The SURPRISING SCIENCE Behind PREVENTING CANCER! | William Li & Jason Fung

we've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer it's about our bodies taking care of itself what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels the cancer growth yeah the stuff you don't recognize you can't pronounce those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria what are the foods that have various components right can activate health right and how do you eat more of those things well i think it makes it it's about having knowledge uh and then making it second nature right so when we heat up something on the stove we know it's gonna be hot we don't burn ourselves so we actually avoid certain behaviors when we go out into the sun we know to put on sunscreen it becomes second nature i think food as medicine is something that can become second nature you have to be exposed to the basic information and you know the science is important because that's what makes it real but at the end of the day is you know this is something that school teachers should be teaching kids that coaches should be teaching athletes that doctors should be telling patients and so and i think family members should be sharing among themselves this is the type of conversation that should be happening at every holiday meal uh in every school yard and and i think that it's not so foreign it's informed by science we can all do it it's true no the other thing i heard you say was at this conference was you showed a slide around immunotherapy for those who know what immunotherapy is essentially a way to get cancer by activating your immune system rather than giving a poison or cutting it out or burning it out right you literally give something that's going to help your immune system get into gear and be like pac-man and eat up the cancer uh and you showed a slide and and who would have thought of this but you showed a slide that people who respond to the key this immunotherapy and and these abilities can race cancers actually have a certain type of bacteria in their microbiome in their gut that makes them respond to the to this immunotherapy whereas those who don't actually die and and this bacteria is called acromancy it's one of the you know thousands and thousands of species of bugs in your gut and you shared a story if i may about your mom yeah who had basically metastatic endometrial cancer which uh was treated with immunotherapy and was successful but you added certain things to the treatment to to make sure that her acromancia were good like pomegranate and cranberry and these polyphenols which come from food that seem to be powerful growers of these great bugs in your gut so how do we how do we sort of begin to integrate these ideas into how we treat these diseases are we giving everybody like a smoothie with all these things in it and helping them with immunotherapy yeah well let's take a step back to say first of all uh our bodies are working hard every single day from the time we're born to our last breath to defend our health and these defense systems and i've identified five of them in my book is angiogenesis stem cells our microbiome our ability for our dna to protect our body protect itself and our bodies and our health and our immunity and all these defense systems work together in concert they're like our security force in our body they're patrolling they're watching out they're making sure everybody's safe inside and everything is functioning smoothly and when you have a disease like cancer for example and it's not just cancer it's heart disease it's diabetes it's alzheimer's it's obesity um but for specifically for cancer it's really you know a few bad guys snuck in and they figured out how to get around the security force you know it's sort of like you know tsa slip let somebody slip by and now we have to try to chase it so in the old days for cancer what we used to do is just say well let's you know take a drug like chemotherapy and wipe it out and you know that that's a blunt instrument approach by trying to take something poison to kill something that you want to kill by the way the rest of you gets poisoned too well that's right and so basically it's it's a toxic approach to uh to something that we don't really it's one bad actor but we don't want to poison the entire uh body we've now changed our minds about this and this is really what's making the impossible possible we've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer it's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancers so immunotherapy which is what you are just bringing up is an entirely new approach of enhancing our own body's defenses we don't use drugs to kill the cancer we allow our bodies we give medicines to allow our bodies to cure kill the cancer so our immune systems can find the cancer and reverse the disease back to health that's what we've always been dreaming of and it's here but here's a problem only about 20 of people actually have this incredible response to immunotherapy sometimes a few a little fewer sometimes a little bit more but the response when it happens is exactly what we want dramatically right your mom is just my mother's head cancer and in 30 days she had no cancer okay and never had chemotherapy what about what makes a difference between somebody who responds like that and who doesn't respond like that right that's a that's one of the mysteries out there and this is exactly where we need to consider more than the typical lab tests that doctors run we need to think more holistically and one of the things we know is that our microbiome our healthy gut bacteria communicates talks to our immune system and it and we need our gut bacteria to help coach our immune system to do the right thing including getting cancer so a study done by a colleague of mine dr laurence zitfield she's in paris she's uh a immuno-immunologist who works with cancer patients she looked at 249 cancer patients who were receiving immune therapies and separated them into people who responded versus people who did not respond this by the way was published in the journal science which is one of the most prestigious journals and what she found was that the difference between people who responded and didn't respond was one bacteria unbelievable acromancy right so well it's not easy you can just maybe take some probiotics with akkar mansion except that you can't no there's no akkermansia probiotics but you can feed them but you can feed it and you can actually change your gut to make your body grow acromancia and the way to do this is the food as medicine solution so turns out that pomegranates and cranberries actually have alleged tannins but pomegranates especially and that natural chemical in pomegranate juice and what's been shown is that just one eight ounce cup of real pomegranate juice not the flavored stuff but the real stuff yeah actually over the course of a week or two will actually help change the inside of our guts so that that bacteria likes to grow that bacteria grows in the lining of the gut talks of the immune system and that makes the cancer immunotherapy work better yeah and then there's other things too like like you said cranberries and and green tea many things can actually feed our microbiome right so plant-based foods have you know i think it's completely accepted now it's not challenged that plant-based nutrition is actually um the healthy approach to life i mean it's kind of eating more plants right but it's not just we're not just feeding ourselves we're feeding our bacteria yeah right so we're feeding the you know 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies and after we extract all the stuff that we need on the human side we're leaving uh you know the the leftovers for the bacteria and this is the fibers this is the bio actives and what's amazing is our bacteria can take some of this fiber and they digest it so it's kind of like giving a sculptor a block of wood and say do something with it so the bacteria our gut microbiome takes up a block of wood and starts making sculptures there's like these things called short chain fatty acids or scaffos that are microbiome make and it turns out that these short chain fatty acids these little tiny particles that they make from our food that we feed them like the fats that fuel the gut lining they do that they're anti-inflammatory they boost our immune system they help regulate our blood sugar they lower our cholesterol cancer they and and they also suppress cancer risk and they prevent blood vessels from growing into cancer as well all tied together and this is you know at the end of the day why we need to take our food seriously yeah essentially you you write a little bit about for example how the microbiome plays roles in autism and cognitive function and i remember recently seeing a study where there are undigestable things in breast milk that humans can't digest called oligosaccharides and they feed the good bacteria in the baby to develop it formula doesn't have those things and the kids that are breastfed have high levels of something called butyrate which is one of these short chain fatty acids which actually turns off colon cancer genes and is an incredible important anti-inflammatory and regulates the gut health whereas the other formula fed kids had something called propionic acid another one of these short chain fats but actually that in animal models can induce autism and so what like it's like whoa well you know it's at the end of the day we're just at the surface of uncovering the mysteries of health and i think that's the kind of humility and on wonderment we all need to have which is you know we know quite a bit about different diseases but we're just at this new frontier of understanding our health i mean you've been working in this field for for a while and you're deeply steeped into it and