Farm-aceuticals And How Food Impacts Health with Dr. William Li - Retire Sooner Podcast

first thing comes your mind very quick get to know your audience how to get to know dr william lee the uh favorite song to sing you know i i i have been listening to different um covers of john lennon's imagine in the last couple of years nobody is going to argue with that that's an an amazing song and everyone that does it's amazing and you know what it is it's sort of like you it's a song you can't screw up almost anybody can sing that and make it meaningful yeah and play it too it's a it is it's like an amazing song easy but beautiful to play how about favorite core pursuit in life core pursuit on our show is basically hobbies on steroids yeah you know um i love to explore food not surprisingly from what i do and so when i travel as i'm sure of any retirees get the chance to do uh on their own terms uh you know when i get to a town i first thing i do is i head to if they have a farmer's market or a village market it's the first thing i do oh that is cool i can totally envision that yeah i head right to the market um you know when back in the day before they had uh your camera on a phone i'd just take my camera with me and you know what's interesting before i've had my first meal in a new place if i can get to a village market or a town market i would i will literally just wander through find things that interest me that seem to be to call out the character of the place and i and i actually kind of anchor my first impressions of a place by the foods that i see uh so cool okay i see you doing a show parts unknown with dr william lay uh favorite instrument either to play or listen to piano i've been playing piano since i was four wow that okay cool and i'm sure you can play imagine it's pretty it's it's beautiful right uh favorite of your either your own books or your uh for your favorite book in general you know i one of my all-time favorite books is a novel fiction novel uh by a um secretive author who passed away his name is trevanian and uh i loved uh the uh book shibumi it's an awesome book you should check it out uh the author um uh was a he only went by pseudonym was actually named rodney whitaker he was a film professor and he wrote his novels as if they were movie scripts and so it's a very cinematic storytelling that's very cool all right favorite athlete or favorite sport uh you know i grew up in pittsburgh pennsylvania so i'm always a pittsburgh steelers fan favorite place you've traveled in michigan i've only been to detroit once and it's not your favorite place and it was and it was literally maybe it's not favorite most memorable and i'll tell you why i always remember detroit because i was in a hotel at the moment that they declared the pandemic oh okay so just a couple of years ago that is okay so not agree not fond i always ask michigan people why because it's kind of an underrated state and that's why i always say i did before that though i did go to a nice restaurant there it was a great place to eat how about internationally or the world what's your favorite place all-time favorite uh kind of like go-to places uh a little village uh on the northwest coast of the island of santorini greece the village is named ia oia been there 35 times that is truly a favorite place there's people struggle with this one it's like like yeah i've been there but that's truly your favorite place yeah that is cool all right well so that's going to come back up because i have a feeling that's going to play into our story today uh as we go through our own cinematic script here for with uh dr william lee tell me about uh so we're talking about your work um around the human body and health and what should we know about keeping our body healthy as we age i mean we're all individuals and we when it comes to food not only is our metabolism all unique our gut bacteria all unique but i think food is something that's incredible because um it's one of the most intimate things in our lives right i mean after we were we came out of our mom's wounds got spanked took our first breath the first thing the first experience we had was actually having a mouthful of food mother's milk okay and and every one of us no matter who you are and what you're you know how disciplined you are and what your background is whatever your circumstances everyone has some memory of a food a smell of some food something that their mom cooked that they loved it brings them right back to childhood and our food tells us something about where we came from uh our families our backgrounds our communities our culture and we all come from some culture you know i mean there's always something to track back to and even historically the generations our generation individual generations past passed down genetics passed down gut bacteria passed down cultural traditions that shape our individual preferences as well as biology and so something that you know i really love um you might not cotton to something you just resonate with that might be healthy i might not um i might not fancy as well but that's okay because you know what i write about my bookie to be disease there's more than 200 different foods i've identified that activate one or more of your body's health defenses so it's not like it's going to be hard to find something that's good plenty right there's plenty on the shelf there's plenty in the farmer's market to your point exactly it's you know i mean and i would say the thing that people need to understand is the healthy food is all help eating healthy is actually leaning into your own preferences the foods that you actually enjoy that are good for you and then leaning into the abundance of what mother nature actually provides us don't eat more but eat more of different types of foods explore um our bodies love variety so don't get into that kind of like i'm only going to eat white foods kind of mode okay get out there and you know especially i think if people are retiring what an opportunity to take that moment those moments to really begin to study the world around you when it comes to food that's what i'm telling you when i get into a new town i go right into the market uh one of the before the pandemic one of the last international trips i took i was asked to give a keynote at in in munich and i'd never been there before landed checked in threw my bags in my hotel and then i i i headed right to the town um market and literally just stood in the middle of saying trying to figure out okay what are they here what's in season here uh what can i find here that i wouldn't find in my own town and then and i made and i made notes and i took pictures of all these things you know um dare to be adventurous when it comes to food even visually do you by the way do you have a i should have asked you your favorite food do can you give me a favorite food or three oh man i could give you a lot of different favorite foods um you know i mean i always drink tea i love tea and i also drink coffee i spent some time living in italy and i got into the coffee habit um