dr. Lee's a world-renowned physician a molecular biologist and leading author he's the medical director of the angiogenesis foundation his work has led to the effective prevention novel treatment and even reversal of Dawid diseases spanning around from cancer cardiovascular disease chronic wheeze obesity diabetes and retinal diseases many of you have seen him featured on his TED talk can we eat to starve cancer which has been viewed over 11 million times he's again authored over 100 medical publications leading the field in this arena and his new book eat to beat disease is coming out in March of 2019 dr. Lee thank you for joining us well thank you is the sound okay great okay well first of all I want to thank Sentara for inviting me out to spend the day with the community and also my fellow speakers that have really done such a fantastic job framing the opportunities for us to take charge of our own lives by making good decisions with our diet and I think it's a big testament to Santara that they've taken the steps to organize this and commit the time to have this type of gathering and I also wanted to thank Naomi for organizing it because we should all give her a hand because she really did a fantastic job so um I'm gonna actually pick up with from all the other speakers and try to put some a few things together because I think after myself after I speak dr. T Colin Campbell's gonna talk about nutrition and kind of sum up the whole day we've actually spent the day the body of the day speaking about the importance of diets in combating disease and indeed that's really where most of our focus naturally is within a health system and as medical doctors is actually how do we actually conquer disease yeah privilege of being able to lead an initiative in my organization called the health expedition to ask a related question but looking at it from the other side which is how do we normally stay healthy how come we actually don't get sick more often so for example if I told you that we know that cancer is caused by mutations in our DNA but what have I told you that we now know that every single one of us here in the room has 10,000 mutations that occur every day naturally in our bodies so why don't we have cancer tomorrow how come we don't all have cancer tomorrow what is it about our bodies that protects us against that problem we know that that bacteria can be deadly and we also know that we need to have good sanitation and we also know as you've heard the microbiome the healthy gut bacteria is really important so we have 37 trillion healthy bacteria in our gut so we are infected but we're not sick how come and what have I told you that within the last two years we've actually discovered two new organs in a human body after all these years the mesentery has now been recognized as one organ and then the interest issue which is the space between organs is also a new superhighway of information that's also considered in organ and then what have I told you just about four weeks ago we discovered a new brain cell in humans called the Rosebud neuron this actually underscores just how much we still have yet to learn about how our bodies actually work and the art that I'm gonna make the case I'm gonna make in order to truly understand how we can actually eat to beat disease and to protect our health it's not only about the food it's about how our bodies actually work and respond to the food so that's really what I want to talk about and I'm going to start with just sort of a little a few statistics the planet is getting more crowded and it's getting older with seven points weekend and we're supported by this thin blue line around the planet that's it the resources that we heard earlier today the some of agricultural products can actually impact severely on our planet we have a responsibility as as a group as a community to really help preserve our planet and in preserving our planet what's good for the planet is also good for our bodies as you've actually heard before so at the World Health Organization and at the United Nations there is a recognition that one of the things that unites us is really disease because there are these non communicable diseases like cardiovascular disease ever heard of and cancer and diabetes and obesity that this is sort of unfortunately one of the great unions that links people together is that we share these diseases and certainly cardiovascular disease as we've heard so much about in the last few talks is really a major burden for us and therefore something we need to get on top of cancer is also another cause of death I'm sure I don't need to see a show of hands but I know every single one of us in this room has been touched by cancer either directly or with somebody who we know could be a family member could be a neighbor it could be a child but some were co-workers somebody we know and if you take a look by the year 2030 the number of people that will die of cancer every year 13 million that's like wiping out the entire country of Sweden the entire country of Belgium and about half of Australia in a single year with cancer's so we need to really be able to think about whether or not there are ways of getting on top of that you all know that there are on television these commercials to do genetic screening and of course there's also genetic screening for cancer and there are some cancers that in fact are able to be detected with genomic screening only about 10% or less actually most of it of cancers due to the environment and so the interesting thing is of the environmental causes about a third are linked to our diet as you heard earlier bad dietary habits do cause disease but I want to actually give you another way about thinking about the our diet which is that what about the good parts of the diet are there ways that we can actually invert the negative model to make it to turn our focus turn our attention to the things that are actually good in our diet as we've heard about that can actually fight not only cancer but heart disease and other diseases as well so I would say that this is where science comes into play we didn't have 450 years ago the ability to look at the body to look at our food in ways that we now actually have we've got many more technologies much more knowledge and so this is allowing us to actually be at this turning point where we can cut and and really get to the future by taking an another path altogether the reason that you are all here in this room as well as my fellow speakers is that we fundamentally believe that there is a better future ahead and that better future is one that we actually play a role in making the decisions so food of course is one of the things that we think about when it comes to disease prevention you don't have to go very far to find a farmer's market or if you're traveling abroad going to a local town or village market to find an abundance of food that's out there and obviously if you go to health conferences like this people are talking about their favorite I think we all agree here there's no such thing as a true superfood there's no magic bullet that actually is going to solve all of our problems as much as we would like there to be and so how do we actually reconcile our desire to find the magic answer with all the signs that's emerging and how do we then translate that into our everyday lives and that's what really what I want to actually share with you the first thing you should know is that we are way beyond just listing our favorite foods and saying that they are actually the treatments for disease as you've seen earlier there are lists of different foods that we now know and we're beginning to dive in to say what is inside that food what are the natural substances whether it's fiber whether it's a vitamin whether it's an oil whether it's another bioactive so you can see here on the list of foods on the far left-hand column a list of bio actives so we're still discovering what the natural chemicals are in these foods we are also beginning to use epidemiological studies which is studies of the community to find out what the outcomes of eating these foods are and when you actually then look at the data you can begin asking what are the doses that have been calculated and to be associated with an outcome this is not cause and effect this is associations that allow us to ask other questions and have some ideas of where to go further and I think dr. Campbell is going to talk about that further but the outcomes can be quite amazing if you look on the far right-hand side of this table you can see that there's decrease of some of the cancers that we care about prostate cancer breast cancer kidney cancer decrease in diabetes even decrease in all cause mortality these are the types of studies that you can actually integrate into our collective