Dhru Purohit Show - The Surprising New Science of Metabolism, Weight Loss And Fat Burning with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, Joovv, and LMNT.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. William Li to discuss how to get off yo-yo dieting and find an eating approach that will work for you for the long haul. Dhru and Dr. Li discuss which foods cause weight gain and slow metabolism, which foods help burn body fat and heal your metabolism, and where you can find quality sources of good, healthy food. Dr. William Li 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 research has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases, including diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity.  He is the President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, which leads global initiatives on food as medicine. His newest book, Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer will be released on March 21, 2023. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. William Li dive into: -The top conceptions people have about fat and metabolism (0:16) -Debunking the idea that some people have a fast or slow metabolism (2:50) -Why fat is more than just something to fear (13:10) -White fat versus brown fat (18:20) -How excess body fat impacts the body (29:15) -The flaws in the “calories in, calories out” approach to weight loss (40:56) -How the gut microbiome factors into obesity (50:06) -The foods that help tame body fat (1:05:11) -Dhru’s health journey and how he personalized his diet (1:30:56) -Choosing foods that support your biology (1:46:53) -Dr. William Li’s MediterAsian diet and a day in the life (1:52:55) Also mentioned in this episode: -Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer is available for preorder here.  -Dr William Li’s free Metabolism Masterclass For more on Dr. William Li, follow him on Instagram @drwilliamli, or through his website, https://www.drwilliamli.com. Cozy Earth are the most comfortable, temperature-regulating, and nontoxic sheets on the market. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRU. Enhance your health with red and infrared LED light therapy with Joovv. Right now, Joovv is offering an exclusive offer on your first order. Head over to Joovv.com/dhru and apply my code DHRU. Right now LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. That’s eight single-serving packets FREE with any LMNT order. This is a great way to try all eight flavors or share LMNT with a salty friend. Get yours at DrinkLMNT.com/DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A slow metabolism doesn't cause you to gain extra fat and weight. It's the other way around. When you add the fat back into the system, you crush your metabolism. So a slow metabolism doesn't actually make you get fat. It's extra fat crushes your metabolism. If you're curious about the ins and outs of metabolism, how it's connected to body composition, weight loss, and burning fat, today's episode is absolutely for you.

Welcome to the Drew Proet 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 a dear friend of mine, Dr. William Lee. Dr. Lee is an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Eat to Beat Disease. And he has a new book out, which we're talking about today. It's called Eat to Beat Your Diet. And it's a book that helps debunk some of the biggest misconceptions, people have about metabolism and how that's connected to both our short-term health,

you know, we all want to have better body composition in the short-term, but most importantly, our long-term health as well. In the book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, Dr. Lee, and we're going to break this down in the podcast today, introduces the surprising new science of weight loss, revealing how healthy body fat can actually help you lose weight, the good type of fat that we want, and how your metabolism at the age of 60 can be the same as when you're 20. There's a bunch of other things inside of there, including how top foods actually support your metabolism and how lifestyle habits can do that as well.

Now, a little bit more about Dr. William Lee. His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments that impact the care of more than 70 diseases, including diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, has gone. honored more than 11 million views. He's featured on all the mainstream media outlets that are out there, Rachel Ray, CNN, Good Morning America.

And he's the president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, where he leads the global initiative on food as medicine. It's always such a pleasure to have Dr. William Lee on the podcast. He gets you excited about food as medicine better than anybody else that I know. So I'm excited for you to jump into today's interview. Stay tuned. Dr. William Lee, welcome back to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here.

The new book, it's incredible. I've been spending the last couple weeks on it. It's fantastic. I'd love to start off for our audience because the book is about metabolism and really it's also about fat and rethinking fat. So give us a couple of the top misconceptions that people have about both metabolism and fat that you're trying to help them unwind with the latest science. I will start with really the, the,

the myths that I actually carried around with me for a long time, right? So the first one about metabolism that you hear so often is that people are either born with a fast metabolism or slow metabolism, right? And so the typical thing you say, my sister was so lucky, she was born with a fast metabolism. She's skinny to stick. She can eat anything. But me, I was born with the slower metabolism. That's why I've had to struggle with my weight and struggle with food, right? That's wrong. And the science actually tells us something different. That's one myth. Okay. That's number one. And who hasn't heard somebody say that? Or who hasn't said that themselves in the past. Exactly. Second thing is that this myth is that, you know,

when we reach our middle age, you know, whatever that may be, it might be 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on, we're going to start gaining weight, right? So anyone who's, let's say, above the age of 30, has stepped out of the shower, myself included, and you, out of the corner of your eye, you actually look, you see the mirror and you're naked and you see a lump or a bump that you don't want to have there and immediately flashes to your head, I'm out of a shower. I'm out of shape. I got to eat better. Then you step on the scale and the number is actually not the one that you want to actually see. You get bummed out. And like that's the trigger for thinking about metabolism and fat and food. You know, it's really the wrong set of triggers and it's actually

the wrong reason for you to actually fight body fat. And so the idea that is really startling, that's a myth is that when we reach our middle age, our metabolism naturally slows, not so. And the science also teaches us what really is actually happening. Wow. Anything else that you want to add to that? Are those two right there? That itself is like a volume of books that you can write just on that topic. I'm going to throw one more out there, which is that, you know, no matter what kind of fat you are worried about, that it's really around your waist that when you start gaining weight, that fat actually starts first. And it turns out the place that you start gaining weight when you increase your body fat isn't,

around your waist. It's not the muffin. And when I tell you where you start gaining weight, you're going to be really surprised and so are the listeners. All right. So stay tuned for that. We're going to get into all that. But we're going to start at even some of the basics, right? Let's start off with that first myth that you mentioned. And we're going to jump around a little bit inside of the book. But this idea that some people are born with a fast metabolism and some people are born with a slow metabolism. So people who have a harder time losing weight, they often think, oh my metabolism is slow. I think even back in like the 2000s I heard Oprah say this one time on TV and was like talking with the audience. Later on it kind of shifted into like thyroid and that

sort of conversation for her health. Tell us a little bit more about this idea of metabolism, even maybe some of the origins of where it even came from. Right. Well, look, a lot of people, I mean, I think probably everyone thinks that knows something about metabolism. It's a very common term. People throw that, sling that word around all the time, even doctors. You know, I'm a medical doctor. I'm trained to talk about metabolism on biochemistry. But in fact, everything that we thought we knew about metabolism was overturned about two years ago through a research study that was published in the journal Science. It's a peer-reviewed journals, one of the top journals out there for scientific discovery. And indeed, this is a real discovery. So there was a study that was led by a guy

named Herman Ponsor out of Duke University working with 90 other researchers. So this is like a global study involving 20 countries and 6,000 people in which what they were trying to do is to say, what does human metabolism really look like? All right? And not only did I want to study everybody in the exact same way to look at metabolism across 20 countries, but they wanted to study the human lifespan. Now, so much of us, you know, so much of our interest now is about life. lifespan, right, living longer.

But the real clues can be gleaned from how do we actually live, even when we're not old, but as we get older, what changes, right? If anything, like, how are we hardwired? So this study dove right into that for metabolism. What they did is took 6,000 people across the human lifespan. They studied people that were two days old and 92 years old. That's a whole gamut, all right? And they studied them using the same technique for metabolism.

They gave them all a little drink of water. Water is H2O. H is hydrogen. O is oxygen, H2O. And what they did is they tweaked the molecules for hydrogen and oxygen. So when your body, after you drink the water, your body metabolizes that you can measure your metabolism from your breath, from your blood, and from your urine. All right?

So this is how they studied 6,000 people. And when they got the results of what the metabolism was of this group of people, 6,000, across 20 countries, guess what they found. It was all over the map, just like you'd expect. Everyone's got a different metabolism, right? Wrong, because we are now in the era of artificial intelligence and high-powered computing. So what they did is they developed an algorithm to correct the metabolism outread based on their body size and how much body fat they should have versus excess body fat. So let me repeat that. They took the metabolism of everybody, 6,000 people. That was all over the map and they inserted an algorithm that would correct what the metabolism should be if you remove the excess body fat for every individual based on their body size. And when they did that, they removed that extra body fat. Out of the murkiness came four phases of human metabolism, meaning that human beings are all hardwired to have an inner metabolism that only goes through four phases from two days old

over to 90 years old. This is who we are. And that's stunning because phase one is zero to one years old. That's your first phase. And the metabolism is skyrock. So when you're born, your metabolism is about the same synced with your mothers like a menstrual cycle. First phase, it goes skyrocket. It's like a rocket ship. It goes as high as about 50% of higher than an adult metabolism. All right. That's why it's so important what we do, how we expose our babies, or infants in the first year. Like, they're highly sensitive. The metabolism is very sensitive to everything that we give them.

Okay. Think about sippy cups with the plastics and all those, you know, all those potential harms that could come. So number one, that's really important. Number second phase is from one year old to 20 years old. All right. Metabolism is coming down, down, down, down, down, all right, to adult levels. Now, think about what that means. That means through your teenage years, adolescence, while kids are.

sprouting up like a beanstalk, they're bouncing off the walls with energy, they're eating two dinners, right? All kids go through this phase like we did as well. And the parents are always thinking their metabolism must be going through the roof. Wrong. It's going down, down, down. All right. Then the third phase is from 20 years old to 60 years old.

It turns out from this research study of 6,000 people, when you subtract out the effect of excess body fat, human metabolism. is exactly the same. It's rock stable from 20 to 60. All right, that's how we're hardwired. That means that 60 is the new 20 if you allow your metabolism to do what it wants to do. All right. And then from 60, that's the third phase.

60 to 90, all right? That's the fourth phase, the final phase. Metabolism does go down, but only a little bit, 17% from between 60 and 90. So by the time you're 90 years old, your metabolism is like, Only 17% less than 20% lower than when you were 60 and when you were lower than 20. All right. These four phases actually are who we are. That's why the old textbooks of human metabolism are being ripped up and thrown out the window.

The new textbooks that are being written based on this research haven't yet been published. This is like brand spanking new information. It's steaming hot. The key thing to understand, though, and this is the empowerment part of it, is that when you add the, remember, these four phases emerge when you remove the effect of excess body fat. What this means is that a slow metabolism doesn't cause you to gain extra fat and weight. It's the other way around. When you add the fat back into the system, it shows you actually suppress and you press down, you crush your metabolism. So a slow metabolism doesn't actually make you get fat. It's extra fat crushes your metabolism. I mean, that is one of the

core concepts in the book. And when I read that, I was like, that is mind-blowing for a lot of people. Now, how you get there, how you take advantage of it, how you do all those things, we're going to be talking about them in the interview and teasing it out. But it's important to understand that because when you believe, I think for a lot of people talking to friends, especially, you know, people that are older than me, I just turned 40, a lot of my family members. There sometimes comes this feeling that when people believe they have a slow metabolism, they're like cross their hands and it's kind of like, why should I even try? Right? Because I just have a slow metabolism. Now through understanding this latest research and how you break it down inside your book, people get to understand that, no, the potential is always there.

Sure, there is a slight reduction when you turn 60, but even then it's much less than we would have expected. So now the question is, how can you step into activating that potential, which truly is one of the most empowering thing that people can hear who want to, you know, change around their body composition and take advantage of all the things that come along with improving and activating your metabolism. Yeah, well, the unlock actually has to do with the fact that you can actually burn body fat. You can burn excess body fat.

And that leads us back to this whole idea of whether fat is good or bad, right? Because most of us, I think as adults and probably shaped from the time we were teenagers, have this very negative connotation with fat. I remember when I was growing up, you know, fat was something that, you know, if you saw it on your dinner plate, like, ugh, I'm not going to eat that. And of course, you know, as bodies develop, we naturally. get very sensitized to the prejudice that's out there, you know, against body size and body fat. I mean, fat is actually a really kind of difficult word, to be honest with you.

And it turns out that the kind of fat that we need to worry about is not the stuff that you can see in a mirror. It's actually the fat that's inside your body, even in a skinny person. And that's what I write about in my book is really there is a reason for you to combat fat, but it's not vanity. Okay, I'm okay with not just vanity. Not just vanity. I'm totally fine with vanity. I mean, if it makes you feel better to look good, please do it. But the real reason from a health perspective, longevity perspective and a thriving perspective,

is that the fat that you want to fight, you can't necessarily see, all right? And that's inside your body. Even a skinny person packed inside your skinny tube, you can have excess body fat. And that's called visceral fat or vat, VAT, the A, state. stands for adipose, which comes from the word, which refers to lard, which then dates back to people eating pigs, you know, for 10,000 years. And so this idea of really taking a look at that visceral fat, and how can we, how can we unpack, how can we release our inner metabolism, unleash our inner metabolism by fighting that harmful body fat? That's where the empowerment

actually comes in. So for me, from the research that I've done, I think there's a brand, it's like a brand new day. It's like a bright sky of being able to actually do the things that you want to do, which is lose weight, fight body fat, improve your metabolism, be extra healthy, have more energy. And it all has to do with not doing something artificial. You don't need a prescription for it. You don't need to go on a crash diet for it. You just need to actually mindfully run your life and allow your body to do what it naturally wants. wants to do. And just becoming aware of that is one step, big step forward. Yeah. One of the things that comes along with being aware of it is also understanding this

thing that we were so afraid of, not to say that people, again, don't maybe want to lose weight for vanity reasons. And generally, people, I think, in today's day and age, understand that improving your body composition can also be supportive for long-term health. And you have a lot of new data on that, and we're going to tease it out. But part of this is understanding that this thing that we feared fat actually is in many ways our friend, right? So let's start there, right? Let's start there. Like, how is fat something so much more than just this thing that we fear and don't want in our lives? Well, look, I'm a research scientist. So as a scientist, I go and go back to look at the origin story of our organs. Like, what's the origin of your heart? What's the origin of your brain?

What's really interesting? And I write about this in the book is what's the origin of fat? Right? So we always think about fat when we're become sensitized to it or we see it that we don't want it to be there. But in fact, when our mom's egg met our dad's sperm in the womb, and they were just a ball of cells for a little while, the first tissues that formed were blood vessels because every organ that forms needs a circulation. The second tissue that forms are nerves because every organ needs a command structure to be able to get signals to tell the organ what to do. And the third tissue that forms is fat. Little bubbles of fatty tissue, they're called adipose cells, actually form like a bubble wrap around each blood vessel. And the reason is that biology of fat cells is they are fuel tanks for our body.

And so the blood vessels bring in the fuel ultimately when we start eating food. And that extra fuel gets stored into our extra fuel gets stored into our fat tanks, just like a car would load up with a fuel tank when you go to the filling station. You need to have a tank to be able to do it. That's what body fat actually does. And so if you think about it, like that's how body fat grows. And when you are born, right, babies are born. What's a healthy baby? A healthy baby is a fat, chubby baby with, you know, big fat cheeks, a little pudgy jaw, arms and legs that look like those circus balloon animals that you fold, you know, their wrists and their legs are. Or the Michelin Man. Big Tumman, right? Big tummy, right? So, like, acute,

baby, a healthy baby is a fat baby, chubby baby, all right? And that is healthy. In fact, if you saw a baby that had chiseled cheeks and super thin arms, super thin thighs, like a fashion model baby, like you'd be worried. You'd be like, wait, there's something seriously wrong with that baby. And you'd be right. And so fat at its origin is not our enemy. It's our friend. It's part of who we are. So now let's break it down to see what fat actually does as we're kind of going through our lives, you know, from childhood all the way to old age. And that's the thing that I think is so amazing, right? I mean, the assumption is fat as blubber.

