Dhru Purohit Show - The Wild and Crazy Science Around How GLP-1’s Are Reducing Cancer Risk, Improving Remission Rates, and Supporting Angiogenesis with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Tiny Health, Bon Charge, Cozy Earth, and Puori. GLP-1 medications have transformed the conversation around obesity and diabetes. But researchers are now uncovering benefits that extend far beyond weight loss. Emerging evidence suggests these drugs may influence everything from inflammation and heart health to cancer risk, opening an exciting new chapter in preventive medicine. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. William Li to explore some of the most exciting advancements in cancer prevention, early detection, and the emerging science behind GLP-1 medications. Dr. Li breaks down cutting-edge research on how GLP-1s may help reduce cancer risk, influence cancer cells, and potentially lower the chances of recurrence and metastasis. He also unpacks the alarming rise in colon cancer, the lifestyle strategies that can help reduce your risk, his perspective on choosing the right healthcare provider, and the latest breakthroughs in cancer screening and early detection. Dr. William W. Li, MD, is an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times bestsellers “Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself” and “Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer.”  His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 40 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases, including diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. He is President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, and he is leading global initiatives on food as medicine.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Li dive into: (00:00) Introduction (4:15) Headlines About GLP-1s and Cancer (13:19) Recent Observations on GLP-1s (23:11) The Heart Health Benefits of GLP-1s (28:42) How GLP-1s May Decrease the Risk of Various Cancers (43:25) Why Is Colon Cancer on the Rise? (55:59) Why the Right Medical Team Matters for Recovery (1:07:42) How to Build the Right Medical Team (1:14:37) The Mixed Opinions on GLP-1s (1:19:46) Dr. Li's Key Reminders and Recommendations (1:28:45) The Right Interventions for Overall Health (1:33:48) Foods That Support Natural GLP-1 Production (1:40:21) GRAIL's Cancer Test: Is It Worth It? (1:51:27) Final Thoughts and Takeaways Also mentioned in this episode: American Society of Clinical Oncology  Grail Test  For more on Dr. Li, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Tiny Health, Bon Charge, Cozy Earth, and Puori. Right now, Tiny Health is offering my community their biggest offer yet: $50 off your first gut health test. Just head to tinyhealth.com/dhru for $50 off your first test. Your gut has a story to tell; Tiny Health helps you understand what it's saying. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off their Red Light mask. Just go to boncharge.com/dhru and use code DHRU to save 15%. Right now, get 20% off your Cozy Earth sheets and sleepwear. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Quality protein matters. Get 32% off Puori Grass-Fed Whey Protein and a free shaker when you start a subscription at puori.com/DHRU and use code DHRU at checkout.  Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of the things that are going on now, including the GOP1 news, is some of the most astonishing jaw-dropping information that I've seen as a cancer researcher in the last decade. What is going on exactly with the intersection of these GOP-1 drugs and cancer? Those people who were taking GLP-1 actually had a substantially lower risk of having their cancer spread. Lung cancer, 45% less risk of metastases. Breast cancer who taking GOP-1, 50% less chance of spread. Liver cancer, decreased spread by 33%. That was in people who already had cancer.

We don't have drugs that can do this. It was another study that was done. Looking at people who didn't have cancer, those women taking GLP1 had a 30% reduction in having breast cancer. Wow. Is there a preventative aspect as well? What are a few things that I should be paying attention to?

You know, if I want to reduce my risk of cancer. Joining us today is Dr. William Lee, an internationally renowned physician, scientist in New York Times bestselling author. In this episode, he breaks down the cutting-edge research on how GLP-1s may help reduce cancer risk, influence cancer cells, and potentially lower the risk of cancer recurrence and metastasis.

Dr. William Lee, welcome back to the podcast when I was thinking about today's episode. I thought there are so many advancements when it comes to this world of cancer. And at the same time, cancer historically, and today is ranking amongst, the scariest diseases that somebody could get. And I couldn't think of somebody better to have on the show to talk about the intersection of new and exciting drugs, including GLPs, separating fact from fiction,

the tried and true lifestyle aspects that we know and that you've been talking about in this podcast for years that help us reduce our risk of cancer. Also, just how you as an individual and a doctor and a human being would think about these tough questions that people would be navigating like if I found out that I had cancer today, what would I do? What are things that you're doing practically in your life? Like are you doing some of these screening tests? So those are the things we're going to jump into today. And first and foremost, I want to say,

thank you for your work. And it's a pleasure to have you here. Always a pleasure to have this conversation. I think, you know, one of the things that your show does head and shoulders above many podcasts is to bring out exciting information presented in a very responsible evidence-based way. So I think this topic is one that requires that because of the fear factor of cancer,

because of a lot of misinformation that is easy to interpret out there as something that's meaningful. And also because cancer is a frontier that is yielding to science. And that's what I have been doing from my whole career as a researcher, including a cancer researchers,

is figuring out how do we advance the frontiers using the science and not just making incremental advancement. I've always been interested in how do we leapfrog forward. Where are the big advances going to be made? And frankly, how do we break the glass ceiling of cancer? Because it's not just you know, a few decades of fear. We're talking about tens of thousands of years where people have recognized cancer as a disease. So where are we today that is different than where we were yesterday or last year or 10 years ago? This is one of the fastest moving areas of medicine. And with all the distressing things that are happening in the world, I would tell you, I wake up every single day to new information, new data, new news that makes me feel confident that we are finally

getting on top of and making progress in the fight against cancer. Yeah, you're optimistic. You feel it through and through because you see where things are going. And that's why we want you on here today. And I want to start off with, there's been a lot of headlines recently. I've written about some of them in my newsletter. My audience has seen them on different news shows that are there. It's been a lot of headlines recently that there may be something going on with

GLP1 drugs or any of the GLP drugs that are out there and cancer. In particular, there's been some, what I understand to be, observational studies that people who have been taking GLP drugs have seemed to either be beating cancer quicker or potentially even lowering their risk. Give us a lay of the land of some of these headlines that are out there and then help us understand what is going on exactly with the intersection of these GOP1 drugs and cancer. A lot of people thought, okay, if they do help, maybe it's been. because they reduce your overall level of obesity and definitely being obese over the long haul increases your risk of cancer. But it seems like there's more that's going on to the story.

Yeah, everything you just said is true. But I think that the context is really important. Please. Some of the things that are going on now, including the JLP1 news, is some of the most astonishing jaw-dropping information that I've seen as a cancer researcher in the last decade. All right.

And we don't know how important this is going to be fully yet. So before we do this, let me just say that in medicine, and I'm an internal medicine doctor, I deal with cancer as one of the many diseases, that many diseases is actually important because sometimes we make discoveries in one area of medicine that apply to other areas of medicine. We leap to leap over the vertical silo and say, wait, if it works here, maybe there's something over here, and then it leads you down the path like, I'm a lot. an octopus tentacle into new areas that you discover. So this is the nature of medical research and medical discovery. Real discovery medical research, especially in cancer, is about exploring the

unknown. We know where our limits are, but what we want to know is how do we get beyond our limits, the limits of chemotherapy, the limits of diagnosis. You know, we'll talk a little bit about blood testing, all those other limits of pain control, complications of treatment. These are the things that, you know, this is the alphabet soup that both cancer patients and oncologists deal with. So I'm setting the stage to talk about GLP-1s because it is a drug area that has leapfrogged from one area of medicine to the other. Do you know when the first human GLP-1 hormone, it's a hormone, was actually identified? It's been a long time.

I know they gave it to diabetics early on, right? It was first identified in Boston, a Massachusetts general hospital in 1986. Okay. So they figured out that there was this hormone that seems to be involved with metabolism and blood sugar. And they worked it out. They identified the hormone. And then it took 20 years for the drug companies to take that scientific discovery. So what does the hormone do?

Well, at the beginning, what we thought the hormone did was something pretty easy. You eat some food. That food in your system signals your intestines, your gut, specifically special cells called L cells, to make a little puff of GLP1 naturally. That puff of GLP1 goes into your bloodstream and that hormone. And as your insulin goes up, that puff of GLP1 makes it a lot easier for your muscles and your fat cells

to absorb the blood sugar. And now it lowers your blood sugar. at the same time that puff of GLP1 naturally that your body makes goes up into your brain and it says dude you've had enough to eat uh slow it down and so it suppresses your appetite it's for that biological circuit that pathway which was really kind of like the construct of our understanding of GLP1 that led eventually 20 years after its discovery for drug companies to come up in 2006 or so uh with the first gLP1 drugs do you know where the first gLP1 drugs you know where the first GLP 1 drugs came from.

It came from that lizard, right? Exactly. And so what I want people to remember is that the GOP1 drugs originally were discovered in the GILA. It's this big, thick lizard that lives in the southwest in a desert. It looks like it's made out of black and red beads. And it's one of the most venomous reptiles, lizards in North America. When it bites onto you, it doesn't carve a chunk out of you.

It sinks its tiny little fangs into your flesh, and it milks out venom, really venomous, okay? Researchers found that in that venom, out of the saliva, out of the venom glands, was a peptide that was a mimic of human GLP1. And so it was because of that discovery that they had stuff to work with, the drug comes to work with, and they developed the first GLP1 drugs to lower blood sugars, the way that, you know, It's, we understand it's engineered to work in our body. And that's how the first diabetic application of GOP1 drugs were developed. Okay. In, you know, basically it took 20 years from discovery to realization.

And I heard, I don't know if this is true or not, but the drug companies that were involved in it, they did see even signaling beyond blood sugar that, hey, there was this weight loss thing that was there. But they shelved it because they never thought that. the mass consumer would be willing to inject something inside himself and the way that the injectable gLP ones you know we have oral ones that are there too but they just never thought that consumers would be willing to inject it's a good point uh and is that true did does well i i will tell you that those were observations that were made but i don't think the commercialization decision was made that way it was that there wasn't a rubric there wasn't a scientific

understanding of a mechanism for weight loss. And so, you know, we see all kinds of effects and side effects with drug development. Doesn't mean that you want to completely pivot and do something different. It is true that weight loss drugs have been the holy grail of the pharmaceutical industry and, frankly, of, you know, supplements and everybody wants to find a magic way to address the vanity issue of looking better by having lost weight. But I will tell you that once you had tens of thousands, hundreds of a thousand people with diabetes taking glp1 drugs, then that effect, side effect. Side effects can be bad, but side effects can be good.

And the weight loss observation from people with diabetes who took JLP1s actually was a good side effect. And that was snapped up after the drug is already approved, has a post-approval observation. Now, sometimes those observations are made early, and cause drug companies a pivot. A great example is a blood pressure drug that was designed to increase nitric oxide to relax blood vessels and lower blood pressure.