knowledge base about food my organization has been also asking some really interesting questions in other words can we go from our knowledge our tools that we use to look at pharmaceuticals and actually compare plants and foods to them so we call this from farm or Pharma too far and this is a just a simple graph showing on the top black column the effect on blood vessels healthy blood vessels that drugs which are seen in yellow and in blue actually have in a test it doesn't really matter what the exact test is just assume you can just take it for granted that I'm telling you that these are the different effects of different drugs whether it's an antibiotic whether it's a statin whether it's a steroid whether it's a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent and then what's really interesting is that we can take the same tools that pharmaceutical companies use as seen here and begin testing foods side by side and not surprisingly you're seeing that some of the effects in these types of laboratory assays show you that the natural chemicals within foods can actually have go head-to-head against some of the drugs this is not actually in patients this is actually taking a look at the natural power of what Mother Nature has loaded into the foods and of course many pharmaceutical products actually originally came from natural sources and so when you hear about this concept of food as medicine I want you to just remember that it's possible to use the tools of medicine to actually begin looking at food that's really one of the areas that I think is going to explode into the future that we should be paying attention to now I mentioned to you it's not just about the food I mean it is about the food but it's really more about our bodies and how our body reacts to food and everybody is a little bit different this is a whole area of precision medicine as you know we're beginning to get away from thinking about cancer just as the organ that it's actually in but we're beginning to look way down deep into the genomics the DNA the RNA the protein to kind of understand to really kind of get into a peel apart the mysteries of the body and that's really where my background is I started in vascular biology I worked in ah I work in oncology cardiovascular disease diabetes and it's complications of vision I've been involved with helping to bring about 32 fda-approved medicines that have helped to shift the way that cancers are treated that vision loss is treated and also at that diabetic wounds are healed I think earlier somebody was saying they're the they're the big fan of their toe I took know all about that it's about how the body heals itself but think about how the body does heal itself and I want to challenge you to think about health in a completely different way normally if you somebody asks you what is health you would say naturally that health is the absence of disease I'm not sick so therefore I'm healthy and maybe that's one way to look at it but I'd like to actually challenge you by saying that nope actually health is not the absence of something health is a presence of defense systems that our bodies are hardwired with from the time we're born to the last breath we take and these defense systems are firing on all cylinders at all times when we're awake when we're asleep defending us against the bacteria that's in the air those mutations that are happening in our body that toxins that we inhale the off-gassing chemicals that are in our homes and our carpets in our cars you know how many of you actually fill up a tank fill up your car at the filling station and you're an are you standing upstream or downstream if you're standing downstream you are breathing in those those fumes and your body has to defend itself your lungs have to defend themselves against those insults and so if you think about your body as a fortress how do we think about our defenses and from those defenses what kind of clues can we get on how to use diet or to understand the role of diet so you know a fortress many of you will recognize castles castles are really fortresses not just where you know royalty live this is in England as in the town called Irondale I've actually been there myself and it looks beautiful but if you actually take a look at how fortresses are designed for defense it's really amazing in addition to the moat which is the part that goes there on the outside many of you may not know that the tailless is actually that curved on the wall all that people from the top used to drop boulders that was shatter in the bottom and send shrapnel to repel the enemy what the spiral staircase always goes up in a counterclockwise fashion and that's because when you're defending from the top if you're right-handed you can strike down and if you're rushing from the bottom of the stairs they're trying to swing up right-handed you're at a disadvantage that's a defense and and I did not know this myself but most castles have something called a murder hole which is right at the entrance when people invade the castle there's a giant hole right and right on top of the doorway that people can drop oil and rocks to try to you know repel the enemy and so again castles are these amazing structures that were part of the community but they were designed to defend them they were designed for defense and so I want you to think about what we know about our body's defense systems we are hardwired with and I'm just going to show you five of them because these are the five that I'm working on right now and these five are angiogenesis which is our blood supply that brings oxygen and nutrients to every part of our body every cell our stem cells which actually help us regenerate our microbiome which we have heard about already our bacteria our ability for our DNA to protect itself and our immune system and the amazing thing about these defense systems is they are standalone each one defends us against a number of diseases I'm going to show them to you but these are common denominator defense systems and they support each other you know if you take a look at Army Navy Air Force Marines these are like these troops that are only these divisions that actually all work together to defend the body now I I do want to come back to food we're going to talk about food obviously and so when you see an apple growing on a tree what you might not be thinking about is how over evolution mother nature evolved those plants the fruits things that we eat to be packed with natural chemicals that actually protect the plant so what are they what are those protect their natural bioactive chemicals and they often repel insects to prevent the insects from eating up the plan to destroying it they are often colorful pigments that attract bees so that you can actually get pollination this is sexual defense you know for reproduction so often the bio actives and foods that work in our bodies actually were originally evolved in the plants that we eat we're talking about whole food plant-based diets they had a function original plant when we evolved as humans and picked those plants up and started to eat them these natural chemicals suddenly had a new job that new job is interacting with our human cells to do something new and that's what we're discovering and that's where the new sites of how foods interact with our body is actually started all right let me just give you a few examples of what we're learning to give you inspire you to think about your the foods are you eating and actually the data you saw earlier in slightly different ways and your Genesis this is a Greek word that's about the growth how the body grows blood vessels it's about the circulation we had good circulation we are able to operate find if we have poor circulation as you heard dr. Esselstyn talk about you have compromised blood flow you can't walk very far you got a problem or in the heart you got a block at your heart actually starves it is starved of oxygen on the other hand if you blood vessels can be hijacked to have really deadly consequences these are normal blood vessels under the microscope you can see they all look different the liver they look like River tributaries for a river in the lung their vessels pressed against air sacs in the heart they're really richly supplying the heart muscle and along nerves blood vessels are like telephone lines of course along nerves to keep the nerves alive that's a special circulation that nerves actually have now what's interesting is how the body keeps this natural balance no you don't want to have too many you don't have to you you want to have just a little right amount and so the body is able to grow more blood vessels when it needs better blood flow or after working out exercise there's a fitness stand back there somebody or a trainer you want to work out you're gonna build