Can We Eat to STARVE Cancer? The NEW Science In the Defense Against Disease | Dr. William Li

recently there was an interesting study that showed if you actually increase your level of omega-3s by an extra serving a week or two from wherever you are with your starting point you can increase your longevity your survival by 4.7 years [Music] dr william lee welcome to the show thanks very much it's a pleasure to be here man i'm excited to have you as i was saying before we started rolling you have such a an interesting perspective on health and the thing that was a real hook for me and where i think is the right place to start is a quote that you said which is that health is not the absence of disease now i found that very surprising then i heard your answer and i was like okay i'm with him so why isn't health the absence of disease well so as a medical doctor i train in internal medicine uh which means that i take care of young and old men and women healthy and sick you know i have spent most of my career not only in sort of the the the center the thick of the current of modern medicine which is largely about prescriptions and knowledge largely about diagnosing and treating disease the thing that's different about me though is i started realizing with all the successes we've had you know treat new treatments for 12 different types of cancers that didn't exist before you know that we were really only tackling part of the equation because wouldn't it be much better if we could actually prevent the disease in the first place and what's interesting is the same science that teaches us how to intercept and tackle a disease using drugs actually teaches us in some ways a hell of a lot more about how to prevent the disease in the first place how do we actually you know um not just pick up the pieces after the time bomb explodes or the stick of dynamite but how do we actually pull the fuse out or disarm the time bomb right so that's what got me really interested in diverting my scientific focus from treatments to taking a look at prevention now if you're talking about disease it's pretty straightforward diagnose it find a treatment write a prescription refer to a specialist if you're talking about prevention you're really talking about health and this brings me full circle to where you where you started what we're starting so what is health right i mean i'm just like everyone else well if i'm not are you healthy well if i'm not sick i'm actually healthy right so in most people's minds including mine not being sick is kind of the default definition of being healthy but that is very problematic because the absence of something the absence of disease is very is impossible to operationalize you can't do something about the absence of something else so that's what i started to ask well what is health if it's not just the lack of disease well it turns out that and this has been my research it turns out that health is not just the absence of disease it is the result of our body's own hardwired defense systems health defense systems that we're born with these are defense systems are formed in the womb before we're born and the moment we appear on planet earth our health defenses are firing in all cylinders from day one all the way to our very last breath and all of a sudden that gives us a whole new canvas to understand what can we do to support health what can we do to boost our body's health defenses yeah i love this idea one when you think about disease it's happening within us all the time and right now i've heard you say this in interviews right now literally this minute you and i are both forming cancers but they are very small and the body has defense mechanisms against that and it goes and attacks it and you talk about the five defenses that the body has and when those five defenses are working well then even though you're being assaulted from the outside you've got things going wrong on the inside you're able to hit this i'll call homeostasis that we think of as health and really taking your approach of saying okay there are these five defenses which would be great for you to walk us through what those five are but that there are things you can do on a daily basis that support those and that's what i really want people to take away from your message so what are those five defenses and how do we keep them optimized yeah so our body has five very simple health defense systems that are um that have now been discovered they are number one something called angiogenesis that's blood vessels that's how our blood body grows blood vessels angio means blood blood vessels genesis is how the body grows blood vessels we've got 60 000 miles with the blood vessels packed in our body and these are the highways and byways of our oxygen our nutrients whatever we breathe whatever we eat in order for ourselves to get the benefits of the critical elements of life they have to be carried by the blood vessels so that's so critical for our defenses that's healthy number two our stem cells you know when we were kids we were told that starfish and salamanders can regenerate but humans can't guess what that textbook's been thrown right out the window because humans do regenerate just slowly and we know that we generally regenerate because our hair grows back um you know our skin can actually heal and and grow itself back but some of the crazy things that we're beginning to actually discover is that uh if you snip a piece of your lung off and it'll grow right back at the very tip if you cut up take away two thirds of your liver okay let's say that you have a tumor in your liver you can remove two thirds of it and that one third will grow the rest of the liver back kind of like a salamander's leg it's crazy and of course our nerves are regenerate and so biotech companies have been trying for decades now to figure out how to inject stem cells well mother nature's already beat them to it because stem cells are present in our body as a defense and we're continuously regenerating ourselves from the inside out repairing problems you know there's a road crew inside our body yours and mine right here right now that are fixing things that are invisible to us third microbiome we can talk more about this you know it's the tip of the spear of a whole new frontier about the human body that we're just beginning to understand but the important part of it is that we know that when we've got good healthy gut bacteria and this microbiome is the ecosystem of our gut bacteria i call it the great barrier reef in our body you know 39 trillion bacteria all living inside there and what we know the important part for your your viewers and listeners is that they help when