TB12 Immunity Webinar With Dr. William Li

co-founder and his friend alex i think as we move to today's conversation uh immunity is obviously a very very timely topic and something on all of our minds uh and it's interesting because uh here at tb12 we think a lot about redefining human performance and proving that age is just a number giving people the opportunity to be their best for as long as they can and in an environment where our health is compromised it's real hard to do that and we talk a lot about making small choices lots of small choices which can be big choices and thrilled to have dr william lee with us here today i'll introduce in just a moment before i start from an administrative and housekeeping standpoint if you could put your zoom on mute that would be great and we're also going to be opening up group chat so you can pose questions at the end of dr lee's presentation i know i've got a few questions for him but would like to see if there's some questions from the audience that we can pose to him as well now on to uh the guest of honor dr william lee who has an extraordinary reputation he's a world renowned physician and scientist he's the author of eat to beat disease which as i was saying a little while ago for people when you're just starting i actually read this book on vacation last summer last july and august and it's been on my mind for a lot of reasons he's had an impact on over 70 diseases he's best known for leading the angiogenesis foundation uh he's got a ted talk that's uh called can we eat to starve cancer that has been viewed over 11 million times and i think a great opportunity today to learn from dr lee a little bit about immunity some of the choices we can make and also importantly he just published a paper last week he was telling us about uh just a little while ago on covid so we may pick up some interesting information there as well so without further ado i'd like to turn it over to you dr lee and uh look forward to hearing more from you and hope we can get a chance to answer ask some questions uh at the end of the presentation well thank you very much it's really a pleasure to speak about this very important topic as we all are navigating with the same set of concerns about our health which has really been redefined in the covet era because a couple of months ago the entire world every human on this planet had their lives upended by something we didn't expect which is the pandemic that came out of the blue took over uh and and really put us back uh into our homes uh hiding out uh waiting for us to figure out when it's actually safe to come out again which hopefully is gonna start emerging soon the safety part can't be overemphasized because we are not sure we not understand everything about this virus yet but we're starting to actually peel away a little bit so what i wanted to do is to share with you my role as as a physician as a scientist uh and as an author what are we learning about covid and what are we learning about that that tells us informs us how to actually lead a better healthier lifestyle when it comes to immunity and our diet because our diet's the one thing that we can all control so with that i'm going to share my screen and just show you a couple of pictures that you may not have seen before and the first thing is this blob in the center of the screen for those of you who um you know are fitness experts or who have ever done any kind of competitive activity visualization of the goal is important and this black dot is is really our opponent this is actually the virus the sars kobe 2 virus that causes the uh kobit 19. if you go lean back and squint you'll actually see the little spikes around that black splotch that actually is the way that the virus actually sticks to our cells now having said that the reason that this is so important is really underscored by the fact that there are more than 5.7 million cases of coba 19 today it's going to be 6 million by the time this weekend rolls around that is an enormous number of people affected around the world and in the u.s we'll probably run the ban of 2 million cases uh by the beginning of next week so this by the way has has affected more people than the soldiers we send into battle in vietnam or the korean war or even world war one from an american perspective uh i want to tell you what we're learning about this that that allows us to just jump right into action first of all this is a respiratory virus that's more related to the common cold than it is to the flu coronaviruses are the same family of viruses that cause the cold and how do we get the cold we breathe them in uh so we know that when we breathe in this coronavirus it the battle is mostly fought in our nose with our mucous you know whatever you blow into the kleenex normally is exactly filled with normal antibodies that you fight off this uh virus and when it actually kind of invades the nose it can get down into the lungs because our nose and our throat and our lungs are actually interconnected and that's where some of the problems actually start us when the virus gets in the lungs that this respiratory virus causes a respiratory problem so you can already see the opportunities to actually intercept this opponent uh we got we have to really kind of block it at the level where we might breathe it in and that's why we actually have been uh following this uh rather um awkward uh phenomenon of wearing face masks we can't let this virus kind of get into our nose we don't want to blow it into other air so other people have it this is going to be our new reality for the time being and also social distancing it's really better said physical distancing because nobody wants a social distance we actually want to pull back together now that the company is starting to open up the country is going to start to open up but we want actually to make sure that we have enough physical distance to remain safe so we're not actually accidentally throwing this virus and getting it from one another especially when we go into crowded uh more crowded places and obviously we want to head back into is be able to celebrate life again that really is the when we actually know we've won this battle is when we can actually get back into celebration there's going to be a new normal but we want to be able to celebrate our life with wellness and be fit and also to be able to do all we can do although i have to say this great pause has given me and i think many other people perhaps watching this a time to ask an important question which is what really matters and i think what really