Know Thyself - E204 – Dr. William Li: The Body's 5 Health Defense Systems, Cancer, Microplastics & Healing From the Inside Out

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Dr. William Li is a Harvard-trained physician, co-founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation, and New York Times bestselling author whose work centers on one quietly radical premise: the power to stay healthy lives inside you. In this conversation, we explore the five hardwired defense systems the body runs continuously, angiogenesis, stem cells, the gut microbiome, immunity, and DNA protection, and what it looks like to actually support them through food, sleep, and daily choices.What We Dive Into:1. You are not just one organism. You carry 39 trillion bacteria inside you, many of which send signals up through the vagus nerve directly to the brain, shaping mood, social behavior, and stress levels.2. Your body was born with 70 million extra stem cells stored in bone marrow, ready to mobilize and repair damage whenever called. Sleep, food, and metabolic health directly influence how effectively they do their job.3. The environment is full of things we cannot fully control, microplastics, toxins, pollution. What we can control is whether our internal defense systems are strong enough to handle the load. Chronic stress degrades those systems faster than most environmental exposures.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfTry LMNT & get a free sample pack https://oneskin.co/KNOWTHYSELFCode KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off___________00:00 Intro01:42 Health Is Not the Absence of Disease05:24 The Five Health Defense Systems07:14 Defense 1: Angiogenesis and Blood Vessel Health09:07 Defense 2: Stem Cells and the Body's Repair System14:01 Defense 3: The Gut Microbiome and the Holobiont21:38 Defense 4: The Immune System as Inner Army31:44 Defense 5: DNA Repair and the Iron Dome Within36:48 Cancer Is Growing in All of Us Right Now43:07 The Rising Cancer Rates and Why They're Skewing Younger47:40 Microplastics: Where They Come From and Why They Matter55:37 The Case for Keeping Your Shields Up59:15 Practical Steps: Air, Water, and Food Quality1:07:46 Sleep, Movement, and Stress as Health Defenses1:11:04 The Danger of Chronic Overeating1:19:09 The History of Abundance and the Clean Plate Myth1:23:43 Bruce Lee and the Philosophy of Personalized Health1:29:00 What Modern Medicine Got Right and What It Lost1:32:42 The Interstitium, Acupuncture, and Converging Worlds1:35:34 The Future of Cancer Treatment and Health Span1:44:42 Dr. Li's Favorite Foods and Why He Loves Them1:55:53 The Science of Dark Chocolate1:59:00 Closing Message: Optimize Your Gut___________✨MORE FROM DR. WILLIAM LI↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drwilliamli/↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drwilliamli/↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrWilliamLi↳Eat to Beat Your Diet Book: https://drwilliamli.com/etb-diet-book/↳Eat to Beat Disease Book: https://drwilliamli.com/book-li/↳https://drwilliamli.com📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Is it true that we all have cancer growing inside of us right now? Yeah, it is absolutely true. But actually, the more interesting question is, why don't we get cancer more often? Why are we always sick? And I will tell you, I'm a medical doctor. I have been involved with drug development, clinical trials, so I know quite a lot about that. Our body has its own hardwired systems. There are five of them firing in all cylinders, warding off disease.

We have the angiogenesis, stem cells, gut microbiome, immunity, and DNA. and that's what we're going to talk about. But here's the thing. The reason we have these health defenses is because just existing on planet Earth is exposing us to toxins. For example, the people with the most microplastics in their blood vessels

have a three to fourfold higher risk of having a fatal stroke. When our shields go down, that's when the enemy missiles can come right in. You've dealt with this in your own personal family life, including my own mother. She had stage four cancer. That's a game over.

And I said, no, no. She's got health defenses, her own 80-year-old bodies wipe out stage four cancer. The power to stay healthy actually lives inside us. But at the end of the day, people just want to know what to do. So let's just tackle some practical things. If I had to tell you one thing, I would say watch your... Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Know That Self podcast.

Our guest today is a Harvard trained physician, co-founder, president, and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. he is a New York Times best-selling author, and he's an incredible voice needed now more than ever, reminding us about the power that the body has to heal itself. Dr. Lee, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. At this stage of your life,

how would you articulate the core focus of your work and therefore what everybody who's listening right now can get to expect from spending the time with us today? You know, I'm a scientist, by training, and I have to say I'm passionate about discovery and science. I'm always looking for what are we finding out that's new and meaningful that can be life-changing, and then finding out what you can do about it. And so it's that combination of curiosity, excitement, passion, and application I think we're going to talk about.

health is not just the absence of disease. Can you say more? Right. I'm a medical doctor, a physician internal medicines by training. And when I was in medical school, I was inundated with professors teaching me about one disease after another, diabetes and pneumonia and Alzheimer's and cancer. And I always wondered, why are we being

taught about health. What's the definition of health? And some of my professors used to laugh, maybe even sneer at me when I asked them, what is health, teach me about health. They would say, well, you know, that's kind of silly. Health is just the absence of disease. And I knew that couldn't be true because the absence of something doesn't explain a state of being, right? Absence of money doesn't really simply explain poverty. Absence of war doesn't explain peace. right so the absence of disease doesn't really explain health and so i carried that that question with me really from the beginning of my medical career all the way to present day i'm interested in understanding why it is that we're healthy most of our lives and only part of our lives

do we wind up getting sick in other words if i see a patient and they say doctorly why did i get cancer there's a there's a stock answer to that and there's probably an intelligent answer that I could personalize. But actually, the more interesting question that I ask myself is, why don't we get cancer more often? Why don't we always sick? And the answer to this, which is really, I think a light bulb being turned on in the room of my head and my career, is that health is actually the result of our body's own hardwired systems,

firing in all cylinders, helping us heal continuously, warding off disease, helping us dodge the things that we want to avoid most of our lives until inevitably, no one lives forever. And so you sort of take a little bit

of an existential view. At some point, disease will come get us. But what a remarkable instrument our body is in terms of being able to navigate our entire life journey, healing. I think it's true that most people view the human body as something that works until one day it breaks. And we have so many individual friends and family members who at some point it breaks earlier than others.

But the reminder that you're giving about the intelligence and the defense systems that the body has is important because it provides context for how we can understand that, change our behavior, and leverage those defense systems. So could you set the framework for what those are? that way we can break them, break them down a bit further. Yeah, I want to talk about that, but before, I want to just build on what you just said a little bit. So traditionally, people don't think about their health as much as we all should be thinking about now, we do. But it used to be that people just went around their lives doing their thing

until they needed to go see a doctor. and the doctor, whether it was a woman or a male doctor, really was the authority. So there was this sort of authoritarian figure who was the doctor who would figure out what the problem is, give you the answer, and then write the prescription, and tell you what to do. And the script has completely flipped now

because what we realize with our own body's power for healing is that the power to stay healthy actually lives inside us, we do our own health care every single day and doctors do sick care. You know, we go to the emergency room or the hospital. You know, if we need something being done, it's kind of like if you have a car, you know, you're maintaining your engine,

you're changing your oil, making sure your tires are okay, making sure you're cleaning the car. That's what we do at home. That's health care. Sick care is when you need to bring your body to the auto shop, to the repair shop, to get something major done to it.

Okay, so what are those health defenses that live inside us that we actually pull the trigger on all the time? And there's five of them that I have been personally working on. And I have to say there's more defenses that are being discovered. Even recently, there have been some remarkable new discoveries made worth touching on. But the five, the first one is called, angiogenesis, that's angio, like blood, blood vessel, genesis, how our body grows blood vessels.

It turns out that the first organ system that forms in our body is our circulation. And that's really this incredible process of generating the 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels are packed inside our bodies. And these are the highways and byways that bring oxygen that we breathe, nutrients that we eat, and medicines that we might be taking to every single organ, every single cell in the body. So that is one of the health defenses that if when your circulation fails, there's no way you're going to be healthy.

So that's one of them. The second is our own stem cells. Sure, we hear about going to different countries for medical tourism to get stem cells injected and all that kind of stuff. And by the way, I have been involved with drug development, stem cell therapy, clinical trial. So I know quite a lot about what we sometimes hear about in the media or in social media. Most of that's not ready for prime time from my perspective.

But Mother Nature beat us to the punch. We have our own stem cells. So here's the thing. I always tell people, our stem cells inside our bodies are silently repairing us day and night, mostly during the night, but also during the day. and we're being fixed from the inside out. We don't feel it. We don't know it.

You don't have to go to the doctor to get it. In fact, the doctor can't give it to you. We can give it to ourselves. By the food that we eat stimulates our stem cells, by the rest we get stimulates our stem cells. And even our metabolism can actually help to influence how well our stem cells repair us from the inside out. So I want to tell what its stem cell is.

Stem cell is think about it as a baby cell. when your dad's sperm met your mom's egg and we were just a ball of cells, those are all stem cells. We didn't have a face. We didn't have a big toe. We didn't have a heart or liver. And those stem cells eventually figured out

what they wanted to become. Who they wanted to be when they grew up. Who they wanted to be when they grew up. Nine months later. Yeah. Okay. Now, here's what's a really cool thing. I think about stem cells.

When we're born, at nine months, by the time we're ready to be born, those stem cells have formed every single or necessary organ in a body, right? We are a whole package. But the way that we evolved is not to have just enough stem cells. We've got extra stem cells line around.

Like, you don't want to be running out of stem cells. You know, one more stem cell needed to grow your liver. Ah, damn, we ran out of it, right? So that doesn't happen. In fact, by the time we're ready to come out of mom, We have 70 million extra stem cells. That's the overage, like extra cans of paint to, you know, fixing up your house, stick them in the garage in case you ever need to touch up the paint.

That's exactly what our stem cells do. We've got 70 million extras. Where is the garage in our body? Ah, great question. So the moment the doctor snips the umbilical cord, and you might have heard that you could actually squeeze out stem cells, umbilical stem cells at birth but actually once that cord is cut no more stem cells are going into the baby whatever we've got that 70 million starts to um pack themselves up like shirts in a shirt

box being stored away and where do they get packed up mostly in our bone marrow so if you don't know what a bone marrow is it's the soft dark inside of a bone you've ever broke a chicken bone you would say you've got the hard, bony stuff on the outside. It's hollow on the inside, but filled with dark material. That's stem cells. So think about stem cells like bees in a hive hanging out inside your bone, and then whenever we need to repair, like whether you cut yourself or whether there's a piece that needs to be repaired, the stem cells will come flying out of our bone marrow, like bees coming out of a hive,

and they will just fly around looking for the areas that need to be repaired. just fix that spot, then go back to roost. Or they get outside of the bone from the inside. Ah, so this is a very interesting area. Signals are sent to them. So if you cut yourself, let's say paper cut or you fall off your bike and you scrape your knee, that injury, which is, you know, we say, ouch, but our skin and the damaged tissue says,

SOS, we need some help to fix ourselves here. So while we're seeing the bleeding stop and the scab form over the top, what that injury is doing is sending little protein signals into our bloodstream, and these are literally SOS signals, signal flares. And they basically tell our stem cells, hey, guys, we need a few of you over here. And so they come flying out, they find just that injured spot, they rebuild them, and then they go away. and then we are healing from the inside out.

