Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How to Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer with Dr William Li #376

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Dr William Li returns to the podcast to talk about his latest book, Eat To Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer. He describes it as an anti-diet book for people who love food. It’s a ground-breaking look at the latest science around how we can harness the power of food, to activate our innate fat-burning systems and transform our health. We talk about the common foods that are marketed as healthy yet are anything but. We talk about the important role that our gut bacteria play in our metabolism, and we talk about the foods that can damage our gut microbiome, resulting in us processing food less efficiently and potentially contributing to weight gain. That being said, Dr Li is actually really keen not to villainise any food – there are many reasons why humans choose to eat certain foods and drinks, from our innate sweet tooth to cultural, social or religious traditions. He just wants us to be mindful of what we’re consuming, how and why.   We also do a deep dive on fat. What exactly is fat? Many of us have negative associations with that word but the truth is that fat is a very important endocrine organ. The problems only start to arise when we start storing too much, of the wrong type of fat, in the wrong places. And one of those harmful types of fat is something called visceral fat - which is a harmful type of white fat, not visible from the outside, that can sit inside us, causing inflammation, hormone disruption and playing havoc with the health of our internal organs. Dr Li explains why an expanding waistline and snoring at night, could be early indicators that you have an issue with internal fat, that needs addressing. As well as being a scientist and medical doctor, Dr Li is really a foodie at heart. And, so of course, we talk about some of his favourite foods which have medicinal properties and fat-burning potential. He also explains why his preferred diet is something that he calls ‘MediterrAsian’ and he is keen to bust some common myths around metabolism – such as, is it true that our metabolism slows down as we get older? This is an episode jam-packed with insights and practical information. Dr Li is an excellent communicator and full of passion. I hope you enjoy listening.  Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.exhalecoffee.com/livemore https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore https://www.seed.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/376 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

We're either born with a slow or a fast metabolism. You know, when kids are teenagers, they're eating two or three meals, their metabolism must be going off the charts. When we reach our middle age, we're naturally going to expand our middle because our metabolism naturally slows down. It turns out all of those ideas are false. Humans all go through only four phases of metabolism from birth to the end of life. The first thing is that everyone's born with the exact same metabolism. The real mic drop here is that from age 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 60 is rock solid. It's stable. It

does not decrease. So in this research, when they added the effect of extra body fat back into the system, it crushes your metabolism. So excess fat slows your metabolism, not the other way around. It's good news because it means that we now have the power to be able to affect some change to fight that extra body fat in our middle years. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. And this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

Today's guest is Dr. William Lee, a world-renowned medical doctor who is keen to help us all understand better how we can use food as medicine. Dr. Lee first came on my podcast back in early 2022 to talk about his first book, Eat to Beat Disease. And the occasion for his return is the publication of his second book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer. Now he describes his latest book as an anti-diet book for people who love foods. It's a groundbreaking look at the latest science around how we can harness the power of foods to activate our innate fat-burning systems and transform our health. We begin our conversation talking about the common foods that are marketed as healthy, yet are actually anything but. We talk about the important role

that our gut bacteria play in our metabolism. And we talk about the foods that can damage our gut microbiome, resulting in us processing food less efficiently and potentially contributing to weight gain. That being said, Dr. Lee is actually really keen not to villainize any foods There are many reasons why humans choose to eat certain foods and drinks From our innate sweet tooth to cultural, social or religious traditions He just wants us to be mindful of what we're consuming, how and why We also do a deep dive on fat that I think you will find really, really interesting. What exactly is fat? You see, many of us have negative associations with that word, but the

truth is that fat is a very important endocrine organ. The problems only start to arise when we start storing too much of the wrong type of fat in the wrong places. And one of those harmful types of fat is something called visceral fat, which is a harmful type of white fat not visible from the outside that can sit inside us, causing inflammation, hormone disruption, and playing havoc with the health of our internal organs. disruption and playing havoc with the health of our internal organs. Someone could look thin on the outside, but be fat on the inside. And Dr. Lee explains why an expanding waistline and snoring at night could be early indicators that you have an issue with internal fat that needs addressing.

Now, Dr. Lee, as well as being a scientist and medical doctor, is really a foodie at heart. And so of course we talk about some of his favorite foods, which have medicinal properties and fat burning potential. He also explains why his preferred diet is something that he calls mediterranean. And he is really keen to bust some common myths around metabolism, such as our metabolism slows down as we get older. Is that really true? Well, you're about to find out. This is an episode jam-packed with insights and practical information. Dr. Lee is an excellent communicator, full of passion and knowledge. I hope you enjoy listening. Dr. Lee, you talk in your new book about certain foods which can impact how much

fat we store on our bodies. Now, before we get to those specific foods, I wonder if you can talk me through some of the common foods that people are consuming that they think are healthy, but actually are not. You know, this is where I think we all get confused by the surround sound of marketing of things that are supposedly healthy. And I think that you can think about like diet sodas being better than regular sugar sweetened sodas. Not true. Diet sodas with artificial sweeteners damage our gut health, which then damages our metabolism, which can actually have tremendous impact in our body's metabolism. Another one is fruit juice. Look, I enjoy drinking the taste of fruit juice,

but when you guzzle fruit juice, which many people do, it's a problem. I'll give you an example. I love oranges, especially when they're in season during the winter. I love eating a regular juicy sweet orange. I love all the fiber that's in it. I love the taste of the whole orange. And it's very sweet. But a single orange is very nutrient dense. I could guzzle, it would take me a few minutes to eat an orange, but I could guzzle down a tall glass of orange juice, which it would take eight oranges to make in 30 seconds, right? And so that's an example of where you can easily overload

the sugars, the fruit sugars, by having a tall glass of its juice instead of eating the whole fruit. So that's an example, like lots of fruit juices. And some of the fruit juices you get in a store are also sweetened. And so people don't check the ingredients to look at all those other additives that are in there as well. You know, we know that coffee and tea are also healthy beverages. But if you take a look at some of the flavored coffees, you know, the drive-thrus, you get your handed that special seasonal version with the pumpkin or whatever. You know, a lot of those flavors, as tasty as they may be, I even like them. You know, they're artificial. They're artificially flavored, artificially sweetened.

And that also takes something that's healthy and makes it, frankly, not just less healthy, but actually unhealthy. Another example would be plant-based foods, you know, the plant-based burgers that they talked about that everyone says is a healthier version than a, you know, a regular burger. Well, look, we know that ultra-processed foods that you buy anywhere are not good for our overall health. And in fact, it compromises our metabolism when we eat too many ultra-processed foods. metabolism. We eat too many ultra-processed foods. And although something that might be plant-based sounds healthy, in fact, when it's ultra-processed, it winds up being something less than healthy and falls squarely in the box of ultra-processed foods. And so it's sort of a bit of buyer beware, be careful about not being snowed by the marketing messages that are out there. Understand what we're looking for in terms of healthy foods and kind of exclude everything that's not. Yeah, I appreciate you outlining some of those common foods there. You know,

as you were talking there, Dr. Lee, the word that came up for me was nuance. There's a bit of nuance here. Tea and coffee are healthy drinks for most people. Lots of these blue zones around the world are consuming tea, coffee, and water as their main drinks, as you write about in your new book. But they're not probably putting in the syrups and all the flavors and all the things. So coffee can be healthy for some people in the right dose at the right time, potentially can turn into something quite unhealthy depending on what you're putting in it. And this whole idea of ingredient labels, I think is something that will come up time and time again. You write about this beautifully in your book. What about something like bread? I think bread

fits into this. Bread is one of those foods that is consumed all over the world, but there are probably some breads that for some people are health promoting, whereas others are not so good, are they? You know, it's so true. I'm glad you brought up the idea of bread. I actually think of bread and wine as two categories of foods that date back to the origins of our humanity. So basically, when humans started to put together their societies thousands of years ago, we fermented grapes, we made bread. There's some of the elemental foods that characterize sort of human society from a cultural sense. that characterize sort of human society from a cultural sense. And one of the things that I think is quite challenging is, first, the quality of the ingredient that goes into the product. So for bread, as an example, the least expensive, softest, longest lasting breads that you can buy in the grocery store,

Longest lasting breads that you can buy in the grocery store, in the supermarkets, are the ones that are made with the lowest quality flour and that have lots of other preservatives added to it to allow it to kind of survive the centuries. Like some of these breads probably could stay intact in a pyramid, you know, for thousands of years. I kid you not. And yet, those are some of the cheapest ones that people are accustomed to, maybe from childhood. Our mom might have fed us this and made our sandwiches out of this, and we become accustomed to having cheap bread. That's one thing, is the quality of the grain used for something as elemental as bread. Second is really that, you know, whether we're having whole grain or whether actually ultra processed flour can also make a difference. There's lots of different types of grains that can be used to make bread. And then of course, there are some historically important breads like sourdough, which in fact has microbiome probiotic starters that are good for our gut health.

For example, like lactobacillus rooteri, it happens to be one of the starters. It's found in our gut bacteria. making sourdough bread generation after generation to develop its own probiotic bacteria that grows right in the bread itself in the little dough that gets pinched and saved from baker to baker and passed down through the generations. So I think that there's also nuance, as you say. And then, of course, there's something that's maybe less nuanced, which is volume. A little bread probably is just fine, but eating bread the way that we are often served bread or accustomed to eating bread, which is wolfing down large quantities of bread, that clearly, like anything else that is consumed in excess, definitely can compromise

our health. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. It's interesting what you said there about quantity. This is something I've learned about in my own life, not necessarily dealing with patients, of course, that's taught me a lot over the years. But I have experimented with wearing a CGM for a couple of weeks, a few times a year, not all the time, but now and again. couple of weeks, a few times a year, not all the time, but now and again. And I have learned, whether it's white rice or bread, the quantity makes a huge difference on the impact it has on my body. And so that device for me has been a really great learning tool to go, hey, you know, if you want to enjoy this, you can, but if you want it to not cause long-term health consequences, maybe just go easy on the volume and the amounts. And you know what? I probably changed the amount I was consuming. Let's say white rice, for example. Let's say I'm going to

have white rice in the evening with my meal, which I grew up in an Indian family. It's a food that I grew up eating. But I can actually have a really small amount now and enjoy it and actually not see it impact my blood sugar. So that's been really quite amazing for me. Have you experienced things like this yourself as well? And I guess, is that what you're getting at with quantity? Yes. I mean, you know, I'm so glad you brought the continuous glucose monitoring as a non-invasive way for us to measure ourselves. I mean, you know, and I think this is where the future is going. Giving us the ability relatively easily to see how we're doing from moment to moment, day to day, is super helpful. from moment to moment, day to day is super helpful. For me, a simple device that I've actually experimented with,

similarly to is, I don't know if you've seen these, it's like a breathalyzer for whether you're burning carbs or fat. It's called a Lumen device. Yeah. And it's quite interesting that the fact that it breaks down a respiratory equivalent for your metabolism just through a breathalyzer. If a policeman can pull you over to the side of the road for drinking too much alcohol, why can't we actually be at home and measure in the morning, as I sometimes do occasionally, just to check in to see how I've been done. And to your point, exactly. I found that when I'm actually moderate and mindful in what I consume, not only in terms of what, but also the quantity of how much I ate, I actually do better. And that's actually a positive reinforcement. So, you know, I think

these little signals that actually help us get smarter about our own behavior and what's good for us. It's not a big ask. It's actually a very easy thing to do. Yeah. It's interesting what we've just been talking about, how we might be able to use tech or all kinds of things, blood tests, whatever it might be, to actually learn what's working for us and what's not working for us, I think really speaks to the message in your new book, which is very much one of personalization. You've done a beautiful job outlining, I think, 150 plus foods in that book, right? These foods are going to help you burn fat. They're going to help you lose weight, give you more energy. Whatever it might be you're looking for, these foods are

going to help you. But you really beautifully put across this idea, which I'm a huge fan of, that you have to personalize this for you. If some of those foods on that list you don't like or don't fit you and your culture and your upbringing, that's okay. There's other foods you can focus on. And you're not prescribing an actual diet per se in this book, more, I think, a way of eating. And you're trying to help people with, I guess, some base principles. I think you say in the book, actually, Dr. Lee, that you prefer people to be mindful eaters rather than prescriptive eaters. to be mindful eaters rather than prescriptive eaters? 100%. I think one of the things that makes diets fail, and by the way, my title of my new book,

