Dr. William Li On The Top Foods You Should Eat To Prevent Disease, Heal Your Body & Live Longer

welcome back to our episode of the adversity Advantage I'm your host Doug bobst and today's guest is Dr William Lee Dr Lee is an internationally renowned physician scientist and author of The New York Times bestseller eat to beat disease the new science of how your body can heal itself his groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new Medical Treatments and impacts care for more than 70 diseases including cancer diabetes blindness heart disease and obesity his Ted talk can we eat to starve cancer has garnered more than 11 million views his newest book Eat to beat your diet burn fat heal your metabolism and live longer will be released tomorrow today on the podcast Dr Lee and I discuss how to improve your diet quality how to optimize your diet for longevity why it's so important to eat a high fiber diet why you may want to avoid the carnivore diet why excess body fat is harmful for your health how to improve your metabolism and so much more so let's get this conversation going and welcome Dr William Lee to the adversity Advantage podcast Dr Lee welcome to the podcast thanks Dougs I'm great to be on I'm happy that you're here too and one of the things that I think a lot of people are going to appreciate hearing from you is that your a lot of your work is based on using food as medicine using food to help people live healthier lives and live longer and I think a good place for us to start is it's no secret that people struggle with what to eat you know the Obesity epidemic continues to get worse and worse people's habits continue to get more unhealthy and unhealthy as the years go on what would you say would be like five tips that you could share with the audience on how people can improve their diet quality yeah happy to give you the five tips but let me kind of frame this by saying there is so much negativity associated with food I'm coming at this from a completely different perspective I would say negativity was out there and also misperceptions and and lack of accurate information so I like to kind of in turn the entire formula around and come at this with how do we not fear our food number one and number two how do we actually use the facts and the signs to really be able to inform uh how we can Embrace food instead and you know this has to do with my background as a physician as a scientist and as somebody who's actually been involved with biotechnology and developing cancer treatments and diabetes treatments and treatments for blindness and for almost 30 years the reality is is that food in fact is really one of the most powerful Health Care interventions that we can do for ourselves and five tips I will give you right up front that could be really useful is and this is sort of you know really across the board for anyone who has to eat which is everyone I would give you the five general principles number one stay hydrated because dehydration actually makes everything in your body work harder and so if you want your food to work for you you actually want to make sure your body has enough water content to be able to keep all those metabolic processes functioning really well number two I would say eat what you like but make sure that most of what you eat and the priority of where your head goes when you're choosing something making good choices really falls in the category of what we call plant-based foods which is pretty broad I mean there are hundreds of foods that are plant-based and doesn't have to be broccoli and kale it could be beans it could be mushrooms it could be onions it could be garlic all the things that you think hark back to those traditional delicious recipes that came from the grandmothers of the Mediterranean whether it's Italy or Greece or Spain or France or Asia whether it's Japan or China or Thailand I mean all those delicious things that you might see in a menu I want people to think about healthy eating is when you look at a menu or when you actually are shopping look for the things in the produce section first or look for the things that actually have vegetables in them they don't have to be the only thing but if you use that as a kind of a filter you're going to be doing something really good for you that's the second thing third I would say to the extent possible avoid Ultra processed foods and we all have things that we like that we grew up with that are snacky type of foods and we all have lives that take us in different places in our communities or around the world even and we can't always get the healthiest food but what I want to kind of like emphasize is if you can cut down if not cut out Ultra processed foods things that actually have lots of artificial preservatives artificial colorings artificial flavorings you know those are the things that actually taste pretty good and we're kind of addicted to from marketing from our childhood so you've got we've got legitimate reasons why we like these things because they taste pretty good if you can cut down if I'll cut out those things that's actually going to tip your dietary pattern in your favor the other thing that I would actually say that would be really helpful is to try to avoid foods with added sugars whenever you can this is your regular soda this is actually even your diet soda which actually has artificial sweeteners added that mess up your gut health and your gut microbiome and actually throw your metabolism off kilter but stay away from added sugar because we can get plenty of sugar from the regular Foods we eat but if you start stuffing candy bars you know the Habit we've had as kids right Halloween get that pillow and stuff it like a gunny sack and go out there and Peg out all night long look that's a lot of artificial sugar and even as adults we wind up actually snacking that way unconsciously and then if you overloads our metabolism that's a fourth thing and the fifth thing I would actually say is that I want to come back to beverages for a second you know besides water there's two other beverages that I think are go-to's for health and one is tea could be green tea could be oolong tea could be black tea and the other one is coffee remarkably you know water teen coffee are the go-to's for beverage and health now what you add to them can make a big difference but you know those are five general rules that I think will take anybody else towards the path to health and by the way you'll notice that I didn't give any absolutes and I didn't say things that are really unreasonable so that's probably a good place to start this conversation yeah I love that and I would imagine that the five tips that you shared probably go in line with what you would recommend for somebody as far as a dietary pattern to follow for longevity so I guess outside of making sure you're consuming a lot of plants drinking plenty of water a limiting Ultra processed foods what are a few other like Staples that you think people should include within like a dietary pattern if they want to increase their longevity right okay so longevity means not only having more birthdays but also having good quality of life along the way right so we want a good healthy lifespan not just a long lifespan if you're gorked out you know at 100 years old or you are blind 100 years old that would not be worth it so I think the key to longevity and you know this is such an important and popular topic I think and it's really driven by science there's a lot of really exciting things about longevity I want to make sure people don't forget that you want to we want to actually be able to enjoy our lives even as we live longer nobody wants to add more miserable years to their life