Harmless "micro-cancers" - fact or fiction? | Ep78

[Music] so welcome to the dr. Gundry podcast today we live in a world where your doctor is far more likely to prescribe an expensive medication than a handful of kale but my guest today says that we need to start thinking of food as medicine imagine that and realize that we already have all the tools we need to fight disease and to live longer healthier lives he's dr. William Lee dr. Lee is a world-renowned physician scientist speaker and author he's written over 100 scientific publications and his 2010 TED talk can we eat to starve cancer has been viewed more than 11 million times he's also the author of the best-selling book eat to beat disease the new science of how your body can heal itself on today's episode dr. Lee and I are going to talk about your five natural health defense systems and how to boost them his five by five by five technique and why he thinks beer might actually be good for you dr. Lee welcome to the dr. Hendry podcast it's a pleasure and thank you having me thank you so much for coming this is going to be really exciting let's start with the title of one of the chapters in your new book starve your disease feed your home what do you mean by that and how can people actually do that well you know as a physician as fellow physicians we know that what we can really impact our bodies but when it comes to food in health it what really matters is how our body responds to what we put inside it and why we stay healthy at all like why don't we get sick more often and cancer is one of these diseases that everybody cares about because it is such a feared condition and what I write about is that in fact we're forming cancers in our bodies all the time we've got trillions of cells that are making divisions and they're gonna make mistakes and these mistakes lead to microscopic cancers that are completely harmless because our body defends against their growth one of the way that they defend against our growth is that they don't allow blood vessels to grow into them but when cancers hijack those blood vessels is called the process called tumor angiogenesis growing new blood vessels to feed the cancer a tumor can grow up to 16,000 times in only two weeks so the question is how can we boost our body's defenses against cancer blood vessel growth and foods can help starve a cancer by cutting off its blood supply really come on now you mean there's actually foods and I know we're gonna get into this that can actually starve cancer so yeah well look the story goes back into the early 1970s when the first idea of controlling cancer without chemotherapy came about and that's a biological approach so rather than just trying to slash and burn everything could we clip those blood vessels it's like it's you know like a harmful scuba-diver the frog man enemy frogmen you can't clip its air hose right now I can't breathe got to come to the surface you could pick them right out and so the idea for can we do the same thing for cancer came about in Boston in a laboratory by the name of a guy named Judah Folkman who I trained with and that ultimately led to biotechnology companies developing anti-angiogenic drugs that are super powerful FDA approved more than a dozen of them and but they're super expensive and so what I did is actually as somebody who's been involved with that drug development use the same approaches that are that are applied to drug development but to study food and when food is studied in the same systems we use to study medicine you've got some real science behind it so yes there are foods that inhibit angiogenesis so what you're saying is you're a doctor who actually helped develop these drugs expensive drugs right right exactly and then you said well I'm very proud of developing these drugs but surely there is a better less expensive way of doing this is that putting words in your mouth no that's exactly what happened I mean honestly when I was involved with doing cancer research I was marveling at the fact that you could go online order a experimental chemotherapy drug FedEx it the next day you could test it into in the research lab in a test tube or an animal and within a few days you would know if this was effective against cancer but yet you could call it food delivery service and have something delivered within a half an hour or 15 minutes if it was a pizza and researchers wouldn't know how to actually deal with that like how would you study that and I thought that was wrong so what I actually did was figure out how to break things down from a food perspective down into ways that we could study using real science yeah I think that's why you and I have had a common bond is that you know I was obviously developing life-saving surgical techniques to treat heart disease for instance and actually lung cancers and I said gosh wait a minute there's got to be a better way of doing this and of course I changed my career so I think it's really exciting to have two individuals who kind of came from the medical side of developing techniques and then said wait a minute maybe we should look at foods as the option when I think what what it means is that we can actually speak the same language across almost any area of medicine and that allows us to actually communicate with our peers and colleagues in medicine as well as our patients as well as families and I think that's what's really important you know I'm sure we went into medicine for the same for the same reasons which is that we want to help people yeah to help people you have to communicate to them that's absolutely true ok so you've got five health defense systems what are they and how do they affect your health right so what is health right so if you were to ask a doctor or asks you know an athlete or a school kid they'd probably tell you the same thing which is that health is the absence of disease right you're not sick you're healthy I actually argue my book that's exactly not true health is much more than the absence of disease it's the presence of our hardwired defense systems that we've been born with health defense systems that are firing on all cylinders from the day were born until our very last breath and these health defense systems actually are the reasons why we don't get sick more often and I and some of them relate to and these are all based on biotechnology so we know our angiogenesis system or circulation is critical brings oxygen and nutrients to every cell our stem cells there's plenty of drug companies trying to biotech company trying to develop stem cell therapies but guess what our body produces its own stem cells that we can actually use and foods can mobilize those the microbiome everybody knows now that gut health is important and this is the frontier of a whole new area of medicine which is how