some muscle you're going to actually need more blood vessels the body can do that and after it grows the blood vessels there if there's a lawnmower kind of that mows back the lawn improves the blood vessels back to where you need to be back for balance we don't have enough blood vessels like after surgery or after injury you need to grow new vessels back well the body can do that too we can actually grow more blood vessels to fill up that space and that's actually what you see under a scab when after you cut yourself it's that red red stuff if you can't grow blood vessels or or prune them back that's when diseases start when this defense system is compromised you wind up having diseases and the diseases are the ones that you can we've talked about some of them too many blood vessels you wind up having cancer vision lots of diabetes and aging psoriasis arthritis and Demetrios as' Alzheimer's disease obesity fat cells require blood vessels to grow when you actually have not enough blood vessels you can actually have coronary disease you don't have enough bypasses natural bypasses or in a stroke after the blockage in the brain you want more blood vessels to grow even hair loss and I suppose it was a little pressured for me to put a rect out as function since everybody seems to have an erectile dysfunction story I will I will find a way to feather that in but it's true you don't have good enough nerves those nerves don't have a good enough blood supply as we've heard about and so that's insufficient angiogenesis we don't have if you don't have the right balance so let's talk about the diseases that result when we have too many blood vessels what can we actually do about those so I'm going to start with cancers because cancers are forming all the time in our body and but they will usually inconsequential they're about the size of the head of a of a ballpoint pen they can't get on with blood supply so they'll actually disappear your immune system will take care of it but when they actually were able to attract their own blood supply recruit their private blood supply the blood vessels actually may feed the cancer cells in a tumor can grow about 16,000 times in about two weeks once a blood vessel starts feeding so it's a massive trigger for cancer growth so there are now medicines that have been developed our new strategies to cut off the blood supply to cancer so the medicines exist I gave my TED talk that you heard about actually is about using food to actually cut off the blood supply to cancer so if you want to look in Ted it's you know can we eat to starve cancer and that's called anti-angiogenic therapy as a way of actually treating a preventing cancer but also as treating them as well it's something that is being done in every oncologist office and my group helped to develop the tools to study how do you mow down those extra blood vessels to prevent them from causing harm this is a eagle's eye view of a little ring that's of the big blood vessel the aorta that you heard about earlier and these those white little hairs that you see are actually those endothelial cells that you heard about those they're lining cells when you put when you grow them in the laboratory they will naturally want to fan out because they want to go someplace if they're not in a body and so this is what cancers do they actually caught they spark these blood vessels to grow all over the place linking the starbursts now if you actually extract the bioactive genistein from soybeans and you put them into the system look at how you shut down all those blood vessels that might be feeding a cancer it's pretty interesting that genistein from soy actually can shut down blood vessels so one of the interesting questions is now isn't that a problem for cancer doesn't soy have these estrogens that actually are dangerous for people women who are afraid of breast cancer turns out that's a complete urban legend like so many things that are out there about food and health phytoestrogens are plant estrogens and this is what they actually look like all right you don't have to memorize this but just I want you here's what I want you to do now this is what a human estrogen looks like do they look the same they're completely different and so actually the phytoestrogen from plants block the human estrogen receptor it's kind of like a natural tamoxifen in fact and so the you know the skeptic would say well okay you're making that case they look this different but does this actually mean anything in real life because that's where it counts this is now where you start taking a look at large epidemiological population studies this was published in JAMA in 2009 this is the shanghai breast cancer survival study in which they enrolled five thousand and forty two women with breast cancers now this group would be the ones that would be hosed the most if they were actually going to be worse their situation would be worse than what is what they found over five years that the that if the women who ate soy had a twenty nine percent decrease in a risk of death during that period of time and a thirty two percent decrease in the risk of the cancer coming back if they had it surgically removed this is the complete opposite of making breast cancer worse this is helping patients who have breast cancer and how much do you need to have I mentioned something about dosing when you go back and look at this paper and do the calculations the amount of soy that you would need to take to get this result is 10 grams of soy protein a day how much does 10 grams of soy protein a day it's about it's about the amount you'd find it in one cup of soy milk all right not a lot practical and in Asia if you have breast cancer people don't freak out and say donate soy in fact they feed you more soy and so again we have to think about the cultural relativism we actually have a sowing a lot of things that we eat not all of them are good a lot of processed foods but in Asia if you think about the Asian diet there's a lot of soy proteins that are actually commonly consumed now here's 17 studies looking at breast cancer in soy associations and if and you can see all the studies show that the balance of evidence suggests that soy actually helps improve breast cancer survival it does not cause death from breast cancer so again this is the kind of evidence that is helpful and I encourage all of you guys when you're thinking about the evidence for food and health it's all about the science it's all about the evidence you know this is we're just trying to figure out we don't know all the answers but we just need to see the data I'm showing you the data because I think it's a useful way for you to have the information to make up your own minds Tomatoes they have lycopene and so they have also been studied for their anti-angiogenic benefits because lycopene is anti-angiogenic well that's interesting but does it actually make a difference well there have been some large studies called the Harvard professionals follow-up study involving 46,000 men that have been followed over 20 years and it was found that consuming 2 to 3 cups of cooked tomato sauce was associated with a decreased risk of prostate cancer by about 30% now that doesn't mean that everybody avoided prostate cancer but there was clearly an association with a risk reduction associated with a food that contains a bioactive that we know stops one of the processes that drives cancer growth so it makes sense our world is better when it makes sense or we're able to make decisions better when things make sense and that's really what I think this is all about now for the men who did develop prostate cancer when they actually did the pathology and biopsies they found that the men who ate more tomato sauce had less aggressive and fewer blood vessels in their cancer so again this is really kind of going the whole hog of all the studies going all the way down to the patients who did develop cancer to look for blood vessels and your genesis feeding their cancers now here's a couple of interesting things beyond that data and this is something that I think anybody who wants to put you know information to use preparing your tomatoes that you makes a difference you want to simmer your Tomatoes about 190 degrees you'll change the amount of lycopene available for your body why if you eat a typical red tomato off a vine from your garden it tastes great and get lots of vitamins from it but the lycopene is in a form that's called trans and it's very difficult for your body to absorb it's one chemical formulas of the of the of the lycopene if you heat it you change the chemical structure naturally and you change the trans to the cysts form and suddenly your body can absorb it so at two minutes of heating tomato sauce you suddenly make it 50% more available and after you simmer for 