Dhru Purohit Show - #218: The Mind-Blowing Science of Starving Cancer with Food with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

The Mind-Blowing Science of Starving Cancer with Food | This episode is brought to you by BLUblox and InsideTracker. Health is not simply the absence of disease. Health is an active state. Your body has within it five health defense systems: angiogenesis, stem cells, the microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity. These systems are responsible for maintaining our health and resisting the regular hazards we all face everyday as part of ordinary life—and they heal us when disease inflicts damage in our body. By knowing how these systems defend your body like a fortress, you can tap into their health powers to live a longer, healthier life.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Dr. William Li, an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times bestseller Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. His groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments, and impacts care for more than 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity.  His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views. Dr. Li has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC and the Dr. Oz Show, and he has been featured in USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, and O Magazine. He is president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and is leading research into COVID-19.  In this episode, we dive into:  -How sugar fuels cancer (6:47) -What is angiogenesis and how it impacts our health (17:29) -Foods that starve cancer (22:47) -The 5 key health defense systems of the body (35:18) -How COVID damages our blood vessels and gut microbiome (44:36) -How to supercharge your immune system (48:43) -How kiwifruit impacts our gut microbiome and reduces DNA damage (1:01:02) -The power of polyphenols on our gut microbiome (1:07:23) -Akkermansia and cancer immunotherapy (1:13:14) -Dr. Li’s Masterclass and Eat to Beat Disease Course (1:23:42) For more on Dr. William Li you can follow him on Instagram @DrWilliamLi, on Facebook @DrWilliamLi, on YouTube @DrWilliamLi, and through his website https://drwilliamli.com/. Get his book, Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself, at https://drwilliamli.com/book-li/. Learn more about his course, Eat to Beat Disease at https://eat-to-beat-disease.teachable.com/p/course11. Sign-up for his free masterclasses at https://drwilliamli.com/masterclass/. This episode is brought to you by BLUblox and InsideTracker. As someone who is on the computer a lot, I realized all that screen time was negatively affecting how well I slept. I started learning about blue light and how it disrupts the body’s natural melatonin production, so I decided to try blue-light blocking glasses throughout the day to see if they helped—and they totally did. I love the blue-light blocking glasses made by BLUblox. BLUblox glasses reduced my digital eye strain and dramatically improved my sleep, and I have more energy throughout the day. Right now BLUblox is offering my listeners 20% off, just go to blublox.com/dhru and use code DHRU at checkout.   InsideTracker helps people live long, healthy, productive lives by optimizing their bodies from the inside out. InsideTracker’s cutting-edge technology analyzes your blood, DNA, lifestyle, and fitness tracker data to give you science-backed recommendations for positive changes to your daily habits. Traditional lab tests can be hard to read on your own, but InsideTracker makes their results easy to understand and even provides tips on how to use food first for optimal nutrition. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 25% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Because we were at the beginning trying to set out to figure out how do you develop biotech drugs that can starve a cancer by cutting off the blood supply. Well, we've done that. And it's actually one of the mainstays of cancer treatment today. But the more exciting thing, we found that when you use the same testing methods that we're used to develop these drugs to test foods, there's more than 100 foods that can actually starve cancers as well. Welcome to the Drew Perot podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. William Lee. Dr. William Lee is an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. His groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and impacts care for more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED talk, Can We Eat to starve cancer, has garnered more than 11 million views.

And to kick off our interview, we jump right into this very topic, the science of starving cancer. Stay tuned. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Blue Blocks. So you know that I've done so many episodes on the topic of sleep because I'm obsessed with it. Sleep is one of those things that you nail it, you get your sleep right, you optimize your sleep. It changes everything. It changes everything. That's why the clinicians at our medical clinic and a lot of my friends that have been on this podcast, sleep is one of the biggest areas that they focus on.

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Drew, D-H-R-U for your 25% off. Now, let's get back to this week's episode. Dr. William Lee, welcome to the podcast. I'm a big fan. It's an honor to have you here. Well, thank you, Drew. It's a pleasure to be here. When it comes to nutrition science and trying to figure out what foods are best for you or what foods can potentially harm you, one example where there tends to be a lot of confusion is if today you go on a webmd and you look up cancer and you look up, there's articles that are on there that, you know, does sugar fuel cancer? And there's well-meaning articles from very respectable individuals that are out there to say there's no evidence

that's out there that sugar encourages cancer. And yes, there may not be these big double-blind placebo-controlled trials, which have their own challenges. They're difficult to fund. Who's going to go and pursue them? How are we going to make sure that we have the resources to explore it? But this highlights sort of the fact that there still may be a lot of evidence that's showing that, for example, example in the case of cancer, that sugar could be very problematic. You may not have that full trial. So this is where a little bit of nutrition science becomes partly an art of piecing the story together and saying what's the best evidence that we have. So talk about sugar and cancer for a moment if you could. Yeah, great, great topic. And you know, by the way,

you know, cancer like sharks, when they're on the cover of a magazine, it sells, they fly off the shelf because people are interested in this topic. And just like sharks, there's a lot of fear and reaction, I think, to the topic of cancer. And I think this is also true even in a medical community. So first of all, let me kind of give my response to what we do know about the evidence of sugar and cancer because I do cancer research. I've been involved with cancer research. I've been involved with helping to develop over a dozen cancer drugs that are FDA approved. And part of my street cred, Drew, when I speak about food as medicine, is that I've actually helped to develop medicines.

I'm one of the guys who actually, I'm not just sort of like waving a leaf of kale saying, never mind all the prescription stuff. Like, I'm actually helping to develop those things. So for me, it's really, food is really an additional tool in the toolbox, but we can understand nutrition with the same rigor, with the same standards of evidence that we actually apply for drugs. So here's what we know about cancer. We know that we no longer talk about cancer just in terms of the organ it's in. The modern conversation about cancer in the medical community isn't, it's a colon cancer, so it's a colon disease, and it's a brain cancer, it's a brain

disease, it's a breast cancer, it's a breast disease. We're actually talking about at the microscopic level that cancer has a microenvironment. It lives in a microenvironment. So, So just like if you had fish in a fish tank, what's going on around the fish in your tank actually makes a big difference in terms of how well the fish actually thrives. And so cancer, think about cancer being like in an aquarium, in that aquarium being kind of miniaturized in our body. There's a microenvironment. There's a little mini terrarium or aquarium around every tumor, every cancer cell. And so among the most sophisticated cancer researchers, and I count. myself in that group, we now refer to cancer as very much due to related to cancer cells

and the microenvironment. And where sugar comes in, along with other micronutrients in the microenvironment that feed both normal and healthy cells is the fact that glucose is uptaken by every single cell in the body. But because cancer cells are revved up, they are able to actually take that nutrient and actually fuel themselves. So what started as sort of like a well-intentioned interpretation by a non-medical profession has now been really validated, I think, by the cancer research world. Now, you know, because sugar itself sort of quickly goes to stuff you would add to your drinks or your desserts, you know, it all of a sudden becomes kind of a flip topic. But in reality, I think that it's incontrovertible to cancer researchers that cancer cells avidly use glucose to fuel their own metabolism.

So here's where things get more sophisticated. In a typical person, let's say you or I or someone watching this podcast who doesn't have diabetes, our bodies are able to take any glucose that we introduced by our diet and take it down to a subthreshold that wouldn't, drive that cancer cell any faster than it would a normal cell. So in other words, our endocrine system, our body's own ability to process glucose, pretty much takes anything that we introduce in our stomach. And although there might be a quick spike, we'll take it back down within a few minutes. If you've got diabetes, it's a different situation because your hyperglycemic microenvironment that your whole body represents is probably contributing to the growth of that cancer to begin with.

