Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #234 How To Eat To Beat Disease with Dr William Li

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

CAUTION: This episode contains references to skipping meals and may be triggering for those with eating disorders. Today’s guest believes that the decisions we make every day about what we eat have a huge influence on our health. Dr William Li is a medical doctor and the author of the international bestseller, Eat to Beat Disease: The Body's Five Defense Systems and the Foods That Could Save Your Life. He works in a field of research called Food as Medicine and having been involved with the development of many different drugs over the past few decades, he is passionate about using scientific rigour to analyse the specific benefits of food. We discuss the five health defence systems that exist within our bodies: angiogenesis (growing of new blood vessels), stem cell regeneration, the gut microbiome, DNA protection and the immune system. These systems maintain our health and help us heal when disease damages our body. Dr Li explains how specific foods can strengthen these natural defence systems. We talk about cancer, how tumours grow, and where food can play a role in terms of prevention as well as part of the treatment. Dr Li shares the research about the amazing benefits of green tea for cancer prevention. We also talk about the impact that fasting has on various health systems within our body. Dr. Li’s ground-breaking work is really changing the way we look at how food impacts our health and I think that by the end of this conversation, you will look at food through a different lens. And I'm pretty sure that it's going to inspire you to make a few changes next time you go to the supermarket - it certainly did for me. I hope you enjoy listening.  Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://www.calm.com/livemore   http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version and US & Canada version   Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/234   Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

As we sit down every day to make a decision about what we eat, or we go to the store to buy some food, we need to realize whatever we put into our body is either going to take our health down or build our health back up. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. live more. So today I thought I would start the podcast with a quote from Anne Wigmore. The food you eat can either be the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison. And I think that quote really sets the stage for my podcast conversation today with Dr. William Lee. Now, Dr. Lee is a medical doctor, but he's also the author of the international bestseller, Eat to Beat Disease, the body's five defense systems and the foods that could save your life. Now, Dr. Lee works

in a field of research called food as medicine, and he's super passionate about using scientific rigor to analyze the specific benefits of food. Now, Dr. Lee has been involved with the development of many different drugs over the past few decades. And I think the way in which he tries to utilize that same approach to the potential use of food as medicine gives him a rather unique perspective. Now in our conversation, we cover so many different areas, but ultimately they are all unified with the empowering message that we can hugely influence many different aspects of our health through our day-to-day food choices. We discussed the five separate health defenses that developed when we were in our mother's womb, our blood vessels, our stem cells, our gut microbiome, DNA and our immune system,

and how specific foods can work on and strengthen these natural defence systems. We also talk about cancer, how tumours grow, and where food can play a role and actually impact this process, both for prevention as well as part of the treatment. In fact, Dr. Lee today talks about specific foods that can be used here, including one of his favorites, which is green tea. We also talk about fasting and the practice of skipping the odd meal and what impact that has on various health systems within our body. And I think at this point, it is important for me to say that skipping meals, fasting may not be appropriate for people who are suffering from eating disorders. But please do try and remember the context of this conversation.

I'm trying to talk to a world leading researcher on how certain practices, whether through, you know, taking in certain foods or actually not taking in certain foods at particular times, and what impact that can have on our health. I really do think that Dr. Lee is doing some incredibly important work that can really move on the conversation around food and our health. My hope is that by the end of this conversation, you will look at food through a different lens. I'm pretty sure it's going to inspire you to make a few changes next time you go to the supermarket. It certainly did for me. I think I probably could have spoken to Dr Lee for another two hours. At least there was so much we had planned to cover that we simply did not get time to go through. I really, really enjoyed

my conversation with this incredible individual. I hope you enjoyed listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Whittian Lee. What most people don't realize is that although we hear about the power of food all the time and we are surrounded by advertisements and images and different types of messaging about superfoods, right? Who hasn't seen an advertisement for a superfood or a super supplement? The reality is there's no single food item that actually does the trick for everything that we want. So there's no panaceas when it comes to food. What is super that most people don't realize is that our body is super. It is actually hardwired. All of us, we were born actually have been hardwired with all the

processes we need to maintain our health from the day we're born until our very last breath. And what foods do is not something magical. Foods that we consume activate our body's own hardwired health defenses. And that's actually why we don't get sick more often. I love that. And I think there's something quite unique about your approach when it comes to food and medicine. I want to get into some specific foods later on in this conversation, but just to sort of tease people, as it were, right at the start, are there a couple of kind of facts about some specific foods that you think would be

surprising for people that a lot of people may not be aware of? Yeah, well, first of all, there's a lot of mythology about foods, and some of it's wrong. And when I say myth, I'm referring to urban legends. So as a bit of a teaser, most people, most women have heard that soy should be avoided because it's dangerous. So eating soy can increase your risk for breast cancer. That is a common thought, but it's completely false. It is an urban legend. Research actually shows that those women who are at highest risk, including women who have breast cancer, the more soy they eat, the lower their chances of death. And so that's an example of an eye-opening fact that science brings to the table about soy. Here's another one. Many people have heard that

tomatoes should be avoided because they're a member of the nightshade family, which is poisonous, and that tomatoes contain a deadly toxin called lectins that should be avoided and it causes inflammation of the body. Well, that's also completely wrong. There are thousands of lectins out there. Tomatoes happen to have some of the non-toxic ones. And in fact, the studies of tomatoes have actually shown in more than 30,000 people that those men who eat

just two to three servings of cooked tomatoes a week have a 30% lower risk of developing prostate cancer. And so again, two examples of common foods that are surrounded by urban modern mythology that science cuts through like a hot knife through butter in order to reveal what the true health benefits could be. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And later on in this conversation, I'd love to get into some more specifics around particular foods. But I think at the start here, just to sort of set the scene, one of the things that really struck me about your approach is you know how you look at health and disease so many of us you know I'm a medical doctor I trained in the 90s in Edinburgh Medical

School you know we're trained how to diagnose disease and then treat it and sometimes we talk about preventing disease in the future but you sort of reframed that slightly, didn't you, to sort of ask yourself, well, why is it that we're not getting sick more often? And I think that's a really beautiful, it's a subtle distinction, but it's such a beautiful way of looking at the human body. So can you tell me a little bit about, you know, why did you frame it that way? And by doing so, what answers did you get that can help us all with our health and well-being? Yeah, so like yourself, during my education and training in medicine, pretty much, you know, we're all responsible for digesting about 4000 years of Western medical knowledge in a few years. And then to be able to, in short order, turn that around into everyday practice for our patients, right? So that's a

tall order just to begin with. And most of it is about learning how to detect, diagnose diseases accurately, as accurately as possible, and then coming up with essentially a textbook solution. I mean, that's what we're taught to do from the very beginning, recognize the disease, recognize the solution, try to match them up, and then actually deliver that as something that we can use to help our patients. And I did that for many, many years. And in fact, I was so inspired by the years. And in fact, I was so inspired by the unmet needs for treating diseases, some diseases successfully like cancer, like diabetes, like blindness, frankly, I wound up actually being starting a nonprofit organization called the Androgenesis Foundations, a charity where we, as a third party, set out to develop better treatments for all of these unbeatable diseases, looking for

their disease common denominator. I'm going to come back to common denominator in a second. I felt that although billions of dollars had been spent towards cancer research or research to prevent blindness as just two different examples or breast cancer or Alzheimer's disease, progress in science was formidable, but progress in treatment was way too slow. And my thought was that if we could actually look at what makes diseases common and similar to one another, rather than appreciate only what makes them different from one another. So as a researcher, we tend to take a study, a field of study, an inch wide, and then dive a mile deep into exploring it. What I wanted to do was to really upend that idea to

say, well, maybe what we should do is take a look at many diseases and see what the common threads are. Because if we could find that common thread, we might be able to pull the bow back and send a single arrow more efficiently through multiple diseases to have an economy of scale of impact. Okay. So when I did that, we wound up becoming enormously successful. I've been involved with 41, about to be 42 FDA approved treatments for cancer complications of diabetes and vision loss. And with that kind of success, one of the things that it made me realize was the power of science to generate evidence that something works.

