Let Food Be Thy Medicine: EAT THIS To Heal The Body & STARVE CANCER! | Dr. William Li

these biological systems that keep us fit keep us healthy and if we're not careful to take good care of them they too will wane in their power to defend us and that's actually how we wind up getting sick [Music] as you were describing that dr lee i was thinking about a a bath right and i was thinking okay well if an overflowing bath when the water goes up and it starts to leak out if that's the disease or let's say that's cancer every day we're sort of filling up our bath let's say um but as long as the drains working well you know the water's staying down it's not getting to the top but if i guess if we're doing enough stuff that's actually blocking that drain then actually we're not going to be able to repair the rising water level and that water level is going to sort of spill out and then we've got a disease then we've got cancer it's probably not a perfect analogy but do you think there's something in that yeah yeah let me let me kind of um build on what you just said so you've got the drain uh keeping the water uh flowing and clean and at the right level and you've got the water coming in and that balance of where the water line needs to be now let's add some more now let's take a garbage pail filled with food bits and now let's pour those in the drain as well okay now you're contaminating the water and if you have more of the drain opening to remove those bits you're going to keep the water clean but if you actually stop up the drain then the garbage starts to accumulate and that's actually part of the problem as well is damage to our body accumulates over time and that's why the bad decisions that we make really take you know over the course of months or years they have a consequence and the good decisions also have the same type of uh time uh uh honored ability to build up on our behalf well in terms of empowering people in terms of what they can do and this is what a lot of your work is about food has power here you know specifically we're talking about dna damage food has the ability to i guess make that drain bigger or put new drains in the bath so there's more ability to kind of repair the damage so you know we're talking again about these five defense systems i've gone straight in for number four that you mentioned dna could you maybe mention some foods that we can think about consuming that might have an impact on this particular defense system yeah well so some amazing research has been done looking at which foods can help protect our dna and and some of them are are very ordinary like the uh a a kiwi fruit that you might eat at breakfast you know that brown fuzzy ball you cut it open it's got this emerald green interior with a little white starburst you know it's kind of um tart and sweet at the same time well that kiwi is packed with vitamins and antioxidants and it's been shown that eating just one kiwi a day can actually protect your cause your blood to be fortified to neutralize about 60 of the incoming damage from dna and if you eat three kiwis a day okay which is pretty easy right i mean you peel it you cut it up you put it into a yogurt okay it's something that simple uh uh actually will build help your dna build itself back up so that damaged dna will be repaired so don't don't forget like think about the way of protecting your dna i remember an old video game called missile command and this is where from the top of the screen there are all these missiles that are descending down on your planet and what you had to do is to be able to you know fire and try to neutralize all the missiles and that's what antioxidants actually do but it's really hard to prevent all the missiles from coming in and so occasionally you actually have one that create that gets through the shields and creates a crater that's damaged and so neutralizing the incoming is like antioxidants but building back the damaged dna well that's important too because that's like patching a pothole in the highway in the roadside so that you so other cars don't have a problem on it and and so here's an example of a food a kiwi that can actually do that but there are other foods that can also have varying degrees of protection of your dna as well yeah it makes me happy that example because my dad who's no longer alive i remember as a kid dr lee he used to say to me you know keep eating kiwi fruits he'd come back from the supermarket with you know these bags of kiwi fruits so they're really really good for you they're rich in vitamin c which of course is true but obviously you're taking it up a notch now you're saying yes it's rich in vitamin c but actually it's also helping us repair dna and i guess to me there's a wider point here which is you know my dad what 20 30 years ago probably said it's rich in vitamin c so thought there was a value on feeding his children that food because of the impact on our health and as science progresses we i guess we're learning more about the magic of this you know quite ordinary food the kiwi fruits it makes me wonder how much about food do we still not know like we're learning do you know what i mean it's kind of like we think we know so much and we of course we know more than we knew 20 years ago but what are we going to find out in 10 years and 20 years about the magical properties of these foods well what you're actually talking about is what i'm working on which is the a new field of research called food as medicine so the the slogan or the saying food is medicines was attributed to hippocrates you know 3000 years ago but in fact back then there were no medicines so food was the only thing that was around today we have a lot of medicines and and it's because we in the quest to develop medicines we've employed some really deep science molecular biology genomics we can drill right down inside the cell to figure out what happens and why what the consequences are and how the cells work together well one of the reasons that i uh went into nutrition was because i realized that food was something that could be used for prevention you wouldn't want to use drugs from prevention but the problem with food nutrition the criticism that many of us in the medical world have you know about the idea of of using food for healing was historically it was that lack of evidence right so we have a lot of evidence about drugs we almost have nothing about foods i mean that's the dismissive tone that i think you probably were exposed to as well as i uh for most of our education however what's happening now and this is i'm leading i'm one of the people leading the charge of this we can use the same technologies that are used to develop pharmaceuticals and instead of throwing a drug into the system to see what happens we can actually start to throw foods into those systems and and see what happens as well in fact you can even compare foods and drugs and see which one wins and that's something that i've been doing for the last decade is really trying to use the same rigorous scientific methodology used for drug development in order to be able to study the impact of food yeah and i think you are in many ways uniquely placed to do this and move this field on because you've got so much experience in the development of drugs and in research so obviously you know how that whole system works and because you are this way inclined to see the healing potential of foods you can actually do that and i and i feel that's really important to get that kind of traction primarily with the medical profession but also i think across wider society you know i've had on the podcast all kinds of people on in the past talking about various aspects of food you're like you know professor felice jacker from australia who conducted the smiles trial showing how food can impact and in some cases reverse depression uh dr drew ramsey this nutritional psychiatrist in new york using food to help people with their moods but i do think there's something very fresh about your approach that um i really really like and resonate with this idea that food and drugs can be compared can you give us an example of that where you've seen that food might have equal benefits if not more benefits than a drug yeah well so we um have been developing treatments for cancer that are designed to starve a cancer by cutting up its blood supply and that's the process of angiogenesis that is hijacked by tumors by cancer cells to get selfishly develop their own blood supply right so i told you the body has normal circulation to feed healthy tissues well cancers can sometimes hijack that so one of the ways new ways to treat cancer is actually to give a drug that can intercept a cancer's ability to recruit a private blood supply that's starving a cancer cutting off his blood supply can't get oxygen and nutrients can't grow okay so i i was one of the people that helped develop the systems that developed those drugs there have been over a dozen drugs that have been approved by health authorities to be able to achieve this in colon cancer brain cancer lung cancer so on and so forth now in that same system we've actually thrown different food substances and as an example we took a drug that is a designer drug to stop androgenesis and then we actually um also threw blinded so we didn't know which one was which a substance that turned out to be the powdered extract from just regular green tea a cup of green tea and we found that they were in that system they went head to head against each other and you could actually get the same effect in that test system so now the question is you know um we we've looked at this in the lab how does this actually play out in real people in the real world well uh you know there are studies now that show that even two to three cups of tea a day can lower your risk of developing ovarian cancer for example by up to 50 percent this is a gigantic study in europe called the epic study that have looked at all the different food patterns and and dietary consumption over time to look for these correlations and so food as medicine research is different from pharmaceutical research okay pharmaceutical research you take one pill or one drug and you get a group of people to make them as similar as possible and then the only thing you do to to people is give them that one drug and everything else is we hope to control it so that there's no other variables well foods can't be studied like that you can't give somebody only green tea to drink for you know months at a time um or a tomato to eat that's the only thing that you can eat and foods don't work like drugs i mean a drug you could you can squash a headache you know in 20 minutes with a powerful drug or a migraine but with food the benefits of food because it's so much more natural because it leverages your body's own defense systems the benefits take time and they build up over time and so you're talking about research studies that could take months or years even to fully appreciate just how beneficial that is so this is how we do food as medicine research we look for benefits in real populations of real people like people drinking green tea how well does that prevent different types of cancer then we back it up to say can we run a small clinical trial a small group of people that we can to control to see we get a similar effect then we go back into the lab and we kind of say well now what happens if you feed animals that actually with green tea like can we you know an animal subject um can we actually see that benefit then we can even go deeper and go dive that don't start going that mile deep what happens at the cellular low level what happens at the genetic level and so food as medicine is really taking that macroscopic community-wide level view and then drilling it right down to that molecular pathway and so i'm i happen to be one of the people that actually can traverse that entire journey yeah um with with what i've done it's just so fascinating very very exciting about the future that study you mentioned about a few cups of tea a day reducing your risk of developing cancer was that black tea or green tea it's green tea but black tea actually also has different benefits uh as well so um a study out of italy did something really amazing well so look let's back up for a second so what everybody would recognize is green tea it's kind of like kind of tea that you get in a sushi restaurant japanese restaurant you know matcha and it's very trendy and and of course the trend goes back thousands of years in asia um and then there's black tea uh classic english breakfast tea or earl grey tea in fact i have a little tin of it i happen to have a tin tin of earl grey tea here right right here i love tea and most people have said this was the thinking previously that green tea is really great for you because it's green it's got filled with antioxidants and it's got all these polyphenols in it and black tea well you know when the british brought it back from asia they couldn't actually bring fresh green tea and with this long ocean voyage they fermented dried it and that drying and fermenting actually destroys those polyphenols so it doesn't have much good like might taste good but it doesn't really have the healthful properties well this is where science again you know is able to heat up that knife and cut through the the butter to kind of see exactly what the story is and it turns out that black tea actually is quite active i studied chinese green tea japanese green tea and studied um earl grey and we can and so you can besides comparing foods with drugs you can compare foods with foods to find out which is the best kind i was interested in this japanese sencha or chinese green tea and jasmine tea or is earl grey which one is better when you throw them into the system and we found actually surprisingly the earl grey the black tea flavored bergamot actually was the most potent tea when you combined all when you looked at all three side by side other thing about black tea that's really amazing that's been studied by researchers in italy is that black tea actually can call out those stem cells from your bone marrow to increase their levels in your circulation and when your stem cells are circulating in your blood uh they come out of their hiding spots in your their storage uh container their the garage that the paint cans were stored in they come out like bees flying out of a hive and then they circulate in your body looking for organs to repair so wherever you need a little bit of renewal regeneration your stem cells will fix it invisibly yeah and so black tea can actually spark that repair and regenerative process as you are describing these different foods and their actions i keep thinking back to this list of five defense systems that i'm just fascinated by and obviously we spoke about dna number four but you've now mentioned tea i think and on and green tea and black tea it can impact stem cells but it can also impact other parts of these defense systems so presumably are there some foods which only work on one defense system from from the knowledge that we have so far and other foods which can kind of hit more and potentially all five at the same time yeah well so here's a principle of nature mother nature tends to be incredibly clever and pack multiple roles in any given food so while researchers may have only looked at one food in one particular way so for example seek i'm trying to think about something that'll be useful from a whole food perspective that has only been found to do one thing actually i have to say most of the foods that i know of that i've done research on when you take a careful look they can activate multiple health defenses so i think that that's really where we're at is really peeling back and discovering the utility the multi-pronged utility of different foods that makes sense though doesn't it because these defense systems they don't work in isolation they're sort of they help you know work they obviously have to work as interconnected systems together so it kind of makes sense that food particularly food that's been around for thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years are also going to have these multiple type effects yeah you know if we go to angiogenesis which you've already mentioned and that was the first health defense system that you talked us through this i found really really interesting when researching your work uh your ted talk which of course has been viewed by millions of people now there was really interesting slide towards the end where i i very much resonate with this idea what's the root cause of multiple diseases can we you know address the root cause and then you know we're automatically going to take care of multiple different downstream consequences and that was a very powerful slide showing that when angiogenesis is working well or when it's not working well what can happen in the body could you just talk us through um through that lens angiogenesis um because i think that's really interesting and then you also mentioned cancer and blood supply and again could you just talk to us about cancer and how it can only grow to a certain size unless it gets its own blood supply as well please yeah sure our circulation is uh these blood vessels this network and the blood is really the vehicle that carries oxygen and nutrients and everything else that our cells need to survive so when we have the right amount all of our health all of our organs are functioning properly um sometimes we need a few extra blood vessels so if you're working out and trying to build your muscles when your muscles get bigger it requires more blood vessels a bigger blood supply no problem your angiogenesis system can actually supply and help to grow more of those blood vessels but they keep it in proper volume so not too many not too few blood vessels very important principle of angiogenesis that's health we have good circulation now here's what happens in disease when you don't have enough blood vessels what are some of the typical diseases that occur when you don't have enough blood flow well one of the things is after a heart attack if you cannot grow enough blood vessels your parts of your heart will get weaker you can get heart failure and and you and a heart attack can actually be even fatal if you don't have if you have inadequate blood vessels to try to bypass any temporary blockage same thing as a stroke we know after there's a stroke uh sometimes a clot gets sent to the brain and results in that type of stroke your angiogenesis defense system is scrambled to be able to immediately generate bypass tiny little bypass muscles get around that blockage to save the brain beyond the blockage if you can't get enough blood vessels growing in that situation parts of your brain die and you wind up being paralyzed or having deficits after a stroke in diabetes many people with diabetes lose their legs they have their legs amputated mostly because they have problems healing wounds on their feet now the reason is because they their nerves actually become they go numb their nerves die back diabetic nephropathy neuropathy and the reason that the nerves die back is because there's inadequate blood vessels feeding those nerves so now in diabetes some of those nerves in your feet and your