matters is our health and how we actually conduct ourselves and what kind of lifestyle we can actually lead pandemics this is what we're actually dealing with are not a new thing in human history over 200 000 years you know since we kind of like stopped dragging our knuckles and started forming communities and cities and and building the communities that we we now enjoy we've actually had periodic pandemics that have also put us on our backs and this is actually a picture from more than 400 almost 400 years ago in venice italy there was a gigantic plague that started to whip around the city and it drove everybody and their families back into their stone houses hiding out from the virus waiting for the town crier to say when it was safe to go back out into the square again sound familiar well actually that's what we've been dealing with we you know suddenly realized lock down we've got a time to be safe let's wear a mask when when are things going to actually return to normal well there is a difference between the plague from you know the the middle ages or the renaissance uh and today and that difference is that we have science on our side science is what i do as a scientist i've had to help to develop more than 34 fda approved drugs and devices using signs for diseases like cancer diabetes preventing vision loss and i'm also looking at cardiovascular disease and this science is pretty powerful because it actually takes us from the dark ages into the age of enlightenment into how using technology to help us and if anybody's heard about food as medicine i'm not going to talk about the medicine side because that's actually what we're waiting for is doctors to actually come up with those vaccines and treatments i'm going to talk about the food part of how science is actually teaching us about nutrition uh last week an article was published in the research i had done recently on uh in the new england journal of medicine this is really kind of like the banner publication for important research and what we discovered is that this fast this respiratory virus from the gets in the lungs makes a bee line for our blood vessels in our lungs and in fact we have the first picture showing um the virus filling up our blood vessels cells like a gumball machine and once that actually happens you damage your circulation uh the blood starts to clot because the circulation needs to flow smoothly and we believe that this is actually the start of understanding why we're affecting the brain why we're affecting our legs or getting covert toe heart issues and the startling thing about this discovery is that if covet actually starts in the lungs but can affect the rest of our body it can really impair our fitness even after we've overcome the virus there could wind up becoming a residual complication of having compromised circulation the circulation is important for our muscles for getting back into shape and think about anybody you know who may have been a positive for covid who's had the disease how difficult it has been for them to bounce back we think that this is partly explained by the effect it has on the micro circulation so this is actually my wheelhouse i study blood vessels and how to keep them in good shape and this is something that is really setting the stage for future research so what are we going to do what can we do for ourselves well we're waiting for a vaccine we're waiting for effective treatments we have our immunity and what we have been doing is avoiding the virus and hiding so hiding is no longer an option we need to be able to lean forward and get back to take control of our lives avoiding well you know the mask the physical distancing the avoiding large crowded spaces you know just being having situational awareness as they call it is actually just an important thing but since we're still waiting for a vaccine or effective treatments we got immunity that is us we are born with our own health defenses with which immunity is one of them and i wanted to actually share with you what we can do now uh which is to boost our own defenses in this epic battle battle between uh our body and a virus so this is a basically you know um a a struggle that we're actually having so it's time to shore up to get into shape to be as fit as possible and not just you know stuff ourselves with junk food or processed foods you know this is not when we're not in a world war where you know we're eating rations we can get fresh food we can exercise we can do what we can to get good sleep and lower our stress all important things for immunity and what i want to actually focus on is how food our nutrition can impact our health defenses so in my book that john talked about eat to beat disease i actually write about when it comes to food and health it's not just about the food it's about how our body responds to what we put into it and how our body responds is through our health defense systems that are hardwired in our bodies from the time we're born until our very last breath okay and and these are the five health defense systems i'm showing you right now angiogenesis is our circulation 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels that actually bring oxygen and nutrients what we eat to every cell in our body we've got our stem cells of regeneration so we can heal us and grow our muscles and heal our organs from the inside out we've got our microbiome healthy gut bacteria we know just how important that is it's becoming more important because we know our gut bacteria talks to our immune system to help it get into shape dna much more than a set of genetic instructions we now know that our dna is hardwired to protect us from the environment by rebuilding itself and slowing cellular aging and then finally the most important system that everybody's talking about now is our immunity and our immunity can be powerfully influenced by food and i want to tell you how we can use food nutrition as our medicine so first of all i told you that i actually been involved with drug development and and one of the things that i realized having developed medicines is how important is to prevent diseases in the first place because medicines you know are expensive and we want to be able to actually get more available accessible things before you get sick what are we learning about from drug development though that we can bring to food well first thing is that there's more than 800 medicines that have been fda approved over the last 25 years that's kind of the time to spend i've been involved in this game and so the bottom line is that there's a lot of