And so if you wanted to be safer, if you had cancer, you struggle with cancer, and even if your sugar, your body's ability to process sugar is fine, you might want to kind of stay away from added sugars if you can. But then this is where it gets even trickier. People say, well, then I'm not going to have fruits because fruits are sweet. And fructosis turned into glucose in a body. You know, again, this is the slippery slope where people who are not biochemists, who are not research scientists, get into that realm where they can talk about the top.

and make themselves more confused. I will tell you that although there is natural fruit sugars in a piece of fruit, the reality is when you eat a piece of fruit, an apple, a pear, a peach, something sweet, a grape, you are getting a lot more than a fructose in your body. You're getting fiber. You're getting polyphenols. You're getting all these other micronutrients, many of which can actually fight the cancer itself. And so food as medicine isn't a pill where you've got good guys and bad guys and cyanide pills and, you know, and cure-alls and magic bullets.

It's really, food is really a complex mix. And what we're really finding when you look at the evidence, again, evidence being really important, is that by and large, plant-based foods, even ones that have some natural sugars on them, actually help reduce the risk of cancer. And I think the important part to build on top of what you shared is that if we look at it in terms of total sugar, consumption, really fruits are a very small part of it. The vast majority, similarly to salts, most of the salt in people's diet doesn't come from the added sea salt. They sprinkle on top of their flank steak or their broccoli or whatever. It comes in these packaged foods that they're consuming. I think it's only 13% of actual salt that we have in our diet comes from the added salt that we add. It's already baked into a lot of the foods. In that same way, sugar is

primarily coming from the calories inside of drinks, Coca-Cola's, other things like that that are a regular part of our diet. Fruit really should not be this thing that we worry about. It's more paying attention to these other areas where it's included without us even knowing about it. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I mean, you know, the amazing thing is that although many people, myself included, have spent years, decades,

doing drug development where we figure out a problem in the body and we try to figure out a targeted therapy like a smart bomb to hit it. You know, this is billions of dollars. It takes a decade or more to develop a single drug. The reality is, and I've come to this conclusion after, you know, having been involved with drug development for 20-some years, is that we are not smarter than Mother Nature. Humans just can't outwit the cleverness of Mother Nature. So most of these foods that are, we now know are good for us. Most of them are plant-based are enriched with not one, and not 10, but hundreds of not thousands of different compounds, most of which we haven't discovered yet, that when we actually do study them, they wind up helping our body, activate our body's

health defense systems so that we can actually better resist disease. What I always tell people is that, you know, like, so, you know, why are so many good things in plants? Well, most of the bioactive chemicals. These are the natural chemicals that are good for us, like polyphenols, antioxidants. Look, the plant didn't develop them for that purpose. You know, plants developed many of these natural chemicals. They evolved them over thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years to protect the plants. So most plant bioactives, okay, either help the plant resist insects that are trying to chew them up. So natural insecticides or fungicides to prevent fungus from growing on a plant. Or they actually create great, beautiful colors in these plants,

which is why it's such an amazing thing to go to a marketplace. You see all the sea of colors that are out there. Those colors attract pollinators, bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, and then help to the reproduction survivability of the plant. So these natural products, these natural chemicals are all for the defense of the plant. Now, so what changed is that when humans kind of stopped walking, you know, stop dragging their knuckles and got up and started to pick off plants, and by the way, non-human primates also eat mostly plants, started to eat these plants. These natural bioactives suddenly took on another job.

There was a new job description to plant bioactives. that they started to interact with human cells. And that's where the fun begins in a way from a research perspective, because I study food as medicine. You know, I would say I would call my works or molecular nutrition. How does the substance in a plant interact with the process in the body? And, you know, you know that if you, 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.

Put something bad in our body. You're going to mess up those cellular pathways. put something good in the body. Now the fun part for me is to really try to unravel the mysteries of what it is, those healthy bioactive chemicals from the plants and sometimes animals, animal proteins, are actually doing to activate our body's health defenses. You know, on that topic of health defenses, the area that you're primarily known for is angiogenesis, as you hinted towards earlier.

And I think it's still one of those things where people, sometimes have an idea, they don't fully have an idea, and you had obviously your groundbreaking TED Talk, which has 5 million views on just TED alone, which I watched when it first came out and I rewatched in preparation of this interview. And you explained in that talk how you got into this world of angiogenesis and anti-angiogenesis and how it's related to many of the chronic diseases that we all know today. So I'd love you to break that down. And since we were talking about cancer earlier, how angiogenesis and anti-angiogenesis links to something like cancer, which we all know of and have probably had a family member who's been impacted by.

Yeah, so angiogenesis is a fancy Greek word that means how blood vessels growth, growing. So angio, blood vessels, genesis, growth of. And it sounds like a complicated word, but, you know, 100 years ago, people couldn't pronounce antibiotics and had no idea what that was either. And so it takes time to actually get important concepts into our lexicon. But antigenesis, how our body grows blood vessels is a super important process. It's a concept because blood vessels form 60,000 miles of channels, are highways and byways of our circulation that are stuffed inside the typical adults, 60,000 miles. If we're to pull out all the blood vessels in our body and line them up and then you'd form a line that

would wrap around the earth twice. Enormous capacity to be able to bring oxygen that we breathe and nutrients that we eat to help feed our cells. So literally they're the lifelines to our body. Now, our body knows how to grow blood vessels from the get-go. So most people don't know this, but when, you know, your mom and dad met and sperm met egg and started to form a little embryo in the womb, among the first organs to form are blood vessels. Why? Because before you can get any organs to survive, you need blood vessels in place, ready to make them make sure that those lifelines are actually there. As we are born, we're born with most of our blood vessels already in place and they stretch as we get bigger and older.

So then we wind up actually having, you know, the whole body. There's an exhibit. I don't know if you've ever seen this called Body World. It's kind of like a museum exhibit. It's all about the human body. And they've got casts there that are amazing where they've dissolved everything away except for the blood vessels. And you get the entire human figure.

It's like the invisible man, except they're visible because of blood vessels. That's angiogenesis. That's how those blood vessels got there. Now, here's the thing why androgenesis is the, a defense system for health. If you don't have enough blood vessels, your cells, your organs, your tissues are going to die. How do we know this? Well, you know, if you've got a disease like diabetes that hammers on angiogenesis since you can't grow blood vessels very well, you get a wound in your leg, it's not going to heal very well. It's called a diabetic ulcer, least amputation.

It's really a bad problem. If you have, if you're older, you've got high cholesterol, you've got diabetes and you have a heart attack. Your heart is not going to grow blood vessels to repair itself very easily. And so basically people die because you don't have enough blood vessels to supply tissues that are in jeopardy. Same thing as a stroke. So we know angiogenesis is critical. And our body defends itself by growing just the right amount. What is the right amount?

Well, it's not too few and not too much. It's just the right amount. I call it the Goldilocks zone. So remember Goldilocks? The bears are like not too hard, not too soft, just right, not too hot, not too cold, just right. So the body knows how to do this was most of the systems that have been hardwired into us to defend ourselves. And so you get just enough blood vessels. And then there's kind of like a zone where more can grow.

Not too many. If you get too many blood vessels, you also get into trouble. Get too many blood vessels growing your eye, for example. Those blood vessels leak, get blood coming out. That causes blindness. Diabetic blindness is due to extra blood vessels, excessive, pathological, androgenesis growing in the back of the eye. You can go blind.

Same thing when older people say, you know, I'm losing my vision. It's usually macular degeneration. That's where blood vessels are growing in the back of the eye and leaking and causing all kinds of problems. So too much angiogenesis is also a problem. So how does the body normally prevent having too much angiogenesis? it's got all these systems to be able to mow the lawn. So think about a landscaper that's trying to create like the perfect lawn in the front yard, right?

