The Liz Moody Podcast - A Doctor’s Anti-Diet Guide To Healthy Fat Levels + Honest Thoughts On Ozempic, Calorie Deficits, High-Protein Diets, & More With Dr. William Li

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

Dr. Li shares the latest research on weight loss, the important distinction between white and brown fat, anti-inflammatory daily practice recommendations, healthy shopping tips, & so much more.  the science behind why health and body size aren’t correlated the 4 reasons why body fat is so important to our health  the best way to know if you have an optimal amount of fat the difference between white and brown fat + Dr. Li’s top tips for increasing brown fat (which benefits our metabolism to have more of!) Dr. Li’s top 3 tips for lowering inflammation levels the hidden cause of inflammation we all need to be aware of 3 foods you should incorporate into your diet for ideal metabolic health whether there’s any validity to “calories in, calories out” or counting calories  Dr. Li’s opinion on Ozempic & other weight loss drugs  and so much more! For more from Dr. Li, check out his new book Eat To Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer and head to his website www.drwilliamli.com. And listen to more of Dr. Li’s advice on his previous Healthier Together episodes: What To Eat For Longevity, Inflammation, Cancer Prevention, Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, & More with Dr. William Li and The Health Effects of Alcohol: Gut Health & Cancer with Dr. Robynne Chutkan & Dr. William Li.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. This episode is sponsored by: Paleovalley: go to paleovalley.com/lizmoody for 15% off your order. Seed: go to seed.com/lizmoody and use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first month. Reliefband: go to reliefband.com and use code HEALTHIER for 20% off plus free shipping.  Ness: head to nesswell.com/liz for an extra 5,000 points when you apply for the Ness Card today.  Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning hacks for regulating our circadian rhythms, getting tips for how to invest our money, or uncovering the latest research on managing anxiety. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. Today, I am so excited to welcome a repeat guest back to the podcast, Dr.

William Lee. Dr. Lee is an internationally renowned Harvard-trained medical doctor, researcher and president of the Angiogenesis Foundation. His groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases, including cancers, diabetes, blindness, and heart disease, and his TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, has been viewed more than 11 million times. His newest book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, is now available wherever books are sold. This is an episode about fat, but it's really did. different than you often hear in the media. One of my biggest takeaways for this episode is that fat is far less about our appearance because as we get into in the conversation, the way that your body looks actually has little to do with you having healthy fat levels. And also, as I've

always said, your body is for living, not looking, and thinking about it more in the same way that you would think about your hormones or your inflammation levels or your microbiome, all of which fat is very, very connected to. Dr. Lee gets into why our goal shouldn't be losing fat to look a certain way, but rather optimizing the amount of fat and the different types of fat, which we get into in the episode, in your body so that your body can function and feel its best. That said, I do want to add a trigger warning. While Dr. Lee's perspective on all of these things is very anti-diet, we do discuss topics like eating habits, body size, and weight loss throughout the interview. And if that conversation doesn't serve you at this time, go ahead and skip the episode.

I will see you next week. On this episode, we get into the science behind why health and body size are not correlated. The four reasons why body fat is so important to our overall health. The best way to know if you have an optimal amount of fat, the difference between white and brown fat, plus Dr. Lee's top tips for increasing brown fat, which benefits our metabolism and our overall health to have more of. Dr. Lee's top three tips for lowering inflammation levels, the hidden cause of inflammation that we all need to be aware of.

Three foods that you should incorporate into your diet for ideal metabolic health, whether there's any validity to the notion of calories in, calories out, or counting calories, Dr. Lee's opinion on OZempic and other weight loss drugs, and so much more. We would both love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening to the episode. So definitely screenshot and tag me. I'm at Liz Moody and Dr. Lee. He is at Dr. William Lee on Instagram. While this is certainly a tricky conversation to navigate, it's also an important one. Fat plays a big role in our health and how we feel every day. But because the world, has been so co-opted by people making money off of making us feel terrible about the way that our

bodies look. It's a hard topic to even get into. So then all of these incredibly false ideas about optimizing for a single best body shape and restricting our food and all of that, these ideas proliferate and we never even talk about the benefits of fat or the idea that thin appearing bodies can be harboring fat that's negatively impacting their health. Or all of these incredibly important tools that we can be using to right size the fat levels. in our bodies. If this episode resonates, please share it with someone in your life who's still being subjected to all of the harmful misinformation out there. Thank you for always spreading the word about episodes. It is truly the best way to support the podcast and it is so appreciated.

Okay, let's get right into it with Dr. William Lee. Dr. Lee, I am so excited to have you back on the podcast to talk about your new brilliant book. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks so much, Liz. It's always fun to talk to you. Let's just get right into it. We have so much to cover today. In your mind, what is wrong with our traditional view of dieting? We are a society obsessed with our looks and our looks are attached to our weight, our weights attached to lots of stigma that is associated with body fat. And so I think that we have, and then that's tied to food. What I've observed is that we have a lot of weight, is that we have a lot of stigma. lack of alignment with joy and pleasure when it comes to our appearance and our body weight and our food. And I wanted to write a book that represents how we should be thinking about our metabolism, how we should be thinking about our body weight, and what is the true nature of the relationship between food, fat, and metabolism? The fact of the matter is that we all have quite a lot of work

that we can do to get ourselves healthy from the inside out. And that's where all those pieces, metabolism, body fat and food all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. I want to dive into this a little bit more because you say explicitly in the introduction that this book isn't about how you look, but how you feel. And weight in general is such a fraught issue. Like many doctors don't consider weight a good benchmark for health and think that we should be focusing on other indicators, while other people say that it unto itself matters. And some parts of the health world say, like, let's not even talk about weight. Let's talk about inflammation and cholesterol and other biomarkers or just eat healthy food and see where our body stabilizes.

And then other people are like, well, if I want to lose some weight, that should be okay, or that fat, which is different than weight, matters unto itself for our health. So I would just love to get immensely clear on how you view the idea of weight and fat loss. We all want to be as healthy as possible. And the key thing that gets misunderstood is that body size has something to do with your health. And my new book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, by the way, it's not a diet book. It's an anti-diet book because it really tries to introduce what are we learning about metabolism. And it turns out that regardless of what our body size actually is, our metabolism is a hardwired.

program, kind of like the operating system in your laptop that is designed to fire off and run in a very, very specific way to keep us healthy from the inside out. And that health actually is tied to the amount of body fat we have. Body fat is actually a really important part of our healthy body. Our body fat is actually an organ in our body, just like our heart and our lungs and our kidney. But the key thing is that we need to actually keep it all under control. So as you described all these different points of view that people have. My answer, when you say, well, which one is it? I would say it's kind of all the above. The problem is when you try to reduce it only to one thing, and then you try to either make that one thing hero or a villain, and then try to focus all of

your attention and actions just on aiming at the one thing, we lose the forest for the trees. Our body fat forms long before we're born. At about three months of age, after our blood vessels form because every organ needs a circulation, our nerves form because every organ needs to have instructions provided through the nerves, like an electrical cord to each organ. Then one of the other tissues that begins to form after that is body fat. And body fat, surprisingly, at that level in the body, forms like a sheet of bubble wrap. And the bubble wrap goes around every blood vessel. So you're like, wait a minute.