they're healthy they help to lower inflammation in our body which then lowers all kinds of disease they help optimize their metabolism everybody's always worried about their metabolism good gut bacteria helps that right along fight fat um help to avoid um insulin sensitivity over and avoid glucose surges all very important controls our hormones you know so that our mood and our brain so our mood is actually uh healthy as well and can fight cancer and uh regulate obesity all kinds of things if our gut and by the way it's so easy to disrupt the gut i mean think about a tanker spill uh that destroys you know a coral reef that's what we can accidentally do to ourselves by eating the wrong things you know if you were taking a boat by the great barrier reef and you were to take a a bottle of toxic material and pour it right down on top of the coral reef guarantee you that the fish and the anemones are all going to be dead okay that's what we do to ourselves so this higher level of awareness that we have we have to take care of our gut microbiome so important for for defending our health our gut defends our health fourth our dna defends us against the environment so most people think about our dna as our genetic code yes it is it is the blueprint for our proteins in our body that we inherited half from our mom half from our dad etc etc however the the really cool unsung part of our dna is that it's one of our body's five health defense systems what does it do it fixes itself what do i mean by facing itself well we go out you know during the summer and you go to the beach and you are enjoying laying out you know enjoying the weather beach weather the ultraviolet radiation is coming in and mutating your dna now how come we don't develop cancer all the time after going to the beach because our dna is hardwired to fix itself when it's damaged by the environment and the beach is one thing and i'm not even talking about the tanning salon but i always ask people when you're actually filling up your car with gas like you're you know you're at the gas tank do you stand upwind or downwind of the of the of the pump and people go huh what are you talking about i'm like well if you smell the fumes the solvents then you're standing downwind and if you smell them you're breathing in solvents that can mutate the dna in your lung so how come we don't get lung cancer because our dna fixes itself an amazing defense system um that our dna plays and then finally is our immune system which of course you know after the past year and a half everybody knows just how important good strong immunity actually is but most people don't know that even as we get older our immune system still has the capacity of fighting invaders not just outside invaders like viruses and bacteria but inside invaders like cancer so we are able to now and this is one of the most remarkable things i've seen in my medical career give people who have cancer even metastatic cancer that spread immune treatments that by themselves don't kill the cancer but uncloak the cancer so that your immune system can go after the cancer and even if you've got metastatic disease even brain metastasis it's possible in some cases now for your own immune system to wipe out all traces of cancer and put you not just in remission okay that's what chemo does can put you in remission but immunotherapy can actually turn the clock back and reset yourself so you don't have cancer anymore hope you enjoyed the episode brought to you by our sponsor thrive get 50 off your at home gut health test when you go to try thrive dot com slash impact theory enjoy the episode so five health defense system what's the mechanism when you talk about the uncloaking what's actually going on our my understanding is that you're basically getting a sample from the tumor cell you're sequencing the tumor itself and you're somehow programming the immune system to go seek that out is that accurate well there are different types of immunotherapy broadly speaking immunotherapy is harnessing your body's own immune system to fight the cancer which is different than inventing a toxic drug or even or even a smart bomb you know a targeted drug to actually go after the cancer so immunotherapy relies on your immune system it is true what you just said there are some very specific kinds of immune systems where you can remove your immune system reprogram it you know kind of turn it from uh you know turn it from uh an ordinary immune cell uh into a super soldier okay and then inject it back in the body and it will go and go after the cancer but there are other forms of immune therapy where what you're what you're doing and this is what i was talking about cancers like to develop these sneaky ways of hiding from your immune system they cloak themselves you know like the old star trek the klingons would turn on cloaking device and now you can't the enterprise can't find the enemy ship okay well that's what cancers actually do some immunotherapies all they do is they rip the cloak off the cancer and the immune system goes regular immune system goes aha i see you i'm going to come after you and i'm going to get you because what keeps you and i uh from actually developing lethal cancers right here right now tom is that our immune system is spotting little tiny harmless microscopic cancers and saying i see you you're gone okay you're dead meat and they just clear off it's like taking an eraser just erasing the cancer right off the chalkboard all right so when you uncloak the cancer it allows your immune system to do this the best uh example of this is former president u.s president jimmy carter when he was in his 90s he developed a melanoma that had spread to his liver and his brain and you know it was at that point this was about 10 years ago now almost 10 years ago a brain metastasis from a skin cancer melanoma is pretty much a death sentence and so he was happy he happened to be one of the first people to actually get a treatment that ripped the cloak off of the melanoma cells in his brain and elsewhere and allowed his 90 year old immune system to see that cancer and even at that age even with that spread he had all this cancer cleared out of the system and i use that knowledge to help treat my own mother who actually had metastatic endometrial cancer so this is this came home to roost really on a personal level and you know we were able to replicate that kind of finding not from a skin cancer but from an endometrial uterus cancer so um you know we haven't beaten cancer uh completely yet but i'll tell you i did not expect in my career in my lifetime to be able to see it's possible to take somebody with advanced cancer and turn the clock back