Habits and Hustle - Episode 121: Dr. William Li – World-Renowned Physician, Speaker, and NYT Bestselling author of “Eat to Beat Disease”

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Dr. William Li is a World-Renowned Physician, Speaker, and NYT Bestselling author of “Eat to Beat Disease.” Everyone seems to be an expert in food and health these days. What to eat, what not to eat, and the myths and fads that practically run our lives and guilt us into all sorts of possibly bad eating habits. Well, how about hearing it from an actual expert? Dr. Li’s research has been based on food and diet reactions to health and cancer. He’s not against hearing what people think, but he doesn’t take anything at face value. For him it’s all about the data, it’s all about the scientific research, and he’s built a career around the study of these very food-based values. Worried about what you thought was good for you but recently have heard it’s not? Tired of health & wellness “professionals” pulling you back and forth on whatever they say is good or bad at that time? Want to feel ok about eating fruit again? Give this one a listen. Youtube Link to This Episode  Dr. William Li’s Website Dr. William Li’s Instagram ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Did you learn something from tuning in today? Please pay it forward and write us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. 📧If you have feedback for the show, please email [e-mail]  📙Get yourself a copy of Jennifer Cohen’s newest book from Habit Nest, Badass Body Goals Journal. ℹ️Habits & Hustle Website 📚Habit Nest Website 📱Follow Jennifer – Instagram – Facebook – Twitter – Jennifer’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pressure Number one, I absolutely and I loved your TED Talk. Oh, thank you. I thought it was so well done. It was, you gave people information that it's, even though it was done in 2010, you still gave people information if you listen to it now.

That's not just like repetitive, the same thing over and over again that we hear about our health, about cancer, which I thought was, and you broke it down in such a layman's terms that like anybody can understand it. I thought it was fantastic. Well, that's great. No, thank you for saying that. One of the things that's different about me than a lot of other folks that are in

a wellness space is that I'm a'm a physician that you know I'm trained to run ICUs in emergency rooms so I'm not sort of a fair weather doc and the other thing is that I'm a real research scientist so I actually do the work that other people talk about. There's so much going on in the research world and last year I actually became a COVID researcher as well. Yeah, I know. So the fact of the matter is that what really lights my fire is I love not just learning, which I love to do, but I love discovering. And the whole idea about a scientist that's different than a doctor is that when you're trained as a doctor, you have this kind of box of knowledge that you practice from, right?

And you would hope that that's whoever's practicing is, you know, knows their box really well. But you can't fix everything with what's in a box. And so this is where my, what I do is a scientist comes in. What's exciting about the scientist is you have to assume that what's not in a box is where the answers are. So as a scientist, you pop out of the box, right? To the next level of knowledge. And so for me, you know, that's what I love about food is medicine. That's what I love about health and wellness is like, I'm not coming at this from, I'm not following a trail. I'm sort of asked just asking questions. And I don't know the answer. I sort of, I go to my, I kind of retreat back to my wheelhouse to say, why, so how do we discover something new? How do we learn something about this

that we didn't know before? Right, and you've done that. You've done that with also your new book, which I'm gonna say, it's a New York Times bestseller, and it should be, by the way, eat to beat disease, that's right behind you. And I found, again, in your book,

you, not only do you give really good information that's not so repetitive that people have heard, but you also quantify certain things. And we're going to get into all this. Like, we're just going to keep on going. We're going to just start right now. I was saying that actually just because I genuinely like it and then I realize, I'm going to do your proper intro and all that later.

Sure. But, so, number one, sure. okay, let me just start with this. Okay, so we have to, we today we have Dr. William Lee, who is a renowned international doctor, a researcher. He's got a TED Talk that has had over 11 million views. And let me tell you, that TED Talk, if anyone has not seen that TED Talk, they have to watch this TED Talk because it is all about how we can starve cancer by the foods we eat. And Dr. Lee does a spectacular job of breaking it down in such easy, explainable, easy ways that we can actually practical ways, I should say, that we can actually do this ourselves. And of course, his book is this New York Times bestseller, Eat to Beat disease.

And the TED Talk was in 2010, the book is fairly new. And he's given also just great information that's different, new, innovative that we can do for our immune system, for cancer, and just so much else. So let's just say thank you.

I'm so glad to have you on the podcast. So let's just start with that. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be on and, you know, there's so much going on in the world that seems overwhelming. And one of the things that I love doing getting up every morning is to sort of look at where the light is actually shining at the end of different tunnels that we all care about. And that starts with our

health. Absolutely. And you do a really good job of really giving people really ways that they can take ownership of their health and really improve it. So let's just start with what a couple of things you talk about this in your talk, Ted talk, you talk about this in your book, angiogenesis. What is angiogenesis? Yeah, it's a fancy Greek word that's actually something very simple.

It's actually how our bodies grow blood vessels. Angios, blood, genesis, is growth. And, you know, it's like a word that seems like a tongue twister like antibiotic. 100 years ago, people couldn't pronounce it, didn't know what it meant. Now everybody knows. So, angeogenesis is one of these words that is starting to get into the main lexicon that everybody knows. But the reason it's important is because our blood vessels represent a 60,000 mile network of highways and byways that are packed inside our bodies. You can imagine 60,000 miles. Literally, if I were to pull out all the blood vessels and my body are yours and line them up and end, you'd form a thread that would circle the earth twice.

So that channel brings oxygen and nutrients to every single cell, every single organ. And so whatever we breathe, whatever we eat gets to our cells through our blood vessels. And that's why it's so important. And how can that, that's one of the pillars, I suppose, in the book, right? Like you talked about this. And what is, and how does that kind of helpless with helping ourselves so much to speak with cancer, with helping our bodies be optimized?

Yeah, it's a great question. Basically, when I spent the last 25 years working on new biotech treatments to conquer diseases. So we've been involved with 41 different FDA-approved drugs that are used to treat cancer complications, diabetes, and even blindness. And they've all been very successful. But one of the things about drugs is that you

really can't use them for prevention. And you, because they all have side effects. And so that's what got me to think about food. Now, in my world of biotechnology, there are companies, biotech companies spending billions of dollars trying to figure out how to get blood vessels into better control. Grow them when you need them to heal, to choose, get rid of them, mow them down when they're too high. It's like a weed overgrowing a garden. How do you achieve mow that down?

And you know, drug companies spend a lot of time in energy and it can take a decade of billion dollars. What I figured out is that mother nature is much smarter than any biotech company and it was already laced into foods that she has put into our garden, into our spice cabinet, into the farmer's market. These elements in foods that actually can help our body get our blood vessels in perfect shape. When our blood flow is good, our circulation is good, we can actually feed our hearts and our brains and our muscles and stay in great shape as we age. And also, if there are diseases that are trying to pop up where extra blood vessels are trying

to grow like in cancer, as an example, basically what we eat in our foods can mow down those extra blood vessels and starve the cancer so it can't grow. That's how powerful healthy angiogenesis is. Amazing. I mean, you talk a lot about in your book, about the grand slammers and you give tons of different food options for people to know what is good for what. And we're going to get all into the weeds there later. But since we're talking about cancer right now, you're saying basically like your blood vessels, you can, you need them to be helpful in some times and then other times it can

be detrimental, right? So what can you, can you talk about a little bit of the what food would you say for cancer specifically can help with this process? Like the foods that we should definitely for cancer? What are the foods that we should really be focusing on to integrate? I know you're all about not taking away foods but more like adding. You're all about like adding, not feeling eliminated. Not the elimination diet. Yeah, we'll see. Look, I mean, I'm a medical doctor and I was trained to practice medicine by writing prescriptions and sending people to surgery and everything else. But I'm a scientist and as a scientist, what I'm always interested in doing is discovering better ways to doing things.

What do we not know? And you know, when it, here's something I, I'll share with your viewers and listeners. I did cancer research, you know, in a lab, famous labs, and I realized something amazing. In a cancer research lab, you can go to any university or that's doing cancer research. You can get a super smart cancer researcher that can go online,

search a chemo drug, hit order, FedEx, so bring it the next day, and you can take a spoonful of it, pop it into your experiment. And within a few days, maybe even a few hours, you'll know if this powder actually can stop cancer. On the other hand, if you're to pick up the phone and call on a salad or pizza to be delivered to the same lab and ask that same cancer research as brilliant as he or she might be, how to actually test whether the peppers or the mushrooms or the onions or the olives or the anchovies can actually have a good effect. They will sit there and scratch their heads. So that's what I set out to do.