You mean it's not put in the tummy or it's not put under your arms? Nope. Actually, body fat forms fundamentally as sheets around our blood vessels. And the question is why. It turns out that the new size of body fat tells us that body fat has at least four healthy roles that allow us to live well and to prosper. Number one, it's padding that body fat keeps our organs from bursting open. If we didn't have any body fat and we tripped on the rug and fell on the ground, regardless of your body size, you could be lean as a stick or you could be large, bodied. If you didn't have any body fat, your delicate organs might shatter or burst when you hit the ground from a slipper or fall. When you actually have padding, it actually protects our organs. So thank goodness we actually have some body fat. That's a structural benefit we have. The second thing actually is that body fat forms fuel tanks for the energy that we get from our food. And the reason at the very beginning the fat forms around blood vessels is because the blood vessels carry the fuel.

that we get from our food, and our metabolism has to take that fuel from our food that's in our bloodstream and put it someplace. So our fat cells, they're called it dipocytes, actually our fuel tanks. And where's the fuel running? Right from the bloodstream. So that's why fat, the fuel tank, actually needs to sit right next to the blood vessel. Thank goodness we actually have fuel tanks because if we didn't have fat, we'd have no energy, we'd have no fuel.

And this is, by the way, why people who try to lose so much body fat to the point of virtual starvation, like on a desert island starvation, 1%, 2% body fat. You know, like some of the people who are bodybuilders really go to these extremes or competition, they don't wind up being stronger because of their muscle mass. They wind up becoming weaker from an energy perspective because they don't actually have enough fuel stored in their fuel tank. The third thing that I think is a real light bulb that goes off is that our fat functions as an endocrine organ.

So an organ that's an endocrine organ that releases hormones, like your thyroid, like your pituitary gland, like your adrenal glands. We all know how important those endocrine organs are. Well, fat releases 15 unique hormones made by healthy fat. And three of them are necessary for us to have a metabolism at all for energy. One of them is actually called leptin. And some people have heard of leptin as sort of like the satiative. hormone so that when you have a lot of leptin, you're not hungry. It turns off your appetite. Well, that's actually not a really truly accurate representation. I want to give a more refined

definition of how leptininin is like a volume switch, a little louder, a little softer. So it's not a toggle switch. It's a volume switch. When your leptin levels are turned down, like volume down, it's like showing that your fuel tank is empty in your car, running towards empty. That better pull over and actually get some food, load up on food, which is our fuel that our body, our metabolism can store in our fuel tanks, which is our fat. So leptin actually helps us, depending on its level, to go pull over to fuel up in our fuel tanks, and we have energy. Now, when leptin is turned up, the volume is up on leptin. It's like the gas tank being full. We don't have to pull over so much. Keep driving. We got plenty of fuel in our fuel tank. So that's

one of the hormones made by fat that's responsible for how much fuel we actually have in our body's kind of like our body's energy level. Another really, really important hormone made by healthy fat, regardless of your body size, is something called adiponectin. Adipo really refers to adipose tissue, which is a fancy scientific term for fat tissue, adipose tissue. So adiponectin is a hormone made by fat. Now, Liz, if you were in my medical office and I drew a vial of your blood and sent it to the labs to go check your blood counts and your kidney function. But I also checked the box to say, please tell me every single hormone in Liz Moody's body. And I want the number that comes out.

When the test results come back, your dip ineption will be 1,000 times higher than every other hormone in your body. Higher than estrogen, higher than thyroid hormone, higher than cortisol, everything. Now, why is it so high? The reason is because adiponectin helps your insulin bring in the fuel from your bloodstream to your energy. So a diphenectin made by fat allows insulin to work efficiently. And because we need energy all the time, adipinectin levels are sky high, much higher than anything else.

Now, if adipinectin is the gas pedal to make your insulin work well, then a third hormone called resistant is the break. So think about adip an actin like you're driving a car. Let's go into the fast lane. Okay, let's go to the left lane, go fast. All right. Adip an neck thing goes pedal to the metal, zoom. Now our car is driving fast.

Fuel's being taken in like big time. Now all of a sudden there's a truck up ahead to slow down, resist in the other hormone, goes on the brake. So a dip in neck and resistant allows us to travel fast to slow down. Travel fast and slow down. And this is actually how we have energy to blink, to have a heartbeat, to run and catch an airplane, to go hiking in the woods. Any of these activities are governed by the presence of healthy fat, serving as a padding, providing a fuel tank, and making these hormones that allow insulin to be able to draw in fuel

to our body and to be able to modulate it so we can go a little bit faster or a little bit slower. Now, there's one last function that is important, unhealthy body fat. Not all body fat's created equal. We've got two different colors of fat. One is called white fat, one is called brown fat. They're called white and brown because that's actually how they look under the microscope. Now, white fat is lumpy, bumpy. It's the stuff you can see called subcutaneous under the skin fat.

Now, it can also be packed inside the tube of your body where your guts are. So that kind of white fat is called visceral fat, visceral for gut. And that's like packing peanuts that you would put inside a FedEx shipping container, a box. You could put a few peanuts or you can really jam a lot of that, the packing material then then force the box to be taped shut. Box looks thin. It's a thin shipping box, but guess what? It is bursting on the inside with these packing peanuts.

So white fat is wiggly-jiggly. It can be packed inside your body to dangerous levels. And that's one kind of fat. It's important that you have to have some of it. And then the other kind of fat that is the fourth function beyond padding fuel tank hormones. Four function is caused by brown fat. Brown fat, amazingly, is not lumpy, bumpy, wiggly, jiggly. Brown fat is paper thin.

You can't see it because it's not close to the skin. It's actually close to the bone and it's plastered around the side of your neck, underneath your breastbone, a little bit under your arms, a little bit in your belly. And what brown fat does is it will fire up when you actually are exposed to cold temperatures or certain kinds of food. And when brown fat fires up, it is like, the gas cut top range. If your kitchen that cooks with gas, you go to the kitchen, you want to cook something, right? You go click, click, click, click, whoosh. Now you get the flame, put the pot on

top of it or the pan. Brown fat does the same thing inside your body. When your brown fat actually is clicked on by cold temperature or certain kinds of food, it generates heat. And when it generates heat, it's got to get fuel from someplace. In your kitchen, you're getting the gas from the gas lines from outside of your house or maybe a gas tank. In your body, the fuel that brown fat uses to go whoosh and turn on to generate heat comes from your white fat, your visceral fat. Brown fat steals that extra fuel that might be stored in extra fat to burn it down. So here's brown fat can fight white fat by burning it down. And remember, I told you cold temperatures can do it, but so can eating food. So now you can eat food to turn on one kind of fat,

good fat to fight a bad fat. And that is actually one of the new components of the science of metabolism that teaches us about inner health. Okay, a lot to unpack there. I have many questions. Going back to one of the first things you said, it sounds like a key message you have is that we shouldn't necessarily be talking about size. We should be talking about getting a right sized amount of fat in our body for our health. Is that a fair thing to say? That is completely fair. And there is no single size that is actually the right for everyone. This is not a one size fits all. And I want to just draw the attention to the fittest people in the world, Olympians, right? People who train to the highest possible level that go into competition. They are super fit. Look across the different

types of athletics and you'll see there's different body sizes. There's a a gold winner in every single body size of category. One of the things that is a reset for us to think about inner health, like fundamental health and fitness. And body size is that big body size doesn't mean that you're unhealthy. You could be in very good shape with a big body size. And thin, small body size, lightweight doesn't necessarily mean that you're fit as well. Remember, I just told you that you could be very, very thin and packed with those peanuts in a FedEx shipping center, but instead of peanuts, it's actually visceral fat packed into you. So you could be thin and have tons of inside body fat. So what's more important than body size is a proportion

of fat and what kind of fat that you actually have. And is there a way to measure that accurately? So this is an area of very, very important and exciting research. The scale is pretty inaccurate, and it doesn't separate out the components, right? You've got skin, you've got muscle, you've got bone, you've got water. Well, then there was a system called the Dexa scan, DXA, and Dexa, which is a scan of the body, is actually able to separate all those pieces. So you can look at skin, fat, muscle, visceral fat. You can actually get a number, and you can see a picture of exactly where it is.