Eat to Beat Your Diet, is a trick title purposefully. It's not a diet book. It's actually an anti-diet book, which is why it's called Eat to Beat Your Diet. The science tells us that if we eat mindfully, and if we make good choices, and we actually think about the volume, sort of what we eat and how we eat, we can use the equipment, the hardwiring, the operating system that's in our bodies to be able to work on our behalf without going to these extreme fad interventions, fad diets. I mean, as you now know, it goes crazy when people are, we're a society obsessed with weight loss, whether it's, you know, prescription drugs for weight loss, or whether it's sucking out fat from your cheeks. There's lots and lots of intense things that people do. The problem is, you know, they don't last. And for me, a healthy diet is

something that you can actually, it's sustainable. You can enjoy it. It can become second nature. And I think one of the things that I also want to add to your idea of the, just the opposite of prescriptive diet and a more natural personalized diet is aligning your life patterns, your eating patterns with what gives you joy. Because food, you know, is different from supplements or medicines. You know, we talk about food as medicine. Yes, food is medicine, but food is in so many ways, but yet food is not medicine because nobody gets joy from actually taking a medicine. If I wrote a prescription or you wrote a prescription and you gave me a prescription and I went to the pharmacy to fill it out and I started taking the

pills or I went to a hospital to get an infusion, I guarantee you it's not going to give me joy. But if we were to have a conversation about foods that can actually activate and elevate our body's natural processes to help us become healthier. And we can pick among those food ingredients and combine them in ways that are delicious and do bring us joy. That's something that would be wonderful to be able to adopt. And that to me is what's important. Yeah. Yeah. It's very clear from reading this book and your previous one, to be fair, that you are a foodie, that you enjoy cooking, you enjoy observing different cultures, you like putting it all together. So there's a real joy, I think, in reading the book because your love of food absolutely comes through really beautifully. There's quite a lot of new science in there.

A lot of the time I feel people think, well, we know everything there is to know now. We just need to do the things that people are telling us. And while some of the principles I guess we know about, there's quite a few areas of science around metabolism and brown fat, which I thought were really, really interesting that I'd love to explore with you. Before we get to that, I wonder if we can talk about gut health and weight loss, and in particular, fat loss. You've touched on it a couple of times already in terms of the probiotics within certain breads. One of the foods you mentioned at the start, which can be problematic, was diet soft drinks. And again, a lot of people will say, well, why Dr. Lee? Surely that's better than my sugar sweetened soft drink. And this all kind of speaks

to gut health. So I wonder if you could talk to these themes a little bit and help people understand what that relationship is. Right. Well, gut health is something that, you know, we live with gut health until our gut's unhealthy. All of us have experienced this. We feel perfectly fine. We don't think about our gut health until we have that crampy, bloated, gassy, uncomfortable feeling. That's our body, our gut telling us there's something wrong in the neighborhood of those 40, 39 trillion bacteria living in our cecum, which is really the final part of our colon. And the thing that is really remarkable is what these gut bacteria do for us when it comes to our metabolism. Well, we're just beginning to peel back the layers of

the onion to discover how important gut health is for our metabolism. For example, we know that a properly functioning neighborhood ecosystem of gut bacteria, our microbiome, as we know, actually helps make our body's ability to use insulin and to absorb glucose more efficient. Now, let me just put that in the context for your listeners in terms of something that they probably have heard about, but maybe didn't connect with gut health. So every time we eat food, we put it in our mouth, our pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. And that insulin combined with the food that we've absorbed through our stomach into our bloodstream draws the energy into our cells so that we're actually

able to use that energy from the food we eat in order to power our body. Now, our gut bacteria actually helps to contribute to how smooth that process is. When our gut bacteria is unhealthy, the ecosystem is disturbed. Think about how easy it is to disturb a beautiful pond in your backyard. If you were to take a gallon of dish soap and just start pouring it into the pond, you're going to start poisoning some of the tadpoles and the frogs and the natural wildlife there, and the pond is not going to be healthy. That's basically what happens when we consume things like diet sodas. It's been shown now that many of those artificial sweeteners, non-nutritive sweeteners, when we consume them, alter our gut microbiome.

They change the neighborhood. And how do we know that this actually has an impact on our metabolism? We know this from clinical studies because ironically, even though people drink diet soda so they don't gain weight with sugar, ironically, many people do gain weight if they consume enough diet soda. So if you poison your gut microbiome sufficiently and you disrupt your metabolism sufficiently, even though you're having, quote, diet soda, that's just a name on the can. The reality is that we're actually changing the biology in our body in such a way that our body is actually going to start to grow body fat and use our food, our fuel source, much less efficiently. So many other things can actually

disturb our gut health as well. Antibiotics, which are so commonly prescribed, overprescribed perhaps might be the right word to say in many societies. I think that overconsumption of alcohol can clearly interfere with your gut microbiome. Ultra processed foods, all those things are back to the ingredient label that we don't do enough. I mean, honestly, it's not a big deal to pick up something that you might put in your shopping cart, but just take a moment before it goes in to turn the box to the side and look at what's actually inside it. If you don't recognize those ingredients, if you can't pronounce them, think, are these ingredients potentially impacting my gut health, my gut microbiome? And if so, could that have an adverse effect on my metabolism?

That is something that we should all be thinking about as we just cruise through the supermarket, putting things into our car. Yeah. It really speaks to, I think, this idea behind fat loss. I want to talk about fat shortly, what it is, why it's not as harmful maybe as it's been made out to be. You make a very compelling case for the benefits of fat, which I think is really, really nuanced, very, very important for us to understand. But there is this prevailing view out there in society that it is simply an equation. It is calories in versus calories out. Or let's be a bit more precise than that. It's if your body is burning more calories than it is actually taking in, you're going to

lose weight. But the question is, how does that occur? How are we going to actually cause our body to burn off more than it's taking in? And sometimes it's about lots of different inputs, right? So let's just go back to these artificial sweeteners for a minute. And the reason I'm pausing here, Dr. Lee, is because this appears to be one of the most controversial areas, you know, sugar sweetened drinks versus diet drinks. Now, for many years, certain scientists have been advising we proceed with caution and say, listen, I'm not sure about these things. There appears to be early evidence that the gut microbiome is getting affected. Now, when you say that online, typically, a lot of the views that come back are, that's a load of rubbish, right? It's surely better than having the sugar-sweetened drink. And it becomes very, very inflammatory, like many things

to do with foods these days, to be fair. And my take as a doctor has always been to adopt the precautionary principle. A lot of these things are very new. They haven't been around for long. I personally just don't like advising people consume them. Doesn't mean I know for sure. This was a few years ago. But I was like, guys, until we know more, I think you're better off not having soft drinks. You're better off not just going to a different version of soft drink. Let's try and get you off them by and large. So I wonder if you could speak to that. Why is it so controversial and why are you so confident to be able to tell people, cut out these diet drinks from your diet? Yeah, well, I think I have the same general outlook as you in my own stance and my advice

is very similar, which is take a precautionary stance and be informed. Look, I mean, life is for the living. So we all do things that are maybe not so good for us from time to time. But every time you commit yourself to making a decision like that, just be aware. It may not be so good for you. We may not be 100% certain. And of course, everyone's a little bit different. But here's what I write about in my book, because I was deeply researching this. What's the role of beverages?

People say, well, fruit juices must be okay, because they come from fruits, which are plant based. Aren't you talking about eating plant based foods? Yes. But again, this is, you know, back to this idea of nuance, which is really important. I think that the science of the body is continuously changing and advancing so that we understand more and more what the impact is of something that we might consume and how our body responds to it. 10 years ago, there were some inklings that maybe diet soft drinks might not be so good for our metabolism. Now that we've dived deeper into gut health, we're beginning to see more concrete data that suggests that there is an impact. We also do know more greatly than ever that our gut health is so important for our overall health.

And so when we start to put together this hypothesis and start to stitch together some of the information, the precautionary position is, you know, be really careful about diet sodas and be careful about sodas in general. And so for my book, one of the things that I wanted to do is just to write about like, where's the safe harbor in all this, right? By the way, I take people in my book through the, as I was writing this section of my book on foods, I wrote for the reader, imagining that they were sitting in the grocery cart, like we all did when we were kids in our mom's grocery cart. And she was pushing us through the grocery store. And what I'm doing is kind of whispering your ear telling you what is healthy

and good for your metabolism to put in the grocery cart. And when we get to the beverage aisle, okay, there's a whole chapter on beverages. I really come to this conclusion that there are three beverages that I call the holy trinity for health. It's water, it's tea, and it's coffee in their elemental forms, right? Not the stuff that's got the syrups and things put in them, not necessarily the flavored waters necessarily, but in their elemental forms. These three beverages all have very, very compelling and deep evidence that they actually benefit our physiology. They help our body do its things in a way. 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.

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or may not be so good for you look everyone enjoys a sweet drink of course you know the remember when we were kids and you went to a function and a parent or an adult pours you a cup of punch? It's of a color that doesn't occur in nature and you drink it and, oh, it's so great. Look, this is who we are. We're humans. We enjoy sweet things. Our brain is hardwired to enjoy sweet things. But I think that one of the things is if you have the awareness that things that we may

enjoy may not be that good for us, and we're mindful about restricting, limiting, consuming only modestly, that's a good first step. I don't believe that people should go hardcore and just come off of everything that they enjoy, nor do I really believe in villainizing foods. I think we should look at all the data. And nothing speaks more to this than even something that is beneficial to you, if you consume it in excess, can overwhelm our bodies. We're just human. Yeah. I think it's a couple of really important points to pause upon there. What is, I think it's a couple of really important points to pause upon there. What is, you know, as you were talking about diet soft drinks,

you said that, look, we're all human. We all like to have things now and again that are probably not the best thing for us. And I think we need to acknowledge that and go, yeah, that is who we are. We all probably have our little tendencies, the things that we like to go to. Maybe it's stress. I know for me, if there's a lot of stress on in my life, and there is at the moment to do with my mum and her health, I tend to seek certain foods out that I know are probably not the best for me. In that moment, they feel as though there's something I want to consume. And I think we need to be honest about that. What we're not looking for is perfection. When you say diet drinks are probably not that helpful, if you're having the odd one now and again,

it's probably going to be fine. But if you're having three or four of them a day, But if you're having three or four of them a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, 12 months a year, there may be some consequences. And I think that nuance is really, really important. You mentioned also about these three beverages, water, tea, and coffee. Now, you didn't mention alcohol. There wasn't a fourth beverage, even though certain communities around the world who are written about the blue zones, for example, to be long living. Most of those blue zones, not all of them, I think, I don't think Loma Linda, the fifth blue zone, I don't think they consume alcohol. But the other four, I believe, do consume alcohol. Now, I have some very clear views about alcohol and where that fits in. How do you see alcohol in the context of our overall health?

And I guess in relation to your latest book, around the context of fat loss? Yeah. Well, I get asked this question all the time. Dr. Lee, what do you think about red wine or what about alcohol? And oftentimes the reason that someone's asking is either that they have heard that drinking red wine or drinking wine in the blue zones is touted as being associated with longevity or better health. And there are some clinical studies that also show some of these overall correlations of health benefit as well. I oftentimes think that people who are asking those questions are looking for a justification or an excuse for it. So I'm always trying to understand where the question is actually coming from. But I'm a scientist and like you and I are

both physicians, we have to answer very honestly. And the honest answer is that alcohol, ethanol, which is a chemical, it's a product of fermentation. It's actually what makes you feel boozy and drunk. There's no health benefits from it. It's a toxin. It's a toxin for virtually every organ in our body. It kills your brain, kills your liver. And you don't have to drink very much, frankly, of pure ethanol, the pure stuff, to knock yourself off. It is actually a poison.

