Heart Health & Aging: Do our blood vessels hold the secret to long life? | Dr William Li

[Music] welcome to Zoe science and nutrition we're World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health [Music] inside every one of us there's an immensely complex system of tubes that transports blood oxygen and nutrients to the cells in our body this system is 60 000 miles long that's enough tubes to stretch three times around the world if these tubes fail the result can be fatal in some cases it's a heart attack in others it's a stroke where the blood supply to the brain is disrupted and brain cells are damaged or killed together heart attacks and strokes are a major cause of death in developed countries high blood pressure can ultimately cause your blood vessels to burst or become blocked for this reason the condition has earned an ominous nickname the silent killer and it affects one in four adults but there's good news we can take action to reduce the risks in this episode you'll learn how to keep your heart and blood vessels in good condition you'll also get a unique insight into how looking after this magical pipe work really could slow down aging my guest is Dr William Lee a world leading specialist in blood vessels and preventative health and the author of countless papers on the subject luckily for us will has a gift for communicating this complex subject in terms we can all understand Dr William Lee thank you for joining me today why don't we start as always with our quick fire round of questions from our listeners and the first question I have is can food improve the flow of blood to your heart yes can you reverse existing damage to your blood vessels with food yes amazing can you reduce cholesterol without statins absolutely yes we're going all the yeses today is there a link between the health of our blood vessels and dementia yes and finally are there foods that can slow down aging yes absolutely all right well I should have I should have said somewhere you're going to say no but I think that's a great a great start and I think our listeners are already like okay I'm really surprised by some of this what myth around eating for a healthy heart most annoys you you know as somebody who studies blood vessels and circulation which is what the heart is all about the thing that really um irritates me is when people think that just simply working out whether it's jogging going to the gym lifting that that'll actually guarantee that you're going to be heart healthy in fact that's only a bit of the solution oh that's fascinating all right we're definitely going to talk some more about that will what are your three tips for living longer three tips number one get good quality sleep I'm a doctor I went through training I was deprived of sleep for years that subtracts years off of your life so get some good rest second eat healthy and what that means is going to be different for every individual but bottom line is that listen to your body because your body knows what actually is not so good for you when you feel badly and there's a huge literature of studying what's actually good for you mostly plant-based foods and we can talk more about that and then the third thing really is to stay Physically Active that doesn't mean you have to jog swim run a marathon what it means is that you have to actually move brilliant I think everybody here knows that their heart is really important right anyway for the last 100 years has been told about that I think most of us and and I'm included have never really thought about our blood vessels and I know that blood vessels will be the center of your research can you start might be by explaining why our blood vessels matter yeah well you know I'm a physician I'm a scientist I'm a vascular biologist which means I study blood vessels and the cardiovascular system and here's a little fact that most people don't know first of all when it comes to your heart which is about the size of your fist that's the best kind of surrogate measure of what it looks like in your chest this heart this beating muscle is connected to 60 000 miles of blood vessels that course throughout your body 60 000 miles 60 000 miles now if you were to pull out all the blood vessels in your body and line them up end to end you'd form a thread that would wrap around the earth twice now you can imagine how important blood vessels are when they're connected to the heart this way because your heart every beat every pump Jets out blood through these highways and byways that bring the blood the nourishment the oxygen you breathe all the growth factors to every cell in every organ of your body I've suddenly discovered that there's 60 000 miles of blood vessel inside me which is amazing wraps around the earth twice not something to try at home I guess um how does it link then from these blood vessels to actually impacting you know our heart health which I think is the thing we we think about what's going on and and how does that link yeah well you know I I'm sort of trying to give people a view that they may not have thought about right because most people think of the heart you go jogging you hear the lub dub in the set the background the the soundtrack of your heart beating but here's something most people don't know is that when we were all in our mother's womb for me one of the first organs that we formed is it in your brain is it in your liver is in your bones it's actually your heart and your circulatory system and they all form pretty much at the same time and they form with these things called stem cells so imagine just dropping a group of marbles on the ground and just and they randomly kind of fall on