Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Foods Every Woman Should Eat with Dr. William Li

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Dr. William Li delves into his research on how certain foods can impact cancer, especially breast cancer, by cutting off blood supply and supporting the immune system. He emphasizes the importance of considering food as a tool for health, discussing studies that show the effectiveness of foods like soy, matcha, and various fruits and vegetables. They also explore the significance of proper clinical trial designs that include diverse demographics and genders to yield reliable results. Additionally, Dr. Li highlights fascinating findings on gut health, the microbiome, and the role certain bacteria play in health, urging a more holistic approach to treating and preventing diseases through diet. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep247 William W. Li, MD, is an internationally renowned physician, scientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers "Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself" and "Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer." His groundbreaking research has  led to the development of more than 40 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases including diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. His TED Talk, "Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?" has garnered more than 11 million views. Dr. Li has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, Rachael Ray and Live with Kelly & Mark, and he has been featured in USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, O Magazine and more. He is President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, and he is leading global initiatives on food as medicine. For the latest cutting-edge food as medicine science, check out Dr. Li's YouTube Channel. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I have such a deep conversation for you all. I have brought you Dr. William Lee. And if you don't know Dr. Lee, he has written a couple of books. One of my favorite is called Eat to Beat Disease. And you're going to hear him talk a lot about some of the research that he discovered around cancer, specifically breast cancer. we really dove into hormonal cancers. You'll hear us talk a lot about foods you can eat to support hormones and burn fat. So his background and his books on different strategies to use food

as medicine is profound. What I think is the most interesting about Dr. William Lee is really that he originally got his start from a TED talk, like his public start, I should say. He's had a cancer clinic for years, treating patients with cancers. You'll hear he is a researcher deep in researching medications. You'll hear that here in the beginning. So he has a really beautiful balance that you rarely see in a medical doctor where he's got one foot in research, if he had three feet, he had one foot in medication and one foot in lifestyle. So, and his TED talk was actually really life-changing. I remember watching it over a decade ago, and he was one of the first to bring to us this idea that it's all about the blood supply to a tumor that matters.

And what you're going to hear in this conversation is there are foods that you can eat to cut off that blood supply. And we go deep into breast cancer. So if you want to prevent breast cancer, if you want to know how to manage breast cancer or heal from breast cancer, this is the episode for you, please pass this out into the world. And then from there, we went deep into the microbiome. And you're going to hear at the end, we geeked out on two specific bacteria that help break estrogen down. So for my menopausal women, this is a really important conversation because you're not making as much estrogen as your younger self.

so how that estrogen gets broken down is really important. And there are two bacteria in your gut that will help you do that. And we just geeked out on the foods that will help grow those two bacteria. So he is personable. He is a great storyteller. He is incredibly intelligent. He has this unique lens in which we can look at health through the lens of research and what medication does for the body.

and then what he did is he took all of that and asked himself where can food be medicine and then he applied it clinically. So it's a really, really cool conversation. What I'm going to tell you here is that what I love about the way he teaches is he sets you up to understand why the foods he's recommending are so powerful. In a world where we have social media that people just want to be spoon-fed. Like, just tell me what to eat so that I can be a better version of myself. Where Dr. Lee and I really connect is that we want you to understand the why. So please listen all the way through because the first half of this conversation is really setting you up to understand why these foods should not be dismissed.

Why these foods become your true health care. He talks a lot. There's a statement he has in here that just I couldn't agree more with. which is when you go to your doctor's office, you're getting sick care. And when you come home and you look at your refrigerator and pantry, that's where healthcare exists. So listen all the way through so you get the depth of what he and I are talking about. And I am so proud to bring you this conversation.

Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. So I'm just going to start off, Dr. Lee, by not just welcoming you, but I'm maybe one of the original people who saw your TED talk years ago. And it was largely because I had a patient that I loved so dearly that had cancer. and we were trying to work with lifestyle and your TED talk came out and I was trying to, you know, take your concepts and turn it into food ideas. So I just, I'm a huge fan of your work and I, of course, have to welcome you to my podcast, but I have to tell you how much I love that TED talk. Is it the

thing that kind of launched you into the social media world? Yeah, no, thanks for having me on. And thank you for your kind words about my TED talk. I had no idea the impact. Pact of TED in 2010 when I gave that talk. I think it's great to give everyone an opportunity to orate, to explain, and to try to show their enthusiasm. As much as the knowledge and the content is really giving people a chance to communicate. At the time, my whole career was really based on biotech and helping to create new treatments that could move the needle in big ways, in cancer, healing wounds and diabetes and reversing blindness or preventing vision loss. And it was really because of the success in that area.

