Why Food Is Better Than Medication To Treat Disease

[Music] welcome to the doctors pharmacy this is dr. Mark Hyman and this is a place for conversations that matter and I believe that today's conversation is going to matter to all of you because it's about how to beat disease through food and today's guest is an extraordinary scientist physician speaker author he's a guy I met a number of years ago and I've been very impressed with and recently had the privilege of listening to him at a Milken Institute conference roundtable on food which brought together all the leaders in thinking about food and health and disease including food companies and he gave a dissertation Nye that was off the cuff that literally blew my mind and in that he elucidated the power of food in terms of treating disease and he showed a slide that I pretty much have been blazoned in my mind which showed the effect of drugs on various biological systems through very fancy chemical analyses and in the affect of foods on the same systems and almost every time the food was more powerful than drugs and really that's why I wanted you here dr. Lee because he's not only written this book which I want you all to get called eat to beat disease the new science of how your body can heal itself and this is really the science of Health as opposed to treating disease which we all learned his doctors he's best known though for his work leading the angiogenesis foundation now those of you don't know what that is this means how you grow new blood vessels and particularly we focus on it around cancer because cancer needs new blood vessels to grow and they love to create new blood vessels to feed themselves and we don't want that to happen so he's really done groundbreaking work on this but not only around cancer but 70 other diseases are affected by angiogenesis including cancer diabetes blindness heart disease obesity he did an incredible TED talk called can we eat to starve cancer which had 11 million views which is impressive but he's been on the odd show Martha Stewart CNN MSNBC and PR Voice of America he's been at the Vatican talking at the unite to cure conference he's authored over a hundred scientific publications and leading journals like the New England Journal of Medicine science lancet these are the top-tier journals he's been on the Faculty of Harvard tough start myth Medical School and and we are so lucky and privileged to have him here today on the doctors pharmacy welcome dr. Lee well thank you Mark it's a honor and a pleasure to be here I know that we share common passions and really trying to understand health and that's what I'm all about and love to have this conversation yeah it's pretty amazing you know we've got a guy like you who is steeped in deep academia who's been published in major medical journals who's been at Harvard Tufts and Dartmouth is leading the field in world of angiogenesis which is an extraordinary field of cancer treatment and versal and yet somehow you took a kind of sideways turn and realize that wait a minute we are in medicine focused on treating disease but what happens after you do that or maybe there's a better way to actually reverse disease which none of us in medical school were taught was possible and actually create health how did you make that sort of shift in your head well or maybe is your heart well it's always a little bit of both look I trained as an internal medicine doc and so my DNA so to speak in thinking about patients is really young and old healthy and sick men and women children to adults and so that gives me kind of a more comprehensive view but the other thing about my background is that I'm a scientist I'm a vascular biologist and so I go a mile deep into you know really kind of significant science and I wanted to bring those worlds together in 1994 so 25 years ago I thought that what a contribution I could make was to create a nonprofit organization called the angiogenesis foundation whose mission would be to do something unusual which is to look at common denominators of disease so rather than look take one disease and then just study it a mile deep what I thought was what are the things that unites diseases that are common and could we find some interesting connections that would allow us to not just treat one disease but maybe pull the bow back and the single arrow through multiple disease yeah that turned out to be angiogenesis how the body grows blood vessels and that led me onto this journey where when I saw patients I started to think through well how do blood vessels normally keep people healthy and then what happens when they go awry and that unites seventy different diseases as I practice I started to realize that you know we were mostly chasing sickness and in fact the work my organization we helped to help lots of different groups that come up with 32 fda-approved drugs and treatments all of which are important but all add to the unsustainability of our model of health care is waiting until the end and then trying to kind of intercept with more expensive treatments for people that are sicker and I thought what if we used this common denominator approach to look at health you know what unites health and that's what led me to write the e2b disease and I realized that there was this remarkable new universe for health that we can actually explore it's quite a radical statement users main you instead of chasing disease you're trying to think about the common denominators of health and it's not something we learn about medical school how many of us took that class creating health 101 I mean it didn't exist in class right right and so your your framework is is a radically different one it is so unusual in medicine how did you actually sort of have that insight because that's a that's a pretty big shift from like wait a minute I don't want to focus on treating all these 70 diseases I want to find out the common things that are underlying them that connect the dots and politically together it allow us to actually create health and as a side effect the diseases either get better improve or maybe go away entirely well look most of us actually don't think too much about our health when we're going around you know getting as we're younger growing up going leading careers said our starting families but in fact you think about health when you lose it right so that's basically what we see as doctors when we see our patients they're concerned when they've lost their health and it seems to me that if we can help more people stay healthy but really use science not guesswork not conjecture not soapboxing and and I think this is where science comes in you and I have talked about this before there is good hard science that can help us understand the body and yes we were not taught this in medical school but we should be because the science of Health is really the future of medicine it's it's it's really powerful and that's what functional medicine is and coming from your perspective you know we've come at it from the clinical perspective which is you know we're seeing these common things we try to create health by changing the diet my optimizing like a microbiome by proving the immune system by improving your energy and your mitochondria helping you detoxify balancing your hormones you know dealing with your lifestyle factors these are the ways in which we create health and it's it's pretty rudimentary I would say I mean functional medicine is is awesome clinically but we're just at the infancy stages of really understanding this and you come at it from the deep science point of view and and that and you come to the same conclusions which is pretty awesome so let's talk about some powerful new drugs that have been discovered that can affect angiogenesis and that actually may be able to reverse many diseases now these drugs are are things maybe people have heard about like catechins Genest in resveratrol lycopene i Cosentino acid glucosinolates isocyanate score certain point the sign-ins flavonols le ellagic tannins curcumin menaquinone beta kratos Anthon brass Ihnen silymarin or organosulfur al al disulfide this are amazing drugs and for those of you don't understand what I just said I was talking about was green tea and soy and red wine and grapes and tomatoes and fish oil and broccoli and oranges and berries and and pomegranate and curcumin and green leafy vegetables and papaya and Chinese cabbage and artichokes and garlic right these are the new drugs and you write about this and it was a beautiful article you wrote it was in journal my oncology called tumor angiogenesis as a target for dietary cancer mentioned now most people are gonna have trouble reading and I certainly was was dense for me but what you did was you mapped out the deep science around the power of all these different compounds and foods to help reverse disease so as a scientist you know what's nice about science is that it is truth and we follow truth wherever it goes and basically the route that I took is there's a lot of research that leads to the discovery of new drugs by the pharmaceutical biotech industry I've been there done that still involved with it actually and it's because we have more sick people that need better treatment so that's valuable by itself not either/or it's not either/or and you know I'm certainly not one of those doctors that have sort of rejected Western biomedicine like it's very important when you're sick to help save lives on the other hand what I realize is that there's a missing opportunity and and that opportunity is what everybody sort of intuitively knows which is that the things that we put into our body can affect our body and they affect ourselves and food as medicine is really not a new concept it's an old concept if you go other cultures whether you're in Europe where you're uh indigenous peoples from all around the world they looked at food as part of their health keeping score card and they viewed food as a precious substance not you know they didn't just need to survive they ate because they were doing something good for themselves we've lost a little bit of that and the research behind it actually resurfaces this in a new way that I think that we can all get behind which is not in fact it's not really just about the food it's about how our body responds to the via how does our body protect its health