So, you know, when you cut yourself, you put a Band-Aid on, you think that you're healing just covering up the wound. Actually, no, most of the healing is from the inside out. That's our health defense system, our stem cells. And what we have now begun to appreciate, just as much as we understand, blood vessels are important, our circulation, our stem cells rebuild our body all the time. And we know that we're rebuilding our body,

our gut, the entire lining of our intestines, turned over every five days. Okay. We know our skin repairs itself, right? You ever get sunburned and it flakes off and just new skin or dandruff, for example? Our hair grows back. You get a haircut. You shave.

It'll grow back, right? That's regeneration. It makes me think about who everybody's listening right now. We're all on our own individual health journey and it's not a spectrum, right? there's not one definite state of health or disease, but different parts of us are on different parts of that spectrum. And it's an empowering reminder that you're giving because whatever it is that we are dealing with currently

or one day that we might deal with, we can, and I'm excited to dive into the behaviors and the tools and the foods that can help activate the regeneration that our body is capable of that has been latent. Yeah, I mean, we literally heal from the inside out all the time. Third health defense system of the five is our gut. You've heard about gut health, gut microbiome, healthy bacteria?

Well, listen, we were once known as humans, but humans are only one species inside our casing. It turns out we've got 39 trillion bacteria growing inside us, like a coral reef. If you think about it, go to, if any, we've been to the Great Barrier Reef. Amazing ecosystem. You've got the reef itself,

but you've got millions of organisms and fish and eels and crabs and all kinds of stuff living around that reef. We are the same way. We have a human body, but inside our body we're filled with 39 trillion bacteria, healthy bacteria. And by the way, when I went to medical school,

I was told within the first week, bacteria are bad, must kill bacteria, must memorize the bacteria, and must memorize the antibiotics to kill the bacteria. Well, it turns out, and this is the really remarkable turnabout, I think, in medicine, is that we now realize that most of the bacteria that we're going to meet in our lives are good bacteria. Occasionally, we meet a bad guy, but usually they're all good. 39 trillion of them. So, by the way, do you know what we call an organism that is not just one species, but that have multiple,

species growing inside or around it. We don't call them human. We call it holobiont, H-O-L-O-B-I-O-N-T. So technically, we're only partly human, but our whole, whatever we get dressed and go out, we are actually a walking holo-biote. We're basically like a coral reef, part human, part bacteria, and these bacteria are doing all these wondrous things inside our body.

They are helping to control inflammation, lower inflammation. They are helping to lower our cholesterol. No statin can do what our natural bacteria does. They are helping our blood glucose improve. They are also doing some amazing things with our mental state. You know, if you want to think about that continuum between really stressed out and activated versus really calm, Zen, almost the spiritual quality, our gut bacteria actually play a role in that,

partly because our gut bacteria text message our brain. They are actually sending SMS signals up through a nerve in our body called the vagus nerve, which is mostly in our gut, and it reverses the signal, goes right up to our brain, and it reshapes our mood, which is really remarkable that these bacteria actually help influence, how our attitude, whether we feel comfortable, whether we're social.

That's quite a remarkable thing. It also kind of destabilizes this notion that you are this individual, single, solid, separate self, but you're a living ecosystem. You are kind of a steward for all these gut guys, which you are mostly made up of. And it also brings into question, which is probably aside for another conversation, and this idea of free will and agency. You know, of course, we are not run just by bacterial zombie overlords in our gut, you know, but they do, like you mentioned,

have an incredible influence on our mood and our thoughts. And sometimes, and I know I've slipped into this in the past, when we want to, like, address a health concern or feel better, we kind of come from this top-down way of thinking of, like, what can I do rather than what does this system need? What can we do? Yeah, what can we do? I mean, that's actually a really useful way to think about it,

is that we are our own community. We were born that way. By the way, do you know how the bacteria get into our bodies? This is a really remarkable story. From birth, right? It happens before birth, actually. It turns out that around eight months of pregnancy, when our bodies are almost ready,

you know, the cake is almost ready to come out of the oven. about eight months the placenta which is like the connection between mom and baby knows when we're about a month away there are text messages

sent to the mom's colon gut and it says dudes let's get ready because it's got about a month and some healthy bacteria hitch a ride on our blood cells and they actually take the journey

it's like calling an Uber and they journey from the mom's gut all the way up to her nipple and the Uber drops them off there. Why do they got to stop with a nipple? Because when the baby comes out, get some skin time, crawl up to the mom's nipple,

take that first suckle of breast milk, and boom, you get injected. I thought they were just taking the scenic route. Okay, so it's both through the placenta and through breastfeeding. And there's a connection between it. And of course, when the baby comes through the birth canal,

there's also a healthy bacteria that are in the vagina as well. There's vaginal microbiome. And so really we're exposed to all kinds of things. And the bacteria start taking off and they grow into this natural colony. And so I like the idea of talking about agency and how we feel on this mind-gut, brain-gut connection, right? So look, I'm sure anybody watching or listening to this,

you've been here the night before you go to bed you're feeling great wake up in the morning and you know get out of bed and you're not feeling that great your guts

verbally little crampy just not feeling good well what happens to your mood when that happens you're kind of in a crappy mood the rest of the day and you're just like I just don't feel that great

well the reason that you're in a crappy mood is because your gut is sending signals to your brain, SMSing your brain saying, look, we're not good. There is a problem in our gut. We've got to, we're working hard to fix it. We're sending the road crews out to come patch up whatever potholes are on there. For most of us, eventually that problem will get fixed.

And we regain who we are, and we're in a better mood, right? You know, I've got to go out to dinner tonight. I don't want to be feeling like this. Well, by the time dinner rolls around, you're actually okay. the gut fixed itself. This is this inner repair that actually affects how we interact with the world around us in a pretty profound way. It makes me bring into question, you know, when we feel ill, we catch a cold, we feel discomfort, or even at the extreme get a diagnoses, we have so much resistance often to these things and we feel like they're happening to us instead of their

like intelligent signals from the body saying, hey, we need some support here. And I'm curious your thoughts on that. Because the way that you just described all these, you know, the bacteria and through the vascular system and our cells and our body, it's like they are constantly sending us signals. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, so there's two more health defenses. And I want to bring up one of them early because you just mentioned about catching a cold,

right? So, yeah, we all grew up that way thinking, you know, like, yeah. I'm totally fine, and then you go out and it's cold outside and you walk back in and I caught a cold, or you go take a bus or take a plane ride, you come back and you're like, oh, man, I got sick because somebody else was sick. Well, here's the truth. We are surrounded by bacteria, including the cold virus, all the time, but it's our immune system, which is a health defense that is always propped up, warding off those bacteria that are surrounding all the time. We get sick when our shields go down,

when our health defense is weakened, then the bacteria is able to get into your body and causes problems. And we heal, we get over the cold when our immune system goes back up, our shields are back up. So once again, it's really this dynamic system, this ebb and flow, this adjustment.

Think about the volume of a radio, you're, it's a little bit too soft, let's turn it up a little bit. Oh, it's a little bit too loud. Can you turn it down a little bit? That's actually how our body's health defenses work in our immune system, by the way, is so much more powerful than we ever thought because not only does it defend us against invaders from the outside world, bacteria, viruses, all those organisms on the outside that try to invade our body, but it also defends us against invaders inside our body as well.

And those are cancer cells. Cancer's just another invader that sprung up inside our body naturally. And so our immune system basically is like an army of super soldiers that are patrolling our body all the time. Like cops on a beat. Okay. But they're armed with really special weapons. So when they see even the tiniest little cancer cells sitting around lurking someplace, all right? This is long before you would ever be diagnosed by cancer.

they spot them kind of like a patrol car in a suburban neighborhood and they see a drug dealer sitting in a corner. They don't even have to be dealing drugs. It's just something that shouldn't be there. They pull them over, they see what they get suspicious, and they put them in the back of the paddy wagon and take them off. And that's exactly how our immune defense actually works against cancer. And within this year, May of this year,

there was a major oncology meeting, cancer meeting, biggest cancer meeting in North America that show that when you ramp up your immune system, you can actually achieve dramatic cancer survival improvements in ways that we never thought possible before for pancreatic cancer, for brain cancer, lung cancer, all these other cancers. We're not done yet by any means, but we've seen more progress against the enemy of cancer by raising our shields than we ever thought was possible. So this isn't about the war on cancer. By the way, the whole lexicon of cancer is changing.

We used to think about war on cancer, killing cancer, burning out cancer, smart bombing cancer. Guess what? Now we're not just talking about killing the cancer. We're talking about healing the person using the immune system, which is a radical shift, which is a recognition of just how powerful that fourth defense system actually is. So I think most of us have heard of the importance of the immune system. It can be this quite elusive thing. It's like when you say there is this army of super soldiers,

or like what are the actual cells that comprise our immune system? And yeah, I think that context is helpful because we're seeing all these rise of these autoimmune disorders and diseases. and it's like this big question mark. It's like when we don't know what it is, we call it autoimmune sometimes. So what actually is literally our immune system made of? Look, I could give you a very technical answer. You know, I could teach a whole course on the immune system,

which is what happens in med school. But I will actually try to boil it down into ways that actually get, I think, what you're asking, which is how do we really understand what the immune system actually is? So if I told you that we've got red blood cells, which should bring oxygen to our body, then there's other types of cells as well, white blood cells, which are actually immune cells.

So they're within the liquid of our blood, which looks red. We've obviously got a lot of red blood cells there, but there's also white blood cells there as well. Those white blood cells are circulating. The super soldiers are already in the blood. So whenever you go to the doctor and you get a vile blood drawn,

okay to send out for some tests. They're looking for red blood cells. They're looking for white blood cells. Those white blood cells are part of your immune system. Now, you go into the lab and you can start breaking down what kind of super soldiers are they? Are they Rangers? Are they Navy SEALs?