And I don't remember how many was that the one I gave the TED Talk. But I can tell you that as of today, there are 46 new FDA-approved treatments for cancer, diabetes, wounds, and vision loss I've been involved with. That success really, let me ask, you know, like, what if we're missing the biggest opportunity of all, which is to prevent disease, not just chase it? And no matter what you're chasing it with, you know, drugs always have side effects. They're always expensive and they're not always equitable. And so I thought, you know, maybe there's something I could pull out of my own value system,

which is food is part of our humanity. You know, I grew up in a city in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it was multi-ethnic. I grew up really appreciating how proud people were, you know, if you were a Latvian, if you were Greek, if you were Italian, like everybody was proud of something. And I realized that that's the one thing in a world of differences that joins us is really that we're all connected to our food. So I love that idea. What I also realized is that food as medicine is an ancient concept because until we had pharmaceuticals, that's all we had. We only had food, right?

I mean, and a few other things as well, but they were all diet and lifestyle. We had to use it as medicine. Food was our medicine. We didn't have any choices. And it was our best choice at the time. And what happened, I think, in the last 100 years, let's just throw a dart and hit the board in the early 1930s when antibiotics started coming out and then everything else afterwards. We sort of somehow lost the food as tools in a toolbox and we were only left with advancing technologies. And so what I thought was that let's go back and look at food as a tool in the toolbox.

But we have a huge advantage today, which is that we've got the power of science. to really get down to the nitty gritty, the mechanisms of action, what happens at the cellular level, the molecular level, the genetics. And because my background was in drug development, developing new treatments to overcome cancer, for example, we have those tools to be able to study that. Nobody was throwing food into the system. So that was one of my sort of things was to throw food into drug development system for cancer and seeing what would actually come out.

And when I saw the results, that 50% of the first, foods that I had tested in the very beginning were as or more potent than the cancer drugs that we were developing and testing, like my jaw dropped. And I'm like, you know, this was my eureka moment. This is actually how we actually try to really move forward in a way that connects to people because of our own humanistic connection to food. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

I love that. So, okay, so with that in mind, when we look at women's health, specifically looking at balancing hormones, starving out cancer, burning fat, are there foods that women should be eating to accomplish those three things? Yeah, well, you know, first of all, I'm so glad that your show and your scope is really focused on women's health because as we are all now beginning to recognize and admit most of the medical research that has been done and still a lot today is focused on enrolling men into clinical studies. Now, without going into the politics of gender bias,

the reality is that we're all different, but there's a very distinct difference between males and females, just using that kind of term rather than genderizing it. And it has to do with very important brain, hormonal, organ, you know, our role, you know, as humans on the planet between male and females, is fundamentally different.

Yeah, it's interesting. And so this is one of the reasons why I think it's so important to recognize when you're looking at clinical studies and people are talking about clinical trials. You know, you want to ask that very important question. So in this study, do they include both men and women? You know, one size is a fit all. You know what I find, though, is that nine out of ten times, the answer is it was either a man, it was a mouse or maybe a mixture of men and women.

Like one of the most profound studies on fasting, and I've been in the trenches looking at all the fasting studies for years, was one that said that fasting is not a good tool for weight loss. And I was like, this is crazy. I'm seeing people lose weight left and right. How can this be? So I went immediately to the sample size. And when I went to the sample size in the sample,

it was a good size. It was like a thousand plus people. but you had everything from a 17-year-old man all the way up to a 65-year-old woman. And I can tell you, as a 54-year-old woman, please don't compare my metabolism to a 17-year-old man. Right. Well, I mean, think about it. You're sitting next to a 17-year-old person

of a different gender on an airplane, and you're asking somebody sitting in front of you to see what the differences are, and they're obvious, right? So, you know, but you're bringing up a really, I think, important point for those of us who communicate, information to people who are interested in terms of understanding something about their own bodies. And that is that understanding that we're all different and that these differences matter and trying to be as specific as possible when it comes to gender is actually something that's really,

really useful. It's a super helpful thing. So, okay, so to your question, you know, in my work as a scientist and as a physician, and also as an author, I wrote two books, E to Beat Disease, to beat your diet, both of them became near town's best sellers, I actually try to cone in on the best possible clinical trials for whatever situation. If it's about children, let's make sure it's well designed. If it's about elderly, let's make sure it's well designed, right? The two bookends of our lifespan. If it's about anywhere in between, I think we need to take a look at, you know, are they females in a trial? Are they males in a trial? If they're mixed, it's okay to make some, but then in the interpretation of the results, let's make sure that we're actually analyzing and thinking about that.

Yes. So, we were talking about powering the trial. That's a term for the people who may not be familiar with clinical trial design. The power of a study. All right. We're not talking about, you know, the Avengers and superpower. We're talking about a little bit of basic math, which is that do you have enough people of the same type in a clinical trial so that whatever the results are, the results are fairly reliable from a mathematical and statistical perspective.