How do we study food as medicine? How do we actually use the same tools that are used for drug development? Right? Those are the no-holes bar, real science. You know, nobody, you can be skeptical about celery juice, for example, but you can't be skeptical about medicine that the FDA has to approve. So that's kind of the bar that I work on. And so when I started to figure out how to actually deconstruct foods and study foods in the same systems that are used for drug development in biotechnology, the thing that was sort of the eureka moment for me was that many foods are equally as powerful or more powerful than the drugs that have actually been developed

in those systems. So what are some of those medicines that actually have been able to starve cancer by cutting off their blood supply? So before I tell you the answer, let me first say, everyone watching this is developing cancer because we all develop cancers. Cancer, we get a trillion cells in our body, 40 trillion. They're dividing, they're multiplying. All takes us for a couple of mistakes in bingo.

You got a tiny little microscopic cancer, like a pimple. And like a pimple, it's really harmless. You can't see it. It's not going to do anything bad to any, cannot grow up to become dangerous because it doesn't have a blood supply. So tumors without a blood supply can only get to about the size of the head of a ballpoint pen, a tiny little tip of a pen, all right. Then they can't get any bigger, they don't have oxygen, I have nutrients.

But over time, these cancers can actually sometimes get around it by releasing these fertilizers. And then with the fertilizers out there, the blood vessels get tricked into growing to the cancer. And once a blood vessel touches a cancer, we've done experiments on this, that cancer can grow 16,000 times in just two weeks. And now you've got from something that's microscopic and harmless into something that's big and deadly.

Now, so the name of the game is actually to cut off the blood supply and keep those tiny cancers tiny. When they're tiny, eventually our healthy immune system, which we know are diet, our foods can also boost, will come swinging by, like there's like cops on the beat,

driving by the neighborhood, making, it's like cops are going to be driving by the neighborhood, making sure there's no trouble. If they see that tiny little microscopic cancer, they will come out of their cruiser and they will just lock up that tiny little cancer and take it away. And that's basically how we automatically control cancer. Let's not ask why we get cancer. Let's ask another question. Why don't we get cancer more often?

Right. why we get cancer? Let's ask another question. Why don't we get cancer more often? Right. And the reason is because we've got a great immune system and our bodies naturally prevent blood vessels from growing to feed cancer. So what are the foods that can help our body do that? How do we boost our bodies, angiogenesis defense system that protects us

against growing blood vessels to cancers? Well, blood vessels are growing so that you just have exactly the right amount to feed your cells. I call it the Goldilocks principle, the Goldilocks sounds. You remember that? Very tough. Not too hot, not too cold, not too hard, not too soft. Same thing for blood vessels, not too many, not too few, just the right amount. So, when

our foods, when we eat foods that can help cut off the blood supply, that would feed cancers, what we're doing is we're preventing the blood vessels from getting too excessive. So, think about a lawn mower, just mowing over that lawn, so the one's at a little growing a little bit too high, mowed right down, you got a perfect lawn, okay? That's what foods can do. So what are some of the foods we've studied that can actually do this? There's actually a lot of them.

I wrote about more than 200 foods in my bookie to be disease. And surprisingly, green tea, great one, tomatoes, another great one. By the way, every food I'm telling you has human evidence. Meaning it's been studied in human research, not animals, not just lab, but actually people. Tree nuts, walnuts, pecans, almonds, macadamious cashews.

And then perhaps most surprisingly, soy. So you know that common belief that's out there that women should avoid soy because they want to avoid breast cancer because soy has got estrogen and some breast human breast cancers can actually are responsive to estrogen. So if you're looking...

I can ask you actually, that's the question I have about soy. Yeah, well look, turns out that's an urban legend. And out that that's an urban legend. And the reason it's an urban legend is because it's true that some human breast cancers respond to human estrogen. And it's also true that soybeans

contain a plant estrogen, a phytosestrogen, but a beer or a scientist, and you look at the chemical structures of human estrogen and plant estrogen, a phytosestrogen, but a beer or a scientist, and you look at the chemical structures of human estrogen and plant estrogen, they look nothing alike. Nothing. And in fact, plant estrogens block human estrogens. In fact, plant estrogens are like mother nature's tomoxifen, which is a drug that's used to block estrogen. So, now how do we know that that makes a difference? Well, it turns out that the phytoestrogens called genostine and soybeans have actually been cited and not only do they block estrogens for breast cancer,

they also cut off the blood supply. They're also anti-angiogenic. They starve cancer by cutting off the blood supply. So now you have a estrogen blocker and a cancer starver all in one little soybean. Now how do we know that this actually works, right? So the natural question would be, yeah, you know, you're telling me some research, so prove it to me. Right.

Gladly. So there was a study called the Shanghai breast cancer study that looked at 5,000 women who already had breast cancer. These are the women at highest risk. And what they found in this study is that those women who ate more soy had a 30% decrease in the risk of death from their breast cancer. And those women who had already had their cancer treated successfully those that ate more soy had a 30% less chance of having their cancer come back. So that actually showed in a huge real world real life study of women who are at the highest risk that soy doesn't actually make you worse, doesn't threaten you. In fact, it makes you better. And so, I just gave you one study, right?

So then, the skeptics would say, you know, any one study would actually, you know, you're just twisting it to your argument. So, there's something called a meta-analysis. In 14 different clinical trials have been done, looked at the same way, exactly the same conclusion. And every single case, the women who ate more soy had better served better survival. And none of them had to show it more death. So this is why it's so important for research and science, which is really the basis for what I would call

the true food is betterson movement, right? Real science. Not not not conjecture, not selling a supplement. This is the real deal. We can actually take a common belief and ask that question true or not true. And that's how we need to be going through this. So soybeans, tomatoes, green tea, tree nuts, the list goes on and lots of fruits as well. I always say, actually, there's this famous MIT professor, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who said the great thing about science is it's true whether you believe it or not. It's actually that's very true. The where did this whole thing come from? Because I remember there was such a movement against soy that that's why all these other

milks came, like almond milk and all these other things came because they didn't, people didn't want to drink soy milk, people didn't want to have it. Mommy, like where did it come from and why is there still such a stigma against it? Yeah, yeah, you know, it's such a great question. So as best that I can track it down, a well-intentioned person who was neither a doctor or a scientist actually found out that soy of phytoestrogen and then researching breast cancers and estrogen started to put the picture together. So you know, it's sort of like

well intention and kind of created an idea that then became essentially viral because this is actually predates the internet. I mean like people are going to be in it now the word spreads and so but this is the great news about this is that But this is the great news about this, is that science is starting to really gain a foothold everywhere we go when it comes to actually our diet and our nutrition. And by the way, the great thing about the research I'm doing is that, just when you thought you might know something, if there's new data that comes out that gives you a deeper understanding of something, that's fair too. It's kind of like we're just discovering new things all the time.

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Don't forget to pie, either. Get grilling at Whole Foods Market Terms Apply. supply. Keep coming back, you got plenty of space. Oof, not how you would have done that. You like working with people you can rely on. Like USAA, who has helped guide the military community for the past 100 years. USAA, get a quote today. No, I think that's really good. That's such valuable information. And then you also said, tomatoes is such a great one for starving off cancer.

And it's interesting because there's been a lot of backlash lately in the last couple of years, three years that tomatoes are bad. Lectin is bad. Fruit is bad. What do you say to all of that stuff? Yeah. So I just basically say, I'm open to all ideas. I just want to see the data.

I just want to see the data. I just want to see the science. This is just me. Not everybody has that kind of hunger for it, but I want to believe. I think humans want to believe things. That's why I hope is based on this need to believe. That's a very important thing when it comes to our health, especially if you're sick, you know, it's really important, more important than ever to actually have that hope, but data is also really important. So let me kind of address the urban legend about tomatoes, right? Look, first of all, tomatoes have been eaten for thousands of years without having any problems whatsoever.

And tomatoes aren't actually from Italy. Tomatoes are California. Tomatoes are actually from Italy, tomatoes are California, tomatoes are actually from Latin America. The first tomatoes weren't even red. They were actually bright yellow and orange. That's what they call them Pomodoro. They tell you that tomatoes are Pomodoro, Pom, Apple, Doro, Gold, it looks like a golden apple. Apple, Doro, gold, it looks like a gold and apple, right? So again, you know, there's all these, if you understand the history, history, you know, our history tells us a lot. I love to understand the history.

The first tomatoes that were imported to Europe by the, by people who are explorers, here was this fruit that was never seen before, that was perishable, and only the wealthy could actually afford to have it. They didn't need it. They used it for decoration. And so what did they decorate? They decorated their beautiful platters that were made out of lead. Okay, and so they put this tomato on the lead, and the lead was soaked into the tomatoes. People eat the tomatoes and we get sick.

