Dhru Purohit Show - What to Eat to Beat Cancer and Supercharge Your Immune System with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Paleovalley. An astonishing 70 percent of cancer is diet related. When it comes to treating cancer, conventional medicine is good at cutting it, burning it, and poisoning it, but many doctors fail to treat the root cause. Functional Medicine empowers patients and practitioners to optimize health by addressing the root causes of disease. The right diet is imperative in preventing cancer and during the healing process. This is in large part because of the role insulin plays in cancer. Insulin acts as a growth factor in the body, which is one of the reasons too much insulin leads to obesity. It’s also why insulin will support the growth of cancer cells.  On today’s mini-episode, Dhru sits down with Dr. William Li to discuss how recent research is now revealing the connection between insulin resistance and cancer, what you can eat to prevent cancer, and much more.  In this episode we dive into:   -How sugar fuels cancer -Foods that starve cancer -How to supercharge your immune system -The power of polyphenols on the gut microbiome -Akkermansia and cancer immunotherapy Listen to the full episode here. For more on Dr. William Li, follow him on Instagram @DrWilliamLi, Facebook @DrWilliamLi, YouTube @DrWilliamLi, and through his website, drwilliamli.com. Get his book, Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself, here. Learn more about his course, Eat to Beat Disease, here. Sign up for his free masterclasses here. This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Paleovalley. ​​InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off their entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/dhru to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone, Drew Brode here. I hope everybody's having a fantastic summer. On today's Monday mini episode, we have an excerpt from a fantastic podcast that we did with Dr. William Lee all on sugar and cancer. We're starting off by talking about how sugar fuels cancer. Why is it that cancer cells have more receptors than healthy cells for sugar and one of the implications when it comes to our diet and lifestyle? Well, we're also going to talk about Dr. William Lee, founder of the end. Ngeogenesis Foundation, foods that starve cancer, foods that literally can help us in the process of starving cancer in the first place. Dr. William Lee also chats about how to supercharge your immune system, the power of polyphenols

on your gut microbiome, and we chat a little about acrimancia. It's a powerful gut bacteria. It makes up about 5% of our total volume, or should make up about 5% of our total volume in our gut microbiome, but a lot of people don't have enough. Well, Dr. William Lee is here to talk about. the importance of this and more. I hope you enjoy today's mini episode. Stay tuned. When it comes to nutrition science and trying to figure out what foods are best for you or what foods can potentially harm you, one example where there tends to be a lot of confusion is if

today you go on a webmd and you look up cancer and you look up, there's articles that are on there that, you know, does sugar fuel cancer? And there's well-meaning articles from very respectable individuals that are out there to say there's no evidence that's out there that sugar encourages cancer. And yes, there may not be these big double-blind placebo-controlled trials, which have their own challenges. They're difficult to fund. Who's going to go and pursue them? How are we going to make sure that we have the resources to explore it? But this highlights sort of the fact that there still may be a lot of evidence that's showing that, for example, in the case of cancer, that sugar could be very problematic. You may not have that full trial. So this is where a

little bit of nutrition science becomes partly an art of piecing the story together and saying what's the best evidence that we have. So talk about sugar and cancer for a moment if you could. Yeah, great, great topic. And, you know, by the way, you know, cancer like sharks, when they're on the cover of a magazine, it sells, they fly off the shelf because people are interested in this topic. And just like sharks, there's a lot of fear and, and, and, um, uh, and, uh, reaction, I think to the topic of cancer. And I think this is also true even in a medical community. So, um, first of all, let me kind of give my response to what we do know about the evidence of sugar and cancer because, uh, I do cancer research. I've been involved with

cancer research. I've been involved with helping to develop over a dozen cancer drugs that are FDA approved. And part of my street cred, Drew, when I speak about food as medicine, is that I've actually helped to develop medicines. I'm one of the guys who actually, I'm not just sort of like waving a leaf of kale saying, never mind all the prescription stuff. Like, I'm actually helping to develop those things. So for me, it's really, food is really an additional tool in the toolbox, but we can understand nutrition with the same rigor, with the same standards of evidence that we actually apply for drugs. So here's what we know about cancer. We know that we no longer talk about cancer just in terms of the organ it's in.

