The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Food Is Better Than Medication To Treat Disease with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

I never get tired of saying it: real food heals. Food has the power to prevent and reverse disease, and the more we know about it, the more power we have to curate a targeted diet to help us reach our health goals. The catch is that we have to choose the right foods, the ones that elevate us, and simultaneously ditch the poor-quality ones that harm us. There are powerful compounds in foods—like curcumin, genistein, catechins, lycopene, resveratrol, quercetin—that have medicinal impacts on the body. That’s why I call the grocery store the drug store; we can literally eat our medicine at every meal. My guest this week on The Doctor’s Farmacy, Dr. William Li, is here to tell us all about eating to beat disease and making the idea that food is medicine second nature. You may also be surprised to find out that angiogenesis, or how the body forms blood vessels, is a common denominator in creating optimal health. William Li, MD, is a world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author of Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. He is best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation.

Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. This is Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. And I believe that today's conversation is going to matter to all of you because it's about how to beat disease through food. And today's guest is an extraordinary scientist, physician, speaker, author. He's a guy I met a number of years ago and I've been very impressed with and recently had the privilege of listening to him at a Milken Institute conference roundtable on food, which brought together all the leaders in thinking about food and health and disease, including food companies. And he gave a dissertation that was off the cuff that literally blew my mind. And in that, he elucidated the power of food

in terms of treating disease. And he showed a slide that I pretty much have been blazoned in my mind, which showed the effect of drugs on various biological systems through very fancy chemical analyses, and then the effect of foods on the same systems. And almost every time the food was more powerful than drugs. And really that's why I

wanted you here, Dr. Lee, because he's not only written this book, which I want you all to get called Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. And this is really the science of health as opposed to treating disease, which we all learned as doctors. He's best known, though, for his work leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. Now, those of you who don't know what that is, this means how you grow new blood vessels. And particularly, we focus on it around cancer because cancer needs new blood vessels to grow and they love to create new blood vessels to feed themselves. And we don't want that to happen.

So he's really done groundbreaking work on this, but not only around cancer, but 70 other diseases are affected by angiogenesis, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, obesity. He did an incredible TED Talk called Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, which had 11 million views, which is impressive. He's been on The Oz Show, Martha Stewart, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Voice of America. He's been at the Vatican talking at the Unite to Cure Conference. He's authored over 100 scientific publications in leading journals like the New England Journal

of Medicine, Science, Lancet. These are the top tier journals. He's been on the faculty of Harvard, Tufts, Dartmouth Medical School. And we are so lucky and privileged to have him here today on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome, Dr. Lee. Well, thank you, Mark. It's a honor and a pleasure to be here. I know that we share common passions and really trying to understand health. And that's what I'm all about and love to have this conversation. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. You know, we've got a guy like you who is steeped in deep academia, who's been published in major medical journals, who's been at Harvard, Tufts, and Dartmouth, is leading the field in the world of angiogenesis, which is an extraordinary field

of cancer treatment reversal. And yet somehow you took a kind of sideways turn and realized that, wait a minute, we are in medicine focused on treating disease. But what happens after you do that? Or maybe there's a better way to actually reverse disease, which none of us in medical school were taught was possible, and actually create health. How did you make that sort of shift in your head? Or maybe it was your heart.

I don't know. Well, it's always a little bit of both. Look, I trained as an internal medicine doc. And so my DNA, so to speak, in thinking about patients is really young and old, healthy and sick, men and women, children to adults. And so that gives me kind of a more comprehensive view. But the other thing about my background is that I'm a scientist. I'm a vascular biologist. And so that gives me kind of a more comprehensive view. But the other thing about my background is that I'm a scientist, I'm a vascular biologist. And so I go a mile deep into, you know, really kind of significant science. And I wanted to bring those worlds together. 1994, so 25 years ago, I thought that a contribution I could make was to create a nonprofit organization called

the Angiogenesis Foundation, whose mission would be to do something unusual, which is to look at common denominators of disease. So rather than take one disease and then just study it a mile deep, what I thought was, what are the things that unite diseases that are common? And could we find some interesting connections that would allow us to not just treat one disease, but maybe pull the bow back and send a single arrow through multiple diseases? Yeah. That turned out to be angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels. And that led me onto this journey where when I saw patients, I started to think through, well, how do blood vessels normally keep people healthy? And then what happens when they go awry?

And that unites 70 different diseases. As I practiced, I started to realize that, you know, we were mostly chasing sickness. And in fact, the work of my organization, we help to help lots of different groups come up with 32 FDA approved drugs and treatments, all of which are important, but all add to the unsustainability of our model of healthcare, which is waiting until the end and then trying to kind of intercept with more expensive treatments for people that are sicker. And I thought, what if we use this common denominator approach to look at health? What unites health? And that's what led me to write the Eat to Beat Disease. And I realized that there was this remarkable new universe

for health that we can actually explore. It's quite a radical statement you just made. Instead of chasing disease, you're trying to think about the common denominators of health. And it's not something we learn about in medical school. How many of us took that class creating health 101? I mean, it didn't exist in class, right? And so your framework is a radically different one. It is so unusual in medicine. How did you actually sort of have that insight?

Because that's a pretty big shift from like, wait a minute, I don't want to focus on treating all these 70 diseases. I want to find out the common things that are underlying them that connect the dots and pull everything together to allow us to actually create health. And as a side effect, the diseases either get better, improve, or maybe go away entirely. Well, look, most of us actually don't think too much about our health

when we're going around, you know, getting as we're younger, growing up, going leading careers, etc, starting families. But in fact, you think about health when you lose it, right? So that's basically what we see as doctors, when we see our patients, they're concerned when they've lost their health. And it seems to me that if we can help more people stay healthy, but really use science, not guesswork, not conjecture, not soapboxing. And I think this is where science comes in. You and I have talked about this before. There is good, hard science that can help us understand the body.

And yes, we were not taught this in medical school, but we should be. Because the science of health is really the future of medicine. It's really powerful. And that's what functional medicine is. And coming from your perspective, you know, we've come at it from the clinical perspective, which is, you know, we're seeing these common things. We try to create health by changing the diet, by optimizing the microbiome, by improving the immune system, by improving your energy and your mitochondria, helping you detoxify,

balancing your hormones, you know, dealing with your lifestyle factors. These are the ways in which we create health. And it's pretty rudimentary, I would say. I mean, functional medicine is awesome clinically, but we're just at the infancy stages of really understanding this. And you come at it from the deep science point of view. And you come to the same conclusions, which is pretty awesome. So let's talk about some powerful new drugs that have been discovered that can affect angiogenesis and that actually may be able to reverse many diseases. Now these drugs are things maybe people have heard about like catechins, genestin, resveratrol, lycopene, icosapentaenoic acid, glucosinolates, isothionates, quercetin,

proanthocyanins, flavanols, ellagitanins, curcumin, metaquinone, beta-crytoxanthin, brassinin, silamerin, organosulfural disulfide. These are amazing drugs. And for those of you who don't understand what I just said, what I was talking about was green tea and soy and red wine and grapes and tomatoes and fish oil and broccoli and oranges and berries and pomegranate and curcumin and green leafy vegetables and papaya and Chinese cabbage and artichokes and garlic, right? These are the new drugs. And you write about this.

And there was a beautiful article you wrote. It was in Journal of Oncology called Tumor Angiogenesis as a Target for Dietary Cancer Prevention. Now, most people are going to have trouble reading it. I certainly was dense for me. But what you did was you mapped out the deep science around the power of all these different compounds and foods to help reverse disease.

So as a scientist, you know, what's nice about science is that it is truth. And we follow truth wherever it goes. And basically, the route that I took is there's a lot of research that leads to the discovery of new drugs by the pharmaceutical biotech industry. I've been there, done that, still involved with it, actually. And it's because we have more sick people that need better treatment. So that's valuable by itself. It's not either or.