And the other thing that I realized is that treating disease was highly valuable, but really misses the mark of preventing the disease in the first place. because if all we do as a sort of in our medical world is invent new things to throw at old diseases in this never ending progression, then we're chasing really the tail of a beast that we'll never catch. And I wanted to be able to actually figure out how to prevent the problem in the first place. Now, a short story about what actually happened that sparked me towards nutrition is I was a doctor for many years in a veterans hospital. This is a hospital in the U.S. that takes care of people who are former soldiers. And, you know, as a payback for their service, they can come to a medical center and receive essentially free care. And I felt compelled, a duty, actually, when I finished my training to be able to pay back the people who helped to support and defend the country. And so I took on a stint at a veterans hospital. These were some of my favorite patients.

They were grateful. They had rich lives they had amazing stories to tell and they were just nice people and unfortunately though they were pretty sick so most of the people that i saw were in their 60s and 70s and 80s were terribly obese they had diabetes heart disease cancer respiratory illnesses name it, they had these terrible problems. And the thing that struck me that, you know, because here I was writing prescriptions and sending people to specialists and having them have surgery and all these other interventions. And I was very excited, actually, at the very beginning, to be able to let them know some of the treatments that I myself had been involved with helping to develop.

But what I realized that was the irony is that these soldiers who were so terribly out of shape in the latter part of their lives were once cut, fit, buff physical specimens that couldn't have even served in the military unless they were in perfect shape. And so I asked myself, what the hell happened to these people? They were in great shape and now they're in terrible shape. And that's what led me on sort of this odyssey to think back about what must have like what kept them from being sick in early days and then what actually happened to their bodies that led them to deteriorate. And that's where I came back to this health defense, the health defenses that are hardwired in our body. Because like soldiers that they were, they once were the defenders of the country. But as they got older, their ability to defend actually waned. And so

too in our body, I realized there's these biological systems that keep us fit, keep us healthy. And if we're not careful to take good care of them, they too will wane in their power to defend us. And that's actually how we wind up getting sick. Yeah, it's very powerful what you just shared about the Veterans Hospital, because I think, although that's in the latter stages of their life, I'm sure there's many people listening to this right now, or watching watching this who would have resonated with that on some level and thought, hey, you know what, when I was at school, I used to swim or, you know, maybe I was on the college or the university squash team or the tennis team. And

now in my middle age, I've got a bit of extra weight, I don't have as much energy. So, you know, it's on a continuum, isn't it? And of course, the end of that continuum, that's where we tend to get involved as medical doctors, Western medical doctors, at least. And we say, oh, you have this disease now. But actually, I think that's a very powerful way of just showing how gradually without us realising as we're, you know, getting on with our daily lives, our health can be deteriorating bit by bit. In terms of these defence systems, you also mentioned at the start of this conversation, the word resilience and how what you try and do, or certainly food when used as medicine can really

help us with that resilience. Perhaps could you take us through these defence systems that you've learnt about? Because I know you've identified five of them. I think it'll be really interesting for my audience what those are. And then I think we'll get to what can we actually do about each and every single one? Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about resilience first before I talk about the health defences. So think about how resilient the human body is, right? I mean, we can take a punch and we can get back up on our feet pretty easily throughout most of our lives. Our body knows how to heal. So if you wind up getting a cold, you tend to recover from it. If you get a cut on your skin, it tends to heal up. If our belly gets upset and we wind up, you know, feeling we're in a toilet in ways that are not comfortable for us, we'll generally rebound back to our normal health.

I mean, that's really most of the experiences that we have as we're younger. And that resilience actually is quite an amazing thing because it has to do with this concept that we learn as doctors, which is homeostasis. Our body wants to stay in a homeostatic position. And that means like a gyroscope, you know, or like a big ocean liner, you know, sailing through, you know, rough seas. There is kind of a set point that no matter how big the waves are, we tend to kind of stay. Our center of gravity is where everything wants to get back to. kind of a set point that no matter how big the waves are, we tend to kind of stay, our center of gravity is where everything wants to get back to. And that is actually critical health. Now, what's the gyroscopes of our health? How do we actually maintain our balance? How do we

veer off to the side, but rebound back to that center point, our own center of gravity? And that's where these health defenses actually come into play. So our health defenses, which I'm going to tell you the five of them in a moment, actually started to be developed in our bodies when we were still in our mom's womb. So when our mom's egg met our dad's sperm and fertilized in the womb, within about four or five days, and fertilized in the womb, within about four or five days, these cells, primitive cells and stem cells wound up forming our organs, our circulation, our hearts, our brains, our noses, our hands, our feet, our bones. And along the way, at the same time, our body formed these remarkable defenses. Now, these defenses are designed to protect our bodies the same way

that in a European fortress, a medieval fortress, there are these defenses, right? You have the moat. You actually have the drawbridge. You have those arrow slits that you can shoot out of. You've got the curved wall. All these defenses that you find in a castle, there is a counterpart in our body. And in our body, our defenses to keep us healthy and resist disease and help us maintain resilience are the following. Number one, we have a defense called angiogenesis. Angiogenesis, two words. It's actually one word, but it's two parts of it. Angio meaning blood or blood vessels.

Genesis meaning growth. So it's how parts of it. Angio meaning blood or blood vessels. Genesis meaning growth. So it's how our body grows blood vessels, our circulation. And the reason blood vessels are a defense system is because we've got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed into the average adult body. And these are the highways and byways that deliver blood, oxygen that we breathe, and the nutrients from the food we eat to every single cell and organ. And if we don't have enough of these blood vessels, our tissues, our organs starve, and many times they'll die. So our body needs to be able to maintain enough blood vessels, enough circulation. And on the other hand, if we've got too many blood vessels and overage, And on the other hand, if we've got too many blood vessels and overage, overgrowth, that would be like a garden that overgrows with weeds.

Those weeds actually obscure the function of a garden, and they can actually destroy our health by feeding diseases. Extra blood vessels can feed diseases like cancer, as an example, or arthritis or psoriasis or many other types of harmful, extra unwanted blood vessels. And so the body maintains its resilience in circulation by literally maintaining a balance, the set point, this gyroscope, center of gravity. And the way that I tell people, it's kind of like the old um fairy tale goldilocks so not too many blood vessels not too few blood vessels just but just right like the three bears yeah not too hard not too soft not too hot not too cold just right this is a paradigm that follows all the health defenses so blood vessels are one of them secondly are our stem cells remember i said that we formed in a womb with stem cells yeah well when we're born

we have extra stem cells left over that we're not used so it's kind of like painting a room uh if you're painting a room and you're gonna buy paint right you always buy extra paint because the last thing you want to do is to run out of paint before you finish the job what do you do when that when the room has been completed from painting you've got extra cans of paint so what do you do you put the cap on you put it your garage, okay, for another time if you need to spot check. Well, this is actually what happens with our stem cells. When we're born, and our organs have formed all these stem cells, the ovaries, and we've got extra stem cells. In fact, we've got 750 million extra stem cells when we're born. That gets packed up into our bone marrow where it

basically sits for most of our lives until we need to repair our organs from the inside out. So regeneration, our ability to be able to renew ourselves is another health defense system. A third one is our gut, our gut microbiome. So much has been made of how important our gut bacteria is. I will tell you, we're just scratching the tip of the iceberg of understanding our gut bacteria. But I will tell you, it is so important that we've got about roughly the same number of bacteria growing inside our body as we actually have human cells. And beyond bacteria, there's even viruses that are healthy viruses. I just learned this the other day. We know, we've got about 39

trillion bacteria growing inside our body. Most of them are healthy. And as you know, when we were in medical school, we were all taught, you know, we drank the Kool-Aid that bacteria are bad. And so one must destroy bacteria. And hence, there are antibiotics to match with bacteria. But in fact, most bacteria in our bodies are good. And occasionally, there is a bad actor that kind of springs out. And so the but what I learned was that there are good viruses as well. In fact, there are 10 times more viruses in and on the body than the bacteria. So it's 380 trillion viruses, the human viral, our DNA is hardwired as a fourth health defense system, hardwired to protect itself against damage from the environment like ultraviolet radiation, radon from the ground, any chemicals or solvents we might inhale, oxidative stress, even emotional stress, which can actually fray our DNA, our genetic code. Our DNA can protect that. And of course, finally, our immune system, which like the volume switch in a car radio, is perfectly tuned to be able to deliver a little

inflammation where it's needed, a lot of immune protection to be able to ward off invaders from the outside like bacteria and viruses and invaders from the inside like cancer. And that whole system, like a volume switch on a radio, needs to be able to turn it up. And when you've had enough to turn it back down and back down to that homeostatic balancing point, that set point. And for all these health defense systems, our body kind of chugs along through life, keeping us right, sort of steady as she goes. along through life, keeping us right, sort of steady as she goes. Every now and then it's got to rear up and swashbuckle to get rid of some disease, but it comes right back to center. And that's what foods can actually help to support. Thank you for outlining those five