science that led to this drug development i want to share with you what we peeled back uh to be able to apply to food please don't even think you need to understand this complicated road map of the science that you want to leave to the scientists but i can tell you these are the systems in our body uh the wiring you know the electrical plan the cellular plan that our foods actually activate and so what do we actually know is that these are the kinds of things that you know you go to the farmers market you go to the grocery store you see them you know you recognize them how do you choose the right ones that can help our immunity well we can plug you know scientists like me we can plug this back into that complicated wiring diagram and i want to basically just bring her straight to you so you don't have to think about the details you can just focus on actually the taste um the way to actually integrate into your everyday life um and you know mother nature has done a lot of the work because she has actually laced many of the fresh foods a whole foods plants um plant-based foods mostly fruits and vegetables nuts and legumes with these natural chemicals that the plants use to defend their own health and bees use them to actually pollinate uh foods and it's just a wonderful way that when we start eating plant-based foods those same defense molecules and plants have a new job description they go to work in our bodies by activating and and engaging our own health defense systems i want to show you something that's really quite amazing because i've actually done repair um what we get out of the farm with pharmaceuticals food is medicine what happens when you compare them head to head uh on the black bar at the very top are actually cells that might be growing for example in cancer and if the full bar left to right is actually what happens when you don't treat with anything and then you can kind of see the blue and yellow bars directly what happens when you throw medicines into the system yeah of course when you throw chemo drugs like tamoxifen in blue near the bottom against these cells you're going to start killing cells because that's what cancer therapies do but check it out when you actually throw foods into the system look at that like you can see that foods go head to head against medicines and in some cases are more powerful than even cancer drugs and so this is really the kind of work that i'm trying to do it's not about you know standing on a soapbox and saying kale is good for you um uh and it's not about ideology it's really about just looking at the evidence to see what's what in our food clearly really powerful so i want you to take home this message when it comes to food and health it's not just about the food it's about how your body responds to what you put inside it our immunity one of our most important health defenses uh i don't want to really spend too much time talking about you know the complexity of the immune system let's leave that to the immunologist let's leave that to the medical doctors that focus on this and a research scientist but for the purposes of today and food and health and immunity let's just call immunity as your immune system is really a group of super soldiers that are circulating your body that are actually designed to recognize invaders and problems and can take care of them and just like you might expect in super soldiers you know you got your special forces you got your generals you've got your um uh people collecting intel and doing a recon um they all work as a team to actually go out and and and get out there into the field to make sure the battle can be won very complicated uh kind of systems but they respond they too need to be fed the soldiers need to be fed so i'm going to tell you 10 things you can actually eat to feed your body super soldiers and these are things that are really easy to find i'm going to show you this again and so you can watch this again on the recap so not to worry but i want to explain to you that boosting your immunity in the fight against a virus is not complicated this is something that you can put into your every single day life vitamin c is one of those micronutrients that helps our immunity because it actually enhances our ability our immune system to be able to kill microbes and get rid of viruses and improve our antibodies and lower inflammation so i'm not going to give you a medical school lecture by any means i'm a food lover i i'm a foodie i love to cook i love to go out to markets i love to eat and if you want vitamin c one of the best ways to get it is actually in guava so if you go to the supermarket and you go you know sort of look at all the fruits and vegetables in the one aisle you go to the next style you'll see there's some of these tropical fruits like the pineapples and bananas mangoes guava coming out now it's grown in the tropics from the caribbean um this guava plant which is this pink juicy stuff you can actually is actually it's got four times more vitamin c than an orange uh so it's really amazing uh to to try to explore you can slice it you can eat it raw you can actually cook it down you can make a jam out of it you can spread it on bread you can actually cook it with chicken or fish works well in the grill just an amazing source of vitamin c to help boost your body's own defense systems and immunity mushrooms another one of my personal favorites um any kind of mushroom actually works uh this is you know kind of like different kinds of mushrooms white button mushrooms portobellos baby bellas you can get fancier to shiitake any bottom line is you can go to any grocery store or farmer's market and see what's out there and mushrooms have vitamin d which has been shown to actually support the immune system but then there's a new booster which is called beta glucan it's kind of fiber that activates your body's immune system to create more antibodies in your saliva and your mucus remember i told you that's where you can actually intercept the enemy right in your nose mushrooms will do that and when you eat them they're the good stuff is in the caps but there's twice as much of the good stuff in the stems of the mushrooms so you don't want to throw the stems away you want to cook with the stems and if you don't know what to do with them you can um cook them in a soup you can actually saute them there's so many different ways you can just go online to look up mushroom recipes and you'll find a lot of different ways to actually cook with mushrooms that can support your immune system broccoli this is not your mom's broccoli with