all right so having said that what are the things that are important to us and I'm going to give you some concrete food things but I you know what you're going to hear me talk about is the framing because I think a lot of times when we hear about nutrition or foodist medicine we hear about individual substances of individual Foods individual recommendations without getting into context so I think context is important how do we actually maintain good later years in our life if we want to expand them our brains need to work we need good cognition what does that require at a minimum our brains need to have good blood flow so we need to protect our circulation so foods that can actually help protect our circulation keep our circulation going are really helpful research has shown there's actually a natural chemical that's found in a lot of foods called bersolic acid that actually helps our blood vessel system stay healthy so we have better blood flow where do you get ursulic acid it comes in chestnuts it comes in Fruit peel which is found on dried fruits which are a healthy way to actually get a lot of dietary fiber which feeds our gut microbiome our healthy gut bacteria in our body and healthy gut bacteria text messages our brain and helps us release social hormones so we're happy to do the things and see the people that we happen to see and so this is sort of like a little bit of a contextual idea of some of the foods that we can eat and the reasons why in order to be able to have a good long healthy life I think number one would be actually a good having a brain working really well second one just tell you is you know we want to be able to move we want to actually you know you don't want to be wheelchair bound or paralyzed or or so weak we're unable to be independent there's independent as we possibly can so we need our muscles to be able to function properly now muscles are built and broken down on a daily basis which is why you know young kids are so active and teenagers are working out and you know why we actually try to encourage people to actually exercise is that you know use it or lose it is really absolutely true so we want to use it well in addition to just physically exercising we need to be able to actually build our muscles now how does our body build our muscles from the time we're born all the way until our Advanced ages uses stem cells now these are not the stem cells you would get at the strip mall injected into your knee you know or your for your tennis elbow or your shoulder these are stem cells we were born with and a lot of people don't know this but humans do regenerate we're actually formed of stem cells when our mom's egg met our dad's sperm and we were just a ball of cells all stem cells and these stem cells that you will want from your jaw and our face our ears and our livers and our hearts we have a bunch left over when we're born about 70 million leftover cells they're packed away kind of like on the shelves of Home Depot you know extra cans of paint you can draw on them when you need to and these stem cells actually will participate in building our muscle over time so what are some of the foods that actually help us build help our stem cells come out so they can help to regenerate things well it turns out that extra virgin olive oil turns out to be really helpful for our stem cells it protects our stem cells as we age and not surprisingly in the blue zones those parts of the world where people live really to healthy ripe old ages over 100 for example centenarians they tend to eat olive oil extra virgin olive oil which by the way comes from a plant it's a plant-based healthy fat number two there's another fact that you should know about that's found associated with protein that's in seafood and that's omega-3 fatty acids Omega-3 trees also help our stem cells regenerate they prompt our body to stay renewed which is important for aging where you get Omega-3s well besides salmon and Anchovies and mackerel and sardines you hear about that a lot it turns out many many many different kinds of Seafoods and even seaweeds actually edible seaweeds actually have omega-3s so one of the things that I write about in my new book Eat to beat your diet is leaning into that Seafood section of the grocery store which you know some people already like seafood but some people aren't familiar and I want to take people's apprehension away to say dive in there because there's a lot of great stuff that's a secret to longevity as well it turns out in many of the blue zones and in many places where people live to a ripe old age they eat reasonable amounts of seafood regularly and not surprisingly this omega-3 is found in there now I'm going to throw one last kind of delight and surprise that can help your stem cells which help to rebuild your brain and your heart and your muscles actually is dark chocolate turns out chocolate's a candy okay it's a confection but to make dark chocolate you have high amounts 70 80 percent 90 cacao Cacao is actually from a c pipe the cacao plant and that's a plant-based food it turns out there's natural chemicals bioactives in cacao made in dark chocolate and high concentrations that help our stem cells come out and rebuild our muscles our circulation many other parts that need to be renewed and as we get older one of the things we want to do is we want to continuously be renewed rather than broken down these are some of the ways that we think about diet and Longevity those are some great tips and some great Foods as you were naming those Foods I was like yep definitely eat that yep definitely eat that and it just seems like it's pretty consistent too with uh like the Mediterranean dietary pattern right would you say that that's pretty accurate absolutely Lily and here's the thing that I think is really important to understand about the Mediterranean diet as you said that it's a pattern it's not a single recipe or a single commercial package the Mediterranean is not just Italy and Greece and Spain which people can pick out in two seconds but in fact it's made up of like 27 different countries that all surround the Mediterranean Sea and most people don't realize this but Tunisia in Israel Croatia are all Mediterranean countries and what that means that there's a really rich diversity of traditional foods that people have enjoyed so you know for people that say well you know I'm not really into Italian food or I'm not really I don't know who wouldn't be in Italian food but you know some people are very picky with their food what I say is that if you want to look at Mediterranean pattern you have to appreciate this is more than 20 different countries that have something to offer for you and similarly Mediterranean is one pattern of healthy eating but the other pattern of how healthy eating isn't Asia because Asians live there's a long pattern of longevity it's traditional patterns lots of seafood lots of plant-based foods and here's the cool thing Doug is that the Mediterranean in Asia if you think about restaurant menus might look like there couldn't be more differences but then two different types of Cuisine but in fact the pattern of eating and the things that are in them could not be more connected because 2 000 years ago there was something called The Silk Road and it was a series of Dusty trails that linked China to the Mediterranean and the traders that did trade silk but many other things as well also exchange their ingredients and recipes and so when you want to think about healthy patterns of eating please do think about Mediterranean eating and realize that Mediterranean is much more than Italian food it's a lot of different foods but now I want you to actually open this up to a