, like just being coddled all day long and living in a happy bubble. That doesn't that's not
00:24:08
that's not good for our health either. We kind of get laxidasical. We let our guard down. Little stress. I mean,
00:24:15
anybody who's hardworking, you know, successful knows that, you know, it's not the no pain, no gain. It's that the
00:24:22
that the grit that goes along with it, which gives a little stress keeps us sharp, you know, uh which is a which is
00:24:28
a good thing. You want to be on you want to be on. So, a little stress is good, but when that stress is unabated, it
00:24:35
literally sinks your health defenses. It is just taking those shields down. Yeah, I've noticed that with myself. I've
00:24:41
spent the last 10 years running businesses, a little bit more than 10 years now, but probably the last 13
00:24:46
years running businesses. And the only times when I really get sick, where I'm
00:24:51
like out for a week and I really, really feel it is one week
00:24:58
after two weeks of stress. So when I say two weeks of stress, what I mean there is when something happens
00:25:04
in my life business where that it's kind of chronic and it's enduring stress. I
00:25:09
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
00:25:15
weeks of an enduring issue, like an enduring angst or a problem, almost perfectly predictably, a
00:25:21
week later, I'm sick. And I'm extremely rarely sick because I think I sleep really well. Like I think I eat really clean. And so it's taught me something
00:25:28
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
00:25:35
almost more than your immune system. So when you're super stressed, it also interferes with your ability to sleep
00:25:41
well. Yeah. When you're sleeping well, you know, sleeping is something that I was taught when I was a kid. When you're
00:25:48
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,
00:25:55
even though our muscles may not be moving like we are during the day, in fact, a lot of other systems including
00:26:00
our health defenses are being repaired, renewed, regenerated, rebooted while we
00:26:06
are sleeping. So in those ideally eight hours, 7 to n hours, eight's the sweet,
00:26:12
sweet number, you know, our brain is cleansing itself, detoxifying itself, releasing. Do you know about the
00:26:18
lymphatic system in the brain? Not as well as you do. Okay. Well, there's a there's a um sewer system of the gra of
00:26:26
in our brains that's called the glimpmphatic system and it's shut tightly during the daytime when we're
00:26:33
using our brain doing our work uh whatever we're doing and during the day we accumulate a lot of uh toxins in
00:26:41
inside our brain during the day. It's just a matter of functioning. All right? And what happens is that those toxins
00:26:46
accumulate which is that you know at the end of a really really tough hard day.
00:26:51
You got if not a headache you've got your you feel like your brain is it's full. It's the cup runth over. Right.
00:26:57
All right. So when you go to sleep guess what this sewer system it's like the sewers of par underneath Paris. The
00:27:04
grates open up suddenly and it drains those toxins out while you're sleeping.
00:27:10
And only when you get good sleep. So, when you're stressed and you're not getting good sleep, you start to
00:27:15
accumulate these toxins that are never quite cleaned up and your brain is not that cleaned up. When your brain's not
00:27:20
cleaned up, you're feeling foggy. So, think about the, you know, when you're in college, you pull an allnighter or
00:27:27
you go to a party or whatever and you're and you're staying up all night, you're never quite the same. It takes a while
00:27:32
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
00:27:39
work out. I'm too tired. I don't care what I eat. I'm just hungry. I'm going to eat anything. You start to make bad decisions when it comes to diet and
00:27:45
lifestyle. You see? So, it's a it it the stress can cascade on your health like
00:27:50
that. Is there a certain stage of sleep where the glimpmphatic system kicks in? Yeah. It's during like the deep REM
00:27:57
sleep. Okay. That dreaming sleep. Okay. And that usually comes later in the night as well. Correct. Correct. And in
00:28:03
more qual quantity later in the night. So, you need to really be getting a lot of sleep. Now, the other thing about
00:28:08
deep sleep is while you're sleeping really deeply, your metabolism is also
00:28:14
burning down fat. So, you think that you're not working out during the night, you're right, you're not actually
00:28:20
exercising, but in fact, your metabolism is burning fat because while you're sleeping and your insulin levels don't
00:28:27
need to be high because you're not eating, insulin levels go down, your metabolism shifts gears. I I sort of
00:28:34
give people the analogy. It's like your your body is a race car, sports car,
00:28:39
like a Ferrari. During the day, you are in gear to drive, accumulate speed, and
00:28:46
and you're you're revving your engines. At night, you shift gears where you're actually burning down fat. You don't
00:28:53
need to accumulate more fuel. Now, you're burning down the fuel. So, when you're sleeping, you're actually burning away fat. But when you don't sleep well
00:29:01
or you don't sleep long enough, you're not burning down that fuel. That fuel accumulates, day or two of not good
00:29:08
enough sleep, that's that's okay. Think about flying overseas, getting some jet
00:29:13
lag. You got to catch up. Once you get catch up, you feel better. All right? But think about this like day in and day out. Chronically stressed people are
00:29:19
never getting good sleep. Add a little booze, alcohol to the to the equation. You can kind of see the problems that
00:29:25
are going to build up. Your brain's going to be foggy. your metabolism is going to be out of whack. You're not burning as much fat from the calories
00:29:31
that you ate during the day. Now, inflammation starts to uh rise in your body and that inflammation really takes
00:29:38
down your health defenses and now you're much more vulnerable. So, in your own example of where chronic stress leads to
00:29:47
poor sleep and then you get sick, no surprise. If we go back up the thread
00:29:52
there, we were talking about the sort of individual perspective on cancer. And I was looking at some stats here and it says that the number one Google search
00:29:59
related to cancer is breast cancer. One in two people will develop some form of cancer during their lifetime. That's according to the NHS. Cancer is the
00:30:05
second highest leading cause of death worldwide. And by 2040, there will be 28 million new cases of cancer each year
00:30:11
worldwide. But one of the most shocking things that I saw was that globally early onset cancer incidents has risen
00:30:18
by about 80% by 1990 and 2019. And there was an article
00:30:24
which I'd sent to my team a couple of weeks ago. It's it's called the worrying puzzle behind the rise of early onset
00:30:30
cancer. And it says that there are rising cases of breast collateral and other cancers in people in their 20s,
00:30:36
30s and 40s. And it posits the question, what is going on? Over the last 10 years, rates of colorctyl cancer among
00:30:44
25 to 49 year olds has increased in 24 different countries, including the UK,
00:30:49
US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway, and Argentina. I mean, what is going on? Yeah, that's a big question.
00:30:57
So, are we seeing the results of more harms in our environment that we're
00:31:04
being exposed to that are more toxic and leading to earlier incidents of clinical
00:31:11
cancer? They're talking about clinical diagnosed cancer, not the invisible microscopic ones that are forming all
00:31:16
the time. Um, it's yes, it's very worrying. Are we be exposing ourselves to something that is more commonly
00:31:25
encountered today than before? Number one. Number two, are our defenses being
00:31:30
taken down by forces that we didn't appreciate are compromising us? Most
00:31:36
likely both. It's most likely uh I mean the human makeup hasn't changed and so it's got to be the fact a combination
00:31:43
that we're being exposed to more harmful things and though some of those harmful
00:31:48
things are actually that you know provoking more cancers but and we're also being exposed to things that take down our health defenses. So the balance
00:31:55
is being tipped against us and it's true. I can tell you that when I went to medical school I mean colorectile cancer
00:32:02
was something that you rarely saw in people even in their 50s. it was for much older uh people. Uh now to see uh I
00:32:11
mean there's even teenagers that have actually developed colurectal cancer which was unfathomable. So I will tell you one
00:32:18
thing that's actually arisen in terms of like what are some of the clues of these things that could be happening right? So
00:32:23
we are talking about climate change and all the things that are happening in our environment. That's a that's almost too
00:32:29
big a conversation to have to answer a question like this. But we I think we
00:32:34
cannot afford to ignore the fact that the environment, the climate that we
00:32:40
live in has changed. But there are other things that we're beginning to unearth
00:32:46
that we didn't realize until just within the last few years. And one of them is the is how many inflammatory
00:32:51
microlastics we are ingesting. When I was growing up, uh my mom very uh
00:32:59
well-intentioned would store foods in plastic leftovers. Uh, and we'd buy
00:33:06
foods that came in plastic packages, right? We wouldn't think think second have a second thought about it. A
00:33:13
plastic cup, styrofoam cup, go to a picnic, you're eating off of a plastic plate, right? I mean, these are all
00:33:18
common uh experiences that we all have uh in the modern developed world. Well,
00:33:24
what if I told you that we now realize that the plastic touching food can shed
00:33:30
the plastic itself as microparticles into the food and then we eat the food and okay, we've known this for maybe
00:33:38
more than a decade. Maybe there's little plastic particles uh that come off, but
00:33:43
you know, hey, there's no harm, right? We we haven't been able to discover it. I I used to say that. Now, just within
00:33:49
the last few years, we're beginning to pinpoint that number one, it does
00:33:55
plastics can actually embed themselves in our body. We even know where we also
00:34:00
know that these plastics uh are associated with inflammation. That is a big red flag.
00:34:07
The claxon alarm should start going off. And third is that the volume of plastics
00:34:12
that we're consuming is crazy. There was a study that came out recently that showed that in normal autopsies of
00:34:20
people that didn't die of a brain problem that when they were doing the autopsies and looking for plastic that
00:34:28
we could find them. And the amount of plastic that was found in the average human
00:34:33
brain is about the amount you'd find in a typical plastic picnic spoon just
00:34:39
distributed throughout the brain. This is like a normal this is a person who's died of something else. Wow. Does that
00:34:45
mean that you know like you and I are actually you got a plastic spoon worth of plastic in our brain. There's been
00:34:50
some people that calculated and this has been the actual calcul math has been challenged but there was an estimate
00:34:56
that you know some people might consume as much as a credit card's worth of plastic every single week in their food
00:35:02
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
00:35:07
about the healthy foods that can actually turn the ship around. How do we turn the battleship of of unhealth back
00:35:15
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
00:35:20
northstar for health? So, I do want to get to that, but let me just say something about microplastics. We've now found
00:35:26
microplastics in the brain. As I mentioned to you, we found it in a bloodstream. A group in Italy actually
00:35:33
looking at men who had narrowing of the corateed artery. That's the blood vessel
00:35:38
feeding the brain from comes from the heart right to the brain the corateed artery. Oh through the neck through the
00:35:44
neck. They found that the narrowing that can occur in some men can accumulate
00:35:49
plastic. They can actually find plastic particles. There's photographs of the chunks of plastic the particles
00:35:55
fragments of plastic in there. And they followed them over a period of time. Those men who had plastic embedded in
00:36:02
their blood vessel lining had a four-fold increase in the chances of having a fatal heart attack or a stroke
00:36:08
years later. 400%. Four four-fold. Yeah. Okay. Now, that's that's not kidding,
00:36:14
right? So, now you're now we're beginning to take notice of this, but we're also finding microplastics in
00:36:20
breast milk. We're finding microplastics in testicles. We're finding microplastics in human semen.