So basically, if the lawn overgrows, you've got to get that lawn, the landscaper to come in and mow it back down to exactly the right height. That's what the body knows how to do when it comes to our blood supply. Now, cancers are forming all the time. So right here, right now, my body and yours and everybody watching this podcast, we're forming little microscopic cancers in our body right now. Why? Because we got 40-some trillion cells that are dividing, making more cells all the time. You make one or two mistakes in those cells. Bingo, you got a tiny little microscopic cancer like a pimple. And like a pimple, it's harmless because it doesn't have a blood supply. So then your immune system wings by, finds it and cleans it right out. It's like your immune system is like a cop on a beat. And it'll take the bad guy right out. However, cancers can become dangerous. dangerous when they are able to hijack our angiogenesis system. So this is really part of the nefarious dirty deeds of cancer. They can be harmless and sit in the background in our bodies all the time, anytime. But if they find a way to leak proteins called growth factors that act like fertilizer

and they hijack our lawn, that, you know, that turf that we're trying to grow, and they grow blood vessels into themselves. And I've done research on this. A tumor that doesn't actually have any blood vessels cannot grow any bigger than the head of a ballpoint pen. The little ballpoint thing, that's it. And it can't get any bigger. It doesn't enough oxygen, no nutrients. So it's stuck. But the moment blood vessels can touch that, that little tiny microscopic tumor and start to feed it, a cancer that is the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen will grow 16,000 times in two weeks. So this is an explosive trigger when angiogenesis is hijacked, and our body is unable to control it. So that's how that's called tumor angiogenesis.

And that's how I got started in this field because we were at the beginning trying to set out to figure out, how do you develop biotech drugs that can starve a cancer by cutting off his blood supply? Well, we've done that. And it's actually one of the mainstays of cancer treatment today. But the more exciting thing, we found that when you use the same testing methods that we, that we, that we, that we're, that. were used to develop these drugs to test foods, there's more than 100 foods that can actually starve cancers as well. Let's talk about some of those foods. And let's talk about it in the context of you use this great analogy earlier in the interview. You said aquarium analogy, that all depending on the nutrients inside of the water, how clean it is, the toxins, the impurities, we know

that that could impact the life that would be living inside that aquarium. So what are some of the factors and what are some of the foods that would create the right environment that angiogenesis in this case with cancer would actually be turned off so that it wouldn't fuel those things. So what are some of the examples of those foods and what are those compounds inside of them that actually change the environment of the aquarium to turn this process off? Yeah. Well, okay. So it's a great analogy.

So think about this aquarium that's got fish that you want to keep. These are your pets. And it's also got overgrowth of algae, you know, like that completely overgrows a tank. And that algae is going to kill the fish, right? You get enough gunk growing in that tank. You're going to kill the fish. So what can you actually do to clean up that tank? You want to get rid of the algae, but you don't want to kill the fish.

That's really probably the best analogy of this microenvironment situation in any organ that we have in our body where you want to get rid of the cancer cell. but you don't want to actually kill the healthy cells. Well, it turns out that cancers are exquisitely sensitive to blood vessels, as I told you. And if you cut off the blood supply to cancer, it's kind of like lowering the bubbling, the air system into the aquarium. So you got enough just for the fish, but not enough for the for the algae to grow. And the body knows how to make that difference. So, for example, blood vessels that are feeding normal cells are really well constructed. Like a, think about a house that the architect really made really strong.

It's got good pilings. It's got good infrastructure. The frame is really solid. The windows are really nailed down tightly. And a cancer, when it grows blood vessels to it, doesn't do it really well. So that's like a crappy contractor that cut all the corners. And so basically the house, the blood vessel system feeding the cancer is like a crappy house. When a hurricane comes, okay, guarantee you that the vessels that are feeding the cancer are going to come flying apart.

But the ones that are feeding the healthy cells, the well-constructed ones, they're going to stick around. They're going to outlast the storm. And that's basically what we can actually do with anti-angiogenic drugs. Now, foods can do the same thing. There are many things in foods. These bioact, as we talked about, that, you know, Mother Nature, late. into plants, you know, kind of like Mother Nature's pharmacy with an F, actually can actually help to mow the lawn and get that,

tame those blood vessels so that if they're growing towards the cancer, you can kind of prune them back, trim them back to normal, and it prevents the cancers from growing new ones, which is really, really important. For cancer prevention, that's just having enough of that milieu to prevent blood vessels from overgrowing, is really, can be really important. So what are some of the things? Green tea, you know, which everybody knows is antioxidants. which can actually lower your blood sugars, help the lower your cholesterol, lower your stress

levels, your cacolamine, actually is super packed with these catacans, EGG, the main polyphenol, that is anti-angiogenic. So way back when when I got in this field, we had a test system where we were testing cancer drugs that could starve a cancer by cutting off its blood supply. And one of the things that I did is I actually dropped some green tea in there. And it was shocking how effective the green tea polyphenols were in stopping those blood vessels that were feeding the cancer. And in fact, if I didn't tell the technician doing the lab work that it was actually a natural compound, and I told them it came from a drug company, they would have been super excited about it and started jumping up and down.

And so again, you know, Mother Nature is really, really good. So polyphenols and T, EG, CG is one of them. Resveratrol and red wine, also another one that's actually really, really powerful in terms of being anti-angiogenic. Genestine, the phytoestrogen and soy, actually can also cut off the blood supply feeding breast cancer. So it's just the opposite of the urban legend out there that soy is not good for you. I recently saw an article. It was a cover of a magazine that said, you know, soy anti-nutrients or something like that. And, you know, like, my mind was blown that somebody could actually say that because most of the nutrients, including the proteins, but also the phytoestrogens and soy, again, you know, if you're a scientist, you take a look at this.

And the phytoestrogens look nothing like human estrogens. They're not dangerous. They actually block human estrogens. And they actually are also anti-angiogenic. And they cut off the blood supply to breast cancers. And this has been shown in human patients, breast cancer patients as well. Tomatoes have lichopene. So many of the, you know, the same foods that we know are good, healthy plant-based sources of

nutrition. We're now rediscovering that many of the bioactives in them are also powerful cancer, blood vessel cutting off systems that cut off the, that starve a tumor. You know, really the point that I want to drive home here is that you had this quote in your original TED talk and he said, as a doctor, I know that once a disease has progressed to an advanced stage, achieving a cure can be difficult, if not impossible. And the reason that you were sharing this in the context of your presentation and your TED talk was you were helping people understand that this is one of the main drivers of why you got interested in the topic of food.

This is something that we do, two, three times a day. And if that food could have just as similar of an impact, in some cases, even more so, then it's not what's better food or medicine. they're both great, but food is something that we all have control over. And because of education gaps in healthcare practitioners, again, well meaning they may not have the education in food, this is something where we're empowered as consumers to start making a difference in a dent. Because as most of us know, you know, there's a, there's this area that's in between, you know, you don't have cancer and you're diagnosed with cancer, right? It's not like one day you just show up at the doctor's office and then cancer came out of nowhere. It's growing always sort of in

the background, at least the conditions are until one day something changes and then it has that explosive growth. So if we can make a difference now, then we're more empowered to actually change our health and hopefully minimize or potentially even avoid some of these chronic diseases later down the path. Absolutely. I mean, you know, my, my, uh, how I got into, nutrition, molecular nutrition, was that, you know, taking care of patients who were terribly sick is incredibly rewarding and giving them an answer to why they're not feeling well and helping them trying to get solutions for that is such an important privilege to be trained and to be able to actually do. But, you know, when I started to see, I'll tell you an interesting story. So I was a

at a veterans hospital, love taking care of veterans. Most of my patients when their 50s and 60s and 70s and older, and many of them were overweight, if not morbidly obese. They had bad heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, cancer, bone diseases. I mean, you name it. There were all the problems that you would see in an older person. But the thing that really struck me as I was writing prescriptions and sending people to specialists was,

the juxtaposition of these individuals who in their second half of their lives, you know, 60s and 70s, terribly out of shape, riddled with disease, you know, and I was just trying to help them. But I also looked at these people and realized that, you know, if I put on my spectacles of the time machine, the same individual going back when they were 20 years old was cut, fit, buff as a soldier. In fact, they couldn't even serve in the military unless they were in perfect shape, right? And so what happened to these people over the course of their decades, over the course of their lives, is they've lost control of their health. And that's what made me realize treating the horse out of the barn is something worthy of doing. But why do we want to wait

for that? Why don't we actually prevent disease in the first place? And when I was thinking about prevention, you know, you really can't think about drugs. I mean, because drugs are expensive, they've got side effects, really difficult to develop a preventative drug. And who would want that anyway, but food naturally lends itself to prevention because that is indeed the intervention that we take multiple times a day. And in fact, our food is the intervention is the health care that we do for ourselves between visits to the doctor's office. I mean, we've come to regard health care as what we do when we, you know, make an appointment and step into the door and get weighed by the nurse before we sit on that, you know, that cold paper-filled table,

exam table, but in fact, most of the health care we're doing is between the time we go see the doctor. It's so true. And if we're fully going to understand the impact that food can have to, going back to that analogy you had, why is it that this cut, healthy, ripped soldier at the age of 20, and then you contrast them, fast forward a few years, you know, 40 years, they're six years old, and their systems are starting to fail. Their angiogenesis in some cases is out of control. In some cases, it's underproducing where it needs to be. What happened in the interim?