30 minutes as 250 times more available and so again how we treat our food makes a difference as well they've been studies looking at to cooking Tomatoes in water and you can actually get the lycopene out and you can see that there's some like apena goes into the bloodstream but lycopene for those of you who have taken chemistry at some point in your careers is a fat-soluble it's an oily molecule it dissolves better in oil than in water right so oil and water don't mix lycopene loves oil so while there are all the cautions that have been given to oils in our in our date today if you cook tomato sauce in olive oil the lycopene gets into your bloodstream a lot more easily because it doesn't get flushed through now it gets absorbed into your body alright by a lot what kind of olive oil what you want to use I'm not talking about the endothelial effects I'm talking about the anti-aging that you know I'm not talking about the lining effects and I'm talking about the anti-angiogenic effects well it turns out that all of us are not all the same if you look across many of the olive species there are three varietals of olives that have a highest number of anti-angiogenic cancer starving polyphenols one's Italian from from Umbria mauriello one is Greek from Peloponnesus it's the core Aniki Olive ones from Spain is called to pick you olives so the next time you guys go out to the store if you're gonna buy olive oil I look at what kind of olives it comes from you can actually find bql Kornacki Mario lo in the grocery store so again that's one way that you can actually make a decision that can actually be helpful to you now what about the type of tomato this is there's a type of tomato actually matter as well you want high lycopene right well it turns out that the San Marzano tomato in Italy has very high lycopene and cherry tomatoes have even more lycopene the black tomatoes that you see now like I mean they're just starting to be around all the time these dark colored smoky color tomatoes they actually have a lot of lycopene and then the tangerine tomatoes one variety where the natural lycopene is already in an absorbable form so that's a good one you don't need to cook that one if you ate that one in a salad raw you would actually be able to get good absorption so again I just showed you you know something from the idea of lycopene to the clinical studies to the pathology to the clinical trial showing absorption to the cooking techniques to the varietals this is really where we should be going with thinking about food we can dive deeply now because we can ask these questions this is actually a partial list of anti-angiogenic foods that you can have they do other things as well many of them have antioxidant effects many of them Pro endothelial effects but they are the ones that definitely have anti-angiogenic effects as well now what about the other side of the equation where you actually have insufficient not enough blood vessels and you want to grow more can you help your body prompt that as we age you know we our circulation tends to not do as well partly because of the blockages you've seen but also just in general our blood flow tends to be a little bit less spry as we age so how about angiogenesis stimulating foods this is a relatively new area that I'm really excited about can we prompt blood vessels to grow where we need them well it turns out barley actually contains a natural chemical call beta-d-glucose stimulates the immune system by the way but it actually causes your body to make more of the substance that grows blood vessels and in fact they've studied this in a laboratory and all the only thing you need to know with that picture is those orange circles I'm showing you that when you actually provide lab animals with barley and this is by the way you're feeding them pasta made with barley barley pasta you can see that there is more blood vessels growing in those animals that have been fed pasta made with barley okay there's another ant Pro intergenic food that is foods it's a substance really called or solok acid where do you find it fruit peels apple peels I mean how many times you you're making a pie you're peeling the Apple all the peels you throw away well there's a new way of thinking about sustainability maybe some of the stuff in the trash is actually good for us and we should set it aside and find other things to do with it by the way it's not just apple peel it's cranberry peels blueberry peels cherry peels dried fruit are a really great source of this because the skin is dried right onto it and this you can see that you heard about nitric oxide making blood vessels healthier it turns out foods with our Solek acid helped increase our nitric oxide so our blood vessels are happier and they'll grow more blood vessels this is actually a experiment where one side of the animals leg on the left side this is all blue doesn't have good blood flow but when you start treating them with or Solek acid feeding them foods with their stomach acid you can see at the end of three weeks it should say weeks there you can see the blood flows come back it's grow new vessels nitric oxides have that blood vessels the endothelial cells are happier as you hadn't heard about earlier this is a dietary approach to this that is actually quite meaningful so these this is I don't have time to go into every single food but this is there's a growing list of foods that of angiogenesis stimulating properties now you might say wait a minute you just show me cancer we don't want blood vessels and we want a new heart you want blood vessels how do we actually know one thing's gonna cause a problem for the other this is where the body seems to know exactly what to do there is a zone a Goldilocks zone that knows exactly how many blood vessels need to be there it's very hard to actually reduce the number of blood vessels beyond what's normal is really hard to grow more than what's normal think about mowing the lawn on both sides of the equation the body knows how to titrate how to get rid of all the extra bad blood vessels and how to grow just the right ones thing just to get to where we want to go its homeostasis this is actually how the body wants to function medicines don't do this by the way medicines actually will take things down to zero it's like medicines like as it doesn't it's not a scalpel it's a hammer slamming things down so foods actually have the unique ability to be able to do things that medicines can't now what about regeneration when I was growing up as I'm sure most of you we were told that people don't regenerate starfish regenerate and salamanders can regenerate and the way that they regenerate is by using stem cells that's how a starfish that's missing an arm will grow new or a new leg for a from a salamander but it turns out that we're all regenerating we all have stem cells inside our bodies and these stem cells are being used all the time that's why arnt hair grows back after a haircut that's why our skin you know that's why you get dandruff that's why our gut replaces itself that's why our liver is able to regenerate we do regenerate just often not that quickly but we generate we regenerate in important ways throughout our existence and the question is when do stem cells come into play stem cells come into play for regeneration when we're injured so this is actually showing that in 25 patients in Italy who suffered to burn and went to an emergency room got admitted to the hospital and they just measured their blood at different time points and over the course of the hospitalization you can see starting from the time of admission to the hospital more and more and more stem cells came out because the stem cells which live in our bone marrow are trying to heal up that skin in the wound that's regeneration that's a kind of real bona fide regeneration and the greater the injury the more stem cells have to come out it's more injury more stem cells needed right we need to regenerate more furiously and in fact for cardiovascular disease this was from the New England Journal of Medicine a very important paper out of Germany that showed if you just took people who are getting you know their and geography as you saw live with the dyes being shot and you measured their blood and seeing how many stem cells are naturally in their blood you can see that the group in blue who had more stem cells in their blood actually had fewer they did a lot better they survived longer they had fewer cardiovascular events the ones who didn't do as well in Green had fewer stem cells more stem cells more regeneration more repair the heart longer survival less stem cells you're in trouble now here's the problem as we age our stem cells also start to lose their punch we have less of them the ones that we have don't work quite as well this is just kind of