even your fingertips actually aren't don't have enough blood supply they die when the nerves die you can't feel when you step on a pebble and you create a little hole that hole gets infected that wound now also won't heal because it doesn't have enough blood vessels that's an example of inadequate angiogenesis and cause a problem and so now medical treatments actually have been designed to actually try to stimulate more blood vessels to coax more vessels than where they're needed but foods can also help do it as well on the flip side when you have too many blood vessels and this is where cancer comes into play it turns out that we all have cancer in our body i mean cancers we fear everyone fears cancer the the word actually you know causes a shiver to run down most people's spine everyone knows somebody who's been touched by cancer and i would say most people know somebody who's died of cancer actually and so this is actually one of the most fearsome diseases but yet biologically we are actually all forming cancers in our body all the time because all it takes for our 40 trillion cells to do is to make those little mistakes i told you 10 000 mistakes are fixed every day a few of those going uh kind of getting sneaking through will turn into a microscopic tumor microscopic cancer and this is called cancer without disease because as tiny little mutant cancer can grow up to the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen and then it's frozen like a pimple can't go any bigger because it doesn't have a blood supply no oxygen no food nothing to feed it and so those little microscopic cancers sit there until our until another one of our defense systems our immune system wings by like a cop on a beat and sees this abnormal cell sitting on that street corner in a good neighborhood and then says get in the car we're taking you away and so our immune system destroys these microscopic cancers but some cancers are able to some microscopic cancers are able to hijack our body's regular angiogenesis defense system and selfishly grow blood vessels to feed themselves now i worked in a lab studying angiogenesis and we discovered that once an avascular or bloodless cancer is able to get vessels to touch it that moment that touch is that the cancer can grow 16 000 times in two weeks so literally angiogenesis out of control is a trigger uh an explosive trigger for tumor growth and in fact we know that if you can cut off the blood supply or prevent tumors from growing their blood supply you can actually keep these cancers harmless for long periods of time and so this is what foods are able to do foods that inhibit angiogenesis they won't they won't stop the good blood vessels from growing because good blood vessels are actually solidly locked into your body your defense system ensures you're not going to get rid of your good blood vessels um with food but those extra blood vessels tend to be fragile and those are the ones that that the foods that we eat and then if necessary drugs that we can prescribe can really just kind of shear those extra vessels away yeah this whole sort of field of angiogenesis and blood vessels i think is going to be fascinating for people because i think many people you know everyone's aware that they've got blood vessels inside them i think a lot of people will think yeah i sort of learned this in biology at school that there's a heart and it you know the blood vessels it pumps oxygen around the body that's how oxygen gets to all my muscles and organs but potentially it kind of ends there like it doesn't go beyond that and what i love about that explanation is when angiogenesis is not working well we're not able to make new blood vessels where we need to it can cause a whole multitude of different diseases but also when it's kind of out of control or gets to these cancer cells too much angiogenesis can cause problems and so and therefore the question for me dr lee is if angiogenesis sits at the heart of multiple different conditions so we can look at it as a root cause we also say similar things about chronic unresolved inflammation don't we we talk about inflammation being a root cause of lots of these chronic diseases so can you speak a little bit about the relationship between inflammation and angiogenesis because it strikes me that they can't be separate they they probably sit side by side together in most cases yeah no it's such a great question i actually worked on research exactly looking at that interrelationship so we know well let's let's take a look at just sort of something everybody recognizes and to show how inflammation and blood vessel growth are go hand in hand uh if you um are in the kitchen and you accidentally cut your your you're cutting a piece of fruit and you accidentally cut your cut your finger or cut your hand what's going to happen it's going to bleed all right now so you're going to stop the bleeding then a few minutes later you look at the cut what's going to happen it's swollen it's puffy it's red because inflammation's actually gotten there your immune defenses have sent these inflammatory cells these are kind of super soldiers from our immune system that go there to kind of clean up and prevent any bacteria from rushing into that site and then shortly thereafter within a day or so new blood vessels start growing because in the inflammatory cells the cells from your immune system started to release some signals to say hey you know what we've cleaned up it's time to reset the table and so now blood vessels actually start to grow into it so inflammation sends the signals for wound healing for healing that for blood vessels to grow by the same token inflammation then goes away which is why our wounds don't stay puffy the whole time the puffiness goes away the blood vessels grow you get a scab and before long you're back to normal and that's because both inflammation is turned down turned off like that's that car volume of the car radio and also angiogenesis once you get enough it stops and so this is getting back to that set point now what happens when you actually have chronic anything usually it's not a good result so inflammation being really good a little bit is really good so you know i think a lot of people misunderstand like i want to get rid of all the inflammation in my body no you don't because you want the ability of your body to be able to mount small amounts of inflammation when needed for a short period of time and then to go away all right that's that's you want that that's life-saving but what you don't want is for the inflammation to get there and the volume to keep turning up up up up or that it never gets turned back down that's chronic inflammation and that's abnormal so your body this whole idea of turning up and then turning down the volume for inflammation if you don't can't turn it down the inflammation continues to smolder in your body example i've given is sort of like for anybody who's listening who's enjoyed going camping yeah you go into woods you set up a tent it gets cold at night what do you do you build a campfire and and that's like a little bit of inflammation gives you warmth that serves its purpose and you know when it's time to go to bed um you know you either let it burn down and you just you know make sure that um it's all walled off and you're fine but that fire if it doesn't um burn down but actually spills out and catches the forest on fire now you actually got a problem because now this thing is going out of control and diseases with chronic inflammation like lupus like rheumatoid arthritis like diabetes frankly you wind up actually having this chronic inflammatory state that starts to provoke all kinds of other things and remember we talked about tumors and angiogenesis well if a tumor is kind of like a wound it can hijack blood vessels and you got inflammation and now the cancer itself causes some inflammation you're just making it a hell of a lot easier for that tumor to get a blood supply which means that the cancer is more likely to grow and in fact we do see this in patients patients who are actually chronically inflamed we know that inflammation is one of those hallmarks for people who develop cancer one of the things i really liked about your approach was you said well let's put into our body foods that support these five defense systems and if we can do that and support them we raise the bar we become more resilient therefore we've got more head room to actually deal with the insults that are going to come in life whether that's dna insults from pollution or whether it's the odd thing that we creep into our diet that we probably know isn't the best thing for us but you know we just fancy it now and again and i really like that approach and i know we're starting off this conversation focusing on some of the things to avoid we're very quickly going to get on to the things that people can put in but yeah i really really appreciate that the most important thing that we as doctors can do is to listen to our patients and hear them out and try to understand where they're coming from and what's important to them i always ask my patients um you know what do you eat what do you like to eat what what brings you joy when it comes to food though the ant that question usually can elicit an answer like i never i try to i'm very careful not to ask that question judgmentally what kind of negative foods do you how much for steak do you eat like i i never asked that i always sort of say like tell me about what do you enjoy eating what brings you joy what are some of the favorite things that you like to eat and you know again it's that conversation that invites someone to look deeply within them i think that um you know uh i i when i was a kid i studied martial arts and uh and one of the greatest martial arts artists ever was bruce lee who i actually read a lot of his writings he wrote in a philosophical sort of way and he wrote one of the most important things that if to succeed in life whether it's a martial in martial arts or otherwise is to know yourself to truly know yourself and i think that so often we get distracted we don't have that opportunity to ask ourselves something simple like so if we had a choice what would we want to eat what brings us joy and my my strong belief is if we want people to get on a better diet to get them started and to keep them going on it we want them to actually feel like it's not a heavy lift it's something that's doable and i think there's nothing easier than to say hey you know what something that you already brings you pleasure and joy something you enjoy to eat already is healthy so let's start with those things because you already know you love them so what i in my booking could be disease i have lists of like 200 some foods i always tell people yeah i have my book get a sharpie okay i i say sharpie like the marker permanent marker yeah because it's permanent you have to make a commitment all right take a sharpie a black sharpie and circle the foods that you enlist that you already like no actually that you love all right and and i i don't care if it's just one or two almost everyone i've met has been able to circle like 10 of them so i or more but if you find a food that you already love that's healthy and good for you that activates your health defenses you're already way ahead of the game we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible whole foods that's why i'm a big fan of good quality whole food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 whole food source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focus digestion and our immune system athletic greens are giving my audience a fantastic offer one year's free supply of vitamin d and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all the details at athletic greens.com forward slash live more or simply click on the link below now back to the conversation love that very empowering approach to people oils oils are something that can cause a lot of confusion i know you're a big fan of olive oil i want to talk about olive oil and why it's so beneficial but before we get to olive oil in the spirit of the kind of foods that we should think about limiting when we are in our supermarket or our grocery store and we're looking around to purchase oils to cook food in to sprinkle on food to pour on our salads what kind of oils should we try and avoid and then what sort of oil should we try and buy instead you know so this like the debate about artificial sweeteners is a loaded topic and so i i want to just start you know this component of our conversation by saying the jury is still very much deliberating what oils are harmful to you and and are most harmful to you um but i think that it's less controversial what uh oils are better for you and good for you i want to you know for your listeners i want to kind of give people some real practical things and not just kind of dive into the science of petroleum products which is what oils are let's talk about this rule number one regardless of what oil you actually have what i would say is don't have too much of it because oils are fats and fats can be healthier but there really isn't such a thing as a healthy fat that you should like drink lots of it every single day okay so the point is that there are healthier oils but you should we should all limit the amount of oil that we actually intake into our body all right number one number two is that and this is actually broadly speaking is don't reuse your oil okay most oils that are reused when we heat them to cook whether we're actually you know i mean again deep frying is generally something that's not very healthy the process of deep frying actually changes the chemical the natural chemicals that make up oil in the oil itself and then paint it onto the food stick it onto the food so we're eating some of the change chemicals when we actually eat deep fried food now look i mean i've had i've had some awesome fish and chips when i visited england before um and and again and again as we talked about you know every now and then if you're you spend most of your time shoring up your health defenses raising your own bar you know having a rare treat it's totally fine but when you fry things in hot oil you're also changing the chemical structure of things that entire browning golden browning crisping of food actually changes the chemical structure of the food itself and in ways that are potentially carcinogenic and so just need to be careful about that the third so so i think you know like reusing oil here's the thing that's kind of like a little risky you go to a restaurant to eat you have no idea if they're reusing their oil over and over and over again you know um i mean think about in uh asian restaurants whether it's an indian restaurant or a chinese forest they've got these gigantic bats where they're frying tasty little bits up but they may be reusing that oil for days so um uh reused oil not good for you for sure and and the stuff that's fried in oil can also change in time so let's start now talking about just like the properties of oils themselves this is where i think rather than kind of walk into the quicksand of trying to say is palm oil better than corn oil is coconut oil dangerous for you you know like we can wade into that jungle with you know but i think you need a machete to cut your way out of it and so the best way to think about it to give clarity is you know are there any healthier oils to use and how to use them and this is where i think olive oil really stands out number one it's part of a healthy pattern of eating that's been revered for thousands of years and that's in the mediterranean traditional mediterranean diet and the olives are seasonal they're pressed the extra virgin olive oil contains not just fat poly monounsaturated fatty acids which are better for your body and less damaging for your cardiovascular health but there's a lot of polyphenols that come from the olive itself now a lot of people don't understand this but when you look at olive oil the reason we say extra virgin olive oil evoo you know that's what the that's what supermarkets and what restaurants are proud to use now is because it's not just fat it contains the polyphenols from the oil so if you were to actually by the way this is a good experiment to do for for your listeners buy a little container of olives from your grocery store deep it make it easy for yourself and literally you know take it home and and take a heavy glass or take a a board like a like a heavy cutting board and press those olives yourself and you'll actually see if you press hard enough you'll see some oil come out of it now in a in an olive oil factory i mean that that's that's so you can actually appreciate where your food comes from where your olive oil comes from and when you actually press it you'll see that you've crushed the olives and some of the bits from the olives are actually in the olive oil the reese that olive oil tastes so good it's got that you know kind of um peppery vegetable kind of quality to it it's got an umami flavor it's not because the fat is flavorful it's because the bits of olives that were crushed in there are actually in there flavoring it now those bits and the stuff that comes from the meat of the olives contain the polyphenols one of which is hydroxytirazole hydroxy tyrosine sounds like a very complicated chemical name you know your listeners don't either memorize it by any means but you should know that that comes from the olive now olive oil will have some of it only about 20 of the of it but if you actually press that olive 80 percent goes into the olive water and and it's stuck in the pulp and so one of the things that i always say is that you know if you really love olive oil and you want to get the most out of it um just eat the whole olive you know and you can actually cut up an olive and you'll get a little bit of fat you'll get all that flavor and you'll get a lot more of the polyphenol now if you're going to cook with olive oil i i always say go for extra virgin because of that reason i would say don't deep fry but but you can spray you can put put some on to food you can actually saute with it not too much all the studies show that about three tablespoons of olive oil sort of like what you probably that's around the max of what you'd want a day so nobody's drinking olive oil and then the other thing that is if you want to choose which olive oil because i get overwhelmed when i walk into a store and i see all these like a whole wall full of olive oils right everybody's marketing here's what i do again i pick up the olive and oil and i look at the ingredients what do i look for i look for mono varietal olive oil mono varietal means it's made with just one kind of olive and i look for the one kind of olive that that that oil is made from from three different varieties of olive in spain spanish olive oil i look for picuol p-i-c-u-a-l picky olives among the highest in in polyphenols in the oil so the olive oil will be loaded second um greek olive oil um the koroneki olive which is from the peloponnesis it both both the picuan coronicki are very common olives so that's a good news it's not very expensive highest amount of poly one of the top three polyphenols and the third for italian olive oil i look