and that's what the health defense systems are all about is true I remember traveling once in Hong Kong and I went out to dinner with this guy that he was part of Merrill Lynch I gave a talk and we had this extraordinary meal and everything in the meal was medicine intentionally medicine and I wrote an article about it called eating your medicine food is pharmacology and then I went through all the dishes we had and I went through the research and I was like well gingko nuts do this and you know this thing does that it was this an amazing kind of experience because I realized that in this culture we don't think of food that way and yet that's that's foundational for creating health well that's why I wrote it to beat disease is that you know why do you explain the science behind things I actually lay out more than 200 different foods that are actually some of the mark real crowd-pleasers or the things that we actually know that are supported by science and then figure out how can you incorporate that because in fact it becomes natural to pick the things that are good for you it's a that's something we've lost that we can bring put back into our everyday lives and for me when I go out to eat or when I prepare a meal that's what I'm doing I'm actually assembling things that I know are good for me mmm absolute thats why this show is called the doctors pharmacy with an FFA RMA because that's where you get your drugs I go to the drugstore which is the grocery store and that's where I find all the drugs and I literally don't know as much as you perhaps about this because I even though I've been doing for a long time but I look at all the vegetables and all the foods tonight I didn't know razor clams we're gonna get into that are so beneficial I don't have you know why I love them but you'd find out what are the foods that have various components right it can activate health right and how do you eat more of those things well I think it makes it it's about having knowledge and then making it second nature right so when we heat up something on a stove we know it's gonna be hot we don't burn ourselves so we actually avoid certain behaviors when we go on to the Sun we know to put on sunscreen it becomes second nature I think food as medicine is something that can become second nature you have to be exposed to the basic information and you know the science is important because that's what makes it real but at the end of the day is you know this is something that school teachers should be teaching kids that at coach you should be teaching athletes that doctors should be telling patients and so and I think family members should be sharing among themselves this is the type of conversation that should be happening at every holiday meal and every school yard and and I think that it's not so foreign it's informed by signs and we can all do it it's true no the other thing I heard you say was at this conference was your shortest slide I rounded me therapy for those who know what immunotherapy is is essentially a way to get cancer by activating your immune system rather than giving a poison or cutting it out of burning it out you literally give something that's going to help your immune system get into gear and be like pac-man and eat up the cancer and you showed a slide and and who would have thought of this but you should have slide that people who respond to the keys immunotherapy and and these abilities can race cancers actually have a certain type of bacteria in their microbiome and their gut that makes them respond to the to this immunotherapy whereas those who don't actually die and and this bacteria is called Ackerman C it's one of the you know thousands and thousands of species of bugs in your gut and you shared a story if I may about your mom yeah who had basically metastatic endometrial cancer which was treated with immunotherapy and was successful but you added certain things to the treatment to make sure that her akram and SIA were good like pomegranate and cranberry and these polyphenols which come from food that seemed to be powerful growers of these great bugs in your gut so how do we how do we sort of begin to integrate these ideas into how we treat these diseases every give me everybody like a smoothie with all these things in it and helping them with their me know therapy yeah well let's take a step back to say first of all our bodies are working hard every single day from the time we're born to our last breath to defend our health and these defense systems and I've identified five of them in my book is angiogenesis stem cells our microbiome our Billy for our DNA to protect our body protect itself and our bodies and our health and our immunity and all these defense systems work together in concert they're like our security force in our body they're patrolling they're watching out there making sure everybody's safe inside and everything is functioning smoothly and when you have a disease like cancer for example and it's not just cancer it's heart disease it's diabetes it's Alzheimer's is obesity but for specific liver cancer it's really you know a few bad guys snuck in and they figured out how to get around the security force you know it's sort of like you know TSA slip let somebody slip by and now we have to try to chase it so in the old days for cancer what we used to do is just say well let's you know take a drug like chemotherapy and wipe it out and you know that that's a blunt instrument approach by trying to take something poison to kill something that you want to kill by the way the rest of you gets poison - well that's right and so basically it's it's a toxic approach to it - something that we don't really it's one bad actor but we don't want to poison the entire body we've now changed our minds about this and this is really what's making the impossible possible we've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer it's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancer so immunotherapy which is what you are just bringing up is an entirely new approach of enhancing our own body's defenses we don't use drugs to kill the cancer we allow our bodies we give medicines that allow our bodies to cure all to kill the cancer so our immune systems can find the cancer and reverse the disease back to health that's what we've always been dreaming of and it's here but here's a problem only about 20% of people actually have this incredible response to immunotherapy sometimes a few a little fewer sometimes a little bit more but the response when it happens is exactly we want dramatic right your mom it's just my mother's cancer and in 30 days she had no cancer okay and never had chemotherapy what about what makes the difference between somebody who responds like that and who doesn't respond like that right that's a that's one of the mysteries out there and this is exactly where we need to consider more than the typical lab tests that doctors run we need to think more holistically and one of the things we know is that our microbiome our healthy gut bacteria communicates talks to our immune system and it and we need our gut bacteria to help coach our immune system to do the right thing including getting cancer so a study done by a colleague of mine dr. Lawrence is if vocal she's in Paris she's a no immunologist who works with cancer patients she looked at 249 cancer patients who were receiving immune therapies and separated them into people who responded versus people who did not respond this by the way was published in the journal Science which is one of the most prestigious yeah journals and what she found was that the difference between people who responded and didn't respond as one bacteria unbelievable Ackerman's here right so well this is not easy that you can just maybe take some probiotics with acromantis it except that you can't no there's no a cure masiha probiotic you can feed them but you can feed it and you can actually change your gut to make your body grow a cure man see and the way to do this is the food as medicine solution so turns out that pomegranates and cranberries actually have alleged attendance but pomegranates especially and that natural chemical in pomegranate juice and what's been shown is that just one 8 ounce cup of real pomegranate juice not the flavored stuff but the real stuff yeah actually over the course of a week or two will actually help change the inside of our guts so that that bacteria likes to grow that bacteria grows in the lining of the gut talks to the immune system and that makes the cancer immunotherapy work better yeah I mean and there's other things too like like you said cranberries and and green tea many things connected feed our microbiome right so plant-based foods have you know I think it's completely accepted now it's not challenged that plant-based nutrition is actually the healthy approach to life I mean it's kind of evil more plants any more person right but it's not just we're not just feeding ourselves we're feeding our bacteria Yeah right so we're feeding the you know 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies and after we extract all the stuff that we need on the human side we're leaving you know the the leftovers from the bacteria and this is the fibers this is the bioactives and what's amazing as our bacteria can take some of this fiber and they digest it so it's kind of like giving a sculptor block of wood and say do something with it so the bacteria our gut microbiome takes that bit block of wood and starts making sculptures there's like these things called short chain fatty acids or skaffa that our microbiome make and it turns out that these short chain fatty-acids these little tiny particles that they make from our food that we feed that like the fats that fuel the gut lining how they do that they're anti inflammatory they boost our immune system they help regulate our blood sugar they lower our cholesterol couple reading the answer is a and and they also suppress cancer risk and they prevent blood vessels from growing into cancer as well all tied together and this is you know at the end of the day why we need to take our food seriously yeah essentially you write a little bit about it for example how the microbiome plays roles in autism and cognitive function and I remember recently seeing a study where there are undigestible things in breast milk that