The modern conversation about cancer in the medical community isn't, it's a colon cancer, so it's a colon disease and it's a brain cancer, it's a brain disease, it's a breast cancer, it's a breast disease. We're actually talking about at the microscopic level that cancer has a microenvironment. It lives in a microenvironment. So just like if you had fish in a fish tank, how we're going to be a microenvironment, how we have a what's going on around the fish in your tank actually makes a big difference in terms of how well the fish actually thrives. And so cancer, think about cancer being like in an aquarium, in that aquarium being kind of miniaturized in our body.

There's a micro environment. There's a little mini terrarium or aquarium around every tumor, every cancer cell. And so among the most sophisticated cancer researchers, and I count myself in that group, we now refer to cancer. cancer as very much related to cancer cells and the microenvironment. And where sugar comes in, along with other micronutrients in the microenvironment that feed both normal and healthy cells is the fact that glucose is uptaken by every single cell in the body. But because cancer cells are revved up, they are able to actually take that nutrient and

actually fuel themselves. So what started as sort of like a well-intentioned interpretation by a non-medical profession has now been really validated, I think, by the cancer research world. Now, you know, because sugar itself sort of quickly goes to stuff you would add to your drinks or your desserts, you know, it all of a sudden becomes kind of a flip topic. But in reality, I think that it's incontrovertible that to cancer researchers that cancer cells avidly use glucose to fuel their own metabolism. This episode is brought to you by Inside Tracker.

You know, in my opinion, I think technology can be a critical part in the solution to helping us figure out what foods are best suited for our own unique genetic makeup. That's why I was super excited when I heard about Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker helps take the guesswork out of living optimally and creates a nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle plan that's personalized for you based on your blood work, DNA and personal preferences. InsideTracker's cutting edge technology gives you the science-back recommendations for positive changes to your daily habits.

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Right now, they're offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com slash Drew. That's D-H-R-U to get your discount code and to try it out for yourself. That's inside tracker.com slash dHRU for 20% off. So growing up, my family used turmeric all the time. I'm talking about in meals that were home cooked or even when I was coming down with a cold or a flu. So now it's kind of ridiculously amazing for me to see that turmeric has become this worldwide health trend. Since hats off to my parents and grandparents, they always seem to know how powerful it was.

Now, as I've gotten older and researched more into brain health, I was really interested to see that many of my guests have talked about the fact that. that India had some of the lowest rates traditionally of Alzheimer's anywhere in the world, which many of them thought, and as I've dug into it, I looked into it a little bit more and found the same, that this came from regularly eating anti-inflammatory foods and spices like turmeric. There are actually over 2,700 studies on turmeric showing more than 600 different benefits like fighting inflammation, DNA protection, workout recovery. circulation, brain protection, and so much more. But I know when I was a kid, I did not love taking a spoonful of turmeric powder.

And that's the reality for most people. It's chalky, it clogs of your throat, and it doesn't taste amazing. So it's great to see how easy it is to get turmeric in a capsule for everyday use. Not all turmeric supplements are created equal, though. A lot of them are only isolated compounds of turmeric like curcumin, instead of the whole plant, which means you're missing out on a ton of important benefits and phytonutrients. So I love taking turmeric complex from Paleo Valley. It contains organic whole food turmeric so you can get the synergistic effects of all its compounds.

Tumric complex also contains coconut oil and black pepper, which have been shown to improve the absorption of those active compounds by get this 2,000 percent. Plus, It includes other natural anti-inflammatories like organic ginger, rosemary, and clothes. This is why I love the fact that turmeric complex by Paleo Valley is sponsoring today's episode. Right now, Paleo Valley is offering my listeners 15% off at paleo valley.com slash drew. That's Paleo-P-A-L-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y dot com slash Drew. D-H-R-U. Check it out today. Now, cancers are forming all the time. So right here, right now, my body and yours and everybody watching this podcast, we're forming little microscopic cancers

in our body right now. Why? Because we've got 40-some trillion cells that are dividing, making more cells all the time. You make one or two mistakes in those cells. Bingo, you've got a tiny little microscopic cancer like a pimple. And like a pimple, it's harmless because it doesn't have a blood supply. So then your immune system wings by, finds it and cleans it right out. It's like your immune system is like a cop on a beat, okay? And it'll take it right out, take the bad guy right out. However, cancers can become dangerous when they are able to hijack our angiogenesis system. So this is really part of the nefarious dirty deeds of cancer. They can be harmless and sit in the background in our bodies all the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They're going to outlast the storm. And that's basically what we can actually do with anti-angiogenic drugs. Now, foods can do the same thing. There are many things in foods. These bioact, as we talked about, that, you know, Mother Nature laced into plants, you know, kind of like Mother Nature's pharmacy with an F, actually can actually help to mow the lawn and get that, tame those blood vessels so that if they're growing towards the cancer, you can kind of prune them back. trim them back to normal, and it prevents the cancers from growing new ones, which is really, really important.

