Dhru Purohit Show - The Top Foods to Prevent Disease and Repair DNA with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and InsideTracker. Traditionally, advocates of nutrition for health maintain that with the right diet, medicine isn’t necessary—in other words, food is superior to medicine. Traditional advocates of medicine, by contrast, believe nutrition takes a back seat to medicine, which is all-powerful.   A growing body of data says both sides are wrong and that food and medicine can work together harmoniously, each enhancing the value of the other. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks with Dr. William Li about how food has the ability to combat and prevent things like cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, and illness. They also discuss how certain foods can positively impact the effectiveness of medicine. Dr. Li is a world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author of Eat to Beat Disease—The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. He is best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. His groundbreaking work has had an impact on more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?, has garnered more than 11 million views, and he has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, Martha Stewart Live, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and Voice of America. In this episode, we dive into:  -Grand slammer foods that light up our five health defense systems (2:48) -Longevity and DNA protection (13:51) -How to slow down the aging process (17:51) -How to maximize the benefits of consuming coffee (21:44) -How food and medicine can work together (27:16) -The key to successful immunotherapy cancer treatment (40:10) -Foods that help our body produce nitric oxide (45:16) -What is causing the most damage to our vascular health (50:26) -The importance of food sequencing (54:11) -The benefits of eating seasonal produce (1:07:50) For more on Dr. William Li, follow him on Instagram @drwilliamli, Facebook @drwilliamli, Twitter @drwilliamli, YouTube @drwilliamli, and through his website, drwilliamli.com. Get his book, Eat to Beat Disease, here.  This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and InsideTracker. Magnesium Breakthrough from BiOptimizers really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. It contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. There isn't anything else like it on the market. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off, just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru, with code DHRU10. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What were these people eating that decreased the risk of mortality by 30%? Welcome to the Drew Perot podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. Today's guest is one of those top bright minds, Dr. William Lee, bestselling author of Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. And that's exactly what Dr. William Lee covers today. on the podcast. We've had them on before, but we're going even deeper on today's episode talking about the different ways that we can use food as medicine. Now, if the name Dr. William Lee

sounds familiar, it's because he's best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. And by the way, his groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. This guy knows his stuff. Now, if you've heard our past episodes, we go into completely new material today. We go into this concept of what are called grand slammer foods, foods that have multiple touch points on the core areas of our health and contribute to our overall longevity and DNA repair. Speaking of DNA repair, we break down exactly how our environment, toxins, chemicals, and many other things have an impact on our DNA, our insults to our DNA and damage our DNA.

And what we can do to use food and lifestyle to repair and protect our DNA. We go into a whole host of other topics, including a bunch of case studies that Dr. William Lee has to share with us. You're not going to regret today's episode. Now, if you don't know about Dr. William Lee, a little bit about him. His TED Talk, can we eat to starve cancer is incredible and has garnered more than 11 million views. and he's appeared on all the main talk shows that are out there, Martha Stewart, CNN, and MSNBC, NPR, Voice of America, the Dr. Oz show. And he's been invited to present at the Vatican's Unite to Cure Conference.

He is an author of over a hundred scientific publications in leading journals such as science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, and many more. Dr. Lee has served on the faculties of Harvard, Tufts, and Dartmouth Medical School. always an honor and pleasure to have them on. If you want to go deeper into the topic of how you can create the conditions for your body to heal itself, today's episode is for you. Dr. William Lee, welcome back to the podcast. As always, I'm a huge fan.

I can't tell you enough. And I'd love to jump right in by providing our audience some value. And I recently had seen you in an Instagram live talk about something that I realized we didn't talk about in our first go-round on the podcast. And that is this concept of grand slammer food. foods and ingredients. Can you help us understand what are these Grand Slamer foods and why are they so powerful for help and maybe tease out a few of them and how they're so impactful?

Yeah, absolutely. So in my book Eat at Beat Disease, I have a whole section called Exceptional Foods. And of course, you know, there's lots of things about individual foods that are amazing. But one of the most amazing properties is that there's certain foods that can really light up our body's health defenses. We've got five health defenses, androgenesis, our circulation, our stem cells that help us regenerate from the inside out, our gut microbiome, healthy gut, healthy brain, healthy metabolism, our DNA, which protects us against the environment, and of course, our immune system. So those five, you know, we can actually match one food with

one system, but there are some foods that hit all five, and that's really where the term grand slamer come from. So you don't even have to be a baseball fan to know that if you have one swing of the bat and you can knock it out of the park and drive everybody home. That's actually what I'm talking about. So one of the things that I said on my Instagram is that like I want people to be able to just benefit from getting like I've already done all the heavy lifting and all the homework to what are all the Grand Slammer foods? And I basically told you've got to link on the bottom of my Instagram and you can download this list. So it basically boils down into about a dozen and a half of foods that fit into fruit, veg,

vegetables, beverages, sweets, oils, seafood that actually hit the Grand Slammer category. So let's start with some of them that, you know, I think are common, right? So apricots and blueberries, they actually amazingly hit all five of your health defense system. Good for your circulation, good for your immunity, and good for your gut health at the same time. So if you wanted to kind of find the shortest distance between two lines, the line, the line being you at the supermarket and picking out one of the, you know, the whole selection of things and you just wanted to be able to activate your health as much as possible. If you picked up a box of blueberries, that would actually do it.

So, you know, like in the fruits and vegetables, it's apricot, blueberries, cherries. Kiwi is one of my favorite. And the reason I love Kiwi is because, I mean, it's a sort of innocuous looking fruit. You know, it sits on like your fruit bowl in your house until like, kind of shrivels sometimes if you don't eat it regularly, but if you cut it open, it's this gorgeous emerald green inside with this kind of starburst in the middle of it. And what I love about it is not very sweet. It's sweet, but not cloyingly sweet. It's not like a one of my favorites things like a juicy peach. It's not that sweet. And you get vitamin C and you get fiber.

And that actually is also a grand slammer, which I think is a real delight. But let's look at some of the less well-known Grand Slammer foods, you know, because I always also like to go for some esoteric things that most people might not think about. And one of them is bamboo shoots. You ever go to a Chinese restaurant and you order the Buddha's Delight, right? So it's all veggie stuff, all plant-based. You're going to get your mushroom, straw mushrooms, or you're going to get your peppers and onions. But you'll actually see there's these little rectangles that are that tastes great. They've got a little bit of texture to them.

And they look like when you pick them up with the chopsticks, they look like they've got fiber in it. And those are bamboo shoots. These are baby bamboo. They're cut from the root. And so people in China will go into the jungle, dig them out. It's not the giant bamboo plant that you would actually get at Home Depot, you know, to put against the wall for your trellis.

It's a tiny little, it looks like kind of have a car. carbon, and you dig it out, and it's all fiber, pulpy stuff. This is what pandas eat. They love to eat bamboo shoots. Now, here's a little bit of esoterica

for people that they won't know. You don't want to be going into the jungle yourself in Southeast Asia to dig up bamboo shoots because the raw bamboo shoots are actually toxic. So you have to actually parboil them, which is how they do it before you eat it at any restaurant or in a can or an Asian restaurant, and then that removes the toxins, and now you can stir fry it.

So that's a grand slamming food that most people might not think about. And I want to point out one other grand slammer that most people won't know about, which is squid ink. Have you ever go to an Italian store or go to an Italian restaurant, and they've got black pasta, squid ink pasta. It is jet black. And sometimes in the Spanish restaurant, they'll actually make paella or black rice out of it. It comes right from the ink sack of squid.