00:36:28
How does it get there? And urologists who are doing surgery on the penis are
00:36:33
finding that in in the human flesh when they look under the microscope, we never
00:36:38
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
00:36:46
anybody listening this isn't taking notice about microplastics now, it's time to start thinking about this. So
00:36:52
one of the questions is and I'm not saying that the rise in rate of cancers that we're seeing is due to
00:36:59
microplastics. What I what I am saying is that we're beginning to wake up to the fact. So let's close off on
00:37:06
microplastics. What are the the easy wins in our lives? Do you think when you think about microplastics? Is it just
00:37:12
removing anything plastic that I eat from or are there some sort of easy cheap wins? Is it my shampoo? Is it my
00:37:18
frying pan? Is it a container? Yeah. So, I always tell people that the easiest way to lower your exposure to
00:37:25
microplastics is to throw out your plastic cups, your plastic plates, and your plastic silverware. Mhm. Okay. And
00:37:33
get ceramic or glass. Uh that's the best way to actually avoid those. And also,
00:37:39
when you're buying food, try to avoid food that comes clearly packaged in plastic. All right. Now, I do want to
00:37:45
point out one thing because right here on this table, we are looking at a tray full of beverages and I can already
00:37:52
identify the matcha and this looks like a cup of coffee and we've got English
00:37:58
breakfast tea. I've done a lot of research on tea. All right, but I'm noticing something that green tea, which
00:38:04
is universally healthy, the polyphenols in green tea lower the risk of inflammation. They actually improve your
00:38:11
metabolism, lower your risk of cancer. They're heart healthy. Before you take that sip though, let me tell you, I see
00:38:17
a tea bag in there. Okay? And there's different ways of brewing your tea. It turns out
00:38:23
research from the University of Montreal have now shown that um tea bags can shed
00:38:29
microplastics. So you can have a billion particles of microplastic shed from a
00:38:34
single teabag. Okay. All right. So I just changed your mind, right? So look, this is the power of awareness and
00:38:41
understanding. I probably should have stopped you. What was you were like, why didn't you save my life? You let me
00:38:47
drink it first, but I've I sp as you were doing it. I was like, uh uh. All right. But look, there's another
00:38:54
there's another one there that's got uh lemon ginger tea. This is like an herbal tea. That's fine. Listen, um I I would
00:39:00
also tell you with flavored teas, just be cautious. Like always check anything that's been machined to
00:39:06
be a little bit more than nature. Tea bags are supposed to be paper, right? Well, in order to prevent the paper from ripping, the the manufacturers of the
00:39:13
tea bag spray it with a small amount of plastic to have it hang together better. And that's the plastic that comes off.
00:39:19
But what about the lemon and ginger in this lemon ginger tea? That that sounds so appealing and calming, right? And and
00:39:26
something that most people would find nice as an herbal tea. Well, listen, you're you're relying on a factory to
00:39:32
actually put that lemon flavor, ginger ginger flavor. Is it real lemon or is it real ginger? always look at the
00:39:38
ingredient label to know what's in there or just buy your own tea and squeeze your own lemon and and add your own
00:39:44
piece of ginger. These are ways to actually kind of avoid the uh potential
00:39:50
exposures to toxins that come from ultrarocessed food. So all this conversation about, you know, avoid
00:39:56
ultra ultrarocessed foods and watch out for all those harmful things, you know, it's actually quite easy to dodge them
00:40:02
if you just have in your mindset that you're just going to make it yourself. And it's uh absolutely easy. Now, I will
00:40:08
tell you in something interesting about English breakfast tea. We did research at the Androgenesis Foundation, the
00:40:14
nonprofit I I looked at, to look at um different types of teas, different types of green tea, Japanese tea, Chinese
00:40:20
jasmine tea, uh English tea. And we were always assuming, again, this is the
00:40:27
power of food as medicine research. We were always assuming that the green tea is going to be the best. I'd always
00:40:32
heard that Japanese green tea is going to be like the ultra best. And what we found was that English tea, specifically
00:40:39
Earl Grey tea, actually was the most potent when it actually supported your blood vessels, your body's defense
00:40:46
system for angioenesis to keep your circulation healthy. Wow, what a surprise that is. And this spoke to me
00:40:53
about the fact that we can't make assumptions. We need to look at facts. We need to look at data. And so I'm a
00:40:59
big fan of Earl Gray. Now, now what could what what might make Earl Gray give Earl Grey a superpower? Well, this
00:41:07
is where knowing a little bit about what you're eating is actually useful because Earl Grey is a fermented is a is a black
00:41:14
tea. It's got bergamut in it and bergamut is a kind of a citrus. So, maybe it's combining those uh
00:41:21
ingredients that actually provides the superpower. But I do see matcha on this
00:41:26
uh uh tray. I want to tell you about matcha because it is a matcha is truly a
00:41:33
superenriched polyphenol enriched tea. A lot of people don't realize it. There's no tea bag in it. So don't worry. So a
00:41:41
lot of people think about matcha uh as just another green tea, but it's not
00:41:46
another green tea. It is made with green tea leaves, the same kind of green tea leaves, but uh as you would find in any
00:41:52
green tea. However, it's what's the composition of matcha? Matcha is green
00:41:59
tea that is before it's ready for harvest is grown under a shade that
00:42:05
changes its chemical structure, natural chemical structure a little bit. So, it's got a lot of potency to it. And
00:42:10
what happens with matcha is they take the tea leaf, they take out the stem of the
00:42:15
green of the of the green tea leaf and they ground up the actual leaf into a powder. Now, what's in that green tea
00:42:22
leaf? You've got not just some of the polyphenols that might steep out in the
00:42:28
cup, whether you're using a tea bag or or loose leaf tea, you are getting all the polyphenols suspended in that. So
00:42:34
now you get 100% polyphenol, okay, in matcha. So go ahead. You're go ahead do
00:42:40
it. That one's good. All right. Okay. For matcha and because you're getting
00:42:46
the tea leaf ground to it, you're also getting your dietary fiber. The dietary fiber is good for your gut health, your
00:42:52
microbiome, good for uh your metabolism, good for lowering inflammation. And the
00:42:57
polyphenols found in green tea have also been matcha matcha tea have also been
00:43:03
found in the lab to kill breast cancer stem cells. What's a breast cancer stem
00:43:10
cell? What's a stem cell? Cancer stem cell. Well, look, stem cells are these renewable cells. All right? And um
00:43:17
cancers contain stem cells that help the cancers come back, right? If you got
00:43:23
cancer, you get it treated. One the one thing you don't want it to do is to come back. So um and by the way, other foods
00:43:28
can also do kill cancer stem cells. Purple potatoes uh that you might have
00:43:33
seen in the market. They're um kind of purpley looking on the outside. Slice it open, dark purple on the inside. All
00:43:40
right. Turns out that those purple potatoes have something called anthocyanins. Purple potatoes have been studied in a
00:43:46
lab, okay, at Penn State University and been shown to kill colon cancer stem
00:43:52
cells which contribute to the colon cancer coming back. So, full disclaimer, I am I made a very very big investment
00:43:58
uh a seven figure investment into a matcher company a couple of years ago. And if you look at the search trend data
00:44:07
on the subject of ma matcher, I don't know if you've seen this, but that's I'll throw it up on the screen for anyone that's watching on video, but you
00:44:14
can see how it's just come out of nowhere. It seems it's exploded. And when you say that matcha cells have an
00:44:21
impact on breast cancer cells, what does that mean in reality? Does it? Because obviously the the the conclusion one
00:44:28
might jump to is that if you drink matcha, you're lowering your risk of breast cancer, but that's not
00:44:33
necessarily what you're saying. What what I what I am saying is that drinking green tea in its most healthful form,
00:44:40
okay, um raises your body's health defense systems. And by having better health defense systems, better immunity,
00:44:47
better control of your blood vessels, better control over your DNA and those mutations, and if you can actually kill
00:44:53
some of those stem cells, cancer stem cells, that's going to be in your favor as well, that is overall going to
00:45:00
actually lower your risk of cancer. And so I think that, and by the way, the other thing that green tea and matcha
00:45:07
can actually do is improve your metabolism. It's it's really pretty much all good. I my great uncle by the way
00:45:14
lived to 104 years old, vital, intact, uh independent. He told me that he
00:45:20
attributed his longevity and his vitality to the fact that he lived at
00:45:26
the base of a mountain that grew tea. That every morning he got up and he
00:45:32
walked up. He walked up stone steps, a stone path to a tea garden and he had freshly picked tea. It's all organically
00:45:39
grown and everything. And he and he drank tea all day long. He probably had 10 cups of green tea a day. And this has been his whole life. He sat with his uh
00:45:47
uh close friends who are also very vibrant and and elderly. Um social
00:45:53
connection. All right. Watch the sunrise. It's very calming. Do you drink it? Absolutely. Um I've got to just
00:46:00
going up the the thread again a little bit. You mentioned the word colurectal. Where is the colarctyl? All right. So,
00:46:07
we have a little um model here cuz I'm asking this because I'm wondering why that type of cancer is increasing. So,
00:46:14
is there is there a particular reason why? Well, okay. So, let's do a quick uh
00:46:21
medical school uh course crash course for podcasters.
00:46:27
Um the the gut, we talk about gut health. Most people think of the gut as
00:46:32
sort of lower down in your belly or maybe even just your stomach. But the gut actually starts in your mouth and it
00:46:38
runs down down down about 40 feet worth of stuff organs u your esophagus, your
00:46:43
stomach, your small intestines, your large intestines. By the way, these squigglies are your small intestines.
00:46:49
All right. This blue is your large intestines. This is like a it's shaped like a horseshoe. It's big thick tube
00:46:56
that that's kind of framing your small intestines. And then it goes down the
00:47:01
poop shoot, the rectal, and the anus. That's the end of your gut. All right? So, the colon is really the large uh
00:47:10
framing thick part of the gut. It's near the very end. All right? So, all this squiggly small intestines winds up here
00:47:19
uh at the beginning of the colon. The colon goes up. It's called the ascending colon. And then it makes a sharp angled
00:47:25
turn right across your belly. Kind of like a belt right across your belly. This is colon here and then it goes to
00:47:31
the descending colon. Take the elevator down down down down down. You see the blue down going down and then it kind of
00:47:37
takes a little jog at the very end and goes down into your rectum and your anus. Okay. Right. So the blue thing is
00:47:43
my colon. So this is where cancer incidence is rising in young people. So you're talking about the rising
00:47:50
incidence of colctal cancer. That could be a cancer that's typically uh either on the right side of the colon either
00:47:57
the going up up the upside up the elevator. Yeah. Or down the elevator. On the right side of the left side. Okay.
00:48:03
Okay. It turns out that we've known for a long time that unhealthy diets are
00:48:10
linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer specifically processed meats. So
00:48:16
the World Health Organization contains considers processed meats, salami, bologna, ultrarocessed, you know, kind
00:48:23
of deli meats, delicates, meat you find in delicates. All right. Um th those
00:48:29
would be uh considered uh carcinogens and and they're they're they
00:48:36
are uh highly linked to an increased risk of bowel cancers. Now, why would that be? Well, it turns out that think
00:48:42
about it. If you're eating a ton of meat, all right, you're actually exposing the gut to a lot of those
00:48:48
processed meat carcinogens that when it sits around in your colon, not one, not not once in a while, go to the ball
00:48:55
game, have a hot dog, enjoy yourself, but if you eat it day in and day out, you're giving a lot of exposure uh to
00:49:03
your gut. This term angiogenesis, you talked about the link that that has to cancer. Angioenesis
00:49:10
from my um novice understanding is how the blood cells provide blood to
00:49:15
different parts of our body. Right? And in the case of cancer there's this the angioenesis system is making a
00:49:24
mistake. Is that a simplified version of it? Yeah. So angioenesis which is the field I studied study you break it down
00:49:33
it to to what it's elemental parts of angio blood blood vessel genesis how the body grows and maintains them so
00:49:40
androgenesis is how our body grows and maintains our circulation a lot of people don't know this but our
00:49:45
circulation is one of our body's health defense systems and it's so extensive that in a typical adult there are 60,000
00:49:53
miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our body. These are the highways and byways that deliver blood to every
00:50:00
organ and tissue. But that means that they also deliver the air we breathe, the oxygen we're breathing in, and the
00:50:07
nutrients that we're eating. So we eat good things, they're going into our bloodstream, and our blood vessels, our androgenesis systems develing to every
00:50:14
cell in the body. Now you eat something bad similarly or you breathe something in bad, similarly those blood vessels
00:50:20
are delivering something negative. Now inside the blood vessels um is a lining. It's called a the lining is like a clear
00:50:28
like a plastic wrap inside the blood vessel called the endothelial layer.
