HEALTHY FOODS That Heal The Body, Starve Cancer & PREVENT DISEASE! | Dr. William Li & Lewis Howes

things that used to be like instant foods gotta be really careful about that because if you take a look at the packaging and i'm telling you there's one thing your viewers can get from me about things to watch out for i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness yeah please welcome you share a lot of science behind how we can beat cancer and other diseases by changing our diet but it doesn't seem possible for most of the population to even think about that so how is this possible yeah well you know uh

first of all thanks for having me on i love talking about the uh the making the impossible possible and usually first of all you just have to kind of think through uh what your goals are and so i'll explain sort of what my goals were when i got into this whole thing so i'm a medical doctor i'm trained as an internal medicine doc and that means that i take care of men and women young and old healthy and sick and one of the things that i uh trained myself more or less to do is a

little bit different than how most medical doctors think which is you know we're trained to diagnose disease chase it with drugs and keep chasing with drugs right so my view has always been we start healthy every now and then we get sick but the real question is how can we actually get back to health and how do we prevent getting sick in the first place so a little bit of a different orientation and my goal has always been to keep health protect health or to to get you back to health um i'm also a researcher

as a medical doctor you're not what i've been told is you're not taught about nutrition and actually teaching how to eat properly to reverse disease or to prevent disease i should say so how come you seem to be you know one of the the few that have tried to have gone outside of the box to say hey listen we're not going to just pump everyone with drugs and and put a band-aid on something we're going to get to the root cause yeah well so here here's a little bit of the kind of the under-the-skirt truth

about this um medical schools teach medical students that would usually get less than one month worth of nutrition education in their entire four years and then it never gets revisited throughout your entire career and in fact nutrition when i went to medical school was kind of dismissed as something that that dietitians actually did and when i trained in the hospital now i trained at massachusetts general hospital it's one of the harvard teaching hospitals okay so i can run a coveted unit i could run an emergency room not a problem but what i realized after many

years of taking care of patients is that when my patients would ask me hey doc what should i do for myself i realize i was never taught that answer so i thought that was wrong now my background as a researcher actually comes into play in terms of how i got into this whole field because um i'm what you call a vascular biologist so that really means that i study the science of blood vessels and uh blood vessels are important because we've got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies so you can

imagine how important this network actually is it delivers every bit of oxygen we breathe and all the nutrition we eat to go through the bloodstream you need the circulation to bring it to every cell and every organ so that's what i study my science so when i actually started yeah you know almost 30 years ago uh in medicine my my goal was to figure out how could we actually first conquer diseases so i i went into the biotech area and you know we tried to figure out common denominators of disease and and it comes back

to food because food is one of those common solutions but common denominators of disease actually means when you take a look at how we do research on alzheimer's and diabetes and obesity and aging and heart disease and cancer these are vertical silos they're about an inch wide and a mile deep and you get specialists that actually come in and they're really knowledgeable about what makes one disease different from another okay and i thought look you know we should actually look at what makes diseases the same so if you drain the pacific you get to figure

out how the islands are connected right and so that's what i was interested in because i figured if you could figure out the common denominators of a disease then you had a shot at pulling the bow back and sending a single arrow through multiple diseases now i looked at angiogenesis which is how the body grows blood vessels that's my area as one of those common denominators and we were right so i run the angiogenesis foundation we figured out that when the body loses its control over its circulation either you don't have enough blood vessels and

wounds don't heal or you have too many blood vessels and you either go blind your cancers grow and so through biotechnology over a couple of decades i actually been involved with developing 41 fda approved new treatments for cancer diabetes and and prevent blindness prevention of blindness okay so that's my street cred so when somebody basically says oh you know how'd you get into nutrition uh you know like are you one of those doctors that don't believe in modern medicine and i basically no i i actually develop modern medicines right but what i realized when i

was actually working with my patients is that although we can actually come up with better more sophisticated more higher tech treatments for diseases these days the fact of the matter is we should be preventing disease in the first place and when you're talking about prevention you can't talk about drugs you got to talk about something like food and when i thought about it and this is how i got into nutrition i realized i wasn't taught about it but i did have these skill set of actually having developed drugs and having invented many of the systems

that drugs are being are tested in you know what why don't we just throw some food into those systems and see what happens and so for me i'm one of those people that actually not just says food as medicine but i actually study food as medicine that's how i got here okay very cool so what are the i mean so it is possible through food to beat cancer and diseases and is that what i'm hearing you say well here's basically what i i actually learned myself is that when it comes to food and health food

is actually a medicine that we all take three times a day right we we try not to take prescription meds whenever we can avoid and even if you write prescription meds you don't want to be taking them forever but food is something that you take three times a day from the time we're born to our very last breath and when it comes to food and health there is it's not just about the food it's actually about how our body responds to what we put inside it so that's the real kind of underlying secret if you

feed your body something that's not good for it it's going to resp it's going to react poorly not going to be good for you if you feed your body something that is good for it it's going to activate its health defenses and that's what i read about my book e2b disease is uh how does a body actually maintain its health and then what can we eat to help the body do it better interesting so i mean what are the key things we should be knowing about the body are all bodies the same when it comes

to how foods i guess are consumed and assimilated through the body in the bloodstream and all these different things or is everybody different where some nutritional foods might impact positively but negatively in other bodies what should we be knowing about the body yeah it's a great question and first of all i'm a scientist so i will tell you how you can tell that i'm a scientist is that real scientists tell you we don't know everything okay and it's the kind of humility that we have to start with because so often you think about you know

scientists being very smart in things real scientists spend their time talking about what we what we don't know not what we do know so but you're asking me what we do know all right so i'll give you that so i'll give you that answer look um uh our bodies are hardwired to be healthy so when we're growing in our mom's womb our body as we're forming our bones and our heart and our organs and our limbs inside the form of the human that's being created uh are these health defenses so you think about the body

