First of all, I love mushrooms. Happens to be one of my favorite foods. Look, this is like another Doctor's Kitchen podcast. So I got to talk about my my enjoyment of food. And I like to cook like you whenever I go to the market and I see really good mushroom specimens, especially the ones that are seasonal or not, that come and I'll buy them right up. They are mother Nature's like umami bomb. It taste great. They're easy to cook. From a medical foods medicine perspective, I can tell you they contain a bioactive called beta Glucan happens to be a soluble fiber. So this vanity glucan is not only a bioactive that activate your health defenses and activate your metabolism. It's a dietary fiber that feeds our gut microbiome. So mushrooms are good for gut health and overall health and our metabolism at the same time. Now, what's really interesting about beta glucan is where is it found in the mushroom? Most people who buy mushrooms and cook with mushrooms get the camp. They cut off the stem, throw away the stamp, and the cap does have been a de glue camp at the stem of the mushroom has twice as much better d gluconate. So if you're cutting mushrooms up and cook with the stem or do something else with the stem, you can put it into a smoothie. You can actually make a soup out of it, make a stew out of it, sauteed, whatever you're going to do, don't throw them away because they actually have a lot of this great natural resource that's good for your health and good for your metabolism. Now, this has been studied, by the way, in clinical studies where they actually looked at substituting just so they took a group of meat eaters and they just asked them to swap out beef for mushroom, which is kind of meaty just two times a week. These are people that eat meat seven days a week, two days out of the week, eight, so mushrooms instead of the meat. So think about it. It's five days of meat eating, two days of mushroom eating. At the end of a year, they actually found that the meat eaters actually gained weight, increase their body fat, their waist size increased for meat eaters just like you expect. But the people who swapped it out for mushrooms just twice a week, they actually shrank their waistline by an inch. They lost by body composition. Some of the harmful body fat, the visceral fat. Their blood pressure came down. So mushrooms are really, really powerful. Doctors, kitchen recipes, health, lifestyle. What do you thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here with you, albeit virtually. The last time we met was at the conference last year and hopefully I get a chance to see you again this year. You know, it was such a great opportunity for us to get together in person and thank you for inviting me. Man. I was thinking about where to start our conversation today, given that we've had so many really good chats in the past and I'm reading your your latest book, I was fascinated by how Bruce Lee has influenced you, you know, as a sort of like childhood hero of yours. And I want to dive into into that and what we can learn from Bruce Lee about the way we approach nutrition and healthy eating. I thought it was just a wonderful section of the latest book. You know, it's it's so wonderful that you jumped right to that deeper section in my new book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. Look, I write in this book about the new science of metabolism. I take people on a tour of the supermarket, the grocery store, to look for all the foods that can actually activate your metabolism, fight body fat and elevate your health. But at the end of the day, you know, I think what readers really want is to feel there's some clarity on how do you put all this information together in your life being that we are all different individuals, you know, nutrition, you know, we talk about personalize and precision nutrition as a sort of a tech forward field, but really personalized nutrition is something that is very natural to us. We what we learn to eat solid food and we are, you know, out in as as schoolkids wandering around the school cafeteria a little extra lunch money you sneak down to the the deli or the drugstore or whatever to buy your snacks. Look, we all make choices that are personal ourselves. And I think that when it comes to food and health, as a scientist, as a doctor, I'm all about sort of not being fooled by just there's a superfood. It's really the body that's kind of super. And when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food, it's about how our body responds to what we put into it. But in this book, I actually really address something much more deep that partners with the food, how your body responds, which is how our mind responds. And it's not just a cognitive act. It really is sort of an act of identity. And this idea that Bruce Lee brought forward now, look, anybody who doesn't know Bruce Lee just by by a quick introduction, he's a guy who was an American born in San Francisco, who grew up in Hong Kong because his father was an opera star and came back to America in his late teens and early twenties for college. And he became and he brought with him martial arts, specifically Chinese kung fu. And as he was trying to teach Chinese martial arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to a very polarized and somewhat racist environment in the United States, he realized that there was this wonderful melting pot of different individuals with different body sizes, different body shapes, men and women, athletes, non-athletes, and people with different physical capabilities. That made America really what it is and this melting pot. And he realized that the rigidity of the martial arts that he was trained on, which was a style called Wing Chun, actually wasn't going to be allow everyone to adapt and adapt and learn how to actually use their body to the fullest. And so this idea that he came around that, you know, you should learn the tools and you should learn as many skills as you can, but to master an art, you have to really make it your own. And in making it your own, you want to sort of don't get stuck on the rigidity of practices that other people say you must do, but, you know, need to understand yourself first, and that self-knowledge allows you to adapt your individuality to the circumstances and situations at hand, using your own skills to be able to master your environment and to thrive. Okay. So that led to an entirely new style of martial arts called Jeet Cundall, which exists to this day. And Bruce Lee single handedly transformed the entire world, the entire planet of martial arts. And in fact, people say that he he was the pioneer of mixed martial arts, which is actually one of the, you know, very popular ways to have of have combat and to competitive and sports setting now. So how does that relate to diet and nutrition? Well, on one hand, you know, from my perspective, I grew up with Bruce Lee being an influence to me. For me, it was what inspired me about him was like, I mean, this dude, man, he was metabolically fit. He was he was like, cut. Anybody who sees him today, like, he's still picture perfect. His body look like he grew out of a comic book. All right. But what was really and but, you know, as I as I became an adult, what I realized is that the philosophies of his art and his craft really makes so much sense in other parts of my life. Which is what? So so how does that Bruce Lee chapter actually fit into how to eat to beat your diet? How do you activate your metabolism? How do you actually elevate yourself to a better health? Is is look, there's some principles of how our body work. But unlike diet, strict rigid diets which are based on elimination restriction deprivation, my approach is really about leaning into choice, specifically respecting what traditional healthy cuisines of the Mediterranean and Asia in particular. And I, I talk about how I actually eat. It's it's not a diet. It's a way of eating. It's a style of eating. And I call it Mediterranean. And I wade through my life, you know, kind of looking at it, inspired by influences from those traditional cuisine, culinary traditions to look for foods that fit within my practice. However, every day is different for me. I've got a different schedule if I'm traveling, if I'm working, I no matter what my location is, I may have different access to different types of food. So rather than pack my lunch in a box and take my my diet kit with me everywhere, I mean, sounds familiar. Like for those strict diets, I actually develop a way where I can, knowing myself and my preferences and understanding the principles, I can navigate my life in that Bruce Lee style, where I can take the best of what I know I can reject what's not useful to me in any given situation. And I can look at the situation at hand and make quick decisions that will actually allow me to thrive in that moment and that that kind of decision making, that choice, that activity, that confirmation to who you are, is an identity. I really believe that in addition to the knowledge about food, the knowledge about your body is this sort of knowledge about who you are and your relationship with food and being versatile and flexible and adaptive to be able to fit the situation that you're in. Yeah, yeah, I love that. I've never really thought about Bruce Lee in the context of navigating a quite a complex nutrition world. And I love the way another parallel is, you know, there were lots of heated debates about which fighting style was the best or superior. And you know, you say in the book like he viewed as, you know, parochial and self-limiting. Really, you want to learn from the best and adapt it to what you feel suits you best. And so, you know, when you navigate a nutrition world, there are all these heated debates about whether you should go vegan, whether you should go paleo, as you go carnivore, whatever, whatever. But really it comes down to the individual where they are, what's convenient for them and helping them navigate what is quite complicated food landscape as well. Yeah, choose what works for you, reject everything else and navigate forward. And you know, and by the way, just like different traditions of martial arts and fighting styles, there are real benefits and real advantages to individual aspects of each one. And I think that look at being vegetarian is very healthy because you're eating mostly plant based foods. Being vegan is an ethical choice, which also makes sense as we have a broader conscience for our planet. But it doesn't mean that you have to be a slave to that unless you really choose to be. You know, meat is actually a quite a good source of protein. And some micronutrients like iron, but having a carnivore diet, you know, that's not really regarded by science. I mean, the data doesn't support that as a healthy lifestyle. And, you know, in eating fish, you know, there are concerns about sustainability, There are concerns about heavy metals. But, you know, there are lots of good things that we're