Okay, so that's not the one that went that way. So then they're like, nah, we're not eating this anymore. And then who went, wound up eating the tomatoes and planting the seeds? The peasants. Peasants didn't act couldn't afford beautiful, heavy, leaded, gorgeous silver things. Peasants just ate it, hence tomato sauce. And you never see peasants dying off because they're not actually putting it on toxic metals. Now, another component that led to sort of this false accusation of tomatoes is when they brought not just the fruit of the tomato,

the explorers, they also brought the vine of the tomato, right? Right. The plant, you know, the biologist, the horticulturalists at the time, looked at that plant leave the tomato and said, you know, I don't recognize that. I wonder what it looks like. So there's a guy named Lenny as who went to England and he opened up the great textbooks of plants and tried to match the leaf to the closest thing

that was known, nightshade. It looked like a nightshade. All we know nightshade is really poisonous, but tomatoes not actually a poisonous nightshade. Leaves kind of looked the same. So another kind of association that's not really based. But now you can imagine how this, I'm going to come to the lectin story in a second. So now you can imagine how, oh, it's like lead toxicity from a special class of people that are eating tomatoes.

Didn't work, didn't harm the peasants, but it hurt the wealthy. And now they said, oh, maybe there's like, it's similar to the night shape Because we hadn't seen this plant before boys in night shape people getting toxic all right So that's the start of sort of like the bad mouthing of tomatoes now fast forward like a thousand years to a few years ago We know that tomatoes and many other plants have lectins in it beans have lectins in it and We have heard this idea that lectins are poison. Well, I'm a vascular biologist, so I actually study lectins,

like that's part of the research that I do. Lectins are all over our body. There are hundreds of different types of lectins that are out there. We're made of lectins, actually. In fact, if we didn't have lectins, our skin would fall apart. And so it turns out that there are some lectins that are out there. We're made of lectins actually. In fact, if we didn't have lectins, our skin would fall apart. And so it turns out that there are some lectins that are incredibly deadly poison, but they're not the ones in our body and they're not the ones in our food.

So this idea of associating well-intentioned person, read somewhere about lectins, but didn't know anything about the biology of lectins, didn't know there's hundreds of them associated electens with tomatoes, associated linked it back up. And you can kind of see how when you play telephone, it can create all kinds of distortions of the fact. That's why we need data. So, we just tell you quickly, study 30,000 people, men in the Harvard Health professionalsessionals follow-up study, studied men to look at their tomato consumption, and men that ate more tomatoes. Two to three servings of cooked tomatoes a week. That's not very much, each serving being half a cup. So if you were to take a measuring cup out, half a cup, put some red sauce on it, and put

it on your pasta, that's not very much sauce. So super easy to eat two or three servings of that a week, or half a cup of tomato juice, or, you know, for a salad, you know, not very much. That men who had that dose of tomatoes had a 29% lower risk of developing prostate cancer. So human studies based on the science and what's in the tomato? Lycopene. Lycopene is really heart healthy and it also starves cancer. When you study lycopene in prostate cancer systems, it cuts off the blood supply so the

prostate cancer can't grow up. This is amazing information. I am so glad I have you on my podcast, first of all, because you explain things so well. Also, you know, I'm happy because now I could eat, you know, tomato sauce again. I love tomatoes in my salad. And it's funny because I was still

relieved in the many way, but it's funny how like one thing, like you said, broken telephone can like shift and change how people's perception of like a super food basically does visit. And I like eggplant and I like night-chayed vegetables, so this is very, very happy. It's a good day today. This is a happy moment.

I appreciate it. You know, I think there's something about food, Jennifer, that's so important. You know, a lot of the superfood community and leaders and influencers in the superfood community, you know, they're so important because they want to lift and elevate the people in society to a healthier level. And that is so important.

And so I really, I'm really supportive of that. I think that the key thing is not to get swept up into fads and friends without seeing what the evidence actually is. Like we don't, you know, the same way that we don't take memes that seriously. We just kind of look at them and we kind of like keep them going. We need to really be careful about our food and health. And by the way, when it comes to food in our health, it's not just about the food. There's no super single super food or super supplement. It's really about how our body responds to what we

put inside it. You put something bad in there. Our body is going to have a bad reaction. You put something good in there. Our body is going to have a bad reaction. You put something good in there. Our body is going to have a good reaction. So when we understand ourselves, self-knowledge, first, like that's the first principle of health, understanding yourself, then you'll actually know what to actually feed yourself. And because I think food isn't just about health. Food is so intimate. It tells us about our childhood, our families, our communities, and our culture. Food tells us who we are.

So rather than be eliminating and restrictive, I'm all about leaning into the foods that we love, that research is discovered to be healthy. Because my big thing is that we can love our food to love our health. I think that's amazing. Do you think that you can overdo something like, for example, let's talk about grapes, right? I love grapes.

I'm obsessed with grapes. And people are like, oh, maybe that, when people are dating, wait, they're like no one's becoming obese because they ate too many grapes or too many carrots. They're saying, why I'm asking you this is because they said the sugar content in a grape or the sugar content in a carrot. That's not why people are getting obese, right?

Could you overdo it? If I'm having, and I eat a lot of grapes, is there any backlash to having too much of that? Yeah, listen, that's a great question. So what I've sort of just told you is that our body accepts whatever we put in it and see they're going to have a good reaction or a bad reaction. And the other thing that I've discovered that's really important is that our body's health defense systems, which we can activate with food, craves diversity.

Our bodies love different things. So if you think about it, we all know that kid, or maybe the neighbor's kid, white foods, right? And you're like, oh my gosh, like how could that be? So I'm like, I'm repairing. Right. But you know, like that, and that reaction we have, like, only when you gotta be kidding me,

the fact is that our body, we know intuitively there are body craves diversity. And that diversity activates a different health defense system that activates our angiogenesis, our circulation. Activates our stem cells, our second health defense system, so we can regenerate the inside out. Activates our microbiome, which everybody understands is related to gut health, but what people are just

starting to understand now. Is that gut health? Controls our immune system. It's anti-inflammatory. Helps us use sugar better. Lowers blood cholesterol. Even causes our brain to really social hormones. So important.

Our DNA protects our DNA against environment helps us slow our aging. And of course, our immune system is incredibly important after what we went through last year. So the question is, can you overdo it? You know, listen, you can overdo it with water. If you drink too much water, you can have water to toxicity, but you can't overdo it with diversity of delicious foods that your body naturally wants. So that's why in a way, if you think about it, if you break it down into three meals a day,

or most of it's encounter food about five times a day, breakfast lunch dinner and a couple of snacks or whatever, you know, we're usually not eating the same things all the time. We have to superimpose ourselves like I must eat only this like That's not natural. And so don't be a robot about it. And so, you know, if you eat grapes, I also heard you eat tomatoes So I know you least at least two things So that's at least three things, you know, I like the fact I'm hearing that you're eating diversity

So what would I tell people is that, you know, like in my book, I list more than 200 foods that have all been shown to have evidence that they activate our body's health defense systems. And everybody's different, so there's no one size fits all. What I feel people is open up the book, get that list out, take a sharpie, circle all the foods that you already love. There's 200 of them. I've never met a single person that can't circle 20 or 30 of them, at least. No, you have a great, you do a great job.

And you also, you know, you, you know, you, that's a great segue. It's going to ask you about the five by five by five system that you have. So talk about it because you're talking about it anyway. Yeah. Well, listen, so how do you actually eat healthy and diversely that's true to who you are and how you grew up and what your mom cooked for you and your favorite stuff? Okay, so I will say a few words about what you should stay away from an eliminate, but let's talk about what you should add first.

And this is my, this is the reason. If you spend more time thinking about what to add to your, good things to add to your life, you won't have as much room to add bad things. So you're kind of just like pushing it out by, you know, you're hip checking out the bad stuff naturally. And you get all the good stuff that you already enjoy. So I created this concept, the framework, called five by five by five.

It's a very easy way. It's a super easy way to remember how to eat healthy. It says this, it know that your body has five health defense systems, angiogenesis themselves, microbiome, DNA in our immune system, super easy. These systems are activated by food. So every single day, make sure you eat at least one food that turns on one of these systems.

Because the more you turn it on, the stronger our body is going to be. And these systems help us resist disease. So why not? Like, that's a good thing, particularly if you love those foods. And by the way, we encounter foods about five times a day. So every time you see food, you visualize food or you're reaching for some food, make that decision, if you've got a choice, make that decision and pick up something that's actually going to activate one-day-rate health defenses, five defenses, you know, eat one food at least every day that activates each one,

about five times a day, super easy. It's not intended to be restrictive. It's all about giving you the freedom to be able to make those great choices. So, you know, there's more than 200 foods in my book, take out a Sharpie, or, you know, and just circle the ones you love, and that's your shopping list. That's what you go to the farmer's market, the grocery store, wherever you're going to fishmonger, wherever you're going to go, just drop a courting to that list, put it on your refrigerator, okay? Make it seasonal. And so, and then you can kind of go from there.

