The TOP FOODS You Absolutely SHOULD NOT EAT! (Avoid These Foods) | Dr. William Li

there's a lot of foods that actually impair our health defenses our circulation our stem cells our healthy gut microbiome the ability for our dna to protect our bodies from the environment and also our immune system your body can't handle some of those foods that we have gotten used to eating [Music] i think one of the greatest things about food is that and food and health is that it actually puts the agency of choice into our own individual hands and so we make our own choices one of the interesting things that is very clear is our bodies health defenses the five of them we talked about last time our circulation our stem cells our healthy gut microbiome the ability for our dna to protect ourselves our bodies from the environment and also our immune system these systems uh for us to reach our health potential we want to make sure that they are not squashed in inadvertently by foods that we have gotten used to eating and so let's talk a little about some of those foods that actually impair our health defenses that's probably the best way of thinking about what to avoid now we know that added sugar is something that is very that taxes the body's metabolism right so if you have a little bit of sugar in fruit you know from natural sugars that's fine because you're getting a lot of other stuff in fruit as well that in fact helps your metabolism and helps your body's ability to be able to digest and metabolize fructose and glucose and use that fuel into your body but if you drink soda you know to have those 10 teaspoons of refined sugar that are dissolved invisibly in whatever colored fluid we might be drinking it tastes great quenches your thirst it kind of our mental blueprint is that you know this is something you use to sleek your thirst on a hot summer day and i can tell you that the hyperglycemic state your body can't handle 10 teaspoons of sugar at the same time and think about you know the people that chug an entire can of soda right i mean i've done it myself there's no way that's good for us so that overwhelms a lot of our systems it overwhelms our stem cells our stem cells cannot adequately function properly function to help us regenerate when there's too much sugar around you know sugar is is a concentrated material it's a solute meaning that it's dissolved in water and when there's a lot of things and think about when you're in a swimming pool or you're in you know or if you're swimming in the ocean for a long period of time what happens the water gets pulled out of your skin or even in a bathtub your your skin gets wrinkly because you've sucked out all the all the water and that's basically what happens to these cells in a high sugar environment your blood so i would say added sugar with sodas that are so popular that is something that sits on your health defense systems too much sugar also literally damages the ecosystem of your gut microbiome which is connected to your immunity um unhappy gut unhappy immunity you know we all want to actually be as strong immunologically as possible and then by the way let's kind of just take one step over to the kissing cousin of regular soda which is diet soda right so here's the thing i just told you you know we might want to cut down or cut out regular soda so what do people say they say well don't worry dr lee we just go over to the diet soda no worries i drink the diet version it's much better for my metabolism well science tells us it's not true and the irony is that people who drink a lot of diet soda with the purpose of not getting a lot of carbs from refined sugar actually still gain weight this is a kind of a paradox that now makes sense because scientists have figured out that many of the artificial sweeteners used in diet sodas actually harm our gut microbiome and so when you're drinking that soda and that artificial sweetener you know you get that sugar hit on your tongue to go to your brain man it's pretty sweet but all those chemicals go down your gut and they're feeding our gut bacteria and the gut bacteria really don't like these synthetic compounds these artificial sweeteners and so they revolt and as they're revolting they're actually drought literally drowning in these artificial sweeteners and that is bad enough because our gut bacteria actually you know helps to lower inflammation but our gut bacteria also controls metabolism our insulin sensitivity so when that gets upset guess what our actual blood sugars raise and we actually have poorer metabolism of our energy and we actually start to gain weight anyway so that's you know kind of two just two just two examples but there's a lot of other foods that we might want to be careful about can you just explain that term metabolism because it's something that i think the public hear a lot but i think it's not always that well understood glad you're asking that question here's what i will tell you because i'm actually working on a project now on metabolism yeah metabolism isn't that well understood by doctors either and it's actually not even that well understood by scientists and that's part of the mystery of the human body that gigantic question mark what is our metabolism right so here we are thinking about metabolism i think classically as energy you know how do we our metabolism is these are some assumptions our metabolism is something we're born with you know i have a lot of body fat so i got the unlucky straw in family genetics look at my sister she's skinny as a stick she's lucky she inherited the thin gene for her metabolism right so that's one assumption that we make about metabolism and that infers and it's wrong by the way um but that infers that our body's metabolism is the machinery that's used to take energy that we put into our body that's our food that we eat how our body processes that energy in order to be able to load up on fuel and then how our body takes that fuel in the fuel tank like filling the gas tank with petrol and then actually uses that fuel as we get on the highway and drive that's not incorrect okay but what we're really beginning to realize is that metabolism is a lot more complicated than that because it's connected to our immune system it's connected to our inflammation it's connected to our ability to actually maintain our health in the sense that body fat is not necessarily bad it's actually really good and so many of the assumptions of metabolism energy and all the negative aspects of it you know an athlete has got is you know who's in his top shape has got great metabolism whereas somebody who actually is obese's terrible metabolism not not as simple as we thought yeah thank you for that i think that's that's really really helpful so in terms of categories and types of foods that we should think about limiting or avoiding the first thing you went to was those drinks with added sugar soft drinks fizzy drinks soda help you know in whatever country you're in however you like to refer to it i hope it's generally well known that actually those things are damaging for our health our immune system our teeth and you beautifully explained why that is now before we go to diet drinks because i'm really glad you brought that up full sugar fizzy drinks is it just the sugar that's causing problems because it overwhelms our system and we can't process it or is it something else is it the sugar and the chemicals and the impact they have on other aspects of our body's health and potentially those five defense systems that you've written beautifully about in your book what's going on there is it just the sugar or is it something else yeah the soft drinks the sodas that we see so commonly around us it's part of everyday modern life you know for the last 100 years or so it's interesting the the history of soda is really fascinating it dates back into europe where um people are trying to find additional ways to be surprised and delighted by beverages right so the traditional drinks were always tea or coffee of course the most popular beverage in the world was just drinking water um the most important one actually as well tea and coffee following close behind and then there was a wine right i mean these were for thousands of years sort of the the elixirs so to speak of our beverages and carbonation was actually added to fruit juice first it was a mistake i think that was made when they invented it but then actually it became something to delight folks you know kind of like in a you go to a carnival you know and you see some spectacle that actually is just some of you walk by and you think oh my gosh that's so unusual that's delightful that's how sodas were actually um uh drank and then once actually the the big industries came in and turned it into a marketing buzz it started to take on a life of its own and here's where it morphed went from food juices that actually had some carbonation which is just gas you know co2 and that's okay but what wound up happening is that they started to have less fruit but they figured out how to put chemical flavorings that actually mimic the fruit flavoring and then of course nobody really wants to have just a plain watery looking carbonated drink so then they started to add artificial coloring and then he started add preservatives and this goes to the importance of reading a label whenever i actually pick up something to drink you know from a store or grocery store i you know uh uh i i'm an explorer so i love to actually try new things if i saw a drink in a store that seemed appealing or attractive or intriguing to me i might pick it up but the first thing i do is i take a look at the label what is in there right so it should be mostly water so i look for that and then most many people don't know this but the order in which the ingredients appear on a label at least in the united states is um synonymous with their relative concentration in the drink and so what you want to do is it's usually water and then it's sugar all right