discovering about seafood that actually all work. And so this idea that must eat only plants or must eat only raw or must eat only meat or must eat only fat, these are very, I say, well-intentioned styles of nutrition in the same way that Bruce Lee looked at all these fighting styles as each having their own kind of value within their own silos. But that doesn't mean that that's the best way, the most adaptive way to move forward. So take the best, reject everything else, and then and just keep moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. Let's let's get into the weeds with the new book. So, you know, the previous book, Eat to Beat Disease, you know, was really well-regarded. It's helped a ton of, you know, millions of people navigate the grocery aisles. And this one, you're turning your attention specifically to the science of well-being, metabolism and and weight before we get into the individual foods, which I think people know and love you about, let's let's dive into fat and sort of anchor people as to what we mean by fat, what the different types of fat are, where we put it on, and we can go into sort of, you know, what we've initially thought of as far as an innocuous organ that just sort of sits on top of our organs and actually something that's quite active and, you know, is an organ in itself. Yeah. Now, I'm glad you asked that. Look, I want to give a little bit of of understanding for people, for listeners like how did I come to write, you know, this book it to be your diet. All right. When I wrote my first book, Eat to Beat Disease, I was really fascinated not just by not only by the foods that are out there in a new research of food as medicine, but I was every bit as fascinated how the body responds in healthful ways to what we feed it and our health defenses, which is what I wrote about my first book, really is where the action is. You know, how our body naturally can be fed and activate, raise our shields to be healthier. So when you know, the success of the first book gave me the privilege, you know, my publisher invited me to actually write another book, and I was really trying to think about what I wanted to write about because I'm a researcher and I'm in the middle of streams of data and new discoveries every single day that is, you know, almost overwhelming but thrilling for me as a scientist, as a doctor. But it doesn't mean I have to write a book about it. You know, this is what I do for a living. And my publisher suggested first, why don't you write a diet book? Because, you know, that's what people do, you know, after their follow up books. And I have to tell you, I had a very visceral reaction to that. And I said, absolutely not. I will not write a diet book, All right. Because diets are I really don't like fad diets and trend diets and extreme diets and pop diets. Anything that, you know, kind of like sells to the place, to the public desire for a magic bullet to be able to shed pounds, you know, fit into a beach. They look like a beach in a bikini and look better like, you know, I'm like, look, I'm a scientist. I'm a doctor. I'm really about have true health, inner health. And they're not about vanity. And I'm really about sustained science based ways to flesh out our own health into an activated. I don't have a problem with with vanity. I don't have a problem. Like, if you feel better by looking better, go for it. But I did not write OP one to write a book about about a diet book. And yet I wrote a book that has the title diet on the cover. And the key thing is that this is a trick title. It's about your diet. It's actually not a diet book, it's an anti diet book. And the reason it's an anti diet book is really, as I was doing my own research on metabolism, taking my own research to the next level, I started to see a series of breakthrough research discoveries that really helped to understand that, oh my gosh, the next level of health is really about improving our metabolism. And while most people think they know something about metabolism, they connected to body fat. And what most people think about body fat is quite inaccurate and quite limited. And so now we need to explain the science of body fat, and only then can you really break through the clouds to discover this joyous, new, delicious world of how we can actually eat to improve our metabolism, eat to fight body fat? I mean, it almost seems like a contradiction of terms, right? You would eat to fight fat? Absolutely. Actively. Our body can do that. So let me start by talking a little bit about some of the myths about body fat. I'm sure even though you and I are, you know, average size, normal size may at a little maybe even a little slender people. The reality is, is that all of us have stepped out of the shower in the morning, looked into the out of the corner of eye and looked in the mirror and seen a little lump or a bump that, you know, we didn't see before. We didn't want to be there. And immediately you start thinking, hey, that's body fat and you have a negative feeling about it. And then you step on the scale. And if that number is what you expect, you're disappointed. And so from the get go, most of us as adults have a similar type of experience where the idea of body fat is very much associated with negativity. And in fact, even if you go to the grocery store and you walk by the butcher counter and you see, you know, some of the the meat and you see a rind of fat around it like that, visually just sparks this negative impression. Right. Well, I have some news that I for for people and I write about this in the book everything we thought about body fat is only partially right. And in fact, the key thing about body fat, the size of body fat is fascinating. Our body fat is not an enemy. In fact, it's a friend. And in fact, we need our body fat profoundly. Our body fat is, in fact, an organ in our body. We now recognize fat as one of our bona fide organs, like our kidney or pancreas or liver or our spleen, our heart, and the multi the multiple job descriptions that our body fat wears actually helps to keep us alive and our fat, in fact, allows us to have energy. Our metabolism is predicated is critically dependent upon the health of our fat. So that's the first thing. Like the first time that I wanted to actually say that, you know, without fat, we wouldn't have a metabolism. And here's something that I think a lot of people won't know Rupay, which is that I you know, as a scientist, we scientists like to understand a subject by going back to its origins. Where did this come from? What does it all mean? And remember, I told you about like the reflection in a mirror and if you step out of a shower as an adult. But hey, guess what? It turns out that the origin of body fat starts in the womb. It our fat formed when we were in our mom's womb. So when our mom's egg met our dad sperm and we were this ball of cells that were becoming the future us, the first tissues that got laid down were our was our circulation. Because every organ needs a blood flow. The blood supply second tissue gets laid down is a whole network of nerves because every organ needs electrical signals that will instruct them on what to do. And the third tissue that gets laid down are tiny little fat cells. And these little fat cells are actually fuel tanks for our future body fuel tanks, meaning they store energy so that we can they can power up our body and how they form when we're in the womb, as they form around blood vessels, these little fat cells form around blood vessels like bubble wrap, you know, the bubble wrap, you wrap your candlesticks in champagne glasses and that's what they look like in the womb. Fast forward, all the organs develop. We have more body fat. We get born at nine months. Right? And so fat is not unhealthy. Their fat is perfectly, lovingly, deliciously beautiful. Because what do we see when we see a healthy baby that makes us smile? Fake chubby baby, big chubby belly, big fat cheeks, arms and legs that are like balloons, You know, the clown twists, the balloons into a puddle at the circus. All right. That's fat, actually is something that makes us feel wonderful when we see a baby, right. And imagine this if you saw a newborn that had chiseled cheeks like a fashion model, long, thin arms, long, thin thighs, runway style, it would be repulsive. We would go, oh, man, there is something seriously wrong with that baby. And you'd be right if you thought that. So the question is, what does fat do? Why do why is fat so important and why did fat form before we even had a face we could stuff with food. That's a profound question for people who have been struggling with body fat to really contemplate. And I sort of put it out there in a book like Let's Rethink Body Fat. So there's a couple of new roles that people need to know about body fat. First body fat is not just insulation like blubber on a whale. Our body fat actually is a cushion. A lot of people don't realize this, but if we didn't have any body fat and we tripped on the rug and fell on the floor went splat, our organs would would shatter. So thank goodness we actually have some cushion. Second, our body fat is a organ and not just any organ, but an endocrine organ. Mm hmm. What does endocrine mean? It means that this is an organ that secretes hormones. We now know our body fat, healthy body fat in a baby in an adult. The normal levels actually secrete hormones that are critical for our metabolism. Unbelievable, Right? Like fat makes we need fat for metabolism. Absolutely. And here's what it does. There's 13 hormones that are known, probably many more we have discovered yet one of them some people may have heard of, It's called leptin. Leptin, leptin. Now, some people think of that as a satiety hormone and it turns off your appetite. I want to kind of explain leptin as more as a volume switch on your radio. When you want less appetite, the leptin switch can turn it down. When you want more appetite, your leptin switch can go up. And what does appetite mean? Appetite means that we actually sit down to eat more food, which is our fuel in our body. All right. So leptin is one of those fat hormones that controls our brain and our behavior, and it actually adjusts our appetite. So we have enough energy We can make sure we have enough energy to function second hormone. And, you know, we know this rupee having gone to medical school, but I'm sure a lot of people don't know this. But if we were to draw a vial of blood from any individual and send it to the hospital lab and ask the lab to to measure the level of hormones in that particular blood, testosterone, thyroid hormone, cortisol. And here's here's one called adipose lectin adiponectin is the word. The root comes from adipose. Adipose is body fat. Adiponectin is another hormone made by by body fat. Not naturally, but the key thing about the hormone adiponectin is that when the lab results come back from from your level of adiponectin, it is 1000 times higher than any other hormone circulating