And in those clinical trials that were conducted by big drug companies, they found that all the men who were in the trial wound up having a really significant erection, like very consistently. And that pivot actually led the drug company to develop Viagra and then a whole other class of blockbuster drugs that are really for quality of life. Okay. So this idea of first here, then there is a paradigm that we've actually seen in drug development. And this is what's been going on, almost hand over fist with the GLP1 drugs, is first for diabetes and then notice for weight loss. and then the drug companies ran clinical trials

and indeed validated, you can actually lose significant weight with a GLP1 drug. Now, the mechanism of weight loss is still not clear exactly what's going on. Yeah, you have better metabolism. Yeah, you have some appetite suppression. But really, if you look at the magnitude of weight loss, all right, it's a lot more than you can accommodate

with just regular the idea that you're just having appetite suppression and better glucose mentality. Do you think so? Because like having no, seeing friends or families that might be on gop drugs and what they used to eat and how they eat now, they're eating so much less. It's almost like they're going on, you know, like some sort of fast that's there. Sometimes they even have to work hard to actually eat to make sure they get enough protein or other nutrients that's there. It just seems like they're eating so much less. But you do feel that it's more than just caloric restriction. Yeah, I think so. And, and, and,

I'm going to tell you how some of the more recent observations are building the case that there's something more going on. But it is true. You eat less. You have less calories in. You're going to, you know, gain less weight. But how do you actually do massive weight reduction, which is what we're actually seeing with these GLP1 drugs?

It's an area of active research. And so that's why it's not like a done deal. This is where the use of a drug leads to me. new scientific questions that researchers need to dive into to try to figure it out. Now, with lots of people excited about the weight loss potential, everybody wound up kind of, not everybody, but many people wound up diving into wanting, demanding, craving this GLP1 injection that causes significant weight loss, not just for the morbidly obese, which is what the initial intention was, but I don't know, for reasons that I'm not personally

that clear on, like the medical community, it's like, oh, yeah, let's go ahead, give it, you can order it online, and there seems to be like a freebie handing out trick-or-treating of GLP-1s now. So anybody can get it, and it's really become a vanity drug as well as a natural medical therapy. And I have to say, it does work. And there's nothing wrong with vanity. I mean, we all have a bit of that in us. But what's really amazing is that once you had people at scale taking JLP1 drugs, you do find, and we do know about some of the side effects, the loss of muscle mass and the loss of bone density, which isn't consistent with everybody, but it does happen to some people. It's really scale.

It's like the COVID vaccine. Once you give it to billions of people, you're going to start saying stuff that you wouldn't have seen in smaller populations, but you also see good things that are happening. And so do you know how many people are taking GLP1 drugs now? In America, is it like something like 30 million people? Exactly. That is the number, 30 million people taking the same class of drugs. Now, from a researcher's perspective, you have an opportunity to look not in a fishbowl at what's going on.

You can look at an arena, you know, like rock concert in arena. You can now start looking at what's going on in an entire arena of people from a health perspective. And this is where some of the really eye-opening jaw-dropping surprises are coming from because that many people taking GOP ones from weight loss, suddenly we're noticing in the medical community there is a dramatic decrease in a risk of cardiovascular disease, fatal heart attack and stroke by about 30 percent and people are taking GOP ones. Let me tell you, you can't do that with a statin. We don't have, you can't work out to decrease your risk.

risk of fatal heart attack or a stroke to get that number. And we don't have a drug that can actually do that. So this is an observation of a positive side effect, which has now been reinforced with study after study, both trials and observational studies. Observational studies are associations, not causation. I can say that line as well as anybody else. But I'm somebody who has spent my career on discovery. And I will tell you that the Charles Darwin's of discovery today are looking at what's happening in populations. And just like Darwin discovered, oh, those finches have different color, different shaped beaks. And later on, you kind of developed this whole theory of evolution. That's how discovery is. Like, do not dismiss the important of it. Don't poo poo. Pooh

observational studies. Totally not. But also recognize that a lot of people don't realize this is that the early data that led to the idea that smoking causes cancer, it's all observation. It's all observational, but it was so strong of observational data that it was like, cause is the right word because the strength of that observation. So we have a history in medicine of using it, and it tends to be in this day and age. If you're for something, you like to cite observational information. If you're against it, you'll poo-poo it. but we have to weigh the nuance of how the quality of the research and the trends over time.

Well, I mean, listen, I'm a real doctor and I'm a real scientist. So for me, the nuances are really how we advance our understanding of our bodies and how we actually make progress. Nothing very rarely. Do we see black and white, good and evil, right or wrong in medicine, especially in research, you've got to keep your eyes open and mind open. That's how all the discoveries are actually made in all the important. discoveries in medicine. So you've got all these people having a cardiovascular benefit. And now there's

trials being run and shows that it seems to be supported. And by the way, these observational studies and clinical trials are published in major journals like Nature, like the New England Journal of Medicine. So these are not lightweight journals that will publish fluff. They report important discoveries that are worthy of attention and more research. That's the key. You key. This is the beginning, not the end. And that's what makes me excited as a researcher. Wow, what are we learning? Okay, so let's talk about the heart for a second before we get to cancer. We're going to get to cancer. How it is that you could actually have a GLP1 that has this metabolic cycle to actually benefit heart disease. Well, you could say the same argument. Well, you know,

if you eat less and you develop and you lose body fat, less versatile fat and you have better blood trigger control. Well, isn't that like those are the risk fractures of heart disease and stroke. So, you know, the equation is solved. That's why it is wrong. Because the magnitude of reduction of cardiovascular poor outcomes, negative outcomes, you know, by the way, I don't know if you know this term is called Mace, M-A-C-E. This is the inside baseball term.

M-A-C-E stands for major adverse cardiovascular event. That's where you have a heart attack or stroke and you don't come back from that or you get massively debilitated. So MACE events are down by 30% in people taking GMB. And they take them in GMPA-1. So that doesn't make sense just on the basis of weight loss

and blood sugar control no matter what people say. Even if the weight loss led to, you know, people that are pretty obese or even moderately overweight, they tend to have more visceral fat throughout their body but also visceral fat in their heart, which we know is very damaging. When you control for all, all those things, you still get a bigger effect.

And there's something else going on. So something else on top of the basics that are there, it's not enough that they're, you know, probably their APOB is improving in LDL because statins and other things have done that. And we haven't seen the same results from those. So something else is happening. We've all heard the phrase, all disease begins in the gut. This is why so many experts agree, especially on this podcast, that having a snapshot of your gut health can be a total game changer.

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slash Drew, D-H-R-U to give your skin the recovery support it's been missing. So what is the mechanism? What is that something else? And this is really what I'm involved with and what I think is super exciting to communicate. And by the way, what I'm actually talking about today, if you're listening or watching, is you're seeing how a scientist, observes and thinks out loud in the middle of a breakthrough. Okay.

We're seeing things that we didn't see before. How do we think about that? Well, first of all, coming from another field, which is vascular biology, blood vessel biology, I run the Androgenesis Foundation. Angiogenesis is how the body grows blood vessels, 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels, bringing oxygen and nutrients and medications to every single organ, every single cell. in your body, it is a major regulator for health as well as disease. Guess what?

The vascular biologists have now discovered that the GLP receptor is on every blood vessel in your body. Not just in your gut, not just in your brain, but it's actually on every blood vessel. Those blood vessels actually penetrating the heart, feeding the heart, feeding the brain. Oh, maybe that contributes to the mechanism of cardiovascular benefits. So what does GLP1 do? Well, if you're a vascular biologist, I'm trying to understand what's going on at the blood vessel level, GLP1, which is a natural hormone made by the body in response to food,

that little puff that I was talking about at the very beginning, it actually helps blood vessels stay healthier. So if your blood vessels sick, if the endothelial cell that lines blood vessels are not doing so well, think about atherosclerosis, clogging the arteries, calcifications, gulpary, actually, actually naturally, natural GOP1 helps to restore, revive, regenerate the blood vessels that are sick. So actually makes sick blood vessels healthier, all right? And if your blood vessels are a little out of control, like in tumors, it yolks them back

in. It actually tries to get back towards homeostasis. So here's a whole new paradigm of how GLP1 seem to work at the vascular level. And that helps you understand perhaps how this could be beneficial. beyond weight loss, beyond blood sugar and metabolism, at the endothelial, the vascular level. That there's some sort of repair process that's happening. And not just repair, but there's a recent study that came out of Naples, Italy, studying people on GLP 1 with a cardiovascular condition called peripheral arterial disease.

So peripheral arterial disease is clogging the arteries, not in the heart of the brain, but actually of your legs. So you can get a heart attack of your leg, believe it or not, by having not no blood flow to the leg. So they found in this Italian study that people on GLP-1s had more stem cells in their bloodstream that are coming out because of the JLP1 compared to people who weren't on JLP1, which improved the clinical outcome for to saving the lake. All right. Oh, stem cells, regeneration, protecting of blood vessels. We're starting to shape a story, a narrative now, a scientific narrative, by putting lots of pieces of the picture together.

This is like CSI, right, crime scene investigation, except this is the good thing. We're trying to understand what the story, the scientific story might be. Wow, there's a whole new avenue, a whole new paradigm of understanding GLP1 as a hormone that may be independent of metabolism, maybe independent of appetite suppression,

and it has to do with vascular health. That is a game changer to think about, right? Okay, we're still talking about heart. We haven't talked about cancer yet. If you think about this hormone that was discovered in 1986, that became a drug in the early 2000s, 20 years later, and then from blood sugar control for diabetes, it turned down to a weight loss drug.

And this weight loss drug at scale, taking a scale, winds up revealing new biology about the body and the implications of vascular health, cardiovascular health, heart, brain, leg, okay? and the fact that these receptors so the receptors are I think if you think about a receptor on a cell it's like a little radar-ish on a cell

sometimes people think about it I sometimes use the analogy like it's a lock that's sitting on top of the cell and you have a key that would be the hormone or the peptide and the key goes into the lock turns the switch and now the cell is activated you open the gateway, the floodgates

for something to happen inside the cell look when that's happening in your brain or that happening in your gut, maybe that's, you know, metabolic benefits. But what happens when you're doing to the blood vessels? Now you are activating vascular health. So to me, running the Androgenesis Foundation, this is an entirely new avenue of research and discovery that could be a game changer in other areas as well, touching blood vessels, which is every organ and every cell in your body.