It's not either or. And, you know, I'm certainly not one of those doctors that have sort of rejected Western biomedicine. Like, it's very important when you're sick to help save lives. On the other hand, what I realized is that there's a missing opportunity. And that opportunity is what everybody sort of intuitively knows, which is that the things that we put into our body can affect our body, and they affect ourselves. And food as medicine is really not a new concept. It's

an old concept. And if you go other cultures, whether you're in Europe or in Asia, indigenous peoples from all around the world, they looked at food as part of their health keeping scorecard. And they viewed food as a precious substance. They didn't just eat to survive. They ate because they were doing something good for themselves. We've lost a little bit of that. And the research behind it actually resurfaces this in a new way that I think that we can all get behind, which is not, in fact, it's not really just about the food. It's about how our body responds to the food. How does our body protect its health?

And that's what the health defense systems are all about. It's true. I remember traveling once in Hong Kong, and I went out to dinner with this guy, I think it was part of Merrill Lynch, I gave a talk. And we had this extraordinary meal and everything in the meal was medicine, intentionally medicine. And I wrote an article about it called Eating Your Medicine, Food is Pharmacology. And then I went through all the dishes we had and I went through the research and I was like, well, ginkgo nuts do this, and this thing does that. And it was just an amazing kind of experience because I realized that in this culture, we don't think of food that way. And yet that's foundational for creating health.

Well, that's why I wrote Eat to Beat Disease, is that while I do explain the science behind things, I actually lay out more than 200 different foods that are actually, some of them are real crowd pleasers or the things that we actually know that are supported by science and then figure out how can you incorporate that? Because in fact, it becomes natural to pick the things that are good for you. It's something we've lost that we can put back into our everyday lives. And for me, when I go out to eat or when I prepare a meal, that's what I'm doing. I'm actually assembling things that I know are good for me. Absolutely. That's why this show is called The Doctor's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, because that's where you get your drugs. I go to the drugstore, which is the grocery store,

and that's where I find all the drugs. And I literally don't know as much as you perhaps about this, even though I've been doing it for a long time, but I i find all the drugs and i literally don't know as much as you perhaps about this because even though i've been doing for a long time but i look at all the vegetables and all the foods now i didn't know razor clams we're going to get into that are so beneficial i don't exactly know why but i love them but you can find out what are the foods that have various components that can activate health right and how do you eat more of those things? Well, I think it makes it's about having knowledge and then making it second nature. Right. So when we heat up something on the stove, we know it's going to be hot. We don't burn ourselves.

So we actually avoid certain behaviors. When we go out into the sun, we know to put on sunscreen, it becomes second nature. I think food as medicine is something that can become second nature. You have to be exposed to the basic information and you know the science is important because that's what makes it real but at the end of the day is you know this is something that school teachers should be teaching kids that coaches should be teaching athletes that doctors should be telling patients and so and i think family members should be sharing among themselves this This is the type of conversation that should be happening at every holiday meal in every

schoolyard. And I think that it's not so foreign. It's informed by science. And we can all do it. It's true. The other thing I heard you say was at this conference was you showed a slide around immunotherapy. For those of you who don't know what immunotherapy is, it's essentially a way to get cancer by activating your immune system. Rather than giving a poison or cutting it out or burning it out, you literally give something that's going to help your immune system get into gear and be like Pac-Man and eat up the cancer.

And you showed a slide, and who would have thought of this, but you showed a slide that people who respond to this immunotherapy, and these literally can erase cancers, actually have a certain type of bacteria in their microbiome, in their gut, that makes them respond to this immunotherapy. Whereas those who don't actually die. And this bacteria is called Ackermanscy. It's one of the, you know, thousands and thousands of species of bugs in your gut. And you shared a story, if I may, about your mom who had basically metastatic endometrial cancer, which was treated with immunotherapy and was successful, but you added certain things to the treatment to make sure that her acromantia were good, like pomegranate and cranberry and these polyphenols, which come from food that seem to be powerful growers of these great bugs in your gut. So how do we sort of begin to integrate these ideas into how we treat these diseases?

Are we giving everybody like a smoothie with all these things in it and helping them with their immunotherapy yeah well let's take a step back to say first of all uh our bodies are working hard every single day from the time we're born to our last breath to defend our health and these defense systems and i've identified five of them in uh my book uh is androgenesis stem cells our microbiome our ability ability for our DNA to protect our body, protect itself and our bodies and our health, and our immunity. And all these defense systems work together in concert. They're like our security force in our body. They're patrolling, they're watching out, they're making sure everybody's safe inside, and everything is

functioning smoothly. And when you have a disease like cancer for example and it's not just cancer it's heart disease it's diabetes it's alzheimer's it's obesity um but for specifically for cancer it's really you know um a few bad guys snuck in and they figured out how to get around the security force you know it's sort of like you know tsa slip let somebody slip by and now we have to try to chase it. So in the old days for cancer, what we used to do is just say, well, let's, you know, take a drug like chemotherapy and wipe it out. And, you know, that, that's a blunt instrument approach by trying to take something poison to kill

something that you want to kill. By the way, the rest of you gets poisoned too. Well, that's right. And so basically it's, it's toxic approach to uh uh to something that we don't really it's one bad actor but we don't want to poison the entire uh body we've now changed our minds about this and this is really what's making the impossible possible we've realized that it's not about drugs killing cancer it's about our bodies taking care of itself and wiping out those cancers so immunotherapy which is what you were just bringing up, is an entirely new approach of

enhancing our own body's defenses. We don't use drugs to kill the cancer. We allow our bodies, we give medicines that allow our bodies to kill the cancer so our immune systems can find the cancer and reverse the disease back to health. that's what we've always been dreaming of and it's here but here's a problem only about 20 of people actually have this incredible response to immunotherapy sometimes a few a little fewer sometimes a little bit more but the response when it happens is exactly what we want dramatic right your mom just my mom had cancer and in 30 days she had no cancer okay and never had chemotherapy what about what makes the difference between somebody who responds like that and who doesn't

respond like that right that's a that's one of the mysteries out there and this is exactly where we need to consider more than the typical lab tests that doctors run, we need to think more holistically. And one of the things we know is that our microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria communicates, talks to our immune system. And we need our gut bacteria to help coach our immune system to do the right thing, including getting cancer. So a study done by a colleague of mine, Dr. Laurence Zitvogel, she's in Paris. She's an immunologist who works with cancer patients. She looked at 249 cancer patients who were receiving immune therapies and separated them into people who responded versus people who did not respond. This, by the way, was published in the journal Science, which is one of the most prestigious journals.

And what she found was that the difference between people who responded and didn't respond was one bacteria unbelievable acromancia right so well isn't that easy that you can just maybe take some probiotics with acromancia except that you can't no there's no acromancia probiotic but you can feed them but you can feed it and you can actually change your gut to make your body grow acromantia and the way to do this is the food as medicine solution so turns out that pomegranates and cranberries actually have elagitanins but pomegranates especially and that natural chemical in pomegranate juice and what's been shown is that just one eight ounce cup of real pomegranate juice. And what's been shown is that just one eight ounce cup of real pomegranate juice, not the flavored stuff, but the real stuff actually over the course of a week or two,

will actually help change the inside of our guts so that that bacteria likes to grow. That bacteria grows in the lining of the gut, talks to the immune system, and that makes the cancer immunotherapy work better. Yeah. And and there's other things too, like you said, cranberries and green tea. Many things can actually feed our microbiome, right? So plant-based foods, I think it's completely accepted now. It's not challenged that plant-based nutrition is actually the healthy approach to life.

I mean, it's kind of- Eating more plants. Eating more plants, right? But it's not just, we're not just feeding ourselves, we're feeding our bacteria, right? So we're feeding the, you know, 37 trillion bacteria in our bodies. And after we extract all the stuff that we need

on the human side, we're leaving, you know, the leftovers for the bacteria. And this is the fibers, this is the bioactives. And what's amazing is our bacteria can take some of this fiber and they digest it so it's kind of like giving a sculptor a block of wood and say do something with it so the bacteria our gut microbiome takes that block of wood and starts making sculptures there's like these things called short chain fatty acids or scaphas that our microbiome make and it turns out that these short chain fatty acids, these little tiny particles that they make from our food

that we feed them. They're like the fats that fuel the gut lining. They do that. They're anti-inflammatory. They boost our immune system. They help regulate our blood sugar. They lower our cholesterol. Help with cancer risk.