in your blood. Holy cow. Why is it so high? Because it turns out that Adiponectin is the hormone made by our body fat that allows insulin to draw energy into from their blood into our cells. Right. So when a dip injected is high and regulated, our insulin goes. All right. Time to getting that energy, time to draw in that energy and load it up to ourselves so we can run the engine of our body. When it happens and is low, it's harder for it. So you want to have good levels of adiponectin. So that's a second hormone and if a tip at neck then is the gas pedal, the accelerator of drawing and energy of your body. And I'd like to use the analogy of cars, because people understand that a third hormone that is made by fat is called resistance resistant resists Adiponectin resistance is the break. If a dip injected is the accelerator, the gas pedal resistance is the brake. So Adiponectin goes, All right, let's do one less of energy. Resist. It goes. Not so fast, guys. A little bit slower. A little bit slower. So this kind of is the the foot brake, the gas and the brake pedal that allows our body to drive its metabolism. So this is all made by body fat, which is pretty amazing. Now, that's a second hormonal thing. The third thing the fat does, as I mentioned, it acts as a fuel cell, a fuel tank. So if you had a car and you were driving a car that uses petrol, still gasoline in America, what do you do? You get in your car and you you don't even think about your car and how the engine is driving. But what you do know, you pay attention to the fuel tank. When the fuel gauge runs low, you know that the engine is going to need some more gas. So what do you do? You pull over to the filling station, you take out the nozzle, you put it into the tank, and you fill it up. And when it filled up, it clicks and it stops filling gas. All right? And then you just drive on. You don't even think about it. Well, our body, our metabolism runs very similarly where we need fuel to be able to run the engine of our body. I mean, people listening to this, if you're blinking, if you're breathing, it takes energy. That energy is is our needs as powered by our metabolism. And when our fuel tank runs low, our brain, the fuel tank in our brain senses that when the fuel gauge runs low, what do we do? We don't pull over to the filling station. We pull over to the dinner table or to the restaurant or to the refrigerator or to the pantry to fill up, because the food, our metabolism, the engine of our body runs on fuel. That fuel that we get as humans is food. Okay? People call it calories. And I don't want people to focus on calories in, calories out, counting calories. I want to use the analogy of fuel because that's where the important concept. And so when we sit down to eat, we eat something to fill up our tank. All right. The insulin in our body that's released from a pancreas helps to draw that energy from the food into our cells. Anything extra gets stored in our fuel tank, right? Just like a car. The fuel tanks for our energy, our fat cells. Remember I told you the bubble wrap that forms water burst. Those are just fuel tanks. And the fuel tanks start really tiny. And depending on how much fuel you're loading up with, they get bigger and bigger and bigger. So a fat cell can expand 100 times its size when you're loading up its fuel. And for those of us who eat mindfully and we stop eating before we're stuffed, there's, you know pretty much your body efficiently stores that fuel tank and then you can drive off. Now imagine what happens if you're filling up your car at the filling station and there's no clicker that stops fuel from going into your tank. The tank fills up, the fuel, spills out the side, runs down the side of the car around the wheels, pulls around your shoes. Now you are standing in this overflowed fill in a toxic, highly flammable, very dangerous mess. Go to the food section. Our body doesn't have a clicker to stop fuel from going in. So the more we eat and the more we overeat, we have more fuel. Our body, you know, the cup overflow with our fuel tank overflows. And so our body goes, oh, wait a minute. Your your fuel tank is full. Now, what does it have to do? Keep on filling up fuel tanks. And when you run out of fuel tanks, out of fat cells, the body says, you know, we still got a lot of fuel. Guys, let's go ahead and make some more fuel tanks. Creates another fat cell from our stem cells, fills that one up, though not enough makes another fat cell fills that up. And now you can kind of see how overeating gives us more fuel than we need. And then it starts to blow up our body fat. So but normal levels of eating, this is actually part a very important part of fuel tank. Now, back to the car for one second, Ruby, when you you know, when you have a car, you know that you want to have your car running as well as possible for as long as possible, Right. Take care of good care of your car. One of the principles of actually managing the care of your car is to give it good quality fuel. If you give it good quality fuel, the engine around longer. Same thing for our body, the higher the quality of fuel that we put into our body to fuel our metabolism, to give our body our our bodies engine energy. The longer energy's going to run and just like a car, if you throw in some crappy fuel once or twice, no problem. The car is going to run. But please, you have to make sure you get it back to good, high quality fuel for our bodies. Same thing if you actually eat some poor quality stuff every now and then, it'll bounce back. It's very resilient. But like the car, if you continuously put poor quality fuel into your car or into your body over days, weeks, months and years, which is what happens in our modern society, what happens is that, you know, in your car, it's not going to run so well, it's going to break down, the engine is going to be degraded, same thing as our body. And so this is why this idea of taking care of our metabolism becomes so important. And the quality of the fuel I put in there. And then finally, one last thing, that body fat as a body. This is all amazing stuff of body fat. The people who appreciate these are healthy, good things of body fat. The other thing about body fat that is a little bit of a hidden secret, by the way, is that, you know, we think of body fat, our bodies fat's a space heater. All right? Now, most people think about fat as weakly jiggly, you know, lumpy, bumpy. And we've got different kinds of body fat. The wiggly jiggly stuff under your arm, under your chin, the muffin top around your waist size and. But. All right. Those are the things that people want to get rid of. That's called white fat. There's another kind of white fat. It's you can't see it. The jiggly stuff. You can see it's called subcutaneous, meaning under the skin. There's another kind of white fat that's called visceral fat. Visceral means guts. And so this is fat inside the tube of your body that wraps around your guts. It's normally like packing peanuts in a FedEx of your shipping, something just light lightly feathered in there. It's cushion. Okay. But just like if you're shipping something fragile in a overnight shipping container, if you pack a ton of peanuts in there, really pack them in. You're like, Hey, I buy the whole bag of peanuts. I got to use them all. And you keep stuffing in there, okay? Like way overpacked, you can still force that thin box shut, tape it in at arm's length is still a skinny box, but inside it it's bursting and it's crushing. And so visceral fat, which is normal, like lightly, lightly, like light peanuts can actually be turned like a baseball glove that crushes your organs, envelopes your organs and crushes them. Very dangerous. So healthy levels of fat are perfectly fine. They do all these wonderful things like the fuel cell, the cushion. But once you go beyond that, you start to disrupt the organ function, the endocrine function, you start to disrupt it, cause inflammation, all kinds of bad things. So even skinny people need to worry about excess harmful body fat now. But that's not that's not a gigantic surprise. I mean, I think people have been talking about that. The real surprise is there's a third kind of fat and I talk about this in my new book, To Be Your Diet. It's called Brown Fat. Now, Brown fat is that wiggly jiggly? And it's not under the skin. It's not subcutaneous. You can't even see it. Brown fat is not it's it's brown fat is paper thin. Wafer thin. And it's amazing because it's not near the surface. You cannot see it. It is actually pressed along your neck. It's under your chest, it's under your arms like a bra strap, a little bit behind your back and between your shoulder blades and a little bit in your belly. And this brown fat, by the way, doesn't. And it serves a very specific function. It is a fuel cell, a space heater. It generates heat by burning energy. Okay. And I and I give you know, for the people watching this, I have a little show and tell thing because I this is what I've been trying to teach people. This is what brown fat is like. This thin paper, thin fat. It is like this. This is a torch. When your brown fat is lit, it does this. All right. It actually blows up the flame. All right. This is what brown fat does when you light up the brown fat. And in order to power this flame, it's got to draw energy from someplace. And that energy it draws from that fuel it draws from in order to create that flame, that heat is that brown fat, thin, fat press down. Invisible fat draws that energy from your dangerous fat and your extra visceral fat and your subcutaneous fat. So here is good fat, brown fat fighting bad fat when it's an excess. And this is like a completely new conceptualization. And the great news is that there are foods that can activate that brown fat energy burning system that's fab. I got to commend you. I haven't I haven't had a description for hyperplasia and hypertrophy of fat explained in the way you just did when you go to the petrol station or gas station, you fill up, you know, with that with the tanker because that conceptually made it so much clearer, even in my mind. And someone who understands, you know, the different ways in which fat grows, you know, by the the cell getting bigger and bigger or the number of cells increasing and how that leads to inflammation, I think that's going to really that process for a lot of people. So that's brilliant. And again, also the show and tell with the brown fat, again, you know, it's made it lot clearer, I think, in my mind as well. But it would definitely help people understand the benefits of fat and how we've got fat wrong in a lot of ways. I think most people think of it as the weekly jiggly stuff like you were saying and your on your on your thighs and your buttocks in your arms. But it's a lot more to that. And what I was going to ask about actually is, you know, beyond fat, growing through these different mechanisms, how does it relate to another passion of yours, which is angiogenesis