what i'm seeing from my end of the table is that we can begin to peel back the layers of the onion so um it's all about balance yeah you know um uh more is not more you need just the right amount so i i in your book um eat to be disease you you break it down into these various digestible bits and you briefly touched on it but i want to go deep in each of these five areas because what you're talking about is something that is our health creation health defense system that we can activate but nobody talks about and you you mention them it's it's our uh angiogenesis system it's regeneration which is stem cells and you're really involved in the stem cell world the microbiome the dna protection how we repair and keep our dna healthy in our immune system so let's talk about each of those and how we can activate those things what are the things that harm them for example you talk about uh you know alcohol affecting stem cells and i'm thinking wow i had a tequila last night did i screw up my stem cells you know or and then you say well red wine maybe helps other areas so it's a little confusing how do you how do you break down each of these and let's just go through let's start with angiogenesis sure and what are those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system and one of those things we can use to actually activate health within it great so um angiogenesis is a term that uh talks about how the body grows blood vessels blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body that's what keeps us healthy they start sixty thousand sixty thousand miles so you're gonna pull out all the blood vessels in your body line them up and then you can actually form a line that would go around the earth twice so that's one of this enormous organ system right so you know it's going to be important and we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart you wind up having big problems of cardiovascular disease blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes um and if you don't have enough blood vessels you can't heal your wounds and if you actually have too many blood vessels you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration um and you can grow cancer right so this is a system that is required to keep every cell and organ healthy help it's a health defense system and if it's out of balance you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels you wind up having in trouble so what are the things that can damage angiogenesis well turns out high fat diets damage energy any fat or just uh you know what actually mostly saturated fats but i think that it's you know really high fat overall like high fat diets are can be can be damaging and hypercholesterolemia for example if you have a lot of cholesterol floating around your blood like the damaging bad cholesterol ldl it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels if you have um second cigarette smoke tobacco you know whether your people shouldn't smoke but even secondary smoke can actually damage your blood vessel response and you know then you think about heart disease you think about cancer things that are your blood vessels out of whack out of balance um although you know the fat thing's interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils and and it's hard to separate out are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil or they're having you know trans fats and and toxic fats and inflammatory you know so the so the the science actually says is is not actually talking about what you actually eat it's about what the net net the effect that's in the body so if you wind up actually going from uh you know researchers have studied for example in the lab animals that actually are naturally hyper cholesterolemic these are you know these are mice whose blood is milky because it's actually so filled with fat that's a genetic thing for sure right and those are the um subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis so i think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good we know that for example that that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good the um the poly unsaturated fats are are good for you um but i'm i'm talking about after what the body actually processes what what actually results in your body um so um what are the things that actually can help restore healthy androgenesis well think about um androgenesis balance like a lawn that's growing right or a garden that's growing you want to you want to prune the garden you know make sure things don't overgrow pick out the weeds and if you're mowing a lawn you're kind of just getting everybody all the uh the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height yeah so you don't wind up having the scraggly lawn that's what the body does to keep androgenesis in balance not too much not too little and so the food we eat is acts like a lawn mower it kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body not too much not too little so the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea which is really good soy actually genestein is a bioactive found in soy is really good tomatoes are really good for helping to keep androgenesis in balance many fruits and vegetables also can do that so the brassinens are really good so many things we already know are good for us we know actually also help our blood vessels and now we know how and now we know how yeah now what about stem cells and regeneration this is a big topic that i think uh people are hearing about the news they they're confused about it there's controversy about it there's laws about it that prevent adequate research i mean it's really quite a messy area and yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in and and it's i don't think uh something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells that there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells and what are stem cells anyway what do they do and how do we how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them yeah well stem cells are really simple um we're made of stem cells so when our moms and dads got together and created you know us in the womb we started out as stem cells they actually made every single organ of sperm and egg and sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory and then pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells and after we were born a few of those stem cells um stuck around um about 700 000 of them they stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines they hide out in our body and they help us regenerate so when you and i are growing up right in grade school we learn from our teachers that starfish can regenerate salamanders can regenerate but people can't regenerate yeah right you can't draw a new arm yeah well it's true you can't grow a new arm but we do regenerate we generate every day we know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back our gut lining grows back our livers can grow back if you actually remove part of your liver will grow back yeah our skin grows back you know so we our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells now what can injure stem cells you know um high doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells okay with the one tequila i had last night you know having a tequila every now and then is not bad having glass wine but you know it's it's the the the thing is on balance what you want to do is people you know people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells diabetes is another state a metabolic state that you know it really impairs it cripples our stem cells sugar high blood sugar cripples our stem cells so the excess of anything can be harmful including to our stem cells so what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells this is where it's really become interesting before i talk about that though let me just affect your stem cell stress can definitely affect our stem cells high stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells you know it's just like stunning them so they're like wait a minute what do i do now you know maybe i'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs we got to rebuild our blood vessels we got to rebuild our hearts you know our hearts turn around like we actually have um the stem cells in our hearts and our brains and we grow our nerves every single day something in our body is regenerating actually a lot of things are regenerating so what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies um that you inject into the body so you know taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them and someday that's going to wind up becoming game changing in medicine someday we're not there yet i've been involved with some of those efforts and what i've seen is very exciting but more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells and here's the research you can actually take it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable getting a stem cell injection like 20 grand or something right well you know uh i would say uh why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table yeah right so the mediterranean diet has it's been a study by spain looked at um uh elderly people on the mediterranean diet and those who were on a mediterranean diet compared to not on a better training debt had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation in their bloodstream so again it's not one magic food it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating now when you you can actually do the research on specific things as well so for example tea green tea will increase your stem cells but guess what so can black tea right so here's what the supplements the japanese live forever well you know all the green tea you know people in asia drink a lot of tea people in britain drink a lot of tea as well we