00:50:34
That's like a layer of ice like on an ice skating rig to ensure that
00:50:39
everything in the blood vessels are flowing smoothly without getting caught on the walls. So when you have
00:50:45
cardiovascular disease, too much uh uh too much salt to hypertension. When you
00:50:50
have diabetes where you're actually wearing down the lining of the blood vessels, endothelial layers being damaged. It's like um damaging the
00:50:57
lining of your angioenesis defense system has really deadly consequences because it's like scraping up the ice on
00:51:05
an ice skating rink. You know, uh if you actually have a lot of ice skaters on a rink, after a while it's unskatable,
00:51:13
right? You can't get on it. And what will happen in your bloodstream is then elements in your blood get caught along
00:51:19
the walls and they build up and that's actually how blood vessels narrow up. So that's one of the areas of of of so
00:51:26
androgenesis actually is intended to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the
00:51:31
tissues that need it for to maintain your health. But because it's so critical, it's also very very carefully
00:51:38
controlled so you don't have blood vessels growing where they should not be growing. like in your joints, in your
00:51:45
eyes, or of course to cancers. You don't definitely don't want to be feeding cancers by delivering oxygen or
00:51:52
nutrients to them. I've got this graph which shows different things that cause more or less
00:51:58
angiogenesis. If you've seen this graph, but okay. So, you are showing a graph that I I generated my my organization
00:52:06
generated. And this is actually you're looking at the experiment that got me into food as medicine. Let me explain to
00:52:13
you the experiment. Um I'll just put I'll put it over here. So um so we were
00:52:19
studying at one point drugs and we're trying to discover
00:52:24
drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments. So what we're looking for are drugs that could cut off the blood
00:52:30
supply to tumors. So we were screening uh lots of chemicals that biotech
00:52:36
companies were developing and inventing and professors were inventing and said hey can you take a look to see if this
00:52:42
could be a worthwhile drug that could cut off the blood supply to a tumor as a cancer treatment. All right and at the
00:52:47
time there were no such treatments. So it was all discovery like this was you know like the like the golden age of
00:52:54
discovery when it came to androgenesis. We were testing oh my gosh this thing could really stop blood vessels. Could
00:53:00
we develop this into our cancer treatment? Ultimately, yes. The answer was yes. But we were looking for them. And we would f and so we developed a
00:53:06
system where we could add a substance into a laboratory test system to see if
00:53:13
blood vessels would grow or shrink. And so here on this graph, you can see at
00:53:18
the very top a very long bar of blood vessels growing. That's normal, healthy
00:53:24
blood vessels growing out as long as they can. And then what we would do is we would throw drugs into it and we
00:53:31
would see if we could actually shrink them up. And so some of the uh shorter bars uh uh are uh cancer drugs. Uh you
00:53:38
can see them uh in this color in blue. Not surprisingly, some of the cancer
00:53:44
drugs were making the blood vessels smaller. Hey, this could be a good candidate drug. And we were also testing
00:53:49
other uh drugs that were available, not used for cancer to see if they would work. Sure, we discovered some of those,
00:53:55
too. But I did something a little bit subversive and as you know, you know, if you want to be disruptive, you got to
00:54:01
sometimes um disrupt yourself in order to be able to do this. So this is our experiment that we were doing at the
00:54:06
Androenesis Foundation. We decided to disrupt ourselves. So we said, we have a whole system of drugs to test. Let's
00:54:13
remove half of them and let's swap them out with powders that came from
00:54:18
food. All right? Just to see what would happen. And when we actually tested
00:54:23
foods in the same system used to develop drugs, food as medicine, tested in the
00:54:29
same system that medicines are developed, we found what you see on this bar chart in red, we actually found that
00:54:36
dietary factors, stuff that's found in food, could actually cut down the blood
00:54:43
supply that would be growing to feed a cancer. In other words, there's anti-angioenic foods. You can see the
00:54:50
green tea. You could see the onions and garlics and red grapes and strawberries. Um, it was really an eye openener to me
00:54:56
for when I saw these results. It made my jaw drop and I said, "My god, foods have
00:55:04
potency just like drugs." I was I was a skeptic. All right. And I and it just
00:55:10
made me realize like this is something that I had to pursue. This was an area of research that I
00:55:15
absolutely had to actually look further into. A drug takes a decade and a
00:55:22
billion or more dollars to be able to develop from uh from scratch to reaching a patient and then not everyone who
00:55:29
needs a treatment can actually get the drug. But a food has immediiacy. If you discover something amazing about a food,
00:55:36
whether it's matcha, whether it's purple potatoes, whether it's a strawberry, that could that that that immediacy
00:55:43
could be used beneficially without toxicity. All right? Uh and affordably.
00:55:49
And so I just saw this as this was this experiment is what brought me into the realm of food is medicine. So I'm going
00:55:55
to ask some stupid questions here. So on here I can see that for example soy extract causes less angiogenesis which
00:56:03
what I understand is the the growth of these blood vessels. But does that mean that if I have lots of soy extract or
00:56:11
arichoke or parsley or berries that it's going to cause other parts of my body
00:56:17
not to grow blood cells? So this is the great question that let let me kind of reframe the question as you're asking
00:56:23
it. If uh experiments are able to show that certain foods can uh prevent blood
00:56:30
vessels from growing, will that actually cause a problem with your body's health defenses to keep blood vessels from
00:56:37
growing in healthy tissues? Yeah. All right. Answer is no. And here's why. as a health defense system. Our
00:56:43
androgenesis system is completely designed to yoke in the right number of
00:56:50
blood vessels to give just amount just the right amount of blood flow. Not too much, not too little. I call it the
00:56:56
Goldilocks zone. You know, Goldilocks a fairy tale. Um, you know, the bears were
00:57:01
home invaders. They broke into the house and they were looking for chairs and porridge and beds. Not too hot, not too
00:57:06
cold, but just right. All of our health defenses, including the androgenesis health defense, is hardwired to keep the
00:57:13
body just right. So, what that means is that eating foods like artichokes or
00:57:19
strawberries or soy can actually help your body prevent extra blood vessels
00:57:25
from growing towards cancer, for example, and and other diseased tissues, but it will not override the body's
00:57:32
natural ability to get the right amount of blood vessels to the right tissue. So you don't have to worry about starving
00:57:38
your healthy tissues. You're just uh cutting off the bad blood vessels of the tissue. I can I call it like a
00:57:44
landscaper on a golf course that that breaks out the lawn mower to mow that uh
00:57:49
the golf course so it's got a perfect level um of the lawn. You're not going to actually uh carve out a bald spot uh
00:57:57
in on in a country club. You're going to get just the right amount. Similarly, and um we're not talking about this
00:58:04
graph. There's another graph that can actually show foods that you can eat that can grow blood vessels, healthy
00:58:09
blood vessels where you want them. And it turns out things like fruit peel uh
00:58:14
uh can actually do that. And barley can grow new blood vessels. And dark chocolate can actually help to support
00:58:19
blood vessels as well. And some of these things can also work on both sides of the equation. They can prune away the
00:58:24
bad extra blood vessels and it can grow them whenever you need them. So your body is sort of like the gardener
00:58:30
extraordinaire. and knows exactly how to actually tend. You give them the right ingredients, they know exactly where to
00:58:36
put the grass seed, and they know exactly where to mow the lawn. Have you ever had cancer in your family? Yes. Um,
00:58:44
cancer's touched my family like it has for most people. Um, I had two uncles
00:58:51
uh years ago that passed away. One passed away from colon cancer, one passed away from liver cancer. And, you
00:58:57
know, I was a doctor at the time. And so I felt so uh
00:59:03
helpless uh because as a doctor I could I could diagnose I could lay hands on I
00:59:10
could feel the hard liver I could feel the masses and I felt at the time
00:59:16
helpless even though I was doing the research cancer research and finding future paths I felt like this was we
00:59:23
we're we're not there yet and we can't I couldn't help him. I felt I felt
00:59:28
powerless. Fast forward, we're now at a point where we're beginning to see the light at the
00:59:35
end of the tunnel. And my mother, when my mother had cancer, so my uncle's
00:59:40
sister, my mother, wound up having endometrial cancer, she was 80 years old. one day um had some bleeding, went
00:59:48
to the hospital, found a mass, she had a hyerectomy to remove her uterus and
00:59:55
ovaries, and they found in there an endometrial cancer. That's a cancer, the lining of the uterus. The surgery and a
01:00:01
little bit of radiation was supposed to take care of it. Unfortunately, in her case, those little
01:00:07
cancer stem cells and it was microscopic cancers that were present took off, raced off in her 80-year-old body, which
01:00:15
you know, weaker immune system when you're 80. Uh, and within a few months
01:00:20
after successfully recovering from the surgery, she had stage four cancer everywhere. All right? And her
01:00:27
oncologist told me, uh, Dr. Lee, you know, you're a doctor as well. You know,
01:00:32
this is serious and this is pretty much the time of game over. And
01:00:37
now times have changed. Science had advanced. Progress has advanced. At that
01:00:43
time when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, immunotherapy, the latest and greatest,
01:00:51
I think advancement in cancer treatment had just broken through and become
01:00:57
approved. Imunotherapy is not chemotherapy. It doesn't actually poison the cancer. Imunotherapy is a medicine
01:01:04
that you give a cancer patient that wakes up your own immune system. Whether
01:01:09
you're a young person or an old person, it can wake up your immune system. All right? And my mother had imunotherapy.
01:01:16
She was one of the early patients that got imunotherapy. And her own 80-year-old immune system woke up like a
01:01:23
super like an army of super soldiers and went after that cancer. Now, we
01:01:28
completely adjusted her diet to so that her body between treatments would be as
01:01:35
strong as possible. Shields raised as we've been talking about. And we gave her a little bit of radiation to to to
01:01:42
help the uh the her immune system spot the cancer. Guess what
01:01:47
happened? Three treatments of imunotherapy, three three weeks apart.
01:01:53
So, time zero is the first treatment. Three weeks later, the next treatment.