And they also suppress cancer risk and they prevent blood vessels from growing into cancer as well. All tied together. And this is you know at the end of the day why we need to take our food seriously yeah essentially you you write a little bit about it for example how the microbiome plays roles in autism and cognitive function and i remember recently seeing a study where there are undigestible things in breast

milk that humans can't digest call like oligosaccharides, and they feed the good bacteria in the baby to develop it. Formula doesn't have those things. And the kids that are breastfed have high levels of something called butyrate, which is one of these short chain fatty acids, which actually turns off colon cancer genes and is an incredible important anti-inflammatory and regulates the gut health. Whereas the other formula fed kids had something called propionic acid, another one of these short chain fats, but actually that in animal models can induce autism.

And so what, like, it's like, whoa. Well, you know, it's at the end of the day, we're just at the surface of uncovering the mysteries of health. And I think that's the kind of humility and awe and wonderment we all need to have, which is, you know, we know quite a bit about different diseases, but we're just at this new frontier of understanding our health. I mean, you've been working in this field for a while, and you're deeply steeped into it. And what I'm seeing from my end of the table is that we can begin to peel back the layers of the onion. So it's all about balance. More is not more. You need just the right amount. So in your book, Eat to Beat Disease, you break it down into these very digestible bits. And

you briefly touched on it, but I want to go deep in each of these five areas. Because what you're talking about is something that is our health creation, health defense system that we can activate, but nobody talks about. And you mentioned them. It's our angiogenesis system. It's regeneration, which is stem cells. And you're really involved in the stem cell world, the microbiome, the DNA protection, how we repair and keep our DNA healthy in our immune system. So let's talk about each of those and how we can activate those things. What are

the things that harm them? For example, you talk about alcohol affecting stem cells. And I'm thinking, wow, I had a tequila last night. Did I screw up my stem cells? Or then you say, well, red wine maybe helps other areas. So it's a little confusing. How do you break down each of these? And let's just go through them. Let's start with angiogenesis.

And what are those things that are impairing the proper function of this defense system? And what are those things we can use to actually activate health within it? Great, so angiogenesis is a term that actually talks about how the body grows blood vessels. Blood vessels bring oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body. That's what keeps us healthy.

They start- What, they're 60,000 miles? 60,000 miles. So if you were to pull out all the blood vessels in your body, line them up, and then you can actually form a line that would go around the earth twice. Unbelievable. So that's one of this enormous organ system right so you know it's going to be important and we know when you block blood vessels like in the heart you wind up having

big problems with cardiovascular disease clogged blood vessels lead to heart attacks and strokes and if you don't have enough blood vessels you can't heal your wounds and if you actually have too many blood vessels you can bleed in your eye like in diabetes or macular degeneration um and you can grow cancer right so this is a system that is required to keep every cell and organ healthy help keep it's a health defense system and if it's out of balance you wind up either too many or too little blood vessels you wind up having in trouble so what are the things that can damage angiogenesis? Well, it turns out high-fat diets damage angiogenesis. Any fat or just?

You know what? Actually, mostly saturated fats. But I think that it's really high-fat, overall high-fat diets can be damaging in hypercholesterolemia, for example. If you have a lot of cholesterol floating around your blood, like the damaging bad cholesterol, the LDL, it actually impairs the function of these blood vessels. If you have cigarette smoke, tobacco, you know, whether people shouldn't smoke, but even secondary smoke can actually damage your blood vessel response. And, you know, then you think about heart disease and you think about cancer, things that are your blood vessels out of whack, out of balance. The fat thing is interesting because a lot of the studies around fat are people eating high amounts of refined oils.

And it's hard to separate out. Are the people eating high fat having avocados and almonds and olive oil? Or they're having trans fats and toxic fats and inflammatory so the so the the science actually says is is not actually talking about what you actually eat it's about what the net net the effect is in the body so if you wind up actually going from uh you know the researchers have studied for example in the lab animals that actually are naturally hypercholesterolemic these are you know these are mice whose blood is milky because it's actually so filled with fat. That's a genetic thing.

For sure. Right? And those are the subjects that actually wind up having problems with angiogenesis. So I think that we're still trying to figure out what kind of dietary fats are good. We know that, for example, that the omega-3 fatty acids are actually good.

The polyunsaturated fats are good for you. But I'm talking about after the body actually processes it, what actually results in your body. So what are the things that actually can help restore healthy androgenesis? Well, think about androgenesis balance like a lawn that's growing, right? Or a garden that's growing. You want to prune the garden, you know, make sure things don't overgrow. Pick out the weeds.

And if you're mowing a lawn, you're kind of just getting everybody, all the lawn to be kind of in the same level of height. So you don't wind up having this scraggly lawn. That's what the body does to keep angiogenesis in balance. Not too much, not too little. And so the food we eat is actually like a lawnmower. It kind of prunes off the lawn to keep a perfectly manicured blood vessel lawn in your body. Not too much, not too little. So the things that we do know that angiogenesis balancing foods are like green tea, which is really good.

Soy, actually genistein is a bioactive found in soy, which is really good. Soy, actually, genistein is a bioactive found in soy is really good. Tomatoes are really good for helping to keep androgenesis and balance. Many fruits and vegetables also can do that. So the brassinins are really good. So many of the things we already know are good for us, we know actually also help our blood vessels. And now we know how. And now we know how. Yeah. Now, what about stem cells and regeneration?

This is a big topic that I think people are hearing about in the news. They're confused about it. There's controversy about it. There's laws about it that prevent adequate research. I mean, it's really quite a messy area. And yet, it's also one of the most exciting areas of medicine that you've been involved in. And it's, I don't think, something that most people are aware of, that you can activate your own stem cells, that there's things you do in your life that you can screw up your

stem cells. And what are stem cells anyway? What do they do? And how do we understand how to stop hurting them and start helping them? Yeah, well, stem cells are really simple. We're made of stem cells so when our moms and dads got together and created you know uh us in the womb we started out as stem cells they actually made every single organ and sperm and egg and sperm got together and they basically decided they would become a stem cell factory and then pretty much we formed out of our own stem cells and after we were born a few of those stem cells um stuck around um about 700 000 of them they stick around and they're mostly in our bone marrow and they're

in lining of our intestines they hide out in our body and they help us regenerate so when you and i are growing up right in grade school we learned from our teachers that starfish can regenerate salamanders can regenerate but but people can't regenerate. Yeah. Right? Can't grow a new arm. Yeah. Well, it's true.

You can't grow a new arm, but we do regenerate. We regenerate every day. We know that we regenerate because our hair falls out and grows back. Our gut lining grows back. Our livers can grow back. If you actually remove part of your liver, it'll grow back. Yeah. Our skin grows back, you know.

So our bodies possess the ability to regenerate through stem cells. Now, what can injure stem cells? You know, high doses of alcohol can damage and blunt your stem cells. So I'm okay with the one tequila I had last night? You know, having a tequila every now and then is not bad. Having a glass of wine. But, you know, the thing is on balance, what you want to do is,

people, you know, people who drink a lot have damaged stem cells. Diabetes is another state, a metabolic state that, you know, it really impairs, it cripples our stem cells. High blood sugar

cripples our stem cells. So the excess of anything can be harmful, including to our stem cells. So what are the things that we can do to help boost our stem cells? This is where it's really become interesting. Before I talk about that, though, let me just tell you. Does stress affect your stem cells?