the carpet they roll around and they don't look like anything those are your stem cells that say day five day seven after conception when dad's sperm met mom's egg over the course of the next weeks those marbles coalesce together and they begin to organize themselves to form these channels they call them first Lakes blood Lakes before they form tributaries before they form streams and that's basically at the end of the day they're left with one additional area which is the heart that is special because it actually has muscles special muscles that will actually pump and its own electrical system and so basically when you think about how your heart and your blood vessels are actually connected together they were formed together at the very beginning all right so what happens to your heart will impact your blood vessels your circulation and therefore your organs and what happens to your blood vessels actually impacts the heart as well so if you have very stiff blood vessels now blood vessels are actually very elastic so basically when your heart pumps they will stretch to accommodate the blood all right because the normal capillary the smallest blood vessel at the very like just getting into your organs to feed your cells that's the thinness of a human hair that's a human capillary now to Jet blood through that in fact that that diameter of that blood vessels is smaller than a single blood cell so even for a healthy blood cell to get through that end Channel it has to stretch to allow things through oh wow so everything that I think about this like these tiny little elastic things yeah opening and closing to squeeze through like literally my blood cells that's right without my blood cells my organs are in trouble is that right without your blood cells pumping through delivering those oxygen carrying oxygen-rich red blood cells very quickly and I'm talking about within seconds your organs start feeling starved think about getting choked you can't breathe all right and then soon it turns blue just like you would be blue in the face and shortly after that your organs stop functioning properly and when they actually stop functioning properly they start to malfunction the ultimate malfunction whether it's in the liver whether it's your kidney whether it's your brain I mean the ultimate brain malfunction is you have a stroke and all and this by the way everything I'm talking about in your organs also can happen to your heart so when that when there's a malfunction of your heart because it's not getting enough blood flow we can also happen the heart has its own circulation which is pretty amazing um not surprising but amazing when the heart's own circulation gets clogged or too stiff and it blocks blood flow then you have a heart attack and so the things that we hear about heart attack stroke cardiovascular disease these are all problems of that giant system that's 60 000 mile system that formed was one of the first organs to form in your mom's womb and so I need this stretchiness in order to deliver down these capillaries and I think we've all maybe heard a little bit about this idea of it being blocked how does that is that the same as not being stretchy or is that actually something different well right well think about this um so think about a a big sock that you putting your foot through right so the sock has a stretch like the stock you pull out of the store out of a drawer is actually pretty thin it looks too thin for your leg to go through but it's because it's stretchy you can actually put your foot and then your ankle all the way through it right yep I'm familiar I thought with my daughter this morning to do exactly that as I seem to end up doing many mornings because it turns out that it's a lot easier to put your foot through the sock when the other person is helping rather than pulling it in the other direction so right right I understand the analogy now when that sock is no longer stretchy it's stiff imagine spraying concrete around that sock or maybe even pouring concrete into the sock okay and and now try to put your foot through it it's not going to go through very easily right it's stiff there's no no stretchiness and that's actually what happens as we naturally get older and particularly when we're eating what is the so-called Western diet that's we can talk about that in more detail but we eat a diet that's not so good for our circulation what happens is that a blood vessel let me just kind of give you a little more detail about the stretch the reason a blood vessel can stretch has to do with how it's designed oblivisal has got different um uh aspects of its wall cut a blood vessel in half and look at its cross section and you'll see there's a thin lining on the outside there's a little muscle on the out beyond that so the muscle can allow it to stretch and on the inside there's a lining of cells various special cells called endothelial cells Endo because they're on the inside endothelial cells these are the liner cells of a blood vessel so think about Saran Wrap that's how thin it is okay aligning the inside of your blood vessel cling film and for those of us in in the UK yep clear film that by the way so basically that's the blood vessel the muscle helps it stretch the wall helps it stretch the the the the clear sheet on the inside that is a special layer that layer is slippery it's like the the surface of an ice skating rink that's been polished and buffed before the first skaters got get on it and the reason that endothelial slippery layer is so important is because blood cells slide right along it they don't stick got it so I'm sort of thinking now but it's like you're in a tunnel but all