and literally erase it off the chalkboard using immunotherapies and so i'm talking about drugs i mean i talked a lot about drugs and and stem cells and and all that kind of stuff but the amazing thing is that with this hardcore knowledge now i've worked in biotechnology so i know what it takes to develop technologies to go after these um help enhance these uh health defenses but what's amazing is that it's very hard to beat mother nature and you can talk about drugs when you're talking about treating disease but when you're talking about prevention and raising your shields amping up your health defenses you can't talk about drugs you got to talk about something like food and food is a medicine we take three times a day and that's what i wrote about my bookkeeping disease all right before we get on to food because we're going to spend a fair amount of time on that i want to understand this uncloaking mechanism what's going on at a cellular level that one to what is the cloak itself is it like a biofilm like what happens with bacteria that that seems odd but maybe that is what happens and then what is the removal mechanism yeah okay so um there are many different ways to cloak uh we're discovering new ways and there are in cancer in many ways the one that actually has um been amenable to immunotherapies uh has been a protein called pdl1 it's called program def ligan1 so this pdl1 protein is made by lots of different cells to help our healthy cells protect to protect ourselves against our immune system so why doesn't why don't most of us have autoimmune diseases because our immune system is jacked up and ready to kind of attack anything that it doesn't want well it can recognize self or healthy self from disease because our healthy cells have created this protein called pdl one and it basically raises the flag okay like on the lawn that says hey you know what we're please don't attack us so cancers have hijacked pdl1 and they make lots of pdl when all over themselves and so basically your immune system kind of wings right by so these these super soldiers their regular immune system is with all these soldiers that are patrolling your body our body all the time they can't see the cancer because they're completely cloaked it's just wearing it another kind of assassin in the crowd waving a flag and so it ignores it and yet there it is it's right there so when you actually take that flag away and you let the body secret service spot that thing okay then your immune system will find the cells that are not make waving the flag that protein pdl1 say uh-huh i'm coming after you all right this is utterly fascinating so let me say this in my sort of layman's terms and see how close i'm getting so we've got autophagy your body's going through and it's saying oh here's a damaged cell i'm gonna strip it down for parts essentially and so that you know whether it's a senescent cell that's just sort of um misfiring or whether it's a cell that's literally broken we're cleaning all that up now i never stopped to ask myself how the body knows that that cell is damaged it knows it if i'm understanding you correctly because it stops producing this protein that you're talking about so in the absence of the sign that says i'm healthy the body then goes okay you're damaged and i need to strip you apart so that is part of autophagy so autophagy is basically like recycling you know you take the plastic parts and the bits and stuff after you've gotten your take out or you carry out you want to put it back so it can get reused in some useful way or the other stuff thrown out so that's autophagy and yes the these types of signals are used to help distinguish between what you're going to keep and what you're not going to keep and and what you should attack what you should not is that what we're triggering here is it normal autophagy or is there another layer where it's a totally different response yeah this is a this is another layer the autophagy will occur after the immune system actually finds it but before that it's really spotting the enemy uh it is cellular profiling okay so if you think about like the security force you know you got a vip in town you got a big crowd that's going to come out to hear the vip and you want to make sure that there are no assassins or trouble causers in the crowd you actually have your security go out there and review who's coming to the party and when they when they get to the party they're scanning the crowd looking for um they're they're profiling the people does that that individual that cell look like it's carrying a problem okay um and and most people are looking like innocents and so they they've got you know um they've got the pdl the proteins that basically say hey no no i'm you i'm i'm fine don't attack me but that um cancer is hiding itself cloaking itself masquerading uh uh uh like a good guy okay um so what immunotherapies can do is peel off the mission impossible mask how does it reveal how does it know to selectively peel off the pdl how do you keep it from just peeling pdl off everything yeah it's because tumors make a lot of it they make tons of extra pdl and in fact this is how we're able to find out if you're a good candidate for this kind of immunotherapy it's called a checkpoint inhibitor checkpoint just like checkpoint charlie just like the checkpoint for a security team profiling to make sure there's no bad guys in the crowd and um uh and and tumors cancers that are going to respond to this make a ton at this checkpoint and what what the um what happens is that the treatments have been designed so they're able to peel back the pdl one it's called a pdl1 inhibitor a checkpoint inhibitor and literally it kind of rips the mask off of of cancer it doesn't rip it off everything otherwise your whole immune system would go after you with autoimmune disease do you have to inject it at the site or something no it goes right into your bloodstream and uh you want the whole you want this thing to go everywhere into your brain into your toes into your kidney into your liver everywhere okay and that's the amazing part like we are moving away from you gotta cut the patient open and look for the thing or you gotta scan you can the this is these biological therapies um leverage the power of our health defenses yeah this is so interesting and forgive me i i'm i piece by piece i'm beginning to understand it better okay so i want to keep pushing on this so i really get it so what am i injecting exactly right well first of all um not every tumor is going to be making tons of it so some tumors are not going to respond to immunotherapy as easily you got to find a different way to attack them but the ones that