Are they, you know, green berets? Like, what are they? And this is what's interesting. There's a whole different types of special forces that are out there, each armed with their own skill sets and weapons that can help do various specific functions. So, you know, like Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, that's how our immune system is also set up. So there are cells that you might read about now. You see this on social media, T cells like T as in Thomas, or NK cells, natural killer cells,

or B cells, B as in boy, B cells, right? So these are all the neutrophils and macrophages. listen, I could dazzle you with vocabulary, but think about the more as just different kinds of soldiers that are all pre-programmed to do some remarkable things, which is defend us against disease and keep us healthy. Now, you mentioned autoimmune disease, right? And so so many of us worry, like, oh, does my immune system trigger happy?

Do I have an autoimmune disease? I feel like I'm inflamed, what's going on in my body? And it's true. it could very well be that your immune system is a little overactive, you know, itchy trigger finger. You don't want those super soldiers to just want to fire their weapons off anytime. No, you've got to keep your, you know, holster your weapons until you need to, right? And so that can be autoimmune disease.

So it's like conditions like lupus or celiac or rheumatoid arthritis, those are true autoimmune conditions. What's interesting is why we're seeing more of these autoimmune conditions around seemingly than in the past. And so I'll throw out an interesting perspective. Is it because we're getting more assaulted by the environment and toxins in the environment or things that are triggering our immune system? That's possible. Or is it that the things that we're exposed?

to lower our shields and damage our responses and make those super soldiers, immune super soldiers, more trigger-happy. So they're not actually as well-behaved. So it's like the military that loses their discipline. You don't want that. That could be a problem. And so what we do understand that connects our health defenses, we just talked about the gut microbiome, it turns out 70% of our immune system lives inside our gut, not in the tube of the gut.

but in the wall of the gut. So if you think of your gut like a garden hose, right? So snip your garden hose, and you'll see the empty middle. That's where the gut microbiome lives. But then think about the thick wall of the garden hose, like the wall of the hose itself. That's the intestinal wall, and that's where 70% of our immune system live. So what's interesting is we now realize that our gut bacteria

literally talk to our immune cells, the super soldiers, they have a communication. They're talking to each other. they're all the time. And one of the rules for our gut bacteria is to calm our immune system. And how do they talk to each other? I always say it's kind of like college freshmen in a cheap dorm with thin walls. You know, like you remember these days where you're like, what do you want for dinner?

What do you want to your pizza? And then your roommate doesn't even need to come out of the room. They just shout right through the wall, you know, I'll have pepperoni or all green peppers. And that's actually how our gut bacteria talked to our immune system back and forth and back and forth through the thin walls of our gut. So when our gut bacteria are imbalanced, it's a condition called dysbiosis, all right? That's that queasy, we're not doing so well.

Got a bunch of frat boys yelling through the walls. Yeah, exactly. They're not giving the right signals anymore, you know. And so the immune system winds up not knowing quite what to do. They don't get the right signals. So that might be overactive or they might not be active enough. And that's why, if I'm not. I had to tell somebody if, you know, like I'm a busy person, I don't have a lot of time,

just tell me one thing, Dr. Lee, that I need to do to take care of my health, I would say, watch your gut. That gut is so powerful that, and we're just beginning, we're just at the tip of the iceberg to understand what it can do, but we do know it keeps your immune system healthy, and if you don't want to get sick during the winter, and you don't want to, you want to minimize your chances of developing a cancer, and you want to lower your inflammation, you want to do all the things those super soldiers are supposed to do, let your gut do the heavy lifting.

And I want to get into the behaviors and exposures that both undermine and then also propagate flourishing for our gut microbiome and our immune system in general. Shall we close out the fifth defense? Yeah, let's go to number five. And it's our DNA. Now, people who are not scientists sometimes get overwhelmed with the topic of DNA,

are genetics. But, you know, listen, we know that DNA is our genetic code. It's a blueprint for all the proteins in our body. We know our DNA is unique. We know that we inherit our DNA from our mom and dad and our ancestors. We also know that our DNA can be damaged, right? So when DNA is damaged, it's called a mutation. And when you have a mutation in a cell because of damaged DNA, we know that cancers actually are created when you have mutated DNA. And you have a mutation. And you have a mutation. mutant cell, which is a cancer, right? So I just explained, you know, like several months of medical school education very briefly on why our DNA needs to defend itself against damage against mutation. So our DNA is much more than just the code, the Bible by which our body's

proteins are made, and way more than just our hair color and our skin color and, you know, whether we can twist our tongue into a circle. Those are all genetic things as well. In fact, our DNA is constantly fixing itself. How do we know this? Well, you know what happens when you get a sunburn, right? Like, if you get repeated sunburns, what are you risk for? Cancer.

Skin cancer. Skin cancer, melanoma, right? Now, how come when you just go out into the sun ordinarily, how come you don't get skin cancer? Because the ultraviolet radiation are beaming down and damaging your DNA. Well, guess what? Normally your DNA can fix yourself.

And this is why when you're driving on a sunny California highway to work every day and the sun is shining always from one side through your window and you're basically getting a lot of ultraviolet radiation that's why you don't have just one-sided skin cancer because your DNA is fixing itself.

And what's really remarkable is just how well and the different ways that our DNA can fix itself. You know, you've heard about the iron dome that Israel has to defend itself against incoming. That's what our DNA does.

It has its own iron dome defense system. And it can build the self back up. So if you actually wind up damaging your DNA, well, first of all, the iron dome shields it from incoming, like ultraviolet radiation and toxins when we don't want to breathe, microplastics and all kind of stuff, let's say it does get damage.

Our DNA has this amazing highway road crew that will come out and fix it right away and perfectly, right? So you've got to actually fix itself. So it's quite profound like how our body fix itself. You know, alcohol, another thing that damaged our DNA or cigarette smoke. You know, a lot of the vices that we encounter or we enjoy part of our humanity that we indulge in, those things are, you know, you know, not always that great for our health, but don't worry.

For the most part, if we don't abuse ourselves, we'll bounce right back because our DNA actually will bounce right back. And that's really quite a remarkable resilience that exists within us. So the theme of the five health defenses, androgenesis, stem cells, gut microbiome, immunity, and DNA, these wind up becoming pillars of our health. and when they are functioning properly, that is what health is, not just the absence of disease,

but those are the explanations for why we're able to enjoy the health span that we do get. A quick share, if you've been feeling sluggish, you might not need more sleep or caffeine. You could just be dehydrated. And hydration is not just about drinking water.

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If you want to try them out, you can get a free eight-count sample pack of elements most popular flavors with any purchase, and if for any reason it's just not your vibe, they will give you a full refund with no questions asked. You don't even have to send it back. That's how confident they are that you will love it. Drinklmnt.com slash know-theyself. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. So to probe a bit further into how to build the resiliency of the system and the regeneration of the system, I want to ask, which we touched on earlier in regards to cancer, is it true that we all have cancer growing inside of us right now? It is absolutely true. that we have cancer forming in our body all the time.

And that's different than actually developing clinical cancer where you're going to wind up getting chemotherapy. Let me explain. So I told you about DNA mutations defining what cancer is. It's a mutant cell. And DNA is one of these remarkable things that are in every single one of our cells

that have to copy and paste themselves, right? That's the other thing is that, you know, when our cells are regenerating and replicating, that's why we're still here today compared to yesterday. And that's why we're still going to be here tomorrow compared today is that our cells are copying and pasting each other. Along the way of copying and pasting the cells, oh, we need another skin cell, we need another eyeball cell, we need another lip cell, another hair cell. In addition to copying themselves, they have to do a spell check when you're copying.

Now, if I gave you an easy thing to copy, so anybody listening to this, you can try this if you want. If I said, write out on a piece of paper, Mary had a little lamb, okay, something simple like that. And I told you to write it 10 times in pen or pencil, not keyboard, all right, keyboard even worse. You probably could get it perfectly right 10 times. If I say write Mary had a little lamb

100 times, you might make a mistake. All right. Now, on a word processor, there's spell check. So you can just hit spell check and it'll find and fix it. That's what our DNA does. It's got its own spell check. So when it's copying, pacing itself 40 trillion times,

which is how many cells in our human body, it's going to make some mistakes. We have our own DNA spell check to find those errors and fix them. but it's not perfect. So 40 trillion cells copying themselves pretty much every day. Even with the spell check, do you know how many mistakes are made? For example, if I asked you to write Mary had a little lamb 40 trillion times,

you're definitely going to be making some mistakes. You know how many mistakes are missed by the body's DNA fixing systems every 24 hours? How many? 10,000. Which is pretty remarkable when you think about 40,000. trillion, okay, only 10,000. Those 10,000 mistakes that do happen every 24 hours become mutations, which means that every single day we're forming 10,000 mutant cells that are all microscopic cancers.

Every day, from childhood to old age, this is what's happening. You're going to miss a few because there's so many, all right? Even as for babies and kids. Even for a baby. Yeah. Okay. Now, how come kids don't develop cancer more often than they do? And we do have childhood cancers,

but why do we not see cancer until you get to your 30s or 40s or 50s or older? I mean, I know what's happening younger now, but it's because those little mutations, those little microscopic cancers, what we call them, are sitting there, and then our next health defense system, the immune system, conducts patrol, by in that patrol car, sees that little abnormal mutant cell, puts it in a paddy wagon,

and gets rid of it. And that's why we do form cancers all the time, but our good, healthy immune system actually wipes them out long before we actually ever get diagnosed with the cancer. By the time you get diagnosed, by the way, you don't have one mutation. You've got a lot of cancer cells. You know, there's the smallest, you know, we always tell women to do self-breast exams in like a shower in addition to getting a mammogram, a screening mammogram. Okay.

Now, you know that when you take two fingers, this is something that people, if you have a good doctor, they should train you on this. You take two fingers and soap up your skin and you run your skin along your breasts for women. Okay. That's the best way to feel for an unusual texture or a lump. The smallest lump that you can feel is about a centimeter in size. A one centimeter tumor in the breast already contains one billion cancer cells.

And that one billion cancer cells can't live by themselves, they have hijacked our other health defense system, angiogenesis, to grow blood vessels to feed themselves. And that one billion cancer, there's one billion cancer cells can shed a hundred million cancer cells into the circulation every 24 hours through the blood supply. So this is why we really need a good immune system

to knock this out so we can't ever grow up. We need a good vascular blood vessel system to prevent the cancers from hijacking them. You need to put that solid cockpit door in so nobody can bust into it and try to take over the plane. That's exactly what our angiogenesis system does to protect against cancer.

And then the DNA, by the way, needs to keep on fixing itself so you don't wind up. even after successful treatment, having that cancer come back. Does that make sense? Like it's this dynamic system. Everything I talked about, by the way, is invisible happening to every kid, every teenager, every young adult, every healthy adult.