Stress can definitely affect our stem cells. High stress will blunt the activity of our stem cells. You know, it's just like stunning them. So they're like, wait a minute, what do I do now? You know, maybe I'm not going to be so enthusiastic in rebuilding our organs we got to rebuild our blood vessels we got to rebuild our hearts you know our hearts turn around like we actually have um stem cells in our hearts and our brains and regrow our nerves every single day something in our body is regenerating actually a lot of things are regenerating so what people are hearing in the news are really efforts by the biotech industry to develop stem

cell therapies um that you inject into the body so you know taking stem cells like drugs and injecting them and someday that's going to wind up becoming game changing in medicine someday we're not there yet i've been involved with some of those efforts and what i've seen is very exciting but more exciting to me is the ability for every single person listening to this podcast to be able to actually enhance their own stem cells and here's the research you can actually take uh it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot cheaper and more enjoyable getting a stem cell injection like 20 grand or something right well you know uh i would say uh why go out and have

to subject yourself to that when you can do it at the dinner table yeah right so the mediterranean diet has it's been studied by spain looked at um uh elderly people on the mediterranean diet and those who uh were on a mediterranean diet compared to not on a better training that had five times the number of stem cells in their circulation, in their bloodstream. So again, it's not one magic food, it's the pattern of food that you're actually eating. Now, you can actually do the research

on specific things as well. So for example, tea. Green tea will increase your stem cells, but guess what? So can black tea, right? So here's what the surprise is. That's why the Japanese live forever. Well, you know. All the green tea.

You know, people in Asia drink a lot of tea. People in Britain drink a lot of tea as well. We used to say green tea is good, black tea is fermented, so it's not going to be that good for you. We're changing our minds. We have to keep our minds open. Black tea can also double the number of stem cells. And then here's another kind of surprise and delight is that there was a study by UCSF in San Francisco where researchers took people with known cardiovascular disease.

So they had kind of crappy blood flow and they gave them hot chocolate. Yeah, I was going to say the chocolate stem cell story. I want to hear about that. It's amazing, right? So the darker the chocolate, the higher the flavanols. These are the bioactives that are naturally present in cacao. And there was a study done- These are the food as medicine components.

This is the food as medicine component. There are literally these chemicals in food called phytochemicals or phytonutrients that actually have these medicinal properties that you're talking about. They are made by mother nature. They're packed in the food, growing in the plant. And every plant-based food will actually have some type of bioactive so in cacao which is a bean which then you process to you actually get you know kind of the cocoa powder if you take the really dark chocolate like 73 cacao that really

dark chocolate and you make it into a high flavanol hot chocolate drink and you have it twice a day this was the clinical study they found in people who wound up actually having um uh drinking the hot chocolate twice a day over the course of a month they doubled the number of stem cells compared to the people who didn't drink hot chocolate right and so okay so the question is is that important well when they measured their blood flow what they did is they put a blood pressure cuff on them, which kind of lowers the circulation of the blood. They didn't let it go. They found that the blood flow was much vastly improved.

Wow. So here's a functional result that actually means it makes a difference. So who's going to complain about chocolate? Who's going to complain about tea? Who's going to complain about a Mediterranean diet? I mean, you go out to eat. These are the things we love. Yeah.

Well, it's interesting you talk about how drugs sort of block, interfere, inhibit some medical process, some biological process. And there's toxicity to them. There's side effects to them. You can take too much, which will harm you. Whereas foods don't work like that but you also talk about the dose and the quantity of food so food is medicine what's the dose is it one cranberry is it a thousand cranberries you know right well so my book eat to beat disease i uh specifically have a chapter on food doses it's important to

me nobody talks about well i know that because i that because when I read about walnuts or blueberries or strawberries or kale, I'm always asking, well, how much should I actually eat? And that always struck me as something that needed an answer, right? So here's how we've approached it. You can actually get food doses. That's the dose of a food that has been found to correlate with something beneficial in terms of our health. The best way to get at that is to look at these big public health studies, these epidemiological studies. There's a couple of them that are ongoing at all times, right? So in Europe, there's something called the EPIC study, NHANES is in the United States. Bottom line is that these are studying tens of thousands,

hundreds of thousands of patients. In Europe, they're studying 500,000 patients over 20 years, and they're tracking everything they eat, and they're asking them, how much are you eating? And then on the tail end, looking at what happens to their health, what's their cancer rate, what's their heart disease rate, what's their diabetes rate? And when you actually combine those two, the result that we want that we want lower cancer less heart disease and you go back into the

research and you figure out what foods they ate you can actually calculate how much they ate of it yeah right so and then you can do smaller clinical studies to also get this by the way this is the same kind of mindset that we use to look at drug dosing as well it's you know just having random amounts of stuff not going to work you got to correlate what works with what actually the amount is so smaller studies there was a study called the health professionals follow-up study done at harvard which looked at 70 000 men and they found that men who had two to three cups of cooked tomato sauce per week that's a half a

cup of cooked tomatoes not that much you have pasta right um lowered their risk of prostate cancer by 39 yeah right so that's a dose that's an outcome and that's a particular food and you can do that systematically you got to hunt and peck for it but it's there and it doesn't give you the exact answer. It's not like a medicine, like actually, frankly, even penicillin. You don't always get the right result, but you have a good approximation. So that's the beginning of food doses. I mean, your book is pretty remarkable because there's a lot of books about diet and eating healthy and reversing disease, but you go so deep into the specifics and the detail and surprising things that I didn't even know about,

like fish roe or razor clams or, you know, different kinds of Chinese vegetables or weird foods that actually have these properties that, you know, maybe haven't been studied in large randomized controlled trials, but have clinical studies, have epidemiologic studies, and we can start to include these. And there's very little downside, right? Right. Unless you don't like clamps. Well, look, what seems foreign to one person might be very familiar to another. And my approach is really a global approach.

You know, my work spans around the world. We're in Asia, Europe, Asia. I mean, America and the Americas. And here's what we realize is that there are healthy practices and healthy foods and no matter where you go, right? So what interests me is what are the common denominators? So for example, you mentioned razor clams. Well, that's actually a category of seafood. We know from most epidemiological studies, including studies in Europe and Asia, that people who eat more seafood, you know, about three times a week, actually have lower all-cause mortality. And they just survive longer.

So then you sort of say, well, what could be possibly responsible for that? Well, we do know that there's marine omega-3 fatty acids that are found in things like clams and the things that we like to eat so if you uh what is the omega-3s in razor clams or something else well there's probably other things as well so uh i can tell you another example that that i was really surprised and delighted to find is that oysters actually um not only have some omega-3 fatty acids but there are polysaccharides, and there's even proteins in oysters that boost your immune system. Yeah.

So, again. So it's like the mushrooms of the sea, because polysaccharides are what are in mushrooms. Exactly. They're anti-cancer compounds. And now they're in oysters? Wow, I didn't know that. And, you know, by the way.

These are long sugar chains. That's right. And your body digests them. They've actually done studies looking at oyster sauce. So, you know, the kind of sauce, the brown sauce you see in a Chinese restaurant, right? Chinese food. They studied that in research to show that oyster sauce can enhance your immune system. Does that actually come from oysters?

It comes from oysters, yeah. They boil them down and they caramelize them. So, again, this is where food as medicine isn't just about the clinical white coat side of things, really. You incorporate the culinary side, the chefs get into it. I mean, this is really, I think, us as a society coming together

and saying, what do we love? And by the way, in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, it's really not about what to cut out of your life. It's about what to add to your life. And what do we really enjoy? And it's all about our preferences and making the right decisions. So this is incredible. So stem cells are not some weird thing you have to go spend tens of thousands of dollars and suck out your bone marrow and suck out your fat, maybe get it from some placenta somewhere. You can actually

activate your body's own regenerative healing power. And you can do this at any age by taking away some of these injurious things and adding in the things that help activate. And that's so powerful. And it's a very encouraging message. Now, let's talk about the microbiome. Now, this is a whole other world that most doctors really are not schooled in, that certainly wasn't part of my medical education, that is something that I've been focused on for almost 30 years in functional medicine, because we know the gut is where the seed of your health is it's

what ancient traditions like ayurveda chinese medicine they all recognize this we just were like oh well it's just poop you know this is brown stuff that comes out as waste who cares like whatever and now we're seeing it linked to so many different conditions from autism to depression to cancer to heart disease to obesity to Parkinson's. I mean, the list goes on and on, and we probably haven't even finished the list yet. And yet, we know very little about it. So could you tell us a little bit about the microbiome and why it's so important and what we can do to protect it, to feed it, to help it? And also, what are those things that we're doing that screw it up?

