Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How To Use Food To Heal Your Body, Boost Brain Health, Improve Circulation & Live Longer with Dr William Li #485

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

How much power do your food choices really have over your health? You probably already know that your diet can hugely influence how well you feel, but did you know that the food you choose to eat can change the make-up of your entire body, all the way down to the health of your cells?   This week, Dr William Li returns to the podcast for the 4th time. He is an internationally renowned physician, food scientist and bestselling author of two books, including his latest ‘Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism & Live Longer’. Dr Li’s ground-breaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and has impacted the care of more than 70 different diseases, including cancer, type II diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. And, his TED Talk, ‘Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?’ has had more than 11 million views. In this engaging and enlightening conversation, Dr Li shares his expertise with his trademark clarity and enthusiasm. His unique ability to break down complex scientific concepts into relatable analogies makes the information accessible to anyone. We explore the intricate relationship between what we eat and how our bodies function. We discuss how certain foods can stimulate and protect our vital stem cells, which enhances our body's natural ability to regenerate and heal. We also discuss how some foods can improve everything from our blood vessel health to the function of our brains.    Dr Li also sheds light on some common myths surrounding metabolism, the importance of personalised nutrition and the very ‘modern’ issue of over-consuming calories. As always, Dr Li shares some of his top practical tips to help.   I thoroughly enjoyed talking to William again. He is passionate, incredibly knowledgeable and wants to empower each and every one of us to be active, engaged participants in our health. 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://thriva.co https://airbnb.co.uk/host https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://www.eightsleep.com/livemore   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/485   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. 

60,000 miles worth of blood vessels are packed into our adult bodies. And these literally are the highways and byways of everything, oxygen we breathe, the nutrients that we eat. And in fact, no matter what else you think about in terms of your health, if your blood vessels are healthy, you are at a really great starting point to optimize the rest of your health. But if your blood vessels are unhealthy, you're going to be far behind. In fact, it'll be impossible to optimize your health in any other part of your health. But if your blood vessels are unhealthy, you're going to be far behind. In fact, it'll be impossible to optimize your health in any other part of your body. 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.

How much power do your food choices really have over your health? Well, I guess you already know that your diet can hugely influence how well you feel on a day-to-day basis. But did you know that the food you choose to eat can change the makeup of your entire body all the way down to the health of yourselves? Well, this week's returning guest is Dr. William Lee, an internationally renowned physician, food scientist, and best-selling author of two books, including his latest, Eat to Beat Your Diet, Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer. Dr. Lee's groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and has impacted the care of more than 70 different diseases, including cancer,

type 2 diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. And his TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, has garnered more than 11 million views. This is Dr Lee's fourth appearance on my podcast, and one of the reasons I keep inviting him back is because not only is he super knowledgeable about the impact of our food choices on so many different aspects of our health, he's also able to simplify complex information and use

analogies that make the information accessible and understandable for everyone. In this conversation, we explore the intricate relationship between what we eat and how our bodies function. We discuss how certain foods can stimulate and protect our vital stem cells, which enhances our body's natural ability to regenerate and heal. And we also discuss how some foods can improve everything from our blood vessel health to the function of our brains. We also talk about some common myths surrounding metabolism, the importance of personalized nutrition, and the very modern issue of over-consuming calories. And of course, William shares some of his top practical tips to help. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to William again, as I always do.

He is really passionate, incredibly knowledgeable, and above all, he wants to empower each and every one of us to be active, engaged participants in our health. Over the past few years, there's definitely been more and more conversations about the relationship between food and health. But I think you, Dr. Lee, are talking about a couple of things that I don't see many other people talking about. For example, stem cells. So I wonder if we could start off with you explaining, number one, what are stem cells? And number two, what is the relationship between them and the food that we consume? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a really interesting topic. In

fact, when I began my foray into studying nutrition and food as medicine, I began looking at all the kind of frontier areas that I'm familiar with as somebody who's been involved with biotech treatment development. So I worked on targeted therapies for cancer. I worked on regenerative therapies for heart disease and stroke and spinal cord injury and wound healing. And from that particular area of expertise that I actually have came stem cells. All right. So many people may have heard about stem cells for an orthopedic or a joint issue. You know, you can drive to a clinic and get

a stem cell injection in your knee or your elbow or your shoulder, I have to tell you, I don't believe that those treatments are really ready for prime time as a researcher in that space. But I learned quite a lot about our body's own stem cells, not the ones that you have to inject, but the ones that actually come packaged inside our body. And here's how it goes. A stem cell is basically a early primitive cell that has formed us. So when your dad's sperm met your mom's egg, all right, and for anybody listening, it's true for all of us. And we were just this ball of cells.

We didn't have a face. We didn't have a kidney. We didn't have an ear. We didn't have a toe. We didn't have a face. We didn't have a kidney. We didn't have an ear. We didn't have a toe. Those cells all started as stem cells, which means that they could become anything. Some of them became blood vessels. Some of them became heart tissue.

Some of them became a brain. Some of them became nerves and bone. And those primitive cells, by primitive, what it means is that they can become anything. Their destiny has not yet been decided. And over time, they can be coaxed to become something that we need. And so what happens is that over the course of nine months in a womb, we form our little mini selves ready to be born. And we're equipped with, you know, two arms and two legs and all the other bits and pieces that make us human. And then when we're born and the umbilical cord is cut, we have extra stem cells left over. These extra stem cells, about 70 million of them,

are still floating around in our blood. And there are instructions at the time of birth to tell these extra floating stem cells, hey, it's time to park your car, hide out in the places that you're going to be for the rest of your life, and you'll come out when you're needed. So think about stem cells like painting an apartment where you're going to paint a new color in your bedroom. You're going to buy cans of paint, but you're going to buy maybe a couple of extra cans so you don't run out because how bad it would be if you actually were, you just had one little section left and man, you ran out of paint. That would really suck. So our body is built the same way we've got extra stem cells like extra cans of paint so that we never run out so these 70 million extra cells stem cells they

are in our bone marrow which is the little tube inside most of our bones um you have to break a chicken bone open there's a little kind of dark area in there. If you're a foodie and you like au sommel, for example, the French dish, that's also bone marrow. But we all have bone marrow, and that's mostly stem cells. And the stem cells in our bone marrows throughout our lives, they help us create more blood cells that we actually will require over our lives, but they also contain these stem cells that are sticking around and these stem cells can regenerate us from the inside out. They heal us from the inside out. Meaning if we actually have an injury, and this is relatively new research in medicine. If we cut ourselves, let's say you're riding a bike and you fall off all right and you scrape your knee on the path that injury on your knee will send a signal and we know what those signals actually are um uh and the signal is basically uh like an alarm and an alert signal like 9-1-1

please or i don't know in the united states that's the telephone number you dial for for the emergency services and basically in response to that distress call the stem cells come flying out of our bone marrow like bees coming out of a hive looking for the area that's injured that they need to repair help to repair from the inside out and it's not just a scrape in and it could be your heart your brain your nerves could be any organ at all that our stem cells repair. And the remarkable thing is that they can become anything. If you need a liver repaired, they can become liver cells.

If you need a nerve repaired, they can become nerve cells, blood vessels, they can become vascular cells or blood vessel cells, even brain. We believe that brain tissue can regenerate in part with these stem cells. Yeah. I mean, that's incredible just to hear that we have this reserve capacity within the body. I think that analogy about painting a house or painting an apartment is fantastic. I've got a couple of spare tins of paint in my garden shed at the moment. So I think many people listening will totally resonate with that.

So stem cells are clearly very important. But I think when we talk about food, I think people these days are thinking about the relationship between food and obesity, food and type 2 diabetes, between food and obesity, food and type 2 diabetes, food and longevity, and all these kind of things. I don't think many people, at least not to my knowledge, are thinking about the relationship between food and stem cells. So you mentioned what they are. Talk to us about how we can use food or choose certain foods that help us harness this potential that we have inside of us? Yeah, well, so I'm a scientist. I study blood vessels. That's where my root as a scientist is, by circulation. And in fact, our blood vessels are remarkable. We've got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our body. 400 of those miles are actually in our brain.

So our circulation is really super important. And as a researcher, I began appreciating that this incredible maintenance of our circulation, which are, after all, the highways and byways that deliver the oxygen we breathe and the nutrients that we eat, that these roads, these blood vessels need to be maintained, just like a road, you know, in the countryside. If you don't maintain the road, it's going to break down over a period of time. And one of the things as a vascular blood vessel researcher, and eugenicist researcher, we discovered early on is that stem cells in our body contribute to building and repairing blood vessels. So that was sort of how I became interested in and quite familiar and actually

worked on stem cell research in the lab. We actually discovered many chemical substances that can stimulate stem cells to help do their repair. And so when I began studying food as medicine, one of the things that it was remarkable to discover is that some of the synthetic chemicals that you could order from a research shop could actually stimulate stem cells. But then it was really jaw-dropping to me. In fact, one of the most light bulb going off moments that I had as a food as medicine researcher to discover that natural substances in our food can similarly activate our stem cells and call them into action. And without necessarily putting out a distress call, we can just gently coax our body's own

reserve into action to help repair ourselves in a more robust way. So which are some of the top foods that we can choose to put inside our mouths that are going to do this? Yeah. Okay. So first of all, we're at the beginning of, you know, a new era looking at regenerative foods, foods that can stimulate regeneration. So I don't have like the wrapped gift box to give you of a laundry list of all the foods known to man. We're still doing research on this, but I'll tell you, I'll give you some examples because and when I talk, by the way, Rangan, I really refer to both laboratory but also to human evidence, which I think is really important. You know, something we see in the lab is interesting and they can actually raise an idea. But at the end of the day, it's whether or not it works in people that makes all the difference in the world. So I'm gonna kind of flip back and forth a little bit, but always emphasize what we know in people.