Same kind of ink that octopus have, but with a cuddle. It's actually not squid. It's cuttlefish. They call it squinting, but it comes from a relative of the squid. The ink sack has this incredibly umami, flavorful, tastes like to see kind of rich flavor. That's just an amazing thing. If you have ever had black pasta, I highly recommend it. Also, squid ink, it can come already made in pasta.

It could come in a little jar and you just take a little spoonful and you stick it into your pasta after it's cooked and stir it around. And you'll turn everything jet black and you'll get that great briny seafood flavor. And it lights up your health defense systems as well as your taste buds. I love that. You know, this all stems again, as you mentioned, Grand Slam on those major areas that you've outlined inside of your book. And I want to jump into one of them a little bit more to get your thoughts. You know, there's a lot of books that are being written on the topic of longevity. And that's a very hot subject these days.

It seems that everybody's writing a book on longevity. And inside your book, one of the areas that we talk about being key for our overall health is DNA protection. What do you think is important to think about, especially under the context of longevity, which everybody's talking about right now, and your take. on DNA protection and food and lifestyle. My background is that I'm an internal medicine doctor and I'm also a research scientist. And my background for many years

was primarily in biotechnology where we were developing really fancy, very sophisticated treatments for cancer and diabetes and vision loss. And I'm still involved with that, very much involved with it. But one of the areas that I thought was super cool that I was involved with was gene therapy.

So this is where you take a piece of DNA and you can actually stitch it to a cold virus and you inject it into a heart or you can inject it into a leg with the goal of that piece of DNA telling the body to grow more blood vessels, to grow better circulation. So, you know, it's a piece of the genetic code. And I have, you know, literally like well over a decade of experience of doing gene therapy. Not ready for prime time yet, okay? There is one gene therapy that's actually FDA approved, but it's, and it's for a or congenital form of blindness, but all the other stuff is still very much in the workshop

kind of being figured out. So we, and of course, then you have your, you know, the 23s and me's and Ancestry.coms where you actually can, you know, swab yourself and send it and see how much, how much of you is Crow Magnon or, you know, where your ancestors actually came from, right? And the answers are always really surprising when you take a look at the code, what parts of you belong to which came from what parts of the world. That's how most people think about DNA, right? Our genetic code or maybe Jurassic Park, you know, you think about T-Rex or the Velociraptor. But let me tell you, you know, so DNA, every one of our human cells, we've got 40 trillion cells in our human body. They're really small. You can't see them with a naked eye. You need to see them under the microscope.

What most people don't realize is that DNA is if you were to have a really, really fine needle and go under the microscope and open up a cell, human cell, and pull out all the DNA, there'd be a six-foot strand of DNA that you could pull out. All right. That's two yards worth of DNA. Okay. Like how on earth could that fit into the cell? And it's all made of DNA, which is our genetic code. But do you know that only 3% of that six foot in length is actually used for making proteins,

which is what our genetic code normally does? So most of the other part of our DNA is air traffic control and protection. So DNA is hardwired to protect us from the. environment. And I think this is what's really, and this is how it relates to aging. All right. So when we're born, when we're forming in our mom's womb, everything, you know, we hope is picture perfect. When we come out, immediately we start aging. So people say, well, you know, like I'm 60 or I'm 70 and I'm aging. Hey man, you're aging like when you are one minute old. The clock is ticking the moment you like take your when you get spanked, you know, you're, you're starting to age. You take your first breath. All right.

So what happens is that our cells all are in this program. And that program actually will think about the mission and possible fuse. Like the fuse, it burns down. Okay. When you burn that fuse all the way down to the bottom, like pretty much you've expended the life of the cell and the cell needs to actually replace itself. And over our time, 60, 70, 80, 90 years, okay, we pretty much run out of our materials to actually keep renewing ourselves.

And as our cells age, net net, we also age as well. That's why, you know, a kid looks at themselves in a mirror and basically just sees the same image, same youthful, chubby image, you know, like, you know, with the cheeks and everything else. When you're, when you're like in your teenage and your adolescence and, you know, in your 20s, you're cut and buff, you want to look as well as you can't, it's good as you can. As you get older, you start noticing those lines and wrinkles and the gray hairs and the things that are like, wait a minute, that's not me. well, actually, what you're seeing in the mirror is the reflection of yourselves wearing down. Now, there's a lot of work about longevity of like how do we slow down the aging process. Some people want to reverse the aging process. What I would tell you is that one of the triggers is our DNA needs to be able to protect

itself better against the environment because our environment ages us. So what am I talking about? We all know somebody who spent, you know, their, their adolescence and young adult life line out on the beach. And then when they're in their 40s, man, they are, they're like leather, right? And they look like their skin's pretty rough. That's aged skin, sun aging of skin. Okay. Now, that's what we see in the extreme. But I can tell you the same thing is happening. When you're stuck in traffic in Los Angeles on the I-10 and on a sunny day, and the sun is coming in on a windshield or your arms out the window, you're still getting that

damage. So how come we don't turn into leather every single time we get stuck in traffic or go out for a run? It's because our DNA knows how to fix itself and reverse that damage that's occurring. We got our DNA actually experiences a problem about 10,000 times a day. And if we didn't fix ourselves, we'd be aging a lot faster than we already do. And so one of the tricks to slowing down aging is to help our support our DNA's ability to fix itself from the environment. And so this is the ability for DNA to block the incoming missiles from the environment, ultraviolet radiation from the sky, radon from the ground, off gassing from your carpet, from your, you know, that new car smell, all fumes coming in, smelling that gasoline at the pump, which is now rising in cost, right,

because everything's going around the world. All that stuff actually damages our DNA. Thank goodness. Our health defenses, our DNA is one of our health defenses, can fix itself to prevent that problem. Now, if there's damage in the DNA, a pothole, so one is to prevent the potholes. If there's a dammit, if there's a pothole, the DNA can actually fill it as quickly as the damage occurred. And that's where foods can also be coming in helpful to help our DNA fix itself. There was a study that she looked at kiwi, the fruit we just talked about. And they wanted to know, like, if you had just one kiwi a day, would it help? How much would it help protect your DNA against incoming?

And they actually found that one Kiwi a day, see, give somebody, a kiwi to eat a day, take their blood out, expose it to environmental damage like ultraviolet radiation or some other kind of toxic, noxious exposure. And one Kiwi a day will protect your cells with the DNA by 60%. So it's like putting up a 60% shield. One Kiwi, all right. Vitamin C, other bioactives in the Kiwi all help our DNA to do that. Now, if you ate three Kiwis, though, now not only are you shielding yourself against that damage, now the DNA note is inspired, geared, triggered, triggered, trigger to fix itself. You can fix holes 60% faster.

So one, you can actually raise a shield. The second, you can actually put the construction crew to start to pave the road, repave those potholes as well. And there's a third thing that's really important for aging to prevent cellular aging, right? So you want to prevent the damage, you want to fix the damage. And now you want to slow that fuse down. So that mission impossible fuse, when the mission is over, man, that cell's done. It's old and it needs to be replaced.