I don't care how many times you go to the gym. This same system is working to defend us something inside out. That's why health is really a remarkable gift, but it's complicated and it's dynamic and it's happening inside us. And that's why if you treat the body as a temple, you would realize there's just a lot of breakable things inside it. So we want to be careful about what we do. It's okay to, you know, wander off the reservation every now and then.

We got good resilience. But if you damage your body repeatedly over time, that's when our defenses go down and think about it like our shields go down. And when our shields go down, that's when the enemy missiles can come right in. How many people on average right now are either getting diagnosed with cancer or dying from cancer? You know, that number is actually increasing. Well, actually, let me just tell you, the people diagnosed with cancer is slightly increasing, as skewed towards younger age.

So there's something going on right now in society that we don't understand why diseases like colon cancer, which we, when I was in medical school, colon cancer was a disease of people in their 70s. like older people, much older people. Now we're seeing people in their 40s, 30s, there's even reports of teenagers, like 16-year-olds getting colon cancer. We don't understand why that dynamic has changed, but something is happening,

either externally exposing our body or altering our health defenses so that younger people are becoming more vulnerable. That said, we are also seeing, people who are taking care of themselves actually plateau the rise of some forms of cancer as well. And then the third axis that you need to really think about, the third dimension of this, is really that cancer treatment breakthroughs are happening at a faster pace than ever before. And I will tell you as a card-carrying medical doctor,

I never thought I would in my career see treatments that could take stage four cancer to stage zero cancer. Can't do it for everybody yet. We don't understand how it is, but it's happening. And I personally know well over a dozen people who have gone, including my own mother, by the way, who is well known, you know, I've

told this story before, you know, had stage four cancer, that's a game over. You know, she was 80. And it's kind of like, there's nothing more we can go do for her. The treatment's worse than the disease at a certain point. And I said, no, no. She's got

health defenses, let's raise her shields. And for my own mother, we were able to give her immunotherapy jack up that critical defense system, along with diet and medications and some other things and we worked under gut. And guess what? Her own 80-year-old body was able to rear up its own shields powerfully enough to be able to wipe out stage four cancer. So this is actually the transformation that's happening. I told you, we're going away from killing the cancer to healing the person. And that's actually a remarkable thing. By the way, it's also not just drugs doing it. It's also attitude. You know, studies have now been shown that you want to be more chill and zen. You want to work on your mindset. You want to be more optimistic. You want to be more

hopeful, but you also want to be less stressed, less anxious. And that's not just brain chemistry. That is really the whole body working together with our minds to be able to actually get us to that healing state. Hey, fam, a quick share about our skin. Healthy skin, I think, is largely driven by lifestyle, things like diet, stress, exercise, sleep. But I also use a couple of products I know can trust while keeping my routine minimal. One brand I love is One Skin. Born from over a decade of longevity research, one skin's OSO1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. What makes it different is that OSO1 is the first ingredient proven to target senescent cells, which are the key drivers of wrinkles, fine lines,

and loss of elasticity. It's been validated in four peer-reviewed. clinical studies. The company was founded by an all-woman team of PhDs in stem cell biology and skin regeneration. So basically, it's good stuff. I use it because I care about what's happening underneath my skin, not just on the surface. So for a limited time, try one skin with 15% off using code know-thyself at oneskin.com slash know-thyself. That's one-skin.co slash know-thyself. That's 15% off. They're going to ask you where you heard about them. Let them know we sent you. I hope you enjoy back to the episode. So you've, of course, dealt with this in your own personal family life. Is it true that about one and two men, one and three women will get diagnosed with cancer?

Yeah. I mean, the statistics are pretty sobering if you take a look at it. So one and two men, one and three women, think about getting an elevator with 10 people and you can start doing the counting. which one are you going to be? And I think that, you know, the truth is that we all have the ability to resist cancer, as we've been talking about. And rather than get overwhelmed and freaked out by the statistics of who's going to get cancer, I want to kind of maybe give a different perspective. If I tell you, we all get cancer all the time from the time we're kids,

but we can remain cancer-free, meaning disease-free, from something like cancer, and we can tip the odds in our own favor by boosting, supporting, amplifying our health offenses, which can be done with diet and lifestyle and mental attitude and how we choose to navigate our life.

Then it turns from a situation of a dire predicament to a situation, of enormous opportunity. And I love that you speak to both because there is, I mean, understandably so, a lot of fear and the health space because of the time that we live, right, the cancer rates that are rising, younger and younger ages that are getting cancer. Before we go into the things that will continue to propagate a healthful system, we do live in a time where there is, we are more experienced.

to toxic things in our environment more than ever. And when you look at the environment that most of us are living in, what do you see as the most predominant causes of building up toxicity in the system, which hand in hand has a way to undermine our immune system? It's a great question. I mean, I think what you're asking is, how do we keep score on what we're exposed to in today's world? it's a big challenge. I have to say, you know, there's a lot of things. But I want to start

by helping people to understand the reason we have these health defenses, really, is because just existing on planet Earth, no matter how pristine our planet was, is exposing us to toxins. We've got damaging exposures, ultraviolet radiation coming in on a bright, sunny day. You know, that beautiful day we will go outside. There's not a rain cloud in sight. Amazing day, great temperature. Ultraviolet radiation coming to damage us. That's a harmful exposure.

Or a lot of people don't think about this, but, you know, there's many places you go down to the ground floor or the basement, and you've got radon, which is radiation coming from the center of the earth, raiding up and exposing the bottoms of our feet

and our bones to radiation, which is also harmful. exposure. Now we're going to add what human society has done. Industrialization, chemical pollutants, pesticides in our foods, microplastics that are being shed in the environment everywhere. By the way, you know, besides being in our food, do you know where most of the microplastics that are in our body come from? Through water? Nope, close. Take another guess.

Through the air? Correct. And you know how it gets in the air. We're just plastic in the air. Like we don't see a big cloud of plastic usually in the air. Probably reheating packaged foods. Actually comes from car tires. Car tires. Yeah, so when car tires are driving on the highway, all right?

You don't have to have a blowout. Just driving on the highway, spinning that friction. actually throws off millions of microplastic particles. Now think about if you live near a big highway, or even a bus route, those big tires grinding and throwing stuff in the air, I'm going to go out and get some fresh air. Well, you know, we had started and I was starting to understand that, wow, microplastics are everywhere.

And rather than freak out and say, I'm going to wear, you know, a space suit, I don't want to be exposed to the sun or the ground or, you know, the air. What I would say is, you know what, if you are so stressed out about everything, you're actually going to damage your health offenses more than anything else. Try to take a chill pill. It's as difficult as it may be to suspend your disbelief that your body's got what it takes to help us stay healthy. And so regardless of what the environment is going on the outside, sure,

I'm a big believer in activism and being, you know, mindful of what we're throwing out into the planet. Yeah, we should be more careful. However, I think that the one empowering thing that we can do, we all have the agency to be able to keep our own health defense as strong. And this is really where diet and lifestyle and sometimes supplements can actually help us achieve that goal. It's, you know, topping us off where we think it would put us in a better position to stay healthy. How much plastic is getting in our body? We don't really know. I know that it's been published and it's kind of become an urban legend that we eat a credit card's worth of plastic every week.

I don't think that's true. I think that's been, I think that was a mathematical calculation that happened to exaggerate the amount of plastic. But I will tell you that there have been really. real human studies done at autopsy, looking at brains, human brains, that you can put on a scale and weigh at autopsy, and the brains with more plastic actually tip to scale. You can actually measure the ones that have more plastic.

And it gets more concerning than that. We have found in people with blockages in their neck arteries that could lead to a stroke, that the people who have the bigger, thicker blockages wind up actually having more plastic studying their blood vessels. I study blood vessels, so I know a lot about this. And what's kind of crazy is that over time, they've now associated those people with the most

microplastic studying their blood vessels actually have a three to fourfold higher risk of having a stroke, a fatal stroke. All right. So, you know, this is not harmless. And nobody wants plastic in their body. We found it in breast milk. We have found it in liver tissue. We found it in the penis.

So urologists doing surgery on the penis have had to do, you know, remove tissue, send it to the lab. And what they found is there's actually pieces of plastic studying. The penis. So these are like micro-sized. So less than five millimeters or even smaller nanoparticles of plastic. They're everywhere. What are you seeing as the effect it has on fertility?

Because I know that's been plummeting for years. Great question. We don't know that, you know? Listen, I'm a scientist. And one of the, I think, calling cards of scientists is that when we don't know something, We just say we don't know. And that's what I'm telling you. I think this issue of fertility is interesting

because fertility requires so many things to go right. It's actually remarkable that we can actually produce more people on a regular basis. But yeah, there's definitely been falling fertility. Is it one thing? I don't think you can nail it to microplastics. It might contribute. I mean, you know, and because microplastics are connected to industry and then you have vested interests by corporations

and then it suddenly becomes politicized. Here's what I would say. Look, whether we like it or not, we live in a time where we benefit from industry, we're now also paying the price for what industry is done to the environment. We've got to control that. We've got to do better. But on an individual level, how can we not freak out?

Well, I think we can take care of this remarkable system of defenses that we have been blessed with, that we're imbued with, and by making more intentional choices and just being more aware, you know, if you think about without getting too metaphysical, you know, if you want to be enlightened and have self-knowledge and self-awareness, one of the most powerful things you can do for your own health is to realize what we have inside us is this very active dynamic system of repair and maintenance and protection and that how we actually navigate throughout our lives the choices we make can influence whether or not our systems our own body can do that job nobody asks to live forever so I know that there's this big trend towards longevity

That's not a new thing. By the way, the quest for immortality goes back thousands of years. You know, the First Emperor of China sent out his best people to go find little ampules of elixir to be able to become immortal. Did that pan out? Not really. You know, it's true, we have a lot of science now. And what I would say is that if you want to live long and if you want to prosper, if you want to thrive while you're living long, and people call that health span,

well, we're back to the beginning of this conversation. What is health, right? So we can dodge the things that we, that'll take us down, then we'll live longer and we'll live better. And if we're not stressed out all the time, then maybe we'll get a chance to enjoy our lives. Yeah, I love the way that you keep bringing it back

into an empowering message for people about the power the body has and the intelligence of our body to heal itself, that it wants to be in a healthful state. and there's a lot of great advice you have in that regard how we can foster the cultivation of those systems that we talked about earlier. If you had to just give a few things

that you think are most important before we do so to protect what is coming in within our home, within plastic exposure, things that you think help consistently in your understanding and your practice undermine the systems from doing their job effectively, what would be some things that people can, you know, have boundaries for in their life

Yeah, that's great. Let's just going to tackle some practical things, right? Because I think I'm somebody who, you know, I spend every single day with my head buried in really, really deep science. But at the end of the day, people just want to know what to do and what they can do. That's pretty simple. So I want to try to touch on the areas that we've talked about already. So if you want to actually lower your burden of environmental exposures, something very simple you can do is to get an air filter for your house, your home.

