The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, Joovv, and Thrive Market. Excess belly fat, or visceral fat around the organs, is the number-one cause of aging. It drives inflammation, increases the risk of blood clots, changes your hormones and brain chemistry, and more. It’s a recipe for disaster in the body. Not only does belly fat surround the organs, but it’s an organ of its own that can produce dangerous inflammatory cytokines that may lead to a cytokine storm.  Today on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I sit down with Dr. William Li to talk about the top foods that can fight harmful fat, improve metabolism, and strengthen our body’s natural defense systems. Dr. William Li is an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times bestseller Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases, including diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer? has garnered more than 11 million views. He is President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and is leading global initiatives on food as medicine. His newest book, Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer, was just released. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, Joovv, and Thrive Market. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Right now InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. For a limited time, you’ll get an exclusive discount on Joovv’s Generation 3.0 devices (some exclusions apply). Just go to Joovv.com/farmacy and use the code FARMACY. Join Thrive Market today at thrivemarket.com/hyman to receive $80 off your first order. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Top misconceptions about metabolism (3:53 / 2:05)  The four phases of metabolism (9:06 / 7:23)  A slow metabolism does not cause body fat—it’s the other way around (11:16 / 9:20)  What is metabolism? (14:02 / 12:05)  Four things that body fat does (22:14 / 20:22)  How brown fat was discovered (30:27 /  20:17) Activating brown fat (33:32 / 29:38)  Foods that fire up brown fat (36:56 / 33:12)  Health risks of being overweight and underweight (47:28 / 43:22)  What Dr. Li eats (53:44 / 50:00)  Get a copy of Dr. Li’s book, Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We are not born to suffer a bad metabolism, and we can take steps to beat the need to have these extreme diets that wind up being unsustainable anyway. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now, I know a lot of you out there are healthcare practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as the framework for getting the root cause of the issues. Now, in my practice, this often means looking at lots of internal variables to find

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slash Dr. Hyman. So if you're ready to get a crystal clear picture of what's going on inside your body, along with science-backed recommendations to optimize what's not working, then visit InsideTracker.com slash Dr. Hyman. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you struggle with your weight and metabolism, you've tried a lot of things, you're a bit confused, and you want to know the latest and the greatest from the science, well, you're going to learn it today because we have

as our guest an extraordinary scientist a good friend of mine a guy who wrote an amazing book that taught me so much called eat to beat disease and has written another book called eat to beat your diet burn fat heal your metabolism and live. We're going to talk about that today. He's an incredible physician, a detective of medicine, a scientist, author of the New York Times bestselling book we mentioned, Eat to Beat Disease. His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments that impact more than 70 diseases, including diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. His TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, has garnered more than 11 million views. That's amazing. He's been on lots of shows, Good Morning America, CNBC, Rachel Ray, Live with Kelly and Ryan.

He's been in USA Today, Time Magazine, Atlantic. And he's president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and is leading global initiatives on food as medicine, which is definitely something we have in common. So his new book is out. Get it wherever you get your books. And I'm so excited to dive into this topic of metabolism, health, fat, all our myths and misconceptions and what the science actually shows. Welcome, William. Thanks, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here. And we got so much to talk about because we've got so much in common. We do.

We do. We do. It's pretty cool. There's just an amazing amount of misunderstanding and misconceptions about our metabolism. What is our metabolism? How does it work? What are the things that people have gotten confused about when it comes to fat and metabolism? What are the top misconceptions?

You know, I think, you know, it starts all the way back to how we think about our bodies and metabolism and body fat and how they're all kind of intertwined. Because all of us have had this experience where you step out of the shower in the morning naked and out of the corner of your eye, you see the mirror and you see a lump or a bump that you don't want to have there. Then you step on the scale. I never do. What do you mean? And the point is that, you know, we wind up cursing, I think, body fat and we start thinking our metabolism isn't actually working on our behalf. And that's actually just completely incorrect. Our body fat and our metabolism are so tied together in ways that give us health, generate our health. And what I write about in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, is really the new science of the metabolism, some of which is only 24 months old. It is brand spanking new research that is changing and upending everything we used to think about human metabolism and how that connects to

body fat, good and bad. And then the really exceptional part of this is that, guess what? We don't need to fear our food. We can actually love our food in order to be able to up our metabolism. So, you know, where do you want to begin? Well, I love that. I always say, you know, love the food that loves you back. A lot of times we love the food that doesn't love us back, but the good news is there's lots of food that loves us and that we love. So I think that's great. So, so, so the myths are, are things that have to do with people's view of like why we get gain weight, how our metabolism works. I just like you to sort of unpack that a little bit. Cause I think, sure. You know, I want to get to what we got wrong and then then we'll talk about what we can do right.

Yeah, that's a great place to start. So first of all, I'm a scientist as well as a physician, and as a scientist, I'm always interested in the origin story. Where do things come from, and how does it actually develop over time? So this, and now I'm going to kind of give you the mic drop research that occurred just published just 24 months ago. The largest human and most ambitious study of human metabolism ever undertaken in history was published two years ago in the journal Science, which is the top, one of the top medical journals. It was led by a guy named Herman Ponser, who is at Duke University, and he worked together with 90 other collaborators. So this is a big research project. And they recruited subjects from 20 countries, every continent. And in total, they had 6,000 people. And what was really remarkable is they studied metabolism in exactly the same way.

So that's one very unique aspect of this, to study 6,000 people, human metabolism in exactly the same way. The way they did it, by the way, is they gave them a drink of water. Water is H2O, H being hydrogen and O being oxygen. And what the researchers did, they tweaked the hydrogen, they tweaked the oxygen very minimally, but that you can detect it so that when people drank this cup of water, their metabolism, you know, worked its magic on hydrogen and oxygen. They could measure it in their breath, in their blood, in their urine. what was human metabolism across 6,000 people? And what was really remarkable is this question was asked because they studied people that were two days old newborns, and they studied people that were 92 years old at the tail end of life. So 6,000 people over the entire human lifespan. And I know that, you know, we've just been talking about lifespan, right? That's really

what you've written about in Young Forever. And in this whole lifespan, the question is, how does your metabolism change? That's one of the things we've always had an assumption about. And I think that, you know, you and I, when we went to medical school, we were taught the rudimentaries about metabolism and the biochemistry, but we never had any of the nuances of how it changes over our life. So like most people, we assume that some people are born with a slow metabolism. Some people are born with a fast metabolism and some people are skinny and don't have to worry about eating what they eat. And other people are struggling with their weight and they have to fight with their food. Same kind of assumptions. I think that many people carry around.