powerful defense systems. There's angiogenesis, there's stem cells, there's a gut microbiome, There's angiogenesis, there's stem cells, there's a gut microbiome, there's DNA and our immune system. I've got a few questions on each of them. Just to go to the fourth one, you mentioned DNA. And I think this really helps to illustrate this very fresh way you had at approaching the body, which was why do we not get sick more often? I've heard you talk about this in the past, that actually our DNA is being damaged every single day, whether it's air pollution, whether it's, you know, the new carpet in our house and the fumes or the smell and the solvents in the paint, you know, whatever it might be. And you think, yes, our DNA is being damaged, yet we're not all getting cancer. Maybe talk to me a

little bit about that, because I think that really illustrates this point about our body's defense systems and this resilience that we naturally have. You know, there's an inherent risk, isn't there, to be alive and to be human and to exist in the modern world. Yet despite that, we're still pretty robust and resilient. Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. So here we are, our genetic code, we know that it's so important to us. And we know that when it functions properly, it makes the proteins that support our life. We also know that when our genetic code has mutations, and everyone has become familiar with this idea of mutated DNA, it tends to cause problems in our body if it can actually continue. So mutations

that form actually all the time, most people don't know this, but DNA fixes these mutations silently. So we are not bothered by them. On average, a typical person has 10,000 mistakes made in their DNA every 24 hours. It's just a matter of the sheer volume of cell divisions of the machinery cranking along, chugging along. Listen, if you're in a factory making a trillion shoes every single day, you are going to actually make a few shoes that are not going to be perfect, right? So 10,000 mistakes that get taken off the assembly line, and then the parts that are broken get fixed up, and then everything moves forward.

So without even knowing it, our body is fixing itself and fixing these natural errors. Now, let's subject the body to planet Earth, right? So we're all born on this planet. We go outside. subject the body to planet earth, right? So we're all born on this planet. We go outside. What's, you know, my, one of my favorite things is to go out on a beautiful sunny day with blue skies. You know, I love the warmth of the sun on my skin. You know, it just, from the time I was a kid, it made me happy, right? Well, that sunshine is ultraviolet radiation, the same ultraviolet radiation that you get when you get a sunburn on a beach, the same type of ultraviolet radiation you get in a sun tanning booth. And we know if you burn on a beach,

sunburn on a beach, or if you go to a tanning salon, you magnify your chances of developing a skin cancer because of ultraviolet radiation mutating your DNA. Now, the same thing, by the way, and you talk about continuum, the same thing happens if you're stuck in traffic. So think about it. You're stuck on a traffic on a sunny day, and here you have the sun just beaming right through your windshield, or maybe you have your window open, and it's beaming on your arm. How come we don't develop skin cancer in that situation? The reason is because our body fixes any errors that is made by the ultraviolet radiation from just regular sunlight. And what happens in a sun tanning booth, or when you burn yourself repeatedly at the beach,

like getting one or two sunburns, not a big deal. But when you do that repeatedly, you overwhelm the defense systems. And that's where these mutations can actually accumulate. So DNA is actually really, can actually accumulate. So DNA is actually really, by the way, you know, we talk about the genetic code, only 3% of our DNA is actually used to make the stuff that we need for life. The rest of it are all instructions, including instructions on how to fix itself. And so this idea of repair, when people hear about antioxidant foods, what they're really talking about is adding foods into your body that can assist our DNA from warding off damage because antioxidants kind of form like a shield to neutralize the incoming missiles from these activated chemicals, reactive chemicals that can actually damage our DNA. By the same token, the foods that we eat that actually create DNA damage because they have these chemicals that can actually generate the chemical ability to damage our DNA, our body has to fight against those as well. And so that's why we need to be mindful. As we sit down every day to make a decision about what we eat or we go to the store to buy some food,

we need to realize whatever we put into our body is either going to take our health down or build our health back up. And it all works at the level of the defense systems. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics

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and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Yeah, it's so fascinating. As you were describing that, Dr. Lee, I was thinking about a bath, right? And I was thinking, okay, well, if an overflowing bath, when the water goes up and it starts to leak out, if that's the disease, or let's say that's cancer, every day we're sort of filling up our bath, let's say. But as long as the drain's working well,

the water's staying down, it's not getting to the top. But if, I guess, if we're doing enough stuff that's actually blocking that drain, then actually we're not going to be able to repair the rising water level. And that water level is going to sort of spill out, then actually we're not going to be able to repair the rising water level. And that water level is going to sort of spill out. And then we've got a disease, then we've got cancer. It's probably not a perfect analogy, but do you think there's something in that? Yeah, yeah. Let me kind of build on what you just said. So you've got the drain, keeping the water flowing and clean and at the right level. And you've got the water coming in and that balance of where the water line needs to be. Now let's add some more.

Now let's take a garbage pail food, fill it with food bits and now let's pour those in the drain as well. Okay. Now you're contaminating the water. And if you have more of the drain opening to remove those bits, you're going to keep the water clean. But if you have more of the drain opening to remove those bits, you're going to keep the water clean. But if you actually stop up the drain, then the garbage starts to accumulate. And that's actually part of the problem as well is damage to our body accumulates over time. And that's why the bad decisions that we make really take, you know, over the course of months or years, they have a consequence. And the good decisions also have the same type of time,

honored ability to build up on our behalf. Well, in terms of empowering people, in terms of what they can do, and this is what a lot of your work is about, food has power here. You know, specifically, we're talking about DNA damage. food has power here. Specifically, we're talking about DNA damage. Food has the ability to, I guess, make that drain bigger or put new drains in the bath. So there's more ability to kind of repair the damage. So we're talking again about these five defense systems. I've gone straight in for number four that you mentioned, DNA. Could you maybe mention some foods that we can think about consuming that might have an impact on this particular defense system?

Yeah, well, so some amazing research has been done looking at which foods can help protect our DNA. And some of them are very ordinary, like a kiwi fruit that you might eat at breakfast. You know, that brown fuzzy ball, you cut it open, it's got this emerald green interior with a little white starburst. You know, it's kind of tart and sweet at the same time. Well, that kiwi is packed with vitamins and antioxidants. packed with vitamins and antioxidants. And it's been shown that eating just one kiwi a day can actually cause your blood to be fortified to neutralize about 60% of the incoming damage from DNA. And if you eat three kiwis a day, okay, which is pretty easy, right? I mean,

you peel it, you cut it up, you put it into a yogurt. OK, it's something that simple actually will help your DNA build itself back up so that damaged DNA will be repaired. So don't don't forget, like think about the way of protecting your DNA. I remember an old video game called Missile Command. And this is where from the top of the screen, there are all these missiles that are descending down on your planet. And what you had to do is to be able to fire and try to neutralize all the missiles. And that's what antioxidants actually do. But it's really hard to prevent all the missiles from coming in. And so occasionally you actually have one that gets through the shields and creates a crater. That's damage. And so neutralizing the incoming is like antioxidants,

but building back the damaged DNA. Well, that's important too, because that's like patching a pothole in the highway, in the roadside, so that other cars don't have a problem on it. And so here's an example of a food, a kiwi that can actually do that. But there are other foods that can also have varying degrees of protection of your DNA as well. Yeah, it makes me happy that example, because my dad, who's no longer alive, I remember as a kid, Dr. Lee, he used to say to me, you know, keep eating kiwi fruits, come back from the supermarket with, you know, these bags of kiwi fruits. So they're really, really good for you. They're rich in vitamin C,

which of course is true, but obviously you're taking it up a notch now. You're saying, yes, it's rich in vitamin C, but actually it's also helping us repair DNA. And I guess to me, there's a wider point here, which is, you know, my dad, what, 20, 30 years ago, probably said it's rich in vitamin C. So thought there was a value on feeding his children that food because of the impacts on our health. And as science progresses, I guess we're learning more about the magic of this quite ordinary food, the kiwi fruits. It makes me wonder, how much about food do we still not know? Like we're learning. Do you know what I mean?