It insulates us, right? Like a seal or a whale. Not so. Fat actually does a couple of things. I mean, the most easy to understand, fat's a cushion, all right? So we bump into the wall, we trip on the rug, and we fall on the ground. If we didn't have fat inside our body cavity around our organs, a little bit of fat, Okay, our organs would rupture because they're pretty delicate.

All right. So we need a little bit of fat just to have cushion. All right. The second thing that's really, really interesting is that fat is a endocrine organ. It releases hormones. And those hormones that it release help us with energy. So one hormone that it releases is leptin. And leptin actually controls our appetite.

It sort of the volume switch when the leptin levels are down, you get hungry, and when the leptin levels are high, you're not so hungry anymore. All right. So that's very, very helpful for getting energy because foods are energy. I'll come to that in a second. The next thing it does that this fat organ, by the way, I don't know if I mentioned this, but fat is an actual organ. It's as important as our pancreas, our liver, our spleen, our kidneys, fat as an organ,

releases these hormones. And one of the most important hormones is called adiponectin. A diponectin is probably not a term that a lot of people have heard about, But I tell you, it's the hormone that if I as a doctor were to measure the hormones in your blood, your dip in neckin levels are a thousand times higher than any other hormone in your body, higher than testosterone, testosterone, than any other thyroid hormone. And the reason it's that high is because adiponecken made by fat helps your insulin work to absorb energy into your cells. It helps to pull the blood sugar out of your blood.

All right. So that's one of the most important hormones to power our tank, our engine. And then the other hormone that I think is worth mentioning is called resistant. And resistant is sort of like the, if adiponectin is the gas pedal to allow you to absorb energy from food and from your blood into your cells, resistant is the brake. It allows you to actually slow down. So between the brake and the gas pedal, these hormones are made by our body fat. Like, that's how we're powered up long before you can even look in a mirror. I mean, number one, we had body fat before we had a face to stuff with food. Number two, when we had food, we needed fat to make these hormones so that we can actually run.

And the other function of fat that's really incredibly surprising and important is that our body fat serves as a space heater. Just like when you're in a college dorm and it's a cold night and your radier's not working, you plug in a space heater to get that warmth, that space heater. that space heater function is made by something called brown fat. Now, a lot of people may have heard of brown fat. You know, it's kind of out there in the internet, like weightlifters talk about it. But brown fat is important to understand because other types of fat, like, okay, two colors of fat, brown fat and white fat. White fat is subcutaneous fat and visceral fat.

We talked about visceral fat. That's the fat that's in your body cavity. It's the cushion. It's the baseball glove that wraps around your organs. All right. Subcutaneous fat, the other kind of white. white fat is the jiggly fat. It's under your arms, under your jails. It's the muffin. So that's the white fat. That part is one thing. Brown fat is really, really remarkable and only discovered recently

in humans. Brown fat is not jiggly. It's not lumpy bumpy, it's paper thin. And it's not near the skin, so you can't see it. It's pressed near the bone, and it's around your neck, under your breastplate, under your arms and a little bit in your back and a little bit in your belly. And that is actually a space heater. So when your body needs to fire up its metabolism, your brown fat turns on like a space heater in a like a torch actually. Like if you're lighting up your gas range, you need a clicker. Woof!

The flame goes on. That's what the brown fat does. And the energy it draws to create that flame, it draws that energy from white fat. it draws down the energy from excess fat. So brown fat burns down white fat. Good fat can burn down bad fat. And the real surprise is you can eat food that can actually turn on the brown fat. Foods and we'll get into some of those.

And also there's some lifestyle things that people can do as well. Absolutely. Can we mention a couple of lifestyle things before we get into food? We'll have a whole section on food. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, the thing that's so important about maintaining optal, look, it's all about balance, right? I mean, like so many other things about health and healthy aging. Goldilocks, right?

Not too much, not too little. Not too hot, not too cold, just the right amount. And it's not one number. It's really a level. So you can kind of cycle in and out and pretty much, you know, be okay unless you go too high or too low. So among those things that you want to basically keep your metabolism, your engine running, okay, is exercise, physical activity.

Physical activity is really important to keep our metabolism trained, running. It's kind of like a car engine. You don't want to be parked in your garage without starting it for months. Start it up, take it around a block. Okay, that's physical activity every single day. You don't need a workout. You don't need a trainer. But even like walking for 30 minutes a day actually gives your metabolism a little kickstart.

So it's actually doing its thing. Clears the pipes. All right. And in fact, one of the things I write about that's so interesting is, of course, going on aerobic exercise doing cardio is going to be better. You're going to burn more energy, of course, and burning down extra energy from I eat calories from whatever food you might have eaten the day before.

But the interesting thing is that even small amounts of movement, for example, fidgeting can actually increase your metabolism. And this is the amazing thing. You know, the fidgeting is like people that shake their legs. Yeah, this idea of like neat.

Is that something? Like, do you know, like non... I forgot the acronym of what it stands for, but it's called neat. I'll look it up, but keep on going. Fidgeting, right? I mean, you know, like, fidgeting is like shaky the legs. leg, tapping, you know, going up and down with your knee, tapping your arm, something.

People are nervous. It's like a nervous stick. When you're around somebody who's fidgeting, like it can be annoying in public, right? But it turns out that even that is a better use of your time, like you're continuously moving. So if you're at a standing desk and you actually go up and down on the balls of your feet, actually, that's kind of a fidget. Like that actually increases your energy. That's the kind of physical activity. So you've got to move somehow. The worst, absolute worst is, you know, consistent with what we know, being a couched potato doesn't help your metabolism at all. It destroys your metabolism. So you don't want to actually do that.

That's a setup for body fat to start to grow. Inflammation is set in. So you do want to set. That's a lifestyle issue that you want to actually do. Another thing that actually is very, very important is actually sleep. Now, we hear a lot about sleep as part of a healthy lifestyle. But it turns out that if you don't get enough sleep, all right. What happens is that your body's inner metabolism actually does a lot of work while you're sleeping.

Your metabolism is burning down energy, is burning down extra energy when your insulin levels are low because you're not eating when you're sleeping. And so you want to actually allow good quality sleep for the longest period of time you can. All right, there's hormones that are shifting, biochemical pathways that are shifting, metabolism that's actually activating. And so if you, let's say, typical college student, all right, staying up late, eating really late. I remember I used to have these 2 a.m. pizzas with a friends of mine, you know, and then we'd be staying up. And I've got to get early for class the next day. You know, you don't have really good sleep. And you're eating a lot of unhealthy, rich, greasy food, fatty foods right before you go to bed.

Like that is a setup where not only you. taking in more calories and not help good ones at that, but you're also actually not giving your body enough time to really do its metabolic job. So you kind of derail. So sleep is actually really important. You know, maybe we'll get into this a little bit later, but, you know, sleeping is just part of natural intermittent fasting because we're not, we're naturally not eating when we're sleeping. It's a perfect time to take advantage of our natural fasting state. So let's just talk about the college student here before we go on to the next item, right? And we'll come back to food. We're going to have a whole section on food.

Stay tuned. How is it that the college student, right, does all these same behaviors that then they're in their, even their mid-30s as they, you know, start to approach 40. And now it feels like, well, that same lifestyle that I had in the past where I was thin and I could see my stomach and everything was working well and I, you know, get up the next day and go do things. But I'm doing those same behaviors at 35 and they're wreaking havoc on my. body and as as you said earlier I can start noticing the mirror so what's going on there yeah well look

I mean when you're younger body's incredibly resilient when you're younger you can abuse yourself every now and then you'll you'll rebound back your body's hardwired systems your metabolism will will bounce back that's why you can actually pull an all-nighter you could stay up until two o'clock on a weekend and eat pizza drink beer eat pizza hang out get up the next day's study for test or whatever it is like it's possible to do that kind of stuff for a little bit but if you actually are practicing that behavior over a long period of time. What you're really doing is degrading your metabolism over time. Let me give you an analogy that I think most people understand. Our body, our metabolism is very similar to having a car with an engine that we're driving, right? So when you drive in a car,

what do you do? You know, you're running your engine. You implicitly know that. You don't think about your engine, but you know it's actually getting you from point A to point B. But you are looking at your fuel gauge, right? And a fuel gauge is either full or it's empty. When it starts to go to empty, what do you do? You pull over to the filling station, pull out the nozzle, put it into the gas tank and fill it up. And when a gas tank is filled up, the nozzle will click. It'll stop delivering gas, dispensing gas. You put the nozzle away, you get back in the car, drive away, right? So that's really kind of like how the engine of our body runs with our metabolism. A couple of points I want to make here. Number one, you're told that you really want to put good quality fuel in your car. If you put crappy gasoline, into your car, you know, your engine will run for a little while. I mean, you know, but it's definitely not going to last as long and not be in this good shape over the long haul. And hence, back to your analogy of like if you do this from a teenager or college student,

do 10, 15 years of this stuff, you're wearing down your engine with bad fuel. Everybody has the potential and is a Ferrari, but if you put the wrong fuel in a Ferrari for long enough, you're going to end up breaking it down. And now add some sugar in the gas tank, right? You know, when kids play that prank, you know, screw up a car when we were kids. All right. So, like, think about it. And that's a good example of, like, when you talk about the harms of added sugar, like,

that's exactly what you do. Would you put sugar in your gas tank to poison your engine? No, but we do that every single day. We're drinking sodas and we're having all this excess poor quality fuel. And even that late night pizza I was telling you about pizza and beer, you know, you can, you can handle that occasionally for a short, pretty time. time, do it a decade and you are now destroying your engine. And that really kind of gets at exactly what you're talking about. Like how come younger people can do certain things, but older people can't? Right. And by the way, that period of time, that decade that you're still embarking on

these carefree habits that are wreaking havoc on your metabolism, they're growing body fat. They're growing excess body fat. That excess body fat slows down. your metabolism, crushes your metabolism, just like we're starting to see with this new research. And so now it starts to make sense why many of us actually start to gain weight and start seeing extra body fat, because, you know, without being mindful of how our body works, we are practicing, we're engaging in behaviors that actually encourage the development of excess body fat. And so we are actually countering what our body naturally wants to do. And that's why I say 60 can be the new 20, because basically it's supposed to be right.

rock solid. If we actually try to allow our body to do its thing and take care of it and put in good quality fuel and make sure that we're doing all these other lifestyle things, you know, we talked about physical activity and sleep. Stress is another big deal because stress hormones, look, a little stress and when you're in college, I got to study for an exam, blah, blah, blah, you know, relationship issues. We all went through that. It's very stressful. Body bounces back. but we have different kinds of stress as we get older. You know, you've got different kinds of relationship stress, job stress, economic stress, you know, kids stress. All those things wind up causing your brain to start releasing different hormones that can start to derail over a long period of time, derail your metabolism.

And also what happens is that it encourages you to build body fat. Even anger is really interesting. Being pissed off for a long period of time, stuffing your anger and holding you. it inside derails your metabolism. You know, excess body fat, we all know again, visually, it doesn't look good on the body and we don't like it, right? Most people. And a lot of it is unseen because it's in between your organs, as you mentioned before,

visceral fat. And a big part of your book is also helping people understand that besides the vanity, besides like looking good for the now, feeling our best in the moment, there are ways that excess body fat is very detrimental to our health. long term. You had this study that was mentioned inside the book. It was done at the University of Mass Medical School. It's in the early part of the book and it's showing what fat is capable of doing. And they took out a chunk of fat from the body. They put in a petri dish. And what happened from there? Do you remember this in the beginning and like what's possible? Like people don't understand

that fat has so many layers to it. Yeah. Well, so this is actually right in my wheelhouse because the study that was done was taking pieces of fat from people getting bariatric surgery. So these are people that are morbidly obese and removing their fat. And the researchers actually took a chunk of the fat and grew them out in a plastic dish, petri dish, and they were able to observe that fat wants to grow. Once it's out of control, you know, it sort of wants to keep on going out of control. And the way it does it is kind of like scary on autopilot. Fat is a highly vascular tissue, meaning that it actually requires a lot of blood vessels, just like a tumor, by the way.

So when fat wants to go way beyond where it should be growing, excess body fat, the way that it supports itself is by hijacking and recruiting and growing out, extending extra blood vessels desperately trying to find a source of blood of nutrients and oxygen. And so what they found, when they removed the fat from obese people and they put it right into a petri dish and to grow in tissue culture, the fat within days started extending its tentacles of blood vessels, searching for new nutrition in order to be able to make it grow bigger and bigger and to explode in its growth. And so this is what's really interesting is that there's an analogy between excess body fat and cancer that's growing. Yeah, it's crazy. And you have to think of excess body fat is kind of out of control. it will damage you at all cost just to fuel itself.

And this goes into the idea of angiogenesis and anti-angiogenesis. So people who have heard your interviews previously and in your first book and know your background, they know that you're the founder of the angiogenesis foundation. And you have a ton of research on how to regrow blood vessels inside of the body. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why I would want to do that. But there's also reasons why we would want the wrong things in our body. we'd want to starve them of their growth, for example, cancer, you mentioned it, but also when it comes to fat. We want to kind of starve it of its ability to do that. So talk about anti-angiogenesis

and fat. What are the ways that we can do that and help kind of starve our fat from growing out of control? Well, first of all, yeah, it's a great question. So first of all, I remember I mentioned to you early in the womb when our bodies are still forming, blood vessels grew and fat formed little a bubble wrap packing around the fat, little formations of fat, in order to build a store fuel. That's basically how we actually form. So our blood vessels naturally have a little rim of fat around it. They're the fuel tanks for our body.

All right. And what happens is that as fat mass grows, it continues to need blood supply, needs oxygen, and when you have too much fat growing, it just needs more blood supply. it actually reaches out and it grabs more blood vessels to selfishly grow blood vessels towards itself. Now, if the fat grows too fast, faster it can grow than it can grow the blood vessels. Actually, the center of the piece of the expanding mass will start to die because it can't get, it can't grow blood vessels fast enough. That's called hypoxia.

And when you, when the center of the fat that's growing, it happens in tumors as well, doesn't get enough oxygen. And that hypoxic area in the center of a fat mass, is really dangerous because hypoxia causes inflammation. Basically, it's a tissue that's starting to die. It's not dead yet. And inflammatory cells just race in there. And that's why excess obesity actually is associated with inflammatory diseases, highly inflammatory diseases like cancer, like diabetes, like Alzheimer's disease, partly because it's a setup.

Too much body fat sets you up to basically be a walking vessel of inflammation. It's mind-blowing. I mean, you had a whole bunch of stats inside your book, but excess body fat makes you more likely to develop diabetes, right, in the future. It increases your risk of cancer, a whole host of things. And to go back to an earlier point that you mentioned, it's not just people who you would look at and you would say, okay, visually, this individual has excess body fat. There's a lot of people from my background, South Asian, who are in the skinny fat category, right? The whole acronym Toffee, you know, thin on the outside, fat on the inside. And this is why this is an important topic for everybody to get a chance to pay attention to.

