Eat To Beat Your Diet: Dispelling Myths About Fats And Metabolism With Dr. William Li

when we kind of like get further in our life Journey life happens we get busy we get distracted we get stressed out whether it's family stress emotional stress Financial stress work stress I mean this is modern society we live in all those things affect how we ate the decision the choices we eat how much we exercise how Physically Active we are how much sleep we get and stress Itself by the way causes inflammation which can actually impact our metabolism as well so not surprisingly as we kind of get into our later years of kind of the mid to life you know it's sort of a lifestyle issue that tends to sit on our metabolism but that actually gives us the agency to be able to deliberately look at those pieces of our life that we can improve welcome to nutrition without compromise a podcast brought to you by orlo nutrition we believe that nutrition shouldn't be in either or that you should never have to sacrifice your moral for your health or that of our home planet join natural products veteran Karina belizzi and experts from around the globe as they discuss healthy solutions that are better for you and better for the planet foreign [Music] of nutrition without compromise today I'm joined Again by one of my very first guests on this show and one of my favorites to date Dr William Lee he's here to talk about his new book Eat to beat your diet Dr Lee is an internationally renowned physician scientist president and medical director of the angiogenesis foundation in our first interview we discussed his New York Times bestseller eat to beat disease the new science of how your body can heal itself he's back again today to discuss this very book Eat to beat your diet burn fat heal your metabolism and live longer it will be out this March 21st 2023. now before we get started I've got to share that disclaimer when we dig into the science of health and nutrition it's imperative to remember that this show is offered for informational purposes only if you have specific health concerns you'll want to connect with your health care provider with that let's get them right up here Dr William Lee welcome to the show hi Karina thank you for having me back it's so good to have you here now I know you've been very busy with your master class with the courses you offer and also with this book I'm personally loving it it is the anti-diet diet book solution so just to prepare our audience for this work I would love for you to quickly summarize the five Health defenses and then talk about what inspired you to double down and create this book yeah my first book Eat to beat the Seas I was writing about food and health which we're all interested in and what I wrote about is that when it comes to Food and Health it's not just about the food it's about how our body responds to what we actually put inside it when we put good food inside it we're actually able to our body responds by activating Health defenses and there are five of them I'll tell you about them five Health offenses the first one is angiogenesis which is how our body grows blood vessels got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels to bring oxygen and all the nutrients that we eat to every cell in our body second Health defense is our stem cells we actually regenerate and rejuvenate From the Inside Out third is our gut microbiome which as we all know helps with our gut health but very importantly our gut health actually helps our mental Wellness our mood helps us heal from the inside and lowers inflammation third Health defense is our DNA much more than a genetic code our DNA protects us from Harms in the environment like ultraviolet radiation or radon from the ground and of course harmful chemicals that we might eat in our food and then finally our health defense fifth Health defense is our immune system which is much more powerful than we ever thought not only does a strong immunity protect us from Invaders from the outside like bacteria and viruses but it also protects us from Invaders inside our body like cancer cells so when I wrote my first book Is that foods can actually activate these Health defenses to help us raise our Shields and when I was done with the book I asked myself where do you go next and that's what eat to beat your diet about it is actually a sequel that says from wherever you are how do you get to that next level if you're good how do you get to Great and that's how you eat to improve your metabolism that's where the answer lies now in a quick review of the book you dive into fats and some myths that we still need to work to dispel about fats about white Oedipus tissue versus brown fat about how these fats can actually impact our hormones and dictate our health and even how our metabolism works so let's dive into the research a bit what is it that you've really found through this journey yeah you know I mean I think all of us who are uh walking around and listening and watching this have the same experience which is we have we associate body fat with something unpleasant uh you know all of us have had this experience you step out of the shower out of the corner of your eye you see the reflection in the mirror and there might be a lump or a bump that you're not happy with right and so immediately then you step on the scale and you start to curse body fat and you blame your metabolism I mean this is such a common scenario and yet I'm a scientist so I want to actually understand better where does fat come from fat doesn't just appear in your body um and actually by the way if you take a look at babies Healthy Babies are chubby babies right they've got big chubby cheeks they've got big tummies and they've their arms and legs are like those circus balloons that the clowns make little poodles out of right they're they're chubby and so fat in a baby is really really good so where does fat come from well I'll tell you when the mom's egg met the dad's sperm and they turned into a ball of cells okay this is in the uterus um the first cell the first tissue that forms is the circulation because every organ that forms will need a have a blood supply second tissue that forms are your nerves because every organ eventually will need to have instructions coming through the wiring of our nervous system to tell it what to do third tissue that forms is body fat body fat forms in little cells called adipocytes the adipocytes means tiny fat cell and guess what the fat forms around our blood vessels like bubble wrap you know a sheet of bubble wrap that goes around your blood vessels and the reason it does this is because body fat adipocytes are fuel tanks for the food that we eat that goes into our bloodstream that are later on going to be stored as energy into our fuel tank so our metabolism can help our body do its thing and so the fact that we need fat even before we're born I mean I always tell people