It's kind of like we think we know so much. And of course, we know more than we knew 20 years ago. But what are we going to find out in 10 years and 20 years about the magical properties of these foods? Well, what you're actually talking about is what I'm working on, which is a new field of research called food as medicine. I'm working on, which is a new field of research called food as medicine. So the slogan or the saying food as a medicine was attributed to Hippocrates, you know, 3000 years ago. But in fact, back then there were no medicines. So food was the only thing that was around. Today we have

a lot of medicines and it's because we, in the quest to develop medicines, we've employed some really deep science, molecular biology, genomics. We have a drill right down inside the cell to figure out what happens and why and what the consequences are and how the cells work together. Well, one of the reasons that I went into nutrition was because I realized that food was something that could be used for prevention. You wouldn't want to use drugs for prevention. But the problem with food, nutrition, the criticism that many of us in the medical world have about the idea of using food for healing was historically it was a lack of evidence, right?

So we have a lot of evidence about drugs. We almost have nothing about foods. I mean, that's the dismissive tone that I think you probably were exposed to as well as I for most of our education. However, what's happening now, and this is, I'm leading, I'm one of the people leading the charge of this. We can use the same technologies that are used to develop pharmaceuticals. And instead of throwing a drug into the system to see what happens, we can actually start to throw foods into those systems and see what happens as well. In fact, you can even compare foods and drugs and see which one wins. And that's something that I've been doing for the last decade is really

trying to use the same rigorous scientific methodology used for drug development in order to be able to study the impact of food. Yeah, and I think you are in many ways uniquely placed to do this and move this field on because you've got so much experience in the development of drugs and in research. So obviously, you know how that whole system works. And because you are this way inclined to see the healing potential of foods, you can actually do that. And I feel that's really important to get that kind of traction, primarily with the medical profession, but also I think across wider society. You know, I've had on the podcast, all kinds of people on in the past talking about various aspects of food, like, you know, Professor Felice Jacker from Australia, who conducted the SMILES trial showing how food can impact and in some cases reverse depression.

Dr. Drew Ramsey, this nutritional psychiatrist in New York, using food to help people with their moods. But I do think there's something very fresh about your approach that I really, really like and resonate with. This idea that food and drugs can be compared. Can you give us an example of that where you've seen that food might have equal benefits, if not more benefits than a drug? Yeah, well, so we have been developing treatments for cancer that are designed to starve a cancer by cutting up its blood supply. And that's the process of angiogenesis that is hijacked by tumors, by cancer cells to selfishly develop their own blood supply, right? So I told you the body has normal circulation to feed healthy tissues.

Well, cancers can sometimes hijack that. So one of the new ways to treat cancer is actually to give a drug that can intercept a cancer's ability to recruit a private blood supply. That's starving a cancer, cutting off its blood supply, can't get oxygen and nutrients, can't grow. Okay. So I was one of the people to help develop the systems to develop those drugs. There have been over a dozen drugs that have been approved by health authorities to be able to achieve this in colon cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, so on and so forth. Now, in that same system, we've actually thrown different food substances. And as an example, we took a drug that is a designer drug

to stop androgenesis. And then we actually also threw, blinded, so we didn't know which one was which, a substance that turned out to be the powdered extract from just regular green tea, a cup of green tea. And we found that they were, in that system, they went head to head against each other. And you could actually get the same effect in that test system. So now the question is, we've looked at this in the lab, how does this actually play out in real people in the real world? Well, there are studies now that show that even two to three cups of tea a day can lower your risk of developing ovarian cancer, for example, by up to 50%. This is a gigantic study in Europe called the EPIC study that have looked at all the different food patterns and dietary

consumptions over time to look for these correlations. And so food as medicine research is different from pharmaceutical research. Pharmaceutical research, you take one pill or one drug and you get a group of people to make them as similar as possible. And then the only thing you do to people is give them that one drug and everything else is we hope to control it so that there's no other variables. Well, foods can't be studied like that. You can't give somebody only green tea to drink for months at a time or a tomato to eat. That's the only thing that you can eat. And foods don't work like drugs. I mean, a drug, you could squash a headache, you know, in 20 minutes with a powerful drug or a migraine. But with food, the benefits of food,

because it's so much more natural and because it leverages your body's own defense systems, the benefits take time and they build up over time. And so you're talking about research studies that could take months or years even to fully appreciate just how beneficial that is. So this is how we do food as medicine research. We look for benefits in real populations of real people, like people drinking green tea. How well does that prevent different types of cancer? Then we back it up to say, can we run a small clinical trial, a small group of people that we can control to see if we get a similar effect? Then we go back into the lab and we kind of say, well, now what happens if you feed animals that actually with green tea, like can we, you know, an animal subject, can we actually

see that benefit? Then we can even go deeper and go dive that, start going that mile deep. What happens at the cellular level? What happens at the genetic level? And so food as medicine is really taking that macroscopic community-wide level view and then drilling it right down to that molecular pathway. And so I happen to be one of the people that actually can traverse that entire journey with what I've done. It's just so fascinating. Very, very exciting about the future. That study you mentioned about a few cups of tea a day, reducing your risk of developing cancer. Was that black tea or green tea? Green tea. But black tea actually also has um different benefits uh as well so um a study out

of italy did something really amazing well so look let's back up for a second so what everybody would recognize is green tea it's kind of like kind of tea that you get in a sushi restaurant japanese restaurant you know matcha and it's very trendy. And of course, the trend goes back thousands of years in Asia. And then there's black tea, classic English breakfast tea or Earl Grey tea. In fact, I have a little tin of it. I happen to have a tin of Earl Grey tea here, right here. I love tea. And most people have said, this was the thinking previously, that green tea is really great for you because it's green. It's got filled with antioxidants and it's got all these polyphenols in it. And black tea, well, you know, when the British brought it back from Asia, they couldn't

actually bring fresh green tea. And with this long ocean voyage, they fermented, dried it. And that drying and fermenting actually destroys those polyphenols so it doesn't have much good like might taste good but it doesn't really have the healthful properties well this is where science again you know is able to heat up that knife and cut through the the butter to kind of see exactly what the story is and it turns out that black tea actually is quite active. I studied Chinese green tea, Japanese green tea, is um earl grey which one is better when you throw them into the system and we found actually surprisingly that earl grey the black tea flavored bergamot actually was the most potent tea when you combined all when you looked at all three side by side other thing about black tea that's really amazing has been studied by

researchers in italy is that black tea actually can call out those stem cells from your bone marrow to increase their levels in your circulation. And when your stem cells are circulating in your blood, they come out of their hiding spots in their storage container, the garage that the paint cans were stored in, they come out like bees flying out of a hive. And then they circulate in your body looking for organs to repair. So wherever you need a little bit of renewal, regeneration, your stem cells will fix it invisibly. And so black tea can actually spark that repair and regenerative process. As you are describing these different foods and their actions, I keep thinking back to

this list of five defence systems that I'm just fascinated by. And obviously, we spoke about DNA, number four. But you've now mentioned tea, I think, and green tea and black tea, it can impact stem cells, but it can also impact other parts of these defense systems. So presumably, are there some foods which only work on one defense system from the knowledge that we have so far and other foods, which can kind of hit more and potentially all five at the same time? Yeah, well, so here's a principle of nature. Mother nature tends to be incredibly clever and pack multiple roles in any given food. So while researchers may have only looked at one food in one particular way. So, for example, I'm trying to think about something that would be useful from a whole food perspective that has only been found to do one thing.

Actually, I have to say most of the foods that I know of, that I've done research on, when you take a careful look, they can activate multiple health defenses. So I think that that's really where we're at, is really peeling back and discovering the utility, the multi-pronged utility of different foods. That makes sense though, doesn't it? Because these defense systems, they don't work in isolation. They obviously have to work as interconnected systems together. So it kind of makes sense that food, particularly food that's been around for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, are also going to have these multiple type effects yeah you know if we go to angiogenesis which you've already mentioned and that was the first health defense system that you talked us through this i found really really interesting when researching your

work uh your ted talk which of course has been viewed by millions of people now, there was a really interesting slide towards the end where I very much resonate with this idea, what's the root cause of multiple diseases? Can we address the root cause and then we're automatically going to take care of multiple different downstream consequences? And that was a very powerful slide showing that when angiogenesis is working well, or when it's not working well, what can happen in the body? Could you just talk us through that lens, angiogenesis? Because I think that's really interesting. And then you also mentioned cancer and blood supply. And again, could you just talk to us about cancer and how it can only grow to a certain size unless it gets its own blood supply as well, please?