That's a big breakthrough. Not that convenient to go get a Dexa scan. got to drive someplace that has a machine, but there are new technologies in the era of wearables and mobile devices that are starting to help us use electrical signals pinging our body, even from our feet, to be able to sense how much visceral fat, for example, we actually have. So this is a fast-moving era of technology advancement that's now getting into helping us look at body fat, but I'm trained as an internal medicine doctor. You go to your typical doctor's office. All they can do is measure your height and have you step on a scale and they make a judgment about your health, even before they

see you in the office. They look at those numbers and they already think whether you're healthy or not healthy based on size and weight. And that's a mistake. That's what we used to do in the dark ages. Now we need to all step forward and be able to have a more refined view that body size is individual, but it's a proportion of fat and the kinds of fat that can make a difference between inner health versus being unhealthy. I love that. I also thought of a very convincing example. of that to me that you used in your book was that sumo wrestlers don't have a lot of the negative indicators of health that you would expect of people at that size. They're actually in very good health. Yeah. So that's another example of a sport in which a young person has a completely

different body size that you would expect to be healthy. And yet actually, sumo wrestlers in their prime, they don't have diabetes, they don't have heart disease, they don't actually have strokes that we associated with decades long of being ultra-sized. Now, I'm not saying that it means that you should be sumo-sized in order to be healthy, but it's an example, as you pointed out, that we can't be judging health on the basis of body-size. Sumo wrestlers actually are very rigid and structured in terms of what they eat, when they eat, how much sleep they get, how much stress they're under, and of course, they're training all the time. When it comes to food and metabolism, it's not really just about food. It's also about all these

other factors like physical activity and stress and sleep all kind of converge together in order to be able to help us become healthier. The next thing you mentioned was hormones. Is the relationship between our body's fat and our hormones bidirectional? And by that I mean, if we're dealing with hormone imbalances, is that going to cause our body to make and store fat differently? And then if we're making and storing fat differently, is that going to cause hormone imbalances? The answer to both is yes. Let me just tell you this. Fat in its normal size gives us energy at a state where our organs that make other hormones,

our uterus or pituitary, our thyroid, is being fed with energy to be able to make those other hormones, non-fat hormones work beautifully, perfectly. And that's mostly what happens when we're younger. The healthiest part of our growing up is often during our teenage, years or early 20s. But what happens is when you grow extra white fat, especially visceral fat, what happens is that the size of the fat expanding, you're eating food, you're absorbing the energy and putting the fuel into the fuel tank. You're still eating? Now we've got to store some more. Let's go to the next fat cell, fill that gas tank up. We're out of fat now. Now our body's going to

tap into its stem cells and make a brand new fat cell and fill that one up and so on and so forth again and again. So you can see how overeating alone can actually start to blow out your fat mass. And this is what's actually dangerous about that because an expanding mass of fat, remember I told you fat's an organ? Every organ requires a blood supply. When you actually grow too fast, the mass of fat outstrips its blood supply. Now the fat doesn't have enough blood flow to sustain the healthy function of fat, those hormones. Now what happens when the center of the fat mass, starts to die because it doesn't have blood flow, it gets inflamed. Inflammation sets in wherever you don't actually have enough blood flow.

In a cancer, the same deal. Tiny little cancer getting to a big tumor, the center of the cancer is always oxygen-starved, and that's why cancers have inflammation at their center and their core. Now, when it happens to fat, which fat can expand like a cancer, needs more blood vessels, doesn't have them fast enough. the core gets necrotic, meaning it's starting to die, becomes very inflamed. Now, Liz, this is where the problems occur. Inflammation within the center of your fat basically is like a forest fire in the ecosystem of your forest.

Now, if that force was making the hormones, making the leptin, filling up your fuel tank, measuring how much energy you need, and also that force was helping the adipinectin make your insulin work more efficiently. But then the resistant was slowing it down. you have a force fire in there, a force fire of inflammation, all of a sudden, your left end doesn't know what to do. Should I make more? Should I make less? Are you hungry or not hungry?

I don't even know how much fuel you have anymore. Adipton and Nectin goes, I don't know. Should we make it more efficient or less efficient? I'm confused. And a resistant goes, look, man, if adip an Nectin doesn't know what to do? I don't know what to do either. So basically you derail your entire metabolism. Now you're not delivering enough energy to your body.

So your thyroid doesn't know what to do anymore. It doesn't have enough energy. and neither is pituitary, nor does your adrenal gland. I'm giving you a simple example of how the inflammation seeps out, and now your other organs also become inflamed. The fire sweeps through the forest and now starts to burn other areas as well. Now your whole metabolism is screwed up, and this is where one problem of fat hormones going out of whack

because the inflammation rapidly spreads to other organs, and now your hormones are all messed up. And because hormones, by the way, also influence your decision-making, your clarity of brain decision-making, when your hormones are out of whack, whether it's due to inflammation at a younger age, or whether it's due to menopause, now your hormones are also out of whack, you might not be making the same lifestyle decisions and even choosing the right kinds of foods to eat that you might otherwise be making if you were clearer of mind. So this is actually how one thing is connected to the other. We cannot reduce the issues of healthy hormones and

healthy fat and healthy glands simply to one hormone. When we want to understand how something is profound in metabolism and inner health goes, we have to look at how everything is interconnected. If somebody was dealing with hormone imbalances, with thyroid issues, with PCOS, with things like that, is there anything pragmatically that you would recommend they do to get to that right-sized amount of fat in their body? It takes time to tame your body fat and burn it down. And there may be medications that you need to prevent your hormonal swings from creating like dangerous chaos in your body. You're in that situation, you should definitely talk to your doctor to make sure that somebody is supervising what's actually happening. But for you as an individual, the one thing you should be

doing right away is putting out that forest fire. So lowering inflammation by anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyles very important. There's foods we can talk about that are anti-inflammatory. Other lifestyle factors. We know good gut health lowers inflammation. Got to work on that. What about physical activity? Absolutely. Regular physical activity. Even though while you're working out or involved at a hike or something, inflammation goes up a little bit. It turns out that right afterwards, inflammation goes way down. Very important and good for your body. Sleep, good quality sleep helps your body lower inflammation by itself. So eat, move, sleep, smile. Stress is another thing. When you're super stressed out, it's like pouring gasoline onto the embers of a fire. The flames are going to just shoot up

and get bigger. There are lots of different ways that these might need to be approached. But the one thing that every individual can do for themselves at home outside of the doctor's office is to actually make moves that lowered your inflammation. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes,

every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein.