broccoli you know big big trees of broccoli broccoli sprouts are out now these are the three to four day old broccoli that are just have a nutty flavor uh turns out that there are these great natural molecules called sulforaphanes that boost your immune system and they're 100 times concentrated in the baby broccoli so you don't have to actually go you know buy the trees or the frozen broccoli you can actually just find the little shoots if you're growing a garden grow some broccoli and the sprouts are amazing um this is from there's a study that came out of north carolina where they took young 20 year olds that were super healthy and they gave them the flu vaccine and they gave half of the the kids really a shake made with broccoli sprouts just a couple of cups a day a couple of cups of the sprouts made into a cup of uh the shake and they swing that down and they measure their immune response and it turns out that in young healthy people who had um the the broccoli sprouts it amplified their immune system's response to the flu vaccine by 22 times this is really actually how to amp up your super soldiers using broccoli you can't find sprouts the adult broccolis are also good if you um most people eat the tree tops but the actually the stem we've studied this in research have twice the amount of good stuff that the stem that the fruit florets have the tree tops so save those for the stems just like the mushrooms find something to do with it saute them turn them into a smoothie you can cook with them with the soup there's a lot of different um recipes so again 22 times more killing power against the virus this is all human studies um uh olive oil like it's not good to have too much fat of any sort but if you're gonna actually have fat olive oil is extra virgin olive oil has got the better kind of fat studies in spain have shown that there's a natural molecule called hydroxytirozole that activates our immune t cells that's one of the super soldiers in our body that actually directly tackles um the the virus itself once it gets into our body and olive oil is a great way to do it you know the best way to actually have olive oil is you know or that is extra virgin and you really don't need more than a couple of tablespoons a day to be able to get you what you need an interesting little side tip is that eating whole olives can do the trick as well and if you actually squeeze the olives to get the water the olive water out olive oil just kind of floats on the top this hydroxy tyrosine is in the olive water and so you want to drink olive juice that's also a really great way to get this immune boost and stuff now berries who wouldn't want to eat something like this right this beautiful dark color filled with this beautiful natural dye the dye is called anthocyanin and guess what anthocyanins help another part of your super soldiers and natural killer cells do their job and studies have been shown in actually athletes that if you actually have regular blueberries like a couple of handfuls a day your immune system just just propped up uh and and then if you work out uh having blueberries before working out actually keeps your immunity going and sort of like the the bonfire that keeps on burning later into the evening that's actually what berries can actually do blackberries can also do have a very similar effect so it's dark and it's blue it's beautiful and actually can help support your immunity and a great way to start the day in my book here's a surprise for you oysters right now i know the shellfish industry is suffering now because of the restaurants uh are are closed but it turns out that in asia they don't just chuck oysters and have them on a half shell they actually cook with oysters because the oysters are not perfectly formed actually are cooked down and reduced and in fact it turns out into oyster sauce well actually studies have been shown that if you test oysters against the immune system you'll actually enlarge your immune organs your thymus your spleen this is one case where size does matter and oysters can actually do that i'm not talking about those those organs i'm talking about your immune organs and for because your immunity can kill cancer cells it doubles the cancer killing power of of of your natural killer immune cells so what if you can't get oysters you can get like living oysters you can get oyster sauce which is found in any asian market uh and you can actually use oyster sauce on healthy greens that you can just saute or steam a great way to light up your flavor it's got this great umami flavor again i love to cook and this is one of my go-to's when i want to actually add a little extra pop to the flavoring of vegetables now i'm just going to close by saying the microbiome is actually super important right that's our healthy gut bacteria probiotics so on and so forth i can tell you that there are so many bacteria in our body that they actually uh outnumber our or they number our cells our human cells so we're really half bacteria and half human by the way a little side note um there's a word for an organism that's composed of multiple species um and it's called a holobiot and that and that's actually what we are we're not just humans anymore we're holobionts because we're mostly bacteria and mostly human cells mixed together like an ecosystem think about it like the great barrier reef now those bacteria in our gut mostly living in our gut um talk to our immune system because in the last 10 years we've discovered that our immune system about 70 percent of our immune system is actually inside the walls of our intestines like a jelly roll so the bacteria live inside there and then they they're separated from our immune system 17 of our immune system just by the layers of our immune system so remember in college when you had lived in the room and you knocked on the wall and you not your roommate could hear every noise coming through your wall that's what the bacteria does to our immune system they talk to our immune system and so when we take care of our gut bacteria we're taking care of our immune system and i want to share with you how we can do this 37 trillion healthy gut bacteria in our body how do we actually feed them as we feed ourselves well it's really interesting pomegranate which is also another one of my favorite is uh one of these fruits that actually contain that's really juicy and it connects and the juice actually contains these natural dyes that feed that help our gut bacteria grow one of the gut bacteria is called acromancia mucinophila and the mucinophila for this bacteria