So first of all, you might not be surprised that the source of stem cell activating substances are plant-based foods. Mother Nature's sort of medicine cabinet are fruits and vegetables, nuts and legumes, and healthy oils and seeds, you know, sources of omega-3s. So, researchers have been actually mining the same pharmacopoeia, farm with an F, not a pH, looking at what substances are in nature

that can stimulate stem cells. So So I'll give you an example. We know that there's a natural bioactive, a natural chemical found in plants called ursolic acid. Okay. That's U-R-S-O-L-I-C, ursolic acid. It's found in fruit peel, right? The peel of an apple, the peel of a pear, the peel of cranberries, a peel of blueberries, right? These are fruit peels. And most likely, if you have eaten an apple, you're not, I mean, unless you were a kid and

your grandmother peeled the apple for you, you just take an apple and clean it and then just eat the whole thing, right? The peel's got good source of dietary fiber and ursolic acid. Ursolic acid has been shown to stimulate stem cells, to come out of the bone marrow, and help to stimulate regeneration and to repair blood vessels, for example. Quite amazing, all right? That's an example. There's another substance that has been discovered called beta-D-glucan. Now, this is a soluble fiber, which we know is good for gut health, and it does a lot of other interesting things, too, that are beneficial for the body. But beta-glucan has been discovered to stimulate stem cells. Now, where do you get beta-glucan?

You can find them in mushrooms. Both the cap and the stipe, the stem of the mushroom, has beta-glucan. In fact, the stem of the mushroom has twice as much beta-glucan as the cap of the mushroom. So I always tell people, if you're actually preparing food and you're preparing your cooking mushrooms, please don't throw the stems away because they have a lot of goodness to them. You can utilize them. It's sustainable cooking. Keep all the food parts and use them, and they're good for you. Oats also has beta-glucan. You know, if you're actually having steel cut oats for breakfast, for example, is another source of beta-glucan. And barley. Now, barley has actually been studied with beta-glucan to look at stimulating

the stem cells that can regenerate your circulation, that can help to repair and grow new blood vessels where they're needed. And this is exactly in my wheelhouse to study circulation. So we took this even further to look at the role of other foods that can stimulate stem cells. And one of them is dark chocolate. Dark chocolate has a very particular benefit because first of all chocolate is a confection it's a candy it's made you know it's crafted to be sweet and delicious and most people like dark chocolate but it is contains a plant-based uh food ingredient and that's cacao cacao comes from a tropical tree where the seed pod of the cacao is this shaped like an American football it can be bright yellow it could be brown if you pick one up it's kind of heavy you shake it and you can feel the heavy chestnut like seeds shaking around and that those

seeds are the ones that are dried, fermented, ground into a powder and used by percent to actually make chocolate. So if you have a 50% cacao chocolate, it's got half of the cacao. If you've got 80%, it's got a lot more, 90%, et cetera. Well what's research has been done shown that 80% or higher cacao puts enough of a natural plant-based bioactive called proanthocyanidin into your bloodstream. So this has been measured. And in the clinic, if you actually give people who have, let's say, coronary artery disease, so they've got narrowing of their blood vessels and stiff, hard blood vessels.

All right. So these are not people at their optimal state of health. If you measure their stem cells and then see how many stem cells are floating around their blood, which is not many, and then you were to actually do a simple test called flow-mediated dilation, FMD, to check how resilient their blood vessels are. Basically, it's a blood pressure cuff. You blow it up, you put an ultrasound in the crook of your arm, and then you let the blood pressure cuff deflate quickly. You see what happens to how well your circulation, your blood vessels recover from compression from the cuff. That's a reflection of vascular blood vessel circulatory health. If you do that at baseline to see how well the blood vessels in these people are doing,

not that well. Then researchers have given them two cups of dark chocolate in the form of hot chocolate that's it two cups to have a day for 30 days and at the end of 30 days you measure take out your blood and measure the stem cells again and then do that flow media dilation resiliency test again of the blood vessels to see have they changed this is what's amazing has been found that dark chocolate the proanthocyanidins not only got into the bloodstream but they doubled the number of stem cells circulating in your blood vessels and they doubled the resiliency improved the by by twofold the resiliency of your blood vessels just over the course of a month with as little as two cups of hot chocolate that's dark. Wow. That's a really interesting point,

what you said there at the end there. The quality matters, doesn't it? Because you could get, I guess, a hot chocolate powder from the supermarket, which was full of additives and full of sugar and has a very low concentration of cacao. Or you could get a completely different one, which is a lot of minimal ingredients, high levels of cacao, as you say, 80% plus. That's the nuance I think sometimes that we're missing, aren't we, when we talk about food. Hot chocolate is not just hot chocolate. It depends on the quality, right? That's right. And the stuff that you get in a packet at the grocery store that's inexpensive and might taste really great, it might be the stuff that we had when we were kids. I know I did.

If you now take a look at the ingredient label i tell people anytime you're buying anything that's pre-packaged please take a look at the ingredient level before you put it in your grocery cart because if you start seeing the added sugar and then the emulsifiers and all the artificial chemicals and preservatives and the stabilizers that's probably not something that you want to actually put in your body. And if the ingredient label creeps you out, put it back and just look for another choice that, as you say, has minimal numbers of ingredients or even better yet. I mean, and I say this to people who are really committed to using a natural way to improve their health.

Put it together yourself. I mean, you can even make it without dairy, which is really interesting. Without any type of milk product at all, you can make yourself a really tasty, super dark chocolate. And in fact, a lot of people don't know this, but the history of cacao and chocolate goes all the way back to the Aztec civilization, where at some point, they actually considered chocolate was used as currency. It was so valuable. And at a certain point of time, it was used for its medicinal and ceremonial value. And so this is why, you know, like we go, you know, you're taking a trip at an airport and you're passing by the newsstand and, you know, it's so tempting to buy a bottle of water and get a chocolate.

The healthful chocolate we're talking about is really paying attention to the details of the quality of what you're actually going to put into your body because that's going to influence how your body responds to it. It's really fascinating. I was reflecting with a friend over the summer on how certain things, let's say cacao, let's even say alcohol as well, were often used in traditional cultures in very different ways to the way we consume them today, or they're often consumed today. You know, it was ritualistic, ceremonial. Cacao probably, from what I understand, wasn't used daily. It was now and again for celebration, for ritual. And I think the same thing also from what I understand with alcohol. Yet we love to take those things and then shove them in every day now. And I feel that we do that

with lots of things. We change the way we consume them compared to how we have done so traditionally. Absolutely. Because if you think about the way that we approach the foods around us today, so often it's really, the food is treated as a commodity. You know, we have this consumer mentality where we just go out to look for the cheapest, most convenient, most tasty thing, so influenced by advertising. And we've gotten further and further away from what I think is absolutely central to our humanity when it comes to food, which is to have some appreciation of our food, to really savor our food, respect our food. And frankly, you know, if you take a look at some of the broader planetary concerns in terms of how we grow our food,

how we treat the land that our food's grown on, how we, you know, how we farm our food, all of those implications of the degradation of the food system comes from the fact that, you know, we don't respect it so much anymore. And so we're just stripping away the land, we're getting the cheapest food possible, the fastest possible, we're packaging it into things that are not very costly, put colors on them, you know, cheap things to attract, you know, sort of like the clickbait idea of nutrition and our food. I think it takes us further away from our humanity and i'm bringing that up because you know as you're talking about tradition and ritual uh and

ceremonial i think one of the things that we're beginning to perhaps appreciate as things are becoming so distressed around the world is that there is really great value and calming value to be able to be more appreciative to the things that we do have and to respect when it comes to food, to really start thinking of our food in a different way, including where it comes from and how it's handled, and then ultimately how we're preparing it

and putting it into our body. It is a continuum that pays off when it comes to our health. Yeah, for sure. Thank you for sharing that. Now, Dr. Lee, so far, the foods we've mentioned in relation to stem cells, I think are ursulic acid, which you can get in fruit peels. You mentioned beta-D-glucan, which you can get in mushrooms and oats and barley. You've also mentioned about cacao and dark chocolate and how beneficial that can be. One thing I've always noticed with your approach, you make food something that I think excites people. You talk about all these different foods and all these different pathways and how we can be active participants in our health by choosing foods

that are going to activate all these incredible pathways. How do you square that alongside the fact that many people these days eat an excess of calories? If someone hears what you're saying and they're already eating an excess of calories and they start adding in dark chocolate, hot chocolate, oats, barley, right? How do you help people tease through that? Because obviously a calorie excess is problematic for health, even if you are adding in some of these powerful foods. This episode is sponsored by Thriver, the app that helps you listen to your blood and get personalized guidance on how to optimize your health and

fitness. Now I think regular blood tests can be a really valuable tool that can help tell us which lifestyle changes are working and where we might need to make changes. And Thriver is the perfect tool to help us do that because they make it really simple. You just take a blood test at home, which is really easy, send it off, and then you get all of your results in a matter of days in an easy-to-understand app, and all of your results come with personalized, actionable Lysol advice from doctors.