For cancer prevention, that's just having enough of that milieu to prevent blood vessels from overgrowing is really, can be really important. So what are some of the things? Green tea, you know, which everybody knows is antioxidants, which can actually lower your blood sugars, help lower your cholesterol, lower your stress levels, your catacolamine, actually is super packed with these. catacons, EGCG, the main polyphenol that is anti-angiogenic. So way back when when I got in this field, we had a test system where we were testing

cancer drugs that could starve a cancer by cutting off its blood supply. And one of the things that I did is I actually dropped some green tea in there. And it was shocking how effective the green tea polyphenols were in stopping those blood vessels that were feeding the cancer. And in fact, if I didn't tell the technician doing the lab work that it was actually a natural compound, and I told them it came from a drug company, they would have been super excited about it and started jumping up and down. And so again, you know, Mother Nature is really, really good. So polyphenols and T, EG, CG is one of them.

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

scientist, you take a look at this. And the phytoestrogens look nothing like human estrogens. They're not dangerous. They actually block human estrogens. And they actually are also anti-angiogenic. And they cut off the blood supply to breast cancers. And this has been shown in human patients, breast cancer patients, as well. Tomatoes have lycopene.

So many of the, you know, the same foods that we know are good, healthy plant-based sources and nutrition. We're now rediscovering that many of the bioactives in them are also powerful cancer blood vessel cutting off systems that cut off the starved tumor. You know, really the point that I want to drive home here is that you had this quote in your original TED talk and he said, as a doctor, I know that once a disease has progressed to an advanced stage, achieving a cure can be difficult, if not impossible. And the reason that you were sharing this in the context of your presentation and your

TED talk was you were helping people understand that this is one of the main drivers of why you got interested in the topic of food. This is something that we do, two, three times a day. And if that food could have just as similar of an impact, in some cases, even more so, then it's not what's better food or medicine. They're both great, but food is something that we all have control over. And because of education gaps in the healthcare practitioners, again, well, meaning they may not have the education in food. this is something where we're empowered as consumers to start making a difference in a dent because

as most of us know, you know, there's this area that's in between, you know, you don't have cancer and you're diagnosed with cancer, right? It's not like one day you just show up at the doctor's office and then cancer came out of nowhere. It's growing always sort of in the background, at least the conditions are until one day something changes and then it has that explosive growth. So if we can make a difference now, then we're more empowered to actually change our health and hopefully minimize or potentially even avoid some of these chronic diseases later down the path. Let's throw a few tidbits out for the audience that's listening and watching. What are some examples of some things that radically can support the immune system,

foods that we all may know of but might not be including on a regular basis? Let's start with one of my favorites, which is blueberries, right? So blueberries are blue because they contain a natural dye that is colored blue that is called anthocyanin. And anthocyanins have been found to be powerful activators of our immune system in a beneficial way. So they don't cause autoimmune disease. They actually elevate our T cells and natural killer cells. These are part of the super soldiers that make up our immune system. You know, they just kind of like give more weapons to our immune system.

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

classic dilemma that is out there in a wellness world, like, yeah, we want to get rid of inflammation. So we want to make sure our immune system isn't overactive. Well, look, inflammation is a subset of immunity. We want good, strong immunity to protect us from invaders, and we want to also lower inflammation at the same time. Blueberries can actually do that. Another great way of actually elevating immunity is with broccoli. Now, broccoli contains a natural compound called sulforaphane. It's actually a family of different natural chemicals that kind of give broccoli its kind of unique taste.

It's also in kale, charred, all these other kinds of salad vegetables, honestly. But broccoli is particularly strong in. And it's been shown that actually you can actually boost your T cells. Again, the super soldiers of your immune system. by just eating broccoli. But here's like a little pro tip and a little tiny hack. If you want to get as much as you can out of broccoli, you should eat normal adult broccoli.

But here's the thing. The tree tops are good, but the stems have twice as much of the sulforaphane. So don't throw the stems away when you're cooking it. You don't want to saute the stems. There's plenty of recipes you can use with stems. You can put it into a blender, turn it into a soup, A little broccoli oregano soup. Amazing.