kaleidoscope of Cuisine that includes Asia and the interconnections between Mediterranean Asia and I actually in my new book I call this mediterration because it really is something that is not new but thousands of years old and now it's time for us to kind of really go back and tap that well of culinary genius that's always existed and the stuff tastes great too and staying on the theme of eating certain foods that can improve our overall quality of life we talked about olive oil you talked about Seafood that contains Omega-3s you talked about dark chocolate I know that you're a big fan of polyphenols as well so I think this would be a good kind of segue to talk about like why you're such a fan of them what exactly they do and what are some foods that contain them first of all polyphenols are a research term that describe hundreds of thousands of natural chemicals that are others so it's sort of a blanket term for many of these natural chemicals that mother nature put into food now these chemicals I call them Mother Nature's Pharmacy not with a pH Pharmacy but actually with an f as in farm you see because these are the things that farmers have been growing part of our Agriculture and a lot of our plant-based Foods Now polyphenols by themselves are pretty amazing if you study what they can actually do they're antioxidant they can activate epigenetic changes that help our DNA perform better you know and there's a lot of popular information out there about polyphenols and I'm telling you the person in many many different types of foods including the ones all the ones we've talked about so far but I will also tell you that when it comes to food and health and polyphenols it's not just about the food and their polyphenols it's about how our body responds to the polyphenols that you would ingest so I'm going to tell you I've done research looking at how we stay healthy and it turns out that our health is not just a passive state of being but in fact the reason we're healthy is the result of Our Own own bodies hardwired Health defense systems we've got five of them androgenesis angio blood vessels how our body grows our circulation talked about how important that is for longevity in our brain number two stem cells regeneration we regenerate all the time which is why we're still around tomorrow is that we're regenerating ourselves today we talked about stem cells growing our muscles also really important polyphenols activate that as well our gut microbiome we touched on that earlier today as well polyphenols actually help to groom the healthy gut bacteria that represents part of our ecosystem this ecosystem of our gut bacteria controls our immunity helps us lower inflammation helps our metabolism and our healthy gut bacteria detects our brain as I mentioned earlier to release social hormones and so polyphenols that help our gut microbiome our gut health are absolutely critical polyphenols also are antioxidant as I mentioned they protect our DNA from damage that can happen now most people say well why do I need to worry about my DNA well because healthy DNA is responsible for healthy you healthy proteins healthy cells and unhealthy DNA is mutations and mutations are the reason the root cause why we develop cancer and so that's why you want to be careful and why you care about it and if you don't fix your DNA repel the incoming missiles that are trying to develop damage your DNA from the environment you actually wind up actually being at a greater risk for being mutated and we're not talking about the X-Men we're talking about the average cancer patient that's out there nobody wants to be that person and if you are someone who's dealt with cancer you don't want to get it again and so this is really why polyphenols can be important for DNA and by the way one other thing polyphenols slow down the fuse that involves DNA that burn down on the end of our cells so you know it's like the mission impossible Strike A Match Light the fuse the fuse starts burning down down well that's really our lifespan as our DNA starts to wear down and burn down our life gets shorter and our cellular Health our longevity gets shorter and shorter so polyphenols slow the burn and in some cases can make the fuse longer again which is cellular longevity and that counts as well and the fifth thing that polyphenols do and it's part of our health defenses is they light up our immune defenses and who must have thought about immunity over the last few years we know that you know a good immune system protects us from the common cold and other viruses that might be out there but I think it's really profound to know that our normal healthy immune system protects us against cancer because we're forming these little microscopic cancers in our body all the time and the reason they never grow up is that our immune system will take them out our immune system normally is like functions like a cop on a beat patrolling through the blood vessels or circulation you know the Alleyways and neighborhoods the highways of our body and our immune system when they actually find and spot a microscopic cancer do what a cop would do they take a bad guy and throw it into the Paddy Wagon and take them away and that's basically why a good strong immunity is so important on a day-to-day basis to avert catastrophic disease and polyphenols can actually do that as well so you ask a very simple question why do I care about polyphenols and I'm saying that look polyphenols activate our health defenses and when our health defenses are activated we stay healthier longer and are able to repel disease and speaking of our immune functions and speaking of gut health I know that one of the things that's really important for our gut is fiber as you alluded to a few minutes ago and it seems like based on the dietary patterns that you're talking about recommending these plant-heavy diets are going to contain a lot of fiber naturally if you could explain like why high fiber diets are so important for people and maybe some potential dangers that can happen if people don't eat enough fiber okay so I'm going to give you a very authentic perspective on this I'm a medical doctor in MD and when I went to medical school I was taught by my professors that dietary fiber is good to eat because it actually helps you they call it roughage and actually when you actually get it down into your colon it kind of scrapes along your colon and you know and keeps your bowels moving so you're regular and you don't get constipated and people used to say well if your poop doesn't move and it just sits there like a toxic dump that's actually what causes colon cancer well this was you know years ago when I was in medical school the entire textbook has ripped up and thrown out in a new way of thinking about dietary fiber is that this fiber so when we eat something with dietary fiber let me give you an example it could be a Celery Stock but I'll tell you something that doesn't seem very fibrousy which is a pear pear doesn't seem like it has a lot of fiber but it's got six grams of dietary fiber a lot of dietary fiber and when we eat a pear we're absorbing our you know sort of an upper gut all the polyphenols and the vitamins and all these great bioactives and then what the trickle down is to the lower part of our gut is the dietary fiber right that's the quote roughage now what we don't absorb goes down the pike of our gut to feed our bacteria so the roughage we eat the dietary fiber actually is the food that we feed our gut microbiome now if you've got a pet if you've got a dog a cat parakeet goldfish you are almost certainly conscientious in feeding your pets every single day and you know many people think about you know what's the