That's right. I mean, you know, I wrote, I titled my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. It's a trick title because it's not a diet book. It's kind of an anti-diet book saying that, you know, you can improve your health without ever having to go on a diet. And it has to do with your metabolism. and your metabolism actually is very sensitive to the relationship with body fat, your fuel tanks, which is then sensitive to the food that you actually eat. And skinny people, people who have a lean body, right?

You think you're okay because you're lean. But that's not necessarily so because the visceral fat, which is the fat you can't see, not the muffin, not the thigh, not the butt, not the jiggly part under your arm. It's packed inside your body can happen in a thin person. Let me tell you what visceral fat's like. The analogy I give is that if you went to a FedEx shipping place and you wanted to send some fluorescent light bulbs, all right, long, thin light bulbs are delicate, you're going to get a thin box and you're going to actually ask for some peanuts or you're going to pack the peanuts in there, right? Now, you can put the peanuts in there gently and have just enough, or you can really begin stuffing extra peanuts in so that, in fact, the peanuts are actually pursing on the light bulb, like almost breaking the light bulb. Now you force the box, the thin box close, and you tape it shut.

At arm's length, you've got a skinny box, but inside there, the pressure from that, those peanuts are crushing the lightball. And that's what can actually happen in skinny people. The peanuts are the visceral fat, the dangerous fat. Fat you can't see. It's stuck inside you. You can be skinny or big body size will also have it. Everybody needs to watch out about visceral fat.

And the thing about visceral fat, I think it's like a baseball glove wrapped around your organ that can choke your organs. It's easy to grow, highly inflammatory. It's one of the first places that actually stores up extra fuel. You eat too much. Now, that extra energy, your body's going to stuff it into those fat cells, that storage tank, your visceral fat. That's actually a place that you really want to be able to fight it first.

Now, a really interesting fact that people don't know. I do this with my masterclasses that I've been on metabolism I've been doing, and I make it really interactive. So I basically said, true or false? First place when you gain extra body fat is around your waist. And most people say true because it's their own experience. They see it in the mirror when they gain extra weight. And actually it's false.

One of the first places that you gain extra body fat is in an area of visceral fat. It's inside. But surprisingly, it's not your belly. It's your tongue. Your tongue can get fat, even a skinny person. So let me explain this to you. And it's the first to get fat? It's one of the first places that get fat.

So studies have been done looking at the anatomy of the tongue. It turns out the tongue is made of three different parts. You've got the acrobatic tip. That's a cirque disillade of the tongue. You've got the middle that's mostly muscle, right? So when you're moving food around in your mouth, you're actually, it's not muscular moving the food around. The rear, the last third of your tongue is big and thick, and it's actually marbled like a T-bone steak. okay, and it's ribbed with visceral fat.

And so as you start to gain weight, one of the first places to gain that extra fat is in the marbling of the last third of your tongue. One of the first places. So even a skinny person has us. How do we know this happens in a skinny person? Well, usually it's their bed partner that tells them, hey, you know what? I don't know what's going on, but you're starting to snore, right?

And what's happening is that when you're, you know, they're gaining weight, the last part of their tongue, last third of your tongue is, gaining weights, getting fat, fat tongue. And when they're sleeping, their whole body's relaxed, and their fat tongue is also relaxed, and it obstructs their airway. All right, we call that sleep apnea. Now you snort awake, and you're starting to snore on and off. And so that's one of the early clues that you're actually gaining extra body fat, visceral fat,

is when your tongue gets fat. Wild. And then there's this whole cascading effect, which is if you don't address that, sleep apnea disrupts your sleep. And then those individuals, you know, we typically think of sleep apnea as being something that only, you know, overweight individuals, men, older men deal with. But even a lot of young people deal with this. And it disrupts your sleep and multiple people stop, you know, breathing. You can go to sleep study done. I had a friend of mine who was on average every hour, like,

stopped breathing like 40 times. And it was disrupting asleep. It was causing all sorts of issues, which that alone will increase and cause you to gain weight. Right. Now, you know, you got to realize how are these studies done to look at fat tongue was amazing and this was done out of San Diego. The coroner's office actually did some of the early research studies to look at what the anatomy of the tongue was. They were actually looking at, they were doing autopsies of tongues of people who had died from trauma of various source and they were able to really begin looking at the fat in the front

in the middle and the back of the tongue. That's where they started to figure out. And then later on people started to pick that up and like, oh, wow. the back of the tongue is pretty fat marbled like a like a like a rib eye um let's now scan it so we can actually start to take a look at uh you know fancy scans to take a look at the amount of fat that's actually there and then they connected this as you just said with sleep apnea and so it's not just the large men uh who clearly have too much tissue in the back of their throat all right it's also thin women who started to gain weight as well so again this is why the point that you

are making is exactly what i want people to hear is that everyone's needs to make excess body fat their business. It interferes with your health, no matter what your body sizes. And what's nice is that if you can start to address that, you're going to allow your inner hardwired metabolism to shine through. That's how we can actually at any stage of your health journey, no matter where you are in your life, and how slow your metabolism you think your metabolism is

and what your body sizes, is you have a shot at actually being able to actually control this hardwiring. So I'd love to zoom out for a second, and we'll come back to this dialogue and the narrative of your book. In the traditional world of, I would say, classic PhD nutrition, looking backwards, big observational studies, and understanding why, when you look at a graph and you saw this explosion of obesity and overweight individuals, around the globe, but in particular America.

The answer from that, from that traditional world is, hey, this is all about calories in, calories out. When we had an explosion of industrialization, we were more sedentary, so we weren't moving as much. And we also, yes, had more processed and especially ultra-processed foods. And ultra-processed foods are not inherently bad in this kind of world, classic worldview. it's just that they're a concentrated source of calories and they are in general going to make you eat more. So yes, there's all this fancy stuff that people are talking about weight and weight gain, but from our lens, again, just taking this side of the argument because I want to get

your perspective on it, it's excess calories leads to a situation where you are building up excess fat and there's nothing inherently that's causing that besides the fact. that we are probably concentrating calories and we have more of a sedentary lifestyle. Give me your perspective on that view. What part of that might have some truth to it and what part of that might not be the full picture? Well, it's definitely not the full picture. And it also is true. It's sort of, it's a phenomenon that's actually true. If you stuff yourself with a lot of calories, that energy's got to go someplace. I'm going to explain to that in a second. But I think that it's way more than the taking the side of calories in versus calories out.

Let me go back to that car analogy we talked about. Please. The fuel. All right. So if you were low on gas and you pulled over your car to the filling station and you filled up the gas tank, imagine if the nozzle didn't have the clicker so that when your tank was full, you would actually stop, right? Now, our bodies aren't built with a clicker. And so what happens is that we can actually keep on filling up our tank. Imagine if you were filling up your car with gas and you didn't have the clicker, what would happen? Gas tank would fill up. It would overflow the tank, run down the side of the car, around the wheels, and just start pooling around your feet. And you'd be standing in a pool of highly dangerous, flammable, toxic fuel right around you, right?

And hopefully you step away from that, then the air will eventually evaporate the gas. Now, in our human body, we don't have that clicker. And so the fuel that we use for our body's engine comes from food. We call it calories, right? So then we're eating our food is our fuel. We remember we talked about the better quality fuel means your engine is going to run longer. But what happens is that if you, so whatever you need to just kind of run your baseline engine, your insulin is going to absorb that right away. Anything excess when you're actually loading fuel into your body, your body's going to stuff it into those tiny little fat cells around your blood vessels. All right.

And those blood vessels are going to get a little bit bigger. If you keep on stuffing food, the little fat cells are going to get bigger, fat cells, bigger, bigger. They're stretched out like a water balloon. All right. And then when those are completely filled, if you keep on eating, more calories in, more fuel, all right, now your body's going to have to make some new storage tanks. More fat gets created. And then the extra fuel gets stored into those little fat cells, which get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Now repeat that, copy and paste that, you know, rinse and repeat that 10,000 times.

And you can kind of see how if you continuously eat too much and you overstuff calories, look, your body is just going to make more fat to store that fuel, right? Now, remember we talked about that, that fat as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It needs more blood vessels. They can't grow them fat enough, fast enough. It'll actually starve in the middle. You have hypoxia, and now you get inflammation. All right.

And so what happens is that now, instead of standing in a pool of dangerous, flammable gas, you are now having inside your body because your food doesn't run out around your pools around your feet. It just gets stuffed in all the corners of your body. Now you actually have this flammable stuff, inflammable stuff inside your body. That's how I kind of explain that traditional way of thinking about calories and calories out. Yeah, you do need to burn your calories. I mean, we all burn our calories continuously just by being awake and blinking. But we want, we're looking for balance.

Okay. And this is where consumption and overconsumption in an era of abundance actually can be very, very dangerous. And the lifestyles we talked about, you know, having exercise and sleep and stress management, along with food. And, you know, not just what to eat and how much to eat, but when to eat, all those things can actually kind of converge. So this is where metabolism becomes wonderfully complex because it feeds into how our body naturally wants to operate. What's our operating system, right? When you're on your laptop, you know, you're not thinking about how your operating system works. You just use your computer.

But I think when we start seeing there's problems with your operating system, problems is our metabolism, problem with our body fat, then it's worth it to actually take the time to kind of figure out what can I do to actually streamline my operating system. And so part of that, what I'm hearing is that, you know, essentially our modern lifestyle which of course filled with chronic stress and all these lifestyle factors that are there, but also food-wise, if the food is primarily coming from ultra-processed ingredients, you don't have that ability to turn on your body's clicker. So you don't actually have the ability to tell yourself, hey, I'm full, I'm satiate, I don't need anything else. When we look around the world and we see these sort of societies that have maintained a little bit more

of their traditional food and lifestyle, their way of life and many of the foods that you talk about in your sort of new term for this diet, it's not a diet, but it's sort of a way of eating. The Mediterranean Mediterranean way of approach, which we'll talk about, that activates more of these clickers and doesn't let your fat run the show. When your fat is running the show, it's like all hell breaks loose and you start craving more of that. That's why some people literally feel like I don't have any control. My body is sort of controlling me. And in a way, what you're saying is that sometimes it might be because that fat is literally hijacking the system. Yeah, no, that's really true. And, you know, I would also say that

ultra-process foods, artificial preservatives, artificial flavorings, artificial colorings, they're present in most of the ultra-processed foods that we actually find. True. We're starting to see more organic and natural. But if you take compare United States and Europe, in Europe, they've actually regulated out a lot of these artificial preservatives and flavors and colorings that we routinely see. You know, I was just coming to see you. I went through the airport and I went into, you know, one of those typical newsstands, magazine stands, and looked at the snack foods.

And there are healthy foods like tree nuts, like walnuts and pecans and almonds. When I picked up the bag and I looked at the ingredients, they were filled with artificial flavorings and coloring, right? So you can take something healthy, and by ultra-processing it, you can turn it into something less healthy. Now, what do those things actually do? Perhaps one of the most profound things that ultra-process foods do and these types of additives to foods is they mess with our gut microbiome. They destroy our gut health. And our healthy microbiome, as we now know, gut health is so important for not only immunity and lowering inflammation, lowering inflammation counters the harm of excess body fat, right? Now you're starting

to lose control over balancing the harms of extra body fat. But it turns out our gut microbiome also helps to control our metabolism, our healthy metabolism. So when you knock that system, that ecosystem of gut bacteria out of control, now you're actually messing with the hard drive and the operating system of our metabolism as well. So again, I think eating ultra-processed foods. And by the way, even in healthy traditional societies that have become modernized, modern Japan, modern China, modern Mediterranean countries, you know, when you study the effects of that ultra-processing, you see that their health is also starting to start to flag and fail. You know, there's a whole section inside of the book where you go through the health systems,

which you're so known for, and you talked about last time on the podcast and how they, the health defense systems. And you talk about the latest research of how fat, excess fat, specifically, damages those systems and can hijack. You just broke that down for the microbiome, right? And actually, I have one more question about the micro-round, but we also have the other systems as well. I'd love to walk through those for a little bit. The DNA protection system, the immune system. We'll walk through them all. So in the microbiome system, one of the things that you talked about was that they studied, there was a twin study, and they looked at the microbiome. Can you chat a little bit more of that if you remember it offhand? Well, I mean, there's a number of twin studies looking at the microbiome,

but they actually take a look at twins. There's a study that looked at twins looking at those twins who actually became heavier, overweight or obese versus thin. And they actually found striking differences between the microbiome. And other studies have actually delved deeper to take a look at differences between the microbiome of people who are heavy, obese, versus people that are thinner or leaner in their body composition. And what they're finding, I'm sure there are many, many differences that have yet to be discovered. But one of the most striking things that they found one bacteria, the acrimancia

musinophila, which is a standout bacteria. I've talked about it. My first book, I've been talking about the research. It's relevant to cancer as well. It turns out this one bacteria, and don't forget. there's 39 trillion. So we're just, we're just at the beginning of this research discovery of what, what, what bacteria important and why. But acromancea keeps on coming back up. All right. And acrimancia seems to actually be present in people who have healthy body

compositions, leaner in nature, and it's almost missing and is sometimes absent in people who are overweight or obese. And so, you know, this is a correlation. Correlation is not causation, but it shows you that there's something going on with this bacteria. This bacteria, by the way, is also protective against diabetes, which, of course, is the end stage of metabolic syndrome, which is connected to body fat, which is connected to body composition.

So again, you're starting to put together the clues, right? This is a big mystery of science trying to figure out what this is. This guy keeps on coming up. And acomancia also protects against inflammatory diseases like Alzheimer's and obesity. It also protects against cancer. It ups your healthy immune system and lowers harmful inflammation. And so, again, we're beginning to discover that, you know, starting from twin studies, but then taking a look at doing a deep dive and trying to figure out what are the patterns of what people who are heavy and excess body fat versus people

lean what are some of those differences in are there are any key players that are standouts and acrimancia seems to be one of them yeah i think i learned from you originally that healthy people who have the what looks to be again it's correlation the right amount of acromancy in their body it could be up to five percent of their total bacterial composition is that right yeah i mean so so it's not just like we're talking about one little strain that's kind of popping up a little bit there but it's a significant amount whether it's five four or whatever it does seem to be like a flagship strain inside of the gut. That's right. It is one of the core bacteria that we need to have. Another one is lactobacillus. You know, there's many different kinds of lactobacillus, but lactobacillus

rutarii seems to be one of these core strains that because time and time and again, the research is shown lactobacillus helps wound healing, helps control your metabolism, lowers excess body fat, protects against colon cancer and breast cancer. You know, when you start adding all these different observations and correlations up between lactobacillus rudderi, acrimanciumucinophila, at least in my book as a researcher, you know, we have to flag them. You know, these are the ones you want to put on your refrigerator magnet to say, you know what, if we had a choice of actually trying to grow these bacteria, these are the ones you actually want to have.