humans can't digest call like a sack rice and they feed the good bacteria the baby to develop it formula doesn't have those things and the kids that have breastfed have high levels of something called butyrate which is one of these short chain fatty-acids which actually turns off colon cancer genes and is an incredible important anti-inflammatory and regulates the gut health whereas the other formula-fed kids had something called proprio one of these short chain fats but actually that in animal models can induce autism and so what like it's like whoa well you know it's at the end of the day we're just at the surface of uncovering the mysteries of health and I think that's the kind of humility and on wondermint we all need to have which is you know we know quite a bit about different diseases but we're just at this new frontier of understanding of how them you've been working in this field for for a while and you're deeply steeped into it and and what I'm seeing from my end of the table is that we can begin to peel back the layers of the onion so it's all about balance yeah you know more is not more you need just the right amount so I in your book eat to be diseased you you break it down into these various digestible bits and you briefly touched on it but I want to go deep in each of these five areas because what you're talking about is something that is our health creation health defense system that we can activate but nobody talks about and you mention them it's it's our angiogenesis system its regeneration which is stem cells and you're really involved in stem cell world the microbiome the DNA protection how we repair and keep our DNA healthy and our immune system so let's talk about each of those and how we can activate those things what are the things that harm them for example you talked about you know alcohol affecting stem cells and I'm thinking wow I had it to kill last night did I screw up my stem cells you know or and then you say what red wine maybe helps other areas so it's a little confusing how do you how do you break down each of these and let's just go through them let's start with angiogenesis sure and one of those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system and one of those things we can use to actually activate health within it great so angiogenesis is a term that a tree talks about how the body grows blood vessels blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body that's what keeps us healthy they start 60,000 60,000 miles so pulling all the blood vessels in your body line them up and then you can actually form a line that would go around the earth twice so that's one of this enormous organ system right so you know it's gonna be important and we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart you wind up having big problems with cardiovascular disease clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes and if you don't have enough blood vessels you can't heal your wounds and if you actually have too many blood vessels you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration and you can grow cancer right so this is a system that is required to keep every cell in organ healthy help keep it's a health defense system and if it's out of balance you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels you wind up having in trouble so what are the things that can damage angiogenesis well turns out high-fat diets damage angiogenesis or just you know what actually mostly saturated fats but I think that it's you know really high fat overall like high fat diets are can be can be damaging and hypercholesterolemia for example if you a lot of cholesterol floating on your blood like the damaging bad cluster LD L it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels if you have second cigarette smoke tobacco you know whether your people shouldn't smoke but even secondary smoke can actually damage your blood vessel response and you know then you think about heart disease you think about cancer things that are your blood vessels out of whack out of balance you know fat things interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils and and it's hard to separate out are the people eating high fiving avocados and almonds and olive oil or they're having you know trans fats and and toxic fats and inflammatory so that so the the sign sexually says is is not actually talking about what you actually eat it's about what the net-net the effect it's in the body so if you wind up actually going from you know the researchers have studied for example in the lab animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemia these are you know these are mice whose blood is milky because it's actually so filled with fat that's a genetic thing for sure right and those are the subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis so I think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good we we know that for example that the that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good the polyunsaturated fats are good for you but I'm talking about after what the body actually processes but what actually results with the body so what are the things that actually can help restore healthy angiogenesis well think about angiogenesis balance like a lawn that's growing right where a garden that's growing you want to you want to prune the garden you know make sure things don't over grow pick out the weeds and if you're mowing the lawn you're kind of just getting everybody although the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height yeah so you don't wind up having the scraggly lon that's what the body does to keep angiogenesis and balance not too much not too little and so the food we eat is acts like a lawn mower it kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body not too much not too little so the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea which is really good soy actually genistein is a bioactive found in soy is really good tomatoes are really good for helping to keep angiogenesis and balance many fruits and vegetables also can do that so the Brass onions are really good so many of the things we already know are good for us we know actually I also help our blood vessels and now we know how and now we know how yeah now what about stem cells regeneration this is a big topic that I think people are hearing about the news they are confused about it there's controversy about it there's laws about it that prevent adequate research I mean it's really quite a messy area yet it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in and and it's I don't think something that most people are aware of that you can activate your own stem cells there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your stem cells and what are stem cells anyway what do they do and how do we how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them yeah well some cells are really simple we're made of stem cells so when our moms and dads got together and created you know us in the womb we started out as stem cells they actually made every single sperm an egg and sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell Factory and then pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells and after we were born a few of those stem cells stuck around about 700 thousands of them they stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're in lining of our intestines and they hide out in our body and they help us regenerate so when you and I are growing up right in grade school we learned from our teachers that starfish can regenerate salamanders can regenerate but people can regenerate yeah all right okay go armed yeah well it's true you can't grow a new arm but we do regenerate we return it every day we know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back our gut lining grows back our livers can grow back if you actually remove heart your liver it'll grow back yeah our skin grows back you know so we our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells now what can injure stem cells you know high doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells I know okay with the one tequila I had last night you know having a tequila Larry now that is not bad having glass wine but you know it's it's the the the thing is it on balance what you want to do is people you know people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells diabetes is another state a metabolic state that you know it really impairs a cripples are some stores are high blood sugar cripples are stem cells so the excess of anything can be harmful including to our stem cells so what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells this is where it's really become interesting before I talk about that though let me just turn this effector stem so stress can definitely affect our stem cells high stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells you know it's just like stunning them so they're like wait a minute what do I do now you know maybe I'm not gonna be so enthusiastic and rebuilding our organs we got to rebuild our blood vessels we've got to rebuild our hearts you know our hearts turn around like we actually have stem cells in our hearts and our brains and our Ebro grow our nerves every single day something in our body is regenerating actually a lot of things are regenerating so what people are hearing in news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem cell therapies that you inject into the body so you know taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them and someday that's gonna wind up becoming game-changing in medicine someday we're not there yet I've been involved with some of those efforts and what I've seen is very exciting but more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells and here's the research you can actually take and it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot cheaper and more joy getting a stem cell judges like 20 grand something right well you know it I would say why go out and have to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table yeah right so the Mediterranean diet has it's been study by Spain look elderly people in the Mediterranean diet and those who were on a Mediterranean diet compared to none of them a better trained at had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation in their bloodstream even so again it's not one magic food it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating now when you you can actually do the research on specific things as well so for example tea green tea will increase your stem cells but guess what so can black tea right so here's what the Safari Japanese live forever well you know all that green tea you know people and Asia drink a lot of tea people in Britain drink a lot of tea as well we used to say green teas good black teas fermented so it's not gonna be that good for you we're changing our minds we have to keep our minds open black tea can also double the number of stem cells and then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study at by UCSF in San Francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease so they had kind of crappy blood flow and they gave them hot chocolate yeah I was gonna say the chocolate stem cells story on here was amazing right so the darker the chocolate the higher the flavonols these are the bio actives are naturally pressing cacao yeah and they there was a study the food as medicine come this is a video literally these chemicals in food called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties they are made by mother nature they're packed in the food growing on the plant and you know every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactive so in cacao which is a bean which then you process to you actually get you know kind of the cocoa powder if you take the really dark chocolate like 73 percent cacao the really dark chocolate and you make it into a high flavonol hot chocolate drink and you have it twice a day this was the clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate right and so okay so the question is is that important well when they measured their blood flow what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them and which you know kind of like lowers as the circulation of the blood they let it go they found that the blood flow was much vastly improved Wow so here's a functional result that actually means it makes a difference so who's gonna complain about chocolate who's gonna complain about tea who's gonna complain about a Mediterranean diet I mean you go out to eat these are the things we love yeah well it's interesting you're talking about how drugs sort of block interfere and hibbett some medical process some biological process whereas and there's toxicity to them there's side effects to them you know you can take too much which will harm you whereas foods don't work like that but you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food so food is medicine what's the dose is it one cranberry is it a thousand cranberries you know right well so my book eats a beet disease I specifically have a chapter on food doses is important to me nobody talks about well I know that because I you know when I read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale you know I I'm always asking well how much should I actually eat and that always struck me as something that needed an answer right so here's how we've approached it you can actually get food doses that's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health the best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies these epidemiological studies there's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times right so in Europe there's something called the epic study and Hanes is the United States bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of patients in Europe they're studying 500,000 patients over 20 years and they're tracking everything they eat and they're asking them how much are you eating and then on the tail end looking at what happens to their health what's their cancer rate what's their heart disease rate what's their diabetes rate and when you actually combine those two the result that we want lower cancer less heart disease and you go back into the research and you figure out what foods they ate you can actually calculate how much they ate of it yeah right so and then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this by the way this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well it's you know just having random amounts of stuff not gonna work you're gonna correlate what works with what actually the amount is so smaller studies there was a study called the health professionals follow-up study done at Harvard which looked at 70,000 men and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week that's a half a cup of cooked tomatoes not that much of pasta right lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39 percent yeah right so that's a dose that's an outcome and that's a particular food and you can do that systematically you've got a hunt and peck peck for it but it's there and it doesn't give you the exact answer it's it's not like a medicine like actually frankly even penicillin right you don't always get the right result right but you have a good approximation so that's the beginning of food doses I mean your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about the diet and eating healthy and reversing disease but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that I didn't even know about like fish roe or razor clams are you know different kinds of Chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that you know maybe haven't been studying the large randomized controlled trials but have clinical studies have epidemiologic studies and and we can start to include these and there's very little downside right right unless you don't like clams look what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another and my approach is really a global approach you know i my work spans around the world where in Asia and Europe Asia I mean America and Americas and and here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods and no matter where you go right so what interests me is what are the common denominator so for example you mentioned razor clams well that's that's actually a category of seafood we know from most epidemiological studies including studies in Europe and Asia that people who eat more seafood you know about three times a week actually have lower all cause mortality and they just survive longer so then you sort of say well what are what could be possibly responsible for that well we don't new know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat so view of the omega-3s and razor clams or something else well there's probably other things as well so I can tell you another example that's that I was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters hmm actually not only have someone making through fatty acids but there are polysaccharides and there's even proteins and oysters that boost your immune system yeah so again so it's like the mushrooms of the sea cause polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms exactly anti-cancer compounds and now they're in oysters Wow I didn't and you know by the way these are long sugar chains that's right and your body digests them they've actually done studies looking at Easter sauce so you know the kind of sauce the brown sauce you see in a Chinese restaurant with Chinese food that they study that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system is actually come from oysters comes from oysters yeah they boil them down and they caramelize them so again this is where food is medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things really yeah you incorporate the culinary side the chef's get into it I mean this is really I think us as a society coming together and saying what do we love and by the way in my book e2b disease it's really not about what to cut out of your life it's about what to add to your life yeah and what do we really enjoy it's all about our preferences and making the right decisions so this is incredible so it's stem cells are not some weird thing you have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat right you know maybe get it from some placenta somewhere that you can actually activate your body's own regenerative healing power yeah and you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injuries things adding in the help activate and that's so powerful and it's a very encouraging message let's talk about the microbiome now this is a whole nother world that most doctors really are not schooled in that certainly wasn't part of my medical education that is something that I've been focused on for almost 30 years in functional medicine because we know the gut is where the seat of your health is it's what ancient traditions like are you evaded Chinese medicine they all recognize this we just felt like oh well it's just poop you know Isis brown stuff that comes out as waste who cares like whatever and now we're seeing it linked to so many different conditions from autism to depression to cancer to heart disease to obesity to Parkman's I mean the list goes on and on and we probably haven't even finished the list yet and and yet we're you know very little about it so could you tell us a little bit about the microbiome and why it's so important and and what we can do to protect it to feed it to help it and and also what are those things that we're doing that screw it up right so you know the microbiome is an entire new discipline that's going to change humanity you know I mean I think that we've always thought of humankind as just humans but in fact we're 5050 with bacteria is really kind of obvious maybe ten new calculations right so it's about 40 40 trillion cells about the same number of bacterias the latest calculation on this and is sort of the up-to-date numbers and it makes a lot of sense right so basically when we evolved as humans we were hunters and gatherers picking stuff up you know nuts and fruits and seeds and picking stuff off of trees that had bacteria in it it was more bacteria in a planet than living than animals and when we ate those the bacteria naturally colonize the body and by the way the gut of course but not just to gut our skin our mouth our nose every orifice has got bacteria are tears of bacteria breast milk has bacteria even in the womb which we you know when you and I were medical school they said we were sterile wrong in fact babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb okay so we're beginning