So you can actually slow down the burning of that fuse, which is really amazing. So that's slowing cellular aging. And if you multiply that by $40 trillion, now you're slowing your entire body's aging. And foods can actually do that too. One of my favorites is actually what I got right here, coffee will actually help you do that. It will slow down the burn rate of your DNA. Well, on that note of coffee, by the way, it's fantastic information. Do you have any rules in your life to get the maximum benefits from coffee, but then also to mitigate any kind of downside that could be associated with having maybe either too much or having coffee at, let's say, not the right hour of the day.

Just curious for yourself personally. Again, there's so many benefits to the day for coffee. I drink coffee as well, anything that you do yourself to make sure that you're in that goldilocks zone of getting the maximum benefits from coffee. Great question. And again, obviously, I'm not giving medical advice here. But when you ask me, what does Dr. Lee do? I mean, I'm happy to tell you, number one, I really only learned to, I mean, I drank

coffee when I was in college, probably not very good coffee. But then when I lived in Italy for a short time on a gap year after college, I really learned what coffee was all about. coffee and how the different ways of brewing it and how to how to drink it and when to drink it. And I also learned something about the role that coffee can play in enhancing your life. So most of it, of course, when I was in medical school, I drank a ton of coffee. But so most of us think of coffee as sort of a morning brew, right? Either you make it yourself in a pot or you go by the drive-thru to pick up something and you

get a little hit of caffeine and it wakes you up, all true. Okay. And for me, I appreciate that, but I learned to appreciate the taste of coffee, which is actually quite sophisticated. And as I sort of was learning more and more about my research, through my research, on what's in coffee that's good for you, you know, the caffeine, that can give you a little hit, a little surge. And that would be the reason why I wouldn't drink coffee late at night because that could disturb my ability to get good quality REM sleep. When you disturb your sleep, your immune system suffers, you know, even your gut microbiome actually suffers if you don't get good sleep, your body. During good quality sleep, your body renews itself, regenerates itself.

And so if you drink a ton of coffee late night, you know, and you don't have this pull it all-nighter, pretty much you're disrupting your sleep and therefore disrupting the rejuvenation, the renewal, the rebooting of your body's health defenses. So I don't drink coffee really, really late. Now, but actually caffeine is only part of the story. It turns out that there's other amazing bioactive natural chemicals found in coffee. One of them is called chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid actually is made by the coffee plant. Okay.

So coffee bean is a plant-based food. It grows on a tree, coffee tree. And Mother Nature made chlorogenic acid as part of the coffee. coffee trees, coffee plants self-defense system. So when bugs and pests nibble on the coffee leaves and stems, the plant views that as an assault, as an attack, and the little nibbles actually are wounds. So the coffee tree is getting wounded, and it makes more chlorogenic acid to drive away the pest. It's kind of a natural pesticide, and it's a wound healing response. All right. So that That chlorogenic acid is therefore more present in organically grown coffee.

Okay. Now, what does chlorogenic acid do in your body? Well, chlorogenic acid activates your health defenses, lights up your immune system, lowers inflammation, cuts off the blood supply to cancer, helps to pull out and protect stem cells, and it's also good for your gut health. So all of a sudden you got another grand slammer, right? Coffee. But now we know that when you compare organically grown coffee with conventionally grown coffee with pesticides, the organic has like three times more chlorogenic acid for that pest nibbling property that I talked about. If you use pesticides, hey, it doesn't need to make as much because, you know, some factory chemical that you did the job for it.

And so here's an example now where I'm where I learned that if I'm actually able to drink coffee, that I grind myself from the bean and I choose a. organic coffee, which I happen to do more and more now because of this new research, I know I'm going to get more chlorogenic acid, which is actually better from my health. And you're going to avoid the pesticides, some of which we know a lot of information on, some of which we don't know as much of information on, but they are possible things that contribute to those potholes that would damage our DNA that we're trying to avoid. Which then could contribute to cancer. And, you know, so, you know, like, again, one of these things that we really want to

to do is just, I think, make mindful decisions when we are putting things into our body. You know, like when you get a baby, you know, like you're teaching the kid what not to put in their mouth. You know, food, a spoonful of food, absolutely. Put in your mouth. You know, a Lego block, don't put that in your mouth. You know, electrical plug, don't put it in your mouth. And I think that, you know, as we get older, we sort of, one of the big problems is like when we just are, are distracted and start shoveling food in our bodies. And I think that's where the new research is starting to help to bring us back to our past where people just became much more mindful of what they're putting into their body.

And giving some thought to, is this something that could be helpful or something that could be harmful? When you and I were chatting a few days ago and we were talking about, you know, some of the things that we wanted to talk about today's interview, you were suggesting that one of the things that's worthwhile talking about is this idea of food. and medicine, not just food is medicine. And what does it look like when food and medicine can get a chance to work together? And you are beautifully sitting at the intersection as somebody who's been involved with

dozens of drugs that are FDA approved and also has this deep knowledge in the space of food is medicine. So I'd love you to talk about that a little bit. And I heard you on my business partner's podcast, just a little bit of a preview for those folks in that, that listen to Dr. Hyman's podcast as well. And you were talking about, you started this conversation by starting the stage and chatting about why first do no harm may not be the complete picture when it comes to the oath that doctors are taking and working with their patients. So I don't know if that's a good place to start or if you want to start somewhere else, but I'll hand it over to you. No, that's a great place to start.

So, you know, when I went to med school, right? So when you start your first day in med school, you get your white coat and your stuff. And then you spend all these years buried in books and learning the ropes. And the reward at the very end of that is you get a medical degree. But the real kind of pinnacle, I think, for anybody who goes through medical school and the moment before you become a doctor, you've got to recite the Hippocratic Oath. And among the many things in the Hippocratic Oath is this pledge that we will first do no harm, right? And to our patients, we want to do everything.

good for the patient, but we don't want to do anything harmful. Well, that's actually been used essentially like a sledgehammer phrase. I mean, it's almost like a meme in medicine that basically says, well, that's an excuse for not to do the right thing. You know, I have a new treatment and it could actually, you know, really make a difference in your disease. Shall we try it? And like, you know, like if you talk to a bunch of doctors, the more conservative will say, you know, I don't know that, I don't know what, I'm not familiar with that medicine, so I'm not going to try it. So first, first out of just at first do no harm, I'd rather not give it. And I'm somebody who has worked at the forefront, the bleeding edge of medicine, where, you know, I know we can do better for cancer.

I know we can do better for Alzheimer's disease. I know we can do better for diabetes. And so I'm never afraid to use the power of science to be able to even eke out incremental improvements to help my patients. I want them to benefit from every last bit of knowledge that we can actually use. So for me, I actually no longer say first, do no harm. I actually put first the interest of my patient. I say first, do benefit. First deliver benefit. At the end of the day, that's what every person wants when they talk to their doctor. I need help. What can you do to help me? You don't want somebody who says, well, you know, I could help you, but I've got this like pledge, so I'm not going to help you. I'm somebody that leans forward to say, let's let's let's let's, let's say, invert that.

And let's put the person first. Let's use science actually as the reason to be able to do it. And most people, you know, would love to meet the doctor in the middle to be able to get the benefit of that. Okay. So that's for medicines. Now, I've spent a lot of time in medicines and I still have all the drug development. So I'm not one of these doctors, even though I work on food and food is medicine. I'm definitely not one of those doctors that basically gets up in a soapbox and,

waves a front of kale to say, never mind your medicine cabinet, that's all BS. You know, just eat, you know, your plant-based foods and you're all set. No. Actually, the way I look at is food is a tool in the toolbox. Medicines are another tool in the toolbox. And just like a real toolbox, when you're actually trying to build something constructive, like your health, you want to be able to sometimes use more than one tool, you know, for a particular project.