Now, if it's good for metabolism, good for weight loss, good for cardiovascular health, the natural thing that researchers say is what else could it be good for, particularly because it's got systemic, meaning whole body implications, including the vascular. You can't escape blood vessels. And so now people like me and others are saying, is there any benefit to cancer? And this is really how this news flotilla of discoveries on cancer came about.

I wanted to do the buildup on this. The bottom was great. an understanding of where the beginning, you know, how do you begin at the beginning and how do you get to where we are right now? Otherwise, it's just like people jumping on board and, you know, taking sides and then getting confused about it. So what happened is that with so many people, 13 million people taking GLP1 drugs because of, you know, it's become a vanity drug as well as a real medical therapy, you can start to observe things and collect information and look at patterns that shouldn't exist normally. unless they were attributed to the treatment. And this is what's been happening with cancer. So recently at this year's American Society for Clinical Oncology,

ASCO, it's the largest cancer meeting in North America. It is where all the, it is the watering hole where all the major cancer researchers come together to talk about real serious cancer research. This is not lightweight. This is not fluff. This is not a health and wellness. this, you know, empowerment meeting. This is like, like, like, like, really brass knuckles for,

and mostly drug, talk about drugs, all right. By the way, in that meeting, now there's conversations about the gut microbiome and then the immune system and dietas starts certain creeping. It's a recognition by the cancer research community at large that used to be drug only, now beginning to ask about what's actually happening inside the body, these pathways, are we, are we missing something or should we be observing something? And with GLP 1, what has been observed and what was presented this year, like session after session after session is a series of very, very surprising findings associating GLP 1, people taking

GOP1 with some cancer outcome. For example, Cleveland Clinic, look at 20,000 people, okay, with seven different types of cancer. And they said, if they were taking GLP, was there any effect on these people who already had cancer on the spread of their cancer, right? Because a lot of people have cancer. Most people don't die their primary or initial organ of cancer. They die of metastases, the spread of cancer. That's what you really want to be able to stop.

If you can't stop the first cancer, that's great. But if you can't stop that, you definitely don't want it to spread. That's heading towards game over. So they found in 20,000 people that those people who were taking GLP1 actually had a substantially lower risk of having their cancer spread, specifically lung cancer.

Okay, if you had lung cancer, if you were taking GOP1, 45% less risk of metastases. So the cancer was still there, but it didn't end up spreading to other organs. Yeah. What would be an organ example that, like, does lung cancer end up in the brain?

Brain could be a good one. And that's one of the scariest ones because it's harder to treat instead of the brain? Yes, although that's also, That's also changing a little bit. That's also yielding. Non-small cell lung cancer, like a smoker's lung cancer, a decrease rate is spread by 45%.

Breast cancer, okay? That's a very popular, people immediately riveter their attention to it. Women who have cancer, breast cancer, who take in gLP one, 50% less chance of spread. 50. We don't have a drug that can do that, okay?

There's no supplement. There's no magic diet. There's no, you know. You can't drink enough, green tea or this or that. Even though these things are helpful, You can't exercise your way out of that. You got to do all that stuff. But now we actually have this dramatic.

And 50% is not 2%. Right, right. This is not a small amount. It's a huge number. It's a huge number. Colon cancer, decrease versus spread by 40%. All right. Liver cancer, which is a very notorious cancer.

All right. Decreased spread by 33%. So we don't have drugs that can do this. And this is really the, you know, like these is the kind of observations that people go, like this is not wishing something good would happen. This is an observation like, holy cow. And by the way, they also look at pancreatic and prostate cancer and all had signals, but those four cancers, lung, breast, colon, and liver had statistically significant

lowering of the risk of spread. Now, that, and I'm just describing for people who are listening, how science works, okay? because, you know, in the news, we tend to hear the end result. But I think it's much more informative when you're in a middle of a breakthrough to, you know, for people, especially in this day and age with podcasts and social media, to understand the process. You know, how does that river flow to get to the sea? And so I want to tell you now, because of that kind of observation, the Cleveland Clinic also looked at a massive data bank called the Cancer Genome. Atlas. Did you know about this? No. Okay. So you know an Atlas like Rand McNally Atlas has got a map of every state and every part of the country. And if you want to plan a trip, you can actually go map out like where the gas stations are,

hotels and where the national parks are and the campsites, right? So that's an Atlas. And there is a cancer genome Atlas that maps out of all the known cancers what the genes are in the cancer. And because of this type of observation with GLP1, research is the, the Cleveland Clinic decided to go look in there and say how many tumors are actually expressing GLP1 receptor and it turns out there are cancers that recept that make the receptor for GLP1 all right and those cancers when you correlate it to survival there's like a 30% decrease in death improvement in survival okay if the cancer the tumor was expressing GOP1

not every tumor does but now we're tagging into a genetic this is not just observation now now we're taking to the next level to look at the smoking gun all right and so think about the tumor this is how we're thinking about it these tumors some tumors not every tumor not every class of cancer but some tumors make glp1 receptors think about it like the tumor the cancer cell painting a bullseye on itself all right and now if you're taking a glp1 drug you're also hitting a the target on the cancer as well as your gut and as well as your brain as your maybe your vascular system now you are hitting a now it's a targeted therapy what's the implication well we don't know yet but imagine if in the future we discover that when you get a when you biopsy of your tumor we should be sending it not just for her to and braca and all those other kras and eGFR but maybe we should be sending it to check the box for GLP1 receptor too, because would that allow us to select a medicine that has been hidden in plain sight the whole time to match it with the target? Because we have the arrow and we've got

the bullseye. Not ready for prime time yet, but this is where we are thinking. Quickly heading in that direction. Heading in that direction. It's a logical way more research needs to be done. Really, really interesting. So, by the way, so this Cleveland Clinic thing that was presented in ASCO, that was in people who already had cancer. There was another study that was done looking at people who didn't have cancer yet the beginning of a study, but some of them were on GLP 1. This is women, 111,000 women who are getting their breasts image for lots of different

reasons. You know, there's lots of reasons that women could actually go for ultrasound mammogram, MRI for different kinds of breast conditions. And what they found is that those women taking GLP1. had a 30% reduction in having breast cancer. Wow. Is there a preventative aspect as well? So he didn't have cancer at the beginning.

The first study had people already had cancer. This is prevention. Was this the study that was done on women who were mildly obese or mildly overweight all the way to, you know, full-blown overweight? These are women who had, you know, kind of a higher than normal BMI. But they were not more really obese. Right, right. Universally. So, and again, you don't get that kind of benefit of decrease, like reduction in breast

cancer simply by losing visceral fat and having better blood sugars, okay, in a five-year study. So, again, think about what I said about the cancer genome Atlas, looking at the cancer painting and target on itself. Now we're beginning to wonder, is there a preventative application as well? Not ready for prime time yet, but this is what. these discoveries are leading us to think about. All right.

And by the way, if anybody listening to this is thinking, oh, maybe I should get on a GLP1. You know, it's a good thought, I would say, because of how easy it is to get in a GLP1, and these are drugs. And drugs, by the way, that are based on normal body substances like hormones. I told you at the very beginning,

the body makes a little puff of GLP1 after a meal. These are sledgehammers. drugs are sledgehammers, all right? They are powerful. And so you don't want to be soloing. This is not DIY health. All right. I don't care who can formulate it for you

and whether you want to microdose it. You should be talking to your health care provider, okay, to really get your health team in on helping you guide and help you make a decision. Listen, they're pretty well tolerated, but, you know, if you have a problem, you want somebody to bail you out. You want to work in conjunction with your clinician.

Yeah. Or at least, you know, because this is very emerging and it takes somebody kind of open-minded. It might mean that you have to shop around a little bit and ask and see and like who's somebody that might be at your hospital or the clinic or the place that you have access to an insurance and they're willing to go on the journey with you because a lot of doctors themselves are now still themselves learning about this. Exactly.

Including, you know, the consequences of being on GLP1 drugs. We've had, you know, a few researchers on this podcast that have talked about a year after, people start these drugs, 50% of people come off. And what are the top reasons? Number one is often some sort of cost or insurance component. Number two is some sort of side effect that they attributed the drugs to, like not having a feeling like their appetite is too suppressed, feeling that they are, don't have desire for certain things. There's been a lot of reports out that some people have a lack of sexual desire that might be there that they previously once had. And hedonia. They just don't enjoy life as much anymore. They don't enjoy life as much. So, you know, there's things to navigate,

but I think a very open-minded clinician who's working with you might say, hey, okay, maybe we try to switch your dose or try a different version. So try to find somebody open-minded on this journey that can figure things out with you. Wise advice. And I think that's really solidly said. One thing I love about summer is spending more time outside. One thing I don't love, waking up hot in the middle of the night. That's why this time of year, I appreciate products that actually helped me and my wife stay cool and comfortable. I've talked about Cozy Earth for years because their bamboo sheet set is one of a few products that genuinely has changed my sleep experience.

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In addition, you'll get a free premium shaker bottle on your first subscription order. All you have to do is go to Puri, P-U-O-R-I-D-C-R-U, and use the code D-H-R-U-Drew at checkout for this limited time offer. Now, what's also interesting that was presented at ASCO is another study that looked at colon cancer, which is increasingly common in younger populations, kind of a scary cancer. But the good news about colon cancer, if you catch it early with screening and all that kind of stuff, you can actually treat it pretty well. We've got, colon cancer is kind of like breast cancer. If you have it, it's never good, but we can actually, there's quite a few tools in a toolbox, and people can actually get through it pretty easily.

It's when you don't catch it early that it becomes a problem. And people have read the news reports of James Vanderbake from Dawson's Creek and other people who seem like very healthy individuals but are dying of colon cancer. These colon cancer on the rise, I've heard conflicting things. Some people say, well, it's because of increased screening and recommendations, and some people say it's classification on how these, you know, polyps and early tumors are being shown. And some people say, yeah, it's on the rise, and especially for young people.

What do you know? All the above, but what's distinctive is that we're beginning to see colon cancer being diagnosed in younger and younger people. When I went to medical school, you know, colon cancer was a disease that you would see mostly in men when they're 70 years old or older. And then, you know, within the last couple of decades, it's like 50 year olds, we got to get screening earlier. Then we start to look at genetic risk factors.