Right. it to feed it to help it and and also what are those things that we're doing that screw it up right so you know the microbiome is an entire new discipline that's going to change humanity you know i mean i think that we've always thought of humankind as just humans but in fact we're 50 50 with bacteria is really kind of like 90 10 well they've actually done some new calculations on this right so it's about 40 40 uh trillion cells about the same number of bacteria is the latest calculation on this is sort of the up-to-date uh numbers and it makes a lot of sense right so basically when we evolved as humans we were um hunters and gatherers picking stuff up you know nuts and fruits and seeds and picking stuff off of trees that had bacteria in it there's

more bacteria in a planet than than living than animals and when we ate those the bacteria naturally colonized the body and by the way the gut of course but not just the gut our skin our mouth our nose every orifice has got bacteria in our tears of bacteria breast milk has bacteria even in the womb which we you know when you and i were medical school they said oh the womb is sterile wrong in fact babies get bacteria from the moms in the womb amazing okay so we're beginning to rewrite the playbook of understanding how bacteria get in our body the next thing about bacteria i'll tell you about in terms of the microbiome is in the middle ages bacteria was responsible for the plague and so we sort of developed this um fear fear and repulsion to bacteria fast forward to the 1940s the discovery

of antibiotics that really was a medical revolution and then everybody went willy-nilly with antibiotics which can be life-saving let's be clear about that but the overuse of antibiotics not just in humans not just in children, but also in our animals. Yeah, which is where most of the antibiotics are. We have 24 million pounds of antibiotics that are used every year. 19 million are used in animals for helping them grow and preventing infections. And getting into our drinking water, right? So we've sort of invisibly impaired our environment so that we're exposed to antibiotics. That changes the ecology, the coral reef, that delicate ecosystem between bacteria and human cells in our body.

So that's one thing is antibiotics. The other thing that actually can really injure our microbiome really is our lifestyle, you know, physical activity. We know that if you're not active, your microbiome kind of suffers. We exercise on the outside. The bacteria get the benefit too. They get that workout, right? Stress can change our microbiome. I mean, how many times have, you know, you've, I'm sure you and I have done the same thing.

We stayed up all night. We've had to pull some all-nighters. Next day, you feel like crap. You know, your gut doesn't feel so good good that's because of microbiomes having a riot yeah they pulled the all-nighter too so what we're realizing diet obviously and our diet plays a huge role so putting in pounds of stuff every day in that too yeah well you know something really interesting right so when i look at the ingredients of any food that I actually get, and I try to do fresh food, whole foods. But every now and then, you know, you have to take it something and you look at all the ingredients.

The stuff you don't recognize, you can't pronounce. Those are the things that we should worry about, actually, that could influence our bacteria. Yeah. Right? You pick a mushroom and you eat it. You know that the fiber in that mushroom is going to feed us and the bacteria right um the pulp is going to feed us and the fiber is going to feed the bacteria right what we need to worry about is like what it is that we're putting in that can actually harm our we have 3 000 food additives in the market that are fda approved and we don't

know what most of them do very few have have been tested. And it turns out that the unintended consequences is that many of them adversely affect their microbiome. Well, and you know, we all know people that are super healthy, right? So they never get sick. And then we know people that seem to get sick all the time. The difference is probably in their microbiome. In fact, it was an interesting research study that looked at super healthy, super agers. You know, these are the people that got to their 70s and 80s and 90s almost without any disease at all. And then they looked at young, healthy athletes. And they found when they compared their microbiome, they were remarkably similar.

They were almost identical. So health is clearly governed by our microbiome. So what are the things that we can actually eat that can affect them? Well, we talked about this a little bit earlier it turns out that um pomegranates actually can make a big difference cranberries can make a big difference nuts walnuts pecans cashews things that we actually know almonds almonds yeah okay and so you know I had almonds for breakfast I want to make sure I got well you know we should all we should all probably, I mean, unless you have a nut allergy, I think nuts are one of nature's most healthful snacks. I don't know if you saw this, but about two years ago, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the big cancer meeting, they presented this result to say in patients with colon cancer, stage three colon cancer, undergoing treatment, whatever the treatment might be, that those who

ate two handfuls of nuts a week actually had a 50% lower risk of death from their disease. Now, you have to put that in context because when you see a drug that has a 20% reduction, everybody's jumping up and down. It's a billion dollar blockbuster drug. And you're talking about a couple of handfuls of almonds for a few cents instead of these drugs that can cost $100,000, is it actually better? Well, it's not an either or, it's together. And again, this is where food as medicine really needs to enter the toolbox of doctors. Not just you and me, but we really need to spread the word among the medical education community. Because if you were taking care of a patient with colon cancer and getting treatment, if you look at that data, it's the same kind of data that's presented at a big meeting where

they talk about all the drugs and immunotherapies. I would actually strongly advise patients to use, have nuts if they can take it. And what do they serve in the hospitals, right? So again, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's slow, but inevitable that we begin viewing food as medicine. And we're gonna be able to map this out, right? We're gonna be very soon in a more clinical way with artificial intelligence, big data analysis, is microbiome assays.

We can actually look at what's growing, what's not growing, how different things affect it, check it over time in a serial way, monitor the effects. I mean, it's fascinating. You know, wow, maybe if you give this cocktail of acromantia smoothie, then your acromantia grow and your cancer response rates are increased from immunotherapy. I mean, this is really radical stuff. And yet there are very few people talking about it in a clinical way like you are. You're saying, okay, wait a minute. We don't know everything, but we know a lot and we know enough to actually start

to integrate these strategies. And the whole idea of these five defense systems is so powerful because it empowers people to say, okay, wait a minute. I don't just have to sort of wait around to get disease and then hope some drug saves me or try to fix it then, but I can actually start to build the foundations of my

health for my whole life by understanding and these are a little bit technical you know stem cells and microbiome and all this stuff but it's actually doable and you make it so practical in your book you have this five by five by five plan which we'll get into but let's go next to the dna thing because we talked about ingenious regeneration stem cells microbiome let's talk about the dna because we think oh wait, wait, we got our DNA. There's nothing we can do about it. We get hits to our DNA from toxins and stress and different things. But what can we really do to help our DNA?

Right. Well, so in my book, I actually talk about how most people hear about DNA these days relates to our ancestry. You know, who are we related to and how much of us is Neanderthal? I'm about 1.5%. But in fact, you know, dna is our genetic blueprint and that part of that blueprint is our blueprint for health it actually is designed to keep us healthy our dna we need the our genetics to actually produce all the healthy things to defend our health we need the right proteins

made we need the right um molecules made at the right time from the time we're born to the to our last breath really and so we know that DNA can get mutated and so some of the things that can mutate our DNA is actually you know it stopped there I just wanna go back a minute because we said it's really important you said our DNA makes proteins that regulate all our biology and so they can actually make good proteins, or if they get damaged, they can make bad proteins. And the good proteins help you create health, and the bad proteins make you sick. Exactly. And by the way, the DNA is part of our hardwiring, right? It's kind of like the operating system in our body that has an autovirus system and actually checks it out, finds problems, and erases them, really just deletes them.

So on average, we know that there's about 10,000 mistakes that can lead to mutations that occur in a healthy person every single day, right? So think about it. We're out there in the sunlight. Sun, ultraviolet radiation damages us. You sit in a car, in a highway a highway on a traffic on a community to work that sunshine's going right through the windshield mutating your dna secondary smoke you're filling up your car and i guess i mean some of us drive electric cars but some most people

still wind up filling up their cars pump gas right so do you stand upwind or downwind of the fumes i just hold my breath okay actually i try to like stuff the cap in the thing because they have the automatic one i run away so here's a way to protect your dna when you're when you put when you're filling your gas stand figure out which way the wind's blowing and stand upwind yeah if you stand down when you're inhaling those solvents the gas and you're mutating your dna like a little wood block you can just stick in and hold them and go well but this is the kind of situational awareness yeah that we want to have you know like i was saying when you when you're at the stove you're really careful not to burn yourself or set the house on fire these are the things that we know we can we should be doing at sort of the health

level so our dna is uh and there's some things we can't do anything about like radon coming out of the earth like that just mutates our DNA as well. So we have to take proactive steps to protect our DNA. And some of the things that we can do are pretty simple. Like, for example, we know that an elemental vitamin, vitamin C, can actually do it. A really interesting clinical trial or clinical study that was done in um uh people who uh were drinking orange juice right so uh their scientists actually took blood from them before drinking orange juice and they took the blood out and they measured how well their dna protected itself