Something with a hepa filter will actually capture most of the nasties that are in the air. And then also, here's an interesting thing that people don't think about, is airing out your house every now and then. open your windows, open your doors, let some clean air blow that out. You know that radon that comes out through the ground? You open your windows and doors, it'll blow it out.

It'll let you diffuse it, disperse it. And so that kind of circulation and cleaning up the air is something really fundamental you can do. Another thing from an environmental exposure perspective, and then I want to talk in a moment about diet and lifestyle, but is that you get a water filter.

Okay. You know, this history, that we have of industrialization, of just burying toxins and unleashing them into the air into the ground, or having a spill, for that matter, you know, that defense,

that the shield, the gate, the guard you can put at the gate to the water coming in your house as a water filter to take as many of the nasties as you can. So that way, the water you're drinking, you're cooking with, you're showering with,

you're brushing your teeth with, basically you're actually lowering the harmful exposure there. So the air, the water, the pretty fundamental things. We need both of those to live. And then what about food? Our diet actually has been shown to either support and boost or attack and dismantle our health defenses.

Now, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know you want to actually raise your shields, not destroy them, right? So, I mean, think about it. like all the things we do to protect ourselves in our home, we lock the doors when we go out, we turn off the stove over the stove top when we go out, we lock the windows at night, we close the windows and I, you know, basic things.

So what are some of the foods that we can avoid to protect ourselves some exposures? Avoid ultra-processed foods as much as possible. It's kind of impossible to avoid all of them. And, you know, honestly, we all enjoy some ultra-processed foods. We grew up with that stuff, right? And it's okay because our body's pretty resilient.

But I would say, like, get off all the snacks, all those crazy, colorful, pre-packaged in plastic things. If it comes in a bag, in a box, in a can, you know, and if it's ultra-plastic, and by the way, I always tell people, this is a super, super simple thing. I've made a bunch of videos on it. You come to my YouTube channel or my Instagram site. You'll see me showing people how I do.

is whatever you're going to buy, you know, you're wheeling your cart in the grocery store, whatever you're going to buy. Pick it up. Take two seconds. That's all it takes. To look in the ingredient label, okay, if it's not in the produce section,

and the fresh section, and just take a gander at how many ingredients there are. If there are like more than 20 ingredients and you can't pronounce them and you don't know what they're there for, that's an ultra-processed food. If you can find one that's simpler, that's a substitute for that, that doesn't have as many chemicals that you can identify what they're there for.

I would do that instead. That's a simple way to just cut down your ultra-processed foods. And then go for the fresh foods. You know, anybody's spending time in Europe will know that Europeans go to the market twice a week and they buy just what they need. And it's coming fresh and local and amazing quality of food. And I know, like we live in America anyway in the United States. a convenience culture.

You know, you want cheap, you want fast. You don't want to be bothered by it. But you know what? Maybe taking a more intentionality to our lives in terms of our food, buying more fruits and vegetables, nuts and legumes, fresh, healthy foods, actually will pay off that, you know, like health is not a convenience.

Health is a birthright, right? Like, because we're born with a healthy system, you want to say healthier your whole life. Like, take the time to appreciate. the food, be intentional about the food. And by the way, something that I noticed, I did a gap year before I went to medical school, and I spent that gap year in Italy and Greece.

And so I was, by the way, shopping with the nonas and the yayas in the local markets, and I was cooking with them and learning, eating with families together and seeing how people lived. And I noticed something right away that was very different between, the eating patterns of traditional Mediterranean lifestyle

versus American lifestyle, which is where I grew up. You know, in America, I remember thinking when you have lunch, you might eat by yourself, you might read something while you're eating, kind of distracted,

you're going to bolt your food down and go back to work, right? And by the way, if you're dining with somebody in the United States, usually you're talking about the problems you have at work or how to solve something, you're not talking about life itself. In Europe, when it's meal time, people stop whatever they're doing. And if you're dining with somebody and they order fresh local food that's coming being

delivered and is freshly cooked, you know, people immediately stop talking about their problems and their work. And they start talking about the food. Oh, my mom makes it this way. Oh, when I make it this way, that's the great part about this season. And then you take the time to appreciate what Mother Nature, the balance of the balance of of Mother Nature and the care that we as humans are able to put through our humanity when it comes to our food. And so, okay, I can give you a long laundry list of healthy foods,

and I can give you some healthy recipes. But I want to emphasize that, you know, old traditional cultures have figured this out. And that is to take your time to be intentional, to appreciate your food, cook as fresh with healthy, with good, good quality ingredients and don't eat too much and you'll probably be just fine. That's really important about the foods, mostly fruits and vegetables. You know the stuff we talk about, nuts and legumes, healthy oils, trying to cut down on your meat. By the way, this is a whole other thing that, you know, I talked to my colleagues about. When it comes to nutrition and health, people tend to be black and white.

This is good and then this is evil and then they swap. Oh, no, no, no, no, this is good. and this is evil now, you know, life isn't that simple. And, you know, the details matter. And the context matters and the individual matters. And so I think that, you know, a little bit of meat, not bad, to get good quality meat. Don't make it your main thing.

I always say, you know, like if you're at a restaurant, don't, I actually look at the vegetables first to order. I don't think about the entree and then the size. I think about the size first and then think about what I, what I saw the other part of the menu. And I think that you can know it's possible to navigate. Like I try when I'm making videos for the public. This is kind of like my mission in life is to get practical information out to people

that they can relate to and they can do something with. If I'm at a restaurant and what do I order on the menu, I try to pick, I try to have the healthy choices. And I try to pick for things that are healthy and tasty. Got to taste good. And so I think that's really where we need to reconcile, like, what do we enjoy eating? That is also healthy. And then we've kind of lined it up perfectly to be able to live the rest of our lives that way.

And then I think that the other parts of protecting our health defenses really have to do with the things that we don't spend enough time thinking about, sleeping. Seven, eight hours, the magic number, no matter how you cut it. all right um and you want good deep sleep and um because during sleep even though we're not physically active so you know when i was growing up uh if uh somebody saw somebody sleeping yeah look at how lazy they are okay that lazy bum actually even though our physical our body's physically not appearing to move not being very active in fact when we're sleeping especially deep sleep our body is cleansing itself, regenerating itself, renewing itself, rebooting, resetting our immune system. It's like, you know, the computer or the laptop that you're putting through like a virus scan,

you're cleaning off all the junk that's accumulated. That's what's happening when we get good, deep sleep. And everybody knows that this cleansing purification happens, especially in our brain. By the way, you know, we've discovered a whole new system, a sewer system in our brain, called the glymphatic system that drains all the toxins that accumulated during the day, time. Our brains are churning on overdrive every day, okay? And so by the end of the day,

you need to sleep and drain all those toxins out. That's the true detox. Like we don't need to go to a clinic to detox. We can do it ourselves just by getting good sleep. And that glymphatic system opens up the grates, like the sewers of Paris, and drains out. all those accumulated toxins.

And if you don't get good sleep, you're not draining out all those toxins, which is why when you're jet lagged, when you pull an all-nighter, okay, you know, like when we did winter or younger, you know, you feel kind of groggy and crappy the next day. You can't think that straight. Those toxins are still in there.

And so some of these exposures, toxic exposures, are just generated as a byproduct of our own lives itself. And so, again, these mindful decisions of good sleep exercise is very important. Movement, physical movement's very important, and de-stressing. Anything that you can do to lower your own stress, you don't need to go in a retreat all the time,

but find little tiny pockets of your day where you can go into a quiet place and just, you know, some people call it zoning out. I'd call it zoning in, like getting back in touch with who you are inside. That's actually the best way to actually optimize your health defenses.

Yeah, I think the information around the glymphatic system is really interesting. It's just yet another reminder about the system that our body has set up for millennia to remove waste and to remove the things, the toxic buildup and to promote health. And one other thing that I've heard you speak to, which we've covered on the show, which is incredibly important, is that we live in a society that is chronically overeating and not giving the body the proper fasting window it needs. Why is overeating?

What is happening within the body that makes it so bad? So what is food? What are we doing when we're eating? We are putting fuel into our bodies. Just like if you have a car and you, like if you have a gas car or your electric car, you're plugging it in and getting the power into your car, battery or you're putting fuel, gasoline or petrol, depending on where you are around the

world, what you call it, into the gas tank of your car, that's putting fuel into your vehicle. Well, our body is a vehicle. When we're eating food, we're putting fuel into our body. Now, if you're putting gasoline in, what do you call it? You call it gallons of fuel or liters, depending on where you are. When you put food into our system, we don't call it gallons. We call it calories. it's just another name for the fuel, okay, the quantity of fuel.

So we're loading the calories in. Now, I like to use this example of filling up the car with gas, gasoline, because this is actually the same concept in the body. First of all, the car uses gasoline to be able to run, right? So most of us don't think about the fuel tank, the gas, until we look at the gauge. It's running low. All of a sudden, we can't stop but thinking about I got to find a gas station someplace. Where am I going to find it?

You're obsessed with finding a gas station so you can put more fuel in the tank. Same deal happens in our body. We are hardwired with this invisible fuel tank. You don't normally think about it until a tank is reading really low, low fuel, right? That's when you get hungry. I got to find some food. Can we pull over and get something to eat now? I got to stop and get something to eat.

same, exact same idea of what's happened to the car when you need to get gas. When you get gas in a gas station, you're putting, you've got a, you put the nozzle into the, into the, into the fuel tank. Fuel tank is made out of metal and it only contains so many gallons and you're putting, and you're squeezing a trigger and it's going in, it's going in, it's going in. Fortunately, for a car, when the fuel tank is loaded, it goes click. and no more gas comes out, right? Now, our body doesn't have that clicker, and our body is not metal, it stretches. It's very pliable, so we can actually eat a lot.

So what is the fuel tank of our body? Now, in a car, it's at that gas tank. And in the body, it is our fat cells, our fat cells store fuel. Do you know that a fat cell, can you guess how many times a fat cell can expand, with fuel more you eat, more expands, more you eat, it'll spend even bigger. So if you take a regular one, how many times do you think that actually can, the size of the

balloon that it can make? Just take a wild guess. 47. Okay. It's three times. So every fat cell in your body, which is like a rubbery, like a balloon fuel tank, can expand 300% of its size. all right so that means that the more you eat the more it gets bigger which is why people who overeat

tend to expand their waistline build extra harmful body fat because this fat that expands is inflammatory it causes inflammation your body that inflammation derails your health defenses which is why we always say got a lower inflammation eat anti-inflammatory fluids stay away from that but really one of the actions that we take that can lead to that state of inflammation and too much body fat is overeating too many calories consumed right in the past we had that conversation through the lens of vanity i got i get ready for the summer you got to get my beach body you know got to look good in a bathing suit and that that's the reason to actually kind of slim down but in point of fact what you want to do is you want to keep your body in good shape all the time

by not expanding the fuel tank. Now, let me tell you what happens in a car when you, let's say that clicker for the gas doesn't work and the gas tank fills up. Now it's full. Nothing to stop it from putting more gas into the car into the tank. What's going to happen? The fuel is going to pop right on the tank, run down the side of the car, run down the tires, pool around your feet, all right?