to rewrite the playbook of understanding how bacteria get in our body the next thing about bacteria I'll tell you about in terms of the microbiome is in the Middle Ages bacteria was responsible for the plague and so we sort of developed this fear fear and repulsion to bacteria fast-forward to the 1940s the discovery of antibiotics that really was over medical revolution and then everybody went willy-nilly with antibiotics which can be life-saving let's be clear about that but the overuse of antibiotics not just in humans budgets and children but also in our animals yeah which is where which is where most of the antibiotics are we have 24 million pounds of antibiotics are used every year 19 million are using animals for helping them grow and preventing infections and getting into our drinking water right so we're we've we've sort of invisibly impaired our environments so that we're exposed to antibiotics that changes the ecology the coral reef that delicate ecosystem between bacteria and human cells in our body so that's one thing as antibiotics the other thing that actually can really injure our microbiome really is our lifestyle you know physical activity yeah we know that if you're not active your microbiome kind of suffers even we exercise in the outside the bacteria get the benefit too they get that work out right stress can change our microbiome how many times have you know you've I'm sure you and I've done the same thing we stayed up all night we've had it pull some all-nighters next day you feel like crap you know your gut doesn't feel so good that's because of microbiome is having a riot yeah they pulled the all night or two so what we're realizing diet obviously and our diet plays a huge role so putting in pounds of stuff every day in that - yeah well you know is there something really interesting right so when I look at the ingredients of any food that I actually get and I I try to do fresh food whole foods but every now and then you know you have to take it something and you look at all the ingredients the stuff you don't recognize you can't pronounce those are the things that we should worry about actually that could influence our bacteria yeah right you pick a mushroom and you eat it you know that the fibrin on mushrooms gonna feed us and the bacteria right the pulps gonna feed us and the fiber is gonna feed the bacteria right what we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm there are three thousand food additives in the market that are FDA approved and we don't know what most of them do very few have been tested and it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect our microbiome well and you know the with a we all know people that are super healthy right so they never get sick and then we know people that seem to get sick all the time the difference is probably in their microbiome in fact it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy super Agers you know these are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all and then they looked at young healthy athletes and they found when they compared their microbiome they were remarkably similar they were almost identical maybe so health is clearly governed by our microbiomes and what are the things we can actually eat that can be effective well we talked about this a little bit earlier it turns out that pomegranates actually can make a big difference cranberries can make a big difference nuts walnuts pecans cashews things that we actually know I mean almonds yeah and so you know you got almonds for breakfast I'm rich I got well you know we should all we should all probably I mean unless you have a nut allergy I think the nuts are one of the one of nature's most healthful snacks I don't know if you saw this but about two years ago the Americans decided for Clinical Oncology the big cancer meeting they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer stage 3 colon cancer undergoing treatment whatever the treatment might be that those who ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually at a 50% lower risk of death of them their disease now now you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction everybody's jumping up and down it's a billion-dollar blockbuster drug and you're talking about a couple of handfuls of almonds for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost a hundred thousand dollars is actually better well it's it's not an either/or it's together and and again this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors you know people not just you and me but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment if you look at that data that's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies I would actually strongly advise patients to use have nuts if they can if they can take it and what do they serve in the hospitals right so again we're in the middle of a revolution yeah it's slow but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine and we're and we're gonna be able to map this out right we're gonna be very soon in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence big data analysis is microbiome assays we can actually look at what's growing what's not growing how different things affected check it over time in a serial way monitor the effects I mean it's fascinating you know wow maybe if you give this cocktail of akram an SIA smoothie then your recommence you grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy I mean this is really radical stuff and and yet there are very few people talking about it in a clinical way like you are you're saying well can wait a minute we don't know everything but we know a lot and we know enough to actually start to integrate these strategies and the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because it empowers people to say okay wait a minute I don't have to settle wait around to get disease then hope some drug saves me or you know try to fix it then but I can actually start to build the foundations of my health for my whole life by understanding and it's these are a little bit technical you know stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff but it's actually doable and you make it so practical in your book you have this five by five by five plan which we'll get into but let's go next to the DNA thing because we talked about in genesis regeneration see themselves microbiome let's talk about the DNA because we think oh we got our DNA or something we can do about it we get hits to our DNA from toxins and stress and different things but what what can we really do to help our DNA right well so in my book I should talk about how most people hear about DNA these days is relates to our ancestry you know who are we related to and how much of us as neanderthal knows guys I'm around 1/2 percent but in fact you know our DNA is our genetic blueprint and that part of that blueprints our blueprint for health it actually is designed to keep us healthy our DNA we need the our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health we need the right proteins made we need right molecules made at the right time from the time we're born to the to our last breath really and so we know that DNA can get mutated and so some of the things that can mutate our DNA is actually you know it's stopped there I just wanna go back a minute what you said was really important said our DNA makes proteins that regulate all our biology and so they can actually make good proteins or if they get damaged adamantane bad protein that's right and the good proteins help you create health and the bad proteins cause assists exactly okay exactly and by the way you know the DNA is heart as part of our hardwiring right it's it's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an auto virus system and actually checks it out finds problems and erases them really just deletes them so on average we know that there's about 10,000 mistakes that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day right so would think about it we're out there in a sunlight sun ultraviolet radiation damages us you sit in a car in a highway on a traffic on a community to work that Sunshine's wandering right through the windshield mutating your DNA secondary smoke you're filling up your car and a guest I mean some of us drive electric cars but some most people still wind up filling up their gardens pump gas right so do you stand upwind or downwind of the get of the fumes i I just hold my breath okay like stuff the cap in the thing cuz they have an automatic with I run away so here's a way to protect your DNA when you put when you're filling your gas stand figure out which way the winds blowing and stand upwind yeah if you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents the gas and you're mutating your deal a little wood block you're gonna stick in and hole them and well but this is the kind of situational awareness yeah that we want to have you know like I was saying when you when you're at the stove you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire these are the things that we know we can we should be doing at sort of the health level so our DNA is and there's some things we can't do anything about like radon coming out of the earth like that just mutates our DNA as well so we have to take proactive steps to protect our DNA and some of the things that that we can do are pretty simple like for example we know that and elemental vitamin vitamin C can actually do it a really interesting clinical trial our clinical study that was done in people who were drinking orange juice right so the scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice and they took the blood out and they measured how well their DNA protected itself in a lab test and then they gave them orange juice to drink it's one in 3/4 cup so it's kind of a tall glass of Oreos and they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their DNA's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by 20% is it is it the vitamin C or is it the inner engine and of course vitamin C because actually they've they've actually studied vitamin C in isolation but there's almost passe it's almost certain that there's other factors as well I mean you're getting a lot of sugar with that much orange juice could you then just take the vitamin C pills so so what's interesting is that the the osebo