01:01:58
Three weeks after that, the next treatment. All right. So, we're talking about like total nine weeks of three
01:02:04
treatments. All right. Of these three treatments, we scanned her stage four,
01:02:10
went to stage zero, and she never had chemotherapy. Now, chemotherapy can be helpful too
01:02:16
with imunotherapy, but this was where I saw firsthand close up in my own family,
01:02:23
the ability to harness your body's own health defenses in a way that I couldn't
01:02:29
do for my uncle 15 years ago before. And we lost them. And we were to save my mom. And I
01:02:36
can tell you, I literally had dinner with my mom two days ago, and she's 90,
01:02:42
91, 10, 11 years later, completely healthy, completely cancer-free. And by
01:02:48
the way, this amunotherapy, if we could only get this to work as well for everyone. This is
01:02:55
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
01:03:01
successes. We just can't get it to work for everyone yet. And there are different ways to actually wake up your
01:03:06
immune system. Another way that I'm working on now that um a colleague of mine in Germany is working on is also
01:03:14
absolutely jaw-droppingly amazing. Imagine this. Somebody has cancer and
01:03:20
you're going to they're going to get a biopsy no matter what. They're going to take some tissue out to look at it under the microscope. What kind of cancer is
01:03:26
it? A brain? Is it breast? Is it a colon? Is it pancreas? Where is it coming from? You're gonna get a diagnosis. Right now, up until recently,
01:03:34
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
01:03:39
on what type of cancer, and you're supposed to then go to the guidelines and open up the the the the treatment
01:03:45
book to say, well, what's the pathway we should what's the recipe we should follow for treatment. Too often, those
01:03:51
recipes don't work very well for very long. Now, what if I told you that where we are headed with cancer therapy is a
01:03:59
new frontier where you take the tumor with the biopsy, sure, look it under the
01:04:05
microscope, call it out, uh uh define what it is, and then you send it to a
01:04:11
lab where you do complete full-on genetics. You sequence the entire cancer
01:04:17
genome. All right? Right now, we do sequence. We take a dozen, two dozen, three dozen. I'm talking about doing 20,
01:04:24
30,000 genes, right? Right now, most people say it's not worth it. We don't know what we do with all that
01:04:29
information. What if I told you if you took a tumor and sequenced all the genes, you find every mutation, every
01:04:37
typographical error that we talked about earlier that's in that cancer. Those are the smoking guns of the cancer. Now,
01:04:43
what if I took a piece of a little normal blood, normal cells, and sequence that too? All right. Now people are be
01:04:51
hearing me talk who are oncologists or scientists would say I don't know what you're talking about that's double the
01:04:56
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
01:05:03
where technology sits in artificial intelligence machine learning let's now
01:05:09
have a computer compare normal cells with tumor cells back and forth and back
01:05:14
and forth and back and forth subtract out all the mutations that are found in normal cells
01:05:19
leaving only the smoking gun mutations in the cancer. Couple hundred are going
01:05:24
to be left. Those are the smoking guns. Those are the doers that led to this cancer. Now imagine, and I'm going to
01:05:31
give you an analogy here. Do you remember that Tom Cruz movie uh Minority Report? Yeah. So you remember like he
01:05:38
was wearing these gloves and you have a glass pane and you can actually move the uh things around on the glass with your
01:05:44
fingertips, right? So now imagine you can take these human uh the the the cancer mutations on the bottom of this
01:05:51
glass screen and you can just randomly with your fingers pick out 20 random mutations and move them up on the
01:05:58
screen. All right, now you've just picked out the mutations and now you can connect the mutations together. I call
01:06:04
it a pearl necklace. Imagine every mutation is a pearl and you connect them together with the string that connects a
01:06:09
pearl necklace. Now now you get what I'm saying? Like now we've taken the tumor, find out the doers, the the the the uh
01:06:16
the smoking guns. Now we've strung them together. Okay, this is the most wanted
01:06:22
sign that you would actually place out for the criminal. And now imagine you hit
01:06:28
print technology. And now you have a protein printer that prints out those
01:06:34
smoking guns as a protein, as a protein full of your own individual cancer of
01:06:40
that particular person. Now you take that protein and you inject it under the skin and you're challenging your own
01:06:46
immune system. You're vaccinating yourself with the with your own cancer and you're c causing your own immune
01:06:51
system to say, "Aha, this is a bad guy. We're going to develop antibodies to go
01:06:57
find our immune system. We're going to get ratcheted up to go find that cancer." Well, this is happening right
01:07:04
now in clinical trials. I have a a colleague named Saskia Biscup that is actually developing peptide vaccine
01:07:11
treatments against cancer. And if you want to see some amazing results, um
01:07:17
there was a paper we published in Nature uh communications about a year ago that
01:07:22
showed in more than a 100 people with glyobblasto that is a game over brain
01:07:28
cancer. Nobody lives more than a couple of years with this. All right. That with
01:07:34
this treatment, we've been able to actually show that some patients with their own immune system woken up can
01:07:40
actually keep them alive and cancer-free brain cancer. Like that is
01:07:47
no win-win situation. Impossible to possible. And actually somebody who I've just recruited as an ambassador to my
01:07:53
nonprofit organization, the Andrew Genesis Foundation, I strongly encourage people who want to have a modicum of
01:08:00
hope, who wants to see what I'm talking about in real life on social media. There's a woman named Rebecca Divine.
01:08:06
She's okay with me giving her name. Her handle is that brainy blonde. It's a
01:08:12
it's a triple antandra. She's blonde. She's very smart, but she had a glyobblastoma 7 years ago and she is
01:08:19
thriving alive with his imunotherapy. So between my mother, Rebecca Divine, I'm
01:08:24
just telling you like I've had well I've known well over a dozen people who
01:08:30
there's no way they'd be here today if it wasn't for the scientific advances
01:08:36
that all shore up the body's health defense systems, specifically the immune
01:08:41
system. But that's the drugs alone aren't enough. you really can take advantage at home of your own diet and
01:08:48
lifestyle to be able to tip those odds in your favor. I've heard you say that amunotherapy is more likely to be
01:08:53
successful if you have certain bacteria in your gut. Yeah, that is okay. So
01:09:02
in 2017, I helped to convene a cancer
01:09:09
research conference in Paris. uh and we called it rethinking cancer
01:09:15
and we brought the world's best minds out there and one of the um researchers
01:09:21
uh uh named Dr. Laurance Zogle she's at the in Paris works in Paris at the
01:09:26
institute Gustaf Rousi she is an imuninooncologist so she studies imunotherapy for cancer and at the time
01:09:33
we had uh we we asked her to present uh some uh groundbreaking
01:09:38
results that were embargoed at the time. So our research, our conference was the
01:09:44
first time it was ever presented and she said in a 100 people who were receiving
01:09:51
imunotherapy for uh different types of cancer that if you looked at the difference between people who responded
01:10:00
lived did well versus people who didn't respond didn't do well died. All right?
01:10:05
And that's the frustration with the types of treatments my mom had. um you know, some people do well, some people
01:10:11
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?
01:10:17
Well, it turns out that when you compare everything, gender, age, coorbidities,
01:10:23
uh uh all the other genetic factors. The research that was presented showed that
01:10:28
there was no differences between the groups of responders, people who did well versus people who didn't do well
01:10:34
for imunotherapy, except for one thing. That one thing was one
01:10:40
bacteria. The responders had one bacteria called acromancia mucinophila.
01:10:46
So most bacteria have a genus and species. First name, last name, first name is acrimancia, last name is
01:10:52
mucinophila. Okay, it likes to grow in mucus. Mucinophilia. Where is there a lot of mucus? In the colon. Where's the
01:10:59
colon? That's the on this model the blue area. So acromancy grows right here in the seeum which is the pouch uh in the
01:11:07
colon right at the beginning before you take the up elevator to the top of of the colon. That's where it grows. If you
01:11:13
if the people had that acromancia they would respond to imunotherapy. So what what the researcher did they she took out the
01:11:20
acromancia and brought it to her lab of the responders from humans and and gave
01:11:26
it to mice who were not responding to imotherapy. Boom. she'd recom she'd resurrect the immune response to kill
01:11:33
the cancer. So this is one of the first bacteria and there there may be many many that we haven't yet discovered. All
01:11:40
right. So like my whole career has all been about discovery. There may be more bacteria but we discovered at least one
01:11:45
the presence of which seems to be absolutely vital if you are a patient
01:11:52
receiving imunotherapy uh the type of imunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors. uh if you want to
01:11:58
uh uh tip the odds in your own favor of being a responder. Now, how do you get acromancia? Well, at the time uh there
01:12:06
was no acromancia probiotics. Now, you can actually find acromancia probiotics, but but at the time this was coming out,
01:12:12
you you had to grow your own acromancia, DIY acromancia. All right. So, how do you grow it? Well, it turns out that
01:12:18
there are certain foods you can eat that grow acromancia. What are those foods? Pomegranate. Pomegranate juice.
01:12:25
Pomegranate seeds will grow acromancia. Cranberries, uh, cranberry juice, dried cranberries
01:12:31
will grow acromancia. Conquered grape juice or conquered grapes will grow acromancia. Chili peppers will actually
01:12:38
grow acromancia. Chinese black vinegar. You ever go to dim sum and have soup
01:12:43
dumplings? Oh yeah. The black vinegar sauce that they use for for as a condiment to the soup dumplings. Chinese
01:12:49
black vinegar. That will prompt your body to grow acromancy as well. So, what is your diet of preference then? There's
01:12:55
so many different diets that we've people speak about when they talk about cancer and other chronic diseases. Um,
01:13:01
as I think I said to you beforehand, I'm on an extremely low carb diet, which is like VG is on keto, but I kind of bounce
01:13:08
in and out of ketosis. What What do you think of Let's start with the the ketogenic diet. Do you have a view on on
01:13:14
that kind of diet? Yeah. So, let me just give you my my perspective on diets. Lots of different diets out
01:13:21
there. They're all designed uh with kind of a specific perspective and a
01:13:26
particular goal in mind. Often times diet, whether you're talking about South Beach or keto or carnivore or vegan, you
01:13:35
know, um they're all designed to achieve a certain kind of goal, uh most of them are very very difficult to maintain for
01:13:42
a long period of time. Now people are vegans uh and vegetarians and they're that's something that because of the
01:13:49
diversity of the food that you can you can actually maintain that but you know if you're only doing pure keto that's very difficult to do. So
01:13:56
most popular trending diets are short-lived
01:14:01
short-term solutions and they'll kind of force your body to do something all right but you can't keep it up. And so a
01:14:08
diet that you can't keep up isn't to me a very practical diet because you're
01:14:14
going to bursts of activity that you just can't do your whole life. I find
01:14:22
that it's much more healthy in the long run if you can find a sustainable way of
01:14:29
eating that works for you personally that you can maintain and that you're going to enjoy your life as well. Most
01:14:35
people who are on really strict diets, they're not enjoying their diet, you know, like people who only eat meat,
01:14:41
only eat carnivore diet or only eat raw food. Listen, you can't don't con me.
01:14:47
You can't you can't be enjoying eating raw food, you know, your entire life, you know, navigating through society and
01:14:54
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
01:15:01
trending diets are well-intentioned. and they often are designed to do one thing, but you can't keep it up. So, it doesn't
01:15:08
really at the end of the day contribute to the ultimate uh goal. What I prefer
01:15:14
and where I think the science takes us where the next frontier for like lifetime health is tearing a page from
01:15:23
the playbook of some of the healthiest cuisines in the world. And I would say Mediterranean is the hot bed, the
01:15:30
crucible of a lot of healthy diets, not just the blue zones. might think but but there but there are blue zones in the
01:15:35
Mediterranean also Asia uh there's a blue zone in Asia as well but you know look there's also a blue zone in Latin
01:15:41
America if you take a look at the common denominator of what's going on in the Mediterranean and Asia is a very healthy
01:15:50
plantforward fresh seasonal uh healthy cooking oils healthy preparation style
01:15:57
absolutely delicious way of eating. I mean, come on. Take if I were to take you to a Mediterranean restaurant or to
01:16:04
a Asian restaurant, I would find it hard to believe that you wouldn't, you and I
01:16:09
opening a menu couldn't find something that we would enjoy eating. Right? So, Mediterranean is what how I tell people
01:16:15
I actually eat. That's my quote diet. Why do the Japanese seem to do so well
01:16:20
on when we think about the world's healthiest countries? Looking at some data here, some a variety of different
01:16:27
graphs that I have in front of me. And Japan seems to continually seem to come out on top as it relates to health span.