do we treat our gut bacteria in the healthy ways so that our gut bacteria can treat our body in the right way and prebiotics and probiotics and other things that we can do can help that our DNA which most people think about as a our genetic code the code of life much more than that our DNA is hardwired to protect us against the environment and against aging it actually got built into it defense systems prevent the harm that can occur and then our immune system which you know every grandma told their grandkid that the immune system is important but we now know the immune systems more powerful than we ever thought because even if you're in your 80s or 90s if you have cancer your immune system is potentially powerful enough to wipe out all cancer in your body if it's given a chance and so we're beginning to revisit what health is using the same knowledge and wisdom that have come out of the biotech community but they're looking at disease they're looking at drugs and what I'm looking at and I think what you know you've been looking at and we're talking about today is how do we use what we already have our natural tools to defend against the diseases that we fear the most so are you trying to put your drug discoveries out of business or is there a place for these well look I mean I think that being healthy being well and getting sick and recovering is natural part of our life cycle I'm somebody who truly believes in the power of medicine people are gonna get sick they're gonna be healed they're gonna need surgeons they're gonna need medicines but the missing tool the tool box actually is our diet our foods and how we think about them because when we're young and one more healthy and as we're getting older and becoming more exposed to toxins in the environment and other harms that's when we need to be able to do the health care that doesn't occur in a doctor's office or the hospital it occurs at home between visits the doctor that's where food comes in great so I know you're a big fan of eating foods that promote veg F for viewers and listeners at home what the heck's veg F and how can they promote it well so veg F is a protein you know lots of foods have proteins legumes are good source of protein but our body makes proteins themselves in fact the body makes proteins out of DNA it's out of the good reads the code and makes the protein some proteins are universal proteins that help us live and veg F is one of those proteins it stands for vascular endothelial growth factor VIII EGF really discovered in the late 1980s I was in the lab that actually was in the early race to discover it the body makes it when it's injured when it needs better circulation more blood flow and when it makes this protein blood vessels start sprouting all over the place in order to be able to nourish re feed and recirculate oxygen and nutrients to where it needs to go like if you cut yourself what's the paper cut or you know a bigger injury you're that tissue will release veg F right away and it'll start to heal up and grow those blood vessels under the wound I always tell people that if a scab comes off too early that bright red stuff you see under there that's the eagle's eye view of thousands of new blood vessels stimulated by veg F protein in order to be able to heal that wound and there are foods that can actually stimulate that as well as medicines that actually do that as well so I have a new puppy so you're saying that the more my puppy scratches me and bites me it's probably good for me because then I'm going to make lots of veg F in my hands well it's never good to actually be injured but I will tell you that veggie Jeff does a lot of things in addition to heal wounds it actually can help restore nerve function which can be really really important as we age it's important for helping to maintain clear vision you need it's a neuro protectant actually it helps the retina actually maintain its function really important for the cardiovascular system for the heart as well ok so can I go to the grocery store and buy veg F is there a section nope there's no veg F section you can't go to the either the food section or the supplement section actually go look for it but this is what's amazing that I write about in my book is that researchers have figured out that certain foods that we eat can prompt our body's health defenses to make veg F in order to be able to up the ante of our own circulation because is that always what we want one better circulation right so some of the foods that can do this by the way are peels of fruit so there is a natural acid called Earth solok acid that is very common an apple peel and appeal of pears you know another stone fruit and that peel part actually contains that is a great source of vasilich acid or Solek acid when it's fed to the body wherever the body needs more blood vessels it'll prompt veg f to actually grow those blood vessels and accelerate healing some of the research that's really amazing is that actually if you have a system in a lab where there's such poor blood flow that you know you're getting wounds and even a whole limb that might not survive if you feed that lab animal or Solek acid derived from fruit peel you'll let you bring new blood vessels and you'll save the leg Wow so you're saying that if I'm gonna grab an apple I should peel it eat the peel and throw the rest of the apple away even better yet you can actually eat the whole apple including the peel but this is the reason by the way why sometimes buying organic is helpful because a lot of the pesticides will stick to the peel the outer rind of the fruit and what I try to do is to keep in mind that if I'm going to eat the fruit peel which I encourage anybody who wants better circulation to do because of a Jeff to really be mindful of what's been what kind of environment and what kind of pesticides or chemicals this might have been exposed to that's where organic ketchikan count yeah you're absolutely right and isn't rosemary a good source of your Casa yeah another great source is rosemary one of my favorite herbs you know a mine too you know I I like to cook I that food and health is rooted in culture and you know and and great cultures have always been involved with developing great foods whether it's Asian culture Mediterranean culture you know Latin cultures it's always been there's been always been a passion about food and rosemary is one of these you know sacred herbs and spices that's used to light up a meal I mean who doesn't like to have the rosemary as a spice and now when you know that there's or Solek acid in it you actually can appreciate an additional benefit for adding it to your diet yeah you know I write about in longevity paradox that the villagers of at charoli Italy south of Naples one of the fundamental parts of their diet here's