went to medical school so i had to drink my share of coffee to stay awake um but uh foods that i really enjoy i mean you know it actually changes by season but some of the things i'm enjoying right now um uh i am and people might think this is odd um i'm really getting into um tinned fish oh cool so like uh what would be give me the example of a fish that you would tin sardines yeah packed in oil with a little bit of tequila pepper okay uh or actually the uh and and another one i had is tin tuna in olive oil and oregano the other day why am i interested in that well number one yeah it's um by the way that's about the last thing i would have thought you would say what is your very favorite food fish wrapped up in metal okay yeah yeah okay i mean look you didn't say what you know what's my favorite michelin star meal i've ever had but but i'll tell you what i'm what i'm thinking about these days i'm trying to figure out and this pandemic shaped this a lot like i was trying to figure out you know in the early in the pandemic we all had to eat and so everybody ran out to get stuff back for their pantry in their in their homes and so i wound up figuring out like okay omega-3 fatty acids marine omega-3 fatty acids are found in smaller fish lower in the food chain and you can find that uh pre-packed and tin for you and yeah you know when i was growing up i always thought that like canned tuna was like cat food yeah right um and maybe it was cat food but by the way i love canned tuna but one of the i have a very fond memory i used to live in spain for a little while and we always got canned tuna yes and i have a fond memory of that with the oil and it just is wonderful yeah and i'm just telling you spain portugal south of france italy greece they do can tin fish like a like it's a it's a fine art they take the finest quality to fish they they really fillet it down they pack it with these incredible oils and flavorings and when you you can have a whole lunch just by ripping open the top and popping a fork in there and you've had this incredible meal so what i do now is you know i'll take some whole grain whole wheat whole grain pasta um i'll i'll boil it up i i try to be i'm actually writing my next book so i'm trying to be really practical about this i don't have a lot of time but i like to make my own lunch i'll take some pasta a little bit i'll boil it up whole grain and then literally i will um put a little olive oil into a pan extra virgin olive oil i'll open up a tin i'll fork the meat in there and i'll break it up i'll throw a handful of capers in there squeeze some lemon throw some oregano just heat it up put it onto a bowl and man that's like a mediterranean meal from heaven yeah so good and you're getting your omega-3s so but for you then so again we're going back to practical for our our listeners which would be hey i want to get on some sort of diet the way to your point you you read a book like an eat to beat disease which you've written and you end up with a long long list of things that you're going to find some things in there that you do a lot and it's interesting so practically so is the first step is to explore well look i mean here's what i this is what i tell people to do if you can get my book um take a sharpie and literally flip to the tables of all the foods any food i listen there's good for you and start um circling the foods that you you like okay um and everybody's gonna be circling something different but i tell them take out your cell phone and take a photograph of that page and then go shopping and when you're when you're in the store open your picture your photos and look at what you circled and start with those buy those and plan those for your meals because if you already if you're starting with the foods that you already love that are good for you um then you're already ahead of the game like you know a lot of people are are are are stymied about healthy eating they don't know where to begin they're like you know i must have a terrible diet i don't even know where i would start and this is my my tip start like and it doesn't even have to be my book other people have also written books on healthy ingredients fine circle doesn't go shopping pick up the ones that you circled and that you like i like that because i get into a rut and i know that again i think that uh you know i love a salad with avocado tomato and a couple other things with oil and white wine vinegar and salt pepper to me that is really wonderful almost every day of the week but but then adding to that i seem to get in a rut and it's hard to go beyond that same salad i've made a thousand times and it's great but i do kind of get sick of it especially if i'll have it three days in a row by third monday tuesday wednesday by thursday i'm like i really just don't want another one of the same butter lettuce but so uh so it doesn't matter it doesn't have to be just be your book it could be any book but that that talks about healthy foods but let's go back to the five so the androgenesis the regenerating your body the micro bacteria in your gut and dna and immune tell me about how food can activate those defenses well first of all i have to tell the story of like you know so my career i i was very interested for years looking at what are common denominators of disease right so if you think about cancer heart disease stroke blindness arthritis they all seem like very different diseases billions of dollars are thrown by researchers to do the kind of studies on them and so you wind up having these discoveries that are an inch wide and a mile deep and you know where's the cures where is the treatments and so what i set out to do 30 years ago is to say rather than look at what makes diseases different from one another let's take a look at let's turn let's upend that entire approach and see what makes diseases the same one of my mentors once said if you drain the pacific ocean you'll see how all the islands connect all right and that's what i was interested in is sort of like all the interconnections between the the the diseases and i looked at angiogenesis how the body grows blood vessels as one of those common denominators because angiogenesis um which is all about blood vessels uh uh is profoundly important for defending our health we've got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies these are the highways and byways of health because they deliver the oxygen that we breathe and the nutrients that we eat to every single cell in our body and so when our body is able and let me just interject to make sure our audience caught that so again your point here is androgenesis is the is the growth or repair of our blood vessels that are so important to and vital to the body is that correct maintenance yeah exactly okay exactly so um i mean think about androgenesis um really as the um the highway in the street system of our country okay um you got to maintain those highways you've got the six-lane highways and then you've got the small one-way roads all of those are what allows us to get from one place to the