for oil that's been pressed from a mono varietal called moriolo and that comes from umbria and there that's less common harder to find a little pricier but i just gave you three olives uh pickuel kornicky mariolo that are not most of them are not good eating olives but they're great for olive oil they're packed with polyphenols if you get uh olive oil that is mono-varietal pressed only from each of those you can be guaranteed that you're getting sort of the top the sort of the capitocapo of the polyphenols in the olive oil yeah i love that i i actually in in my kitchen as we sweet now is the picky olive it's uh well i would have called it a single origin but that's because i'm probably used to picking coffee but as you were describing that there was such a wonderful energy in your voice and your body language it reminded me of like a wine connoisseur talking about the different varieties of wines or or a coffee connoisseur talking about that you know i get a single origin bean from this particular farm but i guess it's not that different is it it's about going back to where does this come from how was it processed what is actually in my hand right now that i'm about to buy yeah and you know there is great pride that we as humans have always had and it's still within us to know something about the food that is around us i mean you know uh if you talk to a farmer they are proud of what they have you talk to a villager they're really proud of what their community what grows around their community and again i think that you know something that maybe that we're fighting against because i want to draw back the jargon that you raised at the beginning that i think is helpful to think about what are we what are we really fighting against you know i think we're fighting against our distraction from ourselves getting to know who we are getting to know slowing down so we can actually understand our own pace we're getting distracted by the uh by the by the pace of what we're expected to do and so we've got no time for ourselves right i mean every every young working parent certainly feels that way you know like man i'm so busy at all time for myself and yet when it comes to food and health we all need to have that time for ourselves and i think we should take great pride in saying what it is that we actually love yeah a lot of people talk about the health properties of vegetables of course you promote all kinds of vegetables which have different impacts on the body but some of the time we're told to sprinkle or pour some olive oil onto the vegetables because it helps us absorb nutrients from them what's your perspective on that in view of what you've just said about oil and you know perhaps not over consuming it even though it can be healthy yeah well there's two let's unpack that because there's two things that you were describing one is that in plants let's take a tomato as a great example there are natural substances natural chemicals uh like lycopene lycopene is a carotenoid it helps to make the tomato red it has lots and lots of healthful properties it's a powerful antioxidant i've studied lycopene in a laboratory and it actually can help starve cancers by cutting off the blood supply it can slow the shortening of telomeres um to slow cellular aging and they can they can protect our dna from even sunlight and ultraviolet exposure lots of good things about it now lycopene actually is a uh naturally occurs in a tomato on a vine in a chemical form that our body doesn't absorb that well so if you pick a tomato off the vine and you cut it up and you throw it into a salad it might taste great just got some vitamin c in it it's a great source of hydration and great flavors okay especially if it's like a home-grown heirloom type of tomato but you're not going to get the light you're not going to get as much lycopene you're probably only going to get maybe 20 of the lycopene that's in there but you want it like for me i want to get as much of the good stuff as i can so here's what research has found if you wanted to convert that chemical structure of lycopene into a form that you can absorb better your body can avidly absorb what you want to do is you want to heat the tomato like in a pan and with the heat will change the chemical structure from a form your body doesn't absorb that well into a form that your body avidly absorbs it loves to absorb it now you go from twenty percent absorption to eighty percent absorption you flipped you flipped it around completely upended that equation completely now you're really absorbing it now here's one additional thing though how would you heat a tomato in a pan you put heat in water or nothing no not really you put a little bit of olive oil in it now why is that and and it's because lycopene is a substance that we call fat soluble it's a lipid it loves to dissolve into fats so a little bit of olive oil in tomatoes on a pan sauteed so soft changing chemical structure flavors are really great now and you have that now when you uh eat that tomato sauce sauteed in olive oil the oil the olive oil with the lycopene is carried into your body even more efficiently than if it were cooked in water and so again that's an ex that's just one example of thousands of how oils with fat soluble foods by the way if you didn't want to look at olive oil here's another common snack in the united states anyways kind of tearing a page book from latin american cuisine you have these tortilla chips and then you wind up actually having salsa and guacamole the salsa has often sort of stewed down tomatoes cooked down tomatoes served at room temperature or chilled and then the guacamole is just avocado that's been smashed up now avocado has a lot of healthy fats in it that's it's a fat soluble veggie it's actually quite uh nutritious and remarkably uh people eating avocado actually shrink their waistline because actually even though you're eating fat it actually makes you it burns down harmful fat it's a whole other story that we had but if you have guacamole avocado with tomatoes you get more lycopene and so that happens to be kind of a popular snack uh in the united states yeah i love that so the right combination of foods can actually help absorb the nutrients i think black pepper also can do that right with certain nutrients well right so black pepper is so this is an interesting thing we most of us have heard that turmeric which is a kind of a root um when you cut it open it's this bright beautiful bright orange a lovely color and and turmeric is also a dried spice used in south east asian cuisine including indian cuisine is where i first became acquainted with it it not only makes food beautiful it actually makes food delicious it's got a quite a lovely taste to it it's a spice inside turmeric is curcumin curcumin is one of those natural chemicals kind of like lycopene it's one of those mother nature's treasure chest mother nature's pharmacy with an f not a ph and the the the the curcumin has a lot of properties anti-inflammatory it's antioxidant it cuts off the blood supply feeding cancers um it uh actually is helpful for your stem cells as well it's it really activates almost all of your body's health defenses and it's good for your gut microbiome so why not just you know enjoy turmeric as a spice by itself because it's so potent that our body actually doesn't absorb everything that it could in fact our body kind of it kind of gets a lot of it gets flushed out you know uh at the tail end and so what we want to do to improve our body's extraction of the good um the good stuff the the turmeric it turns out that if you have fresh cracked black pepper all right there's a substance in fresh cracked black pepper called piperine pepperine is one of mother nature's um again you know these remarkable chemicals that actually influences the body in pimperine helps the body hang on to the curcumin so if you have fresh cracked black pepper with your turmeric you're actually creating a one-two punch that allows you to absorb more of the curcumin yeah i love that so the right combinations can actually help us get more out of these incredible whole foods but i think the wrong combinations potentially can also make certain foods less beneficial one example i've heard you talk about before is what happens when you put milk into tea i know you're a big fan of tea on the last conversation you spoke about a lot of the benefits of tea but i think i've heard you say that if you add milk to your tea that actually you reduce some of the beneficial effects is that right you know those scientists that do television shows to actually uh make science accessible to people this is kind of where we need to go with this this topic so look tea green tea especially has a natural polyphenol that's called catechins egcg uh epigallocatechin gallate egcg and the catechin is actually just part of the natural substance in the tea leaf so whether you're a brewing tea with a bag or whether it's loose leaf tea or whether it's matcha which is just powdered tea leaves the fact of the matter is that into the brew into the liquid the hot liquid comes all these phytochemicals including these catechins so when you sip straight tea the catechins go right in they're easily absorbed by your body and so you know our blood levels of catechins go way up so many things that catechins can do one of the things that's important is actually it's it's a relaxant it actually helps lower your stress it lowers the catecholamines and so other things that helps your lipids it actually also helps fight cancer it's anti-inflammatory kind of like curcumin it's it's a substance that has so many beneficial things that at least when i drink tea i want i want to get as much as i can out of my food all right now i re i deeply respect traditions of of eating and drinking and one of the things that um you know i know is a tradition in england is you know you put or in ireland you actually put some milk or cream into your tea it actually um changes the flavor profile uh and and it's lovely i you know i've i've had plenty of teas in england before and and i i i find it to be just such an incredibly um uh nice i feel great you know sort of like having an english tea put dairy in it here's what you need to know dairy and i'm talking about cow dairy right so not not not milk this is applies to cow here we'll come back to the nut milk in a second cow dairy okay actually is fat milk has got fat in it like butter which is made out of milk and um and the fat when you put it into your tea does change its flavor but that's not what we're talking about here we're talking about the fact that when milk or cream is put into tea the fat molecules in the cow dairy form little soap bubbles these are microscopic soap bubbles they're called micelles fat likes to stick with fat and so tea is mostly water and so when you pour milk into tea the the bubbles the dairy fat sticks together and a little makes a little tiny soap bubble and what does it do those sub bubbles trap the polyphenols from tea it traps the catechin so you've got some good stuff wrapped in a soap bubble of of dairy and now when you drink the tea the catechin is trapped in the soap bubble it doesn't get absorbed as easily in your stomach and it just rolls down your gut and a lot of it comes out the other end okay and so you're missing out on a lot of the good stuff you get a great you know you get a nice flavor and so i have you know what i'm telling you is that if you're drinking uh milk uh or cow milk dairy put it in your tea you're getting the you're getting good flavor if you if that's what you like but you're missing out on all as as most of the polyphenols so just be aware that that's what you're actually doing now if you want to actually still cut the tea with something that is milk like nut milks are fine because they don't actually have the same fatty reaction that the dairy cow dairy has so almond milk uh cashew milk um those those soy milk they're all fine i mean that's really interesting and i like the way you frame it with this deep respect for cultures and traditions because i hear that and i think for someone who might be listening or watching this and they think you have it you know what it's just a part part of what i do like i i love putting milk in my black tea or i know some people even put it in their green seed which i certainly haven't tried before they might hear that and they may not want to change what they do but is this where potentially [Music] supplements could come in let's say someone they like the taste of milky tea but they hear that i think well i want all those benefits of those polyphenols and the catechins that doctor he was talking about maybe i can boost that another way by taking a supplement is there any merit to that way of thinking and i guess you could expand that broadly into what is your view of you know supplements as a whole huge category but there are some really good quality supplements out there perhaps you could speak to those issues a little bit please yeah well let's let's pick up the thread on t for a second because i i had this discovery that might be uh useful for your listeners who are in exactly that situation where they like the taste of milk in their tea i discovered there is something called milk tea and it's actually from taiwan it's grown in the mountain and it actually it's it's just pure tea leaves that when you brew it it tastes like it's got dairy in it oh wow it's quite it's quite amazing i mean if if i made a cup of that for you and then made a cup of of english tea with milk in it you would have a hard time telling the difference it's quite remarkable milk tea it's a kind of i think it's an oolong style tea so it's mildly fermented and still got green properties it's got polyphenols in it but it literally it has to do with the whey the climate the the way that it's naturally grown and the type of tea it is so all right so let's move that aside for a second um uh um all right well so what about supplements you know i think that we should look to the word itself a dietary supplement means something to top off so i always tell people you know if you have a choice of getting it from the whole food the whole food will tend to have a lot of other stuff that's good for you if you eat whole plant-based foods for example you get the fiber you get the polyphenols you get a lot of other chemical substances you get the natural peptides that are found in foods that if you got a pure supplement you might get the one molecule or two molecules that it's been created for like a vitamin c supplement um if you want to top off your vitamin c it's pure vitamin c you're going to get a lot of it if you if you take your take a multi vitamin but you know if you had citrus you're going to get all that flav you're going to get the different kind of flavor you're going to you get some you do get sugar you get fiber you got the limonene and all these other hesperidin all these other bioactives that you can't get from a regular supplement alone that said you are absolutely right supplements can be really important particularly for people who have difficulty getting a lot of of some nutrients or their food so for example i think omega-3 fatty acids are a great supplement if you get a high quality omega-3 not everybody eats oily fish you know dain you know two to three times a week you know you only need to eat um the amount in each serving with the size of a deck of playing cards so you don't need to eat very much but you know that's not something people most people do people who live on the on the coastline they might be doing it but many people don't um so omega-3s are so important to our health i mean this has been shown time and time and again that's a supplement that's that's definitely worth taking and and it's a lot easier to swallow um omega-3s than it is actually to go to their fish monger and then to look at what the catch of the day is that's an example another example of a supplement i think is really where we're taking um is probably vitamin d3 okay vitamin d uh you know for for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere where we don't have as much sun uh all the time all year round and where it's cold so we're indoors a lot and not always outdoors under the sunshine so i'm not talking casa del sol i'm not talking about south africa you know or australia i'm talking about you know england northern europe north america you know sort of the northeastern side okay we don't get as much sunlight and even if we do go outside because it's cold we wear a lot of clothes and so our skin tends to be covered up and so vitamin d is made by our skin when sunlight actually hits it and so we don't we tend to be vitamin d deficient so here's an example of where you can eat foods like mushrooms that can have vitamin d for example uh by the way i don't know this is a little little tip a tidbit for you i just told you that human skin with ultraviolet radiation from the sun will make more vitamin d but did you know that if you took just a plain old lowly white button mushroom that contains some vitamin d if you were to um before you eat it when you buy it if you slice it like slice it pretty thinly and you lay this the slices out and you put it in your windowsill so your sun the sun shines on the slice it will make more vitamin d wow you want to you want to convert more vitamin e into the into the mushroom so if you're going to prepare something with mushrooms slice them ahead of time stick them in front of a sunny window no matter what time of the year it is you know maybe a couple hours before you um cook with it and the mushrooms will actually give you more vitamin d but it's it's not it's a lot easier to get your regular dose of daily vitamin d um by actually just having d3 supplements i want to get into some specific foods later on in this conversation but just to sort of um tease people as it were right at the start are there a couple of kind of facts about some specific foods that you think would be surprising for people that a lot of people may not be aware of yeah well first of all there are a lot there's a lot of mythology about foods and and some of it's wrong and when i say myth i'm referring to urban legends so as a bit of a teaser most people most women have heard that soy should be avoided because it's dangerous so eating soy can increase your risk for breast cancer that is a common thought but it's completely false it is an urban legend research actually shows that those women who are at highest risk including women who have breast cancer the more soy they eat the lower their chances of death and so that's an example of an eye-opening fact that science brings to the table about soy here's another one many people have heard that tomatoes should be avoided because they're a member of the nightshade family which is poisonous and that tomatoes contain a deadly toxin called lectins that should be avoided and it causes inflammation in the body well that's also completely wrong there are thousands of lectins out there tomatoes happen to have some of the non-toxic ones um and in fact the studies of tomatoes have actually shown in more than 30 000 people that those men who eat just two to three servings of cooked tomatoes a week have a 30 lower risk of developing