a rosemary they chew on rosemary they put it in all their foods and you know it's recently been discovered that one of the tricks of their longevity and their brain health is the fact that they consume rosemary every day well roseburg also has something called Rosa Miranda Casa de yeah which also really helps your circulation so you know one of the things that happens as we get older aging is not kind to our circulation as you know as a heart surgeon and so anything that we can do to help our blood vessels stay healthier is a big favor to us how I want to continue on that note because I was a student of history were in food history and I've always been fascinated with the spice trade in the Middle Ages and you know the mortality of sailors on ships on in the spice trade routes was about 50% chance of dying and and the prices were ridiculous for you know spices for pepper for cinnamon for khlo and I got interested in why would people risk their lives for this and it was a drug trade and the only reason now in our modern society people will risk their lives is it is for drugs and these people didn't know that these were drugs nobody knew that black pepper was you know have incredible properties by opium they didn't know the effect of cinnamon and yet people were willing to risk wives and to pay large amounts of money for spices and that yeah well you know maybe they intuitively knew more than that that it was good for you right and therefore is valuable right what we know is good for us we value and I think that's very different than you know writing a prescription and going to the pharmacy and having it filled that somebody else called insurance company pays for we've kind of been disconnected from value but food and spices and herbs are really valuable I'm glad you brought up the spice trade because of what's really interesting was a connection between the East and the West both in terms of materials but also in terms of philosophy and so much of health if you think about the totality of health was second nature in Asian in Eastern cultures and so I think along with the spice route in the spice trade and all the foods that came along with it including not only spices but fermented foods that's true right you know that horseradish which you know certain most people think about a northern European food actually came from cabbage from China that was brought over and it was adopted into the cuisine of Germany and else and other places but so I think that this is where history becomes really important it's useful to know and to and to appreciate where our best foods come from and when you look into it you realize that there was value long before what we're talking about now we're kind of going back to the future we're rediscovering our own past yeah I've got some cookbooks that were written in ancient Venice and almost everything had huge amounts of cinnamon and you often showed your wealth by the amount of sin that you were able to put in dishes and now you know we come full circle and we go oh my gosh you know cinnamon is one of the ways we potentiate insolence actions exactly and you know so it wasn't it's amazing it wasn't a flavoring it had a medicinal benefit they didn't know what it was doing but they certainly were willing and they could incorporate it into their cuisine yeah another another one is like licorice the actual licorice root yeah which was brewed into teas star anise which actually Tamiflu is made from you know the antiviral right so I mean again I think that there's so much to be learned from the spice trade now what I really believe is the modern interpretation of all this is how do we take cutting-edge science how do we take the stuff that we people can count on believe in it's not myth its fact just like anything else in medicine and how do we actually put that right in front of people how do we teach doctors and patients to really have the same language I think that's really important and when it comes to food that's what unites us all that's true I mean everybody's got to eat exactly well I mean look we we are all influenced by where we came from where our parents lived and what they ate and our grandparents and and their parents as well this is the whole thing about individuality when it comes to food and health one thing that's very clear is for example our microbiome our gut health is very much influenced by whether we're breastfed or not and actually even where our moms might have lived and whether they were breastfed and research studies show that if you actually have a healthy gut microbe like lactobacillus Rooter I and it's transferred from mom to baby by the way you know some of the most exciting recent discovery is that around eight months of pregnancy the uterus with the baby sends a signal to the gut and tells this one bacteria lactobacillus right awry it's about a month away so let's get ready the bacteria send a signal to blood cells called neutrophils it's like calling an uber and they they get into these cells the cells come by the colon to get into the cells get into the bloodstream so now you have bacteria in the bloodstream but you're not sick so it's changing our way of thinking about it but no cells drop off the bacteria in the breast like getting out of the uber and then just waiting for the child to be born so during the first episode of breastfeeding they're injecting this bacteria into the baby in lab studies it shows that this bacteria lactobacillus Reuter I can protect a mom against breast cancer and the baby against breast cancer for four generations whoa we need more of this stuff yeah well and again so can you get as a probiotic yes but can you find it in food it turns out lactobacillus Ruta rye is the exact bacteria used traditionally in making sourdough bread it's what makes the bread tangy it's also used in making Parmesan cheese in the Mediterranean and so you know again what we're really discovering is that a lot of the things that are good for us are also good they taste good too hmm you know my my mentor at the NIH dr. Wharram Andrew giamoro always said that there is nothing new that hasn't been known before that the purpose of research is to research to look again and I think this is exciting particularly for our listeners is what we're saying is people somehow knew so much of this and it was passed down from generation to generation to generation but we're just now discovering all these ancient wisdoms that are in food and in the preparation techniques of foods let me give you one example I was recently in Tuscany working with some chefs and winemakers and biodynamic wine yes and we were walking through an organic garden and there of course very large tomatoes grown organically san marzano it looks like a Roma tomato mm-hmm and I said no what are you gonna do with