01:16:33
Yeah. Okay. Well, um there's no one single factor I think that was
01:16:39
responsible for it, but it is true. Um the the Japanese uh demographics uh show
01:16:46
uh consistently some of the uh oldest longest living people, you know, they tend first and foremost. Okay, before we
01:16:54
talk about what they eat, let me tell you what they don't do. They don't
01:16:59
overeat. And I'm giving a purposeful pause there because overeating, caloric loading, okay, uh is
01:17:08
very damaging to our metabolism. It actually counters uh our ability for
01:17:14
long to to live long. It actually speeds up our cellular aging. It's it it sets
01:17:20
up inflammation. So, by cutting down on your caloric intake every day, that's
01:17:26
one of the things is that the Japanese culture, the the the culinary and
01:17:32
gastronomic approach to food in Japan tends to uh favor modesty. Uh uh uh
01:17:39
undereating rather than overeating. I've got a question here. How do how do I know if I'm overeating?
01:17:45
Okay. So, so there's a Confucian saying uh that's been translated into the
01:17:51
Japanese that they that's a mantra which is harachi which means stop eating when
01:17:57
you're 80% full. I asked this question because I have a friend who was I think
01:18:02
it was on this podcast so um don't think I'm revealing anything. He actually sat next to me um when Peter was talking to
01:18:08
him. He's Jack who um runs production for us. He had his DEXA scan done which
01:18:13
looks at your visceral fat, subcutaneous fat, muscle mass, bone density, those kinds of things. Yeah. And he's a slim
01:18:19
guy. He's much slimmer than I am. And the diagnosis that came back from
01:18:25
the doctor basically said, "You're overnourished." And when I look at him, he doesn't look like someone that's
01:18:31
overnourished. And the the doctor essentially said to him that you need to reduce your calories. Now, I'm looking
01:18:37
at this guy thinking, "This is a slim guy. This guy's like much much slimmer than I am, yet the doctor's telling him
01:18:44
that he's overeating. Yeah. So, I wrote a whole book on this called Eat to Beat Your Diet, which is
01:18:49
not a diet book. It's an anti-diet book that really um uh uh unccloaks the new
01:18:56
science of your metabolism. And what I try to say in terms of sharing that
01:19:03
science is that first of all, body fat, which society is regarded as a bad
01:19:10
thing. We don't nobody wants fat, right? Um is actually a good thing. Body fat's
01:19:15
an organ in the body. Did you know that? Like it's it's one of our body organs. Um our body fat, it is distributed
01:19:22
throughout our body. And what does it do as an organ? Well, it's got some cushioning effect. So, you know, like if
01:19:28
you didn't have any body fat, by the way, you tripped on the stairs and you hit the ground, you might rupture your
01:19:34
organs. All right, that's so that has a little bit of a cushion effect, marshmallowy cushion effect. But our fat
01:19:40
also is a fuel tank to store fuel. So, when we're eating calories, our calories
01:19:47
are our energy. We're eating food, we're eating calories. That's our energy. That's that's a fuel our body runs off
01:19:53
of. I always tell people if you have a car and you're filling it up with gasoline at the petrol station or the
01:19:58
gas station, um you don't even think about your gas until your fuel gauge
01:20:04
starts to run low. And the same thing for our our our bodies is that we don't think about our fuel until we're hungry.
01:20:09
And our our hunger in our brain and our gut is really as our fuel tank that signals, you know, we're getting towards
01:20:16
that red line. Better go fill fill up. Now, unlike a gas station or petrol station, there's no clicker on our body.
01:20:24
We can keep stuffing food into our system. We can very easily overload our fuel tank. Okay, that is you've got you
01:20:31
got to cut back on your calories. That's what you your your friend heard when the doctor was saying you got to cut back on
01:20:36
your calories because you're overloading on fuel. So, where does so where does the fat build up? It's there's different
01:20:42
areas that fat in your body builds up. Now, the fat can there's white fat and
01:20:47
there's uh uh uh brown fat. White fat can be under your chin, could be under your arms, could be in your thighs and
01:20:54
your butt, could be your your the the muffin top, you know, around your waist. But that's not where the most dangerous
01:21:00
fat builds up. The most dangerous fat, inflammatory fat, is a fat that builds
01:21:06
up in the inside the tube of your body. So if you think of your body like a poster tube, okay, inside that tube and
01:21:14
all this gut is I'm sorry, the the body cavity, if you were to slice this body in half and look at a cross-section, all
01:21:21
right, it's a tube. You can fill all you any of these uh interstitial areas
01:21:26
between organs, you can pack with fat. So think about you're going to FedEx something to somebody overnight mail uh
01:21:33
a vase or or a glass or bottle of wine or whatever. you're going to pack it full of peanuts and you're going to put
01:21:38
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.
01:21:44
So, it doesn't really matter the size of your tube. You could be a skinny person and you could pack it with a lot of
01:21:49
peanuts. In this case, visceral fat. And that's what you're talking about in a
01:21:54
skinny person with too much visceral fat, too many peanuts packed in there. And that is a result of overconumption
01:22:01
of calories. that fat, that energy, the fuel tanks building up within a skinny body. Yeah. And that's what we call
01:22:07
skinny fat. I am still like mildly in shock about it because because I saw his
01:22:14
results, I I panicked. So the next day I also went to the same clinic as him. I had my Dexus stan scan done and it came
01:22:20
back and said that I had quote zero visceral fat. So my results from Dr.
01:22:26
Peter said I had zero visceral fat which he said was rare but I had subcutaneous
01:22:33
fat which is the fat on the outside more than Jack did. So Jack had visceral fat,
01:22:38
which is the fat inside us, and he had he has like almost no subcutaneous fat,
01:22:44
and I'm kind of the inverse of that. And I don't what like I was trying to figure out why is my body when I eat something
01:22:51
putting the fat subcutaneously on the outside, whereas Jack's body is putting the fat on the inside, which is the the
01:22:57
dangerous fat. Here is um an interesting thing. Let's look at the opposite of
01:23:03
building up subcutaneous fat, which is the external fat, not the not the danger, the external fat. Yeah. So,
01:23:09
okay. So, there's two kinds of body fat. White fat and brown fat. White they're all good. They're all beneficial. Um,
01:23:16
white fat can be subcutaneous. Subcutaneous means under the skin, under your jaw, under the skin of your jaw,
01:23:22
under your arms, on your thighs. That's subcutaneous. White fat can also be visceral fat. That's deep inside the
01:23:28
tube of your body. And then brown fat is not wiggly jiggly like the other like white fat. Brown fat is wafer thin and
01:23:35
it's plastered around our neck. It's behind our breast bone, a little bit behind between our shoulder blades, a little bit in our belly. And brown fat
01:23:41
actually is metabolically as a active and it fires up a process called
01:23:47
thermogenesis to burn down harmful visceral extra body fat. So you can use
01:23:52
good fat to burn down bad fat, which is the amazing thing. Again, fat is not universally bad. It's actually quite
01:23:58
good. And uh so one of the things that I think is really important to know is
01:24:05
that when you've got too much visceral fat, you got too much inflammation, but you can actually use your brown fat to
01:24:11
try to um control that to try to burn it down. Brown fat, by the way, is activated by foods and activated by cold
01:24:18
temperatures. So when you talk about your cold plunge, brown fat can actually light up.
01:24:25
So, you you've just handed me a card. I'll describe this in which there's two pictures of a figure. And one of the uh
01:24:34
pictured on the left is room temperature. And it's not cold. It's regular room temperature. And this is
01:24:40
the same individual, by the way. And you can't see anything lighting up because the brown fat is just adjusted to normal
01:24:46
room temperature. Now, on the right hand side is when you actually um lower the
01:24:52
temperature in an ice bath or something. No, no. This is actually just lowering the room temperature. Really, really cold. Like a like a like a laboratory
01:24:57
condition lowering the room temperature. And boom, you see all this brown fat lighting up. Remember I told you it's
01:25:03
it's plastered around the neck, behind the breast bone, uh a little bit in your belly. And this is mother nature's
01:25:11
adaptation in evolution to help animals survive cold temperatures. So before we
01:25:16
had thermostats and room heaters, um uh uh think about a by the way, brown fat
01:25:22
was discovered in hibernating animals. Um there was a zoologologist uh who was
01:25:29
looking at plucked out a uh kind of a muskrat looking animal from hibernation
01:25:35
and dissected it and found that there was this brown lump that was between its
01:25:41
shoulder blades and nobody knew what it was. They just and the more researchers and biologists and zoologologists looked
01:25:48
at animals that were hibernating, they they found this very consistently. In fact, they called that brown mass first
01:25:54
a hibernoma. Hyper hibernating a mass we don't know what it
01:25:59
does. Okay. um a
01:26:06
hybrer who in the beginning we didn't have microscopes and then we had microscopes and we had really great
01:26:11
microscopes and all of a sudden in 1930s the researcher uh at UCLA said you know
01:26:18
that hibonoma is actually made of fat cells and those fat cells are brown and
01:26:24
the reason they're brown is because they have a lot of mitochondria in it. Mitochondria being the fuel cells of our
01:26:31
body, like they're the batteries of our body. They're packing the they're the energy generators in our cell. And
01:26:37
mitochondria are very rich in iron. And when iron is oxidized, it turns brown
01:26:42
like a pile of nails that you've put outside your door and the outdoors. Silver nails will turn
01:26:48
brown. Brown fat packed with mitochondria, energy generating, packed
01:26:53
with iron, oxidizes, turns brown. That's why brown fat is brown. And and so what happens is that in cold temperatures
01:27:00
like in hibernation in winter, the brown fat fires up and that's what keep keeps these hibernating animals warm
01:27:06
throughout the winter so they don't freeze to death. Now humans, we can actually use that to our advantage. We
01:27:13
can actually activate our brown fat. Cold bath will do it. U sleeping in cold
01:27:18
cooler warms will actually start to activate it as well. When that, by the way, that when those mitochondria fire
01:27:24
up, they are burning energy. You know where they draw the energy from? From your white fat. From your visceral fat
01:27:29
first. So you want brown fat, good fat to burn down bad fat, visceral fat, white fat. You want to sleep in a cool
01:27:35
room or you want to go into a cold bath. And there are lots of foods that will also you can eat foods to activate your
01:27:43
brown fat to burn down harmful fat. Um, and then the last thing is cortisol. the
01:27:48
job that we have. I know this doesn't sound like a hard job to be a podcaster, but the in Jack's role, he's basically
01:27:55
working seven days a week sometimes. You know, he's working early hours of the morning. He's traveling around the world with me to come to these studios. It is
01:28:01
I observe it. It's a stressful job. So, I was wondering if these if all of these factors play a role in in how our body
01:28:09
chooses where to store things. And really like the role of cortisol in determining fat storage is so
01:28:14
interesting to me. like the role of stress in determining where our fat is stored.