And this really comes back to the idea of, okay, people are asking, well, what can we do? Do we need to be on a fancy probiotic? Do we need to do this? And part of your book in this microbiome system section, talking about both the damage that excess fat can have on it, but also the way that we can combat that and revert it is these principles that are very straightforward. Hard to sometimes put into action for people when they don't have the education.

This is why I'm so excited about your book, your work, people like you that are out there because when you get the background, when you understand the importance, you literally see how every bite you take is helping you grow a healthier body. So a couple of the classic things that you include inside of there, but you really go deep into the science is diversity of plant matter and its relationship with things like short chain fatty acids. Just talk about that for a second. Right. Okay. So our gut bacteria, really, there's about the same number of bacteria in our body as our human cells. So we're 50-50 human and bacteria all packaged together, all walking around and close. And one of the things that we provide humans as humans, we provide our bacteria, we provide them room and board. The room we provide them actually is in our gut, mostly in our colon. We've got some in our skin and orifices and things like that. But a lot of it actually is in a place called a seekum. It's actually a little pouch in your colon. And most of the bacteria are actually there. So that's where they live. That's their room. And the board we give them is the food that we eat. So whenever we're eating, we're eating not for just ourselves who are eating for

49 trillion bacteria. It's kind of like, you know, the pregnant mom saying I'm eating for two. Well, here, all of us are actually eating for 49 trillion plus one. That's us. And so what a lot of people don't realize is that the food that we eat, that we, whatever we choose to put on our dinner plate, whenever we're sitting down for food, our human bodies will absorb the nutrients and the upper part of the digestive system. And then anything that we don't absorb gets sent downstairs, our bacteria get the, they get the leftovers. And a lot of those leftovers in plant-based foods, the broccoli, the fruits and vegetables, the legumes, are dietary soluble fiber. So soluble fiber and some of the polyphenols that are also prebiotic nature, they feed the gut

microbiome. They eat it up. That's their dinner. And when they're well fed, well cared for, okay, with soluble fiber from plant-based foods primarily and different ones. They like the different polyphenols. They like the different kinds of, you know, like you, you know, you want to be able to feed them diversity. They pay us back. And they pay us back for room and board. Like they pay the rent. and the way they pay it back actually is by creating something called short-chain fatty acids. These are the metabolites produced by our gut bacteria that they just send into our bloodstream. These short-chain fatty acids help our blood lipids become more normal. To control our blood pressure, help us speed up our wound healing.

They actually also communicate with our brain as well. Short-chain fatty acids lower inflammation. And so our gut bacteria release these short-chain fatty acids really in response to being well-fed and well-cared for. Now, why is that important? It's because, now, again, this is all about the choices that we make, right? So you can make a good choice, plant-based food, mostly. If you make a bad choice, ultra-processed foods, what you're doing with these artificial colorings and flavorings and preservatives, we poison our gut microbiome. When we poison the bacteria, it's like pouring Drano down to poison the ecosystem, you know, you got some floaters down there,

right? They're not happy. They're dying. And so, number one, they're not making, those short-chain fatty acids, but even worse, some of the bacteria, the bad actors can actually start to overgrow. You can grow bad bacteria. And rather than produce mostly short-chain fatty acids that's good for our body and good for our metabolism, the bad bacteria produce toxins that get into our blood. And so this is how invisibly the choices that we make sitting at our dinner table or at a restaurant meal, you know, or at a snack bar or at a vending machine, they can actually determine the fate of what happens. Now, remember I told you. you, look, we're pretty resilient, so you eat, you know, some crazy nuclear-colored chips

every now and then, your body will bounce back from it. But it's that lifetime habit. You know, you talked about really how we tend to be addicted to certain kinds of foods that are engineered to make us addicted to them or the flavoring would or change our brain or our brain pattern. Now we start to destroy our gut microbiome. We derail our metabolism. Our fat starts to grow. And yeah, the fat starts to take over. It starts to reach out with its blood vessels to try to grow itself and yet not fast enough so it becomes, it starts to die in the middle and starts to become inflamed. You can kind of see this. Like it's a, it's a, it is a domino effect. Cascading? Yeah. Cascade. So in a way, people are a little right. It's a partial truth

when they say as they're getting older into their mid-30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 60s, 60s. 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, they notice that it's harder for them to lose weight. And it may be, but what I'm hearing you saying, please correct me from misunderstanding this, is that it's because the excess weight is damaging their health systems. And if your health systems continue to get damaged, they are your defense mechanisms on gaining away, avoiding excess fat in the first place. So in that sense, people are right that it can feel tougher. Right.

But it's not just because our metabolism potential. Our metabolism potential is always there. It's not because of the number of birthday candles you're blown out. Right. All right. It's not hardwired into it. It really is, again, you know, it's that idea that if you put poor quality fuel and you mistreat your car over a long period of time, you know, you cannot ride your car around

a block a couple of times. once or twice, it's no big deal. But if you keep on abusing that car, you know, it's not going to be less than you take it out 10 years. It's not going to be driving as well as a car that's been well cared for. The difference with a car and a body, though, is that we can actually revert back. You know, the car will start to corrode. Our human bodies, and this is really, I think, the message of empowerment is that we can actually be mindful to know that just how powerfully hardwired we are, we can try to restore our operating system and really have it do what it, what it wants to do simply by being mindful of how we eat, when we eat, what we eat, and also these other

lifestyle choices. What's another health system that you want to talk about in the context of how excess fat can damage it and how we can start to unwind that and actually activate that health system? All right. I'm going to tell you one that's not very well known, which is people know stem cells by mostly associating with driving to the corner of strip mall and getting your knees injected or the elbow injected, right? To me, as a researcher, that kind of stuff is not ready for prime time. But our body is ready for prime time. We are primed with stem cells from the time we're born. We've got about 75 million stem cells that are just left over from developing in a womb, and they get stored in our bone marrow and in our other organs and our skin. And even inside our

body fat, these stem cells are called out to help repair us from the inside out throughout our lives. So we are actually continuously renewed where we regenerate. And this whole idea that humans don't regenerate, but salamanders and starfish can is wrong. Another myth that's being overturned is that humans do regenerate. We just regenerate slowly. We can't grow back an arm or a leg or a tail, but we can actually grow back our liver. We can grow back our lungs. We can even grow back parts of our brain, which is really, really amazing. And definitely we grow back our nerves. The thing about our stem cells in our body fat that can affect our metabolism is that our body fat does contain stem cells. And remember I told you, if you have too much energy, too much fuel,

too much food, too many calories, but your body is going to have to stuff the fuel into the fuel tank. So the fat, if that's completely loaded up, now you've got to create more fat, you know what it creates it from stem cells. All right? So our stem cells and our fat are there as reserves if we need to actually create more fuel tank. But it turns out that you can do some good things with those fat adipose cells as well. I read about some research that is being done.

I took part in some of this as well. Cardiologists are working with plastic surgeons in liposuction to remove fat and to identify and isolate out the stem cells from body fat. So here's how it works. Do liposuction, you get this jar of yellow stuff, which is fat, and you put that, put that into a tube, and you spin it in a centrifuge, which makes it go round and around and around. And what happens when you spin it like that is that the cells, the stem cells will clump to the bottom, the fat will float to the top.

You stop the machine, it's not spinning anymore. You pour off the fat, and the stem cells are what you have left. cardiologists are taking those stem cells and they're putting it with a little saline, a little salt water, and they're injecting into the heart. Okay. And because it's not in the fat, it's now in the heart, it will create new heart tissue. All right. And one of the remarkable things in my book I talk about is that they're doing the same thing with spinal cord injury.

Now, it's research only, but it actually is in humans. There was a really famous case of somebody who, a young person who injured his spinal cord at the neck level became quadriplegic. And what they did is they actually took his body fat, spun it down exactly the same way, got the stem cells, and then took his stem cells and injected it into the spinal cord. And he was able to regain movement, which is really, really amazing. I'm telling you this to show you how powerful stem cells are. And if you imagine them in the heart or in the spinal cord, that might be something that the medical community is going to be able to use in the future. That's very promising. But that just shows you how powerful the stem cells can be inside the fat itself.

You don't want to be triggering those stem cells to grow new fat by eating more food and overloading your system. Those guys can really fuel up your fat really fast, which is why sometimes when we see massive weight gain and quickly weight gain, it's partly due to these stem cells. So what's really important is that you can tame these stem cells. There are foods that can actually you can eat that will actually start to divert the stem cells by telling the stem cells, hey, buddy, don't be making more fat. Let's stay calm, all right? Let's just stay quiet. Don't act out. Don't make more fat.

And that's really another example of a health defense system that on one hand could be really powerful to help recharge, renew certain body parts that we want to have. But we have to tame it. Body fat is not bad. It's good. But what we want to do is we want to respect it, but we do need it be tamed. We cannot allow it to actually go haywire. Let's just do a little teaser here. we're going to get into foods in a second, but what are a couple of foods you're talking about

taming that body fat and working with those stem cells and helping them understand not to work against us? What are a couple of foods that you have found that are important there? So one of them actually is tomatoes, the lycopene in tomatoes. There's a bioactive called lycopene, a carotenoid. Turns out that founding tomatoes actually, you know, kind of do a lot of things to harmful body fat, to fight body fat. But one of the things, it does, it actually tames the stem cells. So it basically tamps down the ability of fat stem cells from going haywire. That's important. That's like sending that that crazy kid in the classroom who can't stop making noise and being disruptive. That's like sending them over to the principal's office,

getting them out of the space, making sure it's not causing trouble. That's what tomato is one of them. Olive oil actually turns out, which contain lots of bioactives. And I think that's what I'm so excited about as a research scientist, not only is it the food, but we're beginning to identify the specific substance in the food that can be beneficial. So hydroxytyrazol, all the lyrgyl, all these types of bioactives in olive oil, which is also present in whole olives, by the way. And it's present in olive oil, but it's also present in olive water. Olives are mostly water, not oil. So when you press olive oil, it turns out that they throw away the water right now, and they collect the oil. But the water's got a lot of these polyphenols. One of them,

hydroxytyrosol, which also makes it into the oil a little bit, actually will tame your stem cells in body fat. So again, this is an example where the foods that we eat, actually, not only surprisingly, actually can help us fight body fat. That's one of the things that I was so surprised that when I started to set out to do this research, you assume that when you're eating food, you're going to grow fat eventually, right? Here, actually, there's actually substances in food that can actually help you tame and even lose fat. You know, in the premise of this book and in the introduction, you're basically taking the reader on a journey that you didn't set out to write a diet book. And it's obviously an anti-diet book, right? That's why it's called Eat to Beat Your Diet.

Click in the show notes, by the way, pick up a copy. It's an amazing read. Everybody listening on audio, on YouTube, please pick up a copy. And one of the things you, saw from your first book is that people were eating according to the education that you put out there, which isn't about, sure, you get us excited about individual foods. Here's what olives can do. Here's what pomegranate juice can do. But you are not there to advocate necessarily for any one way of eating or any one food. You're just showing us the power of whole foods and when we include them in a good diversity inside of our diet. Now, the thing is that even though you didn't think that you were writing a weight loss book. A lot of people went on that eating program

and style from the first book and they were reporting and they were writing into that, hey, like, I'm not trying to restrict calories. I'm not trying to lose weight, but I'm noticing that I am losing weight. And that was like, that was really an amazing experience for you to have. Big surprise to me. In effect, I'll confess something that most people don't know is that when I I wrote my first book and I turned it in and it became very successful, New York Times bestseller. I had in the back of my mind a little concerned that people would become so enamored with eating all the foods that I talked about that they might gain weight. And, you know, I'm a medical doctor. So I get concerned about this obesity epidemic.

And I would be receiving these emails, you know, thousands of emails, tens of thousands of emails, people thanking me for writing the book and then talking me about how more empowered they feel and how much healthier they felt. Some people said, oh, you know, I was able to get off of my medications, you know, like I got lots of really good feedback. And I was, I was, but I was, my radar was on for people that might say, but I was waiting for the butt, but I'm getting weight, you know, because I'm eating so much of the good food that you actually talking about. I never got that. What I got instead was, I distinctly remember somebody wrote it and said, and you know what, the other benefit I got from eating to be disease is that

unexpectedly, I was started to lose weight in ways that I could never lose before. And I got that one letter and I thought, well, thank God he didn't gain weight. And then I thought, wait a minute, that's a little bit weird. How could you be eating more food and losing weight? So I kind of brushed it off and then I got more, maybe another dozen letters like that or notes, emails like that, people reporting that they were actually losing weight. And by the time I got to like 20 or 30 of these, I thought, wait a minute, there is actually something going on. I'm a researcher, right? So we pick up clues by observing it. And I thought what the most unusual thing is that by eating food, and these people are all telling me, like, now they're like really eating, you know, foods to fight five health

defense systems. How is it that they could be eating food and losing weight? So that's what literally triggered me to begin looking more deeply into this. It was really just the next part of my research. Actually, I was doing research of metabolism, but now I wanted to dive in to see what the heck was going on. And so when we started to take a look at the bioactives in these foods, because as a researcher, a scientist, that's what I'm wondering. Is there a mechanism? Like, what could possibly be in these foods? The lycopene, the hydroxytyazole in olive oil, lycopene and tomatoes, the elagic acid in chestnuts. I started to discover that, in fact, all of these bioactives started to also make sense to me because they were fighting body fat.

They were taming the stem cells. They were preventing fat cells from loading up with extra fuel. They were actually igniting the brown fat, turning on that space heater to burn down energy and increasing metabolism. And then when you actually really took a look at the studies that were looking at specific foods, studied in clinical trial, clinical studies, isolating the food, all right? And just giving the food to people, you started seeing that it was shrinking waist circumference, and they were losing body weight as well. And so all of a sudden became clear to me that there was this whole other field of foods that actually can activate your metabolism, burn down harmful body fat, and against

what we talked about at the very beginning of this, which is this new science of the metabolism, these four phases and the harms of extra body fat, I realized that there was something that people had to read about, which is what are those foods that when you eat, that we know what's inside them, can burn harmful body fat and unleash your inner metabolism. That was worthy of a book. So that's why actually wrote this Eat to Beat Your Diet.

And I'm so glad you did because there's so many things that we forget about or we don't take it advantage of that are there in front of us in our cabinet or easy to pick up in the store. that can be a part of our health system. And really, this goes towards a larger idea. And the larger idea, which, again, you write about so eloquently inside the book, which is that it steps us into the love of food. There's so much fear around food.

And listen, I'm going to be the first person to call myself out and even maybe past guests. Because we live in such a complicated world and nutrition science is very difficult to do, there sometimes are foods that people isolate. are categories and there are maybe sometimes legitimate and maybe sometimes sensationalize concerns around those foods. You know, it could be gluten or could be this thing or that. And yes, go back to the Goldilocks idea. Too much of something, you know, not enough of it, you know, the right fit in the middle.

But really a lot of that has contributed to this fear of food. Right. And people constantly feel like they're going to make the wrong decision. Right. And this book is about stepping back into the love. of food and backing it up with some of the science. You know, you just mentioned something, which you were talking about foods that help you, your fat not get overactive. And one of the ones that you talked about was green tea. So what are one of the compounds or molecules that are

part of green tea that make it become one of these foods? All right. Well, you know, who hasn't heard of the benefits of green tea, right? It's been sensationalized, right? And to your point, I think that in the modern world, because of all this complexity, human nature tends to either create a hero or a demonization, or a heroization, right? Green tea tends to be in the hero side. But for me, what I really try to bring to the forefront and then to focus is that the science is actually trying to teach us exactly what it is that's in the tea. So we know tea has polyphenols.