those and they said oh you know we're gonna make pasta sauce okay so well how do you do that and they said well it's easy you just peel and deceive the tomato and then cook and I went so why the heck do you appeal in DC than mail or anybody knows she can't make pasta sauce with the peels and seeds they've got a toxin and I saw who taught you that my mother who taught her my grandmother and these culinary traditions are just fascinating to figure out okay tomatoes are probably good for you you know but maybe there's parts of the tomato that we don't want and we should get rid of them and what are the parts that we want we want actually what we've discovered is that the lycopene in the tomato is really great first this is a carotenoid it's a-you know and it's what makes carrots orange and what makes Tomatoes red and watermelon right yeah well right I mean it's good stuff it's with and and what's interesting about lycopene is that when it appears in mother nature like a tomato off of vine if we were to eat it in the salad raw or eat it like an apple most of the lycopene isn't really absorbed by your body however if you take the peeled tomatoes and use and you simmer them gently and lycopene is what we call fat soluble so lex's dissolve an oil so what's the best way to cook it is with some Oh Tomatoes olive oil simmer it you actually gently convert the chemistry of lycopene as it occurs in nature into a form the body loves to absorb so once again you can actually you know just look back at history and culture and realize that some of these old wisdoms that you know grandma's working in the kitchen they had really were aimed at lighting up the body's health defense systems which is really a modern view so speaking of health defense systems how do we underestimate the power of our immune system to help us well look immunity is something that has been known for well over a hundred years it's it's protects us against the cold and viruses and we know when we have got a bad immune system and bad can be not active enough a great example that everybody knows how bad it is is is with AIDS you know we immune deficiency is really a horrifying situation where you become vulnerable to everything the boy in the bubble so to speak but you've also an overactive immunity autoimmunity that's where you attack yourself and so just like every other defense system the immune system functions perfectly for health when it's when it's in a middle when it's got that balance whether you're talking about angiogenesis or stem cells or microbiome or DNA repair or immunity it's really about getting your body to sort of stay in that happy state that middle balance when do we know when the immune system needs to be powerful to be reared up I think one of the most striking advances in modern medicine is in immunotherapy against cancer won the Nobel Prize this whole field in 2018 recognizing that you know rather than just throw chemo at the body to kill normal organs as well as cancer cells why not just kind of guide and urge the immune systems that do what it is designed to do which is clean up cancer by the way that's why even though we form microscopic cancers all the time why they never mostly turn into anything dangerous did I mention to you that there was an autopsy study done of women in their 40s between 40 and 50 and when they died of other things besides cancer and they didn't have cancer but when I actually did the autopsy they found 40 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 50 already had microscopic breast cancers that most of them will never turn out to be anything because their immune system will wipe them out 50% of men between 50 and 60 have microscopic prostate cancer yes and over the age of 70 almost everybody has thyroid cancer but you know it's our immune system that actually is does the job of doing surveillance security and it takes out these microscopic cancers so immunotherapy jacks up our immune system to find a search and destroy the cancer here's what's interesting President Jimmy Carter who is the oldest living former president today had melanoma that spread to his liver and his brain from from the skin yeah and he actually was given no hope but then was given an immunotherapy one of the first patients to receive this and by actively his ninety-year-old immune system his body could destroy all the cancer so today he's cancer-free yeah my mother also had metastatic endometrial cancer cancer from the uterus that spread and it was given really little to no chance she was in her 80s and we gave her an immune therapy that helped her ripped off the cloak from the cancer so her own immune system could find the cancer and destroy it after three treatments all of the cancer disappeared and she's cancer-free today but here's how why food is important because as a remarkable as these treatments are they really only work in about 20% or less of people super frustrating for doctors like how come we can't achieve this miracle for most people well it turns out our diet and our gut microbiome may actually hold the key one of my colleagues Lawrence Zipp Vogel who is a cancer immunologist in Paris took looked at 200 consecutive patients cancer patients on immunotherapy and separated them into the people who responded and did well versus the people who didn't respond to this breakthrough and didn't do well and she looked at everything compared everything left and right figure out what the differences are turned out the difference one dipping in one bacteria in the gut called Ackerman Xie mucin a Phila write a lot about it and it's actually one of the surveillance protecting bacteria in our gut important for a lot of things including helping us you know properly monitor how well we do when we're aging but for cancer seems to be very important and in the patients who responded they all had a cure man SIA and the patients who did not respond and some of them were on antibiotics they had no Ackerman's yes what she did is she took the akram an SIA from the responders and went back to the lab and stuck them into mice that had no bacteria and had but had a tumor growing and they would actually respond to the treatment when she gave an antibiotic to wipe it out they stopped responding and so now even in oncology we're beginning to reconsider the important of gut health not just you know for irritable bowel or inflammatory diseases we're really thinking this could be life and death in terms of you know whether one of the breakthrough drugs of our century it's going to work or not and so this is why I think this idea of of gut health is so important and by the way there's no probiotic frac romance here right now right you can only manipulate it with by eating food one of the best pomegranate juice studies have shown that the Elijah tannins of pomegranate