used to say green tea is good black tea is fermented so it's not going to be that good for you we're changing our minds we have to keep our minds open black tea can also double the number of stem cells and then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study at uh by ucsf in san francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease so they had kind of crappy blood flow and they gave them hot chocolate yeah i was going to say the chocolate stem cell story i want to hear about it's amazing right so um the darker the chocolate the higher the flavonols these are the bioactives are naturally present in cacao yeah and they there was a study the food is medicine this is the food there are literally these chemicals in food called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties they are made by mother nature they're packed into food growing on the plant and you know every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactive so in cacao which is a bean which then you process to you actually get you know kind of the cocoa powder um if you take the really dark chocolate like 73 cacao that really dark chocolate and you make it into a high flavonol hot chocolate drink and you have it twice a day this was the clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having um drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate right and so okay so the question is is that important well when they measured their blood flow what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which you know kind of like um lowers the circulation they let it go they found that the blood flow was much vastly improved wow so here's a functional uh result that actually means it makes a difference so who's going to complain about chocolate who's going to complain about tea who's going to complain about a mediterranean diet i mean you go out to eat these are the things we love yeah well it's interesting you talk about how drugs sort of block interfere inhibit some medical process some biological process whereas and there's toxicity to them there's side effects to them you know you can take too much which will harm you whereas foods don't work like that but you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food so food is medicine what's the dose is it one cranberry is it a thousand cranberries you know right well so in my book eat a beet disease i uh specifically have a chapter on food doses it's important nobody talks about it well i know that because i you know when i read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale you know i i'm always asking well how much should i actually eat and that always struck me as something that needed an answer right so here's how we've approached it you can actually get food doses that's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health the best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies these epidemiological studies there's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times right so in europe there's something called the epic study and haynes is the united states bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of patients in europe they're studying 500 000 patients over 20 years and they're tracking everything they eat and they're asking them how much are you eating and then on the tail end looking at what happens to their health what's their cancer rate what's their heart disease right what's their diabetes rate and when you actually combine those two the result that we want lower cancer less heart disease and you go back into their research and you figure out what foods they ate you can actually calculate how much they ate of it yeah right so and then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this by the way this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well it's you know just having random amounts of stuff not gonna work you gotta correlate what works with what actually the amount is so smaller studies there was a study called the health professionals follow-up study done at harvard which looked at seventy thousand men and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week that's that's a half a cup of cooked tomatoes not that much you have pasta right lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39 yeah right so that's a dose that's an outcome and that's a particular food and you can do that systematically you've got to hunt and peck for it but it's there and it doesn't give you the exact answer it's not like a meta like actually frankly even penicillin right you don't always get the right result right but you have a good approximation so that's the beginning of food doses i mean your book is pretty remarkable but because there's a lot of books about the diet and eating healthy and reversing disease but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that i didn't even know about like fish roe or razor clams or you know different kinds of chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that you know maybe have been studying large randomized controlled trials but have clinical studies have epidemiologic studies and and we can start to include these and there's very little downside right right unless you don't like clamps but well look what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another and my approach is really a global approach um you know i my work uh spans around the world we're in asia and europe asia i mean america uh and the americas and uh and here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods and no matter where you go right so what interests me is what are the common denominators so for example you mentioned razor clams well that's that's actually a category of seafood we know from most epidemiological studies including studies in europe and asia that people who eat more seafood you know about three times a week actually have lower all-cause mortality and they just survive longer so then you sort of say well what are what could be possibly responsible for that well we don't you know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat so if you uh what is the omega-3s in razor clams or something else well there's probably other things as well so uh i can tell you another example that that i was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually not only have some omega-3 fatty acids but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune system yeah so again so it's like the mushrooms of the seed because polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms exactly anti-cancer compounds and now they're in oysters wow and you know by the way these are long sugar chains that's right and and your body digests them uh they've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce so you know the kind of sauce the brown sauce you see in a chinese restaurant chinese food they study that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system does that actually come from oysters it comes with oysters yeah they boil them down and they caramelize them so again this is where food is medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things really yeah you incorporate the culinary side the chefs get into it yeah i mean this is really i think us as a society coming together and saying what do we love and by the way in my book you to be disease it's really not about what to cut out of your life it's about what to add to your life yeah and what do we really enjoy it's all about our preferences and making the right decisions so this is incredible so stem cells are not some weird thing you have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat right you know maybe get it from some placenta somewhere you can actually activate your body's own regenerative healing power yeah and you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate and that's so powerful and it's a very encouraging message so you're talking about what is the problem which is the incredibly high amount of starch and sugar we consume and you've talked about this in the diabetes code the obesity code this is a central driver of almost all chronic western diseases heart disease cancer diabetes alzheimer's high blood pressure are caused by this phenomena of insulin resistance or too much insulin which is driven from our diet basically a highly refined processed carbohydrate diet and also this constant eating pattern this thing called snacking which i think is a modern invention we have a snack food industry but i mean i don't snack if you eat properly you're never hungry i mean if you don't have these spikes and insulin going up makes you hungry but what's fascinating is that what you're saying is that insulin actually fuels the cancer growth and sugar fuels a cancer growth yeah so all of these diseases are actually diseases of too much insulin so if you look at obesity for example if you were to measure the levels of insulin people who are more overweight tend to have higher insulin same with type 2 diabetes hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are really sort of two sides of the same coin so one causes the other sort of hyperinsulinemia can cause insulin resistance insulin resistance can cause hyperinsulinemia so they're really the same thing and again uh the the the same thing applies to sort of cancer and this is the pattern that was noticed so many years ago that there are these diseases of sort of too much insulin which is uh that that sort of they all go together the heart disease and you don't see that in people eating traditional diets because they're not eating all the time so i remember there was a study this enhanced study which is a big sort of american survey of lots of things but they included dietary habits so in 1977 they found that most people ate three times a day so breakfast lunch and dinner and by 2004 it was almost up to six times a day right so it's like wow that's