And in your book, you really highlight that in addition to angiogenesis, there's really, with angiogenesis, there's five areas. There's five sort of key areas that we have to look at these sort of systems in the body to understand what happens. when we go from being healthy to being in a place of disease. But let's walk through them, starting off with the, you know, you can pick which one you want to start off with next. And we'll give a little bit of an overview, just like we did with angiogenesis.

Yeah, sure, Drew. I mean, this is such a great question. I'll tell you how I got into it, because I think that's the best way to articulate this for your viewers. you know, as a doctor, I was always trained to wonder why somebody got sick. What did they do? What was going on in their bodies that led to an illness? And in fact, most patients always ask me, you know, like, well, so what happened?

How did I get this? You know, how did I contract this condition? And that's how I was trained to think for decades. But reality is, and as a researcher, that's what I was looking at is what is the underlying cause of illness. But I think I discovered it was a much more interesting question. And that more interesting question is, why don't we get sick more often? We think about it. Like, kids are usually pretty healthy.

And actually, when you're in the problem of your life, you're generally pretty healthy. Yeah, you might get a flu or might get a cold every now and then. It's only when you get older that you start getting sick. And the more interesting question is like, why don't kids get cancer more often than they do? Why don't healthy adults get more heart disease? why don't they get diabetes? You know, like more often than they do. I mean, some people do in a younger age.

And so that's really by turning that question about why did I get sick into why aren't I getting sick more often, that led me down this direct path to saying, what does a body doing to prevent illness? And what is health itself? If, you know, the question, the way that I would use to answer the question, what is health is like, yeah, well, you know, you're healthy if you're not sick. And I think that's how most people would answer it. It turns out health is not just the absence of disease.

Health is the result of our body working, firing on all cylinders to keep us that way and to ward off illness. And what keeps us healthy, what wards off illness, what is firing in all cylinders are health defense systems. Now, I found five health defense systems. And I wrote about five in my book E2B disease because I've worked in the drug development field in each of these areas. Androgenesis is one of them. Let's talk about all five of them first. Blood vessels, I've done drug development in helping to grow blood vessels and stop blood vessels.

Second, our stem cells, I'll come back to that. I've done decades of work in developing regenerative medicine to try to regenerate organs. That's amazing what you can actually do in the biotech world with that. Third is a microbiome. I've done research on the microbiome with colleagues at MIT and elsewhere. fourth is genes, our DNA. And most people think of our DNA as sort of the genetic code. I've done gene therapy.

So I've actually helped to develop gene therapies. And fifth is our immune system. And our immune system, which is hardwired. And this is more important than ever before. In immunotherapy for cancer, for example, is one of the most powerful breakthroughs in the medical world today. So I've got the street credit of doing drug development in each of these areas. But rather than thinking about using using. using drugs to activate these systems.

If we turn the sock inside out and take a look at, okay, so how do these systems actually defend our health? Our circulation prevents disease by feeding our healthy cells and preventing bad diseases from growing like cancer. Our stem cells, by the way, you may not know this, but all of us have about 75 million stem cells that are in our bodies at any given time. And we're actually made it as stem cells because when we were in our mom's wombs, the only reason our bodies were able to even form a human figure, like, you know, the little Plato that kind of forms humans in the womb is because of stem cells.

And we retain some of those after we're born and we lock them up in our bone marrow and in our skin and elsewhere. And our bodies regenerate continuously. That's one of our health defense systems, because, you know, as we age, we need to repair ourselves from the inside out. Like, we know our hair regrows for most people. We know that even our mucus membranes are the sort of skin in our mouth. We grow. Anybody who's ever, you know, had a really hot, something, a hot piece of food and you burn your mouth and, like, man, like it totally screws you up.

Next day, you're back to normal because you're, you're, skin in your mouth, your mucous membrane, regenerated. Okay? That's like eating a Dorito and you scrape the top of your mouth. Next day, you'll be fine because of regeneration. But what's amazing is that our organs regenerated from the inside of. If I took your liver and we cut off two thirds of your liver and left one third left, it would regenerate the rest of the two thirds.

Just like a star foot, you regenerate an arm. Your lung, if I cut off the tip of your lung, it would grow right back. And what we're starting to realize is that the playbook of human biology is being rewritten, because when you and I were kids, I'm sure our grade school teachers taught us the same thing. Starfish and Salamanders regenerate, but people don't. Wrong. People regenerate. And so now we can actually try to coax this regeneration to go faster.

It's one of our defense systems. And while biotech people are trying to figure out ways to make us regenerate, foods can also cause us to prompt regenerate. as well, which is really cool. Foods like chocolate, foods like dark cacao, like dark chocolate, cacao, polyphenols can actually stimulate regeneration.

There's all kinds of other biotech kind of things that can actually do this, but Mother Nature has laced things that can be regenerative, like ursolic acid and fruit peel, can coax our stem cells to come out of our bone marrow

to stimulate regeneration as well. I mean, imagine a few, a future in which we understood how to match the substance in a food that naturally occurs with something that we need like brain regeneration for dementia, for example. That would really be a game changer. And so that's where the future of understanding our body's hardwired self-devences for regeneration goes. Microbiome, you know, we've got like 39 trillion bacteria in our body, most of them in our colon. And we know that when our gut bacteria is healthy, it controls our hormones, it controls our cholesterol metabolism. It controls how our, how our body uses

blood sugars. When we screw up our gut bacteria, it screws up everything. Like literally, we've got an ecosystem inside our body that if we don't take care of that ecosystem, it destroys, it wrecks the rest of our body. And something that's stunning to know, for example, is that is how vulnerable the system is artificial sweeteners like you find in a diet soda can in 24 hours overnight start to destroy your gut microbiome the healthy gut bacteria start to change they don't like that artificial sweeteners because they're trying we don't absorb those those calories right those are the those are the non-caloric sweeteners so we get the taste in the front end in the back end we don't absorb it so we don't get the calories but guess what our bacteria are eating those things too

and they don't like it. We're poisoning the field. When those bacteria don't like it and they start dying, it affects our metabolism. It affects even our hormone, our brain hormone. So we want to keep our gut defense system, which is tied to our immune system, by the way, really, really healthy. Our DNA is another defense system. People don't realize this, but we make 10,000 mistakes in our DNA every single day that causes mutations, which then can cause cancer. fortunately our DNA system defends us by fixing itself and our immune system of course is like an

our ultimate shield to prevent us from bad guys coming in from the outside whether it's COVID or whether it's the flu or whether it's you know some other germ but also our immune system protects us from bad guys on the inside of our body and that's those cancers that we started talking about our immune system conducts surveillance to take out those bad guys inside our skin as well. You know, last year, because you mentioned COVID, was such a big year for a lot of people who previously, as you mentioned, never really thought about, they thought about being healthy was just the absence of disease. But last year, with everything that the world went through in the pandemic, there was so much more interest in education. I think that's the silver lining of all the

challenging things that we went through and the unfortunate deaths, the untimely deaths. there was so many more people that started to pay attention to this topic of wow okay i might not be fully you know uh have some diagnosable chronic disease but is my are all these systems working at an optimal level that enhances my layer of protection have you did you see a big interest in your work and what you were putting out there in the context of everything that's happened in the you know last 18 months yeah well you know i mean i i was one of of those people that when the lockdown came and I made sure every after I made sure everybody in my family was safe and my friends and family were safe, you know, I was sitting around wondering what to do.