Should you eat fresh, should you eat organic, could you cook with olive oil, healthy oils? You know, all those kinds of things are, everything downstream follows that basic principle. And if you like Italian, it still works. If you like Greek, it works. If you like Japanese, it works. If you like Eastern European food or just a plain old American comfort food, it still works.

And that's what I think is so fundamental. Our bodies are hardwired to respond to good foods. So go for it. Right. Well, you said I also wanted to ask, I want to talk about the health, the five things that you just mentioned. One of them was regeneration and stem cell stem cells. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and what you mean by that? And like, basically, how do you boost the amount of stem cells you have? What, how do we even, what kind of foods can we eat to boost them, I should say?

Okay, so first let me just tell you what to do. And what are stem cells? I just say, and also tell people what stem cells are. Let me tell you what stem cells are. We are all made out of stem cells. When mom and dad got together, sperm and egg got together, how do we turn from a little ball of cells to turn into a human being nine months later?

Well, we are formed by stem cells. So for we actually are made of stem cells. But when we're born and we grow up, our body reserves some of those early stem cells and says, you know what? I'm gonna take an insurance policy and I'm gonna keep a few of these stem cells around just in case. So where does the newly born, freshly minted baby

keep their stem cells? Where do we have it? Where do you have your stem cells? Where I have mine? It's packed in our bone marrow, okay? Stuffed inside the bone cells. Where do we have it? Where do you have your stem cells and where to have mine? It's packed in our bone marrow, okay? Stuffed inside the bone marrow. What's our bone marrow? You know, have you ever seen a chicken bone cut in half?

There's like that dark stuff in the center of it? That's bone marrow, okay? If you know somebody who's had leukemia or something else, they may have had a bone marrow transplant. That's also called a stem cell transplant because you're taking healthy stem cells to try to regenerate

somebody whose body is filled with cancer to regenerate healthy cells. That's how powerful stem cells are. We have them as adults. Now, where I got into this is because as a physician, taking care of people with heart disease, stroke, heart attack, or wounds that aren't healing, or diabetes, where your pancreas isn't able to make insulin. One of the holy grails of medicine is to create regenerative therapies using stem cells. 20 years ago, that was very controversial because people were worried about embryonic stem cells

and baby farms used to harvest stem cells. None of that is extra on the beetroot. Instead, what we've tried to figure out is that how to use adult stem cells. And so people are finding, by the way, this is, you're going to like this, really cool. Another place that people store to stem cells is in fact. Light blue? Yeah, when you suck out fat, it contains hundreds of millions of stem cells. And by the way, that's why fat can grow so fast. Think about it.

Like, is this? That's why. It's like having, like, your fat having a baby, okay? Yeah. That's why it expands. It's cool. What, imagine this, you want to regenerate your heart. A plastic surgeon can do a liposuction, okay? In the same person, suck out their fat, and so you get this like canister of yellow fat, and you put some stuff into it and you spin it down, and the

the fat floats to the top like it's a doily and the stem cells stay in the bottom because of gravity. And you pour the fat out, you take those stem cells and you give it to a cardiologist. And the cardiologist will take these fat stem cells from the same person, loaded up in a syringe and jacked it into the heart. To grow new blood vessels and new heart muscle. That's the future. So I've been involved with this for almost 20 years. Okay. It's friggin cool. All right. And it is going to be the future. We can like, oh my God. Okay. So now let me tell

you, it is still early days yet for getting this to be FDA approved and everything. There's been a lot of efforts. So you know, anybody wants to go look this up. You just go to clinicaltrials.gov, which is the government's database on trials and look up stem cell and heart stem cell brain stem cell erectile dysfunction. You'll see all the research is going on in this area. But what's cool is that if man, the if mankind thinks they can invent something that can help treat a disease, mother nature probably beat humans to the punch. And so what I wrote about

my book is this mind-boggling set of discoveries that foods, things that mother nature is put into food, can actually coax themselves to come out of our bone marrow into our bloodstream to regenerate us naturally from the foods that we eat. That's basically, so every time I told you about a drug, a biotech effort, and then I'm telling you that many foods can do the same thing. What foods tell us? I want to know. All right. So, um, well, I'll tell you the one that you're going to you're going to love. You're going to remember, uh, the most turns out that dark chocolate can do this.

Cacao contains these polyphenols. And it's been studied. If you get high polyphenol chocolate, that's really dark chocolate, that's greater than 80% chocolate. What will happen is that if you eat that, those polyphenols will send a signal to your bone marrow and call out to stem cells and they'll come flying out like bees coming out of a hive. And then they will actually help to regenerate you from the inside out. So there was a study done of men in their 60s who had heart disease, right? So these are people who demonstrated that they have problems with their blood vessels

and their hearts. And they just gave them two cups, two eight ounce cups of dark hot chocolate to drink every day for 30 days. That's it. Like two espresso cups of dark chocolate. And they measured the stem cells in each person from the beginning to in 30 days later. And they found that you could double the number of stem cells that came onto your bloodstream just with dark chocolate. Now, so does that matter?

Like just because you can measure your blood, absolutely, because they are actually able to test to see how the effect on their blood vessels, and they could actually make the resiliency of your blood vessels that you can measure with a blood pressure cuff twice as good as from the baseline, from the beginning. So that's an example of how powerful foods are. Now what besides chocolate? By the way, I have a big reveal for anybody who wants to go on social media to check me out, Dr. William Lee and chocolate. By the way, I have a big reveal for anybody who wants to go on social media to check me out.

Dr. William Lee and Chocolate. I got a big project that's actually going to be announced tonight. So you should check it out. You'll find it. I can't say anything about it at this moment. At the time of the staping, but I've actually helped a partner with somebody to really come up with an amazing collaboration. So, and it has to do with what I just talked about. So another food that actually is stem cell recruiting is fruit peel. So it turns out that there is a natural chemical called Ursulic acid, Ursulic acid. And it's found in fruit peel, apple skins, cranberry skins, grape skins. Okay, you like grapes?

Yep. All right, now think about it. You might be popping a lot of grapes. You're probably not eating a ton of apples, right? Okay. I love apples, actually. It's my second favorite. So, so if you eat an apple, eat it with the peel.

And by the way, that's the one single reason that I would encourage people from an apple perspective to get organic apples because less chance of having pesticides is not that easy to watch pesticides up. Organic apples are going to be going to not have that problem. But if you eat the apple with the peel on or cranberry with the skin on or grape with the skin on, right, you're getting orcelula acid, Ursula acid regenerates tissues as well, and they've been, they've studied this in the same systems that are being used to study stem cells for treating human disease.

And it works. So now it's difficult to eat a lot of whole fruits with fruit skin, there's a lot of good stuff in it too. And you can bake apple skins and have chips and all that kind of stuff. Now I'll give you the hack and the kind of the pro tip on how to eat a lot of fruit skin. Trail mix. If you get tried fruit, you know, it might be hard to, you might be, well, you might not have a hard time eating 10 grapes, okay, or 20 grapes, but if you had 20 raisins, it'd

be really easy to actually eat that. Dried cranberries, dried raisins, dried cherries, any kind of dried fruit, mix it with healthy tree nuts or don't, just have dried fruits. That's a great way to actually get this ursula acid. Now, I want to come back to something that you said earlier about sugar. Okay. So again, this is, you know, I sometimes tell people that, you know, I'm kind of a peace loving guy and I love to, you know, like, I love to build communities

and I love people to be excited by the same things that I'm excited by. But I do have a vendetta against misinformation. Sometimes, that misinformation isn't deliberate. It's just a mistake that broken telephone that we talked about. So here's the thing. For a long time, I didn't believe that sugar actually is responsible for or can can provoke cancer. But that was the rumor that was out there.

And I was taking care of cancer patients. And I never saw anybody eating a Snickers bar or chocolate and having their cancer get a lot worse. And so I thought, that must be an urban legend. Then I actually, and there's a reason for that, then I actually started to see research in the cancer research community showing that, yeah, metabolically, if you overload a system with sugar, so more than your body can take care of in your bloodstream,

yeah, you actually will get cancers to grow faster. This isn't a lab. Well, so I'm like, ooh, okay, now I started to straighten up, and this is where science and data actually helps me learn like everyone else. But then how do you actually reconcile the fact that people who eat a lot of fruits actually have a lower risk of cancer?

So plums, peaches, pears, apples, apples are a great example, lowers the risk of lung cancer. Buy about 15%. How could that be? Well, because you're eating the sugar. Well, it's because, look, when it comes to food, it's not either or. There's some sugar in fruits. It's fructose. It's not refined sugar. It's not added sugar, okay, and it's not added sugar, it's not anywhere near what you'd have in a canisota, all right, or in a candy bar or in the snow cone or whatever it is that you want to talk about, it's natural. And that fruit contains all these other bioactives that Mother Nature put in there.