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on things like hormonal health, heart health, sports performance and nutrient levels. For listeners of my show Thriver are offering an exclusive offer of 20% off your first Thriver cycle when you enter the promo code LIVEMORE at checkout. Just visit Thriver.co to get started today. That's T-H-R-I-V-A dot C-O. Thriver, listen to your blood. This episode is brought to you by Airbnb. This episode is brought to you by Airbnb. Now my family and I have had some great trips over the years using Airbnb for pleasure and for work. In fact, a few weeks ago when I was in Oxford for a work conference, I stayed in an Airbnb and used the living room to record two wonderful podcasts which you'll be hearing on this show very, very shortly. Now, I personally prefer staying in an Airbnb when I'm traveling for work compared to hotels,

as I like staying somewhere with a kitchen where I can prepare my own food instead of relying on eating out. In fact, I was chatting to the owner of this Airbnb and he told me that he only recently started hosting his home as a way to earn some extra income whilst he's away on holiday. And I know many friends who also host their flats or home when they're away to help with the extra household expenses or cover the cost of holidays. Which got me thinking when we're next away as a family and our house sits empty, we could Airbnb our own place and make some extra money to go towards our own holiday too. And if you have a trip coming up, you could do the same. Your home might be worth more than you

think. Find out how much at airbnb.co.uk forward slash host. Yeah, no, I mean, this is a great topic of discussion. I'm very passionate about this idea of not overeating, not overconsuming. Okay, because we're here, we're talking about how we have gotten further and further away from traditions and rituals and, and, and mindfulness. Look, over consumption is a relatively recent phenomenon. I say within the last 70, 80 years, within our last 100 years for sure, of modern society. Because if you go further back than that, most people were still scrabbling around to actually get enough food. They were hungry most of the time. It's only really in our modern day and age, sort of post-World War II, where relative prosperity,

World War II, where relative prosperity, especially in modern countries, developed countries, actually allowed us to essentially overconsume food on a regular basis. And so I want to talk about metabolism for a moment, because this is actually where this squares away with healthy eating and overeating. Okay. So I want people to think about metabolism, which has to do with weight gain, which has to do with obesity, which has to do with diabetes and metabolic diseases and other chronic diseases ranging from cardiovascular disease to cancer to dementia. So it's all connected together. Our metabolic health is maintained by our body like a machine. And in fact, it's like the operating, our metabolism is like the operating system on your computer, like on your laptop. And, you know, there's all these myths about metabolism. And one of the myths is that our metabolism is just the roll of the dice. We get it from our parents where we're, we're born with whatever metabolism we're, we're, we're born with. And that's actually not correct.

You know, people, how many people have heard, oh, my sister was so lucky. She was born with a fast metabolism. She's skinny as a stick and she can eat anything. Me, I've actually was born with a slow metabolism. I've had to fight with food my whole life and I've had trouble with my weight. That's not me, but I'm saying what people have, what I hear people saying. And it's just the luck of the draw. So therefore they give up and they say, you know, this is my fate. Wasn't my fault. I was born. I drew the short end of the stick. No, it's not true. What, you know, if, if we are born and our kidneys work the same and our eyesight works the same and our nerves work the same, what makes you think that metabolism in the human body is a crapshoot and just a, and it's, it's, it's, it's ramshackle and just a game of chance. Who gets a fast or slow metabolism?

No. Our metabolism is an operating system. The same as in your laptop. And Rangan, if you went to buy the same model of laptop I have, we bought them from the same store at the same time. You and where you live and me where I live, and we plug it in, charge it up, and then hit the button at the same time, boot it up. me where I live, and we plug it in, charge it up, and then hit the button at the same time, boot it up, the operating system of your laptop, where you live and where I live, it's going to be exactly the same out of the box. So the human metabolism is hardwired in our body to operate exactly the same way. And I'm telling you this because it's very important to think

about the consequences of abusing our metabolism over a period of time. All right. And when you abuse your metabolism, you can actually slow it down. You can actually cause problems with your metabolism. You can derail your metabolism and over consumption of calories is one of the things that you can do to, to abuse your metabolism. So think about it. You Rangan are, are take exceptional care of your laptop. You know, you have it in a case, you clean it afterwards, you shut it off at night, you use an antivirus program to make sure, you know, you make sure you don't have malware on it, viruses on it.

Okay, me, I'm not so careful. I travel with it. Sometimes it gets dropped. I just shove it. I just throw the laptop on the back of my car. Oops, I spill coffee on it every now and then, water. I mop it up. And I never turn it off.

And I'm downloading stuff all the time off the internet. Okay. Now, what do you think is going to happen to that same operating system in your laptop versus my laptop? Yours is going to be functioning a lot better than mine. And if you think about taking in calories, when you over consume calories, among other things that you can do, what that does is that puts a stress on your metabolism. And if you overload your metabolism by eating more calories. Now, calories are basically look food is food is our fuel we call and our fuel just like in your car uh is something that we absolutely need so you need

calories food is our fuel and in our body we we call it calories all right so this is the similar way and we and just like you're filling up your car with fuel, we fill up our bodies with fuel with the food that we eat. If you overload the fuel in your car, what's going to happen? I mean, usually the gas station, the petrol station has a clicker to prevent you from overloading your gas tank. In the body, we do not have that clicker. So we can easily overload, overflow our own body's fuel tanks. Fuel tanks are fat. When you overload your fat, okay, you're going to keep on filling up fat and filling up more fat. You need more fat. Our stem cells will create more fat, more fuel tanks, and you keep on eating, you keep on overloading. That caloric load, overload, puts a stress on our metabolism all right and that then starts to

derail our health and so i don't care if you eat and uh eating healthy food or junk food now obviously just like petrol fuel that you put in your car if you care about your car if you're very conscientious about the uh about the the longevity of your car the health about your car, if you're very conscientious about the longevity of your car, the health of your car, your automobile, all right, you are going to actually try to choose higher quality fuel to put in it. Put some crummy fuel in it once in a while, once or twice, no problem. Your car's not, it'll survive it. You put crummy fuel in your car, low quality fuel, the cheapest fuel in your car every single day, I guarantee you your car's not gonna last as somebody who's,

as long as somebody who takes really good care of a car and put good quality fuel. So the quality of the fuel, the quality of the food matters for the engine of our body, okay? And if you overload fuel in our body, you overload our metabolism. And it doesn't matter whether you actually have good quality fuel or bad quality fuel.

Overloading is not good, but whatever fuel you have, you would prefer to have good quality fuel. So this is, go back to your point of overconsumption. I always tell people who are struggling with, okay, there's so much information out there, Dr. Lee, how do I get started? And the first thing I say is that, take stock with the quality of the food that you eat.

What quality fuel are you loading into the vehicle of your body? And if they take a food diary, record for a few days or a week, everything they eat, then they can read it and say, "'Oh man, this isn't so good, I shouldn't be eating this.'" And sometimes people surprise themselves, actually I eat pretty well on average,

but they can identify some of the low quality fuel items that they actually are putting in. Then I ask them to say, how much do you actually eat? Now, this is a trickier question because most people overeat, you know, and we're trained or almost trained to overeat. And so if you are loading your own plate, I always tell people, take only-thirds of what you would normally take so if you're if you're if you're serving yourself at dinner uh from the the the platter whatever you would normally take as a just have an instinct to say no i'm just going to take i'm going to leave a third of it back in the platter i'm going to to take only two thirds and put it in my plate. All right. I always say load the vegetables on first. Yeah.

Then take, then take only the, then remove a third of it as a start. All right. Then I always say, if you are, if you eat slowly and if you're feeling full, stop eating,

you don't have to clean your plate. It's okay. If you don't clear, clear everything on your plate. That's a good health habit. And then I always tell people, try not to snack after dinner, because snacking after dinner is another opportunity to actually overload your body. And so these are all little tips that I think people always try to get into like so how do I do this like I want to choose good healthy food but it's more than that I can't I don't want to overeat the food

how do I start so I give people these sort of like little easy tips of how to how to take those first steps in their health journey yeah I really appreciate that. It's really, really useful because you mentioned quite a few things there that are worthy of conversation, I think. One was about the wealth of information that now exists for people, the overload of information, even good quality information. It's a bit like the overload of good quality, healthy food. If you are, if you are overeating lots of healthy foods. And that analogy with the car is a really nice one because as you say, you can't really overload your car fuel tank because there is a stopper. It just won't allow you to do it. But just imagine that wasn't there. If you start spraying petrol all over the internal workings of your car, even if it was premium fuel, well, it's a little bit like when we have visceral fat accumulating in our body, isn't it? You know,

this harmful fat, certainly beyond a certain point where it's starting to send out inflammation and damage those organs and increase our risk of early death and disease. So I think it's a really, it's a great analogy. I want to talk about this era of information overload because I think people can consume all kinds of information and they can read books, they can watch your YouTube channel or my YouTube channel and they can get all this information.