juice and you only need eight ounces a day can actually cause your gut to secrete the mucus that this bacteria loves to grow in so how do you actually grow your own Ackerman SIA with pomegranate or cranberry juice or Concord grape juice you know my my great grandmother who lived one month shy over a hundred birthday and I write about her she actually lived on the third floor of her house and until the and her bedroom was on the third floor and my sister and I thought she was nuts you know in her 90s going up to her you know bedroom on the third floor every day multiple times a day and say what an idiot she should move her bedroom you know down to the first floor or be easy she's pretty smart but she always actually before bed every night had a small glass of mogen David Concord grape wine when we you know we thought yeah that's silly well there you go she was actually feeding her necromancy yeah exactly and I mean she was smart and you know wonderful and told the day she died she went to sleep which is what I think we'd all like yeah so so you're saying that we can actually change our body's immune system or our ability to deal with cancer cells by foods that we eat now are you saying that right if I've got cancer the first thing I should do is drink eight ounces of pomegranate juice no I mean look it this is where it's not food versus medicine it's really a new way of thinking about food and medicine I mean this is a continuum right look if you're well use your diet if you're not well use your diet and real medicines you got to combine it all together cancer is a you know one of the diseases of Aging it's a considered a chronic disease but a preventable disease in most cases if you've got cancer you really need to go to the doctor and get an accurate diagnosis I mean today we can actually take a tumor we can bust it down to its you know fundamentals in terms of genomics and discover things we couldn't do even three years ago in order to be able to find smoking guns that we can use to design treatments one of the things that I think is so important though is to recognize that the same vulnerabilities that we might find for drugs could also give us clues to what we can eat and how we can actually treat ourselves every cancer patient I've ever seen by the way after besides you tell them all the medical stuff they always that hey Doc what should I eat what can I do for myself and in fact that's one of the things that prompted me to write my book and to get into nutrition itself is that I felt like I was never educated about nutrition there's not a lot out there to educate doctors in a in a structured rigorous trustworthy fashion and I thought that was just wrong so it was time to really put some real muscle behind the science and up our ante as you've done yourself to look at the science behind attrition on that note in your book you describe the five by five by five framework as a way to eat to be diseased what the heck is that and how does it work when I actually set out to write a book about food and health of course everybody asked me so what's your diets gonna be what's the plan and you know I felt like diets are difficult because they tend to put you into a box that you've got to stick to every day for the rest of your life and how many of us can really do that I mean life is for the living everybody's life is different we enjoy certain things and so I felt like how can you have a diet without dieting right so you know that sounds like well listen I was there there was a you know the great martial artist Bruce Lee said you know his skill was the art of fighting without fighting and so it's really how do you adapt to your circumstances at a given time and use the weapons and assets that you have at hand to help yourself so when I came up with is just a simple way to think about how to eat healthy and I call it the five by five by five kind of strategy or framework to approach it in my book I read about more than 200 foods that can activate one or more of your health defense systems angiogenesis stem cells microbiome your DNA protection or your immunity one of these five can be activated in some cases there are certain foods to activate all five I call them grand slamming foods because single food will like knock it out of the park and so five by five means that five health defense systems on average we encounter food about five times a day be think about it breakfast lunch dinner a couple of snacks you know most people somehow or they meander through the day encounter the opportunity to choose food about five times a day that's an opportunity to make a choice you don't have to eat but if you're going to eat something you can select something you can think about which of your health defense systems you're activating and so what I say is take five foods each and one to activate one of your health defense systems every time you encounter food five by five by five super easy way to think about this and one of the things is that there's two hundred plus foods so I made it possible I actually created a shopping list according to how you would find foods in the grocery store that anybody who's listening your podcast and watching can actually download for free on my website at www.uvu.edu/library one is fresh plant-based foods always good to actually get something that's fresh and seasonal in the market organic if you're going to be eating the skin or anything else where you you know you're you're kind of careful about that and the other thing is dry goods because of a surprise you know like we used to always say don't shop in the middle of the grocery store but in fact there are some good things that are in the middle nuts different sources of fiber whole grains those are good things that you can actually get in store you know to really help help you so what you have at home when you go out to eat or when you're encountering food if you're at work or you're running an errand or you're traveling someplace that's another choice to make I always try to go for the fresh plant-based material first if I'm at a restaurant for example and I'm looking at a menu right this is the this is always the dilemma everybody has sure man what am I gonna eat what's good for me okay what you want to eat might not be good for you but if what but if you want to actually make those things marry what I try to do is I just look first and look at the foods I recognize that are good for me this is why getting familiar with this language of food and health becomes so important and then I will build my choices around the vegetables usually that I see and that's sort of another trick that I actually do and a third trick is really don't eat as much as your eyes or your mind might want you to eat so think about that classic dilemma being in front of the buffet