prostate cancer and so again two examples of common foods that are surrounded by urban modern mythology that science cuts through like a hot knife through butter in order to reveal what the true health benefits could be yeah thank you for sharing that and yeah later on in this conversation i'd love to get into some more specifics around particular foods but i think at the start here just to sort of set the scene one of the things that really struck me about your approach is you know how you look at health and disease so many of us you know i'm a medical doctor i trained in the 90s in edinburgh medical school you know we're trained how to diagnose disease and then treat it and sometimes we talk about preventing disease in the future but you sort of reframe that slightly didn't you to sort of ask yourself well why is it that we're not getting sick more often and i think that's a really beautiful it's a subtle distinction but it's but it's such a beautiful way of looking at the human body so can you tell me a little bit about you know why did you frame it that way and by doing so what answers did you get that can help us all with our health and well-being yeah so like yourself during my education and training in medicine you know we're all uh responsible for digesting about 4 000 years of western medical knowledge in in a few years and then to be able to in short order turn that around into everyday practice for our patients right so that's a tall order just to begin with and most of it is about learning how to detect diagnose diseases accurately as accurately as possible and then coming up with essentially a textbook solution i mean that's what we're taught to do from the very beginning recognize the disease recognize a solution try to match them up and then actually deliver that as as something that we can use to help our patients and and i i did that for many many years and in fact i was so inspired by the unmet needs for treating diseases some diseases successfully like cancer like diabetes like blindness frankly i wound up actually being starting a nonprofit organization called the angiogenesis foundations the charity where we as a third party set out to develop better treatments for all of these you know kind of unbeatable diseases looking for their disease common denominator i'm going to come back to common denominator in a second i felt that although you know billions of dollars have been spent towards cancer research or research to prevent blindness as just two different examples or breast cancer or or alzheimer's disease progress in science was formidable but progress and treatment was way too slow and my thought was that if we could actually look at what makes diseases common and similar to one another rather than appreciate only what makes them different from one another so as a researcher we tend to take a take a study a field of study an inch wide and then dive a mile deep into exploring it what i wanted to do was to really upend that idea to say well maybe what we should do is take a look at many diseases and see what the common threads are because if we could find that common thread we might be able to pull the bow back and send a single arrow more efficiently through multiple diseases to have an economy of scale of impact okay so when i did that we wound up becoming enormously successful i've been involved with 41 about to be 42 fda approved treatments for cancer diet complications and diabetes and vision loss and with that kind of success one of the things that it made me realize was the power of science to generate evidence that something works and the other thing that i realized is that treating disease was highly valuable but really misses the mark of preventing the disease in the first place because if all we do as a sort of in our medical world is invent new things to throw at old diseases in this never-ending progression then we're chasing really the tale of a beast that we'll never catch and i wanted to be able to actually figure out how to you know prevent the problem in the first place now a short story about what actually happened that sparked me towards nutrition is i was a doctor for many years in a veterans hospital this is a hospital in the us takes care of people who are former soldiers and you know as a payback for their service they can come to a medical center uh and and receive essentially free care and i i felt compelled a duty actually when i finished my training to be able to pay back uh the people who helped to support and defend uh the country and so i i took on a stint um at a veterans hospital these were some of my favorite patients uh they were uh they were grateful they were uh they had rich lives they had amazing stories to tell and they were just nice people and unfortunately though they were pretty sick so most of the people that i saw were in their 60s and 70s and 80s were terribly obese they had diabetes heart disease cancer respiratory illnesses you name it they had these terrible problems and the thing that struck me that you know because here i was writing prescriptions and sending people to specialists and having them have surgery and all these other interventions and i was very excited actually at the very beginning to be able to let them know some of the treatments that i myself had been involved with helping to develop but what i realized that was the irony is that these soldiers who were so terribly out of shape in the latter part of their lives were once cut fit buff physical specimens that couldn't have even served in the military unless they were in perfect shape and so i had to ask myself what the hell happened to these people they were in great shape and now they're in terrible shape and that's what led me on sort of this um odyssey to think back about what must have like what kept them from being sick in the early days and then what actually happened to their bodies that led them to deteriorate and that's where i came back to this health defense the health defenses that are hardwired in our body because like the so like like soldiers that they were you know they once were the defenders of the country but um as they got older their ability to defend actually waned and so too in our body i realize there's these biological systems that keep us fit keep us healthy and if we're not careful to take good care of them they too will wane in their power to defend us and that's actually how we wind up getting sick yeah it's very powerful what you just shared about the veterans hospital because i think although that's in the latter stages of their life i'm sure there's many people listening to this right now or watching this who would have resonated with that on some level and thought hey you know what when i was at school i used to swim or you know maybe i was on the college or the university squash team or the tennis team and now in my middle age i've got a bit of extra weight i don't have as much energy so you know it's on a continuum isn't it and of course the end of that continuum that's where we tend to get involved there's medical doctors western medical doctors at least and we say oh you have this disease now but actually i think that's a very powerful way of just showing gradually without us realizing as we're you know getting on with our daily lives our health can be deteriorating bit by bit in terms of these defense systems you also mentioned at the start of this conversation the word resilience and how what you try and do or or certainly food when used as medicine can really help us with that resilience perhaps could you take us through these defense systems that you've learned about because i know you've identified five of them i think it would be really interesting for my audience what those are and then i think we'll get to well what can we actually do about each and every single one yeah well let's talk a little bit about resilience first before i talk about the health defenses so think about how resilient the human body is right i mean um we can take we could take a punch and we can get back up on our feet pretty easily throughout most of our lives our body knows how to heal so if you wind up getting a cold you tend to recover from it if you get a cut on your skin it tends to heal up um if our belly gets upset and we wind up uh you know uh feeling we're in a toilet uh in ways that are not comfortable for us we'll generally rebound back to our normal health i mean that's really most of the experiences that we have as we're younger and that resilience actually is quite an amazing thing because it has to do with this concept that we learn as doctors which is homeostasis our body wants to stay in a homeostatic position and that means like a gyroscope you know or like a big ocean liner you know sailing through you know rough seas there is kind of a set point that no matter how big the waves are we tend to kind of stay set our center of gravity is where everything wants to get back to and that is actually critical health now how what's the gyroscopes of our health how do we actually maintain our balance how do we how do we veer off to the side but rebound back to that center point our own center of gravity and that's where these health defenses actually come into play so uh our health defenses uh which i'm going to tell you five the five of them in a moment actually started to be developed in our bodies when we were still in our mom's womb so when our mom's egg met our dad's sperm and fertilized in the womb within about four or five days these cells primitive cells uh and stem cells wound up forming our organs you know our our circulation our hearts our brains our noses our hands our our feet our bones and along the way at the same time our body formed these remarkable defenses now these defenses are designed to protect our bodies the same way that in a european fortress a medieval fortress there are these defenses right yeah you have the moat you actually have the drawbridge you have those arrow slits that you can shoot out of you've got the curved wall all these defenses that you find in a castle there is a counterpart in our body and in our body our defenses to keep us healthy and resist disease and help us maintain resilience are the following number one we have a defense called angiogenesis angiogenesis two words uh it's actually one word but it's two component parts of it angio meaning blood or blood vessels genesis meaning growth so it's how our body grows blood vessels our circulation and the reason blood vessels are a defense system is because we've got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels packed into the average adult body and these are the highways and byways that deliver blood oxygen that we breathe and the nutrients from the food we eat to every single cell and organ and if we don't have enough of these blood vessels our our tissues our organs starve and many times they'll die so we need our body needs to be able to maintain enough uh blood vessels enough circulation and on the other hand we've got too many blood vessels and overage overgrowth that would be like a a garden that overgrows with weeds those weeds actually obscure the function of a garden and they can actually destroy our health by feeding diseases extra blood vessels can feed diseases like cancer as an example or arthritis or psoriasis or many other types of harmful extra blood unwanted blood vessels and so the body maintains its resilience in circulation by literally maintaining a balance the set point this gyroscope center of gravity and the way that i i tell people it's kind of like the old fairy tale goldilocks so not too many blood vessels not too few blood vessels just but just right like the three bears yeah the not too hard not too soft not too hot not too cold just right this is a paradigm that follows all the health defense systems so blood vessels are one of them secondly are our stem cells remember i said that we formed in a womb with stem cells yeah well when we're born we have extra stem cells left over that were not used so it's kind of like painting a room uh if you're painting a room and you're gonna buy paint right you always buy extra paint because the last thing you want to do is to run out of paint before you finish the job what do you do when that when the room has been completed with some painting you've got extra cans of paint so what do you do you put the cap on you put it in your garage okay for for another time if you need to spot check well this is actually what happens with our stem cells when we're born and our organs have formed all these stem cells the overage and we've got extra stem cells in fact we've got 750 million extra stem cells when we're born that gets packed up into our bone marrow where it basically sits for most of our lives until we need to repair our organs from the inside out so regeneration our ability to be able to renew ourselves is another health defense system the third one is our gut our gut microbiome so much has been made of how important our gut bacteria is i will tell you we're just scratching the tip of the iceberg of understanding our gut bacteria but i will tell you it is so important that we've got about roughly the same number of bacteria growing inside our body as we actually have human cells and beyond bacteria there's even viruses that are healthy viruses i just learned this the other day you know we've got about 39 trillion bacteria growing inside our body most of them are healthy and as you know when we were in medical school we were all taught you know we drank the kool-aid that bacteria are bad and so one must destroy bacteria and hence there are antibiotics to match with bacteria but in fact most bacteria in our bodies are good and occasionally there is a bad actor that kind of springs out and and so uh the the but what i learned was that there are good viruses as well in fact there are 10 times more viruses in and on the body than than bacteria there's 380 trillion viruses the human viral our dna is hardwired as a fourth health defense system hard wired to protect itself against damage from the environment like ultraviolet radiation radon from the ground any chemicals or solvents we might inhale uh oxidative stress even emotional stress which can actually fray our our dna our genetic code our dna can protect that and of course finally our immune system which like a uh like the volume switch on a car radio is perfectly two to be able to deliver a little inflammation where it's needed a lot of immune protection to be able to ward off invaders from the outside like bacteria and viruses and invaders from inside like cancer and that whole system like a volume switch on a radio needs to be able to turn up and when you've had enough to turn it back down and back down to that homeostatic balancing point that set point and for all these health defense systems our body kind of chugs along through life getting uh keeping us right sort of steady as she goes every now and then it's got to rear up um and and swashbuckle to get rid of some disease but it comes right back to center and that's what foods can actually help to support thank you for outlining those five powerful defense systems there's angiogenesis there's stem cells there's the gut microbiome there's dna and our immune system i've got a few questions on each of them um just to go to the fourth one you mentioned dna and i think this really helps to illustrate this very fresh way you had at approaching the body which was why do we not get sick more often i've heard you talk about this in the past that actually our dna is being damaged every single day whether it's air pollution whether it's you know the new carpet in our house and the fumes or the smell and the solvents in the paint you know whatever it might be and you think yes our dna is being damaged yet we're not all getting cancer maybe talk to me a little bit about that because i think that really illustrates this point about our body's defense systems and this resilience that we naturally have you know there's an inherent risk isn't there to be alive and to be human and to exist in the modern worlds yet despite that we're still pretty robust and resilient yeah no that's that's absolutely true so here we are our genetic code we know is so important to us and we know that when it functions properly it makes the proteins that support our life we also know that when our genetic code has mutations and everyone has become familiar with this idea of mutated dna we you know um it tends to cause problems in our body if it can actually continue so mutations that form actually all the time most people don't know this but dna fixes these mutations silently so we are not bothered by them on average the uh a typical person has 10 000 mistakes made in their dna every 24 hours it's just a matter of the sheer volume of cell divisions and the machinery cranking along chugging along listen if you're in a factory you know making a trillion shoes every single day you are going to actually make a few shoes that are not going to be uh perfect right so 10 000 mistakes they get taken off the assembly line and then if the parts of the broken get fixed up uh and then and then everything moves forward so be without even knowing it our body is uh is fixing itself and fixing these natural errors now let's subject the body to planet earth right so we're all born on this planet we go outside what's you know my one of my favorite things is to go out on a beautiful sunny day with blue skies you know i love the warmth of the sun on my skin you know it just from the time i was a kid it made me happy right well that sunshine is ultraviolet radiation the same ultraviolet radiation that you get when you get a sunburn on a beach the same type of ultraviolet radiation you get in a sun tanning booth and we know if you burn on a beach sunburn on a beach or if you go to a tanning salon you highly you magnify your chances of developing a skin cancer because of the ultraviolet radiation mutating your dna now the same thing by the way when you talk about continuum the same thing happens if you're stuck in traffic so think about it you're stuck on a traffic on a sunny day and here you have the sun just beaming right through your windshield or maybe you have your window open it's being on your arm how come we don't develop skin cancer in that situation the the reason is because our body fixes any errors that is made by the ultraviolet radiation from just regular sunlight and what happens in a sun tanning booth or when you burn yourself repeatedly at the beach like getting one or two sunburns not a big deal but when you do that repeatedly you overwhelm the defense systems and that's where these mutations can actually accumulate so dna is actually really um by the way you know we talk about the genetic code only three percent of our dna is actually used to make the stuff that we need for life the rest of it are all instructions including instructions on how to fix itself and so this idea of repair when people hear about antioxidant foods what they're really talking about is adding foods into your body that can assist our dna from warding off damage because antioxidants kind of form like a shield to neutralize the incoming missiles from these activated chemicals reactive chemicals that can actually damage our