a natural part of our life cycle but and because of that there are a number of diseases where impairments of stem cells are important so when you have hair loss ILP cheb baldness alzheimer's is these stem cells in their brain asthma you can't get scarring and you actually don't have enough stem cells to keep repairing the lungs erectile dysfunction I put it but I put it back they're also not enough stem cells are actually using stem cells as a treatment for that ischemic heart disease macular degeneration there's some amazing reports coming out of England now of people who are having stem cells injections of their eyes that regenerate their retina and they're able to get some vision back from being legally blind stem cells as we get older are weaker if we could actually replace them with stem cell therapies it is really a whole new future of medicine and that's really what the biotechnology world is doing I'm involved with that I've been involved that for well over a decade but that's biotechnology you're talking about a billion dollars a ten years unknown safety issues what about food do foods stimulate stem cells in the is yes first one I want to show you is cacao or chocolate it turns out that studies have been done where if you take high chocolate with high flavonols and make a hot chocolate out of it and you drink it just twice a day two cups a day for 30 days you can start by measuring your stem cells and this is from 16 subjects and you can make the stem cell levels go up this is 2 cups of hot chocolate of high flavonol hot chocolate just twice a day by the way all of these patients had cardiovascular disease they had documented blockages in their arteries in their heart and they could get more stem cells going that is a small study but really really interesting to think about so again we need to pay attention to what kind of studies these are this is a clinical trial it's a small study but it actually is really important because it correlates with some of the other information I showed you a larger study 20,000 people in Germany showed that 'men and 1/2 grams of chocolate per day lowered the risk of heart attack or stroke by 39 percent okay what is 7.5 grams of chop this is about three chocolate chips got to be dark chocolate not that much and you know it's by the way I want to say it's not that dairy in the chocolate it's not the sugar in the chocolate it is that natural chemical and cacao and that's what we need to be able to do is that you know the final product that we're served up by companies isn't necessarily what's good for us but we need to be able to discern what it is that it's actually in the food that might be doing us a favor now diabetes we've talked about is a big problem now I'm going to a stack when what you heard diabetes impairs the stem cells in our bodies if you have diabetes your stem cells just they're kind of sleepy and they don't want to work as hard and there's fewer of them but it turns out that will make it 3 fatty acids have been studied they can stimulate those stem cells and wake them up and say hey go do your job now I'm not saying that this is a 1:1 answer to all the problems with stem cells but it is really interesting that when you actually have omega-3s that you can actually get this type of six statistically significant increase in the activity of your stem cell to wake up stem cells now there are patterns that enhance our stem cells Mediterranean diet not surprisingly also helps the stem cells the Okinawan diet they actually have studied the vegetables that the people in Okinawa eat this is in a blue zone they actually stimulate stem cells caloric restriction we heard a little bit about that during a QA helps your stem cells even intermittent fasting it turns out when you're really fast you get where your body responds in all kinds of way one of them is getting rid of all the old cells that are not as good anymore and then when you start eating again it reboots all their stem cells to come out to come out and rebuild it rebuilds your immune system in fact in fact so there are also patterns that hurt our stem cells high-fat high-salt hyperglycemic diets okay all injure our stem cells so again these are I don't have time to show you all the data for every single piece of information I'm showing you but the data exists and it actually shows you that there are explanations for some of these things that we know to be true not good for us or things to be good for us and that helps us get more comfortable when things make sense we're more likely to do them here's just a list a partial list of foods that stimulate stem cells again I don't have time to show you everything but I mean looks quitting I don't know if any of you have ever had squid ink pasta black pasta but it's a delicacy in some parts of the Mediterranean and Spain and Spain and in actually goji berries another another herbal tea okay now one example one exception to stem cells because they're generally good for us they help us for generate but cancers like them to cancer stem cells are a big problem they are kind of the holy grail for cancer researchers because they are like baby cancer cells that make more babies and in fact cancer stem cells are responsible we think for most of the times that cancers come back after successful treatment how many people know of a case where you have a breast cancer that's removed in a patient looks like they're fine and then a few years later it comes back or a colon cancer like that's like the worst thing that you can happen if you've been successfully treated and then it recurs it occurs because of the cancer stem cells and so what we want to do is find a way to actually target those little mini baby cancer stem cells so the tumors won't recur well guess what it turns out that foods some foods target cancer stem cells it's really amazing this is just a partial list purple potatoes target colon cancer stem cells cacao targets breast cancer stem cells green tea its colon and breast time you know Thanksgiving is coming up and hits prostate cancer so again this is the research this has been done in a laboratory the isolate cancer stem cells you look at what the impact of these food bioactives are then you test it in an animal then you start taking a look in patient samples it's really quite amazing to think that we can actually eat I mean think about the patient's been successfully treated you don't want that cancer to come back shouldn't you be on a diet or shouldn't you include Foods in your diet that actually target those cancer stem cells brand-new gateway opening up for us to think about how to manage cancer patients switching on a microbiome another defense system we know that bacteria important I told you there's 37 trillion of them obviously you've heard a little bit about them before I can't go through all 37 trillion in fact we barely know much about all those bacteria but I will tell you one thing we've got about we've got roughly the same number of human cells in our bodies as we do bacteria so we're 50% bacteria and 50% human you know what they call that I mean we first of all it's like a coral reef right here it's a reef a skeleton of the coral with a lot of other like clownfish around it Nemo the the thing though is that there's actually a term for animals or organisms that are not just one type of organism like all of us in this room we are not just human we are partly bacteria 50% of us are bacteria and they call this there's a term for this called holo biomes hol o bi o NT that's what humans are we are Homo BIOS because we are 50% humans 50 percent bacteria and the bacteria help us with our health these are the conditions and the list is growing where we know that our gut bacteria are abnormal or disturbed it's called dysbiosis because you get a problem with them we don't understand everything about it but we know people with Alzheimer's disease their gut bacterias disturb after sclerosis something between the gut bacteria and the lining of the blood vessels as we heard about earlier even bipolar disorder schizophrenia major depression all associated with our gut celiac disease food allergies hypertension by the way that there's also bacteria in your mouth if you actually use that super type of antiseptic that sometimes dentists gives up do you have major dental work you wipe out your mouth by oh okay and that causes your blood pressure to go up because of because the mouth bacteria also digests the food that you eat in order to help lower your blood pressure so again we're just beginning to discover this I told you at the very beginning how many new things were discovering about our our health so this is I mean we could have a whole week's of conference on the microbiome and still not even scratch the surface but I will tell you what we're discovering is that there