means that this bacteria likes to grow in the natural healthy mucus that our intestines secrete so when we drink we eat pomegranate drink pomegranate juice it actually helps our our gut secrete that nice healthy mucus and it's basically like fertilizing the soil so this acromancing grows acromancy by the way basically um jacks up our immune system and it actually puts into motion the super soldiers that can protect us against not only infection but also cancer and that's really what uh this research um has been all about um i have a colleague in paris um dr laurence zip vocal who discovered people with cancer who are getting treated with immune therapies if they actually had um uh this bacteria acromancium used cinephylla mucous growing super soldier supporting bacteria they actually their immune system could tackle the cancer a lot more effectively and if he didn't have it their immune system was weaker how do you do it you can't actually eat this as a bad as a bacteria as a probiotic you have to grow it yourself this is diy immunity against cancer and against immune protection so we can actually drink pomegranate juice so here's how it works you have pomegranate juice you get the mucus the mucus that helps um uh cradle the akkermansia when the bacteria grow they they knock through those collage dorm walls and they they activate the immune system and the immune system goes to town to its job the super soldiers go to work to protecting the homeland this is like homeland security with pomegranate juice so easy to do i have a glass of it every day green tea you know it's like hardly a situation that you can't use green tea to do something better for you we know that the natural chemical egcg and green tea actually it lowers inflammation which is also what we want when we're you know um this covent environment we don't want inflammation okay but when we're working out and trying to get fit as part of our normal lifestyle we also want to decrease inflammation after working out as part of recovery now here's the latest part there was a study out of out of asia that showed that people who did better had less severe coping infections um had more of this natural chemical called interferon gamma uh that their body produces natural antiviral substance and then they found that peop that the people who had more lactobacillus a healthy gut bacteria had more interferon then they found that people who drank more tea with egcg had more lactobacillus who had then had more interference gamma you can connect the dots here really easily a cup a day actually not only lowers inflammation it boosts your antiviral fighting capability and this has been studied in covid19 patients on a worldwide so this is kind of smoking hot research that's going on right now as well that i'm involved with and then finally one of my favorite uh snacks really are tree nuts i like them all macadamias walnuts but one of my favorites are pecans because there's so many things you can do with pecans the key thing is really to try to get the nuts and you know you can you can kind of roast them to kind of make them a little bit tastier you can salt them a little bit you know be really careful about added sugar you don't want to actually you know sugarize your whole body but nuts are one of mother nature's greatest immune boosters because they've got the natural fiber that feeds our gut bacteria which then talks across the college dorm walls amps up our super soldiers and nuts are also a great source of protein they also are a source of healthy fat so a handful of nuts is a snack before you go on for a hike you know uh you know with safe physical distancing this to me is a no-brainer and it should be something that you can actually store in your pantry this is by the way a middle aisle idol so they used to talk about like avoiding the middle aisle when you go to the grocery store what i would tell you here there are some good things in the middle aisle extra virgin olive oil and tree nuts so think about those and beans are also good for you as well uh but again this is the tell you the little secret here again that same study in asia interferon gamma virus fighting in covid um there's a bacteria called raminococcus that actually boosts this um interfering gamma and guess what you've got the ruminococcus and inferior gamma from people that people who are eating more polyunsaturated fatty acids healthy fats you get in nuts and dietary fiber so again this is like really state-of-the-art thinking uh in the covent era that informs our nutrition in a very specific way that have been studied in people so again take home these are just 10 foods there's a lot more in my disease book i write about more than 200 foods but here's 10 that i i try to put into my diet on a regular basis there's a lot more it's about diversity it's not about one thing all the time and more isn't better eating you know sort of a moderate amount on a regular basis of all of these foods mixing them up finding clever ways you know looking online to finding good ways to cool recipes uh that you know that that to me is a hobby that's worth getting into is you know how do we actually eat to beat disease is actually taking mother nature's bounty whole foods mostly uh uh plant-based foods fruits vegetables nuts and legumes finding ways to actually build them into our everyday lives and this to me is how to actually get into shape to run that olympian marathon of our lives how do we actually you know get into shape so we can go into um uh the competition of our lives right now we're facing the greatest uh opponents really which is this virus but it's there's gonna be more we're gonna see more viruses we're gonna see more things and as we get older we have to fight the diabetes we have to fight the cancer and the heart disease and the dementia and the obesity all the other things so i think about life as a marathon our nutrition and foods whole foods are about getting into shape and getting into that right mindset so um i wrote all about this i need to beat disease if you want to get more information you can come to my website dr williamleeli.com you can follow me on social at dr william lee l i i always try to bring out new information that's coming out on uh on data surrounding uh food i'm all about the science i'm you know i i i respect the ideology that comes around diets but if we follow science the nice thing about science has been said is that it's true whether you believe it or not and for here we you know we have no room for error in terms of improving our immunity we have to keep marching uh forward