Yeah, sure. So our circulation is these blood vessels, this network, and the blood is really the vehicle that carries oxygens and nutrients and everything else that our cells need to survive. So when we have the right amount, all of our health, all of our organs are functioning properly. Sometimes we need a few extra blood vessels. So if you're working out and trying to build your muscles, when your muscles get bigger, it requires more blood vessels, a bigger blood supply, no problem. Your angiogenesis system can actually supply and help to grow more of those blood vessels, but they keep it in proper volume. So not too many, not too few blood vessels, very important principle of angiogenesis.

That's health. We have good circulation. Now here's what happens in disease. When you don't have enough blood vessels, what are some of the typical diseases that occur when you don't have enough blood flow? Well, one of the things is after a heart attack, if you cannot grow enough blood vessels, parts of your heart will get weaker. You can get heart failure. And a heart attack can actually be even fatal if you have inadequate blood vessels to try to bypass any temporary blockage. Same thing as a stroke.

We know after there's a stroke, sometimes a clot gets sent to the brain and results in that type of stroke. Your angiogenesis defense system is scrambled to be able to immediately generate bypass, tiny little bypass muscles get around that blockage to save the brain beyond the blockage. If you can't get enough blood vessels growing in that situation, parts of your brain die, and you wind up being paralyzed or having deficits after a stroke. In diabetes, many people with diabetes lose their legs. They have their legs amputated, mostly because they have problems healing wounds on their feet. Now, the reason is because their nerves actually become, they go numb. Their nerves die back, diabetic neuropathy.

And the reason that the nerves die back is because there's inadequate blood vessels feeding those nerves. So now in diabetes, some of those nerves in your feet and even your fingertips actually don't have enough blood supply. They die. When the nerves die, you can't feel when you step on a pebble and you create a little hole. That hole gets infected. That wound now also won't heal because it doesn't have enough blood vessels. That's an example of inadequate angiogenesis and cause a problem. And so now medical treatments actually have been designed to actually try to stimulate more blood vessels to coax more vessels in where they're needed. But foods can also help do it as well. On the flip side, when you have too many blood vessels and this is where cancer comes into play, it turns out that we all have cancer in our body. I mean, cancer is, we fear, everyone fears cancer.

The word actually, you know, causes a shiver to run down most people's spine. Everyone knows somebody who's been touched by cancer. And I would say most people know somebody who's died of cancer, actually. And so this is actually one of the most fearsome diseases. died of cancer, actually. And so this is actually one of the most fearsome diseases. But yet, biologically, we are actually all forming cancers in our body all the time, because all it takes for our 40 trillion cells to do is to make those little mistakes. I told you 10,000 mistakes are fixed every day. A few of those going kind of getting stinking through will turn into a microscopic tumor, microscopic cancer.

And this is called cancer without disease because a tiny little mutant cancer can grow up to the sides of the tip of a ballpoint pen and then it's frozen like a pimple. Can't go any bigger because it doesn't have a blood supply, no oxygen, no food, nothing to feed it. And so those little microscopic cancers sit there until another one of our defense systems, our immune system, wings by like a cop on a beat and sees this abnormal cell sitting on that street corner in a good neighborhood and then says, get in the car, we're taking you away. And so our immune system destroyed these microscopic cancers. But some cancers are able to, some microscopic cancers are able to hijack our body's regular angiogenesis defense system

and selfishly grow blood vessels to feed themselves. Now, I worked in a lab studying angiogenesis, and we discovered that once an avascular or bloodless cancer is able to get vessels to touch it the moment that that touches it the cancer can grow 16 000 times in two weeks so literally angiogenesis out of control is a trigger an explosive trigger for tumor growth and in fact we know that if you can cut off the blood supply or prevent tumors from growing their blood supply, you can actually keep these cancers harmless for long periods of time. And so this is what foods are able to do. Foods that inhibit androgenesis,

they won't stop the good blood vessels from growing because good blood vessels are actually solidly locked into your body. Your defense system ensures you're not going to get rid of your good blood vessels with food. But those extra blood vessels tend to be fragile. And those are the ones that the foods that we eat, and then if necessary, drugs that we can prescribe, can really just kind of shear those extra vessels away. Yeah, this whole sort of field of angiogenesis and blood vessels, I think is going to be fascinating for people,

because I think many people, you know, everyone's aware that they've got blood vessels inside them. I think a lot of people will think, yeah, I sort of learned this in biology at school, that there's a heart and it, you know, the blood vessels, it pumps oxygen around the body. That's how oxygen gets to all my muscles and organs. But potentially it kind of ends there. Like it doesn't go beyond that. And what I love about that explanation is when angiogenesis is not working well, we're not able to make new blood

vessels where we need to, it can cause a whole multitude of different diseases. But also when it's kind of out of control or gets to these cancer cells, too much angiogenesis can cause problems. And therefore the question for me, Dr. Lee, is if angiogenesis sits at the heart of multiple different conditions, so we can look at it as a root cause, we also say similar things about chronic unresolved inflammation, don't we? We talk about inflammation being a root cause of lots of these chronic diseases. So can you speak a little bit about the relationship between inflammation and angiogenesis? Because it strikes me that they can't be separate. They probably sit side by side together in most cases. Yeah, no, it's such a great question.

I actually worked on research exactly looking at that interrelationship. So we know, well, let's take a look at just sort of something everybody recognizes and to show how inflammation and blood vessel growth go hand in hand. growth are go hand in hand uh if you um are in the kitchen and you accidentally cut your your you're cutting a piece of fruit and you accidentally cut your cut your finger or cut your hand what's going to happen it's going to bleed all right now so you're going to stop the bleeding then a few minutes later you look at the cut what's going to happen? It's swollen, it's puffy, it's red because inflammation has actually gotten there. Your immune defenses have sent these inflammatory cells. These are kind of super soldiers from our immune system that go there to kind of clean up and prevent

any bacteria from rushing into that site. And then shortly thereafter, within a day or so, new blood vessels start growing because the inflammatory cells, the cells from your immune system, started to release some signals to say, hey, you know what? We've cleaned up. It's time to reset the table. And so now blood vessels actually start to grow into it. So inflammation sends the signals for wound healing, for healing, that for blood vessels to grow. By the same token, inflammation then goes away, which is why our wounds don't stay puffy the whole time. The puffiness goes away, the blood vessels grow, you get a scab, and before long, you're back to normal. And that's because both inflammation is turned down, turned off, like that car volume, the car radio, and also androgenesis.

Once you get enough, it stops. And so this is getting back to that set point. Now, what happens when you actually have chronic anything? Usually it's not a good result. So inflammation being really good, a little bit is really good. So, you know, I think a lot of people misunderstand, like, I want to get rid of all the inflammation in my body. No, you don't, because you want the ability of your body to be able to mount small amounts

of inflammation when needed for a short period of time and then to go away. All right. That's, that's, you want that. That's life-saving. But what you don't want is for that inflammation to get there and the volume to keep turning up, up, up turning up up up up or that it never gets turned back down that's chronic inflammation and that's abnormal so your body this whole idea of turning up and then turning down um the volume for inflammation

if you don't can't turn it down the inflammation continues to smolder in your body. An example I've given is sort of like for anybody who's listening who's enjoyed going camping. You go into woods, you set up a tent, it gets cold at night, what do you do? You build a campfire. And that's like a little bit of inflammation, gives you warmth, it serves its purpose. And when it's time to go to bed, you know, you either let it burn down and you just, you know, make sure that it's all walled off and you're fine. But that fire, if it doesn't burn down, but actually spills out and catches the forest and fire. Now you actually got a problem because now this thing is going out of control and diseases with chronic inflammation, like lupus, like rheumatoid arthritis, Diseases with chronic inflammation, like lupus, like rheumatoid arthritis, like diabetes, frankly, you wind up actually having this chronic inflammatory state that starts to provoke all kinds of other things. And remember we talked about tumors and antigenesis.