and? Perhaps we can that can be like a bit of a take off for diving into the foods that might help with that. Yeah, No, that's a great question. So remember I told you that fat is an organ. It forms very early in life and just like every other organ in your body, for fat to remain vital and functional for all the purposes that we just described, it needs a blood supply. It's a it's a mass. It needs circulation. And as fat actually gets its circulation, naturally, when your body needs to make more fuel tanks because it needs to store more energy. And so it makes another fat cell, another fat cell, another fat cell. And you're starting to expand that fat cell. And it's just a not not only the number is the size. So then you fill it up with the gas tank and now it's bigger and it's bigger and you've got another one that's bigger. Pretty soon your normal levels of fat. So this is the key point. We all want normal levels of fat that's very healthy for us. Important. Very important. Okay. But when do you actually have too much fat, excessive fat? It actually becomes harmful because what happens is that as that fat mass grows bigger, it's sort of below. All right. What happens is it grows bigger and faster than the blood supply can support that it naturally has. So it desperately wants to get more blood vessels to grow, which is a process called angiogenesis, which and I study how blood vessels grow to it. And this this excess billowing of fat is where fat and cancers and tumors actually become very similar because tumors also start as small cells, just like a normal fat cell. But as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it needs it outstrips its blood supply. And what happens in both a tumor and in fat when it outstrips the blood supply because it's just growing too big. The center of the fat or the center of the tumor starts to die. We call it hypoxia, not enough oxygen. It feels like it's getting strangled. Not enough oxygen needs more blood supply desperately. And too often the growth outstrips the ability to recruit healthy blood supply. And what happens and when parts of your an organ starts to die naturally is inflammation inflammation kind of courses in there like bees coming to a flower bed. All right. And what happens is that those inflammatory cells start to build up now a big inflammatory mass of fat because you put too much fuel into your body right? Like the overloaded tank, the spilled overflowing gas tank in a filling station, the air will evaporated away. So as long as you step away and you let the air evaporate, you'll be fine in the body. There's no evaporation. You've got to burn it somehow and stored. And so what happens is that when you're overloaded, it's it's flowing in there. Yes. When it overflows, guess what? Your fat can spill out of the out of your, your adipose tissue. It can even accumulate in your living liver and spilled fat energy in our other organs, like our liver is poisonous. It poisons as toxic to our other organs. So when you grow up bigger, bigger, and it spills out and it doesn't have enough blood flow, inflammation starts. And by the way, this inflammatory, toxic environment is over, over, over, split spillage. You know what it does? It completely damages the normal orchestration of those fat hormones, the left and the volume switch. Do we want it up or down? We want to be hungry or not so hungry. Who knows? The fat is too big. It's too inflamed. Adiponectin that's released to be able to have insulin draw in energy so we have normal levels of metabolism and energy in our cells. And insulin works well too. You know, for sensitivity of insulin, I don't know what is be more sensitive or less sensitive. Who knows? Let's make a little bit better, less screwed up. And now your insulin system is not effective anymore. This is why excess body fat leads to metabolic syndrome. You really sort of throw your blood sugar use off and your insulin a third. What about resistant? Do we want more or less adiponectin and insulin? Yes. I don't know. It's all a mess here. So when you create chaos with this expanded fat mass that tries to grow blood vessels, you get into a problem big time. Now, the fact that you can actually the fat wants this blood vessels, if it can't get enough blood vessels, at the very end of the day, not only is it going to start to die, it'll start to shrink back. So one really interesting analogy to the tumor story that the cancer stories that we know in cancer, which also causes chaos and inflammation and expands and dies in the middle, one thing we know we can do is we can starve cancer by cutting off its blood supply. We can give biotech drugs that can do it. There's been over a dozen approved drugs that are used by oncologists treating cancer patients. I've been involved with developing all of them. We also know they're food sickened, actually starve cancer. I write about this in my first book, Eat to Beat Disease. But guess what? We're now seeing the same principle can apply to body fat. We can eat certain foods that actually are anti angiogenic, meaning they cut off the blood supply. Look, I know the tumor wants to get more blood vessels to grow bigger, but guess what? If you basically say, no, sir, you are not getting any more blood vessels. That's it. Okay. What happens at some point? It just gives up. It's like, all right, I guess we're not going to expand anymore. And so it starts to shrink down. So antiangiogenic foods actually are a way of actually containing our body fat, the growth of our body fat. And it's not the food themselves. It's not like, you know, the whole it's not that it's a it's a broccoli that does it or the blueberries it is it's the bioactive. So natural chemicals made by Mother Nature that we've figured out what do those chemicals do in the food to actually thwart the ability for the blood vessels to grow. And by the way, in some cases the same substances in foods that can tame fat growth by cutting off the blood supply also can change. The ability of the fat to fill up, can help make harmful fat turn into useful brown fat and can even trigger the the, you know, the brown fat as a flame. So you can actually start to burn down fuel and burn down extra fat. So this is really the, you know, the beating heart of my book, which is that, you know, fat isn't our enemy. We shouldn't fear fat. We should respect it, but we should tame it. And our metabolism isn't what we're born with. A sense of fate, you know, How often have people heard that we're born with a fast or slow metabolism? And that's why my sister has a fast metabolism, and that's why she's skinny as a stick and never has to worry about what she has to eat. And B, I had a slower metabolism. I've always struggled with my weight and I can't eat everything I want. It's been a big struggle. Well, we now know there's a new science to the metabolism that teaches that otherwise. And we also know now that the link between metabolism and body fat is such that if we were to actually use the hardwiring of our metabolism in how our fat works and make a tamer fat to make it healthy, our metabolism will naturally rise. We will actually lower inflammation in our body. Our energy usage will be so much more efficient and we will start to be as moving away from this threat of chronic disease. And so that's really the next level of health. You know, wherever you are, where you're starting from. Do you want to get to that next level? This is where you start. You start by thinking about your metabolism and recontextualizing how you think about body fat. Yeah, absolutely. I think it would be a really good place to start. I think talking about the by activism food, because I think that's, you know, the body of the book. And what I find absolutely fascinating about it. But before we get there, you do touch on how some people are uniquely susceptible to fat being put on in certain areas, know there's a genetic predisposition. Let's put aside sort of the energy surplus. You know, portion control is obviously very important. You also talk about a bit of fasting every now and then during the week as well. But but what are the sort of genetic components as to why someone might be putting on more fat than their their counterparts? Right. So we're all born differently. We all have the same DNA, human DNA, but our DNA is actually put together in different ways. Think about it like a like a like the Lego toys you have. Every box has the same number of pieces. But how we choose to put them together can be slightly different. All right. And so we all are put together slightly differently and our genetics are put together slightly differently depending on how our genes are actually functioning. You could have an extreme where there are some genetic mutations that actually make us exquisitely vulnerable to a celebrated body fat mass. And I, I sort of don't want to get too deep into those rare diseases because that's not common and most people don't have them. And I'm not encouraging people to go out to get screened for a rare genetic disease for obesity. But but it does exist. But other times, you know, we have different genes, functions that influence our brains, sensitivity to leptin make more leptin, make less leptin, make at some sensitivities that also can change our our cognitive functions in our brain that might make us behave more in a addictive personal ity, where, by the way, if you have I mean, look, addictive personality sounds bad, but in fact, there's another way of there's another definition of it, which is intense focus, right? So we give the reward to somebody who's intensely focused on their work, you know, or on their career or on something. But, you know, some people wind up getting intensely focused on food, for example, and you're intensely focused on food. If you have a fixation on your food, it becomes very easy to eat, overeat, and then you've got too much fuel in your body. And so that's another way behavior can easily over Lotus as well. And of course, diabetes is a is not a single disease. It's probably multiple diseases or multiple conditions, genetic conditions that all predispose us in different ways to accumulate too much body fat, to tweak our metabolism, knock our metabolism off of work. But fundamentally, all humans start off with the same set of hard wiring. The operating system for metabolism is the same. It's how we our body puts together the Lego blocks in slightly different ways that can influence how we behave and how our body processes the energy that can actually throw us more towards a body fat building mode or not. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That it's a great way of putting it. And you know, are there certain before we go into the, the really good foods, the foods that I love talking about, the foods I love promoting and experimenting with all their particular and cooking. Yeah. Are there particular foods that are uniquely worst for us when it comes to fat deposition, when it comes to the types of fats that we want to make sure that are under control? Yeah, well, look, this has the answer's yes. And the science tells us that the foods that are that encourage age, the excessive growth of body fat and that encourage inflammation and and and thwart our metabolism kind of knock our metabolism, derail our metabolism are very much the same foods that are talked about as being not so good for you. Sodas, both regular soda and diet sodas with artificial sweeteners, sodas, non caloric sodas, added sugars, too much added sugar, too much calories. I mean, that's like basically not not just filling a gas tank. That's like putting a jet nozzle and churning out that gas like your metabolism can handle it. But at a certain point, it's going to go, whoa, this is way too much for me to handle over time. Again, once or twice, occasionally. Not a big deal over time, that overwhelming ness of the metabolism leads to spillage, leads to waste, leads to toxicity. So added sugars. Number three, ultra processed foods. Now ultra processed foods almost has become a bumper sticker. So let me explain a little bit more closely. These are food products that, you know, big companies make, but even small companies make them. And they fundamentally take Whole Foods raw ingredients and they transform them and combine them in ways and extrude them and shape them in ways in which the product never doesn't even resemble food anymore. And so, you know, the fact of the matter is that, you know, the shape of your breakfast cereal or some of the candy you might eat, you know, the combinations, that's the ultra processed and ultra processed foods also tends to be cheap. It tends to be live forever, more or less for a long time. And the reason it and it tastes great is taste great because it's artificially flavored, often with chemicals. It looks beautiful because it's artificially colored. Now, I know in Europe, for example, there's been, I think, a a faster enlightenment of protecting citizens by banning some of the artificial flavorings and colorings in it in America, in the United States of America. Not so. There's still a lot of things that are banned in Europe that are common in the in the foods that are surrounding us now, those damage our metabolism. They damage our health defenses, they damage our gut microbiome, which is connected to our metabolism by helping to streamline our metabolism. So that's ultra processed foods. Anything that, by the way, you pick up and it's got like 20 ingredients and you look at them and you can't pronounce most of them and you can't tell what they do, that's something that is important that I sort of use as shorthand for people like teach me, Dr. Lee, about what an ultra processed food actually is. I say, look, you know, that's a long that's a long there's a lot of to say about that. But if you pick up a package and you read the ingredients just like 20 degrees on there and you can't define what every ingredient does, what it contributes, it's probably ultra processed. That's a good that's a good way to look at it. And then I would actually say that other things that encourage derailing of our metabolism, overage, you know, unhealthy oils, excessive saturated fats, like in red meats, excessive like a little bit good source of protein. And I would also say processed meats, you know, because they are processed, they've got all kinds of other chemicals and things associated with them. So, by the way, I just listed the same things that everyone talks about over and over again that are not so good for us. What I'm saying is that now we have another reason to understand that they actually derail our hardwired metabolism and they encourage harmful body fat to actually grow. Mm Yeah, Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, it always serves as a reminder to go through this and as a general heuristic, you know what you just described ev if you can't recognize the ingredients, it's packaged as a very long shelf life. It most likely has got a lot of contaminants and a lot of additives. The environmental pollutants that you talk about in your book as well, about how they're obesogenic, you know, a lot more people are coming around to this idea about phthalates and other obesogenic as derailing our metabolism. So that's really important. I think we should we should go into the good stuff. Now, like I want to talk about these bioactive. So, you know, it was enlightening to to read about the mechanisms behind bio actives and how they can impact healthy fat, you know, how they can amp up your brown fat, how they can trigger thermogenesis and how they can improve your mitochondria. The, you know, the power cells of your the powerhouses of your cells. What are we talking about? There's a mechanism first. Then perhaps we can go into some of those bioreactors and then dive into some of those delicious foods that you and I both love. Sure. Okay. So as we discussed, there are three main types of body fat, the wiggly jiggly, which is the subcutaneous fat. You can see the visceral fat, which is the the choking fat of our organs wrapped around our organs. Okay. That you need some of it, but too much of any of those things is not good. And then the brown fat, which is to our to the best of our knowledge, is all good stuff. All right. It actually it's the space heater, the fuel cell. It and it's designed to burn down extra energy. So it's a good fat that can fight the bad fat. In fact, like burning off extra fuel. Why? By the way, I want to explain why it's called brown fat, because it has to do with the mechanism. Brown fat is is brown colored. And they've looked at this under the microscope because brown fat contains a lot of iron. It turns out that the space heater function, the the the cellular organelle that generates the heat is the mitochondria. Now, when I was in medical school and probably you as well, Rupi, and we were trying to memorize everything and there were like thousands of things to memorize every single week. I tried to find fun ways to memorize. I used to memorize mitochondria as the mitochondria, you know, and it's small but mighty and these are the fuel cells, these are the nuclear power plants of our cells. They generate energy. And to generate that energy, there's a lot of iron in it. Same kind of iron that causes rust. All right. As it gets rusty. And so rusty iron is brown and so mitochondria are brown and brown fat, even though thin and it's wafer thin is packed with mitochondria. This fuel generating light up stuff, the organelles, the nuclear power plants. And because it's so densely packed with mitochondria, mitochondria, it's got a lot of iron in it. So that's why it looks brown. So number one, there's a reason why brown fat looks brown. Yeah. Now The way that actually you can turn on and get rid of harmful body fat, the easiest way is actually to activate thermogenesis. Basically it's just turning, flipping the switch so that your brown fat starts to fire up. I showed you a little lighter, a torch. But actually, if you think about a gas stove, which most people have in their kitchens or their homes, Right. What do you do? You turn on the handle and it goes click, click, click, click, whoosh. Right. That's what certain foods actually do when you're eating certain foods. It actually send signals to your brown fat and it goes woosh. And once it goes woosh, it just like your stove. It requires fuel to keep that flame going. Where's it going to draw that fuel from? It's going to draw it from your harmful fat. So that's how you burn it down. So that's one basic mechanism, but it gets much more interesting than that. For thermogenesis, for example, Hot Chili Peppers, which I happen to like spicy food, but everyone knows what happens when you eat something spicy, like a chili pepper pepper flakes you put on your pizza. That's a great example, right? In fact, I have a little sample here. Let me just show you. Yeah, I just happen to be in front of I just have the in front of a desk so I can show you this stuff. Think. Oh, yeah, stuff. All right. When it comes like in, it comes off of a plant like that. Okay, so what happens is when you put it in your tongue, you feel the burn, the zing. And what's happening is that there's a bioactive called capsaicin in actually is also there's another family called caps noise. They're all that chemical family and like a key that fits into a lock Your tongue has the lock. It's a receptor for capsaicin. It's a capsaicin receptor. There's a name for it, by the way. I know B, giving lots of easy to understand analogies for for your listeners, viewers. But. All right. We're going to dive in and be a little bit of a scientist here. The receptor is called TRP V1 and it's not only all over our tongue, but it actually is in our esophagus, inner stomach in our guts, all the way down to our intestines. And it's and is also at the very tail and even our rectum. So you've heard that saying burning on the way in and burning on the way out. Yeah. Hey, you know what? That's because of V1 the receptor. But here's the interesting thing. The connection between body fat and thermogenesis hot chili pepper on your tongue. Lock the key fitted to the locked the V one receptor. As soon as that happens, you feel spicy. Your tongue sends a text message to your brain, amazingly, and it tells your brain to do two things. One is to release endorphins. Endorphins are the feel good hormones, which is why some people really are addicted to eating spicy food. I got to ask my I got to have you some more spicy food. Now, the other thing that and not everybody has the same degree of response, so some people, it's just way too spicy there. They have too many receptors. They have to be one is so dense in their tongue that even a little spice is overwhelming. Okay. But the second thing that that the capsaicin from chili peppers on the tongue can activate. And what the text message to your brain it can release nor epinephrine. Okay. Norepinephrine is a flight or flight hormone. So basically put up your dukes, all right, or run away. Okay. And what happens is that and and what happens when you do that? Your eyes dilate. You start to sweat. Right? And you remember people eating spicy food. They often sweat and they turn red, right? You start breathing a little bit faster. That's what's happening. And the next time you eat something spicy, I think you and I talked about this when we were in person last year. But, you know, this is what's amazing. If you eat something spicy and you just put yourself like meditate a little bit, go into a quiet place and pay attention to your body, you will literally feel your brain, your activated brain, your texted brain, releasing more epinephrine. You'll feel it running down the side of your neck because the norepinephrine is going down. Nerves. You will actually feel that sensation happening, the current going down, and it goes right down to the brown fat that's pressed there on the side of your neck to light up that flame, that that's called thermogenesis, that