And now you're standing in the middle of a dangerous, flammable toxic mess. We'll talk about toxicity. Our body doesn't have a clicker. So when we overeat, the same idea. We wind up overloading our bodies, and we're now standing, we're now filled with this dangerous, flammable, toxic mess, all right? And that's really one of the reasons from a metabolic perspective,

we don't want to overeat any time. Now, how do we know that this screws us up? Anybody who's been head of Thanksgiving, you know what it's like. You know, you don't eat in the morning and all the food's being prepared and you can't wait to get to your aunt's house or your parents' house or whatever.

And you know that incredible spread that's going to be there that you're looking forward to and then all the guests arrive and you get there, you get a plate and you load up that plate. Okay, the first serving is going to already be way too much that you can eat. But then you're eating it. You're eating it quickly.

You're eating it, by the way, you're putting in fuel faster than your fuel gauge and your body can measure it. All right. So you're really already overloading your tank. And then you're distracted because you're talking to people. And that food just keeps on looking so good. Everybody's kind of overeating, right? So I'm sure anybody watching and listening to have been through this experience. What do you do when you're done with your plate?

You're going to go back for seconds. I'm going to have some more. Okay, let's go. all right so then you put it in i'm just telling you because this has happened to me so many times when i was younger you take that one first forkful of your seconds and you swallow that you know oh man i cross that line i'm going to feel like crap now and yet you keep on going and you're just overflowing that gas tank okay and you've overwhelmed your metabolism it's just like overflowing your car now i can get into the biochemistry of what's happening but this analogy i think makes the point that you want to to keep

keep your car in good shape so that the fuel is running on is efficient. You don't want to overload it. And that's the same way with our bodies of metabolism. It is taking in food as fuel running very efficiently. But if you overload it, you're going to derail all those processes. It's going to be inflammatory. You're going to derail the health defenses. Do it once, like at a holiday, you'll bounce back.

It might take you a couple of days, right? How many days, I mean, think about it, like, how many days it takes for me to recover from a holiday where I overindulged in something, whether it's food or whatever. It takes a few days, all right? Then you get back to normal. Shouldn't be doing that. But if you do that all the time, which is what we're talking about, chronic overeating, not only you're going to stretch out your fuel tanks, your fat cells and become bigger,

and your body mass index is going to increase, your visceral fat's going to increase, and all these things derail your health defenses, which is why too much visceral fat is associated with 14 different types of things. cancer with cardiovascular disease, with metabolic diseases like metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes, it's associated with dementia, all the things that you don't want to actually have that take you further and further away from your healthy state that your body is hardwired to actually protect. And it's not one time, it's that chronic chronic chronic.

And so I think eating, the volume of eating is a high, how? happy you should get into thinking about. And I want to talk a little about the history in a second because it's interesting. So what I always tell people, what's the practical thing? Listen, first of all, if you're cooking at home, you should try to cook at home. And it doesn't matter how much you cook. Don't serve yourself too much. A great rule of thumb is never go back for seconds. Never go back for seconds. Appreciate the plate that you already have. And when you're filling that plate, fill up two-thirds of what you would normally fill it up with. All right. So you're taking a little bit less.

Moderation is the key to success. All right. And then don't go back for seconds. And that way you will always be like in sort of a good sound. The Japanese borrowed a Confucian philosophy called a Harahachibunmi, which basically means eat until you're 80% full, which means eat till you're satisfied. That tastes really good.

but don't eat until you're full. We are trained almost from the time where kids to eat until we're full. You don't look like you're full yet. You should eat some more. Like that's what our grandmothers and our mothers told us to do. That's not what we want to do. You want to actually practice moderation

and stop before you actually get into trouble. Leave the party before it's time, before it's over. Like that's the kind of approach to get. Now, there's something really historically contextual about overeating. Because, you know, through most of the history of mankind, we didn't have, we weren't surrounded by abundance of food. You know, forget about Neolithic man and, you know, cave dwellers and stuff like that.

They definitely didn't have too much food. But if you take a look even as early as the first half of the 20th century, the 1900s, you know, people were chronically under-calorized. They didn't have enough to eat. And then you add a couple of World Wars. You know, we had food shortages. And by the way, you know that the whole idea of the clean plate club, clean your plate, is what, you know, I grew up, my teacher's telling me when I was in grade school,

you've got to be in a clean plate club, clean your plate, eat every little bit because there's people starving in, name your country, all right? And that idea of clean your plate came from World War I. where there was actually a shortage of food to feed the troops. And so there was a national campaign put out to make sure not stuff your plate and then clean it, but whatever you put on your plate, don't waste it, don't throw it away. Make sure you eat everything that's on there, whatever you're taking, and don't take too much because we don't have enough.

And it's only really after World War II when we, like, we as a modern society, Western society, especially in the U.S., ramped up everything. We had huge capacity. And then the economies actually started to flourish, actually in Europe and the United States. That's actually when we became surrounded by an abundance of food. We kind of supersized ourselves, but it's a relatively recent phenomenon. I would say less than 70 years old. Okay.

And so in the timeline of history, we haven't been overeating for that long. And it's around that time, that 70-year time, that 70-year time, of cycle, that's when we start to see the rise of all these chronic diseases coming up as well. So we did it to ourselves, but now, because we know that, we can undo it to ourselves by practicing some of the more moderate principles. And I think this is really where I'm a big believer in self-awareness, you know, self-knowledge. I think that if you can actually, first and foremost, be true to who you are and take the time to come. contemplate on like what's in my body, how do I, what do I enjoy, what, what's good for me,

what's not so good for me, what do I want to avoid? How do I feel? Like you, I think getting in touch with how you feel when you eat is one of the easiest ways not to overeat and not to eat the wrong things. Because I would say most people eat junk food, a lot of junk food. You can't tell me they feel better afterwards. They get that dopamine hit while they're eating the junk. but afterwards they feel like crap.

Why do you like Bruce Lee so much? Why do I like Bruce Lee? Yeah. Oh, man. Okay. So I read this in the similar regard in a chapter of one of your books. And I believe it was around a similar topic. Yeah, well, look.

Okay. When I was a kid in the 70s, I encountered a lot of racism. and Bruce Lee on one hand was this hero from Asia that showed that, you know, an Asian could kick ass and in a way that we hadn't seen before. And in fact, he's actually now regarded as the father of mixed martial arts because everybody actually continues to quote and crib from and really respect what the legacy of Bruce Lee, the martial artist is. In fact, you know, California

just created, I think, May 15th or something as Bruce Lee Day. It's actually an official date in California, which is pretty remarkable for Asian, it's the first Asian American day. But I found Bruce Lee to be more than

interesting, more interesting than just simply combat and self-defense. He went to study philosophy when he was in college. And what's interesting is that he took a very philosophical approach to life itself and to self-defense health defense systems which is what I study and also to really sort of being in touch with

oneself so he basically really believed that self-knowledge taking time to appreciate and understand yourself is this sort of quest that is the most important thing that you can actually do in terms of your own personal mission and that if you want to achieve anything in life you start with yourself. And we don't take enough time to do that. The other thing I liked about Bruce Lee that I think is relevant in this day and age where everybody's got a different diet

and is it keto, is it a carnivore? Is it Atkins? Is that South Beach? Is it whatever? Is it fasting? Whatever you want to talk about, there's so many different approaches out there is he had this really great approach

to developing his own style of martial arts. And you can understand how progressive that was. to go beyond tradition, these thousands of years of stylistic martial arts, karate, Kempo, Jiu-Jitsu, Aikido, Kung Fu, and those practitioners, by the way, they were black and white, our way or the highway.

If you were doing it my way, you were my enemy. Like, that's how rigid the traditional martial arts for them. Bruce Lee, basically, said, no, no, no, we're going to borrow a little bit from karate, we're going to borrow a little bit from judo, and then he was like, and then he went beyond that. He kind of like went, he leaped over cultural and even athletic silos, vertical silos, and said, you know, let's borrow from fencing. Let's borrow from ballet. Let's borrow from Western boxing. And he would study this and he would integrate it together so that his style of fighting was a combination of all styles or no style, as he called it. And I actually think that that influenced how I approach my research, how I approach my thinking about health, which is that you don't need to listen to anyone's style or any one doctrine.

You got to follow what you know to be true yourself inside. You've got to evolve. That's the thing about Bruce Lee. He was always evolving his thinking. So, you know, when you see something new that works. adopted. And that was the other thing that he did that was, I think, really that I admired, that that means a lot to me to this day, which is that he said, you know, take what's useful, reject what's not useful, and stick with that in order to be able to live your best life.

And that's exactly how I try to do it with my own life. That's exactly how I perceive, that's how I kind of like do my research. And that's how I try to communicate the messages about health to people. It's not one way, my way, or the highway. Everyone's going to have their own unique combination of influences, styles, resonance, what works for them, their own body. And yeah, the biology is largely the same, but you've got to adapt to your situation and make it work for you.

So that's really kind of where I come from. And it's a very honest, authentic, you know, decades-long way of thinking. And I've been very consistent about it. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

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definition of luxury. I love all that. What was it like for you, I guess, being born and educated into a prevalent system that is a sick care system that treats health from the diagnose and cure lens with the pharmaceutical industry and how intertwined they are. And you've carved your own path to realizing the power of the body has to heal itself, which is counterintuitive and I think in many regards against the grain from the traditional system. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I mean, first and foremost, you know, my training as a medical doctor, as a physician and internal medicine,

you know, I went through a very rigorous, super high level, ultra-intense, I would say, traditional medical system. And I'm so thankful for that because modern medicine is amazing, man, like what we can actually do. You know, like I just told you, stage four cancer to stage zero, heart transplant, you know, even something as simple as fixing a broken hip, you know, that would otherwise take away somebody's independence and put them in a wheelchair. Those are really quite miraculous that we can actually do that.