other yeah and without them we end up like that we're on the oregon trail and only half the people even make it exactly precisely and and so uh when we inspire and we breathe in air the reason that that oxygen that we just inhaled gets to [Music] bring vital uh oxygen to our toe is because the blood vessels actually help the oxygen get there similarly the food that we eat because all the nutrients get absorbed in our stomach they're distributed the nutrients are distributed to our organs all by these blood vessels these highways and vitamins you got to think about 60 000 miles how extensive that is 60 so we have 60 000 miles blood vessels in our bodies that's in your body and if you were to pull them out all the blood vessels and line them up and you'd form a thread that would wrap around the earth twice huge it's one of the most exhaustive extensive organ systems in the body one person by the way one person that's right and so you might imagine that when this defense system is perturbed you don't have enough blood vessels now your organs not getting fed now your organs are going to start dying like after a heart attack or after a stroke or an erectile dysfunction okay those are all examples of where androgenesis is insufficient on the other hand if you have too many blood vessels more than you need okay that's like just like building extra bridges and extra roads and overlay you know it's a mess those those extra blood vessels can feed diseases like cancers you don't want to feed a cancer you want to starve a cancer you want perfect you don't want cancers to get access to oxygen nor do you want it to get access to the nutrients you're going to cut off the bloods of blood some body cancer your body can actually do that as well but there are diseases like cancer but also blindness due to aging so the most common cause of vision loss in people of retirement age is age-related macular degeneration and and the reason that people lose their vision and i've worked on this for the last 20 years is because abnormal blood vessels grow in the back of the eye shouldn't be there they leak the leaking fluid and blood actually destroy your vision your eye has to be crystal clear but when they're growing and so biotechnology which i've worked on has been able to prevent those bad blood vessels from growing in the eye also been able to starve cancers by cutting off their blood supply and what i did is i because i've been involved with the research for all this i said well what happens when we throw food into those same development systems what does green tea do what does garlic do what does what do scallions do what does um figs what do figs do and when i started to throw food by the way i love figs so much i just discovered them someone gave me figs for my birthday dried figs i hadn't had one for i don't know 20 years and whoa love them but anyway keep going sorry yeah well so what you know what i did is i studied um the foods in the same systems for drug development and i also threw drugs in too so literally you could you can compare them head to head and what was astounding to me was that in many cases foods have the same potency as medicines in these experimental systems and in some cases they're actually better than the medicines and so if i had disguised the name of the food and gave it a funky drug company name bfx1300 you know like and you were an investor you go crazy like i want to invest in that one i want some mcgloxa generative generous yeah right so the the the amazing thing is that you know truly we're beginning to take a scientific approach to unlocking the the potential for food and it's not just in the laboratory but we're able to study in the clinic as well and that's what really allows people to understand how do we starve cancers by eating foods that help to cut off our blood supply prevent extra angiogenesis how do we eat foods that can grow up blood vessels to help us develop more nourishing blood vessels and the amazing thing about the body is that with food anyway you cannot cause more blood vessels than you need northeast i'm just gonna ask that okay the goldilocks zone we call it it's not too hot not too cold not too hard not too soft your body's health defenses know how to work you know within a band of perfect function it can be a little higher a little bit lower but our body lawn mows any extra blood vessels and it'll throw grass seed on to grow where there's bald patches but but it will do so best if it is nourished with the food food that right that will and again you said that you again let's say you're you're eating a food that's good in angiogenesis meaning it helps grow yeah or is androgenesis both it's it's it's essentially keeping the goldilocks zone yeah it's keeping the gold election i was thinking that it was one would be really good at growing and one would good at shaving but you're saying it it helps keep a tight band on the right amount of blood vessels exactly got it so so you can't eat you can't over eat these foods well you can't eat that you cannot use these foods to achieve overage where you would actually threaten your own health can you give a couple examples of good angiogenesis type foods yeah great you want to grow blood vessels i'll give you a couple of examples apples dried fruit with fruit peel there's a natural chemical called ursulic acid that's found in the peel of apples and apricots and that fruit peel actually stimulates blood vessels to grow naturally um like in the bald spots it's kind of like the the the grass seed to kind of help fill out your lawn now you want to starve you want to prevent the blood vessels growing on the other side the a good one would be um uh pomegranate pomegranate juice contains a natural chemical called elijah tannin the elijah tannins actually are anti-andrew and so actually if the vessels try to grow too far up it's kind of like a weeds growing too high up in a golf course guess what uh your body would naturally mow it down but if your body needs a little help the elijah tannins will also help to mode mow your help your body mow it down hold on okay so wait hold on so let me go maybe i didn't understand it so so some of these foods are pro growth some are pro trimming the growth but what if you what if you accidentally ate all pomegranates and no dried apples as an example you're you can never using food you can never go below that zone got it okay okay so you could you don't have to worry about which ones so much are pro versus non but either way they're androgenic in general they're all good exactly so i can eat dried fruit and pomegranate or one of the same give me one more example i love all that i love these food examples uh um walnuts okay uh walnuts are a good source of uh healthy uh fats uh plant-based omega-3s and they're an amazing source of dietary fiber dietary fiber when we eat them uh we when we eat a walnut or any tree nut frankly macadamia cashew pecan pistachio almond when we when we eat it our our body the human body will absorb the nutrients in your stomach and upper part of our gut and then