That's a myth because it turns out that, let me tell you what they did in a study. When they, when they looked at the metabolism, they looked at what they found in the beginning is that the metabolism was all over the map for 6,000 people, just what you'd expect. But we now live in the era of artificial intelligence and supercomputing. So they developed an algorithm that would go to every subject and correct the result of the metabolism on the basis of excess body weight, excess body fat. So they could remove the effect of excess body fat every individual 6,000 times. All right. Now you got to remember 6,000 people over 20 countries, that's men and women, young

and old, different racial backgrounds, different body sizes, different eating patterns. And what they did when they removed the effect of metabolism, excess body fat, it was like pulling the cloak off the statue of David. They found that all humans go through only four phases of metabolism in their entire life. We are hardwired. This is like revealing the operating system of your- Wow. Tell us, tell us. I'm so excited. The four phases, everyone is born with the same metabolism okay in the first phase it's zero to one human metabolism skyrockets so that at one year old when you're when you reach 12 months

your metabolism is 50 percent higher than what it would be later when you're an adult all right so it's like a rocket ship blasting off phase two that's from one year old to 20 years old. Your metabolism goes down, down, down, down, down, down. Now, why is that important? Because most of us who have had kids assume that when your teenagers are eating two meals and bouncing off the walls and growing like a bean sprout, their metabolism must be going up, right? Wrong. It's going down.

It's going down and it descends to adult levels. That's phase two. Phase three is starting from 20 to 60. And you know what the result was? This is the most surprising part. 20, 30, 40, 50, 60. Metabolism is hardwired to be a straight line. It does not change as the hardwiring in our body. And what that means is that 60 can be new to 20. If you allow your metabolism to do a sting. All right. That's phase three. Now I'm going to, I'm going to come back to that in a second. And then phase four, the four phases from 60 to 90,

you do decline a little bit, but only by 17%. So by the time you're 90, all right, your metabolism is basically only less than 20% decreased from what it was at 60 or at 20. All right. That's amazing. So it is amazing. Now, and basically what this discovery has done is led us to completely rip up the old metabolism textbooks. And the new ones are being rewritten right now based on this new science. Now, the key part though, because people say, well, wait a minute, I'm 40 years old. I'm 50 years old. I'm gaining weight. Like I know this happens. What happens is that when you add the data back, when you add the effective extra body fat back,

you crush the metabolism. So it's not that a slow metabolism causes you to gain body fat, okay, and gain weight. It's the other way around. Our metabolism runs this way, but if you undertake behaviors, whether you're inactive, you're not getting enough sleep, you're overly stressed, you eat incorrectly, your microbiomes derange, what happens is you gain body fat and it's body fat that crushes your metabolism completely the other way around than what you thought. So being overweight slows your metabolism down. That's right. So the good news, by the way, with this discovery is that it means that suddenly we have a new

ability, a newfound ability to be able to control our metabolism. Because if we can actually right size our body fat, because this is the other point, fat isn't our enemy. Fat's in fact, a critical part of our health, except when we have too much of it. So what you want to do is sort of like shave it back down, tune it down, turn the volume down. And as you do that, your metabolism rises because that's the hard wiring in our body. So proportional to your weight, your metabolism rises. That's right. And body size, right? So, and it all depends on your body size as well. So, um, and, and by the way, this is important because body size is often viewed as sort of the, the, the,

the lead balloon, you know, when it comes to the bummer of metabolism, but that's not really the case. If you look at the, some of the healthiest people in the world, and I read about this in my book, think about Olympians. You have the little gymnasts, you've got the shot putters, you've got the weightlifters, and they're all champions, even though the body size are different. And then if you look at boxing, there's like 14 different weight classes from flyweight to heavyweight in and there's a world champion in every single group and so those people are super fit and i think this is the other thing is we need to do is to realize our metabolism is like the operating system in our laptop whether you've got a 15 inch or a 13 inch laptop this operating system is still at work and so what

happens is that when we accumulate excess body fat, that's like confusing your computer and getting it glitchy, then you got to actually clean that up. And I think this is really what there's an opportunity for us to do is to clean up our body of excess body fat to allow our operating system when it comes to metabolism to be able to run the way it wants to run. So then, you know, what you're saying essentially is that excess body fat will create a slower metabolism. The question then is, you know, what is causing us to gain the weight? And what do you mean by metabolism exactly? Because I think people have different conceptions of what that means.

And I think there's like scientific definitions and there's a common sort of understanding of it, which are a little bit different. Yeah. No, no. Listen, I and by the way, this term metabolism is a term that everyone thinks they understand, even even doctors. Right. So, you know, like you and I, when we talk, when we sit over coffee or lunch and we talk about metabolism, like we're pulling out, we're busting out, you know, the standard accepted scientific definition of the net sum of all the chemical reactions in a body, et that people can relate to. So everyone has a car, right? And in a car, you just assume as you're driving your car that it will actually take the energy to power up the engine

so you can get from point to point, right? That's what we do. And that's frankly what our metabolism is. It's the process by which our body drives our engine in our body, gives it energy to go around. We don't normally think about it, right? Just like you don't think about the energy in a car, you're just going about your way. Now, the analogy of the car is really useful to think about because when you're driving in a car, you do keep your eye on the fuel gauge.

And when the fuel gauge runs low, what do you do? You pull over to the filling station, take out the pump, the nozzle, put it into the tank, and you repress it. You fill up the tank, goes click, no more gas comes out, and you drive off. Okay. Now, same deal in our body. When our body uses fuel, our fuel in our body for energy to drive the engine of our body comes from our food. Our food gives us our fuel, right? So we don't have a fuel gauge in the same way that a car does, but our brain senses it and our organs sense it so that when our fuel gauge runs low, we don't pull over to the filling station. We pull over to the dinner table or to the refrigerator. 7-Eleven.

Hopefully not to the 7-Eleven. But the idea is that we pull over to fuel up. All right. Now, when we eat food, it's kind of like going to the filling station. And I want to first give this example. Imagine if you're filling up your tank in your car and the gas tank filled up. But at the end, it doesn't click when the tank is full. You know what would happen is that the tank would fill up. It would overflow.