dna by the same token the foods that we eat that actually create dna damage because they have these chemicals that uh are can actually generate the chemical ability to damage our dna our body has to fight against those as well and so that's why we need to be mindful you know as we make sit down every day to make a decision about what we eat or we go to the store to buy some food we need to realize whatever we put into our body is either going to take our health down or build our health back up and it all works at the level of the defense systems many people these days have caused as as you've already touched on super busy stressed out lifestyles and they're rushing around and they don't have time to cook a fresh whole meal they're often buying things on the go that probably aren't the best thing for them they've probably got high levels of stress so actually they're probably not even absorbing as many nutrients as they could because their digestive system isn't in the right place to absorb those nutrients and i found sometimes you know a good quality supplement like let's say a whole food sometimes a green supplement which has lots and lots of different phytochemicals prebiotics polyphenols in it could be helpful and sometimes can be helpful in the short term to help them have more energy and feel better so that they can then make those lifestyle choices so i know a lot of doctors take quite a hard line on supplements but you've demonstrated some really important ones that i think have been shown in scientific studies have real benefits like vitamin d for sure so yeah i really really appreciate you you know i wanted to support and underscore what you just said you know that i i you know there's there's always something valuable to look at the history of things supplementation um did wasn't developed to be an online internet scam okay supplementation was a really serious effort to improve global nutrition yeah because you know back in even the early 20th century most the world was under nourished that's different than malnutrition i mean maybe there's some momentum to do but under nutrition an undernourished means that you know we were eating food but we weren't eating enough of the right things at the right time and so one of the things that supplements were developed were to do is to really fortify supplement top off yeah you know everyone so that everyone could have a more equal chance of being filling up becoming replete with the key micronutrients that we our body needs to actually survive and so i think it's a mistake to disparage supplements as a category i mean this isn't a theme of what we're talking about today yeah let's not you know let's not throw the baby out the bathwater let's not character assassinate entire categories of things let's be i mean let's let's be discerning and trying to know exactly what we're talking about there are some dietary supplements that are absolutely valuable some that uh uh that's research has actually shown proven to be helpful and some that are can be life-saving uh as well pregnant moms really need to be taking folate you know if you don't have those um you'll have neural tube defects in your babies that the risks go much higher so you really want to be able to actually take the evidence and so this is the other thing i think maybe a useful um coat hook or hat hook to hang for your listeners is that supplements are the real deal because they were once designed originally designed to help the body top off with what it actually needs but if the marketing and we're back to marketing now sounds too good to be true if the claims sound like they're just magical claims that's when you're that's when your spidey sense your radar needs to go on that you know maybe maybe there's something not quite uh fully honest about what is being told about this and it's being misrepresented and so i think that every consumer needs to be able to i mean again this is where i come back to we all have mobile devices we can easily search something when in doubt look it up yeah check it out and then make your own decision if that if that fits your if it's your comfort zone organic or non-organic is another topic that people find confusing if people are able to access organic and they are able to afford it in your view are there any benefits to choosing that right well i want to just tell everyone that first of all i was a skeptic for many years about organic food i thought it was marketing i thought the food looked beautiful was very expensive and i thought it was mostly marketing and the marketing message that i received as a consumer was here's this beautiful food that's more expensive and by the way we don't grow with pesticides and so you've got less harmful chemicals on it and i you know i it didn't feel right to me and i had all these questions in my head about like whether or not that's really true and what do i just wash my food a little bit more i mean i i i wasn't really sure what was real or not well i changed my mind a few years ago and i'll tell you i was at the royal society in london actually at a really incredible meeting with um horticulturalists with uh astrophysicists just a bunch of incredible scientists and i had the privilege of sitting next to a horticulturalist and i was i was talking with her about it a new paper research paper that had come from out of the journal nature which is a british publication one of the premier scientific journals and i said you know i just read this paper that was really astounded me they looked at strawberries and they were looking for the natural substance a lactic acid which is what makes strawberries tart and electric acid is anti-inflammatory it helps your immune system it starves cancer i've done research on electric acid myself and so i know how powerful it is and they were looking at strawberries comparing organic versus um conventionally grown strawberries another way to say that is strawberries made grown with pesticides or not with or no pesticides and they were looking at ellagic acid in the strawberries and when they measured the conventionally grown strawberries they all had some ellagic acid that was fine okay um i expected that but then when they measured the organic strawberries every single organic strawberry they measured had two times or more of the ellagic acid and i thought that was absolutely astounding that an organically grown fruit would actually have more of that beneficial substance that mother nature's kind of bioactive and so i talked to the horticultures and i said okay so help me understand why right so look you know you know when you're talking to a real scientist when when scientists admit that they don't know something right so and and that's how anybody who says they know everything probably not a scientist i mean so so i i literally admitted my my ignorance about this and i asked the horticulturist can you help me understand why that might be and she gave me this answer that i've subsequently dove deeply more deeply and it's absolutely true it's true with coffee as well mother nature um uh in part made these bioactives like ellagic acid in strawberries or on coffee chlorogenic acid is another one of these and the way that um plants respond to bugs nibbling on the stems and leaves biting at them okay that's the pest okay might make the plant not look so nice all right it might even like might even mar the fruit a little bit so it's not quite as beautiful but the plant reacts to those little nibbles as an injury as a wound and in response and then wound healing response it produces more electric acid yeah or in a case of coffee it makes more chlorogenic acid so the little nibbling is part of kind of the way that evolution actually developed um how plants respond to create more of these bioactives so what happens so why is there just difference well if you actually grow a strawberry with pesticides there's fewer bugs the plant looks nicer fruit looks nicer no bugs no injury less electric acid being made and so all of a sudden like i this light bulb went off in my head and i've this is a few years ago that i i i realized this and i had this conversation everywhere i've looked uh any research that's been done it is true that the bioactives are higher in the organically grown plants and that started to change my mind about organics because the argument now is not that organics have less bad stuff the argument is the organics have more good stuff now all of a sudden i have a different view of the the nature of how this fruit is grown and what the benefits of growing without pesticides are yeah super clear explanation thank you for that and then taking that one step further which goes i guess beyond organic into non-organic as well but let's take something like an apple or a carrot let's say a carrot for example there's all kinds of phytonutrients and beneficial compounds within that carrot so what happens when we start to peel off the skin off that carrots because my view would be well a lot of the beneficial properties are in that skin right that's what's had to protect itself from the environment from bugs as you've just mentioned so when we are peeling off that skin yes people may want to do it for a taste profile i understand but aren't we reducing how beneficial that food could be by taking off the outside yeah i'm glad you described the fact that we might want to remove and to peel for aesthetic purposes maybe for taste purpose or dry texture purposes but the fact of the matter is we know for a fact that skin does actually have good stuff i'll give you a great example like in an apple or a pear or a peach okay um those are all fruits that you know if you took the time to peel it um you'll have a more homogeneous you know kind of looking piece of fruit but most mothers will tell their kids if you eat if you eat it with the skin you'll get more stuff and it's absolutely true there's not only more fiber oftentimes in the outer layers as you're talking about outer outer layers yeah but there's also more phytonutrients and these bioactives in apples and pears and in peaches there is actually a substance called ursolic acid that's much more concentrated in the outer layer and uracilic acid is one of those bioactives that stimulates blood vessel growth it helps us heal it stimulates angiogenesis so that if we have an injury our bodies will more will speed its healing up that could be really important for our cardiovascular system for example it helps to promote the growth of blood vessels in beneficial sort of ways now that's actually on the peel so okay so how can you eat fruit peel well uh look uh if you had to eat six apricots or six pears uh or six peaches you know that might take a little work or six apples that's that's a pretty commit that's a good commitment to eat six apples um uh even in a day but on the other hand if you actually get dried fruit the dried fruit will take a big fruit and shrink it really small so take a look at an apricot i could i might not be able to i might not feel like eating six apricots whole apricots from the tree but i could easily eat six dried apricots you know uh sort of in a in a dried fruit mix and so again if you want the skin it's not just you know eating the lot the fresh fruit which you can do but you can also get it in a dried form now back to the fresh for a second this this this would be a good reason to buy organic as well because you know when you spray with pesticides for fruits and foods with very thin skins um i mean for carrots you're really there's not a skin it's really just an outer kind of layer of the carrot the the fact of the matter is is that that um if there's pesticides in that area it's very hard to scrub them off i learned by the way from a food safety expert at the u.s department of agriculture who teaches food safety even for a regular piece of produce to wash all the potential pathogens bacteria listeria all these other things that could happen it's recommended that you actually rinse whether it's organic or not you rinse it under cold running water for 60 seconds i did not realize that wow that's been shown and by the way another thing i didn't realize is that even like an onion you're supposed to rinse off before you actually cut it now i i had previously never really washed my onions i just figured if i peel off the skin what's underneath there is pretty clean but then i was told no no you you should see the research you really want to be able to wash that onion 60 seconds in cold running water is what you want to do so again back to the fruit skin a great reason to buy good to have good to eat nutritious more phytonutrients phytochemicals um a good reason to get organic is because it's harder to wash the pesticides off of it and and dried dried versions of fruits are also ways of actually getting the skin as well and that's the other reason again if you get dried fruit get dried organic fruit yeah super interesting i'm conscious of time there's so much i want to talk to you about um yeah let's go here autoimmune disease is on the rise massively across the world frankly and i'd love to hear a little bit from you about the relationship between foods and the development of autoimmune disease and i want to just add there before you respond that you know i've been practicing now as a medical doctor for almost 21 years and you know maybe 10 years ago as i started to really get tuned into how you might start to use food as a therapeutic tool with your patients i've noticed that when certain patients with certain autoimmune diseases like i can remember one clearly this lady with hypothyroidism she was on levothyroxine but she still didn't feel very good at all when i changed her diet i helped her change to a completely whole food diet from like a standard western diet that she was at that time consuming her symptoms went right down we could halve the dose of levothyroxine i think within a few months it was really incredible so maybe you know speak to that if you can a little bit about the relationship and potentially why that could have worked with that patience yeah i mean you know so i've noticed this as well you know over the uh decades of my clinical practice that autoimmune diseases which by the way uh let's just make sure our audience uh the listeners actually uh appreciate this it's not one disease it is dozens scores of actually different types of diseases that all share kind of a common denominator that and the autoimmune part of it is that somehow for some reason the immune system is triggered in ways that actually the immune response causes um harm to your body itself it's sort of the body attacking the body or the body responding the immune system responding in ways that causes incredible distress at the organ level right and so it could be lupus it could be rheumatoid arthritis it could be psoriasis it could be hashimoto's it could be celiac those are some of the more common ones that people actually talk about but in fact there's probably a lot of autoimmune diseases that we don't even recognize it and a new one by the way which is coming down the pike which we believe long covered which many many people uh do have already and i think we're going to see a whole other emergence of of long covet as a significant medical problem uh in the coming decade uh that also seems to be autoimmune as well where the body's immune system has overreacted or is overreacting to attack ourselves our healthy cells okay so if if we're talking about a panoply of different diseases that share this common denominator um what's the what's the role of food well one thing that actually we do know a celiac is a great example of this glutens and gluten enteropathy is that some foods in in the case of celiac it's gluten which is in wheat and whole grains for reasons that we don't fully understand the body sees that and just has a bad reaction it's kind of like that you know the the the family member that you know the the black sheep in a family that comes over for your family holiday gathering and like you just don't have a good reaction to them we all have we all have one or two of those people in our families um and that's how your immune system kind of reacts to something in food that it just doesn't like and it gets pissed off and when it gets angry it actually starts to have this reaction that makes the entire body unpleasant just like that visitor to your home that you just don't react well to like you want to stay in a different room well that reaction is what autoimmune diseases are and that's why when you talk about um you know the levothyroxine just to so your listeners know like that's actually trying to replace something that is damaged because of this reaction you want to actually see we can undo the damage a bit right and autoimmune disease is often treated with steroids what do steroids do they shut down they turn down the volume of the immune system hey this rock music is too loud let's turn it the house music's too loud let's turn it down a little bit okay so that's what steroids do it turns out that if you go back back back back to look at what might be some of the root causes increasingly we're wondering if some of these chemical additives in ultra-processed foods are actually triggering um uh immune responses that are unintended these are unintended consequences and so there's a um theory that in people who say that they're they've got gluten or celiac disease um they're actually don't they don't actually have full blown celiac disease but they're they're reactive allergic they're immuno response reactive to something that's in packaged food that also has gluten in it and so uh so you're you're sort of um there are things that in these chemical laced foods that we may not fully appreciate yet now goes back to what your observation with your patient is so what happens when we take people and there's many people who spend most of their lives eating things out of a box right by the convenience become from a factory sits on the shelf for months or years and you change it to a whole plant-based diet mostly plant-based or a whole foods diet okay now you're talking about not shopping in the middle aisle of the store and i have nothing against the middle there's good treasures in there but you're spending time in the produce or you know if you live in a village you're going to the village market and going first to the fruit and vegetable in herb stand and you're buying all the stuff and now you're getting fresh foods that have all these phytonutrients um you're having to take the time to repair them in tasty ways um you're staying away from that boxed can preserved chemically preserved foods you're allowing your immune system to to calm and you're allowing the phytonutrients to also lower inflammation and we're getting back to a more natural state like that's how i that's how i explain the kind of broad observations that you actually had is probably allowing unburdening the body uh pissing it off less and allowing the body to actually get back to a more natural state that's where it's capable of being less inflamed allow the health defenses to reassert themselves yeah i love that explanation and moving to a whole food diet no matter who you are no matter what your current state of health there's very little side effects or negative