crazy and it was never this sort of deliberate hey there's good scientific evidence that we should eat six times a day it just sort of crept in there and i think part of it was of course the snack food companies wanted to promote it and you know people thought it was a good idea so then it was sort of it became almost gospel oh you have to eat six months a day right and i remember thinking about it um a while ago and thinking where did that suddenly sneak here yes did we have a big randomized control trial that i missed somehow because i don't think so it was just this gradual change in attitudes and you saw it because i start to think back to my upbringing in the 70s right so i grew up in the 70s and you know if you wanted a sort of after-school snack your mom said no you're gonna ruin your dinner right and if you wanted a bedtime snack your mom would say no you should have ate more at dinner and it's like that's just the way it was and of course people would have this sort of natural fasting period from after dinner which was say six o'clock because people ate a bit earlier back then to like say eight o'clock so 14 hours of fasting every single day without even we call that breakfast yeah exactly breaking the fast it's breaking the fast that is the word that we use and it's like somehow we went from that where people didn't have the obesity problems type 2 diabetes problems because they have this natural fasting period built in that has always been there it's even built into the english language and then it's like oh you got to eat all the time and it's like oh you can't ever skip your breakfast you got a snack all the time right you see it in schools for example oh they go to school they get a mid-morning snack then they have a lunch and then they have their after school and then they have the dinner then you know you're playing soccer and they think that they need to have a snack in between the halves of soccer you know i played well jason you've written a lot about you've written a lot about fasting and and the effects of either time restricted eating which is you know 12 14 16 hour fast every day or taking a 24 hour 36 hour fast a week or even longer fast for diabetes and and and i'd love you to sort of share why around cancer this is so important and um on my podcast soon we're going to have dr patrick hanaway who's my colleague and friend was the medical director at cleveland clinic who had cancer and used fasting as an approach to his cancer treatment he still got radiation but he also did it in a way that actually reduced all the side effects to almost none has kept him healthy now for well over a year and this cancer was not a great one and let him go through the process with really no issues which was really staggering and and really went on a ketogenic diet in order to do that which is a both using fasting and ketogenic diets to drop insulin levels to almost undetectable so can you talk about this whole idea of fasting cancer ketogenic diets why it's so important and how it connects to this whole idea of insulin resistance and insulin high insulin levels yeah so both fasting and ketogenic diets have the same sort of goal at the end which is trying to lower insulin because the difference between a ketogenic diet say and a low-carb diet is that you know you're sort of low-carb ultra low carb for the keto but sort of moderate protein because protein can also stimulate insulin whereas some of the older low-carb diets were like very high in protein you take protein shakes or whatever it and that's generally not yeah like atkins and so high protein is not always the best idea because you can get high insulin but you also get this high m tour which is sometimes not so good for cancer as well but the idea is to really drop your insulin levels and if these are diseases of too much insulin then that's going to be a very useful adjunctive treatment so fasting is is actually fascinating because there's all these different things we're discovering so one of the things is sort of autophagy so as you fast of course your nutrient sensors go down so mtor insulin go down and then you activate this process called autophagy where you actually start to break down some of your subcellular organelles and stuff so basically your your body is just trying to clean house man coming around and cleaning up all the garbage yeah exactly people think it's a bad thing maybe don't people know who pac-man was but that was the original video game that they all played back in the 70s yeah i don't know what pac-man is anymore you can still find them sometimes but yeah the idea is that people think that this sort of breakdown process is really bad for you but it's actually really good for you and in fact it's sort of one of the keys to rejuvenating the body that is you want to break down all your old stuff and then sort of rebuild the stuff that you need so the the whole idea of fasting is you're trying to put the body into this sort of regenerative maintenance mode because what we've recognized over the last little bit is that your body sort of has sort of you know you can go into growth mode or you can go into sort of the cell maintenance repair mode and it really depends on your nutrients availability when nutrients are available you want to grow when nutrients are not available you don't want to grow and you want to go into this sort of maintenance repair mode and everybody thinks growth is good but growth is not always good especially as an adult so i always say think about a car like if you have a sports car and you rev that engine and you're running it fast all the time you're going to go fast which is great but it's going to burn out much faster so you can't just keep revving that engine keep redlining it you got to sometimes bring it to the shop put it in the garage let it rest and all this stuff pit stop yeah exactly a little pit stop so so that's the point of the human body too you can either go for growth or you can go for longevity or cellular maintenance repair but you gotta you gotta have a bit of both it's a balance there it's not all growth and this is where you say oh edd well you're going to put your body your nutrient sensor can go up your growth factors are going to go up you're going to put yourself in growth mode but you don't want to do that especially for a disease such as cancer which is a disease where cells are growing too much you're basically feeding into that growth and that's going to be very very bad for you so what you do instead is you do the fasting and you put your cells into this sort of maintenance repair mode and it actually allows you to undergo the um both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better because ra chemotherapy we have a couple studies on fasting and chemotherapy where what you do is you fast sort of just before and during and just after your chemotherapy and what they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from the treatment because what you've done of course is taken the cells of your normal body and you sort of put them into a more quiescent state they're not trying to grow they're actually trying to slow down and chemotherapy the general way it works is it kills the fastest growing cells which are usually the cancer cells but it also kills like the hair follicles because they're fast-growing cells it kills the lining of the gi tract so you get nausea and your hair falls out so if you can put those cells into sort of a quiescent sort of repair mode it's not going to sustain as much damage from the chemotherapy and instead the cancer cells which can't stop their growth they're always trying to grow they can't do that so therefore they're going to sustain full damage from the chemotherapy while your body is relatively protected and that's one of the things that might be very interesting to use as an adjunct to sort of standard treatment i would never advise not to take the standard treatment because of course there's a lot of interesting work by dr mukherjee mukherjee and others looking at ketogenic diets and cancer and i've heard him present on this it's just fascinating he wrote the emperor of all maladies it's about cancer i'm sure you've read that and he said that to me he said mark you know we figured out the solution to cancer i'm like what is it it's this big discovery it's like and the cause and like what is it he's like it's sugar i was like yeah you know i guess that's not really news but uh maybe it's good you know that now and then he said we were studying ketogenic diets and seeing incredible results with pancreatic cancer melanomas stage four cancers that weren't responding to anything else in animal models they literally were curing cancers with ketogenic diets and now they're doing human trials can you talk a little bit about some of that research and how how it might be applied to people who are struggling with cancer yeah so this was the sort of big discovery of dr lou cantley who's discovered sort of this whole pathway the pi3 okay a pathway that links sort of insulin and growth and cancer um so the the important thing is that insulin it acts as that growth factor and therefore acts as a sort of pro-growth in there for a sort of pro-cancer agent yeah sugar of course plays a big role in in the hyperinsulinemia and it's interesting because dr lou cantley in several of his um you know articles or whatever he goes sugar scares me right here is this guy who studies cancer for a living and he's like yeah sugar just scares me and that's the same sort of thing that siddhartha mukherjee is talking about too right and that's the whole point is that with ketogenic diets with fasting and of course fasting you have to cycle it because you can't obviously fast you can't fast forever right as opposed to ketogenic diet which is sort of very low carbohydrate you could sustain that for