The gas would come down the side of the car, around your tires, pool around your feet, and you'd be standing in a dangerous, toxic, flammable mess. All right. And what would happen is you have to step away and wait for the air to blow it off, you know, evaporate it. But we, you know, our body isn't quite as cleverly designed. We don't have a clicker that's an off switch per se. So we can sit, pull it over to our filling station to fill up on food as our

fuel, but we can eat and fill up and fill up and fill up and not stop. And so one thing when we don't stop, we are literally overloading our fuel tank. So let's talk about the fuel tank for a second. All right. We need that energy from our food. Let's call it calories, but I don't want people to count calories or think about calories in and calories out. The moment you say the word calories, people kind of go in a certain direction. So I just want to talk about fuel. So basically what happens is that when you're putting food in your mouth, your pancreas makes insulin. Insulin is elevated, and basically it helps us draw the energy into our cells so we're able to operate. If you've got extra fuel, what happens is your body takes that extra fuel and it slows it up into fat cells.

Now, we are born with fat cells that formed in our mom's womb. And they formed not to make us look bloated, but our fat cells at birth basically were our fuel cells preparing for later on when we needed to store energy. Now, a fat cell can actually blow up when you store it with fuel by about 100 times in size. But when that thing's filled up and you eat more food, your body has to fill up another fat cell and yet another fat cell. The more you eat, the more fat cells have to be filled up to a hundred times their size. And when you run out of fat to fill up, you need more fuel tank. Your fat cell goes to stem cells to make a new fat cell and fill that up as well. That's terrible.

That's like going to the gas station and just loading up jerry cans of gas and stuffing your pickup truck with them and piling it high, right? And so what happens is that we can easily overeat and gain body fat and therefore gain weight just for that reason. Now, so that's one explanation for the body fat. Now, the other issue with regard to that, back to the car analogy, is the quality of the fuel we put in our car matters a lot. We want to put the highest quality gas into our gas tank in order to be able to run our car as long as we can. And if you basically put some crappy gas, low octane gas into your car once in a while, no biggie, the engine's going to run.

But if you did it for a whole lifetime of the car, it's not going to run as long or as well. Same deal with our metabolism over the course of our lifespan. If we put high quality fuel in, nutrient dense foods like plant-based foods, high quality sources of protein, we are actually taking care of our engine. And of course, you don't want to eat too much. And so, but if you put low quality fuel, ultra processed foods, you know, all those artificial preservatives and flavorings and colorings, what we're doing over time is we're poisoning our engine, including our metabolism.

Ah, wow. So basically what you're saying is that, is that this fat just kind of accumulates and then it slows our metabolism. It's kind of a vicious cycle. Yeah. But you also said we shouldn't be so afraid of fat in a way that that isn't necessarily the villain we thought it's supposed to be. So what's true about that paradox that you're highlighting in your book? You know, it's actually not a paradox. It's really about balance and homeostasis, like so many other things in the human body. So I like to tell people that when your mom's sperm met your mom, your dad's, when your mom, your dad's sperm met your mom's egg in the, in the womb, and you were just a ball of cells starting to form your future body,

the first tissue gets laid down is your circulation. And that's what I study, angiogenesis, because every organ needs blood supply. A second tissue that gets laid down is your nervous system, because every organ needs the ability to have the wiring to get instructions through this nerve to do something. All right. The third tissue that gets laid down are little fat cells. They're called adipocytes. And the interesting thing, Mark, about where these form, they form around blood vessels. The first fat is laid down like bubble wrap, like a layer of bubble wrap around blood vessels. And the reason why is preparing for later in life when you're eating food, the energy, the fuel from your food has to be stored.

And it's best to put your fuel tank right where the fuel is coming in by your blood vessels. So we're actually born with our body fat long before we had a face that we could stuff with food. So we got to ask that question. Why do we have body fat? And by the way, is it always harmful? Answers no, because if you take a look at fast forward nine months, newborn baby, right, makes everyone smile. You know, you want to actually, you want to pinch its chubby cheeks. Healthy babies are chubby, tubby. They've got big cheeks big cheeks big big tummies their arms and legs look like those um balloons that a circus clown makes the little poodles out of you know they're they're big right okay and and so fat actually in a baby is healthy in fact if you saw a baby that had chiseled cheeks like a runway model long thin arms and long thighs you'd be freaked. You'd say there's something seriously wrong with that baby, right?

Yeah, it would look very sick. You want those chubby, fat cheeks. And so that's one of the things that I think is so important for people to understand is that fat is not our enemy. We had our body fat for a long time. And so what are the roles of body fat as we grow up, right? I mean, basically, I will put a little footnote to say, as we, every little boys and girls all look the same, but as we go through puberty, it's really our body fat that

kind of shapes us. So, um, you know, uh, the female form that, that classic form actually you get a little skinnier in the waist, less subcutaneous fat, um, guys that you get a little bit bigger, they get a little more visceral fat, hips get bigger, breasts, but all those, it's a fat reshaping it. So if you were to think about the human body being made by Michelangelo, back to that statue of David, body fat plays a big role in that. However, let's talk about for any person, not just, you know, sort of like the idealistic figure. Here's the four things that body fat does. Number one, it's a cushion. Okay. And if we didn't have body fat, if you tripped on a carpet and you fell on the ground, your organs could split open. So thank goodness we have a little bit of cushion. Sounds terrible. Right? Number two, what is it? It's a fuel tank, like

we talked about. You need to actually have your fuel. So your body fat is critical for your metabolism. It's part of our metabolism. It's a fuel tank that stores our food. The third thing that body fat does is quite remarkable. It's an endocrine organ. In fact, it's the biggest endocrine organ in the body. Endocrine organs like your thyroid,

your adrenal glands, like your glands, your ovaries and your testicles. To think that body fat's an actual organ is a kind of stunning thing to think about. It's like your muscles are an organ, right? That's right. That's right. So here's the endocrine hormonal function of, of healthy body fat. All right. This is like to keep you alive. You have to do this. There's about 15 organs that, at least 15 organs that we now know that body fat as an organ makes healthy body fat. One of them is called leptin. Okay. Now leptin, people think about it as a satiety hormone. I prefer to explain it as a volume switch. When the leptin is elevated, you don't you don't feel so hungry. When the volume is down, you feel a little hungrier.

So it actually it's not a it's not a light switch to go up and down. You turn it on, lights and off. It actually goes up and down like so much of the body and like hormones go. They're kind of a feedback loop. So a little bit higher, a little bit lower. That's leptin. Second, and by the way, when you're hungry, what do you do? You pull over to the filling station to fill up.