that that signal norepinephrine binds to a receptor on the top of your brown fat. It's called you sleep one don't worry about the names but what that you sleep one does another locking key on top of your brown fat is it then ignites your your burner on your stove and then whoosh it goes up and now in order to keep that flame going, it's got to draw the energy down. Right. So that's an example of chili peppers found in both Mediterranean cuisine, Asian cuisine, all kinds of Asian cuisines that actually are part of this culinary traditions that that, you know, are very much part of our humanity. And that's just one example of an ingredient and a mechanism. There's other ways, mechanisms that can work as well. But I thought I would start with thermogenesis. I love that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I remember talking about that and how the meditation and, you know, being intuitive as to what's going on in your body for, for those of I mean, there was also a reference to a couple of lots of studies in the book about a dose response with more chilies in the diet. So they looked at different population and they measured how much chili they have in their diet every single day. And you can definitely see a dose response in the likelihood of them being slim as well. So, you know, it's a mechanism that nicely fits with some epidemiological data as well that you've, you know, put throughout the entire book. And and clinical trials, because I've actually taken the capsaicin capsaicin out from Chili Peppers. They packed them into a little uniform tablets of the same dose and they this low dose versus high dose. And they gave an intervention for four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks. And you can kind of see the longer you give it, the more weight you will actually lose. And so you know, by the way, this comes right back to something very important. Mhm. Most people who go on diets have a singular goal which is actually to lose weight. But what we really want to do is improve our body composition by burning down the harmful fat. Let's, let's dive into different categories of food now, fruit, I think fruit is got a bit of a bad name. You know, everyone's sort of demonizing the fact that it has natural delicious sugars, but you know, you talked about apples, grapefruit berries, you know, tomatoes as as being beneficial as part of this smorgasbord. All these different groups should be that we should be consuming. Why don't we dive into a fruit of your choice and and go into what they contain and how they might be beneficial to fighting fat and improving our metabolism? Because I think it's, you know, something I'm commonly asked about, like, should I eat fruit? Is it not you know, is it not something that puts makes me put on weight? All right. Well, you obviously you can see I'm in front of a table that's I've been using for show and tell. Here's one of my favorite fruits. It's a pear, okay? And it's a medium sized pear. And pears are very nutrient dense. It's one of my favorite fruits. They're sweet, but not too sweet there. No. Squeeze a mango. There is a pineapple. And they've got a lot of dietary fiber. They've got six grams of dietary fiber and pears. Also have a bioactive called chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid is not only found in pears, is found in apples, it's found in coffee. You know, Mother Nature's very clever. She, as she puts a lot of these useful BI actives across multiple food types. But I love pears and I want to use this. One of the things that I a fruit I enjoy eating to address this. I think it's a it's an extreme interpretation. Well intentioned about the harms of sugar and fructose. You know I think as as people we we love to either make a food a hero or a villain and it is true sugar, too much sugar nugget, good for you. But you know our brain depends on sugar. Our body can make sugar. And so it's really not fair to basically say, oh, a sweet fruit is really bad. Fruits are very nutrient dense, which is they have sugar for energy, they have fiber. So hurt my gut microbiome. They've got bioactive to activate our health defenses and activate our metabolism and activate thermogenesis as well. Here's what you want to do. You want to actually choose foods like fruits that have that taste great, that are pleasing, that also are nutrient, and give you all these other factors that are good for your body. So net net, you're getting some energy from the fructose in sugar, you're getting some prebiotic stuff from the from the dietary fiber and you're getting a ton of these bioactive to activate your health defenses. You just can't reduce everything to the sweetness of the fruit. That's ridiculous. And I think that it's very important to actually state that. Mm. Yeah, Yeah. I think it's really important. And you know, when I look at an apple or a pair or berry, I don't just think about Yeah, he's got vitamin C, it's got a bit of sugar and I'm thinking of like there are hundreds if not thousands of different polyphenols that are having unique impacts on my body. Yes, some of it is on, on weight control. And you know, all the things I've learned from your books, but also on angiogenesis, on DNA or on gut microbiota, you're really I want people to really think about the wider aspects of what we're consuming on a day to day basis. And Whole Foods are just fantastic. You're giving us that that huge selection of different nutrients. Now, let me give you an example, though, where we do want to be careful. Oranges, citrus are wonderfully delicious. They're pretty sweet. Okay. There's quite a lot of sugar in an orange. So people always ask me, well, what about fruit juice? Hmm? And I tell people, you know what, oranges citrus is are very nutrient dense. They got fiber. Anybody who's ever peeled an orange and it has sliced by slice knows there's a lot of dietary fiber to it. You can see it, you can taste it, you can feel it. It's also very sweet, which you know is good, but too much sweetness, not so good. And it's loaded with bioactive, like these polyphenols, nitrogen in his spirit in a lemony, like all kinds of great stuff. That's good for your metabolism. It fights body fat and activates your health defenses. But let's compare an orange to a glass of orange juice. Now, I like to eat. I like I actually like orange juice. But, you know, if you remove all the fiber from orange, all the pulp you're getting, you're moving a lot of the good stuff. All right? If you ultra processed the orange juice like you see in a lot of the commercial, inexpensive versions you can buy in the grocery store, you might have to remove some of the polyphenols as well, even if you fresh squeeze it. A tall glass of orange juice. I could, you know, on a hot day and I want to slake my thirst. That tall glass that'll go down my gullet. I can whip it down in 30 seconds. Glug, glug, glug, glug glug right. Okay. You know how many oranges in the sugar of all of those oranges it would take to make a tall glass of orange juice on average, eight oranges. Mm. Now, I would never sit down and eat eight oranges at a time. Yeah. That, that's an example of where you want the, the all the beneficial healthful benefits of fruits versus the juice. If you choose a juice it's a lot easier to eat a lot more of that sugar compared to the whole fruit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good, really good point. I mean that's why when people ask me about it, I think it's one of those things nice to have. Not something you should have every day. You know what? This is a treat not I what I love about your sort of philosophy is nothing is off the table, right? You're a true foodie. You want people to enjoy the pleasures of food, but it's just, you know, sometimes these are things that we have every single day. And then there are other things that we have as a treat or as a luxury item. I want I want to enter into vegetables here because I think particularly at this time, there's a lot of attention being given to weight loss drugs. You know, GOP one analogs like Semaglutide or you guys I think have a brown ankle wegovy I think it's called and I was really interested in the mushroom section. Mushrooms are also very popular right now, you know, for lots of reasons, some psychedelic, some, you know, the more sort of rare forms like our lines made in China. But even your regular store cupboard mushrooms are a fantastic Let's dive into that a bit because it's got multiple attributes, right? First of all, I love mushrooms. It happens to be one of my favorite foods. Look, this is like another Doctor's Kitchen podcast. So I got to talk about my my enjoyment of a food and I like to cook like you. So, you know, there's nothing whenever I go to the market and I see really good mushroom specimens, especially the ones that are seasonal or not that common, I'll buy them right up. Mhm. They are Mother Nature's like umami bomb. They taste great, they're easy to cook and you know from a, from a medical foods medicine perspective I can tell you they contain a bioactive called beta Glucan happens to be a soluble fiber. So this, this beta glucan is not only a bioactive that activates your health defenses and activates your metabolism. It's a dietary fiber that feeds our gut microbiome. So mushrooms are good for gut health and overall health and our metabolism at the same time. MM Now, what's really interesting about beta de Glucan is where is it found in the mushroom? Most people who buy mushrooms and cook with mushrooms get the camp, they cut off the stem, throw away the stem, and the cap does have beta de glucan, but the stem of the mushroom has twice as much better declawed. And so if you're cutting mushrooms up and cook with the stem or do something else with the stem, you could put it into a smoothie. You can actually make a soup out of it, make a stew out of it, saute it, whatever you're going to do, don't throw them away because they actually have a lot of this great natural resource that's good for your health and good for your metabolism. Now, this has been studied, by the way, in clinical studies where they actually looked at substituting just so they took a group of meat eaters. These are carnivores. They eat red meat almost day and they just ask them to swap out the beef for the meat for mushroom, which is kind of meaty, like just two times a week. So these are people that eat meat seven days a week, two days out of the week, eat some mushrooms instead of their meat. So think about it. Let's five days of meat eating, two days of mushroom eating. At the end of the year, they actually found that the meat eaters actually gained weight, increase their body fat, their waist size increased the for meat eaters just like you would expect. But the people who swapped it out for mushrooms just twice a week. Okay. With something that can be made to taste like meat, actually put it on the grill, you know, barbecue, put it, you know, saute them. You can really get a really, really