jokingly look we all had fat before we had a face that we could stuff with food so stop blaming the food let's just think about what it is that our body fat actually does for us and this is the big discovery body fat has at least four unsuspected functions all right we used to think that fat is kind of like a insulation like blubber okay like in a whale but actually that's not the case our fat is kind of a cushion and thank goodness we have it because we didn't have body fat if we slipped on a rug and fell on the floor our organs would burst open okay so goodness good thing we actually have good body fat as a cushion second our um our body fat uh uh actually remarkably uh is a hormonal organ okay it's an endocrine organ an endocrine organ is like your thyroid your adrenal glands your ovaries your testicles they make hormones and it turns out that fat are body fat adipose tissue okay which is very normal forms in the womb all right secretes hormones all right now what are the hormones they secrete normally to help our metabolism they secrete hormone at least 15 of them one of them is called leptin leptin sometimes known as a satiety hormone which means fullness I like to think about it not as an off and on switch I think about it as a volume switch when you turn the volume up with Latin yeah less less not so hungry turn it down yeah getting kind of hungry all right um another hormone that your body fat normal healthy body fat secretes is called adiponectin it's a it's just a name of a hormone however this hormone is very very important so Karina if I actually as a doctor asked you to draw a tube of blood that I sent to the hospital lab to measure all of the hormones in your body okay your cortisol your thyroid your diponectin I'll tell you that adiponectin will be 1 000 times higher than every other hormone in your body wow surprise and the reason is because our healthy fat makes a diponectin a bit dippinctin works with our insulin in order to help our metabolism draw energy from the blood to store it into the fuel tanks so the only reason that we have energy it's because we eat food and the food provides the fuel in our body just like uh going to The Filling Station a gas station to put fill up your tank and in order for the uh your body to absorb that fuel we need a dipinectin collaborating partnering with insulin to draw that fuel in okay A Thousand Times higher than any other hormone because that's how important our energy is that's normal healthy fat with our our metabolism another hormone by the way if if a dipinectin is the gas tank gas pedal to help us absorb fuel more efficiently and faster then another hormone is called resistant and resistance like the break so think about it you're getting onto you're driving on a highway get into the fast lane time to push the adiponectin more energy more fuel not so fast as the car ahead now you hit the resistant slow down not so fast this is how these hormones actually work and the reason I wanted to stop here for a second is because this was the first time I actually heard about resistant I had done some reading on things like resolvins which support resolution of inflammation protectants which protect and support your DNA and how Omega-3s and omega-3 Source fats like EPA and DHA impact those systems and so when I learned about this new one my big question comes up is there a connection between the types of fats we consume and this particular action in the body so what what we're talking about these hormonal uh factors absolutely functioned like the operating system in your laptop you got your laptop from the computer store and you started it up it's hardwired to do its thing and so these hormonal functions are hardwired from the time we're born all the way to our very last breath to do its thing one of the startling things that I write about is a the most ambitious human study of human metabolism undertaken in history that was just published two years ago that showed that all humans only go through four phases of metabolism I'm so glad you're talking about this because I mean I read this section of your book and I was like whoa mind blown so yes tell us about those four faces and I'll tell you how it links up to your question about how the fat we is yes what we eat and and when and how we eat and when we eat all affect our metabolism in different ways and can influence our hormones but it's what's really important to understand how we're wired what is our operating system like and you know when I wrote when I wrote started to write eat to beat your diet I wanted to write about metabolism and not dieting in fact the title itself need to be your diet's a trick title it's not a diet book it's an anti-diet book as you said because it's really about how do we actually what's what do we know today about our metabolism based on the new signs of the metabolism that this that really upends the myths that we all walk around with right people say oh you're either born with a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism that's why some people are skinny as a stick and don't have to worry about their food and other people you know are battling with their weight over their lives and they always need to worry about what they what they eat I can tell you that there's it's not the metabolism doing that um another myth is that you know when kids are growing up in teenage years and they're eating two dinners and bouncing off the walls that their metabolism is going Sky High also a myth another big myth um is that when you reach middle age whether you're a man or a woman your 40s and 50s of course then you get to your 60s your metabolism naturally slows down which is why many people are struggling with their weight uh when they actually reach middle age also not true based on how our metabolism is hardwired and so I'll explain to you how we discovered that these are all myths about two years ago a paper appeared in the journal science a mind-blowing paper because science is one of the most prestigious scientific journals that they really talk about discoveries like fundamental discoveries mind-blowing game changing you know a human advancement kinds of discoveries and this was a study that was published a researcher named Herman ponzer worked with 90 other collaborators this is a big research study and they came from 20 different countries all around the world and they studied metabolism in 6 000 people that's a big study what's really remarkable they study the people on exactly the same way they gave them a drink of water H2O and what they did is they were able to chemically tweak the H which is hydrogen and water H is a hydrogen and O the O in H2O is oxygen they tweaked it a little bit so they could measure after you drink the water what your metabolism does to those atoms they could measure metabolism in the breath they could measure it in the blood they could measure it in urine and so they