so we just talked about that or artificial sweetener and then you start seeing the other things behind it and i think most people will be astounded and um disappointed rightfully so that natural fruit juice is usually pretty low on a list of 10 or 20 ingredients and so if you are creeped out by not being able to pronounce understand identify the ingredients on on on a beverage your you should follow your instincts that's probably not something you want to put in your body because your body's not hardwired to handle those chemicals yeah i think that's great advice something i use in my patients as well people say there's always exceptions yeah there are exceptions but it's a general principle when looking at ingredient labels i i completely echo that if you don't recognize it you know maybe give it a miss and choose something else instead you also mentioned marketing there when you were talking about fizzy drinks and that really is something that we're fighting you know you are trying to promote all this incredible colorful food but what we're fighting is this marketing machine and in particularly around i guess soft drinks and fizzy drinks and sodas it's it's really tragic to see sports stars who are looked up to by children you know you certainly have seen this in the uk for many years you see this in a big way in india where like the big cricket stars are often sponsored and are seen drinking a can of soda and actually i think this is one of the big problems we're up against because that just infuses into these young kids mind that actually i want to be like that person or they're drinking that drink oh i want to drink that and be like them how much of a problem do you think marketing is you know sponsorship product placements commercial deals is that something we need to be fighting against i think that we all have the freedom most of us to make our own choices and i try to think about any argument um such as the one we're discussing now from both sides of the coin if you run a company and you're and then your company's making a product your job is to market it whether it's a soda or whether it's a tennis shoe or whether it's a wrist watch right on one hand i i don't blame companies for actually doing marketing and the ones that actually do it really well hey you know what that's that's their job okay on the other hand i think that the fight that we're actually having is not really against the company the fight is really against the inertia that many of us have in the community to do our homework on and get back in touch with our body because i think that if we actually you know took a look at the mirror and started to um reacquaint ourselves with what our body is telling us i mean you know look here's how i think about it in the morning you get up in the morning you take a shower you step out of the shower you look you're going to see the mirror you look in that mirror most people aren't that happy most people are not that happy with what they see they can always find something wrong with themselves you know and then you know and then you might step on a scale and you might not like that number okay um and then you like those are the few moments of clarity in a day where you might actually be thinking about yourself and then we get dressed and we go off and we're just swept up with the rest of our lives whether it's our jobs whether it's our families where there's other responsibilities and we leave ourselves behind oftentimes we de-prioritize what our body needs and i think that one of the things the inertia we're fighting against is actually all those other distractions in our life i actually think that you know one of the things that we could do to teach children and one of the things we could do to teach young parents one of the things we could do to help teachers whether it's grade school high school or college or beyond is to really re-emphasize the fact that we all need to be in touch with our bodies we need to know ourselves first knowing yourself first allows you to then discern whether or not a message that you're seeing on television or being promoted by a sports star or whether something that is being marketed to you in a grocery store is something that you want to partake in right and so i think that yes we should um be vigilant and we should enact policies that prevent predatory marketing practices to people that are uninformed and are highly vulnerable like marketing to children you know with uh certain ads like that i think that's that is something that works and therefore it's something that really we need to we do need to actually push back against but on the other hand you know i think companies are just doing their job i think that we have our own decision we need to push back on the predatory practices um of companies that are preying on the vulnerable and we also need to be able to lift up the consumers so that they are smarter wiser more in touch with themselves and then they actually can discern what they should be ordering uh or buying uh that can actually help themselves yeah i really appreciate that nuanced answer looking at it from both sides you mentioned sugar and these soda drinks that we know certainly even small amounts consume regularly can be quite damaging for our health and then you went to artificial sweeteners in these diet drinks now i share the same perspective as you do on this but it does appear to be a very divisive topic with the public but even within science and within medicine this whole topic of whether artificial sweeteners are good bad or neutral seems to get a lot of people's backs up i know professor tim spector who has been on the show before and he's pretty clear as well that we should be avoiding them you seems to be pretty clear on that i certainly take the precautionary principle with my patients say listen that i've seen enough data that suggests it's having a negative impact on the gut microbiome so i would prefer to take that precautionary approach to say let's try something else what is your view on that and why do you think it's such a divisive topic well first of all every kid loves candy right me me as well i remember when i was a child you know in the u.s you know at halloween and who who didn't look forward to collecting all the candy from the neighbors and and i think that you know sugars the candies that they're delightful and there's nothing wrong with being delighted and i think we carry with us lots of pleasant fun memories i think brain's also hardwired to actually go after sweet babies yeah right i mean it's part of our instinct as animals to you know just like the the the lion on the savannah goes after the antelope i think humans you know on the street go after candy it's one of those things that just we're we're hardwired to go after sugar i think there are industrial interests that actually you know pose uh counter arguments to the harm of sugars and artificial sweeteners and by the way i do want to actually bring this up because i think it's it's important let's not character assassinate categories i think that's really important so artificial sweeteners let's be specific what i was referring to are things that are not refined sugars the powdery white stuff that you would buy in a supermarket the artificial sweeteners are the ones that are chemically synthesized not natural that actually have been designed to activate the sugar receptors on your tongue and mimic sweetness right okay and there's many different kinds and so i think that if anybody were to go to google and look up categories of artificial sweeteners you'll start seeing this is not one product it's a many different types some people could consider artificial sweeteners stevia now stevia is a natural sweetener but it's still artificial when you compare it to refined sugar and so and what about you know like some people use monk fruit which is also a natural sweetener which isn't the same thing as refined sugar it also activates your sugar taste buds it's more natural and then what about aspartame and circulos and what about all those other kind of chemical names that you can't pronounce and so i think as we're talking about this now we need to say categorically you know i think excess natural sugars in product form added to food this added sugars tend to be unhealthy if you over consume that and sodas is just one of many examples with lots of added sugar artificial sweeteners is not one category it's a lot of different types of things that that are used in place of refined sugar and what i would say to be a savvy consumer you know um just know that there are more natural versions of those i think stevia is fine however there are stevia um that actually are not really all stevia you pick up the package you look at the ingredients and you find even though it says stevia you look at the ingredients and you actually see that there are other things that are added to it we cannot forget when you buy ultra processed food in a package stuff has been added to it almost certainly even to preserve it on the shelf that may or may not be good for you and one of the big advantages we have right now every one of us carries around one of these a mobile phone um and so if you don't recognize something and you're curious go ahead and type it in and search that chemical this to learn something about it that could actually make the difference between whether you put it in your cart or not yeah i love that very empowering way of looking at this to put the information in the consumer's hands and say right you start as much as possible to make these better decisions because you know that this one's going to lead to health this one's probably going to not promote my health over a period of time i mean look at what happens when we sit down at a restaurant right you open a menu and the waiter comes over and says do you have any questions and so all of us have done this you've picked one that kind of seems interesting to you and and you ask what's a