And so this is why I also find similarly the rejection that a lot of regular medical doctors have, MDs have, on the role of nutrition to be kind of like the wrong instinct. Just because you didn't learn nutrition in medical school doesn't mean that it's useless. And so there's real evidence now that shows that food and medicine can work together. I'll give you a couple examples. There was a study at the University of North Carolina involving young, healthy people, during flu season getting a flu vaccine, right? You get a flu vaccine during flu season.

And the thing about flu vaccine is that, you know, you want it to really work well. You want your immune system to rear yourself up and basically, you know, they would battle off the flu. And what they did, though, is they knew that there was a substance, natural substance, natural chemical, and broccoli that is called sulfurophanes. These are natural chemicals. They kind of give broccoli that sulfury taste, that characteristic taste. And so they were thinking about how can we give this to broccoli, this broccoli substance to people,

because we know that sulforaphanes activate your immune system. So making them eat a lot of adult broccoli, grown-up broccoli and stems, that's a lot of work. So they took broccoli sprouts instead. Now, broccoli sprouts, which you can get in most grocery stores these days, three-to-four-day-old baby broccoli, okay? They have a hundred times more of sulfurophane than the grown-up broccoli. So it's like when the broccoli seed sprouts, it's got all the whole forophoresans is ever going to have, it just kind of distributes it, you know, into the gigantic mass, the big tree that it ultimately becomes. So then they made a shake out of these broccoli sprouts.

And they gave half of the subjects in their research. Everybody got a flu shot. Half of the people got the broccoli shake to have two cups along a day with the flu vaccine. They did it only for four days, very short period of time. And then they looked at the blood. they drew their blood and they looked at their immune system. And guess what? The people who, everybody who got the flu vaccine had some response, but the people who had the flu vaccine and were drinking the broccoli shake, sprout shake, two cups a day for four days. It's eight cups

only had a immune response that was 22 times higher. Their natural killer T cells were 22 times more activated. And then when they actually swab their nose to look for flu, there was absolutely nothing found in the people who had the vaccine plus the sprouts, whereas the people who just had the vaccine alone had a little bit of flu virus that they catch you fine in their nose. Okay. So again, this kind of shows you that it's not food versus medicine. I didn't say, you know, they tested broccoli sprouts versus vaccine. This is actually putting it together.

So the next time, you know, someone goes to their doctor to say, hey, you know, what should I be eating? this is the kind of information that medical doctors should be sharing with their patients when it comes to improving their health. You know, we recently had Dr. John Abramson on the podcast. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work, but he's an expert witness, family physician, and somebody that's been involved in some of the largest litigation trials when it comes to drug company malfeasance over the years, including biox. And he's a guest lecturer at Harvard.

and really just an all-around great dude. He wrote a book called Sickening. And one of the things he was saying is that there also is when we come to this education gap because most of the education that's being done for medical doctors who are just trying to survive and keep up with the patients and just trying to do their best, a lot of the education that's being provided on interventions is coming from the drug companies themselves. And in most cases, we are not demanding that the drug companies do a study like you're talking about.

So often when it comes in and it says, hey, metformin, you know, reduced X, Y, and Z, or, you know, this drug did X, Y, and Z. We don't have or force the drug companies to look at compared to what, compared to what lifestyle intervention that is also there, and maybe that the drug would work even better if we combined the aspects. There was one study that I mentioned in his book, which was the definitive study on diabetes that was done in the late 90s and how when you combine, just as you were sharing in your example, drug with the lifestyle changes. And when you had highly motivated patients that went through the lifestyle

changes alone, they got even better results than the drug. So I think part of this goes back to number one, education. And number two, maybe even raising the standards a little bit in terms of what we think is possible when we're asking drug companies or the NIH to look into the effectiveness of different treatments and how they compare. Sometimes drugs are going to work better. Sometimes drugs in combination with lifestyle or food is going to be maybe the best approach. But we wouldn't know until we did the study. You know, I'm so glad you brought that example up. Type 2 diabetes is definitely a reversible disease. And one of the very with diet and lifestyle. And one of the things, that I always try to teach other young up-and-coming doctors is a little bit of my own philosophy,

which is, although I've written plenty of prescriptions in my day, and still do, the reality is that whenever I give somebody a medicine, my goal is to take them off it. Okay. Like that's, that, that to me is a sign of somebody who is really trying to restore somebody back to health. if all you're doing is chasing the same disease with a renewal of prescription time, day after day, week after week, year after year, you're just chasing the horse after it after it's out of the barn. You're never going to catch it. Okay.

And then you're just going to add more medicines, more prescriptions to it when it doesn't work. If every doctor's goal was to actually get people back to health so they don't need to be on the medicine anymore, the goal is to stop the drug prescription, even as you start it, can figure out like how can I work with the patient so they don't. don't need it anymore. That's where you can do a lot of education of the patients and look at the evidence to see what it's going to take. And by the way, I mean, movement, physical activity, 30 minutes of, you know, good aerobic exercise every single day. That goes a long way to actually lowering the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and even dementia, not to mention obesity.

And those are easy things for the medical doctor to actually say you don't have to get in your car and drive to the drugstore to do that. But you do want to actually come. You do want to actually combine that with your medicines until you don't need the medicines anymore, which takes the partnership of the patient and their doctors. And by the way, I think if you want to like take this example and move it all the way to like the cliff edge of life and death, let's talk about cancer. Okay. Now, I'm a cancer researcher. I've taken care of plenty of cancer patients, even though I'm an internal medicine doctor. And so this is a scary subject for a lot of people to deal with, but because this is like my wheelhouse to work in this, I want to tell you that,

you know, I never thought in my career that I would see the kinds of results we're getting today with some of the most advanced cancer treatments, which involve your health defense, the immune system. It turns out that the immune system, when you give immunotherapy against cancer, is just allowing your immune system to do what it always wants to do, which is to find hidden cancer cells whether they're tiny and microscopic, whether they're big and spread in your brain everywhere else, and allow your immune system to just wipe out the cancer. That's what it's designed to do. One of the things that your immune system is designed to do in the same way it can wipe out an infection, okay, in your lung, like a pneumonia, your immune system can also wipe out cancer.

And I've seen now, first it was just one person, and I could barely believe it, then it was another one, then it was another, then it even with my own mother, where, you know, she had metastatic and omitro cancer. we gave her immunotherapy and diet. Now, come back to that in a second. Wow, her 80-year-old immune system was powerful and have to wipe out all the cancer in her body and she never even got any chemo. All right?

So this is what's possible now, but diet, what we eat, affects our immune system. So we know, for example, that if you have good, strong immunity, if you take immunotherapy, then your immune system is ready to rock against the cancer. But if your immune system's weak, okay? not being maximally supported by diet, then, you know, it might not perform the way it needs to perform.

So this immunotherapy, which can be really amazing, miraculous, I would actually use that word, works, some of them only work in about 20% of people, meaning 80% of the people don't respond. So the big hunt has been what makes a responder from a non-responder, because, you know, you want 20, you want all 100% to respond. Well, it turns out now we're beginning to get the clues. Okay, there was a study published recently looking at 200-some patients with melanoma, deadly form of skin cancer that had spread, and they were getting immune therapy. The immune therapies are things like Pemblisomab or they call checkpoint inhibitors.