measured a metabolism of 6 000 people but that's not all of the 6 000 people they studied people that were two days old babies newborns gave them a drink of water okay and studied their metabolism and they also studied people that were 90 plus years old wow that's the last chapter of life and so and everyone in between so this study in exactly the same way studied metabolism across the human lifespan when they got the results initially what they found was that everybody had a different metabolism was all over the map just like you would expect right but what they did is then you know we now live in the era of super Computing all right where we can crunch a lot of data and what they did is they developed an algorithm where they could actually go into every individual result and correct for the size of the the subject so they could remove the effect on metabolism of excess body fat it could remove that and when they removed it from the two from the two day old and the 20 year old and a 40 year old and a 60 year old and a nine-year-old removed all the effects of excess body fat and what what they the result they found was like pulling the cloak off the statue of David for the first time what they found was literally stunning All Humans only go through four phases of metabolism and here they are we're all born with exactly the same metabolism at Day Zero first year of life is Phase One our metabolism Rockets like a spaceship goes High Sky High to 50 higher than what we're going to be our metabolism is when we're an adult phase two from one year old to 20 years old our metabolism goes down down down down down this is right through teenage years right through adolescence right through spotting like a green spot you need two to three dinners the capsule is going down to to adult levels phase two phase three 20 years old um your metabolism 20 30 40 50 60 metabolism is Rock Solid our metabolism is hardwired to uh not change one bit between 20 and 60 okay and what that means that's so stunning is that 60 can be the new 20 if you allow your metabolism to do what it's designed to do our operating system and then finally fourth phase from 60 onwards to 90 you have a slight decrease in your metabolism about 17 so when you're 90 okay if you're lucky enough to live to be 90 your metabolism will be about 17 percent of what it was when you were 60 which should be what it was when you're 20. so the question is why do people have different metabolisms so they could add the effect of fat back into the system and you know what they found it's not that the metabolism that you are born with is your destiny to grow fat and gain weight it's the other way around when you add the effect of body fat back to these four patterns extra body fat crushes your metabolism so it's not that a slow metabolism because you gain body fat it's body fat crushes your metabolism slows your metabolism that means that the good news is that means is that we actually have the power to unleash our inner metabolism our operating system we can clean up you know sort of like on your laptop you know you have an operating system you got glitchy screens because you got viruses on it so you got to clean the virus we can clean our metabolism up by fighting harmful body fat unleashing who we actually are inside that to me is really the secret to elevating our health improving our metabolism and at the same time it also improves our health defenses so there's a couple of things that this drew me to think about just from the prior knowledge I came to your book with one of which was that we essentially build the same number of fat cells that we'll have by the time that we're really toddlers throughout our adult life right and then we actually start producing new fat cells in our later life starting around age 60. so I wonder just as I was reading through this what the correlation might be I know this is brand new research but I wondered if this was something that you had put any thought into because essentially yes our fat cells kind of create more of a situation where we can become more fat but those fat cells are essentially the same number they're just getting bigger they're swelling they're creating more space they're they're taking on more so so how do we potentially look at this whole picture and then help people actually get to the point where they can say okay well I can reduce my body fat weight my body fat percentage and and start to turn on this thermogenic capacity of my body's natural metabolism again all right yeah let's let's just Dive Right In by trying to explain metabolism in a way that anyone could understand okay even though it's very state of the art so here's a deal most of us have a car we drive a car we don't think about the fuel and the process of getting energy to the engine so we can get our way we just get in the car and we drive it right so um uh but our car runs on fuel and in the same way our body is an engine that our metabolism uses fuel to run our engine so we can go about our way we don't normally think about our metabolism we just do we just go okay now back to the car for a second think about it we don't think about the energy in our car until we've checked the gas the fuel gauge if we see the fuel going on empty what do we do we pull over to The Filling Station to the gas station take the pump out of the nozzle put it into the gas uh uh the the gas tank we push the container that gas comes out fills up the tank the Go-Go's click stops and we put it back and we drive off right in our body it's the same way okay although we don't actually have a fuel gauge that you can actually see like in the car our organs and our brain does continuously monitor the amount of fuel in our body that our metabolism uses in order to be able to keep us our our operating system functioning okay now when our fuel gauge and our body runs low we don't pull over to The Filling Station we pull over to the dinner table we pull over to the refrigerator we pull over to the pantry we go to the restaurant okay and and that's basically what we do now just like a car filling up the station when we reach over for food and we put food into our body that our food provides our fuel our metabolism takes that fuel tool and Powers up all of our cells so one of the things that happens is that we when you put food in your mouth your pancreas releases a substance called insulin it's a hormone insulin actually works with the adiponectin which are normal healthy fat makes right they partner together and they're basically saying okay let's go draw that fuel from the food into our sauce remember I told you that fat originally starts like bubble wrap around blood vessels when you eat it goes to food the fuel goes into your blood and now your metabolism is able to take it your insulin and your dipinectin can take that fuel from the bloodstream and pack it into give first of all give your body the fuel it needs