That said, wine and other spirits, again, are part of who we are as humans, part of our humanity. You know, I mentioned it a little bit earlier, you know, from the time of earliest cultivation of agriculture, people have actually been cultivating grapes and fermenting them and not making just processed grape juice. They've been making wine. Wine actually has been a revered part of human tradition, religious ceremonies, celebrations. Wines and spirits are consumed at funerals and holidays, celebrating the new year. Cultures around the world, but in no case is the actual ethanol something that is healthy for you. It's that this is part of our human tradition. It's not done very

frequently. And like anything else, if done in moderation, it's probably okay. Now, what about the blue zones? What about these Sardinian goat herders who actually do drink red wine every night, you know, from the great Sardinian cannonel red wine, which, you know, actually is quite a nice wine. Here's the issue. They're doing almost everything else right in their lives. And so the alcohol that they're having is offset by all the other physical activity, low stress, social commitment, sense of purpose, other healthy, local, fresh foods that are actually grown and prepared in healthy ways. The absence of ultra processed foods, they're not drinking a lot of diet sodas, diet or otherwise. And so in that sense, you know, everything is a check and balance. Our body is

like a gigantic calculator. So how much does, if you do everything else right, how much does a glass or two of red wine, of ethanol do for you? Probably not much harm. And by the way, the fermentation product in red wine, if you remove the ethanol, the toxic stuff, all the other polyphenols are actually in the non-alcoholic part of the liquid. So I think this nuance part is actually really important, as you brought up. Yeah, there's just so much there. First of all, thank you for sharing your perspective. I think a lot about thresholds when I talk to my patients. There's also a course called Prescribing Lifestyle Medicine that

is accredited by the Royal College of GPs that me and a colleague teach to healthcare professionals and doctors all over the world about how to use the principles of lifestyle medicine to personalise care for the individual patients. And we've created all these frameworks to help people do that. And I talk about thresholds a lot on that course and say, look, especially when you're looking at our lifestyle behaviors, it's not always about the one thing. It's about the combination of things. What else is going on? And I completely agree to go to the theoretical mythical blue zones in our head. Let's say that goat's herder in Sardinia. What else is going on? And I completely agree to go to these, you know, the theoretical mythical blue zones in our head.

Let's say that goat's herder in Sardinia. Low levels of stress, strong community ties, local whole foods, right? Alcohol there is probably being used as a way of bonding and connecting. It's not being used, typically from what I understand, and connecting, it's not being used, typically from what I understand, as a way of de-stressing from the chronic overload, the chronic stress. And of course, in the West, we know that stress now is thought to be responsible for 80 to 90% of the conditions that medical doctors see. If you're using alcohol as a way to mitigate stress, I'm not convinced it's going to have the same impact than if you're feeling really chilled and relaxed. You're using half a glass of wine to bond with one of your best mates who you've not seen in a while. I really do believe the impact on the body is

going to be somewhat different. Also, speaking to what you just said about tea and coffee, let's say, tea and coffee are really interesting because we can epidemiologically look at populations. And I think last time you came on the podcast, we spoke a little bit about tea and we'll definitely get to tea. So I know you're a huge tea fan and how these long living populations are consuming high amounts of tea and coffee, but also to really get very granular, we can look in the lab and look at the cell and look at the science and reduce it right down and go, yes, tea and coffee have certain compounds that are going to be helping us. We can't really say the same for alcohol in the same way. Yes, epidemiologically, these populations are consuming,

but then as you said, yes, there are compounds within the alcohol. But if you look at the pure ethanol, I'm not sure yet we've got any scientific study showing that is good for our cells. Do you know what I mean? So I think on all these levels, we have to take a bit of balance and go, what else is going on in your life?

Maybe the amount of alcohol you're currently consuming is not the best thing for you, perhaps. No, I totally agree. And this idea of bonding is really important because if you're getting together to celebrate an event or mark an event and bringing people together, that social bonding actually is really important. Your gut microbiome, by the way, also responds to the bonding by helping to text message your brain to release social hormones as well. So again, I think that we tend to oversimplify the impact of foods. Nuance, again, is really important. What happens in addition to the food? What's the context in which the food is actually eaten? It's healthier to eat with people than to eat alone. Not only are you more likely to eat less, but you're also connecting with others as well. And

oftentimes, people are interested in the other's sense of purpose, which you then leave for yourself. All of these factors are there. And by the way, maybe to give another analogy that as we were talking, I was thinking about, we all do things that may not be the best for us occasionally, and that's okay. And I think giving people that acknowledgement of humanity and the occasional going off the reservation is totally fine. It's like when we drive a car, right? I mean, on the highway. Most of us abide with safety, traffic safety rules, and we drive in safe ways. Every now and then, you got to go into the fast lane and you speed and you go a little bit faster than you should, or maybe a lot faster than you should. And that's okay, you know, for the most part.

And that's okay, you know, for the most part. But if you got in a fast lane every single day and you put the pedal to the metal and went as fast as you possibly could, I guarantee you that that is unlikely to end up in a good way for you as a driver. a highway where the behaviors that we actually take, decisions that we make are not dissimilar to the decisions we make in a car on the road, that might help us understand every now and then you need to go a little bit faster, maybe even above the speed limit. And that's okay as long as you're not doing it all the time. Yeah. Thank you for that. I want to really dive now into some of the science in your new book, which, you know, the subtitle I think says it all. Burn fat, heal your metabolism, live longer. Okay. I think these are three things most of us are pretty keen to have a bit more of in our lives. Now, let's start with fat. So yes, there's a lot of people around the world now who are carrying

excess weight. When we talk about losing weight, to get really specific, I think most people are talking about losing excess fat, not necessarily weight. But let's just start off at the beginning, right? Because fat has got a bad rap. We associate fat in our bodies as being toxic, but you quite beautifully make the case that actually fat is helpful. Certainly the right kinds of fat and the right amounts can be very, very helpful and we need it. So let's go back to the start. Talk to us about fat and why it's so important for our bodies. Yeah. So first of all, I want to acknowledge that excess body fat is something that most of us can recognize instantly when we step out of the shower. I think we've all had this experience. You step out of the shower in the mirror, you're naked and out of the corner of your eye, you see in the mirror a lump or a bump that displeases you, wasn't there before. Immediately, you have this negative feeling that, oh man,

I'm gaining weight. I've got too much body fat. What's the next thing you do? You step on the scale. The number that comes up may or may not be the number you want to see. And then you start to curse yourself. And I think that as adults, this is a very common kind of reaction to the idea of fat. In fact, one of the things that, you know, if you go to the grocery store and you walk by the butcher section and you see a rind of fat around the piece of meat, it kind of gives you a negative feeling. And so one of the things that I'm a scientist, I sort of wanted to ask myself, as we certainly understand that fat is something that needs to be tamed. In some cases,

people clearly, as a doctor, I've told many people that having excess body fat puts them at high risk for chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease and cancer. And it's in their interest to really try to lose some of that extra body fat, not just weight. You don't want to lose muscle weight. You want to lose body fat. And frankly, not every kind of body fat. It made me as a scientist want to go back to the origin. So this is where I think we really want to begin at the beginning. Okay. First of all, a lot of people don't realize that fat is formed on our body while we're in our mother's womb. That is formed on our body while we're in our mother's womb. And this is some of the origins.

So when your mom's egg met your dad's sperm and they fertilized and it turned into a ball of cells that would become the future you. One of the first tissues that lays down is formed is your circulation because every organ is going to need to have a blood supply. Another tissue that gets laid down very early are your nerves because every organ is going to need instructions through the wiring that nerves provide. Then the third tissue that forms as we develop in the body, in the womb, is our body fat. They're called adipose cells. That's the name of the cell that fat is, of which fat is composed. And adipose cells or little fat cells wrap around like bubble wrap around blood vessels. Now, you know, the bubble wrap is the packing wrap that you can click and pop. All right.

They're little fat cells. They're tiny. They wrap around nerve circulation. Now, why do they do this? It has to do with what fat ultimately is designed to do after we're born, which is when later we eat food and we have that energy, the insulin that we mentioned earlier, will draw the energy into ourselves, but any extra energy gets stored into the fat. So it makes a lot of sense that fat cells, which form our fuel tanks, just like the fuel tank in your car, is located next to a blood vessel because as we eat food, the nutrients go into our, the energy goes into our bloodstream.

And we want to store it right in our fuel tank in the same way that when you pull over to the filling station and you want to put petrol in your car, you want to have it close by so that the nozzle can go into the tank. So that's how we form when we're little. Now, fast forward to nine months when we are born and we take our first breath. Think about the appearance of fat on a baby. A healthy baby is a chubby baby, round tummy, round cheeks, arms and legs that look like those balloons in the circus that the clown twists to make a poodle, right? A little circus animal. A fat baby, a chubby baby is a happy baby. In fact, that's how we know. It brings a smile to our faces. And in fact, if we saw a baby that was thin with chiseled cheeks like a runway model, thin arms and long, thin thighs,

we'd be freaked out and we'd say, there's something seriously wrong with this infant, right? And we'd be completely correct. And so the fact is that body fat, even as we are young, is something that is part of who we are. It serves a very important role. And that sets up for asking. And by the way, because it's formed in a womb, I always tell people semi-jokingly, you had body fat before you had a face you could stuff with food. All right. you had body fat before you had a face you could stuff with food. So that's why we need to kind of dissociate this idea of eating too much and gobbling up and then having fat grow. The fat actually plays a very, very important healthy role. So it turns out there's at least four functions of fat that we didn't previously appreciate. We don't appreciate

it enough. Number one, fat is actually a cushion, not just a layer of insulation like blubber, but in fact, it's a cushion. It's in our bodies to cushion our organs. Because we didn't have it, if we tripped on a rug and fell on the ground, our organs might burst because it doesn't have enough cushioning. So thank goodness we actually have fat as a healthy cushion. But the second thing that fat actually does that's quite remarkable is our fat is an endocrine organ for our metabolism. Endocrine organ is an organ that secretes hormones, like your thyroid, like your pancreas, like your adrenal glands, like your testicles, like your ovaries, like your pituitary gland. And you say, wait a minute, are you saying fat is an organ? Absolutely.

In fact, it's the largest endocrine hormone secreting organ in our body. And the hormones that fat secretes, there's at least 15 of them. I just want to let people know the hormones that your normal healthy body fat secretes allows you to stay alive and gives you the energy to just be who you are and to function to get from place to place and do ordinary things and three of the hormones that people need to know number one there's a hormone called leptin leptin is sometimes known as a satiety hormone meaning it makes you feel full but i prefer to have people understand this is how i understand as a scientist it's more of a volume switch you turn it up you turn full, but I prefer to have people understand. This is how I understand as a scientist. It's more of a volume switch. You turn it up, you turn it down. Okay. When leptin is

up, you don't want to eat as much volumes up. When leptin is down, you want to eat some more, but you know, your body fine tunes that switch. It's not a, it's not a light switch and on and off switch. It's more of a volume switch. Okay, so that's something that healthy fat makes. In order to help us gear towards going to the fuel tank, eating food so we can load up our body tank with fuel so our metabolism can go to work. Another hormone is called adiponectin. Adiponectin is a fat-made hormone. That's why it's called adiponectin because it's made by adipose cells. it's called adiponectin because it's made by adipose cells. A lot of people don't know this, but if I went to a patient and I asked for a vial of blood and I sent it to the hospital lab for measuring all the possible organs out there, the results would come back. And many people would be

surprised that their normal healthy levels of adiponectin, this fat derived hormone, is a thousand times higher than other hormones in your body, higher than cortisol, higher than thyroid hormone. And the question is, why is it so high? Why is this fat hormone the highest level of hormone in your body? It's because adiponectin helps insulin draw in energy from the food we eat. Adiponectin from fat works with insulin from our pancreas. Two endocrine organs work together so that when we eat food and we have energy, it can draw the energy efficiently into our cells. The more adiponectin we make, the more energy or the more efficiently we draw the energy in. This is how important our fat is. It's making adiponectin so our insulin will actually

work. Insulin sensitivity being very, very important. Ironically, you're saying fat, Dr. Lee, helps insulin sensitivity? Absolutely. The right amount of fat is critical for insulin to actually work. Now, you have too much of it or too little of it, you got a problem. Now, the other hormone is called resistant. And if adiponectin is the gas pedal to allow us to absorb energy more efficiently, resistant is the brake. So we're not so fast. Maybe slow down just a little bit, right? So just like I remember driving a car, the accelerator and brake, they work together.