the walls are covered in like a bit like Teflon I guess on my pans or something right like something very non-stick is that a way to right right to think about this we'll have to talk about the Teflon in your pan from a healthy eating perspective but but yes that's exactly what it is um and I and I and I use the idea of an ice skating rink because many people have you know um spent a winter holiday looking I could be outdoors it could be in Sword as a skating rink or just think about the Olympics right um so when the ice is fresh and ready for the first the day's first skaters it is it is slick it is smooth and everything just starts at one end it goes all the way to the other end yep take off your sweater and throw it on the ice and it'll go all the way across the rink right now as long as that lining is perfectly smooth everything will Glide right along now what happens when you actually um smoke a cigarette okay uh the the the nicotine the chemicals the harsh chemicals it damages that Teflon layer it damages that liner that transplant liner uh it going back to the ice skating rink analogy it would be like if you took um a ray like and you just raked the ice and scuffed it up now try to throw a sweater on it suck it's just gonna stick right there it won't slide and so that roughening up of the inner lining can actually make blood cells clot stick and form a clot that is the beginning of the end when I say the beginning of the end that starts to narrow the blood vessel the blood vessel starts to get stiffer you don't actually have that stretchiness um plaques fat can actually build on the inside of the wall and what is a plaque well a plaque is a thickening you know like a plaque on your teeth is anything any kind of a thing that builds up on your teeth right so a plaque in a blood vessel is similar to what you would find in your teeth but it's on the inside layer and it what it does is it makes it stickier it makes it narrower it makes it stiffer all the things you don't want in a healthy blood vessel that makes sense and I can see if you're trying to deliver if I'm trying to deliver anything through this and it's starting to get more and more constricted I mean it doesn't sound it's sort of obvious to a Layman right it doesn't sound good if I try to push something through and the pipe is getting more and more more furred up so is there a is there you know I have a toothbrush for my teeth right for for this situation with plaque it's there is there a is there a toothbrush in this situation or is this a sort of one-way Direction This is just going to get worse and worse as we get older and we we fur up these um blood vessels well well this is actually the most exciting thing when I went to medical school we thought it was a one-way Street meaning once you start narrowing and stiffening the blood vessels the only way you could do it it we used to think about it like a clogged toilet right like we've all experienced that the toilet's supposed to flush because all of a sudden it's not flushing anywhere backs up terrible what do you have to do you have to have to like plunge it call the plumber or you have to snake something down and to clear it right yeah and so that's what we I was taught when I was in medical school you got to call the the heart plumber the cardiologist the Interventional cardiologist who basically will stick a Roto-Rooter which is like a coil in your uh in your groin snake it up through the blood vessels you're growing into the blood vessels in your heart and literally Roto-Rooter like basically drill out that clog to clear the toilet so it is a bit like brushing your teeth uh well fancy technology but exactly well and and then of course it would clog back up and so what they then invented in the medical world are stents which are literally little Teflon or metal coated stents that would strut the um the uh the blood vessel open right so sort of like a like a thin like think about Mission Impossible you get this little thin thing you put it into the blood of soul and then boom it opens up and now it's actually stenting open forcing open the blood vessel now that sounds good because you've solved the immediate problem of the lack of blood flow but actually gets out what that actually also damages the natural elasticity stretchiness of the blood so now you've got basically an iron tube stuck inside your blood vessels that's not normal and that's not good so then we developed statins which are drugs aimed at actually lowering the amount of stuff that could clog fatty deposits that can clog uh the plaque on the walls statins actually work pretty well they work by metabolically lowering the amount of cholesterol and other lipids fatty things that float around your blood if you've ever cooked bacon you know that you know after the the raw bacon starts frying up in the wonderful bacony smell is in the air and you take the bacon out you know that you're left with a pan of a pan of Grease right now you're going off eating your brunch or what have you you come back to the pan after breakfast and what do you actually have you've got this congealed mess imagine that congealed white creamy thick stuff the bacon grease imagine that is actually sluicing through your blood doesn't sound good right like nobody's going to suggest that this sounds like a good thing to be going on inside you no and that's what statins were designed to do is to sort of try to cut through that grease like a detergent and lower the levels in your blood sounds like a good idea but here's the problem statins which are capable of actually preventing the build up to some extent have a lot of side effects actually most there's I