however anything extra gets packed into those tiny little fat cells so as you say um most of us are born with most of the fat we're gonna always have uh uh and what happens is that a single fat cell can expand about a hundred times in size so when you've got extra fuel you're going to store it up into the fat cells it gets bigger bigger bigger bigger okay and then it's kind of stretched to thin good thing you're not eating too much because your your tank is full now yeah uh now you can kind of go up out your way when you're done eating now in a car back to the car for a second when you fold it fill the tank at the very end when the tank is full the clicker goes and no more gas comes out right but can you imagine what would happen if there was no stopper there was no click at the end of the of the gas pump what would happen your tank would fill up would overflow very quickly run down the side of the car run the tires pool around your feet and then you'd be standing in a dangerous flammable toxic mess all right you'd have to back away wait for the air to evaporate the gasoline it'd be very dangerous to be in there okay now in when we sit down on our table to get our fuel unfortunately our bodies don't have does do not have a clicker so we can keep on when our tank is full those fat cells are full all right we have all the energy we need we can still keep on eating all right and when we eat just like overflowing your fuel tank you got a lot of fuel it's got to be stored someplace so our metabolism okay with insulin and dependictin starts filling up not one cell another cell blowing up 100 times there's another cell filled that up a hundred times now get another one you got to keep on filling your tanks up but guess what if you keep on overeating all right you you then all of a sudden you've run out of your fat cells are all full but you can imagine the fat mass is starting to get bigger because you're filling up the mass a hundred times guess what you're out of fat so even when you're a child our fat contains stem cells stem cells can regenerate more fat so when you keep on eating all right uh what's going to happen your body will tap into the stem cells and just make more fuel tanks fill that up whoops still still eating now I'm going to make another one one of a stem cell and so these adipose stem cells actually continue to make more fuel tanks so we can make more and more and more and more fat all right even when we're young okay this is why if you take a look at childhood obesity that actually can happen different kinds of things are actually influencing body fat but at the end of the day this is actually how the fuel works when your insulin is up when you're actually eating okay your metabolism is completely focused on storing the fuel because that's what it's doing it's supposed to store that fuel for later even if you're overeating it's still going to store it now when you're not eating your insulin levels go down right we know that okay and then when an insulin levels go down your metabolism switches gears and now it can say you know what no more fuel to store let's go start burning some fuel and so when we're not eating also called fasting which happens when we're sleeping every night when we're not eating our metabolism switches into fuel burning mode but over the course of months or years if you keep on overeating you're going to actually accumulate a lot of body fat a lot of extra Fuel and even when you're sleeping and trying to burn that fat you're not going to actually burn enough of it okay so this is one of the ways that we can actually think about how to optimize our body is to think about the amount of time and how to use our body's natural hardwired fuel burning system in order and how to control the amount of food that we eat so we don't overflow our tank and we give our body enough time to actually uh burn down that fuel wow okay well you've given us a lot to digest I think so as I think about the whole picture when it comes to our diet then so let's say we had a healthy foundation and we didn't build a ton of extra fat cells when we were in our childhood years but now we're adults and we seem we at least think that we have the symptoms of a slowing metabolism I personally have not noticed a real slow down but what I'm coming to terms with and reading your book is that my activity level definitely shifted when I started working from home and then shifted again when I had two young children at home and so you know you might perceive yourself to be expending the same number of calories but really not be doing some of the same things so what do you think we can learn from this and how we can kind of turn on this brown Oedipus tissue this brown fat that we learn about reading your book yeah well first of all you bring up such an important point which is that when we kind of like get further in our life Journey life happens we get busy we get distracted we get stressed out whether it's family stress emotional stress Financial stress work stress you know we all I mean this is modern society we live in all those things affect um how we ate the decision the choices we eat how much we exercise how Physically Active we are how much sleep we get and stress Itself by the way causes inflammation which can actually impact our metabolism as well so not surprisingly as we kind of get into our uh later years of kind of mid to Mid to life um you know it's sort of a lifestyle issue that tends to sit on our metabolism but that's actually giving us that actually gives us the agency to be able to deliberately look at those pieces of our life that we can improve um by the way exercise of course is a good thing you're you're burning the fuel burning the calories you're burning the fuel but you don't have to get a trainer and work out at a gym if you don't want to you don't have to train for a marathon some people do that and that's great but not everybody needs to it turns out that if you just spend 30 days 30 minutes every day staying doing something Physically Active it could even be walking around your house or walking up and down stairs or going for a walk after dinner you know anything that's regular that requires physical activity you don't have to break into a sweat you are actually burning fuel if you think about that it makes a lot of sense if you take your car out for a spin you're burning fuel and that's what we need to be able to do at the very minimum and when we're tired and exhausted and at the end of our day and end of our widths and all we want to do is sit down and veg and maybe have some snacks you know what I mean think about it like that's so common happens to all of us and yet so it's being mindful about face but doing being Physically Active by the way one thing I read in my book that I thought was so interesting is that yes working out exercising is good for you but it turns out researchers have even looked at fidgeting