So the net net is that you're eating so many more good things that can cut off the blood supply to cancer, boost your immune system, even kill cancer stem cells, which is really cool. Like sometimes cancer stem cells you want to get rid of those. Got some foods. Some foods can actually do that like walnuts. And so the bottom line is that I'm not afraid of eating fruit. I think that if you're a cancer patient, you probably want to avoid candies, cakes.

You probably want to avoid super, super sweet fruits or fruit juices. And sometimes fruit juices are artificially, have that extra sweetener as well. Right. Regular fruit? No problem. More from our guest, but first a few words from our sponsor. Everyone's career is different, and reaching your goals takes time. LinkedIn Learning offers courses based on the in-demand skills trending on LinkedIn, taught

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That's LinkedIn Learning.com slash free month. I'm loving you so much right now. I live off of fruit, right? And so, could you, though, in terms of weight gain, though, if you're eating too much, because it has a lot of calories, though, right? Like, you have to be careful in terms of that. I would imagine to some extent, not because people are getting obese off of fruit. I know that, but, you know, it still can be, it's not leaning to have that much. It won't lean you out to have that much fruit or is that a myth also?

No, that's that you know like it's really hard to have too much fruit to you all gain weight by eating a lot of Plant-based foods Including or despite the fructose that's in it If you actually have a normal metabolism and and that means that your gut health is healthy You're able to lower your lipids, and you don't have some, you know, odd genetic kind of issue that might be forcing your driving you to gain weight. And I wish I could talk about this, but I can't talk about it yet.

I'm working on another project that actually will help use foods, actually help you lose weight. So, there's brand new research. It's like smoking hot. That'll come out in about a year. You won't tell me that how could you not tell me? I will tell you, there's another system in the body that you can activate using foods. And it's amazing, it'll let your system up. So I'm telling you, as a scientist, I'm working on, these are like my research projects, these are the scientist, I'm working on these are like my research projects. These are the projects that I'm working on. They're the next things that are on my to-do list that I'm working on.

And it's exciting because you know, like that's why, you know, when we were talking before, there's never a reason for me to repeat other people's stuff because there's so much new things to actually work on that are really, really great. But back to the fruits. Now, it's great that you love fruit. I think it's really, really healthy. I'm so glad to hear this, you've no idea. Well, now you just said something that I'm kind of upset about

because one of my questions down the road, which I haven't even gotten to other things, were about the new things you're working on. But before I even get to that, you were talking about polyphenols in chocolate, and that's why it's so good for stem cells. But so does that mean that olive oil as well, how about coffee has polyphenols, like all these other things that have polyphenols, are those the other foods that can help really increase the amount of stem cells you have in your body Yeah Absolutely, there's a whole list of foods and a growing list of foods that actually help

Recruit our stem cells and again, you know, this isn't Medical therapy. This is what I call the healthcare that we do between doctors office visits I call healthcare occurs between doctors do between doctor's office visits. Like, all our healthcare occurs between doctor's office visits. And so, and it's a way to actually enhance our life by eating foods that we love that actually can help our stem cells actually get activated. And it's the same thing, by the way, for all these health defenses. How do we make our blood vessels healthier? How do we make our stem cells work on our own behalf? How do we make our bodies work for us? How do we get our blood vessels healthier? How do we make our stem cells work on our own behalf?

How do we make our bodies work for us? How do we get our gut to be healthier? How do we protect our DNA? And how do we actually activate our immunity? Each of these health defense systems can be activated by food. All you got to know is what category of defense each of these foods activate. And most of them are plant-based foods, although not exclusively.

And so- Are you a plant that you eat meat, then, at all or no? You know, I'm very straightforward about this. Like, I'm an omnivore, so I will eat a little bit of everything, but I would tell you very straight that most of what I eat is plant-based, and most of what I actually do,

when I plant a meal, you know, I don't do what I grew up kind of thinking about it, like, you know, when first time you go to a restaurant by yourself, you're like, you know, like, what do you do? Open up your pop open to menu, right? I mean, some of these, some of these habits are like, would they get ingrained really? We're preconditioned to do it. We're preconditioned to kind of eat the way that we did when we were kids when we had no control over it.

Exactly. So you pop it open and you're watching what your mom and dad did and you're like, what's the animal protein we're going to have? I'm going to have like the T-bone steak or I'm going to have the pork chop or I'm going to have the whatever. Right. What I do is I go and I peruse the entire menu first and I look at all the foods I recognize all the ingredients

I recognize and what's great about chefs now is they all put all their ingredients out there so I immediately I know which ones are actually good for me that I actually like and I will pick the plant-based vegetable first It's not that I am using it as my main, but I'm using that first. And then later, like from my side, I'll pick something else to see if I want to let it up, but I really try to focus on the plant-based.

And so, 80% of what I eat is easily plant-based, maybe more. And then, you know, I'll eat fish. Sure, see if food is good, and I like to explore. I'll eat a little bit of meat. Mostly, I don't need very much red meat. I try to keep out and saturated fat. I don't eat processed meats. I'll eat a little bit of chicken. But for chicken, I almost always have free range chicken and chicken thighs. I was going to ask you about that. I saw in your book you recommend chicken thighs and not chicken breasts.

Why is that? Okay, well first of all, there's two reasons. I think the thighs are tastier, so who's got a taste kit? There's a little bit more flavor in it. I like that flavor. And breasts, by the way, although we're, again, conditioned to think about the breasts as the best part of the chicken.

It's clean, it's white, It's you know uniform. It's right. By the way, if you've ever seen like a regular real Chicken in the wild. They're not wearing these double D cups I mean, no, we're talking like new chickens are like B cups I mean, we're talking with new chickens and like beacups. We can make them. And it's like that big thing. Like you know, I love it. So, but more to the point is that it turns out that chicken thighs, especially free range,

they have a special kind of vitamin called vitamin K2 that they accumulate in their thigh. They're exercise in their workin' out. They're eating normal, natural things, they're picking up, you know, greens and grubs and stuff like that on the ground, natural free range, and they're accumulating vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 is anti-angogenic, cuts off the blood supply to cancers, hard healthy as well. So why, you know, it's a no brainer for me if I'm good

at it, and it doesn't accumulate in a breast. And so that's why that's one of the reasons why I like chicken thighs. That's so interesting. You're right. Again, one of these urban myths that you think that the chicken breast is better. Now you said you talk about K2 in chicken thighs. Why is it that when people now take vitamin D supplements, they're telling you to take it vitamin D with K2? What is the combination? Well, so, you know, I think that the jury is still out really about whether or not a combination is really important.

Here's the most important thing, honestly, that I would tell you about vitamin D and vitamin K. They're both vitamins that we call fat soluble vitamins, which means that they don't dissolve in water. So if you try to take a capsule of vitamin D or vitamin K2 and you put it into a glass of water, like it just kind of floats atop, it doesn't mix. But if you were to actually put it in some salad dressing

and mix it up, it'll dissolve really easily. And so one of the things that you should know is that there's water soluble vitamins and fat soluble vitamins. So if you have something, if you have a meal that has some olive oil or natural healthier oils, fish with omega-3 fatty acids, and then you take your vitamin D, vitamin K, it'll get absorbed in your body a lot easier. Oh wow, that's great information. This episode is brought to you by FX's The Bear.

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zero self-doubt you. Grab a with love today. Vitamin water, zero sugar, nourish every you. Vitamin water is a registered trademark of glass O. Okay, so you were saying something because I wanted to, oh yeah, I wanted to ask you, but we were on the polyphenols, we've been jumping a little, and then I want to get into a little bit of gut and immune health and the COVID-19 resource that you've done. So why is there such a bad rap thing on coffee if it does have all these polyphenols and all these other health benefits? I mean, yes, it has caffeine, but is that kind of also an urban myth that coffee is a problem? And when people are doing a lot of elimination diets,

which are a huge fad right now, again, with these fads and trends in dieting, they always eliminate the coffee. But yeah, you know, so again, I go by the science coffee. First of all, I will tell your viewers that I have a couple of coffee every day. I did a gap year after college. I was lucky enough to spend some time in Italy. I think probably back then I picked up the habit of having an espresso and then when I was in med school, you know, basically you're getting your butt locked every single day to get up the morning, you need a swig a little coffee.

And, you know, all the data I have seen in humans is that coffee actually is beneficial. Lower is your risk of heart disease, has anti-cancer effects, and, and wait for it, because this is actually the most important thing I think as, you know, as people, as we get older, turns out that drinking coffee slows down cellular aging. So

And it's a polyphenols on a coffee. So our cells naturally are aging, right? We get exposed to the sun. This gun just looks so good. And then we get older like, you know, what's the difference between you know, the flesh of somebody who's a grandma or grandpa versus somebody who's a teenager? You know, there's a difference. Well, it turns out the cells are also getting older and that's a grandma or grandpa versus somebody who's a teenager. You know, there's a difference. Well, it turns out the cells are also getting older, and that's a natural kind of life fuse that burns down, right? Like that mission impossible thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that.