They're called catechins. We know one of the cattacons is called eG-cg. It's epigalocatacin 3 gallate. But don't worry about the fancy Latin scientific names. Let the scientists kind of deal with it. But there's a polyphenol in tea, catacin that's actually really, really good for you. Not only does it cut off the blood supplies to help starve cancers, not only is it anti-inflammatory, not only does it help protect your stem cells so you can regenerate from the inside out.

The fiber in green tea and some of the catacin itself is actually a prebiotic helps to nourish your gut microbiome, take your gut bacteria and make it happy. It's antioxidant, good for your DNA, stimulate your immune system. So again, you know, these are the attributes of only one of the substances that we know about in green tea. That actually helps our body stay healthier. It turns out when it comes to your body fat, the catacin, the same substance, actually fights white fat. So it actually helps you actually lose some of the subcutaneous jiggly stuff. but more importantly, it actually helps you lose visceral fat, the harmful baseball glove fat that can be

trapped even inside a skinny body. That's the stuff that chokes your organs, that grows fast, that's the fat in the back of your tongue that we talked about earlier. So the bottom line is that green tea drinkers just metabolically are healthier. And here's the other thing about green tea. Not only has a catacan, but it's actually just brood in water, whether it's hot water or iced tea, ice green tea, you end up hydrating yourself as well. And so again, you get multiple benefits in hydration also. By the way, a lot of people don't know this, but a cup of ice tea, a glass of ice tea has got water in it, and not only got the catacons, but it's got water in it.

Turns out water itself turns on your metabolism, turns on your brown fat. And basically when you drink ice tea, cold or a glass of a cup of cold water, it actually gets into your stomach and there's a temperature gauge in your stomach that senses that It's cold. And because it's your core body temperature, what we think happens is it triggers this gauge to turn on your metabolism to try and warm up the water. It's kind of like a hot water thermos. It wants to warm it up and it turns up your metabolism to turn up your metabolism and act is your brown fat. Your brown fat needs that fuel to be the space heater.

It draws down energy from your harmful fat, burns away some of your harmful fat. So again, you know, like this is how, this is a new way of thinking about our food. It's actually working our inner, the food is working our inner workings on our behalf of our metabolism. And by making really, really smart choices, we can actually allow ourselves to unleash our inner metabolism. You broke out a whole section and you talk about how insulin, blood insulin, is related to the conversation about metabolism and is connected to fat. Set that conversation up and then there's a few things that I want to tease out instead of there. All right. So remember that analogy of pulling over to the gas station and filling up the tank?

When your car, when your tank says, your gauge says low and your car needs to be filled up so you can run your engine. Same thing in our body. When our fuel tank runs low in our body, we pull over to the dinner table or to the pantry or the refrigerator or to the restaurant and to load up. Right. Now, when we actually eat food to load up on our fuel, which has to be taken to our cells, what happens is that when food hits our body, our pancreas secretes this hormone called insulin. Now, a lot of people have heard of insulin. Insulin's a pretty complicated hormone, but when insulin goes up, it really partners up with the active eating to draw that fuel and to be able to so our body can actually use it.

It's that simple, all right, for most people to understand. Now, when our body has insulin, which, by the way, is also partnering with adipinectin, that fat-based hormone to allow this to be more efficient. So you want that body fat to actually be able to do, make insulin's job possible, working in balance at the right amounts. Now, when insulin is out and you're absorbing energy, you're actually not able to burn. Your body's not able to burn fuel easily. It's kind of like when you're feeling if you're attacking a gas station, you tell you to turn off your engine. So you're not burning the fuel as you're loading it in.

So our body is actually jury rigs so that we actually can't burn down fuel while we're loading up on fuel. It makes perfect sense. All right. Now, when we're not eating between meals, but particularly when we're not eating for long periods of time, like when we're sleeping, which is called fasting, like between meals is fasting, relative fasting, then what happens is the insulin levels go down because you don't have food in your mouth, you're not eating. When the insulin levels go down, it takes a little while for the insulin levels of plateau down. because you have to clean up all that energy that's in your blood. When insulin levels go down, then your metabolism switches into a different gear where it can actually burn down fuel again, right?

That's like basically stop loading gas into your tank at a filling station, put the nozzle back, get in your car, start up that engine, and now you can begin burning fuel again. And so when we're not eating, when insulin is low, we're able to burn fuel, burn fat, excess fat, excess fuel in our body fat. And when we're actually loading and eating, we're not able to do it. Our body's hardwired not to do it naturally. And that's why we need to be able to pay attention to how often we eat and when we eat

and giving our body maximal time to be able to level off and burn off that extra fuel that we might have eaten during a day. One of my friends who's been on this podcast before Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, she also talks about how, especially as we get older, making sure we increase or maintain the muscle mass that we had when we were younger is an important part of that because muscle uses up a lot of the insulin in the body. How do you feel about that idea? Do you think that's true? Very, very, very important. I mean, you know, like think about, again, we're talking about, remember that 6,000 person study looking at the impact of body fat metabolism. Well, the other component of that lifespan behavior is

really what happens to your muscle. So when you're a little kid, you're skinny, you know, Most kids are really skinny. They don't have a lot of muscle. But think about it. When you're adolescent, you know, and that's when both boys and girls wind up building their muscle. And, you know, boys in particular, you know, they start getting interested in building muscle.

They can get ripped, right? So like, basically everyone looks awesome if they're working out, like when they're 18, 20, 21, when they're early 20s. You're never going to look like that again, right? And that's, in that basic way, not just because you're too busy to work out, But that actually has to do with sort of the biology. And so as we naturally get older, all those forces of behavior and lifestyle conspire in a little bit of our biology to start losing muscle mass.

And so what's really important is to be able to stay physically active, to keep on building muscle mass, to eat proteins, they're actually building up muscle mass. You never want to actually be protein deficit and underactive. That's the setup actually to be able to lose that critical muscle mass. And by the way, when you lose muscle mass, I mean, you know, it could be whether you're, you could be a big person and losing weight, you could be a thin person and losing muscle mass. It's equally harmful. People actually have studied people with low muscle mass. You know, the extreme is called sarcopenia. I mean, that's basically what people look like when they've been stranded on a desert island or a concentration camp. That is a really, really unhealthy place to be. It also wrecks your metabolism as well. So we, it's all part of that body. Goldiloxone, you're right. Fat needs to be tamed. Muscle needs to be groomed. Yeah, and even from what I understand, and again, correct me from wrong, for a lot of the older population that's there, you know, you get into your later years, you can even be

very fat and also be suffering from sarcopenia because you're over fat and undermuscled, which makes you more likely to fracture your hip, which makes you more likely to be brittle, and break your bones. Is that also the case? It's not just somebody who looks very thin. It could be somebody thin, but it also could be somebody who's overweight who has lost a lot of their muscle

because they're not active and they're not eating protein. That is absolutely correct. And then if you actually have too much body fat, so somebody who's obese with sarcopenia, insufficient muscle mass, if they fall and broke their hip, with carrying that extra body,

excess body fat around, they're pro-inflammatory, their health defense systems are down. They're going to heal a lot. slower as well. And so again, this is why we see in a lot of elderly people, when they actually break their hip, you know, they oftentimes, that's the spiral towards the end for them, because their bodies are naturally compromised. Not only do they not have enough muscle mass, they have excess fat, body fat as well. And that actually counters their ability to heal and rebound back to a state

of health. And so to stay healthy, we need to tame our fat and we need to nourish and nurture our muscles. You know, you're mostly known for like highlighting some of the benefits that crazy amazing benefits. Nobody does this better than you, right? And I'm not just saying that because you're my friend. Like you do such an incredible job of being the hype man for all the incredible compounds that are found in especially like a lot of plant foods. This book, you actually have a whole section on seafood, which we're going to chat about coming up next. And, you know, you do that really well for fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, things like that. And this is a question for me. You know, we just talked about.

protein, not that you can't get protein from plant compounds to, of course you can. How do you feel about the prioritization of animal proteins inside of the diet? And then seafood can be a classification of that as well too. So just would love you to take that, you know, take that on. Yeah. Well, so, you know, I sort of reflect back on my own life style and also how I try to counsel people like patients who ask me, what should I be eating and should I be going vegetarian or vegan? And I really try to make that an individual conversation. I think that's super important. Everyone is different. Everyone comes from someplace. And this is something I write about a lot of my book, which is, you know, we all have points of origin and our relationship with food. We all come from some culture, family culture,

ethnic culture, religious cultures where, you know, it's very natural for us to actually be living in a certain way. I think that the, you know, many times in modern society, we leap for these kind of extreme diets or extreme philosophies. And I have no problem with, you know, the ethical nature of veganism. That's an ethical decision. That happens to be also a generally healthy decision. But that's not, you don't become a vegan because you're healthy. You want to be healthy. It's like, it's really, the origin of it is really a religious, I mean, a moral, an ethical decision, a moral decision. And I'm all for that if that's what's important to you.

Some people actually, you know, really like to eat animal protein. And what I would counsel them is that if you eat animal protein, make good choices and make the right choices not only for yourself, but also be conscious that there's a planetary implication for the animal protein you actually choose. And so this is where I think modern sort of the modern zeitgeist is really useful. If you eat red meat, just realize that, look, red meat is generally not that healthy for you. So if you eat it, eat it in moderation. If you're going to choose to eat red meat, realize that just the farming of animals, the way that we tend to eat it now from factory farming, not done in a way that's actually particularly healthy or sustainable for the planet.

So if you're going to do it, just recognize what you're actually doing. You're making a move that if you overdo it is not going to be good for you or for the planet. But I don't want to actually stop you. I don't want to become the policeman against animal protein. Just recognize what you're actually doing, right? I mean, I think that that's kind of like speeding on the highway. You need you get someplace, all right, you're going to go over 65 or whatever. Don't do it for a long time.

It's not that good for you and you might kill somebody if you get into an accident. So I think that like my approach is sort of like respect to people who want to eat it in a pattern that's healthy. people that are not eating in that traditionally healthy pattern, just try to provide the framework so they can actually make better decisions. Seafood is another source of really useful protein. And actually remarkably, all the epidemiological studies have shown that people who eat two to three serving the fish a day for seafood naturally, they tend to actually live longer. They have longer, healthier lives as part of an overall balance, not its exclusion of plant-based foods.

all right but there is no study that shows that people who eat red meat predominantly live longer than everyone else that that's that's the one thing so again you know uh buyer beware you know you're making these choices yeah you know that certain patterns are good and for seafood by the way not all seafood is created equal if you eat mercury laden large predatory fish at the top of the food chain that's going to damage the heavy metals are going to damage you as well and so you want to be and and by the way overfishing not good for the planet either So I think that this idea of eating mindfully more so than eating sort of according to a specific rigid practice is more useful. And what I read about my book is really try to connect people to how I approach food.

I grew up in a place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where we had a lot of ethnicities. I had wonderful folk festivals where everyone celebrated their traditional food cultures. That's what I grew up in. I grew up in an Asian background, Chinese background. My mom cooked fresh food, mostly plant-based every single day. It tasted great. I did a gap year. I lived in Italy and I lived in Greece.

I lived in the Mediterranean long before people were talking about Mediterranean cuisine. And I saw how much joy it actually gave people. So for me, naturally, I go out my life navigating around, should I eat something tonight? What am I going to eat today? Well, what genre should I choose? It's going to be probably in a Mediterranean or an Asian genre. That's where I naturally go. Not exclusively, but that's where my natural water line is.

And once I choose in those directions, I try to look at, I try to respect. I immediately sense the value of these traditional recipes and cuisines. And I do take a look at like, well, what are the ingredients that are in them? And how are they prepared? And is it prepared and do I think there's ultra-process stuff in it? Try to veer away from that. If it's more natural, local, sustainable, plant-based, I will go for that. But the bottom line is it tastes great. I lean into my food. I get joy from eating. I don't like to pig out. Okay, it makes me, I'm like anyone else. If you eat too much, you feel gross. You feel, if you gorge, you're not going to feel good. But you can actually sample from what I call the Mediterranean way of eating. It's a way of eating. It's not a diet. And really get a great joy out of life. And that to me is something I really want my book to communicate.

You can love your food and love your health. Yeah. I think it's an important message. You know, a couple of things I want to tease out on what you've shared. You know, I grew up vegetarian. And then for a while I became vegan primarily out of like ethical, moral decisions. And also I had a very transformative experience, which is, you know, that I'd really bad acne in high school all the way since my freshman year.

It's like the gods are looking down to me for my freshman year right to my senior year. And then my summer of my senior year before I went into college, I went to a youth camp that was done for people that were from this background of India, the Jane community, J-A-I-N. And the keynote speaker there was somebody who was trying to get everybody excited about getting off a dairy, which was a very tough thing to do because these kids are already all vegetarian, right? And now you're going to tell them that dairy is not something. something that they can have and most of the kids are checked out. They're like, look, the only place that I literally can eat is Taco Bell when I go out. You're going to tell you that I have to

like not get cheese anymore. So mostly everybody was checked out. And at the end of the talk, she said, well, I also want you to know that dairy, this is in the year 2000. So this is a while ago, right? And I was just turning 18 at the time. She said, dairy can be, first time I'd heard somebody say like, I don't know if she used the word inflammatory, inflammation. Dairy can sometimes cause some inflammation for the gut, and then you can get acne. And as soon as I heard acne, somebody had been struggling for years, I said, okay, my radar's up. I've tried the different gels. I've tried the different prescriptions. They dried out my skin, but ultimately the acne persisted. So I went on a journey and I took off dairy. And within a month and a half, my skin completely

cleared up. Wow. Now, the type of dairy that I was having at the time was just commercial factory farm milk. Nobody taught me and didn't learn until much later on about all the nuances that actually, you know, there's goats milk and there's yogurt and there's this small batch dairy that can be made more ethically. And actually dairy isn't inflammatory unless if you have a GI issue based on all the big studies that are out there. So, you know, that was my own journey, right? I went through an experience. I kind of bought hook, line, and sinker the plant-based message. And as I started to get more to the world of personalized nutrition, personalized medicine through the people that I met, I started to understand that you can piece together different things to still be healthy.

And you always have all the diversity of plant foods that are out there. And I also realized I was probably under eating on protein. And so I got that back up as well. And when people just told me like, how do you eat? I would just say, you know, I eat my own personal way, but I just try to make it clean. I'm off of ultra-processed foods, right? I was plant. I don't even say I'm plant-based now because the only thing is that even though I eat a ton of plant food, I don't want to give the misconception that it's easy for everybody to hit their protein goals without having animal protein.