like a fortress you know you've seen a bit we all seen in a medieval fortress a castle right and basically like it's a happy community that lives inside there you got a king you got a queen you got a princess you got everything else going inside there but that fortress has got to protect itself so it's designed to repel enemies it's got a moat it's got a drawbridge it's got the little slits you throw you fire arrows out of it's got sloping walls so enemies can't crawl up it's got traps by the way you know

like a medieval fort um the thing that i never realized having been to quite a few castles is that when you go to the entrance there is a hole right above you and it's called a murder hole and it's basically if the if people breached the the drawbridge they would just drop rocks boulders down through that hole all right so the body is designed better than a medieval castle we've got our own defense systems and there's five of them that i know about and i helped to kind of put together this picture partly because i

studied the biotechnology how do you actually treat diseases using these systems and when you forget about the disease part and you think about the health part these are the systems these five systems that maintain our health so i'll tell you what they are okay first health defense system is called angiogenesis that's what i study blood vessels a 60 000 mile channel that delivers oxygen and nutrients everywhere got to have enough of them um or your our body is in trouble second angiogenesis this is this is the channel of blood vessels this is the this is

how this this is how the body grows blood vessels okay it is a whole system of growth okay when we have just the right amount of blood vessels our body is healthy now are you going to go to work out all right you're going to pump some iron your your muscles got to grow now you need a few more blood vessels all right um if you skin your knee and fall off a bike got to heal that wound underneath that scab you got new blood vessels growing to heal now the body never lets too many

blood vessels to grow or causes problems for example cancers are forming in all of our bodies because we're filled with these dividing cells and some of them make mistakes but a microscopic cancer is completely harmless because it doesn't have a blood supply and so our body prevents cancers from growing naturally by controlling the angiogenesis so we just got enough for our good cells not enough for the bad cells so that's one of our health defenses and there are treatments including ones that i helped to develop that can cut off the blood supply to cancer by

cutting off it by starving it so that's called antiandrogenic therapy and the same treat same approach has been used to prevent blindness all right so you don't have blood vessels leaking in the eye however turns out that sometimes your body needs a little help so now you can actually use foods to actually amp up your body's angiogenesis defenses so that's just one of the defenses okay that's the first one what's the second one all right second one is our stem cells right so our s when we were kids uh louis you know like our great

school teachers told us salamanders can regenerate starfish can regenerate but people can't regenerate right wrong you lose your hand it's not going to grow back well it turns out that people do regenerate we can't regenerate that quickly but we and we regenerate from the inside out like a lizard can regenerate like a limb or tail but we regenerate our organs continuously our lung regenerates our liver regenerates okay the lining of our mouth regenerates if you've ever eaten a chip all right and scratched the inside of your mouth and it hurts next day all fixed right

because of regeneration all right now here's the thing uh um turns out that the way we naturally regenerate is through stem cells not the kind you go to a strip mall to have injected into your knee but this is the kind that we're born with because you know like when when we were when you and i were but we're like sperm and egg meeting in our mom's womb and dividing that's what we were these are stem cells we were all formed from these primitive cells that could be anything it could be an eye it could

be a nose it could be a heart and they and they formed our whole body and and there's always some overage okay and so you have more than you need to form your in into a person and when we're born about 750 million stem cells are left over and they are packed up in a suitcase and stuffed into our bone marrow all right and so when we're born even a little baby inside their bone marrow in this hollow of their bones are 750 million stem cells and they are stored there like a like bullets in

a bandolier waiting for when they're needed so that when we grow up and we need to be regenerated you know you have too many too much to drink now your liver needs to be regenerated you cut yourself now you need to actually heal that wound these stem cells come flying out of our bone marrow like bees out of a hive wow who regenerates renew us from the inside out and there are biotech efforts that i've been a part of to try to grow new heart grow new brain regenerate nerves not ready for prime time yet

but it turns out that foods can coax these stem cells out of our bone marrow so we regenerate faster huh which foods this is the second one but i'm curious which foods can help us there are there are a number of them i'll give you one uh right from the get-go is dark chocolate oh you're speaking my language now okay can you eat too much dark chocolate that's the question you know i i have never seen anything about an overdose of cacao but i will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the

number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream just by having two cups of hot chocolate made with eighty percent high flavonol chocolate dark chocolate come on yeah it's been done in people 60 year olds with heart disease so wait what happens when you when you drink or you you eat this dark chocolate okay it happens yeah the polyphenols in this dark chocolate that we we know what they are they're called pro-enthocyanin so i'm a scientist so my job is to actually know what are what the inside chemicals actually are these are natural chemicals all right

most people don't need to know that but you drink it it tastes good that's all you need to know but but i'll tell you these these natural chemicals found in cacao actually trigger a reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells so it is literally like bees flying out of a hive can double the number of stem cells and what's the what's the practical impact well there was a study done uh at ucsf in san francisco that looked at 60 year old men with heart disease so these are people whose blood

vessels were already not doing so well and their blood flow wasn't going so well either and their blood vessels were kind of sick that's kind of the definition of heart disease by having the stem cells coming out they were able to actually double the resiliency the function of their blood vessels so they got better rebound the better agility um their their blood vessels are in better shape because their stem cells are regenerating their circulation wow so this is human studies right like most most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice

or cells i'm talking about human studies and that's kind of where we are with food is medicine it's not the kind of like the guesswork like we can do serious research to get down to exactly what's actually happening at the human level so that's the second health defense systems okay third one third one is our gut microbiome now people have been talking about gut health and microbiome it's almost like a buzzword these days and people are saying well we can actually scoop your poop and we can actually measure your microbiome and we can tell you

what you need to eat and what you don't need to eat again i'm a scientist so i will tell you that there are 39 trillion bacteria in art in the typical body that's more stars than in a night sky all right so we barely understand uh the gut bacteria but what we do know is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism communicates with our brain um actually can help us heal from the inside out and very importantly our gut bacteria basically lives if you think of your gut like a garden hose it's a tube