Yet I still think with all this information, so many people are confused and they go, well, yeah, Dr. Lee, you're saying this, someone else is saying this, someone else I followed online is saying this. And my feeling, and I'd love to know your perspective on this, is that, yes, we want to listen to experts. We want to get their advice and hear about the science and the research. advice and hear about the science and the research, but then we also have to then go inwards and go, okay, which bit of this advice works for us? I heard Dr. Lee say this. I heard Dr. Chastity say this. I heard Dr. whoever else say this. But actually, you know what? When I eat like that, that's when I feel good. And I feel we're missing that these days. We've outsourced our inner expertise

about our own bodies far too much to external experts and I think that is a massive problem these days that we're not talking about enough. Yeah, no, our own health is incredibly personal. What makes me feel good when I make a food decision or I sit down to make a meal,

or even how I prepare a meal, for example, or if I sit at a restaurant, where I naturally kind of gravitate in terms of ordering food. That's very personal to me. And how I feel about how I eat, and how much I eat, and when I eat, these are all very important factors for health,

but how it works for me is gonna be different than These are all very important factors for health, but how it works for me is going to be different than how it works for you, for example, or anybody who's listening. So knowing thyself, like self-knowledge is true knowledge. Every individual needs to reckon and recognize their own self-knowledge. I've got self-knowledge, self-limitation in order to be able to teach you advance. And you're right. We spend so much time externally consuming information and not enough time contemplating how we, what makes us tick? How are we actually doing it? You know, there are, taking a walk is a solo, can be a solo activity that allows you to exercise and be in motion. But if you do it by yourself, I mean, some people like to walk with others. But if you do it by yourself, it's an opportunity to actually calm your mind from other people and think about yourself.

If you meditate, it's another way to actually, and practice breathing exercise. It's another way to actually center yourself. And I think that, you know, one of the things, even though we talk about healthy foods and we talk about exercise, all these, we give a lot of recommendations, right? And I want to talk about the information overload sources in just one second, but you know, we give a lot of advice, recommendations, because part of our mission, your mission and mine is to get useful information out to people. But, you know, that's still an external thing to somebody listening to us. What's really important, equally important, is that anybody who wants to pursue better health, take the time to really get to know

how they feel when they're healthy and how they feel when they're not feeling so healthy and how individual moves make them feel to find out what their own path is. Everyone's got their own path. And by the way, I would say this again, I mentioned it briefly, personalized medicine is where all medicine is going.

So I don't care if you're in oncology and treating cancer, cardiology, treating blockages of your blood vessels in your heart, the bottom line is that we're all realizing one size doesn't fit all, all right? And every individual is going to be different and respond differently to the same treatment that we might listen. Medicine, when you were training and I was training, I'm sure we had some very, very common patterns and themes.

One of the themes is that you take an antibiotic, you get right the same dose and you treat for the same number of days and you're done. It's like a cookbook that's supposed to work the same way for everyone. And it's just not so it's not true not so. It's not true in medicine. It's not true in nutrition. And it's not true in exercise either. And so I think that this whole idea of personalization, having individuals know themselves, is absolutely vital. Vital as a start. And then I want to say just one more thing about this whole information overload. You know, this is true for children who are consuming information in a very particular

way, right? So typical kid in high school is, or junior high school, or maybe even younger, is on their phone scrolling all day long. They're watching TikTok, they're watching, looking at various things or communicating with Snapchat and quick, you know, communication. It's, it's very externally focused and it's consumptive. There's an algorithm that, that feeds you more of what you seem to be enjoying seeing or looking at longer, but that doesn't actually help you get to know yourself. And it also doesn't force you to consider the source of your information. I think another really important thing for anybody who is interested in health information from experts is first, try not to listen to everybody and everything. You know, try to pick a few people who are trusted voices. It's up to you to decide

how you connect to them. One of the big challenges, I think, of the online community, whether it's YouTube or Instagram or these other media platforms is that anybody can actually deliver information. And I think that one of the things that I believe is that people who are trained in health and who do research and who are very careful in their communication and what they're actually projecting. Because words matter. I think that that's really important from a source perspective so you can actually narrow yourself down.

Pick two or three people that you feel you resonate with, you like their voice, but do check into their backgrounds to see if you think that that person should be a trusted resource. So you're not getting wild ideas that may not actually be correct. Yeah, thank you, William, for sharing that. Really some great life advice there, you know,

beyond food in terms of how to navigate the modern world. And I think it's, I really, I feel very passionately about the idea that we've got to start tuning into ourselves more. You know, yes, there are some core dietary principles that we can share. And, you know, you've written two fantastic books on a lot of these things that, you know, a lot of the foods that people can choose to help improve their health for whatever reason they want. But also, you've got to try this stuff out for yourself and really pay attention to when do I feel good? What pattern of eating suits me? When do I not

feel bloated? When do I feel that I sleep well? What is going on in my life when those things happen? That's the ultimate knowledge, that self-knowledge, that self-awareness, that insight, that's wisdom. And honestly, if I reflect over my career about the patients who truly transform their lives for good, it was those patients who at some point converted the advice being from the outside to figuring that out for themselves and going, no, I know what's best for me. I know which way of eating works best for me. Having heard from the experts, but then becoming their own experts. So that's something I really want to help people

do more and more. Going back to foods then, Dr. Lee, we mentioned a few foods already that can help our stem cells. What about olive oil? Does that have any relationship with our stem cells? Absolutely. So olive oil is a healthy fat, as they say. It's a plant-based food,

comes from plants, the olives. And it contains bioactors, many bioactors. Some of them have been identified. The ones that actually have been best studied, one of them is called hydroxytyrosol. The other one's called oleocanthal. And, you know, for people who are listening, you know, if you're a science geek, you can write all this stuff down. But just know that there are these natural substances that have powerful effects on our body. And, for example, hydroxytyrosol as a molecule, but olive oil as a food substance, all right, has been shown to be protective of our stem cells. Meaning when you consume olive oil and you get these polyphenols, the hydroxytyrosol, oleocanthal in our bloodstream circulating around, look, there's a lot of stuff in our bloodstream that's going on, a lot of exposures that we have. And when you've got hydroxytyrosol from olive oil in the bloodstream, along with your stem cells, they sort of act as police escorts to help your stem cells get to where they go in a safer way.

They're escorted to where they're needed. They're protected. And so why do they need to be protected? Well, if you think about it, there's a lot of oxidative stress that can be in our bodies. Well, if you think about it, there's a lot of oxidative stress that can be in our bodies. You know, oxidative stress can come from fumes that you breathe, from vaping, from off-gassing, from carpets, from artificial flavorings and preservatives that you have in your food, from cleaning materials that you're actually having. All these chemical exposures cause oxidative stress in our blood, which can

damage your stem cells. Hydroxytyrosol, again, is one of those natural molecules that have been shown to protect your stem cells against oxidative stress. So literally, it's like a police escort that helps your stem cells get to where it needs to go in sort of a safe and efficient manner. go in sort of a safe and efficient manner. So when you think about olive oil, there are multiple reasons to consume olive oil. You just mentioned the research around stem cells. I'm sure if I asked you about longevity or inflammation or blood vessels, you could also talk to me about the benefits of olive oil. But how do you recommend people consume it? Are you a fan of it being cold on salads and vegetables? Or are you someone who says, yeah, it's okay to actually cook with olive oil as well? Because this is an area of a little bit of confusion and controversy online. So I'd love

to get your take on this. Yeah. I want to be very clear about this. very clear about this. This episode is sponsored by Thriver, the app that helps you listen to your blood and get personalized guidance on how to optimize your health and fitness. Now, I think regular blood tests can be a really valuable tool that can help tell us which Lysol changes are working and where we might need to make changes. And Thriver is the perfect tool to help us do that because they make it really simple. You just take a blood test at home, which is really easy, send it off, and then you get all of your results in a matter of days in an easy to understand app and all of your results come with personalized actionable Lysol advice from doctors. You can then test again in a few months time and learn what's working well and where you might need to make some changes.