do here's what we do we actually there's a bag of liquid that contains a immunotherapy drug they're called checkpoint inhibitors and most of them are what we call monoclonal antibodies so we're hearing a lot about antibodies in the news we get a vaccine your body makes antibodies antibodies are really kind of the ammunition that your immune system uses they're the bullets that the immune system uses to attack things like viruses or cancers and so um but you but then antibody can be designed okay so you can actually create a designer antibody to tackle and strip away the pdl uh the the cloaking mechanism so literally what what's in a bag that you would actually drip in as an infusion uh is a bag full of antibodies it goes straight into your body okay it's like getting an antibody if you infusion that's exactly what it is and these antibodies have been designed and dosed and primed so all they do is they they get all over your body they're patrolling everywhere and and they don't last forever so just a single injection and they're ripped in there anywhere there's extra pdl and extra cloaking peel it right off okay how did we get to the point where we could design something that would only strip it away if it's extra ah well that's the that's the heavy lifting of biotechnology you gotta look at normal you gotta look at abnormal then you gotta titrate it you gotta figure out that recipe you know how how does grandma how does nona make that red sauce so delicious she just seems to know exactly you know they've tried this over and over again different doses different levels different formulations until they found just the right one dude that is so brilliant that's really really incredible okay so about 20 percent of people if i remember correctly are like sort of hyper responders to that um you've got an interesting hypothesis that'll lead us into another one of our defense mechanisms which maybe is the place to go next before we get to food which is and i don't know if it plays into the antibody role but certainly just in in treatments in general that there are certain things that may be going on in your microbiome that metabolize the medication in a way that that either works for or against you um can you give us some color on that yeah absolutely i i you know you're you're setting this up perfectly for me to tell you how our health defense systems don't work in their own silos they actually work together our health defenses collaborate and through these connections they can really help us resist diseases like cancer so you know the microbiome is something that i can tell you when i went to medical school was never taught med school we were taught bacteria is bad you want to actually scrub it out clean it out treat it out with an antibiotic well now we know that actually most of the bacteria in our body is good there's a few bad actors but most of them are good and a lot of the good ones live in our gut okay and the gut bacteria as i mentioned a little bit earlier do all kinds of amazing and crazy kind of things one of the things they do is the gut bacteria talks to our immune system which connects back to the immunotherapy so you need to have a good immune system that's ready to rock okay ready to respond to the immunotherapy that you may be treated with that's what's hanging in the bag so if you hang something in the bag the antibodies that go into your bloodstream that rip off the cloaking device you still need the other half of your immune system the other half is the immune system has got to be good enough to go after it now it turns out the microbiome pretty much is the trainer for the immune system one of the trainers one of the caretakers one of the housekeepers of the immune system and so if your microbiome isn't in good shape your immune system is not going to be in good shape as well now here's what's kind of crazy um most doctors that are out there in practice now when we were in school we were told that um our immune system like where's your immune system it's in our lymph nodes it's in our spleen it's in our thymus you know people kind of like had we we had a checkbox of places that the immune system is located right you get a lymph node after you got like a sore throat or a flu or something like that bronchitis that's not where the immune system is now we we know that there's some there but actually 70 of our immune system lives inside our gut so think about your intestines right it's a big long tube like a sasha's casing a garden hose cut a garden hose in half it's got a layer inside that layer think about the jelly rolls think about it like a jelly roll now inside the middle of that layer is 70 of our immune system inside our gut wrapped like a like the jelly in a jelly roll now where's the bacteria the bacteria is inside our gut that ecosystem's inside our gut like inside the tube and then the jelly rolls where the immune system is 70 of our immune system so what happens what's the connection what's the collaboration our gut talks to our immune system like college roommates living in a dorm right so you go to college paper thin walls right some guy wants pizza what are we gonna have tonight you know you just pound through the wall and shout through the wall and the guy knows what you want to order right that's the same thing your gut bacteria can talk to the immune system through the walls of the bacteria and help to prompt them and give them commands and how to actually get in good shape drop down and give me 50. you know like that's actually what our gut bacteria is able to do for our immune system now there's one bacteria that's actually they're different bacteria that are important for different things we're just beginning to discover this there's one bacteria that seems to be particularly important it's called acromancia mucinophila acromancia mucinophila i'm going to come back to the name in a second so this um immunotherapy cancer therapy i mean it's truly remarkable what it can actually achieve in its best form okay but yeah only about twenty percent of people are the kind of responders that we wish we all would be right the jimmy carter's or my mother's for example and so um one of my colleagues in paris um dr laurent sitbogel is an immuno-oncologist okay and she took 200 people that had different types of cancers breast colon pancreas and she and they were all treated with immunotherapy and of course only 20 percent had the good response the beneficial response the other one were so-so that's a catsy response okay and and she looked at everything that made the difference between responders and non-responders right that's the typical thing that an analyst would do what makes the good one