and you were to cut a garden hose in half and you look inside it there's a lining okay uh the bacteria is inside the hose but inside the wall of the garden hose that's where your immune system 70 of our immune system lives inside our gut so our gut bacteria so yeah so if you're feeding your gut a lot of bad foods it's probably you're poisoning your immune system you're preventing your gut bacteria now i'll tell you what's interesting about the gut bacteria your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the walls of

the of your gut immune system's in there 70 right like a jelly roll like a like the jelly in a jelly roll that gut bacteria is inside so think about like a college student in a freshman dorm they are talking to their roommate by pounding on the wall right what do you want what kind of pizza do you want all right and they can answer you and that's basically what our gut bacteria says to our uh our immune system so we got to keep that gut healthy by the way interestingly uh and i've done research

on this um certain gut bacteria uh can actually signal to your brain it's a gut and brain axis and cause your brain to release social hormones okay and can affect your mood so you know when you've got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut i guarantee you like it's not just because you're irritated it's affecting your brain as well so yeah we had uh we had dr amaran uh mayor on who he's got the gut i think it's the gut brain connection or the good immune connection or something like that so he's

he's got a lot of great research on that yeah so well the key thing though is that foods can actually help right size your gut health think about like an ecosystem the great barrier reef so certain foods can support the ecology the ecosystem the great barrier reef and certain ones actually kill the coral all right and so our continuously want to keep it in good shape all the way through our lives and by the way even conditions like autism alzheimer's and schizophrenia are all now seemingly connected to our gut bacteria really yeah now is there

a way if someone has those are they pretty easy to reverse though or is that hard we're well listen we're just figuring this out because right now medically we prescribe medications uh to try to treat those things and a lot of times those medications just blunt the symptoms okay they cover up the symptoms they don't get at the underlying cause now we don't know exactly how the gut bacteria communicates to the brain completely yet but there's one giant nerve called the vagus nerve it's like a giant shoot it's about the thickness of a shoelace and

it hangs from our brain all the way down into our gut okay goes right near wraps around our esophagus on the way down and we think the gut bacteria basically sends text messages up to the brain through this big nerve okay so the key though is that foods can actually influence our gut bacteria either good bacteria or bad bacteria so that's important uh so that's enough that's the third health defense system okay okay so what the fur fir angiogenesis number one stem cells number two gut microbiome number three okay the fourth one number four our

dna now if you watch csi dna is just sort of like a genetic fingerprint a code that you can find on a crime scene or if you're actually trying to do ancestry look for your ancestors you figure out how how much of you as neanderthal right so that was one percent neanderthal when i did it yes uh so the the key though is it's dna is a lot more than our genetic code it actually protects us from the environment now what am i what do i mean by that well you know how if we are

exposed to uh we get a sunburn ultraviolet light you damage your dna and what happens cancer skin cancer right um if you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant it's going to actually damage your dna and your lungs you get lung cancer right but think about it if you are in los angeles and you're driving on the i-10 or if you're actually just walking on a beach uh uh you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation so how come we don't get skin cancer all the time because our dna is hardwired to fix itself from damage

and so the dna is a protective mechanism from the environment i always tell people when you're pumping gas if you still drive a gas vehicle as opposed to an ev um i always ask people do you stand upwind or downward what do you do are you upwind or downward do you know up up uh well upwind right so you're not getting the the fumes in is that what you mean right right right well if you're standing downwind you can smell the fumes yeah right and if you're smelling the fumes you are poisoning the dna in

your lung so how come we don't develop lung cancer after pumping gas because our dna is hardwired to fix itself and so our dna is sort of like a self-defense mechanism against the environment radon from your basement okay off-gassing from the from the new car you just got or the uber that you're riding in you know or the furniture that you got right so like this is this is this incredible defense mechanism against our environment and then and foods can actually speed up the repair help fix holes that are in our dna and then the

other kind of ps the resistance for our dna's defense is that there's something called a telomere i don't know if you've ever had anybody on your show talk about tea limiters telomeres yeah yes these are these are they see if you're at the longer the telomere the the longer you can live or something or they can right well well i'll tell you basically what the you know like to to give a to remind you to remind your listeners and viewers basically if your dna is like a shoelace the telomere is like the little plastic cap

at the end of the shoelace and over time that little cap kind of wears down just like a shoelace and you know when they when that cap is gone man that your shoelace just falls apart yeah and that's what happens to our dna so we need that cap that's called the telomere and it burns down like a life fuse so you know like mission impossible light diffuse right so this thing is burning down and when it burns down that's it your cell's done so what you want to do is to slow down your cellular aging

and harsh things that you do to your body smoking cigarettes being in a couch potato being exposed to damaging oxidative stress actually just being stressed out um like we are now with this friggin pandemic um those things all shorten our teenagers they burn the fuse faster stress yeah but foods can slow it down and some foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere which is really cool for from an aging perspective right one of those what are those top three foods that help lengthen the telomeres green tea is one of them coffee i got it

i got a yeah it's amazing i got i got a little i used to live in italy and i just got into this habit of drinking espresso uh so i got a little cup here amazingly coffee actually lengthens your telomere come on i i kid you not it's it's quite amazing um uh and uh leafy greens some of the polyphenols and leafy greens can also slow down and some of them actually look like they can like the new telomeres as well so the key thing is that we you know we are not just hapless pawns

of aging we can actually do something about it and we can also fight against our environment um because look the the tax that we pay for being on planet earth is we're exposed to stuff all the time and we need to we count on our bodies health defenses to fix it so that's a fourth defense and our fifth defense is our immune system which you know after two years uh over the last two years we all know how important our immune system is but what if i told you that your immune system is so powerful

that when it's in its best shape even when you're 80 years old it is strong enough to fight cancer in fact it can even wipe out metastatic cancer that's spread all over your body that's how strong your immune system is if you give it the chance and so here's what the immune system does it's like an army of super soldiers so uh rangers seals as you know uh marines special forces they're all they've all got these are all parts of the immune system all cells of the immune system and like the special forces that got