you know the shaky the leg Thump Thump Thump Thump Thump tapping everything even fidgeting actually Burns fuel so stay even even that amount of activity and that's my point is that you don't have to be an acrobat you know you don't have to be a marathon or an Iron Man person the training for that in order to be able to really burn fuel even small movements actually count and and so that so that's one thing um I think that the other issue I want to address before talking about what to eat is actually um Stress Management is also very very important because when we're held highly stressed out uh our we're overworked our metabolism actually thrown uh off of whack as well it just kind of derails our metabolism and in my book one of the things I write about that's so interesting is that repressed anger which a lot of people have frustration and anger derails our metabolism in fact Studies have been done showing that you know in groups of women that those women who have a lot of repressed anger actually have more difficulty managing their body weight so again mindfulness you know see a therapist meditate yoga get together with friends managing our stress can also help your metabolism but let's talk about eating because I think that's something that we do have the agency three times a day to make some decisions on first already I you know we talked about this don't overeat if you overeat you're just going to need to make more fuel tanks more fuel tanks in order to store that fuel don't do it all right um never goes for seconds uh quick the clean play Club be very careful about how much you take that's just a volume thing second remember I told you that when you're um uh when you're not eating your body's burning fuel so one of the really cool practical ways for anybody no matter where you are in your life to really burn a little extra fuel burn down fat okay is actually to try to get as much time you're not eating as possible so here's how it works if you go to bed for eight hours which is what you should try to do eight hours of sleep is a kind of a basically an optimal amount of sleep for your metabolism your brain brain health uh your immune system let's say you go to bed at 11 and you get up at seven in the morning now that's that's fat burning time because you're not eating when you eat let's say you eat dinner at seven o'clock the night before and you finished eating eating dinner at eight you put the dishes away at eight o'clock now a lot of people actually will snack later at nine o'clock or ten o'clock maybe a bedtime snack open the fridge sneak an extra slice of whatever all right the moment you do that you put insulin up and now you're not burning fat anymore so what I do is I basically say when I put my dishes in the sink I'm done eating I'm not going to eat anything afterwards I'm not going to snack I'm gonna have a bedtime snack and what I've done if I eat at seven and I stop eating at eight put the dishes away at eight o'clock and I go to bed at 11. I've just gained three extra hours of fat burning time fuel burning time that's eight hours overnight three hours after dinner just when the sink when the dish is going to sink I don't need any more and then when I get up in the morning I don't do what my mom used to tell me to do get up hurry up and eat breakfast catch the school bus and get to school on time we're adults so when I get up in the morning I actually take my time to get ready take a shower I get dressed uh I might uh check my email I'm gonna go for a walk I do something else all right before I eat breakfast so I usually wait about an hour to take my time and before I put anything in my before I break my fast and change my metabolism back to fuel storing mode guess what now I've gained an extra hour so just add up do the math three hours after dinner after the food the dishes go in the sink eight hours overnight that's 11 hours add one more hour in the morning it's 12 hours of fat burning fuel burning time 12 hours half the day I've spent 50 percent of my existence burning down Fuel and still pretty reasonably I ate normal I made breakfast and I ate dinner in normal ways and I don't eat too much that without actually having to think too much about it is one way to use your body to help you get that operating system to do what it wants to do you want to take it to the next level you asked about Brown fat okay let's talk about it eating Ultra processed foods lots of saturated fat overloading and growing your fat cells okay uh uh artificial preservatives artificial sweeteners artificial coloring artificial flavoring all those things derail cause inflammation derail or metabolism and guess what when our metabolism is derailed we start to gain extra body fat all right and what happens at that point is our health starts to go we start losing our ability to burn the fuel we just start to store extra fuel we don't know where we are all right and so on the other hand if you Choose Wisely and I write about 150 Foods in my book that actually have been shown in a lab and in clinical studies to help you burn body fat by activating Brown fat on one hand number two by preventing the formation of more fat or slowing down the loading up of fuel in your tiny little adipose sites here fat cells slow down down the load of the fuel okay in some cases even redirect the stem cells instead of copy pasting and making another Fat cell fuel cell white fat cell oh it's going to make a brown fat cell instead now what is brown fat Brown fat is this surprising feature of fat that we haven't talked about yet turns out the special you know there's there's two colors of fat in our body white fat and brown fat white fat is the wiggly jiggly stuff it's under your arm under your chin as it's the muffin top it's around your thighs and your butt okay most people don't want too much of of that kind of subcutaneous under the skin white fat um and white fat is also uh so you can see that part white fat is also the kind you can't see lumpy bumpy wiggly jiggly except it's found inside the tube of your body all right and that kind of fat is very dangerous it's called visceral fat visceral means gut gut fat is like a baseball glove that wraps around your organ and when you've got too much of it it chokes your organs okay and it's very very inflamed very dangerous even skinny people can actually have visceral fat that can cause inflammation and cause disease you can hey what you can cause your metabolism go Haywire that's white fat a little bit good just the right amount good normal good too much bad bad in almost every single way because it derails your metabolism I'm not talking about vanity you know that's a different conversation to have you know um everyone has their own taste of what the body shape and body body um uh how how it looks I'm not I'm not there I'm talking as a doctor and as a scientist I'm talking about the fact that when you have excess body fat