question we ask you ask the waiter hey what's in this all right what's in this dish and they tell you and on the basis of the information that you asked for as a consumer for on food that you're about to purchase and eat you might say oh well that sounds pretty good i'll have it or you might say um you know that doesn't sound so great to me i think i'll choose something else and i think that that the power you know the powers in the pocket of the consumer and it's our money our resources that we're spending and and by the way i mean you can see this now with you know global and the geopolitical events that are happening if we choose not to support something it can have a powerful impact and that impact actually comes from our pocketbooks yeah apart from these drinks that we've covered so far any other sorts of foods that we should generally try and avoid let's say when we're in the grocery store or the supermarkets anything we should think about yeah so i think you know largely for the same reasons of having chemicals being put in our body that we don't really want ultra processed foods foods that come in a box foods that got lots of ingredients and lots of preservatives and chemicals inside them things that that they say that your grandmother if you showed her might not recognize his food or great-grandmother and perhaps the ultra-processed foods as a group tend to be associated when we look at populations with poorer health outcomes from diabetes obesity cardiovascular disease and even cancer and so again you know i even though i said we should be careful not to over generalize it is true things in a box things in a can things you know that are manufactured at scale and intended to sit on the shelf for months or maybe even years tend to draw the attention my attention anyway that it really is worth reading the label and knowing what it is you're putting in your body so ultra processed foods i think alcohol is another thing that is a is popular it's social i mean look um if you look at beer and wine these go back millennia as part of human culture people sat and and distilled and fermented beer and wine for thousands of years uh you know in the coliseum in rome they're still doing excavations to figure out what the gladiators actually ate and drank and they found they find inside there you know wine casks and and things like that like it was a it was a it's a it's a cherished tradition of humans but what we do know is that it's easy to over uh consume and we do know that there are while there are healthful properties in the liquid of wine due to the fermentation it pulls things out of the red grape skin or pulls things out of the barley hops in the case of beer like xantho humeral and beer or resveratrol and red wine the fact of the matter is that none of the benefits that you get from any alcoholic beverages come from the ethanol the alcohol itself the thing you get the buzz from does nothing for your health okay um some of the other things that happen to be in the broth of the fermentation might be good for you and so that's something that you know like like oh well they found that and i think recently there was research showing that you know even one glass of red wine could have an impact on brain health as well and i think that you know we have to be i i'm really careful about not chucking a spear you know at every food that you know we want to kind of malign for a health reason i think wine is a cherished tradition alcohol is a cherished tradition but people should know that the benefits of it and it's okay to have a glass or two every now and then but i think that the people who really go after it hard look besides the obvious liver disease and the problems of nutrition and the brain health i mean alcohol is a toxin to your brain um we do want to actually be mindful about the amounts that are consumed you know processed meats are another food product that actually are classed as a carcinogen by the world health organization now what kind of processed meats are we talking about we're not talking about that the air-cured salami from sardinia you know that you know that have been made in the same way for thousands of years that people eat sparing amounts of you know as part of a more well-balanced mediterranean traditional meal i'm talking about the deli foods you go in there and they're slicing stuff you know from a big lump that that looks nothing like the animal from what you came and some of these cured sausages if you visit a sausage factory i had i had a patient once who actually worked as an inspector in a commercial sausage plant and he told me that he has to he used to have to change his boots every month rubber boots walking in there because the stuff that splashed out of the pool in which the sausages were essentially um uh embalming it for preservatives and for flavorings would actually dissolve the soul of his rubber does that mean such an impression on me i'm still talking about it 20 years later yeah and we're sort of removed from that process aren't we we don't see that we don't see that on videos we just see the nice packaging and the clever marketing copy on there and so i think that's really really important and i really like the way you made that distinction there also you know when talking about things like alcohol or anything it depends not just on that one thing it depends on everything else that's going on in your life as well we like to take these things in isolation good or bad it's like well it kind of depends doesn't it in our first conversations together which if people haven't heard i'd highly recommend they go back and listen to one of the things i really liked about your approach was you said well let's put into our body foods that support these five defense systems and if we can do that and support them we raise the bar we become more resilient therefore we've got more head room to actually deal with the insults that are going to come in life whether that's dna insults from pollution or whether it's the odd thing that we creep into our diet that we probably know isn't the best thing for us but you know we just fancy it now and again and i really like that approach and and i know we're starting off this conversation focusing on some of the things to avoid we're very quickly going to get on to the things that people can put in but yeah i really really appreciate that the most important thing that we as doctors can do is to listen to our patients and hear them out and try to understand where they're coming from and what's important to them i always ask my patients um you know what do you eat what do you like to eat what what brings you joy when it comes to food though the ant that question usually can elicit an answer like i never i try to i'm very careful not to ask that question judgmentally what kind of negative foods do you how much for steak do you eat like i i never asked that i always sort of say like tell me about what do you enjoy eating what brings you joy what are some of the favorite things that you like to eat and you know again it's that conversation that invites someone to look deeply within them i think that um you know i i when i was a kid i studied martial arts and uh and um one of the greatest martial arts artists ever was bruce lee who i actually read a lot of his writings he wrote in a philosophical sort of way and he wrote one of the most important things that if to succeed in life whether it's a martial in martial arts or otherwise is to know yourself to truly know yourself and i think that so often we get distracted we don't have that opportunity to ask ourselves something simple like so if we had a choice what would we want to eat what brings us joy and my my strong belief is if we want people to get on a better diet to get them started and to keep them going on it we want them to actually feel like it's not a heavy lift it's something that's doable and i think there's nothing easier than to say hey you know what something that you already brings you pleasure and joy something that you enjoy to eat already is healthy so let's start with those things because you already know you love them so what i in my booking could be disease i have lists of like 200 some foods i always tell people yeah i have my book get a sharpie okay i i'd say a sharpie like the marker permanent marker yeah because it's permanent you have to make a commitment all right take a sharpie a black sharpie and circle the foods that you enlist that you already like no actually that you love all right and and i i don't care if it's just one or two almost everyone i've met has been able to circle like 10 of them so i or more but if you find a food that you already love that's healthy and good for you that activates your health defenses you're already way ahead of the game we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible whole foods that's why i'm a big fan of good quality whole food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 whole food source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focus digestion and our immune system athletic greens are giving my audience a fantastic offer one year's free supply of vitamin d and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all the details at athletic greens dot com forward slash live more or simply click on the link below now back to the conversation love that very empowering approach to people oils oils are something that can cause a lot of confusion i know you're a big fan of olive oil i want to talk about olive oil and why it's so beneficial but before we get to olive oil in the spirit of the kind of foods that we should think about limiting when we are in our supermarket or our grocery store and we're looking around to purchase oils to cook food in to sprinkle on food to pour on our salads what kind of oils should we try and avoid and then what sort of oil should we try and buy instead you know so this unlike the debate about artificial sweeteners um is a loaded topic