side effects i should say there's many effects mostly beneficial effects very very few negative side effects of doing that one thing i must ask dr lee before we end this conversation is in our first chat you mentioned many foods which have super helpful properties two that come to mind are kiwi kiwifruit you mentioned how they can actually help repair dna which is remarkable the amount of people who stopped me in the streets since then to say since that conversation i'll be buying kiwi i've been buying kiwi i've heard it over and over again so that's credit to you dr lee but also tomato as you mentioned i know we covered lycopene in this conversation as well but many people contacted me including some family members to say listen i don't tolerate kiwis like i get a really bad reaction when i have them i don't tolerate tomatoes i get a really bad reaction when i have them and of course this is individual because not everyone has intolerances or reactions to certain foods but for people who've heard your great advice and wanted to bring those in but thought well i can't have that how would you respond to them like what would you say to them to to give them some sort of hope yeah well look what i always tell people is when it comes to food and health it's not just about the food or any single food whether it's a kiwi or tomato it's really about how our body responsibly put inside it so if you don't like kiwis can't find kiwis or are allergic to kiwis all right those are three easy reasons or can't afford a kiwi um you can do a swap out okay so what's what is what are in kiwis kiwi's got vitamin c it's got fiber what are some other foods that actually have vitamin c that also have fiber red bell pepper can actually have that what if you've like well i'd like i'd like something a little sweet okay guava that also has vitamin c and it's also got fiber as well now the research that we discussed last time about the kiwi was research done with kiwi itself but the properties of the kiwi which is vitamin c and fiber and some of the other phytonutrients um those can be found in other fruits as well so kiwi i always say like if you want to kind of stick with the research you got to go with the food that was actually studied but the properties and the principles allow you to actually think about how to swap things out what a tomato great example i don't really like tomatoes i'm allergic tomatoes some people have hypersensitivities like a histamine reaction tomatoes i have i i remember in college i had a classmate who um would never go to the salad bar she would stay as far away as possible because um tomatoes kind of gave her this um super histamine mast cell reaction her whole face would puff up when she actually had anything tomatoes on it and um well guess what lycopene if you want to get the lycopene benefits you know lowers risk of breast cancer by twenty percent lowers the risk of prostate cancer by almost thirty percent protects your dna against sunlight what else is lycopene watermelon watermelon has lycopene as well so maybe you don't like tomatoes maybe you can't get tomatoes well what about a slice of watermelon yeah and so again these swap outs are are really and this is something i think is so important and and this is what i hope to be able to convey through my book and i you know i created a free master class i've been trying to teach people periodically online um how to do this is is think about why something is beneficial for you and then if you can get that food that's perfectly fine if you need to swap it out because you can't find that food or can't afford that food think about what else might be a good standard yeah right and at the end of the day it still has to taste good for you so maybe you don't like tomatoes but you like watermelon maybe you don't like kiwi but you actually like guava sorry interrupts if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification bell and now back to the conversation we've mentioned cancer a few times in the conversation so far and i completely agree even the name i think strikes fear into people i don't know when you were at medical school when i was i was told the statistic that one in four people in the uk at that time so i started in 95 at medical school are going to develop some kind of cancer in their lifetime that has since gone up to one and three and a few years ago in the uk it was published that uh one in two adults at some point in their lifetime are going to develop cancer so this is a pretty alarming rise as you say we all know people who are either suffering from who have suffered from or who even have died from cancer you mentioned at the start about soy i have never covered on this podcast food and how it can help us with cancer whether that's for prevention of cancer or potentially as part of the treatment regime for cancer so i wonder if you could speak to a little bit about food and and how we can think about that in terms of cancer prevention and treatment well so there's a whole field of research that was developed in the 1970s by a researcher named michael stucker michael sporn from the national cancer institute looking at the opportunity of intercepting cancer before it becomes a clinical problem this is this idea of cancer prevention originally it was looking at chemicals that could prevent cancer from starting at its early stages then it became angio prevention which is can we interfere with androgenesis so the cancers actually can't grow a blood supply as a way of controlling it and now we know that there's plenty of foods that have been studied that actually have been shown to be associated with reduced risk of cancer whether it's green tea whether it's soy whether it's tomatoes whether it's stone fruit you know peaches and plums um there's there's a a plethora in fact i write about more than a hundred different foods in my book youtube disease that actually have various abilities to impact on angiogenesis towards health now what i think is really amazing is how foods can be used during cancer treatment and the reason that's so poignant and i think for people listening who may know somebody undergoing cancer treatment right now i mean look your doctor we're both doctors how many times has a patient who has cancer asked us um uh very earnestly hey doc i've got cancer i'm getting treated i'm getting my chemo but what should i be eating is there anything you can advise me to right that's such a common question it's a question that almost every cancer patient asks their doctor and it's a question that almost no doctor can answer so the typical response that a patient gets is incredibly frustrating and and aggravating them because the doctor is just saying you know what either they say i don't know there's nothing there's nothing out there because no evidence on food can help or they say you know go eat whatever you want go eat some junk food or some fast food because at least you get some nutrition the most important things you don't lose weight well actually scientists said both of those things are not true number one actually cutting down your caloric intake during cancer treatment actually reboots your health defenses to fight cancer so intermittent fasting and you know manipulating your metabolism uh by lowering caloric intake actually is an anti-cancer strategy number one number two actually there are certain foods you can eat that actually can help you fight cancer and the best most compelling examples all have to do your health defenses so um there is the newest form most profound form a cancer treatment that's a biggest advance in 100 years for cancer treatment is immunotherapy and immunotherapy which is used everywhere uk north america russia china everywhere is a new type of cancer treatment it doesn't poison the body like chemotherapy does and it's not even a targeted therapy that's like a heat-seeking missile you you infuse into the body immunotherapy is a lot more simple and more natural in this concept hey let's just use the body's own immune system and harness it to be able to destroy cancer because remember we talked about this early on like cops on the beat the immune system conducts surveillance and takes out the bad guys the drug dealers on the sitting on a street corner well what happens if you had cancer even if it's metastatic and spread what happens we allow your own immune system to do it so this is now reality immune therapy is being given to cancer patients and it allows your immune system to wipe out cancer it is so dramatic that in about 20 of people you get a phenomenal response and in a smaller group of people you can that your immune system can wipe out cancer completely i give an example of in the u.s one of our oldest living presidents is president jimmy carter you know as a peanut farmer he came from the state of georgia when he retired from his presidency when he finished his presidency he went back to his sunny state and he wanted to build houses and with this non-profit this ngo called habitat for humanity they spent a lot of time outdoors under the baking sun building houses for homeless people okay and in so doing he got a lot of sun damage which caused mutations in his skin which led to skin cancer that spread to his liver and his brain so he was in his early 90s when he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma because it has spread and melanoma is such a deadly cancer um most of his doctors basically said this is game over so he withdrew from public life he wrote his own obituary and it was about to sort of just you know make uh sort of meet his maker and he he sort of became he got he became at peace with himself but then at the 11th hour he enrolled into a clinical trial of one of these immune therapies it's something called a checkpoint inhibitor and um and he got this infusion and remarkably at 90 years old his own immune system reared up on his haunches and wiped out and did what it's supposed to do it wiped out all the cancer in his brain in his liver all over his body and he went from having metastatic cancer with brain metastasis that's a game over kind of situation when you and i are training to actually having no cancer and he's alive today with no sign of cancer happened to my mother too who had endometrial cancer cancer in the lining of the uterus it's spread everywhere and we put her on a immune therapy same kind as the president did at press the form present and in three treatments only over the course of nine weeks once every three weeks no chemo okay all of the her her uh 80 year old immune system wiped out every bit of cancer in her body and she's been completely cancer free this isn't even a cure this is a reset this is getting back to baseline restoring health because that's what your body's supposed to do this is kind of really full circle to what we were talking about at the start of this conversation isn't it the body's resilience the body's natural ability to you know patrol itself and actually repair damage and be resilient and it's it's incredible now that you're talking about these drugs that are being used to really help support the immune system but it but i think i think what you're coming to is that food can also do that as well is that right yeah well well no yeah yes but it's sort of the combination so remember i said that for this type of immune therapy 20 of people have these really amazing responses which means that the majority don't and for a long time we were scratching our heads saying okay what's going on because there's nothing more frustrating than a breakthrough that only works for a small proportion of people we've got to use science to figure out what makes the difference well so one of my colleagues dr lauren zippogo in paris she's at the institute gustaf rusi which is a one of the big cancer research centers of europe looked at 200 patients with different types of cancer all getting immune therapy and she looked at every compared every uh dimension that she could between people who responded and people who did not respond very well to immunotherapy and you know what she found the difference was one bacteria in their gut it wasn't genetics it wasn't body size wasn't obesity it wasn't concomitant disease it was actually one bacteria that bacteria is acromancium mucinophilia now this is out of the 39 trillion bacteria in the body this one has been studied and it's stuck out it's kind of like finding a fossil in the hillside there's probably a lot of fossils but they she found this one this uh bacteria was present in responders and if you had this you responded to immune therapy and had a better outcome for with cancer and if you didn't have it man your outcome was not good so how do you get this bacteria to grow well it turns out it's all about your diet because there's no probiotic you can take for acromancia acromancia can be grown you can grow akromancia in your gut by having uh by help by eating foods that help your gut secrete mucus now that sounds disgusting to a lot of people it's gross mucusy gut but in fact our gut naturally secretes mucus just like our mouth normally secretes saliva and and this bacteria acromancia it's got its full name acromance is just its first name its last name is mucinophila so akkermansia mucinophilip means it loves to grow a mucus yeah so when you actually eat foods like pomegranates or pomegranate juice or cranberries or conquered grapes or concrete or the juice from these it prompts your gut to secrete healthy mucus it's kind of like fertilizer in the soil your garden is going to love to grow better that acromancy grows there it actually makes you a responder so that actually is a difference of how foods can make the difference in one bacteria now two weeks ago a paper a landmark paper was published in the journal science which is one of the big credible scientific journals major scientific journal this is like an 80 person study led by md anderson cancer research center in the united states uh with the national institute of health and they looked all again at melanoma that had spread people getting immunotherapy and they found that another bacteria they found the second bacteria of responders it's called ruminococcus all right now i i encourage your listeners not to stress out about remembering these fancy names it's kind of like when you go to a a museum you get the dinosaur hall you're not going to remember the latin names of all the dinosaurs you're gonna remember man that was pretty cool that big one yeah it's called t-rex but you don't need to remember all the latin names so ruminococcus uh is is part of responder profile for immunotherapy and what they wanted to find out is what dietary intake was correlated with this healthy bacteria with a good outcome and it was dietary fiber and what they found is that those people who ate more dietary fiber had more rheumatoid and had a better response so how much fiber they calculated it they calculated for every five grams of fiber per day they got a 30 decrease in mortality 30 okay on immunotherapy now what's 5 grams of fiber a day this that's how much you get 5 grams of fiber in an average size pair that's all you need to eat a day to make this difference now think about that if you had melanoma and if you were getting immunotherapy your doctor is probably not telling you yet to actually eat fiber but this is the nature of breaking research in food as medicine is not food versus medicine i'm not on a hilltop waving a thing of kale saying everybody should forget about their medicines then don't go to your doctor anymore what i'm saying is that food plus medicine it is another powerful tool in the toolbox and people with cancer need to know that yeah they really do and you remind me of a story i've heard you share i think in an interview i saw of yours in the past where there was a patient who was due to have some immunotherapy and you checked out her stool and found out that she had no akkamancia musinophilia so you halted things for three weeks you encouraged these kind of foods that went up and she responded perfectly is that an accurate uh reflection of that story yeah that you captured it exactly and and so i think that you know as we move into the future we're going to be putting together this puzzle that you know it's almost like we've seen what we need to do for years like we intuitively we've known that foods can uh help us get better that foods and medicine have got to work together this cat you know why do cancer patients ask that question because they know inherently there's got to be something there and and so one of the things that i'm really committed to doing you know in my career is trying to up the level that doctors actually have to be able to take the latest science and answer those patient questions like patients don't really want to know all the mumbo jumbo the scientific details they're not equipped in many cases to really go into that level of detail but doctors need to be sophisticated enough if you can understand how an immunotherapy works which is pretty complicated then you need to be able to understand how a food works yeah i mean i think you've done a wonderful job uh from what i've seen over the last years of spreading the word about this your book eats a big disease is i think it's a wonderful read for anyone you know public or doctors to learn more about what kind of foods can help them i think there's over 200 foods in there that you've detailed is that right yeah that's right over 200 foods you know so this whole idea that our body craves diversity our health defenses respond to so many different foods so i basically put together a catalog of more than 200 foods that activate one or more or multiple health defenses and the wonderful thing and this is really one of the sort of the take-home messages i want your viewers and listeners to have in here that the foods that activate our health defenses taste great many of them are part of traditional food cultures mediterranean cultures asian cultures so you don't have to fear your food anymore for health we don't have to think about taking away all the foods that we love to eat we can actually lean into the foods that we love that are healthy for us and start there and so one of the things that i do you know i've always challenged people who go well you know i've never really liked dr lee to eat healthy so i'm kind of bummed out i give them a sharpie and a copy of my book and i say go to the tables and i said take five minutes and leave through here and circle every food that you like that you like to eat and i've never met anybody who wouldn't be able to circle 10 foods at least and then i and then i they come back to me and i'm like look you've identified all these circled foods activate your health defenses start with these stick with these and then explore all these other foods out there that's that's the best way to enrich our lives and our health at the same time yeah and this knowledge you give people uh dr lee is very empowering because it could be that that person who does that and circles these foods goes oh i'm already having like mushrooms and bees i'm already eating foods and even that just reframes in their mind that they're already using food as medicine for their body you mentioned cancer patients of course of course they want to know what