When I started tracking my protein, you really have to work hard if you're vegan and you're vegetarian if you want to hit those protein goals for what's needed to be age-appropriate and avoid sarcopenia and things like that. but I do respect completely the message that regardless of how you eat, there are some core principles that you want to make sure you never let go of. And that's really what this book is about, right? Don't let go of the diversity of foods. Don't let go of the range and sample from all these different traditions that are there. And then find that last 10% that people want to tweak. Great. Let them tweak and people can debate about it all day. But there's plenty of sick people out there. So let's just get them at least on the fundamentals that we know work. Absolutely. And I think, you know, the other part of it, to just connect to where you

the story you just told me is that think about it. So many of us are influenced and our connections to food and our dialogue that we have with food and connecting to health start when we're younger, right? I mean, like, whether it's a teenage high school years or in college, like people start to become more conscious. There is a consciousness of how food connects to our health that starts quite early. It's not something that you just like suddenly, the lights go on when you're 30 or whatever or older.

And so I think that the importance is to realize that our relationship with food, our consciousness of food begins long before we actually are maybe explicitly aware of it. And the more mindful we are, you know, one of the things I talk about in the last part of my book for, you know, how do you actually put this plan into action so you can prove your metabolism? I recommend food journaling. You know, you bust out either piece of paper in a pen, if you're old school, or you could just use, like I've done, just take my phone, my iPhone to open up the notes and I just record what time I eat and what I'm actually eating and how much I actually eat. No biggie.

You just scroll a couple of notes. And when you do that over the course of a day, over that course of a couple of days, over that course of a week, and you look back at it, it really is. does give you an objective view of what your relationship with food actually is like, we're interacting with our foods all the time. And I think as an adult, we tend to lose connection. We tend to lose that concrete connection of like, what are the things that motivate us towards eating? When we're kids, and maybe whatever our mom served us, you know, or whatever sneaking out with our friends, you know, you talk about the Taco Bell. But honestly, you know, I think

that now we're adults, we can actually be more mindful of these choices. And I kind of feel that we should really also be in touch with who we are. That personalization, you said, is so important. We each individually have our own preferences. I read about this my first folk as well. I call it food preferences. Don't feel like if somebody tells you to eat, you know, walnuts, that that's all you have to eat. It's not going to solve all your problems. You know what, if you love walnuts is fine, but if you prefer a different nut or a different, you know, look for that. Look for the thing that works for you. In every single one of my books, including this one, I put hundreds of foods down that are all supported by evidence.

And what I encourage people to do is bust out your Sharpie or whatever it is that you actually do or highlighter. Circle the ones the foods that you love already because those are the ones that you're going to work for you. That's telling. That's kind of a kind of self-reflection of what healthy foods do you already love. Start with those, and you're already headed the game. You know, I did a test after I'd been vegan for about six, seven years. And again, I'm not putting that down, and I respect everybody's choices. I have plenty of friends that are vegan.

Everything. Eat any way they want to eat. But I'm just talking about my own personal journey, right? And I so appreciate the fact that in this book, there's a lot more of your personal journey, which is part of the reason that I'm setting up this question. One of the first tests that I did, I have no affiliation with them, but it was a test that was recommended to me by a friend, and it was called Omega Quant. and it was looking about my omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, which there are so many studies around.

And I saw that one of the reasons that maybe I was having depressive-like symptoms, I was not diagnosed with depression, is that I was so low on my omega-3 and my omega-6s were up really high. It's a great test. Anybody can do it from home, it's like $90 or whatever, and you can get it done, little prick of the blood. And it's at time that one of the first foods, as I started, you know, Googling and looking around, and I started seeing all these seafoods that were out there.

And seafoods was a foreign concept to me. I had not really eaten eating fish growing up. And, you know, I think there are a lot of people that if you look at society now, we're not really consuming a lot of seafood. Now, there's a lot of, you know, fair criticisms around seafood. You've touched on a lot of them before, microplastics, mercury, other things. But generally speaking, if people are going to include more seafood in their diet, that they're also going to get a chance to make,

it's going to crowd out a lot of the other unhealthy or processed food calories that are there. So in you writing about seafood, what were some of the ones that were out there that really stood out to you as sort of these ancient nutritional foods that are not just going to become a healthy part of a diet, but have these super healing properties

in the context of metabolism? Listen, because I like to cook and I really find joy in food traditions, that question is like a perfect setup for me to talk about sort of my own, my own story. You know, I grew up in Pennsylvania inland. I didn't grow up eating, I mean, grew up naturally on the coast, eating a lot of seafood.

But I learned to love seafood by having the opportunity to taste seafood that was cooked really, really well. I think that's one of the biggest kind of like blockades to people kind of trying seafood. If all you've had is, you know, salmon from, you know, like your cafeteria, school cafeteria, or, you know, you associate tuna fish salads, sandwiches with cat food. You know, it smells like cat food. You know, it's kind of not palatable, right? But the thing is that if you go to look at any of these cultures where seafood is very natural,

and again, I've had the privilege as part of my research to travel around the world, I've got friends in different places, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Venice, Italy. You know, when they invite me in, they tour me around the markets. You know, like you see those TV travel shows where people are being like that. That's me. I'm being led around by locals and they're showing me their delicacies, right? So you go to the Venetian fish market, which is unbelievable. And you have a local showing you the cuttlefish or you're showing you the squid or showing

them to tiny little crabs that you would never see normally. And then you sit down and you eat it. prepared in this traditional way that's unbelievably delicious, like flavors you've never had before. That's the kind of adventurous kind of like nature that I tell people for that they should really approach seafood. Wander out, I mean, a good way to do is actually go to a restaurant that's cooking seafood, good seafood, and try something in a way that you haven't had before. So let's back up for a second.

So most people know about salmon. all right, salmon is good for you. But, you know, even for me, I can only have so much salmon. So it's same damn salmon that, like, I could never have a staple of salmon. I'm craving diversity, something different, right? Then you say, well, if you're talking about health, there's got to be oily fish. Saman's got a lot of omega-3s, what are some of the oily fish? So then you kind of automatically go to macro sardines, anchovies.

And some people go, well, you know, those are pretty strong tasting fish. You know, I don't know if I, like, want to eat those. And so immediately, then you kind of just discard seafood as a whole category. Not for me, right? It's fishy. I don't want to be eating that. Well, that's where I'm actually telling you that if you go to these cultures, I actually go to the Mediterranean coastline or look at the coastal culture around Mediterranean or Asia,

you'll see all these amazing ways of cooking. So how do I tell people to do this? Pick a seafood that you might see in the market that is interesting to you. And I'll give you a little clue and how to do that. and we'll talk about some of the interesting seafood I write about. But if you don't know what to do with it, by the way, this is the beautiful thing about the internet. All right. Type that seafood's name out with Mediterranean or Asia with recipe and then click video and up will pop YouTube videos of people who are more than happy to show you the joy of cooking it.

How do you select it? How do you clean it? How do you cook it step by step? And then talk to you about how delicious it actually tastes. There's no excuse. There's no barriers to actually finding a way. way to actually get a delicious way to cook seafood now. So what are some of the interesting seafood I wrote about?

Well, I wrote about salmon, of course. Then what I wrote about is this remarkable study that showed that salmon improves your metabolism because it's very rich in omega-3s. Of course, we would know that. Omega-3s fight white harmful body fat, including visceral fat. It activates your brown fat. It turns on your metabolism, lowers your, evens up. lowers your lipids, your harmful cholesterol.

All good, right? Salmon. We knew that. All right, good for cardiovascular, low-recogn vasculin disease. But another study that was done in Finland and Ireland actually showed that when you compare salmon to cod, not an oily fish, that just that the amount of omega-3s in cod, which is 5.5 times lower than in salmon, right? So oily fish, it's got to be oily, right?

Nope, even five times lower than salmon, you'd still get the omega-3 benefits. So this tells you about the dose response. You can actually go way lower than the amount of omega-3s in salmon to get a metabolic benefit. Weight loss, shrinking waist circumference, lipids lowering. This to me was like a groundbreaking discovery that you can actually eat much lower levels of omega-3 and still get the metabolic benefits. All right.

Now, what I've done to the book, and again, I've done all the heavy lifting, all the math for people, I've converted the amount of omega-3s that you find in cod, all right, and I've converted across all kinds of seafood that you would find in the grocery store. You walk by the seafood section. So you got the mussels, you got the clams, you've got the king crab, you've got the lobsters, you've got the, and those are the shellfish, maybe some squid. But also, you know, the hake, the bass, the sea bath. I converted it all. By converting it, I can tell you exactly how much you need to eat, how many pieces you need to eat in order to actually get the same benefit as the omega-3 you get in cod, which works. Now, obviously, if you get an oily fish like mackerel, I can tell you it's very little that you actually need to eat. So that's the other thing about dose.

So to get the same amount of metabolically active body fat fighting, weight loss, for cod, all you need to eat is one forkful of mackerel, gives you enough omega-3. It's packed with omega-3s. But you could also have four medium-sized shrimp, right? So this is liberating. This means that if you're inclined to explore the diversity of food and look at sources of protein, including healthy proteins like in seafood, and you're looking at whether you're going around your grocery store, you know, like seafood section is a place that a lot of

people just ignore. They push their cart right by it. I'm telling you, read my book, take a look at it, look at some recipes, and then take the time to actually get interested in what they're actually offering. If you happen to be living in a place like Los Angeles or Tokyo or Maine or any coastal city, San Francisco, Boston, take the time to go to a seafood section and a seafood monger and see where all the different kinds of things they can sell. It is true. You know, when you buy seafood, you want to cook it that day. so it requires a little bit extra effort, but man, it tastes so great that once you kind of get over that hump of preparation and you feel confident in making it, it's really worth it.

That's well said. And there's plenty of services that will ship to you frozen. Right. And that's still great too because often that can be just as fresh, if not fresher, because they're freezing it at the factory. Again, as long as you get from a good place and location and everything. And I'm not pushing this brand, but I can tell you, I just did a, I just did a, I just I just did a video interview with the founder of a sustainable seafood group. It's called Seed to Table.

And again, I don't receive any money from them. But the thing that's amazing that they were telling me is that not only do they have traceable seafood, they specifically look for sustainable fishing practices. It's all frozen, but it's frozen on the boat. So it locks in all the omega-3s and all the proteins fresh right then and there. and then they shipped them very nicely to your home. So, in fact, it's even fresher than the fish that has to go back to shore before it's packed on ice, then flown around an airplane someplace. And it really changed my mind about the idea of frozen seafood.

So if you're in the middle of the country, last summer I was on an RV, I took up an RV trip just to see the United States. And I went right into the middle of the country. You know, I was like in Nebraska and South Dakota, you know, as far away from the ocean, you can make it. I went to, you know, the basic grocery stores, and I wanted to take a look at, like, how do I find healthy food in the middle of the country, all right? You know, like, of course, there's produce there. But I went to the frozen section, and I opened up the freezer section, and I found there

was a bounty of seafood, flash frozen at sea that you can actually buy. So you can get healthy seafood, even if you live far away from the ocean. Yeah, and I think that's such an important thing because there's, again, so much well-intentioned food phobia and some of that is associated with topics that are just very controversial and there's a lot of nuances in there like seafood and overfishing and at the same time too the part that I feel like it's a little bit politically incorrect but it's the truth you every category you go to you're going to find somebody who's going to demonize that thing and if you let those information sources even in the wellness community, run wild, then you're going to be left with nothing that you can get a chance to eat.

And confusion. And confusion. And the thing is that I feel like seafood, especially because the research is one of those areas. But I actually feel it's going to be coming to the other protein categories too, because we're learning so much more about what actually drives arthrosis. And there's great cardiologists that are out there. There's one that's coming on here that's going to go through my blood panel, you know, that's going to go through the latest. scans that are out there that are way better than CT scans. There's a scan, again, no affiliation with them. It's called a clearly scan that looks at soft plaque buildup, right? CT scans, which look for

hard plaque buildup. And the whole idea is that, okay, great, we don't want to have so much high concentration of saturated fat in our diet or a high level of APOB. Why? Because then that's going to lead to, you know, potentially plaque build up and also associated with inflammation. Well, that's a much more detailed story than what people are talking about. Right. And so there's a lot of nuances that's very specific to each person and we're getting better and better testing. So he's going to walk my audience through my clearly scan.

How much soft plaque buildup do I have? Where is my LDL number, which has always been high? Even though I eat a diet that's very healthy and things like that, I've always had high LDL. And so where is it a problem? Where is it not a problem? And how can people start to think a little bit more nuanced for these categories that become so polarizing and demonizing that we may not have the full story out yet on these topics.

Well, I mean, I think that you make such a good point, which is that in the wellness community, and, you know, maybe this is just part of the nature of our community. You've got authoritative voices that are passionate, I think, good intention, but by practice, they wind up either creating heroes or demons. By the way, it's always easier to get attention when you demonize something. All right. And then if you make a hero, you want to sort of like sell it as the hero. But the reality is that, you know, what I try to bring it back in my book is really that

old traditions that have been time tested, and I'm not talking about like 50 years. I'm talking about like 5,000 years, you know, go way, way, way back. These traditions, particularly food traditions, really align healthy food practices, you know, with sustainable food, with a sustainable ingredient. prepared in ways that tend to be healthier and give you that diversity, as well as the pleasure of food. And so I talk about, you know, back to Mediterranean because that's how I eat. And people like, oh, well, where did you come up with that?

And I explain it, you know, based my own history and my own background. But in fact, I also explain that it matches really well with ancient traditions. So Mediterranean Asian, two of the healthiest traditional food cultures in the world, also tastiest cultures by my reckoning by my palate. And I think most people would agree with me, actually date back two or three thousand years. And in fact, they were once connected by the Silk Road, which is the most famous, most influential trading route in human history. So going back 2000 years, you actually had China and the Mediterranean, Asian and Mediterranean connected by this road that's wound through Central Eurasia, went through, wound through India, and all the way, went

all the way to Turkey and then into the Mediterranean. And the traders back then met each other, exchange ingredients, exchange foods, exchange recipes. And so to some extent, this is the opportunity for us to rediscover some of those old exchanges that were always there. This isn't necessarily about fusion food where you have to go to some, you know, iron chef to come up with something really cool. That's cool, too. Listen, I love creativity. And I think creativity with food is really awesome. I have a lot of friends who are chefs. But I think that, you know, by rediscovering our roots of tasty food and being mindful about how to choose, look, they didn't survive tradition for thousands of years if they were going to be really unhealthy practices. And if you think about that,

makes you wonder whether or not eating all these ultra-processed foods are going to survive another thousand years. Probably not, right? It's only the good things that are actually going to survive over time, the standard test of time. So I think going back, and recognizing there's a history to mediteration eating that's based on traditional combinations, know-how, revered tastes and preparations. And it's something that, you know, we didn't have the same kind of frenetic society, wellness community. I think back then, wellness was just much more natural to who we were. It's part of, we didn't have all this, we didn't have all the distractions that we have today. I'm encouraging people to say, we have science that really push us

us to understand why these practices actually are good. We can use our individual tastes and preferences to rediscover which of those foods and ingredients actually fit our own bodies, our own preferences, our own psyches the best, and really lean into them. So this idea of getting away from food fear, fat fear, you know, like to really try to get back into balance, that's really what my new book is all about. One of the coolest section of the book is, where you walks through sort of a day in life of this Mediterranean approach. We have the book so we can open that section or you can just recount it if you remember it.