You know, for your listeners, it doesn't really matter what the name is, just called them immune therapies that, you know, allow your own immune system to go after and wipe out cancer. And when I'm talking about wiping out cancer, I'm talking about basically like the eraser and a dry erase board, and you just get up there, write the word cancer and just scrub it away. That's basically what your immune system actually does when it's at its best. So who are the people that actually respond? First clues are coming out. This study was done by the MD Anderson Cancer Center along with the national instance of health.

And what they found that the responders had one bacteria when you looked in their poop that the non-responders didn't have. And that one bacteria of the gut microbiome, gut health, was called ruminacoccus. Okay. Wow. One bacteria seems to make the difference between whether you respond and maybe even, you even, save your life versus don't respond. That's profound, right? Okay. And think about how many cancer patients are on antibiotics that might that that could also affect that. So then they took one step further. And they said, well, wait a minute. Ruminococcus, this healthy gut bacteria or microbiome grows when you

actually eat dietary fiber. What were these people eating that got the ruminococcus? They were eating dietary fiber. And it turns out the more fiber they ate, the more ruminococcus they have. the more ruminococcus they had, the more likely they would respond to immunotherapy, treatment for cancer, life or death in melanoma. And what they found, they were able to calculate this for every five grams of dietary fiber that a patient ate a day. How much is five grams of dietary fiber? Not very much. That's the amount of fiber you get in a medium-sized pair. That's five grams a day.

Decrease the risk of mortality by 30%. 30%. Huge. percent. Food and medicine together. Okay, so one of the things that, you know, we know is that you're supposed to eat, you know, anywhere from 20 to 40 grams of fiber a day. Most people don't even eat that much. This calls into focus the fact that we do need to take care of our dietary patterns, especially when you're ill. And, you know, when cancer patients act their oncologists, what they should be eating, this is the kind of data that they should be talking about. They

should be sharing this kind of information because, you know, the oncologists are not going to write a prescription for them at home. They're not going to the chemo infusion unit to get a pair. But this is something that you can do for yourself at home. You know, on that topic of medicines, you know, sometimes we think of medicines being there for diabetes or cancer or heart disease or even acid reflux or, you know, SSRIs for depression. But there's other medications that are out there that are treating things that are, you know, other challenges that are in the body. And one of them is Viagra, right? A lot of people take Viagra who have ED men and erectile dysfunction and don't have the proper

sort of blood flow and vasal flow down to their genitals area. Now, one interesting thing is we've had Dr. Lou Ignaro on the podcast, and he was one of the original researchers that found that the connection between nitric oxide and being a vasodilator, and that information ultimately was part of the information that led to developing the drug Viagra. Now, nothing wrong with that. People can take that. One thing that people have shared is that, well, if you do have ED, that's actually

one of the earliest signs that something might be going on with your vascular health. And by the way, don't wait till you need Viagra. other things that you can do to start improving and increase your uptake of nitric oxide. So I recently heard you use this example of what it's like if you eat something like a beat and you start in the mouth and how that very process of beginning, the digestive process of the beat, actually could play a significant role in this example. Could you walk us through that and the beat in the body and how that's connected to this topic that I just brought up.

Yeah, yeah. So look, I'm a vascular biologist. That's my research background. So, like, blood vessels are my wheelhouse. And you're absolutely right. You know, the science behind blood vessels is that in order to keep our body alive, you need the blood vessels to dilate, and you need to actually contract, and you need to be able to grow.

And it turns out that certain foods can help our body produce nitrogen, Oxide, which is a natural signaling molecule in the body to help our blood vessels dilate. They widen. And when our blood vessels widen, as you can imagine, if the plumbing in your kitchen sink were to widen, the sink levels will go down, right, faster. And so the widening your blood vessel lowers your blood pressure, which can be very helpful because what happens if you have high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, stroke, all kinds of really bad things can happen with high blood pressure. So nitric oxide is one of these absolutely critical molecules. I know Lou Ignaro, he's a friend of mine. We've known each other for many, many years.

Amazing this set of discoveries he's made. And actually turns out that nitric oxide isn't just a little blue pill for erectile dysfunction. You can get nitric oxygen from the food you eat. Okay, now here's what it is. Foods like spinach and beets grow low to the ground. their roots absorb a lot of nitrogen from the soil, right? So nitrogen is a natural part of soil. And so nitrogen is present in natural nitrogen is present in beets and spinach. And when you cook the beets or spinach in a way that's really flavorful, so you want to take a forkful and you really enjoy chewing it, we're beginning to realize now that the microbiome, the gut microbiome isn't just in our colons, like at the end of our gut. It starts in our tongue, in our mouth. We have a tongue

microbiome, a little coral reef of bacteria that live in our tongue. And when you chew your food, that tongue microbiome goes to work on the nitrogen in spinach or in beets. And it converts the nitrogen from the soil that was into a food into a form that when you swallow the food, the spinach of the beats, when you swallow the whole shebang, it gets absorbed in your stomach in a form that your body turns into nitric oxide. So just eating spinach and beets will lower your systolic blood pressure by a few points. And it'll last for a few hours, which is quite amazing, right? So Viagra only lasts like four hours. It's a half-life of Viagra. You take a pill, and about eight hours, it's all gone. But four hours is about half, it'll be half the level in

your body. Same thing as spinach and beats. You want you get this kind of vasodilating, lowering effect. Now, I'm not saying that spinach and beats are treatment for Viagra, but what they do is they actually make, they lower your blood pressure, which protects your brain and your heart, heart, all good for you. And they also caused this nitric oxide, stiggling to come out. Now, why is that important? Let me give you another reason that's not erectile dysfunction based, is that nitric oxide is a trigger for one of the health defense systems in our body are stem cells. So remember what I told you, we've got five health defense systems. One of them is our body's ability to regenerate itself from the inside of out using stem cells. Nitric oxide is one.

of the natural signals to call out stem cells from our bone marrow to go start circulating and repairing whatever it needs to be repaired, whether it's your penis and blood vessels in your penis or whether it's your brain. Okay. Some people confuse the two. So the the idea of actually being able to protect your organs is really important. I'm going to just take that thread one. I'm going to move this one, the chest piece one, down to board one, a couple of blocks more. So there was an amazing recent study from the Cleveland Clinic looking at 7 million people's electronic medical records. That's a lot of people.