We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, mitochondria, does. It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system,

your muscles. One study found that taking mitopure increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change and exercise routine. It's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithin A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com

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Get 15% off your first order, plus free shipping at bollandbranch.com slash Liz Moody with code Liz Moody. That's Bullen Branch, B-O-L-L-L-B-Range.com slash Liz Moody. Use code Liz Moody to unlock 15% off. Exclusions apply. Can you give us three of your favorite specific things we can do to lower inflammation, whether it's a specific food, a specific practice, just three things that we can add in? I like to start with something that is all around us that people don't often think about,

which is lowering stress. We're all under stress. It could be financial stress, relationship stress. It could be stress on the war, stress on the economy, whatever it is. There's a lot of stress. By the way, unplugging, because we get this like news feed every couple of minutes of something else inflammatory, you know, some news that makes our brain go crazy. I just want to pause there. I think it's actually very important.

I don't think a lot of people make the connection. They make the connection between like doom scrolling and their mental health, but you're making a really important connection, I think, between doom scrolling and our physical health. And I think that's a really important reframe for people to recognize. 100%, Liz. We call it doom scrolling, because doom scrolling almost implies that we can't stop scrolling down to keep on looking at the news. That is also true. But we're being fed inflammatory information all the time. Mindfulness, to me, is importance for lowering stress. Part of mindfulness is minding ourselves. And taking that quiet time to be introspective and not to be distracted with good news or bad news

from the outside world, but especially bad news or things that can whip us up. You ask a couple of things. I would say, number one, unplug, take a little bit of me time and try to lower your stress. And if you can connect to a friend or a family member you really like that can actually make you feel better by talking about something that you're passionate about that doesn't whip you up, that's also a good thing. So number one is way overlooked the importance of kind of mental calmness with body inflammation and physical disabilities that can actually arise from that.

That's number one. Number two, I like to drink tea. Tea actually is anti-inflammatory. Tea also has bioactives like these polyphenols, they're active natural chemicals, that burn away extra body fat. it turns out that the polyphenols in green tea, black tea, u-long tea, puir tea, there's a whole range of teas I read about in my book, actually helped to fight your body fat, and it also lowers your stress levels as well,

and lowers inflammation. So this whole idea of like, oh, I'm going to drink some tea, and I can be a little calmer. Calm down here. Let me get you some tea. The ancient wisdom actually plays out now. The science is helping to explain. So I think tea is another great thing.

And then, of course, we should be eating more plant-based whole foods prepared in healthy ways. I usually try to focus on what you should do rather than what you shouldn't do. But because of what you're asking me, like what are three things we should be doing to lower inflammation and help harmful body fat. I have to say that's important to cut down or cut out as much as you can, these ultra-processed foods that have artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavorings, artificial colorings. Because all those things whip up our body, whip up the inflammation. that slow down our metabolism, help us grow extra body fat that suppresses our metabolism as well. And so it's all in the wrong direction. And the great news is our body is quite resilient.

So if you stop eating your box of whatever, you name the product, instantly, your metabolism begins to heal itself. So cutting out or swapping out some of those harmful ultra-process foods is another really important step. And if I had to name one thing I would swap out, I would say it's soda. cans of soda, either regularly sweetened or artificially sweetened. It doesn't matter. Both of those are damaging your metabolism. When you cut down your soda, your metabolism will immediately start to heal itself. And do you feel the same about the, like, healthy new sodas with stevia and erythritol and things

like that? Jury is out. Okay. I can tell you that this is a very fast-moving area of research. are spartame, sucralose saccharine, these non-nutrative sweeteners. It gives you the sweet hit in your mouth, goes down, and there's no sugar in it. There's no glucose. Basically, your blood glucose doesn't rise, but ironically, your metabolism gets haywire,

and you gain weight anyway. Now, why is that? It's because some of these real synthetic sweeteners, factory-made sweeteners, actually poison our gut microbiome. When our gut microbiome is poisoned by these artificial sweeteners, What actually happens is that because our gut bacteria, healthy gut bacteria, streamlines our metabolism and lowers our inflammation. Basically, they can't do it anymore.

So our inflammation goes up. Our blood cholesterols go up. And our metabolism starts to teeter and go off the rails. And eventually our blood sugar will actually go up. And so what about the natural sweeteners? Stevia, monk fruit. This is where the active research is. And when it comes to stevia, by the way,

just because the box or the bag says stevia on the front, and you're wheeling your grocery cart quickly through because you're in a hurry. Be very careful. Read the ingredient label because many products that say that there's stevia when you actually read the ingredients, also of other things that are actually in there that you don't want to have as well. We need to keep our eye on a new research to see if stevia, monk fruit, orthodal, all those are actually as safe as we hope they are, but they may not be. And also make sure that whatever you think is a naturally artificial,

sweetener or natural substitute for a sweetener, there isn't anything else added in there that you wouldn't want to put in your body. That's interesting. So we're sort of waiting to see what the effect is of those things on our microbiome. I've never heard it framed in that way. Yeah. There's 39 trillion bacteria in our gut, mostly is the tail end of our gut. And they are like our house pets. If you have a dog, if you have a cat, you have a parakeet or a goldfish, every day you're mindful of giving them some flakes, some seeds, some kibble. And if you didn't feed your animal, it'd be a big problem. Like they'd be really hungry and bark at you or scratch at you.

And that's basically what happens when we're really not giving good quality food. If you decide that you're going to feed your pet really poor quality crap every single day, the crappiest cheapest, junkiest food, your pet's not going to do well. They're going to get sick. You're going to be taking them to the vet. and eventually they're not going to live as long as you would like them to live. Same deal with our gut microbiome. If we actually start to feed them really poor quality food, those ultra-processed foods, added sugar,

or lots of alcohol, all those high salt diets, all those things actually will degrade that ecosystem. You won't notice it much, you might notice a little bit, that if this is what you do, day in and day out, month after month, year in and year out, guarantee you, you will actually not feel as good because your gut microbiome gets degraded, and then your metabolism and overall health gets degraded, and the inflammation goes up in your body. All right. For the T, is there a dose that the research suggests is the minimum amount that we actually need to have this positive inflammation impact on our body?

Right. Okay. So I will tell you that the idea of food doses, what's a dose of food you need if you're going to treat food as medicine? How much do we need? Well, I can tell you from the studies that been done, a human study that have been done, if you want to lower your risk of cancer, for example, green tea consumption, anywhere from one cup to three cups has been associated with a significant lowering of risk of colon cancer,

breast cancer, lung cancer, esophageal cancer, anywhere from 10 to 15 percent to 30 percent in some cases, just by drinking one to three cups of green tea. Now, what about your metabolism? It turns out that studies have been done to look at the impact of drinking tea on your metabolism. And most of those studies use four cups of tea a day. Once in the morning, once before lunch, once after lunch, and once before dinner or with dinner. And those four cups of tea per day have been shown to get rid of harmful visceral fat. Also improve your blood sugar levels, lower your insulin spikes, and also help your gut microbiome lower inflammation as well.