But now we're getting like people in their 30s and 20s. And I've even heard of cases of 16-year-olds being diagnosed with colon cancer. It is crazy. Is it something in the environment? Is it something in our bodies that we've been exposed to that's changing our. our health defenses, our natural anti-cancer defenses, we don't really know. But it is alarming, and it does raves this idea that we need to figure out more than just react to the cancer. We should try to figure out how to catch it earlier in younger people. You would never advise

somebody younger previously to go get a colonoscopy or do a circulating blood test for, you know, cancer, the DNA methylation. One of my dear friend, she's been public about it, so I'm not releasing any information. A dear friend of mine who recently moved to L.A., Rina Malick, she's a YouTube star and urologist and puts out great content, really beautiful content. She opened up that this within a matter of a couple of weeks, not only did she find out through regular screening that she had breast cancer, but her husband, super sweet guy who had a chance to meet, he had a red flag on a blood test that he was anemic and he had no history of that, and that was raised the red flag for her of, oh, we got to go look into this

young guy, and he found out that he had colon cancer. I have a, you know, a person in my orbit that was taking care of my own health care for the last, like, three years and part of my own team, and he passed away just two years ago of colon cancer. And again, you know, I couldn't tell he's exact age, but he couldn't have been over, like, you know, 58 years old. So because of all this, and some of the headlines, I got nervous and I said, okay, my insurance is not going to pay for it. I'm only 43 years old. I don't have any history of colon cancer in my family.

Even though I have great insurance, they're not going to cover it. I'm so worried about colon cancer and healthy people getting it, I'm just going to pay out of pocket. Knock on wood, I did my screening like two months ago. It was all completely clean. Everything is good. But that's how worried, even healthy people are, that, shoot, do I need to see what's going on even with my own health,

even though I'm not, I have great amount of fiber in my diet, I exercise, I do these other things. I don't know. Is it the pesticides? Is it this? Is it that? We don't know what's going on. But I was worried enough that I paid out of pocket to go get it done. Yeah.

No, listen, we are clearly having more awareness that if we can take a step to dodge a bullet, we should, we should probably do it if we can. And that's where diet and lifestyle actually become accessible. Tests, if we can afford it, are good to do as well. we can talk a little bit about which tests and what their upsides and downsides might be and screening, all that kind of stuff. I mean, listen, what I would tell you when it comes to cancer is that anxiety and stress, catacalymein state, high cortisol state actually can increase the chances of doing cancers.

You don't want to be the walking worried and then be so fixated on, you know, what's going on inside your body. I mean, I think we've talked about this on the podcast before. We're all forming microscopic cancers in our body. the time. Yeah, even healthy people. Even healthy people. You know, like cancers are mutations. There's 10,000 mutations that escape our immune system every single day

when mistakes are being made. And these wind up becoming little microscopic cancers that, fortunately, our healthy immune systems, which are partly controlled by a healthy gut and gut microbiome, can wipe out microscopic cancers. And so the ones that we're really worried about are the cancers that get bigger than microscopic. They take

off and they start expanding in size. And so through the whole angiogenesis process and expansion blood vessels, they hijack blood vessels, they recruit new blood vessels to feed themselves and how the cancers can grow. By the way, so it's interesting. When I was studying and training in the field of the pioneer of angiogenesis, Judith Fopin, it was a famous experiment where if you implanted a tumor in an experimental system and you prevented blood vessels from ever getting to the cancer, that.

The tumor would stay there for weeks and never get larger than about the size of a grain of rice, about two to three millimeters in diameter. But then if you stimulated blood vessels to touch the tumor, the cancer cells, then the cancer getting oxygen and nutrients would explode and grow 16,000 times in size in just two weeks. Crazy. Okay. And so there's a lot of cancer biology that, you know, like this is what we're learning. We're learning more about how cancer forms. But I want to tell you one thing that's important, one of the main ways that as we learn more about the biology of cancer, it does open the doors and open our minds for more ways of treating the cancer for sure. But I will tell you that there's been a kind of a wholesale shift in thinking away from the wartime analogy of the war against cancer, killing the cancer, burning the cancer out, poisoning the cancer, and switching a,

towards healing the person, healing the patient. And that frame shift is really important because we now realize that boosting your immune system, helping better gut health is really absolutely and improving your circulation so you don't have those runaway hijacked blood vessels. Those are even better ways to be able to prevent cancer and to help restore success of what your body already tries to do. So let's go back to colon cancer for a second.

So there was a study presented at ASCO, this major cancer conference just recently, that looked at people with colon cancer who had been successfully treated. They had the surgery. They had the chemotherapy. They had the radiation. They had a targeted therapy or the immunotherapy. Now the cancer is gone. So what happens in medicine at that point is that we say, congratulations. We got, you got, we're all clear.

and now the clock starts ticking so you hit the stopwatch and the timer goes off for five years and that's really when you look for that five year all clear mark and there's a second all clear mark after the second five years you feel much better right

and anybody who's known or dealt with cancer you know that that's what the oncologists tell you once you cross, once you get out of the jungle you still another five years to be sure you're out of the jungle yeah that happened with my mom and her breast cancer journey exactly so it turns out

that this other research study found that those people who had their colon cancer successfully treated, if they were on a GLP1 drug, it prevented the recurrence of cancer between 30 and 50%. So it didn't come back, all right? And that's really important because that's the secondary prevention part, right? And again, we're talking about, you know, just within recently these eyes on the community, the 30 million people taking GLP-1s at scale and trying to look at patterns that we wouldn't have expected. Less metastases of cancer metastases, if you're a

cancer patient already, preventing cancer itself, possibly associated with a mechanism, with the bullseye being painted by the tumor on itself, possibly. Now you're talking about preventing secondary cancers, the cancer recurring. We don't actually have drugs that can do that effectively at this level. And so this is really having us, one more thing about that it was presented at ASCO. You know, they also presented studies to show that people in GLP-1 is getting chemotherapy had fewer side effects of chemotherapy. Now you're preventing the side effects, less neutropenia.

That's like knocking out your white cells and making you vulnerable for infection. You know, boy in a bubble syndrome, some people actually wind up like losing their immune system. because the chemo knocks out their bone marrow and their white blood cells or immune system. And then less neuropathy. So that's a chemical killing of the nerves that can cause very distressing, tingling or pain in some cancer patients. In fact, a lot of times people stop a cancer treatment altogether because their neuropathy is intolerable. The observation that GLP1 drug, people taking them, actually had a significantly lower risk of having these side effects. is very much eye-opening, right?

So we don't have the answer. This is not ready for prime time. Everybody jump on GLP-1s, but I'm telling you, this is a series of back-to-back breakthrough observations leading to new discoveries, tying to genetics, looking at targets, thinking about a brand new role for GLP1.

So beyond metabolism, blood sugar, appetite suppression, and weight loss. Now we're talking about cardiovascular health, GLP1 makes you have healthy their blood vessels, that natural puff that your body makes. Maybe that's Mother Nature's natural pathway to do more than one thing. It's a hormone with multiple job descriptions. One is appetite metabolism. One is weight management.

One is cardiovascular health. Now could there be one tied to cancer? And I just want to say one thing. Our bodies normally make GLP1. we should, and we can talk about this, optimize our own GLP1 secretion. Super important. Really important because that's the thing that doesn't require insurance and doesn't require, like we can help our bodies make its own GLP1.

So we'll talk about that in a second. But the thing that understand is that what everything we're talking about now is not intended by me to have everybody race out to get their own GLP1 treatments. You've got to talk with your doctor about it. Don't forget, your body creates a puff after you're eating and it does all, it may do all these great things, but the drugs that you inject or take us a pill now are sledgehammers. And drugs are really the blunt instruments compared to what the body does. Like most pharmaceutical companies, most drugs we have, you know, really kind of,

some of the many of them actually mimic what the body already tries to do, but just doesn't in a blunt instrument kind of way. So what I'm telling you is that this discovery from the early mid-1980s that morphed into a simple drug for type 2 diabetes turned into this blockbuster weight loss drug that everybody goes to and then that scalable population taking the drugs now have led serious research to say, wait a minute, what's going on with lower of heart disease and stroke? And the vascular biologist said, wait a minute, these receptors are also found in all the blood vessels a body and all of a sudden we're rethinking the entire pathway of GLP1 way beyond metabolism. And then this observation with this life or death scary disease called cancer that has touched all of us, suddenly we're sitting up straight and saying, wait a minute, is there something

here that we really need to be paying attention to because nobody would argue against the need for better cancer treatments? And that's kind of where we are. That hopefully helps to frame. the news that's out there and gives a little bit historical context to it as well. No, you did such an incredible job. I feel like we should just slice it out, call it a TED Talk, put it out there,

and it gets people thinking, you know, but I guess that's the beauty of these podcasts this day is we can have these nuanced discussions. We can ask questions back and forth. So first and foremost, that was fantastic. I want to put out there an idea of how I'm thinking about it in my own family's life.

And, of course, you've already said it. You're not a doctor for any, that's here, even though you are a doctor. And by the way, guys, I'm not a doctor. Even though I'm Indian, and you look at me, so many of you call me Dr. Drew in the podcast, I'm not a doctor. That's a different Dr. Drew.

That's a different Dr. Drew, right? I'm a literal layperson. I call myself a professional amateur. I'm just interested in these subjects. And at most, I can ask hopefully good enough questions to get our great guests to share some great information. Better than being an amateur professional. Yeah, exactly.

Better than that. So we're not anybody's doctor I'm not a doctor, William Lee, is a doctor, but he's not your doctor. Now, with that all being said, I mentioned my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was her two positive breast cancer, for those of you that are not familiar, that is found out through the biopsy, and it helps her team, her doctors, know what type of treatment is best for her, including some of the functional medicine doctors that were on her team. So she had a traditional oncologist that was there, but she also had some incredible

doctors, including Dr. Elizabeth Bome, who is herself a breast cancer survivor and a nutritionist, who was really helping my mom dial in a lot of the lifestyle things, increasing her exercise, being aware of her carbohydrates, the fact that South Asians, my mom is Indian, tend to have a lot more visceral fat and to kind of keep that in check, having protein for the first time in her life from animal sources, reducing a little bit of, you know, some of the carbohydrates that I mentioned. So she had a whole team that was there. And then being aware of understanding that this was a breast cancer that's been made worse, from my understanding, speaking in layman's terms, correct from wrong, through estrogen dominance that's there, like a her two positive. So she had a very personalized treatment.

Knock on wood. She caught it very early, right? I think it was literally at stage one or before stage one that was there. This was 13, 14 years ago. And didn't have to do chemo. just did a shortened radiation stint and surgery, and has been in that five-year mark plus of being in the all-clear. And knowing a little bit about the data,

about resurgence of cancer, spread of cancer, you know, I'm hearing this information. And yes, we get my mom to stay active and eat healthy and other things. And my mom probably would say that she has, you know, she's not obese by any means, but she might have, especially in that sort of belly fat region, she might have a good 10, 15 pounds that she might want to lose to bring her in a more optimal state of what could be their BMI-wise.