And they were using a computer to look at all the medicines that people are taking, seven million people and all the diseases that people are having and seeing using artificial intelligence, if there was some connection that not apparent to the human brain that we couldn't connect ourselves, but a computer can find it. Guess what they found? They found that there was a certain group of people who, had a 76% reduction, or sorry, it's 67, I missed it up, 67% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer's disease, boom, okay, compared to other people. And they found it was connected to a drug. You know what

that drug was? Viagra. They found that people who were taking Viagra had a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease by a substantial amount. How could that happen? Well, you're actually dilating the blood vessels, better blood flow to your other brain, and also being able to recruit stem cells to actually repair organs, perhaps your brain. And so again, this is the kind of research that's going on now that, you know, from the medicine side, that even leads us to think about, wow, I wonder spinach and beets or other foods like bok choy that can actually also have a lot of nitrogen and your tongue microbiome can govern into nitric oxide. Are there other potential ways to actually prevent Alzheimer's disease based on the drug

finding, could we then start to move it over to food? And this is really how food and medicine, medicine and food, you know, we're just exchanging information back and forth to see how one field can help the other. I love it. You know, you talk a lot about the things that people can add into their life, their diet, their lifestyle to significantly improve their help. I'm curious because this area is something that you know so well. What are the top things that you would say that people are doing every day that actually create those potholes when it comes to our vascular health. I know you like to focus on what we can add, but I'd also like to talk about what's causing the most damage when it comes to our vascular health and our overall blood flow

throughout the bottom. Yeah, okay. So that's really an important thing to think about. Like I spend most of my time developing positive messages that people can lean into. But if you want to start from a level playing field, you got to think about, all right, how do you unburden your, how do you unload and unburden your body's health defenses. So you're not working against yourself. That's kind of like what we're talking about. What are the things that we that people commonly do that work against your health, your health defenses. So you're sitting down and suppressing your defenses. Well, let's let's walk through a couple of them. Number one is physical and activity, right? Like I mean, think about during a pandemic, a lot of people were just not doing as much, not outdoors as much,

not exercising as much, not socializing the most, not traveling as much. And, you know, And there's a lot of depression, too. And so physical activity, you know, even 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, get your heart rate up, walk out, you know, like everybody feels a little bit better after taking a walk, no matter how stressed out you are. And even if you're not stressed out, you feel better. It gets your circulation going. It exercise like that lowers inflammation. Being physically inactive, the couch potato actually is incredibly, being a couch potato is incredibly, being a couch potato is incredibly good. damaging. By the way, I heard a, like when you walk, you rev up your metabolism as well.

I saw the study that I was just looking at for the next book I'm writing. That's really amazing. It turns out if you are going to be a couch potato that sitting down a lot, there was a research study done in this. Even fidgeting the knee going bump, bup, pop, pop, or, you know, fidget with a, you know, like one of those fidget toys, even that starts to burn calories compared to just not moving at all, like just sitting and staring at a screen. And so again, movement, physical activity, really important actually to kind of rev up your metabolism, get back to better health, and unleash your health defenses. Another thing is really eating a lot of ultra-process foods. You know, all of us who go to the grocery store are tempted to go into the middle aisle.

It's almost like a siren calls you into the middle aisle to look at all the colorful, packaged, ultra-processed things. You know, call. you, it's like the siren that calls the ship captain to wind up on the rocks and then sink the ship. Well, this is the middle aisle of the grocery store. Now, there's a lot of good stuff there too as well, but I think most of us go for the things that have been advertised to us since we were a kid to go look for those sweets and things in the middle aisle. Well, it turns out that if you take the time to go around the perimeter first and go to the produce section, and that's where you should spend most of your time when you're grocery shopping, looking for what's fresh and plant-based, and it really kind of rub up your dietary fiber and your bioactives.

That's what's really good. But the middle aisle, you know, it's hard to stay out of it. And so when people eat boxed foods, jarred foods, canned foods that are laced with chemical preservatives and processed, made up using factory processes that take whole food and turn them into sort of this weird machined food, extruded food, you know, food that your grandmother or grand grandmother would not recognize as food. And then you add these synthetic chemicals to it. Man, does that actually work against your body's health defenses?

Wow. And, you know, there's been so much conversation these days about being mindful. This goes into the category of ultra-processed foods, but being mindful about the overall sort of load of sugar and highly refined carbohydrates. You know, we've done multiple episodes about continuous glucose monitors and just being more aware about the order of food. So maybe you go to a restaurant and instead of having the bread, and the butter, which everybody likes to do here and there, especially if it's a nice piece of sourdough,

or we're lucky here in Los Angeles. There's a few places that will import in wheat from Italy. You were talking about Italy and the quality of ingredients there. So instead of having those at the beginning of your dinner when you sit out at the restaurant, maybe saving that piece of bread for the end after you have some fiber, some healthy fats and protein inside of there. How important is sequencing to you? And do you think of it in the context of the advice that you give folks when you're talking about food is medicine? Very important. Sequencing, you know, like, first of all, I believe that we should eat food not only for our help, but to bring us joy. Okay. And so there's nothing wrong with eating foods that you really enjoy that are also healthy for you. And I think that's really the alignment we're to have. And when you have a spread of food in front of you, whether it's at a restaurant and you get your bread and butter and then you get your salad, then you get your main, then you get your dessert. Okay. There's a, there's kind of like a ritual order that it goes in. But nobody said that you have to eat it in the order that it's actually served to you.

What I think when it comes to food is that you should eat the healthiest things first and save other bits really on the side. Take a little nibble of them. The problem, you know, that you talk about with bread, okay, even good quality bread like, you know, homemade sourdough bread with stuff from Italy, the problem with that is that if you sit down when you're really hungry. And that's the first thing that you're served. You're going to eat a lot of it.

I try to tell people, you know, don't waste your appetite. You're going to have a certain amount of appetite. You don't want to load up on the stuff that's not necessarily high quality calories and bioactives. You know, what I do when I actually sit at a restaurant, I don't eat the bread right away. I look at the menu. I look at the whole menu. And what I try to do is to recognize ingredients that are healthy and then see.

of they are actually listed in offerings that I really am drawn towards, attracted towards. Something with capers. I know capers have a lot of chlorogenic acid, too, or quercetin. Wow, look at that. That's an interesting salad. I've never had that before. Let me try that. You know, and I kind of, then I size up the whole meal.

And then I will order, but I'm not eating the bread first before I even look at that. And I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm kind of full up. I'm just going to eat, I'm just going to get like the family style pasta for myself. Now you've got bread. Now you've kind of like just distorted your whole kind of thing. So what I say is that look on the menu for the things that are good for you. And by the way, sometimes you can order, sometimes there's really good stuff that's order in smaller plates. And you can just order two of those or even three of those without order an entree.

You know? And so there's no rhyme or reason. You know, I don't want to say that you should eat dessert first and your main last. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is that spend the quality of your time eating the things that are tasty and good for you. On the topic of things that are good for you, I love your Instagram. And by the way, everybody who's listening, if you want more of this information, a little preview, Dr. William Lee has so many great resources that are out there.

This is an incredible free webinar that your team is doing on a regular basis. We'll link to it inside of the show notes. as well as your Instagram is another great resource because you'll always make me excited about an ingredient or food that I thought I knew about, but then maybe I forgot to include on a regular basis. And this is one of those foods that was in your Grand Slam, sorry, a little tongue twister, grand slam PDF.

Again, we have the link to where to download that inside of the show notes. And also I saw you do an Instagram TV or an Instagram live video on this recently, and that's sunflower seeds. So why should we be excited about sunflower seeds? If you can remember some of the key highlights and talking points that you shared about why you like to include this ingredient in your diet on a regular basis. Well, one of the things that I love about sunflower seeds is they taste really good. They're nutty.