everything else goes to the lower part of the gut and we used to be taught in medical school that all that fiber like you have dietary fiber it kind of irritates your colon so you stay regular and that way you're not constipated that's totally the wrong idea now like we've completely changed our mind that dietary fiber is actually feeding our gut microbiome so think about all this healthy gut bacteria look we've got 40 trillion we are you and i are made of 40 trillion human cells but inside our gut is another 39 trillion bacteria all right so we're one to one one part to one one part human one to one part bacteria and a lot of the most of that bacteria live in our gut when we feed when we eat something we eat first the human part of us eats first the rest of it goes down to feed our gut bacteria and that's what's so profound we give our gut bacteria room and board we let them live in our gut we feed them uh the foods that we eat and by the way this is why it's also important what the foods that we we're eating if we eat something crappy junk okay um [Music] overloaded with sugar overloaded with preservatives um ultra processed foods not only are we not getting the human part of us not getting the most we can out of that opportunity of eating but we're also dumping junk food to our gut bacteria now our gut bacteria is responsible for lowering inflammation helping our metabolism even text messaging our brain and telling our brain to release social hormones so when we screw up our gut bacteria by eating foods that disrupt it think about like putting toxin in the on the great barrier reef you're destroying that ecosystem the whole area is not going to be very happy not only is your tummy not going to feel good your brain is not going to feel good your metabolism is not going to feel good but trina so if i eat a bag of schneider's pretzels and a papa john's cheese stuffed pizza with lots of sodium and carbs and sugar and all those things that's just like wreaking havoc on the gut i would say of the type of meal that you would be having a lot you know the the way type of things you'd be having with that the most harmful things would be the soda whether it's a regular soda or diet soda um that extra you know like a typical can of soda which is very common people have 10 teaspoons of refined sugar in each cup all right that's way too much for the body and that overwhelms me and it's actually kind of it's kind of toxic for your gut microbiome um dietary so diet soda with artificial sweeteners you don't want those calories guess what you just dumped a whole bunch of chemicals on your gut bacteria they really don't like that and that changes the makeup of your gut bacteria so ironically so it really is bad for you diet that like diet coke terrible for you you know like i i'm i'm not talking about brands i'm just saying that any form of these diet soda greeners are just really not great um uh but the tree nuts when you feed when you eat a walnut and that dietary fiber feeds the gut bacteria they're thanking you they're releasing these things called short chain fatty acids that lower the inflammation in your body your gut bacteria communicates to your immune system as well not only they text message your brain they also talk to your immune system to say go after cancer cells go protect us from bacteria and viruses and uh i am literally throwing out every diet coke that i have in my house i had i was so good for like five years on no diet soda and now i've got a i'm gonna what about uh what about sparkling water all the sparkling water is out there now are they okay you know um there's nothing inherently wrong with the carbonation that's the sparkling part and then the flavoring you know what i would recommend that you do is to just look at the ingredients to make sure they're so there's not a lot of flavoring you're okay mallory's like over here just crazy worried that she can't drink her lacroix look just do you know whatever it is you're drinking just make sure it doesn't have a ton of added sugar and as natural a product as possible carbonation for you know spitzer type of things they're fine you're like fine you're good uh but i'll tell you a study of walnuts was amazing there was a study done by over a dozen major cancer research centers looking at 800 patients with stage three colon cancer okay it's pretty advanced they're getting surgery radiation chemotherapy all the rest of the stuff and then they follow them for a number of years to figure out like who did better and it turns out that those people who ate two handfuls of tree nuts like walnuts actually had a fifty percent decrease in mortality wow so so tree nuts so a walnut macadamia nut all those nuts very very healthy yeah because the fibers talking to your microbiome feeding your gut bacteria who are then paying you back for by by by expressing their gratitude by releasing anti-inflammatory substances better immunity and also making you emotionally healthier as well um well hold on emotionally healthier yeah because you're why are we what is that because your our gut bacteria will text message our brain when they're healthy to release social hormones what's a social hormone what does that mean like serotonin like you know the things that people take prozac for uh they're trying to they're trying to restore the chemical balance in your brain your gut can actually do that kind of like as a natural antidepressant and so that's why gut health is you know poor gut health is associated with depression and schizophrenia and adhd and a number of other kind of challenging mental health disorders so what we're beginning to realize is that as we dig deeper and deeper and deeper into our gut health just how profound um this health defense system of our gut microbiome could be let me tell you an upside um research done at mit with a colleague of mine um susan erdman showed that one one of the important gut bacteria is a lactobacillus ruderi and it's commonly found in yogurt and uh it's the bacteria that's used as a starter for sourdough bread um real parmesan reggiano cheese is actually made with lactobacillus ritualized so it's it's a food substance and it used to be very common in the human gut up until the 1940s when antibiotics were invented and now some people have it some people don't okay so but i'll tell you what lactobacillus rudrate does not only does it actually help our immune system not only does it actually help our metabolism but this bacteria has been studied it actually taps our brain to release the social hormone oxytocin you ever hear of oxytocin it sounds like a good one oxytocin is a good hormone it is the hormone your brain releases when you see a friend your best friend you haven't seen in a while and like you feel good like that's the that's what's coming out of your brain when you have a kiss that's oxytocin that feel good of a kiss is oxytocin when you have an orgasm your brain pumps out for a few seconds a ton of oxytocin now you can imagine what happens is lactobacillus rotari bacillus yeah r-e-u-t-e-r-i amazingly it's actually the