That's roughly the dose. And don't forget, everyone's a little bit different. And of course, the quality of the tea matters as well. When you're drinking tea, I like to just use a regular plain tea bag or loose leaf tea. Sometimes there's powdered teas, but I don't like to add different flavorings to them. I don't want that coconut flavor or the lavender flavor because we don't know if they're actual artificial flavor, synthetic flavorings that are actually doing it. When you go for the drive-by and you get that seasonal pumpkin-flavored shot of whatever, I can tell you that the coffee is probably really good. It's got a healthy metabolism activating, fat-biting,

substance called chlorogenic acid. Organic has more. But the moment you start putting the whipped cream, the sugar, the sweetener, the syrup, the pumpkin flavor, all of a sudden you've added all these additives that actually could be harmful for your gut microbiome. We mentioned this on the last podcast that we did together.

But if you're a caffeine-free baby like me, caffeine-free tea, coffee, all of that is just as good, right? You just need to get water processed. That's absolutely correct. So don't worry about the caffeine. You can always find a water processed coffee or tea in which the water has been used to remove the caffeine, which then keeps your polyphenols that you want still in your tea. Love that. I always like to ask about the dose because I feel like it's one of the criticisms we often hear of food as medicine is like, oh, you'd have to eat 5,000 pounds of blueberries to have any effect. And I do think, something that your work shows really nicely is that the amounts that you need to have studied

researched effects are amounts that really fit into your daily diet. And you don't need to eat a lot. That's the power of food is medicine. Our body is designed to process lots of diverse inputs in ways that can be helpful. One of the most dramatic, by the way, Liz, I saw as a study from Portugal, University of Porto. They were looking at women from 18 to 25 and studying the effects in their metabolism and body fat of tomatoes. And you know how much tomato they studied?

Just one ripe tomato a day before lunch. That's it for a month. They only got one tomato. And guess what? At the end of a month of eating just one tomato a day, their visceral fat actually shrank and their blood cholesterol actually got better as well. One single tomato.

What's in a tomato is called lycopene. Lycopene's a bioactive. This is a chemical that likes to dissolve in oil. As a researcher, we call those kinds of chemicals, natural chemicals, fat soluble. And indeed, when you eat a tomato, chew, chew, chew, swallow. It's in your stomach. And then the lycopene gets absorbed into your bloodstream beyond the stomach after it's ingested. You know where the lecopene goes?

It goes right to your body fat. Where it fights the fat. Pretty cool, right? One tomato a day is a dose you. you need. University of Toronto, they studied white beans, ready to eat canned white beans. It does not get any cheaper than that. Go to the middle aisle, get your coupons in, and you get some cans of white beans. Five cups of canned, ready to eat, white beans per week. That's five out of seven days. Okay. You add that to your diet, and it actually, over the course of a month, shrinking that

harmful visceral fat. All those other parameters improve. Inflammation levels actually go down. more isn't always more. Sometimes less actually is more. Last thing you mentioned just going back to the beginning was the idea of brown fat. I want to dive into that for a second. With brown fat is the idea that more is more, like the more brown fat we can get, the better. And what are some daily practices that we can do to increase our brown fat?

Okay. I want to take a moment to talk about the history of brown fat because I think it's so interesting. Let's go back to the 1700s. In Europe, there was a naturalist, a guy who studied the natural world, the living nature. His name was Conrad Gessner. Conrad Gessner was studying hibernating animals. And the animal he studied was called a marmit, an alpine marmot. Alpine meaning mountain. And this thing was like a woodchuck. And it was hibernating. And when he actually was dissecting this to see what kind of stuff he had inside it, he recognized the arm bones and a leg bones and a liver and a heart. heart, but then he found this little brown thing between his shoulder blades that he could not identify. And it was called a hiberoma because of hibernating animals, didn't know what his purpose was. Later on, other hibernating animals, bats and squirrels and other things were also found to have a hibernoma between their shoulder blades. And in fact, even human babies also have this little lump between their shoulder blades that's brownish. And it wasn't.

until 1930s that a scientist at UCLA, at that point, microscopes became really powerful microscopes in a lab. And so he was able to take one of these hibernomas and he looked underneath the microscope and he goes, oh my gosh, that's actually fat, except this color brown. Well, now he can dive even deeper to find out why that kind of brown fat is brown. And what does it do? Well, it turns out in hibernating animals, these hibernomas, this brown fat, actually generate. rates heat. There are these little things inside brown fat cells called mitochondria. They're like nuclear batteries. When they turn on, they emit heat. So why did these hibernating animals need to have lots of brown fat? Because they're in cold weather. They are hibernating. They eat all fall long to

stock up for the winter. They're taking energy from their food. Their metabolism is packing it into their fuel tanks. They're getting big and round. And now when they're sleeping or hibernating, it's not really asleep, they're hibernating. Now the cold weather turns on the brown fat, whoosh, just like your gas range. And guess what it does? It draws down the fuel from the white fat, the stored fat, to create heat. So humans actually do have this as well. The amazing thing is that for a long time, we in the medical community thought,

eh, humans aren't going to need brown fat. We don't hibernate. We live in houses, you know, with thermostats. And it's always 69 or 70 degrees. We don't need anything like that. Turns out we were completely wrong. And this is what I love about the kind of research I do is I get to take a look at what we always used to think and then ask, is science teaching us a new lesson? Is there a new chapter that we get to open up that goes, oh my gosh, this is how it really is.

This is a really fascinating story. Human brown fat was discovered in adults in Boston when a woman walked in with a tumor in her chest and they wanted to do a biopsy. which is normal, and also do a scan. Well, the first decade of the 2000s, after the millennia, we actually had PET scans, P-E-T. Pet scans are scans for metabolism. We often use it for cancer patients because tumors are very highly metabolically active,

and so it's easy to pick up a tumor. So this woman had a biopsy and a PET scan, and man, did that little chest tumor light up? Holy cow, it's very, very metabolicly active. Boom, let's go biopsy. Let's go get it. Now, under the microscope, they found, oh, it's not a cancer after all. Okay.

But what it was when they looked at it in the microscope, oh, my gosh, it was a brown fat tumor. It was just like a mass, wasn't malignant, wasn't cancer, made a brown fat. And so the researcher that looked at this basically said, wow, so PET scans can pick up brown fat. So he went and looked at thousands of PET scans from the hospital medical record room in the radio. room, pulled them all out and started to look for this brown fat. He was like, well, maybe we just missed it because we weren't thinking about it. We weren't looking for it. We didn't know. And some people had it. Some people didn't have it. Some people had it. Some people didn't have it. And then he said, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hybernation, cold weather. So he found that everybody

who had brown fat lighting up on their pet scan in the hospital. And remember, this is Boston. So it gets cold winters. All the people who had the brown fat light up on the pet scan were having their scans done during the winter months. Now let's go back to what you might have heard, your listeners might have heard, cold immersion therapy, cold plunge therapy, right? It activates your metabolism and helps you burn off fat. This is the reason why. When you get plunged into cold water, or if you're a telephone line worker in Minnesota and you're exposed to pretty cold weather for a lot of the year, that cold weather is going to trigger on the brown fat in your body, and it lights up like a Christmas tree. So what's interesting is,

is we have the brown fat's hidden in plain sight in our body. We can't see it lighting up until we're exposed to cold or certain foods will also turn on your brown fat. And that's the cool part. We can eat to activate our fat. And when that brown fat is activated, the brown fat fights the white fat. And it actually burns down your fat and allows your metabolism to rise. And is the idea that more is more when it comes to.

to brown fat because modern society has created more of that white fat for most of us than we would want in our bodies. So we're kind of wanting to hack this system of our brown fat and create more of it. Well, that's right. You know, that expanding fat I told you about that outstrips the split supply gets bigger and bigger and the fuel tanks, that's all white fat. And so when we overeat and we need more fat and we build up our fat, it's like we're a hybridating animal that never has to go into the cave because it's never cold. We just spilled up a ton of body fat, and the brown fat doesn't grow like that. The brown fat we're born with. It is what it is. Now, it's true. There are some foods that can actually coax white fat to become more brown. It's called Beijing. By the way, a great way to

remember brown fat is that those mitochondria, those nuclear batteries that actually create the fuel, there's a lot of those batteries packed into brown fat. Brown fat's paper thin, but those mitochondria are packed with iron. What does iron do? I like if you take a bunch of nails made out of iron, you put them outside, what do they do? They rust. They oxidize. They turn brown. That's why brown fat is brown.