that they gave to a group of people were just sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice is not the sugar we know that's not good for you but it was really the other stuff so vitamin C is what they were focusing on but I think it's probably the narrow Jenin and has spared in other things and whorin juice as well you know the pulps got a lot of good stuff in it and you know by the way the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits it's the peel the rind that actually has a lot of stuff well I say you know if you're taking statins or certain drugs you should have grapefruit especially the appeal like the white stuff because it actually affects the metabolism exactly rugs and so if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit if you're taking a statin well so you know that's a pretty interesting but just a point of clarification on that so it's if you have grapefruit it can slow down the metabolism of the liver so when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels you and Deliver has to clear that yes that's when you call it toxicity right but in point of fact think about another way if you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods you love of the healthy things in your yeah bloodstream so here's another amazing food that can protect our DNA's Kiwis Kiwis oh my god well I just came back from New Zealand where my wife is from and I ate a lot of Kiwis listen I love Kiwis right Kiwis used to be in the jungle I think monkeys ate them and they were grown in New Zealand and then shipped to America and I think they were called Chinese gooseberries originally with his name Kiwis so anyway there was an interesting study done in Scotland that looked at whether you ate one two or three Kiwis a day and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your DNA turns out even even eating one Kiwi a day can help your blood protect it's the deed to help your blood protect the DNA from damage by 60% amazing one Kiwi day and what you're talking about is is he's learning about in your book all the various foods you might not like razor clams but there's a lot of options right and it's not just that you're gonna eat Kiwis all day because you add all these different different creative foods into your diet as much as you can and you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about right well I mean look here's the thing about most health diets right if you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only one food you're not balancing your body it's not natural to do that I think it's the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable it's supported by real science and real evidence and that allows you to do things you enjoy so in my book my emphasis you need to beat diseases number one look for foods that you would eat the foods that you enjoy that are good for you and so I present a whole list of food huh 203 foods actually and you get to choose pick the one circle the ones take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off that's your shopping list you've started out you've had a great start already you're already identifying the foods you love that are good for you I've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good now you just choose them secondly besides doing the things you like be moderate and that's the other thing is that you know I think most researchers most research has shown that if you cut down your calories by 15 percent 30 and actually you improve survival at least in lab animals but also in people to people that eat somewhat less you know the Japanese have this same very hit you boot right exactly 80% full don't push yourself away from the hammock before you're so stuffed that you can't leave the party before it's over right that's basically what it is it's better for your body it doesn't put metabolic stress you know your your when you stuff yourself to the gills your body is really stressed out even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress your cells if you eat slowly and moderately your brain will sort of say hey you know what's enough well takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain your fault exactly right so you know here's here's and this is by the way why eating with other people which is what most of these Mediterranean countries do the Blue Zone you know where people live a long time they eat with other people it's good for your talking so you can't be stuffing your mouth go home exactly and you're not distracted you're not watching television you're not looking at your phone it's you know eating social and and so that's another important component then finally it's got to be sustainable you got to do something that you can do your whole life and that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can explore on you know you were talking about razor clams in my book there's a lot of foods that most people may not have heard about bitter melon bitter melon it's a you know it's kind of a staple in some Asian countries but great to try I wouldn't cook it yourself for the first time because it's not that easy to go to a Chinese restaurant yeah and let it let somebody who knows I love it it tastes really bitter but it actually is so you know diabetes it helps lower blood sugar absolutely and you know what the interesting thing about bitter melon is again this is the Kulin Airy side right so you know here we are talking about the doctor's pharmacy but in effect we could we could be having a chef having this conversation as well when you have bitter melon which is a little bitter it actually makes other foods taste more intense so it actually the way was designed in cuisine is that to help you make you enjoy other foods even more so again it's it's not either/or it's not an extreme and it's about different cultures and I'm finding what we love to do well it's fast and we bread food and vegetables to be more disease-resistant to be draught resistant to be easier to be shipped without spoiling to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols in fact the flavor comes from these phytochemicals exactly so we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables that's why I say eat weird food because those typically haven't been screwed with and and there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast the chef Boulet from New York yes who actually has quit his world-class restaurant and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like her cumin and turmeric oil and various things that he's done and Dan barber is also to being an incoming on our podcast and he's create a new seed company design seeds not to be heirloom necessarily but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor nobody was breeding for flavor people were just breeding for all kinds of other things that pest resistance or GMO whatever instead of saying well how do we create more of these medicinal foods and which is all new thing that chefs are starting to think about food as medicine I remember I was at Canyon Ranch years ago probably late 90s and I got up in a meeting there was the executives there the owners the doctors the Titans the chefs and I got up and I said you know we need this is a health resort we need to start thinking about how to design our menus to use food as medicine and the head chef got out but he screamed to me this is not a effing Hospital this behalf like oh god I guess a little too early on this one but well you listen being ahead of the time is something that you're known for and I think that we're now starting to appreciate it I mean think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food not only hospitals by the way but restaurants may be a great place yeah theme parks would be a great place Airlines would be a great place I mean there's so many places we can have an impact was a frameshift getting people think about food as not just calories but in for mine's not just energy but actually instructions that regulates your stem cells and your DNA in your microbiome in your immune system and your engine Genesis I mean these are things that are not basically it's the new science of nutrition right so beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff we're now combining food science with life science you know the life science is what we learn in medical school food science you know not so much right so the average it's only like 20% of medical schools that require any nutrition yeah you know I can tell you part of what got me into this is that I used to be a doctor at a VA hospital and and I felt a brave soul well I felt a duty to really try to help people that committed their lives to help protect our country right so what was interesting and I'm sure you know this as well the veterans that come to the hospital they they're often they have a lot of health problems some of them are obese diabetes like a diabetes bat heart disease cancer you know that's the sort of everyday in the clinic you see people that are really really dealing with a lot of illness and what I noticed was I said you know this it's as odd because these people when they were in their 20s or healthy were fit they were that that they couldn't get into the military they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness right right so what happened to them over the decades and I realize it wasn't you know just medicines it had to be their lifestyle and when I kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses oftentimes really bad diagnosis you know and then they would ask me what's the treatment how long do I have doc you know how bad is it going to be they put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door and almost all of them would turn around and ask me one question they said hey doc what can I do for myself what can I eat and I didn't have the answer because I wasn't taught we weren't taught to give that answer and I thought that was wrong and that's what led me on this journey that led me to write this book need to beat disease because I think that we need to know that people want to know that what can we do for ourselves to eat to be diseased and in a way there there are really no drugs work as well when you look at the spectrum of over your lifetime in putting all these powerful foods compared to what the effect of a medication would be right I mean