So a very important form of metabolism. Second, there's a hormone called adiponectin. And if you and I saw a patient and ordered a vial blood, it's standard vial blood to be sent to the hospital lab to measure all the hormones in the body, a hormonal panel. There'd be the thyroid, there'd be the cortisol, all the other hormones to toss around. There'd be one hormone, adiponectin, made by healthy body fat that is 1,000 times higher in your circulation than any other organ, any other hormone. And the reason it's so high is adiponectin is part of your metabolism.

It works, it collaborates with insulin to make your energy extraction from your blood, from your food and your fuel back into your cells more efficient. And so when you have a lot of adiponectin, you're capable of getting that energy in when you're eating, which is so important. And then there's another, and if adiponectin is kind of the gas pedal for this, for efficiency, a third hormone called resistant is the brake. Adiponectin draws in more energy, not so fast, resistant goes there. So again, balance. Think about driving on a highway, you're on a four lane highway, every now and then you got to get into the fast lane, adiponect thing goes on. But then, you know, there's a car coming up, so you got to slow it down. These hormones are naturally functioning along with leptin in order to be able to tell us to go to the filling station and how we fuel up and how fast we actually fuel up. This is normal. That's an incredibly, that's a third role of fat. And the fourth role of fat, which perhaps is one of the most surprising, and you hear about this in the fitness

world, but is that your fat can also be a space heater. And by space heater, I mean that there's a special kind of fat called brown fat that will ignite and fire up by drawing down fuel. Now, this is kind of like the gas burner on your on your stovetop. Right. So what do you do? You want you hit a striker and it goes whoosh and you wind up having a flame. That's like brown fat. OK. And what it does in order to get that flame, it's drawing the energy from your other fat cells. So it's brown fat, good fat drawing on the energy to burn down bad fat. So I have a little demo here for for your guys. I show it is that think about brown fat like this.

It's like a torch. You turn it on. You're actually this is brown fat. It is burning down fuel. Where's this fuel coming from? It's drawing this fuel when it's turned on from your white fat. And so this is how you can actually use one type of fat to fight another type of fat. So those four functions of body fat really help us reconceptualize, like don't fear it, but tame it. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. Now you guys know how seriously I take my health routine and one of my non-negotiables is getting a daily dose of red light therapy. When red light is absorbed through the skin, our cells' potential to produce energy increases. Picture how our solar

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That's T-H-R-I-B-E market.com forward slash Hyman. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So is there a way to activate brown fat with food? Because we know how to activate it, for example, cold therapy, because often cold plunges increase metabolism, improve insulin sensitivity, and they've been shown to actually help speed up your metabolism and burn white fat, which is the kind you don't want. So can you, can you, uh, can you take us down that road if there's anything that we can do other than like lay in a 40 degree hold lunge to activate our brown fat? Yeah. Well, look, I mean, you know, this, uh, I don't know, are you,

Although by the way, I think people should do that, but yeah, it's not everybody's cup of tea. What's interesting is how brown fat was discovered because it was discovered in humans. We've known for hundreds of years that there's a little bit of brown fat in animals that hibernate, which means that they're sleeping in cold temperatures and they need warmth. And so the brown fat in hibernating animals actually fires up and it provides their heat by drawing down the fat that they've stored when they're actually eating, getting ready for the winter, right? So, okay. So in humans, brown fat was actually discovered in a Boston hospital with a female patient who had a tumor in her chest. And they had a PET scan of this woman. And PET scans look at metabolism. We're talking about metabolism. And guess what?

This little tumor in her chest lit up like a Christmas tree. It was really metabolically active. So they didn't know what it was. But when they biopsied the tumor and they looked at it under the microscope, it turned out to be brown fat. Brown fat was thought to be in children for a little bit behind your shoulder blades. Most people thought that's not in adults. But here was an adult with brown fat. And so what what what the researchers did at this Boston hospital, Ronald Kahn, they went back and they said maybe other PET scans are showing brown fat and we just haven't been looking for it. So he went back and looked at 1000 PET scans of adults that were getting scans for lots of different reasons. And he went to look for the brown fat signature. And guess what? He found it in about half the people. And so he's like, well, you know, that's interesting.

It seems to be present. But what he found out is that it became much more noticeable when the people who are getting these PET scans were getting their scan in the winter in. And it's all over adults. And so basically they were able to characterize, and this is a big program at the National Institutes of Health now at the NIH, they're actually figuring out where human brown fat is. They profiled it. And I actually, you know, the researchers actually gave me the photograph, gave me permission to publish the photographs in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. Some of the first pictures ever of brown fat. Really? So lumpy, bumpy white fat, which is the harmful fat is lumpy, bumpy. It's a stuff, jiggly stuff under your arm, under your chin. It's the muffin top. Okay.

And the visceral fat, by the way, also lumpy, bumpy, but you can't see it because it's inside the tube of your body. Brown fat isn't lumpy, bumpy. It is wafer thin. It's paper thin. And it's not near the skin. It's close to the bone. And where is it in the body? And this is what's really cool about the imaging studies. It's plastered around the side of your neck. It's behind your breastbone. It's under your arms and a little bit in your belly. And behind your back and your shoulder blades? A little bit behind your back and your shoulder blades, but a lot under your arm, kind of like a bra. Okay. And a lot under, exactly. So think about it, right? This is how we stay warm in the winter, right? So what's really cool is that as they've been teasing out the mechanisms of how cold actually

stimulates brown fat, turns it on, it turns out it's the same pathways that foods can turn on the same pathway. So basically here it goes. Yeah. Your brain releases norepinephrine, which is kind of a stress hormone. Really, you know, when you get into that cold, that cold bath, right? Like you go, whoa. Yeah. Jump into the ocean, uh, you go to the beach and the water's cold. Whoa. And that whoa is your, tells your brain to go release, um, uh release stress hormones. And what happens is that the stress hormones run down the nerves to the rest of your body. But when they get to your brown fat, some of the nerves go to your brown fat, it fires them up. And it makes a lot of sense because you're trying to warm up for it. So we now know that norepinephrine will

actually bind to a receptor in brown fat called the beta-3 adrenergic receptor. This is a very well-known switch on our body. And anything that can trigger that switch, like hot chili peppers, like mushrooms, like sulforaphanes in broccoli, can trip that switch, the beta-3 adrenergic receptor, then what actually happens is that there's a domino effect inside our brown fat, that wafer thin fat, the beta-3 adrenergic receptor, when it fires off, when that light switch is turned on, it sends another signal. It's like dominoes. The next domino it turns on is something called UCP1, uncoupling protein one.