It's packed with iron. It's oxidized. And it's like a bunch of rusty nails, except this bunch of rusty nails can actually help to burn down harmful white fat in order to be able to improve your metabolism. Okay. So you've mentioned foods a few times. What are some of those foods that encourage the production of brown fat? Let's start with the archetypal food that activates. brown fat. Are you somebody who likes chili peppers or spicy food? All right, me too. All right. So you and I can go

out and we can have some spicy food together, right? So spicy food made with chili peppers have a natural substance called capsaicin. Capsacin activates the taste receptor on our tongue. It's not actually a tape receptor. It's called Tripp v1. If the spicy chemical in chili peppers is like a key, then on our tongue is the lock, that as soon as the key goes into lock, our tongue sends a message to our brain. It goes, ooh, spicy. I like that. And what our brain does is it releases a hormone called norepinephrine. And that hormone comes from our brain and it travels down the nerves in our neck.

Those nerves activate brown fat. In fact, the next time, Liz, you sit down with a plate of spicy food. What I want you to do is to close your eyes and try to be very calm and still and put the spicy food on your tongue a little bit, just the spicy stuff, close your eyes, and you'll actually feel your brain releasing the hormone. You'll feel it going down your neck. It's a cool feeling, and then it's activating your brown fat. Now, we actually didn't even know how it activates your brown fat, because when those norapenephyne-hephyrins hits the brown fat, it's like an electrical wire that turns on a light. And we even know what's inside the light switch in order to be able to

turn on. It's basically a beta adrodenic receptor that operates something called uncoupling protein one, Bada b'a-bing, bada-boom, whoosh. Now you've gone click, click, click on your stove and goes, now you get the flame going up. Okay, so the brown fat is burning down the fuel, consuming the fuel from your white fat. So chili peppers are a great example, but it doesn't stop there. We also mentioned beans, we'll do it.

Brassica vegetables, broccoli, of course, cauliflower, of course, kale, of course. But let's talk about broccoli rub. Let's talk about bok choy. Let's talk about escarol. Lots and lots of different kinds of, Leafy green vegetables, well, actually, the sulfurapines that are in the leafy green vegetables, they turn on your brown fat. So that's pretty cool. Chili peppers, soy, edamame will also do the same thing.

Coffee, and you can remove the caffeine, it'll still do the same thing. There's something called chlorogenic acid and coffee that triggers it. Three to four cups of coffee a day has been what's been studied. Tea, the catacans, a polyphenol and teas, EGCG, does the same thing. Activate your brown fat. strawberries, two and a half cups of strawberries a day. That's a pretty substantial pile of strawberries to have, but you can put that into a smoothie, boom. The point is that you don't need a lot of food, but a lot of these things you can find in your grocery store, definitely in the produce section,

but even in the middle aisle, dried mushrooms, chili pepper flakes, buckwheat, soba noodles, little tin fish, that tin seafood is a delicacy. We'll also do the same thing because of the healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Apple cider vinegar, the acetic acid in vinegar will also light up your brown fat and prevent your fat cells from expanding. And so the first part of the book, I explain some of this jaw-dropping stuff about body fat, things that we didn't really know, but now we know. And then the middle of the book, I literally take the reader on a tour of the grocery store. It's kind of like when you were a kid and you sat in your mom's grocery cart and she's pushing you around and I whisper in your ear what you should take from the different aisles to put

into the cart that can burn down harmful body fat. And guess what? Most of those ingredients are found in the recipes of either Mediterranean cooking or Asian-style cooking. So this is not about deprivation elimination restriction. This is really about leaning into the foods that have been revered generationally as delicious, tasty foods in some of the healthiest food cultures in the world. I love that part of your book, too, because I think a big part of the conversation about fat in this country, at least, is about privilege. and one of the parts of that part of your book that you talk about is like, yes, there's a lot of great stuff at the edges of the supermarket,

but there's also a lot of really incredible foods that are more affordable, more accessible in the inner parts of the supermarket that I think a lot of the people in the health world would tell you to avoid. That's right. We used to always say, I even said this before, shop the perimeter of the grocery store, avoid the middle sections. That's an oversimplification. In fact, the chapter of my book that I take people into the middle aisles, It's like a true treasure hunt, but what I want to do is to tell you there are lots of crappy foods, ultra-processed foods that will harm your metabolism. Look for the real gold and don't make a mistake and pick up the fool's gold, the stuff that's marketed to you.

There's a million things, lentils, different kinds of beans, tree nuts. All these things you can find in the middle aisle actually have human data that they help you fight body fat and ignite your metabolism. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier. That's where Marley Spoon comes in. What I love about this company and what's different than all of the other companies out there that are doing like stuff in the same arena, is that you can customize your choices based on the effort that you want to put in. So if you want them to send you ingredients, so you can make your own 20-minute meal and, like,

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That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. Can you talk to me about the notion that calories are all that matters? Basically, the notion of calories in equals calories out. Is that a myth or is that true? It's a principle that's true, which is that we do take in calories and we do burn calories. The math goes on in our body all the time.

And it's similarly true that if we don't take in as many calories that will have less energy, and if we don't actually burn as many calories, we'll accumulate calories as long as we're keeping on eating. That's, I would say, basic arithmetic, and it's true. But I think it does get a lot more complicated to that because calorie counting far undervalues the quality of the calories. You know, a thousand calorie salad, it's got the same number of calories as a thousand calorie candy bar, but clearly the quality of those calories are very, very different. Okay, well, what's the quality of the calories? Well, it turns out that it's really not about the calories themselves.

Calorie just happens to be the measure of energy that's in the food. But think about in the salad, there's all these bioactive. The lycopene we talked about in the tomato, or the quercetin in the capers, or the omega-3s in the salmon that you're in. actually put in there, or if it's chicken thighs, vitamin K2. There's lots of other things besides the energy unit. And that's what we talk about calorie dense or high quality calories. It's got other stuff in the food besides the energy unit. When you talk about calories and calorie out, the quality of the food you eat makes a big difference. And by the way, those are the bioactives

that turn on your brown fat that can burn down your white fat, which can activate your metabolism. So at that point, it gets much more complicated than simply calories out. Do you think if somebody is trying to right size their fat in their body and take care of their metabolism, that tracking calories is a important step for them to be taking? When it comes to weight management, I don't think there's a single right number to do. To me, it's a lot of work to track calories. Every time I eat, I got to look it up or take a picture of it and upload it. Oh, gosh, I got enough to do, you know?

rather than count the calories, write down how you feel at the end of the day. More energy, less energy. How are you feeling? And as you adjust your diet, what you should expect is that you're going to actually be feeling better. Anybody who's listening to this can actually do it. It's dirt cheap. This is sort of like the easy, peasy way of translating the science that we've been talking about into something that you can actually measure. What do you think about the notion that we have a weight set point? And once it sets, it's kind of hard to change. Like, When our stem cells are creating more fat cells, are those hard to get rid of? There was a lot of news around this a few years ago.