bacteria it's it you know it's naturally found in the human gut but it's actually the bacteria that is actually used to create the tangy flavor of sourdough bread oh cool cool so sourdough bread isn't bad for you if you're in moderation because of the carbohydrates but but but the fact is that it's got something extra it's actually got this tangy bacteria the lactobacillus root or eye that can do all these other things that contributes to your gut bacteria lactobacillus root or eye it's in yogurt sour bread sourdough bread parmesan cheese parmesan cheese not any italians italians have it right throw parmesan on everything right and it's the one that's the real parmisano reggiano which is different than the kind of like the mass-produced uh parmesan that you can find you know in most places okay so let's go to so we have androgenesis and then all the kind of these well you have androgenetics then you have the others other for regeneration we talked a little bit about gut dna and then immune system let's go through the the others on the impact of food on these other areas yeah so let's talk about regeneration so uh when i was a kid um probably as well you know my kindergarten teacher told me that starfish regenerate uh salamanders can regenerate and unfortunately humans don't regenerate right so but that chapter is now being torn out of the textbook and thrown away and rewritten the new chapter says humans in fact do regenerate we regenerate slowly uh we can't grow a new arm or leg but you know our liver regenerates our lungs regenerate our gut regenerates our immune system regenerates for sure and so how do we regenerate how do we heal ourselves from the inside out this is all by the way invisible repair you don't even know that your liver needs to be replaced or you know uh part of your lung needs to grow your body knows how to do that uh for you and uh the the way we regenerate um goes to stem cells now you probably know you can go to a strip mall someplace and find somebody that can inject some stem cells into your knee or your ankle or your elbow right for for joints like those those those kind of clinics are everywhere well i've been involved with the kind of the real hardcore biotech stem cell therapy and here's what i can tell you we're not ready for prime time yet it's very promising for the future we got so much more to do to be able to perfect it as a medical treatment however mother nature's beat us to it because we already have stem cells in our body and foods can make our stem cells come out and and speed up the repair so where do we get our stem cells we get our stem cells from um from the womb so while we were developing when mom's egg met dad's sperm and we were just a couple of balls of cells growing for nine months okay um at the same time that our chin formed our ears formed our pancreas form our heart our nerves formed okay our bladders formed so too um were all these stem cells that were feeding the process of sculpting our body now when we were born pretty much the stem cells did all their had already done all their job but we had overage it's kind of like painting a room like you know you're going to buy a couple of extra cans of paint last thing you want to do is run out of paint before you're finished right so you're done with the paint and what do you got you got a couple of extra cans you put the cap back on and stick it in the garage and that's basically what happens when we're born we're fully formed we have some overage of our stem cells because we didn't want to run out and those extra stem cells of which there are 70 million of them are packed into our bone marrow and those extra stem cells wind up being reserves for us so that as we go through our life if we actually need some regeneration we just call out the stem cells so what are the foods that can actually do that turns out that dark chocolate is actually one of the foods that's been studied in humans that can call out your stem cells so one research study took people in their 60s men in their 60s retirement age okay who actually had heart disease and they had poor blood flow and they um gave them to the equivalent of two cups of hot chocolate made with dark chocolate think 80 or higher cacao right you know you look at how many how many percent cacao 80 or higher that's really dark now cacao is a plant-based food cacao is not doesn't come in a wrapper like in the shape of a kiss uh hershey's kiss cacao comes from this big pot it's like a football size thing it's plant made of a plant it's got dietary fiber it's got natural bioactives polyphenols in it and one of those proanthocyanidin calls out the stem cells from our bone marrow so when you drink hot chocolate more bone more stem cells come out to throughout our body and the stem cells only repair the areas that need to be repaired so this study that looked at these 60 men i mean the men in their 60s gave them either a placebo or they gave them um chocolate dark chocolate dark chocolate hot chocolate dark chocolate twice a day and they found over the course of a month they could double the number of stem cells in their bloodstream okay and they could improve their circulation by almost double as well the resiliency the agility of their blood flow was also improved and think about that if the the ability to be able to improve your circulation you know as we are in that third chapter of life is amazing gives you more energy your brain's got better blood flow you've got better cognition you know um uh the the other bits and parts that you want good blood flow better regeneration as well and so huge implications of this regenerative system um that foods can actually stimulate barley is another food that can actually stimulate stem cells uh as well now but we need to do that with the exclusion of of sugar how how if you deli i know you like to add but if you had to eliminate a couple really toxic things what would what would they be dr you know uh you know i got to go with the the things that are just um overtly essentially toxic one is alcohol you know even though people drink i mean even though it's a social tradition for humans to have a wine or a beer all the good stuff and they've been shown to have health benefits all the good stuff all the benefits come from the stuff inside the the liquid not from the alcohol itself the ethanol that's actually in winery beer is actually a toxic it poisons your organs your kills brain cells kills liver cells your body has to fix itself every time you have a drink okay and fortunately we can regenerate as i told you but that's that's a toxin that not everybody needs to have number two i would say you know um uh the a little bit of sugar is fine um a lot of added sugar that is something you should really try to cut down or cut out i'm telling you those 10 teaspoons of sugar in a soda think about it if i gave you an empty glass and i gave you a teaspoon and just in a sugar bowl and i said go ahead and put 10 in a glass okay you want to actually and i said now now now eat it you would never do it right gross yeah right so