years and years you can't fast forever you need some some some food at some point but the idea is the same what you're trying to do is really reduce those insulin levels they're of course studying this in terms of drugs they're trying to develop these blockers to the whole pathway of pi3k and so on i think they've they've developed a couple companies for that but you know just like anything else it's like why would you want to do it with a drug when you can do it with your diet you know what's so striking jason is that you know often when people get cancer treatment their doctors make sure you keep your weight up eat ice cream eat milkshakes have cake you know and i'm like what are you telling them that for i mean that is death and yet it's it's it's i mean i actually had a radiation oncologist as a patient who worked at md anderson and he was very aware of these studies and these issues and he tried to tell his patients do the right things that all the nutritionists this is like the number one cancer hospital in the world are telling their patients to eat a lot of starch and carbohydrates and sugar to keep their weight up and it's just such a unfortunate situation uh that is going on right now so so when when we talk about cancer we're clearly talking about some of the risk factors right sugar there's other risk factors uh and one of the one of the things that i think is very concerning to me is these these obesogens which are environmental chemicals uh that not only are directly toxic and carcinogenic but they're actually causing insulin resistance so they're really creating a double whammy pesticides herbicides additives all these environmental chemicals that we're exposed to 80 000 of them that have been developed over the last hundred years what's your perspective on that and how do we reduce our risks well i think that stuff is really hard because they're not adequately studied i mean there's so many chemicals and what do we know about the effect on the human body for most of these like very very little right i mean you know they they have this classification as generally recognized as safe but you know i mean that just means it doesn't kill you within a month right i mean that's about it so and all of these chemicals that like you know and even the ones that we eventually find out are really bad for us i mean they were originally approved and you know for you so you know we we trust our government to sort of keep us safe from all these sort of chemicals rudimentary like you do it in a you test the toxicology and some rats and it doesn't kill them and hey nothing you know you get out there and it doesn't kill people right away so hey you're good that's the sort of uh idea that we have but yeah i think that unfortunately it's hard to know exactly what to say because one there's just so many of them they're changing all the time so like the classic sort of pesticide was like ddt remember it was yeah i dated myself here a little bit but ddt was this big big time pesticide was amazing killed everything right turned out it was like super super bad for us and you know causing cancer all over the place right there's all kinds of stories like that um now of course there's all these other chemicals in there and we don't even know what they are i mean they're not i mean the government did write the government did write a whole report on the environmental chemicals and how they're linked to cancer so i think that's a big thing and i encourage people to check out ewg.org which is the environmental working groups website where they have guides on how to reduce your exposure through your food through household cleaning products through skin care products and many other ways to reduce your exposures household cleaning products so i think i think the more we can do to reduce our intake of these chemicals is a good idea so so let's talk about how to reduce your risk what can people do who are listening that you talk about in your amazing book the cancer code a revolutionary understanding of the medical mystery i encourage everybody to get a copy the cancer code it's out now because it really is a revolution and understanding of cancer that i think would help so many people so tell us what can we do to reduce our risk of getting cancer yeah i think the most important thing is to go after the sort of hyperinsulinemia because we know it's such a big risk factor so you can you know you can't always test it but you'll know because if if you are overweight for example then you want to try and get back to a normal weight and there's lots of different ways to do that sort of ketogenic diets are not the only way you can do you know all kinds of different diets and and and you know vegetarian diets and sort of uh paleo diets there's also sorts of good ones and then the other one of course is the sort of reintroduction of intermittent fasting into sort of the normal schedule and i think that's really important because what what we've lost of course is that balance between feeding and fasting right we've gone to a sort of feeding all the time model which is not so good for growth because we all were you know you're always telling your body to grow more and of course if you have type 2 diabetes which is becoming a huge huge problem so if you look at pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes in america it's like it just skyrocketed over the last 15 years and that too is a sort of massive massive risk factor for the development of cancer the world health organization actually classifies 13 different types of cancer as obesity related cancer so including brass and colorectal so that's actually in prostate and liver pancreas and interestingly if you look at the types of cancer so we've actually been doing really well for most cancers over time as you track them through the years most cancers are actually slowly declining except those obesity related cancers are actually going up so pancreatic cancer going up liver cancer going up all of these cancers are going up and they're not rare diseases so breast cancer for example is very very common colorectal cancer very very common and i think that this is one of the things that um we hadn't recognized so i went to medical school in the 90s we never talked about diet uh and uh you know canada it just wasn't even on the radar screen it was it was crazy except maybe a few people who are really into it but for the most part people just we just didn't talk about it and then it wasn't until sort of 2003 that the first large papers started to come out that said hey this is a big risk factor and then you multiply it by the millions of people who have it and that's why it's such a big risk factor so staying to normal weight you know which includes getting your diet in order cutting out sugar cutting out the processed foods for the most part adding back the intermittent fasting which is part of a normal sort of regimen when you when you say that what do you mean you mean time restricted eating right you mean uh yeah so an hour or 14 hour fast five to 14 hours should be your sort of baseline because that's just you know 1970s style uh eating when we didn't have so much obesity now if you're trying to lose weight or if you have type 2 diabetes then you can extend it to say 16 hours which is time restricted eating or you can even go further 24 hours or even multiple days of fasting and you know people always worry about that but you know that's that's why i talk about a lot because a lot of the stuff that we worry about simply isn't true people worry about oh they're going to lose muscle they can't work they can't concentrate i'm like all you're doing when you don't eat is that you're making your body rely on your body's own store of calories which is sugar right or body fat that's how your body stores calories so you're literally using the body fat for precisely the reason that you carry it so what could be wrong with that what is more natural than that if your sugar is high and you don't eat you're going to use up the sugar and your sugar will fall now that's great news if you have a high sugar and type 2 diabetes which of course that high sugar drives a high insulin which drives you know cancer risk and so on so something like that is a completely natural way to get this all of this back in order and if you're too far along the scale of you know you have too much insulin you don't have to stop at 14 hours there's nothing to stop you from taking your fast out to you know a couple of days at a time right and that's the thing it's it's it's a free intervention it's a natural intervention it's been used for thousands of years right every every culture in history has used it it's crazy that we don't use this sort of thing what you're talking about is just something so extraordinary and effective and the side effect is that it also prevents heart disease and diabetes and dementia and depression and i'm like pretty much everything so it's like a one-stop shop for staying healthy which is cut up the starch of sugar and and practice eating in a way that we're designed which is take a break after dinner and don't eat until breakfast or a little bit later in the morning uh it's it's so simple it's so obvious and it's so different than our current thinking but if you have cancer like if you already have cancer and we can do this to reduce our risk what about the screenings the cancer interventions the treatments um that we have now should we still do those do we do we do how far can this go to really have an impact uh screening is a very interesting problem because it sort of gets down to the sort of seed and soil idea so all our all our cells in our body actually have the potential to become cancer right so your heart can get cancer your liver can get cancer even your placenta can get cancer you're you know it's crazy that every single cell