So the hormone triggers off the switch called beta-3 adrenergic, which then triggers off another switch called UCP1. UCP1, by the way, is on top of the mitochondria. And I like to actually, which is in brown fat, and I like to tell people, and I'm sure maybe you had your own word for this, but when I was memorizing all the stuff in medical school, mitochondria, which is a fuel cell, an energy cell inside, like a battery inside all of your cells, I called it the mitochondria, because it actually is like a fuel cell, like a nuclear power plant. And when that adrenergic receptor, tryptophan light switch at the UCP1 on the mitochondria, it fires them up. And guess what?

Mitochondria has a lot of iron in it, the element iron, the metal iron. And a lot of iron, by the way, packed together is like rusty nails. It's colored brown. Iron tends to oxidize as brown. That's why brown fat is brown because it's got so much fuel cells with so much iron, it looks brown. I'm a scientist. I asked the why's, right? Like why is brown fat brown? That's a good question. I never thought about it. That's the answer, right? Okay. So it turns out that anything that turns on that beta three adrenergic switch, cold weather can do it.

There's a bladder spasm medicine called Mirabegron that if you actually, that also specifically designed to hit that switch on your bladder. But guess what? Researchers have actually shown it'll hit that switch on your fat cells, fire up your brown fat as well. Is that why you have to pee when you're cold? Well, but they did that experiment to show this mechanism at really high doses. So I don't recommend anybody you try to use Mirabegron to actually fire up their brown fat.

But it turns out foods like chili peppers, like avocado, like walnuts, like capers are all capable of firing off this switch and so what i do in my book is you know in the research that went into this is like there's 150 foods that have been discovered along with the doses of how much it takes to fire off your brown fat really like what foods um well uh uh one thing is sulforaphanes, right? So sulforaphane-containing foods like brassica, broccoli, bok choy, cauliflower, that entire cat, Swiss chard, all of those substances containing food, plant-based foods containing sulforaphanes will fire up your brown fat. So will the beta-D-glucan in mushrooms, white button mushrooms, shiitake, enoki, maitake, right? I mean, some of the- Well, I feel good about my dinner last night

because I had gai lan and shiitake mushrooms. You were firing up your brown fat, right? Okay. So this is, and by the way, as I went through the entire catalog and I wrote my whole section about food in this book, imagining for my reader that I was taking them through the grocery store and the shopping cart as if they were a kid. You know, like when you were a kid, you hopped in your mom's shopping cart and she was pushing you along. Except this time, what I'm doing is as we're going through the different sections of the grocery store, I'm telling you what to pull out that will activate your metabolism at burning body fat and put it into your cart. Produce section, the forbidden middle aisles, the seafood section, the beverage section. It literally is like a tour of your grocery store to what to shop, like a shopping list for metabolism. Yeah.

So shiitake mushrooms and mushrooms, the broccoli family, what else activates brown fat? Okay. So one of my favorites- Because this is important because what you're saying essentially is that we don't activate our brown fat enough because we don't have cold exposure. We don't eat certain foods that are meant to do it. And it undermines our metabolism. And a way to speed up your metabolism is actually to activate brown fat.

So that's why this is so important for people to listen to. And by the way, let's do this again. Activating your brown fat with food is like turning on your burner, okay? And you're burning down fuel. That's quite a lighter you got there, William, Dr. William. I don't know. Are you sure you're not a little pyromaniac on the side there? It's great for a fireplace. But it's a great illustration because people really understand that the strength of that flame has to come from someplace.

And that's really the potential of our brown fat. you know, the greens, the leafy greens, the kales, the mushrooms, the onions, the red onions I talk about. I actually like to say, surprisingly, if you go into the middle aisle of the grocery store, remember, we used to always lecture people to stop the perimeter. That's where, obviously, there's a lot of good stuff. But it turns out there's a lot of good stuff in the middle aisles it's just buried with all the junk like sardine cans and olive oil exactly and dried apples and capers in jars or in bags uh lentils uh you know uh prunes uh not tree nuts

tomato pastes all these kinds of foods actually have been shown to activate brown fat in the lab they actually activate metabolic stuff so all the foods that i talk about in the book have human evidence so i explain the lab but then i should show the human research that actually shows that you know meaningfully when you eat these foods over time like three quarters of of a cup of dried, like dried apple chips, actually will lead you to lose almost an inch of your waist circumference over the course of a month. All right. And this is like controlled studies with placebos, not requiring people to cut their calories or go on a special exercise. Just adding foods to the diet will actually trigger these processes to burn down extra energy, burn away some of this fat, the extra energy, shrink your fat cells and unleash your inner metabolism.

And some of the most dramatic things, by the way, I think are like navy beans, pre-cooked, ready to eat can navy beans, cheap stuff, right? I mean, people care about much thing food costs in the supermarket these days and if you buy a can of this is from the university of toronto they studied men eating three a can of beans uh three quarter three quarters of a cup of can of beans five days a week okay and compared to any kind of beans or of navy ready navy beans, the kind you would make bean soup or a stew out of. And it turns out that just a little under a cup, three-quarters of a cup, five days a week, over the course of a month, shrank their waist circumference by an inch. Now, waist circumference is a good surrogate of the amount of harmful body fat you have inside you because the visceral fat is a dangerous fat. The subcutaneous fat is either beautiful or could make you not be so happy with your body shape.

All right. But the visceral fat, which you can't see, is actually inside the cavity of your body. So when you it's like peanuts, you would pack into a FedEx container, you're shipping light bulbs. You can pack a lot of peanuts in a thin box and tape it shut. The box still looks thin, but it could be bursting with pressure on the inside. And basically visceral fat is something that whether you've got a big body or a small body, whether you're obviously overweight or whether you're skinny as a stick, you can still have too much body fat. By the way, here's an interesting little factoid. Do you know where one of the first places you gain visceral fat, extra body fat when you start gaining weight?