You put a little vegetable stock in there. It's like a really tasty way of actually using broccoli and getting more of these sulfurophanes. But if you really want to like rocket with your broccoli sulfurophanes, you eat broccoli sprouts. These are the three to four day old baby broccoli. And it turns out that the broccoli sprouts have about 100 times more sulfurane than the grown-up broccoli.

So, and actually the study has been done looking at the people getting the flu vaccine. These are 20-year-olds, healthy 20-year-olds, just getting the flu vaccine. And it was found that if you gave the flu vaccine and gave somebody broccoli, a shake minute or broccoli sprouts, you could ramp up their immune response by 22 times. So, like, really just amp up your immune system without causing inflammation. What's an example of one of those things that is an underrated food, something that people overlook and might not have as part of their normal routine, but can have such a profound effect if they start including it into their diet. Yeah, I'll tell you a great one. Kiwis, right? So these sort of, I don't know, baseball shape, little smaller baseball, furry little brown

things, you cut them open, they're beautiful green with seeds, starbursts on the inside. I didn't use, I always liked Kiwi, but I never really ate them very much, but I started doing the research on them. And Kiwi is pretty amazing. First of all, it's a great source of vitamin C and fiber. And the vitamin C actually has tremendous antioxidant effect and it can protect your DNA. And studies have been shown that actually if you eat one Kiwi a day, it'll protect your DNA against damage by about 60%. If we ate three Kiwis, it would actually help your body build any damage DNA back by about 60%. And so here's something simple that you can peel, cut up, chop it into a yogurt or just eat plain. It's delicious. You can put it into a smoothie that actually has

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

try a kiwi, you know, you can't unlearn what I just told you. Every time you see the kiwi, you're going to say, you know what, I know there's something good about it. And then if you remember what that is, that's really what I try to do with my course, is really They've tried to teach people how to make it second nature to make great choices and to be enthusiastic about it. Like I think most people are kind of intimidated by, this is kind of like the whole philosophy behind my course. People are intimidated by diets, right? To begin with, they're a little, you know, maybe I didn't do so good in my life.

I should do better. You know, it's always people go into a diet in order to try to get better. And what I try to shift that paradigm is, look, if you're serious about getting health, and this is the time you want to actually do it. It's not that difficult. You just kind of dive in, engage. You do want to be awake. You need to be alert.

And you got to realize it's not about somebody feeding you a super food or a super supplement. And that's all you got to take every day. You know, it's really about understanding more about you, self-knowledge about how your own body works, right? Like at some point, we all figured out how our eyes work and how our lungs work and how our prostate works and our uterus. figure this out. This is like, this is like the cutting edge science. You want evidence. You want food as medicine and you want to know that. It's not about memorizing food. It's about memorizing

how your body actually works and then recognizing our bodies actually work really well to complement certain foods. And so what does the tomato do? Well, tomato complaint. It's lycopene. What does lycopene do actually protects our prostate? Man, that's a really good thing. Also protects our breasts. That's a really great thing. You don't need to remember all the chemicals. just need to remember that that's the way to do it. And then I try to get people to be passionate about cooking because, you know, one of the antidotes to unhealthy eating is really trying to get back into the kitchen and preparing your own meals. You don't have to be a fancy chef. You don't even have to have a fancy palate. You know, if you can fry an egg, you can actually cook healthy food.

And that's what I try to do is to try to make people feel like, lower your guard. It's not a problem, you know, you can actually learn how to do this. And, you know, there's nothing more satisfying to me than to actually go out and, you know, find some great looking healthy, fresh foods, figure out how to cook them and taste it myself. Like, it's like, you know, like back in wood wood shop when you're in junior high school and you created your own toolbox, like, man, that's really cool. I made that. And that's how I want to get people to feel excited about, about food as medicine. This is not hard. It is not a burden. It's not an onus. this is something that you can do, you can make for yourself.

Well, we have a little bit more time over here. I think one area to geek out a little bit in is in this topic of the gut microbiome, and you mentioned a term a little bit earlier, polyphenols. Now, a lot of folks that are familiar with the term polyphenol, primarily think of it as as an antioxidant. But in your book and in your continued work, you started to highlight that this is so much bigger than that. Polyphenols, which I'd love for you to define,

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

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

You've got chocolate, cacao polyphenols. You've got fruit polyphenols. And any one of these foods have more than one kind. And so it's part of the diversity and richness. of any single food that we actually have. And, you know, what I love to think about is, for example, red grapes have polyphenols. And when you actually make wine, it's the polyphenols that actually have the same coloring that gives them red wine. It's characteristic color.