and so i i want to just start you know this component of our conversation by saying the jury is still very much deliberating what oils are harmful to you and and are most harmful to you but i think that it's less controversial what uh oils are better for you and good for you i want to you know for your listeners i want to kind of give people some real practical things and not just kind of dive into the science of petroleum products which is what oils are let's talk about this rule number one regardless of what oil you actually have what i would say is don't have too much of it because oils are fats and fats can be healthier but there really isn't such a thing as a healthy fat that you should like drink lots of it every single day okay so the point is that there are healthier oils but you should we should all limit the amount of oil that we actually intake into our body all right number one number two is that and this is actually broadly speaking is don't reuse your oil okay most oils that are reused when we heat them to cook whether we're actually you know i mean again deep frying is generally something that's not very healthy the process of deep frying actually changes the chemical the natural chemicals that make up oil in the oil itself and then paint it onto the food stick it onto the food so we're eating some of the change chemicals when we actually eat deep fried food now look i mean i've had i've had some awesome fish and chips um uh when i visited england before um and and again and again as we talked about you know every now and then if you're you spend most of your time shoring up your health defenses raising your own bar you know having a rare treat is totally fine but when you fry things in hot oil you're also changing the chemical structure of things that entire browning golden browning crisping of food actually changes the chemical structure of the food itself and in ways that are potentially carcinogenic and so just need to be careful about that the third so so i think you know like reusing oil here's the thing that's kind of like a little risky you go to a restaurant to eat you have no idea if they're reusing your oil over and over and over again you know um i mean think about in uh asian restaurants whether it's an indian restaurant or chinese rice they've got these gigantic bats where they're frying tasty little bits up but they may be reusing that oil for days so um uh reused oil not good for you for sure and and the stuff that's fried in oil can also change in time so let's start now talking about just like the properties of oils themselves this is where i think rather than kind of walk into the quicksand of trying to say is palm oil better than corn oil is coconut oil dangerous for you you know like we can wade into that jungle with you know but i think you need a machete to cut your way out of it and so the best way to think about it to give clarity is you know are there any healthier oils to use and how to use them and this is where i think olive oil really stands out number one it's part of a healthy pattern of eating that's been revered for thousands of years and that's in the mediterranean traditional mediterranean diet and the olives are seasonal they're pressed the extra virgin olive oil contains not just fat poly monounsaturated fatty acids which are better for your body and less damaging for your cardiovascular health but there's a lot of polyphenols that come from the olive itself now a lot of people don't understand this but when you look at olive oil the reason we say extra virgin olive oil evoo you know that's what the that's what supermarkets and what restaurants are proud to use now is because it's not just fat it contains the polyphenols from the oil so if you were to actually by the way this is a good experiment to do for for your solicitors buy a little container of olives from your grocery store deep it make it easy for yourself and literally you know take it home and and take a heavy glass or take a a board like a like a heavy cutting board and press those olives yourself and you'll actually see if you press hard enough you'll see some oil come out of it now in a in an olive oil factory i mean that that's that's so you can actually appreciate where your food comes from where your olive oil comes from and when you actually press it you'll see that you've crushed the olives and some of the bits from the olives are actually in the olive oil the reese that olive oil tastes so good it's got that you know kind of peppery vegetable kind of quality to it um it's got an umami flavor it's not because the fat is flavorful it's because the bits of olives that were crushed in there are actually in there flavoring it now those bits and the stuff that comes from the meat of the olives contain the polyphenols one of which is hydroxytirozole hydroxy tyrosine sounds like a very complicated chemical name you know your listeners don't either memorize it by any means but you should know that that comes from the olive now olive oil will have some of it only about twenty percent of the of it but if you actually press that olive eighty percent goes into the olive water and and it's stuck in the pulp and so one of the things that i always say is that you know if you really love olive oil and you want to get the most out of it um just eat the whole olive you know and you can actually cut up an olive and you'll get a little bit of fat you'll get all that flavor and you'll get a lot more of the polyphenol now if you're going to cook with olive oil i i always say go for extra virgin because of that reason i would say don't deep fry but you can spray you can put put some on to food you can actually saute with it not too much all the studies show that about three tablespoons of olive oil sort of like what you probably that's around the max of what you'd want a day so nobody's drinking olive oil and then the other thing that is if you want to choose which olive oil because i get overwhelmed when i walk into a store and i see all these like a whole wall full of olive oils right everybody's marketing here's what i do again i pick up the olive and oil and i look at the ingredients what do i look for i look for mono varietal olive oil mono varietal means it's made with just one kind of olive and i look for the one kind of olive that that that oil is made from from three different varieties of olive in spain spanish olive oil i look for picuol p-i-c-u-a-l pick your olives among the highest in in polyphenols in the oil so the olive oil will be loaded second um greek olive oil the koroneki olive which is from the peloponnesus it both both the picuan koranicki are very common olives so that's a good news it's not very expensive highest amount of poly one of the top three polyphenols and the third for italian olive oil i look for uh oil that's been pressed from a mono varietal called moriolo and that comes from umbria and that's less common harder to find a little pricier but i just gave you three olives uh picuelle kornicky mariolo that are not most of them are not good eating olives but they're great for olive oil they're packed with polyphenols if you get olive oil that is mono-varietal pressed only from each of those you can be guaranteed that you're getting sort of the top the sort of the capitocapo of the polyphenols in the olive oil yeah i love that i i actually in in my kitchen as we sweet now is the picky olive it's uh well i would have called it a single origin but that's because i'm probably used to picking coffee but as you were describing that there was such a wonderful energy in your voice and your body language it reminded me of like a wine connoisseur talking about the different varieties of wines or or a coffee connoisseur talking about that you know i get a single origin bean from this particular farm but i guess it's not that different is it it's about going back to where does this come from how was it processed what is actually in my hand right now that i'm about to buy yeah and you know there is great pride that we as humans have always had and it's still within us to know something about the food that is around us i mean you know uh if you talk to a farmer they are proud of what they have you talk to a villager they're really proud of what their community what grows around their community and again i think that you know something that maybe that we're fighting against because i want to draw back the jargon that you raised at the beginning that i think is helpful to think about what are we what are we really fighting against you know i think we're fighting against our distraction from ourselves getting to know who we are getting to know slowing down so we can actually understand our own pace we're getting distracted by the uh by the by the pace of what we're expected to do and so we've got no time for ourselves right i mean every every young working parent certainly feels that way you know like man i'm so busy on time for myself and yet when it comes to food and health we all need to have that time for ourselves and i think we should take great pride in saying what it is that we actually love yeah a lot of people talk about the health properties of vegetables of course you promote all kinds of vegetables which have different impacts on the body but some of the time we're told to sprinkle or pour some olive oil onto the vegetables because it helps us absorb nutrients from them what's your perspective on that in view of what you've just said about oil and you know perhaps not over consuming it even though it can be healthy yeah well there's two let's unpack that because there's two things that you were describing one is that in plants let's take a tomato as a great example there are natural substances natural chemicals like lycopene lycopene is a carotenoid it helps to make the tomato red it has lots and lots of healthful properties it's a powerful antioxidant i've studied lycopene in a laboratory and it actually can help starve cancers by cutting off