basically that's something that overwhelms a little bit of sugar from a incredible juicy summer peach something i crave really sweet like that's not going to hurt you and because your body is getting a little a little hit of it but you're also getting all these other bioactives and dietary how about a uh how about a how about a sumo orange have you ever had a sumo i love those are they not so great they look ugly but you know what i love about them is they're pretty intimidating looking right yeah they're kind of gnarly almost in their texture but all you do is you just grab it and you just pull on it and the whole thing comes up rip off the skin the sumo orange is amazing and by the way i'm such a huge fan of the next gen apples and hopefully they're still good for us but the combination of the of the i think it's the honey crisp and the empire to make the pink lady or the pink crisp i know it's like a designer apple but some of those apples have gotten so good um i did a a bunch of i don't know i had this fascination phase with apples at one point in my life and uh and and have discovered a couple of apples that i love and um i don't know i guess you're saying the skin of apples is really really good for androgenesis correct and the and the flesh of the apple is good for anti-angiogenesis for for for starving cancer eat the whole apple yeah right so hold on alcohol sugar one more thing to avoid what about red meat am i allowed to eat steak you know what okay so this is um you know there's so much when it comes to nutrition and food and health that almost becomes a religion right so i'm i'm a scientist and i'm a doctor and i'm working on food as medicine i'm all about the science i'm all about the evidence and of course you know people listening to this you can tell that i actually really enjoy food i'm kind of a foodie and so i to me food is also food as medicine does something that medicine can't do which is bring you joy all right um and so i don't take the sides of like you know you got to be vegan you know if you're a good person and if you eat meat you're a bad person like it's almost like that way how it's discussed i'll say look life is for the living and i used to tell this to my patients all the time you got to make it worth your while um what i encourage you to do is to spend most of your time eating stuff that's good for you and every now and then if there's just something that you really love that you want to treat yourself to go ahead and knock yourself out like if you're gonna i don't think that you should be eating red meat all the time but i don't think that's one of those toxic materials you got to cut out of your life oh okay okay i think i think you know you wanna by the way if you're gonna actually eat if you enjoy me not everybody enjoys me but if you enjoy meat and meat does have iron and other minerals and vitamins that you can't get very easily from other uh foods so i i just say that like but you gotta like it and i'm saying if you're gonna get meat get the best most enjoyable cut of meat don't get too much of it don't eat it too often but really knock yourself out by with enjoyment like really savor what you're actually doing like a six ounce fillet why not once again like and what i'm saying is once a month this whole idea of in inventing things that are ultra processed foods that that look like meat and maybe taste like meat but oh yeah beyond burger meat yeah i'm just not into that and i just sort of think um that's an ultra processed food by the way uh yeah it's what is made of soybeans is that great it's like ultra process extruded stuff that doesn't look like the whole food you know it's not made it's not maybe the whole food they mixed all kinds of stuff together in fact some of that stuff is genetically modified so it can bleed the meat can bleed um so i'm just telling you like i think we need to go we need to be as simple as possible the old food cultures you know the things have been handed down for hundreds or thousands of years it didn't stick around that long without reason and that's why mostly eating whole foods that are mostly plant-based nuts and seeds healthy oils seafood is actually really good for you seafood is okay yeah so seafood is you could eat if you don't want to eat a a steak every day but you would be fine to eat some sort of seafood what is kind of a staple seafood you would that you like beside while you you've already said you've liked a kind of fish and tin like i think a tuna what's good in fish well it's not it's also it's a good source of protein it's also a good source of these marine omega-3 fatty acids that ultimately by the way come from algae so at the end of the day the good stuff still comes from a plant but the fish ate it when you eat fish there's so many fish that actually have omega-3s and even shellfish as well manila clams have more omega-3s than salmon does actually and and so you know so again like you know uh embody you know kind of bring out the inner foodie and and explore these different foods and to get your omega-3s everybody says salmon and i tell people halibut hake all these other fish have also sea bass mediterranean sea bass they all have a lot of omega-3s um clams mussels have omega-3s you know if you like shellfish lobster has some omega-3s so you don't have to only be a robot and eat salmon all the time if you eat salmon by the way something a lot of people don't know is that the healthy omega-3s most of it in the salmon is in the skin so don't be throwing away that skin that's all the good stuff so then you got to prepare it in a way where you're going to eat the skin like make it nice and crisp so that you know like the skin tastes if that's done right by the way in a good mediterranean or persian restaurant the skin of a salmon is just it's so good it is it is the best part but it's not everywhere that you find it done well enough to do that precisely yeah precisely i can tell you're some i can tell you're somebody who appreciates that you appreciate food yeah i really do i mean a guy yeah i feel like every human does but i i get made fun of in my family as the as the non-foodie only beca because i've got a couple siblings that all love to cook and i actually do too ironically i secretly probably cook almost as much as they do or like it just as much as they do but i think that that i get chided a little bit because i also like any non-fancy food like i love i would be totally fine with a hot dog and mustard and relish i know that's terrible but that for some reason cancels me out of the family foodie camp well tell them about tell them about the uh the the pasta with the tin fish that's a that's an ultra simple it sounds lowbrow but as you know from spain if you get it i lived in southern spain yeah for a long time that's a that's a delicacy yeah i love it all right so let's go to kind of our gut our dna and then i know this all kicks into the immune system yeah well so um uh gut microbiome we talked a little bit about already you know eating foods with high dietary fiber what kinds of foods are