their own weapons their own training their own tactics but they all work together for you know the collective good and what happens is that when you've got good strong defenses you can fight off invaders from the outside bacteria and viruses for example and but it's not just outside invaders you've got inside invaders as well and those little microscopic cancers are inside invaders and so our immune system patrols our body okay cops on a beat and they're looking for things that don't look right and you see that microscopic cancer that is it can't grow because it

doesn't have a blood vessel blood vessels feeding it angiogenesis basically you if the immune system goes there and takes them right out okay and takes a sniper shot and it's gone and so that's why we got to protect our immune system and there are lots of foods that can actually boost our immunity as well what would be those what would be those top three that boost the immune system uh blueberries are a food that definitely boosts immune system it's uh in young people as well as older people uh that they boost the natural killer cells

which is really cool um broccoli sprouts can boost our immune system now these are the three daily these are like the three day old sprouts right okay um okay i mean okay here's something here's something most people don't know the big broccoli that when we eat broccoli we're really you know our moms told us to eat the tree tops right those they're all same you go to the freezer section of a grocery store and you buy some frozen broccoli and they all look the same they're all the same size that's not really what broccoli looks

like if you go to the group farmer's market and you see a real broccoli is this gigantic stem with a little bit of tree top okay so what's in a broccoli it's called sulforaphane so that's what gives broccoli that unique taste of broccoli it's a little sulfurous okay you got to put a little olive oil a little bit of garlic you know you could can saute it up okay so the sulforaphanes we've done research now looking at what what's in the treetops and it turns out that these sulforaphanes can starve cancer anti-androgenic help help your

body cut off the blood supply to cancer broccoli tree tops have it but guess what the stock of the broccoli has twice as much of the good stuff than the tree tops eat the stalks eat the stock so man like if you don't want to eat if you don't want to saute the socks like a lot of cultures will just cut the stocks and saute them stick it in a blender you can make it into a smoothie or make a soup out of it you know and so there's a lot of good things you can

do put a little broccoli stem a little oregano powder you know you can do lighter light it right up a little turmeric it'll be really good um smoothie or a soup however here's the thing so this imagines adult broccoli having these sulforaphanes well it turns out that these big broccoli plants used to be sprouts and the sprouts pretty much were born or sprouted from the seed with all the sulforaphanes it's ever gonna have all right so when it gets bigger it just gets distributed with the stock closer to the ground having more of it of

course but the broccoli sprouts have 100 times more wow of the sulforaphane the good stuff as a grown-up broccoli so sprouts broccoli sprouts now studies have been done to show that if you give people a flu shot people in the winter should get a blue shot so you don't get the flu all right uh just go to your drugstore to get one uh it turns out that if you uh people they did a study looking at people getting the flu shot and they gave half the people a little shake made with broccoli sprouts and the

other group just got a placebo and the people who got the broccoli sprout shake and the flu shot their beneficial response of their immune system is 22 times higher huh like it totally rocked if they actually had a broccoli sprout shake so that's not food versus medicine that is food and medicine which is really cool right interesting so we never want to throw out we don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water we want to figure out how to make everything go work even better absolutely um wow this is fascinating okay so

i'm curious because you you talked about this process where all these diseases or cancers seem to have this thing in common right this these heightened blood cells that it is or too many blood too many blood too many blood vessels that are feeding the cancer they're feeding the cancer so i'm curious do you know is there a specific cancer or disease that's easier to reverse okay so let's take a look at what we know from the cancer treatment perspective so i i work in this area uh and uh you know i i've been involved with

helping treat cancer patients so we do know that there are there is a new type of medicine that's not chemo that if you uh they're called anti-angiogenesis so they cut off the blood supply feeding the big cancers by the time so here's a research experiment that was done a couple of decades ago in the lab that i worked in if you grew tiny little cancer cells and up to the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen that's about three millimeters in diameter and you kind of floated them in a broth and didn't allow them

to touch blood vessels they would just stay there at that size almost indefinitely okay and in our body that's the side that the immune system would wing by and take out the moment you allow blood vessels to grow into that microscopic mass that tumor will grow sixteen thousand times in two weeks it'll explode this is like a trigger that's get pulled in order to have cancers grow up and for that reason biotech companies started to develop anti-angiogenic drugs to treat cancer by cutting off the blood supply so there are about a dozen anti-angiogenic drugs that

have changed the game for treating kidney cancer and liver cancer and lung cancer and even brain cancer all right so we know that we can actually do this uh with drugs the question is can we do with food not so much when cancer is out of the barn horses out of the barn but what about prevention what are foods that can prevent cancer well it turns out that two apples a day actually can lower the rate of lung cancer and colon cancer why because there are natural substances in apples like quercetin that's one of the

natural chemicals that actually are naturally anti-angiogenic green tea actually has been low lower risk of colorectal cancer okay uh particularly in women and yeah and what's in a cup of green tea are these polyphenols eg cg and when you drink it it gets in your bloodstream why because the blood vessels are carrying it and now your blood vessels loaded with this cancer starving stuff these little tumors don't have a chance wow yeah okay is it the same as eating two apples a day and and uh you know eating these specific foods as it would be

just putting all those ingredients in a supplement and taking the supplement when would that work just as well to have like a super supplement that is just the the killer of all cancer and diseases you know of all these different nutrients well look i i'm a researcher and so and i've been involved with drug development and so if it were that easy it would have been done a while ago but i can tell you that the whole what i tell people is that the whole food is always going to be a little bit better for

the following reason number one uh for a supplement you reduce it to a couple of different elements you know that that you try to pack into a capsule the whole food man it's got the hundreds if not thousands of natural goodies and chemicals including like an apple's got the skin it's got ursolic acid it's got fiber which feature gut microbiome it's got quercetin which cuts out the blood supply so you're getting all that in there um compared to just one thing you try to pack into a little capsule that said supplements are useful and i'm