And the stuff that settles at the bottom of the vat when you make wine, that's also really, really rich with polyphenols, which is red wine is richer with polyphenols than white wine. But that's not the only thing that has polyphenols. Tea also has polyphenols. We talked about EGCG. And we tend to kind of gravitate towards understanding one or two, but there are thousands of polyphenols in a cup of tea. Many which we don't even have a name for yet.

We don't even have a name for half of them. Like, you know, like the most undiscovered country is not outer space. it's actually inside our food. It's like the inner space of our fruits and vegetables of produce section and also some animal proteins as well. I think there's some really amazing things in seafood, shellfish, seaweed, you know, things that are not classically, you know, grown on a farm. And so that's what's exciting to me is discovering these things.

There are polyphenols in almost every fruit and vegetables where you're talking about a cherry or a cranberry or whether you're talking about a plum, you've got polyphenols that are there. And there are even polyphenols in tree nuts that can actually be very beneficial as well. So I think that the term polyphenol is known as an antioxidant. But for example, when we eat them, let's just use green tea as a great example of polyphenols. you sip a cup of tea. Our body absorb some of it.

Some of the polyphenols like EGCG, the Epigalcatecate, actually feeds our gut microbiome. The bacteria also get to share in whatever it is that we consumed, whether it's tea or fruit. And so the bacteria digesting these polyphenols. As they're digesting these polyphenols, the bacteria are creating their own metabolites. So anytime we put in something in,

gets crunched, and then there's metabolites that come out. Same thing as a bacteria. And what the bacteria produce, you mentioned this sort of the orchestra producing music. The bacteria produce these other metabolites called short chain fatty acids, sometimes called scafas. There's three main ones that are made. The number doesn't matter, but really, I mean,

unless you're like really hardcore about it, but these short chain fatty acids actually, they help lower cholesterol in our bloodstream. Another one actually lowers inflammation, which is a really good thing. Another one actually helps our blood sugar, our body use blood sugar better. And some of them are anti-angiogenic. They starve cancers by cutting off the bloodstream. They groom our circulation as well.

And so here's sort of this daisy chain of effect, where Mother Nature has put something into the food. The food is consumed by us. We absorb some of the good stuff and it activates our body's cells, but some of it also goes to our bacteria. And our bacteria also get to get the upside of whatever we ate that's good stuff. And they digest it and produce their own metabolites. So we produce metabolites from polyphenols.

Our bacteria produces polyphenols. And that's all part of this incredible health defense systems. The more good stuff to eat with polyphenols, the more we actually benefit from it. And we start to flood our own system with the good stuff, which leaves less room for the bad stuff. Crowding out is what you were talking about. One specific strain of bacteria that different reports, but it seems to be about 3 to about 5% of our total bacteria

and you write about it is acrimancia. And one of the reasons why that bacterial strain is getting a lot of attention is that it seems to be that people who have lower levels of acrimancia, municipality, or Mr. Palli, you could probably pronounce it better than I can, that they are more likely to become obese or they're more likely to have their metabolic health, not in the best condition. So this isn't just about having a good microbiome for the sake of having a good microbiome.

These pillar strains of bacteria, and there's millions of them that are out there, they, well, millions of types of bacteria, I don't know how many pillar strains there are. They have direct implication on us immediately. Yeah. So I learned about acrimancia because one of my colleagues, Dr. Laurent Zittvogel in Paris, was studying cancer patients. So we're back to cancer again. And she was studying like 200 different, 200 cancer patients with different types of cancers.

and they are all being treated for their cancer using immunotherapy. So these are the treatments that are biotech given to cancer patients. The treatments don't kill cancer cells directly, but what the treatments do is they rip the cloak off of the cancer that's trying to hide from your own immune system to allow your own immune system to tackle that cancer. Remember that health defense property of our immune system to fight the bad guys inside our body.

And we know from immune therapy, as doctors, that, you know, they can be an amazing win, meaning that some cancer patients are able to literally have their cancers completely disappeared, even if it's metastatic cancer. My mother was one of those people, but former President Jimmy Carter was another one who had metastatic cancer spread to his brain on immunotherapy. All went away, all doing well today.

No sign of cancer. We don't like to use the word cure because it is such a loaded word, but it's about as good as you can get. from a, you know, as a doctor and someone to involve a biotech. But that only happens in less than about less than 20% of people, right? And so Dr. Zitbelgol was doing this research. I helped to convene a conference called rethinking cancer. Like how do we rethink our whole approach to cancer?