the blood supply um it can slow the shortening of telomeres to slow cellular aging and they can protect our dna from even sunlight and ultraviolet exposure lots of good things about it now lycopene actually is a uh naturally occurs in a tomato on a vine in a chemical form that our body doesn't absorb that well so if you pick a tomato off the vine and you cut it up and you throw it into a salad it might taste great just got some vitamin c in it it's a great source of hydration and great flavors okay especially if it's like a home-grown heirloom type of tomato but you're not going to get the light you're not going to get as much lycopene you're probably only going to get maybe 20 percent of the lycopene that's in there but you want it like for me i want to get as much of the good stuff as i can so here's what research has found if you wanted to convert that chemical structure of lycopene into a form that you can absorb better your body can averagely absorb what you want to do is you want to heat the tomato like in a pan and with the heat will change the chemical structure from a form your body doesn't absorb that well into a form that your body avidly absorbs loves to absorb it now you go from twenty percent absorption to eighty percent absorption you flip the you flip it around completely up ended that equation completely now you're really absorbing it now here's one additional thing though how would you heat a tomato in a pan you put heat in water or nothing no not really you put a little bit of olive oil in it now why is that and and it's because lycopene is a substance that we call fat soluble it's a lipid it loves to dissolve into fats so a little bit of olive oil in tomatoes on a pan sauteed so soft change of chemical structure flavors are really great now and you have that now when you uh eat that tomato sauce sauteed in olive oil the oil the olive oil with the lycopene is carried into your body even more efficiently than if it were cooked in water and so again that's an ex that's just one example of thousands of how oils with fat soluble foods by the way if you didn't want to look at olive oil here's another common snack in the united states anyways kind of tearing a page book from latin american cuisine you have these tortilla chips and then you wind up actually having salsa and guacamole the salsa has often sort of stewed down tomatoes cooked down tomatoes served at room temperature or chilled and then the guacamole is just avocado that's been smashed up now avocado has a lot of healthy fats in it that's it's a fat soluble veggie it's actually quite uh nutritious and remarkably uh people eating avocado actually shrink their waistline because actually even though you're eating fat it actually makes you it burns down harmful fat it's a whole other story but we had but if you have guacamole avocado with tomatoes you get more lycopene and so that happens to be kind of a popular snack in the united states yeah i love that so the right combination of foods can actually help absorb the nutrients i think black pepper also can do that right with certain nutrients well right so black pepper is so this is an interesting thing we most of us have heard that turmeric which is a kind of a root um when you cut it open it's this bright beautiful bright orange a lovely color and and turmeric is also a dried spice used in south east asian cuisine including indian cuisine is where i first became acquainted with it it not only makes food beautiful it actually makes food delicious it's got a quite a lovely taste to it it's a spice inside turmeric is curcumin curcumin is one of those natural chemicals kind of like lycopene it's one of those mother nature's treasure chest mother nature's pharmacy with an f not a ph and the the the the curcumin has a lot of properties anti-inflammatory it's antioxidant it cuts off the blood supply feeding cancers um it uh actually is helpful for your stem cells as well it's it really activates almost all of your body's health defenses and it's good for your gut microbiome so why not just you know enjoy turmeric as a spice by itself because it's so potent that our body actually doesn't absorb everything that it could in fact our body kind of it kind of gets a lot of it gets flushed out you know uh at the tail end and so what we want to do to improve our body's extraction of the good um the good stuff the the turmeric it turns out that if you have fresh cracked black pepper all right there's a substance in fresh cracked black pepper called piperine pepperine is one of mother nature's um again you know these remarkable chemicals that actually influences the body and pimperine helps the body hang on to the curcumin so if you have fresh cracked black pepper with your turmeric you're actually creating a one-two punch that allows you to absorb more of the curcumin yeah i love that so the right combinations can actually help us get more out of these incredible whole foods sorry interrupts if you are enjoying this content there's loads more just like it on my channel so please do take a moment to press subscribe hit the notification bell and now back to the conversation but i think the wrong combinations potentially can also make certain foods less beneficial one example i've heard you talk about before is what happens when you put milk into tea i know you're a big fan of tea on the last conversation you spoke about a lot of the benefits of tea but i think i've heard you say that if you add milk to your tea that actually you reduce some of the beneficial effects is that right you know those scientists that do television shows to actually uh make science accessible to people this is kind of where we need to go with this this topic so look tea green tea especially has a natural polyphenol that's called catechins egcg uh epigallocatechin gallate egcg and the cat and the catechin is actually just part of the natural substance in the tea leaf so whether you're a brewing tea with a bag or whether it's loose leaf tea or whether it's matcha which is just powdered tea leaves um the fact of the matter is that into the brew into the liquid the hot liquid comes all these phytochemicals including these catechins so when you sip straight tea the catechins go right in they're easily absorbed by your body and so you know your our blood levels of catechins go way up so many things that catechins can do one of the things that's important is actually it's it's a relaxant it actually helps lower your stress it lowers the catecholamines and so other things that helps your lipids it actually also helps fight cancer it's anti-inflammatory kind of like curcumin it's it's a substance that has so many beneficial things that at least when i drink tea i want i want to get as much as i can out of my food all right now iris i deeply respect traditions of yeah of eating and drinking and one of the things that um you know i know is a tradition in england is you know you put or in ireland you actually put some milk or cream into your tea it actually um changes the flavor profile uh and and it's lovely i you know i've had plenty of teas in england before and and i i find it to be just such an incredibly um uh nice i feel great you know sort of like having an english tea put dairy in it here's what you need to know dairy and i'm talking about cow dairy right so not not not milk this is applies to cow here we'll come back to the nut milk in a second cow dairy okay actually is fat milk has got fat in it like butter which is made out of milk and um and the fat when you put it into your tea does change its flavor but that's not what we're talking about here we're talking about the fact that when milk or cream is put into tea the fat molecules in the cow dairy form little soaked bubbles these are microscopic soap bubbles they're called micelles fat likes to stick with fat and so tea is mostly water and so when you pour milk into tea the the bubbles the the dairy fat sticks together and a little makes a little tiny soap bubble and what does it do those sub bubbles trap the polyphenols from tea it traps the catechin so you've got some good stuff wrapped in a soap bubble of of dairy and now when you drink the tea the catechin is trapped in the soap bubble it doesn't get absorbed as easily in your stomach and it just rolls down your gut and a lot of it comes out the other end okay and so you're missing out on a lot of the good stuff you get a great you know you get a nice flavor and so i have you know what i'm telling you is that if you're drinking uh milk uh or cow milk dairy but in your tea you're getting the you're getting good flavor if you if that's what you like but you're missing out on all as most of the polyphenols so just be aware that that's what you're actually doing now if you want to actually still cut the tea with something that is milk like nut milks are fine because they don't actually have the same fatty reaction that the dairy cow dairy has so almond milk uh cashew milk um soy milk they're all fine i mean that's really interesting and i like the way you frame it with this deep respect for cultures and traditions because i hear that and i think for someone who might be listening or watching this and they think you have it you know what it's just a part part of what i do like i i love putting milk in my black tea or i know some people even put it in their green seed which i certainly haven't tried before they might hear that and they may not want to change what they do but is this where potentially [Music] supplements could come in let's say someone they like the taste of milky tea but they hear that i think well i want all those benefits of those polyphenols and the catechins that doctor he was talking about maybe i can boost that another way by taking a supplement is there any merit to that way of thinking and i guess you could expand that broadly into what is your view of you know supplements as a whole huge category but there are some really good quality supplements out there perhaps