Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Eat to Beat Disease | Dr William Li #415

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D 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

Starting point is 00:00:51 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. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 234 of the podcast with medical doctor and author Dr. William Lee. Dr. Lee believes that the decisions we make every day about what to eat have a huge influence on our health. In this clip, he shares how specific foods can strengthen our health defense systems and help our bodies heal. Our bodies heal.

Starting point is 00:01:53 Our body is actually 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. Biological systems 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. Perhaps could you take us through these defence systems that you've learnt about? Because I know you've identified five of them. Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about resilience first before I talk about the health defenses. So think about how resilient the human body is, right? We can take a punch

Starting point is 00:02:35 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, 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 or like a big ocean liner, you know, sailing through rough seas. There is kind of a set point that no matter how big the waves are, our center of gravity is where everything wants to get back to. And that is actually critical health.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Now, what's the gyroscopes of our health? How do we actually maintain our balance? That's where these health defenses actually come into play. Now, these defenses are designed to protect our bodies the same way that in a medieval fortress, there are these defenses, right? Yeah. You have the moat. You actually have the drawbridge, you have those

Starting point is 00:03:45 arrow slits that you can shoot out of. 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. 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. And on the

Starting point is 00:04:38 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. And so the body maintains its resilience in circulation by literally maintaining a balance, the set point, this gyroscope, center of gravity. So blood vessels are one of them. Secondly, our stem cells. We formed in a womb with stem cells.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Well, when we're born, we have extra stem cells left over that were not used. The ovaries. 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. We've got about roughly the same number of bacteria growing inside our body as we actually have human cells.

Starting point is 00:05:55 And beyond bacteria, there's even viruses that are healthy viruses. In fact, there are 10 times more viruses in and on the body than bacteria. So it's 380 trillion and on the body than bacteria. So it's 380 trillion viruses, the human virome. 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

Starting point is 00:06:24 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 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

Starting point is 00:06:50 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. 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 DNA and our immune system. 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

Starting point is 00:07:39 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 the new carpet in our house and the fumes, 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. 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 is so important to us. And we know that when it functions properly, it makes the proteins that support our life.

Starting point is 00:08:29 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. 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?

Starting point is 00:09:14 One of my favorite things is to go out on a beautiful sunny day with blue skies. 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:09:53 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 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

Starting point is 00:10:50 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. 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

Starting point is 00:11:37 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 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 filled with food bits and now let's pour those in the drain as well. Okay. Now let's add some more. Now let's take a garbage pail filled 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

Starting point is 00:12:16 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. 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

Starting point is 00:13:07 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. 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. Well, that kiwi is 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, which is pretty easy, right? I mean, you peel it, you cut it up, you put it into a yogurt. It's something that simple actually will help your

Starting point is 00:13:59 DNA build itself back up so that damaged DNA will will be repaired so don't don't forget like think about the way of protecting your dna um 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 you know 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.

Starting point is 00:14:49 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. 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, most of the foods that I know of, that I've done research on,

Starting point is 00:15:31 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

Starting point is 00:15:53 been around for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, are also going to have these multiple type effects. 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, 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? Yeah, that's right. 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

Starting point is 00:16:34 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. Now, let's talk about some foods that everybody should know about.

Starting point is 00:17:11 I'm going to purposefully 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. 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. Among leafy green vegetables, which we all know are good for us, I like Swiss chard.

Starting point is 00:17:34 I like some forms of kale, dinosaur kale. That's the kind of kale that is used to make minestrone soup. So you can actually cook with it and you blend it into the background and you get this wonderful dietary fiber. Mushrooms. I 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 um who get button mushrooms eat the cap the stem actually it's got twice as much of the good stuff so so don't throw the stems away. Spices and herbs, I like all kinds of spices and herbs. I love the flavors. They make your food taste a lot better. Seafood. I do like salmon, but oddly, as I got into looking at food

Starting point is 00:18:20 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, an odd confession, I actually really love squid ink. So when you have squid ink pasta or you go to Spain or Italy, the squid ink actually cuts off the load of phytic cancer. It preserves your stem cells. So many different great ingredients. And I love a juicy pear and 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.

Starting point is 00:18:59 And so one of the things that I do, I've always challenged people who go, well, 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 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 out there.

Starting point is 00:19:35 That's the best way to enrich our lives and our health at the same time. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Eat to Beat Disease | Dr William Li #415

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