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Pod 4 Ultra. It currently ships to the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, and Australia. Olive oil is, of all the cooking oils, a healthier choice to be able to have with a meal. You don't have to cook with it, but you cook with it there's a myth that olive oil has a low smoke point so you shouldn't do high heat cooking as it turns out olive oil's smoke point is almost the same as canola oil which is used for frying it's pretty close you shouldn't reuse olive oil at a hot heat but but cooking with it in a in a wok if you're using doing asian cooking is perfectly fine. Actually, you just have to like the taste of the olive oil in cooking it. So again, that's a little bit of a myth. You can actually cook with olive oil at pretty high heat and you're fine. Certainly,

sauteing is no problem. Stir frying is no problem. And by the way, in the Mediterranean, I don't encourage people to eat a lot of fried foods because the frying creates these little side products called acrylamides, which, you know, are potentially carcinogenic. But everyone likes occasionally people like crispy food. You know, in the Mediterranean, how they fry foods, they fry them in olive oil. All right. And in fact, the polyphenols get into the food that you fry. So it actually makes something that's not that healthy a little bit healthier with the polyphenols in it. I would you fry. So it actually makes something that's not that

healthy, a little bit healthier with the polyphenols in it. I would say, so you can actually cook with it. I'm not saying you should eat, you should fry with it or eat fried foods, but cooking with it is fine. Using olive oil cold, plain is also fine if you want to dip it in some bread or put it in a salad dressing. I think the quality of the olive oil is really, really important. Okay. And a lot of people don't appreciate this, but when you go out to buy olive oil, what do most people do? Well, you know, if you are for the first time buying olive oil, it's overwhelming how many different choices you have. So you might go for the less expensive one, or you might go for

the one that's got a more attractive label on it. I'll tell you the way that I recommend doing it and what I do myself. I always want to get the highest quality olive oil. So what I look for are olive oils that are made with, pressed with only one kind of olive. It's called mono varietal olive oil. And there's two reasons for that. When you're when olive oil makers make olive oil, they're picking olives when they're ripe off the tree and literally just crushing it and then spinning it in a basket. And so it whips out all the fluid and the oil floats to the top. a basket and so it whips out all the fluid and the oil floats to the top

and then the watery stuff goes to the bottom and the chunks will go to the bottom and they just scoop the olive oil off. They don't filter it and so that's why you wind up getting little bits that are green. So extra virgin first press olive oils, always gonna be tastier, you're gonna get that peppery, you know, sometimes peppery taste to it.

By the way, that's what the polyphenols are. They're actually giving you that taste sensation, a great taste sensation of olive oil, all right? Many olive oil makers, and you can look this up on Google, there's a whole scam in the olive oil industry where people who are labeling olive oil are in fact adding other oils to it. It has some olive oil and they cut it. And so that's not good. You're getting who knows what

other kind of olive oils. It's a whole scam. The other times people are mixing different types of olive oils together, sometimes the cheapest ones they can find together to serve it up to you. And so the way to get around that is to look for mono varietal olive oils pressed with only one variety of olives. These are going to usually be coming from a single farm. All right. It could be a large farm, but a single farm. And this also not only guarantees the quality of the olive oil, because it's not going to be cut with other things. Mono varietal, it's a label. Mono one varietal type of olive. But I look for a mono varietals, olive oils coming from one of three different kinds of olives that you can actually find very easily in the store. And

the reason I look for them is because they have the highest levels of polyphenols of all the olives. All right. So if you like Spanish olive oil, all right, I look for mono-varietal Spanish olives made with the type of olive, the variety of olive called piqual, P-I-C-U-A-L, piqual olives. Fortunately, it's a very common olive in Spain. And fortunately, that olive,

you can easily find piqual mono-varietal olive oil, and it's not that expensive, all right? If you like Greek olive oil, I love Greek olive oil. The olives that have highest polyphenols among Greek olives are called Koroneiki, K-O-R-O-N-E-I-K-I, Koroneiki olives. It comes from the Peloponnesus. Fortunately, a very common olive in Greece.

Monovarietal, highest polyphenols, taste amazing. Great for whatever you're cooking or grilling or salad dressing. And then Italian, if you like Italian olive oils, in Umbria, the highest polyphenols have been found in Moraiolo olives, M-O-R-O-A-I-L-O, Moriolo olives, which is found in Umbria. It's a less common olive. It's going to be more expensive. But again, tastes great, highest polyphenols. And so I kind of tell people, look, if you're going to go buy olive oils, why not get the highest quality? It's fuel.

If you're going to go buy olive oils, why not get the highest quality? It's fuel. And you want to be able to have it taste great if you're going to use it and dip some bread or whatever it is, sourdough bread or whatever, something healthy in it. Or you're going to dribble it on some pasta or whatever you're cooking with it. Why not get the best? And why not get the best with not only best taste, but also pure and also with the highest polyphenols? And that's how I actually choose with olive oil. By the way, some people have reported, I heard this before, that olive oils are not good for your blood vessels. They actually damage the lining of your blood vessels.

That's all bunk. I'm a blood vessel expert. And I'm also an expert on food as medicine. We've studied this. It's a theoretical thing that got put together that winds up actually not being true. Well-intentioned people try to put science together, and I'm not a real scientist, and they don't know the data. It's understandable how they may come up with it, but olive oil is perfectly fine. In fact, it's very healthy for your blood vessels, quite the opposite. How much to eat? You know, there's a lot of studies out there of olive oil. On average, if you take a look at all the studies, the average amount of healthy oil to consume per day is about three to four tablespoons worth of olive oil. Okay, that's a fair amount of olive oil if you're not the mediterranean three to four tables go ahead and take a measuring uh a spoon

out in your in your kitchen and to take out three to four tablespoons and put it into on a dish it's not that much and if you are um scrambling your eggs with it all right if you like eggs um instead of butter and in lunch if you're making a salad dressing with it and you're going to put some salad dressing on and then at dinner if you're going to roast some vegetables or grill some vegetables, and you're going to put some olive oil on it, you will easily get three to four tablespoons of olive oil into your system. Okay, brilliant. That's super practical. So essentially, a lot of advice on olive oil, if people are struggling with the cost of things, as many people are these days, is your advice to get the best quality olive oil that you can afford?

Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I would say it's a buyer's world out there, particularly because you can buy things on the internet as well. If you search for particularly because you could buy things on the internet as well. If you search for mono varietal, PQL or Kornacki or Mariela olive oil, and you just let the internet show you what's the cheapest one, you know, and do a little review to make sure that they're, you know, a good quality manufacturer or supplier, order it, buy it, you know,

that's the fastest way to actually get high quality. Listen, people, people spend a lot of money on a lot of different things, right? But then you actually, again, take a look at your own lifestyle. I can tell you the best investment you can make is getting high quality food for yourself. And in Europe, it's a lot better than the United States. I mean, people buy junk stuff for food and they spend their money on things that are unhealthy as well. They buy cheap unhealthy things and they spend money on unhealthy things. I think getting healthy food, high quality food is one of the best investments you can actually make. Yeah, I completely agree. I think everyone does have different financial situations and different means, no question. But I think something quite profound happens when you internally, going back to what we were talking about before, about tuning into yourself, listening to your body's own signals. When you

consciously make that decision, not like an opinion, a decision that, you know what, the food I put in my mouth now is of top importance. You know, I made that decision a few years ago. Like I internalized that, you know, if I'm going to be the best human being that I can be, the best father, the best husband, the best capable human being as I age, well, the quality of the food I put into my mouth day in, day out is important. It doesn't mean you're never going to go off track, but there's something really, I think, powerful about when you make that decision. And once you make that decision and you live with that decision for a while, you know, other things start to change. So, you So, I love eating out as much as the next person, Dr. Lee,

but I will say that I've become a lot fussier these days and I actually prefer eating in. I much prefer eating in because when you really tune in to what good quality food tastes like, often when you're out, not always, there are some great restaurants out there and great cafes for sure. I just don't feel that good afterwards a lot of the time when I go out. It could be the

oils they're using to fry or whatever it might be. So again, I'm not saying that applies to anyone else, but for me, I much prefer to eat in these days when I can. I totally agree. And by the way, I think the companion piece that I add, because I'm like you, I, you know, I sort of, I try to find what makes me feel good and stick to that. You know, having some self-compassion is an important component to that as well. So if you've decided that you're going to just try to be as healthy as you can, don't feel like it's a strict religion or you're not in a military camp where you can only do one thing. We're all human. We have to enjoy ourselves. We have to have enough compassion to realize that it's okay every now now and then to you know kind of wander off the path as long as you get back on the path you're going to be just fine and i try to kind of lower people's stress level yeah i'm trying to live a healthy

life by also saying you know look these are guidelines you know that they're good for you you you should feel you should feel better when you're doing them. It's up to you to actually take that path. And rather than make people feel fear, guilt, shame when it comes to food, I try to give people permission to live a little. Every now and then you're going to do something you're going to really enjoy. Listen, if you spend more time doing things that are good for you, your body's going to be strong enough to be able to rebound from something occasionally you do that's not so good for you. It's driving on the road right i mean look you know the rules following the rules of the road are actually going to help keep you a safe driver so that you're

going to be accident free but look who doesn't speed every now and then and you know speeding can kill you right so but every now and then you need to get someplace quickly you're going to go a little bit faster than the speed limit it's okay it's okay and so i i kind of try to give people permission to um and i encourage them to be self-compassionate and give them permission to feel the liberty to choose yeah with the with the encouragement to make more good choices more often yeah i, I completely agree. It's a great point. And just to be super clear, I've only got to that point about eating in

compared to eating out, I would say in the last couple of years. You know, I've been on this journey to improve my health with my lifestyle for, you know, 10 plus years now. So you start off where you can and bit by bit that builds and you go off track and you go,

ah, you know what? I actually feel better when I'm like this. And last week I was away for work between Monday afternoon and Friday evening. So all my meals were out and I was completely fine. I was able to function and do what I had to do. But since I got back at the weekends, I'm like, no, no, no. I just want to eat in. I cook my own food now. So I think that's a really, really important point. You mentioned blood vessels before in relationship to olive oil. Now, we've spoken a lot about stem cells. If we could just shift the focus to blood vessels, olive oil is a food that can help us with our stem cells

and help us with our blood vessels. Let's just set the scene again like we did with stem cells. Why is the health of our blood vessels so important? What do we get wrong when we think about blood vessels? And then how can we choose specific foods that are going to enhance the health of those blood vessels?