You don't want to have only the accelerator. That'd be a problem. Or only the brake. You wouldn't go anywhere. And so these are three fat hormones that are really important. Leptin, adiponectin, and resistant, all without worrying about obesity or diabetes. In fact, you need these things to function properly. So this is the endocrine function. The third function that is vital, actually, is that our fat is the fuel tank. We talked about this earlier, but as adults,

is the fuel tank. We talked about this earlier, but as adults, when we eat food and we are powering in our insulin and adiponectin is just helping that energy into our body. So we can go to the next meeting or, or, or make the bed or, you know, go out grocery shopping or go to a part birthday party. Um, anything extra than what we need, our body stores that extra energy into our fat cells. Now, every fat cell is pliable. It's kind of like a balloon. You can actually put a lot of fat into it. Lipogenesis is what it's called, creating fat cells for triglycerides. You can expand a fat with this fuel, load up the fuel tank, so it's 100 times larger

than where it started out. Unlike a car's fuel tank, which is fixed a hundred times larger than where it started out. So unlike a car's fuel tank, which is fixed and made out of metal, our fat fuel tanks actually can expand and you can expand it a hundred times. And if you continue to eat and you have extra energy, well, your body will just tap into another fat cell and blow that up a hundred times. Oh, still more food. Let's just go to another fuel cell and blow that up. Oh, you're still eating? Oh, still overeating?

Well, now we've kind of run out of fat cells. Let's go to our stem cells and make a brand new fat cell and blow that up. And again, and again, and again, the more we overeat, the more we've got to load up on this fuel. And very simply, if you think about the food we eat and the energy that we store, that our metabolism actually uses to drive our body, this makes overeating and the growth of fat completely understandable. So fat is our fuel tank. But if we overload our fuel tank, it'll actually be a problem. Now, by the way, this fuel tank analogy is very important because if we actually had a car and we noticed that the fuel tank was low, the gauge was low, we pull over to the filling station, we load up our fuel tank. Most of the time, there's a clicker at the end of the fuel gauge that when the tank is full, it'll click and it'll stop filling up the tank.

Imagine if you didn't have this automatic stop of the fuel. Fuel tank fills up. oops, it's broken, and you're still loading fuel. And what's going to happen? The fuel is going to, petrol is going to come out of the tank, run down the side of the car, around the tires, pool around your legs. And now you're going to be standing in this dangerous, toxic, flammable substance of too much fuel.

Now, in our body, our body is not wired with a clicker. So we can keep eating. We can keep filling up our fuel tank and filling up our fat. And in fact, what happens, just like in a car that's fuel tanks overflowing, we can have fat leak out of our fat cells when we have too much. And that fat accumulates in our liver and it is lipotoxic. Lipo meaning fat, toxic, well, it's obvious what that means. We can actually poison our liver. And one of the biggest epidemics right now is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, fatty liver meaning overloaded fuel spilling off and killing our liver. This is a silent epidemic that's actually going on that's attached directly to the behavior of

overeating in an era of abundance. So that's another, but the fuel tank part, normal healthy fuel tank is very important. And the final component of what fat does, the fourth surprise that most people don't think about. So before you kind of beat up your fat, think about these incredibly important functions is that our fat acts as a space heater. It can actually create heat. It's called thermogenesis. And not just any fat, but called brown fat. Now, we've got two colors of fat in our body, white fat and brown fat. White fat is wiggly and jiggly. It's the stuff under the arm, under the chin. It's the muffin top that people don't want to have. It's in your thighs and your butt.

White fat, subcutaneous, under the skin fat is the stuff most people want to get rid of. White fat is also visceral fat. Visceral fat is packed inside the tube of your body. When you grow visceral fat, you actually expand the tube of your body because it's like stuffing a suitcase. You need a bigger suitcase. It's expanding. It's like folding a jacket, a winter jacket, into your suitcase. It's going to not really close. It's going to really expand and be stuffed that's visceral fat that's

white fat again wiggly jiggly lumpy bumpy and when it's too much it's dangerous brown fat is completely different than that and this is actually something that a lot of people don't appreciate brown fat is paper thin wafer thin and it's not close to the skin, so you can't see it. It is close to the bone. And it's located around the side of our neck, under our breastbone, under our arms, a little bit in our belly, behind our shoulder, in between our shoulder blades. And this brown fat acts like a space heater. Actually, another analogy is it acts like the burner on our gas range or gas stove in the kitchen you click it on it goes whoosh and you get this flame and to burn that flame so you can heat up your water or heat up your soup

or cook your stew that fuel to that flame has to come from someplace and what brown fat does is it draws that fuel that energy from your harmful white fat, that overloaded fat, the fuel cells. So this is a strange but wonderful system where brown fat, good fat can burn down white fat, harmful fat in your body. So those four aspects of fat, we haven't even talked about obesity or being overweight or diabetes or chronic disease, these functions of being the cushion, creating hormones, being the fuel tank, and actually being able to light up and create heat. This is the miracle of normal, healthy fat. Yeah, I mean, that's brilliant. So insightful. And I guess in many ways, just helps to change our relationship with the word fat because it has become very toxic

and you know we can go into some of the consequences of that one of the things that I see which I think is a little bit worrying actually is you can almost not talk about weight loss anymore when you're talking about health certainly in in the UK, I don't know what it's like in America. It's very much messaging now that let's just focus on health. Let's just focus on health and well-being. Let's not talk about weight loss. And I understand that. I understand where it comes from. One of the reasons is because there's been a lot of fat shaming in culture for many years, which is incredibly toxic, is incredibly problematic. But again, with many things, we go to these extremes. And there's a bit of nuance there. And as a medical doctor, I have to be able to talk about the consequences of excess fat on our bodies.

My fourth book, Dr. Lee, was called Feel Great, Lose Weight. It was a, again, like yours, it was an anti-diet book. It was a more holistic, rounded, sustainable approach to people who want to lose excess weight. And I tell you, and I don't know if you've had this yet or not, Dr. Lee, but some of my followers were like, oh, Rangan, I love everything you've done. I love your first three books, but really shocked that you released a diet book. I'm interested as to whether you've experienced any of that yet or not. I certainly hope not. But there's a wider point here, which I think you just spoke to, that fat is not per se bad. It's when the fat becomes too much and goes into the wrong compartments when it becomes problematic.

So could you just speak to that a little bit, please? Yeah. So look, I think it's horrible to have body shaming. over decades have created this unrealistic idealism about the perfect body shape that actually whips people into a frenzy, frankly, when it comes to trying to do weight loss. So I sort of think about something more positive. And the word that I use is actually body positivity. We want to be very positive about the things in our body. And our body, if you recognize, it has been said that the body's a temple. And what I would say is that the body's hardwired. It's really remarkable. You don't have superfoods. You usually have a super body. The body is hardwired to do a lot

of remarkable things. And fat really needs to be moved from this category of something we don't want. And it's unpleasant. It's just something that's actually really needs to be moved from this category of something we don't want. Okay. And it's unpleasant. It's just something that's actually really powerful to help us attain and maintain our health. Okay. But like anything else, it's about balance. Anything that's excess in our body is generally not very healthy for us. And so fat can be thought of as absolutely a healthy tissue that we need to have enough. I want to talk about body size for one second before talking about what happens when fat goes in excess and creates chaos. But this idea about fat and body size, it's nuanced again.

One of the things that I write about in my book that I use to reframe my own thinking about body size is that if you look at some of the fittest people in the world, people who are physically fit, they have different body sizes and they could be at the peak of their fitness with different body sizes. And the best example are Olympians, Olympic athletes. Think about that. You've got the tiny gymnast, you've got the lanky marathoner, and you've got the shot putter and the weightlifter. These are all people with very, very different body sizes that are attuned to what they do best, personalized to what they do best.

And they're the fittest they're probably ever going to be in their entire lives. And we celebrate that. And I think that that's something that we can learn to do is to recognize that there is a champion that can be at any different size. And so that we don't actually try to think there's only one iconic size that actually is perfect for fitness. Let's talk about fitness. The other thing that, you know, in boxing and American boxing, you know, there are 14 different weight classes, heavyweight, you know, 250 people 250 pounds and above, but also featherweight and ultra featherweight. I mean, these are people that are light. They're like just over 100 pounds.

And again, if you look at this competition of people who are boxing with these different weight classes, there is a world champion at every weight class. And I think that if we sort of recast this idea that body size and body fat are different, fitness and body size are different. Just look at the Olympics and look at other sports. I think it's just helpful to reframe our thinking. Can I just respond to that? I think that's such a beautiful point. And I think, Dr. Lee, there's also potentially the issue of race here, where certain cultures, certain ethnicities have different body sizes and presumably carry different amounts of fat in certain ways. Yet, we seem to try and narrow everyone down to the same size and the same level. So I think that's an important thing as well. But then the wider point, Dr. Lee,

is how can someone who is reading your book or watching this or listening to this podcast right now, how can they determine if they've got the right level of fat for them to give all the benefits you've so beautifully outlined, or whether now the amount of fat they've got, the location of the fat is now starting to become problematic for them. Is there an easy way for them to do that? 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? 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. 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. The answer really is, we're beginning to find more sophisticated ways to measure this. You asked two things. Number one, how do they know how much fat is healthy versus unhealthy? And how do you measure it? And also, where is it located? That's also quite important. So we know, and before I can actually come to both of those points, let me just say one

thing. We talked about those four healthy fat functions, the cushion, the hormone, releasing of hormones, the endocrine function, the fuel tank function, and the space heater function. Look, when you actually overeat and grow too much body fat, and when your metabolism is upset, when you start to grow excess body fat, no matter where it is, okay, what happens is that excess body fat, as it accumulates, getting larger and larger and larger, this mound of fat that accumulates too quickly can do a couple of things. Number one, it rapidly outgrows its blood supply because fat's an organ. It needs its blood supply. And when it outgrows its blood supply because fat's an organ. It needs its blood supply.

And when it outgrows its blood supply because it's expanding so fast, think about fat being like a loaf of bread you put in the oven. It's just blowing up or souffle blowing up really quickly. The center part of it doesn't have enough blood vessels. It can't get enough circulation. And what happens, it's called hypoxia. Hypoxia meaning not getting enough oxygen in rapidly expanding fat tissue. Hypoxia in tissues, in human tissues,

winds up becoming inflammatory. So in addition to actually leaking the fat out of the fuel tanks, as I described, expanding fat becomes inflammatory. and inflammation pretty much screws up the hormonal function. When you script a hormonal function with ischemic or hypoxic fat that's inflammatory, in addition to the leaking of the fuel, which is a disaster, kind of an environmental disaster inside your body, what does it do to the hormonal function? Well, your leptin goes, I don't know. It's pretty messed up in here. I don't know if we're hungry or not so hungry. I don't know what to do. A diponectin. Well, I don't know. Should we make more diponectin to be more efficient or should we make less? I, I can't, I can't keep my, keep track of this and resistant. Should we slow down or speed up? I

don't know. And so when you actually grow excess fat and it starts to leak and has it becomes toxic and winds up also becoming inflammatory, we disrupt all of these functions that normally help keep us healthy. And you sort of knock it off kilter. Where in the body is this the worst? The worst place for this chaos, this riot to happen within our fat that disrupts the normal healthy function is actually within a tube of our body, right? So think of our body, our bellies, especially kind of like a sausage casing, right? So, and we know that when we wear a belt, all right, we're wearing the belt around the sausage casing. When we actually grow excess visceral fat, remember I told you it's the lumpy, bumpy fat that grows inside the tube of your body.