what makes a bad one what are the differences she could not find any difference between the responders and the non-responders except for one bacteria that one bacteria was acromancium mucinophila the people who responded it had it in their gut one bacteria and the people who didn't respond to immunotherapy had a bad outcome were missing it that's so interesting you're so crazy okay so she took the so she she replicated that in the lab and found that if she had mice growing cancers and she gave immunotherapy if she gave them an antibiotic to wipe out necromancer man the cancer just grew grew grew grew they didn't respond to the treatment if she put akromancia back in their gut the tumors responded they shrank frank trying to disappear amazing right um uh and by the way she got the acromancia from human patients she put it back into the mouse so all right so what does it have to do with um how to boost akkermansia right because it's very sensitive you have if i were to give you a z pack okay to treat a bronchitis uh that would wipe out acromancy your body will eventually grow back slowly but surely but if you had cancer and you're getting this treatment you cannot afford you don't have time time's not on your side right so we cannot eat acromancial right now as a as a supplement it doesn't exist it's not a probiotic okay not yet the only thing that we can do is actually grow acromancia so we have to be our own gardeners of our microbiome to grow the acromancia so our immune system is in good shape so that acromancy can talk to the immune system so that that part of is in good shape to respond to immunotherapy how do you do that well it's all in the name okay achromacia mucinophila mucin this bacteria loves to grow in mucus loves to grow in the mucus of the gut our gut normally secretes mucus so the more mucus we have it's like fertilizer the more the more acromancia will grow so how do we grow the mucus well you can eat foods pomegranate pomegranate juice the alacitannins natural chemicals and pomegranate actually one of the few things that can stimulate our gut natural gut natural substance and art to our gut naturally to secrete more mucus so you can grow back your acromancy so that's basically what we're doing now with some of these cancer patients is making sure before they get immunotherapy that they're actually growing back to akkermansia let's talk about thrive did you guys know that your gut is related to so many potential health issues trouble focusing bloating constipation maintaining a healthy weight and skin blemishes like acne and eczema our gut communicates with our brain through nerves and hormones and when gut health is poor it can directly contribute to these types of health concerns my wife lisa has struggled profoundly with gut problems so i know exactly how troublesome this can be unfortunately lisa is not alone in this battle one in five americans are struggling with gut health issues thankfully we can fix a lot of these issues with a better diet and the right probiotics and thrive makes this process really simple by offering an at-home gut health test so you can know the state of your gut health and what problems it may be causing thrive will then use your results to develop custom probiotics to help treat these problems these aren't the one size fits all probiotics you will find at your local grocery store these are personalized to you based on the results of the test thrive is easy convenient and accessible thrive sends the test straight to your door and based on your thrive test results they will customize a diet and probiotic suggestions just for you when you subscribe to thrive's program you can also save ten percent on all probiotics and other products they provide you can get fifty percent off your at home gut health test when you go to try thrive dot com slash impact theory that's tri thrive dot com slash impact theory and thrive is spelled t h r y v e go there right now for fifty percent off your at at-home gut health test again that's tri-thrive.com forward slash impact theory all right guys take care be legendary dude this is crazy and this brings us right to food one of the things that's so profound about your approach is you've compared the response to all kinds of diseases to a drug and then the response to food as if it were a drug and it really i literally have the chills right now just saying that it it is astonishing how you can get a response from eating food whether it's pomegranates increasing the mucosal layer in your intestines or many many other things which i'm sure you will rattle through some of here shortly that if you saw a drug that gave that kind of response it would be a multi-billion dollar drug and people be losing their minds but the fact that it's food becomes even hard to test for walk us through some of the early realizations that you had around that and i've heard you talk about how as an oncologist it's easy to get you know um oh god what are the chemotherapy drugs and test it out in your lab but if you ask the same thing about what the response would be for broccoli or something it's like nobody they look at you sort of sideways um talk to me about food as a drug yeah so first of all food is medicine is a an ancient concept and if you go back to the ancient societies and ancient cultures like greek culture or asian culture food isn't just food it's not sustenance you know it's actually part of our lives and part of our lives is actually what we eat influences our bodies um here's how i came into this you know very honestly i'm not one of these doctors that basically you know quit modern medicine and then pooh-poohed and eschewed prescription drugs like i just told you i i've actually been involved with developing biotech drugs so i i believe that new medications can be really really important for the right person at the right time in the right situation however i started to realize that because i helped to develop many of the systems to develop drugs that we were not taking full advantage of all these testing systems right and and to just to flesh out how i explained it i i'm a cancer researcher so i i've done a lot of research with in cancer labs and i can tell you you can um go on to the internet click on some chemo drug or whatever have it fedex to you by by a mail order haven't arrived the next day put a a little um a spoonful of the chemo drug into a into an experiment and within a few days or maybe even a few hours you would know using this test system whether or not the drug is effective against cancer where there's activity okay now you can pick up the phone and you can call on a pizza or a salad and have it delivered in 15 minutes and you ask