I feel like when there were some exposés on shows like The Biggest Loser and these really like unhealthy ways to lose weight. And people were saying that essentially, even though these people lost weight, because their weight set point was different, they would have to starve themselves to be able to maintain their results. Right. What you just said has a lot of different components to it. The last one that you just talked about, which is maintaining and,

sustainable weight loss has got to be something that works not only for physiology, but also works for your psychology as well. If you deprive yourself by restricting to and go to extremes to not eat stuff that you really enjoy, the moment you get to stop, guarantee you your brain is going to swing back into action. So I think that the most important thing that I write about my book is the idea that fat control is really very personal. and you have to individualize this to your own sensibilities. Now, you asked about set point, which is actually really important.

Our body is incredibly resilient. Think about our body like a gyroscope. When you were kids, one of those spinning tops, you get it to spin, it just keeps on worrying. It's hard to knock over. And our body is kind of like that. If you actually keep your body at a really, really large size over a long period of time, it does actually reset itself to function at that level. So as you lose weight, it takes a while for your body to reset to a new level, which is why weight cycling, ultra low, then back to normal.

If you can't sustain it, you're going to bounce back, and you're going to bounce back to wherever your abnormal set point probably was. That's why when you find a way that you can actually slowly lose weight and prolong it for a long period of time, because it's something you can get behind, taste great, align with who you are as an individual, your personal taste. Now your set point will reset itself. And that's what you want to do. You want the thermostat to reset itself. It's like if you're used to being in a room that's really hot, you know, 80 degrees, like something really hot. And then obviously you're put into a cold room. As soon as no one's looking, you've got to turn the temperature back up, right?

That's what happens. But on the other hand, if you start lowering the heat in ways that you can get behind, pretty soon your body's going to get used to and reset what its expectations are. Same thing with the thermostat, the set point. the equilibrium in our body. So on a physiological level, if our stem cells create new fat cells, are we able to get rid of those fat cells? Eventually they will. I mean, they'll shrink down once you actually burn the fuel, and then you've heard the phrase called autophagy, where basically your body just kind of cleans up all the extra cells that it's not using.

But it'll keep them around if it thinks it needs them. So that's why you want that new set point to say, eh, screw it. We don't need those guys anymore. The autophagy vacuum cleaner will come and just take them all away. How much do our genetics matter when it comes to the amount of fat that we're creating and storing on our bodies? Our metabolism is hardwired, so it's not that we can blame our parents for a slow or fast metabolism, although there clearly are disorders of metabolism that you can be born with that are very severe.

Most of the time these kids that are born with these inborn errors in metabolism, they don't make it to beyond five or six years of age. not capable of you surviving. But that said, it's not just genes for your metabolism, but it could be genes for behavior. You know, if you have genetic predisposition for depression, as a teenager or a young adult or later in adulthood even, you might be depressed. You might be more likely to not exercise, not get good quality sleep. You might harm your gut microbiome with addictive behaviors. We know addiction actually has a genetic component. You're addicted to soda. You're addicted to something. You're addicted to drugs. And now you're not even

eating regularly, forget about leafy greens, you're undernourished it completely. Now you're actually harming all those other systems in your body. So to a great extent, genetics matter, but not in the way that we thought, which is, I got to blame my mom and dad for my slow metabolism. Not that simple. That's interesting. Because I do feel like I have a very similar body shape. I store fat in very similar places when I look at like my mom and my aunt. What's happening there? So body shape is a completely different but fascinating thing. So baby fat is distributed in pretty much the same way, whether you're a boy or a girl. As a young kid, five years old, six years old, seven years old, most children look the same. They're pretty much like a tall rectangle. The fed is distributed

it evenly. And it isn't until you get pre-adolescence to adolescence where hormones start to make that difference where men actually grow more visceral fat within a tube of their belly. Women grow less. So that's why men at the end of the day get a little bit bigger around the middle than women in the middle. Women's hips actually get bigger and the shape of the buttocks and the thighs actually develop a little more fat. Men actually develop more mass, including fat mass on the upper body as well. So during adolescence and into young adulthood, 1920, 21, that's where the distribution starts to change.

And yes, just like the colors of your puppy's spots are going to be informed by where the spots were on the mom, so too will your propensity to be able to deposit fat and shape your body be very similar or likely to be similar to how your mom's was. I just think it's an important thing to always be, aware of when we're having these conversations because it's like no matter what I do, no matter how much hot peppers I eat or cold showers I take or my calorie deficits or anything like that,

I'm still probably going to have this shape as my sort of base shape. I do feel like when we're talking about a lot of this stuff, we're talking about optimizing our fat levels and trying to make our health as good as possible, but we need to acknowledge that we're working within a certain playing field and we're not going to suddenly switch to somebody else's playing field. Well, that's right. And that's okay. And this is why physical appearances, this outer appearances, are very different than inner health. And body size isn't an automatic scorecard for whether we're actually in good shape or not. I think it's very important for us to proudly own who we are as individuals, right? This is one of the big challenges I think we have in modern society anyway,

is that there are standards set by others that actually make everyone feel that they need to aspire to that or that they're hopeless and not being able to attain somebody else's standards. And one of the things that I write about in my book is that however you set out for your journey towards health, from where you're starting from, the most important thing is to know yourself and be true to who you are. And that includes your shape, which is informed by your parents and, you know, your family and your background. and it's not just okay, it should be great. And that's something that you should be happy about. But what you do want to do is to optimize who you are based on all the features that make

up you. I love that. I have to ask your thoughts on two things that have been really prevalent in the news recently. We have Ozzympic and then we have the new American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations around childhood obesity. So weight loss medications are now being offered to people as young as 12 years old. and people as young as 13 are being recommended to be considered for weight loss surgery.

I would love your thoughts on medical interventions and how we're talking about weight versus how we're talking about these health notions of fat that we've talked about in this conversation. Right. Okay. So first, let me put on my doctor's hat. I'm not giving medical advice here, but I am actually giving you a professional opinion here, which is that there are medical situations, circumstances,

on an individual basis where at any age, including a younger age, the body size, body weight, body mass can actually cause dangerous medical complications. And for those children who are in that position, or adults, frankly, these weight loss drugs might be appropriate and are worth considering and certainly worth having a conversation with your doctor about. It's very hard to generalize because a particular physician will know their patient well enough and all the ins and outs to be able to make hopefully the best possible recommendation. And by the way, if it seems equivocal or you're not confident in the answer, go get a second opinion.

And if you're not comfortable with that, get a third opinion as well. I can tell you, said, doctor, I respect patients more when they actually take the responsibility of asking for different opinions. I am never insulted by having more opinions. I welcome it, actually. There are some medical reasons to actually, for all these, whether it's surgery or pills. That's my caveat. But now I'm going to take off my doctor's hat and just tell you really how I feel about this. I think that today's obsession with prescription weight loss drugs is dangerous.