And I'm the kind of person that, you know, in a crisis, I try to go to work. And so I took my research to dive in there to understand what's going on with COVID. How could we have a counter-send counterstrike or countermeasures against this. And this is where nutrition and immunity all kind of came into clarity. And because we then found that COVID actually damages our blood vessels, that meant that we want a better antigenesis defense system. We need a better immune system. We discovered pretty early on that COVID damages your microbiome,

takes down, you know, your gut bacteria. And now we want to kind of defend our microbiome. And so now you can kind of see how our health defenses are more important than ever. And so I started to work on this, not only to educate people about, you know, how to actually protect their immune system with the work, but I actually took what I was doing further. And in fact, you know, one of the things that I'm super excited about is that we just updated my book E2B disease with a new revised version that has complete section based on immunity. And I put new recipes on there, things that, you know, kind of came out of my work, you know, during the 2020 pandemic year to really make things even more updated. and the interest was huge. Something I did that, by the way, people kept on coming to me online and saying,

what can I actually do for myself? The pandemic told us that hospitals and doctors were rather limited in what they could offer people unless you were really, really sick, right? I mean, think about it. In 2020, nobody wanted to go to the hospital. Nobody wanted to go to the doctor. We were all stuck at home trying to figure out. out just how to shelter and how to stay in good shape. And so one of the things that I started to realize

is that, wow, in becoming isolated from the health care system, unless you basically were needing to go to the emergency room and maybe needed to go on a ventilator, at home, this is where we became reacquainted with our kitchen, our stovetop, our pantry, our refrigerator. And when we went out to go shopping, by the way, it was like a Navy SEAL mission. We made a list. We put on our stuff. We zipped out there, got our supplies and then bolted back to the safety of our home. That made us rethink how we go shopping. People were not just like lounging and cruising and going to the end caps and, you know, being a sucker to the marketing and buying the junkie food. No, we went out there and we got whatever we needed and came back and camped out and then cooked for us. So I think it was this resurgence in the interest in being able to take charge of people's own health. And so that's the other. thing that I did is in response to all of this interest, I, you know, developed an online course and started to teach people what I know so I could start sharing with them. What is it that we could do when we're on our own? You know, we weren't on a desert island. We were in our homes

with a fridge and a stove. What could we do to actually elevate our own health and how could we eat to be disease? Let's talk about a practical example. I mean, even prior to you adding the section on immunity, you know, inspired by COVID, you were talking about immune system in general and even things like things that would make you more resilient towards getting the flu, right? Or other just general viruses that we would expose through. Let's throw a few tidbits out for the audience that's listening and watching. What are some examples of some things that radically can support the immune system, foods that we all may know of, but might not be including on a regular basis? Let's start with one of my favorites, which is blueberries, right?

So blueberries are blue because they contain a natural dye that is colored blue that is called anthocyanin. And anthocyanins have been found to be powerful activators of our immune system in a beneficial way. So they don't cause autoimmune disease. They actually elevate our T cells and natural killer cells. These are part of the super soldiers that make up our immune system. You know, they're, they just kind of like give more weapons to our immune system to defend against invading armies.

And just by eating like a cup and a half of blueberries a day, you can elevate your T cells by like 88 percent. Okay. And athletes that actually eat blueberries regularly, they just walk around with a higher level of immunity to begin with. It's kind of a performance maintainer, not an enhancer. and maintainer because your immune system is also firing at peak. Now, what's also interesting is that the same anthocyanin lowers inflammation.

So this is a classic dilemma that is out there in a wellness world. Like, yeah, we want to get rid of inflammation. So we want to make sure our immune system isn't overactive. Well, look, inflammation is a subset of immunity. We want good, strong immunity to protect us from invaders. And we want to also lower inflammation at the same time. Blueberries can actually do that. Another great way of actually elevating immunity is with broccoli.

Now, broccoli contains a natural compound called sulfurophane. It's actually a family of different natural chemicals that kind of give broccoli its kind of unique taste. It's also in kale, charred, all these other kinds of salad vegetables, honestly. But broccoli is particularly strong in. And it's been shown that actually you can actually boost your T cells, again, the super soldiers of your immune system by just eating broccoli. But here's like a little pro tip and a little tiny hack. If you want to get as much as you can out of broccoli, you should eat normal adult broccoli. But here's the thing.

The tree tops are good, but the stems have twice as much of the sulfurophane. So don't throw the stems away when you're cooking it. You know, if you don't want to saute the stems, there's plenty of recipes you can use with stems. You can put it into a blender, turn it into a soup. A little broccoli oregano soup. Amazing. You put a little vegetable stock in there. It's like a really tasty way of actually using broccoli and getting more of these sulfurophanes.

But if you really want to like rocket with your broccoli sulfurophanes, you eat broccoli sprouts. These are the three to four day old baby broccoli. And it turns out that the broccoli sprouts have a hundred times more sulfurane than the grown-up broccoli. So, and actually the study has been done looking at the people getting the flu vaccine. These are 20-year-olds, healthy 20-year-olds, just getting the flu vaccine. And it was found that if you gave the flu vaccine and gave somebody broccoli, a shake met or broccoli sprouts, you could ramp up their immune response by 22 times. So, like, really just amp up your immune system without causing inflammation.

It seems very deliberately since the beginning of your career and your TED talks all the way up to today. So much of your attention is focused on adding in. You really want the audience to add in and the readers to add in. And I'm curious about that from your perspective of how you arrive there and how much does the balance come in terms of adding in versus, as you were talking earlier with artificial sweeteners in the gut microbiome, that there's certain foods that, just by taking them out, we allow the body to do what it does naturally. How do you think about that balance? Yeah. Well, look, first of all, I'm like most people, I think, when you tell me not to do something, my brain goes, well, maybe I'll do it a more time. Maybe I'll try it. And so there's a lot of human nature to how we respond when somebody says something to take something away from you.

And human nature abhors deprivation. And so one of the things is, you know, I think most of us like to have our, quote, cake and eat it too. And so I always felt when I was, you know, taking care of patients and trying to counsel them on things, rather than tell them to remove things from their diet, because that's really easy to do. And there's plenty of people out there, you know, scolding people, you know, fear, guilt, and shame is sort of like the building blocks of traditional counseling about nutrition.

you know, and makes you feel bad, actually, when somebody tells you, you know, like you're a bad person for eating junky food. What I try to, too, is empower people because I think people love to feel justified in what they love like. And so in my book, I read about 200 foods that all activate the body's health defenses. And I used to say, I dare you to find in this 200 foods something like that I dare you to find, review this foods and tell me that there's nothing that you like. and most people actually find something in 200 foods that they actually like. And I say, well, look, start with this because what you like is already good for you. So you're already way ahead of the game. And if you can start and keep on adding things that you like and just understand, this is that education knowledge piece.

What you like is good for you. Then you can love your food and love your health at exactly the same time. And then this whole idea of anti-deprivation is that if you spend more time thinking about what to add to your body that's good for you, you'll spend less time thinking about the bad stuff and more good things in your body, kind of push out room for bad things. And if you spend most of your time fortifying your body's health defenses, those five health defenses, angiogenesis, stem cells, microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity with foods, honestly, every now and then, you can fall off the wagon, you can eat something you really like,

who you really want to or, you know, everybody's eating it around you. And it's not that good for you. That's all right. your body's got you covered. Your health defenses are there as a shield. So again, you know, like I think that there's just a healthier way to navigate through your life. These strict diets don't work for a long time.

They're unsustainable. So I'm all about how do you actually get people to feel like they're in control and what they like to do already is actually good for them. Now, that's a great explanation. It's you're crowding out the quote unquote bad. I mean, there really is no bad because the beautiful thing about it is that, you know, There's this term that's coming out now more with blood sugar and continuous glucose monitors. And the idea is metabolic flexibility that when you're doing, when you have a diet that is maintaining a healthy blood sugar on an average basis, then you go somewhere.