you actually derail your metabolism however it turns out even though your metabolism is hardwired to not burn fuel when you're eating there are ways of actually getting around that to burn fuel even when you're eating it that is actually to activate Brown fat Brown Fat's the other color Brown fat is not wiggly jiggly you can't see it brown fat is paper thin it's crazy it's paper thin and it's not subcutaneous so you can't see it it is close to the Bone so where's Brown fat located it's pressed along your neck it's behind your breastbone it's under your arms like a bra strap a little bit behind your back a little bit in your belly and brown fat when you eat certain foods can actually light up ignite like a like a space heater okay and I like to give a demo like this this is actually a lighter look at those check this out boom okay that's your brown fat all right it is burning you can turn it on with cold temperatures you'll ignite it to stay warm but it will also turn on if you eat certain kinds of foods mushrooms broccoli Brassica broccoli bok choy Swiss chard cauliflower lights up brown fat mushrooms Light It Up Chili Peppers lighted up white beans lentils Capers all have been discovered to light up your brown fat which is really remarkable Tomatoes whole tomatoes tomato paste will light up your brown fat omega-3 fatty acids will light up your brown fat which is quite remarkable you know and and this is actually how you can use good fat Brown fat to fight bad fat with excess bad fat which is white fat now I showed you this this is take this is burning fuel where's the brown fat drawing the fuel from it's sucking up the field just like on your uh on your gas stovetop when you click whoosh all right now you're going to boil some water that fuel was coming from some place your brown fat draws that extra fuel to create that space heater function from your white fat it starts to burn down that fuel and foods can activate that process which is really cool because most people think when it comes to metabolism and body fat the last thing you would do is to eat foods to activate your metabolism and get rid of fat but here for the first time I'm into writing you can actually love your food to love your metabolism who burn down harmful body fat wow now you do also put some lists of the foods that you can eat to activate these things within your work and I find myself also thinking about that Mediterranean diet that you've kind of coined is this amalgamation of both kind of Asian Cuisine and kind of these Mediterranean ways of eating to help stimulate our bodies natural ability to maintain healthy metabolism and a healthy weight but I'm also also really finding that a lot of what the recommendations stem around come back to foods that have a high fiber content that may not have a very high total calorie density so the nutrition you're getting from each of these Foods is it's like packed with micronutrients that we may not be so accustomed to measuring like okay protein fat carbohydrates it's like One Step Beyond that and we've also learned through talking to you in the past too about the power of green tea or even components of black coffee as for examples but one of the things I wanted to make sure that we connect to and get people thinking about is the empty calories that we tend to consume in the day-to-day and often they come in liquid form the wine we drink the beer we drink the lattes the Frappuccinos and then all of those extra things that we may be consuming after we put our our plates in the sink at 8 pm so that we can actually set ourselves up for Success while adding these great things to our diet so I was hoping you could comment on not only the integration of some of these fabulous foods but also saying goodbye to perhaps some of our overconsumption of these liquid calories sources yeah no I mean it's you know it's a it's all about balance and about making mindful choices that you know you realize I'd rather do something good for me that I enjoy rather than doing something bad for me that I might enjoy or might not enjoy and so let's talk about that you know the the you know the most commonly consumed beverage in the world uh has no calories is actually water and this turns out researchers shown that water can actually activate Brown fat too which is really kind of interesting specifically like cold like room temperature water or anything colder than room temperature and we think it's because there are little thermostats inside our stomach that when you actually put water that's colder than our body the the thermostats activate and of course that's our core body temperature like you don't want to be cooling out of your core body temperature so our Brown fat lights up super simple no calories but actually it actually also makes us feel full so we're likely less likely to overeat just with water I'm talking about beverages now because I have a whole chapter on beverages second tea uh green tea does a lot of things for metabolism uh but also actually helps improve your circulation and your immunity and help improve your gut health lots of things at Green key actually is beneficial for if you let you drink it straight if you start adding other things to your green tea you know you start making a you know the pacinos that you talked about anything any kind of like something you drive through and order it um the machacinos or whatever once you start adding other things to it you know Dairy other types of artificial you know get a shot of flavoring you know now you've changed the you've changed the nature of what it is you've kind of created your own Ultra processed food and of course that's really really common uh and I think that what if you look at the cultures like in the Mediterranean and Asia they tend to drink these beverages pretty straight now green tea is obviously great black tea people used to say ah it's fermented there's not good for you turns out black tea activates your metabolism turns on your brown fat and Eve and the blackest of teas that you can possibly get I can tell you is a tea that most people may not have heard about but you can order online it's called poo or t p u apostrophe e r h poor a little town in China that's actually what I'm drinking right now oh my gosh I love poor tea it it it's really Smoky and dark yeah it is it can replace your coffee if you're into it that's right exactly it's kind of like a uh like a chicory almost like a chicory coffee um uh Smoky and uh it's actually often consumed in China as a digestive tea or beverage after dinner uh but what's really cool about it is it's actually a fermented tea that actually has his own bacteria healthy bacteria for the gut okay it's I think it's called poor acillas it's its own bacteria that it's that that's evolved in pure tea so it's a probiotic tea good for your gut health as well which is really really cool so but don't monkey with it by putting all