nice, unctuous kind of like flavor of this umami bomb. And they actually shrank their waistline by an inch. They lost by body composition, some of the harmful body fat, the visceral fat, their blood pressure came down. So mushrooms are really, really powerful. And by the way, these are culinary mushrooms. You know, you mentioned Chagas and lions, beans and cordyceps, you know, one of the things that I like to tell people is that medicinal mushrooms, we have to be careful about them because they're separate from culinary mushrooms. And although they're very popular these days, you don't want to treat medicinal mushrooms just like you would treat culinary mushroom. Culinary mushrooms. What are those? Well, all over the place, like button Portobello, Carbone maitake, porcini and, you know, enoki mushrooms. I mean, the list goes on trumpet, mushroom, king, trumpets and somebody to choose from. They don't have medicinal psychotropic or any other immuno like immuno influencing properties the way that certain medicinal mushrooms do. Mushrooms tend to be very expensive. And there was a recent thousands go dating back thousands of years where healers, traditional healers, reserves the medicinal mushrooms for specific ailments. And I think that's one of the cautions I want to give, is just because they're called mushrooms and just because you can buy them and just because they're not regulated as such. Look at the wisdom of the elders. People were not eating chugga mushrooms like they weren't making a chug a mushroom olmert, for example, whereas they would actually make a white button mushroom omelet. Be careful. Yeah, yeah. It's a very good point. You I think if food is I mean, as you talk about in your books, food is medicine. And there are certain foods that are particularly and uniquely powerful that we need to be careful. Okay. I get this a lot from my my parents as well. You know, growing up in Indian household, having lots of erratic traditions or certain foods, things like ashwagandha or even ginger, something that we want to make sure that we're not overdoing because it can have a negative impact in overuse. And I think that's why, you know, diversity is very important, actually exploring all the other foods available to us. That's right. And diversity is very important. Moderation is very important. Finding unique new combinations of things are really important as well. This is all, by the way, not news but this idea was present in, you know, the culinary traditions of India, Southeast Asia Thailand, China, Japan, Indonesia, you know, some of these really amazing cuisines. They chose these very same ingredients that I write about in my new book, To Better Your Diet. I write about 150 ingredients that all have metabolism, activating properties. They come from Asian cooking traditions found in recipes and are also nomadic, largely in a mediterranean traditions as well. I call it Mediterranean because that's how I actually eat and navigate between these two worlds Mediterranean and Asia. Because I spent a gap year living in Italy and in Greece. I think the last time I talked I spoke to you about this and by the way, Mediterranean, which is the term I give it, of how I eat and I encourage other people to eat for healthy metabolism isn't a new concept. It's a very old concept that dates back 2000 years, back to the days the Silk Road, which is the greatest trading route in human history that connected Asia to the Mediterranean and back then 2000 years ago, you know, traders riding on camels and working in caravans, when they met each other on this road, they traded in gradients, they traded recipes, they shared food with one another. They stopped at the roadside and they ate other peoples foods. They had diversity. And that's what I want to encourage people to to lean into, to realize that, you know, yes, in this era of really sophisticated science and my gosh, there are pharmaceuticals now that can actually help you lose weight. Some say body fat. But you know what those there are and I think you would agree with me, Rupi there are certain patients with pathological obesity, life threatening obesity that probably would really benefit from some of these pharmaceutical approaches and other whole, you know, whole body approaches to treating excessive body fat. But for most people to jump on the bandwagon, I really discourage it. And the reason is there's just many reasons, because they're toxic, they're expensive, you know, their side effects. And by the way, because they're also approved diabetes, people that are actually diving at the using you know, the assumption it will go vs the semaglutide class of GLP inhibitor drugs. Now agonist drugs, what they're doing is they're depriving diabetics for the medicines they need to treat their diabetes, their shortages of these drugs that are now going on around the world. It's kind of ridiculous. Yeah, but I'm on the Doctor's Kitchen podcast, so I got to give you my biggest reason for it. Okay. These drugs that GLP one agonists semaglutide wegovy champix of the world, you know what they do? They work by cutting off the appetite in your brain. They make you not hungry. They the pleasure they kill the joy of food. How sad is that for a typical person who doesn't need that? I personally find joy every single day. I look forward to every meal in which I can make a choice of something that's going to light up my taste buds and light up my health and give me joy as well. So for me, I tell people the time to get off the bandwagon of these, you know, weight loss drugs and it's time to rediscover the joy of food. And for people like you and me, Ruby, where we're doctors, we know the science. We also know how to cook. It's really time to lean forward into your food. And you can love your health and love your metabolism and love your food all of the exact same time. Yeah, I 100% agree. I couldn't I couldn't have put it better myself. And, you know, in the context of pharmaceuticals versus pharma suits, because if a are a you know, the sort of purpose and the reason why start the doctor's kitchen in the first place is to increase that time span by which we we don't need to use drugs and we can we can push that further along. So actually, you know, we can sometimes avoid or at least minimize the amount of time that we have before we have to use things like drugs if it gets to that point. So I completely agree with, you know, especially in the context of overuse. And we have the same problem over here in the UK. Polypharmacy has been very recognized by the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians. So, you know, it's definitely something that hopefully will allow food to come more so into the discussion. But also, you know, from the perspective of pleasure and enjoyment, you know, it's one of the the fastest routes to joy and hopefully we can inspire more people to do that. You mentioned that the stems of mushrooms there, and that reminds me of another section, the book where you talked about the stems of broccoli in particular having a high concentration of your friend and so forth. Refrain is something that I think you know, is absolutely fascinate eating. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about brassica vegetables and broccoli, if you will, because yeah, having your greens every day, that's definitely something. That's a home agenda. Yeah. Well, look, I want to talk about the whole class of brassica vegetables. Most people go into the grocery store and they don't. The word brassica doesn't come into their mind. But you know what I write about and write about in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. In the second section where we talk about foods and there's 150 foods in there, I write with the reader in mind, imagining the reader to be writing in the grocery store of my shopping cart the way that you might have when you were a child, writing in your mother's shopping cart and having her push you along to the grocery store. So I actually take people on a journey on a tour. The grocery store is a supermarket and whispering in the ear what to pick out to put into the cart. So Brassica actually is a big family of of leafy, stocky vegetables that all contains sulforaphane. Now Sulforaphane, they're called Sulforaphane because that's a natural bioactive that has a slightly sulfurous tinge to it. That's why broccoli tastes the way it tastes. That's why cauliflower stays that way. That's why bok choy has not only a little crispy bite, it's got a little bit of a of a of a of a of a spicy, smoky taste to it. Right. So wonderful things. And so the key is that walking into the grocery store, it turns out that broccoli has sulforaphane and most people eat broccoli, eat the treetops and if you get frozen broccoli, that's okay, too, because they're often flash frozen. And but the thing is, you're only getting the treetops, which does have sulforaphane. But research I and other have done has shown that the stems of the broccoli broccoli plant, by the way, it's not just a bunch of treetops, all right? It is one giant stalk, like a telephone pole with a tree top on top of it. And so most people who go to a farmer's market will know that, you know, when you bring home the broccoli from the farmer's market, you off the stem. A lot of people used to throw away the some for good steaks, keep the stem, cook with it, saute it, slice it up into the medallions and puree it and make it into a soup. Add a little oregano, a little extra of olive oil. You know, there's all kinds of delicious things you can actually do with the stock, because there's twice as much of the sulforaphane. And by the way, there's also baby brassica, baby brassica. It's like broccoli sprouts. It turns out if you look at the sulfur or for pain of a of a grown up broccoli, if there is such a thing as adult broccoli, mature broccoli, I should say the baby broccoli is only 3 to 4 days old. It's just picked it's it's a tiny little sprout, a little nutty flavored, actually. It's quite nice. Drink it, sprinkle it on a salad. It's sprinkled on, you know, some fish, whatever you, however you cook. But it turns out that that the sulforaphane levels in broccoli sprouts is 100 times higher than the sulforaphane levels in an adult. Broccoli, so small but mighty are the broccoli sprouts. But it's not just broccoli, but choy, Swiss chard, cauliflower. There's a whole gamut of these incredibly delicious, plant based brassica that you can go to the regular grocery store. This is not difficult stuff. I write about some unusual foods in my book. It's about your diet now require a little bit more searching online to find them. But for the most part, you know the things that you would just normally wheel your cart by and maybe ignore. I'm asking people to take the to read the book, realize that these things are actually wonderful. They taste wonderful and they're wonderful. Your metabolism. Please try them. Oh, and by the way, not everyone could be is handy in the kitchen and some