best food I should be feeding them because you care about them and they pay you back right with affection and you know help lower stress well this is the same thing with our gut bacteria if we mindfully feed our pet gut bacteria that lives inside Us by the way the number of human cells we are made out of is about 42 really in human cells and the number of gut bacteria that lives inside this is 39 trillion so we're almost one to one with our bacteria we got to feed those guys and we provide them room and board which is what we're feeding them and they pay us back for that by releasing these signals and hormones that control our metabolism they help us use glucose better so we have enough energy and we don't develop pre-diabetes and active diabetes they help us heal our wounds faster so when we were cut or we have surgery we heal up faster they help us control the amount of body fat that we have I mean like you and I sitting here we might not look like we have a lot of extra body fat but actually I'll tell you you don't have to look big to have a lot of dangerous body fat packed inside a thin frame they call this you know lean obesity and there's dangerous fat called visceral fat that that can be packed around your organs like a baseball mitt holding your kidneys in your heart and your liver that kind of fat actually predates all kinds of chronic diseases and good healthy gut fights that as well as in addition to all the things that are good for our mental health and wellness as well so what I'm saying is that when we feed our gut properly it pays us back with all these benefits and all different aspects of our health and when our gut is unhealthy and damaged all right what happens is that bad bacteria overgrow good bacteria the bad bacteria don't don't give us all those benefits and then what happens is that all those functions start to fall apart our metabolism goes Haywire our blood sugars rise we get pre-diabetes our wounds don't heal as well our immune system goes down and then our mentally we start getting more agitated as well you know it's interesting dysbiosis which is a problem of our gut bacteria has been connected to depression schizophrenia even autism and so this connection between our gut and our brain is so profound that it really represents one of the new next frontiers of medical research and that's really why the simple thing that everyone needs to know about who's watching and listening to this is that you know if you have a cat and a dog and you're feeding your cat and your dog just remember you've got gut bacteria to feed them well give them some dietary fiber they will thank you for it and you'll actually be healthier overall and I know what you've said that you don't like to speak in absolutes in terms of diet but it seems that you're big on fiber you're big on vegetables and there's a lot of information out there I guess online where people are seeing that it's super healthy to be fully carnivore and you know have your diet composed of mostly red meat and that vegetables are bad like what do you say to people that believe that yeah look I tell people I'm a scientist and the interesting thing about science is that it builds upon itself with evidence and you look for new discoveries that help us understand something better and sometimes the new discoveries built on the old discoveries that make you more certain that something is a truth right and of course there are lots of ideas out there online and I think the issue about diet and nutrition and philosophy about food you know there is a true science of new nutrition and food as medicine and then food and nutrition also has sort of this very emotional component to it psychological component to it where it's almost like a religion you know you believe in a god of religion a belief a philosophy a school of thought and either you're for it or you're against it well that's not how science works and so I can only speak as a scientist all the evidence has accumulated to date with real hard scientific evidence so shown that fruits and vegetables nuts and Grains and seeds healthy oils Seafoods actually overall are good for you okay you know there's caveats of course but you know you can always overdo things but overall that's a healthy pattern listen I'm not again you mentioned a carnivore diet I'm not against red meat I'm actually not a vegan I'm not a vegetarian but I eat mostly vegetables I would say I'm probably like an 80 vegetarian I'm a very reasonable guy and I actually enjoy food I enjoy the tradition I'm kind of a foodie I'll eat some meat every now and then but I really don't think the evidence shows that eating a mostly red meat diet is good for you in fact I'll tell you it's quite the opposite most of the evidence is that if you eat heavy proteins red meat high in saturated fats and then you know you can even go to keto and other sources where you have a lot of butter and all that kind of stuff all the evidence shows that over the long haul that dietary pattern does not pay off in good health you might really enjoy that rib eye you know finished off with some melted butter all right but I can tell you that if you do that every single day for year after year your body will pay for that so I think more of a concept of understanding where the body of Health lies being a practicing moderation and you know what if you really like to eat something this is the kind of doctor I am I'm not about absolutes talk to me tell me what it is that that really matters to you I'm okay kind of coaching you a little bit on like okay you can have a little bit of that but just make sure that you don't have too much of it spend more time thinking about the good stuff and there'll be less room for the things that aren't so good for you and you can treat yourself occasionally I'm okay with that yeah I love that advice I love that you know you kind of have to do what works for you things in moderation and really just Master the foundation of your dietary pattern and making sure you're checking certain boxes you brought up like Diet tribes food religions if you will and I think that also exists in the fasting world where you see people that are just super dogmatic about fasting like fasting's the only way to do this that and the other I know this is one of the things you talk about in your new book so what are your thoughts on fasting and do you think it actually is worth the hype listen I'm so glad that you asked me about that because my new book is titled eat to beat your diet and it's not a diet book in fact it's kind of an anti-diet book because it actually shows you it's a little bit of a kind of a trick title it actually shows you how you can be healthy without having to jump on onto a ship of an extreme point of view or an extreme practice and let's talk about fasting for a second you know here's the reality and I think that you're probably sensing this from our conversation today I'm a pretty reasonable person but I'm uncompromising when it comes to science here's the fact we actually all fast anyway fasting is what happens when we're sleeping and we're not eating that's the definition of fasting so whether you're sleeping for five hours a day six hours a day hopefully seven or eight hours a day which is healthy sleep during that period of time all right we're not eating and that's called fasting and when we get up take a shower get dressed go out of the kitchen and you know pour ourselves something we are breaking our fast which is why it's called breakfast all right and so there's really no religion or crazy breakthrough idea about fasting it's how the body is wired when we're sleeping we're not eating or fasting when we eat we're actually breaking our fast now what