Like some of the highlights of like, what does it look like if we're going to take these ancient ways, but we're going to incorporate it into a modern lifestyle of like, okay, people are asking kind of like, well, what am I eating throughout the day, especially in contrast to the typical sort of American lifestyle of breakfast, lunch, and dinner and how that's organized. Yeah, I mean, you know, I will tell you exactly how I do it because it's very consistent every single day. I'll make different choices every day, but my approach is very consistent every single day. And it starts with breakfast. I mean, and I'll throw in a few nuggets of what I talk about in the book as well.

Please. When I wake up in the morning, I never eat food right away. I take the time to kind of get ready. If I take a shower, get dressed, I'll catch up with some emails or whatever it is. I change up the padded, the habit that I grew up. You know, like all of our mommies told us to get up and hurry up and eat some breakfast so we can get on the school bus to get to school, right? And so we stuff ourselves with food.

I never do that because our body doesn't do that. And I know that if I get up and I take a little bit of time to get ready, like about an hour-ish, is probably that's what I did this morning. I did some other stuff for an hour before I sat and had anything to eat. That gives my fasted time, my low insulin time. my body, an extra hour to burn extra energy to burn down extra body fat. It's part of my extension of my intermittent fasting that I do when I'm actually sleeping. All right. And so I get up and I do that. And what do I eat? Choices I made this morning. I had some coffee. I'm just sort of thinking through.

I had a cup of coffee. I almost always have coffee in the morning. I know it's got chlorogenic acid. I don't put a lot of dairy in it. I mean, I like I had, I like my coffee black, but sometimes I'll have a little dairy, but not very much, light. I had some berries. I ordered some berries this morning. I'm staying at a hotel. I looked at room service and what could I find? That was like my centerpiece for my, for berries. They had some organic free range eggs. I wanted some protein. And eggs, so I wanted to get some protein. So I had some eggs. I just had them scrambled very simply with a little bit of olive oil. I specified that.

And they also had some sides. I had some tiny little mushrooms that were actually sauteed in the size because I know it has dietary soluble fiber. And that's basically what I had for my breakfast. And again, I didn't have a lot. I didn't finish everything that was brought up to me. I don't belong to the Clean Plate Club. I quit that a long time ago.

I don't like food waste. but, you know, I'm going to only eat enough to satisfy but not feel full. You felt satiated. I felt, I felt good. And by the way... You were doing out of willpower. You were just like, okay, cool, I'm good, I'm complete. And by the way, you know, I was also, when I eat, I actually stay in touch with my body.

So I don't wolf food down. When you wolf food, that's when you tend to overeat. Because you're putting food, i.e. fuel in your body faster than your body can process the loading, the filling up the tank. to your brain. But when you eat slowly, like, you know, this morning I probably ate breakfast over 45 minutes, you know. I mean, I wasn't sitting there methodically eating the breakfast. I was doing some other things as well. But I ate slow. So actually, before long, you know, my body, so, you know, you're good. I don't feel like another bite of anything, you know. So I didn't feel like,

and by the way, that's an important thing. Quit the Clean Plate Club. Because if you feel like you have to clean everything on your plate, like your mom and your teacher and the cafeteria lady told you, all right, who put that amount of food on your plate? Now, when I serve myself, I will actually be very conservative, not put too much on, all right? But when somebody else serves you, I always make sure I don't feel compelled to actually clean the plate out of a sense of duty. Now, it's true, like we do want to be, we don't want to waste food. But so anyway, so that would be like my typical breakfast. And can ask one question about breakfast? sometimes people hear the advice and I've experimented a little bit with myself that especially in the

morning that you had eggs in your case starting off with a healthy source of protein whatever that might match your dietary standards in your life protein is very satiating and you don't feel hungry for a lot of other things especially if people are at the beginning stages of maybe wanting to lose a decent amount of weight any thoughts about that is do you feel like Like that can work for some people, that doesn't work. You know, I think, yeah, no, I mean, I think that it, it'll be different for every individual. But yeah, if you actually eat proteins and foods that actually provide more satiation, meaning that you just feel fuller longer, that'll help you not overeat.

But the, but the one caveat to that, that is that if you wait too long and then you get really, really hungry, and then you are tempted to overeat again, you know, so just delaying the time to eat, actually doesn't prevent you from overeating. Yeah, got it. So I think that what you want to do is to stay in tune with your body. I mean, like a good example of something people might not think about, you know, like the traditional English breakfast. It's meat heavy, blah, blah, blah, you know, maybe not so good for you.

But it's got a tomato. Tomato is actually good for you. It's got lecopene in it. And sometimes it's got beans. And depending on how the beans are actually cooked, beans are a good source of protein. It's also a good source of dietary fiber. and it's actually satiating. And I write about beans in my book where actually if you eat beans on a regular basis,

you can actually shrink your weight circumference as well. And so again, there's metabolic activation depending on what you eat, as long as you don't eat too much. Yeah, which goes back to the whole thing. If you are generally eating food, I don't know anybody personally who's eating a primary whole foods diet, and which usually requires you to make food, unless if you're very well off and you have a chef making food for you,

where the vast majority, including myself, is going to be your making food, that you struggle with, if you've been, you're on that, it's just a lot harder to overeat. Not that you can. You definitely can. You can overeat on any kind of approach. But it's really the ultra-process foods. And then even in the wellness category, you have not all processed foods are bad, right?

almond mokas process. This is, you know, olives are processed. So it's not all processed foods are bad, but where I see it challenging for even people in the wellness community who sometimes write to me or, you know, I see them writing on social media and I'm reading comments is people who are eating a lot of processed forms of like, quote unquote, healthy foods, like healthy Oreos. Oreos at the end today, there's still Oreos. And I guess you could still call those processed foods or you're eating a lot of chips in your diet or, you know, yeah, sure, it's cassava, but you're having all these concentrated calories that would be. a lot harder for you to have that much cassava if you were just eating it plain. Yeah. Well, here's a great example.

I mean, 100%. And here's an example. Please. When you do ultra-process foods like chips, you can take wholesome, good ingredients, convert them into a form that doesn't exist in nature, and then reshape them and fry them or whatever it is. You've taken something that might be actually originally healthy, and you've turned it into something that's not so healthy.

Think about like purple corn chips, right? or frankly even corn chips. You can actually take something that inherently has some nutritional value. That's good for you. And you can just convert it into something from healthy into something that's not so healthy. But you can also take healthy and minimally process it and turn it to something that is less healthy than the original form. This is back to the whole conversation about Whole Foods. So here's an example I read about my book.

orange juice is good. People critique it for having a lot of added sugar or had a lot of sugar, very sweet. And that's actually true. But that doesn't mean you should avoid oranges because it turns out that oranges like citrus has a ton of dietary fiber. Think about peeling a mandarin or whatever. It's a ton of dietary fiber in there. It's got vitamin C. It's got asperidin and aerogenin, all kinds of good. Actually, metabolizing. Metabolizing. metabolism activating bioactives. And you would eat those. And that's what you call nutrient dense if you have an orange, for example. Now, orange juice, which in moderation, and if you have the pulp and everything and you make it yourself, can also be quite good. You're not going to be having all the same pulp. You're not going to be having all the bits because you leave a lot behind when you're squeezing the orange. But think about it. A tall glass of orange juice takes eight oranges on average to actually make. All right. That's eight oranges. And you can go help that down, you can swig down a big, tall glass of orange juice in seconds.

But you would never sit down and eat eight oranges, probably. Right. And that's the point. The whole food versus even minimally processing, like turning into a juice, can make all the difference between having that much extra fructose sugar, natural sugars, and even though it's nutrient tests. Now you've actually swigged it down long before that, you know, that you would have even noticed that you actually pounded so much sugar into your body.

Well, I interrupted you and you were taking us through your day. So you talked about coffee, some berries, a little bit of protein with the eggs, not always belonging to the clean plate club, you know, watching your portions in there and not feeling like you have to eat the whole thing. So take us from there. Yeah. And I want to say one more thing about breakfast because sometimes I will skip breakfast. Sometimes I'll skip breakfast because I'm busy.

Sometimes I'll skip breakfast because I don't feel like eating breakfast. And so I think this idea of breakfast being the most important meal of the day, actually, most people don't know this. That was a marketing message. Some agency came up with that, you know, from the cereal companies, like I think in the 1960s or 70s. So that's a complete myth. And, you know, if you skip breakfast, all you're doing is you're giving your body a little bit more chance to metabolize extra fuel in your body. So sometimes when I do that, I won't feel like I've got to go snack on something crappy, right? I mean, that's the other thing. If you skip breakfast, now you're going to reach for some crappy snacks in the morning. Don't do it. So for me,

I will then look for lunch and I tend to eat lunch, a light lunch. I try not to eat a heavy lunch. You know, the idea of eating a salad for lunch, I will sometimes do that. Sometimes I have a bowl of soup, sometimes I have a stew, you know, have a little bowl of stew, something that's not too heavy, a small amount for lunch. I do like to build my meals around vegetables whenever I can. and if it's cooked, I even like it better because I think it's tastier. You know, so if I saw something like bok choy or sauteed spinach, I'll gravitate towards that.

And I tend to look, if I'm at a restaurant, I'm looking at a menu for lunch, you know, I'm out traveling or working. I'll actually look for something on the vegetable side to actually order as kind of like my quote, main. And I try not to order too much other than that. Or maybe I'll get two little appetizers. something that's tasty. I look for tasty things.

I should say that's the most important thing. I look for the ingredients that I recognize. A beet salad with some pecans or something like that, hey, you know what? That sounds pretty good. A little bit of vinegar, a little dressing with manual vinegar, apple cider vinegar. Oh, that looks pretty good too.

I will recognize these things from the work that I've done. And that's what I really try to encourage people to do, is start to recognize the ingredients that are actually good for you and tasty at the same time. And I'll go for that. So I'll eat kind of a lighter lunch. The one thing that if I skip breakfast, I want to make sure that I actually don't overeat at lunch.

And so I will almost deliberately make sure that I'm eating kind of a lighter lunch. I don't want to feel loaded, overloaded after lunch. I'm like, I'm brain dead. Feel sluggish, slow energy. Yeah. So that's the key is not to overeat. And again, if I'm kind of navigating along the Mediterranean kind of genre, you know, I probably won't, I probably will not.

order a big, heavy pasta for lunch, you know, but I might order, again, kind of like a couple of appetizory kind of things, or I'll make a salad, you know, another thing that's sometimes good for lunch, I'll sometimes look at leftovers from whatever I made for dinner. Yeah. Right. And I'll take a small amount of that. And because if I try to cook some healthy, tasty food, I'll have a, it'll be, it'll be another treat for me that I'll look forward to eating the next day.

So then moving on to dinner, you know, I always build my dinners. based on what the vegetable actually is. So, you know, some people look for their protein. What's my, am I going to have chicken or I'm going to have whatever it is? And they kind of build down vegetables or condiments on the side. Even when I'm designing my own meal, I will try to say, what's fresh or local or I can get my hands on or on the menu that I want to make kind of a centerpiece? And I'll look at how it's prepared.

And what are all the ingredients, other ingredients I want to add to it or make it. And then I'll add things around that. And that's how I, you know, again, I think you've. correctly pointed out, there's so much made. We're all, we're being hit over the head with the, with the slogan of plant-based food, plant-place eating. But to me, I know that I'll be able to get really good dietary fiber and polyphenols if I actually choose that. Got to be tasty. I don't want to eat it if it's not that tasty. Then I'll start to build my meal around it. Same deal if I'm actually cooking or whether I'm eating out, dining out at a restaurant.

And I haven't invited somebody's house. Same deal. Like I will take a look at what's on the dinner table. And I will always go for kind of like the veggie stuff first. That's the first thing I put on my plate, not too much. And then I'm looking at my through the Mediterranean lens. You know, what is cooked in a particular direction that I find. I won't do this if I'm somebody's house.

I'll eat whatever they're making. But I'll always gravitate towards the healthy and tasty. That's what I'm looking for. And I don't take too much. I leave plenty of white space on my dinner plate to make sure I'm not eating too much. When it's all crowded together, it's a big mountain. You know, like that's no good. That's the buffet style of eating.

I will never do that. So always leave white space. You want to make sure there's enough white space. And the other thing I do is I never go for seconds. I try to savor the first, right? So like sometimes you get something really tasting your plate and like, man, you're going to eat that first. And they're like, oh, I can't wait to go get some more. what I try to do, like eat slowly, take the things that you really know you're going to like and savor them.

And that's where you're taking your time. That's part of eating mindfully. Like I think if you put enjoyment as part of it as part of your eating pattern and then you make sure that you're not taking too much, you're satisfied but not, you don't feel full, that allows you to leave the dinner party before it's over kind of thing, meaning that, you know, you're not overeating that. our harahachibun me, the, you know, eat about 80% when you're full and then like leave. Those are some of the basic principles of how I do it. And again, through the lens, I naturally gravitate to say, is there something Asian, or is there a Mediterranean or whatever is prepared for me or what's in front of me? I'll try to cherry pick the things that I know that are healthy.

And I don't eat too much. I love it. It's great. While we're in the latter part of the interview, I want to talk about these principles. you kind of tease them out a little bit. And these principles really go into the idea of what does it look like to eat to beat your diet? Because it's so much more than just the individual foods that you choose. There's a whole sort of lifestyle in a way. And when we start to, you know, we see these longest living societies, the blue zones, the Asian communities, the Mediterranean

communities, which you rightfully highlight that as they've adopted more of the Western diet, even if they're eating their traditional foods, but they're more processed, they're not groups in societies that are as healthy as they once were. But even those groups that are the long-living ones, it's not just the individual food. It's kind of like the food is part of their lifestyle as a whole. Alcohol is a perfect example of one. You know, you often hear that the blue zones, all except for Loma Linda, they all have a little tiny amount of alcohol on a regular basis. Now, can we infer that alcohol is good? Or is that that population can handle it because the, the rest of their lifestyle is organized, we don't know yet, right? Unless if you know.

Well, I mean, I'll tell you, I have something to say about alcohol because I get asked us all the time. Dr. Lee, red wine's good for you, right? Well, now I just read the red wines, that all wine is bad for you. And what I basically say when it comes to alcohol, because it's a, it's a triggering and somewhat controversial point. point. It is true that many epidemiological studies have shown that, you know, drinking a glass or two, very moderate, red wine is associated with some beneficial health outcomes, lower risk of some diseases. But I will tell you that in no study, no research is alcohol, ethanol, okay, the stuff that's underlying, you know, your whiskey, your beer, your wine, it's the alcohol is not actually good for you. Alcohol is a toxin, actually.

It's a, and so a little bit, though, as you say, if you're mostly healthy and your health defenses and your metabolism is very resilient, human body is amazing. There's no such thing that's a super food. It's a super body. And even if we slug down a glass of wine or sip a glass and wine or have a drink or two, our body will bounce back. It's only, again, continuous abuse of that system that lets you break down our engine. But alcohol is something very specific.