in the body can become cancerous so the point is that that seed sort of lies everywhere and that aggressive screening we found you know may or may not be that useful so so this is the reason why people are sort of backing off a little bit on a sort of aggressive screening works very well in some cases like cervical cancer for example but taken too far it was useless of the thyroid cancer as an example where they screened people in south korea for thyroid cancer found a ton of ton of thyroid cancer it was like everywhere so the the the incidence of new thyroid cancer went up sort of 11 fold because of screening but the mortality was still just about the same it didn't impact it because most of those didn't need to be treated so that's the point is that you have to there's a limit to the screening but you know there's there's well-established protocols that you know people study so breast cancer for example mammograms have been studied but they're rolling sort of they used to say oh maybe you should start at age 40 and they've actually recently been sort of moving it back down to maybe age 50 same with colonoscopy for example one of the big successes of screening has been colonoscopy and removal of sort of early cancers has made a big difference in terms of reducing colon cancer but they're also talking about you know maybe you don't need it they actually just rolled i think just last two weeks ago or something they actually said we should start earlier in part because i think that they're worried that with the obesity epidemic they're actually getting more and more so if you look at these obesity-related cancers we're actually finding them younger and younger because the younger and younger populations are getting more of this obesity so i think they just recommended instead of age 50 they actually rolled it down to like age 45 or something to get colonoscopy so i think it's still a good idea to do screening because one of these cautious things but you have to you have to be wary so certain things didn't pan out the way we thought psa is super controversial for prostate cancer thyroid cancer didn't turn out to be useful so but you pick and choose the big ones are going to be um breast and colorectal of course so given what you've learned about in this research that you did for the cancer code which is an amazing book and everybody needs to get it a revolutionary understanding of a medical mystery um what what does the future look like for cancer because you know it feels to me as a doctor if someone says i have diabetes i have alzheimer's i have heart disease i have an autoimmune disease i have this i'm like great i got that cancer it's like you know not so easy so what what does the future look like in terms of prevention and treatment of cancer i think the there there's two different things so in terms of treatment of cancer of course a lot of these things that we talk about are not applicable once you have the cancer like you can't just use dye like i would never say to somebody you know just use the diet or just use fatty and it's like no you need to get that surgery or the radiation or the chemotherapy or whatever they're recommending for you because by that time you have a high risk of other other issues you can use it as an adjunct but the treatments have come a long way because again we've moved past now that sort of idea that we need to find the genetic cure for all these cancers and now we're sort of moving into the age of immunotherapy which is taking this idea that cancer is sort of this evolving sort of new species and saying well let's use our immune system to try and destroy it so we've been seeing some sort of incredible successes from a therapeutic standpoint with these new agents these sort of checkpoint inhibitors and car t and some of these other things so really very hopeful of course that depends on a lot of research dollars or very high tech sort of stuff yeah it's more exciting from a prevention standpoint because the you know the only real successes we have in cancer medicine are really in prevention so stopping smoking for example is sort of so far ahead of anything else we do for cancer but it's all through prevention same with uh colonoscopies and for colorectal cancer uh you really start to see as these things as you do more and more screening so as you go from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s to the 2000s for example you can see that as people start you know to accept that they need to do this screening that colorectal cancer mortality is slowly coming down um and and that's where the sort of future lies i'm hopeful because we're starting to bring into sort of um clear picture that hey all of these things you know this these dietary things that we talk about are so important like stuff that you write about for example so well that hey this is great news that people are paying attention to it because those are the cancers that are rising in terms of uh numbers right those are practically the only cancers that are rising in numbers are the obesity related uh cancers so if we can understand that if we can make people aware of that of the dangers of sugar so for example sugar intake i think peaked at around year 2000 but prior to that was really going up very high right you know yeah or drinking their gatorades and stuff you know they were like oh yeah i just worked out so i'm gonna have a gatorade just full of sugar right people don't do that anymore like you know i look around like you know you'll be surprised you live in canada people maybe are are better over there i think you're in america and still sugarpalooza yeah probably probably i think that plays a big role i mean look 88 of us are metabolically unhealthy and and the translation of metabolic and healthy means you're insulin resistant so think about that almost 9 out of 10 americans are on track for these diseases caused by too much insulin including cancer yeah including cancer and all those other diseases you talked about alzheimer's and all that sort of stuff but um you know and part of it i think is uh you know if you look at the total number like total amount of sugar it has been going down but it's still very high i think that's that's the big problem there's a lot of um sort of corporate interests and so on like you know a few years ago coca-cola was revealed as giving like a million bucks remember this story they gave a million bucks to the university of colorado to develop a global energy balance network or something like that yeah i wrote about that in my book food fixie i was a big scientific uh it was like a mess it was it's it's a horrible story because here you have a university taking millions of dollars from coca-cola which you know obviously is peddling something very unhealthy and was ready to sort of go to war against people like you and me who keep saying you know look at food as medicine and what you put in your mouth is super important like they're you know the universe not just calories are all the same right exactly like who like this whole calories is the same like that always gets gets me all riled up because it's like you're telling me that a hundred calories of cookies is the same as 100 calories of broccoli that's the dumbest thing like honestly well it's it's just because of of the law of thermodynamics right so the idea is that it's calories a calorie because when you burn it it releases the same amount of energy and that's true it's absolutely true in a vacuum yeah but now when you eat it because when you eat it interacts with your microbiome and your hormones and your brain chemistry and and so many different factors that drive benefit or cause harm when i look at the ingredients of any food that i actually get and i try to do fresh food whole foods but every now and then you know you have to take it something and you look at all the ingredients um the stuff you don't recognize you can't uh pronounce those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria yeah right you pick a mushroom and you eat it you know that the fiber that mushroom is going to feed us and the bacteria right um the pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria right what we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm three on the market that are fda approved and we don't know what most them do very few have been tested and it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect their microbiome well and you know the what they uh we all know people that are super healthy right so they never get sick and then we know people that seem to get sick all the time the difference is probably in their microbiome in fact it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy super agers you know these are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all and then they looked at young healthy athletes and they found when they compared their microbiome they were remarkably similar they were almost identical amazing so health is clearly governed by our microbiome so what are the things we can actually eat that can affect them well we talked about this a little bit earlier it turns out that pomegranates actually can make a big difference cranberries can make a big difference nuts walnuts pecans cashews things that we actually know uh almonds yeah okay and so i had almonds for breakfast i want to make sure i got it well you know we should all we should all probably uh i mean unless you have a nut allergy i think the nuts are one of the one of nature's most healthful snacks i don't know if you saw this but um about two years ago the americans decided for clinical oncology the big cancer meeting they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer stage three colon cancer undergoing treatment whatever the treatment might be that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually at a 50 percent lower