and what a great way to do this with healthy delicious foods well look we really appreciate that it was a wonderful wonderful presentation and uh got a number of questions uh from the group i want to get to some of those had a few things i'd like to just dig into that you brought up and maybe one or two questions um the first thing i want to say i just very much appreciate the positive and constructive tone you've taken on these issues relative to people actually having some control because i think one of the things that's happened with uh the whole narrative around the current environment is so many things are out of control and the fact that you talk a lot about the choices that people can make is is very very important and something we believe in very strongly here at tb12 and so i really really appreciate that um i will tell you uh relative to choices uh one of the questions that we've talked about a bit is when you don't necessarily have access to fresh fruits and vegetables what about things like frozen fruits and vegetables or you know for some people canned things like that what are the um what are the puts and takes relative to nutrition uh from fresh first maybe frozen and canned right well so look uh i think the key is to focus on the identity of the food whole foods mostly plant-based foods are actually good for us and so fresh of a course is best but not everybody can get fresh as you pointed out and it turns out that most of the frozen foods have been pretty much snap frozen and tests have been done showing that largely speaking the nutrient value is very similar in high quality frozen foods and uh and canned foods actually can be good as well it turns out that you know if you take a look at some of the uh foods that you finally see in cans um that their their nutrient their the same chemicals that mother nature laced in them stay really shelf stable which is a good thing what i would say though is you want to be careful about processed foods when you actually have sort of uh plant-based foods that look healthy but they're mixed in with all this other ultra processed foods i know my my own rule of thumb is that if it's in a box be a little bit careful pick up the box and look at the ingredients if it even if it takes you more than a then a couple of seconds to read the ingredients you know there's probably too much stuff and it's it's ultra process ultra the idea of ultra means that you know like if there's tongue twister chemicals on there it's probably something that is not good as good for you as the can the frozen or the fresh yeah we'll take it in the beginning too mother nature has already done a lot of the work for us right so you you can just rely on some of what's been put put forth by mother nature uh it was interesting when i first read your book uh last year one of my big takeaways was the brassicas family of foods there and uh particularly broccoli sprouts which i actually grow at home now too so just for people that want to take some of dr lee's advice very very simple to do and i just clip them every day and drop them in a shake or on top of a salad but one of the questions that i think comes up often times in these things is how much like so you mentioned in there you know a few cups you blend it down into a smoothie you know i do a a couple clippings and i drop it in a shake i know what people's biologies are different their sizes are different but with all these foods you talked about could you give some sense of how people should think about portions and how much right well in my book eat to be disease i have a whole chapter a whole section on food doses and if you're going to talk about food as medicine in medicine it's always about the dose right like like your doctor writes a prescription and tell you exactly what it needs to be well we're not quite there yet with all the foods but but actually we know quite a lot about the the rough dosing for things so for example we know that for the pomegranate juice if you just drink eight ounces which is one fluid cup a day you'll grow some real good acrimancia and you can measure that if you check your microbiome for example so that's not asking a lot uh uh we know there's some amazing data uh looking at um nuts and it's really just a handful of nuts a couple of times a week um that's all you need for tree nuts so like those pecans two handfuls of nuts i don't wanna even count them out you can actually get down the count of the nuts but then they're different sizes but i would just say two handfuls a couple of times a week um i can tell you there's a study that was done by oncologists so that you can cut the uh the chances of death and colon cancer uh just by adding nuts um uh to your to your regular diet so this is powerful stuff olive oil uh two to three tablespoons a day that's totally adequate to get you that hydroxytorazole and for berries you know think about um a couple of cups so you got a measuring cup up and you poured blueberries or blackberries on them you know just think about that as kind of like something you want to spread out in terms of your day or just eat them for breakfast or if you want to puree them down into a smoothie my message is that it's not asking a lot yeah that it's easy super easy to do yeah well your blueberry point is interesting uh for those of uh the viewers here who are not familiar with tb12 uh tom's favorite smoothie that he makes uh is filled with blueberries makes it every day and has it before he works out and it's interesting because you had mentioned you know uh benefits of before uh as a as a real positive of blueberries as well so it's definitely something near and dear to our heart um one question that i think was posed in the group and i know one i had uh when i heard you talking about pomegranate juice uh because i will tell you very candidly one of the piece of advice in your book that i did not take was the pomegranate juice because i am in the camp of um worried about too much sugar and added sugar and i know a lot of people are so you talk about one cup of pomegranate juice how do you feel about that trade-off between the additional sugar in a cup of juice versus um versus the benefits of pomegranate juice that is a great point right so there's been a lot said about the role of sugar and how sugar actually can erode deteriorate our health but most of the research that's been done on that sugar really relates to added sugar you know where you're taking refined cane sugar and you're dumping it into something and you know think about your your your frosted cereals or whatever that