When you slow that burn down, explosion doesn't happen so quickly, and that's slowing down cellular aging. Coffee actually does that. So, you know, again, that's, that's just the evidence. I love that. Does it matter what kind of coffee there's all these things about mold being on coffee and this and that. You know, you can always find something wrong with somebody's food or somebody's manufacturing or something like that. And so I don't, I don't really want to kind of get into, you know, fencing with people's complaints about food. Yeah, get the best possible coffee you can have. You know, and by the way,

you're brewing coffee with water, what's in your water, if you're testing your water, like it goes on and on from there. 100% agree with you. You can drive yourself crazy trying to do it. I think, look, life's for the living. You got to be real practical about what you do. You know, get as clean as water as you can, get the best quality of coffee you can, get the kind of you like. Here's what I would say about coffee. Don't put added sugar in it, drink coffee black. If you like it or if you can, if it's too strong of you, make it less, a little bit less.

If you're going to actually, if you want to sweeten it, don't put refined sugar in it. You can actually put honey, maple syrup. There's other ways of natural syrups that are or natural sweeteners that are actually good. There is monk fruit, actually sweeteners, actually got zero calories. Here's what you don't want to do. You don't want to use artificial sweeteners. You don't want to use artificial synthetic sweeteners. Why? Not because of the calories. In fact, people who eat a lot of artificial sweeteners gain weight, you know why?

Because artificial sweeteners, they screw up your gut microbiome and the gut microbiome processes your body fat. So you screw up your internal fat defense system, you wind up actually gaining weight. And so, you know, like, so you just kind of did like a complete U-turn of what you wanted to do. So I would say use a natural sweetener. I mean, this is, this is like where some of the popular wheat stem actually makes sense.

Do natural things you become. No, I think that's a great. What do you think of Stavia? Is Stavia okay? So far, Stavia looks pretty good. It's natural. What you want to be careful though. Okay. There are lots of Stavia's that are not fully Stavia. They've actually engineered with other things. Oh.

Anything that comes in a box or a can or whatever it is, look at that ingredient list. That's the number one thing I always tell people and check it out because at least in the United States by law they have to declare what's in it. And once you see what's in it, then you can decide, make a decision and usually there's choices, right? Stevia this, that, this, this kind of brand, that kind of brand. Pick ones that actually is just pure stevia.

I love that. Thank you for telling me that because I'm a big stevia person as well. And there's always again Like that's one of them that's always on the fringe right people say it's good some people say stay away from it What also you did it Kiwis Kiwis are great for cellular health too, right for Kiwis are amazing You know first of all Kiwis originally came from southern China They got transplanted to New Zealand where they

Flourished because it's a kind of a in a tropical environment there They Were associated with the bird which is the Kiwi a Kiwi is actually a bird I think they I think the original name for Kiwis was Monkey Fruit, because monkeys would eat them picked them out of trisol. And somehow when they got transplanted in New Zealand, they became associated with Kiwis, which is a New Zealand bird. And the islanders are called Kiwis, right?

Yeah. So anyhow, and then they started selling it all around the world. So I love the history of food and like understanding something about this stuff. Anyway, so here's a great about Kiwi. They are packed with fiber and they're packed with vitamin C and they do a couple of things. The fiber when you eat a Kiwi is so good

for your gut health. And if you even eat one or two Kiwis a day, you'll change your gut microbiome to be healthier in 24 hours. So overnight, your gut starts to be healthier. Good, better, bacteria start to grow. Number one, number two is that the vitamin C and other polyphenols found in kiwis protect your DNA. So there was a study done, it was amazing in Singapore, where they actually gave women, healthy women, one, two or three Kiwis to eat, and then they drew their blood, and they tested, they looked at their DNA to see how well the DNA was being protected. protected. Our DNA naturally is kind of fragile, but eating fruits and vitamin C, things like that can protect our DNA. They found that eating one kiwi a day will protect your DNA from

damage by 60%. So it's like a shield. The amazing thing. Right. And you eat three kiwis a day, it helps your DNA, your body, to rebuild damaged DNA by 60%. So one of three kiwis a day, I mean, think about it. Like, take a kiwi, peel it, cut it up, put it into a yogurt, just or slice it, have a slice of it. You know, it's just delicious. It's not too sweet.

Little tangy, you know, you cut it in half as that beautiful green, emerald, green, middle. It's just a really great fruit. Now, I'll give you like a little tip. There's a lot of fiber in kiwi. If you want to make the fiber increase by 50%. Here's what you do. Make a smoothie out of it. So you just put into a blender with other things as well, obviously.

And you actually cut off the ends because they're kind of nubby. And you just blend up the skin too. With the skin? Yeah, this is the crazy thing. Like, I, I, this is something I recently was working on is one of the things that I really care a lot about is sustainability foods. How do we use foods that, that is helpful for our planet, right? I mean, like everybody's woken out to the fact that like we can't be messing up

modern earth. I'm like, we only got one earth, You know, we had two of other things. We only got one earth. And we're screwing it up. So it's payback to how do we actually do it better. So like instead of throwing parts of foods away, are there things that we can actually do? So I did not know this, but there are people that have successfully made smoothies, including

the kiwi skin and it increases your fiber by 50% that fiber helps your gut health. So it's not for everybody, and I would never eat kiwi skin by itself, like that's disgusting, but if you could perfect that kiwi smoothie, blend with other things in it, that's another way to really get some

super enriched fiber, and I would get organic kiwi scent. That's amazing. I think a kiwi is so underrated. People don't really talk or eat it. Like that's not like a main fruit that people normally go for. But you can't unlearn what I just told you.

So now you're going to actually be looking thinking about kiwis in a different way. I'm actually going to go buy some kiwis today because of that. And I will be, I'm gonna be integrating that into my diet. So, can we just a little bit, let's talk about the immune system

because I feel like everything starts and ends with that, like a lot of these diseases that COVID-19, or COVID-19 recently, of all these other things, it starts when you have a week and a troubled immune system. So how could we, and I know it's a very tag-blind, very, how do you boost the immune system? It's very kind of like popular right now to say that. But are there ways that we can actually boost our immune function, create an optimal place for that. So a lot of these other diseases won't be able to kind of fester from.

And that's one of your specialties. So I would imagine you have a lot of ways. Yeah, well, like every one of those health defense systems, the five health defense systems we talked about, our immune system is pretty sensitive to what we eat. You can damage your immune system. If you eat a lot of ultra-process foods, a lot of added sugars, too much salt, ton of saturated fats, all those things

kind of blunt our immune response, but you can boost your immune system as well. And this, again, has been studied using the same types of systems that are used for drug development. You can measure your immune response and your bloodstream. And a couple of good foods that we'll do this, broccoli sprouts. We'll actually do that. So there's something in broccoli called sulforafine. That's what gives broccoli. It's kind of unique flavor. It's kind of a little sulfury, right? And it turns out that the grown up broccoli

has just about as much as it's ever gonna have. Sorry, the baby broccoli has as much as ever gonna have when it gets bigger, it just distributes more evenly throughout the bigger plant. But the baby broccoli spouts three to to four days old has a hundred times more of the sulfur of fain than the big broccoli. And by the way, the big broccoli, you know, we mostly eat the trees of the broccoli, but the stem has twice as much of the good stuff as the trees. The trees are good. The stems are twice as good.

Really? Well, throw the stems away. Cut them up, not tell you them. Puree them into a green juice, make a soup out of them. You're going to make a soup, add a little oregano, broccoli oregano soup. Amazing. So many ways that, again, this is sustainability, right? Like, don't throw it at the skins.

Don't throw it at the stock. So that's immune boosting. Mushrooms. Another immune boosting foods because it contains something called beta-glucan. Beta-de-glucan is found in the mushroom. You eat the mushroom cap, right? So the lowly, lowly white button mushroom. Go to any grocery store, you can get you get it. What do we normally do? We take it home, we cut it off the cap, we throw away the stem. at home, we cut it off the cap, we throw away the stem. Caps got beta glue can, stems got twice as much. Eat the stem, cook with the stem.