So I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, she's not somebody that's seeking out GLP1 drugs, but is it worthwhile to have a discussion and for her to listen to this podcast and talk with her own team and say, okay, this is interesting information. we are not going to be prescribing it to anybody right now. As you mentioned, it's not ready for prime time, but let's say she's borderline as somebody who might be a good candidate for a GLP1 drug

for addressing some extra weight that might be there. Could this nudge her in the direction, or could you at least nudge her in the direction of having a conversation with a team to say, hey, what are the pros and cons? And then most appropriately, what would be if you did decide to go down this pathway, the right dose in intervention and drug, et cetera. My mom, her sister also had breast cancer and then was in the clear for a long time.

And then one day, after eight years of being, you know, cancer-free, she started getting pain in her spine out of nowhere. And then that led to some diagnostics MRI. and it turned out that she had now a tumor in the spine, three tumors in the spine that had spread. And even though she had already gotten the all-clear and that tumor was putting pressure on a nerve, and that's where this pain was coming from,

and ultimately went down the path of treatment, other things, and she ended up surviving a lot longer than what the doctors expected, but then she ended up passing away from a combination of things, but passed away from this cancer that ended up spreading. And I look at those situations and I'm like, man, you know, that's such a sad thing, especially after obviously getting the all clear. And, you know, every person's situation is unique. My mom's situation is different than my aunt situation.

But even more so, it kind of nudges me in the direction of like, man, I really got to get my mom to have an informed conversation and make sure she has the right team to see if these gLP ones or now gLP3s that are coming down the pipelines and these other drugs. could potentially be part of her interventions on top of a healthy diet, exercise, all the other beautiful things that she's doing. She's a huge fan of yours, right? Shout out to my mom. She watches her YouTube videos all the time.

So, yeah, that's my thinking that's there. A couple of things. As a great case example and a very personal one, you know, what you just articulated is you advocating on behalf of your mom thinking through what might be, useful for your mom, maybe even in ways that she doesn't have the knowledge or the exposure or the, or maybe sometimes people just don't even think about it themselves. I need some help. And so you're advocating for your mom. And I think that having that conversation with your mom and then maybe together with her oncology team, her breast cancer team, could be a powerful way to

surface the opportunity to say, should we do it? Might there be some benefit? And that's, again, very individualized. What I think is great is that, you know, you've heard, obviously, about some of these breakthroughs, not just through me, but your own through your newsletter, you've been talking about it. You could print out the original papers and the reports that have come out. Not every oncologist goes to ASCO and some of this breaking news hasn't yet

hit the peer-reviewed literature. But, you know, sometimes this is what I found. Listen, as a doctor who does research, the researchers all have, should have humility because we know how much we don't know. And if you're open-minded as a real researcher, if you were to bring a research paper to me, along with your mom and to say,

hey, listen, let's have this conversation. What do you think? And I might not have seen that research. result, and I read it, you might be educating me. And so this is where I think that, you know, that the team approach is not just the medical team, which is what we normally think of, the oncology team, but the family team, the advocates could be really, really a powerful way to even help your doctor improve their knowledge or challenge their thinking or push them out of their comfort zone. And if you're lucky, they might already have a lot of experience with it

or getting some experience with and say, yeah, yeah, you know, I think that's reasonable. Like, I mean, I think this is where the art of medicine is very much in the hands of the operator, you know. And I think this is like where medicine is a bit like cooking. You know, you go to some of those cordon-blue train French chefs. They're only going to, they're only going to cook that chicken in one way because you know that that's going to turn out for the restaurant chicken. But, you know, you go to a more creative, modern American chef. they might have a lot of different ways to prepare the meal, still going to have chicken at the end of the day.

And I think that this is where I think a lot of people just put way too much stock. Their doctor is going to know everything, especially at this cutting edge. They're human beings. They're human beings. And, you know, like we all went to medical school. We got the same degree. But after that, you know, it's all on us to actually stay up to date.

And, you know, some people are comfort with the same old, same old, right? I mean, you know, some people go to the same restaurant, order the same thing off the menu. Other people are like, you know what? I want the latest dish that you haven't, that you just posted on a blackboard. Let me have the special tonight. You know, like, so I think that doctors are very human. Medicine is at the end of the day. There's still a lot of creativity and art to it.

But the intellectual aspect of what science is teaching us, revealing new biology, I think that's the kind of stuff that we can't ignore in medicine. So whether or not I read about it or your mom's doctor reads about it through the journals or goes to the conferences or whether you bring it up or your mom brings it up, I know my mother would always hesitate to bring up things to her doctor. You don't want to challenge a doctor old school. You know, the doctor knows everything. Listen, when I go with my mom to the doctor and this is like my mom had stage four cancer

or got her to stage zero, it's because I advocated for her. I brought the data. And, you know, and when her doctor initially wasn't. wasn't the of the mindset to give her the treatment that I knew was cutting edge and there was data. We switched to doctor, found it, we expanded her team to get a new doctor and a new setting and they were able to get her on it. And, you know, man, the difference was day and night in terms of the same trained oncologists, but just different mindsets. One was looking into the future and very optimistic and willing to use science to actually try something on an individual level that might

work for that one patient. And other person is like, you know, we don't do this here. We don't, that's not what we practice. And so I would encourage anybody listening to this. You know, JLP1s is just one example of a breakthrough. There's, by the way, at ASCO and if you just pay attention, anybody listening, you want to actually really see something interesting and follow the cancer research. A lot of people don't know how to do this.

type in on your Google search or whatever AI tool you're using, ASCO, ASCO, and type in the year and just put breakthrough and just hit search and see what data has been presented and who find out who are the researchers and what are the medical centers that have been doing this type of work. This is not fringe stuff coming out of, you know, some yurt in Mongolia. This is mainstream research at the cutting edge. I've been breathing this thin air of research for my whole career. And what's exciting to me is seeing how quickly the new social media news age delivers it to the hands of the consumer, information consumer. And one of the things that I think would be important about this episode that I'm appearing on is I hope one of the things I've done is really tried to frame things out so that isn't a all or nothing. thing, we got a win, we got a loss. You know, this is good and this is not bad. Listen, this is a discovery and everyone wants to benefit from the discoveries. And you need to find the right

team to help you benefit from that. And I think that's what I would recommend anybody to do, including you, to help your mom. Yeah, that's great advice. And it's good for everybody to hear because you have so many fans out there that even somebody like a Dr. William Lee has to sometimes go back on the system and say, hey, look, you're doing your best. but you're not open-minded enough, I need to go find a new doctor for my mom. And for anybody who's listening who's like, well, I don't know who to go to.

A great place to start, even if you're in a small town, is go to any doctor that you like or had a good experience with, even if they're not in that field that you're trying to go in, that you're looking for, you know, care in, for example. If you were in my situation

where you were looking for like an oncologist for your mom, it was more open-minded, although I'd probably go to her primary doctor first and have that discussion with them. she's at Kaiser, but let's say you don't know who to go to. Well, go to somebody that you had a good experience with. And if you're friendly with that office,

or even if you've been there before, if you're nice about it and you call them up and say, hey, just wanted to ask, you know, I had such a great experience with you, and I know it's a small network, who does this doctor, or if you're talking to the doctor directly, who do you love in the space of oncology?

Who do you love in the space of neurology? Who have you heard good things about? Who have you had a positive experience? And who's open-minded? And who's open-minded? Right. Right. like who's open-minded?

this is why I like you, who's open-minded? That's what doctors in the field do. I see my brother-in-law who's a cardiologist and takes great care of and has advocated so much for, he sees my parents as his parents, right? Calls a mom and dad. And this is what he does. He'll go to his colleagues.

Hey, who's the best person in New York for this that also is open-minded and we'll be looking at this? And people just share one referral to another. And I like to use a restaurant analogy because people relate to that. You know, if you want to find a restaurant in a city and a new city, what better source of information than a chef that you already know from that city? Yeah, it's a great analogy. Where do I go?

Where should I eat, right? And I think that the old days of this kind of authoritarian figure, the white coat, the guy with the gray hair or the lady with a gray hair and who's coming down from the hill to tell you how it's going to go down, that's changing. I think that the new generation of people coming through medical school are much more sensitive to the authenticity of communication, the relatability. And that's why I really think that there's an opportunity. I have tried to coach and mentor young doctors for my whole career because I think that that's something we don't get enough of. How do you communicate? How do you stay on top of the field? How do you think about advances?

How do you help individuals benefit from a breakthrough? While at the same time trying to recognize that we don't have RCTs for everything, randomized controlled trials and placebo controlled. By the way, just because I know that this has been discussed in your and other shows before, RCTs with a P value, those are the gold standard. By the way, are mostly drug company sponsored trials. So you're going to have some inherent bias. in those kinds of trials

and drug companies don't study everything that could be studied. And they don't release the full set of data. Correct. The raw data is considered proprietary. So you get, and these peer-reviewed journals get, often what the drug companies want them to see. And we just have to know that's part of the process.

Doesn't mean that it's bad. It doesn't mean that there's always trickery or this or that. It just means that that's how the system is. And I'll give you one additional nuance that is really meaningful. You know, because I hear a lot of people talking about medical research and like, well, that's observational, it's anecdotal. There's no randomized controlled trials on a gold standard.

Very dismissive of important observations that might be discoveries that might lead to big breakthroughs. I mean, by the way, that's how most of these Nobel Prize is in medicine are awarded. Like some accidental discovery observation, they get turned down by NIH for funding. They're like, ah, it's not important. And, you know, they stick with it. And guess what? That observation, the cure turns into like a massive ground swell of a gigantic difference.

I mean, so what I would tell you is that even for randomized controlled trials where you're looking for a significant difference between the treatment versus the placebo and you still wind up getting a bell curve. Okay. and the question is whether the average of the treatment group versus the placebo group has statistical significance. And the, I would say, the overly simplistic way of looking at this, but the traditional way is that if the P value is less than 0.05, then it's a win. And if it's greater than 0.05, it's a lose. And so billions of dollars are lost by drug companies that when their trials don't hit

P values of less than 0.05. But as somebody who has spent my whole career on discovery, if you really take a look at these, the raw data, as you said, and analyze it, you'll find out that in every failed trial at the tail end of the curve are some people that responded remarkably, real winners, super responders. And if you just throw the whole conclusion away that doesn't work, you missed the opportunity to figure out what made those super responders, super responders. That's where the action is, honestly, from a scientist perspective.