Fresh, kind of a fresh start. And she found that in 200 consecutive patients with different types of cancers, all getting immune therapy, if you looked at, if you split them up into group, groups that responded and did really, really well with their immunotherapy, had their immune system, you know, attacked and wipe out the cancer versus the people who didn't do well, where their body didn't respond the right way, the only difference between the responders and the non-responders was one bacteria in their gut, and that one bacteria was acrimancia. And it's acrimanthia, and that musinophila actually says it all.

this bacteria, which is considered now to be a guardian of our microbiome, it's one of the guardians of our health, loves to grow in the mucous membrane, and the mucus inside our gut. So our gut, actually, most people don't know this, but actually our gut has mucus. You know this if you have diarrhea, it's very mucusy, but there's some mucus in there all the time. And that mucus is sort of like topsoil for acrimancia. Loves to grow in there. That's the garden of the acrimancia, where this guardian.

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

data. It, like, the light bulb just like, like, blazing in my brain. Like, holy cow, we have got these guardians in our microbiome that we have to take care of. And the reason that I got involved in this food is medicine, is that you cannot eat an acrimancia probiotic. So you can eat a lot of other bacteria in probiotics. You cannot eat acrimancia.

the only thing you can do with Akramancia right now is to grow it yourself. This is a DIY kind of bacteria. And the way you grow it is actually by creating more healthy mucus, that topsoil that it likes to grow it. So how do you do that? You do that with food as medicine. So pomegranate, cranberry, conquered grape, the juices. You know, you only need eight ounces of a glass of cranberry juice, pomegranate juice. And, you know, you'll be able to actually grow back this acrimanagania.

I had a cancer patient, by the way. This was a couple of years ago who had multiple myeloma, was going to get an immunotherapy. And her doctor was really gung-ho to get her immunotherapy or oncologist. And her kids had a cold, so she had got a bronchitis and got a Z-Pack. Okay. And so before we started this immunotherapy, I basically said, let's check your stool. set out her stool for acrimancia, zero, which you would expect from the Z-PAC, okay,

and the antibiotic. And so I said, no, no, no, let's put the brakes on here. So we skid it to a halt before actually giving her the immunotherapy. I'm like, we do not want to waste this shot on gold. Like, this is her shot. And so I gave her cranberry juice and pomegranate juice, and we had her drink for three weeks straight every single day. And then we tested at the end of three weeks.

So we delayed her treatment for three weeks. When we tested her stool again, she had six times above the average population of acrimanza. So she really killed it and got a ton of acromance. She got on her immunotherapy. And within three treatments, she responded to the upper 1% of responders. So she was like super responder and just completely recovered from her cancer, like completely wiped it out. And again, this is sort of me learning from research that had been done. and published in research and evidence, thinking about how food fits into it, and actually using

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

It's so true. And the earlier we start, the less reliance that we have on medicines, not for the sake of just not having reliance on them, but to avoid any potential side effects or other stuff. At the end of the day, whatever gets the job done gets the job done. And there are sometimes folks in situations. I think you mentioned your mother who had cancer. Is that right? Yes, that's right.

She had metastatic endometrial cancer and had surgery removed. It came back very aggressively within about a year. And, you know, like if you were just using the playbook of the 20th century, you know, she would have gotten chemo or palliative care. And that would have been it. Like pretty much like most of the old school doctors that were involved with her care said, you know, game over. And I, you know, said, no, actually it's game on, you know.

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

I want to try to remember what I need to do. What are my instructions that I need to follow to be healthier. But no, I think that we want to actually bring food back to what it really means. Food is, Drew, one of the most intimate things that we have in our life. Our food tells us something about our childhood, the smells we had, our memories when our mom cooked in the kitchen growing up. It tells us about our own current families. It tells us about our community. And no matter where you come from, you know, we all come from someplace. It tells us something about our culture. And that's why I think that if we can actually lean into our food and relate back to how, what food means to us, what do we prefer, what's meaningful to us?

What do we think about when we're selecting among healthy foods? How do we make those choices that are meaningful? Now you've actually got a different formula for approaching food as health, food is medicine, than just trying to memorize some strict diet that you're not going to be able to stick to anyway. So true. when we have our health in a good place, it allows us to give love and attention to everything else that we care about.

You know, the goal is not to eat the perfect diet. The goal is to have strong health so that we can give love and attention to all the other beautiful things in our life that we want to do.