mean there's a billion dollar Blockbuster area of pharmaceuticals and many many people are on them but you know statins can damage your muscles can damage your kidney can damage your liver there's all kinds of things every drug has an effect and the potential for a side effect or an unwanted effect so not particularly a great solution and frankly not a not a you know people don't shouldn't take medicine I look I'm a doctor I was trained to write prescriptions but my own practice my own mindset of how to help a patient is really to try if you have are forced to give somebody a prescription my goal has always been to figure out from the beginning when you're going to take the person off the prescription so they no longer need the drug now you need to find a different solution so this is different than put writing a prescription putting somebody on a drug for the rest of their life right like how many of us know people like that and or even doctors who actually think that way my view is that medicines can be a life-saving but if you put somebody on a medicine the goal ideally is to figure out how you're going from the beginning when you're going to take them off it so now research actually has then discovered that there are foods and lifestyle issues that can actually reverse all the things that damage the elasticity the the flow uh that can block your circulation I mean we started at the very beginning right we just started saying drop those marbles their stem cells they have informed and then they form and they work perfectly when you're a baby and over the course of your life over eight during aging and over the course of maybe un on less than uh salutatory dietary habits you're eating foods that are not so good for your circulation you get the clogging gets a cigarette smoke damages that smooth ice and now it's sticky all right um you know we can can we avoid stents I think we can can we use drugs yeah I think we can but can we use diet and lifestyle to reverse that clogging that prevent and reverse that is actually what's remarkable because science has now discovered it's possible to not rely on the drugs or the hardware that I was taught we that doctor the medical community has to use and well before we talk about the food that you can you know we could use to do that could we maybe talk about the first talk because given this example of smoking has been one of the things that can cause damage and I'm sure most listeners here are saying either they once smoked and they stopped or that they no longer smoke because there has been this amazing decline in smoking right is one of the great sort of Public Health improvements if I compare with levels when when I was a kid what else is causing this and I think you know obviously this is a podcast where people are very interested in food you know is is what we eat linked to the damage to these blood vessels in the first place yeah well I mean if we um eat a well let's first talk about before we go to sort of how to fix the problem let me tell you how our blood vessels are uh perfectly evolved to be able to function with our food so let's think about that 60 000 miles of Highways and byways the lakes and tributaries and creeks and streams that are inside our body that we are our very life actually depends on has to coexist harmoniously with the foods that we eat so just like a river in a stream you know there's all kinds of things that float through your stream in your reverse right it's not one thing there's a lot of different things similarly we can eat lots of foods and our blood vessels can handle them that lining can handle it just fine what are the things that our bodies designed to actually handle mostly plant-based Foods so basically if we eat fruits and vegetables not the legumes seeds um it the the nutrients that we absorb from it actually are beneficial and they protect that smooth they keep the ice on the ice skating very slippery all right that's beneficial for our body and you know every now and then you eat that piece of bacon I talked about the bacon and the grease and you're going to dump some of that grease into your bloodstream it's less than you would have in the pan after you make a you know a thing of bacon a package of bacon but it's still there now fortunately that even though that will actually circulate through your bloodstream once or twice after you've had your big brunch with bacon and it tastes great the fact of the matter is if you continuously live a life pattern of eating lots of fatty foods saturated fats red meats I mean look I grew up and I and I I actually love food so I mean I I don't love to eat but I I enjoy food and I appreciate the culinary history uh that cultures actually have so look I'm not afraid to tell your viewers and listeners that but you know I've I've enjoyed a great rib eye steak like anyone else all right but the problem is that if you actually have that all the time or you have bacon all the time you have lots of greasy fatty foods all the time hamburgers all the time what happens is that your bloodstream is not that well adapted for that huge amount of fat that continuously circulates that's what your doctor's measuring you get your go to your GP and get your blood drawn PCP we caught in America primary care doctor physician um and you what are you getting you're getting a cholesterol test some blood lipid panel and that's actually just a that's a that's a test that looks at like what are the levels of the lipids in your system if you eat very unhealthy Foods your lipids will naturally go up because you're oh you're flooding your system with fat now that can be on top of other damage that unhealthy foods