is new and what does actually help argue for increasing the period that we're not eating meaning increasing our lengthening our fasting time is that when we're fasting we are allowing our metabolism the way that our body is hardwired okay our operating system to be able to actually burn down extra fuel let me explain this to you so when we eat food okay when we're breaking our fast okay which is breakfast lunch dinner maybe some snacks all right what we're doing and this is what metabolism is all about it's all about fuel just like when you're driving a car you gotta load fuel into your car at The Filling Station when it's loaded up you can actually get in your car and drive away and the engine uses that fuel to keep you powered that's what we do when we're eating we're putting fuel into our body and then we're actually going about our day we're actually burning our gas our fuel now what happens is that our body is hardwired so that when we are eating we can't burn that fuel okay like our body isn't completely in storage mode it's only when we're not eating okay that we're actually able to burn that fuel down so think about this the longer we're not eating let's say sleeping late okay or just not eating before you go to sleep no midnight snack and maybe having a late breakfast or maybe even skipping breakfast you're extending the period of time where your body is able to burn down fuel well what happens you're actually cleaning your pipes you're burning that extra fuel that you might have accumulated from the day before the day before that and your metabolism is actually just burning down that fuel because you're working on that hardwired system that operating system where when you're not eating you're able to burn down fuel so you want to stay trim and lean you want to lose harmful extra body fat lower inflammation fasting actually does that for you and by the way other systems also respond well to that energy burning fuel burning stage your circulation improves your stem cells improve your gut micro or biome use that as a period to reboot itself your DNA is able to stand back from all the stuff you might pour into the body and your immune system also improves as well reboot so fasting it's actually normal and kind of good for you this idea so I'm trying to tell you we already intermittently fast just by going to bed all right and we can tweak it now because we're beginning to understand if you've spouses a little longer it's better for you but this idea that you have to fast until you go into ketosis and then you you know if you fast for days on end you know these kind of extreme ideas okay they might be okay for the short term your body's not going to like it for the long term I guarantee you and it's going to wear down your health eventually and so it's just like you want to fuel your car on a regular basis and you never want to overfill it so that's another kind of caveat to this whole thing but you want to run things normally and for people that want to live long and prosper you know that old Star Trek Spock kind of thing you want to be reasonable and you want to enjoy your life and you want to do things that are not not too unreasonable and that's why these extreme patterns are really unsustainable and don't give you pleasure as well so I'm all about sustainability pleasure and biology all the same time absolutely and I think fasting can be a great tool too to keep your calories in check if your goal is weight loss and trying to lose weight because it reduces your your eating window I know that weight loss is a theme of your new book as well and you talk about some new things as it relates to that I know typically when people think of weight loss they say that you know you it revolves around like energy expenditure and calories and calories out that you're like what you're consuming versus what's your like how much you're moving and stuff like that like what are your thoughts on weight loss and like what other insights do you have to share on that that's featured in your new book yeah well so my book does talk a lot about weight loss and foods that have been shown in human research that allow you to lose weight now this is not the Quick Fix lose 20 pounds in two weeks kind of thing I mean there are things that you can do to aim for that but it's not healthy for you it's not sustainable but what I really talk about is how I kind of uncloak how human metabolism works so how many of us have heard this idea that well you're born with either a fast metabolism genetically or a slow metabolism and people will point out look at my sister she was so lucky she was born with a fast metabolism that's why she's skinny as a stick and eat anything another has a problem and then they always Point me on the other hand I was born with a slow metabolism my genetics aren't really good and so I've been struggling with my weight the whole time and that's a very common kind of it's a common idea that's out there but it's an urban legend and I'll tell you when this urban legend was overturned just about a year ago there was a landmark study that changed everything we know about human metabolism and this was done by a study by a researcher named Herman ponzo out of Duke University and he studied 6 000 people involving 19 countries okay and he studied metabolism in people across the human lifespan from two days old to 95 years old the entire human lifespan and study 6 000 people in exactly the same way by the way these people were male and female men and women girls and boys they were um young and old they were healthy and sick some had diabetes some of them had big body frames some of them were skinny and when they studied the metabolism in exactly the same way here's what they did they gave everybody a drink of water H2O is what we call water in which the H of hydrogen and O of water oxygen had a special Atomic signature not radioactive but everybody drank the same now you can measure in the lab the hydrogen and oxygen and therefore your metabolism in your breath in your urine in your blood and so imagine this 6 000 people across the human lifespan from days old to 90 years old in exactly the same way and they looked at the metabolism what do they find all over the map scattergram everything is completely confusing and so they said oh well you know isn't this what we just expect is that everyone's got a different metabolism well that's not where the Breakthrough came the Breakthrough came they developed an algorithm right in which they could actually subtract out from the results of this study the contribution of excess body fat okay we call Fat adipose tissue when you actually employed this algorithm to remove from the scatter of data that remove the effects of excess body fat it was like bada Being Human metabolism emerged only four phases of metabolism across humans over the course of Life everyone followed the same exact same pattern so the inner workings of our metabolism are exactly the same this idea that you were born with fast or slow completely wrong and the four phases are absolutely fascinating zero to one your metabolism skyrockets when you're a baby to one years old at one year old you're metabolism babies metabolism is faster 50 faster than their their metabolism as an adult okay which is surprising from one year old to 20 years old all the way through puberty when you see kids sprouting up when they're super active when they're eating two dinners teenagers okay metabolism is going down down down down down down okay to so completely different than we thought from age 20 to age 60 metabolism is completely Rock stable is how we are hardwired this is through your first job this is through your pregnancy this is through your