You want to enjoy something. You enjoy that thing. You're not having the stress of this thing is going to completely throw me off because your foundation is so healthy, so resilient that you can, enjoy some of these things because food is not just about fueling our body and avoiding disease. It's all about the joy, social aspects, breaking bread together, so to speak. And that adds a lot to life, including severely reducing stress. And I find that the healthier that I become with the foundation and having a ton of plant foods inside of my diet by volume, I would still say most of the calories, by calorie, it's still

probably a little bit heavily reliant on, you know, the healthiest quality animal foods that I can find, wild caught fish, grass-fed steak, you know, things like that that'll throw in. But by volume, it's still plants. When I have that base, I also have less desire for these other things. So instead of eating the whole croissant, I was in Mexico City recently and we came by an incredible bakery, I just wanted a little taste. I wanted to get the idea of it. I had a little bit. I was like, that's cool, because I never feel deprived. I never feel that I have to use willpower to say that I can't eat something or that it's bad for me. No, this is something that I can enjoy.

I get the point and then I can move on from there. Yeah, you know, I know there's this, you know, Japanese saying Harahachibun Me that basically says just eat 80% and then leave, you know, like quit the clean play club and don't eat, you know, and just eat 80% of what your body would want. I have another, which I think is really healthy. It's kind of like your own way to actually have caloric restriction, which we know scientifically is good for you. But I have another story to tell you.

Please. I traveled to Asia after college, and I was in China in Beijing. And this is, you know, soon after China, not too long after China opened up for tourism. So, you know, this is many decades ago. And I went to visit the summer palace. And I've been back a few times. Obviously, this is way before the pandemic. And you can actually visit the summer palace where the Dauers or Empress lived.

And basically this royalty of China basically is fed by imperial chefs. And it was a restaurant. So I was honored to be able to dine there. And they wanted to serve an imperial meal to show you what it was like back then. So I'll tell you, most of it was plant-based, but they had 30 different types of dishes that came out in a dinner. 30, okay? And there's no way you can eat 30 dishes. Right? I mean, think about it. You go to like a steakhouse. There's no way you're going to eat 30 meals or you go to a vegetarian restaurant. You're still not going to eat 30 meals. So what I learned that was that never left my mind was that food is pleasurable. And the way that the approach was not to put a lot on the plate, have a lot of different variety to really be able to stimulate the taste buzz, get the enjoyment of the food, make people feel like they could indulge and enjoy their meal.

Dowager Empress would just eat with the chopsticks. Just take one bite out of each plate. Okay. And just get a sampling. And so that's what I realized, when you're talking about the croissant, it brought that memory back to me. You know, like, you don't have to have the whole hog of whatever it is they're serving. You can actually satisfy your indulgence by having a taste of it,

savoring it, like really try to enjoy it. And that way, you know, if you, and if it gives a little bit of time, you don't, it's not going to make you want to go back and just pig down on the whole thing. Like, learn how to enjoy the taste of something, allows you to experience more without having to stuff yourself. It's well said. And I think for a lot of people who are listening here, you know, just like you gave the example about the broccoli and the broccoli sprouts, they know food is powerful. And we're all creatures of habit. We get into buying the same sort of five, you know, vegetables that everybody ends up having, corn, potatoes, you know, all those classic examples.

Tomatoes, which obviously have a lot of healthy properties as you highlight inside of your book. But when we talk about variety and getting inspired, that's what I really love about what you guys are doing with your course and kind of extending out the book is you're giving even more inspiration, more education so that people can get excited about wanting to go try something new so that you go into Whole Foods, you go into Trader Joe's, you go into your local supermarket, wherever it is or shopping online, and you're like, wow, I'm actually going to pick out this other food that I kind of overlooked. What's an example of one of those things that is an underrated food, something that people overlook and might not have as part of their normal

routine, but can have such a profound effect if they start including it into their diet. Yeah, I'll tell you a great one. Kiwis. Right. So, these sort of, I don't know, baseball shape, little smaller baseball, furry little brown things. You cut them open, they're beautiful and green with seeds, starbursts on the inside. I didn't use to, I always liked Kiwi, but I never really ate them very much, but I started doing the research on them. And Kiwi is pretty amazing. First of all, it's a great source of vitamin C and fiber.

And the vitamin C actually has tremendous antioxidant effect, and it can protect your DNA. And studies have been shown that actually if you eat one Kiwi, day, it'll protect your DNA against damage by about 60%. If we ate three Kiwis, it would actually help your body build any damage DNA back by about 60%. And so here's something simple that you can peel, cut up, chop it into a yogurt or just eat plain. It's delicious. You can put it into a smoothie that actually has this amazing ability to actually protect your genetic material.

Like, you know, that's so fundamental. And it tastes great and not too sweet. and it's got a little citrusy flavor. Then the other thing that's great about kiwi is that it's packed with fiber. Now, fiber is basically a kiwi is essentially a prebiotic food. Its fiber feeds our gut microbiome. And studies have shown, this is a study done in Singapore that show that just eating a kiwi, even one kiwi, overnight will start to change your gut microbiome favoring more healthy species

of bacteria. And so, you know, like I always tell people, like, if I tell you something like that and you try a Kiwi, you know, you can't unlearn what I just told you. Every time you see the Kiwi, you're going to say, you know what, I know there's something good about it. And then if you remember what that is, that's really what I try to do with my course is really try to teach people how to make it second nature to make great choices and to be enthusiastic about it. Like I think most people are kind of intimidated by, this is, you know, kind of like the whole philosophy behind my course, people are

intimidated by diets, right? To begin with, they're a little, you know, maybe I didn't do so good in my life. I should do better. You know, it's always people go into a diet in order to try to get better. And what I try to shift that paradigm is, look, if you're serious about getting healthy, and this is the time you want to actually do it, it's not that difficult. You just kind of dive in, engage. You do want to be awake. You need to be alert. And you've got to realize it's not about somebody feeding you a superfood or a super supplement. And that's all you got to take. every day, you know, it's really about understanding more about you, self-knowledge, about how your own body works, right? Like at some point, we all figured out how our eyes work and how our

lungs work and how our prostate works and our uterus. Figure this out. This is like, this is like the cutting edge science. You want evidence. You want food as medicine and you want to know that. It's not about memorizing food. It's about memorizing how your body actually works. And then recognizing and our bodies actually work really well to complement certain foods. And so what does the tomato do? Well, tomato complain, it's lycopene. What does lycopene do? Actually protects our prostate.

Man, that's a really good thing. Also protects our breasts. That's a really great thing. You don't need to remember all the chemicals. You just need to remember that that's the way to do it. And then I try to get people to be passionate about cooking because, you know, one of the antidotes to unhealthy eating, is really trying to get back into the kitchen and preparing your own meals.

You don't have to be a fancy chef. You don't even have to have a fancy palate. You know, if you can fry an egg, you can actually cook healthy food. And that's what I try to do is to try to make people feel like, lower your guard. It's not a problem. You know, you can actually learn how to do this. And, you know, there's nothing more satisfying to me than actually go out and, you know, find some great looking healthy, fresh foods, figure out how to cook them and taste it myself.

Like it's like, you know, like back in wood shop when you're in junior high school and you created your own toolbox. Like, man, that's really cool. I made that. And that's how I want to get people to feel excited about, about food as medicine. This is not hard. It is not a burden. It's not an onus.

This is something that you can do. You can make for yourself. It's powerful because, you know, we started off this interview by talking about how, again, well-meaning, well-intentioned researchers, practitioners, you know, people that we look to as the voice of authority in a lot of key areas, sometimes it's not the absence of evidence. It's just the lack of awareness of the evidence that's there. But also, we as individuals call us consumers, people that are in charge of our own health that are just trying to live a happy life, take care of our families. We have to take on some of that burden. I think in a way

we have, and there's a lot of layers to this, but we expect a little bit too much from our doctors. We expect a little bit too much from the healthcare community. They're just doing their best, right? They're just doing their best that they can. So we have to remember that, you know, where we need help and thank the Lord for all the incredible medicines, many of which you've been a part of, you know, developing that have given us healthier lives and extending lives as well, too. but on a day-to-day basis, us getting educated is so key and central because if you don't know

or care enough, then you become a victim of sort of the marketing. And the marketing could be in the health world and the wellness world or the marketing could be towards big food companies. Again, all primarily well-intentioned. We used to be a society that was dying of not enough food. And that's where a lot of that marketing comes from. but now we're dying of having too much of, you know, too much food and too much of especially the wrong foods that are there, the ultra-processed foods.