Well, if a tumor is kind of like a wound, it can hijack blood vessels, and you've got inflammation, and now the cancer itself causes some inflammation you're just making it a hell of a lot easier for that tumor to get a blood supply which means that the cancer is more likely to grow and in fact we do see this in patients patients who are actually chronically inflamed we know that inflammation is one of those hallmarks for people who develop cancer yeah thank you for explaining that and it's fascinating for me to hear that relationship. We've mentioned cancer a few times in the conversation so far. And I completely agree, even the name, I think strikes fear into people. I don't know when you were at medical school,

when I was, I was told the statistic that one in four people in the UK at that time, so I started in 95 at medical school, are going to develop some kind of cancer in their lifetime. That has since gone up to one in three. And a few years ago in the UK, it was published that one in two adults at some point in their lifetime are going to develop cancer. So this is a pretty alarming rise. As you say, we all know people who are either suffering from, who have suffered from, or who even have died from cancer. You mentioned at the start about soy. I have never covered on this podcast food and how it can help us with cancer, whether that's for prevention of cancer or potentially as part of the treatment regime for cancer.

So I wonder if you could speak to a little bit about food and how we can think about that in terms of cancer prevention and treatment. Yeah, well, so there's a whole field of research that was developed in the 1970s by a researcher named Michael, Dr. Michael Sporn from the National Cancer Institute, looking at the opportunity of intercepting cancer before it becomes a clinical problem. This is this whole idea of cancer prevention. Originally, it was looking at chemicals that could prevent cancer from starting at its early stages. Then it became angioprevention, which is can we interfere with angiogenesis so that cancers actually can't grow a blood supply as a way of controlling it. And now we know that there's plenty of foods that have been studied that actually have been shown to be associated with reduced risk of cancer, whether it's green tea, whether it's soy,

whether it's tomatoes, whether it's stone fruit, peaches and plums, there's a plethora. In fact, I read about more than a hundred different foods in my book, ETP Disease, that actually have various abilities to impact on androgenesis towards health. Now, what I think is really amazing is how foods can be used during cancer treatment. And the reason that's so poignant, and I think for people listening who may know somebody undergoing cancer treatment right now, I mean, look, you're a doctor, we're both doctors. How many times has a patient who has cancer asked us very earnestly, hey, doc, I've got cancer, I'm getting treatment, I'm getting my chemo, but what should I be eating? Is there anything you can advise me to, right? That's such a common

question. It's a question that almost every cancer patient asks their doctor. And it's a question that almost no doctor can answer. So the typical response that a patient gets is incredibly frustrating and aggravating because the doctors just say, yeah, you know what? Either they say, I don't know. There's nothing out there because no evidence on food can help. Or they say, go eat whatever you want. Go eat some junk food or some fast food because at least you get some nutrition. The most important thing is you don't lose weight. Well, actually, science has said both of those things are not true. Number one, you don't lose weight. Well, actually, science has said both of those things are not true. Number one,

actually cutting down on your caloric intake during cancer treatment actually reboots your health defenses to fight cancer. So intermittent fasting and manipulating your metabolism by lowering caloric intake actually is an anti-cancer strategy, number one. Number two, actually, there are certain foods you can eat that actually can help you fight cancer. And the best, most compelling examples all have to do your health defense. So there is the newest form, most profound form of cancer treatment that's a biggest advance in 100 years for cancer treatment is immunotherapy. And immunotherapy, which is used everywhere, UK, North America, Russia, China, everywhere, is a new type of cancer treatment that doesn't poison the body like chemotherapy does. And it's not even a

targeted therapy. That's like a heat-seeking missile you infuse into the body. Immunotherapy is a lot more simple and more natural in this concept. Hey, let's just use the body's own immune system and harness it to be able to destroy cancer. Because remember we talked about this early on, like cops on the beat, the immune system conducts surveillance and takes out the bad guys, the drug dealers sitting on the street corner. Well, what happens if you had cancer, even if it's metastatic and spread? What happens when you allow your own immune system to do it? So this is now reality. Immune therapy is being given to cancer patients, and it allows your immune system to wipe out cancer. It is so dramatic that in about 20% of people, you get a phenomenal response. And in a smaller group of people,

your immune system can wipe out cancer completely. I give an example of in the US, one of our oldest living presidents is President Jimmy Carter. He was a peanut farmer. He came from the state of Georgia. When he retired from his presidency, when he finished his presidency, he went back to his sunny state and he wanted to build houses with this nonprofit, this NGO called Habitat for Humanity. They spent a lot of time outdoors under the baking sun building houses for homeless people. And in so doing, he got a lot of sun damage, which caused mutations in his skin, which led to skin cancer that spread to his liver and his brain. So he was in his early 90s when he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Because it had spread and melanoma is such a deadly cancer, most of his doctors basically said this is game over. So he withdrew from public life.

doctors basically said, this is game over. So he withdrew from public life. He wrote his own obituary and was about to sort of just, you know, make, sort of meet his maker. And he sort of became, he got, he became at peace with himself. But then at the 11th hour, he enrolled into a clinical trial of one of these immune therapies. It's something called a checkpoint inhibitor. clinical trial of one of these immune therapies. It's something called a checkpoint inhibitor. And he got this infusion. And remarkably, at 90 years old, his own immune system reared up on his haunches and wiped out and did what it's supposed to do. It wiped out all the cancer in his brain, in his liver, all of his body. And he went from having metastatic cancer with brain metastasis. That's a game over kind of situation when you and i are training to actually having no cancer and he's alive today with no sign of cancer happened to my mother too who had endometrial cancer

cancer the lining of the uterus it spread everywhere and we put her on a immune therapy same kind as the president did at press former president, and in three treatments only over the course of nine weeks, once every three weeks, no chemo. Her 80-year-old immune system wiped out every bit of cancer in her body, and she's been completely cancer-free. This isn't even a cure. This is a reset. This is getting back to baseline, restoring health, because that's what your body's supposed to do. This is kind of really full circle to what we were talking about at the start of this conversation, isn't it? The body's resilience, the body's natural ability to patrol itself and actually repair damage and be resilient.

And it's incredible now that you're talking about these drugs that are being used to really help support the immune system. But I think what you're coming to is that food can also do that as well. Is that right? Yeah. Well, yes, but it's sort of the combination. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be.

In my live event, I'm going to simplify health. And together, we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are of course many different

ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now,

if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. So remember I said that for this type of immune therapy, 20% of people have these really amazing responses, which means that the majority don't. And for a long time, we were scratching our heads saying, okay, what's going on?

Because there's nothing more frustrating than a breakthrough that only works for a small portion of people. We've got to use science to figure out what makes the difference. Well, so one of my colleagues, Dr. Laurence Zipogel in Paris, she's at the Institute Gustave Roussy, which is one of the big cancer research centers of Europe, looked at 200 patients with different types of cancer, all getting immune therapy. And she compared every dimension that she could between people who responded and people who did not respond very well to immunotherapy.

And what she found, the difference was one bacteria in their gut. It wasn't genetics. It wasn't body size. It wasn't obesity. It wasn't concomitant disease. It was actually one bacteria in their gut. It wasn't genetics. It wasn't body size. It wasn't obesity. It wasn't concomitant disease. It was actually one bacteria. That bacteria is Acromantia muciniphila. Now, this is out of the 39 trillion bacteria in the body. This one has been studied, and it stuck out, kind of like finding a fossil in the hillside. There's probably a lot of fossils, but she found this one. This bacteria was present in responders. And if you had this, you responded to immune therapy and had a better outcome with cancer. And if you didn't have it, man, your outcome was not good. So how do you get this bacteria to grow? Well, it turns out it's all about your diet

because there's no probiotic you can take for acromantia acromantia can be grown you can grow acromantia in your gut by having uh by help by eating foods that help your gut secrete mucus now that sounds disgusting to a lot of people it's gross mucusy gut but in fact our gut naturally secretes mucus just like our mouth normally secretes saliva. And this bacteria, acromantia, it's got its full name. Acromantia is just its first name. Its last name is mucinophila. So acromantia mucinophila means it loves to grow mucus. So when you actually eat foods like pomegranates or pomegranate juice or cranberries or concord grapes or the juice from these. It prompts your gut to secrete healthy mucus. It's kind of like fertilizer in the soil. Your garden is going to love to grow

better. That acromantia grows there. It actually makes you a responder. So that actually is the difference of how foods can make the difference in one bacteria. Now, two weeks ago, a paper, a landmark paper was published in the journal Science, which is one of the big, credible scientific journals, major scientific journal. This is like an 80-person study led by MD Anderson Cancer Research Center in the United States with the National Institutes of Health. And they looked, again, at melanoma that had spread, people getting immunotherapy, and they found that another bacteria, they found the second bacteria of responders. It's called Ruminococcus. All right.