kinds of other flavorings and other kind of stuff look you know I always think about this when I um see teenagers lining up at the mall in front of the bubble tea stand you know here you have tea and they're and then they're adding all kinds of stuff to it look it tastes great but now you've actually doctored it and and added all this other stuff to it that probably or maybe definitely isn't going to be good for your metabolism and people drink a lot of it same deal as coffee you know coffee uh by the way it's good in tea or the catechins uh egcg which activates your metabolism and coffee's got something called chlorogenic acid and by the way organic coffees have about uh much more at least 30 times more chlorogenic acid than conventionally grown coffee and chlorogenic acid turns on your brown fat and also prevents white fat from forming huge Globs and it redirects the white fat to turn into Brown fat so ignites their space heater function again if you want to really drink your coffee think about how they do it in Italy you know they basically take a straight cup of coffee and they drink it that's how I drink coffee every day you know like I'll take a straight cup of coffee you know there's this tradition where you drive go to the drive-through and you look at all the things and what are the holiday when is the pumpkin flavor come back you know you know what I'm talking about yes right and what you're doing is you're doctoring it up so I think for the beverages I call it the Holy Trinity if you want to activate your metabolism and fight body fat the Holy Trinity of beverages are water tea of all kinds and coffee have it straight well and to your point earlier about the things that you could consume let's say after 8 PM that might be water it could be an herbal tea and if you don't have an intense reaction to caffeine it might be a cup of tea that like a poo wear or a green tea yeah and these things come with things like catechins that support your overall health and to your point also in your earlier work not having coffee with milk because milk itself dairy milk can create some noxious chemicals when you consume it when it combines with with caffeine for or with the coffee correct well actually what happens uh the the the kind of uh the Insight the discovery of what happens when you put Dairy into coffee so not not milks but Dairy is that the that Dairy has got milk fats that's what Dairy is from a cow and milk fats you know fat form soap bubble so if you're a chemist and you could look under the microscope you would see that fat would form little soap bubbles whatever you have fat and what happens when you put dairy in your coffee okay cow milk those little soap bubbles start forming inside your coffee you can't see it doesn't look like soap bubbles but it's there and what those Supple bubbles do is they form little bubbles around the chlorogenic acid and the other bioact is the polyphenols now when you drink that coffee that those sub bubbles don't get absorbed directly into yourself you're blocking your ability of absorbing the chlorogenic acid all right most of it doesn't get up absorbing your stomach it most of it goes down the lower part of your gut and you don't actually get the benefit of it so it's not that you get toxins but you miss out on the good stuff quite a lot of it and the more Dairy you use the more soap bubbles form the less you're going to actually of the good stuff you're going to absorb well thank you for that clarification now something else that you mentioned um within the book is that when you got to the work of recommending all of these dietary changes or looking at eating to beat disease there was some level of concern that people that read the book might become overweight but you found that the exact opposite was true and that that's part of what led to this work now I have also noticed the same thing when it came to consuming the right fats so for instance you tell people you need to consume more omega-3 and they consume more omega-3 and you'd get those random calls of people saying oh well you know I started consuming more and I have some pounds that are just coming off I don't even really understand why now we might both know that a calorie is not a calorie but what more might you have to share about this well first of all you know again this um uh we lump together the idea of fats into one Collective not so good for you but for example omega-3 fatty acids yes they are fatty acids but they're incredible bioactives meaning that when we actually consume them in our body whether in supplement or in natural form whether in platform or for marine form I mean I write about the whole chapter of seafood that is is you know I was quite surprised that that you know we used to always think you have to have really oily fish mackerel sardines anchovies or salmon um to be to be healthy but it turns out that the latest research shows that even not so oily fish that still have some amount of Omega-3s actually are enough you don't need to over like you don't need to go like oh man I got to go do Overkill and so even Cod has Omega-3s and and so the amount of cod omega-3s actually help you lose body fat and body weight now obviously if you go the more Omega-3s you consume the more you're actually going to activate your body's Health offenses the more you're going to activate your metabolism but even um modest amounts and this is why like I always tell people you get intimidated like oh man I don't know if I want to have that many supplements okay then don't but like have have a little get started with it and you can see that that you're you're going to feel the difference because you're putting up an active not just it's not any fat you're not putting a stick of butter into your body you're having a fat that actually activates your health defenses and so um so not all fat is fat same thing as olive oil olive oil is a cooking fat a delicious natural cooking fat still a fat you know what's in olive oil are polyphenols and those polyphenols come from the olive plant itself the olive fruit one of them is called hydroxytarazole and it's really really potent what is hydroxy tyrazole do guess what it does this it activates the the brown fat the space heater all over again and I think that you know the reason I'm actually you know using this demo is because I think people then will start to associate a picture an image of the space heating function otherwise it's just a bunch of colors and fat I want people to understand this is the discovery that really allows us to eat Foods so that we can take charge of our metabolism wow well I will say too that you've separated the book into three primary sections and within each of these sections you're hoping to outline a plan for people by the time you get to that third part so it's organ in such a way that I think people can really take a lot of what we've talked about here today as well as