I would assume your belly, but maybe you're going to be wrong. I'm going to be wrong. Well, 90% of people think it's around the belly. And reason, understandably, because that's what you would see. I'm gaining weight. You look in the mirror, I've seen it around your belly. But actually, that's not so. Turns out that the first place you gain, start building body fat, especially the visceral fat, is in your tongue. Your tongue can get fat. So if you take a look at the anatomy

of the tongue, the tip of the tongue is the Cirque du Soleil acrobat. It's actually capable of doing all kinds of crazy acrobatics. The middle of your tongue is muscular. It is buff and full of muscle to be able to move food around your mouth. The back third of the tongue is normally marbled like a ribeye steak with fat. And a lot of people don't realize this, but when you start gaining extra fat, one of the first places that it starts to grow where it matters, the visceral fat grows in your tongue. You get more marbling in the back of your tongue. Wow. This happens even in skinny people. And in fact, it was studied in Sweden. Young women, women who are middle age or younger, who are thin, actually, when they started to gain weight and they started to gain visceral

fat, they found it was in their tongue. They started snoring. Their bed partners would say, wait a minute. Oh, you started snoring. Now, why? say, wait a minute, you started snoring. Now why? Because when you're sleeping, you're relaxed. And when you're relaxed, your tongue's relaxed. Your fat tongue is relaxed. It blocks your airways. And guess what? You have sleep apnea. And so even thin people who have a lot of visceral fat, it's not just the diameter of the airway. We used to think it's just, it's like the tunnel getting narrower, but even your tongue can gain weight. So these are some of these really interesting facts

about body fat that we never really even thought about. Amazing. Which is why we need to actually take actions, as you say, to eat foods. If you really want to fight body fat and raise your metabolism, you don't want to fear your food. really want to fight body fat and raise your metabolism, you don't want to fear your food. You want to actually lean into it to look for delicious, healthy foods

eaten at a modest volume and also eaten at the right time. You know, so it's not just, it's obviously what you eat is important and how you eat is important, but when you eat can also make a difference. Totally. So, you know, the whole problem of, you know, body fat is interesting. And I think there's sort of this conversation over the last few years that we shouldn't be discriminating against people who are overweight, which I agree, and that we shouldn't actually assume that it's bad for their health, that there's this whole body positive movement, healthy at any weight. And this is sort of a narrative that I think, you know, I don't know for sure, but it feels like it's something that's messaging from the food industry. Because as a doctor treating patients and looking at their metabolism and their biochemistry and their lipids and their glucose and really doing deep dives on

thousands of patients who are overweight. I just don't see that. And I think that the question is, you know, what's wrong with the data that showed that, you know, in some of the studies that we see that if you're thin, as you get older, you're have a higher risk of death. And I think there's a new study that came out that showed that, that you know we went from like assuming that maybe obesity increased your risk of death by two to five percent and more like 90 percent and and are you aware of this and and what's your perspective because I I have my own perspective but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are well well two things first of all uh I I they think this new science of the metabolism invites us all to become radiologists, which is basically like we don't see the actual patient, but we're looking at the pieces of the puzzle to try to figure out what's going on. And that's what going on is really about the overall health and the function of our bodies from a metabolism perspective.

I think you can actually be visually agnostic to what an individual looks like. I think this body positivity versus a very neutral, I'm a scientist, I'm a doctor, I try to help people just like you. And so one of the interesting things is very clear. I think your experience, as you just said, supports this. The data shows if you have excess body fat, if you fall into these categories where you have your fuel tanks are too big. And by the way, the other thing I didn't mention, as you load up on the fuel tanks with overeating and bad habits, besides your metabolism crashing, being suppressed, you know, the fat leaks out of the fuel tanks at some point. That fat actually, the leaking fat accumulates in your liver and it's toxic. It poisons your liver and that's non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Okay. That's an epidemic all by itself. It's like the gas leaking out of the car around your shoes. It's toxic and it's

dangerous. Second, when fat actually builds to a certain mass where it exceeds its blood supply, then excess body fat billowing out is like a tumor. Tumors grow so fast, they can't get enough blood vessels. And so blood vessels they can't get enough blood vessels. And so blood vessels are desperately trying to get blood vessels. What happens in the center of the tumor, and I'm a cancer researcher, so I've been doing this for decades. In the center of the tumor, you get necrotic, you get ischemic, meaning not enough oxygen, you get necrotic, meaning it actually dies. What happens when something doesn't get enough oxygen and dies? Inflammation. So the center, like a tumor, the center of burgeoning fat is highly inflammatory. And fat inflammation leaks out throughout the body.

So now not only do you have the actual fat causing lipo fat toxicity in the liver, causing now alcoholic fatty liver disease, but now you've got a whole body full of inflammation, which is why we correlate obesity with diseases of inflammation, right? Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative conditions. So that's one thing about overweight being bad. By the way, the other thing is that when you've got inflammation in a large mass of fat, you derail the hormonal system. Is the volume switch of leptin high or low? Am I hungry or I'm not hungry?

I don't know. There's too much inflammation. What about adiponectin? You know what? Should we have more or less energy? I can't tell anymore. There's too much noise in here. And so it gets confused.

Resistant? I don't know. Breaks on or breaks off? I can't tell. And that it gets confused. Resistant? I don't know. Breaks on or breaks off? I can't tell. And that's what happens. You basically derail the hormonal function when your fat grows faster than its blood supply and it exceeds and starts to leak its contents. All right. What about skinny? It's the completely other side of the equation. Ultra skinny is very dangerous. In fact, studies have been done looking at the likelihood of mortality of people getting a cardiac catheterization of skinny people versus obese

people. It turns out the chances of having a complication and dying as a complication of cardiac catheterization is higher if you don't have enough body mass. You know why? Basically, when you actually have too little body fat, you don't have your energies compromised. You're not making as much leptin. You're not making as much adiponectin. Resistant is also not in its normal fashion. And what happens is that you're not able to command the signal. The conductor is missing members of the orchestra and pages are missing from his own sheet music. And what happens is that that actually is a setup for metabolic disaster, right? And healing. And that's why, you know, in my book, I talk about healing your metabolism. Look, it's all about balance. We are hardwired with an operating system and keeping that balance with a healthy lifestyle,

exercise, sleep, lowering stress and eating the right foods and staying away from the wrong foods actually allow us to make this entire life journey, our lifespan from a baby two days old, again, over to 90 plus years old. And I know you spent a lot of time with the 90 plus year olds, you know, when you're in the blue zones, they, they have healthy metabolisms that is in part, uh, uh, uh, really shaped and groomed and, and caretaken by their lifestyle, including their diet. It's so true. So you think it is a problem if we're overweight and you don't think it's healthy in any way based on what you're seeing? I think overweight and underweight, both ends of that spectrum are not healthy. What we want to do is kind of get towards the middle

and the middle actually has, by the way, probably a pretty big, it's not a black or white, it's not a thin line. You cross that line, you're overweight and you're unhealthy. I think there's a band of really, there's a zone that's very individual. You know, like we talk so much about personalized medicine, individualized care. I think that for every individual at different parts of their life, there's a cycle in which you can actually go up and down a little bit and you're probably going to be just fine. But if you exceed the highway, think about it, a one lane highway versus a two lane highway versus the four lane highway, you can still go off road. You can still go off the edges on either side and get into trouble.