Okay, so I mentioned earlier, 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels are packed into our adult bodies. That is so extensive that if we were to pull out all the blood vessels and line them up end to end in your body, you'd actually form a line, a thread, that would wrap around the earth twice, all right?

And these literally are the highways and byways of everything everything oxygen we breathe the nutrients that we eat they deliver to every single organ in your body really really critical and in fact no matter what you else you think about in terms of your health if your blood vessels are healthy you are at a really great starting point to optimize the rest of your health. But if your blood vessels are unhealthy, you're going to be far behind. In fact, it'll be impossible to optimize your health in any other part of your body. And this is true when you're a child. This is true when you're a young adult. This is especially true as we get

older, like 40 and above. we need to start paying super attention to how well our blood vessels are functioning. Now, the good news and what people don't get right sometimes is that we think about our blood vessels as passive and like plumbing, and then they get clogged, they get narrowed with lipids or plaque or atherosclerosis, you know, and this is what ultimately leads to a heart attack or a stroke or for, you know, leg dysfunctions when you've got clogged arteries in your legs. My arteries are hard. You hear this all the time. Well, our blood vessels are anything but static. It's not just piping under your sink that if you keep pouring grease down the sink, it's going to clog up your sink and then you got to call the plumber to open it up with a wire.

Nope, it's not like that at all. Our blood vessels are incredibly dynamic. And what that means is our body manages to maintain our blood vessels to try to keep them optimized all the time. Now, something that keeps our blood vessels healthy and dynamic is the inner lining of the blood vessels. Our blood vessels have a sleeve in it. It's like a layer of plastic wrap

that is extraordinarily slippery. We call it the endothelial layer. If you think about like a garden hose and you were to cut the garden hose in half and look down the middle of the hose, you're looking down into the hole. And if you were to actually take a plastic wrap, the kind of you would have in your kitchen

and coat the inside of the garden hose with a plastic wrap, so that when water's running through, that the water is slipping through, sliding through the plastic wrap. Now imagine in your blood vessels, that same kind of wrap made out of living tissue called called vascular cells blood vessel cells it's extraordinarily slippery so slippery that i give the analogy of like an ice skating rink if you've

ever been a kid gone ice skating i don't know most many adults don't ice skate anymore but if you're a kid you might have had that experience you know that when you get up on the ice on the skating rink, it's really, really slippery. It's hard to actually keep your balance. All right. And that's what the blood vessels need to be. So all the blood cells that are winging through our body, they don't stick to the walls at all. They just keep on going, keep on going. You know, like there's like traffic direction. This way to your liver, this way to your eyes, this way to your brain. OK, now you also know that if you're and by the way, if you've ever been ice skating, you know that after the ice is cleaned, there's a machine that will polish the ice between sessions and ice skating. It's called a Zamboni machine.

They drive over it. It's called a Zamboni machine. They drive over it, it heats the ice, there's a little brush underneath it that kind of polishes the ice. When the ice is new and newly polished, you could take a sweater, because it's a little cold in the ice skating rink, and you can throw it on the ice and the thing will glide, your sweater will glide, it's so slippery, all the way across the rink to the other end. Now after you have a hundred people skating on the ice for a session or after a hockey game, you know, where, where the players are really scuffing up the ice big time. All right. When you come off the ice, if you were to throw that sweater on it again, it won't slide.

It'll just stick right to the ice. It'll just stay right there. So the S so we, we just like the ice skating rink, you want your blood vessels to be really, really polished and smooth, flowing. And if you don't treat your blood vessels properly, and there's lots of things that can damage our blood vessels, high amounts of salt, high amounts of sugar, high amounts of unhealthy saturated fats, scrape up the lining of our blood vessels. scrape up the lining of our blood vessels. That's like, you know, that's the difference between being able to have the sweater glide all the way to the end of the rink versus having the sweater stick to the ice.

Now, when you have blood cells sticking to the ice, that's not good when that ice is inside your circulation, because that stickiness can actually start to build up layers and layers and layers, and that's really how blood vessels get narrowed. So one of the things your body tries to do can actually start to build up layers and layers and layers. And that's really how blood vessels get narrowed. So one of the things your body tries to do is to use those stem cells we talked about earlier and to try to repair those areas of the ice

where like a piece might have come off and smooth it out again. So we can actually restore that healthy layer. It's very quite, it's very amazingly dynamic. And when we need more blood vessels, our bodies can naturally grow them where they need to be grown and then stop it when there's adequate blood vessels. And if there's too many blood vessels growing, our body can also trim the extra blood vessels so we don't have too many. It's like a landscaper that's looking

at a golf course and keeping maintaining a perfect golf course. Hey, there's a couple of patches that need some more grass. They'll let you put the seed in there and grow it right up so it looks perfect. And if the grass grows too high, it'll just mow the lawn. So you wind up having just the right amount at all times.

Not too few, not too many, just the perfect amount. That's how our blood vessels are maintained. That process is called angiogenesis. That's how blood vessels grow and stay healthy. Yeah, it's such a beautiful image to think about the inside of these miles and miles of blood vessels inside our body as either being smooth and the blood can travel with no friction and no problem at all, or there could be bumps and lumps there and it can be more difficult. And, you know, we don't naturally, I think many of us think about food and blood vessels, but we do think about our brain health, our cognition, our mood, our skin health, our immune

system, without realizing that, wait a minute, what underpins all, our skin health, our immune system, without realizing that, wait a minute, what underpins all of them? Well, if you don't have healthy blood vessels, you're not going to be delivering oxygen to all of those critical things. So healthy blood vessels mean a healthy heart, a healthy brain. I think it's such a core tenet of optimal health to have healthy blood vessels. Of course, many people talk about exercise and actually moving your body is going to help maintain those blood vessels, or certainly it's one factor. But I've heard you say in one interview that one of your pet hates is when you hear about exercise being the only thing that's good for your heart's health, because of course the food you consume is also very important with these blood vessels as well.

So perhaps you can give some examples of what kinds of foods directly impact the health of our blood vessels. Well, one thing we talked about already is olive oils, olive oil. But I also want to actually back that up and just say, look, and what about olives? You can just eat the whole olive and now you get the fiber from the olive and you'll actually get the other polyphenols, more polyphenols from the flesh of the olive. Other things, other foods

that are clearly very heart healthy are the leafy green foods that have dietary fiber and all these other polyphenols, so the brassica family. Now I like to cook. So, you know, when you get me talking about about foods i'll usually start talking about the foods and most people think about broccoli okay um i would tell you broccoli like other brassica veg family of vegetables have isothiocyanates these are the class of molecules that create sulforaphanes

and sulforaphanes are great for our metabolism. They help to lower our, burn down our harmful body fat. They lower inflammation, which is really, really critical. And many of the brassica family of vegetables, you're talking about broccoli, you're talking about kale, you're talking about Brussels sprouts, you're talking about bok choy, you're talking about Swiss chard. You know, I mean, these are vegetables that are growing in the summer gardens. Take a little extra olive oil, saute some garlic on it, and just throw the vegetables in there. Hit them with a little bit of spice, and you've got very quickly a delicious warm cooked vegetable dish that's tasty. Squeeze a little lemon. You want to add a little red pepper flakes.

What is that doing for our blood vessels? I mean, it sounds delicious. My stomach's watering already at the thought of that. But what does it actually do to our blood vessels? What's happening is that when you're eating it, when you're eating that delicious food, the polyphenols and the sulforaphanes get absorbed into our bloodstream from your stomach. chlorophoraphanes get absorbed into our bloodstream, all right, from your stomach. And those, they serve a number of functions that help protect our heart. Number one, they lower oxidative stress while these molecules are coursing through your blood vessels, because they've been absorbed after you've eaten them from your stomach, they're protecting the walls of your blood vessels from damage. So there's oxidative stress. They actually protect your cells, the lining, the smooth lining of blood vessels.

Number two, they actually lower inflammation as well. So the sulforaphanes and leafy greens lowers inflammation. Inflammation itself can damage the ice. They can scrape up the lining of the blood vessels lowers inflammation the other thing about these leafy greens is they have dietary fiber which don't get absorbed into your bloodstream but that tumbles all the way down through your gut down to your gut microbiome we haven't had a chance to talk about that yet but gut health turns out feeding dietary fiber from our food to our healthy gut bacteria leads our own bacteria, healthy gut bacteria to produce substances, short chain fatty acids that then lower inflammation further. Inflammation is

super damaging to our blood vessel health, right? So if you have, if you're inflamed and you've got inflammatory markers, I mean, we can measure in the lab, if you take a vial of blood, you measure your C-reactive protein as a marker for inflammation. Listen, that inflammation, if your CRP, if your levels of inflammatory markers are high, you got inflammation everywhere in your body, including in the line of your blood vessels. That's 60,000 miles worth of inflammation. That's actually a really bad thing to be carrying around. So this is how leafy greens with our polyphenols and their dietary fiber can all conspire in a beneficial way or collaborate in a beneficial way to be heart healthy, starting with improving the healthier blood vessels.