When we grow it, this kind of fat is like a glove, like a thick glove, like a ski glove that when it's expanding, that wraps around and strangles your organs. It can grow enormously inside the tube of your body. enormously inside the tube of your body. And I give an example of this, like if you were to try to ship some delicate champagne glasses overnight with a Federal Express or some overnight courier service, and you go to the post and basically say, can you hand me a box for these glasses? They'll give you a small thin box, and then you'll get packing peanuts. And you can just lightly pour packing peanuts in there so you have just enough and close it and mail it off. Or you could be very aggressive and stuff it with an entire bag of packing peanuts, more than you need. And you're really, really packing it in and you're forcing the lid shut and you tape it shut. The box still looks pretty thin. But inside, those peanuts are really compressing. There's way too many peanuts in there. Okay. Pressing against those glasses. That's what visceral fat can do to your organs. And now you start making this expansion leaking inflammatory system. You can

kind of see why this might be bad. Now what's the simplest way we can tell you're gaining visceral fat? Well, it's actually your belt size. So the simplest way is if your pants start getting a little tight and you have to unloosen your belt by one hole, you're probably growing visceral fat. The proverbial beer gut. It's not the muffin top. It's literally you're expanding the casing. The good news is that actually, and I read about in my book, we can actually shrink that visceral fat. There are ways that we can actually utilize our metabolism and foods to be able to shrink that visceral fat. So we have less of those peanuts packing the tube inside our body. So location does matter. While we might not enjoy seeing fat under our arm or chin, that's not the most harmful part.

The most harmful part is that visceral fat that's inside. So now you ask, well, so how much fat is too much and how much is about the right amount? Well, this is actually another interesting fact that I write about, you know, what percent body fat is considered healthy? I think it depends on your body size and there's no one number that fits for everyone. It's kind of like clothing, right? I mean, you might be small, medium, and large. You go to the store, you're going to look in the rack to look for what size works for you to fit your body type.

All right. And so I think that's really important. Again, the nuance of actually personalization is different. Again, the nuance of actually personalization is different. But in general, by percent, we're really talking about 10% to 15% is probably okay, probably a good amount. Less than 5%, some bodybuilders will really, really skinny down their body weight. And so they have less than 5% fat, 2% fat. When you do that, the reason that bodybuilders do it, man, you see every sinew in your body. You've like pretty much, you've melted away all the fat in your body. All your,

the sinews actually stick out of your muscle. It looks beautiful for competition for the judges, but that's not healthy. And in fact, studies have shown that people who have really, really low body fat, radically underweight, they actually have higher mortality than people actually have really, really low body fat, radically underweight, they actually have higher mortality than people who actually have too much weight as well. So again, this is about balance. It's about being in that Goldilocks zone of healthy amounts, not too much, not too little, but just right. I think this point about visceral fat is really, really key because many of us these days are carrying excess fat. I think that's just a reality that we may not want to acknowledge, we may not want to accept, but I think many of us are. And it doesn't always show up with us being overtly overweight. There's of course a condition

called skinny fat, whereby on the outside, people look fine. Many people will say, oh, that person can eat whatever they want. They can have cakes and pastries and drink what they want, yet they're not putting on weight. Now, certainly, cosmetically, from the outside, it may not appear that there's a problem, but that doesn't mean that internally there's no problem. I think doesn't mean that internally there's no problem. And I think you either wrote about this, or I think you said in a recent interview I watched, the fat you want to fight, you can't necessarily see. That's right. I mean, the stuff you see is subcutaneous, but the dangerous stuff is

invisible because it's actually packed inside the tube of your body. So, you know, I think we need to also shift our focus. One of the things that I try to do in my book is to explain the new science of the metabolism and the new science of body fat so that we can appreciate just how important fat actually is for our health. This isn't about body shape. It's very much about body positivity and what we're discovering about what our fat does. But too much of the wrong kind of fat in the wrong place can be extraordinarily dangerous. And we definitely want to be wary of that. By the way, one of the things that I found so interesting when I was researching my book

is where does visceral fat accumulate? What's one of the first places that visceral fat accumulates when you gain extra harmful body fat? I don't know if you read this part, but it turns out that even skinny people, regardless of your body size, but including skinny people, when you grow body fat, where do you think the first place it goes? Take a guess. You'd think your stomach, I guess, or around your waist. I think that's what most people would think. And the reason most people think that is because that's what we can see, right? We see that in a mirror. So it's exactly the logical answer, but that's not the case. The first place when we start gaining excess visceral fat, harmful fat is our tongue.

Wow. Our tongue actually can get fat. And here's the thing that's really cool. Even as a medical doctor, I didn't realize this, so no idea what deep dive into it. So I don't know if you remember from med school, Ranga, but like we had to dissect all the tissues in the body, right? To learn what's inside it so we can appreciate it as doctors and living people, what the cadavers actually would teach us. Well, I learned that more recent research has looked at the anatomy of the human tongue, which is about the size and weight of a bar of soap and found that the tongue is composed

of three different sections. The first section, the tip of the tongue, is like a circus acrobat. It can actually do all kinds of fancy feats. The middle of the tongue is very muscular because it moves food around through different parts of our mouth. It needs to be really strong. But the back of our tongue, the last third of our tongue, is actually very fatty. It's kind of a cushion.

It's in the back of our mouth, just against our throat, and it's filled with visceral fat. In fact, when you slice it open, it's marbled like a ribeye steak. It's actually like a roast, very ribbed. It's got lots and lots of marbling of visceral fat. So when we start gaining visceral fat, one of the first places it starts to accumulate is in the back of our tongue. Now, how do we know this? Studies have been done in Sweden of skinny people, women, who actually started to gain fat and it started first in their tongue. And they were able to measure this with MRI. And coincidentally, it was found that their bed partners would often say, hey, you know what? You're starting to snore.

And they would say, oh, interesting. I'm starting to gain weight too. And think about what happens when you're sleeping. You're relaxed. And your tongue, your fat tongue is also relaxed. And it sags and it blocks your airways. So all of a sudden you snort, you have sleep apnea, and you start to snore. So all of a sudden you snort, you have sleep apnea and you start to snore.

And so this is one of the interesting things, again, this idea that the kind of fat that we want to tame grows first in locations that we can't see very easily, but it's deep inside our body. The reason, you know, look, I'm all for cosmetics and I don't have a problem with vanity. If you want to look better because you want to shape your body in a way that's pleasing to you, please do. I don't have a problem with that. But what I do think is that people go to extremes and focus only on that, and they ignore what's really important, which is this visceral fat inside our body that you can't see. Yeah. What you said about the tongue is fascinating because we're looking for early warning signs, aren't we? Things that we can pick up before things get really, really harmful. And of course, we both know that erectile dysfunction for men is a really important early warning sign because if you're having, depending on the cause of it,

of course, if there's a problem with the blood vessel in your genitalia and it's showing up, well, there's very likely to be a problem also with the blood vessels in your heart. So it's an early warning sign, right? We know that as doctors, if that comes up, we need to be thinking about the heart as well. But I think what you just said about snoring is another beautiful early warning sign. If you think you're okay with your weight, hasn't been flagged as a major concern to you, but you have started to snore and you previously weren't, hey, maybe you want to just check it out, maybe see a dot set, maybe just see what might be going on. It's another simple,

free, non-invasive way to get an indication. But also, Dr. Lee, this really fits with a lot of things I've seen over two decades of practice now, which is if people have got snoring, even if they've got early obstructive sleep apnea like what i found is if i can drastically help them improve their health improve their diet yes often it's because they want to lose weight but yes they lose weight but often their sleep apnea gets better often they stop snoring as well i know in some extreme cases it's not enough but it really speaks to this idea that when you've come on the show before you've spoken about in your last book, and also in this book, the body is connected. It's a system. You change one thing in one area,

it affects something else in another area. Yeah, no, that's absolutely completely correct. By the way, some of those improvements that you were just describing, sort of overall improvements, one of the first things that we can do to appreciate about our body fat is that in the same way that we can actually grow fat by continuously overfeeding and filling up our tanks and requiring more tanks, we can also consume the tanks and we can actually shrink it down as well. And so this idea, and this is especially true of the visceral fat, we can actually reduce the amount of visceral fat in our body. This is actually something that we have agency over. In fact, I will tell you that there's no real drug, there's no pharmaceuticals that you or I could write to specifically shrink down visceral fat, but there are foods that can actually achieve that, which is really quite remarkable.

And so the point is that this is the kind of health care that we do at home, outside of the doctor's office, that empowers us to make good decisions. And especially when the foods that can actually do this fit within the realm of culinary traditions from healthy eating patterns from around the world that people find delicious. That, to me me can give you joy and better align, you know, all the signs that we've been talking about with really behavior changes that you can look forward to. You know, one of the things that I think that is so important that small changes don't have to be unpleasant changes, even big changes don't be pleasant, they can actually give you joy. I always say it's time to rediscover the joy in our life, especially what we've gone through over the last few years. And even thinking about today, the present day and all the kind of ominous things that are on

the horizon, it causes a huge amount of stress. Our food and what we eat and how we eat and with whom we eat can all be small, subtle, but powerful things that can help us not only gain overall health, but also lose some of the weight and the dangerous visceral fat along the way. Look, we've covered a lot of science. There was plenty more I wanted to talk about, but I really do think we should get into what you're just talking about now, which is what are some of these foods, right? So we started off the conversation, Dr. Lee, talking about some foods that people think are health promoting, but actually if consumed too often for too long a period of time, actually are not health promoting. We then spoke about the relationship between gut health and the fat in our bodies. We then were

talking about the science of fat. You beautifully explained how fat actually is an organ, and we need to think about it. It's not all bad, but if we get too much in the wrong place as it starts to become problematic, and we could go down that rabbit hole for longer for sure, but you are one of the leading experts in the world, I think, researching and writing about food as medicine. So I really want to talk about what are some of these foods that can burn off that fat for us. And there was a very interesting paragraph, provocative paragraph, I would say in your introduction that I really liked. And if you don't mind, I was just going to read it out to you just to sort of set up this part of the conversation.

Certain foods can stop fat cells from expanding. Other foods cause bad fat cells to become good fat cells. Still, other foods can even redirect a fat stem cell so it can't create more dangerous fat. Some foods even crank up your brown fat space heater. And I could go on, but essentially, I'm not sure that is common knowledge, that actually the foods you can eat, specific foods, can actually go in and target fat. So we're all waiting. What are some of these foods that we can start bringing into our diet to do all these magical things? All right. I want to tell you a little background story of how I got into this area of research to begin with. I wrote about foods in my first book that activate your health defenses, your circulation, androgenesis, stem

cells, your microbiome, your DNA defenses, as well, androgenesis, stem cells, your microbiome, your DNA defenses, as well as your immune system that also lowers inflammation. And one of the things, and I wrote actually about 300 plus foods in that book, and I really loved them. The book became very popular, and as it became more and more popular, one of the things in the back of my mind that I was a little afraid to hear, actually, I was worried about is whether or not people would be writing me to say, Dr. Lee, you wrote about so many tasty foods. I'm eating so much that I'm actually starting to become, I'm gaining too much weight and I'm becoming obese. and I'm becoming obese. Like that as a physician, as you described as well, I'm in the same page as you, like I have a responsibility to actually make sure that people use foods and respect foods in a way that is within a normal physiological balance. And so I was a little afraid of this, but you know what happened? I would get emails from people who are thanking me for feeling better,

more energy coming off medications, you know, just being more empowered in general. But then I started to receive the first signs that, in fact, that quite the opposite of what I was hearing. I was afraid of what's coming true. People were saying, you know, Dr. Lee, in addition to all these other good things that you write about, I'm starting to actually lose weight in a way that I haven't been able to lose before. First time, I sort of thought, you know, somebody's just overly kind. But then I started to hear it over and over and over again. And I thought, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. I'm a scientist. So I'm really attuned when I observe something that doesn't fit with the obvious paradigm. What? Eating food causes you to lose weight?