And it's also miraculous that we trust each other, you know, a patient to a doctor and a doctor to their colleague to be able to actually even allow that intervention to be happening. Pharmaceuticals, we didn't have pharmaceuticals. We wouldn't have antibiotics. You know, we didn't have antibiotics. Well, we'd be back to the 18th century, 17th century. All right. Most of us would be dead. You know, most people didn't live beyond 40.

years old or so until just about 100 years ago, then we have this huge soaring improvement in a lifespan. So I always tell people who don't like pharmaceutical, who like totally dismiss the benefits of pharmaceuticals, but they still want longevity. I'm like, dude, you wouldn't have lived beyond 40 without the help of modern medicine. So number one, I think I deeply respect the, the gift of science and what that's given us

understanding human body. We're still understanding more things and the tools that modern medicine, including pharmaceuticals and medical devices, have given us, you know? It's really quite remarkable, like astounding that we could actually do that. And it takes money, it takes investors,

it takes industry to scale it, so we can give it to as many people as possible. That said, I do think that we lost our way because you know that pharmaceuticals, have been only around for less than 100 years. All right. You know, antibiotics came out in the 1930s and 40s. Before that, we had no drugs.

And before we had, we didn't have drugs, before we had any drugs, all we had was diet and lifestyle. And somehow, with this revolution of pharmaceuticals, we lost the other tools in a toolbox. We lost diet and lifestyle. We lost a belief in, you know, integrated systems and healing. We just all kind of like all get fixated on what the guidelines and pathways and how to use products are.

And I think that, you know, capitalism actually drove that to a large extent. But without entrepreneurship and capitalism, we wouldn't have the discoveries that we actually have. So it's a it's a balance that we have to we have to. accommodate, but what I love about where we are in society today is we're going back to the old ways. We're realizing a diet and lifestyle is important. You know, talking about cross-cultures, have you heard that we've discovered a new organ in the body recently called the interstitium? Anybody who's listening, if you want to go back to the, there's a really great article in a New York times. Just look up interstitium, I-N-T-E-R-S-T-I-U, I'm interstitium. I was taught about the

interstitium when I was in medical school because when we were in anatomy class dissecting bodies and learning about anatomy, you know, open up the belly and you take out the liver and the intestines and blah, blah, blah, blah. We were saying, oh, you know that all that area, empty space between organs, those dried up organs? Like, that's called the interstitium, but never mind. We don't care about the interstitium. Turns out the interstitium in the living person, not the corpse. The living person is the fluid that interconnects all the spaces between our organs,

all the negative space. That fluid in the living dynamic person is filled with communicators. exosomes, little microcommunication channels that one organ communicates to the other organ, and that itself is an organ, interstitium. And the reason I'm bringing that up is because, you know, we now have rediscovered, and this is what's in this New York Times article, I would encourage people to look up, is that the interstitium that connects one thing to the other thing through these channels actually seems to correlate

with the acupuncture meridians that have been known for thousands of years in Asia. You put a needle here in your ear would actually stimulate something else. We're now beginning to think it's the interstitium that helps to communicate those signals.

So we're bringing some scientific, we're landing, sticking the landing with some of this, what some doctors used to call woo-woo. We're not bringing, our worlds are colliding. And I think that's what's wonderful is we're beginning to put the tools

back in the toolbox so we have more than pharmaceuticals. In fact, you know, when I was in med school, they're like, well, if you go to supplements and diet and lifestyle, like you're practicing alternative medicine, those people are weirdos or wackos. I will tell you that where we're going now,

if you in the future, if you are a doctor that only practices pharmaceutical medicine and you don't integrate diet and lestown. The people who are only using pharmaceuticals, they are going to be called the alternative medicine practitioners. They're not doing mainstream medicine. Mainstream medicine is going to be so characterized by totality. And I think that that's the good news of how we're evolving. What do you think we're going to see in our lifetime in terms of the innovations and understanding remedies, treatments for cancer, and And especially as AI, some people think we will have a longevity, escape velocity,

and potentially be able to outpace degeneration in our body. What do you think are some realities in terms of what we'll be able to see happen? Yeah, what you're asking about is sort of like the discussion topic of panels of biohackers that get together and they're futurists that predict what's going to happen in terms of health care lifespan, technology. I will tell you that in my own career, I've already seen things like the glass ceiling broken time and time and again. What are a couple of those?

Well, we used to have wounds that wouldn't heal, especially in diabetes because their blood vessels aren't really good. And in 1997, the first successful treatment was a gel, like in a tube of toothpaste, that made with recombinant DNA for a growth factor, a peptide, that you would put onto the wound, you squeeze it on, take a wipe it off, and bam, this growth factor would stimulate new blood vessels to heal a wound from the surface and it was zip shut. Never thought we could do that. Prevents amputations. blindness causes a blindness from aging, age-related macular degeneration.

When you hear grandma's going blind because she's old, no such thing. Over the age of 70, the most common cause of vision loss is something called age-related macular degeneration. So people who want to live long, you want to be whatever, add the number of zeros you want after your age. If you can't see, you will lose your independence. So you want the macular degeneration to not happen. And in my career, we've actually went from that. It was a condition you could not treat, incurable, untreatable, to suddenly we can actually give medicines to the back of the eye

that would actually stop macular degeneration, the bleeding and leaking that would actually happen. And you can actually take somebody who, I've had a patient who was legally blind from mac of the degeneration. She was in the late 70s, had like lost her license and the thing that she really regretted the most, she was an avid golfer.

Like golf was her passion in her retirement. That's what gave her pleasure. And when she couldn't hit the ball, because she couldn't see clearly enough, that was her biggest bummer. She couldn't drive to the golf course and then she couldn't hit the ball. And she got onto this treatment right at this turning point.

It was 2006-ish and got the medicine into her eye, dried up her eye from all the problem, leaking blood vessels from macular degeneration, called the wet form of, because it's leaking. And guess what? She could get behind the wheel of a car again. She could drive from legally blind, can't drive to be able to drive again,

and she could hit her golf ball again. So, you know, who would have thought that you could actually treat, prevent blindness? Amazing. Cancer, immunotherapy, stage four to stage zero. I never thought you'd be able to see the N, C, stage of cancer where we would have naturally thought about hospice, morphine, drip, end-of-life care. No way, man. Today, if you're in that situation, your oncologist has a lot of tools to tap into a whole new gateway has opened up. And if your doctor says there's nothing else we can

do for you, you might want to have another oncologist because there's so much we can do now. And And guess what it does? The immunotherapy ramps up your health defense system, that immune system, those super soldiers, they turn into ultra super soldiers, and they can seek out and destroy cancer. And by the way, some of these treatments are just infusions every three weeks. Or there's a new treatment called CAR-T, C-A-R-T, capital T, CAR-T cell. That's basically where you, if you had cancer, you take out some of your T-S. cells. These are those specialized super soldier cells, immune cells. You send them away to a factory.

All right. They literally, you fetics them off. And in the factory, they genetically engineer the super soldiers. So they turn them into literally super soldiers, like real super soldiers. And then you get a bag of them back, sent back to you, and you get an infusion. Twenty-five minutes, don't feel anything. You can sit there read a magazine in the clinic. All right. And your super-soldiers are back in your body. Okay, your body will undergo this huge immune surge, okay? They call it a cytokine storm because it is your immune system is now being like super woken up. All right. And guess what?

When that works, you can literally dry erase out all the cancer from your body. And it stays that way for a decade or more with one bag, one infusion of your own cells that have been actually amplified. So this is, I mean, this is today. So you're asking me about the future? I don't even know what the future is going to bring because I, the things that are happening today have been so dazzling, so jaw dropping, so eye-popping. That, you know, what I say is that don't look at 20 years from now. Why don't you just look 20 months from now? Because we're in this revolution.

I mean, there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of distractions happening in society now. people generally feel that, you know, we don't live in great times. There's a lot of stress. There's a lot of war. You know, a lot of turmoil. I would say from where my, from the cockpit of the plane that I fly and what I'm seeing out the windows, it is so amazing what's actually happening that we should look forward to the future.

Will we have longer lives? Absolutely. Will we have longer health spans? Absolutely. will we actually be able to have better foods and medicines and wearables and biometrics and different techniques to improve our health defenses? That too, absolutely, because they're already here. We're restarting them.

So, you know, the future is already here. It's just not yet evenly distributed. I think that reminder is super needed and welcome because it can get quite depressing when you look, you know, online and the news and social media. But there is so many burgeoning new fields of study and cutting-edge technologies and therapies that give people a newfound sense of hope and that are really empowering.

You know, my mentor, Judah Folkman, once, he was filled with great wisdom that he imparted to all of his students. And one of the things he used to always say to us when we were rounding on patients afterwards, you know, like really sick kids. He was a pediatric surgeon. He would always tell us,

never destroy hope. Never get false hope, but never destroy hope because science is blazing the trail forward. And I think that's so true in terms of what I'm seeing. And so I'm excited about the future. I'm very positive about the future when it comes to health. and what I think is really different from the way that I was educated and trained is that a lot of the future is in our hands.

It comes from understanding who we are. And we're not giving up our agency to some overinflated healthcare system that is just trying to make money in a capitalist environment. But in fact, we have the agency to be able to do things for ourselves. Could I ask you a couple questions about your favorite personal? Because we covered extensively, I think, the lay of the land in terms of the environmental toxins, the ability the body has to heal itself. And I would just like, before we start to head to wrapping up,

like your favorite foods as you understand them as proper medicine to propagate these health systems in the body from doing what they do. What are your personal favorite foods? Well, okay, so first of all, I have to confess to anybody listening and to you is that I am not one of these rigid diet followers. People always ask me, Dr. Lee, what's your diet? or people will, if I'm dining with, like, if people go out to dinner with me, they're always looking over my menu and saying, what are you going to order?

Because I'll have whatever he's having, you know, in that Harry Met Sally sort of way. And I always try to tell people, number one, I appreciate really delicious food, especially the food that comes from traditional cultures, regardless of where they are. I mean, I'm a food explorer. I love great taste.

tasting food. And because I know I don't want to eat too much of anything, I'm open-minded to exploring almost anything. I also know what I shouldn't be eating too much of. I know what I should be eating more of. So within that realm, I always say I don't follow a diet. I follow a pattern. If I had to characterize my pattern, and I'm going to give you some individual foods in a second. I would say, you know, I eat Mediterranean style for health. I love Mediterranean food. I love Asian food. You know, Mediterranean is sort of like dealer's choice.