in a lab test and then they gave them orange juice to drink uh it's one and three quarters cup so it's kind of a tall glass of orange juice uh and they found that within two hours drinking orange juice could enhance their dna's ability to protect itself by lowering damage by 20 is it is it the vitamin c or is it the naringin or course we think it's vitamin c because actually they've um uh they've actually studied vitamin c in isolation, but it's almost certain that there's other factors in orange juice. I mean, you get a lot of sugar with that much orange juice. Could you then just take the vitamin C pills? So what's interesting is that the placebo that they gave to a group of people were just

sweetened water that was the same amount of sugar as the orange juice. It was not the sugar. We know that's not good for you, but it was really the other stuff. So vitamin C is what they were focusing on. But I think it's probably the naringenin and hesperidin and other things in orange juice as well. You know, the pulp's got a lot of good stuff in it. And, you know, by the way, the other interesting thing is that in most of these fruits, it's the peel, the rind that actually has a lot of the stuff. Well, they say if you're taking statins or certain drugs,

you should have grapefruit, especially the peel, like the white stuff, because it actually affects the metabolism of the drugs. And so if it's that powerful that you can get toxic from eating grapefruit if you're taking a statin, that's a pretty interesting fact. But just a point of clarification on that. So it's, if you have grapefruit, it can slow down the metabolism of the liver. So when you're taking a drug that can be toxic at high levels,

and your liver has to clear that, that's when you call it toxicity. But in point of fact, think about it another way. if you have grapefruit and you're eating other healthy foods you raise the levels of the healthy things in your bloodstream so here's another amazing food that can protect our dna is kiwis kiwis oh my god i just came back from new zealand where my wife is from and i ate a lot of kiwis listen i love kiwis right uh kiwis used to be in the jungle. I think monkeys ate them and they were grown in New Zealand and then shipped to America. And I think they were called Chinese gooseberries originally and they were just named kiwis.

So anyway, there was an interesting study done in Scotland that looked at whether you ate one, two, or three kiwis a day and looked at what happened to your ability to protect your DNA, turns out even eating one kiwi a day can help your blood protect the DNA from damage by 60%. That's amazing. One kiwi a day. And what you're talking about is learning about, in your book, all the various foods.

You might not like razor clams, but there's a lot of options. Right. And it's not just that you're going to eat kiwis all day it's you add all these different different creative foods into your diet as much as you can and you actually will probably have a more powerful effect than even what you're talking about right well i mean look uh here's the thing about most health diets right um if you are extreme and you only go on one way of eating or try to only eat one food, you're not balancing your body. It's not natural to do that. I think it's the most healthful approach is one that's sustainable, that's supported by

real science and real evidence, and that allows you to do the things you enjoy. So in my book, my emphasis in Eat to Beat Disease is number one, look for foods that you eat, the foods that you enjoy that are good for you. And so I present a whole list of food, 203 foods actually. And you get to choose, pick the ones, circle the ones, take a cell phone picture of the ones and check them off. That's your shopping list. You've started off, you've had a great start already. You're already identifying the foods you love that are good for you i've done some of that work to figure out which ones are good now you just choose them secondly besides doing the things you like be moderate and that's the other thing is that you know i think most researchers most research has shown

that if you cut down your calories by 15 30 actually you improve survival at least in lab animals but also in people too people that eat somewhat less you know the japanese have the same hit you boo right exactly 80 full don't push yourself away from the tail before you're so stuffed that you can't leave the party before it's over right that's basically what it is um it's better for your body it doesn't put metabolic stress you know you're you're you when you stuff yourself to the gills, your body is really stressed out. Even if you eat healthy food and you don't want to stress your cells,

if you eat slowly and moderately, your brain will sort of say, hey, you know what, it's enough. Well, it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain your fault. Exactly. Right. So, you know, here's,

and this is by the way, why eating with other people, which is what most of these Mediterranean countries do, the blue zone, you know, where people live a long time. They eat with other people. It's good for you. And you're talking, so you can't be stuffing your mouth the whole time. Exactly.

And you're not distracted. You're not watching television. You're not looking at your phone. It's, you know, eating social. And so that's another important component. And then finally, it's got to be sustainable. You got to do something that you can do your whole life. And that's why doing the things that you love and that you already like and that you can

explore on. You were talking about razor clams. In my book, there's a lot of foods that most people may not have heard about. Bitter melon. Bitter melon. It's kind of a staple in some asian countries but great to try i wouldn't cook it yourself for the first time because it's not that easy to go to a chinese restaurant yeah let somebody who knows i love it it tastes really bitter but it actually is

so you know diabetes it helps lower blood sugar absolutely um and you know what the interesting thing about bitter melon is again this is the culinary side right so you know here we were talking about the doctor's pharmacy but in fact fact, we could be having a chef having this conversation as well. When you have bitter melon, which is a little bitter, it actually makes other foods taste more intense. So it actually, the way it was designed in cuisine is actually to help you make you enjoy other foods even more. So again, it's not either or. It's not an extreme. And it's about different cultures and finding what we love to do.

Well, it's fascinating. We bred food and vegetables to be more disease resistant, to be drought resistant, to be easier to be shipped without spoiling, to be not necessarily designed for flavor or polyphenols. In fact, the flavor comes from these phytochemicals. So we've actually bred all of the good stuff out of even our common fruits and vegetables. That's why I say eat weird food because those typically haven't been screwed with. And there's a couple of chefs we're having on the podcast, Chef Boulay from New York, who actually has quit his world-class restaurant

and is now focused on food as medicine and creating all sorts of different culinary experiences that integrate these magical foods like curcumin and turmeric oil and various things that he's done. And Dan Barber is also going to be coming on our podcast. And he's created a new seed company to design seeds, not to be heirloom necessarily, but to be full of these rich phytochemicals so they enhance flavor. Nobody was breeding for flavor.

People were just breeding for all kinds of other things, pest resistance or GMO, whatever. Instead of saying, well, how do we create more of these medicinal foods? And which is a whole new thing that chefs are starting to think about food as medicine. I remember when I was at Canyon Ranch years ago, probably late 90s, and I got up in a meeting, there was the executives there, the owners,

the doctors, the dietitians, the chefs, and I got up and I said, this is, we need to, this is a health resort. We need to start thinking about how to design our menus to use food as medicine. And the head chef got up and he screamed to me, this is not an effing hospital. I'm like, oh God, I guess I'm a little too early on this one. Well, you know, listen, being ahead of the time is something that you're known for. And I think that we're now starting to appreciate it. I mean, think about all the opportunities to impact on health using what we now know about the health of food.

Not only hospitals, by the way, but restaurants would be a great place. Yeah. Theme parks would be a great place. Airlines would be a great place. I mean, there's so many places we can have an impact. Well, it's just a frame shift. Getting people to think about food as not just calories, but information. Food is not just energy, but actually instructions that regulate your stem cells and your DNA

and your microbiome and your immune system and your angiogenesis. I mean, these are things that are not things people think about. It's the new science of nutrition, right? So beyond proteins and calories and sugar and all that kind of stuff, we're now combining food science with life science. You know, the life science is what we learn in medical school. Food science, you know, not so much, right? So the average, it's only like 20% of medical schools that require any nutrition. You know, I can tell you part of what got me into this is that

I used to be a doctor at a VA hospital. And I felt a duty. A brave soul. Well, I felt a duty to really try to help people that committed their lives to help protect our country, right? So what was interesting, and I'm sure you know this as well, the veterans that come to the hospital, they're often, they have a lot of health problems.

Some of them are obese, diabetes, they got diabetes, bad heart disease, cancer, that's the sort of every day in the clinic, you see people that are really, really dealing with a lot of illness. And what I noticed was I said, this is odd because these people, when they were in their 20s, were fit.