are some foods that we eat that actually contain bacteria and the same bacteria that our healthy gut is made out of like for example kimchi on the upper right hand corner it's packed with bacteria Bacteroides form acutest lactobacillus if you go to a Chinese restaurant you have a little album pickled appetizers got from acutest lactobacillus sauerkraut which I didn't realize this but originally sour cream came from Asia and then it was exported over the Silk Road and then it took root in Eastern Europe but sauerkraut also has lactobacillus when you're when it's fermented the lactobacillus comes from the air that settles down and as though as the cabbage ferments the bacteria start growing in that an elective bacillus dominates kicks out all of it then we eat it then are we put the bacteria into our gut now there's a couple of other things how sourdough bread this is a big surprise I shower dough is actually made with lactobacillus inside the doh now there's been research studies looking at the number of different types of lactobacillus that are present in sourdough the dough itself and if you've never seen how to actually look at bacteria in bread in the bread dough this is the this is the graph you can actually pick out the individual bacteria and characterize them and profile them but there's one of these bacteria which is particularly important called lactobacillus Reuter on which originally is delivered from the mom something that is startling as we're realizing that this bacteria lactobacillus rerai lives in the colon when the mom is nine months pregnant there's a signal sent from the uterus to the colon and it causes this bacteria to come out of the colon inside blood cells it kind of like calls an uber picks up a cell and it rides all the way to the breast where it lives it gets it gets out of the Oberer by the nipple and when the actual breastfeeding begins the milk injects mother's milk injects this bacteria into the baby and so this is another example of how the microbiome actually works it turns out that this bacteria actually can reduce the growth of breast cancer and it comes from breastfeeding and at least in the laboratory if the mom actually breast is able to breastfeed with Alecto basilic Rooter I'd it'll protect for generations later on against breast cancer so again really powerful stuff that we're beginning to but that its president sourdough bread this is actually from the breast a tumor study healthy diet breast cancers don't grow very well put them on a fast-food diet you might not be surprised breast cancer grows much faster now you feed the animal fast food but lactobacillus root Arai it activates the microbiome defense against cancer up regulating your immune system and the breast cancers have a hard time growing even when you're eating not that great a diet now obviously we should be eating a good healthy diet but it just shows you the power of actually the microbiome now here's something interesting but people always critique well you know how do you know that that's stuff that you buy like in the drugstore actually it's alive or if you cook it you know in these foods you showed aren't the bacteria dead at least for lactobacillus if you kill the bacteria by putting an ultrasound on in and just blitzing them so they're just nothing but tinier little fragments and then you you filter out anything that possibly could alive be alive the fragment from that bacteria if you feed it will have the same microbiome health-promoting effects so there's if you don't need live bacteria at least for this bacteria just that just a presence of his fragments are good enough to actually work mind-boggling to think about that right okay one other thing that lactobacillus Rotary does it alters fat metabolism inside our gut it changes a way that we absorb lipids that we actually process fat that adipose cells fat cells actually grow if you take regular Cho and you over feed a mouse that turns fat you fat and feed a mouse fast food Chow and it gets fat now you actually feed either regular Chow or fast food Chow an animal with lactobacillus look at that they don't gain weight this fast this is the power of the microbiome at least this particular bacteria seems to play a role to prevent cancers from growing in the breast to help lower the the weight gain and actually the development of adipose tissue and then there's another set of data that I don't have time to show you it actually causes the brain to release oxytocin which is the which is actually the social hormone that we get when we hug and so again this is our bacteria controlling our minds and our psychologies and our social networks now most people won't have even thought about kiwi fruits actually impacting our microbiome but this is a study a very small study but an important one that just shows a proof of concept of a singapore they gave female volunteers two Kiwis a day for four days and then looked inside their stool to see what happens in the first 24 hours they had 35 percent more lactobacillus in their stool just from eating the Kiwi the fiber and the fruit feeding the bacteria changing the population and the bifida bacteria increased by 17% over the four days these two bacteria lactobacillus no bacteria they actually make other metabolites called short chain fatty acids or skaffa that are anti-inflammatory they alter our lipids and energy metabolism and they actually helped our gut have protective mucus layer so you have less leaky gut kind of syndrome so Kiwi who would have thought that Kiwi would have be beneficial to us on the basis of our microbiome but now you have it this is the beginning of the evidence to study this fruit and these are all the foods that beneficially affect the microbiome okay that's really interesting now processed food processed meats actually tend to be harmful artificial sweeteners we don't absorb them but guess what they get delivered right to the gut the bacteria have to deal with that so it's sort of like this you know raining a fire of artificial sweeteners also the bacteria have to deal with because they're not not absorbed in our body there's a study in Israel that actually shows that it actually damages the artificial sweeteners damage the microbiome especially saccharin so I'm not spending your time Oh showing you all that but just to show you just how powerful that is DNA modification also really interesting I don't have time to show you every aspect of them but just know that our DNA we got good DNA and bad DNA the good ones can actually help us block cancer as an example the bad DNA our oncogenes can help us grow cancer this is a lot of other diseases are similar patterns you know if this then that and of this then we have an opposite effect turmeric is one example of a food that actually increases the good DNA through epigenetic changes and that actually blocks cervical cancer lung cancer and breast cancer at the same time that it blocks the bad DNA so it actually works on both sides of the equation in order to be able to help benefit us and so with turmeric you want to actually have some fresh cracked black pepper because the body likes to eject the turmeric but fresh PAP fresh cracked black pepper will help the body absorb the turmeric a little bit better so again some of these nuances of actually mixing spices by the way I have to compliment whoever designed the lunch again today because it was really tasty and it had spices in it and that's really how a plant-based whole food diet can taste is really really flavorful and I think that's something that we should all lean towards because those spices can make a big difference especially when it comes to our DNA all right so foods can modify our genes they can they can turn on the green light for more good genes they can turn on the red light for more for bad genes and they can sometimes do them together at the same time next slide I'll show you an example of a bunch of foods in the middle and the bioactives and the green lights are good ones good genes and the red lights are bad ones and you can see that we're starting to create this puzzle of which stuff in which food turns on good genes which stuff in which foods turn off bad genes all right that's what we want what do you want to do as another way of understanding our diet so you don't need to memorize this picture but just know that in addition to all the other things you've heard about today and I've talked about as well that the foods that we eat that are good for us also affect our DNA now finally let me tell you something was startling about the immune system so we know that you know little babies have to be protected because their immune systems aren't quite as strong breastfeeding helps boost our immune system oh wait a minute that lactobacillus Rooter eye actually helps to boost the immune system