Now, I encourage your listeners not to stress out about remembering these fancy names. It's kind of like when you go to a museum, you go to the dinosaur hall, you're not going to remember the Latin names of all the dinosaurs. You're going to remember, man, that was pretty cool. That big one. Yeah. It's called T-Rex, but you don't need to remember all the Latin names. So, um, ruminococcus, uh, is, is, is part of responder profile for immunotherapy. And what they wanted to find out is what dietary intake was correlated with this healthy bacteria with a good outcome. And it was dietary fiber. And what they found is that those people who ate more dietary fiber had more ruminococcus and had a better response. So how much fiber? They calculated it.

They calculated for every five grams of fiber per day, they got a 30% decrease in mortality. 30, okay, on immunotherapy. Now, what's five grams of fiber a day? This. That's how much you get five grams of fiber in an average size pair. That's all you need to eat a day to make this difference. Now, think about that. If you had melanoma and if you were getting immunotherapy, your doctor's probably not telling you yet to actually eat fiber, but this is the

nature of breaking research in food as medicine. It's not food versus medicine. I'm not on a hilltop waving a thing of kale saying everybody should forget about their medicines and don't go to your doctor anymore. What I'm saying is that food plus medicine, it is another powerful tool in the toolbox. And people with cancer need to know that. Yeah, they really do. And you remind me of a story I've heard you share, I think in an interview I saw a few years in the past where there was a patient who was due to have some immunotherapy and you checked out her stool and found out that she had no Acomancia mucinophilia. So you halted things for three weeks, you encouraged these kind of foods that went up, and she responded perfectly. Is that an accurate reflection of that story?

Yeah, that you captured it exactly. And so I think that you know as we move into the future we're going to be putting together this puzzle that you know it's almost like we've seen what we need to do for years we like we intuitively we've known that foods can help us get better that foods and medicine have got to work together. Why do cancer patients ask that question? Because they know inherently there's got to be something there. And so one of the things that I'm really committed to doing in my career is trying to up the level that doctors actually have to be able to take the latest science and answer those patient questions. Like patients don't really want to know all the mumbo jumbo, the scientific details.

They're not equipped in many cases to really go into that level of detail. But doctors need to be sophisticated enough. If you can understand how an immunotherapy works, which is pretty complicated, then you need to be able to understand how a food works. Yeah. I mean, I think you've done a wonderful job from what I've seen over the last years of spreading the word about this, your book, Eat to Beat Diseases. I think it's a wonderful read for anyone, you know, public or doctors to learn more about what kind of foods can help them. I think there's over 200 foods in there that you've detailed. Is that right? of foods can help them. I think there's over 200 foods in there that you've detailed. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Over 200 foods. So this whole idea that our body craves diversity,

our health defenses respond to so many different foods. So I basically put together a catalog of more than 200 foods that activate one or more or multiple health defenses. And the wonderful thing, and this is really one of the sort of the take home messages I want your viewers and listeners to have in here, that the foods that activate our health defenses taste great. Many of them are part of traditional food cultures, Mediterranean cultures, Asian cultures. So you don't have to fear your food anymore for health. We don't have to think about taking away all the foods that we love to eat. We can actually lean into the foods that we love that are healthy for us and start there. And so one of the things that I do, you know, I've always challenged people who go, well, you know, I've never really liked Dr. Lee to eat healthy. So I'm kind of bummed out.

I give them a Sharpie and a copy of my book. And I say, go to the tables. And I said, take five minutes and leaf through here and circle every food that you like, that you like to eat. And I've never met anybody who wouldn't be able to circle 10 foods at least. And then I, and then I, I, they come back to me and I'm like, look, you've identified all these circled foods, activate your health defenses, start with these, stick with these, and then explore all these other foods foods activate your health defenses start with these stick with these and then explore all these other foods that are up there that's that's the best way to enrich our lives and our health at the same time yeah and this knowledge you give people uh dr lee is very

empowering because it could be that that person who does that and circles these foods goes, oh, I'm already having like mushrooms and bees, I'm already eating foods. And even that just reframes in their mind that they're already using food as medicine for their body. You mentioned cancer patients, of course, of course, they want to know what else they can do. Whether it's cancer or anything, patients want to feel a sense of agency over their health and their life, right? So, you know, no one does well when they think, well, I can't do anything. I just need to leave it up to that treatment or that doctor. We all like to feel that we're sort of playing a role and participating in our health. So I think your work and research and your books

and these masterclasses you run on your website, I think are so helpful at giving people that agency. When it comes to cancer, Dr. Lee, there's a lot now about sugar and cancer. And I think this is where there's a bit of complexity around food because some of these foods, of course, let's say kiwi fruits or pomegranate juice or the sort of food you're talking about, of course course some of them can raise our blood sugar some of them do contain degrees of sugar i know they come with lots of other ingredients as well but how can you help us look at that what's the relationship between sugar and cancer and then how does that impact the foods that we consume yeah it's a great question. And I get asked this a lot. What I try to do is to make people feel comfortable with the idea that our body needs sugar.

In fact, the organ in our body that needs the most sugar is our brain. It is it is sugar fuels our metabolism. fuels our metabolism. And the key is that in most people who are able to, your body is able to process a small amount of sugar without a problem, without any problem whatsoever. And so the sugars that you might have encounter in your whole foods, so fruits and vegetables, those are completely fine. Your body should be able to take care of that. It's the sugars that are dangerous for diseases and the sugars that damage your microbiome, that spark inflammation, that can even damage your DNA. That's the concept of added sugar. So it's a can of soda that's got 10 tablespoons of added sugar to it to make it really sweet. No body,

no human body can tolerate that over any period of time. And so what I try to say is that like, it's so easy, so tempting when it comes to something like sugar to go for that all or nothing approach. No, our body needs a little sugar. Your body can actually handle most sugar when it comes in a fruit or vegetable. It's just fine. Added sugar, candies, cakes, sodas, okay? You know, those are the ones that easily overwhelm you. So if you're sensitive to sugar, just like you've got diabetes,

you've got to sort of cut down or cut out those things and be super mindful of making those types of choices. But fruits and vegetables, you have to look at the human data. Okay. Don't focus on how much sugar is in a mango. Mango is pretty sweet fruit. Take a look at the human data to show that people who eat mango and other tropical fruits have a much lower incidence of disease X and Y and Z, look, you can't argue with the science and you can't argue with the data. Sugar itself, nothing that's natural is by itself inherently evil. And I think that's the thing that I'm trying to get people to think about with sugar. It's a matter of source, it's a matter of quantity and a matter of degree yeah i want to

be very respectful to your time uh i've not even scratched the surface of what i wanted to talk to you about so maybe we can set up another conversation in the future at some point but just to finish off the sort of cancer conversation um i'd love to mention before we end a few sort of more helpful foods like mushrooms mushrooms, for example, that you would recommend people focus on. But where does fasting fit into this? Because we talked about the addition of foods into our diet to help us repair DNA and such like. But there's also a case, isn't there, to actually withdraw foods from our body for a set period of time to help us heal and repair as well, right? Right. So again, similarly to how we were just talking about sugar, fasting is another topic

that's captured the public attention. And people think of sort of fasting as extremes. I think that we tend to think when foods in terms of extremes. Here's the science. We know that the body needs a certain number of calories just to function in its ordinary state. And we know that if you go in a if you're lost in the desert, or when you don't have any food, you're not going to be eating, you're going to starve to death. And at some point, your body is going to run out of energy, and your systems are going to collapse. And you'll just trip up in a desert and be dead. Now, we also know that if you pound yourself and you overload yourself with calories, you're going to be unhealthy, metabolically unhealthy.