01:28:19
Yeah. Well, I mean cortisol is a stress hormone. It actually snaps us into uh
01:28:25
action. It actually is also healing. Cortisol is a got multiple job descriptions. It's kind of like a Swiss
01:28:30
Army knife of hormones. Uh and uh in a in small bursts, cortisol incredible
01:28:38
like and it makes you feel good as well. I mean it's a kind basically it's a it's a type of body steroid. So cortisol is a
01:28:46
very very useful hormone for all kinds of reasons. But long-term stress uh will
01:28:52
lead to excessive prolonged unabated cortisol secretion. And when your
01:28:58
cortisol levels are up up and and relentlessly that then actually changes
01:29:04
your metabolism. It definitely alters your the ability for your fat to
01:29:11
actually conduct its metabolism. I mean, fat releases itself about 15 different hormones. So, when you mess up the
01:29:17
hormonal structure, the endocrine structure of your own body fat with something like excessive cortisol,
01:29:24
you'll actually begin to derail your own metabolism. So, it's not the short-term cortisol, it's a long-term cortisol
01:29:30
that's actually the most damaging. Why is visceral fat dangerous? Because people refer to it as being linked a lot
01:29:35
of chronic disease and cancers and stuff like that, but what evidence do we have that it's dangerous? And what why is it
01:29:40
dangerous? Yeah, because the tube of your body with all the organs packed into it, just like we're seeing here.
01:29:46
Look at all these organs packed in. You got your liver, you got your stomach, you got your your colon and your small
01:29:51
intestines that's packed into the tube. All right, it is it's it's kind of like uh packing for vacation. You know, some
01:29:58
people are really really skilled at packing. They can actually uh fold their socks and underwear and their pants and
01:30:04
it's like, oh my, you're a genius. You're you're packing genius right now. visceral fat grows between those folded
01:30:11
shirts and pants and it and it fills all that space in there. When you have too
01:30:16
much of it, not only does it fill up that the suitcase of your body, the tube
01:30:22
of your body, but it starts to push on organs, which is not healthy because it's all packing inside the between the
01:30:28
spaces, the potential spaces in there. And then when they grow, when it grows beyond its own blood supply, the
01:30:33
visceral fat um starts to starve. It becomes hypoxic, meaning it's not getting enough oxygen. bigger than the
01:30:39
amount of blood vessels that are growing in there. And now you've got the center of the fat star of oxygen. Uh the
01:30:46
inflammatory cells start moving in. And now you've got this fat that's outgrown its own blood supply that's now becoming
01:30:53
very inflammatory. And because it's packed all throughout your the tube of your body into the suitcase of your
01:30:58
body, it's leaking out that inflammation everywhere. So, think about it like if you have a neatly packed suitcase and
01:31:04
you're like, I'm, you know, I'm going to put um I'm going to put some uh uh lotion and cream, canisters of lotion
01:31:11
and cream. I'm going to pack it everywhere in in between the spaces. Okay, look uh Stephen, pack a few, but
01:31:18
but let's stop right there. And you're no, I'm going to pack like 20 or 30 of them. And you keep on stuffing it. Even
01:31:23
though the suitcase it's a hard suitcase and you can you can put a lot in there. Now, you're starting to press on the the
01:31:29
clothing. you're going to scrunch up your pants. And here in the body, you're scrunching up your organs. Now, why
01:31:34
don't we make those one of those tubes uh uh of of cream. Let's break one of
01:31:41
them open. Now, it's leaking. All right? And that's what's happening when your fat is so inflame so inflamed, it starts
01:31:47
to leak, inflammation. Now, imagine that that cream uh starts to leak out into
01:31:52
the interstites of your suitcase. Now, you've got a suitcase. Looks skinny on the outside. It looks like it just looks
01:31:58
like a suitcase. It's a could be a carry-on. But now all the organs, all the clothes you packed so neatly are
01:32:05
squeezed and scrunched off and now the lotion is leaking everywhere. That is
01:32:10
the analogy of excess body fat in a small container spreading out
01:32:16
compressing the organs and leaking out and that's why it's dangerous. Oh gosh. And that there's a link there to cancer.
01:32:22
Yeah. So studies have actually shown that and this was a study uh done uh by
01:32:28
Cornell in New York um looking at Swedish women who were normal body size
01:32:35
or skinny. So you've heard of skinny fat. This is what they were studying. And they looked at these women uh to see
01:32:43
they did DEEXA scans as you described um to see how much body fat they had. And
01:32:48
then they followed them over 13 years and they actually found that women who
01:32:54
did not have extra body fat had you know normal risk of breast cancer but women
01:32:59
who had skinny fat remember all the women in the study and so 3,000 women
01:33:04
actually were normal body size not I mean they weren't super models but they were they were just normalsized women
01:33:11
some of them were slimmer than others but none of them were obese none of them were overweight u just normal size Um
01:33:18
and they but they knew at the b baseline what the DEXA scan showed and what they found is that women who had excess body
01:33:26
fat over the period of 13 years had a three-fold increase in the risk of developing breast cancer and it's linked
01:33:33
to higher met inflammatory markers in their bloodstream which makes total sense. The leaking body cream, the
01:33:39
leaking inflammation, you know, in a skinny tube, all right, or normalized tube, normal suitcase. Look, the
01:33:45
suitcase can't expand bigger. It's it's got a finite size um but it's leaking out and and this is because cancer
01:33:52
thrives in an inflammatory environment. If you have inflammation without even a microscopic cancer like we talked about
01:33:58
but a small tumor putting inflammation in the environment of a cancer is like
01:34:04
pouring gasoline on the embers of a fire. You ever go camping, you have a campfire, it's almost out at the very
01:34:09
end. Now if you pour some gasoline it boom whoosh you're going to have to create a bonfire all over again. That's
01:34:15
how dangerous inflammation is. So that's why excess visceral fat, inflammatory fat, is so dangerous and linked to
01:34:22
cancer. And by the way, not just breast cancer. Turns out that excess visceral fat has been linked to 14 other cancers.
01:34:29
Increased risk of 14 other cancers. Everything from colon, ovarian, lung, breast, prostate. Uh it it's the it's a
01:34:38
it's a growing list of cancers that seem to be at put you would be at higher risk
01:34:44
if you had high levels of visceral fat. And it makes total sense given the inflammation. Don't you hate it when you
01:34:52
have a good idea and then you forget? For the last two years, I've been writing my brand new book. And my book
01:34:57
writing process is a little bit atypical in the sense that I have all of these great conversations on the diio. And I
01:35:02
might stumble across a great idea while my guest is speaking to me in the middle of a conversation. Or I could be walking
01:35:07
the dog. I could be out and about with my friends. I could be anywhere when I have an idea for my upcoming book. This
01:35:14
is why notion, who are a show sponsor of mine now, has been an incredible platform for me. I've designed my notion
01:35:20
so that I can pull out my phone super quickly and store the idea in the section about my new book and I can
01:35:26
collect pictures, images, voice notes, any type of media on the go, which means
01:35:31
I'm able to capture that point of inspiration in a flexible way and I'm no longer losing good ideas. I imagine many
01:35:37
of the creatives and entrepreneurs listening to my podcast already use Notion. But if you want to try out Notion and you've never used it
01:35:43
yourself, head over to notion.com/doac. That's
01:35:50
notion.com/doac. There was a a shocking study that I read about this a while ago in JAMAMA and it examined the impact of
01:35:57
illness anxiety disorder which they call I a formerly known as hypochondriitis
01:36:04
and the impact that being avoidant of health and illness has on your mortality rates. And they the researcher analyzed
01:36:11
data from approximately 45,000 individuals over a 24-year period comparing 4,000 patients who had this
01:36:17
anxiety around their health and were avoidant. And the findings showed that those with IAD that were anxious about
01:36:24
health and getting checkups and those kinds of things had an 84% higher risk of death during the study period, dying
01:36:31
on average 5 years earlier than those without the disorder. And again, causation is hard to establish there because it could mean that being an
01:36:36
anxious person means your cortisol's up anyway. being an anxious person means you make worse dietary choices. But I
01:36:42
I've always remembered that and thought about how um how it's I find it much more much
01:36:48
better, especially as I age and I'm going to be now confronted with more risks, especially things in men like prostate cancer. Being on the front foot
01:36:56
um is probably a better approach. Well, uh and if you take some proactive approaches using food as medicine where
01:37:03
you got to eat three, you know, you got to eat every day. Most most of most people eat three times a day. Most
01:37:08
people encounter food about five times a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a couple of snacks. If you realize every
01:37:14
time you're encountering food is an opportunity, an opportunity to choose a
01:37:20
food, an ingredient that actually supports raises your shields, supports your health defense systems. and know
01:37:27
that and trust your body, trust your health defense systems that if you raise your shields, you're less likely to
01:37:32
actually have uh have problems later won't eliminate them. Okay? There's no
01:37:38
guarantees in life, but it'll lower the risk. Here's an example. Um Stephen, you know, research studies have shown that
01:37:44
tomatoes are good for overall um health. You mentioned prostate cancer. So
01:37:50
studies have shown that uh men who eat tomatoes regularly, cooked tomatoes, actually have a 29% lower risk of
01:37:57
developing prostate cancer. It's pretty good. Uh what's the dose of the tomatoes
01:38:03
that you need to cook tomatoes you need to eat? Two to three servings per week. All right, I can probably I can probably
01:38:09
accomplish that. How much each time do I got to eat a wheelbarrow of tomatoes each time? No. the the typical serving
01:38:17
that this study supports is just half a cup of tomato cooked tomatoes is per serving. How do they know this stuff?
01:38:23
Because obviously how do they isolate that in a test? So these are from largecale population studies. In this
01:38:30
case it's a it's a uh epidemiological study called a uh health professionals
01:38:36
follow-up study where they looked at they developed hypotheses and they looked at outcomes over the course of 25
01:38:41
years and they looked for statistical correlations. So they found that um tomatoes lowered the risk of prostate
01:38:47
cancer based on people reporting their tomato eating. Then they actually went back and look at the report within the
01:38:53
data collected. How much how much do they eat on average every week? So that then you can actually back calculate the
01:38:59
dose. All right. Now I I told you earlier about the way that I do research foods and medicine research. Let's take
01:39:05
it further. Let's figure out what's in a tomato. Well, tomatoes have lots of it's
01:39:11
got it's got sugar. It's got uh some salt. It's got uh carotenoids which are
01:39:17
bioactives. One of which is lycopine. Well, okay. What does lycopine do? Guess
01:39:22
what lycopine does? Lycopine in the lab will cut off the blood supply to tumors.