i'm involved with you know designing and developing supplements as well what we want to do supplements uh the term means topping off right so you're supplementing you're not replacing and this is what you know like what you were just asking louis is so important like can we just not bother eating and just have a supplement no man like you should be eating because you enjoy food it's good for us it brings people together it tells us something about our traditions our culture our family our community everybody's from someplace there's everybody's got something that they love

to eat and of that list there's some good stuff in it and so we should really lean forward so that's the other thing that's a little bit different from me that compared to a lot of other doctors that tell people what not to eat i try to tell people what you should add to your life not that what you should take away plenty of people will tell you what to take away right i'm telling you what to add and we should add foods that activate your health defenses and supplements can be useful to top things

off got it i've been told uh many times that inflammation is the is a also a big i guess warning sign for diseases and cancers and the more inflammation the more your body is less capable of defending itself and its immune system is weaker is what i've been told what would you say are the best ways to reduce inflammation in the body quickly is it through food is it through medicine is it through fasting is it through you know less you know more sleep is it through a better environment what would you say is that

so you know a lot of people i think when they hear about inflammation they think about it as a bad guy and what i want to tell you is that inflammation is normal and it's just part of our immune system so when you actually have a bacteria or virus and made in your body let's say you get a cold your immune system uh sets up a little bit of inflammation in your nose okay which is why we have a stuffy nose a runny nose and then it takes it tackles the invader right then and there

and then hopefully that's all that's all that matters and by the way another sure sign of inflammation is if you cut yourself in the kitchen and you see that little cut will pretty quickly swell up turn red swell up inflammation that's your immune system trying to tackle all the bacteria that might be trying to get into their skin inflammation is good but it goes up to protect you and then it comes right down i think i call it like a like the volume switch in a car radio right you get in a car you want

to hear some tunes got to turn it on but what the problem with inflammation is when it doesn't go back down it keeps on going more more more it's chronic and it keeps on going up and that's like getting in your car and having somebody a passenger turn up that volume and keep cranking that volume and you're like hey man turn that thing down right it doesn't go down and you just can't go on right and that's what happens inside your body so what's what are some of the different ways to actually deal with that

well the first thing to do is think about lifestyle because we can actually give anti-inflammatories i could tell you to go out to take some motrin tylenol whatever that'll take down your inflammation but actually there are ways of actually doing if you actually just if you stopped and just calmed yourself and took some breathe did some breaths and start to meditate your inflammatory body's inflammation will start to calm down okay if you actually got a good night's sleep your body will start to the inflammation will uh start to calm down it's it's kind of like

you know everything is going crazy just let everything let the things settle a little bit so that's your inflammation settling down now there are foods that have a lot of anti-inflammatory properties that can be very helpful so for example cranberries um i have a lot of anti-inflammatory polyphenols chocolate even also has anti-inflammatory properties vitamin c is pretty anti-inflammatory strawberries guava red bell peppers all really good uh really good um and uh and uh you know i think that the other thing to think about is uh lots of fruits and vegetables lots of fruits in particular

have anti-inflammatory uh properties so the key about inflammation is that you don't want to get rid of it all together okay okay like if you if you got pumped up on steroids it would shut down your inflammation you might get infected because you don't have any inflammation you want your body to get its set point you want to get back to balance so i think that you know there's lifestyle there's uh diet uh foods you can choose there's sleep all these things can actually help to calm inflammation it's not a single on and off switch

i'm curious what would you say are the the most harmful foods then if you said here are three foods that we should be eliminating what would be those most harmful foods that cause the spike in inflammation consistently and causes a lot of these other diseases and cancerous uh cells to occur right well i'll tell you three foods that actually harm the body's health defenses and including the immune system by ratcheting it up inflammation and then lowering the defensive properties but also harm to your dna also harm your microbiome also blunt and stun your stem cells

and also wreck your body's ability to control its blood supply so it's a lot worse than simply causing triggering inflammation and by the way that's the whole point right like we try to take the silver bullet approach to everything let's match this with smash that what i'm telling you is that the body is this system yes so either you introduce something good to it and you'll probably light up a lot of good systems and if you put something bad to it you'll probably trash a lot of it right okay so uh what are some three

foods that actually we know that can trash your body's health defenses one is soda so sugar sweetened beverages like soda all right so you know the favorite ones it's tough right because i wish i could go back to my younger self and say put down the doctor eight cans of dr pepper a day you know when you're like eight years old man well and i'm telling you like this is one thing that um i always try to coach people on if you really really love sodas okay try to come off it you know just by

going down one can a day because if most people drink multiple cans go down one can a day and get to as low as you can because the added sugar actually overloads your body uh your body's ability to be able to handle the sugar and then it makes you inflamed just by the nature of the sugar i cut out i cut out soda years ago i mean maybe i have it once in a couple months or something for like a treat but yeah it used to be almost an addiction probably for how much i drank

it growing up as a kid in the summer as you're just drinking it non-stop like water um but then when i learned about nutrition more when i was playing sports and realizing this is making me tired it's not quenching my thirst that's when i said oh okay i needed more of a competitive edge and kind of got cut out of my life so not only not only does it does soda actually the sugar and soda cause inflammation it really wrecks your microbiome your gut bacteria as well your gut bacteria just can't tolerate that much sugar

okay um and then guess what uh and then you know you say well wait a minute uh that's why we have diet soda right turns out that those artificial sweeteners and soda screw your microbiome your gut bacteria even more ooh more than regular cannabis more more than a regular candida come on so if it says zero sugar and it's a soda or a pop you're saying that could be more harmful than for you for your gut microbiome gotcha right because because a zero sugar is actually to prevent you know um glucose spikes in your body

but in point of fact it actually wrecks your gut microbiome and remember what i told you the microbiome communicates your brain communicates your immune system communicates your healing systems that is not a system you want to screw with and so that's why you know i try to tell people um you really got to watch out for those uh artificial sweeteners they are they they do some bad things so that's one thing so what are the best before we go to the next thing what are the best sweeteners we should be looking for when we're adding