people will go. But Joy, I don't know how to cook a bok choy. You know, like, that's too much for me. I try to say there's really great news and you should be an adventure. Heavier tap into your adventure spirit If you've ever cooked bok choy or Swiss chard or you know anything like that. No worries that even when you're required in your grocery store, you can actually type in the back. CHOI For example, in Google Hit recipe and then hit video and your app, the search will come up videos of people who know to cook this food, this bok choy, and they will show you with passion, with love, exactly what kind of ingredients you need to knock out a dish that's going to look great. Your mouth will be watering at the end of that short video. Yeah, absolutely. And you might even serve some doctors kitchen cooking videos. You never know. Exactly. I'm going to ask you some impossible questions now about spices. Now, what are your go to spices? If you're anything me with my spices just behind me as well. You know, there's just way too many for me to to to to dive into exactly which ones I want to have in my pantry all the time. My, my, my cooking. So what are your go to spices? Particularly through the lens of it, to beat your diet and, in fact, control? Yeah, well, look, let me describe that from the flavor and culinary cooking perspective, because I think that's what most people relate to. I could name every spice and I can tell you what is known about the bioactive in them. And I could tell you what the mechanism is. But you know what? People are not going to remember that. But what people will remember is I approach spices using that lens of Mediterranean cooking and eating. All right. So what are the spices that are used in both the Mediterranean and Asia Chili peppers, white peppers, black peppers, turmeric, lovely ways of actually cooking, saffron, a sort of a near east spice, lovely flavor, very kind of expensive, but really good at. Then you start going into like in the Mediterranean basil or basil, rosemary sage, incredible flavors to it. Some of them are exquisite flavors that are very unique, like lavender. You can also use that to actually flavor your food. All spice, cloves, cinnamon, Cinnamon, by the way, actually originally from Asia, they imported the the cassia bark. Yeah. From from China around the world. And it became it was traded on the Silk Road as part of Mediterranean trading of ingredients because it's a dried bark. Those are some of my favorite types of spices. I naturally go to, you know, curries. You know, you can either buy a pre-mixed curry powder, you can mix your own curry, have some fun doing it. These are just kind of the my go tos. And I automatically think about paprika, smoked paprika, pimento split. I mean, these are the things that you would find, you know, if we went to my kitchen and opened up my cabinets. These are the ones that you would actually find with low filled, quarter filled bottles because I use them so often in my cooking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's kind of a similar way in which I describe it. You know, people always ask me about the benefits of turmeric or the benefits of cinnamon. And and I always say, look, you can find the this a similar sort of collection of bio actives in your typical culinary herbs that you find in a UK kitchen, whether it's basil, whether it's time or, you know, tarragon or whatever it might be, you don't always need to go for the exotic ones. It's great if that's the way you want to cook and that's the way you like to cook. But really it's just a case of getting the spices and herbs in your diet because it has all those benefits and, you know, through the lens of of metabolism and weight control, I think you can look at it through that way. You could look through other lenses as well, like improving your guts and improving the ability, possibility of all the different foods that serve your your immune system and gut health as well. So I'm glad you started with that sort of perspective because it mirrors mine as well. Yeah. Well, and by the way, you know, the spices all come from plants and the spices, the little piece of the spices. Many of them have dietary fiber like basil or thyme, rosemary. And so you're actually feeding your gut bacteria as well as getting this incredible. So, you know, it takes a little bit of practice. I think with spice, you have to you know, it's kind of like being an artist. I think of cooking with spices as a little bit of the art of cooking. How much how much red paint do you want to use? How much pigment do you want to use? I don't know. It's a little bit different for everyone and your own taste buds and and the combinations. But again, I think the way that I really try to approach it is don't be intimidated by this stuff. These are the thousand year old traditions that people have figured out. What are some of the healthy ingredients combined together in ways that are pleasing, that give you joy, you know that and that are not that difficult to do? Sure You can find complicated recipes, but I'm saying you can find simple recipes and as you say, typical kitchen in the U.K. or the U.S. or frankly, any place in the world, you can find some of these spices. They are flavor enhancers. They're the original way that we actually made food taste great long before the industrialization of food to make ultra processed food with these synthetic artificial flavor enhancers. And so we should just go with the old ways because they're really great. Yeah Yeah, absolutely. Look, as we as we bring this conversation to a close, I'm sure we can carry on. And, you know, if there was a kitchen in front of us and we were in the same place, would be cooking alongside this as well. So we definitely have to do that. I'm going to hold you to that for sure. Yeah. You know, leaning into your experience in the pharmaceutical industry and drug discovery, you know, you're really using that sort of scientific lens to go into, you know, the epidemiologic studies, the mechanism that we typically look and at lab studies, but then also human trials as well. How do you approach looking a particular food in that manner? So for any budding scientists out there or even medics and, you know, people in the nursing profession, people interested in this, how would you advise people to approach this subject of food as medicine? Great question, because I want more people to kind of like step into the field and, really understand how wonderful it is. I think there's kind of two components to it. And and I don't want to get away from the first component, which is we were just talking about, which is food is wonderful, it tastes great. It brings joy. It's part of tradition. And people honestly, it's part of our humanity. It connects us to the land around us and and our and our cultures and our history. So please don't forget the tasty part of food. That said, if you're trying to get into the research field, you know, there may explain to you how somebody studies food as medicine. This pear, which I showed earlier, could be might as well be a pill in a in a in a drug and containing a drug. And how do you study that? Well, you look at what's been studied in the lab. If you look at if you go into PubMed, which is one of the search engines for medical and you type pair and you type pre-clinical and you type bioactive as an example, all the search results will come up, will show you what people have been doing in the lab to understand what how a pair might actually work. When you feed on a live animal pair, what happens when you extract from the pair and put it into cells? What actually happens? That's a really easy way to kind of like scratch your itch of curiosity to learn something about that. You want to step it up, take out the word preclinical, hit the search engine again and put pair bioactive clinical trial. Now you actually see what clinical trials have been done in people studying pairs. There may not be a lot, but you'll see what has been done and that will actually, you know, really be fascinating for you to realize that people actually study pairs. By the way, there was a metabolism study in which they gave people two pairs to eat before lunch every day and it actually shrank your waistline by using the chlorogenic acid to burn body fat over four weeks, Just two pairs. Oh, what kind of pairs? Bartlett? Pearson also pairs read the paper. So again, you know, these are the fascinating things that for anybody to kind of dive in if they're interested and then you know, if you really want to find out, well, okay, clinical trials, interesting. But you know is really doing the randomized double blind, placebo controlled, you know, multicenter trials on only pairs because that's that's what people do with pharmaceuticals. It takes millions or billions of dollars to do that. You don't need to know. You don't need that to actually demonstrate the goodness of a pair. But there is a clinical trial. You want to remove a clinical trial from that, put epidemiological study, and now you'll find what research has been done. Looking at pairs across big populations to see the correlations with health or disease, either lowering the risk of disease or elevating improving the levels of health. That's a simple way that anybody with access to a computer or the Internet can begin to dive in and take any ingredients, start to look at it now. And so for anybody who wants to get involved this field, if you're a young researcher or Medicare interested in exploring it further, you know, you can also just kind of look at conferences on food as medicine. There are literally conferences being put together on multiple, probably over a dozen conferences that are actually beginning to study this new in this budding field. The food is medicine register with the conference attended learn was there. The conference that you and I were at Rupi was fascinating because last year because we were watching researchers from all around the world present their data showing the power of food in the human body. And so this is like a super easy way to do it. But I never want people to forget that food is part of our humanity. So as intellectually fascinating and as mechanistically compelling as a food might be, as cool as that might be, you know, the reality is that food should taste great. And if you're not going to be eating it, if it tastes crappy and you're going to and you're going to want to, you'll learn, you'll be avidly looking and seeking out for more knowledge and more opportunities. So more ways to activate your taste buds, the more you learn. Absolutely. Well. Well, I can't wait to do this again in in person in front of a hub. A couple of saucepans and a good selection of delicious food that we can knock up together. So yeah. Until then, thank you very much. The book's fantastic and I can't wait to help push it up for you. Over in the UK and beyond. Thanks very much. Looking forward to getting together and cooking. Absolutely. Absolutely.