line right I mean you get a plate it's completely empty you get this big line of food take as much as you want you know that's probably one of the biggest pitfalls these pratfalls you could actually have take only about a third of what you might want to eat and you don't even have to finish it I always tell people quit the clean plate Club and better yet don't even put as much on the plate yeah use the salad plate rather than the dinner plate absolutely absolutely and eat more slowly because really you want to be able to savor and enjoy what you're eating and this is why eating with people community eating is what happens in these so-called blue zones where people age gracefully and healthfully as they tend to eat together by having conversation meaningful conversation at low is stress you get oxytocin secreted you're too busy they're just wolf food you're docking and you're also enjoying the food that you're eating ideally you know fresh prepared healthy foods yeah one of my good friends Tom guy used to tell me that a menu only tells you what the chef's got in the back and never you know just except what you know is on a particular entree he said the menu tells you what he's got back there and if they won't give you the pieces that you want you know one from column a one from column B then don't don't go back because they're not actually interested in your health you know it's so interesting you mentioned that so you know how many of us have been to a restaurant where we see something and we want a dish and you're like but you know I'm allergic to this or I I prefer not to have that can you remove it imagine going to a restaurant and seeing something you want and you want to ask the chef they can add something healthy to it could you add some turmeric to it yeah you know fresh cracked pepper might be interesting or where's the olive oil and where is the olive oil yeah exactly and probably the olive oil isn't actually olive oil and many more yeah well I mean that's the other thing I think is authenticity right one of the things that I think we're all realizing in you know this day and age you know even with you know honestly the internet brings us to this point this brink where we got so much information we don't want fake stuff we want real stuff and I think that's where you know we're beginning to realize our minds tell us we would know when something is real and something's not real and so I think when it comes to food we got to use those same instincts to go for the real stuff which is why you know what's in a box and it's ultra process and you can't pronounce most of the stuff that's probably not real food and it's probably not real good for you either very good so why do you think the medical community has been so resistant to seeing food as medicine I mean you and I both came from training that you know we maybe got 15 minutes on proteins carbs and fats yeah well I mean I think that originally medicine and food was tied together very closely I mean Hippocrates was the guy who said let medicine be I food and food be thy medicine right yeah so really what's interesting is it's not when did food start to become part of the medicine it's kinda like when did we lose track when did we lose our way when did our focus change and I think you know probably the focus started changing during wartime particularly during World War one and to where you had to feed masses of soldiers in expensive highly preserved foods I think that the Industrial Revolution the industrialization of food you know when you can make a lot and make it cheaply right so think about after World War two you know when people were worried about having enough food after afterwards you had prosperity prosperity meant you could what you could get cheap TV dinners wrapped in foil that you can sit in front of the boob tube and just wolf down and it was like a whole cooked meal right yeah so I think we started to lose our way when things became manufactured and cheap and convenient because it's true it's not as convenient to actually grow your own food or to cook your own food but man it is just so much more satisfying so as we've become more detached from our planet and by the way that's one of the things that's really becoming clear is that what's good for our bodies is also tends to be good for the planet we should be you know thinking about more than ourselves where we're I think this is where the movement is now we're beginning to you know rivas the past think about basics consider not only ourselves and our families but also consider the planet and just trying to do good things all around yeah I like to remind my patients that during World War two in the United States forty percent of all the food in the United States was grown in Victory Gardens home Victory Gardens forty percent of all the food we ate and if we could just you know realize that actually wasn't a long time ago and maybe we should be turning our front lawns back into Victory Gardens and rooftops and rooftops right and balconies exactly you can you can grow food in very limited space and by the way gardening itself is is calming for the Soul there's something that is relaxing about going into your own garden and in and take in tending to it taking care of it yeah actually when I was a resident of the University of Michigan we planted a Victory Garden in Ann Arbor and my kids you know we go out and you pull out a carrot and we didn't watch the dumb things off you took off the dirt and munched it well look this is the victory against the war against disease right so that's really I think that dubby that would be a good campaign of about there you go we're kind of touching on this what gonna change the status quo now your book is a great start I happen to think my books are a great start how do we how do we get buy-in into this well I think that the medical community at large is being forced to consider new ways of thinking about managing health and disease because everything that you and I were trained in is unsustainable correct just taking care of sick people you know dealing with train wrecks you know I'm sweeping up the train wrecks on the highway after the cars already crashed I mean that's so that's what we were trained to do sure and that's what most of the technologies that you've been been around and by the way as you mentioned I've been involved with drug development it takes ten years on average more than a billion dollars and the odds of 10001 that you're not going to succeed and so everything is expensive you can't afford it we're waiting too late the outcomes aren't satisfactory and I think this isn't just the United States this is worldwide so I think the pressure of economics is a wake-up call for the system at large so what do we have to do what role do we have to play I think the