you could speak to those issues a little bit please yeah well let's let's pick up the thread on t for a second because i i had this discovery that might be uh useful for your listeners who are in exactly that situation where they like the taste of milk in their tea i discovered there is something called milk tea and it's actually from taiwan it's grown in the mountain and it actually it's it's just pure tea leaves that when you brew it it tastes like it's got dairy in it oh wow it's quite it's quite amazing i mean if if i made a cup of that for you and then made a cup of of english tea with milk in it you would have a hard time telling the difference it's quite remarkable milk tea it's a kind of i think it's an oolong style tea so it's mildly fermented and still got green properties it's got polyphenols in it but it literally it has to do with the whey the climate the the way that it's naturally grown and the type of tea it is so all right so let's move that aside for a second um uh um all right well so what about supplements you know i i think that we should look to the word itself a dietary supplement means something to top off so i always tell people you know if you have a choice of getting it from the whole food the whole food will tend to have a lot of other stuff that's good for you if you eat whole plant-based foods for example you get the fiber you get the polyphenols you get a lot of other chemical substances you get the natural peptides that are found in foods that if you got a pure supplement you might get the one molecule or two molecules that has been created for like a vitamin c supplement um if you want to top off your vitamin c it's pure vitamin c you're going to get a lot of it if you if you take your take a multi vitamin but you know if you had citrus you're going to get all that flav you're going to get the different kind of flavor you're going to you get some uh you do get sugar you get fiber you got the limonene and all these other hesperidin all these other bioactives that you can't get from a regular supplement alone that said you are absolutely right supplements can be really important particularly for people who have difficulty getting a lot of of of some nutrients or their food so for example i think omega-3 fatty acids are a great supplement if you get a high quality omega-3 not everybody eats oily fish you know day and you know two to three times a week you know you only need to eat um the amount in each serving with the size of a deck of playing cards so you don't need to eat very much but you know that's not something people most people do people who live on the on the coastline they might be doing it but many people don't um so omega-3s are so important to our health i mean this has been shown time and time and again that's a supplement that's that's definitely worth taking and and it's a lot easier to swallow um omega-3s than it is actually to go to their fishmonger and then to look at what the catch of the day is that's an example another example of a supplement i think is really what we're taking um is probably vitamin d3 okay vitamin d uh you know for for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere where we don't have as much sun all the time all year round and where it's cold so we're indoors a lot and not always outdoors under the sunshine so i'm not talking casa del sol i'm not talking about south africa you know or australia i'm talking about you know england northern europe north america you know and sort of the northeastern side okay we don't get as much sunlight and even if we do go outside because it's cold we wear a lot of clothes and so our skin tends to be covered up and so vitamin d is made by our skin when sunlight actually hits it and so we don't we tend to be vitamin d deficient so here's an example of where you can eat foods like mushrooms that can have vitamin d for example uh by the way i don't know this is a little little tip a tidbit for you i just told you that human skin with ultraviolet radiation from the sun will make more vitamin d but did you know that if you took just a plain old lowly white button mushroom that contains some vitamin d if you were to before you eat it when you buy it if you slice it like slice it pretty thinly and you lay this the slices out and you put it in your windowsill so your sun the sun shines on the slice it will make more vitamin d wow you want to you want to convert more vitamin e to the into the mushroom so if you're going to prepare something with mushrooms slice them ahead of time stick them in front of a sunny window no matter what time of the year it is you know um maybe a couple hours before you cook with it and the mushrooms will actually give you more vitamin d but it's it's not it's a lot easier to get your regular dose of daily vitamin d um by actually just having d3 supplements so that's an example yeah no i love that and and certainly what i found with my patients like i i always adopt a food first approach definitely but many people these days have got as you've already touched on super busy stressed out lifestyles and they're rushing around and they they don't have time to cook a fresh whole meal they're often buying things on the go that probably aren't the best thing for them they've probably got high levels of stress so actually they're probably not even absorbing as many nutrients as they could because their digestive system isn't in the right place to absorb those nutrients and i found sometimes you know a good quality supplement like let's say a whole food sometimes a green supplement which has lots and lots of different phytochemicals prebiotics polyphenols in it could be helpful and sometimes can be helpful in the short term to help them have more energy and feel better so that they can then make those lifestyle choices so i know a lot of doctors take quite a hard line on supplements but you've demonstrated some really important ones i think have been shown in scientific studies have real benefits like vitamin d for sure so yeah i really really appreciate you you know i wanted to support and underscore what you just said you know that i you know there's there's always something valuable to look at the history of things supplementation um did wasn't developed to be an online internet scam okay supplementation was a really serious effort to improve global nutrition yeah because you know back in even the early 20th century most the world was under nourished that's different than malnutrition i mean maybe there was some momentum to do but under nutrition an undernourished means that you know we were eating food but we weren't eating enough of the right things at the right time and so one of the things that supplements were developed for to do is to really fortify supplement top off you know everyone so that everyone could have any more equal chance of being filling up becoming replete with the key micronutrients that we our body needs to actually survive and so i think it's a mistake to disparage supplements as a category i mean this isn't a theme of what we're talking about today yeah let's not you know let's not throw the baby out of the bath water let's not character assassinate entire categories of things let's be i mean let's let's be discerning and try to know exactly what we're talking about there are some dietary supplements that are absolutely valuable some that uh uh that's researchers that you've shown proven to be helpful and some that are can be life-saving uh as well pregnant moms really need to be taking folate you know if you don't have those um you'll have neural tube defects in your babies that the risks go much higher so you really want to be able to actually take the evidence and so this is the other thing i think maybe a useful um coat hook or hat hook to hang for your listeners is that supplements are the real deal because they were once designed originally designed to help the body top off with what it actually needs but if the marketing and we're back to marketing now sounds too good to be true if the claims sound like they're just magical claims that's when you're um that's when your spidey sense your radar needs to go on that you know maybe maybe there's something not quite fully honest about what is being told about this and it's being misrepresented and so i think that every consumer needs to be able to i mean again this is where i come back to we all have mobile devices we can easily search something when in doubt look it up yeah check it out and then make your own decision if that if that fits your if it's your comfort zone organic or non-organic is another topic that people find confusing if people are able to access organic and they are able to afford it in your view are there any benefits to choosing that right well i want to just tell everyone that first of all i was a skeptic for many years about organic food i thought it was marketing i thought the food looked beautiful was very expensive and i thought it was mostly marketing and the marketing message that i received as a consumer was here's this beautiful food that's more expensive and by the way we don't grow with pesticides and so you've got less harmful chemicals on it and i you know i it didn't feel right to me and i had all these questions in my head about like whether or not that's really true and what do i just wash my food a little bit more i mean i i i wasn't really sure what was real or not well i changed my mind a few years ago and i'll tell you i was at the royal society in london actually at a really incredible meeting with um horticulturalists with uh astrophysicists just a bunch of incredible scientists and i had the privilege of sitting next to a horticulturalist and i was i was talking with her about a new paper research paper that had come from out of the journal nature which is a british publication one of the premier scientific journals and i said you know i just read this paper that was really astounded me they looked at strawberries and