we many of us grew up with you know again ultra processed foods um think about your sodas you know and if you were to see these pictures of how much sugar is actually in a can of soda that's put in there it is frightening turns out that mother nature's sugar tends to actually be more reasonable to eat i mean think about it bears out there in the wild forage for berries bears don't develop diabetes okay um and so mother nature's sugars um you do have to be careful if you do have diabetes to actually limit the amount of even fruit sugar but in general natural fruit sugars in the fruit is probably fine one thing that you want to be careful of you want the upside is that along with the sugar the natural sugars come all these other benefits so like everything else life is about sort of checks and balances uh benefits and risks and i would tell you pomegranates pretty sweet but it's got a ton of these uh polyphenols that you know are good for your gut so you can dilute it out dilute it out a bit you can add it to other things uh just to kind of uh you can drink it more slowly over the course of the day and sugar you know sort of like a sugar load is what's important so rather than swinging a whole cup of pomegranate juice maybe a sip it over the course of you know a little bit uh you know read a paper or or or scan your uh check your emails or whatever that's probably just fine so again you know you want to check with your doctor if you have if you know you have a problem with sugar but i would encourage people to think don't be afraid of mother nature sugars but do ask what else what else am i getting what's the fringe benefit i'm getting if i have to have some natural fruit sugars that's great well consider a cup of pomegranate juice added to my daily routine i'm going to have to get get that going um can you talk a little bit about talk about 10 things that people should eat do you have a couple things and sugar's making me think of it but do you have a couple things that you'd say to people hey you should just avoid these things even just two or three things quickly that your advice would be to stay away from yeah so my my my message is is a little bit different than a lot of people who are on diet and health because i gotta i gotta confess with you i not only am a scientist but i i i'm a foodie i love to eat i i love that adventure i love to you know the the exploration of delicious foods um uh and and i believe that food is tightly is very tightly connected to who we are how we grew up our families and our own individual cultures because we all come from somewhere and you know our cultural roots inform our bodies you know over generations with the kinds of things we like to eat so my philosophy is the more good stuff we eat the more we build up our bodies defenses the more the less room we have for bad things and by the way we also build by taking care of our home defenses we have a resiliency so we can actually our bodies will naturally be able to defend against a few you know bad habits or treats that we want to give ourselves um look human nature abhors deprivation and when somebody tells you no what does your brain tell you i'm going to sneak something i want to feel i want people to feel more confident that if you're doing good stuff for yourself all the time as part of your fitness routine as part of your lifestyle you know every now and then it's totally fine to celebrate by eating a couple of things that are not so good for you but i want to answer your question directly so one of the things that i would you know categorically say you know if you if you can avoid them definitely avoid them number one we talked about early sugar sweetened beverages like sodas you know as much as everyone around the world you know naturally thinks about slinking their thirst with an ice cold or whatever uh you know and that comes in a can the reality is that's mostly sugar it's got a lot of other chemicals into it and there's been so many studies that show that sugar not only wrecks your that in from sodas regular metabolism but the latest research shows that um sugar sweetened beverages like sodas destroy our microbiome they destroy that ecosystem and it happens fast even after a couple of sodas you know the bacteria are really unhappy with what we've done to them and part of it is going to be the huge sugar load but also the other things that are actually in the soda as well so i would say you know reduce or eliminate that another thing that's like a no-brainer to me from evidence is highly processed meat and you know the the stuff you would get um uh in a in a deli frankly stuff that we grew up on everyone grew up on these uh ultra processed meats um uh they've been classified in europe uh as a world health organization as a car as a class one carcinogen we know that's tied to cancer and again you know every now and then if you're going to go out to a ball game and you're going to get something from the vendor as long as your body is resilient and strong you could probably take it you know you could take that punch but what you don't want to be doing is doing that every single day or regularly or making that a weekend habit that's a treat so those would be two examples of things that i would say stay away from that's great that's that's really helpful um series of other questions i think if i could package them up all into one things like you mentioned mushrooms the actual vegetable or fungus mushroom verse dried powdered form of it um you know if you want to get your gut health stronger but you don't have access to or you don't like yogurt and you want to take a probiotic pill um you whatever the case may be the dried or powdered form and a supplement versus the natural form what are kind of the pros and cons as you think about that right well the advantage of a dried powdered form is that anybody can order it you can store it and you can have it really easily every every day and you can kind of decide what you want to do with it it doesn't need to be washed it doesn't need to be peeled it doesn't need to be cooked in any other way um so i'm i you know i'm totally a believer in the powderized version if that's what you prefer uh i think the whole fresh foods are are also really kind of the no-brainer as community right i mean we live on a planet that is a living planet where foods grow and we take care of them and we eat the fruits of the earth and so to me that's the most natural way to actually exist but we can actually get a lot of the same things from powdered and we know that they're meal replacements they can