You can develop diabetes. You can develop all these other chronic diseases, the chronic inflammatory state, and you're going to gain weight. And when you gain weight, the fat tissue actually is also more inflammatory. So these are the extremes you want to avoid. You don't want to die in a desert, starve, and nor do you want to actually balloon up and become deadly unhealthy, as I call it. All right. Having spelled out those bookends, let's talk about what the science tells us. The science tells us that if we restrict our calories, okay, that's called fasting. Periods that we don't eat. By the way, we all fast. When you're sleeping, you're fasting. That's why they call it the morning meal breakfast is because we're actually breaking our evening fast. So fasting is something we do. It doesn't have to be extreme, but we do know that when we actually restrict our calories, wonderful things happen to our health defense systems. It all comes

back to our health defenses. It turns out it helps your body by restricting calories, intermittent fasting. Our body's defenses and androgenesis help to starve starve cancer it kind of helps our body cut off the blood supply to cancers um we know that when you actually um intermittently fast you call out more stem cells your stem cells kind of reboot and then the fresh ones come out so it's kind of like um trying to think like changing the batteries in a flashlight you you get refreshment. We know when you intermittently fast, it also reboots your gut microbiome. Yeah. So, you know, it kind of takes away some of the bad neighbors and some fresh neighbors, better neighbors that reorganize the neighborhood. We also know that intermittent fasting helps to repair your DNA and it even slows down cellular aging at the level of the caps on the end of your DNA, the telomeres that burn down

normally during aging, intermittent fasting slows that aging process down at the cellular level. And inflammation, intermittent fasting, by the way, helps us develop a more fortified immune system because part of the reboot at the stem cell level is to make new immune cells. So we've got fresh super soldiers produced coming right out of the oven to help our immune system. So these are ways that intermittent fasting has been shown to help our defenses. It doesn't mean that you have to do it all the time. It means that this is another technique we can use to kind of up our game periodically when it comes to our health. Is it something you do in your own life? technique we can use to kind of up our game periodically when it comes to our health. Is it something you do in your own life?

You know, the answer is yes. And I've been doing this since medical school. I don't know if this was your experience. But man, when I was in medical school, I have to say it was difficult for me to have three square meals a day, as they say. You know, I would sometimes miss breakfast, I would sometimes miss lunch, I would sometimes miss breakfast, I would sometimes miss lunch, I would, you know, I would try not to miss dinner, but sometimes I wouldn't have a meal for, you know, because I was so crazy busy. And I think I naturally, over the course of a week, probably skip three meals a week. And you know, that you don't you don't have to go crazy. You don't have to be you don't have to be a robot to do intermittent fasting.

Skipping a few meals a week actually is helpful for your body. Sounds like you were intermittent fasting by accident before it even became a thing. Final two quick questions, if I can. Could you leave the listeners with some kind of top foods that you would ideally have them focus on? I appreciate that actually it's very hard to distill everything down to that. But also you wrote your book, we're recording this end of January 2022. It came out from what I can tell March 2019, almost three years ago. If you were writing the book now what new information would you put in it that you weren't able to put in three years ago let me start with that question first because

the answer is i'm actually writing my next book right now okay so i'm actually adding all and enhancing that information so my book my next book is really kind of a sequel to this first book. And it's, you know, so it's not on a completely different, it's not switching off the topic. It's like, what did we learn about the health defenses that take things to the next level? So I will kind of create not a spoiler, but a teaser. And I will tell you that the next level of where you go with your health defenses is the metabolism. And I will tell you that the next level of where you go with your health defenses is the metabolism.

So not only can you actually improve all your health defenses, but our health defenses are inextricably wired to our metabolism. And our metabolisms obviously wired to our ability to be able to control one of the most important organs in the body. And this is a bit of a surprise, body fat is an organ. So while many people curse the amount of body fat that they actually have, the reality is back to the set point, we want to kind of use fat to our advantage. And so that's what my next book is about. It's sort of more in health defenses, taking it to the level of metabolism, and then taking it to actually managing fat, finally, for the right reasons. Now, let's talk about some foods that everybody should know about. I'm going to purposefully tell you, tell it to people through my own lens, because I want to tell people the

foods that I actually enjoy. So I enjoy green tea. Okay. Here's my Earl Grey, but I have got lots of tins of green tea. I enjoy coffee. So think about it. I got tea on one end and coffee on the other. Coffee, by the way, contains chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid is a natural kind of insecticide that the coffee plant makes. And so, by the way, that's something we didn't get a chance to talk about is what research is really revealing about how we grow our plants. Turns out that the nibbles that insects do on plants, on the leaves and stems, are perceived by the mother plant as a wound. So the response to wound healing with these little nibbles that insects make is that the plant pumps

out more bioactives like chlorogenic acids. So the organic coffee bean actually has more chlorogenic acid than a conventionally grown one because the one that's conventionally grown has all these pesticides. Now you don't have as many nibbles. And so it's not only that you have less of the pesticides, less chemicals, but you've got more of the good stuff, which is a good thing. So coffee, I love coffee. I love tea. Among leafy green vegetables, which we all know are good for us,

I like Swiss chard. I like some forms of kale, dinosaur kale. I like to cook too. Dinosaur kale, most people don't realize, it's got this funny pattern that looks like dinosaur skin, which is why it's darker green. that's the kind of kale that is used to make minestrone soup so you can actually cook with it and it and you and you blend it into the background and you get this wonderful dietary fiber mushrooms i love mushrooms all kinds of mushrooms you know white button the lowly white button mushroom packed with a soluble fiber called beta-d-glucan, which boosts your immunity, starves cancer. Most people who get button mushrooms eat the cap. The stem actually, it's got twice as much of the good stuff, so don't throw the stems away. Save those stems, make it into a soup, cut it up into a salad, stir fry it. There's all kinds of ways you can actually use the whole plant. I like dried

mushrooms as well, like porcini mushrooms, which you can buy in a specialty store or order it online. Amazing flavor for a stew or risotto, anything else you want to make or a pasta. I love mushrooms, spices and herbs. I like all kinds of spices and herbs, I like all kinds of spice with herbs, uh, rosemary, but basil, uh, turmeric, cinnamon, uh, all of those types of spices. I love the flavors. They make your food taste a lot better. Seafood. Um, you know, I do like salmon, but oddly, as I got into looking at food lower in a food

chain that actually has great healthy omega-3 fatty acids, polyunsaturated acids. I found that sardines are really delicious, these tinned sardines. And by the way, I started this in medical school, so I'm kind of giving you a confession. I didn't have time to cook a good meal. And so if I was late night and I wanted to whip up something, I'd boil some pasta, like usually some whole grain pasta, not very much. And I would sit around looking at some really good olive oil, some tinned sardines and squeeze a lemon. And I would literally boil the pasta, put it into a pan with a little olive oil. I'd open up a tin of sardines and just with a fork, cut it up, mix it up,

put some fresh ground pepper, squeeze some lemon on it and bam, had a Mediterranean meal. So I actually do like seafood like that. An odd confession, I actually really love squid ink. So when you have squid ink pasta or you go to Spain or Italy, they have these. Squid ink actually cuts off the load supply to cancer. It preserves your stem cells. So many different great ingredients.

And I love a juicy pear, a peach in the summer. There's nothing much more that I love than a juicy peach. But those are just some of the foods that I love. Well, thanks for sharing that. And of course, in your book, you've detailed what the benefits of all these foods are, what they do for us, what they do for their various health defense systems. Black tea, green tea, I hope you're sleeping well with all that tea that you're drinking. Of course, some people struggle with that. And just at the end of this conversation, I just want to acknowledge you, Dr. Lee, because I think you're doing incredible work.

Thank you for joining us. Where would you like to direct my listeners right at the end of this conversation? Yes, of course, your book, but is there anywhere else? Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that people where people can find me because I'm always pumping out new information and disseminating it, you can come to my website. It's drdrwilliamlee.com. You can find me on social. I'm on Instagram, Facebook at Dr. William Lee, Dr. William Lee, li. And, you know, one of the things I wanted to just quickly touch base on is that, you know, when you talked about agency and, um, uh, and empowerment, I learned like everyone else at the very beginning of this pandemic, that here

was a moment where no one, whether you were a doctor or whether you're not a doctor, an ordinary person, had no idea what was going on. We had no solutions for this disease, nothing that the medical community could really offer up. And that's when I realized that there was a big opportunity, a big need to be able to communicate to people what decisions they can make three times a day for foods that they have to eat, even if you are locked in. And we still, without medical things. So something I learned from the last couple of years was that this agency to be able to make good decisions was never more clearly seen than what we all shared as humans, the same experience on the planet that it was this health threat that we didn't quite understand. And yet we still needed to make these

food decisions. And so that's really why I created this masterclass. I hold it every other month. It's free. It's my opportunity to share with people the new science that's coming out about your health defenses and the foods that I like to share with people that they might eat for their own health. Very powerful words to end this conversation on. Thank you for all the work you're doing. And I look forward to the next time

we get to have a conversation. Look forward to it. Thank you so much for having me. Worthy hope you enjoyed that conversation as always do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life and perhaps this week it will be one food one food that you introduce into your life thank you so much for listening have a wonderful week and always remember you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.