And I think that every individual has got a different kind of size of highway based on who they are and also at different points in their life. We're at this new juncture of understanding our metabolism. And the wonderful thing to me is that number one, our metabolism is not our fate. We are not born to suffer a bad metabolism. And the wonderful thing to me is that, number one, our metabolism is not our fate.

We are not born to suffer a bad metabolism. There's something we can do about it, which is actually we can help our metabolism shine. We can help our metabolism rise and we can take steps, including using food to beat the reason, the need to have these extreme diets that that actually wind up being unsustainable anyway. So then, you know, how do people best lose weight and lose their body fat? And what is your sort of prescription and sort of the eat to beat diet? Yeah. How do we take all this science and make it practical? It's like take the last 10, 15 minutes and make it real for people. Yeah.

Well, look, I get asked this question all the time when people see me wherever, on the street or in a lecture hall, they basically say, Dr. Lee, what diet do you follow? Because they're assuming we all follow a special diet or our own diet. And I answer very, very authentically, very sincerely, I'm not on a diet. I don't go on a diet. However, I do eat in a certain way. And the way that I eat, and I think people will relate to this, I call it Mediterranean style of eating. Mediterranean happens to reflect the ways that I like to eat. I enjoy eating and reflects my own background. I'm Asian. I grew up eating Asian food. I lived in the Mediterranean and I spent time in Italy and in Greece and elsewhere. And I lived Mediterranean. I lived and learned to love

Mediterranean cuisine, especially traditional cuisine. And so I always, whenever I'm choosing a meal or ordering off a menu, I are going shopping in a grocery store or the farmer's market. I naturally gravitate towards recipes and ingredients from one of those genres, which by the way, Mediterranean Asian happened to be traditionally among the healthiest eating patterns on the planet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the blue zones are in Okinawa and basically the Mediterranean places, right? Exactly the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the Blue Zones are in Okinawa and basically the Mediterranean places, right? Exactly, right? So, I mean, you were just there seeing this in action. And so I call it Mediterranean style eating. And I think that

I use that to inform what ingredients I pick, what catches my eye, how foods are prepared. And by the way, also Mediterranean and traditional Asian foods, these culinary traditions tend not to be ultra processed. They tend to use fresh, local, seasonal ingredients combined in really unique ways and flavored with herbs and spices and nuts and legumes and healthy oils like olive oil. So that's one approach I take is sort of how do I, for anybody who's sort of confused, like, okay, well, what style of eating should I have? What's Mediterranean? But Mediterranean can be anything.

It can be like pasta and pizza or it can be like fresh fish and vegetables. So that's really what I try to do is I try to present people with a list of ingredients you can buy in my book in the grocery store, in the produce section, in the middle aisle, whether you're going to the seafood counter or you're going to the farmer's market, you can find these ingredients and they taste delicious. And you have to, you know, somebody who said, I haven't had broccoli or I don't like fish. You haven't had somebody

prepare it for you in the right way. That's my theory. I think the reason people don't like vegetables is they were prepared poorly. I remember, you know, I was in the right way. That's my theory. I think the reason people don't like vegetables is they were prepared poorly. I remember I was in the movie Fed Up and I went down and this family would basically never eat vegetables and they thought they tasted bad because mostly they came out of a can and were awful. Or overcooked

or mushy. I hope you whipped them up some. I did, but this woman said she had a friend of hers make her asparagus on the grill and she thought, Oh my God, this is really good. And that's by the way, where I think if you see an ingredient that can activate your brown fat and help your metabolism and you don't know how to cook it in this day and age, go onto Google or if you're, if you're shopping for it, go onto Google, type the ingredient, type Mediterranean or Asian,

and type recipe, and then search video, and somebody will come up to show you with passion how to do it. That's a great, simple way to learn how to cook these ingredients. But it's not just ingredients. So basically, fruits and vegetables, nuts and legumes, all the usual cast of characters. And I try to identify specific ones. The middle aisle, dried fruits and dried mushrooms, dried chili peppers, dried beans, all great candidates as well. Capers, I really love. Seafood, I take people into the seafood section.

Why are capers so good? Oh, okay. Do you know that in onions, okay, which are not related to capers, you go to the produce section, you see onions, they've got quercetin. Quercetin is a natural bioactive that activates your brown fat. It actually redirects your white fat that causes beijing to your white fat, harmful fat, starts to look a little bit more brown, starts to do the right thing, and also redirects the stem cells. So you make less white fat, more brown fat. But quercetin in an onion is found 66 times higher, okay, in a caper. Oh, wow. Because I love capers.

I love capers too. And by the way, for those who are listening, you've been checking in on my podcast, you heard me talk about quercetin for longevity. And it's one of the compounds that's super important that actually can help reverse biological age. So I think it's very, very key. And where do you get quercetin?

You get them in dry, rocky Mediterranean islands. And capers are actually flower buds that are picked before they turn into open up as flowers. And they're packed in salt or they're packed in brine or a little vinegar. And, you know, you got to rinse off all that extra salt. But whatever you are eating that's savory, if you add some capers to it, anything. Oh, it's so good. It'll make it taste so much better. Yeah. I, and you know, like if you haven't been exposed to capers, you got to try it.

Capers from the Island of Santorini or capers from the Sicilian Island of Pantalea. Those are some of the most famous culinary capers that are out there. I like to cook. I mean, I know you do as well, but you know, I think that the other thing is really talk to somebody who really enjoys cooking about these ingredients and you'll, you'll get excited about them as well. But, you know, I think that the other thing is really talk to somebody who really enjoys cooking about these ingredients and you'll, you'll get excited about them as well. But the point is that you can go to the seafood section, something I wanted to tell you that I discovered. So, you know, when I was writing the book, some of the people advised me to say, you know, that Dr. Lee, that a lot of people don't like to eat seafood. So be careful writing, you know, including fish in your book. And that made me want to really write about a whole chapter on seafood.