are doing we do know that for example this is pretty brand spanking new that the gut bacteria in our body the healthy gut bacteria there's about 39 40 trillion bacteria that we think and we know that inside our gut and these gut bacteria we call it the microbiome actually play a critical role in getting rid of the fats that are floating around in our bloodstream and helping our metabolism move smoothly so it's not just eating the fat but if we eat foods like Ultra processed foods with lots of additives synthetic preservatives chemicals all right too much sugar too much alcohol all the things that you know like I think present day conventional wisdom tells us it's not so good for us I don't think there's any mystery to most people who have access to the internet or the media to be able to figure out like what are the foods that are not so good for our health here's the latest breaking information those foods that are not just not so good for us not only not only can clog up our blood vessels they damage our gut microbiome they damage our healthy gut bacteria when we damage the gut bacteria when I what do I mean damage think about your gut bacteria as a ecosystem like the Great Barrier Reef with this incredibly dazzling array of organisms that all live harmoniously and do something for the environment in this case the environment's your body and then one of the things they do is they help to lower the lipids they help to improve your cholesterol to help blood flow smoothly they help protect the lining of their blood vessels now you damage those protector bacteria suddenly your blood vessels are even more vulnerable and so it's not just having the fat it's also damaging the bacteria and so there's all kinds of things that we can eat Ultra processed foods too much red meat too much fatty foods all those contribute conspire together to thwart the natural resilience of our circulation and um these are topics I think that we we talk a lot about on on this show so it's fantastic to hear these links back to um to heart health just before moving off that we had a lot of questions about high blood pressure um does high blood pressure um fit into this story about what's going on with all of these vessels or is this a completely different thing that's going on inside us yeah well so here let's let's kind of review a little bit about what actually blood pressure means right so you go to the doctor's office and or you can do this at home you put on a cuff uh usually at the bottom part of your upper arm you blow it up and then there's like a little meter that actually clicks off and the blood pressure is two numbers because the systolic or the top number and diastolic is the bottom number without having to go into the physics of what all that means it's two numbers blood pressure that's all I've ever understood so that's great that I don't need to understand more thank you will well I'll break it down in ways that actually matter to what we're talking about the first number called systolic is a reflection of how fast and hard the heart pumps the blood out so if you look at the ideal blood pressure you know which basically it's an ideal it's like 120 over 80 or 120 over 70. okay that first number 120 that's 120 millimeters of mercury of jetting out okay that's that's a good amount if you go to 130 140 150 160 like you're getting to it's like driving on a highway you know speed limit 40 miles per hour so or I can't translate my to kilometers but you know um in America or Canadian business we'll forgive you it's okay but then you actually um put your uh uh pedal down and now you're going to 60. now you're going to 70. now you're going to 80 90. now you're redlining the car all right and and you know just from sitting behind a driver's seat you're going to you're going too fast all right and your car is telling you you're going too fast that's the similar way of jetting that blood out faster harder with more force and that's when you start to get into high blood pressure 140 150 why am I having to push it harder than I did when I was younger why why am I now having to do this because the heart has to actually get a healthy bolus of blood delivering oxygen and nutrients to all those cells 60 000 Miles when the arteries the blood vessels that is pump jumping through are stiff it has to pump a little bit harder in order to get it out and that compression that the thing that's causing this problem is that entirely about the blood vessels through the rest of your of your body not entirely because many things can cause blood pressure high blood pressure but because we were talking about clogging that's one of the consequences of the clog now if the heart is actually um racing too fast you can also and and the body can't compensate for it it can also raise the blood pressure there's another part of it which is the back pressure that second number of the blood pressure the diastolic and we talked about the two numbers the first one is the jet the second one is the back pressure because there's always a little pressure if we didn't have some back pressure in our body all the time we'd be fainting with no blood to our brain so that back pressure is basically what we call the resting or diastolic pressure if that's too high we've got a lot of tension in the circulation as well that can be oh fluid overload you can have too much fluid in your system so there's lots of things that can cause high blood pressure when but here's the consequence when you have continued Relentless unremitting high blood pressure you got to think about what happens like that tension that jetting that pressure builds up and your organs suffer for it either