And so for me, I think a sophisticated medical doctor tries to keep up with the science. The latest discovery has a healthy amount of humility and skepticism. You want to look at the data, but also has groomed him or herself to be comfortable with this idea that we don't know everything yet,

and there's new, exciting, discoveries made every day. I always tell people, you know, if you look at history, you had the dark ages, the medieval period, where it seemed like not a lot was going on if you wanted to black and white broad brush it. And then the Renaissance, and all of a sudden it was the Golden Age and the Age of Enlightenment. Well, you know what? There was a lot going on in the Dark Ages. We don't talk about it that way. We just dismiss it. And the Renaissance was quite remarkable, but there was actually quite a lot of ignorance in the Renaissance as well, a lot of missed opportunity. And what I would tell anybody is today in medicine, for me, my perspective, as a medical

researcher, as a scientist, as somebody who bridges the gap of yesterday's medicine, tomorrow's breakthroughs, and also somebody who participates in this, every single day that we wake up, yesterday was the dark ages, tomorrow is the Renaissance. And so it's very exciting for me to be doing what I'm doing, because I'm focusing on these breakthroughs. I'm focusing on those observations. And to me, a scary disease like cancer has become less scary because of the sheer volume of discoveries

and breakthroughs that are underway right now. I wanted to get a chance. Now that we've talked about GOPs and I'm sure we could keep on going, but I think that's a great primer and snapshot for what's happening right now in informing people about the potential and the possibility

and also what's not ready for prime time. But there are things that you've been talking about for years, and it's a good opportunity, to remind people that, yes, drugs are powerful, we're thankful. And I got to pause here for one second because, you know, when GLP won drugs were first starting to get more popularity, right? And there was these articles that were being written in Vanity Fair and other places saying, OZempic is the new secret thing that celebrities and very wealthy people are doing to lose weight.

Why are your favorite celebrities all of a sudden so much, you know, lighter and look less heavier, what's going on, hush, hush, there's this thing called OZempic that's getting out there, right? So in the early days, there were a lot of people that came on this podcast that would look at something like a drug, like OZempic, and eventually Wagovi and said, hey, listen, throughout the history of medicine, there's never been a completely free lunch. We should wait a little bit and see if are there side effects that we don't know? And some people that came in very strong and said, I bet money that there's going to be all these unintended consequences that are there. You don't have this quote unquote, what was being thrown around a lot then was this free lunch that was there.

And then very informed individuals would come on this podcast and say, hey, okay, I get where you're coming from, right? I understand what you're saying. And we do have drugs in medicine that have had major consequences, things that have to be recalled, were too good to be true. that is part of the history of medicine, but you have to understand that these GLP1 drugs have been around for a long time. We actually do have quite a bit of a data set,

not 30 million people, but we have hundreds of thousands of people that have been on these drugs. And if there were these very, very strong signals, sure, there was some tiny bits of you could increase your risk of this rare cancer by a little bit double, but already the risk was really, really low,

and double would just mean a little bit, you know, more than really, really low, which was still very low. But there's been people that have been on these drugs for a long time, these diabetics that have been on these drugs. And so, you know, we probably would have seen some signals that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be open-minded, but also you have to understand for people that are very obese or even significantly overweight, that is extremely dangerous as well, too. It's dangerous to be overweight because you increase your risk of heart disease. It's dangerous to be overweight because you increase your risk of cancer.

And so in a way, yeah, we could be worried and say, we're not going to do these drugs or not going to talk about their benefits. But then you're arguing against reality, which is that many people could be significantly helped just from the weight loss component alone. And now, of a sudden, a lot of people, which I do applaud, I was kind of in the middle like saying, I don't know, I'm not the expert. I'm just wanting to host this conversation that are here. but some people that were the biggest naysayers have come back and said, okay, I spoke too soon, I was a little bit unformed. That doesn't mean these drugs are perfect. No drug is.

But there's so much more good that's coming from them, it seems, and so much more potential than ever before. And it's kind of funny because if you follow this podcast, you know that some people were worried that are these drugs going to increase cancer? And now we're having a whole entire episode talking about signals, not ready for prime time, that actually they might be reducing the risk of cancer. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

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Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter. matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. By the way, the main cancer that was thought to be, have a higher risk from JLP ones with thyroid cancer. And it turns out that was only in lab animals. Okay. And a recent study presented recently, actually in humans, show that there's no increased risk of thyroid cancer as well. There are other risks for sure. And I think that your your point is very well taken that, and I think this is the nature of discovery, is that, you know, people tend to have an

opinion of something that's going on. And ultimately, you wind up weighing the overall body of evidence, including the number of years that's been around and adjusting your opinion. And so this is why I think it's so important because people get confused on social media about black and white thinking, the good guy, the bad guy, do this is good, this is bad. You know, that old whiplash about diet itself. Yeah. You know, like, eggs are good. Eggs are bad.

Yeah. I mean, listen, life is not that complicated. Life is not black and white. And health is highly individualistic. And so something that works for one person may work, may work less well for another person or make work even better for somebody else. That's why I think the physician, the medical doctor, your health care provider, needs to be open-minded and needs to be your gatekeeper

for the things that could be dangerous, including prescription drugs. Yeah, well said. So imagine you're on an airplane, you travel a lot, and you're sitting next to somebody, and they say, oh, you know, what do you do? You say, oh, you know, I'm a medical doctor, educator, however you give your normal sort of introduction that's there,

and obviously, I don't know anybody that would be sitting next to you that wouldn't think that's incredibly fascinating. And let's say the topic of cancer comes up and they say, you know, what are a few things that I should be paying attention to? You know, if I want to reduce my risk of cancer in particular, what should I be eating and doing? And, you know, we've done entire episodes where we've talked about the benefits of different foods. You've written books about this topic. But in the context of today's conversation, what are some things that you want to remind people that, yes, GLP1 drugs, fantastic.

There's some strong signals. There's some amazing things that potentially might be happening. We should be paying attention. and there's this foundation of lifestyle, of eating, of thinking. You've already included one thing, which is we don't want to be so worried about cancer that we end up stressing yourself out that we get sick from that. So that's one aspect. What are a couple other things, lifestyle, food-wise, that you want to highlight at this stage in the conversation?

Yeah, you know, if I was sitting next to somebody on a plane who was that, and we were just having a conversation about this, I would actually first frame it out, knowing what's on their mind to say people who have, cancer now or struggling with it really should be asking their oncologist about immunotherapy because the stopgap where we're actually seeing a big breakthroughs are this whole class of drugs that go way beyond chemo now. And so if you're worried about cancer and you have cancer or you know somebody with cancer, they should be asking about immunotherapy.

So that's how I would start that conversation. I've heard it being phrased as, you know, from like the 60s when I believe chemotherapy was first sort of introduced, maybe 60s, 70s, or something. somewhere around there, up until maybe right before immunotherapy, largely cancer was treated, you know, the basic core tools were kind of poison it without trying to poison the body so much, cut it out, you know, those are the main things. And then when immunotherapy came, that was the first time where it's like, how can we supercharge the body's own defenses, its own immune system? So it was a major, major leap on a previous sort of few decades of cancer being treated.

treated largely the same. Is that a correct understanding? Absolutely. Although, you know, the idea is that the thing thing I would tell the person sitting next to me is that, you know, our body is hardwired with every defense to help us prevent cancer. In fact, it's doing it all the time because our bodies are forming these microscopic cancers just as a matter of being alive and copying, pasting, and reproducing ourselves. So we're still around tomorrow. That's what our body does and a few mistakes winds up making a little microscopic cancer, but no worries because our body's health defenses, our ability to moke down our circulation so you don't feed the cancer to grow, our ability to kill cancer stem cells in our body, our ability to have good gut health

so to lower inflammation and get a good immune system going against cancer. Our ability of our DNA, mutations can be kind of like countered by our DNA's ability to fix itself. and to block harmful incoming missiles that could damage our DNA and cause a mutation that could make a cancer cell. We have all of it. So, and by the way, and it's like when you say, how do you, how do I know I have all of it? Because that's why you didn't get cancer before. That's why most, when you were a kid, you didn't get cancer.

Children do get cancer. But the fact of the matter is that most people, if you look at the population, they soar through childhood and adolescence and most people in young adulthood. And it's not until later in life when, well, their health defenses wind up becoming damaged or suppressed or shields down from environmental forces, toxicities, comorbidities, even medications and toxic exposures. When the shields go down, then our body is less able to defend against cancer. And so the ways that diet and lifestyle that are in the hands of everyone can help out, we talked about lowering stress. stress hormones, the fight or flight hormone, catacola beans, epinephrine.

Actually, it's healthy to have a little shot of that every now and then, but chronic stress, which is, you know, what a lot of us are dealing with, honestly. We got to actually be kinder to ourselves. Self-compassion is, listen, your worst fear of diseases will come true if you actually cultivate your stress. I mean, I think that's something we need to unlearn

how to actually just keep winding ourselves up. Number one. Number two, you want good sleep. Sleep is something that, by the way, nobody teaches us how to sleep, right? I mean, we come out of our mom, we get the first suckle of breast milk, you just had a baby, you know about this, and then what does the baby do? It conks out right away, right? It's something that just happens naturally.

And yet, as we get older, things do disturb our sleep, whether it's the blue light from a device that we're staring at until we fall asleep. But the point is, stay away from blue light, put your devices away, don't check your email or anything for a couple hours before, you know, be in a quiet space if you can. You know, some people live in noisy urban environment, say they're surrounded by noise. Get the earplugs, you know,

the same earplugs that you'd wear to a loud concert or the same earplugs that you, if you worked in an airport and you were out there waving the planes in, you know, you're going to be wearing earphones. That actually can help you sleep as well. Noise cancelling, headphones or earbuds, those are really helpful as well. Good sleep does a lot for you.

Because that's when the body repairs, right? The body, you're physically not very active from the surface. Inside our body, we are more active in our body during that night when we're sleeping than during the day. It's like the inside stuff that's going, your brain is opening up the sewers that drain toxins that have accumulated during the day. And everybody knows this because if you pulled it all-nighter, you know, been out late partying and, you know, stay up until the sun comes up.

You got brain fog. You know why? Because you weren't sleeping and your brain didn't clear the time. toxins from the night before, you're going to feel foggy in your head. And like, so that's one thing. But guess what? Your immune system gets rebuilt. Your gut microbiome gets rebooted when we're sleeping. Our metabolism gets, uh, it gets optimized actually while we're sleeping. We're not eating, but our metabolism actually is kind of right sizing itself and grooming itself to do the right thing. We're burning, we're actually burning fat, visceral fat when we're sleeping because when we're sleeping,

um, you know, we need to draw energy. We're not eating. And so, The body draws down on the harmful excess fat just to get energy to run ourselves. And so good sleep, 7, 8 hours, good REM sleep, super important. If you go take yoga or Pilates to try to stay, or you go to the gym, you know, it's worthwhile. Make it a little, carving out a little time to go and figure out how to actually get good sleep. That's equally important. Protect your sleep, figure it out. if you don't know why you're sleeping well

and you need to dig in it a little bit deeper, find somebody, you know, there's all these great devices now, like a watch pad, you can get a home sleep study done. You know, you can get into it and see, do you have upper airway issues? Do you have sleep apnea?