They couldn't even get into the military if they weren't like perfect specimens of fitness, right? Right. So what happened to them over the decades? And I realized it wasn't just medicines. It had to be their lifestyle. And when I kind of talked to them and gave them diagnoses, oftentimes really bad diagnoses, you know. And then they would ask me, what's the treatment? How long do I have, doc? You know, how bad is it going to be? They put their clothes on and they'd be on their way out the door. And almost all of

them would turn around and ask me one question. They said, hey, doc, what can I do for myself? What can I eat? And I didn't have the answer because I wasn't taught. We weren't taught to give that answer. And I thought that was wrong. And that's what led me on this journey that led me to write this book, Eat to Beat Disease, because I think that we need to know that. People want to know that. What can we do for ourselves to eat to beat disease?

And in a way, there are really no drugs that work as well when you look at the spectrum of over your lifetime inputting all these powerful foods compared to what the effect of a medication would be, right? I mean, and studies have shown this, that the diet and lifestyle works better than statins, for example, for preventing heart disease. Mediterranean diet, the big study that was done, the Predimed study, which gave people a liter of olive oil a week or a bunch of nuts every day, the effects were equivalent or better than taking a drug and tastes much better and less side effects, right? Right, right. Well, you know, as we've been talking about, food as medicine is very natural

in most parts of the world. And I think just sort of in our society, we've lost touch with things. You know, earlier you were talking about chefs um getting into this you know this whole farm to table movement yeah well that's what it used to be for everybody we only ate stuff that was going around us and we ate it because it tasted great because it was rich with these um polyphenols and flavonoids and by the way you know these bioactives that are natural chemicals and foods what do they do it's really interesting when you think about health defense. Most of the bioactives that are found in foods evolved in the plant, plant-based foods, to protect the plant.

So either they were natural insecticides or they helped to attract bees and other insects so they'd pollinate so they could reproduce, right? Or protect them from elements or damage. Or protect them from the elements or damage, make them stronger, right? So then when humans started to eat these plant plant based foods, then these natural chemicals had another job description, which is they interacted with our human cells. And because they were already engineered to be protective, the ones that were useful to us. And we developed this relationship with our plant based foods also help us. And so there's really not a lot of surprise if you really take the large view

of what we're finding out what we need to do now though is actually to help everyone understand that the knowledge is around us for us to help ourselves and if you're interested in the science it's there it's it's an evolving science yes we have health defense systems that's you know health isn't the absence absence of disease. It's our body working full steam, cranking along. And you can take chronic diseases and you can prevent, treat, or even reverse them by activating your defense systems using food. And whether you're healthy or sick, every person can take a decision three times a day to really enhance their health.

And you don't need a doctor's prescription. It's true. And I just want to loop back to what you said, because it's a concept that I don't think most people really understand about food. There was a recent study that was published, I think it was over 60,000 people, looking at people who ate organic food and cancer rates. And they found a lower risk of cancer.

Now, is it the avoidance of pesticides? Or is it something else? Because when you're an organic plant, life sucks. I mean, it's hard. You've got to work to protect yourself. You've got to produce more phytochemicals. You've got to produce more nutrients. Again, it depends on the soil and all these other things.

But organic foods have higher concentrations. Wild foods have even more. Like wild blueberries are better than organic blueberries, which are better than regular blueberries, right? is a this is the science we we actually know and then i i thought about this for a long time like why are these molecules in plants so smart that they know how to upregulate this enzyme or protect our dna or enhance our immune system or improve angiogenesis or help our micro how does that happen and i came up with this idea called symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is the idea that we evolved in symbiosis, in collaboration, cooperation with plants to actually activate many of our

body's essential functions that we're too lazy to do. For example, humans and guinea pigs don't make vitamin C. Many other animals make vitamin c well we like why should i make vitamin c if i can eat some whatever and get vitamin c so there's so many of these pathways that aren't we don't think of these as essential nutrients like vitamin b12 or or vitamin e or whatever we actually use these to activate these health systems that you're talking about this defense system and we don't think of them as essential but they really are essential because without enough for example glucosinolates you can't upregulate glutathione which detoxifies

all the chemicals or you can't you know reduce inflammation if you don't have enough curcumin or so you you actually have these available to you every day in the grocery store. And we're going to become smarter and smarter about this. And it's such an amazing moment. Well, that's what I love about the title of your podcast, you know, Pharmacy. Because literally when you walk into the grocery store, it's like walking into a pharmacy. Yeah. Literally. You know, recently I had the privilege of actually being invited to attend a celebration at NASA at the Kennedy Space Center celebrating Apollo 7.

And a bunch of astronauts got up there who had actually been in space. And these are flighted astronauts. And they basically said when they looked at the Earth from the International Space Station, they realized that the only thing that separates us from any other cold, dark, dead planet is this thin blue line of atmosphere. And underneath that thin blue line that we have to protect, we're all the same. We're all one species on the planet. And this is getting to your symbiosis idea, which is that however life got created,

we all live together. We all adapt together. We think about a lot of things that don't work well together. It's usually us versus them is not helpful. It's us together that's really helpful. Almost in every situation, figuring out how things work in harmony, in balance, is really the, leads to a better solution. And the silos and the reductionism in medicine also spreads across everything else, right?

So we don't think about how do we produce energy and how does that affect climate or how do we grow our food how does that connect everything so it's connecting the dots i mean we you know you hear that saying you have a butterfly flap its wings in china and the hurricane in the caribbean i don't know if that's true but that idea that everything affects everything else that we're one interconnected organism right yeah no i mean i think i think that's absolutely true and so so the great thing is that we are now able to benefit from all the research that's been done over the years, directed, you know, to develop new drugs and pharmaceutical companies. And we can use those same tools in a toolbox to study food. And when you do that, you start to really begin developing

the answer why something works, not just that something works. Yeah. So that deepens our knowledge. I think it helps us feel more confident in what we're doing. And it allows us to, it brings more people together.

We need to bring more people into this field, which is partly why you're doing this. Yeah. It's amazing. And your work is so great. Before we end, I want to sort of touch on the last of the five systems which is immunity and the same question what messes it up how do we fix it and what foods can we eat to fix our immune system okay so immune

system is and all that in three minutes or less no just kidding no i'm just kidding well no i mean when we you know uh i think even school kids know that the immune system is important, right? Bundle up. Don't get sick. You don't want your immune system to be down. Have the chicken soup. You know, all the maximum. Which turns out has a lot of things that actually do help your immune system.

Well, it turns out the chicken soup actually does actually influence inflammation in your body. But our immunity is our first and best well-recognized defense system, right? Nobody would challenge that. And we've always assumed that, you know, if your immune system is working, you're going to stay healthy. If it crashes, like you see in HIV or in AIDS, it's a terrible situation. If you've got an overactive immune system, like autoimmune disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis. I mean, lots of people suffering from that. Even celiac disease, for example,

food triggered immune responses. People really suffer. And so balanced immunity is what's important. I don't know if you remember this, but I certainly do. When I learned about the immune system in medical school, it seemed infinitely complicated. You know, you get this system, you get do. When I learned about the immune system in medical school, it seemed infinitely complicated.

You get this system, you get that system. They break together and there's like 50 different parts and they work together. And I thought it was an alphabet soup, honestly. A lot of molecules involved in the immune system. But here's at the end of the day, what we know is that the immune system acts like a security force in our body. They patrol our system to make sure any invaders that might get in through our eyes, our nose, our mouth, our ears. I mean, every orifice is an entry point. You cut yourself, bacteria can get in there. Our body basically, our immune system goes, hey, wait a minute. We're going to go to the site of action and we're going to secure

the zone, so to speak, clear it up and make sure everything can be not disrupted that's essentially what our immune system does and yeah there's a lot of complexities in there um but we do know that things can lower our immunity we know that infections lower can if you have a lot of infection you can lower our immunity we also know that um again smoking aging um you know. Stress. Stress all lower. Sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is a big one, right? So there's some new studies coming out that show that, you know, pretty much if you don't get like six hours, at least six hours of sleep,

your health is seriously in jeopardy, right? And we know this, again, that all-nighter phenomenon that every college student and definitely anybody who's gone to medical school or done a residency training has, right? Yeah. It takes time to recover from that. And our immune system needs to come up along with our microbiome and all these other defense systems. I used to feel like I had fibromyalgia after every night on call.