How could that be? Eating foods you enjoy, eating more foods you enjoy cause you to lose weight. That didn't compute for me. And so I had already been studying metabolism in my own research. And so I started to probe into this. Could it be that in many foods, there are bioactive certain substances that actually target fat and cause the behavior of the fat in your body to do something completely different than you would have thought, which is just to get bigger and accumulate.

Maybe there is some hidden mechanism within nature that is just lying hidden in plain sight that we need to know about. And that's really kind of the beating heart of this book, which is not only is there a new science of the metabolism, but in fact, is within the realm of food as medicine, there's this new discovery that the bioactives that are present, the mother nature is laced into our foods, can activate the healthy fat to reshape itself, not grow so big. Redirect itself so we're creating more beneficial fat than harmful fat.

And literally get rid of visceral fat. And as I dove into this deeper and deeper, the discoveries were getting more and more exciting to me. Because not only was the lab research there showing, identifying what these compounds are. They could be the catechins in tea. They could be the lactic acid and strawberries and in chestnuts they could actually be the sulforaphanes and brassica the broccoli and bok choy and gylan or or turmeric or it could actually their clinical studies were also being done to show that eating these foods specifically could actually shrink your waistline, your waist circumference, making your body tube a little bit smaller because it is knocking down the visceral fat. Weight loss is sort of, overall weight loss is sort of a side effect,

as you pointed out, to actually right-sizing your body in ways that eating foods can actually generate. And so what I did, I spent about two years cataloging these foods. I spent about 10 years doing metabolism research, but two years really cataloging these foods. And I finally write about them again, as if I were taking the reader into my grocery cart and pushing them around and telling them what to actually put into the cart from section to section in the grocery store. Yeah, it's really an incredible read. Now, a couple of things there. You've mentioned brown fat during this conversation about brown fat being different from white fat. And we actually want brown fat. And it has a lot of properties that can help us lose weight, lose the excess fat on our

bodies that many of us are trying to do. Now, a few months ago, I had Dr. Susanna Soberg on this podcast and she's done a lot of research into cold immersion and what happens when you spend periods of time in cold water, in cold showers, in cold plunges, and what that does to brown fat. But immersing yourself in cold water to increase the amount of brown fat in your body is frankly something that a lot of people are not going to do, right? Nor do I think everyone should do cold water immersion, having said that. I think it's going to be very, very individual who benefits from something like that. But you are beautifully making the case in your book that you don't need to actually do that. There are certain foods that will do that for you. So help us unpick that and help us understand

what some of these foods might be and how they're able to do this. Okay, this is where my background in biotechnology and looking at the mechanisms, like what is the domino effect of a trigger to the beneficial effect would be in understanding brown fat. It turns out that cold immersion, eating foods, and there's a few pharmaceuticals that have been tested can actually activate brown fat, largely in the same way. So let me, let's, I just want to make one point to say, brown fat was originally discovered in animals that are subjected to the cold. Hence, you may have talked about this before. It was discovered actually in hibernating animals plucked out of their burrow in the wintertime.

It's the alpine marmot actually in Europe where they discovered this little brown mass. And it really was the space heater. It actually created heat for the animal. And to fuel up that engine to create heat, it was drawing down on the fuel that it accumulated by stuffing its cheeks as it was preparing for hibernation. So this is an evolutionary process that has been conserved, meaning that it's actually passed on to humans. But for humans, we didn't really think that, you know, because we were born in warm hospital rooms or in incubators, our homes have thermostats, we don't hibernate, we're not born in caves

anymore, the cold caves, but it's a vestigial kind of thing. It turns out not to be. It turns out that brown fat is actually an incredibly important thing, but here's how it works. Cold temperature, and I'm sure you've talked about this, causes a shock to the body that releases epinephrine and norepinephrine, these hormones that actually are produced by our brains and they course through our nerves and they turn on, they trigger brown fat and really start the engine of the brown fat. Literally like the clicker on your gas range in your oven to start to before you put, some water whoosh all right and so cold will actually do that it turns out that the one of the receptors is called the beta-3 adrenergic receptor beta-3

adrenergic receptor is a receptor for adrenaline which is a shock hormone a stress hormone a fight or flight hormone uh so brown fat actually lights up when you actually have a shock to your system like a cold plunge. For those who want to do it, go for it because that's actually how it works. It turns out that there's a bladder medicine, bladder spasm medicine called mirabegron that also does the same thing because the beta adrenergic receptor can actually be found on your bladder, all over your bladder as well. And the bladder does something different than your brown fat. It actually helps your bladder contract, which you need to contract your bladder to pee. All right. But some people have a spasmodic bladder. It's contracting all

the time. You get leakage and all this other unpleasant stuff. And so there have been medicines that have been discovered to actually hit the beta-adrenergic receptor in your bladder to calm the bladder down. It hits the beta-adrenergic receptor in your bladder to calm the bladder down. It hits the beta-adrenergic receptor. Interestingly, researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health have studied that bladder medicine to see if they can target brown fat. And when they do, boom, it lights up the brown fat beautifully. And I show pictures of this. I've got permission from the researchers to show how this mechanism can light up brown fat. Now, I don't recommend anybody to use medicines to light up their brown fat because the doses of the medicines that were tested were way higher than you would normally use for bladder spasms.

So don't do that. But that's a setup to say, well, what else can light up brown fat with a beta-adrenergic receptor? to say, well, what else can light up brown fat with a beta-adrenergic receptor? Well, it turns out it's not just a beta-adrenergic receptor, but once you click that, once you tip that switch, after that, the next dot that gets checked in this cascade is something called uncoupling protein 1, UCP1. And that trigger lives on the mitochondria, which is a little organ in your cells, especially in your brown fat, that is packed. Our brown fat is packed with mitochondria, these little sub-organs in our cells. The mitochondria is the fuel cell.

I remember when I was in medical school and I had to memorize everything. I thought of it as mitochondria because it's small but mighty. It actually burns fuel, creates a lot of energy. It actually processes, creates ATP, burns ATP to create energy. Well, it turns out mitochondria have a lot of iron in it, naturally. Iron, when it's oxidized, it's naturally brown. Lots of mitochondria, lots of iron, lots of oxidation. And guess what? That's why brown fat is brown. So just for people wondering, why is brown fat brown? That's the reason. It's packed with this mitochondria that actually fuels cells. So anything that can activate the beta adrenergic receptor, anything that can actually turn on uncoupling protein one, anything that can

activate the mitochondria will turn on your space heater. And this is where foods that should come in because beyond the cold, beyond the bladder spasm drugs is a whole collection of foods, produce, dried, canned, jarred foods, seafoods, and beverages that can actually turn on one or more of these processes. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible because I wonder here on this, right? Some of the foods that I know are, I think chili peppers and chili in general are one of these specific foods that target brown fats. Is that right? Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. Well, listen, I want to show you. So this is a chili pepper.

It's a dried chili pepper. And you might see this dried and sold in a grocery store. You might use it to cook different types of dishes, whether it's an East Asian dish or a South American dish or an Italian or Spanish dish. A lot of people like chili peppers. And by the way, here's another example of chili. This is what you put on your pizza, right? So chili flakes. So a lot of chilies come in a lot of different forms that we actually cook with.

It turns out that inside chili pepper is something called capsaicin. Capsaicin, it gives us the burn, that zing, the fire in our mouth. And the reason it does it is because we have receptors in our tongue, taste receptors for capsaicin. They're called capsaicin receptors. So in addition to sweet, sour, salty, we can activate, we can feel the zing. The receptor, just for people who are interested, because I know some people who watch your podcast are really into the details. It's called the TRIPV1 receptor and capsaicins tackle the TRIPV1, turn on a TRIPV1, and then it's on your tongue. You feel the burn. All right. And what happens is that that receptor text messages your brain and your brain releases two different kinds

of hormones. One is endorphins. Endorphins make you feel good, which is why some people are in love with eating hot spicy food you've heard about that right i can't wait till i get some hot spicy food for those people they have they they have their their reaction to this endorphin from spices caused by this receptor for the capsaicin binding receptor is one of pleasure all right now the other hormone that your brain releases is norepinephrine. Norepinephrine actually is released from your brain and it goes down your nerves. And this is what I tell you. Next time you eat something really spicy, if you're inclined to do this, do it in a quiet room and close your eyes and just feel your body. You'll feel the burn.

You'll literally feel your brain activated. You'll feel it. I kid you not. And then you'll feel a rush of nerves being activated down your neck. Those nerves down your neck light up your brown fat and it'll turn on your brown fat. So the norepinephrine from your brain, from chili peppers, actually turns on that hormone, goes down your neck, activates a beta-3 adrenergic receptor in your brown fat, that turns on the UCP1, turns on the mitochondria, and starts the space heater

function. You can actually feel that. And by the way, the noradrenaline that forms, that's also why people get sweaty and red and flushed when they're eating hot food as well. So this is just another dimension of how foods that we eat can actually activate this. And so that's one of the things that you alluded to earlier. I've been doing the research to figure out what exact substance in a food, what's in a caper, what's actually in green tea, what's in coffee, what's in a pear, what's in a bean that can actually light up our fat, not only our brown fat, but it can also change and shapeshift our white fat in order to be able to burn down and slim down the harmful fat so we can be more physiologically fit. Yeah, fascinating. Absolutely

fascinating. I love the way you walked us through that. I'm definitely going to try that next time. I love the way you walked us through that. I'm definitely going to try that next time. Quiet room, pay attention. But as you were saying that, I think I know what that feels like already. I'm pretty sure I've experienced that, but I can be a bit more aware of it next time. A couple of things there, Dr. Lee. You mentioned maybe 10 minutes ago how when people read your first book and they read about all these incredible foods that they can bring into their diet to help them fight disease, reduce the risk of them getting sick in the future, you were getting communication after communication saying, yeah, but I'm eating all those foods, but I'm losing weight. And it's great. I wasn't planning to, but I feel good now

that I've lost this excess weight that I couldn't lose for years. And I think there's something really powerful about that. They weren't trying to but by focusing on the right foods and of course in your first book they're all whole foods, they're all foods that come from nature, foods that have been consumed by cultures for hundreds if not thousands of years. That's fascinating to me. How does that and what you just said about chilies and how they and other foods can impact brown fat, how does that fit in with the calorie model? Because let's say, for example, Dr. Lee, there's people writing into you. Let's say they were having lots of ultra processed foods initially

and they then move to a lot of the whole foods you recommend. Well, whole foods tend to keep us fuller quicker, right? It's very hard to overeat whole foods. And I'm sure some of the benefit was that they were also naturally getting full earlier, so not overeating. But some of the studies that you've referenced in your new book where they've controlled calories you know you've been very clear with how you write up these studies and you said they were all calorie controlled they were all doing this so that we can actually draw good conclusions at the end it suggests that for the same amount of calories consumed, by changing the nature of those calories, we can have a very profound impact on weight loss. Is that fair? Have I interpreted what

you said in your book correctly? Do you agree with that? Yeah, no, absolutely. That's exactly the point. They talk about empty calories and the quality of your food and whether something is nutrient dense. Look, I try not to overuse the word calorie in my book because I think there's so much association in the public with calories, calories in, calories out, counting calories, that it's actually almost lost its true meaning. And so I try to equate the idea of calories with fuel. And again, I want to come back to how you can use your body to actually naturally burn calories, burn fuel. Okay. So, you know, there's this current practice that's viewed as a fad called intermittent fasting. And I write about this in my book as well i don't call it a fad i don't call it a you know it's not a it's not a new religious practice look intermittent fasting is one of