medical community needs to find champions internally yourself and me and other colleagues that we actually have here and we need to educate our brethren we need to educate our colleagues in medicine to be able to help them because one doctor with a panel of three thousand patients that's a scalable impact number one number two I think we need to give consumers real facts we need to be able to answer their questions when they say hey Doc what should I be eating we should be able to feel comfortable that what you're saying to somebody is the same thing I would say to somebody because it's based on science in fact the same way would be if we were talking about our medicine or a diagnosis right and so one of the big problems I think that consumers have is they're not trusting what they're hearing about food and health so we have to work to give them that trust the third thing I think is that you know we need to be able to apply science to really support marketing as opposed to have the marketing overwhelmed besides I have no problem of you know finding weight great interesting ways of appealing finding appealing messages of people as long as the science mm-hmm but you know I think when you don't have really solid science or you have piecemeal science and then what you wind up doing is just creating marketing around it it confuses everyone and by the way doctors like us we're just consumers as well we're seeing the same stuff everybody else's so everybody's confused so I think these are three things that we that that will actually move the needle so tell me tell me a few foods that you think we ought to be eating that might surprise people ah okay so I have a whole chapter a book called exceptional foods that are really the surprising foods that most people wouldn't even think about and a couple of them I'll bring up is I mean obviously let me just say green leafy vegetables are good for you and you know fruits and vegetables in general have incredible healthful properties all the research supports that but what are some of the uncommon things or that are not normally connected to health one of them is oysters yeah boys stirs I love oysters by the way moister me contains an amino acid that actually helps to protect our DNA it is a powerful antioxidant and although most of us don't live by the ocean and even if you do you're probably not shucking oysters in your kitchen at home the fact of the matter is you can actually get the same benefits of oyster sauce which you can actually find next to the soy sauce in a grocery store well now here's what's interesting boy stur sauce is really oysters cooked down there's polysaccharides and proteins that are found in there and they've been actually found to activate your immune system in addition to protect your DNA so I'm not trying to tell about everybody that should go out and rush out to eat oysters everybody's gonna be different but this is a real surprise to me is that you can actually measure immune system function with blood tests after feeding giving people a stir sauce and it actually baits an increase of their t-cells or neck natural killer cells yep which can be helpful that's one surprise another interesting surprise food is you know omega-3 fatty acids the polyunsaturated acids are really good for you and of course a really good fish supplement fish oil supplement is super simple easy an easy way to actually get what you need but you know people who live by the sea or people can get sick fresh seafood can find amazing sources so we always think about Oh eat your salmon well most of the omega-3 and Sam and a lot of it it's actually in the skin yep not everybody to skin so I encourage people to eat the skin but what about what if it's not salmon what are some other sources you can actually find well it turns out that clamps Manila clams are one of them in cockles are another source of omega-3 fatty acids and so again you know there are entire tables that I put in my book that where they've measured the different amounts of different healthy fatty acids and other bio actives in different foods that's another one and you know another thing that is surprising to me when I encountered this you know I as you know as a scientist we just look at data and we're reading it critically and you know sometimes you just see stuff that's just wow surprising there was a publication that was presented by cancer researchers at ASCO which is the big American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting a few years ago 2017 where they studied 700 patients with stage 3 colon cancer so this is advanced colon cancer undergoing treatment and they wanted to figure out what people were eating and what they found was that those patients with stage 3 colon cancer who were eating two handfuls of nuts tree nuts a day had a 50% decrease in the chance of death yeah amazing right so what could that be well nuts not only have good healthy fatty acids but they also have great fiber that I feed our microbiome oh that's the same microbiome that might be a cure Mencia that may actually help to promote our immune system to fight cancer so again the secrets are in our body our body has them is the most highly engineered system there is that we can actually even imagine and so finding foods that can activate our health defenses is really clearly the way to go now you mentioned beer really beer is good for you you know I was surprised when I saw that too that's another it was a fascinating surprise I mean I'm a researcher and a doctor but I sometimes feel like one of these science journalists where you know I'm I'm finding myself so amazed that I have to tell the narrative of how I discovered this well look we know that there are healthful beverages green tea you know the coffee green teas you know good for your circulation lowers your cholesterol lowers your blood pressure we know that coffee lengthens your telomeres and actually improves your cardiovascular outcomes red wine another you know well known especially biodynamic red wine grown properly I know rich with polyphenols and so that led me and others to ask well what about other fermented beverages like beer well look beers made with hops right and you drink the suds but actually the beer but the hops are in the bottom well turns out that the hops actually contain a natural chemical called xantho humoral and the xantho humoral actually cuts off the blood supply of feeding cancer so actually ironically enough if you drink a small number of beers a week there's been a sudden - oh it reduces the risk of kidney cancer now it's not the alcohol let's be clear correct it's it's the stuff that the alcohol coaxed out of the hops and this is anthro humoral also mobilizes your regenerative stem cells so now there's something about beer that could be non-alcoholic