It's not dangerous because you're losing weight. It's dangerous because it's being driven by the consumer demanding something from their doctor when they may not medically need it. If they medically need it, they should get it. But that's a one-on-one conversation. And by the way, most of these weight-loss drugs like Wagovi and OZempec, they are developed as diabetes medications. And do you know that this trend is so intense now?

The demand for these drugs from people who don't need to lose that weight that way is so intense that people with diabetes have a shortage of getting their drug for diabetes because they're being taken over by people who have used them to actually lose weight without having to do that. Just sort of on a moralistic level, like, that's not good. That's wrong. And not for a good reason, because you don't medically need it. If you haven't tried the things that I'm talking about, eating the right foods and exercise and sleep, stress management, those are all things you should try and exhaust those before you decide what next steps you need to take. Plus, we don't really know what the long-term consequences of this are. And so because as a doctor, I can tell you,

good physicians should be operating on a professional code where they're looking at whether or not a patient needs a treatment and they're actually trying to do the calculus in their head. Well, should I be recommending this or not? Do they need it or not? And if a patient is demanding something from me that I don't agree with, I will try to understand their point of view and I'll try to explain to them why they don't need it and what else they might try first so that I can try to communicate and strike up. up a dialogue so they understand that better. The importance of a physician is to be able to use

that professional education and judgment and experience to be able to help patients decide what's appropriate, even when they want or demanding something. And for me, I prefer to reserve those medications for the people who really need them, starting with the diabetics, but then evaluating in people who appropriately have morbid obesity or really significant problems with their weight, I would actually consider that. But that's not. the common situation. So that's why this kind of media fad, this overhyping of these drugs, to me, I find very disturbing. The question I always have about things like Ozempic is we've talked about today how complicated the equation of fat in our bodies is. It's impacting and

impacted by our hormones, our microbiome, our inflammation levels, all these things. And the thing I don't understand, and maybe you do, is how Zemphic is actually interacting with all of that, or if it's just causing fat loss in a way that it won't positively impact all of these health things that we're trying to impact? These drugs, they affect our brain. They don't directly affect our fat. They affect our brain. There's a switch in our brain in the center of our brain that when it gets triggered, when you push that button, it tells our body that we're full. So what OZEPIC does, this whole class of drugs do, GLP1 agonist, they keep on pushing that button. So you feel like you're not hungry.

You lose interest in eating. You can be presented with a beautiful meal, your favorite food, on your birthday. And if you're on these things, you're going to get, eh, never mind. I'm not interested. For me, I love this idea of tasting foods. I have great respect for the cultural traditions of food. What a friggin bummer man to actually have, just lose interest in your favorite foods. And so I think that's another reason.

It further separates us. from our humanity, as if we need another thing in today's world that kind of take us further and further away for who we are as people. And so I understand why people would be interested in this. It has the promise and actually the effect of kind of being a one-shot wonder. And you can lose quite a lot of weight. It's just when you take all these things together, plus we don't know what the long-term effects are, you know, plus we're depriving people who actually need the medicines for their health and takes away the joy of eating. I just think the whole equation solves the wrong way. I will say that I think you take one of the best approaches of like food

is fuel and we have great evidence for that, but also food is one of the great pleasures of life. And I think you married those two things really nicely, which I personally really appreciate. Next, I really just want to touch on the notion of protein right now. There's a lot of talk about how very, very high protein diets are the missing component for fat loss. What do you think about consuming large amounts of protein and how that would impact our metabolism? Well, protein contributes to the buildup of our muscles and our physical structure. So, in fact, having too low protein levels is not a healthy position to be.

We need protein in order to have strength. and especially in an aging population, losing body fat is one thing. Losing muscle mass is really dangerous. In fact, the loss of muscle mass is actually a greater risk for your overall health for mortality than actually having too much body fat. Two little muscle mass is worse than having too much body fat. All right. Now, if you have little muscle mass and too much body fat, you're like really in trouble.

So one of the things that I think that's important to keep in mind is that it's separate but related. So you do want to actually have. a good protein mix. You should have healthy forms of protein. And there is also very exciting new research being done to look at previously undiscovered properties of different kinds of protein as well. I recently read that a protein that's found in the red blood cells of animals like cows that you would have in red meat, for example, actually crosses the blood brain barrier and it actually lowers inflammation in the brain. This has been shown in animals.

and they're beginning to look at it in humans as well. I'm not espousing the people go out to eat a carnivore diet, but what I'm saying is that this is actually part of the research. We can't afford to oversimplify. Every time we oversimplify, we find out around the corner that's something we saw it was so easy, it wasn't so easy. This is how I approach it. Keep your mind open, you know,

keep those windows of open, and pay attention to good research that's being done. And we might just be surprised that the things that bring us joy are also the things that are very healthy for us. We just have to do it in moderation. Love that. But you think with the research as it stands right now, prioritizing protein if we're trying to right size the fat in our body

is a thing well worth doing. I think having solid amounts of protein in your diet is well worth doing. Love it. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your amazing new book? My new book is called Eat to Be Your Diet. It's not a diet book. It's an anti-diet book to show you how the new science of the metabolism, like we've talked about, allows us to have to have.

have the power to make choices and eat foods and live a life that we actually enjoy that's informed by science to fight harmful body fat. Start from the inside. Don't deprive yourself of food. It is time to rediscover the joy of eating. And you can find that wherever books are sold. And you also have resources on your website as well, right? That's right. Please come from my website, Dr.D.R. William Lee.com. Sign up for a free newsletter. I give out all kinds of free information every week. There's new things that I'm seeing. I try to get out to the world. and for people who really, really are kind of hardcore, want to learn about things, I give these free masterclasses that come up, and I've had tens of thousands of people come from all over

the world to actually hear me talk about some of the latest discoveries, and sometimes they'll do some food demos as well. So it's a lot of fun to do, and I hope to see everyone there. Love that. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Lee. This was wonderful, as always. Thanks very much, Liz. It's a pleasure to be on. Thanks for having me. I found this conversation with Dr. Lee immensely helpful in reframing the role that body fat plays in my life, and I hope it gave you some tools that will benefit your approach to your body. I do think that I need to do a larger interview about Ozempic at some point. There's really interesting new research about it and addiction that I'd like to dive into,

but I thought that Dr. Lee's points about it were valid and fascinating. If you want more from Dr. Lee, definitely check out the previous episodes that he's been on. I will link them in the show notes. And if you like this episode, please share it with someone you think would benefit. Shoot them a link on Slack or text them or mention it the next time that you see them. It is a win-win. You get somebody to talk about everything with, and it is the single best way to support the podcast, and it is so, so appreciated.

If you're new here, make sure that you are following the podcast on whatever platform you like to listen on. Just go to the main podcast page. It's the one that lists all of the healthier together episodes, and you'll see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts. That way, all of the new episodes will show up right in your feed so you will

will never miss out on one. And you are definitely going to want to be following along because we have some amazing episodes coming up, including a juicy sex and relationship tips episode and one all about the best healthy travel tips for summer. So make sure that you are following so you do not miss out. Okay, I love you and I will see you next Wednesday on the next episode of the healthier together podcast. I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years. And I am so upset. with it. I've been telling all of my friends to get it, so now I need to tell you guys. Here's some science first. Your skin isn't just getting older. It's being actively broken down

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