Yeah. Super interesting. Any other foods that we forget about when thinking about our blood vessels that you would like to highlight and encourage us to bring into our diets yeah well you know it turns out that two beverages tea and coffee have polyphenols that are heart healthy and beneficial all right tea has catechins and the specific catechin that has been best studied is called egcg epigallocatechin 3 gallate and again i encourage people not to get hung up on the technical stuff unless you're a science geek but just know that we we know these things in coffee there's many different polyphenols one of the best best studies is called chlorogenic acid. And both of these are heart healthy and vascular healthy, blood vessel healthy, for similar reasons.

They protect your blood vessels against oxidative stress. They lower inflammation. They're good for gut health. They improve your metabolism by helping your body burn down harmful excess body fat, which then contributes to inflammation. So they're powerful levers that can actually help us. By the way, if you combine this over the course of the day with eating some leafy greens, and then you have some of these blood vessel

regenerative foods like the barley with a beta-glucan or the mushrooms that we talked about earlier or a little bit of dark chocolate High-quality dark chocolate you see it's the net consumption of the things that we're eating all day long That expose our blood vessel that extraordinary network to help us maintain The roads in our body and that's our circulation you mentioned some of the benefits of green tea there. I know you often speak about these drinks that all the longevity populations consume, tea, coffee, and water. You've also made a video recently on your YouTube channel about drinks that we can consume that help us with our metabolism and help us perhaps remove visceral

fats from organs like the liver. It's quite an interesting concept that for people because I think if most people think about their weight and excess fats that may have built up on their body, I think there's a widespread view out there that the main thing that matters is being in some form of calorie deficit. So essentially you are consuming less than you're burning off. So over time, you start to lose some of that excess fat. Now, I know your last book covered this in a lot of detail, but just help us understand how important what I just said is versus particular drinks like green tea or coffee that can really help boost our metabolism. Can you help us sort of find a way through that in case anyone's getting confused there? Yeah, there's a lot of ways to help our body optimize its metabolism.

We talked about one earlier, which is don't overconsume calories and whatever you do consume, make it high quality. So that kind of that snapshot captures a lot of what we talked about earlier. mechanism, a hidden trigger in our body that can help burn down extra harmful body fat that allows us to eat foods in order to burn fat. Now, that sounds like a contradiction in terms, right? If you want to lose fat, you want to not eat, right? Nope. Actually, there are some foods, and this is a big surprise, and I wrote about this in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. There are some foods that actually trigger fat burning. Now, before I tell you the foods, I got to tell you how this works. You know, the popular fad that people have been doing these days, like cold plunges, right? And cold plunges being healthy for your metabolism and other things. Well, actually it does work. And I'll tell you why it works. When you expose your body to cold, the temperature drop actually triggers a special kind of body fat.

That's not harmful, but really beneficial. And it's called brown fat. And brown fat is not a fat that most people are familiar with. Most people are familiar with white fat. We call it white fat. They're two different colors. This is what this tissue looks like under the microscope, okay? White fat looks white under the microscope if you're in a lab, and brown fat looks brown under the microscope. White fat is sort of the fat that we normally think about. It's lumpy, bumpy, wiggly, jiggly. It can be under the skin, subcutaneous white fat. It's under our arms, under our chin. It's the muffin top that

people don't like or the thigh fat or butt fat. Okay. But white fat is also not only under the skin, but it's packed inside the tube of our body. Our body's a tube. So if you look inside the tube of our body, where our organs are, our gut, our viscera, fat growing there called visceral fat can be extraordinarily dangerous because as it expands, it sort of expands like a glove wrapping around your organs and it can be highly inflammatory. And so our body has kind of evolved a natural way to tame that kind of extra visceral fat. And it's through brown fat. There's other kind of fat.

Now, brown fat is not lumpy, bumpy, wiggly, jiggly. Brown fat is thin as a sheet. And it's not close to the skin. In fact, it's close to the bone. It's like attached to the muscle deep underneath your skin. And we got a little bit on the side of our neck. We have a little bit under our breastbone. We got a little bit between our shoulder blades and it's scattered in our belly a little bit.

All right. And what brown fat does, it just kind of hangs out quietly in the background. But if there's really cold temperatures, okay, cold temperatures will trigger to fire up and generate heat right um uh and and uh when it generates heat this this evolved in animals uh who are that are hibernating right you get that wood chuck gets nice and fat in the fall into the winter and then it waddles into the cave and then it's not coming out it's got to stay warm in the winter. Why doesn't it freeze to death? Well, because the brown fat of those hibernating animals, when the weather gets really cold, triggers thermogenesis, thermal heat, genesis, generating heat. And that brown fat

actually fires up and keeps the animal warm all winter long, provides it energy. Where does it get the energy from? The brown fat in hibernating animals has to sustain the heat making fuel. Okay, the fuel, we'll talk about fuel again. It draws it down from the white fat. So that's why animals start the winter hibernating as big, round, you know, fat balls. And by the time spring comes around, they consume most of the energy. They've lost most of that fat by generating heat well guess what humans also have that same mechanism in fact it wasn't until 1930s and before until we realized that humans also a brown fat and it's in the locations I mentioned

around your neck behind the breastbone and so on and so forth cold weather will actually fire it up and we discovered discovered this, by the way, it was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, um, and an analysis of PET scans. Now, PET scans pick up metabolism. When you're generating heat, when brown fats generate heat, it'll actually light up because of higher metabolism. It was picked up in PET scans, um, uh, in New England, which is an area in the United States that gets cold winters. in New England, which is an area in the United States that gets cold winters. And people were looking for tumors.

And they found instead of a tumor, they found something lighting up in the body that turned out to be brown fat. It wasn't a tumor. It was brown fat. People hadn't noticed it before. No one had noticed it before. in a tumor, it was brown fat. People hadn't noticed it before. No one had noticed it before. But then when they actually looked at when PET scans showed the brown fat firing up, it was only during scans taken in people who are getting the scans in the winter, not in the summer. And so seasonally, our brown fat lights up, which makes sense,

just like those hibernating animals. So cold plunges actually are beneficial for your metabolism by firing up your brown fat to burn down your harmful white fat. So brown fat is good fat, burns down extra white fat, which is bad fat, visceral fat, and lowers inflammation. Now, temperature adjusts it. That's pretty cool. There are some drugs that will do it.

I don't recommend it because they all have side effects. But guess what? It turns out that there are certain foods that you can eat that turn on brown fat and, uh, and, and certain beverages. And two of them, we talked about green tea and, uh, uh, and coffee, uh, both contain the polyphenols that light up your brown fat to burn down harmful excess white fat. So the two beverages, and there's a whole other bunch of foods as well, can actually help to stimulate your metabolism by lighting up your brown fat. One last thing I'll tell you that people will like, I can't remember which is the brown fat,

which is the white fat. I'll tell you how you can remember brown fat. You know, people are talking about mitochondria now these days in the health and wellness world. Well, mitochondria are the little tiny batteries in our cells that give us energy. I remember when I was in medical school, I'm sure you had a similar experience memorizing all the different parts of the cell. Man, there are so many different parts of the cell. How on earth are you going to memorize them? So I always remember mitochondria as mighty chondria these little tiny little things that are small but mighty and they generate energy and so brown fat has a lot of mitochondria okay the cell fat cells and that's why they're able to generate the heat they're like

loaded with batteries okay and they the batteries generate heat they draw down the fuel from the white fat well mitochondria have a lot of iron in them. Iron, the same kind of iron that you'd have in nails, like, you know, like for construction. Now what happens when you take a bunch of silver nails and you stick them outside in your front deck for a few days or a week? They're gonna turn brown,

because they oxidize, right? Rusty nails. And that's what actually happens in our brown fat is that the iron attached to other mitochondria, and there's a lot of mitochondria, which means a lot of iron, all right, gets oxidized and it gets rusty. And that's why brown fat is brown and white fat doesn't have that. So that's the reason that there's white fat and brown fat. Yeah, I love it. So if someone is trying to lose excess fat on their body, yes, they need to think about how many calories overall they're consuming. We've covered that a little bit on the show already. But I guess people really do struggle to, you know, lose weight and keep that weight off in the modern food environment.

lose weight and keep that weight off in the modern food environment. So you're saying, yes, pay attention to how much you're consuming, but also if you are consuming the right kinds of foods and drinks like green tea and coffee, and I know tomato juice we haven't mentioned today, but those things can also help activate brown fat, which is, it's all going to help basically, you know, instead of just taking one approach, you're saying, why, why just stick to one? Why not do everything that you possibly can to increase the chances of success? That's right. And, and, you know, and do it in ways that are kind of natural and don't, don't force you to take it, go to extremes.

So one thing is just putting less on your plate. That's low-hanging fruit. That's easy to do. Whatever you put on your plate, make it plant-based and as healthy as possible. Don't eat too much saturated fat. Don't eat too much salt. And don't have added sugars.