I call it the daily catch. And the reason is this. If you've ever lived near the shore, if you've ever been to Asia or the Mediterranean, there is so much tasty seafood there. And, you know, here, I think in most, you know, like in America, most places go, ah, salmon, you know, the salmon or the chicken, I'll take the chicken, you know, at the wedding or whatever. It turns out that yes, oily fish are healthy because you get marine omega-3 fatty acids. But there was a study from Iceland that was quite surprising. They wanted to look at what the effect of omega-3 fatty acids were on body fat and guess what turns on brown fat shrink helps you lose weight burns away visceral fat so your waist size can shrink and of course they found it that eating salmon three times a

week for eight weeks will actually cause you to lose up to 15 pounds all right so that's a lot of weight yeah wait okay wait wait so you just said eating salmon a few times a week and help you lose 15 pounds. Yeah. So basically now this is the study where they actually did a little bit of caloric restriction, um, to get it started, then added salmon to see if, if eating salmon would actually trigger faster weight loss. So that's a pretty good amount of weight loss. Now, omega-3s are in salmon, right? It's an oily fish. In fact, I can tell you there's 1,500, 1,565 milligrams of marine omega-3 fatty acids in a five-ounce serving of salmon, okay? But here's what's crazy, and I think this is what opened my eye. The same researchers studied what they thought was going to be a non-oily fish like cod. Cod's not considered an oily fish.

Cod only has 284 milligrams, not 1,500 of omega-3 fatty acids. Pretty low. Guess what they found? People that ate cod three times a week lost 10 pounds over eight weeks. Wow. Three times a week. Was it because of what they were not eating or was it because of the fish, you think? Both.

Because basically when they lowered their caloric, their calorie intake, that kickstarted it. But when you compare cod with salmon, you lost 10 pounds with cod over eight weeks. You lost 15 pounds, 30% more if you had salmon. But guess what? Cod has so much less of the omega-3s. All right. So we're just comparing two kinds of seafood here. So you don't need as much omega-3 as we thought. You don't have to eat mackerel and anchovies in order to get adequate omega-3s. When it comes to your metabolism to fight fat, something as low as cod with that amount of omega-3s will do it. So in my chapter, I convert in different seafoods that cod amount of omega-3s. You want 294 milligrams of omega-3s

in a serving. Guess what that translates to? To medium-sized Gulf shrimp. You only need to eat four Gulf shrimp to get as much you get in a serving of cod. How many oysters? You need to eat eight oysters. You want mackerel, which is really oily. You only need one forkful of mackerel to get that amount as a cod. You don't even need that much mackerel.

Open a patina, just take one forkful and you're done. That's amazing. Halibut, another white fish. You can even plug your nose. Halibut, which is a very mild white fish, right? Not oily. You only need to eat a piece of halibut half the size of a deck of cards in order to get the same amount of omega-3s as you get in cod. What I do, I go through all kinds of spiny lobster, mitten crab, razor clams, like stuff that I love to eat. Yeah.

Oh, I love razor clams. I'm telling you. So you got to check out this chapter eight. It's called The Daily Catch. And I have a complete list with all the converted doses of how many you need to eat. You know, Joe's stone crab kind of thing. Like a stone crab, how many claws would you need to eat. You know, Joe Stonecrab kind of thing, like a stone crab, how many claws would you need to have? It's all there. So look,

eating for your metabolism and to fight body fat doesn't have to be a chore. Don't fear your food, love your food. Look at all the stuff that comes from the Mediterranean and from Asia. Look at the recipes, you know, you got to be careful, you know, what you eat. But then like the last part of it, by the way, of how I do this, just to share how a practical way, besides what to eat and be careful not to overload your fuel tanks by overeating, you know, there is really quite a profound aspect of metabolism, body fat and fat burning when it comes to intermittent fasting. So everyone thinks that intermittent fasting is like modern trend, but it turns out that we're

always intermittent fasting. When we're sleeping, we're not eating, we're fasting. When we get up in the morning, eat breakfast, we're breaking our fast, which is what's called breakfast. Now, remember I told you, right. Remember I told you when you actually eat food, your insulin rises and draw that energy to load into your cells. Our metabolism is hardwired so that when you're eating and your insulin is going up, our metabolism stays focused on loading up on fuel and not burning it. Okay. When we're not eating, our insulin goes down. Our metabolism switches gears like switching train tracks. And basically it says, all right, let's try to burn some of that fat stored in cells.

And maybe you're burning the fat from dinner. Maybe you're burning the fat from yesterday. Maybe you're burning the fat from the holidays. But that's actually when you're sleeping, you're actually able to burn. That's the way our metabolism is hardwired. So here's what I do. I try to give my body as much time to naturally burn fat as possible. If I'm sleeping eight hours a day from 11 o'clock to seven o'clock, for example, all right, here's what I do. When I eat dinner the night before, if I eat dinner at seven o'clock and I put the dishes away at eight, I don't eat anything after dinner. I just, I've stopped. I closed my eating window at eight o'clock. No midnight snacking, no noshing.

I don't raid the fridge, no extra slice of pie before I go to bed. Now, guess what? I put the dishes away at 8 o'clock, I go to bed at 11. I've gained three extra hours of fat burning, metabolism, grooming. When I get up in the morning, I don't do what our moms told us to do, which is hurry up and eat breakfast and catch the school bus to go to school. I get up, I take a shower, I get dressed, I take my time, I go for a walk or I'll check my email or do something else. I'll wait an extra hour before I eat breakfast. Okay. Now I've gained an extra hour. So the eight hours of sleep plus the three hours of night before 11 hours plus

one extra hour in the morning, I have just spent half my day burning down extra fuel. Super easy. You want to go intense? You want to go 16 hours and squeeze down eight? Go for it. But 12 hours works as well. I'm just trying to tell people easy, practical, delicious ways to do it. And then if you want to go hardcore, go for it.

Well, you know, William, your book is just so chock full of all sorts of practical tips, as well as all the science behind it and the why, which I think how people change their biology. And you talk about how phytochemicals influences, how the microbiome influences, how your fat affects your brain health and cancer risk and so much more, how to shop and what to drink i mean your book is just really quite quite beautiful and deep and richly researched so i encourage everybody to get a copy it's called eat to beat your diet burn fat heal your metabolism and live longer uh william you're a good friend you're a brilliant man uh you're awesome and you love food

like i do And we're actually going to be on a panel at a conference in a couple of days to talk about food as medicine to the whole healthcare system, which I think it's news to, but it's not news to us or news to all of you listening. And thank you so much for listening to Doctors Pharmacy. Thank you, William, for being on the podcast. And if you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family on social media. We'd love to have them learn about all the things that you now know about. Leave a comment. How have you hacked your metabolism?

And what have you learned about how it works and what you've done to actually improve your metabolism? And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know

and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up.

That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.