the most natural things that we do in our lives as as humans and the reason is when we're sleeping we're not eating we're not eating that happens to be called fasting and there's a key to the metabolism here that is really, really important to understand. And that is this. When we're awake and we're eating food, remember I told you, put food in your body, your insulin goes up with a dip of nectin, draws energy into our body. Our metabolism is hardwired so that when we're actually eating, its focus is really on storing energy, including loading up fat. When we're awake and eating, we're storing energy. We're not burning it. Now, of course, if you're walking around, you're exercising, you're going to be burning it as well, but you're usually not exercising while

you're eating. It's sort of like you're waking hours. Then you'd be burning down some of that fuel one but our metabolism is is geared to storing not burning when we're sleeping our insulin level not eating our insulin levels go down when insulin goes down our metabolism shifts gears and it says oh you know what we're not eating anymore we're not we're not getting fuel in let's focus now on burning calories so in point of fact it can draw energy from fuel from the fat stored fat and burn them down so in fact when we're sleeping and we're not eating our metabolism is naturally shifting into fuel burning fat burning mode so that's like at a baseline how we actually work now when we're asleep and when we get up in the morning, and of course, the quality of sleep, we want to get really good quality REM sleep that actually works a lot better. And we want to sleep

as much as we can, eight hours being sort of still very much that kind of general good number, seven to eight hours of good quality sleep being very, very important for your metabolism, as well as your immunity and so many other aspects. But here's where some of the patterns can actually make a big difference in addition to the food that we actually choose. For example, the more time we give our metabolism to burn down energy and fat burning mode, the better off we are. The more we are burning fuel. So here's a common thing. So get eight hours of sleep. Let's say that you go to bed at 11, you get up at seven in the morning, let's say, I'm just using these numbers

as an example, let's say eight hours of sleep. Now, when you eat dinner, this is what I do. When I eat dinner the night before, let's say I eat at seven o'clock and I put my dishes away at eight o'clock, I'm done eating, put my dishes away. Now in the past, and I know a lot of people do this, I might have earlier in my life gone to snack in the evening, or maybe even gotten a bedtime snack. Before I go to bed, I'm going to eat one more thing. All right. I don't do that anymore. I do that. What I do now is when I put my dishes away, whatever time it is, let's say I eat dinner at seven. I sit for meal at seven. I stop eating at eight. When I put my dishes away, I don't eat anything after that. I'm done. Now from eight to 11, I've gained three extra hours where my metabolism can tap into and burn my fuel down. That three extra hours makes a difference because now I'm going to add it to the eight hours of

sleep I'm going to get. Now I've got 11 hours of fat burning, fuel burning time. Now when I get up in the morning, I don't do what my mother told me to do when I was a kid, right? Our moms always tell us to hurry up, get up, eat breakfast, get on the school bus and get to school. All right. And now when I get up, what I do is I take my time getting ready, take a shower, I get dressed. I might go for a walk, I might read a book, I might check my emails, I'll do something. I don't eat breakfast right away out of reflex like we were taught to do, conditioned to do, but I usually wait for an hour before I sit down to eat something. Now I've gained an extra hour for my metabolism to burn it. Do the math. Three hours after dishes away to bedtime, eight hours of bedtime, and one extra hour in the morning. That's 12 hours. That's

half the day that I've now taken, 12 hours over 24, that I've allowed my body to be, my metabolism to be in fuel-burning, calorie-consuming mode. Now, it's true. We may actually have calories of fuel that's accumulated from yesterday, from the day before, from last weekend, from the holidays. We've got more and more to do it. And it's true. We do need to be physically active. In fact, in my book that I write, you can work out. You can get a trainer.

But, you know, but even walking for 30 minutes will actually be useful. And, in fact, even fidgeting, you know, that's shaky the leg, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Even that burns calories as well. So before even talking about what foods we should eat and the volume that we should actually eat, the timing, it's not just only what we eat, but how we eat and when we eat can actually make a difference as well. That's actually quite important. It's a nuance within, you know, showing a list of 150 great foods to eat that can turn on your fat burning and increase your metabolism and heal your metabolism. How and when we eat actually can be also very, very

important. Yeah. Thank you for outlining that. I completely agree. 12 hours in every 24-hour period without food, I have seen is achievable for most of my patients. It really is very, very achievable. And for those people who are unable to, it's probably because their metabolism is maybe not broken, but not functioning as well as it could do. And we need to make some improvements so that they can go for 12 hours without food. So I think that's a very safe and consistent recommendation that pretty much all of us would benefit from. There's also studies, circadian biology studies, Dr. Lee, showing people having the same amount of food in the day,

but at different times. There was one study, I think in Spain, when they front-loaded the food so you'd have most of your food quantity in the first half of the day. I think by 3 p.m so you'd have most of your food quantity in the first half of the day. I think by 3 p.m. they'd had most of their food in a very light dinner. And when they did it the other way, when they had a heavy dinner, same foods, there was a significant change in body fat composition for the better when people front-loaded. Again, it's highly individual.

Everyone's going to react slightly differently. We've got to figure out what works for us. But I think this nuance that you speak to in the new book, I think is so important because it's not just as simple as looking at the calorie counter on the food that you're taking in. I will acknowledge that for some people that seems to work. Fine. I've never found it helpful in practice with patients, but I'm not going to write something off that, let's say, some personal trainers have found useful with their clients, right? I understand there's different ways to meet your goal of losing excess fat. But I think this idea that certain foods can certainly stack the odds more in your favor, I think is a very

powerful argument for people to take. And a lot of these foods are frankly delicious. What is some of your favorite foods to talk about in relation to this? You mentioned chilies. I get asked this question all the time. Dr. Lee, what diet are you on? And I say, I'm not on a diet. They say, well, then what do you eat? And I actually say, you know, it's very different. I eat different things every day. So I can't give you the one food that I eat all the time that's my secret. But I will tell you my secret, which is no longer a secret because I read about it in my book,

is there's a way, a style. I call it Mediterranean eating. Mediterranean is I naturally gravitate because I've lived in the Mediterranean. I also have an Asian background. These are two foods that I actually really resonate with. I love the taste. And by the way, they happen to come from two of the healthiest culinary traditions of the world, right? Mediterranean and Asian, at least traditional cultures, have been always very, very healthy and healthy ingredients, healthy combinations. And so to me, there's like, you can't go wrong by choosing either Mediterranean or Asian genre foods. This isn't necessarily

fusion, by the way. It's a spectrum. And I mean, that's my answer in present day. I will tell you what's really awesome about the idea of mediterranean foods. Eating is that it's been done thousands of years ago, because back in the day of the Silk Road, which was the greatest human trading route in history, it connected China, Asia, with Europe and the Mediterranean specifically. People on Camelback were trading goods and selling silk and many other goods, but they were sharing their ingredients and sharing their recipes and sharing food together. And really, this is this blending and amalgamation dating back 2,000 years of culinary heritage that tastes really great. So let me just take you through the

grocery store quickly of some of the things that catch my eye. I go into the grocery store and the first thing I go to the produce section, I love fresh foods. I'll look at tomatoes. Okay. Tomatoes are originally from Latin America, but they're now popular not only in the Mediterranean, but also even in Asia. In China, they cook with tomatoes now and they grow them. I will look at tomatoes during the summertime. Avocados, I love avocados, a great source of dietary fiber, surprisingly, because they don't taste very fiber-y. And they've got avocatin B, a substance that actually fights white fat and lights up brown fat. Tomatoes have lycopene, by the way. Lycopene is a fat-soluble substance. It actually dissolves, it fights, it lights up

brown fat. It fights harmful body fat. The really cool thing about lycopene and tomatoes, and this has been studied in humans, when you eat lycopene-containing foods like tomatoes or watermelon or guava or papaya, actually the lycopene gets absorbed in our bloodstream. You know where it goes? It immediately goes to the fat in our body. First in our belly fat, then in our thighs, then in our butt. And there, it's kind of like a fat-fighting bomb that gets implanted into your fat to fight fat right where it needs to be fought. The battle needs to be fought, which is pretty cool. I look at greens. I like leafy greens, brassica. People think about broccoli, but I write about broccolini, gai lan, bok choy, baby bok choy. Again, these are vegetables you saute with a

little garlic and extra virgin olive oil. You blanch it. You can stir fry it, add a little oyster sauce or soy sauce. Man, you can make amazing tasty dishes with it. You can make a stew out of it. You can make a smoothie out of it. You can make a soup out of it. So many delicious ways of looking for chili peppers. I actually like to cook with chili peppers. And it's a whole gamut.

Hundreds of chili peppers out there you can buy in the market. You have to find the ones that actually suit your tolerability and your taste buds to be good. Mushrooms, love mushrooms. Maitake mushrooms, on the grill, roasted. Simple white button mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, morels, enoki mushrooms, put them into some miso soup with soy, edamame in the market. These are some of the fat-finding ingredients.

I'm putting them in the context of how I would love to see them on my plate or on a menu of what I would actually order. All very reasonable. Middle aisle. I talk about studies with canned beans that can actually shrink your waistline by fighting visceral fat by eating them. Lentils, other legumes, dried chili peppers again, dried mushrooms. In the wintertime, when you find it hard to find really fresh, a diversity of fresh mushrooms, get the dried ones. Amazing. Tomato paste, tomato powder, canned tomatoes, all have lycopene in them. There's olive oils, extra virgin olive oils. Look for the high polyphenol type with mono varietals. I look for picual from Spain, moriola from Italy, koroneki from Greece. I look for those mono varietals.

You can read it right in the bottle if you look for those. Barley, buckwheat, soba noodles. These are just some of the examples of the foods, the ingredients that are found in either the Mediterranean or Asian genres that are absolutely delicious. And it's a small piece of what I write about that are delicious and good for you. Yeah. There's a section in the book, which is beautiful, where you put the 10 principles for eating Mediterranean. I won't go through them all. You've covered a couple of them. Skip a meal or two, go for fresh. Respect tradition. I really like that section that you wrote about. And you ended it with something that I think speaks to what you just said. Take advantage of the wisdom of centuries. When it comes to healthy foods, newer inventions are rarely better.

That was profound, Dr. Lee, because it's been said many ways, like eat the foods that your grandparents would eat or however we want to talk about it. But there's nothing that fancy and new. If we eat in that old-fashioned way, most of the time we're going to benefit. So that's a very powerful section of the book, which I think people are going to benefit from. I wonder if we've got time to squeeze in a couple of quick things, which I think would really benefit the audience. One is fish and omega-3s. First of all, I want to cover fish, but then also metabolism and these four different areas which you write so beautifully about. I think those would be two really lovely things to sort of end this conversation with if we have time. Let's dive into the seafood.

sort of end this conversation with if we have time. Let's dive into the seafood. So when I set out to write Eat to Beat Your Diet, I had these conversations with my publisher and I said, you know, I really need to write about seafood, fish, because omega-3 fatty acids happen to be fat fighting, metabolism activating, and they activate brown fat as well. And the feedback I got from the editor was, you know, be very careful about seafood. Many people don't like fish. So we don't want to be, you know, putting too much information on it. I decided to write an entire chapter about it. Okay. And the reason I decided to do it, because it's so important when you think about delicious foods that adequately represent eating culinary traditions. You know, so much of humanity lives on the coast. And those people who live on the coast live off the sea.