and if studies have shown this that the diet and lifestyle works better than statins for example for any heart disease Mediterranean diet the the big study that was done the pediments study which gave people a liter of olive oil a week or a bunch of nuts every day the effects were equivalent or better than taking a drug and tastes much better and less side effects right right right well you know as we've been talking about food as medicine is very natural in most parts of the world and I think just sort of in our society we've lost touch with things you know you earlier you're talking about chefs getting into this you know this whole farm-to-table movement yeah well that's what it used to be for everybody we only ate stuff that was going around us and we ate it because it tasted great because it was rich with these polyphenols and flavonoids and by the way you know these bio actives that are natural chemicals and foods what do they do it's really interesting when you think about health defense most of the bio actives that are found in foods evolved in the plant plant-based foods yeah to protect the plant yeah so either they were natural insecticides or they help to attract bees and other insects so they pollinate so they can reproduce right so when will protect them from elements or protected from the elements and dams make them stronger right so then when we when humans started to eat these plant-based foods then these natural chemicals had another job description which is they interact with our human cells and because they were already engineered to be protective the ones that were useful to us and we developed this relationship with our plant-based foods also helped us and so there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view of what we're finding out what we need to do now though is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves and if you're interested in the scientists there it's it's an evolving science yes we have health defense systems that's you know health isn't the absence of disease it's it's our body working full steam cranking along and you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent treat or even reverse them you know activating your defense systems using food and whether you're healthy or sick every person can take a decision three times a day to really enhance their health and you don't need a doctor's prescription it's truly not and I just want to loop back to what you said because it's a it's a concept that I don't think most people really understand about food there was a recent study was published it was over 60,000 people looking at people who ate organic food and cancer rates and they found a lower risk of cancer now is it the avoidance of pesticides where does something else because when you're an organic plant life sucks I mean it's hard you gotta work to protect yourself you've got to produce more phytochemicals you gotta produce more nutrients and it hasn't the soil and all these other things but organic foods have higher concentrations wild foods have even more like wild blueberries are better than organic blueberries which are better than regular blueberries right so this is a this is the science we actually know and then I thought about this for a long time like why are these molecules in plants so smart that they know how to up regulate this enzyme or protect our DNA or enhance our immune system or improve angiogenesis or help our Micra happen and I came up with this idea called symbiotic phyto adaptation which is the idea that we evolved in symbiosis in collaboration cooperation with plants to actually activate many of our body's essential functions that we're too lazy to do for example humans and guinea pigs don't make vitamin C many other animals make vitamin C well we like why should I make vitamin C if I can eat some whatever and get vitamin C so there's so many of these pathways that aren't we don't think of these as essential nutrients like vitamin b12 or or vitamin E or whatever we actually use these to activate these health systems that you're talking about this defense system and we don't think of them as essential but they really are essential because without enough for example glucosinolates you can't up regulate glutathione which detoxifies all the chemicals or you can't you know reduce inflammation if you don't have enough curcumin or so you you actually have these available to every day in the grocery store and we're going to become smarter and smarter about this and it's such a amazing well that's what I love about the title of your podcast you know my mistake because it literally when you walk into the grocery store it's like walking into a pharmacy yeah literally you know recently I was I had the privilege of actually being invited to attend a celebration at NASA at the Kennedy Space Center celebrating Apollo 7 and a bunch of astronauts got up there who had actually been in space and these are flighted astronauts and they basically said when they looked at the Earth from the International Space Station they realize that the only thing that separates us from any other cold dark dead planet is this thin blue line of atmosphere and underneath that thin blue line that we have to protect we're all the same we're all one species on the planet and as this is getting to your symbiosis yeah idea which is that over you know however we got Korea however life got created we all live together we all adapt together we think about a lot of things that don't work well together you know the it's usually us versus them is not helpful it's us together that's really helpful almost in every situation figuring out how things work in harmony in balance is really the leads to a better solution and the silos and the reductionism in medicine also spreads across everything else right so we don't think about how do we produce energy and how does that affect climate or how do we grow our food how does that connect everything so it's connecting the dots I mean we you know you hear that saying you have a butterfly flapping wings in China and the hurricane and the Caribbean I don't that's true but that idea that everything affects everything else then we're one interconnected organism right yeah no I mean I think I think that's absolutely true and so the great thing is that we are now able to benefit from all the research that's been done over the years directed you know to develop new drugs and pharmaceutical companies and we can use those same tools on a toolbox to study food yeah and when you do that you start to really begin developing the answer why something works not just that something works yeah so that deepens our knowledge I think it helps us feel more confident in what we're doing and it allows us to it brings more people together we need to bring more people into this field which is partly why you're doing this you it's amazing and and your work is so great I guess before we had I want to sort of touch on the last of the five systems which is immunity and the same question what messes it up how do we fix it and what foods can we fix our immune system okay so immune system is and all that in three minutes or less no just kidding when we you know I think even school kids know that the immune system is important right bundle up don't get sick you don't want your immune system be down have the chicken soup you know all the turns out has a lot of things that actually do help your immune system well it turns out that you can sleep actually does actually influence inflammation in your body but our immunity is our first and best well recognized defense system right nobody would quote would challenge that and we've always assumed that you know if your immune system is working you're gonna stay healthy if it crashes like you see in HIV or an AIDS it's a terrible situation you've got an overactive immune system like autoimmune disease lupus rheumatoid arthritis I mean lots of people suffering from that I'm even celiac disease for example food triggered immune responses people really suffer and so balanced immunity is what's important I don't know if you remember this but I certainly do when I learn about the immune system in medical school it seemed infinitely complicated you know you get this system you get that system they break together and there's like 50 different parts and they work together and I thought it was an alphabet soup honestly a lot of a lot of my a lot of molecules involved in music so here's at the end of the day what we know is that the immune system acts like a security force in our body they patrol our system to make sure any invaders that might get in through our eyes our nose or mouth our ears I mean every orifice is an entry point you cut yourself you know bacteria can get in there our body basically our immune system goes hey wait a minute we're going to go to the site of action and we're gonna like secure the zone so to speak clear it up and make sure everything can be not disrupted that's essentially what our immune system does and yeah there's a lot of complexities in there but we do know that things can lower our immune we know that infections low can if you have a lot of infection you can lower our immunity we also know that again smoking aging you know for stress all lower reprobation sleep deprivation is a big one right so there's some new studies coming out that show that you know pretty much if you don't get like six hours at least six hours of sleep your health is seriously in jeopardy right and we know this again that all-nighter phenomenon that every college student in definitely Army's gone to medical school or done a residency training has right yeah it takes time to recover from that and our immune system needs to come up along with our microbiome and all these other defenses I used to feel like I had fibromyalgia after every night on call use a key tired yeah and now emergent it never goes away yeah okay that's so what do we now know about food we know that foods can actually boost our immune system I mentioned oysters it's quite amazing that actually oysters have polysaccharides these long sugars and proteins that actually can help boost our immune system moistures and oyster mushrooms and oyster mushrooms yup exactly and then you know our microbiome talks to our immune system so here's the pomegranates and here's the mushrooms again