menopause all right it's exactly the same and then from age 60 to 90 it does decline a little bit only about 17 percent by the time you're 90 compared to when you were 60 which is the same as compared to your 20. so when you're 90 years old our hard-wired metabolism is only 17 percent lower than when you were 20. now here's what happens so that's the pattern of human metabolism like it's a bombshell that this is how we're actually wired now what happens is that when you start adding back the effects of body fat into that equation what do you think happens you take this beautiful four stage pattern and you start to suppress it okay so you squash the metabolism so it's not that slow metabolism cause you to gain body fat and gain weight it's an extra body fat and weight squashes your metabolism it's completely the other way around and the reason that that's why that's important and back to your question about so what do I think about weight loss I think that not everyone needs to lose weight but everyone needs to understand that excess body fat including skinny people that might not be able to see their body fat it could be packed like peanuts inside a thin frame like okay you go to FedEx you're going to ship you know some long fluorescent lights you're going to put the lights in the Box you're gonna add peanuts in it you can over pack peanuts tape it up still a skinny box but it's way over stuff and in our skinny bodies in a skinny body you can have that those extra peanuts that harmful fat choking your organs and releasing really harmful inflammatory substances so here's what I think I think we should all try to aim at getting back to our Baseline metabolism so we can be who our body wants us to be from a metabolic perspective and part of that is by fighting extra body fat we can do this with exercise and we need to stay active but we can also do that with by eating food and so this is the kind of the irony of what I write about you can eat to beat your fat and there's even more surprises because you can actually harness and leverage good fat to burn down bad fat and so this is there's all these serious really surprises that turn the equation around don't fear your food use your food don't fear your fat because we need some fat to live you need to tame your fat and so on and so forth as it relates to weight loss that's such interesting stuff because I was always one of those kids too who was like man that person's just lucky they have a fast metabolism or she's just lucky she has a fast metabolism and you're right we hear this all the time so let's just say we have that person that might be reading your book they're listening to this podcast and they're like wow I do have a bunch of extra body fat to lose I want to be able to in a way jump start my metabolism and do what I can to control my metabolism so that I can get rid of this stuff as fast and healthy way as possible like what are a few things that you think are shown by science or that you can recommend to help them do that yeah I'll give you a couple of examples so first of all in my book I read about 150 Foods I think this is the first book that ever did is 150 foods that have been shown by human clinical research that they can actually improve your metabolism decrease amount of body fat reduce your waistline and improve things like your blood sugars and your insulin sensitivity and how healthy hormones that relate to your metabolism okay and so I think this is the first book ever to put together this compendium of all these Foods so let's pick a few out okay because we don't have time to go through all of them but I'll pick a few standouts all right turns out tomatoes have a lot of good things about them they're a great source of vitamin C they're they do have some dietary fiber but they also have these bioactive natural chemicals called carotenoids one of them called lycopene lycopene many people might have heard about but lycopene is a fat fighting bioactive here's what it does it actually takes our harmful fat it helps to burn it down by activating a special kind of fat we have in our body called Brown fat so Brown fat can good fat can burn down white fat which is harmful fat dangerous fat and eating tomatoes will light that up it kind of lights up the space heater and uses fuel so you can improve your metabolism improves your metabolic profile overall lowers bad cholesterol this is all with tomatoes and actually shrink your your waistline as well one study that was done actually took normal healthy young women who were not overweight or obese okay because many researchers many much a lot of research has done with people who are already overweight but this is actually taking young healthy female grad students who don't have extra weight they're considered normal body size whatever that means okay that that can be debated but the bottom line is that they had just one tomato to eat before lunch every day and they were able to lose weight and improve their metabolism very achievable dosing so tomato can actually do it here's another one strawberries have also been shown to actually improve your metabolism and what's really interesting by eating strawberries is that although strawberries can be sweet when they measured blood sugar eating strawberries in a way to improve your metabolism not only decrease weight and waist size and lowered weight and decrease body fat it also didn't raise blood sugar so this whole idea another kind of like common idea that's kind of a kind of like a paintbrush idea and I don't eat fruit it's got too much sugar in it it's got too much fructose it might kind of sound like it makes sense at a casual level but the science actually doesn't show that and the reason is that the bioactives and the strawberry activate your body so it starts to burn down the bad fat yeah okay so you can actually metabolize even faster this is by the way not about trying to become a supermodel this is about optimizing your engine of your body and I think that's something that we really want to be able to emphasize look people that want to actually look like you know a supermodel they want to fit into a bikini body back they need to get into a wedding dress they need to actually get you go for a bodybuilding competition those are short-term things that people do extreme things for okay I'm not categorally against that I'm just saying that and what I write about my book to be your diet is we should all be trying to do things that are good for our health over the course of our lifetime if we want to live long and prosper and Thrive this is what longevity is all about so another food that can actually actually have incredible benefits is actually tea sipping green tea actually has been shown to decrease excess body fat as well so remember I told you this experiment where you know you when you remove the effects of body fat your real metabolism starts to shine and when you add unhealthy foods and you add extra fat back you'll start to suppress your metabolism so this is really the concept we have a hardware program inside us it goes through four phases of metabolism if you want to be all you can be work on the sum of the body fat work on the metabolisms you can eat foods like tomatoes and strawberries and green tea and there's 150 other Foods including Seafoods that I have in there that can all work in harmony to help you get there and so this isn't about a fad diet this is really about a lifestyle and trying to embrace and enjoy your life as well yeah and I think from what I also understand is a lot of this comes back to satiety as well and that's why you know people who eat a decent amount of protein it can be good for your metabolism and weight loss because it