they're not getting enough blood or they're actually and they may be starved of the blood or they're actually not getting the right delivery of those nutrients in the right way that is actually very damaging over time that's why high blood pressure is a silent killer it's it sneaks up on you it can exist and you don't even know it you don't feel anything right well like um you don't feel it in because until it becomes catastrophic it can be related to your blood vessels but it's not entirely like how important is the blood vessel part of this story for high blood pressure is it just like a little part is it is it important if I'm worrying about blood pressure I would say blood pressure and blood vessels are they go hand in hand but blood but clogging of the blood vessels is not the only issue not the only problem there's many other components but I would say blood vessels are involved in every aspect of blood pressure and by the way remember the stretchiness if you're above if your blood vessels are elastic like the sock out of your drawer we talked about um when the pressure is high it just stretches a little more and the pressure comes down and so when your blood vessels are stiff when there's a lot of jet it can't stretch now your blood pressure is going to go up right got it and I know from another another conversation we've had that I think you know on average we lose some of this elasticity with age isn't that right because I happen to know my co-founder Tim has ridiculously elastic blood vessels for his age it was something that Sarah discussed uh out of a study we've done so how much of this is I think again the question a lot of people ask is like how much of this is just inevitable right you're getting older so there's nothing you can do about it how much of it is just like it's your jeans you know my grandfather um uh sadly passed away because of a heart attack so clearly there's some some um potential genetic predispition how much of it is explained by this and how much actually it can diet really affect what's going on you know over these these years and decades well in in the same way that we talked about how diet can help protect your blood vessels by eating healthy foods that preserve protect and even regenerate renew the lining that's ice that ice skating rink the the clearest wrap on the inside your blood vessels foods can actually help you maintain that youthful elasticity of the blood vessels so too foods that are harmful can actually cause it to clog up and so there is clearly value for longevity for resiliency throughout your aging process for eating healthier foods and likewise if you if you nurture an unhealthy lifestyle okay you smoke you don't exercise you eat unhealthy food right um by the way the footnote on it you know back in the day that's actually how most doctors live their life they had all the stress they were I you know I remember being in training in a hospital and they had actually a smoking room for doctors which is ridiculous right so um the uh but the point is that you can do bad things to your circulation your cardiovascular disease your blood pressure or you could do good things so I think what you're trying to um get at is it destiny that that our blood vessels are going to get damaged over time or are there ways that we can slow that process down or perhaps even reverse that process the answer is and this is what's quite striking it's possible to take somebody who has existing established blockages in their blood vessels who would otherwise be requiring a stent the plumber called the plumber put the equipment in or requiring drugs like the statins all right that if you actually give them an intensive regimen of lifestyle change starting with their diet you cut down this you cut down or cut out the saturated Meats no red meat remove that okay and you really switch that you upend their dietary equation by putting them on high fiber foods fruits and vegetables with high fiber what does that do oh it feeds your gut microbiome now your gut bacteria are happier they restore their Community their ecosystem now they're working in your favor all right this lifestyle change now you can eat Foods More Foods fruits and vegetables nuts and legume seeds that actually then renew regenerate the damaged lining so you know just like our skin renews itself and our hair for most people renews itself right which is why we need a haircut and the skin sheds which is why people have dandruff all right there's a renewal of the blood vessels if you eat Foods uh like lots of foods that actually have health healthy bioactives natural chemicals that can stimulate regeneration so an example would be anthocyanins that are present in dark chocolate or that are present in blueberries they will actually are eggplant they will actually help to renew replace those old damaged liner cells in your blood vessels now you're actually regenerating damaged tissue so what's quite fascinating with intensive lifestyle change starting with diet replace unhealthy fats with healthier fats Omega-3s okay are better than butter and palm oil and lots of other less Health less than healthy fats cut down the amount of oil Omega-3s are a very healthy form of fats you can get them from nuts and seeds you can also get them from Seafood which is a known to be heart healthy you're actually protecting the liner you're you're starting to dissolve by by replacing regenerating the liner okay you're actually also solving some of the plaques that have accumulated so it's sort of like Mother Nature's toothbrush using the natural substances that are present in your foods and you can replace and reverse heart disease food diet