So empowering yourself, empowering yourself with that knowledge, it actually is the thing that makes the difference. You know, it makes the difference in our lives. And while we have a little bit more time over here, I think one area to geek out a little bit in is in this topic of the gut microbiome, and you mentioned a term a little bit earlier, polyphenols. Now, a lot of folks that are familiar with the term polyphenol primarily think of it as an, you know, an antioxidant. But in your book and in your continued work, you started to highlight that this is so much bigger than that.

Polyphenols, which I'd love for you to define and give some examples of, they actually operate as sort of like gut modulators inside of our bacteria. And they're like orchestrators in terms of keeping us healthy when it comes to our microbiome, which has all sorts of. sorts of implications. So let's talk about polyphenols a little bit more and give us some of the highlights of some of the research that you came across in that area. Right. Well, so, you know, let's let's take the word down polyphenol and break it down into what it actually means. A phenol is something a chemist would understand. You could give a chemist a piece of chalk and a chalk and they would draw what that chemical structure looks like. And a poly of the phenol just means there's a lot of those little chemical structures floating around.

That's all you really need to know about the chemistry of what a polyphenol is, is that it's kind of a building block, and there's lots of different ways to construct polyphenol. So polyphenol is not a single molecule or a single chemical. It's actually a family. And so, you know, I sort of think about it in the best possible way. You know, it's sort of like ammunition, like ammo. And so there's different types of ammo that you can actually give your body

and give your microbiome as well. And the polyphenols belong into different categories. So you've got tea polyphenols. You've got chocolate, cacao polyphenols. You've got fruit polyphenols. And any one of these foods have more than one kind. And so it's part of the diversity and richness of any single food that we actually have. And, you know, what I love to think about is, for example, red grapes have polyphenols.

and when you actually make wine, it's the polyphenols that actually have the same coloring that gives them red wine, this characteristic color. And the stuff that settles at the bottom of the vat, when you make wine, that's also really, really rich with polyphenols, which is red wine is richer with polyphenols than white wine.

But that's not the only thing that has polyphenols. T also has polyphenols. talked about EGCG. And we tend to kind of gravitate towards understanding one or two, but there are thousands of polyphenols in a cup of tea. Many which we don't even have a name for yet. We don't even have a name for half of them. Like, you know, like the most undiscovered country is not outer space. It's actually inside our food. It's like the inner space of our fruits and vegetable produce section and also some animal proteins as well. I think there's some really amazing things and seafood, shellfish, seaweed, you know, things that are not classically, you know, grown on a

farm. And so that's what's exciting to me is discovering these things. There are polyphenols in almost every fruit and vegetables where you're talking about a cherry or a cranberry or whether you're talking about a plum. You've got polyphenols that are there. And there are even polyphenols in tree nuts that can actually be very beneficial. as well. So I think that the term polyphenol is known as an antioxidant, but for example, when we eat them, let's just use a, let's use green tea as a great example of polyphenols.

You sip a cup of tea. Our body absorbs some of it. Some of the polyphenols like EGCG, the epigal catacetychin gallate, actually feeds our gut microbiome. The bacteria also. get to share in whatever it is that we consumed, whether it's tea or fruit. And so the bacteria digest these polyphenols. As they're digesting these polyphenols, the bacteria are creating their own metabolites. So anytime we put in something in, gets crunched, and then there's metabolites that come out, same thing as a bacteria. And what the bacteria produce, you mentioned the sort of the orchestra producing music.

the bacteria produce these other metabolites called short chain fatty acids, sometimes called scafas. There's three main ones that are made. The number doesn't matter, but really, I mean, unless you're like really hardcore about it, but these short chain fatty acids actually, they help lower cholesterol in our bloodstream. Another one actually lowers inflammation, which is a really good thing. Another one actually helps our blood sugar, our body use blood sugar better. and some of them are anti-angiogenic.

They starve cancers by cutting off the bloods, but they groom our circulation as well. And so here's sort of this daisy chain of effect, where Mother Nature has put something into the food. The food is consumed by us. We absorb some of the good stuff, and it activates our body's cells, but some of it also goes to our bacteria.

And our bacteria also get to get the upside of whatever we ate that's good stuff, and they digest it and produce their own metabolites. So we produce metabolites from polyphenols. Our bacteria produces polyphenols, and that's all part of this incredible health defense systems. The more good stuff to eat with polyphenols, the more we actually benefit from it,

and we start to flood our own system with the good stuff, which leaves less room for the bad stuff. Crowding out is what you were talking about. One specific strain of bacteria, that different reports, but it seems to be about 3 to about 5% of our total bacteria, and you write about it is acrimancia. And one of the reasons why that bacterial strain is getting a lot of attention is that it seems to be that people who have lower levels of acrimandcia,

municipal, or municipality, you could probably pronounce it better than I can, that they are more likely to become obese or they're more likely to have their metabolic health. not in the best condition. So this isn't just about having a good microbiome for the sake of having a good microbiome. These pillar strains of bacteria, and there's millions of them that are out there, they, well, millions of types of bacteria,

I don't know how many pillar strains there are. They have direct implication on us immediately. Yeah. So I learned about acrimancia because one of my colleagues, Dr. Lawrence Zitvogel in Paris, was studying cancer patients. So we're back to cancer again. And she was studying like 200 different cancer patients with different types of cancers. And they are all being treated for their cancer using immunotherapy.

So these are the treatments that are biotech given to cancer patients. The treatments don't kill cancer cells directly. But what the treatments do is they rip the cloak off of the cancer that's trying to from your own immune system to allow your own immune system to tackle that cancer. Remember that health defense property of our immune system to fight the bad guys inside our body? And we know from immune therapy as doctors that, you know, they can be an amazing win, meaning that some cancer patients are able to literally have their cancers completely disappeared, even if it's metastatic cancer.

My mother was one of those people. but President Jimmy, former President Jimmy Carter was another one who had metastatic cancer that spread to his brain on immunotherapy. All went away, all doing well today. No sign of cancer. We don't like to use the word cure because it is such a loaded word, but it's about as good as you can get from a, you know, as a doctor and someone to involve a biotech. But that only happens in less than about less than 20% of people, right?

And so Dr. Zitbogel was doing this research. I helped to convene a conference called rethinking cancer. Like, how do we rethink our whole approach to cancer? Fresh, kind of a fresh start. And she found that in 200 consecutive patients with different types of cancers, all getting immune therapy, if you split them up into groups that responded and did really, really well with their immunotherapy, had their immune system, you know, attack and wipe out the cancer,

versus the people who didn't do well, where their body didn't respond the right way, The only difference between the responders and the non-responders was one bacteria in their gut, and that one bacteria was acrimancia. And it's acrimancia and eucinophila. That musinophila actually says it all. This bacteria, which is considered now to be a guardian of our microbiome, it's one of the guardians of our health, loves to grow in the mucous membrane, in the mucus inside our gut.

So our gut, actually, most people don't know this, but actually, Our gut has mucus. You know this if you have diarrhea, it's very mucusy, but there's some mucus in there all the time. And that mucus is sort of like topsoil for acrimancia. Loves to grow in there. That's the garden of the acrimancia where this guardian bacteria loves to grow. So if you take antibiotics, you can wipe out your acrimancia like that. Okay, and then you've got to grow back.

And so what she was finding is that people who were not responding to the immune therapies, you need a good immune system that they were missing their acrimancia. And many of them had been taking antibiotics, you know, as a matter of course, as a cancer patient, you might get sick. Man, you take like a Z-Pact, man, you wiped out your acrimancy. Now you got to grow back. So this was like a brand new discovery was published in a journal science. For me, when I saw that, and I saw it before when it was embargoed, I saw the original data.

It like the light bulb just like one blazing in my brain. like, holy cow, we have got these guardians in our microbiome that we have to take care of. And the reason that I got involved in this food is medicine is that you cannot eat an acrimancia probiotic. So you can eat a lot of other bacteria in probiotics. You cannot eat acrimancia. The only thing you can do with acrimancia right now is to grow it yourself. This is a DIY kind of bacteria.