they mushrooms have a lot of dietary fiber it's called the fiber is called prebiotic because it's before the bacteria you're feeding the bacteria bok choy is a good source of dietary fiber tree nuts are a great source of dietary fiber kiwi is a great source of dietary fiber you know i just i just kind of ran the gamut right now of the of the produce section of grocery store so you can find all kinds of things with great dietary fiber probiotic foods are also good for the gut microbiome because now you're introducing healthy bacteria you're eating it kimchi sauerkraut yogurt you know like anything else you want to make sure you understand the providence of where your food's coming from and what's been added into the food you don't want a lot of stuff that's been doctored up um and that's that's i would say you know for your for your audience whatever you're getting you know make sure you know where it's coming from and ask that you should ask that question and also if it comes in a box or a can um or a bottle lift it up and take a look at those ingredients you want to read it and if there's something that doesn't make sense to you or something you can't understand why it's there probably not a good idea probably not a great idea how about our dna i mean that to me feels like well does isn't the dna just the dna what can you do right so here's the thing our dna is well known now to be our genetic code they mix proteins in our body which keeps us alive um and i'll give you some interesting stats uh so remember i told you you've got 43 40 trillion cells in your body well each cell if i were to take one of the cells out and put it under a microscope and i would take a tiny little dissecting knife and open up your cell and wanted to get your dna with a pair of forceps i could pull out a six foot strand of dna in one cell in one cell okay it's all packed in there okay now guess what the part that's our genetic code to actually make proteins the way that we think about it only occupies two percent of that six foot okay the rest of it is all instructions for coordinating things in your body uh actions in your body chemical reactions in your body and protecting the body from harmful forces now why why do you say protection when our dna is injured or altered in a negative way that's called a mutation everyone knows that cancers are caused by mutations in their dna so one of the things that our body desperately is hardwired to do is prevent these mutations from actually happening now it's hard to prevent a mistake from happening a mutation it's much easier to fix that mutation oh okay so our dna's protection as a health defense is to fix those mistakes how many mistakes do you think your body makes or a typical person humans body makes every single day in terms of their dna yeah that's that's what i'm wondering now that we've got 40 million cells i guess it happens more than we think that's right it's not like once or twice a day it's like the answer is that 10 000 mistakes are made in an average person every single day whoa and no okay and again if 900 if 999 of them get corrected but one doesn't that's what leads to a cancer a microscopic cancer correct and so that's why eating foods that can help our dna protect itself is really important now where do those 10 000 mistakes come from well some of it comes from just the copy-paste mechanism of 40 trillion cells it's really hard to do that perfectly but think about the other forces that we go through our life where that where we can actually damage our dna look um you know going to a sun tanning uh uh uh clinic not good for you laying standing you know burning on the beach can mutate your dna but you know it's ultraviolet radiation and so is sitting in traffic with your window down and the sun shining in your forearm also causing damage to your dna so how come you don't get armed skin cancer your arm you know after sitting in traffic for your career because your your body's dna the protection is fixing it here's another one what about like when you're you know putting at a filling station filling up your car with gas i always ask people do you stand upwind or downwind and people look at me like uh i don't know why do you even ask if you are smelling the fumes the gas you are downwind and you are inhaling these solvents into your lung that's causing mutations in your dna in your lung so how come you don't get lung cancer from going to fill up your car with gas because your dna is fixing itself here's another one radon just a basement radiation coming up from mother earth is also frying our dna from the souls of our feet upwards how come we don't develop foot cancer because our dna is fixing itself so now obviously it's to our own advantage to tip the odds in our favor of not having those mistakes helping our body fix those so what are some of the foods that can actually help fix our dna well citrus foods that actually contain vitamin c which is an antioxidant can help our dna prevent from being damaged so what are some of the foods strawberries um besides sumo oranges as you're talking about lemons and limes guava papaya tomatoes all great sources of vitamin c red bell peppers what are some other great sources of dna protection turns out the kiwi is a good one one of my favorites so research studies have been done showing eating one kiwi a day and checking your dn your bloodstream an hour later um is enough to actually protect the dna damage by 60 i'm going to get a kiwi i've never been able to wrangle the kiwi but i'm going to try it now i just have never bought a kiwi ever because i've loved and and if you're not really uh into eating peeling the hairy skin off and then cutting up that green fruit do that and just throw it into a into um a blender for making a smoothie oh just yes you almost don't even yeah at least you get the keyway you at least you get well it's got a lot of fiber in it as well fiber for the gut kiwi for the dna repair yeah exactly it's got the other stuff bioactives for for protecting your dna and then lastly immune are there are there immune boosting foods i suspect there are yeah well i mean there's a lot of you know especially in the last couple of years people have been really digging deep to see say what kind of foods can be helpful for our immune system i'll tell you first of all you got to understand a little bit about how complicated the immune system is our immune system is like an army of super soldiers different types of immune cells and each of these immune types each immune cell has their own special weapons that they can use to fight invaders invaders from the outside of the body are bacteria and viruses for example invaders from the inside of the body are these microscopic cancer cells we talked about and so our immune cells patrol looking for problems to make sure everything is like peaceful and we've got good security foods that can actually help boost our immune system our blueberries for example can up our t cells [Music] we also know that uh we also know that um uh broccoli and broccoli sprouts can help elevate