Listen, that's also pretty easy. You just got to remember the details on that. So less fuel hot but high quality fuel that makes a lot of sense um now if you want to actually add to this uh you know this idea of like uh burning down fat now you can actually think about swapping out the foods that grow fat, in fact, that build fat, and swapping them out for foods that burn down fat. So swap your soda for tea or coffee, all right? And now, rather than building up your fat with empty calories, you know,

with extra calories from the soda, or destroying your gut microbiome with the diet soda, now you're actually drinking a beverage that traditional and tastes great to most people that actually will light up your brown fat at the same time and to burn down harmful visceral fat. So simple swaps can swap out something that's not good for you, that builds your fat

with something that actually can burn down your fat. That's a simple thing as well. But, you know, and then, but if you think about like, what about planning a meal, right? Like, oh my gosh, you know, I got to, if you have to do your meal plan for the week and I think about what you're going to shop on, shop for, that can, and then you want to choose healthy. Oh man, that's another layer I got to actually deal with to figure out like, what should I buy that's healthy? Well, look, let me kind of run down some interesting foods that can have been shown in human studies

to burn down harmful body fat. All right, and let me challenge you, if you're going to listen to this, to write it down on your grocery list and see if this is something you might consider buying. All right, as long as you don't eat too much of it. All right, onions,ions have quercetin. Mostly packed on the outer layer of the onions. So once you peel the onion, don't throw away, don't peel off too much of the outer layer because

most of that fat burning quercetin, brown fat lighting up quercetin is on the outer layer. Red onions got more of the good stuff than yellow onions, but yellow onions are also good. What about tomatoes? Turns out lycopene in tomatoes, which helps to make the tomato red, actually can burn down extra body fat. It can actually burn down visceral fat through thermogenesis. That can actually shrink your waistline. You're not stretching out the tube of your body as much. It'll shrink it down.

This has been studied in humans. What about strawberries? Strawberries, ripe strawberries have been shown to actually burn down harmful visceral fat. A can of inexpensive white beans has been studied. Just eating a can of beans for five days out of seven days has been shown to shrink your waistline by one inch by burning down harmful body fat.

What's in a bean? Well, a lot of dietary fiber, some healthy fats from the legumes. Obviously, how you cook the beans is going to make a difference. If you want to stew them, add a little extra virgin olive oil, and now you've ganged up

because olive oil can also burn down harmful body fat as well. Carrots can burn down harmful visceral fat. All you need to eat, and this has been studied, is the equivalent of three medium-sized carrots a day can actually turn on your thermogenesis. Going to make a salad, going to roast some carrots. Hey, you know what?

I'm just giving you a partial grocery list, but if you think you can take that and run with it, oh, what about seafood? Let's say that you do eat seafood. All right. Listen, I'm an omnivore. I pretty much eat anything. I try to eat healthy things. I try to mostly plant-based foods.

I eat actually only a very tiny amount of meat. And I try to choose high quality, whatever it is I am eating. But seafood actually contains omega-3 fatty acids. Guess what? That's another healthy fat. Actually, omega-3s, a lot of people don't realize, are originally coming from plants. They come from algae, all right?

So the plants of the sea is where they're originally coming from. And they wind up in seafood. Most people think, oh, I gotta eat salmon. I'm sick of salmon or I gotta eat tuna It's expensive. You know what actually it turns out that lesser fish more inexpensive fish and shellfish Also have omega-3s and so sure salmon has a lot

but you can actually look at cod or flounder or other types of Mediterranean sea bass. They all have omega-3s that are healthy for you. And so do mussels and clams. If you eat shellfish and squid and octopus and shrimp, okay? They all have omega-3s. And that's another way, if you live near the coast or you're somebody who enjoys cooking and you want to kind of live it up with, you know, some seafood, you know, that's also a way of turning on your good beneficial brown fat to burn down your harmful excess white fat. The underscore here, though, I want to say, even though I mentioned a lot of ingredients, you got to remember how you prepare the food is important. If you don't want to be putting a lot of butter into it, you don't want

to putting a lot of salt into it that can damage your blood vessels. You don't, you know, cook in a healthy way. You don't need to steam everything, but you want to actually be mindful. You're not going to fry everything either. Yeah. That's why you have such a wonderful way of talking about food. You clearly explain the science, but your passion infuses through everything. And it kind of leaves us all with this idea that the foods we choose can be a creative pursuit for us. Yes, it's for our health, but there's a, it's like an artistic endeavor that we can play with to actually find the things that we can utilize to improve our health. So I really, really appreciate that. I also appreciate that list at the end there. Many of those foods that

you recommended were very, very affordable, which I think is something to be very aware of these days. To finish off, Dr. Lee, if someone has heard our conversation and they're like, okay, Dr. Lee, I hear what you're saying. I understand the science there, but I don't really need to change much. My life is going pretty well. I think I'm of a decent way. I can function at work. Why should I start changing the food that I put on my plate? What would you say to them? Well, listen, my current research, the area that I am working on, my books are all about the research I'm doing. I'm not reaching for topics to cover. I'm writing about what I'm researching. And right now I'm researching about aging, healthy aging, including longevity. And I'm researching brain health and

all the things connected to brain health. And one of the reasons that, you know, to answer to somebody who's asking the questions that you just stated, I would say, listen, if you are doing pretty well now, keep it up. All right. But what the exciting research is showing is that if you push a little bit harder and try to buff up some of those areas, even by a little bit, you could actually be doing yourself a service to improve your brain health as you get older in remarkable ways. Like, for example, here's one. You know, I'm eating plenty of fruits and vegetables. I'm fine. Well, you know what? ah, you know, I'm eating plenty of fruits and vegetables. I'm fine. Well, you know what?

You might be amazed to know that strawberries, even a cup, one cup of ripe strawberries a day, all right, has been shown to actually reduce cognitive decline in human clinical studies and also reduce the depression that comes with cognitive decline.'s in a strawberry you got ellagic acid and anthocyanins these are natural molecules that we're discovering and so we're discovering the benefits to brain health of ripe strawberries so you know maybe you're eating healthy but maybe the next time you go by a market and you just are walking by those strawberries you might want to double take and go back and say you know i'm going to try some of those now. And so these little tiny extra tweaks, if you're somebody who's already healthy, think about what you're doing. If you feel pretty good now, great. Now it's time to actually level up to actually see if you can do something to make yourself even better in the future.

And so I think thinking about what we do now having an impact in the future is kind of like saying, rather than put all my money under my mattress, which is sort of a depression era thing, why don't we invest our money in some good things? I mean, you're going to have the money anyway, but where are you going to put it? Under your mattress, you're going to invest it in something that's going to grow. And I think that making healthy food choices are a way of growing our health. And this is where my research is now. By growing your health, you know, you're really investing and you're becoming wealthier inside out in terms of brain health, which is a huge dividend for you.

I mean, think about it. The thing that all this discussion about longevity and mitochondria and glucose spiking and trying to get your sirtuins and all the millions of things that people are talking about now, I have one thing to say to that. Who wants to live longer if you're not able to have good brain health? You could live to 150, 200, go for it. But if your brain isn't working, it's not worth living for. And so that's why I think that in this accompanying this quest to live long, we want to live well. And the choices that you're making now, the research is finding remarkably that we can actually improve our future, us as well, in ways that are profoundly important.

Our vision, our brain, you know, our muscle strength, our ability to enjoy life. You know, you mentioned the word passion. We want to actually really enjoy every year that we get. And I think that the good choices, those little tiny little tweaks we make, they can make a big difference. Yeah, William, I love that. Thank you so much for that impassioned plea at the end of our conversation. Where would you direct people who want to learn more? Obviously, you have two wonderful books, but you also have an online course that people can do, I believe. Yeah. So, you know, first of all, I have a YouTube channel. Anybody who's interested in YouTube, check out the content because I'm putting out stuff that people are asking me all the time.

I can't always get in front of an audience, a live audience that you do it. So I'm like, okay, I'm just going to put it up on YouTube. So my YouTube channel, Dr. D.R. William Lee L.I., my website is also the same. It's www.Dr.D.R.WilliamLeeL.I.com. And I'm on social media. want to really do a deep dive with me, I'm happy to accompany you and be sort of your guide on a health journey. And I do an online course, which is a really, really deep dive for a month at a time with a lot of interaction. And I teach you about your body's health defense systems. It's called the Eat to Beat Disease online course. I've been doing it for more than four years now. And I'll

tell you what's remarkable is there are more than 4,000 people from 80 countries that have taken it. So one of the sources of pride I have of the impact that's actually having is really being able to have this broad reach from all around the world. And what I try to encourage my students to do is not only to learn these practical tips and how they can help make daily moves to actually help them their own health, but I encourage them to share their insights with their family and friends as well. And then they become the expert. They become the person who is actually able to communicate something important that's based on science and evidence that they've learned in order to help other people become

healthier as well. So this is something, you know, living life with purpose is actually something that's very, very satisfying, I think, to most of us, certainly to me. And so I try to share that with people by saying that, listen, if you know how to live a little bit healthier, and you can share it with your kids, or you could share it with your neighbor or your friends, and then they become a little bit healthier, you've actually made an impact on the world. Yeah, I love it. Dr. Lee, you're doing fantastic work. Thank you for coming on the show once again. Always a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Always a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation

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