make life a lot easier so i'm sort of i sort of take healthy eating and sort of the mindset of the cage fighter you know the mixed martial arts you know you got to kind of take a look at whatever style was going to work for you in the cage at the time to win that battle yeah that's great uh one or two last one or two last questions uh if we could uh we'll wrap this up um just you know you mentioned green tea we've had a few questions on that and it's something that um i'm a fan of personally i use a lot if you're around me you'll see me drink a lot of matcha green tea so curious matcha versus regular green tea there's a question from the group on decaf green tea does it have the same benefits anything you could expand upon there absolutely so um like you i love tea i love all kinds of teas but especially green tea a tea is a second most common beverage in the world after drinking water yeah okay so and it's and it's in almost every culture uh although i think it started in asia uh and there's been lots of of um uh interesting debates over is japanese tea sencha better than other tea so what did i do i went and took different teas and i studied them in drug development assays to see which ones are better and a couple of myths got busted by me when i did my research number one japanese tea is great but it's not the only powerful tea jasmine tea which is a kind of green tea mixed with flowers also great but i discovered even black tea is also great like earl grey with a little bit of citrus bergamot it's great a couple of tips about that um if you put milk in your tea you actually precipitate out you sink to the bottom you take out of the liquid the good stuff so sort of you know like enjoy your tea uh straight i would say you know hot or cold doesn't really matter by the way we've studied hot tea and cold tea both are potent so equal i the ice t version is also good um as as it relates to decaf here's the one thing that you got to realize uh when you're decaffeinating tea what they're doing is they're they're the tea makers are pouring a chemical through the tea to remove the caffeine in removing caffeine that solvent is also taking a lot of the good natural not natural polyphenols out of the tea as well so you lose along with the caffeine some of the good stuff so that's not something you really i mean you'll miss that if you have it so if you enjoy the taste of tea and you don't want the caffeine that's fine but again this is might be where you might take a dietary supplement that has you know the green tea supplement minus the caffeine yeah solvents in tea does not sound healthy so look out for that for sure um last question uh which i think you talked about early on and and i'd be remiss not to ask just given your extensive experience and authority on angiogenesis uh about i think it was six to eight weeks probably weeks ago now we put out what we call the tb12 unity game plan and one of the points we made in there aside from things like you know eat more foods with vitamin c and things like that was move 30 to 60 minutes per day and i thought your comments in the very very beginning were interesting around that with your authority on on the topic in circulation i thought it'd be interesting just to ask you maybe to recommend recommendation on that and the importance of movement not just diet but movement how the two support each other right like food and health is just one component of your overall health along with food what's really super important are is movement physical activity regular physical activity everyday physical activity and yeah working out is great having a trainer is great getting into fighting shape is superb if you can actually do that um you know athletes and actors have to you know look good and feel good and they've got to look the part but really no matter who you are no matter what you do everybody can actually spare a half an hour or maybe a little bit more to do some regular exercise if you're gonna do any kind of regular exercise whether it's exercising in place doing kind of calisthenics workout resistance training or even going for a really brisk walk for half an hour get your heart rate up get your muscles moving one of the things that comes out of my field of angiogenesis is when you exercise your muscles want to grow because use them and so you're moving uses them don't use them you lose them but when you're actually using them blood vessels new blood vessels more circulation grows into your muscles and here's a little again i talk about these hidden fringe benefits when you're exercising regularly even half an hour even brisk walking those signals to your muscles send a a natural kind of um uh press a natural button that tells your bone marrow to release stem cells to regenerate your body so part of generating bigger better more defined muscles those stem cells go everywhere else and they start to regenerate your brain they help to groom your heart they help to comb and fix your other organs as well and so just regular exercise has been shown to improve longevity slow cellular aging improve your immunity and of course get you in tip-top shape that's great well you know really appreciate your time today and i think uh particularly you know when tom and alex founded tb12 it was all about bringing the things that they've learned to the world and so much we were talking about is so aligned and particularly with tom's day job as a quarterback uh we talk a lot about being on offense not on defense and one of the things i really enjoyed about your talk today and when i read your book is similarly it's about going on offense it's about making choices and we have control and we can make many of the choices you've mentioned to take control of our immunity of our health and whether that's in an environment today with covid or something after or beyond uh we do have some control so on behalf of everyone at tb12 and certainly all the viewers want to really thank you for your time and very much enjoyed it learned a lot and uh appreciate everything you've done and for those of you who've listened i can tell you firsthand eat to beat disease a great book i really enjoyed it and you'll learn a lot more about what he talked about uh today in the book if you go out and read that as well but thank you very much

Channel: TB12 Sports

Views: 27,225

Rating: 4.8745389 out of 5

Keywords: TB12, TB12 Sports, Keep Going, webinar, immunity, immune system health, immune support, strengthen immune system

Id: eGOmNd6mpxQ

Length: 53min 27sec (3207 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020