something into food or we see it on the packaging well natural sugars in fruits and vegetables people go well i don't want any sugar then but what about in a beach there's nothing better than a summer peach to me and that natural sugar is okay because when you eat the peach you're not just getting the sugar you're also getting all these other bioactives and the fiber and everything else hundreds the hundreds of thousands of natural chemicals that are good for you from mother nature's kind of pharmacy with an s okay so that's different than just

you know having sugar in a glass or corn syrup right high fructose corn syrup not not good for you um maple syrup a good way to sweeten okay honey is also a good way to uh sweetened as well monk fruit is actually a really really sweet uh tasting uh gourd that's really a shell that is also a decent sweetener stevia actually pretty powerful sweetener i've been doing some research on i haven't been to find anything wrong with it but but for people that are looking at stevia be very careful pick up the package and look

at the side of the box and watch you and read what's on there because a lot of things that are called stevia actually have a lot of other things added to it oh yes so you want to get the pure stuff i always tell if it's in a box look at what's inside it before you buy it there you go okay so soda and pop is the number one thing that is one of the worst things you could be eating um to uh or or the things that could cause more disease and cancer yeah in

your in your body okay that's number one number two uh processed meats now all of us our kids grew up you know at the you know eating deli meats turkey and a ham right i mean like that's basically you what is your mom what did your mom pack in your lunch bag right yeah exactly okay well that's that's a relic of the 1950s you know of this sort of ultra processed foods that are everywhere laden with chemicals that's not what we want to be doing now i have to say it doesn't mean categorically that uh

that hams or sausages are bad for you because if you go to italy or if you go to places in asia or latin america where they create they they create dried meats kind of the old way they're not putting chemicals in there and they're not manipulating it but here you know where you go to the deli counter and you know like yeah take take a look at that deli meat like that's not meat doesn't come like that okay so here's the thing uh processed meats are actually classified by the world health organization as a carcinogen

and you know linked to the uh causation of cancer you got to eat a lot of it but a lot of people actually eat i mean how many hoagies or something yeah right um and i gotta say you know like when i was growing up as a kid i loved those kind of like fancy kind of uh like the deli meats and stuff like that absolutely totally not good for you so that's not good for you uh it also damages the gut microbiome uh oh and it can actually damage your dna so you want to

kind of be cut down or cut out sodas and processed meats and then the other thing is really a category and i call these ultra processed foods so things are in a box or in a can that you know like are instant this or you know uh scooping out and eat it quick you know i don't want to name any particular products um uh i don't want to call any products out but i think we all know the stuff a lot of stuff we grew up with and or advertise on television to kids you know

the frosted this the pop that the things that you that you know they're like the tv dinners like things that used to be like instant foods gotta be really careful about that because if you take a look at the packaging and i'm telling you there's one thing your viewers can get from me about things to watch out for whatever you buy pick it up if it's in a box or in a can and look on the side don't look just at the the label look at the i mean the name of it look at the

side and see if you recognize the ingredients if that if you start you know if you lose start losing track and you can't pronounce and you don't know what most of that stuff is it's an ultra processed food that harms your dna that lowers your immunity that screws up either gut microbiome it impairs angiogenesis it actually causes our cells to age faster those telomeres burn down faster oh man by those processed foods yeah ultra old ultra processed foods ultra right between ultra and products so look processing is technically any type of food you manipulate i

like if you pick a tomato and you cut it up and you make spaghetti sauce at home that's processing you're processing it okay if you're taking flour and an egg and you're making homemade pasta you're processing it i'm talking about ultra process you know there's a term called extrusion have you heard of this yes okay so basically you've got these die-cut machines that like this goop gets thrown into and like the big oil like crazy oils get thrown in there and then it just like pushes out uh like play-doh chunks of food that get cut

and dried that's what i'm talking about like that's the ultra processing it takes i guess maybe the definition it takes food and transforms it into a form you don't recognize got it okay you don't recognize that food yeah you don't want that i'm curious dr lee what do you think has been [Music] the the biggest aha for you in your decades of work through from medical school to your research to your practice to these things what is what was the biggest aha when you learned this thing it it changed everything for you you know there's

been so many instances of that like scientists i'm seeing new things uh literally on a weekly basis things are like my jaw drops virtually you know like last week uh louis i read about a new discovery that we just discovered a new type of human cell in our heart last week like you know like that that's like i hit my head like oh my god really we a couple years ago we discovered a new uh brain cell called the rose hip neuron okay and it seems to be linked to depression so i i'm always amazed

i mean as a scientist i'm amazed by the um by the marvelousness of the body and how much we don't know about it and still so we have to respect it did you know by the way that we had it also um this is just this past year 2021 there was a landmark discovery that changed everything we knew about our metabolism right well so everybody says that you know like um when you're uh uh a teenager you're grown tall you've got a high metabolism you're just basically calories right okay totally wrong the time is going

down when you're team okay and then people say when you're um in your 20s or 30s you know and you're starting to gain weight and getting out of shape and they're like man my metabolism is slowing down and then some people basically say that uh you know i was unlucky because i was born with a bad metabolism look at my sister or look at my cousin she's real thin she's so lucky she's got a fast metabolism right all that has been turned up ended completely it turns out that all humans go through only four phases

of metabolism in their whole life tell me okay actually i'm going to show you this because it's actually right here on my desk you got a chart you got a you got a graph you got a chart no no i got it i got this baby right here it's in a journal science okay this is how researchers do it like all around my office man like i am reading this stuff and this paper uh i'll tell you i i gotta look at this it it's studying 8 000 people from like 30 countries and it studied