01:39:29
Anti-androenesis shores up your health defense systems. Prevents cancer from getting a blood supply. And in fact in
01:39:36
correlative studies um uh they've actually taken the prostate cancer
01:39:43
biopsies of men who did not avoid prostate uh cancer. So they were tomato
01:39:48
eaters who went on to develop prostate cancer anyway. There's no nothing takes you versus zero. And they looked at them
01:39:54
and what they found is that those men who ate more tomatoes had fewer blood vessels in their prostate cancer and the
01:40:02
prostate cancers were also less aggressive. So people who ate four times and five times and six times had fewer
01:40:08
and less aggressive blood vessels growing into their prostate cancer. So that's an example where you know if I
01:40:15
told you um consider having some cooked tomatoes
01:40:20
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
01:40:27
out lycopine is uh a natural chemical that in its native form, pick a tomato
01:40:33
off the vine and eat it that like an apple, it's absorbed in your body, but not avidly, not as much as
01:40:41
possible. Um, what is that? That is coffee. Okay. And we've been talking a little bit about brown fat. Yeah. Is
01:40:48
there a link between fat and coffee? Because I heard someone the other day saying that if you want to lose weight, drink coffee. And I wasn't sure if that
01:40:53
was well. So coffee is a beverage made with coffee beans. Coffee beans are
01:40:59
plant-based foods. Coffee beans contain many polyphenols including chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid is
01:41:06
anti-inflammatory. Chlorogenic acid also turns on your brown fat. So it activates
01:41:12
it triggers your brown fat and it causes your brown fat the mitochondria to fire up undergo thermogenesis to burn down
01:41:18
harmful white fat or visceral fat. So cup of coffee a day or actually the dose
01:41:23
is actually about three to four cups of coffee a day will definitely cause your brown fat, good fat to burn down your
01:41:30
bad fat, your harmful fat, your visceral fat. What about fasting? People people often talk about fasting
01:41:37
as a as an intervention as a form of medicine for the body. And I wondered if you had a take on that. Yeah, f listen
01:41:43
fasting is beneficial. Fasting is good and fasting is very old. It's not just a recent trend. uh if you go back
01:41:49
thousands of years, I mean if you look at some of mo some of the oldest religions of the world, fasting was part
01:41:54
of their ritual that would happen, you know, throughout the year. Now, people go, "Well, what about intermittent
01:41:59
fasting? How long should I fast?" I try to tell people there is no magic formula for success for fasting
01:42:07
because we're all different and our bodies are different. Our lifestyles are different. There's no universal fasting
01:42:12
protocol that's going to be one-sizefits-all. However, I will tell you an easy way to fast because fasting
01:42:18
is very natural to us is just paying attention to what you do every day and be mindful. So, when you're sleeping,
01:42:27
you're not eating. When you're not eating, you're fasting. So, I try to be reassuring. So, guess what? You're
01:42:33
fasting every day anyway. When you fall asleep, you're fasting. All right? And the longer you're not eating and
01:42:39
sleeping, the more time your metabolism, the Ferrari of your of your metabolism
01:42:44
of your body can switch gears to burn down any extra fat that's accumulated. Now, if you've been eating whatever you
01:42:51
want over time, you probably built up a lot of extra fat. Now, from your scans, apparently not. You don't have too much.
01:42:58
All right? But you if you you're fasting regularly, you're burning down all that extra stuff. Okay? And so then how do
01:43:05
you optimize that without having to calendarize your fast and figure out,
01:43:11
you know, how to uh schedule your meals? I try to make things
01:43:17
um as scientific but as practical as possible. And so I tell people you want to really get involved in intermittent
01:43:23
fasting. Easiest way is take advantage of what you're doing already. And that is if you're sleeping, try to sleep
01:43:30
eight hours a day. So, how do you sleep eight hours a day? I don't know. I said if you go to bed at 11 o'clock, get up
01:43:36
at 7 o'clock, you get to eight hours of sleep. All right, we know that that's the med the sweet spot for your brain,
01:43:41
for your metabolism, for you know, for burning out harmful body fat. How do you get more out of that? How do you turn
01:43:46
that eight hours of fasting into more? Well, what I say is that the night
01:43:52
before when you're eating dinner, let's say you eat from 7 to 8 o'clock in the evening, what I say is that when you
01:44:00
finish dinner and you put your dishes away in the sink or in the dishwasher, that's it. No more eating. Stop eating.
01:44:08
Nothing until the next day. Um, if you're going to have dessert or whatever, squeeze it in there. Don't
01:44:14
take a snack with you and sit by the television or, you know, absent minily gobble food and don't before you be you
01:44:21
go to bed eat a big chunk of whatever. Okay, now you got 3 hours before you go
01:44:26
to bed at 11. Again, this is all a theoretical model. 3 hours of not eating. Your blood sugar goes down. Your
01:44:33
your insulin goes down because your blood you're not eating anymore. All right. Now, your metabolism shifts gears
01:44:38
three hours earlier. Okay. Now you've got those eight hours plus three hours,
01:44:44
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
01:44:51
our moms told us to do, right? So when if you were like me growing up, my mom when I got up like hurry up and get to
01:44:57
breakfast and eat something so you have enough energy to actually go to school and learn something. All right? So that's I I developed this instinct of
01:45:03
actually just getting up and eating as quickly as I can, getting some breakfast in. What if I told you that what I do
01:45:09
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
01:45:16
getting ready, uh, I get dressed. Um, I don't eat anything right away. In fact,
01:45:21
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.
01:45:26
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
01:45:33
wait at least an hour before I eat anything. Now, let's do the math. Uh,
01:45:38
Stephen, 8:00, stop eating. 11 o'clock, go to bed. 3 hours. 11 to 7, 8 hours. 3
01:45:44
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
01:45:50
hours of fasting. Just like that. Okay. Now, if you really want to do that
01:45:55
16hour fasting, 168, just skip breakfast and get to lunch. And as long as you
01:46:02
don't overeat at lunch, which does require a little discipline after you go for your fasting window that you don't
01:46:09
overeat and you're eating the right foods, that's how you actually get to do intermittent fasting in the most natural way possible. So, there's one part of
01:46:16
the body that we haven't talked about, which is and my little mannequin here inside its head, the brain. And I'm
01:46:23
wondering how some of the themes we've talked about link to one of the most common brain diseases which people talk about, which is Alzheimer's and
01:46:30
dementia. talked about I can't say that long word but um angiogenesis is there a link between
01:46:36
angioenesis what we in the brain health dementia Alzheimer's yeah absolutely so
01:46:42
I mentioned to you that the human body has got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels that are coursing through the
01:46:49
entire body bringing the uh oxygen and nutrients through the highways and byways of health right 400 miles of
01:46:57
those blood vessels are in your brain 400 miles of blood vessels are actually coursing through our brain. And our
01:47:03
brain is super metabolically active. You know, we're we're the engine of the
01:47:08
brain is functioning all the time. Regardless of your IQ, regardless of what type of task you do, our brain is
01:47:15
very very metabolically active, highly dependent upon a healthy circulation. Now, what we do know as people get older
01:47:24
is that problems can occur with uh brain function. And the reason I'm framing it
01:47:30
this way is that it's quick to jump to a term that people use like dementia or
01:47:36
Alzheimer's disease thinking it's one thing, but in fact, dementia is just a descriptive term for your cognition not
01:47:43
working properly most commonly as you actually age. Alzheimer's, even though it is one
01:47:50
type of diagnosis, is probably several different kinds of disease as well. And we do know that there are different
01:47:56
types of dementia. Alzheimer's is a subset of dement of dementia, Alzheimer's dementia. There's there's a
01:48:02
more common type of dementia called vascular dementia and that's where those 400 miles of blood vessels in your body
01:48:09
actually narrow, get hard, get clogged up, and don't have good blood flow. So, you can imagine if you were to actually
01:48:16
interrupt the sprinkler system, the tubing, the blood vessels, the tributaries bringing oxygen to your
01:48:22
brain within those blood vessels. Okay? over time your brain is not going to function very well. So vascular dementia
01:48:28
is is by far the more common type of dementia. So what can we do to maintain
01:48:34
healthy andogenic blood vessels throughout the course of our lives for anybody who wants aspires towards
01:48:40
longevity. All right, you should be thinking about how to avert that path where your blood circula your blood
01:48:47
vessels your circulation to your brain gets impaired. the more uh vascular,
01:48:54
blood vessel healthy, androgenesis supporting diet and lifestyle and
01:48:59
medications that you take, the better it's actually going to be. Now, here's what what's interesting. What are some of those things? Turns out that dark
01:49:06
chocolate, plant-based foods, the cacao, actually um produces helps your body
01:49:12
produce something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide actually widens your blood
01:49:18
vessels so you get better blood flow. So dark chocolate is one of those foods
01:49:23
that actually can see seems to be able to promote better vascular health including in the brain. Now there are
01:49:30
other foods that can produce nitric oxide as well. Beets beetroot actually can produce nitric oxide. Spinach can do
01:49:37
produce nitric oxide as well. Those are vascular healthy. Now here's the other thing. When you produce nitric oxide,
01:49:44
like with these foods, you know what nitric oxide does? It recruits stem cells, healthy stem cells, not cancer
01:49:51
stem cells, but healthy stem cells from your bone marrow. Stem cells are stem cells are primitive cells that can turn
01:49:58
into anything you need them to be. Turn into a brain, heart, lung, liver, skin,
01:50:03
hair. Um, our stem cells actually regenerate us from the inside out. Now, you know that one of the things that
01:50:09
happens as we get older is our brain atrophies and can start to degenerate. It shrinks. Literally, a scan of an
01:50:16
older person, the brain, the brain matter, the mass of the brain shrinks inside the skull. It's like a like a
01:50:23
cotton shirt that shrank and you see this actually in a scan. And so in order
01:50:28
to be able to try to keep the shrinking from happening, you want to make sure there's good blood flow going, which
01:50:33
actually helps to keep the brain growing in a healthy and maintained in a healthy sort of way. So um stem cells that are
01:50:40
recruited by nitric oxide actually can help to also regenerate the blood vessels and keep the blood vessels
01:50:45
helping healthy feeding the brain. That's the connection between Alzheimer's and and I mean dementia and now for Alzheimer's
01:50:52
um I worked with a colleague Dr. Anthony Vagnucci some years ago and we published
01:50:58
uh what was then an editorial in the Lancet uh you know very prestigious uh
01:51:04
British medical publication and we were connecting the dots between androgenesis and Alzheimer's disease and here's how
01:51:10
it works most people assume that if you've got Alzheimer's disease or someone has Alzheimer's disease they
01:51:16
don't have very good blood flow they're not going to have a lot of androgenesis they got problems right of their of their circulation of course and in fact
01:51:24
if If you look at um the blood flow studies, scans, brain scans looking for
01:51:29
blood flow in Alzheimer's brain. Indeed, you see poorer blood flow in people who have
01:51:36
actually Alzheimer's disease. But it turns out the brains of people with
01:51:42
Alzheimer's disease have more blood vessels, more blood vessels that aren't working well. So their andro abnormal
01:51:49
androgenic blood vessels are not working well. So you don't get good blood flow. So the scans don't show them just don't
01:51:55
creating blood flow. Guess what those blood vessels are doing? Those abnormal blood vessels, they have been discovered
01:52:01
to secrete a neurotoxin that kills your brain cells. So abnormal androenesis in
01:52:10
Alzheimer's disease grows blood vessels that don't create blood flow, but they secrete a toxin that kills brain cells
01:52:17
and they also secrete the precursor to build up the plaque. So, uh, we we published this as a as a hypothesis and
01:52:23
an editorial in the Lancet and now there's a whole field looking at androgenesis and and Alzheimer's disease. It's crazy how this all stems
01:52:30
back to this idea that food is medicine. Yeah. I mean, listen, before we had
01:52:36
medicine as medicine, before we had pharmaceuticals in the 1930s, it's all we had. That's all humans had our diet
01:52:43
and lifestyle for medicines, you know. And so I think that that's really I think what's happened is that in during
01:52:51
the industrial revolution that occurred with pharmaceuticals,
01:52:57
we put aside a tool in the toolbox that we've always had. In fact, that's the only thing we had before. And we focused
01:53:04
myopically just on what pharmaceuticals can do. Now, I'm telling you, as somebody who has developed biioharmaceuticals and who is still very
01:53:12
much involved in that, new medicines can be life-saving. Old medicines can be life-saving. And so, you never want to
01:53:18
throw out the baby with a bath water. What we have forgotten about is that tool in the toolbox. It's been with
01:53:23
humanity forever, which is what we do with our food. And and what I'm saying is that what we can do now with the work
01:53:31
that I'm doing in food is medicine. We can take the modern science that deep probe that ex extraordinary level of
01:53:40
sophistication that we use for drug development and we can use it apply it to understand why our foods help us
01:53:47
which foods help us and what types of outcomes we're actually looking for. And so food is medicine. Bringing it back
01:53:54
into the fold is just replacing a tool in the toolbox. But now we are actually fortifying it with the
01:54:00
knowledge provided by science of what we should choose and when and why.