And the way you grow it is actually by creating more healthy mucus, that topso. soil that it likes to grow it. So how do you do that? You do that with food as medicine. So pomegranate, cranberry, uh, uh, conquered grape, the juices, you know, you only need eight ounces of a, of a glass of cranberry juice, a pomegranate juice, and, you know, you'll be able to actually grow back to sacramanza. I had a cancer patient, by the way. This was a couple of years ago, who, um, had multiple myeloma, was going to get an immunotherapy. Uh, and, um, um, her doctor was really gung-ho to get her immunotherapy or oncologist. And she had, her kids had a cold.

So she had got a bronchitis and got a Z-PAC. Okay. And so before we started this immunotherapy, I basically said, let's check your stool. Set out her stool for acrimancia, zero, which you would expect from the Z-Pack, okay, and the antibiotic. And so I said, no, no, no, let's put the brakes on here. So we skid it to a halt before actually giving her the immunotherapy. I'm like, we do not want to waste this shot on gold.

Like, this is her shot. And so I gave her cranberry juice and pomegranate juice. And we had her drink for three weeks straight every single day. And then we tested it at the end of three weeks. So we delayed her treatment for three weeks. When we tested her stool again, she had six times above the average population of Acrimanza. So she really killed it and got a ton of acromancey.

She got on her immunotherapy. and within three treatments, she responded to the upper 1% of responders. So she was like super responder and just completely recovered from her cancer, like completely wiped it out. And again, this is sort of me learning from research that had been done and published in research and evidence thinking about how food fits into it and actually using our body's own defenses to really help itself. This was not food versus medicine.

This was food and medicine. And I think that's something I want your viewers to really take away from. Like, you know, we're really not talking about food versus medicine. Like, we're way beyond that. Honestly, you can still have that battle. But it really is about this totality. You know, we want to be able to figure out how to use all the tools in our disposal to be able to win this battle, you know, which is called our life as we journey through it.

And we can enjoy ourselves with food along the way, you know, then that's really having our cake and eat it too. It's so true. And the earlier we start, the less reliance that we have on medicines, not for the sake of just not having reliance on them, but to avoid any potential side effects or other stuff. At the end of the day, whatever gets the job done gets the job done. And there are sometimes folks in situations. I think you mentioned your mother who had cancer. Is that right?

Yes, that's right. She had metastatic endometrial cancer and had surgery removed. It came back very aggressively within about a year. year. And, you know, like if you were just using the playbook of the 20th century, you know, she would have gotten chemo or palliative care. And that would have been it. Like pretty much, like most of the old school doctors that were involved with her care said, you know, game over. And I, you know, said, no, actually, it's game on, you know. And that's where we actually are at. you know, things that we thought were unbeatable before, we're beginning to actually see a whole new frontier

open up on this. And this is where understanding how our body is the most powerful system of defense that we could possibly imagine and how foods can activate that and help us to be able to resist disease. And, you know, gain those extra quality years. It's not about how long you live. It's about how well you live along the way. And so this is why we have to enjoy our food. You know, one of the things that I really try to teach in my course and, you know, and also my master classes is how do we really approach our food, not just from sort of like that, you know, I'm a robot.

I want to try to remember what I need to do. What are my instructions that I need to follow to be healthier? But no, I think that we want to actually bring food back to what it really means. Food is true. One of the most intimate things that we have in our life. Our food tells us something about our childhood, the smells we had, our memories when our mom cooked in the kitchen growing up. It tells us about our own current families.

It tells us about our community. And no matter where you come from, you know, we all come from someplace. It tells us something about our culture. And that's why I think that if we can actually lean into our food and relate back to what food means to us, what do we prefer, what's meaningful to us? What do we think about when we're selecting them with healthy foods? How do we make those choices that are meaningful? Now you've actually got a different formula for approaching food as health, food is medicine,

than just trying to memorize some strict diet that you're not going to be able to stick to anyway. So true. When we have our health in a good place, it allows us to give love and attention to everything else that we care about. You know, the goal is not to eat the perfect diet. The goal is to have strong health so that we can give love and attention to all the other beautiful things in our life that we want to do. Dr. William Lee, this has been a super pleasure. I'm excited for you to tell the audience a little bit more about your course, where they can

sign up because I think you have a master class or a course coming up right now that people can participate in, especially if they found this interview in Lightning, which you've been listening this far. You probably have. And you want to go a little deeper so that you can benefit your health, your family, health. So where can they go to get more information and how long is it and give us some details? Yeah. Well, so I, you know, first of all, I have free masterclasses that I give online. They've been incredibly popular. And I feel such a sense of purpose in being able to communicate

with these free master classes. You know, what do I know to give people an intro to the Five Health Defense systems and all the foods that you can eat? that can possibly activate them. Can't talk about all the foods in a master class. But I try to share a little bit about my passion about how I got into it and how it's doable and how you can actually benefit your actual health in practical ways.

So the master class is always free. It's a great intro to me. And you can find all the upcoming dates from my masterclasses on my website, which is at www. dot Dr.D.R. William Lee, That's Dr.D-R. William Lee.com.

Dr. Williamley.com. You can find, I've got posting on all my upcoming masterclasses. And you can just tap on the tab. This is masterclass on top to figure that out. Now, for people who really want to do a deep dive, and I encourage people to come take a master class first, because you'll get a little bit of a sampling of what the class is all about. My online course is a four-week course.

It's videos. It's me coming on live every single week with office hours, because I have a teaching background. I come from a teaching family. I love to get online and just kind of interact with people. And it's a great way, opportunity to get questions, answer questions. I can't give medical advice because I'm not doing telemedicine, but really trying to share information and everybody's got questions.

And then I've got a section called QA-N-S, which is questions and answers. And it's a way for me to invite people to submit questions and I answer them. I post them for everybody who takes the course so that everybody can see the questions that other people asked. Because a lot of times you can't, you know, you're like, hey, that's a good question. I didn't think of it, but now I am interested in and also see the answers for everything. And, you know, and it's just a great community. And it starts with my master classes.

I will tell you, my master classes, when I first started them, I had no idea the amount of interest that I actually get. I thought, you know, maybe I'd get a couple of dozen people that would come on. like in 24 hours, like a thousand people signed on with one masterclass. Another masterclass, like 8,000 people that signed on. So I started to actually have to, you know, kind of limit them and break them down. But it's a great way. Just come to my website.

Find out about my upcoming dates for all my masterclasses are all posted. Click a masterclass. Sign on. It's completely free. And it's a great way just to kind of get to know me a little bit more and get into a deeper dive into what we've talked about today. Yeah. You can find all those on your website, but we have them in the show notes too. So anybody who missed it, just click on the show notes and you can click over and check them out. Dr. William Lee, thank you for being who you are in the world and really giving people a sense of hope and empowerment when it comes to their health. You know, health, aging, you ask most people on the street, you pull them over and you say, you know, do you want to live to be, you know, 80, 90, 100 years old? And a lot of people say, I don't know, because their version of, aging and being at those ages is somebody who is maybe really sick and in old folks home

and is going through a really tough time in life. And they think of that as miserable. But it doesn't have to be that way. And it wasn't that way throughout human history. We actually, for the most part, you know, aged well, had a great health span and lifespan. And then one day we went to sleep and we didn't wake up and we lived a fulfilling life. And it wasn't this scary thing. Aging was something that we actually in many cultures, especially your background, my background, we looked forward to. And in a way, you teaching about nutrition and the foods that can empower us is returning us back to that spirit of how to live a healthy, fulfilling life and not really live in fear, which there's been a lot of in this past year. So I just want to acknowledge you and thank you for all the incredible

work that you're doing for everyone out there. Well, thank you, Dr. I want to just say that that, you know, good health makes us feel ageless. And the thing I want to really leave all of your viewers with is really that it's possible to love your food, to love your health. And with good health comes great aging. And that's really what I think a fulfilling life is all about. Well said. Dr. William Lee, thank you again for being on the podcast. We appreciate you.

Thank you for having me.