And here's how I explain it. As long as humans have been growing grain, they've been fermenting it and creating alcohol. Alcohol is part of human tradition. We celebrate main events of our life with it, you know, births, deaths, you know, holidays. It's all part of, alcohol is part of human society. I don't think we should demonize alcohol. I think that, you know, we should just recognize as part of, it's part of the traditions of human, tradition, but we should know that in no cases the ethanol actually good for you. It's just something

that we do, all right? And that's why we should actually think about it as a tradition rather than as a health food. And I think that allows us to actually accommodate it in moderation in ways that are actually going to be allowable if that's your preference to celebrate, you know, a wedding. with a glass of champagne. Like, there's no shame to it. That's a human tradition. We're all human. Embrace that part of who we are.

And that's, I think, the thing that I try to, that's my contribution in the health and wellness community. I try to use science, but I also try to be reasonable and I try to recognize who we are as humans. The nuance, right? That's where everything is heading towards. You're not all answer for everybody. We're going to sweep it under the table.

Everybody's got to do the same thing. And generally speaking, if you have all these other components, components, whether it's alcohol or diet soda that's occasional here and there, it's not going to make a difference for you. You'll bounce back. You're going to bounce back. There's plenty of other crazier things that people do in life. So this goes back to the 10 principles that you talk about in the book and that you close off the book with. And I'm just going to pick a few. We're not going to run through them, you know, pick up the copy, pick up a copy of the book, link in the show notes. You can go through them. I'm going to pick a couple of these that, you know, we can talk about here. The first one

that I want to do is I want to pick something called Drink the Trinity. So what is that? What does that mean? And what is the Trinity? Well, in my book, in a part about food, I take people on, I take my reader on a tour through the grocery store, including to the beverage section. And literally the way I do this is actually, I invite you to jump into my shopping cart like you would have when you were a kid in your mom's shopping car, get pushed through. And I kind of narrate all the things. through it. So the beverage section in a grocery store is a pretty confusing section because it's in the middle aisles and there are endless sea of juices and sodas and bottled waters that are there. And so I try to bring a little bit of clarity to, you know, what are the three beverages that are

unquestionably healthy for you? There's no real controversy of them, all right? Because other drinks like juices and sodas, lots of controversy, lots of data. But the three things I call the Holy Trinity of beverages are water, okay? Water actually is critical for hydration, critical to maintain our health defenses, critical for our metabolism. You need water in the system, okay? And drinking water is something that is very natural and important to us. And again, when you drink cool water, you activate these temperature gauges in our stomach that are triggering our metabolism to kind of warm up the water in our stomach so we don't cool our core body temperature. So there's even metabolic benefits to drinking water. Water is also by satiating. So when you actually drink water with a meal, you're naturally stretching out your stomach a little bit. And rather than actually having food in there, that water stretch actually basically slows down your appetite, slows down your hunger as well, which also helps a

contribute to preventing you from overeating as well. So water is really good for you. There's no, you know, like, it's a human right to drink water. You know, we have to drink water. It's really great. Footnote to that. And this is actually something that I think really deserves careful research, more careful researches, you know, bottled water, which is so commonly consumed, probably will have

microplastics in it. Almost certainly does. And, you know, even though the research doesn't, hasn't clearly nailed. what the harm of microplastics are, I would say it's probably not so good for you. We can find it like attached to a red blood cell circulating in our blood. That freaks me out, actually, to think about that. So if you can drink water, if you can drink water from a source other than bottled water, it's probably preferable.

Yeah, get a filter at home. Get a filter at home. There's a great quote that a friend said years ago, an acquaintance said years ago. He said, either you get a filter or you become the filter. That's actually really true. And our kidney is going to be the filter and our bloodstream is going to become the filter. Yeah, you don't want to be accumulating these microplastics. But the water is really, really a good beverage.

Second is tea. We talked a little bit about green tea as being beneficial to you. And, you know, tea is the second most popular beverage in a world after drinking water. So we're talking about something that a lot of people have a lot of experience with. But what I point out in my book is not just green tea. It's different kinds of green tea. Macha tea is actually good for you. Ulong tea, which is slightly fermented green tea, also has metabolic benefits.

benefits also has polyphenols. And then for green tea, if you have macha, you know, which you find in a ceremonial tea, you find in a Japanese restaurant, it's bright green tea. It's kind of opaque because it's actually made with powder. And it's the entire tea leaf that's powdered. A lot of people don't realize this, but macha is super packed with polyphenols. You know why? Macha is grown in a very particular way. 28 days before they pick the tea leaf to make matcha, they put it under shade. They basically cover it with a canopy, and the shade is there. So the tea in response to the tea leaf, tea plant, in response to shade, actually wants to make more polyphenols. So they make anywhere from 30 to 300 times more polyphenols under the shade.

All right. And then what happens when you pick the leaf, cut off the stem, and then they powder, a drying powder the entire leaf. And so that's why you have so much more polyphenol. It's like a stress response to not having enough sun. First is a stress response on the plant. But then you get more, rather than having a tea bag or loose tea leaves, you actually powder the entire leaf. So you're getting the entire leaf, including all the polyphenols.

So you drink all the polyphenols, which is why you get 30 to 300 times more than just dunking a tea bag. You also get the dietary fiber. Good for your gut microbiome. So machetee actually is quite amazing. Actually, he's done a study to show that matcha tea extracts can kill breast cancer stem cells. Wow. I'm always amazed by that because, you know, you know, it's a lot of.

Look, as somebody who's been involved with biotech development and cancer treatment development, finding something that could kill stem cells, cancer stem cells, like breast cancer stem cells, which is what makes cancers come back, is a holy grail. We don't have a drug for it, but here, macha tea actually been shown in the lab to actually be able to do that. To me is actually really jaw dropping. Then going down into even more fermented tea, because traditionally, again, you know, this idea that in our wellness community, we wind up having all these mantras must drink green. tea and oxidized fermented teas no good.

Turns out that's not true. The science is showing the U-Long tea, which is slightly fermented, also good for your metabolism. You can shrink your waist-sized, your waist-sacor's, waist-sacor comfort, loose body fat. And then even perhaps more surprising, if you take the extreme of fermented, smoky dark teas, there's a tea that I write about called Pu-U-U-U-A-R-H, one of your favorites, right? One of mine as well. this has come from a village of Pooer that back thousands of years actually traded tea on the Silk Road.

So they smoked the tea, they fermented it, so it would actually survive the tea journey. And it turns out research had been done to show that Pooer tea lights up your brown fat, triggers your excess fat burning by burning the cells, decreases your stem cells from making more fat, in white fats, visceral fat as well, quite remarkable. that this fermented tea, that supposedly, you know, fermented and it's not, can't be good, doesn't have any of the polyphenols left, wrong. And on top of that, they've actually discovered, just a few years ago, that there is this, this tradition, thousand-year-old tradition of making pu-R-T, there's even a bacteria, a probiotic that actually is, the bacteria has grown in

the way that's fermented. In fact, they call it puercilis, like a bacillus, that actually grows in puer tea. So this is actually a probiotic. Obiotic tea, which to me is remarkable. And not only does it improve gut health, it's good for your metabolism as well. So it fires up your brown fat. So again, you know, tea is the second part of the holy trinity. The third, which I always drink and you asked me, what did I want? If I, you know, I was coming in to do this podcast with you and I requested a cup of coffee. Coffee has chlorogenic acid and many other polyphenols, but the chlorogenic acid not only boosts your health defenses, but it also triggers your metabolism and it stimulates your metabolism from going as well.

A little bit of the caffeine, which I'm able to tolerate. Not everybody can tolerate caffeine, but I'm able to tolerate the caffeine. Caffeine also stimulates not only your kind of like your brain, but also stimulates your metabolism as well. And I'm not encouraging people to go after caffeine. I'm just saying that coffee is one of the third of the Holy Trinity, coffee, tea, and water that actually is really, really healthy. You know, the beautiful thing about the way you presented is like, Puera, one of my favorite teas.

I drank it so much during college. Yeah. Like I would drink it all the time. And then I had a little bit of a gap. And then I'm thinking recently, I'm like, you know what? It's probably been a year or two since I've had it. Like, when you know the information, it's another reminder of like, oh, this thing that I used to enjoy or that I've heard of or that I heard somebody else having, like, wow, like,

that's exciting for me and you include it back into your routine. and all this culminates together, and it really goes into this last principle that you talk about in the 10 principles, which is live to eat, right? The joy of searching out, being a food hunter, forger, in our modern world

and really leaning into the idea of not being fear-based around food, but actually, you know, I'll let you set it up. You know, sometimes we hear this phrase, like people say, oh, do you eat to live or do you live to eat? And almost like live-to-eat has a demeanial. tone that people give it in that capacity. Talk about how you're representing it to the audience.

Yeah, well, in my book, one of the things that I really try to, and I hope the readers get this, convey is that we don't need to fear our food. The very foods that taste great can be actually good for us if we're mindful about how we eat it and when we eat it and all that kind of other stuff and define good combinations of it and that these are connected to our old traditions. And that's really how I really became very mindful of this idea of living to eat. So I did a gap year before I went to medical school to become a doctor. I was a biochemist in college. And I was very enamored by history.

And I was always interested in the Mediterranean because when I studied, I took a very influential course called the Renaissance history of man. And that course fascinated me because it was really. talking about that inflection point between the dark ages, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, sort of the Enlightenment, and all the incredible arts and sciences and literature, explosion of culture that occurred during the Renaissance, right? And I realized something that was really amazing, which is that at any point, like, it didn't happen overnight. It wasn't like, you know, one day it wasn't a dark room. It's called the Middle Ages. And then one day somebody clicked on a light switch and, oh, it's a Renaissance. No, this actually took place over.

hundreds of years that this evolution actually occurred. And I realized that there was something really valuable about this idea of growing to higher light, a stage of enlightenment that occurs over time. I really wanted to see where this occurred, which happened to be in the Mediterranean that we were studying in Italy and Greece. So I really wanted to get over to study it. And then I also realized that the food traditions also, as part of my study, changed dramatically between the Middle Ages where people are just like, you know, cooking, you know, those gigantic, you know, Bronto burgers over a fire to really beginning to understand how ingredients melded together, you know, the simmering and the cooking and the stewing.

Like, these were not medieval age, you know, did have cavemen weren't doing that. But really, sort of during the middle age, that's when the modern Asian and Mediterranean actually cooking techniques came into being. So I wanted to see this. So before I went to medical school, I did a gap. year. And I went to Italy. I kind of embedded myself, so to speak, and I was, I lived with the family, and I was there explicitly to study the link between food and culture and health. I wanted to see what it was like over there. In Italy, in Greece, I traveled all around Italy, and I actually

also did some cooking for the families I was living with. In Greece, I went to a monastery. I literally volunteered to be a cook in the monastery one day because the Abbott announced that the chef monk was sick at the flu and they needed volunteers and who knew how to cook and so I raised my hand and off I went in there. We were stirring a ginormous pot of beans with a canoe paddle literally and cooking for the entire monastery. This is like cooking Easter feast. And to me, that experience burned into my brain while I was living there that people really

enjoyed their food. They knew about their food. They talked about their food. They looked forward to their food. So, you know, if you go to Mediterranean, anyone, if you have a friend in Italy or in Greece, and they took you out to a meal or cooked a meal for you, while you sat down with your meal, they would be talking about their food. Italians talk about what they're eating as they're eating it, and they talk about the season it is and how to prepare it and different nuances about it. People are passionate about their food. Same thing in Asia. You know, and, you know, I would imagine the same thing as in India. People take the time to prepare their food and when they serve it.

That's what people talk about. They talk about their food and they really, really relish it and enjoy it. And they look forward to their next meal. I think to me, I learned that was the antithesis is what I came back to when I went to medical school, where we were so rushed, you know, we were so busy. We didn't have time to eat. And so when you sat down, it was really just to pile in some sustenance and to get through to get to the next thing. And that, to me, was, you know, I really wanted to live to eat as opposed to just eat to live, to pile in some calories so I can keep going.

I think I've really lived my life that way. And what I hope for people who read me a book is that they'll really see from the way that I write about food. That it's something that I enjoy, it's passionate, and that it's something that you can really look forward to. like when I was writing some of the things that I wrote, I actually wrote part of this book, by the way, in the Mediterranean. I went back. I was doing some research in places.

And I finished my book actually in Greece. I was on a Greek island. And I went to a little writing cave. And the food that I would eat, like I would write about afterwards and it would make my mouth water to write about the food I just ate all over again. So, you know, I hope readers really get this idea. Like, please don't fear your food.

you know, love your food. And it's just so amazing that we're so fortunate, actually, to be able to, you know, benefit from societies and histories and cultures. I've actually figured out a lot of stuff for us. And now what's cool is that science is bringing us really to the cutting edge, that forefront, where we begin to understand why the things that taste so great are actually so great. It's well said. And, you know, Dr. Lee, nobody does it better than you. I really, really, really appreciated this book.

A few months ago, you were just finishing it up and turning it in and you and I were hopping on the phone and you were telling me about the book. And we had called just to do a little catch-up. And I remember thinking like, this is so timely, especially in a day and age where there's a lot of discussions that are happening right now about how do we address the obesity epidemic. Is it going to be solved via drugs, which are going to bankrupt our country if you do the math on them? but what's an alternative? What's an alternative? What's a different way that, yeah, sure, it would require a shift in society. And you know what?

We have to provide funds to make it more accessible to the people that don't have access to it. But it's a much more sustainable and gets to the actual result that we're looking for. And that's immediately what I thought of when you were telling me about this book. And I just so appreciate you putting out your work on there. Coming on the podcast and talking all about it, this is absolutely the time that we need to re-establish a better relationship with food and you're helping us do exactly that. Thanks very much. Tell us more. People can get the book out there, eat to beat your diet. I know you're always hosting different courses, webinars and things about it. Where can people go to sign up for all that?

Well, look, I'm actually continuously digesting and then also distributing disseminating new research that I see if you want a best way to find out and learn what I'm actually talking about this week. Come to my website. It's Dr.D.R. William Lee, L.I.com. Dr. William Lee.com. I'm on social doing the same thing. You can find my handle is at Dr. William Lee. I do free masterclasses.

People from around the world. It's amazing. It's so satisfying to me when I'm doing a free master class. And I ask people to actually tell me where they're coming from when they attend. And they're like, you know, besides the, you know, Arkansas, Mississippi and New York and New Jersey, I'm seeing South Africa and Kenya. and, you know, Philippines, it's so thrilling that we can actually get that message of food out because we're all united by that. So sign up for a free masterclass. I do regular masterclasses. They do metabolism masterclasses. I teach, for people that want to do a deep dive, by the way, I do a four-week deep dive, eat-to-beat disease online course. You can do the course on your own time, but it really is synced up. And I take you like really, really deep into all the nuances that people, you know, love to know.

more foods, more techniques, more shopping, more recipes. It's all there. And then something that's been really, really fun for me, as I've gotten into metabolism as paired up with this book, I do a metabolism mini course. And I pair it up with a quick start guide, lots of recipes, lots of shopping guides. You know, this whole thing about what should I buy? How do I make it easy? Those are the things that I actually try to do with what I have now.

Leave the science to me because I'm a scientist. but what I want to do as a scientist is to make it easy for you to love your food and love your health. Well, you're doing it well. Dr. Lee, thank you for coming on the podcast. Super appreciate you. Thank you very much.