They have this kind of really delicate kind of flavor. It's not a, it's not, and they're not very crunchy. They're kind of soft. And they're very commonly eaten in the Mediterranean, lightly roasted. And so it's just a great treat. It's a good source of dietary fiber. And there's also a bioactive in it called SDG. I'm not going to even bother going into the chemical name,

pronounce what the S and the D and the G stands for. But I can tell you that actually it protects your stem cells. And yes, sunflower seeds do belong to the grand slammers. But I will also tell you that the fact that there's dietary fiber to feed your gut microbiome, which helps your metabolism, helps you heal better, makes you feel better, and actually activates your brain and improves your mood. Sunflower seeds are a great way of snacking. And the protection for your stem cells also means that it helps your body renew itself from the inside out. Now, sunflower seeds are something I like to keep around, like just a little bowlful,

like if I'm for a snack, that's the other thing I like about it. You don't have to, like, you don't have to eat up like a couple of fistfuls of the stuff to be good for you. You can just kind of like chewing them a little bit by bit and you feel totally satisfied and it's a great source of fiber and other bioactives. Does it matter if we eat them raw or not or roasted? Should be worried about how much sodium might come up. If they are roasted, just any kind of considerations. And I guess people could think about this when they're thinking about all sort of seeds and nuts that they want to include your guys. So we'd love to hear your take out. Such an important thing. So, you know, like what I do is I buy, I like to buy just a bag of sunflower

seeds or cashews or walnuts that isn't actually pre-seasoned. I like to do it myself, honestly, or sometimes like sunflower seeds, I don't mind them, but they're not seasoned at all. I kind of like the fact that they're actually even a little sweet, you know, and they're not colloquially sweet, but they're definitely not salty. You can salt them if you want. But be very careful about commercial brand seasoned nuts and seeds because oftentimes they are loaded with salt. Also, sometimes they're loaded with unhealthy oils because to roast them, they'll coat them with really unhealthy saturated fats and then they roast them and they'll dump salt on them and they'll shake all the salt off. And that'll be a pretty tasty bag. That I guarantee you, like it'll be kind of

addictive to go through them. But man, your sodium will go through the roof. And then if you get the barbecue flavors and then the pizza flavored and all those other kinds of things that might sound attractive on the label, just remember, mostly those are seasonings that some of which are synthetic in are engineered to taste like something with artificial, you know, something synthetic. Like that's not what you want. And so I like to go for the elemental natural flavors. If I'm going to season it, like cashews, I might season myself a little bit. Walnuts, I don't need seasoning. Pekons or almonds, I don't really need seasoning. But if you're going to use seasoning, just take a little pinch of sea sauce.

salt, okay? And you can just, just sprinkle it on it, mix it around. You'll get a little bit of salt, but you do not want to actually, this is not shaker style. You definitely don't want to do that. Yeah, the interesting thing about it is that the level of sodium that comes in, these highly processed snacks that are already prepared for us, I was even using a spice yesterday that is from a very healthy company and known as a healthy company. The spice was organic. It's pre-seasoning. And I was looking at the back and the bag, which had the spice inside of it that I was using for these chicken thighs that I was making to add to my base salad, my big fat salad, you know, I had avocado oil, had olive oils, some avocados, olives, a bunch of really just good and

healthy things, including fermented beets. That's usually my sort of chosen way of having beats in my diet and other great vegetables. Anyways, I was looking at the bag on the back and the amount of sodium that was in there was essentially almost 30% of the recommended daily value for one serving of that seasoning that's there. Now, the crazy thing is I was doing the math online about what it would take for me at my house to use salt, right? High quality table salt or Himalayan salt or sea salt to get close to that amount. And what most of us forget is that if we wanted to salt our food at the level that it comes pre-seasoned by processed food companies, some which are still in that quote-unquote healthy category, it actually wouldn't taste that

good if we used salt ourselves to do that equivalent amount of sodium. You have to engineer it and do all sorts of things to make that amount of salt palatable. So I think for the most part, if people are just using a reasonable amount of sea salt at home just to dust their meal or add a little bit to their roast veggies, you're going to be fine overall. It's actually very hard to get to the levels of sodium that are coming in these processed foods that we pick up in the store. So I think the moral of the story, and feel free to disagree or agree, is just overall cutting down the amount of processed foods that we include in our diet, even being very wary of a lot of that healthy processed foods that are now being sold at Whole Foods in other places, because that's really

where you get these large quantities of sodium from. Yeah, I mean, it's always buyer beware. And the one sort of cheat that every commercial food provider, restaurants included, to make their food taste better, is salt. Because salt does make almost everything taste better, just like sugar makes everything tastes better. A little bit's okay. The quantities that are often used are not okay. And I think that that's important to remember, too. Along those same lines, you know, your listeners should actually think about this. When you go to a restaurant, if you were to actually go behind the same.

scenes and see how the chefs are actually salting the food. You'd be surprised. They will grab like a like a like a big mound of salt and just throw it into a dish sometimes and it'll taste really great, but you've got way more sodium in there than you ever thought. When I cook at home, I'll tell you, although I will be be very cautious, conscious not to use too much salt, Here's a little trick that people who cook at home can use. So if you're going to saute something in a pan, okay, I usually cook with olive oil over medium heat, not super high heat. I don't want to burn the stuff in the olive oil.

And I wanted to put a little salt, you know, just a little bit of salt. What I don't do is cook the food and then take the salt and throw it into the food after it's done. I will actually sometimes just take a pinch of salt and dust the olive oil while it's heating up. now you're guaranteed not to actually put too much salt in because you can see exactly how much salt you're putting in. If you were to put like a spoonful of salt in it or you're like, man, I just ruin the whole pan. I can't use that pan. I got to clean it out and start it all over again. So I think, you know, even if you're cooking at home, just having that awareness that, you know, whether it's at home or a restaurant or at a process, ultra-process factory, somebody is putting salt in there and it's up to you to determine how much you're going to allow into your body.

Yeah. As you mentioned, fire beware, especially when we're eating out and all the processed ingredients. And I know there's some healthy debates that are out there about really how much should we be worried about salt at home. And I'd love to get, you know, maybe for another time, it'd be nice to dig into some of those details a little bit more because it can be very confusing for the average person who's listening. But I think by far, at least from the studies that I've looked at, the vast majority of people who have really hot, bad issues, with hypertension and are having challenges where sodium is a major play into their chronic health issues are people who are generally on very high ultra-processed foods diet. So if we just stick towards whole foods in general, we're going to be in a better boat to begin with than people who just literally can't control it because they're primarily getting most of their calories from ultra-processed foods that are there. But yeah, we'll revisit that topic another time. You know, Dr. Lee, you're always coming across new information, things that make you excited.

And I feel you do such a great job about sharing that. As we start to wind down for today's interview, I'd love to just toss it back to you. And I don't often do this in podcasts because I value myself as somebody who's very prepared and going through and has an exact list of topics that he wants to chat about. But because I have you here, and I know you're always thinking about new stuff, Is there anything that we didn't get a chance to talk about today that you'd love to share with our audience? Well, you know, one of the things that I think we haven't talked about is seasonality of food. And, you know, most of us live in places that do have seasons.