the same cancer researcher how do i study what the onions do what do what does the anchovies do what do the you know what does the lettuce do and they would scratch their heads and say i have no idea so that's what i did 10 years ago is to tackle that challenge of of bringing two world cup making two worlds collide the world of biotechnology where we have like you can't believe how sophisticated some of these testing systems are and that's what's amazing because you can throw in the drugs too and you can throw in the foods and then you can compare them side by side so um uh my area is in the field of angiogenesis how the body grows blood vessels for years cancer researchers were finding trying to find ways to cut off the blood supply that feed cancers so the cancer doesn't get a blood supply it's just this microscopic thing and it can't grow in fact tumors cannot grow larger than the head of a ballpoint pen the tip of a ballpoint pen until it gets a blood supply no oxygen no nutrients no growth all right but when cancer is actually able to get this blood supply they start taking off they can grow 16 000 times in two weeks so it's an angiogenesis is a trigger to propel cancer growth so finding drugs that can inhibit angiogenesis or stop blood vessels from going to tumors was at one point kind of a holy grail it was you know like how do we get that lots of drugs i've been involved with the whole thing and now there are actually lots of real fda approved drugs but we were able to study foods in that same system foods some of the foods soybeans grapes strawberries lemons and it was crazy to actually see um because i had the street cred of being able to study against the biotech drugs that pound for pound ounce for ounce molecule for molecule um uh in in many cases the food held their own against the drug some cases more powerfully obviously some foods are not as powerful but that actually opens the gateway for a whole new future and i think that's something that's really exciting to watch no joke do we know what's going on at the molecular level is it a metabolite that our microbiome produces when um breaking down grapes that's stopping the angiogenesis or is it something else yeah so um so mother nature in creating foods um have uh laced these foods with natural chemicals right um these are called bioactives and they're called bioactives because they're biologically active and in a plant let's look at a strawberry for example okay the tartness of strawberries you know their strawberries are sweet and tart the tartness comes from an acid unsurprisingly called ellagic acid okay and so you know when a strawberry is a little tarter because it's got more logic acid so um electric acid is a powerful starver of cancer so cuts off does that actually end up in our bloodstream like can could i eat strawberries and then you could draw my blood and be like you had seven strawberries absolutely that is insane okay now but here's here's the even more insane part what are these what are these bioactives doing in the plant they are part of the plant's health defense system so these natural chemicals help the plant defend themselves when we eat them they have another job description they do double duty and they actually help to activate our own body self defenses now here's one thing that i think is a practical value you know for a long time people are sort of talking about like well you know like you should eat more organic and don't need pesticides and stuff like that here's a whole new take on this okay and this is kind of smoking hot information um pesticides actually kill insects so that the plants um look better the leaves aren't as chewed up and usually the fruits or vegetables look a little bit better too right that's just agriculture makes it look better and the product looks better on the shelf organic doesn't use that and so a lot of times you get you have that more natural you know the bugs are nipping at the leaves and chewing up the stems guess what mother nature created things like elastic acid as natural insecticides and so basically when the um the plant the strawberry plants being chewed on it makes more elagic acid to repel the bugs it's a wound healing response and a defensive response so organic foods have more bioactives as a reaction i just was involved with a study i was meeting about yesterday talking about coffee organic versus conventionally grown coffee conventional grown coffee with pesticides organic coffee hands down this is a study at the university of warsaw university hands down a pound per pound of coffee bean organic coffee has more bioactives than the pesticide treated coffee because the insects the natural things of the environment cause it to create more natural health defenses dude this yeah this gets incredible i can't believe i'm this deep in my journey of health and all that and i never realized that the actual chemical compounds from food i always thought it was the metabolites from the digestive process that was making its way into the bloodstream which i know also happens also happens yeah that's uh that's really intriguing so one thing we actually haven't talked a lot about which is your specialty is angiogenesis so when we eat something that has an anti-angiogenesis benefit is it like ubiquitous across every blood vessel in the body or is it doing something creating some sort of knock-on effect like the antibody drip that we're getting where it's somehow selectively targeting things that are over producing something great question let me kind of frame it in uh first framing about androgenesis in general so when we were in our mom's wombs okay and sperm met egg and started to form a little ball of cells that didn't look anything like a person yet but started to create little organs and start to create shape the first organs that get created are blood vessels our circulation is the first thing that gets created so our blood supply our circulation is very much a part of who we are and i mentioned that we have 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels just to give you a sense of how extraordinarily big that is if you were to pull out all the blood vessels from from you or me and line them up end to end that would form a thread that would go around the earth twice huge okay it is insane now um every single cell in our body every organ require relies on just the right amount of blood flow so they're getting fed with oxygen and nutrients um uh they don't need more than just the right amount and but if they don't have enough our body has to be able to grow more okay this having just the right amount i call it the goldilocks zone so goldilocks remember the the the story um you