keeps you Fuller longer and it seems like that's the same with what you're saying especially with some of these foods that contain a decent amount of fiber because one of the other benefits of fiber is it keeps you Fuller longer right that's right that's right so when you eat like if you're at a bean burrito okay provided it doesn't have a ton of unhealthy things in it you're going to be feel full longer it's not because the beans are heavy it's because there's a lot of fiber in the beans and the fiber feature gut microbiome and that actually sets into motion this series of signals in your brain that may just make you less hungry now there's a hormone actually that does this it's made by body fat called leptin some people may have heard of leptin but we all you know it's all part of this remember I told you like intermittent fasting is natural leptin's natural so we have a little bit of fat in our body which we need and when we eat and our stomach gets full one of the things that happens is that the full stomach sends a signal text messages are body fat and our body fat releases some leptin the leptin okay travels in our bloodstream to our brain and our brain receives the leftist signal the text messages and that leptin says hey you know what slow down man like you're full just slow down and stop all right and that's basically what when we feel full in front of a dinner plate like it's because our fat is signaling our brain saying all right you know chill out man like stop slow down and stop all right now here's what happens when you've got too much body fat lots of leptin gets produced and the funny thing that we don't fully understand is your brain stops reading the leptin it doesn't read the signal anymore and so even though you make more leptin you're always hungry and you don't never stop eating and so basically what you want to do is to tame that fat so your brain becomes more sensitive to leptin and leptin will tell you chill out and by the way when you eat if you eat too quickly you'll outstrip the speed of your signal that your stomach is full and your fat will make the leptin so you can chuck a ton of food into your gut and you can overeat really easily if you eat super fast and so this is another kind of like trick to actually optimize your metabolism is eat the healthiest eat the right stuff but eat more slowly don't wolf your food down because you'll beat your body's ability to signal to turn on the off switch and then you'll overload yeah yeah I mean you got to eat slowly I've also heard like eat till you're about like 80 full or something like that I think the Caesar can be some great tools that you can do as you're eating to not eat as much and if your goal is to lose weight this will likely help you to do that as well I want to shift gears just a little bit you talked about how somebody can be lean but quote unquote also obese in your research even in your practice like do you believe that people who are obese can still be metabolically healthy okay so here's a way that I want people to think about the idea of body size right and I wanted you to think about healthy people super healthy people they can have different body sizes and how do we know this look at Olympic athletes you got your tiny little gymnasts you've got your shot Putters you've got your lean track stars you've got your svelte ice figure skaters there's a champion there's an Olympian in every body size category and then if you want to take a look at another sport like boxing you've got 14 weight categories you get featherweight to heavyweight and there's a champion there's a world champion every day and then if you want to really look at an extreme look at Sumo these are behemoths three to four hundred Pounders right people would call them obese and yet actually they don't suffer from the diseases that you would normally think about heart disease and diabetes and cancer they don't actually get them and yet and they're in super fit shape all right and so the first thing that I think is really important is to for us to kind of rethink this idea that large body size is equated to poor Health Science Matters but it's not the only thing that matters what's actually happening inside matters a lot more so back to your question if somebody has got a large body size can they ever be healthy or are they stuck being unhealthy and what I would say is that the science tells us you can Unleash Your Inner metabolism by focusing on ways that allow you to burn down harmful body fat including the stuff you can't see which is packed inside your body whether you're thin or big and you'll actually start to improve your health overall so I think that there's a different measure like true Health isn't visible in the mirror that's the key thing and you can't measure it automatically on a scale and yet that's what we have come to think is that when you step out of the shower in the morning out of the corner yeah you look at the mirror and you see some lumps and bumps you know like oh man that really stinks I must not be as healthy as I can be I gotta go to the gym or you step on the scale the number that comes up isn't the one that you want to see and you kind of like you know you have some self-loathing about that it's a wrong way to think about it the fact of the matter is that we are all hardwired to be healthy we've got Health defenses our metabolism is there and so what we want to do if people haven't thought about this before it's never too late to take advantage of the new science and says we can make these little moves little adjustments and eat delicious food at the same time to help us kind of maneuver our way towards Better Health regardless of your body size I love that you said that because I think so many people that get caught up on focusing on the scale is their only metric and I think obviously it could be a great tool depending on your fitness goals it's something that could be consistently used to make sure that you're on track whether your goal is to gain weight or lose weight or whatever but it also sometimes gets masked as the only way to determine if you're healthy or not and there's plenty of people like you touched on that are not quote unquote overweight physically but they're overweight like internally because of the way they're eating and their poor food choices and maybe they're not active and what have you and so I think it's important to like you said kind of control what you can make sure you're fueling yourself with the right types of foods for longevity making sure you're moving your body and then making sure I think also would you say it's also important to get labs done to make sure that markers for things like cholesterol and APO B and glucose and stuff like that that you're able to monitor those things as well yeah well look I mean I'm a biologist but I would say that I'm philosophically not a biohacker but I do think as a doctor it's really important for people to go get an annual physical and part of that is getting a blood panel and you should be checking and asking your doctor you should be having this conversation how's my metabolism doing doc you know is my liver okay my cholesterol my blood lip it's okay okay and by the way one thing that some doctors don't order that I think is a good biomarker for your health and maybe for the inner body fat you're carrying is something called C-reactive protein or CRP that's a simple blood test you can order almost anywhere now and it tells you how much inflammation is in your body and there's a normal range and if you're above that normal range that might be kind of a a red flag to start doing something about it and one of the easiest things to cause one of the logical things that