the resources within the book to build a plan that will work for them that will help support their long-term Health but this also isn't it's not like a standard diet book I don't I don't know how else to put it it's um you know where your first book eat to be disease and this category was really focused on helping people understand the nutrition that they get from each of these Foods this one helps people get to the plan so you have sample meal guides and recipes Finding Your Own Way making it their own how to ultimately optimize your own metabolism so taking all of these pieces and integrating them together so I know we're really at the close of our hour here today so I wanted to offer you the opportunity to leave our audience with a closing thought or two what you would have them take away and ultimately understand that they will get from spending the time with your book yeah look I mean the the Great Discovery that's been made about human metabolism is that we can actually control it and our body is hardwired our operating system wants to do its thing and we can actually live our entire human lifespan in really really good health and even if no matter where you are in your journey you can actually make some subtle move some easy moves with the timing of what you eat when you start eating opening your window for eating and when you close your wood window for eating and then choosing while you're eating what types of foods you should you you prefer I call it I call my style mediteration because I'm Asian I grew up eating Asian food um I lived in Asia I've also lived in a Mediterranean and who doesn't like you know Mediterranean Asian food my point is the way that I eat is really to lean into my food and eat delicious foods that I like I put 150 different foods uh that are all supported by both research and clinical studies human studies and I put the dose that you need to eat too that research has shown how much wheat you need to eat guess what the doses are all very reasonable they're things that are the they're the amounts that we would normally want to eat um uh for for if you're eating for health and when you're eating for pleasure for me food um you know it's time to ReDiscover our joy of food not to fear it if you care about lowering your body fat you want to fight and lose some weight but very importantly if you want to increase your metabolism fighting body fat UPS your metabolism more of its metabolism more energy more energy more vibrancy that's what we want across our whole life span I put recipes in there 36 recipes I cook those recipes in my own kitchen I'm sharing my way of doing it with you but I emphasize at the end of the day you've got to tailor this for yourself that's how I practice medicine that's how I practice you know my think my approach to and coaching for healthy eating every individual is different it's all about you and how your body is actually wired but we can all do it that's awesome now I know you also have some resources that you offer Beyond this book I've taken one of your courses as a for example which was led over the course of four weeks and had the opportunity to interface with you directly for that I also know that you do a free master class so what more would you like to share with our audience about the ways that they can age with you and if they want to learn more how they can go about that yeah I mean I listen my research the work that I do is like sitting in front of a fire hydrant and it's gushing out information at me and and it's it's a it's it's incredible and a lot of it's thrilling for me it's a lot of fun because I'm trained as a scientist and I try to curate it and so but I didn't try to get it out I tried to get out to the public that's part of my mission so if you want to learn what I'm learning and how I actually want to make it available for people to share in the upside of the discoveries of science come to my website it's Dr D R William Lee Li Dr William lee.com follow me on social my handle is at drdr William Lee Li at Dr William Lee you can follow me on Instagram Tick Tock Facebook Twitter I'm on all of these things and what you're going to find is I'm just giving away little bits of information because you know listen I've been involved with biotechnology you know developing treatment for cancer and blindness and diabetes the reality is drug development's very hard we don't want everyone to have to be on a medicine to be honest with you it's not Equitable not everyone can get the medicines even the people that need it but food is the ultimate Fair Way of actually not just treating disease but actually improving our health that is right there right in front of us my mission is to get it out too so see come to my website sign up for a free newsletter come to my master classes they're free and you know for people who want to do a deep dive I actually do mini courses I do month-long courses as Karina you've actually taken and look it's it's all about you know being human and part of being human is sharing that's what I want to do for for everyone well thank you so much again for coming and spending this time with me today I've so enjoyed it I look forward to completing your book I didn't get through the recipes yet I've had it on my iPad kind of furiously going through it but really an incredible work I learned a thing or two that I didn't expect and the mind-blown moments about how I can activate the brown Oedipus tissue to ultimately support my long-term health and turn on the the engine within is just so useful I'm putting it into action and I just want to personally thank you for the work thank you very much thanks for having me wow what a treasure Trove now this podcast is all about serving each of you so if you would like specific topics to be covered or have questions for myself or for Dr Lee or any of the guests that we feature on this show you can always reach out at orlo nutrition on social channels that's at o r l o nutrition you can also send me an email note at any time to hello at orlonutrition.com I want to thank you all for joining me here today if you learned a thing or two I hope that you will give me a thumbs up five star rating and even brighter review on your favorite platform and perhaps you'll join me to day as I raise my cup of puer tea and say my closing words here's to your health thanks for listening to nutrition without compromise to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts if you'd like to learn more visit orlonutrition.com and join our mailing list you'll gain access to complete show notes features and informative blogs because nutrition shouldn't be an either or foreign [Music]

Channel: Örlö Nutrition: Nutrition Without Compromise

Views: 26,428

Keywords: William Li, Metabolism, Fats, Diet, Brown Fat, White Fat, Omega-3, Body Weight

Id: 73Pgj3FDB4o

Length: 57min 49sec (3469 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023