uh-huh another link between immunity and our microbiome we also know that as we get older our immune system tends to go down because the stem cells that build immune systems are not quite as strong or are they and this is what we're beginning to find out we're having a new paradigm of the strength of our immunity as we get older so our immune system you know without going into a whole lecture about the Newsom's very very complicated you've got the immediate immune system that reacts to infections or invasions you've got the adaptive immune system that creates antibodies I just want to show you this picture this picture was done by a group at the Weitzman Institute in Israel that kind of look at the social media the social networks that connect immune cells part of our immune system and our non immune cells and they are talking all the time our immune system is talking to other selves all the time and we don't understand everything we don't know how to decode all that conversation but we know it's really really important and that's why we need to actually protect our immune system so how are the ways that we can actually protect our immune system we know that the boy in the bubble which you guys probably remember from you know back in the 70s and 80s they in a movie about this this is a kid with them and a immunodeficiency syndrome were basically no immune system couldn't expose them to the outside air or he'd get infected and die and that's one example that's one extreme example where you don't have a strong enough immune system and we also now know that in many cases in cancer the cancers are escaping our immune system our museum wants to get rid of the cancer I showed you earlier without blood vessels cancers can't grow they're tiny your immune system wipes them right out well how come some of them grow because they can escape our immune system so what we're beginning to realize is that you can actually now amp up the immune system using immuno therapy for cancer immunotherapy for cancer is not chemotherapy okay it's not radiation it's giving medicines to cancer patients that are now fda-approved was like six of them just within the last three or four years that actually don't kill the cancer directly per se but they unmask the cancer so your own immune system can benefit my mother who is 83 with metastatic and new material cancer that was recurrent was given really no chance and unless she went on high-dose chemotherapy would probably would have been very destructive for her but she got an immune an immune treatment and after three infusions that allowed her own 80 year-old immune system to find the cancer all of her cancer disappeared not one bit of cancer was left this is an example on the left of a metastatic cancer from melanoma in the brain after immune therapy it is gone a tumor in the brain that's spread from another part of the body with the immune system can go away Jimmy Carter was one of the most visible early recipients of this some of you may remember at one point of I think 2015 in August he actually wrote a public letter saying I'm retiring from life of public life now because my melanoma you know he's all building houses out in and in Atlanta my melanoma my arms spread to my liver and my brain and there's no treatment well there's no treatment until immune therapy and he is alive today with no sign of cancer okay on immunotherapy now here's the problem with immunotherapy it is 4,000 times the cost of gold by weight 4,000 times the cost of gold and so you know if you just google immunotherapy and cost you will wind up seeing the big debates that are going on I mean how can we not give somebody we care about the benefit of having an immune therapy well it's really simple the checkbook who's paying for all of us and how do we actually make more people benefit because not everybody benefits yet these this is a big social conversation but that's not why I'm telling you this I'm telling you this because these treatments actually are impacted by food there was a study a chair co-chaired a conference in Paris last year called rethinking cancer and it was really interesting because we said let's organize a cancer research meeting but you can't talk about chemotherapy you can't talk about clinical trials you can't talk about you know drugs or radiation the only thing you talk about everything else well that's your immune system that's your sleep that's your stress that's your diet what we found out is that the people who when you look at patients who respond to immunotherapy versus people don't respond the only difference is one bacteria in the gut called Ackerman see a moose in Oh Philip if you had a cure masiha he would actually survive you would actually you would respond if you didn't have it your immune system wouldn't survive microbiome connected to the immune system what you cannot eat ackerman SIA as a probiotic doesn't exist the only thing you can do that we can do all in this room oh by the way Accra man see it if I gave you by accent clarithromycin it'll wipe it out okay in two days that's how sensitive it is so how you gonna go back the only way to grow back Ackerman say Musa Nephila is with food eight ounces which is one fluid cup of pure pomegranate juice or cranberry juice over the course of a couple of weeks will grow back your Accra man SIA now that's not known in oncology that's not known by the cancer patient community but it needs to be known and it's a way of making that huge investment in immunotherapy more likely to work so again this is I'm not able I'm not rejecting modern medicine Western medicine I'm not one of those guys I'm saying we need to know this stuff even to make medicine work better but that's how powerful the immune systems here's some a couple of other surprises Easter's I know this is like plant-based I just want to show you this is fruit of the sea okay boy stur x' have been discovered to have a polysaccharide and a protein that boosts your immune system and in fact what's really amazing is that in if you take Pacific oysters which are the most common oysters worldwide you buy them at a local fish market and you can extract the proteins from them and you feed them to mice with cancer you can see that it about you have a reduction almost by half of the tumor growth the immune organs the thymus of the spleen get bigger because they're rearing up actually take down that cancer and you've got two times killing power of some of the natural killer cells okay this is early days yet we're not treating cancer patients with oysters but this is just showing you the impact of our of what we can find in our diet by the way the way these that these peptides are extracted and the oysters is the same way that they make moister sauce that you might have in a Chinese restaurant okay so again there's some pragmatism too about this and this is where our world's need to come together broccoli sprouts have been studied this is the living food movement if you have broccoli sprouts there's there's a group that actually showed that a beauty from this is from three universities 29 healthy volunteers they gave them two cups of broccoli sprouts that made into a sheikh gave him for four days on the second day they gave him a nasal flu vaccine right so some attenuated flu in there and guess what actually the people who had the brighten up the sprouts had 20 responded to the vaccine by having 22 times more immune cells that is a really significant boost 22 times more and there NK cells natural killer cells had more killing power and when you looked in the nose the cells of the people who actually had that were had the sprout shake there was less remaining flu in their nose as well just showing how powerful their immune system is again our diets impact our health defense systems in meaningful ways that can change our lives so I want you to really think about our health your health our collective health as not just a passive absence of disease but really these systems that we are responsible for that we actually have to make decisions about that we have the ability from the kind of information you've heard about all throughout today including what I've shown you to choose foods that can have make this difference in terms of our our body's defense systems and and and I this is just a chart it'll be in the book that I'm publishing these are called grand slammer foods these are foods that hit all five defense systems they're all angiogenic help blood circulation they help stem cells they help microbiome they help your DNA repair itself and they help boost your immune system so again if you had to choose some foods that would actually do all these things these would be the list so this is the book my new book is gonna come out of March you can actually go on Amazon or pre-order it right now but what I've