01:54:06
Supplementation. Are you a fan of supplementation? Because I take a couple of supplements every morning. Things like creatine and omega-3 and vitamin D.
01:54:13
Do you take supplements? Yep. Yes, I do. And I I'll I'll first say um my my first
01:54:20
off approach is that uh we should get most of the micronutrients that we need
01:54:26
to be healthy from our food. Use your food uh to our advantage because uh
01:54:32
single foods will have hundreds of different uh polyphenols and fiber and all kinds of other beneficial things. So
01:54:38
and and vitamins and minerals. So, our food is a much more efficient way to get
01:54:44
all of our micronutrients. However, supplements can be helpful in the
01:54:50
literal translation of the world, supplement, which means topping off. So, if you can't get everything that you
01:54:56
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
01:55:02
do it as well. Omega-3 fatty acids, another good uh top off uh to actually use for a supplement. And by the way,
01:55:09
there are some probiotics that um I feel that it's prudent to actually get have
01:55:16
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
01:55:21
talking about. Everything's personal. It's personal to them. But I, you know, we talked earlier about the acromancia,
01:55:27
right? So I do eat the foods that support acromancia, the pomegranate, etc., and the chili peppers. But I'm
01:55:33
going to take the supplement because I've seen the data that shows how important it can be. Oh, an acromancia
01:55:38
improves your metabolism, lowers the risk of metabolic syndrome. There might even be some clues that acromancia um
01:55:45
might also lower the risk of dementia development later on as well. So, hey, this is a pretty safe natural bacteria.
01:55:52
I'll take that probiotic. And another probiotic I take is called Lactobacillus rutery. Lutery. What does this do?
01:56:00
Lowers inflammation, builds immunity. It actually text This is the bacteria that text messages the brain. We talked about
01:56:06
the brain and it causes our brain to release social hormones like oxytocin.
01:56:12
That's a social hormone that makes us feel good. So, you know, uh why wouldn't I actually take that? And oh, one last
01:56:19
thing. Lactobacus ruti has been I the kind I take is chewable. Why wouldn't you just take a capsule? Well, it turns
01:56:26
out that the same bacteria, lactobacus ruterides, good for the gut, but if you chew it up, this is the bacteria that
01:56:32
kills the bacteria that causes cavities and gum disease.
01:56:38
I haven't had cavity in well over a decade, you know. And so, again, this is one of these types of practical things
01:56:44
that um just knowing the science and knowing what I do and where where I
01:56:50
don't need enough. It's hard to get enough vitamin D. um uh uh hard enough to get omega-3s, I will actually top off
01:56:57
on those. I'm wondering, you know, you've I've got these two great books in front of me, Eat to Beat Disease, which is a New York Times bestseller, and Eat
01:57:03
to Beat Your Diet, which is really about burning fat, healing your metabolism, and living longer. I know that you must
01:57:10
have some f people use the term superfoods all the time, but there must be some foods where you look at them and
01:57:16
just think they are little miracles in their own right. So, I wanted to a
01:57:21
little challenge for you is if you had to pick five of your favorite foods based on the research that you've done,
01:57:27
the science you've seen, what would those top fives be? I would bring coffee. Okay. Um because of all the
01:57:34
polyphenols in coffee, I'd bring tea. Um I tend to drink coffee in the morning and I have tea at night. Um and I can
01:57:40
I'm not caffeine sensitive, so I can have the tea at night. If if if you
01:57:45
allow me, I'll actually lump those into my beverages. Okay. Under one category. Um I'll bring tree nuts. Tree nuts. Tree
01:57:53
nuts. Walnuts, almonds, macadamia, pistachios. Um I love nuts. U tree nuts.
01:57:58
And you know, not the pack prepackaged kind, but I like to, you know, kind of like toast them up myself and see flavor
01:58:05
them myself. Um, I would bring that because of the dietary fiber, the healthy pro, it's a good source of
01:58:10
protein, some healthy fats in it as well, and can kill some cancer stem cells while we're at it. Okay, so tree
01:58:17
nuts are actually good. I would bring tomatoes because I love tomatoes. Okay, it's a great source for hydration, good
01:58:24
source of lycopine, which we talked about, good for metabolism. I would take berries. Berries, blueberries,
01:58:31
strawberries, raspberries are are among my favorites. Raspberries. You might be
01:58:36
surprised at this, but raspberries are poundfor-pound or weight for weight one of the most fiber richch foods out
01:58:43
there. They're light, they're hollow, packed with fiber. Um, and they've got polyphenols and that are useful for
01:58:50
lowering inflammation as well. Berries um are actually really good. And then, you know, I because I follow what I call
01:58:57
the Mediterranean uh style of eating, I love to have those vegetables that are
01:59:05
actually used in both the Mediterranean and Asia, Mediterranean style cooking,
01:59:10
the bok choy, the kale, chory, escarol, you know, all of those types of um of of
01:59:18
leafy greens. So, those would be the five I would actually take with me. And what is the most important thing that we
01:59:23
didn't talk about that we should have talked about? You know, I think that uh
01:59:29
the most one of the most important things that that I want people to walk away with is that there's more than 200
01:59:35
foods that I've studied and I've written about in my books eat to be disease and eat to beat your diet that you know I've
01:59:41
done all the heavy lifting to help you figure out what foods are healthy that you could consider adding to your diet.
01:59:47
But if you notice, I didn't actually give you a formula or a set menu on what
01:59:54
to do for health. Because the most important thing I I I want people to walk away with is that my humanistic
02:00:01
approach to this is um you should love your food to love your health. And if you could actually do both at the same
02:00:08
time, you have to find out what are the foods that resonate with you. What do you prefer? What do you enjoy? So, if
02:00:14
you could look at 200 healthy foods, which is what what I have in my books, and just take a highlighter or a pencil
02:00:20
and circle them. Circle the ones you already love. Start and stick with those, you're already way ahead of the
02:00:26
game. And that builds confidence that you're actually doing the right things. And that's what I love about this book
02:00:32
in particular, Eat to Beat Disease, is that it also comes with lots of great recipes um inside the book. And um I
02:00:39
think that's super helpful because there's a lot of information here, but this makes it actionable. It's a it's a
02:00:45
really iconic book. It's such it's sold so incredibly well because also it's so unbelievably accessible to people who
02:00:50
aren't scientists and that are trying to find some things that they can add to their plate. Um and I think that's
02:00:57
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
02:01:03
things that we should be adding to our plate to make our lives more um healthy and increase our longevity, which I'm
02:01:08
very excited about actually because you're writing a book about longevity, I hear. And um I'm very much awaiting that
02:01:15
book, which when when do you think that'll be due and ready? I don't uh I'm working on a manuscript, so I'm not ready to give a release date yet, but
02:01:21
you'll be the first to know. Okay, good. We have a a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who
02:01:27
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
02:01:36
on Earth has been successful, that you've achieved what
02:01:42
you set out to achieve? Wow. I think I would
02:01:48
have two sides, two answers for that that represent different sides of the coin. For me, I think if I'm able to
02:01:57
have made my immediate community, my family better, that would uh be
02:02:05
meaningful, a meaningful life uh having been lived. And if you look at the whole
02:02:12
uh rest of my career and existence and how I spend my time, I want the work that I've done to
02:02:22
resonate with others in a way that can improve their lives. I'm, you know, what I do. I kind of say I'm taking one for
02:02:28
the team. The team being the rest of the world. And if I can contribute even a small piece that makes other people's
02:02:35
lives better, then I feel like, you know, I've done it. I've done my job. Well, that's what you're most certainly
02:02:41
doing, my friend, because you when I was looking through what you've accomplished in your life, um whether it's the all of
02:02:48
the FDA approved treatments for over 70 diseases, including cancers, diabetes, chronic wounds, and blindness that
02:02:53
you've helped to develop, um more than I could possibly count, or whether it's the work that you're doing through your foundation, which I think people should
02:03:00
uh check out, which is a nonprofit organization, which helps develop treatments for chronic diseases that are based on
02:03:05
angioenesis. You've most certainly done that and you continue to do that. But even maybe more importantly of all because there's so many billions of
02:03:12
people out there that are starved of the information that you have and that you find in your research laboratory is
02:03:17
you've come out into the world into the public forum and you're helping to articulate and demystify these
02:03:23
incredibly confusing things that people like me who didn't go and get a PhD or didn't go to Harvard don't understand.
02:03:30
And you're masterful at it. You really are masterful. your ability to break down. You know, I sit here week in week
02:03:36
out speaking to very very smart people and not all of them have the very important skill of being able to turn something very complicated into
02:03:42
something understandable. And that is a skill you have. It's a real real gift and especially your use of like metaphors and analogies which really
02:03:49
cement these ideas in our brain in a way that we can all understand. That for me is a really really important gift. So
02:03:54
long may you continue to continue your work of public communication as well because for people like me it it can
02:03:59
cause a penny drop moment that then leads us to change our lives for the better. So thank you. Thank well well thank you for inviting me. But you know
02:04:05
I would say that you know we also live in a time again this is about going into
02:04:11
the future. I'm always about moving into the future. Well, we have the platforms. We have, you know, I I went on to I
02:04:17
developed a YouTube channel because I realized it was a place for me to take to drink from the fire hydrant, distill
02:04:22
it, and figure out how I can deliver it in swift fashion, which would have been impossible 10 years ago. So, for
02:04:29
example, you know, we talked about how, you know, uh, when my uncles had had
02:04:35
cancer and passed away and I felt helpless, then my mother had it some years later and we had progress. we had
02:04:41
the ability to be able to do something different. Similarly for me, I look at my books, I look at my social channels,
02:04:47
my YouTube um uh platform as ways of being able to actually solve a problem that I felt like needed to be solved,
02:04:54
but I wasn't really sure how to do it until now. Dr. William Lee, I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out
02:04:59
your YouTube channel because it is fantastic and that's a great place to get more of this information, but also I'm going to link the YouTube channel
02:05:05
and all of these books below for anybody that wants to continue their journey of learning. Thank you. Thank you. I really
02:05:10
appreciate you being so generous with your time and wisdom. This has always blown my mind a
02:05:17
little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribe to the show. So, could I ask you for a
02:05:23
favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe
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02:05:34
that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue
02:05:41
to do what we do. Thank you so much. [Music]
02:06:03
[Music]