else they can do whether it's cancer or anything patients want to feel a sense of agency over their health and their life right so you know no one does well when they think well i can't do anything i just need to leave it up to that treatment or that doctor we all like to feel that we're sort of playing a role and participating in our house so i think your work and research and your books and these master classes you run on your website i think are so helpful at giving people that agency when it comes to cancer dr lee there's a lot now about sugar and cancer and i think this is where there's a bit of complexity around food because some of these foods of course let's say kiwi fruits or you know pomegranate juice or the sort of foods you're talking about of course some of them can raise our blood sugar some of them do contain degrees of sugar i know they come with lots of other ingredients as well but how can you help us look at that what's the relationship between sugar and cancer and then how does that impact the foods that we consume yeah it's a great question and i get asked this a lot what i try to do is to make people feel comfortable with the idea that our body needs sugar in fact the organ in our body that needs the most sugar is our brain it is it is uh you know sugar fuels our metabolism and the key is that in most people who are able to your body is able to process a small amount of sugar without a problem without any problem whatsoever and so the sugars that you might have encounter in your whole foods so fruits and vegetables those are completely fine your body should be able to take care of that it's the the sugars that are dangerous for diseases and the sugars that damage your microbiome that [Music] spark inflammation that can even damage your dna that's the concept of added sugar so it's a can of soda that's got 10 tablespoons of added sugar to it to make it really sweet no body no human body can can can tolerate that over any period of time and so what i try to say is that like it's so easy so tempting when it comes to something like sugar to to go for that all or nothing approach no our body needs a little sugar your body can actually handle most sugar when it comes into fruit or vegetable it's just fine added sugar candies cakes sodas okay um you know that those are the ones that easily overwhelm you so if you're sensitive to sugar just like you've got diabetes you've got to sort of cut down or cut out those things and be super mindful of of of making those type of choices but fruits and vegetables you have to look at the human data okay don't focus on how much sugar is in a mango mango is pretty sweet fruit take a look at the human data to show that people who eat mango and other tropical fruits have a much lower incidence of disease x and y and z look it you can't argue with the sites and you can't argue with the data um uh sugar itself nothing that's natural is by itself uh inherently evil and i think that's the thing that i'm trying to get people to think about with sugar it's a matter of source it's a matter of quantity and a matter of degree yeah i want to be very respectful to your time uh i've not even scratched the surface of what i wanted to talk to you about so maybe we can set up another conversation in the future at some point but just to finish off the the sort of cancer conversation um i'd love to mention before we end a few sort of more helpful foods like mushrooms for example that you would recommend people focus on but where does fasting fit into this because we talked about the addition of foods into our diet to help us repair dna and such like but there's also a case isn't there to actually withdraw foods from our body for a set period of time to help us heal and repair as well right right so again similarly to what we were how we were just talking about sugar fasting is another topic that's captured the public attention and people think of sort of fasting as extremes i think that we tend to think when foods in terms of extremes um here's the science we know that um the body needs a certain number of calories just to function in this ordinary state and we know that if you go on a if you're lost in the desert or and you don't have any food you're not going to be eating you're going to starve to death and at some point your body's going to run out of energy and your systems are going to collapse and you'll just trip up in the desert uh and and then be dead now we also know that if you pound yourself and you overload yourself with calories uh you're going to be unhealthy metabolically unhealthy you know you can develop diabetes you can develop all these other chronic diseases the chronic inflammatory state and you're going to gain weight and when you gain weight you have the the fat tissue actually is also more inflammatory so these are the extremes you want to avoid you don't want to die in a desert a star and nor do you want to actually balloon up and become deadly unhealthy as i call it all right having spelled out those bookends let's talk about what the science tells us the science tells us that if we restrict our calories okay that's called fasting periods that don't that we don't eat by the way we we all fast when you're sleeping you're fasting that's why they call the morning meal break fast breakfast is because we're actually breaking our evening fast so fasting is something we do it doesn't have to be extreme but we do know that we actually restrict our calories wonderful things happen to our health defense systems it all comes back to our health defenses it turns out it helps your body by by restricting calories intermittent fasting our body's defenses and angiogenesis helped us starve cancer it kind of helps our body cut off the blood supply to cancers we know that when you actually um intermittently fast you call out more stem cells your stem cells kind of reboot and then the fresh ones come out so it's kind of like um trying to think like changing the batteries in a flashlight you get refreshment we know when you intermittently fast it also reboots your gut microbiome yeah so um you know it kind of takes away some of the bad neighbors and some fresh neighbors better neighbors that reorganize the neighborhood we also know that intermittent fasting helps to repair your dna and it even slows down cellular aging at the level of the caps on the end of your dna the telomeres that burn down normally during aging intermittent fasting slows that aging process down at the cellular level and inflammation and intermittent fasting by the way helps us become develop a more fortified immune system because part of the reboot at the stem cell level is to make new immune cells so we've got fresh super soldiers produced coming right out of the oven uh for to help uh our immune system so these are ways that intermittent fasting has been shown to help our defenses doesn't mean that you have to do it all the time it means that this is another technique we can use to kind of up our game uh periodically when it comes to our health is it something you do in your own life you know the answer is yes and i've been doing this since medical school i don't know if this this was your experience but man when i was in medical school i have to say it was difficult for me to have three square meals a day as i say um you know i i would sometimes breakfast i would sometimes miss lunch i would you know i would try not to miss dinner but sometimes i wouldn't have a meal for you know because i was so crazy busy and i think i naturally um over the course of a week probably skip three meals a week and you know that you don't you don't have to go crazy you don't have to be you don't have to be a robot yeah to do in do intermittent fasting skipping a handful skipping a few meals a week actually is helpful for your body sounds like you were intermittent fasting by accident before it even became a thing uh final two quick questions if i can um could you leave the listeners with some kind of top foods that you would ideally have them focus on i appreciate that actually it's very hard to distill everything down to that um but also you wrote your book we're recording this end of january 2022 it came out from what i can tell march 2019 almost three years ago if you were writing the book now what new information would you put in it that you weren't able to put in three years ago let me start with that question first because the answer is i'm actually writing my next book right now okay so i'm actually adding all and enhancing that information so my book my next book is really kind of a sequel to this first book and it's you know so it's not on a completely different it's not switching off the topic it's like what have we learned about the health defenses that take things to the next level so i will um kind of create not a spoiler but a teaser and i will tell you that the next level of where you go with your health defenses is the metabolism so not only can you actually improve all your uh health defenses but our health defenses are inextricably wired to our metabolism and our metabolisms obviously wired to our ability to be able to control one of the most important organs in the body and this is a bit of a surprise body fat is an organ so while many people curse the amount of body fat that they actually have the reality is back to the set point we want to kind of use fat to our advantage and so that's what my next book is about is sort of more into health defenses more taking it to the level of metabolism and then taking it to actually managing fat finally for the right reasons now let's talk about some foods that that everybody should know about i i'm going to purposefully tell you um tell it to people through my own lens because i want to tell people the foods that i actually enjoy so i enjoy green tea okay here's my earl grey but i have got lots of tins of green tea i enjoy coffee so think about it i got tea one egg and coffee in the other coffee by the way contains chlorogenic acid chlorogenic acid is a natural kind of insecticide that the coffee plant makes and so by the way that's something we didn't get a chance to talk about is what research is really revealing about how we grow our plants turns out that the nibbles that insects do on plants on the leaves and stems are perceived by the mother plant as a wound so the response to wound healing with these little nibbles that insects make is that the plant pumps out more bioactives like chlorogenic acids so the organic coffee bean actually has more chlorogenic acid than a conventionally grown one because the one that's conventionally grown is all these pesticides now you don't have as many nibbles and so it's not only that you have less of the pesticide less chemicals but you've got more the good stuff which is a good thing so coffee i love i love coffee i love tea um uh uh i like you know among leafy green vegetables which we all know are good for us um i like swiss chard i like some forms of kale dinosaur kale i i like to cook too yeah you know dinosaur kale most people don't realize that's kind of this it's got this funny pattern that looks like dinosaur skin which is why this darker green um that's the kind of kale that is used to make minestrone soup so you can actually cook with it and it and you and you blend it into the background and you get this wonderful dietary fiber mushrooms i love mushrooms all kinds of mushrooms you know white button the lowly white button mushroom packed with a soluble fiber called beta d glucan which boosts your immunity starves cancer most people who get button mushrooms eat the cap the stem actually has got twice as much of the good stuff so don't throw the stems away save those stems make it into a soup cut it up to a salad stir-fry it there's all kinds of ways you can actually use the whole plant i like dried mushrooms as well like porcini mushrooms which you can buy in a specialty store order it online amazing flavor for stew or for uh or risotto anything else you want to make or a pasta i love mushrooms spices and herbs i like all kinds of spicy herbs rosemary basil uh turmeric cinnamon uh all of those types of spices i love the flavors they make your food tastes a lot better seafood um you know i do like salmon but oddly as i got into looking at food lower in a food chain that actually has great healthy omega-3 fatty acids polyunsaturated acids i found that sardines are really delicious these tin sardines and by the way i started this in medical school so i'm kind of giving you a confession i didn't have time to cook a good meal and so if i was late night and i wanted to whip up something i'd boil some pasta like usually some whole grain pasta not very much and then and i would sit around looking at some really good olive oil some tin sardines um uh and uh a squeeze of lemon and i would literally um boil the pasta put it into a put into a pan with a little olive oil i'd open up a tin of sardines and just with a fork cut it up mix it up put some fresh ground pepper squeeze some lemon on it and bam had a mediterranean meal yeah uh so i actually do like seafood um i like that the odd confession i actually really love squid ink so when you have squiddy pasta or or you know you go to spain or italy they have these uh the squid ink actually cuts up the blood supply to cancer it's preserved your stem cells so many different great ingredients and i love a juicy pear and a peach in the summer and it's nothing much more that i love than a juicy peach um but those are just some of the foods that i love i think one of the greatest things about food is that and food and health is that it actually puts the agency of choice into our own individual hands and so we make our own choices one of the interesting things that is very clear is our bodies health defenses the five of them we talked about last time are circulation our stem cells our healthy gut microbiome the ability for our dna to protect ourselves our bodies from the environment and also our immune system these systems for us to reach our health potential we want to make sure that they are not squashed in inadvertently by foods that we have gotten used to eating and so let's talk a little about some of those foods that actually impair our health defenses that's probably the best way of thinking about what to avoid now we know that added sugar is uh something that is very that taxes the body's metabolism right so if you have a little bit of sugar in fruit you know from natural sugars that's fine because you're getting a lot of other stuff in fruit as well that in fact helps your metabolism and helps your body's ability to be able to digest and metabolize uh fructose and glucose and use that fuel into your body but if you drink soda you know to have those 10 teaspoons of refined sugar that are dissolved invisibly in whatever colored fluid we might be drinking it tastes great quenches your thirst it kind of our mental blueprint is that you know this is something you use to sleek your thirst on a hot summer day and i can tell you that the hyperglycemic state your body can't handle 10 teaspoons of sugar at the same time and think about you know the people that chug an entire can of soda right i mean i've done it myself there's no way that's good for us so that overwhelms a lot of our systems it overwhelms our stem cells our stem cells cannot adequately function properly function to help us regenerate when there's too much sugar around you know sugar is is a concentrated material it's a solute meaning that it's dissolved in water and when there's a lot of things and think about when you're in a swimming pool or you're in you know or if you're swimming in the ocean for a long period of time what happens the water gets pulled out of your skin or even in a bathtub your your skin gets wrinkly because you've sucked out all the all the water and that's basically what happens to these cells in a high sugar environment your blood so i would say added sugar with sodas that are so popular that is something that sits on your health defense systems too much sugar also literally damages the ecosystem of your gut microbiome which is connected to your immunity um unhappy gut unhappy immunity you know we all want to actually be as strong immunologically as possible and then by the way let's kind of um just take one step over to the kissing cousin of regular soda which is diet soda right so here's the thing i just told you you know we might want to cut down or cut out regular soda so what do people say they say well don't worry dr lee we just go over to the diet soda no worries i drink the diet version it's much better for my metabolism well science tells us it's not true and the irony is that people who drink a lot of diet soda with the purpose of not getting a lot of carbs from refined sugar actually still gain weight this is a kind of a paradox that now makes sense because scientists have figured out that many of the artificial sweeteners used in diet sodas actually harm our gut microbiome and so when you're drinking that soda and that artificial sweetener you know you get that sugar hit on your tongue to go to your brain man it's pretty sweet but all those chemicals go down your gut and they're feeding our gut bacteria and the gut bacteria really don't like these synthetic compounds these artificial sweeteners and so they revolt and as they're revolting they're actually drought literally drowning in these artificial sweeteners and that is bad enough because our gut bacteria actually you know helps to lower inflammation but our gut bacteria also controls metabolism our insulin sensitivity so when that gets upset guess what our actual blood sugars raise and we actually have poorer metabolism of our energy and we actually start to gain weight anyway so that's you know kind of two just two just two examples but there's a lot of other foods that we might want to be careful about can you just explain that term metabolism because it's something that i think the public hear a lot but i think it's not always that well understood glad you're asking that question here's what i will tell you because i'm actually working on a project now on metabolism yeah metabolism isn't that well understood by doctors either and it's actually not even that well understood by scientists and that's part of the mystery of the human body that gigantic question mark what is our metabolism right so here we are thinking about metabolism i think classically as energy you know how do we our metabolism is these are some assumptions our metabolism is something we're born with you know i have a lot of body fat so i got the unlucky straw in family genetics look at my sister she's skinny as a stick she's lucky she inherited the thin gene for her metabolism right so that's one assumption that we make about metabolism and that infers and it's wrong by the way um but that infers that our body's metabolism is the machinery that's used to take energy that we put into our body that's our food that we eat how our body processes that energy in order to be able to load up on fuel and then how our body takes that fuel in the fuel tank like filling the gas tank with petrol and then actually uses that fuel as we get on the highway and drive that's not incorrect okay but what we're really beginning to realize is that