Do you have all these things? I'm dealing with, and we're still digging into why, but I'm dealing with some airway obstruction where now I'm being recommended to get a little bit of expansion in my palate to make a little bit more room for my tongue. And because my tongue is kind of when I'm sleeping, you know, your body and your

jaw relaxes, my tongue is kind of coming down. It's relaxing a little bit. And I'm not getting as much oxygen at night. I've always been an incredible sleeper. And then, you know, separate from having, you know, my wife having a baby and everything now. And then about a year ago, I started noticing that I just would wake up throughout the night. And I did a little bit of sleep study. And I did something called a comb bean scan with an airway specialist, and I saw that my airflow wasn't as optimal as it could be. And I'm going to the whole history of all the things that could have contributed to that. So now I'm being recommended, you know, things to address it. And the reason that you want to nail that and do something about it is that if you wind up having,

if one winds up actually having true sleep apnea, obstructive airway sleep apnea, which is basically you're relaxed when you're sleeping, your tongue sags down, you're blocking your airway, and you're not really getting out of oxygen anywhere in your body over years of that, what if it's not dealt with, and that puts you at risk for heart disease. Dementia increases your risk of dementia, so many different things. Atrial fibrillation, which then put you at risk for having a stroke,

and then you've got to be in a blood thinner. And so, you know, these are things that have cascading implications, a domino effect. get some good sleep. You know how to do it when you came out of mom. You probably slept really well when you were a kid. You know, I think that we just tend to not think about it and just assume that sleep's going to be okay.

And a lot of times it's not that okay. So we can optimize. Anybody who's interested in optimization performance, think about sleep as something that you want to actually optimize and perform on. And then, of course, when it comes to actual exercise, I do think that you want, you know, exercise is an incredible, simple cancer prevention move that you can actually make.

And because exercise does so many things for your immune system, for your mental health, lowering stress, helping your gut microbiome. Actually, exercise helps that as well, improves your vascular function, gets your lung capacity better for exercise. And the key thing that I think a lot of people overestimate is that you have to go to the gym, you've got to get a trainer, you know, you have to be performing an Ironman. and be ready for the Iron Man or run a marathon in order to get good exercise.

You know what? Everybody starts at zero. And what I would say is for people who feel intimidated by the term exercise, listen, go for a 30-minute walk after dinner every night. Okay. And, you know, that's a great start. And then figure out how to build from there.

Walking is something that's not difficult. Anybody can get access to that. And I like to say that because, you know, for people who are listening, a lot of people go, well, you know, I don't work out. I'm not in good shape. I'm not going to, I can't afford a trainer.

You know, I'm not going to drive to the gym every day. I'm too busy. Listen, take the time to go for a walk, 30 minutes after dinner, make that, find a partner, check out with it, walk your dogs or whatever it is. You know, do something like that as a start. Anybody can get started with that. That's the great thing about self-empowerment when it comes to health is that anybody can do it. It's accessible to you don't need a doctor.

You don't need an insurance company. You can actually take a step on it. So exercise. sleep, stress management. And of course, diet counts for a lot as well. What we choose to eat and what we choose not to eat can make the difference between long-term health and thriving. There's so much conversation about longevity today.

What I would say is that if you want to live long, no matter how you get to do it, the bottom line is you want to live healthy to whatever many years you can, which means you've got to dodge those chronic diseases, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, like you want to dodge all those, and you can dodge all those with mindful, intentional diet and lifestyle. That is something that is the health care you do at home between visits to the doctor's office. That is where we are sticking the landing today.

Even medical schools are teaching people that now. Like we do sick care when people come to us in a clinic, you know, we try to keep people going in a right direction when we see them in the primary care medicine clinic, and if somebody gets really sick, we got to bail them out. Earlier I was using analogy of the Coast Guard. Medical doctors, as we've been trained, we're the Coast Guard. We get into the boats and we go out there into the rough surf to fish people out of the water if we can before they drown. But, you know what?

Now we're beginning to realize in modern medicine, hey, we want to keep people happy on the beach, you know, and you don't want to go into the riptide. So what can you do to be mindful to enjoy the environment, enjoy the beach, enjoy the health without waiting to just get into trouble so you've got to get fished out. That is the modern message of health care. That is what even medical doctors are being trained on. I think the current generation of young doctors coming in medical school, they're going to have a completely different approach towards their patient because they're going to be thinking about themselves as well. Do unto others as you first do unto yourself. And that is health and wellness.

Yeah, and many of them are listening to podcasts. They're seeking out some of this information. they want to stay fit, they don't want to burn out, like previous generations of doctors. No, people don't realize it, but doctors actually have a high instance of all sorts of stuff higher than the general population that's there. They're more likely to abuse substances. I believe they have a slightly higher increased rate of even things like suicide that are there, prescription drug abuse, and a bunch of other stuff. You know, it's just an intense lifestyle that demands a lot for them.

And unfortunately, we're in the situation where also patients. are never been sicker than ever before, and we're living longer. So it's this perfect cascade of a lot of demands. Then in America, you throw in an insurance system and that and the, you know, dealing with admin and all that other stuff. It's a lot.

It's a lot of pressure. And so doctors are out there. My friends that are the most committed to working out and family members are often doctors because they're like, dude, if I don't wake up in the morning, shout out to my brother-in-law, Neil. He's a cardiologist. He's like, look, if I don't wake up in the morning

and do some form of exercise, the day is just going to eat me ahead. Even though I love my job, it just demands so much for me. So I have to be consistent. That's there. You mentioned this before. We didn't talk about it. Foods to support natural GLP1 production.

Any things that you want to highlight in that topic? Yeah. Listen, this is so interesting that certain foods can be beneficial to help your body make that puff of natural hormonal GL1, right? So I told you at the very beginning, we talked about this. You eat food. It's a natural signal for JLP 1. Well, enter the gut microbiome, which seems to be the getting into almost every topic in health that we're talking about now.

It turns out certain bacteria can help our body create natural GLP1. And it's not the bacteria that's manufacturing the JLP 1. It's the metabolite of the bacteria. I'm sure we've talked about this before, short chain fatty acids. So healthy gut bacteria, they got to be fed. You feed them fiber and polyphenols, good prebiotics, and one of the things they produce are substances like butyrate, propionate, acetate. Well, it turns out butyrate, which is a metabolite of healthy bacteria, actually stimulates the gut to produce GLP1. So good healthy gut means more GLP1, optimizing it, still a puff, not the sledgehammer, which is what you inject with a drug.

But if you, but it stands the reason we should be optimizing our own body's natural hormone and think about the biology. Maybe there's all these other benefits if we can actually activate it. So I'm a super practical guy. I like to get down to the bottom of things. I like to communicate to the bottom of things. What's a healthy bacteria that can do that? It turns out, and we've talked about this bacteria before, acrymancia, mucinophila, which you can grow yourself with pomegranates, cranberries, conquered grape.

Now there's the list is going peach juice, summertime, sweet peaches, the juice of a peach can help your gut grow natural acrimancia. Black, Chinese black vinegar, you know, when you go to a soup dumpling restaurant, they always have soy sauce and they have a little canister of black vinegar. That black vinegar will help your, has been shown you, help your body grow acrimancia. Chili peppers, you know what you put on, you sprinkle on pizza when you're in college, that can actually help to grow acrimancy as well. the list is increasing of foods that can help us produce this grow, nurture this natural bacteria, acrimancy, musinophila. That talks to the immune system, improves our metabolism, and acrimancia by helping to produce buterate with other bacteria can also help our gut produce healthy GLP1. Now, obviously, you can get probiotic acrimancia, mucinophila as well, much harder to produce the probiotic. the probiotic form bit, you got to, like most people would try to do it. They're not making

the correct version of it. So, you know, I have kicked the tires really hard on one form of acromancy made by pendulum. And I would say that's actually the one I take because it's the one that actually has the most science, kind of biotech-like production. And a lot of research has been done and clinical studies have been done on that, including GLP1. So I think that as we are beginning to look at the new biology of GOP1, we're also beginning to look at, well, how do we make our body do its job to top off our own GLP1 without having to get an injection or take a pill? And here, food is medicine and gut health enters the picture once again. So, you know, if somebody back to the airplane, I'm talking to somebody and they're saying,

oh, Dr. Leanne, I know who you are. Just give me one thing to do. I can't remember more than one thing at a time. I would say, and I've said this before. You're like, first of all, you need more sleep. If you can only remember one thing at a time. I don't know, you're keeping me up on the plane. Go to sleep. What I would actually say is that take good care of your gut, because that's the gift that keeps on giving. We get good gut healthy. Focus on that. It tells you kind of what you should be eating. But those 39 trillion gut bacteria, including acrimancy and other healthy gut bacteria, man, they are, scaling up. They are knocking down those dominoes everywhere to give a whole flotilla benefits.

And we're just even beginning to understand the cascade of all the different things. And of course, we can't talk about gut health without acknowledging the basic, which is that most Americans are not eating enough fiber. So even starting with getting more fiber sources, more plant foods in your diet, a variety of things, fiber can come from a lot of things. You know, my wifo sometimes asks me, like, I don't know, like, I don't always love eating a lot of vegetables and other things. Like, what's the, I'm like, sweetie, avocados have. a good amount of fiber. Pears have a great amount of fiber. All the berries that you love have a great amount of fiber. By the way, raspberries have per pound, per unit weight, the most

dense fiber content delivery system. I mean, you know, think about a raspberry, it's hollow, it floats on water. You think it doesn't have much in it, but like a little brief sweet taste, very distinctive flavor. But pound for pound, raspberries are one of the highest source of berry fiber, and they're very easy to eat. I put razzberries. berries in my smoothie in the morning with some chia seeds. I'll also add in a scoop of cillium husk, which is great. You know, there's all these different types of fibers. We won't go into them all right now. And I feel better. I feel better. And I know that I'm also taking care of my gut health. And, you know, I'm sure every year we'll probably have you back next year and the

year after that and we'll learn some new breakthrough about just how much work our gut bacteria is doing to keep us safe. Okay, as we're winding down, Dr. Lee, this has been fantastic, by the way. I appreciate our friendship, and I also appreciate just how present you are on podcast and how your sole goal and mission when you're delivering content, whether you're on my show or you're doing your own content on YouTube, and please everybody subscribe to Dr. William Lee's channel. You have one sole focus. How do I empower the person who's listening and leave them better off after watching this material

than they were coming in? So I really want to acknowledge you for that. It's not just that you are a wealth of information. you are incredibly present when you're delivering that. So you have so much thought as to as you're delivering information, how it can be received, how it's being contextualized, if something's missing, whether or not we have to take a step back and provide more context so that people actually not just hear it,

but absorb this information. So I see that in you and I want to acknowledge it in you. As we're winding down today, a couple things that I talked about that I just wanted to ask you, there are a lot of companies this day and age that are promoting direct to consumer testing. It's becoming more popular. It's becoming available. And a couple that are related to cancer, which is the topic of today's episode, the big one that's out there is the Grails test.