our immune system here's an um quite an amazing research study that was done at the university of north carolina they studied a bunch of young people in their 20s who are getting the flu vaccine so ordinary it's fall gets a good flu vaccine and they divided them in half and half of them they gave a placebo and the other half they gave a shake made with broccoli sprouts okay broccoli sprouts are three to four day old baby broccolis kind of nutty flavor um you can season flavor them with other things and what they found is they measured their blood and they found that you know of course everybody's immune system uh reacted uh positively to getting the flu vaccine but the people who had flu vaccine and the broccoli sprout shake okay had a 22 times increase in their immune response so they became supercharged their immune system became supercharged um just with this shake wow talk about i mean that's a very powerful so broccoli broccoli sprouts really powerful for the immune system oh yeah yeah wow so food really is i mean is there a world where if you if you were to take away the pharmaceutical world and start over and make food just as profitable as pharmaceuticals is there a world where that could be you had mentioned earlier that in a lot of cases food is is as powerful as the as the a drug that's fda approved could that could that actually be part of a world that we've lived in if we were to be able to restart or is it or is there a massive is a real place for obviously for both and i think that would be the answer but is there just not enough emphasis on food yeah i mean listen i mean i think that that we are heading to an inflection point where more and more people are realizing that when it comes to human health we cannot only rely on pharmaceuticals we need to rely on the other pharmaceuticals that isn't spelled with a ph but cell with an f the farm right f the writer exactly and the the idea is that rather than sort of um rely on the industrialized pre-packaged you know inexpensive quick heat and serve kind of food that there's a a new type of awareness knowledge and interest in pursuing um the foods are going to be best for us make better choices and i think that that's really where we're going to be more attentive to all right tomatoes have lycopene which can lower the risk of prostate cancer which tomatoes have the most like lycopene i can tell you the answer is a san marzano tomato from italy um instead of using butter or canola oil we should use extra virgin olive oil okay well there's a lot of different types of olive oils what's the best most healthful type of olive oil well what's an olive oil hydroxy tyrosine one of the bioactives so which olives have the most hydroxy tyrosine well if you look at a greek olive oil it's the oils made with koranki olives as a mono varietal in the olive oil if you look at italy it's the moriolo olive from umbria and if you look at spain it's to pick you out olives so now you know like that's those are the best they have the highest amount of polyphenols so it's kind of like the robert parker you know the wine guy oh yeah rating the wines you know it gives a number you're rating olive oil for for for health yeah well i think that this it's not and it's not just olive oil i mean i think that in the coming future we are going to want to find ways to create ratings and rankings of not just different types of foods like right now like our conversation has a lot been a lot been a lot about identify the bad foods versus the good foods all right but you know i think in the future we're going to be talking more about the good foods and say what's the best among the good things yeah and that's a that's a higher level conversation that i'm looking forward to having well this has been a high level conversation holy cow i mean i feel and now at least i have so so i get if i were to sum this up for the happy retiree it is to first understand our conversation and the power of food which a lot of us can we do we're getting better at understanding that and then exploring the world of food to be able to feel good about a variety of things that are really powerful for our bodies and that is it makes me excited i cannot wait to go to my local fresh market and farmers market and find the foods that are fun and also can help with the five things that we talked about today so god so glad we had you so glad i found you on the on the interwebs well you know and the thing is that this research is coming out faster and faster every week and every month and so one of the things that i do um as a food as medicine researcher is i try to curate the parts the the studies that are actually most important and and you know i call it kind of like information that you can actually use there's a lot of pretty sophisticated research that not ready for prime time or maybe interesting for just a bunch of chemists or biochemists or scientists food scientists but what i what i'm interested in are is information about food that you can put to use every day like i told you like we talked about the nuts and colon cancer we talked about um you know the the dietary fiber that can actually be uh transformative those are the kinds of things that people can use and so i actually would encourage anybody who's interested that wants to follow the ongoing news that i pump out because when i see it i'll take a look and see if it's something i think the audience should know um and then you know so people want to sign up for my newsletter just come to my website uh which is drdrwilliamli.com dr williamley.com or follow me on social my is at dr william lee um i'm always on instagram on instagram on instagram yep yep i'm i'm always putting out new information that's coming out well you picked up at least one follower today thank you you picked up one big fan today and uh this is exactly what what we needed on the retire standard podcast we this was this has been a void and i'm glad we this is so i'm so excited that we're able to find you and this is so good so much good information and gives me hope that we can eat healthy and i've seen the power of it i've i've had some phases of life where i really was it was good about i was good about eating healthy and it just is so awesome if we can do it i think your job is to to help make it easier for more people to be able to do that and not feel like it's restrictive so thank you dr lee thanks for being on retire sooner today my pleasure west

Channel: Retire Sooner Team

Views: 42,745

Keywords: wes moss, retire sooner, retire early, early retirement, clark howard, Wes Moss, Dr. William Li, William Li, how food impacts health, retire sooner podcast, the retire sooner podcast, how to retire sooner, retire, retirement, retired, podcast, podcasts, healthy lifestyle, eating healthy, healthy foods, food impacts health, happy retirement, retire happy, retiring early, health journey, health defense systems, healthy tips, eat to beat disease, exploring new foods, retirees

Id: 0WrV_yFyNX4

Length: 61min 3sec (3663 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022