metabolism is a lot more complicated than that because it's connected to our immune system it's connected to our inflammation it's connected to our ability to actually maintain our health yeah in the sense that body fat is not necessarily bad it's actually really good and so many of the assumptions of metabolism energy and all the negative aspects of it you know an athlete has got is you know who's in his top shape has got great metabolism whereas somebody who actually is obese's terrible metabolism not not as simple as we thought yeah thank you for that i think that's that's really really helpful so in terms of categories and types of foods that we should think about limiting or avoiding the first thing you went to was those drinks with added sugar soft drinks fizzy drinks soda help you know in whatever country you're in however you like to refer to it i hope it's generally well known that actually those things are damaging for our health our immune system our teeth and you beautifully explained why that is now before we go to diet drinks because i'm really glad you brought that up full sugar fizzy drinks is it just the sugar that's causing problems because it overwhelms our system and we can't process it or is it something else is it the sugar and the chemicals and the impact they have on other aspects of our body's health and potentially those five defense systems that you've written beautifully about in your book what's going on is it just the sugar or is it something else yeah the soft drinks the sodas that we see so commonly around us it's part of everyday modern life you know for the last 100 years or so it's interesting the the history of soda is really fascinating it dates back into europe where um people were trying to find additional ways to be surprised and delighted by beverages right so the traditional drinks were always tea or coffee of course the most popular beverage in the world was just drinking water the most important one actually as well uh tea and coffee following close behind and then there was a wine right i mean these were for thousands of years sort of the the elixirs so to speak of our beverages and carbonation was actually added to fruit juice first it was a mistake i think that was made when they invented it but then actually it became something to delight folks you know kind of like in a you go to a carnival you know and you see some spectacle that actually is just some of you walk by and you think oh my gosh that's so unusual that's delightful that's how sodas were actually um a dragon then once actually the the big industries came in and turned it into a marketing buzz it started to take on a life of its own and here's where it morphed went from fruit juices that actually had some carbonation which is just gas you know co2 and that's okay but what wound up happening is that they started to have less fruit but they figured out how to put chemical flavorings that actually mimic the fruit flavoring and then of course nobody really wants to have just a plain watery looking carbonated drink so then they started to add artificial coloring and then he started adding preservatives and this goes to the importance of reading a label whenever i actually pick up something to drink you know from a store or grocery store i you know uh i i'm an explorer so i love to actually try new things if i saw a drink in a store that seemed appealing or attractive or intriguing to me i might pick it up but the first thing i do is i take a look at the label what is in there right so it should be mostly water so i look for that and then most many people don't know this but the order in which the ingredients appear on a label at least in the united states is um synonymous with their relative concentration in the drink and so what you want to do is it's usually water and then it's sugar all right so we just talked about that or artificial sweetener and then you start seeing the other things behind it and i think most people will be astounded and um disappointed rightfully so that natural fruit juice is usually pretty low on a list of 10 or 20 ingredients and so if you are creeped out by not being able to pronounce understand identify the ingredients on on on a beverage you should follow your instincts that's probably not something you want to put in your body because your body's not hardwired to handle those chemicals yeah i think that's great advice something i use with my patients as well people say there's always exceptions yeah there are exceptions but as a general principle when looking at ingredient labels i i completely echo that if you don't recognize it you know maybe give it a miss and choose something else instead you also mentioned marketing there when you were talking about fizzy drinks and that really is something that we're fighting you know you are trying to promote all this incredible colorful food but what we're fighting is this marketing machine and in particular around i guess soft drinks and fizzy drinks and sodas it's it's really tragic to see sports stars who are looked up to by children you know you certainly have seen this in the uk for many years you see this in a big way in india where like the big cricket stars are often sponsored and are seen drinking a can of soda and actually i think this is one of the big problems we're up against because that just infuses into these young kids mind that actually i want to be like that person or they're drinking that drink oh i want to drink that and be like them how much for a problem do you think marketing is you know sponsorship product placements commercial deals is that something we need to be fighting against i think that we all have the freedom most of us to make our own choices and i try to think about any argument such as the one we're discussing now from both sides of the coin if you run a company and you're and then your company is making a product your job is to market it whether it's a soda or whether it's a tennis shoe or whether it's a wrist watch right on one hand i don't blame companies for actually doing marketing and the ones that actually do it really well hey you know what that's that's their job okay on the other hand i think that the fight that we're actually having is not really against the company the fight is really against the inertia that many of us have in the community to do our homework on and get back in touch with our body because i think that if we actually you know took a look at the mirror and started to um reacquaint ourselves with what our body is telling us i mean you know look here's how i think about it in the morning you get up in the morning you take a shower you step out of the shower you look you're going to see the mirror you look in that mirror most people aren't that happy most people are not that happy with what they see they can always find something wrong with themselves you know and then you know and then you might step on a scale and you might not like that number okay um and then you like those are the few moments of clarity in a day where you might actually be thinking about yourself and then we get dressed and we go off and we're just swept up with the rest of um our lives whether it's our jobs whether it's their families where there's other responsibilities and we leave ourselves behind oftentimes we de-prioritize what our body needs and i think that one of the things the inertia we're fighting against is actually all those other distractions in our life i actually think that you know one of the things that we could do to teach children and one of the things we could do to teach young parents one of the things we could do to help teachers whether it's grade school high school or college or beyond is to really re-emphasize the fact that we all need to be in touch with our bodies we need to know ourselves first knowing yourself first allows you to then discern whether or not a message that you're seeing on television or being promoted by a sports star or whether something that is being marketed to you in a grocery store is something that you want to partake in right and so i think that yes we should be vigilant and we should enact policies that prevent predatory marketing practices to people that are uninformed and are uh highly vulnerable like marketing to children you know with uh certain ads like that i think that's that is something that works and therefore it's something that really we need to we do need to actually push back against but on the other hand you know i think companies are just doing their job i think that we have our own decision we need to push back on the predatory practices of companies that are preying on the vulnerable and we also need to be able to lift up the consumers so that they are smarter wiser more in touch with themselves and then they actually can discern what they should be ordering or buying uh that can actually help themselves yeah i really appreciate that nuanced answer looking at it from both sides you mentioned sugar and these soda drinks that we know certainly even small amounts consume regularly can be quite damaging for our health and then you went to artificial sweeteners in these diet drinks now i share the same perspective as you do on this but it does appear to be a very divisive topic with the public but even within science and within medicine this whole topic of whether artificial sweeteners are good bad or neutral seems to get a lot of people's backs up i know professor tim spector who has been on the show before and he's pretty clear as well that we should be avoiding them you seems to be pretty clear on that i certainly take the precautionary principle with my patients say listen i've seen enough data that suggests it's having a negative impact on the gut microbiome so i would prefer to take that precautionary approach to say let's try something else what is your view on that and why do you think it's such a divisive topic well first of all every kid loves candy right me me as well i remember when i was a child you know in the u.s you know in halloween and who who didn't look forward to collecting all the candy from the neighbors and and i think that you know sugars the candies they're delightful and there's nothing wrong with being delighted and i think we carry with us lots of pleasant fun memories i think brain's also hardwired to actually go after sweet things yeah right i mean it's part of our instinct as animals to you know just like the the the lion on the savannah goes after the antelope i think humans you know on the street go after candy it's one of those things that just we're we're hardwired to go after sugar i think there are industrial interests that actually you know pose uh counter arguments to the harm of sugars and artificial sweeteners and by the way i do want to actually bring this up because i think it's it's important let's not character assassinate categories i think that's really important so artificial sweeteners let's be specific what i was referring to are things that are not refined sugars the powdery white stuff that you would buy in a supermarket the artificial sweeteners are the ones that are chemically synthesized not natural that actually have been designed to activate the sugar receptors on your tongue and mimic sweetness right okay and there's many different kinds and so i think that if anybody were to go to google and look up categories of artificial sweeteners you'll start seeing this is not one product it's a many different types some people could consider artificial sweeteners stevia now stevia is a natural sweetener but it's still artificial when you compare it to refined sugar and so and what about you know like some people use monk fruit which is also a natural sweetener which isn't the same thing as refined sugar it also activates your sugar taste buds it's more natural and then what about aspartame and circulos and what about all those other kind of chemical names that you can't pronounce and so i think as we're talking about this now we need to say categorically you know i think excess natural sugars in product form added to food it's added sugars tend to be unhealthy if you over consume that and sodas is just one of many examples with lots of added sugar artificial sweeteners is not one category it's a lot of different types of things that that are used in place of refined sugar and what i would say to be a savvy consumer you know um just know that there are more natural versions of those i think stevia is fine however there are stevia um that actually are not really all stevia you pick up the package you look at the ingredients and you find even though it says stevia you look at the ingredients and you actually see that there are other things that are added to it we cannot forget when you buy ultra processed food in a package stuff has been added to it almost certainly even to preserve it on the shelf that may or may not be good for you and one of the big advantages we have right now every one of us carries around one of these a mobile phone um and so if you don't recognize something and you're curious go ahead and type it in and search that chemical this to learn something about it that could actually make the difference between whether you put it in your cart or not yeah i love that very empowering way of looking at this to put the information in the consumer's hands and say right you start as much as possible to make these better decisions because you know that this one's gonna lead to health this one's probably gonna not promote my health over a period of time i mean look at what happens when we sit down at a restaurant right um you open a menu and the waiter comes over and says do you have any questions and so all of us have done this you picked one that kind of seems interesting to you and and you ask what's the question we ask you ask the waiter hey what's in this all right what's in this dish and they tell you and on the basis of the information that you asked for as a consumer for on food that you're about to purchase and eat you might say oh well that sounds pretty good i'll have it or you might say um you know that doesn't sound so great to me i think i'll choose something else and i think that that the power you know the powers in the pocket of the consumer yeah and it's our money our resources that we're spending and and by the way i mean you can see this now with you know global and the geopolitical events that are happening if we choose not to support something it can have a powerful impact and that impact actually comes from our pocketbooks yeah apart from these drinks that we've covered so far any other sorts of foods that we should generally try and avoid let's say when we're in the grocery store or the supermarkets anything we should think about yeah so i think you know largely for the same reasons of having chemicals being put in our body that we don't really want ultra processed foods foods that come in a box foods that got lots of ingredients and lots of preservative and chemicals inside them things that um that they say that your grandmother if you showed her might not recognize his food or great-grandmother and perhaps ultra-processed foods as a group tend to be associated when we look at populations with poorer of health outcomes from diabetes obesity cardiovascular disease and even cancer and so again you know i even though i said we should be careful not to over generalize it is true things in a box things in a can things you know that are manufactured at scale and intended to sit on the shelf for months or maybe even years tend to draw the attention my attention anyway um that it really is worth reading the label and knowing what it is you're putting in your body so ultra-processed foods i think alcohol is another thing that is a is popular it's social i mean look um if you look at beer and wine these go back millennia as part of human culture people sat and and distilled and fermented beer and wine for thousands of years uh you know in the coliseum in rome they're still doing excavations to figure out what the gladiators actually ate and drank and they found they find inside there you know wine casks and and things like that like it it was a it was a it's a it's a cherished tradition of humans but what we do know is that it's easy to over uh consume and we do know that there are while there are healthful properties in the liquid of wine due to the fermentation it pulls things out of the red grape skin or pulls things out of the barley hops in the case of beer like xantho humeral and beer or resveratrol and red wine the fact of the matter is that none of the benefits that you get from any alcoholic beverages come from the ethanol the alcohol itself the thing you get the buzz from does nothing for your health okay um some of the other things that happen to be in the broth of the fermentation might be good for you and so that's something that you know like like oh well they found that and i think recently there was research showing that you know even one glass of red wine could have an impact on brain health as well and i think that you know we have to be i i'm really careful about not chucking a spear you know at every food that you know we want to kind of malign for a health reason i think wine is a cherished tradition alcohol is a cherished tradition but people should know that the benefits of it and it's okay to have a glass or two every now and then but i think that the the people who really go after it hard look besides the obvious liver disease and the problems of nutrition and the brain health i mean alcohol is a toxin to your brain we do want to actually be mindful about the amounts that are consumed you know processed meats are another food product that actually are classed as a carcinogen by the world health organization now what kind of processed meats are we talking about we're not talking about that the air cured salami from sardinia you know that you know that have been made in the same way for thousands of years that people eat sparing amounts of you know as part of a more well-balanced mediterranean traditional meal i'm talking about the deli foods you go in there and they're slicing stuff you know from a big lump that that looks nothing like the animal from which you came and some of these cured sausages if you visited a sausage factory i had i had a patient once who actually worked as an inspector in a commercial sausage plant and he told me that he has to he used to have to change his boots every month rubber boots walking in there because the stuff that splashed out of the pool in which the sausages were essentially um uh embalming it for preservatives and for flavorings would actually dissolve the soul of his rubber band does that mean such an impression on me i'm still talking about it 20 years later if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one that i really think you're going to enjoy give it a click and let me know what you think when you consume sugar you are poisoning your mitochondria sugar and cyanide do the same thing ultimately if you're inhibiting your mitochondria you are poisoning your body

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 855,796

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: cNPV_5stNLo

Length: 160min 48sec (9648 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022