done because I know that people are interested in this information as I go out to speak if you come to my website dr. william lee calm and you sign up i actually have created a plant-based guide that has lists of some of these foods that you can actually download so you can just get that guide just to get started alright I mean this book is like you know it's really thick and so but this will be a starter for you and actually what you can actually do so I just closed by quoting a medical colleague and surgeon named Nicole Atul Gawande he's written some really fabulous books and I was at the TED conference with him when he gave his talk and he said something that really made an impact on me he said it's not how good you are now it's how good you're gonna be that matters and I'd say for everybody in this room with everything that we've actually heard all day long that regardless of what your life was like yesterday we now are all armed with the knowledge to be able to make better decisions for how good we're gonna be tomorrow thank you very much [Applause] with the many different books topics and everything else on the benefit of the plant-based diet that there's a general public out there that sees other things on TV some of the shows like the doctors stuff like that they will come out with a report that kind of throats depth on some of the things that were eating like tomatoes are good for you the greens and stuff but it was put out that these plants have lectins and he said the lectins are bad for you that they bind with the sugars cause a sticky substance that affects the cells and stuff so how is the general public supposed to really figure out what's good and what's not and then if somebody publishes something that everybody else disagrees with how do you address that because I haven't heard anything say that gives this doctor that came out said all that stuff is bad for you so it's a really good question I mean sort of sum up by saying that what you're asking is we are presented with provocative information in the media and that that we can access all the time we hear about all the time and sometimes it sort of is confusing because it contradicts what you hear one area and or another area and what I would say is that what I do I would encourage you to do what I do which is to really look into it and look at the facts when you look at the facts sometimes you need to go into the literature and and even though you may not be a scientist it's if you take a look at what's actually out there it's possible to really see what most people are actually saying for example there is a resource online called PubMed P you bmed some of you may be familiar with it it is the country's national database of medical research it is free is available to anyone you know Google will serve it up to you in two seconds if you look up tomatoes and lectins I guarantee you'll find nothing that actually shows that tomato lectins are actually harmful to you it's a it's an interesting idea I'm not casting aspersion on anybody's ideas what I would say is that you got to look for where the evidence actually is and what I've tried to do when I constructed my talk today is to show you different types of evidence that actually puts together a whole picture you should you know like when you go out to buy a car everybody's going to be telling you about one thing versus the other you're going to buy a house the real estate agent tells you went through another we have to ask consumers of information on food and health do the same thing which the you know trust but verify be critical we want to find people that we trust to listen to I think that if you find that the majority of people are agreeing with something I think that you know you can probably put more weight on it and then some things are just not known yet and it's okay you know if you're if you're actually in the space field we think that there might be life out there we don't know yet we've found planets that look like they may support it and so people are buzzing about that but it doesn't mean that there are little green men that are waiting to come down to earth and so again I think we need to be able to be critical in looking at the evidence science generally doesn't lie you know evolve but it generally tells the truth and so I'm all about the truth and I think that's a probably the best way to recommend everybody in this room is look for the truth yes sir I saw one who's had Crohn's disease and over over the years and have been dealing with nutrition and so forth to get it back into the admissions people were saying we talked about a lot of things that are good for us and one of the things we talked about was the soy you know you're talking about in terms of women and breast cancer and stuff like that but a lot of man was shy away from things like soy just because of things that they've heard over time and the second part of the question that was when you in a hospital you see a lot of people who might be battling cancer other type diseases but the things that they're being fed in the hospital the type of diets that there have a lot of sugary fatty meals even the stuff that they're given in the IV in terms of the protein when you look when you read the ingredients on it you know just like why are you giving me sugary stuff that's something you think the cancer will actually feed let along you know for any other health reasons so in terms of those things what would you give and what these that can we change about that to to do things that we as no layman think know should be simple but apparently not well you know the question really is how do we address the fact that the place of the second one is how do we address the place where we really need the most support when we're sick in a hospital with the food to remove the foods that actually might actually hurt us and not help us or the other way to think about is you know like we can get a warm blanket in the hospital how come we can't get a good you know plant-based meal and if we're vegan how come we can't get that always in the hospital and so this is a basic injustice that is now being addressed really by people in this room I mean they rate the fact that Santara is that you put this together you've got you know doctors who are leaving this conference and attracting other people who are physicians from around the country to talk about it this is where it starts this is where you know as my friend Dean Ornish said you know you can't underestimate the power of a small group of people that actually want to change the world this is why we're here we are all gathered here because we want to make a difference and I think we're learning and I think very much so in the hospital it should be the I mean it should be the it should be the last place where unhealthy food is being served but I can tell you the doctors now are only starting to see it changes in what we're fed but when I was in medical school and in residency training you know we were there on call day and night being sleep-deprived and the cafeteria had horrible food it was almost all fried you know we almost had very no fresh vegetables a lot of processed foods and you know how do you expect to create that culture of health when in fact the things that are being served in the hospital are are not that good for you it's you know but it's a deep rooted issue that needs to change its gonna take collective effort it's like school lunches you know I mean the future of our society is are the kids that we're bringing through school it's not that easy to solve the problem but we need to all work together on a hopeful note and addressing that issue the latest forks over knives magazine has an article about a doctor at Montefiore hospital system in the Bronx he has Forks Over knives showing in all 2,000 hospital rooms in four or five hospitals he has had their food system serving vegan meals he has their cafeterias serving vegan meals and some eight meals as well but the vegan meals are selling out so he has managed to do it he is a doctor of preventive cardiology dr. Robert aust felt that they nicknamed him dr. Cayle correct that's really I mean that's really great news that these little pockets of change are happening and I think for Sentara this is its own pocket of change right now right here I think in the Bronx there's something going on I can tell you that teaching this concepts in school is also very important I was visiting a school in Massachusetts about a month ago and I saw an eleventh grade project looking at anti-angiogenic foods that could be served in a nursing home for their cancer patients and so if a high school student can do it then we then we really need to be able to up the conversation with our hospital administration as well thank you so much for a wonderful [Applause]