that help our microbiome to actually boost our immunity and then we do know that that there are other foods that can calm our immune system so tea you know for example green tea can not only help boost our immune system that can calm it if it's overly active so people talk about inflammation right and sometimes we use inflammation in sort of this broad sweeping statement inflammation a little bit of it the ability to have it is good you want you need acclamation a little bit but you still want too much of it and so there are foods that can calm and quell information inflammation as well and that's important if you have autoimmune disease right well so again tea is one of those foods that can actually lower your on your immunity not your hot tired moon system just the inflammatory component you know because as catechins actually can actually help to quell things so I was talking to a guest phrenologist from Harvard he was saying I use curcumin and green tea extracts as ways of treating colitis that's right well I mean Soaker communes an interesting one because when you eat this yellow natural spice powder which is delicious by the way it can be particular curry powders it it tends to go right to our system out the other end unless you have it with fresh cracked black pepper I don't know if you know about this basically you have first-class black pepper you actually help your intestines get activated so it observe absorbs more of that curcumin from the turmeric so again this is also traditionally like in India used to make oil like with this onee and turmeric it's right in fact I'm writing in a cookbook called food what they actually I cook and I've invited chefs to contribute recipes in David Brule created this amazing thing called turmeric oil and it's special infused oil with turmeric that actually helps to activate on the inflammation fighting properties and you know it's it's so interesting you mentioned that because combinations of foods can be really important you know for example tomatoes which contain lycopene most people don't realize that if you pick a tomato off the vine and you eat it like an apple you get the vitamins from the tomato but the lycopene actually is in a natural form that the body doesn't really like to absorb yeah it's called the transform if you heat the tomato and cook it you gently change the chemistry into another form that's right your members love to absorb but it's still fat soluble so if you actually cooked the tomato slowly even with olive oil a healthy oil its fat soluble and then you eat that together now your body really loves to absorb it sounds good so alright like and again back to the Mediterranean and or you know in Asia - there's combinations that work let's go back and look at what the people from olden times knew like I think that you know we're forward-looking I'm a researcher so I'm always looking at the latest new thing but I think there's great value in looking back at the ancient cultures the ancient recipes you know we've probably forgotten more than we have to learn but we still have a lot to learn mr. O'Mara I'm going to send you that article I wrote called eating your medicine food is pharmacology in fact your Chinese and in Chinese the word for take your medicine is true yaw which means to eat your medicine which is a very interesting way of framing it it's that you know take medicine like a pill they eat their medicine that's right one you know in Chinese medicine you know traditional TCM traditional Chinese medicine you kind of view food and medicine and herbs all sort of in continuity you've got hot and you've got cold you've got balance all the things that you know we're now rediscovering using science and you know I think that there is so much to learn about health and we need to have the humility to recognize that while we know you know quite a bit about disease and we've got some good medicines to treat them when it comes to health we need to keep our eye on the ball we need to focus on what we're learning and we need to think about that ourselves because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health what you need to do is to make that part of your life in a natural way well if we can get food reimbursed by health care it's a game-changer and actually working on that equipment clinic with the food pharmacy which is the idea of actually paying for food for people instead of drugs to get them healthy and reverse disease and then actually we'll say insurance companies are starting to recognize that as well so we should all work together find ways to you know apply our knowledge so that everybody can benefit from from the most advanced knowledge possible and you know actually honestly for the average person they shouldn't have to think too much about it it should be natural all around them they should be doing the things they like we moderate and actually be do it for a lot stuff because we're not educated about it we don't learn about it the environment of our food is so toxic we live in a nutritional wasteland where to try to find something that's good for you is really tough well that's what we've and that's what we've done for ourselves is but I'm saying that the health is an invisible thing and that's why we need to think through what our health actually means and because we're against really a brick wall almost every single day in you know modern society with everything we've done to the environment and to the stress that we put ourselves in just living life in general you know the odds are kind of stacked against us unless we take our own control this is incredible I mean for a guy who was sort of steeped in traditional medicine who's you know probably one of the leading scientists in the world around angiogenesis who understands you know the deep biology that we all learned in medical school and has published 100-plus papers and major journals you're sort of coming around to this idea this paradigm shift that the way to get people well and reverse disease is not by treating disease but by creating health and that has a massive paradigm shift and that's really what functional medicine is all about and it's really now becoming more accepted in mainstream and you're leading the way and I think most of us would go into medicine we started out by wanting to create health right I mean people who go to medical school to treat disease they go to medical school because they want to help people stay healthy so you better you know here we are you know we're at the precipice of a new era in society not just medicine where we can actually do something for ourselves amazing so if you were in charge for a day King maybe and you could change something in health care medicine and make a sweeping change what would it be well there's so many things that I can think of but the one thing that I think is closest to my mind is I think it mandatory that every doctor in their training and actually in their practice so they have continuing education has to learn about food and health and how foods can be used for health and I think that they need to have nutrition that is state-of-the-art nutrition and this should be as important as learning about diseases and treatments and like you know the pharmaceutical treatments that all come out like we all have to certify we have to take board tests again we have to learn what the latest treatments are I think that if I could mandate something it would actually be learn about food and health learn how to talk to our patients about it because they want to know well that's a great that's a I think a great strategy in fact colleague of ours Darsh Mazda fine is the Dean of Tufts yeah school nutrition health policy I said we just need to change the licensing a mess for doctors to include questions that are about this and when you do that that changes the medical school curriculum that changes what people study it changes the incentives and it's a sort of a domino effect exactly and by the way because you know every doctor sees thousands of patients over the course of their lives it's scalable it's a it's a ripple effect now that we can have I mean and you know there are people that are not in medicine who are equally passionate and they're working you know really hard to come up with really great ideas but those of us who have medical degrees we have a unique privilege right so we learned and I've been given the opportunity to impact people's lives by the nature of our profession and I think this is an area you know the food pharmacy food is medicine that it's an idea whose time has come and there was a quote that said you know no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come you know it's so great and for those ideas I'd encourage everybody to go check out dr. Lee's new book eat to be diseased the new science of how your body can heal itself you can find him at dr. william lee that's dr william li comm and learn about us booking in on amazon anywhere you get books bookstores this is gonna be one of the most important books as we look back in history that creates that benchmark from where we go forward and rethink health and medicine i encourage everybody to check it out I'm excited about the book I've read through it it's it's really something unique and there's a lot of help books out there I mean I'd give away all my books and just read that way this is really the book you should look at for what to know about your health about how to activate these healing systems and how to actually enjoy food because we're talking about it's fun it's delicious it's yummy so thank you so much dr. Lee for being on the doctors pharmacy a place for conversations that matter thank you for having me yeah I appreciate you being here if you love this podcast and you like what you heard please leave a comment on the review section sign up wherever you get your podcast and share with your friends and family on social media wherever you want we'd love to hear from you and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 196,765

Rating: 4.8566451 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. William Li, Eat to Beat Disease, Food, Cancer, Chemotherapy, Dr. Mark Hyman, The Doctor’s Farmacy, Podcast, Health, Nutrition, Diet, Food as medicine

Id: UUSWWI2qVt4

Length: 81min 37sec (4897 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2019