people from eight days old to 90 years old across 20 different countries all right this is the largest study of human metabolism ever undertaken and here's what they found that if you subtracted out body fat and which is different for everybody okay and you were to just go right down to the core of real metabolism energy usage uh energy generation are here's here are the four phases when we're born we got the same metabolism as our mother makes sense synchronized okay from zero or from from from the day you're born to one year old your

metabolism skyrockets in fact it's twice high when you're one year old as when you're 20 years old wow okay so from one year old down to throughout your teenagers in puberty that time you think that you're eating a lot and your metabolism is going sky high it's actually coming down from its peak interesting why does it seem like you're burning so many calories well you you just you you um well you're more active and you're growing yeah uh so you may be burning more calories but your metabolism isn't changing this is the key thing we

are hardwired to go through these phases now it's going down to 20 years old from 20 years old to 60 years old okay from college to retirement it doesn't change it is rock stable all right so it's our and then after 60 it starts to diminish but not as fast as you think it's a slow deep it's a slow grade down okay four phases of human metabolism we never knew this before this year all right this is how it knew it is so here's the key thing what makes all the difference between people like how

why is your metabolism different than mine and why is somebody why is a sumo wrestler's metabolism different than you know somebody who's on a runway okay and it has to do with the fact that our metabolisms are all the same but the lifestyle choices that we make can actually push our metabolism one way or the other so it our metabolism doesn't cause us to be fat our fat slows down our metabolism it's the other way around interesting completely right so what so how do we burn more fat then to all right so that's my metabolism

that's what i'm working on right now and that's that's a that is the topic of my next book by the way which i'm writing right now yeah so so stay tuned for that answer because i i'm on to something really hot on that um and i will give you a little bit of a sneak peek what's that yes well you can eat certain foods to burn your fat down absolutely so so while while uh caloric restriction and fasting uh can actually also do it it turns out there are certain foods that you can actually eat

that will trigger it you want to give me something else i i don't i don't want to give you a too much i don't want to give your viewers as a spoiler because i i'll have you come i'll have you invited back in the show well yeah we'll have you been waiting for sure we'll have you back for sure you can give us the whole debrief but what would you say are a couple of these foods at least that you think that are are now researched and proven to be powerful fat burning uh well i'll

give you i'll give you i'll give you one that's actually just a surprise is seafood actually seafood yeah helps burn fat yep does it help burn fat or it starts to trigger and activate the fat triggering process it's it triggers so there are there's certain elements in food that are newly discovered in research like i just told you i just told you some new stuff that's coming out of the hot off the presses but i can tell you like this is where this is what i do the research that if i told you about research

about biotech developments it may not actually mean anything to you for 10 years maybe every never okay but when there's when there's research about food or about your health a lot of times there's stuff that you that has immediacy you can put it to use right away so cancer starving foods regenerative foods gut health foods that can also help your brain foods that slow down cellular aging foods that lower inflammation and boost your immune system at the same time you know that's what i'm talking about because the power of healing rests inside our body and

health care is not something that we need to rely on when we go to the doctor's office right every year you go once healthcare is everything in between that we do for ourselves and food is a medicine that we take absolutely i've talked about this many times on on my show before that i grew up in a specific religion called christian science where it was more the practice of spiritual awareness and that were spiritual ideas and and less on using medicine to heal but more using the mind and awareness to heal you know thought which

would then heal the physical body so medicine was never a really thing i studied or really took growing up it was just kind of like when we got sick or when something happened we we used thought prayer spiritual prayer to kind of remind ourselves of who we are but the uh i'm curious do you think that people could live without modern medicine if they eat properly like all the things that you talk about in your book eat to be diseased do you think we could live longer lives healthier lives without the need of certain medicines

um or are you saying we should be using here and eating food when we need them well we should be eating to enrich our lives from the time we're young all the way until our last breath and that should actually be able to tackle about two-thirds of all the chronic diseases and by the way about a third of all cancers are thought to be due to diet and lifestyle one-third of cancers all right we ought to be able to dodge but you got to start early right i mean this is not one of these things

where i've been smoking my whole life and now i'm going to actually turn over a new leaf it's never too late to quit by the way however the fact of the matter is is that uh you know like so you grew up you know as in christian in the christian science um framework which you're in you're in the boston area so you yeah that's where the hub is the mother church is incredible yeah it's in boston yes it's uh it's amazing it's an amazing place a really a spectacular uh place to visit and a very

special place actually but i will tell you that the idea of of um having formative years uh uh groomed in a healthy mindset yes which is i think what you're talking about uh is so important so that if you've got kids and if you're involved with teaching and if you're involved a business where you can actually impact on kids think about the impact that you have now could actually influence their health 30 40 50 60 years from now and that to me is big responsibility it's a giant opportunity to make a better society that's beautiful

i'm curious we've got a few more minutes left um what do you think you're telling me that every week you're essentially finding these aha moments based on the research papers you're finding and things that you're discovering yourself and what do you think in your mind if you could predict the future ten years out five ten years out what are gonna be the brown groundbreaking things that we as humans discover in the next five to ten years that is going to transform our health wow um based on what you've seen in the last five to ten

years and we're like these are unbelievable every year findings what do you think is on the horizon for us well one thing that i think is most uh one of the big aha jaw droppers for me in the kind of the journey that i've actually had in my career is the fact that we can regenerate ourselves okay and i never thought that was even possible i had been working in stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine and you know it's a real struggle it's an uphill climb to really try to show that we can actually regenerate

the heart or the brain or nerves and yet the body does it every single day and when i discovered that you know you could regenerate um uh tissue by uh uh barley you know eating barley which is beta d glucan or with uh chocolate as i mentioned too cacao polyphenols or even olive oil there's something called hydroxy tyrosol it's a natural chemical in extra virgin olive oil it helps to kind of make that distinctive olive oily taste that that can actually help to protect your stem cell or if you are not a vegan but you