by the way is only part of the equation there's other things like regular physical activity that's helpful why does that it gets the blood that your juice is Flowing literally get your blood flowing that's important for reversing heart disease of stress lowering stress and sleep and will is there because I mean this this sounds great it's very much in line interestingly with the advice for things that got nothing to do with blood vessels so it's always interesting how much uh alignment there is at the maximum level are there are there real clinical trials and studies that support uh this because I think some people will be listening and saying you know well reversing you know heart damage that sounds a bit radical you know I know that Will's a doctor but you know are you are you way out on a Ledge is there is it the data to support what you're saying yeah well first of all I what I I was a skeptic on this for many years okay uh look I I'm part of a a Cadre of life scientists that actually I've been involved with biotech drug development so for me my my my wheelhouse actually has been to develop the latest new drugs and actually I've been involved with developing stem cell therapies and Gene therapies for heart disease so I'm not a kale waiver okay I'm not somebody that sort of stepped away from the fold for those of you who are on video you'll see that will doesn't look like a care waiver either but if you're just on audio you know it's harder to harder to tell but yeah so uh so I believe in in medicines I believe in advancing medicines but I and I was a skeptic I'm like how can lifestyle do it but I have to say from the very beginning we know that after you have a heart attack that if you go for what they call cardiac Rehabilitation cardiac rehab that's what every patient leaving the hospital undergoes to recover from a heart attack it's a manner of actually diet and lifestyle and reduction and if you really take it a pure clinical study that I've actually compared interventions to Lifestyle management I would cite the work of Dr Dean ornish who is a professor at University of California San Francisco he's at the preventative Medical Research Institute he's actually done a career worth you know probably 40 or 50 years worth of research looking at the reversal of heart disease that it that does not require the hardware and pharmaceuticals and it you know again it's not a magic it's not a silver bullet it is not a one-step deal it's a pretty big commitment to change for somebody who's lived their life to actually suddenly be quote Scared Straight And that because you've had a heart attack or you've had a a big warning sign um and now you need to actually change your diet and learn find new ways to eat that bring you Joy and then to learn how to lower stress I mean how many of us live in a continuous state of stress especially if you're building a career I I'm running a startup doing this podcast have children I'm I'm 100 in a permanent state of stress well and I can tell you training in medicine I mean just being a doctor going through the training is high stress all the time that's not good for us and so one of the reasons why people that work at a high level of stress probably like you and me that's why we enjoy vacation so much is that when we take a break our body truly thanks us for it our minds also do as well our gut bacteria also thanks us for it because we tend to be more active and probably eat slightly healthier things and take it easy on ourselves and so I think this idea of self-renewal is very important for not only preventing disease but reversing disease and that's why I'm trying to emphasize it is definitely possible to reverse heart disease it's not you know just pop a pill in your mouth and swallow it Chase it down with a drink of water it's a commitment to a better lifestyle a healthier lifestyle and I think you're not saying no one I don't think you're saying to people that everyone should stop taking their statins who has currently got them from doctors I think you know I think I I don't believe you're saying that is that right will you're saying that there is ultimately this enormous impact that you can have through your diet and your lifestyle which you know there's real scientific data to support am I is that fair am I putting words in your mouth no no you are absolutely correct and as I said you know I'm a I'm a medical doctor trained in that hardcore you know um uh using all the tools in our toolbox and as I said I'm actually involved with developing the next generation of treatments for heart disease and stroke and many other cancer and many other conditions so I'm a big believer in using the best tools but what I said at the very beginning my own philosophy is that if you put somebody on a medicine the goal should always be as a doctor to figure out how to get them off the medicine and if all you do is to renew the prescription over and over over and you just tell the patient just take it it's that's what you need to do we're not doing enough and I think what patients and people need to realize is that if you actually have cardiovascular disease there's a tour of health care that you can do for yourself doesn't rely on a doctor there's no anesthesia required it doesn't require a pharmaceutical it requires something that you do at home which is caring for your heart health and that's been done with diet physical activity sleep and Stress Management I think it's brilliant I want to make sure you know we don't run out of time because I really want to talk a bit about aging because we've talked a lot obviously about heart health and you know we're very conscious that you know that