You go into a restaurant, you go to your own kitchen, you know, you go to the supermarket. What could I make or what could I order? What could I have that actually is within those genres? And they tend to be really healthy, those ingredients and the way that they execute the food. So what are some of, I don't know, I'll just riff on some of my favorite foods. Well, first of all, I love green tea. When you asked me if I wanted tea, I immediately said green tea, right? And that's because I know green tea is loaded with polyphenols, that lower inflammation,

they improve my blood pressure, they relax my mind, they are heart healthy, it starves cancer by cutting off the blood supply. What's not to love about this cup? And plus, I love the taste, you know. And if you want the really full test of all the polyphenols, don't just have green tea, have macha, because macha is the entire tea leaf ground together. And so you spare no good stuff. Another beverage that I really enjoy is coffee.

I picked up the coffee habit when I did my gap year. I told you I was in Italy in Greece. I spent, you know, I don't know, I was in Italy for maybe two or three weeks when I got started and immediately my host family hooked me on to morning espresso and, you know, and I've always drank a lot of coffee. It turns out coffee is loaded with polyphenols like chlorogenic acid as long as you don't put, you know, the pumpkin, the artificial pumpkin flavor and extra added sugar to it. Like, I like my coffee, jet black.

And, you know, people say it's a diuretic, it helps you lose, makes you lose water. no if you drink less than 10 cups you'll be just fine water-wise because it is it's got water in it by itself less than 10 cups less than 10 cups 10 that's a lot yeah exactly so you're safe right and also the caffeine it is true some people are very sensitive to caffeine and coffee and tea but most people are not that sensitive and for me I'm I you're asking me personally I'm not that sensitive to caffeine. I'm good with it. And coffee has been shown to slow down cellular aging. So the burn down rate of the telomeres, which are the little DNA caps that protect your DNA from aging, slow down their burn rates. So you literally age slower from the inside out when you have coffee.

What's not the love about that? You know, and you're more awake anyway. So that's a second. What are some of the other things that'll laugh? Listen, I'm a pretty seasonal person. We're taping this in the summertime. Nothing I like better in the summertime than a really ripe tomato and a really ripe peach. And in fact, I just made a dish the other day where I mixed ripe tomato with ripe peaches together

with hand-torn basil leaves, a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, a little balsamic vinegar. I'm telling you, that made the best. summer salad I've had in a long time, right? So again, you know, like I like things that taste good that are also good, because if you can identify things that you love that are also good for you, then, man, you're like, you're a winner, right? Let's see. I enjoy, I enjoy different kinds of

vegetables that are seasonal. I like asparagus. I love mushrooms. Mushrooms are loaded with called beta glucan. Beta glucan actually is good for your gut health, which is good for your immune system. Mushrooms are great for immunity. If you want to boost up those super soldiers, mushrooms are great. What are some of the best mushrooms?

Well, Shatake mushrooms, people talk about medicinal mushrooms, turkey tail and cordyceps and rashi. I try to say those are medicinal mushrooms. Stick with the mushrooms that are culinary mushrooms. Now, there are two mushrooms that are both, both culinary and medicinal. You know what they are?

Shatake and my tape mushrooms. In Japanese culture and Asian culture, they're both in the medicinal side and on the culinary side. So the Venn diagram crosses both for those. Amazing. And by the way, there's an interesting dietary supplement that I looked at the research on.

So I'm not just only about food. I also pay attention to research on dietary supplements. there is a dietary supplement made from the tender little roots of shatake mushrooms. So we don't really eat the root, the little spindly roots. We eat the stock or the cap, right? These little roots, man, are they potent with polysaccharides, a booster immune system? There's a dietary supplement called AHCC that actually makes a whole supplement out of that. But I love Shatake mushrooms.

and then I started to do more research. When I travel, I'm always researching foods. I realize that trumpet mushrooms, you know, kind of thick stock, a little cap. They are packed with a – they have a lot of dietary fiber, good for you, but they also packed with a bioactive called ergothyony. Ergothionine is good for brain health, good for cognition. lowers depression, lowers anxiety. And that's really, the trumpet mushrooms really packed with that.

How do I cook them? I slice them in half. I rub them with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil. I get a really hot pan. And I just sear one side of it. A little bit of sea salt. If I put a sprinkle of dried oregano or something on top of that and just let it kind of sear and brown up on one side,

golden and crisp, absolutely delicious. And I want to talk to you about the foods I like in the way that you can relate to why I like them, not just because they're a laundry list of foods. Pomegranate juice I like because it actually is good for gut health. It grows a particular bacteria called acrimancia. That acrimanthia musinophila is one of those 39 trillion bacteria in the gut, but it's been studied in humans to. help fight cancer by boosting the immune system, all right, help to improve your metabolism.

Guess what it does, acrimancia. It helps your body produce its own GLP1, which is the weight loss diversion that the drug companies do is for weight loss and for diabetes, but GLP1 has now been discovered to actually help prevent cancer, help improve cancer survival, help. prevent cancer spread, all kinds of goodness to it. And pomegranate juice is, for example, is one of the ways that you can cultivate and nurture your own healthy acrimancy,

which you can get as a supplement as well. But I like the taste of pomegranate juice. Not too much. It's very sweet. Yeah. So again, you know, you asked me the question, Dr. What kind of foods do you like? I got to tell you why I like them as well. I'm hungry now, first of all.

second of all it's interesting after a fast you know you taste a simple blueberry and how bursting with flavor it can be our tongue can be conditioned by the hyper palatable foods and processed foods that kind of steal the appreciation

away from these whole foods and how amazing they taste you know so I those are all great reminders little additions into our diet and by falling in love with those whole foods, you know. And I love blueberries too.

We've just done some really interesting research on blueberries to look at their polyphenol levels, anthocin levels, and look at their taste. So, yeah, I mean, by the way, there's a new research discovery recently published that showed that if you made a smoothie with berries, like blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and banana. that adding the banana will neutralize the polyphenols of the berries in your smoothie.

So you don't want to put, if you want the good stuff in the berries, you don't want to mix it with a banana. Interesting. So again, this is a whole area of research. I'm going to work on it's not just categorically saying this food is green light and that food is red light. I'm also looking at the subtleties of food, the food combinations, which are the best foods. How do you combine the foods together so they work together even better? you know, tomatoes contain lycopene. Lichopine is good for the metabolism,

helps fight body fat, helps to cut off the blood supply to breast cancer and prostate cancer, so it's a good preventative as well. But if you want really to get the lycopene into your body in a much more significant way, you want to mix the tomato with something, and that's something as extra version olive oil.

Tomatoes and extraversion olive oils, now you're talking about traditional Mediterranean eating, right? So again, you know, these are, These are the things that I find so fascinating and so pragmatic as well. Yeah, you're speaking my language growing up and just eating Middle Eastern my whole life. Right. It speaks to me. What about chocolate?

It's the last one. I want to ask you about chocolate. Ah, well, I do like chocolate. I like dark chocolate, particularly. Why is it good for us? Okay, so let's talk about some, let's talk about the name chocolate. chocolate, which is a candy, is a confection made by mixing things together, whether it's in a factory or a home, if you make your own chocolate.

And then you add a lot of stuff to it, all right. And a lot of times the things you add to it, like sugar or other things to it, butter, like they're not the healthiest things for you. But the actual chocolate, to call it chocolate, relies on a plant-based food, which is cacao. And if you haven't seen a cacao bean, it's either yellow or brown about the shape of a football, about the size of a football, grows in a tree in tropical environments. And that's where chocolate comes from. And that plant-based food in the football-shaped pod, the pot is ripened. It's opened up.

You got all these little seeds in it. You peel off the flesh, which is a little sweet and sour. actually quite tasty. You dry them up and ferment them and you crush them up. And now you've got pure cacao powder or cocoa powder. And then you mix that together with various things that create chocolate. And the darker the chocolate, so dark chocolate by percentage, 60%, 70%, 70%, 80%, 80%, or higher is better. And you've got more of the plant-based material.

And that plant-based material is packed with polyphenols. One of them is called proanthosyanidin. It's got catechins, the same thing that's in green tea, or similar. Lots of flavonols in it, Alagetanins. But the proanthocyanid is amazing. It actually can mobilize our stem cells and call them out from our bone marrow into our bloodstream. So we've got more stem cells floating around to repair whatever needs are repaired.

And human studies have been done to look at cocoa flavanol from dark chocolate actually hot chocolate two cups of hot chocolate using really high flavonol chocolate dark chocolate actually can up to double the number of stem cells in your circulation measure in your blood and it improves your vascular function improves their circulation

and you can measure this through a test called flow mediated dilation so we know it works which is really amazing so it's good and good for you and chocolate's one of those um uh foods that you know when i talk about it uh you know i'm giving a talk or something you know like it's the food that nobody that it doesn't suck nobody hates everybody like stands up in cheers when they hear there's something beneficial about chocolate yeah

we can keep going on for for days i love the passion behind uh so much of the work that you share message that they would take to heart for the next decade of their life, what would you leave them with? Optimize your gut health. Make those bacteria in your body work for you. Stay away from things that will damage your gut microbiome. Eat things that will support your gut microbiome because that gut microbiome does so much heavy lifting for your health defenses.

and it's the undiscovered country that we all ignore. We've all ignored until recently, and it's the easiest thing to treat well. So it's sort of like the, you know, you treat your gut well, and it's going to have a ripple effect on your other health defense systems and your brain health and your mood as well.

Dr. Lee, thank you so much, man. Is there anything else on your heart that you want to share with the context of the whole conversation we had, that you feel would be important to add before we close out? The one thing I'll add is that, you know, listen, I'm constantly drinking from a fire hose of science every single day. I have a team of people that work with me, and they know this.

Like, every day, every night, I'm sending them more information about new discoveries that are coming out that can actually have profound meaning. And so one of the things that I've decided to do is to put out on my YouTube channel, Dr. William Lee, L.I, as much information as I can about the new discoveries and how they relate to practical information. This is what I'm passionate about is getting information out through video content, long-form video content, that people can use. And I, you know, I try to make sure that I stay in my lane and to make sure that the information and the way that I give it is trusted information.

because we live in an era where there's so much misinformation out there. It's so easy to be overwhelmed. And I kind of felt like if I didn't put my voice out there, I would be missing a huge opportunity. Well, I think your voice is needed now. I mean, the rise of so many, like we mentioned earlier, with cancers and diseases, and people at times feel like victims of circumstance.

And one of the biggest take-homes is outside of all the things, the practical advice you gave from the foods, the lifestyle to the sleep and optimize our lymphatic system and our immune system and our gut microbiome and all of these things is like that you can heal yourself. Your body knows how to and you've given many powerful reminders of how to how to access that. So thank you man and we'll leave links down in the description where people can find your work, your books, your YouTube channel and that's it. Thanks for much. Yeah, thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, pleasure. Pleasure is mine. Everybody, thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Know That Self podcast. Until next time, be well. Thank you, men.