eat seafood and and you and you're really adventurous you know that black pasta squid ink uh that they have sometimes on menus i i happen to i you know i like to explore different kinds of food squid ink actually protects your stem cells it's like a shield okay and so the fact that you we can actually eat to regenerate so i'm very excited by this idea that we can um uh eat foods and we're still discovering what foods can help our propel our body's regenerative capacity i think that's going to actually be groundbreaking and then

something that i'm actually working on that is really you know future forward right so you're asking like what what's going to be mind-blowing in the future yes all right well look um i'm a i'm kind of like a pretty down-to-earth guy like i believe that we should be protecting our planet doing everything we can we can to take care of nurture this ball that we live on and we should be doing better for our community but i also i think from the time i was a kid i appreciated and i was excited by this idea

space travel which is now happening more often right all right so here's something i think is going to happen over the next decade um as humans become extraterrestrial we're going to be the first extraterrestrials are ever going to meet is ourselves and we get beyond near-earth orbit we're going to be our bodies are going to be bombarded by galactic radiation and and and have the effects of negative gravity um changing our body we're going to find what kinds of foods or supplements that we got to eat to protect ourselves that's crazy so i'm working on

that that's cool so i i've been meeting with astronauts i've been talking to people in the space program flight surgeons and what i'm figuring is that if we can figure out what we're going to need in the future for that we could probably bring that right down to earth right now to actually do something good for us so that's you know so i'm excited by that that's cool that's really cool um i've got a couple final questions for you but you've got a lot of this information and more in your book eat to beat disease

the new science of how your body can heal itself and you've also got a master class that people can check out if they want to learn more about this and get these trainings from you over at doctorwilliamlee.com you've got some great stuff over on your instagram and facebook and twitter dr william lee as well over there we'll have it all linked up uh and then the new the you know in the future we'll have you back on about the next book about burning fat and the metabolism that sounds like a really cool topic which i'm

sure people will love um this is a question i ask everyone at the end of our conversations it's called the three truths question so i'd like to imagine a hypothetical scenario um that it's your last day on earth dr lee and it's many many years away you get to live as long as you want to your telomeres uh they continue to extend you live as long as you want to live right but for whatever reason it's your last day and you've accomplished every dream and goal that you can think of but for whatever reason you've

also got to take all of your work with you to another place all your books and your content and master classes and videos and ted talks in this interview it all goes away but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true three lessons that you've learned from your life that you would share with the world and this is all we have to remember from your content and your information what would you say would be those three truths for you well that is a big heavy um i i would say one of

the truths is that um we got to be good to the people around us and at the end of the day one of the things that i try to do is to make sure that i uh uh practice acts of kindness uh to the people around me um and i think that that's just an important thing that uh makes the world a better place yes uh and makes me a better person and because i remind myself of it it keeps me on my toes um you know when there's all these stressors around so that's one

thing is just sort of be kind to people around you the second thing i think is um that i would leave with people is believe in the impossible you know um you know the impossible actually contains the word possible in inside it and so for me part of what i've realized in my my own life journey professionally is that um and i've and i see this i've seen this as a doctor you can take people who like nobody else thinks there's any hope for and they're at the end of the line and every doctor is

giving up there's nothing else we can do for you and if you believe something is possible and you're informed and you're and you've got the audacity to think that maybe maybe we can do it i'm just telling you i've i've personally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat wow in people who had no hope uh by the way including my own mother who had metastatic cancer and we got her on this immune therapy and three treatments nine weeks later all of the cancer melted away wow because we allowed her immune system to rear up and

clean up the act and her and she's alive today seven years later there's zero cancer okay that's you gotta put you gotta believe i mean this is not this is not just hope it's an informed hope and you have to commit yourself to actually doing it so i've and by the way i've done that a number of times so that's something that i think that i would leave people you believe just remember that that you know you can convert the impossible into the possible and then the third thing i think is that i believe as

a truth is that science leads the way and uh uh it's going to take us to the future and if you're somebody who's helpful and you're somebody who believes in a better place and and a better existence in the future follow the signs of science and and um one of my mentors a guy named judo folkman used to end some of his lectures with this great quote from an american novelist named el doctoro he um and he was describing his process of writing right so i'm an author and i went through this whole process and

what he what he what doctors said was that the act of writing is like driving at night you can't see beyond your headlights but you can make the whole journey that way and that's what science is like research is like you know you got to follow the headlights of science just to kind of see where it's going to go and you're always going to get to a different destination than where you started so those would be my three truths those are beautiful and your second one sounded like christian science was rubbing off on you the

mindset the belief belief when there's no hope um dr lee i want to acknowledge you for a moment before i ask a final question for your continued trust and faith in directing your headlights in a certain way without seeing too far ahead of them and being consistent with that for many decades and finding these solutions to help us heal the body help us heal the different uh causes of inflammation and disease and cancerous things um with your research so i really acknowledge you for your consistency on this um and i'm just grateful that you continue

to put it out there in in ways that we can consume it you know a lot of this science and research seems overwhelming you're holding up the research paper i'm like i don't know how to read this stuff but your ability to translate that into tangible uh bite-size information for us to start taking those actions is really powerful so i acknowledge you for for all that you do to communicate this wisdom um and my final question is what is your definition of greatness wow you know you're like you're like the uh you're like the the

college professor that gives all these extra credit questions [Laughter] um hopefully a good one hopefully the one that you liked yeah yeah yeah exactly you know i i guess you know the definition of greatness i think is um anything that's better than you thought you know because i think that that there's so many different definitions but we all come to the table with certain assumptions about almost everything and almost everyone and to me great is anything better than what you expect and i think that that that allows us to be grateful by the way for

what we got around us and uh again i think that we uh no matter how accomplished you know somebody might be we always have to take a couple of steps back just to be humble to recognize that it's a privilege to do what we do no matter what you do and we have to just remember that it's it's part of our duty to keep doing good for the world when you actually look at the science of what happens very fast fasting it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a

mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint assuming of course you're not malnourished right i mean i'm assuming if you're the average american who's still 10 20 30 pounds overweight then this is something that actually has a lot of benefit