can set off that extra inflammation is extra body fat so that might be kind of another signal for you look we navigate Our Lives successful people navigate their lives looking for signals on what they should be doing what they shouldn't be doing I think the point you just made about you know going to the doctor getting a blood test I wouldn't obsess about it you don't need to do it every month it's not gonna you know you could do it but really I think if you do it maybe a couple of times a year I think it might be a good idea and especially as you're are aging and getting older you might want to keep tabs on it and if you found something that's not doing well yeah sure check it more often so know whether you're making progress that would be the way I would do it and the last question I have for you kind of stays on this theme of medical practice and going to a doctor and getting labs done I know you're obviously a physician and you also talk about food is medicine if you could maybe just explain the difference between the two like when do you think it's a good time to look at food and then when do you believe like medication and stuff is actually necessary yeah well look first of all I built a whole career developing biotech drugs I mean I've helped to develop 43 FDA approved drugs for cancer complications of diabetes and even blindness so I am not somebody who shies away from medicine I'm actually trying to develop better medicines to help us overcome unbeatable diseases so I do think it's important however medicines drugs are just one of the tools in the toolbox and in fact you go to the doctor to get a prescription or go to the hospital if you're sick enough to get an intervention which might involve medications but that's not Health Care Health Care doesn't happen in your doctor's office Health Care happens between visits to your doctor's office and Healthcare is what we do for ourselves we care for your own health doctors are trained to try to fight disease now doctors should really be trained to help you stay healthy as well but I'm just telling you the facts that in fact most of the doctors are trained and the way that I was trained is really to diagnose and treat disease largely with Pharmaceuticals Healthcare is up to us man and it's something that you know we're able to do and that's where food comes in because food is the medicine that we put into our body three times a day that's called food is medicine you put good stuff into your body your body's gonna last longer you add bad things in your body it's not going to last as long and by the way I use the analogy we talked about the car again in fuel food is not only fuel but food is medicine as well if you actually but looking at the fuel thing if you put bad quality fuel in your car your engine is not going to last that long okay if you put good quality fuel in your car that's part of the caretaking you do to make make sure that your vehicle is going to last a longer time you're caring for it that's where food comes in now what's really interesting Doug is that there's new research it shows even when you're using medicine like cancer drugs to try to help people survive their cancer that the food that you eat the dietary fiber the polyphenols the things we talked about earlier actually can make the Cancer Treatments some of the Cancer Treatments work better and there's nowhere more profound than this in some research studies done by the MD Anderson Cancer Center where they looked at melanoma deadly cut to skin cancer being treated with immunotherapy that boosts your own immune system to fight and wipe out the cancer and they found that people would do much better their cancer would respond much better to their own immune system prompted by the immunotherapy if they were eating dietary fiber in fact what they found was profound six grams of dietary fiber a day would lower the risk of mortality by 30 percent 3-0 that's huge that means that the food that you eat and by the way how much is it six grams of dietary fiber we talked about this an average size medium-sized pear has six grams of dietary fiber imagine if more people knew about that more oncologists knew about that that difference is something that is not done in a doctor's office they're not giving you a sack of pairs that's what people you know like most oncologists tell their patients go off and eat whatever you want just don't lose any weight eat as much you want to go eat junk food that's fine totally not the science is now telling us that there are things that we can deliberately choose it's not food versus medicine it's food and medicine that can help our treatments work better obviously ultimately this is my goal as a doctor is to come help people come off their medications if you can come off your statins so your blood cholesterol is better if you come off your metformin so your blood sugars are better that would be the goal that we all have use medicines when you need them the goal should be to come off the medicines but your doctor is not going to be doing that for you you're going to have to participate and be the leader in that so you can can actually get back to who your body wants you to be how it was hardwired that's what my books are about eat to be disease it need to be your diet is really harnessing and empowering yourself to make those decisions that are inside us that to me is really the secret sauce to Health and Longevity that's some great wisdom and perspective there Dr Lee and like you said like medicine is obviously a great tool but during the times where you're not using medication or you're not taking the drug or whatever it is you have to be working on your overall health and making sure you're fueling yourself right making sure you're exercising making sure you're spending time with great people and living a a healthy a healthy life and so I think people are going to really connect with you they're going to want to buy your new book They're going to want to check out more of your work where's the best place for people to do that yeah well you can buy my books including my new book Eat to beat your diet anywhere books are sold whether it's online or at your local bookstore I'm a big believer in sort of like the low local family-run bookstores but if you really want to actually also stay up with the science because I drink from a fire hose of new research come to my website Dr Dr William Lee l i.com Dr William Lee sign up for my newsletter I teach a metabolism mini course I do master classes I give away you know like tips and recipes and sheets like that I just feel like this is the kind of my mission is actually to get information out to people that they can translate into their own lives so come to my website drdrwilliamleyli.com and find out more because we've had this like wide spanning conversation today but there's so much more that people actually can learn yeah there's so much more there and I I will make sure to plug the links to that stuff in the show notes and for those listening what I invite you to do is to share a takeaway maybe it was something that Dr Lee shared about tips for people to improve their diet quality or some of the things people can do for longevity maybe it was something that he shared about fiber weight loss poly phenols metabolism whatever the takeaway was make sure to tag Dr Lee and tag myself because we'd love to hear your feedback and we once again thank you for listening to this episode of the adversity Advantage I'm your host Dougs we'll see you next time

Channel: Doug Bopst

Views: 1,448,018

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Id: r4YVohyyV1s

Length: 59min 50sec (3590 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023