risk of death of from their disease now now you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20 reduction everybody's jumping up and down it's a billion dollar blockbuster drug and you're talking about a couple handfuls of almonds for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost a hundred thousand dollars is actually better well it's it's not an either or it's together and and again this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors you know people not just you and me but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment if you look at that data it's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies i would actually strongly advise patients to use um to have nuts if they can if they can take it and what do they serve in the hospitals right so again we're in the middle of a revolution yeah it's slow but uh inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine and we're going to be able to map this out right we're going to be very soon in in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence big data analysis is microbiome assays we can actually look at what's growing what's not growing how different things affect it check it over time in a serial way monitor the effects i mean it's fascinating you know wow maybe if you give this cocktail of akkermansia smoothie then your recremancy grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy i mean this is really radical stuff and and yet there are very few people talking about it in a clinical way like you are you're saying okay wait a minute we don't know everything but we know a lot and we know enough to actually start to integrate these strategies and the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because it empowers people to say okay wait a minute i don't have to sort of wait around to get disease then hope some drug saves me or you know try to fix it then but i can actually start to build the foundations of my health for my whole life by understanding and it's these are a little bit technical you know stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff but it's actually doable and you make it so practical in your book you have this five by five by five plan which we'll get into but let's go next to the dna thing because we we talked about angiogenesis regeneration stem cells microbiome let's talk about the dna because we think oh wait we got our dna there's something we can do about it we get hits to our dna from toxins and stress and different things but what what can we really do to help our dna right well so in my book i should talk about how most people hear about dna these days as relates to our ancestry you know who are we related to and how much of us is neanderthal those kinds of about 1.5 but in fact you know our dna is our genetic blueprint and that part of that blueprint is our blueprint for health it actually is designed to keep us healthy our dna we need the our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health we need the right proteins made we need the right molecules made at the right time from the time we're born to the to our last breath really and so we know that dna can get mutated and so some of the things that can mutate our dna is actually you know it would stop there i just want to go back a minute because what you said was really important you said our dna makes proteins that regulate all our biology and so they can actually make good proteins or if they get damaged they have proteins bad proteins that's right and the good proteins help you create health and the bad proteins causes sick exactly okay exactly and by the way you know the dna is hard as part of our hard wiring right it's it's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an auto virus system and actually checks it out finds problems and erases them really just deletes them so on average we know that there's about 10 000 mistakes that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day right so think about it we're out there in the sunlight sun uh ultraviolet radiation damages us you sit in a car in a highway under traffic on a community to work that sunshine's going right through the windshield mutating your dna secondary smoke you're filling up your car and i guess i mean some of us drive electric cars but some most people still end up filling up their car pump gas right so do you stand upwind or down one of the of the fumes i i just hold my breath okay actually i try to like stuff the cap in the thing because they have the automatic so here's a way to protect your dna when you're when you put when you're filling your gas stand figure out which way the wind's blowing and stand upwind yeah if you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents the gas and you're mutating your data like a little wood block you can just stick in and hold it and then well but this is the kind of situational awareness yeah that we want to have you know like i was saying when you when you're at the stove you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire these are the things that we know we can we should be doing at sort of the health level so our dna is uh and there's some things we can't do anything about like radon coming out of the earth like that just mutates our dna as well so we have to take proactive steps to protect our dna and some of the things that we can do are pretty simple like for example we know that an elemental vitamin vitamin c can actually do it a really interesting clinical trial or clinical study that was done in people who were drinking orange juice right so their scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice and they took the blood out and they measured how well their dna protected itself in a lab test and then they gave them orange juice to drink it's one and three quarters cup so it's kind of a tall glass of orange juice and they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their dna's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by twenty percent is it is it the vitamin c or is it the naringenin or chromosomes we think it's vitamin c because actually they've um uh they've actually studied vitamin c in isolation but there's almost it's almost certain that there's other factors i mean you're getting a lot of sugar with that much orange juice could you then just take the vitamin c pills so so what's interesting is that the the placebo that they gave to a group of people were just sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice was not the sugar we know that's not good for you but it was really the other stuff so vitamin c is what they were focusing on but i think it's probably the neurogenin and hesperide and other things in orange juice as well you know um the pulp's got a lot of good stuff in it and you know by the way um the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits it's the peel the rind that actually has a lot of stuff well they say you know if you're taking statins or certain drugs you should have grapefruit especially the the peel like the white stuff because it actually affects the metabolism exact drugs and so if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit if you're taking a statin well so you know that's pretty interesting but just a point of clarification on that so it's uh if you have uh grapefruit it um can slow down the metabolism of the liver so when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels you and your liver has to clear that yes that's when you call it toxicity right but in point of fact think about it another way if you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods you may raise the levels of the healthy things in your bloodstream so here's another amazing food that can protect our dnas kiwis kiwis oh my god well i just came back from new zealand where my wife is from and i ate a lot of kiwis listen i love kiwis right uh kiwis used to be in the jungle i think monkeys ate them and they were grown in new zealand and then shipped to america uh and um uh i think they were called chinese gooseberries originally and they were just named kiwis so anyway um there was an interesting study done in scotland that looked at whether you ate one two or three kiwis a day and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your dna it turns out even even eating one kiwi a day can help your blood protect its d help your blood protect the dna from damage by 60 that's amazing one kiwi a day and what you're talking about is is is learning about in your book all the various foods you might not like razor clams but there's a lot of options right and it's not just that you're going to eat kiwis all day is you add all these different different creative foods into your diet as much as you can and you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about right well i mean look uh here's the thing about most health diets right um if you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only eat one food you're not balancing your body it's not natural to do that i think it's the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable that's supported by real science and real evidence and it allows you to do the things you enjoy so in my book my emphasis you need to beat diseases number one look for foods that you eat the foods that you enjoy that are good for you and so i present a whole list of food 203 foods actually and you get to choose pick the ones circle the ones take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off that's your shopping list you've started off you've had a great start already you're already identifying the foods you love that are good for you i've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good now you just choose them secondly besides doing the things you like be moderate and that's the other thing is that you know i think most researchers most research has shown that if you cut