It was achy, tired, sore. Now imagine it never goes away. Yeah. Okay. So what do we now know about food? We know that foods can actually boost our immune system. I mentioned oysters. It's quite amazing that actually oysters have polysaccharides, these long sugars and

proteins that actually can help boost our immune system. Oysters and oyster mushrooms. And oyster mushrooms. Yep, exactly. And then, you know, our microbiome talks to our immune system. So here's the pomegranates and here's the mushrooms again that help our microbiome to actually boost our immunity. And then we do know that there are other foods that can calm our immune system. So tea, you know, for example, green tea can not only help boost our immune system, but it can calm it if it's overly active. So people talk about inflammation, right?

And sometimes we use inflammation in sort of this broad sweeping statement. Inflammation, a little bit of it, the ability to have it is good. You need inflammation a little bit, but you still want too much of it. And so there are foods that can calm and quell inflammation as well. And that's important if you have autoimmune disease. Well, so again, tea is one of those foods that can actually lower your immunity, not your entire immune system, but just the inflammatory component.

Because those catechins actually can actually help to quell things. I was talking to a gastroenterologist from Harvard. He was saying, yeah, they use curcumin and green tea extracts as ways of treating colitis. That's right. Well, I mean, so curcumin is an interesting one because when you eat this yellow natural spice powder, which is delicious, by the way, it can be predicted in curry powders. It tends to go right through our system out the other end, unless you have it with fresh cracked black pepper. I don't know if you know about this.

But basically, if you have fresh cracked black pepper, you actually help your intestines get activated so it absorbs more of the curcumin from the turmeric. So again, this is where- And also, traditionally, like in India, they used to make oil with ghee and turmeric. That's right. In fact, I'm writing a cookbook called Food, What the Heck Should I Cook?

And I've invited chefs to contribute recipes. And David Boulay created this amazing thing called turmeric oil. And it's a special infused oil with turmeric that actually helps to activate all the inflammation fighting properties. And, you know, it's so interesting you mentioned that because combinations of foods can be really important. You know, for example, tomatoes, which contain lycopene. Most people don't realize that if you pick a tomato off a vine and you eat it like an apple, you get the vitamins from the tomato, but the lycopene actually is in a natural form that the body doesn't really like to absorb.

Yeah. It's called the transform. If you heat the tomato and cook it, you gently change the chemistry into another form. That's why it's tomato sauce. You love to absorb, but it's still fat soluble. So if you actually cook the tomato slowly with olive oil, a healthy oil, it's fat soluble. And then you eat that together. Now your body really loves to

absorb it sounds good so right like and again back to the mediterranean and um uh or you know in asia too there's combinations that work let's go back and look at what the people from olden times knew like i think that you know we're forward looking i'm a researcher so i'm always looking at the latest new thing. But I think there's great value in looking back at the ancient cultures, the ancient recipes. We've probably forgotten more than we have to learn, but we still have a lot to learn.

That's true. I'm going to send you that article I wrote called Eating Your Medicine, Food is Pharmacology. I'd love to see it. In fact, you're Chinese. And in Chinese, the word for take your medicine is chui yao, which means to eat your medicine, which is a very interesting way of framing it. It's that they don't take medicine like a pill.

They eat their medicine. That's right. Well, you know, in Chinese medicine, you know, traditional TCM, traditional Chinese medicine, you kind of view food and medicine and herbs all sort of in continuity. You've got hot and you've got cold, you've got balance, all the things that, you know, we're now rediscovering using science. And, you know, I think that there is so much to learn about health. And we need to have the humility to recognize that while we know, you know, quite a bit about disease, and we've got some good medicines to treat them.

When it comes to health, we need to keep our eye on the ball. We need to focus on what we're learning. And we need to think about that ourselves, because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health. What you need to do is to make that part of your life in a natural way. Well, if we can get food reimbursed by healthcare, it's a game changer. And actually I'm working on that at Cleveland Clinic with the food pharmacy, which is the idea of actually paying for food for people instead of drugs to get them healthy and reverse disease. And then actually we'll save lives and money.

And insurance companies are starting to recognize that as well. And so we should all work together, find ways to, you know, apply our knowledge so that everybody can benefit from the most advanced knowledge possible. And, you know, actually, honestly, for the average person, they shouldn't have to think too much about it. It should be natural all around them. They should be doing the things they like, be moderate and actually be do it for a long time. It's tough because we're not educated about it. We don't learn about it.

The environment of our food is so toxic. We live in a nutritional wasteland where to try to find something that's good for you long time. Well, it's tough because we're not educated about it. We don't learn about it. The environment of our food is so toxic. We live in a nutritional wasteland where to try to find something that's good for you is really tough. Well, that's what we've done. And that's what we've done for ourselves. But I'm saying that the health is an invisible thing. And that's why we need to think through

what our health actually means. And because we're against really a brick wall almost every single day in, you know, modern society with everything we've done to the environment and to the stress that we put ourselves in just living life in general, you know, the odds are kind of stacked against us unless we take our own control. This is incredible. I mean, for a guy who's sort of steeped in traditional medicine, who's, you know, probably one of the leading scientists in the world around angiogenesis, who understands, you know, the deep biology that

we all learned in medical school and has published 100 plus papers in major journals, you're sort of coming around to this idea, this paradigm shift that the way to get people well and reverse disease is not by treating disease, but by creating health. And that is a massive paradigm shift. And that's really what functional medicine is all about. And it's really now becoming more accepted and mainstream. And you're leading the way.

And I think most of us who go into medicine, we started out by wanting to create health, right? I mean, people don't go to medical school to treat disease. They go to medical school because they want to help people stay healthy. So here we are, you know, we're at the precipice of a new era in society, not just medicine, where we can actually do something for ourselves.

Amazing. So if you were in charge for a day, king maybe, and you could change something in healthcare, medicine, and make a sweeping change what would it be well there's so many things that i can think of but the one thing that i think is uh closest to my mind is i'd make it mandatory that every doctor in their training and actually in their practice so they have continuing education has to learn about food and health and how foods can be used for health and i think that

they need to have nutrition that is state-of-the-art nutrition and this should be as important as learning about diseases and and treatments and like you know the pharmaceutical treatments that all come out like we all have to certify we have to take board tests again we have to learn what the latest treatments are i think that if i could mandate something, it would actually be learn about food and health, learn how to talk to our patients about it because they want to know. Well, that's a great, that's, I think, a great strategy. In fact, a colleague of ours, Dariush Mazzafarian,

who's the Dean of Tufts School of Nutrition and Health Policy, said, we just need to change the licensing exams for doctors to include questions that are about this. And when you do that, that changes the medical school curriculum, that changes what people study, it changes the incentives, and it's sort of a domino effect. Exactly. And by the way, because every doctor sees thousands of patients over the course of their lives, it's scalable.

It's a ripple effect that we can have. And there are people that are not in medicine who are equally passionate and they're working you know really hard to come up with really great ideas but those of us who have medical degrees we have a unique privilege right so we learned and i've been given the opportunity to impact people's lives by the nature of our profession and i think think this is an area, you know, the food pharmacy, food is medicine, that it's an idea whose time has come. And there was a quote that said, you know, no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. That's so great. And for those ideas, I'd encourage everybody to go check out Dr. Lee's

new book, Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. You can find him at drwilliamlee, that's drwilliamli.com, and learn about his book. You can get it on Amazon, anywhere you get books, bookstores. This is going to be one of the most important books as we look back in history that creates that benchmark from where we go forward and rethink health and medicine. I encourage everybody to check it out. I'm excited about the book.

I've read through it. It's really something unique. And there's a lot of health books out there. I mean, I'd give away all my books and just read that one. This is really the book you should look at for what to know about your health, about how to activate these healing systems and how to actually enjoy food.

Because what we're talking about is fun. It's delicious. It's yummy. So thank you so much, Dr. Lee, for being on The Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I appreciate you being here. And if you love this podcast and you like what you heard, please leave a comment on

the review section. Sign up wherever you get your podcasts and share with your friends and family on social media or wherever you want. We'd love to hear from you. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.