know the bears went in there and it's not too hot not too cold not too hard not too soft or our health defenses including angiogenesis is exactly the same way not too much and not too little but just the right amount so this just right zone exists for our blood vessels our stem cells our microbiome our dna kind of balance as well as our immune systems all about homeostasis the term you used earlier just the right amount now that means our body knows how to grow more when it's necessary and then when there's enough it stops and there's too much it's kind of like a gardener you know that sees your lawn over growing it mows the lungs mows it right back down until it gets to the right height okay our body's health defenses when they're working at their best there's like a perfectly manicured lawn not too much not too little just the right amount to be able to uh to to go around like playing like rounds of golf on a perfect course now um what tumors do is they hijack this process and so they like a tumor is sitting on a golf course and just grows extra weeds and grass righteous for itself so that's what gets targeted your body tries to fight that off but sometimes we need some extra help for it that extra help can be a smart bomb drug that we designed to target those extra blood vessels or we can help our body mow the lawn by eating foods that have anti-angiogenic or blood vessel mowing capacity you'll never go to get rid of them all it's just back down to the body's set point so what's an example of um a drug that can actually do this there's monoclonal antibodies that are designed like smart bombs to take out tumor blood vessels but foods can actually do it too now why can drugs and foods target a tumor blood vessel and not take down your aorta or the blood vessels feeding your brain like your carotid artery it's because when we build the healthy blood vessels we take our body takes great care to construct them to be very very strong it's like building a skyscraper okay the architects and the contractors and their craftsmen they make everything perfect as perfect as they can but when a tumor does it you know it doesn't it's not careful contractor that's like a lousy contractor just throws the the thing up and so the blood vessels that are grown are flimsy they're fragile they're unstable and so think about you know a hurricane like eric and ida sweep through the area and the strong sturdy structures are healthy blood vessels are going to stay up even when the wind is there all the ones that are not well constructed the wind blows them right down and that's why a tumor blood vessel is much more vulnerable to either food or drug wow that that's really incredible okay so you wrote the book eat to beat disease we've touched on a little bit but now i think it's worth what what is your sort of general i know that there's never going to be a one-size-fits-all it's very important for people to understand but in terms of general patterns of eating to be disease what are those general patterns yeah well first of all um when i wrote it to be disease which became a new york times bestseller uh the whole point was not about writing about a diet it's not keto it's not south beach it's not about weight loss even it's really about health and because when i was doing my research to look at different foods that would activate our health defenses here's the first thing i was surprised by it's not like one food or two foods or five foods or yeah it was more than 200 different kinds of foods and they were fruits and they were vegetables they were spices and they were legumes and they were different kinds of seafood including shellfish and they were different kinds of fish beyond salmon okay and there's even some dairy products that can actually have some benefits as well including fermented foods like yogurt and sauerkraut and kimchi and these foods are so ubiquitous that they are found in the traditional cultures of every single society but especially mediterranean diet which we know is healthier for us as a pattern an asian food which we also know is healthier and so what i started to realize is that eating to beat disease is not just picking a particular disease and trying to figure out what the recipe is that the one size fits all but it's really a journey that we have our whole lives from the time we're small until we get old we get older um parents have the opportunity to actually start feeding their children when as soon as they're taking solid food foods that can actually help them beat diseases in fact in fact breastfeeding is actually helping your child um beat disease by uh shaping and sculpting their microbiome right one of the health defense systems so i came up with 200 different foods i laid them all out according to which health defense systems they activate some cases they activate all of the health defense systems i call those grand slammers because man a single food will knock out you know knock the five health defenses out of the park it's a home run not to eat those things and i explain all the research has been done by myself and other people to show how they actually work so what's the principle to eat to beat disease you can love your food to love your health love your food to love your health that seems so contradictory to what we used to think about healthy food right because the old thinking is that well you got to eat healthy you got to cut out everything you love you know and and and i'm i'm turning that upside down inside out i'm inverting the whole equation i'm saying if you look at those 200 foods that i put down in my book you could be diseased take a sharpie out and circle the ones that you love already i like this i like that one tomatoes i like oh man i like this one okay that's a great starting point because if you start eating those foods you're already head of the game because you already love foods that can actually eat that can activate your health defenses now you can explore expand your horizons by choosing these other foods that are out there as well if you sat on tv and watched a food the food network you can find all these people experimenting with different ingredients if you go onto youtube you can look for an ingredient you don't recognize or melon the heck is a bitter melon well it's an asian gourd is it bitter absolutely but there are ways of actually cooking it so it's not so bitter and it has medicinal value well how would i do it click on youtube and search on recipe cooking bitter melon and you'll watch somebody teach it to you so love your food to love your health explore with your life and just know the foods i put in the book activate your body's health defenses right and some