Peel off the, I mean, trim off the very end piece, it's kind of dry and kind of cruddy looking, but eat the rest of it. And that's immune, that stimulates your immune system as well. You know, there's so many dishes and so many cultures that you cook with the stem. If you don't like the idea of just eating the stems, save them up. You can freeze them if you want. And then blend them up and you can create a mushroom soup out of it. That's a great idea. So is there one kind of mushroom that's more have healthier, more nutritious than others? Are they all the same? Yeah, so this is what I love, I first

find love mushrooms, but I love the story of mushrooms too, right? Because they're basically wild, you know? Yeah, mushrooms don't naturally grow on farms, like you have to put them on the wall. Right. They actually grow in the forest, right? Let me just tell this, say this, because it's important. Don't be wandering around the woods,

picking your own mushrooms, the ones in the woods. But when you go to the grocery store farmers market and you let the foragers kind of do all the work for you and they do have mushroom farms, all the research that showed the benefits of mushrooms started by looking at the lowly white button mushroom. Okay, so regular plain white mushroom,

you find everywhere, that works. Now, let's get interesting. What about these other mushrooms? Which one has more? Shataki, more than white butt mushrooms. More beta glucan. What's better than shataki mushrooms is shantarrel mushrooms.

The dish, the somewhere shantarll. The chantarell. Which, you know, if you've ever gone, if you've ever tried around Europe and been lucky enough to actually, eat some of the seasonal summer chantarell mushrooms, they're tiny little guys. They just saute them with a little shallot, little garlic, chop up some chives and fresh herbs

and just skillet them like literally for like maybe 15 seconds on a hot skillet. And you wind up having this incredible mushroomy or the beautiful golden the chantarell flavor. You can make soup out of a too. So the chantarell's got even more than shiitake. So again, start with the white button mushroom, you know, but you can graduate your way up. I love that. I haven't always oyster mushrooms? I love oyster mushrooms. I've got a lot. Also, a lot of mushrooms also. You mentioned the broccoli sprouts, the babies.

Is that easy? Is that easy to find? You know, it didn't used to be. Um, uh, I used to have a hard time finding anything other than the old school bean sprouts. But now we go to most grocery stores. I mean, not just the fancy ones, but even like the regular grocery stores.

If you ask the produce manager, that's what I always do. When I can't find something I'm looking for, I just ask the produce manager. If you have any of this and they're like, oh yeah, it's over there. I'm starting to find broccoli sprouts, arugula sprouts, all know, like all kinds of different spices. Really? You should never see them. Yeah. So I think they're just

becoming, they are seasonal though, like so you'll find them like earlier in the season. And what do I do? How do you cook? Do you cook the broccoli sprouts? Or you eat them raw? You put them in the salad. I tell you what I loved about broccoli, broccoli sprouts. So you get them. They're just three to four day old sprouts. Sometimes they're hydroponically grown, so they're not even, there's no dirt. Mm hmm. Up anyway, and simple thing you can do, you can just peel some out and they're, they're, they're, they're little threads.

And you can just drop them onto a salad. They add this like nice, nutty flavor to the salad. Um, or you can take a big mound of them and you can pop them into a blender and make a smoothie out of them. It's great. It's just, it's so great. You can, um, make a, you can add them into a blender and make a smoothie out of them. It's great. It's just, it's so great. You can make a, you can add them into soup, you know, like just puree them and blend them

up so many different ways. And you know, you can tell from what we're talking about, like I, I'd love to cook. I love to. You seem super passionate about this and you know, like, you know what you're talking about in terms of even the preparation stuff, not even just the research on what the benefits are nutrient-wise, but you seem to know it sounds like you enjoy the process of cooking. I love the process of cooking. I love exploring the flavors of foods. And that's, you know, part of what gives me joy is actually just loving the things that I already love. I like to keep up with those.

But I love to also try new things that I haven't tried before just to see what's new and what's out there. And, you know, like, there's nothing that gives me more, lights me up more than trying something that somebody says, hey, you should try this. And, you know, somebody I trust, obviously. And I don't want to get pumped. But I try. And I'm like, wow, that is amazing. And I'll tell you one because I know what's it we're talking about, you know, make you think about it to go out to find it. Have you ever heard of something called bowtarga? No, but is that? B-O-D-T-A-R-G-A bowtarga. You can look it up online. It is a dry piece of fish egg, like like a mound of fish eggs, and it comes like wrapped in wax and

sounds kind of weird but I was talking to a friend of mine who's Italian you said oh you got to try this because like we eat in Italy all the time and like what's it like and you got to try it because until you taste it you won't know what it's like so he made some pasta for me, a little bit of olive oil. And then all he does, he took out the botarga, which I don't know, it's like a giant eraser, like rubber eraser. And using the same grate that you use for parmesan cheese, he just grated it right over the pasta, like little tiny, little flakes. Man, I can't tell you how good this is. It was like melt in your mouth, umami flavor, not fissies. It's a flavor that just fills your whole mouth with tastiness.

And is packed with omega-3 fatty acids. Wow. Okay, I'm going to look for that. You have got so much great information. I'm just amazed. Can you tell me about frozen veggies, actually, because I've heard that frozen veggies are much more nutritious. And then I wanted to know if that was actually also just a myth,

like frozen vegetables, frozen fruit, because they contain more of the nutrients when they freeze it. They capture all the nutrients. Yeah, so I actually did research on this. So I know a lot about it. The idea is that when you pick a vegetable from the field and you bring it over to put it into a truck and you transport it across the country or wherever,

it's probably degrading its nutrients a little bit. Frozen foods actually, if they're flash frozen, meaning they're picked and pretty much brought up the field and flash frozen, they're going to lock in their nutrients in that particular way. That's not to say that the stuff that you're eating as fresh isn't good for you. It means that you're probably getting closer to the field if it's properly flush frozen. That said, over time, like long frozen food will also degrade a little bit. And the nice thing about frozen foods is that you could be in a food desert, you could be in a truck stop, you can go to the frozen section and sometimes you can find frozen veggies.

And so sometimes that's the only kind of veggies you can actually get. What I tell people though is this whole concept, if you can have local, organic, fresh food that hasn't been pretty very far, yeah, that's the ideal. Most people go to the grocery store. And most of the grocery stores these days are offering the usual stuff, but more and more you're seeing them offering local stuff. Awesome. Go for that if you can.

Seasonal, if you can. Never, don't be afraid of going to the frozen section because sometimes you want to get a food that eventually that's not, or fruit that's not seasonal, you can find it frozen and you'll get their nutrients that way. Well, that's good information. And so with all of your research with the immune system, now you've been doing, I guess over the last year, even focusing on COVID-19. Has there been any findings that you want to share, you can share as to, even like, why

is it, or why was it, I would say because someone has a good immune system. Some people just never, even they were exposed to it, they never got it, other people got it easier. Is it really just because of someone's strength and steps that they'll have just a stronger immune system or? You know Jennifer, the truth is we don't really know. COVID is a disease that we've only encountered on this planet in humans, you know, for a little bit over a year. And every time we think we have an understanding of COVID, it seems to throw another curveball at us and something new that we didn't know. So, you know, I'll tell you as somebody who's in the field doing the COVID research, and

I've been doing this since the beginning of the lockdown, we don't know why some, we don't really know why some people get it and get really sick and some people who get it and just kind of like just cruise right through and they don't get sick at all. Almost certainly it has something to do with our immune system. And so I think that's a good place to start in terms of thinking about what did we learn from this whole crazy year that we went through. You know, I think one of the things that we've learned, a couple of things we've learned.

Number one, we've learned that doctors and hospitals can't do everything for us because a year ago in 2020, like there was nothing that you could get out of the hospital and a doctor other than a ventilator, you know? And so this taught, I think, everyone that home is where health is, right? So we all came home, we all got reacquainted with our stovetops, our pantries, our refrigerators.

We didn't hang out and grocery stores. People like zipped out and zipped back with whatever they needed to get And so I think that you know We started to become much more in touch with how we feed ourselves Immunity is one of those areas that clearly food makes an impact on so whether it's blueberries or broccoli or broccoli Sprouts or Other immune boosting foods like tree nuts, you know, those are all things that

olive oil. I mean, those are things that we can actually do for ourselves. Is it a 100% shield? No, it's not. But sometimes it's that extra margin of strength that we have that can make the difference between whether we dodge the bullet or we like Get it right in the face So I actually think that you know one of the things that we learned is how important our immune system is I think the research kind of doubled up Double down to try to figure out like what foods are actually really helpful for our immune system and by the way We also learn I think almost everybody in the public learns something.

We want better immunity, stronger immunity to ward off the coronavirus. And we want lower inflammation at the same time. Used to be people thought that, well, inflammation is immune system. You want to, you want less of that. You want to fight your immune system lower your inflammation again sort of Not like right idea wrong interpretation Inflammation is part of the immune system you want good defense and you want to lower inflammation I was I just took part in this medical health conference

Research conference that the Vatican actually held, believe it or not. And wow, you're nights to prevent. And we heard this amazing series of lectures. I spoke about food as medicine. Mark Heimann was there, the Dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition, Dario Mazzafarin was there. I did a really fun, meaningful, I had a great convo with my friend Cindy Crawford. We've been for a long time. We were talking about, how do you age healthy and how do you actually

do sensible things to allow us to be beautiful on the inside as well as the out because that's what's at the end of the day. More important, but as it relates to inflammation, one of the things that was really underscored is that, look, inflammation is part of our body's protective system. We would need a little bit of it. What we wanted to promise, we have too much of it. So we also learn that there are some foods that can be anti-inflammatory.