down your calories by 15 30 actually you improve survival at least in lab animals but also in people too people that eat somewhat less you know the japanese have the same sorry right exactly 80 full yeah don't push yourself away from the table before you're so stuffed that you can't leave the party before it's over right that's basically what it is um it's better for your body it doesn't put metabolic stress you know your you when you stuff yourself to the gills um your body is really stressed out even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress yourselves um if you eat slowly and moderately your brain will sort of say hey you know what's enough well it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain your fault exactly right so you know here's here's and this is by the way one way why eating with other people which is what most of these mediterranean countries do the blue zone you know where people live a long time they eat with other people it's good for you you're talking so you can't be stuff in your mouth all the time exactly and you're not distracted you're not watching television you're not looking at your phone it's you know eating social uh and and so that's another important component and then finally it's got to be sustainable you got to do something that you can do your whole life and that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can explore on you know you were talking about razor clams in my book there's a lot of foods that most people may not have heard about bitter melon bitter melon it's a you know it's kind of a staple in some asian countries but great to try i wouldn't cook it yourself for the first time because it's not that easy to go to a chinese restaurant yeah let it let somebody who knows i love it it tastes really bitter but it actually is so you know for diabetes it helps lower blood sugar absolutely um and you know what the interesting thing about bitter melon is again this is the culinary side right so you know here we were talking about the doctor's pharmacy but in fact we could we could be having a chef having this conversation as well when you have bitter melon which is a little bitter it actually makes other foods taste more intense so it actually the way it was designed in cuisine is actually helping make you enjoy other foods even more so again it's it's not either or it's not an extreme and it's about different cultures and finding what we love to do well it's fascinating we bred food and vegetables to be uh more disease resistant to be drought resistant to be easier to be shipped without spoiling to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols in fact the flavor comes from these phytochemicals exactly so we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables that's why i say eat weird food because those typically haven't been screwed with and and there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast the chef boulet from new york yes who actually uh has quit his world-class restaurant and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like curcumin and turmeric oil and various things that he's done and dan barber is also going to be coming on our podcast and he's uh created a new seed company to design seeds not to be heirloom necessarily but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor nobody was breeding for flavor people were just breeding for all kinds of other things uh pest resistance or gmo whatever instead of saying well how do we create more of these medicinal foods and which is a whole new thing that chefs are starting to think about food is medicine i remember when i was at canyon ranch years ago probably late 90s and i got up in a meeting there was the executives there the owners the doctors the dietitians the chefs and i got up and i said you know we need this is a health resort we need to start thinking about how to design our menus to use food as medicine and the head chef got up and he screamed to me this is not an effing hospital this but i'm like oh god i guess i'm a little too early on this one but well you know listen being ahead of the time is something that you're known for and i think that we're now starting to appreciate i mean think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food not only hospitals by the way but restaurants would be a great place yeah theme parks would be a great place airlines would be a great place i mean there's so many places we can have an impact um let's just frame shift getting people to think about food as not just calories but information foods not just energy but actually instructions that regulate your stem cells and your dna and your microbiome in your immune system and your angiogenesis i mean these are things that are are not these people it's the new science of nutrition right so beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff we're now combining food science with life science you know the life science is what we learn in medical school food science you know not so much right so the average uh it's only like 20 of medical schools that require any nutrition um you know i can tell you part of what got me into this is that i used to be a doctor at a va hospital and um and i i felt a brave soul well i felt a duty to really um try to help people that um committed their lives to help protect our country right so what was interesting and i'm sure you know this as well um the veterans that come to the hospital uh they they're often they have a lot of health problems some of them are obese diabetes they got diabetes bad heart disease cancer you know we that's the sort of every day in the clinic you see people that are uh really really uh dealing with a lot of illness and what i noticed was i said you know this this is odd because these people when they were in their twenties were fit they were that they couldn't get into the military if they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness right right so what happened to them over the decades and i realized it wasn't you know uh just uh medicines it had to be their lifestyle and when i kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses oftentimes really bad diagnosis you know and then they would ask me what's the treatment how long do i have doc you know how bad is it going to be they put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door and almost all of them would turn around and ask me one question they said hey doc what can i do for myself what can i eat and i didn't have the answer because i wasn't taught we weren't taught to give that answer and i thought that was wrong and that's what led me on this journey that led me to write this book eat to be disease because i think that we need to know that people want to know that what can we do for ourselves to eat to be disease and in a way there there are really no drugs that work as well when you look at the spectrum of over your lifetime inputting all these powerful foods compared to what the effect of a medication would be right i mean and the studies have shown this the diet and lifestyle works better than statins for example for preventing heart disease uh mediterranean diet the the big study that was done the predimed study which gave people a liter of olive oil a week or a bunch of nuts every day the effects were equivalent or better than taking a drug and tastes much better and less side effects right right right well you know as we've been talking about food as medicine is very natural in most parts of the world and i think just sort of in our society we've lost touch with things you know you earlier you were talking about chefs um getting into this you know this whole farm to table movement yeah well that's what it used to be for everybody we only ate stuff that was growing around us and we ate it because it tasted great because it was rich with these polyphenols and flavonoids and by the way you know these bioactives that are natural chemicals and foods what do they do it's really interesting when you think about health defense most of the bioactives that are found in foods evolved in the plant plant-based foods yeah to protect the plant yeah so either they were natural insecticides or they helped to attract bees and other insects so they'd pollinate so they could reproduce right so when we protect them from elements or protect them from the elements and dams make them stronger right so then when we when humans started to eat these plant-based foods then these natural chemicals had another job description which is they interacted with our human cells and because they were already engineered to be protective the ones that were useful to us and we developed this relationship with our plant-based foods also help us and so there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view of what we're finding out what we need to do now though is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves and if you're interested in the sciences there it's it's an evolving science yes we have health defense systems that's you know health isn't the absence of disease it's it's our body working full steam cranking along and you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent treat or even reverse them by activating your defense systems using food and whether you're healthy or sick every person can take a decision three times a day to really enhance their health and you don't need a doctor's prescription hey youtube if you like this video you're gonna love the next one click on it to check it out today when we go to the doctor they go well your tests are fine your exam's fine you know i don't know what's wrong with you and there's not a wonder

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 59,732

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: JQCC93urBFQ

Length: 78min 1sec (4681 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021