Yeah. And to the point that, you know, and they eat seafood all the time. It's second nature to them. I do think that responsible, sustainable fishing is something that needs to be practiced. So much of the disruption that we have in our ecosystem has to do with mechanization, industrialization, this sort of overage and excess without being mindful of the consequences. without being mindful of the consequences. So let's talk about, let's assume that we, that you're able to go to a fishmonger or a seafood section in your store and find responsibly sourced seafood. There is amazing. So everybody knows that oily fish are healthy for you. Right. And most people go, well, I don't like oily fish. What are those oily fish? Salmon,

uh, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, right? They're like, Oh, those are pretty fishy fish. I'm not sure I like that. Well, I happen to like seafood. All right. And I've been fortunate to be able to travel to many places and experience different seafoods in the places where it's naturally caught, cooked and eaten as part of the culture, whether it's in Italy, whether it's off the coast of Naples, or whether in the Adriatic Sea, or whether it's in Hong Kong. I've had the opportunity to eat all these incredible dishes. And I tell people, if you don't like seafood because you don't like the way it tastes, don't worry. You just haven't yet had it properly cooked for you yet. When you find that opportunity, you're going to love it like the millions of other people that love this kind of food.

So the study that you're referring to that I think is amazing shows us that we don't need to have the oil list of oily seafoods in order to get health benefit for omega-3. So this is a study in Iceland that did break out into four groups. I just want to isolate the most important ones. They wanted to study the fat-burning weight loss possibility of salmon. And so they were looking at oily fish like salmon. By the way, how much omega-3 does salmon have? About 1,500 milligrams per five-ounce serving of salmon. It's about the size of a couple of decks of cards, not too much.

And they wanted to, and their initial idea was like, well, let's compare salmon with a non-oily fish like cod. Cod is a white flaky fish, not very oily, not terribly tasty. Actually, very mild. Actually, I like cod. And how much omega-3 does it have? 294 milligrams of omega-3 in about five ounces serving, same size serving. So literally seven times less than salmon does. either salmon or cod or fish oil or nothing, three times a week for eight weeks. It gave them a little bit of a calorie restriction so that you can really see weight loss or not weight gaining. But then to see if you add the fish on, do you actually get more out of it? Does a gas pedal go even harder if you have salmon, the oily fish? Well, guess what they found? They found that, in fact, salmon did cause weight loss quite dramatically in conjunction with restricting some calories, about 15 pounds over eight weeks,

just three times a week, two decks of cards of salmon, pretty profound. By the way, they have to eat the skin because most of the omega-3 is actually in the skin of salmon, not so much in the flesh. Now, but the real surprise is that the people who had the least oily fish, the cod that has seven times less omega-3s than salmon per serving, okay, they actually lost 10 pounds in eight weeks eating cod only three times a week. So the real kind of jaw-dropping, eye-opening discovery here is that we don't need to have the oiliest of oily fish in order to get benefit when it comes to our metabolism and fighting body fat you can lose 10 pounds in eight weeks by eating cod which is not that oily so that opens up the gate heaven's

gate to looking at other seafoods because remember we used to say well you know you got to go for the oiliest of the oily seafoods all the other other ones, nevermind, they're not oily enough. Well, if cod's good enough to do it, if the omega-3 in a cod, 284 milligrams is enough to do it, then we can then figure out how many other seafoods do you need to eat in order to get the same amount as five ounces of cod? Well, I'll give you some examples. And I pepper my whole section on seafood. So if you're a seafood lover, please read my chapter. You're going to find out amazing seafoods there that I enjoy that most people have.

I'm quite sure this is the only book with the word diet on the cover that talks about mitten crab and mantis shrimp and razor clams. But- It's a deep dive, that chapter. I mean, I was reading about types of seafood I wasn't even aware existed. So it's a really, really fascinating read. Dosti, we must just

cover for that person who's listening, who is choosing to be vegan for whatever reason they're choosing to be vegan. And you just said all the benefits of fish and omega-3s. You do cover this in the book, but could you just explain what you would ask them to do to try and get those health benefits? Sure. Look, omega-3s are originally in seafood. They're in plankton. So it's sort of the plant of the sea. So you can actually get the omega-3 precursor, amino levy lactic acid, actually from certain plants as well. Or you can actually, which then your body will process and create. To a certain extent, omega-3 is very similar to what you would get in fish if you're a vegan.

But honestly, what I tell the people who are vegans who ask me, it's totally fine to get a high-quality marine omega-3 supplement. You can actually have the supplements as well. If you're not getting enough from your diet, it's so important to eat this because that actually improves your immunity. It has effects on your telomeres for longevity and good quality of life. I think that it's not a big deal if you are not eating seafood, but just find other sources to eat it as well. So just to really complete an arc here that I think people will be interested. If cod is good for you, can help you fight body fat because of the omega-3, the amount of omega-3s you get, it's similar to cod. Four medium-sized Gulf shrimp.

Eight oysters. One forkful of mackerel, half of a serving of a size of a deck of cards of halibut. This is an example, like if you want to find out what the dose of seafood you need to get exactly what they found in this research study, it's packed with it. I'm quite certain this is the only book that's ever done this because I looked for other examples and then I had to put together a research team to crunch out all these calculations. But the point being that I think that most people who go into the grocery store, it may not be a reflex to stop at the seafood counter unless you already normally eat seafood. But I'd encourage you to really look for, it's a

little bit of adventure in a grocery store to look for all these metabolism useful foods. So if you're of the mind and you eat seafood and you're open to it, please do stop by the seafood counter and compare the notes and see if there's something that might catch your fancy. Yeah, brilliant. You cover metabolism in a deep way in the book, which people can read about, just to finish off this conversation, one of the key reasons I wanted to bring this up is you outline some research, which has shown that there are these four very stable stages of metabolism in our lives as humans. And it really fights against this idea that many of us have that, you know, in our 30s, when we get into our 40s, of course, our metabolism starts to slow down and we start to put on weight.

That evidence is absolutely suggesting that that is not the case. Also, the caveat there is I know women, when they become perimenopausal and menopausal, there can be a consequence sometimes on people's weight. So I am aware of that, just bringing that into the conversation. But just to finish off, Dr. Lee, how would you explain that top-line view of metabolism and why so many of us think we're going to put on weight as we get older? to put on weight as we get older? Yeah, this was the most jaw-dropping thing that I researched when I was writing this book. First of all, a few commonly held thinking ideas about metabolism were either born with a slow or a fast metabolism. My sister was born with a fast metabolism, so she's skinny as a stick and can eat anything. Me, I was born with a slower metabolism. I've struggled with food my whole

life. How common do we actually hear that kind of sentiment? The other thing that we believe is that when kids are teenagers, they're eating two or three meals, they're bouncing off the walls, their metabolism must be going off the charts. And then, of course, as you just alluded to, that when we reach our middle age, we're naturally going to expand our middle because our metabolism naturally slows down. It turns out all of those ideas are false. They're incorrect, scientifically incorrect, because within the discoveries, by the way, to show they're incorrect have been made just within the last two years. To me, this is the cool part about science is that we're still beginning to

discover more about our own human nature. So two years ago, published in the journal Science, which is one of the most credible scientific rigorous journals that focuses on discovery, a study was published by a researcher named, with the lead author of Herman Ponser, who worked with 90 researchers. They did the most ambitious study of human metabolism ever undertaken in history. They looked at 6,000 people coming from 20 countries, young and old, men and women, different racial backgrounds, different dietary backgrounds, and they studied the metabolism in all exactly the same way, which is one of the distinguishing features. They gave them

all a drink of water in which the water, which is H2O, hydrogen and oxygen, they tweaked the chemical hydrogen, they tweaked the chemical oxygen so they can measure it. So when the subjects drank the water, their metabolism worked on the atoms and they can measure their metabolism in the breath or in the blood or in the urine. The other remarkable thing is they studied people, humans that were two days old, newborns, and they studied people who are 90 plus years old at the end of sort of the tail end of life. So this is the 6,000 people in the entire human spectrum. life. So this is the 6,000 people in the entire human spectrum. When they actually looked at the results of metabolism, the first results that came out, the raw data showed that metabolism, everyone was all over the map, just like you'd expect, right? But then we now live in this era of supercomputing and really being able to really crunch data. What they did is for every person's

body size, they were able to remove from the data the impact of extra body fat, excess body fat. They were able to subtract from the result. And when they removed the effect of excess body fat from all of these individuals, all 6,000 individuals, it was like pulling the cloak off the statue of David for the first time. They saw that humans all go through only four phases of metabolism from birth to the end of life. The first thing is that everyone's born with the exact same metabolism. And from age zero to first year of life, our metabolism is skyrocketing to 50% higher than what your metabolism is going to be when you're an adult. That's first phase. Second phase,

from age one to age 20, metabolism goes down, down, down, down, down to adult levels. This is right through adolescence, right through, you know, people's super energy, the teenager's high energy mode. Metabolism is going down. The real mic drop here is that from age 20 to age 60, human metabolism from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 60 is rock solid. It's stable. It does not decrease. Human metabolism is hardwired. The metabolism is hardwired to be completely stable through the mainstay of our adult lives. And I do know people gain weight. I'm going to come back

to explain why. And then the last phase, that that's the third phase the last phase is phase four from 60 to 90 your metabolism slowly sags a little bit to about only 17 percent that by the time you're 90 it was from you're 60 all right by the way that middle part phase three means that 60 can be the new 20 if you follow your natural metabolism so why do people actually gain weight? Why do some people have more trouble gaining weight than others? Because during those periods of time from 20 to 30s to 40s to 50s and 60s, life happens to us. And so think about it. Our metabolism is hardwired. It's like the operating system in your laptop.

It's going to do what it's going to do. However, in our 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, life happens to us. We have stressors that prevent us from getting enough sleep or from exercising regularly. We have hormonal changes that can change our mood. We've got relationship pressures. We've got emotional stress or financial pressures, job stresses, all these kinds of changes slow us down. And turns out that that it leads us towards behaviors that allow us to grow extra body fat so in this research when they added the effect of extra body body fat back into the system back into that stable metabolism guess what happened when you add extra fat into the system it crushes your metabolism so excess fat slows your metabolism

not the other way around it's not the slow metabolism that at the beginning of life causes you to gain extra fat and extra weight. It's completely the inverse. Why is that surprising? And why is that good? Well, I'll tell you why it's good news. It's surprising because people don't think about it. It's good news because it means that we now have the power to be able to affect some change to fight that extra body fat in our middle years. We can now have the awareness that our operating system, our hardwiring is intended to actually be

rock stable. So if we fight our extra body fat, that visceral fat, and if we actually stay active, okay, and if we lower our stress and do all these things that actually help our fat be its normal, healthy self, okay? Then it'll actually allow our metabolism, our suppressed metabolism to rise back to the surface to where it wants to be. We can be aspirational for our metabolism. It's not our genetic fate. It is in our hands. Yeah, I love that. I mean, what a walk through human metabolism. And there's a beautiful image in your book around that chapter where you literally, as you say, lift off the cloak.

It's like, no, you're not slowing down your metabolism as you get older. You're putting on fat and that's slowing down your metabolism. So it's like, what comes first? It's actually, for all of us, whether we want to accept it or not, we are, you know, like you mentioned before about the tongue and the snoring, right? It's already going on. That's then slowing down and damaging our metabolism so that we think there's a problem with our metabolism. Dr. Lee, I think this is honestly such a wonderful book. There is so much in it that we've not even touched upon in this conversation. For that person, Dr. Lee, who feels inspired, but who has really struggled to lose excess body fat

before and really, really wants to, do you have any final words for them? Yeah. I mean, I think you should love your food to love your health and love your metabolism. If you align what you enjoy doing with ingredients that can gain a lot, and it should be aligned with pleasure. So rather than try to jump off the cliff for something extreme, align yourself with what your goals are with something that you would actually enjoy. It's time to rediscover the joy of food. Pick those foods that actually activate your metabolism and help you fight body fat. You will actually live long and thrive along the way. body fat, you will actually live long and thrive along the way. Dr. Lee, it's always a pleasure speaking to you. The new book is Eat to Beat Your Diet, Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, Live Longer. Keep up the incredible work and I cannot wait for the next time we get to have a conversation.

Thanks very much. really hope you enjoyed that conversation as always do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life now before you go just wanted to let you know about friday five it's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness in that that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only

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