And so green tea, for example, is an anti-inflammatory food. That's really, it puts that whole idea that the fad concept of anti-inflammation into a brand new context, which is, yeah, that's what I want. And also, to your point, I think inflammation, is another one of these key terms that people now are talking about a lot. You talk about tea in your book, which is interesting to me about how about combinations?

The combinations of different teas are more effective than just like one-off, so to speak. And because you did talk about inflammation, could we just talk a little bit more about ways we can reduce that inflammation beside, like talk about the tea in other ways we can limit our inflammation? Yeah, well, I mean, it turns out green tea can reduce inflammation. It's also anti-anrogenic, so it can restate with starved cancer. We've done research where we've actually combined teas and found that when you mix two blends of tea, like jasmine tea and Japanese sencha, you actually get a much more potent cancer

starving tea. It's quite amazing that food combinations can be so powerful, but that's also the future of food as medicine is that we don't eat foods one by one. We cook our foods together, right? Like we mix things together, we serve a plate. It's got a lot of stuff on it. Even a salad's got a lot of stuff in it.

So I think that's an exciting future to look at. But otherwise we can actually lower our inflammation. I mean, you know, there have been studies done around the world looking at a super inflammatory disease like a lupus, right? So autoimmune disease, people who have mostly, mostly in women, and it's characterized by an overactive immune system where you get tons of inflammation. You're joined, served, your muscles, you know, all kinds of challenges for these people. And it's been shown that if the more vitamin C you have, more that you get from food,

the lower the flares and the lower the inflammation in the body. So what are some of the vitamin C foods? Well, oranges, right? Like we know oranges, citrus will do it. But guava, red bell pepper, tomatoes, all great sources of vitamin C. Kiwi. And kiwi, another great source of vitamin C and good for your gut too. What are a couple, and then I'm gonna leave you at this,

but it means a couple of good food combinations that really make things that much more potent for your health. Okay. Let's see. Salsa made with fresh tomatoes and that have lycopene, which is fat soluble, dissolved in fat and guacamole, which has avocado, which actually has a healthy fat, which will help you absorb your lycopene from the tomatoes better. So that's a great example of... I think it's a combo, that's a great combo.

Tomato sauce that is simmered in olive oil, olive oil for the same reason of actually helping you absorb the lycopene. But I'm not done yet. You want to actually slice up some garlic. You saute in olive oil and there's um, allyson and other natural bioactives in the garlic that are also mixed with inside the tomato sauce. And why don't we just add some healthy herbs to

like basil. Cut up some basil, you could sprinkle it in there, or if you don't want basil, you can put a oregano in there. I love fresh oregano, and that's just a dried stuff. Like take fresh oregano, you gotta peel off the leaves like time, you just cut it up, and you throw it, it's got a completely different, more subtle flavor. And now you've got, a simmer it for 20 minutes, don't boil it, simmer it. Now you've got a sauce that actually research is shown, can lower the risk of prostate cancer and breast cancer, and it's got all these other synergistic elements to it as well.

I love that. You can't just, can't you leave me with one thing that you're working on that's new, that's not in your book, that's not in your TED talk, and that you can talk about. I know you're working on something in a, I'll know in a year that will help with weight loss and how foods and how it activates in your body. But one that you can. Yeah, no, I'll tell you, one of the things that I am really interested in is seafood that is healthy for you because I think that like kiwi seafood is also something that a lot of people are familiar with. Some people have difficulty with fish like if you grow, if you grow up in a village in

England, it's like, I don't eat fish. And then fish is fishy, people don't like that. But seafood is more than fish and not all fish is fishy, people don't like that, but seafood is more than fish, and not all fish is fishy. And so I'm starting to like really do some deep dives into looking at which fish is good. So salmon is obviously good. By the way, you know that it's got omega-3 fatty acids in salmon, right?

It's an oil fish. Do you know that most of the omega-3 fatty acids in salmon is in the skin? I heard that, I heard that, but I didn't know if that was true information or not. True, so if you're gonna eat salmon to get all those good, I mean, if you like the taste of it, go ahead and eat it.

I know however you like it. If you want the healthy omega-3 fatty acids, what I tell people is find a way, find a restaurant that will do it this way or cook it, or look on YouTube and figure out a good video, how to do it. Get that, keep that skin on, and make it real crispy, nice and crispy skin.

Okay, and now you've got that tender juicy flesh, nice crispy skin, eat that whole thing together. Don't leave it in your plate, don't peel it off. Eat it together, it's like, it's just a much better way to do it, but I'm interested in, what's better than salmon, right? Right. What's more more fun? It turns out that Hake, which is a white hate, has got more omega-3 than salmon does. Where can I buy that? Go to your fishbonger, you know, and go to the seafood section and ask them where you can get

Cape. Hey, if you're actually the Vila Bonnet Coast, as I know you do, you can find it easily in a fish market. You can also buy frozen, frozen fish, flat frozen from the boat is also good. So you could, and there's now, during the pandemic, all these seafood companies that actually do flash frozen fish that they will just overnight to your house. So you can not be ordered overnight now.

It's pretty cool. Another fish that actually has got a lot of omega-3s that are even more than salmon would be sea bass. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. would be sea bass. Really? Oh yeah, yeah. And then, you know, they used to say Chilean sea bass, but that's not a sustainable fish to eat.

But regular sea bass is fine. So again, you know, like this whole, it's sort of a matter of gradation and degrees. What you ask me about the tomatoes, oh, we have our mushrooms. There's every species, every variety of food has different, including seafood. So I'm looking at, okay, so what, oh, you know what?

So it's got also, you're going to like this. What's more than salmon is manila clams. Really? Has got more omega-3 fatty acids. So, and you can find a millililil, millililil clams in a seafood. So how do you do it? Right, this down. Super simple thing. You've got a little ploncho or griddle or just a pan, put some oil,

cut up some garlic at the oil, real hot, throw the, throw the, um, uh, clams in there, covered up, shake the pan a little bit to get the heat distributed and the clams will pop open. Okay, you can just put a little white wine in there, cover it up, they'll open up all the way, you're done, like, 12 minutes. This is amazing information. I mean, again, for people who have not read or they should read for sure, is eat to be, is, is of course Dr. William Lee's amazing Neutrised Best Cell or E2B disease.

How else can people find out what you're doing? Because you're obviously working on extremely important life changing things that it can really help impact people. Yeah, well first of all, you can get my bookie to be disease anywhere that books are sold, including online and Anybody who wants to follow me I have a free newsletter that actually I keep on giving out every single week sometimes a couple of times a week new food facts and new Like little tips you can use when it comes to healthy food. Just come to my website. It's Dr. DR William Lee just come to my website, it's drdrwilliamli.com, drwilliamli.com. And you can follow me at drwilliamli.com

on Instagram, Facebook. I'm out there. I'm always trying to put new information up in one of the things that, you know, I would tell people to look for, like, just started a few months ago is I started doing these free master classes where, you know, like, and I was amazed at how popularly these are. I, I, I just, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll make an announcement of a master class and I'll have thousands of people sign up for it. I'm from like 22 countries with the last time. And they'd come and they would tear me talk about health defense systems and different foods and my latest research. And so just come to my website, follow me on social, keep an eye out. I do these master classes pretty much every other month, sometimes a couple of times. So I'm going to go to them.

Yeah, it'd be a lot of fun to have you there. I mean, it's, and I'm also doing an know, doing an online course as well for people that are like hardcore, really want to change their lives. And it's a lot of fun. I mean, you know, for me, my mission is to really help spread the word in ways that are meaningful to people as widely as I possibly can. And so I appreciate the opportunity to come on to talk about it on Habitson Hevel. Absolutely, and also I want you to cut if it's all right with you. I'd love to have you back because I mean you will believe this, but I only got through half of my questions. I love to come back anytime, just let me know when. This episode is brought to you by the YAP Media Podcast Network.

I'm Holla Taha, CEO of the award-winning digital media empire YAP Media, and host of YAP Young & Profiting Podcast, a number one entrepreneurship and self-improvement podcast where you can listen, learn, and profit. On Young & Profiting Podcast, I interview the brightest minds in the world, and I turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life Each week we dive into a new topic like the art of side hustles how to level up your influence and persuasion and goal setting I interview a list guests on young and profiting. I've got the best guest like the world's number one negotiation expert Chris Voss Shark Damon John serial entrepreneurs Alex and Leila Hermosi, and even movie stars like

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