might affect your your um your ultimate length of your life but at first glance like aging doesn't seem very linked to heart health to me it doesn't really seem obviously linked to um you know your core research about um blood vessels but I know we're having a discussion uh prior to this call and we're talking about aging and dementia could you tell us a bit about how your research has taken you here what the links are with sort of all of those things about our blood vessels yeah well I mean you know uh first of all people think of Aging uh in a very particular snapshot-y sort of way right we think about our grandparents we think about a picture of of an actor that we know who's now you know at the Twilight of their career or their life and look at all that gray hair look at all those wrinkles that's a snapshot on time here's here is the here's the reality the moment we are born you know the moment the doctor delivered us and gave it that little SWAT on the butt to allow us to take our first breath that's when the Aging clock starts we are aging from the moment we are born that's very depressing well but I would but I would say that's only because our social construct of Aging is looking at the terminal components of our life but if you think rethink Aging in a different way and say you know what aging is completely normal it starts from the time we were born and we just continuously um Advance you know right so don't think about it as getting better and then getting worse which I think after all my children are all terribly Keen to be older and then that suddenly switches doesn't it for different people at different ages you know I think you know I remember a long time ago Tony 30 seemed you know like somehow that was a tip but I know other people who frankly didn't get there till they were 50 or 70. well you know so here's an interesting thing when I was in medical school um I which was in the 90s I uh we were looking at the average longevity of people to be like in the early 70s 72 now all people live to 86 87 88 routinely right and so think about that from a societal perspective our whole society when we live in a country in a nation that is has has means and resources everyone actually gets older by the way here's another thing a hundred years ago you know like most people only live to like 40 or 50. like so we've actually can we've pretty much doubled our lifespan I mean here we are like you know bitching and moaning about like you know not living to 100 or aspiring to living 120 I would say step back and take a look at the big picture a hundred years ago we didn't live half as long as we live now so now we're actually living into our 80s brilliant well thank you so much we've covered a lot of stuff and um I always try at the end to try and do a summary I think this could be particularly challenging but I'm trying to do that just to to capture the um the key things that we uh discussed today so I think we started off with this amazing fact that there are 60 000 miles of blood vessels in each of us um that over time uh in fact aging starts from the day we're born and specifically for our blood vessels you know they start to stiffen which is a big problem because you're describing how tiny the ones are at the end in order to feed uh all of our different organs and they can end up getting blocked whether it's from smoking but also through the sort of Western diet that we tend to eat this is quite heavily related to high blood pressure uh which you said is a silent killer because many of us aren't really aware um of it but the good news is it's not just Destiny we're not entirely uh stuck with you know the genes we were born with and in fact even more positively is a we can actually reverse some of this damage so it's not just about stopping it it's possible to reverse it we can actually reduce some of these blockages and um of course there's medical modern Medical Science you talked about like stents or statins but actually I think you were really saying that lifestyle change would be at the top of your proposal with these things really being secondary is that is that right that is completely uh correct well summarized brilliant well thank you so much for coming on I really enjoyed that there are many other topics that we could have covered and uh I hope we'll have a chance to talk about some of those other ones in the future well thank you very much it's a pleasure to always it's always a pleasure to speak to you and uh look forward to continuing our conversation for that bye-bye bye bye thank you to Dr William Lee for joining me on Zoe's science and nutrition today we hope you enjoyed today's episode if you did please be sure to subscribe and do leave us a review as we love reading your feedback if this episode left you with any questions please send them in on Instagram or Facebook and we will try to answer them in a future episode at Zoe we want to improve the health of millions by understanding the right food for each of us to improve our health and manage our weight each member starts with an at-home test comparing them with participants in the world's largest nutrition science study if you're interested in learning more about Zoe you can head to join zoe.com podcast I get 10 off your personalized nutrition program as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by Fascinate Productions with support from Sharon feder and Alex Jones here at Zoe see you next time [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: ZOE

Views: 1,514,404

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Id: Rb0X-RU0Tcs

Length: 47min 36sec (2856 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022