beer will do the same thing by the way that mobilizes your stem cells good for regeneration good for aging helps to stimulate repair maintenance of your heart and can help your body fight cancer hard to beat that kind of science if it's actually in something that we enjoy drinking yeah I think the hops is is the important part of beer I would disagree with you that beer is good for you because the Vleck 10 content in wheat went or corn where most beer is made oh no non wheat beers I'll put in with you that might be a good compromise well right well look I mean this is this is the whole thing if you can understand the best ways to actually produce a product and you can preserve the good stuff the best stuff the stuff that actually has the activity yeah that's the best of all possible worlds yeah in fact I might take a hop extract every day it's been extracted but maybe that's not the right thing so exactly where can we find eat to beat disease you can find each beat disease anywhere books are sold online or at your favorite bookstore I'm a big proponent of going to your local bookstores that's where we can go in there browse and discover new things and again I want to sort of just emphasize to you that your viewers that if you want to get something I felt was the most useful thing for me to have which is a free downloadable shopping list of all the 200 foods that are my book and I went to a grocery store with a series of grocery stores and I actually organized this list in the order in which you encountered them in a grocery store just makes your shopping a lot easier all you got to do is come to my website at wwlp.com that's dr william lee calm we can follow me on social at dr. william lee perfect okay so it's time for one of my favorite parts to the show the audience question and I want you naturally to please maybe take it first so there are I've had David aspera as my guest on this podcast Jim he hates kale so here's the question joy on YouTube as I love high oxalate veggies like kale and Swiss chard and eat them five times a week lightly sauteed is it okay to consume them that often what say you well so this is where I think it's important to use science yeah I mean you know there are some green leafies so that's the contain oxalate and if you are normal and healthy and your kidneys are working fine you can handle a pretty good oxalate load and just pass right through you'll be fine what's interesting about kale is that although some people don't really like the slightly bitter taste to it if you cook it you looking to mellow it out and kale and chard all belong to us or Brassica contains these are other chemicals and and and there are hundreds of ISOs isothiocyanates - and the thing is that the by and large the isothiocyanates in brass actually are good for you they actually can boost your angiogenesis system they can actually help your stem cells they're good the fibers actually good for your microbiome so what i would say is that you can feel safe to eat kale five times a week if you're if you enjoy it and if you don't have any other active medical problems you always talk to a doctor if you do and if you're concerned about it and the best thing I think of that I discovered in writing you to beat disease is that you got more than 200 foods you can choose from so maybe you don't like kale because you don't like the taste of kale but that's okay you can choose something else within that family that's actually good for you and I would try to encourage people not to get too fixated on any one molecule that's found in any one food because foods are made out of hundreds of molecules it's Mother Nature's factory for bioactives and most of the bioactives and foods were originally in the plant to protect a plant correct right so what happens is the one man mankind humankind started to eat the plants they had a new job description they they had to figure out how they worked in the body and sometimes they're not so good for you sometimes they're really great for you yeah no that's absolutely true you know our ancient ancestors probably encountered 250 different plant species on a rotating basis and those plants were all grown in you know six feet alone soil everything was organic and even the animals that we're eating we're eating those plants and getting those polyphenols and as I tell anyone who will listen the average person will probably 20 different vegetables in a year maybe if they're lucky and if they think even if they're eating organically that they're acquiring those polyphenols of 250 different species I got oceanfront property in Palm Springs too so it just can't be done and so I think you're right the more varied our diet the more we change even seasonally change the better off you know it's really interesting if you look at these healthy aging populations the so-called Blue Zones right there's five mill around the world these are people that are not on strict diets you know they're not depriving themselves they're living really good lives they enjoy they they would tell you they're having great meals every day but you know the thing is that they're eating diverse very diverse repertoire of foods yeah they're not limiting they're actually broadening their there at their menu so I would actually encourage anyone if you want to eat well you think broadly don't eat too much and eat mostly what's fresh yep and an answer to Joy's question from my end I actually have a couple of female patients who have gone on kale kicks kale smoothies in the morning kale salads for lunch and dinner and they have over the course of a few months suppress their thyroid function to the point that I can pick it up and when we and they don't have Hashimoto's thyroiditis when we back off on kale in particular that their thyroid returns to normal so just again be careful don't become you know focused on a single food as the key to health yeah and very these things change it up more is not more that's true yeah that's true so that's it for the doctor Gundry podcast and we'll look forward to seeing you next week and thank you again for coming on dr. Lee my pleasure before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes Google Play stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you [Music]

Channel: The Dr. Gundry Podcast

Views: 83,414

Rating: 4.8948259 out of 5

Keywords: dr gundry, dr. gundry, steven gundry, gundry md, gundry, plant paradox, the plant paradox, plant paradox diet, diet, cookbook, lectins, lectin free, the dr gundry podcast, podcast, interview, dr will li, dr william li, dr. will li, dr. william li, angiogenesis, beer, is beer healthy, is beer good for you, microbiome, cancer, food as medicine, heal yourself with food

Id: GU8wL3J3rn0

Length: 57min 24sec (3444 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020