of the things i know you've recommended historically mostly plant-based um you talk about getting some omega-3 from marine sources uh whether it's from fish or whether it's from i think you talk about seaweed you'd have to refresh my memory um you do personally eat some meat though i don't know if you eat any red meat or not i know you recommend that people cut that down extra virgin olive oil um things like that am i missing any of the the heavy hitting advice well i mean so here here's the basic thing all the research scientific research has been done and the epidemiological the public health research shows that eating a plant-based mostly plant-based diet that that's pretty broad you know um uh fruits vegetables legumes nuts healthy oils good for you you should eat most of mostly that doesn't mean and by the way plant-based could be tricky because a lot of ultra-processed foods also have plant materials in it processed soy all kinds of other things all kinds of unhealthy oils made from plants however it's whole plant-based foods it's kind of stuff you'd find in a grocery store or a farmer's market okay like i would say mostly go for those mostly go for those okay seafood has been shown to improve survival and decrease the risk of death if you eat two or three servings of of seafood shelf it could be fish or shellfish um you get a healthy omega-3 fatty acids per day per week two to three servings per week and the amount you would eat uh which i write a whole chapter about food doses um amount you would eat is about three ounces so people like only i'm not a human scale i have no idea what three ounces is what i would say it's a lot less than you think it is a piece of fish about the size of a deck of playing cards you can put it in your palm and it's about yeah it's about as thick as a deck of playing cards not that big a deal and you know and people who love seafood can can get a lot of it that way recently there was an interesting study that showed if you actually increase your level of omega-3s by an extra serving a week or two from wherever you are with your starting point you can increase your longevity your survival by 4.7 years so an extra serving of of omega-3 rich seafood you increase your survival by lifetime survival by 4.7 years now you can get if you're a vegan or a vegetarian you can get omega-3s from plant-based foods so chia seeds flax seeds some of the nuts you can get those as well but what in plant-based foods you get a different kind of substrate to make your omega-3s so you gotta eat a lot more of it so you know um i i i like diversity so um plant whole plant-based foods seafoods if you actually eat fish um if you don't explore it if it's not for some ethical reason um and then you know look uh and dairy by the way you know when it comes to food and health there's no universals okay some dairy products you know like honestly cheeses are good for the microbiome because many traditionally made cheeses not in large quantities they've got saturated fats and a lot of salt but some cheese actually have lactobacillus and other healthy gut bacteria that we can use as a probiotic food yogurt a dairy product probiotic food and so i'm all about the science wherever the science takes me is where the evidence takes me there is a great american novelist named el doctoro and he had this great quote he once said writing he's a novelist writing is like driving at night you can't see beyond your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way and that's what science is like you just can only see where your headlights are going and you're focusing on the evidencing ignoring all the darkness that's out actually out there so what about meat okay um i can tell you that most of the research has been pretty convincing that if you eat a lot of red meat okay which was really only done for the last 70 years or so like you know since the 1950s before that most societies didn't have we're not prosperous enough to have a ton of meat around okay and and now we have an abundance of meat that we've industrialized meat and all the things that are not so good for us but um all the studies show that eating a lot of red meat and all the studies have shown that eating processed meats we're talking about our sausages and the pepperonis and all kinds of other hot dogs all that kind of stuff that's been classified by the world health organization as a carcinogen by the way processed meats you know once in a while especially that's something you really enjoy don't worry about it knock yourself out enjoy it but do not do it all the time and if you can cut it down or cut it out more power to you better for you and so this whole idea about you know life is for the living got to enjoy our how we do things you know some things we enjoy aren't that good for us you know some people like to roll down the windows or take the top down and drive really fast on a road faster than the speed limit just don't do it all the time because one of these times you're gonna actually get into an accident right and so i think that idea of moderation but if you're informed by science and you can actually then listen to your body you feel like crap after eating something don't go for it don't eat it the next time or eat less of it the the science is just so rich at this point in time in history that you know anybody that wants to get into food as medicine as a science not as a friend but is a real science has a huge future ahead of them dude that's all amazing this has been absolutely wonderful where can people follow along with you are you on social where can they get the book yeah well so um first of all you can uh i continuously put new information out that i'm finding on uh on social media and through uh you can find it on my website come to my website dr william lee d r william lee li dot com dr williamleecot.com i'm also at dr william lee on social i'm on instagram on facebook um i also uh uh do free master classes every now and then i'm a super mission driven person so whenever every now and then i'll feel like i gotta go out there and i just gotta teach a master class and i'll go with it for free and people can find out about it on my on my website dr william lee.com and uh and you know spend an hour with me and i'll give you an update on what's what's new what's going on how your health defense systems uh work for it and i also have an online course as well for people that really are interested in a deep dive thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 268,805

Rating: 4.9040236 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: X_4JxOuMHLQ

Length: 55min 28sec (3328 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021