they were looking for the natural substance a lactic acid which is what makes strawberries tart and electric acid is anti-inflammatory it helps your immune system it starves cancer i've done research on electric acid myself and so i know how powerful it is and they were looking at strawberries comparing organic versus um conventionally grown strawberries another way to say that is strawberries made grown with pesticides or not with or no pesticides and they were looking at ellagic acid in the strawberries and when they measured the conventionally grown strawberries they all had some electric acid that was fine okay um i expected that but then when they measured the organic strawberries every single organic strawberry they measured had two times or more of the ellagic acid and i thought that was absolutely astounding that an organically grown fruit would actually have more of that beneficial substance that mother nature is kind of bioactive and so i talked to the horticultures and i said okay so help me understand why right so look you know you know when you're talking to a real scientist when when scientists admit that they don't know something right so and and that's how anybody who says they know everything probably not a scientist i mean so so i i literally admitted my my ignorance about this and i asked a horticulturist can you help me understand why that might be and she gave me this answer that i've subsequently dove deeply more deeply and it's absolutely true it's true with coffee as well mother nature um in part made these bioactives like ellagic acid in strawberries or on coffee chlorogenic acid is another one of these and the way that plants respond to bugs nibbling on the stems and leaves biting at them okay that's the pest okay might make the plant not look so nice all right might even like might even mar the fruit a little bit so it's not quite as beautiful but the plant reacts to those little nibbles as an injury as a wound and in response and a wound healing response it produces more electric acid here or in the case of coffee it makes more chlorogenic acid so the little nibbling is part of kind of the way that evolution actually developed um how plants respond to create more of these bioactives so what happens so why is there this difference well if you actually grow a strawberry with pesticides there's fewer bugs the plant looks nicer fruit looks nicer no bugs no injury less electric acid being made and so all of a sudden like i this light bulb went off in my head and i've this is a few years ago that i i i realized this and i had this conversation everywhere i've looked uh any research that's been done it is true that the bioactives are higher in the organically grown plants and that started to change my mind about organics because the argument now is not that organics have less bad stuff the argument is the organics have more good stuff now all of a sudden i have a different view of the the nature of how this fruit is grown and what the benefits of growing without pesticides are yeah super clear explanation thank you for that and then taking that one step further which goes i guess beyond organic into non-organic as well but let's take something like an apple or a carrot let's say carrot for example there's all kinds of phytonutrients and beneficial compounds within that carrot so what happens when we start to peel off the skin off that carrots because my view would be well a lot of the beneficial properties are in that skin right that's what's had to protect itself from the environment from bugs as you've just mentioned so when we are peeling off that skin yes people may want to do it for a taste profile i understand but aren't we reducing how beneficial that food could be by taking off the outside yeah i'm glad you described the fact that we might want to remove and the peel for aesthetic purposes uh maybe for taste purposes right texture purposes but the fact of the matter is we know for a fact that skin does actually have good stuff i'll give you a great example like in an apple or a pear or a peach okay um those are all fruits that you know if you took the time to peel it um you'll have a more homogeneous you know kind of looking piece of fruit but most mothers will tell their kids if you eat if you eat it with the skin you'll get more stuff and it's absolutely true there's not only more fiber oftentimes in the outer layers as you're talking about outer outer layers yeah but there's also more phytonutrients and these bioactives in apples and pears and in peaches there is actually a substance called ursolic acid that's much more concentrated in the outer layer and orcolic acid is one of these bioactives that stimulates blood vessel growth it helps us heal it stimulates angiogenesis so that if we have an injury our bodies will more will speed its healing up that could be really important for our cardiovascular system for example it helps to promote the growth of blood vessels in beneficial sort of ways now that's actually on the peel so okay so how can you eat fruit peel well uh look uh if you had to eat six apricots or six pears or six peaches you know that might take a little work or eat six apples that that's that's a pretty commit that's a good commitment to eat six apples um uh even in a day but on the other hand if you actually get dried fruit the dried fruit will take a big fruit and shrink it really small so take a look at an apricot i could i might not be able to i might not feel like eating six apricots whole apricots from the tree but i could easily eat six dried apricots you know uh sort of in a in a dried fruit mix and so again if you want the skin it's not just you know eating the lot the fresh fruit which you can do but you can also get it in a dried form now back to the fresh for a second this this this would be a good reason to buy organic as well because you know when you spray with pesticides for fruits and foods with very thin skins um i mean for carrots you're really there's not a skin it's really just an outer kind of layer of the carrot the the fact of the matter is is that that um if there's pesticides in that area it's very hard to scrub them off i learned by the way from a food safety expert at the u.s department of agriculture who teaches food safety even for a regular piece of produce to wash all the potential pathogens bacteria lysteria all these other things that could happen it's recommended that you actually rinse whether it's organic or not you rinse it under cold running water for 60 seconds i did not realize that wow that's been shown and by the way another thing i didn't realize is that even like an onion you're supposed to rinse off before you actually cut it now i i had previously never really washed my onions i just figured if i peel off the skin what's underneath there is pretty clean but then i was told no no you you should see the research you really want to be able to wash that onion 60 seconds in cold running water is what you want to do so again back to the fruit skin a great reason to buy good to have good to eat nutritious more phytonutrients phytochemicals um a good reason to get organic is because it's harder to wash the pesticides off of it and and dried dried versions of fruits are also ways of actually getting the skin as well and that's the other reason again if you get dried fruit get dried organic fruit yeah super interesting i'm conscious of time there's so much i want to talk to you about um yeah let's go here autoimmune disease is on the rise massively across the world frankly and i'd love to hear a little bit from you about the relationship between foods and the development of autoimmune disease and i want to just add there before you respond that you know i've been practicing now as a medical doctor for almost 21 years and you know maybe 10 years ago as i started to really get tuned into how you might start to use food as a therapeutic tool with your patients i've noticed that when certain patients with certain autoimmune diseases like i can remember one clearly this lady with hypothyroidism she was on levothyroxine but she still didn't feel very good at all when i changed her diet i helped her change to a completely whole food diet from like a standard western diet that she was at that time consuming her symptoms went right down we could halve the dose of levothyroxine i think within a few months it was really incredible so maybe you know speak to that if you can a little bit about the relationship and potentially why that could have worked with that patience yeah i mean you know so i've noticed this as well you know over the decades of my clinical practice that autoimmune diseases which by the way let's just make sure our audience uh the listeners actually uh appreciate this it's not one disease it is dozens scores of actually different types of diseases that all share kind of a common denominator that and the autoimmune part of it is that somehow for some reason the immune system is triggered in ways that actually the immune response causes harm to your body itself it's sort of the body attacking the body or the body responding the immune system responding in ways that causes incredible distress at the organ level right and so it could be lupus it could be rheumatoid arthritis it could be psoriasis it could be hashimoto's it could be celiac those are some of the more common ones that people actually talk about but in fact there's probably a lot of autoimmune diseases that we don't even recognize it and a new one by the way which is coming down the pike which we believe long covered which many many people uh do have already and i think we're going to see a whole other emergence of of long covet as a significant medical problem in the coming decade that also seems to be autoimmune as well where the body's immune system has overreacted or is overreacting to attack ourselves our healthy selves okay so if if we're talking about a panoply of different diseases that share this common denominator