A lot of people have heard of that, right? In particular, I'm even thinking about it for my mom. As a breast cancer survivor, and I shared about her journey, is this something that I should be considering, you know, potentially having her especially since her sister, my aunt, who we are so close to and miss dearly, it's her birthday actually this weekend, and we're all been remembering her and sharing stories about her,

you know, had this relapse of cancer that ultimately took her life. Should she be doing the grilles test? So what is the grills test? Is it something that you do? I have no affiliation with them or any other company that offers this test that's out there,

but I'm just asking the question like a lot of people are. Is it worth doing? And what should we know about it? Yeah, so grail test is actually an example, a growing popular example of a direct-to-consumer test where you get a little bit of blood drawn, about 20 millimeters, it's two tubes worth of blood, and what does the test do is it takes advantage of the fact that we can detect DNA today. Ten years ago wasn't that easy. Twenty years ago, it

was impossible, okay, to do it at scale in an affordable way. Now we can actually do it pretty quickly. And so what the Grail test does is it looks for DNA signatures of cancers that have an unusual DNA signature. They call it methylation. It's epigenetics. And let me just say it's basically detecting a fingerprint from floating DNA in our blood that cancer cells can shed. So if you get a little microscopic cancer or a big honking cancer, it's going to be releasing. flakes of DNA that are just floating. Okay? Think about, you know, that plastic bag that's floating down the river

when you're going canoeing or something or you're paddle boarding? You're like, the heck is that plastic bag floating down that shouldn't be there, right? Or maybe an empty soda can that's crumpled up. Like, we've all seen that. That's what tumor cancer cell DNA that's methylated. You look for that, that test looks for those floating pieces of plastic around. And actually it's quite good at nailing down the organ of origin if they see some tumor DNA floating around. So for something at breast, they probably nail it pretty well.

Okay. The false positive rate is very, very low, meaning that if you find it, it's probably real. Okay. It doesn't catch everything, though, and it doesn't always catch early cancers, which is what you want to do. But, you know, I think for people that are scientifically minded who, really want to advocate hard and because it's consumer available, if you can afford it, if you think it's something that you want to build into your monitoring system, it's kind of a, it's a little bit of a biohack, but you know, a life and death biohack, if you can find cancer cells,

I think particularly in somebody who's had cancer, if you're already of the mind that I like to monitor everything I can, that's a pretty decent test to actually do. It's about a, it's about a grand, a little bit under a grand to actually do. And then the question is like insurance doesn't, most insurance doesn't cover it. So then the question is, how often should you do it? You do it every year? Do we do it every month? Do we do it every week? You know, like, and that's where the slippery slope is, because when do you catch this thing? You know, I mean, colon cancer screening, you wait until you're 50 or 40 or whatever, and then you look at your risk factors. And so I think what about it? Full body?

MRI. Like that'll catch things too. This is the modern debate, an intelligent debate. I think a really good conversation to be had and like how much should we be looking for trouble? In whom should we be looking for it? And what technology do we apply? And then is it something that everyone should get or just the people who can afford it? And if it's only for the wealthy or the people who have the resources, what about all the people who don't have it? You know, how do we? actually make it fair. So I think there's multiple layers. It's also a sociological, not just a medical conversation. But if you're asking me, point blank again, I'm not giving medical advice here, for somebody who has had a history of cancer, if they want to tap into a technology, that's

very, very good at detecting floating plastic bags of cancer DNA in their bloodstream for, you know, to see if anything is sticking around, it's a pretty good test. For somebody who has a history of cancer in their family, which is almost now like 38% of Americans, I think. You know, it's almost like one in every, you know, one out of every two adults will get cancer. Not exactly. It's a little bit lower than that. So a lot of families have a history of cancer in their family. And obviously, this is a question about means because this tests are expensive. A lot of things that are cutting edge in medicine start off expensive. And the hope is that eventually, you know, more competition comes in and we bring the cost down and eventually insurance gets on board. But,

for somebody that can afford it that has a history of cancer? Is this a test that you'd think about for them? And we think about it. Then maybe having a conversation with their regular doctor, you know, their primary doctor, and bring their literature, you know,

you really want to actually make your medical, uh, team members part of that conversation. Again, I sort of say this, you know, like you don't want to treat your doctor like the Coast Guard when to your cotton,

that riptide, taking out to sea and like you might drown and you're hoping they're going to be able to pull you, snag you out in time. No, no, build them in. You know, say hello to the lifeguard. Say hello to the, to the Coast Guard people. Like, and say, look, I'm here. I'm going to enjoy the surf. What should I do? Do you think I should do this? And look, because we all have access to AI and we all have all of access to downloads of papers and peer reviews and, you know, look at the website of these testing companies and look for the references. I always say, look for the references and then go to

PubMed, download them. Oftentimes they're free. Show your doctor these things. And see if you can build in as part of your team the idea of doing testing. If it makes sense for you. And again, I think just to repeat something that you brought up earlier, you know, if you have a skeptic or a doctor who's like just not interested in entertaining it, you know, find somebody else who would give you maybe a different point of view,

like that soft second opinion. Not medical advice, but is William Lee getting these tests? Is William Lee going and getting a full body MRI done? Is William Lee getting a grail's test done? Is that something you feel comfortable to comment on? I will tell you, I am personally, as a deep dive medical research, I am not a personal biohacker. I do not spend my time fixated on getting every test done,

including the grail test done for me right now. Is it something I would consider in the future? Sure. I'm very open to all these things, but I'm not somebody that stacks my measurements. Why? Because honestly, I feel that how we're doing needs to be grounded in how we're feeling. So you'd have to feel off or you'd have to have a signal in your blood work or something else or symptoms for you to feel that you want to go and look for these things. I think so.

And also because I'm so involved with health care itself. And I just kind of feel like it'd be very easy for me to get obsessed. Okay, got it. And if I got obsessed to go down that rabbit hole, it would ratchet up my own anxiety. So you know yourself. You know yourself. Yeah. And you know what sort of fits in your wheelhouse.

But you're also so open and minded that if that ever changed, then you'd go in a different direction. Totally. And I like very much having the tools, by the way, for testing. I think testing is really quite a remarkable thing. we can actually do. You know, when I was in medical school, we had a handful of tests for cancer or other conditions. Now we have all these great tests, and it used to be only in a hospital.

Only doctors could order it. Now you've got all these consumer grade tests. And I think that this is where understanding the technology, understanding the biology, can be really helpful. And I am all for anybody who wants to explore the grail test, particularly if they've had a family history or their high risk themselves to really consider it and have a conversation about it. Yeah, yeah. There's obviously so much emerging and now with AI and so many very smart people coming into health care because frankly, you know, you've gotten so sick. It's brought a lot of

people in and many people that are working on solving these problems have had a story about a family member, you know, a loved one who all of a sudden, you know, they were healthy and then out of the blue got diagnosed with some disease or another. So it's attracting a lot of people in the healthcare space that are smart, that are figuring that it's out. So it's a very exciting time. It's a very exciting time. And there's a lot on the horizon.

And while things are on the horizon, we have to make sure that we double down on the basics. Don't stress out. You know, have your restorative things that are out there, even if that's just, you know, getting out of the house, getting sunlight and getting a walk several times a day. which is super key, staying away from ultra-processed foods, having as many of the great whole foods that we've talked about in the past with you being on the podcast that are there, having a good workout regimen, you know, avoiding being sedentary.

You know, there's been studies that have been done on young men that are in the military and forcing them to be sedentary. Ages their body. In a six-week sedentary experiment, you're aging their body more than they would have aged naturally in something like eight years. forcing somebody who's healthy to be sedentary for like six to eight weeks.

So one of the worst things we can do is be sedentary. And the best thing is that we can be moving at any level. Penn State just two weeks ago put out this incredible workout plan specifically for older adults who are either mobility challenged or have had some sort of injury that prevents them from doing a lot of traditional workouts. And they showed all these benefits that they got and reversal of sort of biological age by just a following this very easy to do plan. So there's a plan that's out there for everybody at any stage. We'll link to that in the show notes.

Sleep you've mentioned as well, too. Figure out if you're not sleeping, why? Get to the root to it. Treat your sleep like a sport, like something that you're serious about. Be a professional when it comes to your sleep. Those are the basics. We need to double down on them. William Lee, Dr. William Lee, thank you.

Any final words you want to leave our audience with on this topic that we've been talking about today. Cancer, future, hope, investing in our health. Yeah, well, listen, I'm a very hopeful person who is standing at the mouth of a fire hydrant pumping out new information, literally on a weekly, sometimes daily basis from new things that are coming in.

What I have to do is, as a scientist, I do the heavy lifting to try to figure out, like, what's what, what's real, what's premature, what's ready for prime time. And so for anybody who really wants to keep up with me as a follow on to our conversation today, please subscribe to my YouTube channel because every week I put out new content

on some aspect of health. And I try to bring it down. I try to stick the landing on that topic with something that you can do for yourself that can be empowering. And then finally, I would just tell you that, you know, something that you didn't mention as the summary that I think

we need to do more of in this, day and age, especially of just distressed society, is self-compassion. We need to be kinder to ourselves, not so hard on ourselves. It's so easy to be self-critical. I'm not doing this well enough. I should be doing this more. And we talked about a lot of things that you can do, but I think that if we are just kinder to ourselves, it actually will make it easier for us to be kinder to other people. And that's what we need. A great point to end on. The world needs a lot more kindness. let's start with ourselves. Dr. William Lee,

thank you so much for being an incredible friend, somebody who's a mentor in this space to so many, including myself, helping us navigate even our own health issues at times, and just being an incredible resource for people out there,

putting hundreds, thousands of hours of free content out on a regular basis to help people. We really appreciate you and reasonality. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening this podcast.

If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. And it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy to digest protocol. of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health.

We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T-com.com. click on the tab that says, try this.