And seasons dictate what's actually available in the market and what's grown locally. And so one of the things that I think that I always try to tell people to do is just to be more conscious, mindful, aware of life. where we are. You know, like a lot of us spend a lot of time in a car or in an office of building or in your home office, whatever the case may be. But actually, you know, there's a functioning world that we live in, and that rotating planet goes through seasons and the markets that are available, even in a big supermarket, like the stuff in the front where they offer it up, oftentimes will come from local growers. And so I encourage people always to go look for the local stuff and just get a sense of what comes out when. I mean, we know strawberries come out.

out in the summertime. But many people don't realize that citrus and pears actually are coming out more in the winter months. And so if you start to think about like what's seasonal, if you go to these traditional food cultures, whether it's in Asia or whether it's in Europe, you know, the people who are older who live simpler lives, they're pretty well aware of what time of the year certain things come up. When do chestnuts come out? They come out in the fall, you know. And again, I think that being aware of not just where you live, but when you live is actually something that can help you make some choices as well. The other thing that I think that I think is really interesting to think about being, it's all

about awareness is back in the day, back in the day, the idea of not having enough food made you hungry. And so you were forging, foraging, looking for food to be able to get your energy requirements in. Now that we're surrounded by food, there's something called hedonic eating. And so we're eating because our brain is seeking some other reinforcement besides energy requirements to survive. And I think that what we need to do is to realize that even when we're really happily eating, whether it's at a buffet or whether it's at Thanksgiving dinner, when you actually are surrounded by plenty, the hedon. eating center in your brain is lit up. And that's also a time to be cautious because it's so

easy to overeat. And that old Japanese saying, Harahachi Bun Me, which is, you know, just eat 80% and stop, you know, quit the clean play club, leave before, leave the party before it's over kind of thing is another way to actually prevent overeating, which is a whole other topic that we can talk to, I talk about at some other point that can be really, really harmful to overload our body as well. And so I think the key, you know, the two things I was saying is number one, think about when you live, the time of the year. And that can be a useful guide for actually what you buy and what you see, what you prefer in a marketplace, just to be in tune with who you are, where you are, when you are. And the other thing is really to recognize that, you know, we, when we, as an animal,

we eat for our energy and for survival. But when we're surrounded by food, because we now live in a time of plenty. The reality is there's these things called, hedonic center in our brain, hedonism, right? We just love to eat. And the key thing is to just be really mindful when you're surrounded by food, it could be a time that you need to be most cautious so you don't overeat and over-text your body with calories as well. Do you think that one way of hedging against that is to have a regular practice of intermittent fasting? So you just know that you have this window. And then when you're outside of that window, it's just your normal time to give your body a rest? Yeah, well, that's really what the latest research is showing. And some of

this research is coming from anti-aging and longevity research as well. You know, this is really fascinating. About 20 years ago, they found out from lab rats and lab animals that if you actually fed them 30% less than what they would have. So most people don't, who aren't in research, may not know this, but, you know, you go into these research facilities. And, you know, there's veterinarians that actually measure out how much food the animals are getting. So the experiments were done 20 years ago where they were cutting down the amount of food by like 30%. And they found that when animals had their foods cut down or calories cut down by 30%, they lived longer.

You actually triggered a program for longevity. And that's where a lot of this interest in fasting, intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, and longevity came in. But I'll tell you, caloric restriction is just a useful thing because we shouldn't be. human body is not intended to be continuously eating. You know, that all day snacking, not good for us. You do want to give your body a rest. It's like never shutting off your computer.

You know, you want to give all of your health defenses, your digestive system, your metabolism, and even your brain. You know, because when you're eating food and you're putting fuel in your body, your brain's continuously churning as well. You know, we don't want to overtax our bodies. give it a rest, intermittent fasting, caloric restriction. Those are actually really good practices. And by the way, I bet more people than we realize are actually practicing intermittent fasting because if you're a busy person, busy mom, busy executive, you know, busy rushing around

getting things done, you might be missing a breakfast or lunch every now then. And that's okay. I think that, you know, I know when I was in medical school, I can't tell you the number of breakfast for lunch that I had to skip because I was always behind. I was, you know, I had to rush to do something else. I was just way too busy to be able to do it. And actually, the good news is that your body thanks you for that. Absolutely. When you build that on top of a good whole foods based diet that is actually leaning towards a balanced blood sugar so that you're not having so many spikes throughout the day, which have their own inflammatory reaction, then it's like you're not even hungry. where I see sometimes people run into trouble is if they're still basing their diet on things that are not kind of helping them stay even, the healthy fats, the healthy plant-based foods that are out there, the things that sort of are good for their microbiome, but also good for their blood sugar.

And when they're not eating those foods, and instead they're eating a lot of refined carbohydrates and basing their diet around that or even a lot of things with sugar or, added sugar, then it's very actually really tough to do things like intermittent fasting and because your body's sort of just like, I need that next hit. So you got to give it to me. Yeah. No, that's that's so true. And again, you know, one of the most important things that you can do is to know yourself better. And a lot of us are just so busy with life. We don't take the time. You know, the amount of time you take in the morning to brush your hair, shave, brush your teeth, put on your makeup, you know, like we do that every day. Like those are people, you know, that's a ritual that we actually brush our teeth, all that kind of stuff. And I actually think that, you know, one of the

things that we could also take the time to do is just to even a little bit time every day, just to think about how you're going to be mindfully choosing the food you're going to put into your body, as opposed to mindlessly putting things into your body. Don't forget, when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food. It's about how your body responds to whatever you put inside it. You put something bad inside, it's going to react negatively. Nobody wants that. You put something good inside your body.

Your body will react positively. And especially if it's food that you already love, then you're actually getting something that you want that brings you joy and health at the same time. An important message and a great lasting message to leave people with. Dr. William Lee always appreciate you on the podcast. You have these ongoing masterclasses. give us our audience just a little bit of a preview of what you cover inside of there. And anybody can sign up. We'll have the link. I know there's a few that are coming up and they're always changing. So we'll update that link there. But what's an example of some topics that you

cover inside of those masterclasses? Yeah, well, one of the things that I, the reason I started doing these masterclass is because during the very beginning of the pandemic, when I was staring out the window like everyone else wondering what was going on, I realized that the health system didn't have any solutions. And this was maybe the first time, definitely in 100 years, where we were all left to our own devices. And that's where food as medicine came from. That's where the knowledge of what weak decisions we could make for ourselves

could trump and beat anything that the health care system could have offered us, you know, all throughout the pandemic until we, before we had anything, no vaccines, no antivirals, no nothing. We still had to eat food. And so that's where I stepped forward and said, you know what, I have information that I'm going to give for, for free to people to really help humans actually act according to their own instincts to be able to choose foods that are better for them.

And so what I've been doing really throughout the pandemic and now continuing throughout is to pick out foods and topics and seasons and new research that actually tell people how do you light up your own life? How do you take control? How do you have the agency to be able to actually choose something that's good for immunity, good for lowering inflammation, good for having better blood flow? all these things that are going to help us not only live longer and live better, but also help prepare us for the next stressor that might be around the corner.

And I think that that's one of the things that that's great about my interaction with masterclass is that I've had like 8,000 people sign up for a single masterclass from 44 countries now. And so this is like a global topic is that, you know, humans are incredibly resilient. And so what I want to do with my masterclasses is just to give you a little bit of information that's cutting edge, smoking hot information about your body that researchers know have just learned and the foods that can actually help you light up that health. So if, you know, most people walk away, they leave a little message for me about like something that they learn, that they can incorporate in their life or something they shared with somebody

that they cared about that also made a difference. And if it tastes really great at the same time, because I'm also somebody who's, I'm a foodie. So I really enjoy, I enjoy the joy of eating. I always try to bring something flavorful to the conversation as well. So I hope people sign up for the masterclass. Yeah, and you do such a good job at it. So you can find that in the link below, as well as the link to your first book, Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself.

Dr. William Lee, thank you again for coming on the podcast for cheering your wisdom with the audience. Thank you, Drew. Pleasure.