um what's the what's the role of food well one thing that actually we do know a celiac's a great example of this glutens and gluten enteropathy is that some foods in in the case of celiac it's gluten which is in wheat and whole grains um uh for reasons that we don't fully understand the body sees that and just has a bad reaction it's kind of like that you know the the the family member that you know the the black sheep in a family that comes over for your family holiday gathering and like you just don't have a good reaction to them everyone we all have we all have one or two of those people in our families um and that's how your immune system kind of reacts to something in food that it just doesn't like and it gets pissed off and when it gets angry it actually starts to have this reaction that makes the entire body unpleasant just like that visitor to your home that you just don't react well to like you want to stay in a different room well that reaction is what autoimmune diseases are and that's why when you talk about um you know the levothyroxine just to so your listeners know like that's actually trying to replace something that is damaged because of this reaction you want to actually see we can undo the damage a bit right and autoimmune disease is often treated with steroids what do steroids do they shut down they turn down the volume of the immune system hey this rock music is too loud let's turn it the house music's too loud let's turn it down a little bit okay so that's what steroids do it turns out that if you go back back back back to look at what might be some of the root causes increasingly we're wondering if some of these chemical additives in ultra-processed foods are actually triggering um uh immune responses that are unintended these are unintended consequences and so there's a um theory that in people who say that they're they've got gluten or celiac disease um they're actually don't they don't actually have full blown celiac disease but they're they're reactive allergic they're immuno response reactive to something that's in packaged food that also has gluten in it and so uh so you're you're sort of um there are things that in these chemical laced foods that we may not fully appreciate yet now goes back to what your observation with your patient is so what happens when we take people and there's many people who spend most of their lives eating things out of a box right by the convenience become from a factory sits on the shelf for months or years and you change it to a whole plant-based diet mostly plant-based or a whole foods diet okay now you're talking about not shopping in the middle aisle of the store and i have nothing against the middle there's good treasures in there but you're spending time in the produce or you know if you live in a village you're going to the village market and going first to the fruit and vegetable in herb stand and you're buying all the stuff and now you're getting fresh foods that have all these phytonutrients um you're having to take the time to prepare them in tasty ways um you're staying away from that boxed can preserved chemically preserved foods you're allowing your immune system to to calm and you're allowing the phytonutrients to also lower inflammation and we're getting back to a more natural state like that's how i that's how i explain the kind of broad observations that you actually had is probably allowing unburdening the body uh pissing it off less and allowing the body to actually get back to a more natural state that's where it's capable of being less inflamed allow the health defenses to reassert themselves yeah i love that explanation and moving to a whole food diet no matter who you are no matter what your current state of health there's very little side effects or negative side effects i should say there's many effects mostly beneficial effects very very few negative side effects of doing that one thing i must ask dr lee before we end this conversation is in our first chat you mentioned many foods which have super helpful properties two that come to mind are kiwi fruit you mentioned how they can actually help repair dna which is remarkable the amount of people who stopped me in the streets since then to say chatty since that conversation i'll be buying kiwi i've been buying kiwi i've heard it over and over again so that's credit to you dr lee but also tomato as you mentioned i know we covered lycopene in this conversation as well but many people contacted me including some family members to say listen i don't tolerate kiwis like i get a really bad reaction when i have them i don't tolerate tomatoes i get a really bad reaction when i have them and of course this is individual because not everyone has intolerances or reactions to certain foods but for people who've heard your great advice and wanted to bring those in but thought well i can't have that how would you respond to them like what would you say to them to to give them some sort of hope yeah well look uh what i always tell people is when it comes to food and health it's not just about the food or any single food whether it's a kiwi or tomato it's really about how our body responsibly put inside it so if you um don't like kiwis can't find kiwis or are allergic to kiwis all right those are three easy reasons or can't afford a kiwi um you can do a swap out okay so what's what is what are in kiwis kiwi's got vitamin c it's got fiber what are some other foods that actually have vitamin c that also have fiber red bell pepper can actually have that um what if you've like well i'd like i'd like something a little sweet okay guava that also has vitamin c and it's also got fiber as well now the research that we discussed last time about the kiwi was research done with kiwi itself but the properties of the kiwi which is vitamin c and fiber and some of the other phytonutrients those can be found in other fruits as well so kiwi i always say like if you want to kind of stick with the research you got to go with the food that was actually studied but the properties and principles allow you to actually think about how to swap things out what a tomato great example i don't really like tomatoes i'm allergic tomatoes some people have hypersensitivities like a histamine reaction tomatoes i have i i remember in college i had a classmate who would never go to the salad bar she would stay as far away as possible because tomatoes kind of gave her this um super histamine mast cell reaction her whole face would puff up uh when she actually had anything like tomatoes on it and um well guess what lycopene if you want to get the lycopene benefits you know lowers risk of breast cancer by 20 percent lowers risk of prostate cancer by almost 30 percent protects your dna against sunlight what else is lycopene watermelon watermelon has lycopene as well so maybe you don't like tomatoes maybe you can't get tomatoes well what about a slice of watermelon yeah and so again these swap outs are are really and this is something i think is so important and and this is what i hope to be able to convey through my book and i you know i created a free master class i've been trying to teach people periodically online how to do this is is think about why something is beneficial for you and then if you can get that food that's perfectly fine if you need to swap it out because you can't find that food or can't afford that food think about what else might be a good standard yeah right and at the end of the day it still has to taste good for you so maybe you don't like tomatoes but you like watermelon maybe you don't like kiwi but you actually like guava yeah i love that and in my experience also when we go to more of these whole foods that we can tolerate over time actually i find that we often repair our gut and then we become more tolerant to foods that we previously couldn't manage i'm not talking about over allergies but a lot of food intolerances i've definitely seen that that happens i just want to echo what you just finished off there dr lee with that for people who want to swap things out your book eat to be diseased i think it's a fantastic resource for people because you can see the properties and you can find a food that you like that suits your culture your backgrounds your tastes and i think the master classes that you put on for people i can see why so many people around the world really enjoy them because they're very beneficial they're developed with they're really delivered with passion and engagement and quality information so i want to say thank you to you for all the work you're doing at raising awareness of these little things that we can all do each day to make a huge impact on our health any closing words to my audience who might be confused inspired empowered by what you said any closing thoughts for them you know i have a i have one motto that i want everybody to just sort of try to take to heart which is that when it comes to food and health i really believe that you should love your food to love your health both can happen at the same time you know we should find the foods that we love that are good for us and really lean into it and that's the best way to have a long and enjoyable life you're incredible individual you're incredible doctor you're doing such wonderful things for the world thank you so much for joining me on the show today thank you for having me if you enjoyed that conversation about the foods to stop eating i think you are really going to enjoy this one that's all about inflammation chronic inappropriate inflammation is at the root of a lot of our cancer coronary artery disease obesity type 2 diabetes hypertension and so forth

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 1,338,784

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview, william lin interview, william li food as medicine, william li heal the body, william li prevent disease

Id: 8KqnaecZ8_M

Length: 81min 2sec (4862 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022