And so that's the power of a trial. You got a chance to actually design the power of the trial at the beginning of a study. And so one of the things that happens is if you're mixing men and women, and then you're interpreting them, let's take a look at the male part, let's look at the female part. Well, you might have actually cut the power in half. So then did you need a bigger study to begin with? And this is something that should be done at the very beginning and not just at the end of a study. But that said, what I do is I actually look at, I love to look at trials that actually look at women only.

And oftentimes, you know, those studies that are about the conditions that women care about the most. All right. And think about breast cancer, which is an area that I'm working on a cancer research as well as a vascular blood vessel specialist. But if you look at cancer, this is perhaps one of the most feared diseases of all the diseases out there, very common in women, very common in women. And breast cancer being the one that immediately jumps to mind. And, you know, all of us know somebody that has been touched by cancer, but especially breast cancer. And, you know, the good news is that there are increasingly better treatments for breast cancer, and we're beginning to detect it earlier and earlier.

But nonetheless, what about when it comes to diet and lifestyle? What is it that's actually good for women in the context of breast cancer? What's preventative? What can improve treatment? What can prevent cancer from coming back? And this is actually an area that I think is super fascinating that I wanted to share with you and your audience. And one thing is that there's a lot of urban legends that are out there when it comes to food and health. And food and cancer, you know, back in the day, and you may remember this, is that cancer treatments were either chemo or you had to go over the border in Mexico to go fish out some.

Oh, yeah, no, totally. Africa fits. I live part-time in L.A., and so there was a lot of border crossing to get some crazy alternative. Right. So, but if you fast forward to where we are today, what's wonderful is that we are now not looking at food as medicine as alternatives. We are now actually starting to blend them together to see how they actually interact. And so I want to give you a couple of examples where there's some urban legends about food and breast cancer and how they're, It's kind of like all coming together into a more cohesive story.

Look, people are complex, but we're whole people. We're not little body parts and we're not even cellular parts. Everything kind of works together. So what's important is to integrate our knowledge about things. And particularly when it comes to women, like not to overgeneralize. So here's a thing, breast cancer. Like everyone's heard this, that soy and soy foods are harmful for breast cancer. All right?

I remember hearing this for years. And I remember when I was in medical school and training, my patients who are women with breast cancer, you know, they'd always sort of ask me like, okay, do you have anything you recommend to eat for breast cancer? And then they would have a laundry list of things that they wanted to ask me about. It's natural to ask that. So one of the top level kind of fears is that, you know, maybe I should say away from soy. Soy can cause breast cancer, right? and it has an estrogen, a plant estrogen, right?

And so isn't that really bad? Well, so in my work, I'm agnostic to urban legends. In fact, when I find them, I try to smash them. It's kind of like being at a picnic, you know, outdoors with a fly swatter. When you see the fly, boom, see if you can knock it out. All right. So I'll tell you, in my field of angiogenesis, which is studying blood vessels, very early on in my field, it was discovered that tumors are cancers, are completely, you know,

harmless, they form in our body all the time, until they are able to recruit a private blood supply. A tumor isn't born with a blood supply. A mutated cell doesn't naturally have a blood supply. It'll sit there, it'll grow about the size of a tip of a ballpoint pen or tip of a pencil, and then it can't get any bigger because the center of the oxygen doesn't have any nutrients. But when cancer cells, like breast cancer cells, are able to hijack our body's own circulation, they begin to selfishly recruit blood vessels to grow into them. And what we found is that if you take a tumor, isolate it from blood supply, it'll stay there forever. Now, in our bodies there.

Without growing. Without growing. Yeah. And it can only get to two to three millimeters in diameter. That's the size of a pencil. That's it. Okay. And then our immune system wings by like cops on a beat in a suburb and they spot a drug dealer

on the sidewalk. All right. They don't have to be dealing. Oh, they're just sitting there looking like they shouldn't be there. What their immune system does, put that cancer cell in a patty wagon and drives off with it and gets rid of it. Okay. And that's how our body naturally resists cancer. Like many women will ask me, Doc, why did I actually get breast cancer?

And, you know, I would try to give an intelligent answer to that, obviously, you know, being empathic to the situation, the state of mind that they're in. But, you know, when I walk away from somebody who asked that question, I ask myself a different question. I ask myself, why don't we get cancer more often? It's much deeper, right? Yeah, what's the answer to that one? And the answer is because our immune system wings by, conducts surveillance, and every time it sees a little microscopic cancer, it puts it in the paddy wagon and gets rid of it, all right?

And that's one thing. The second thing is that our body has this powerful way of trying to prevent tumors from getting their own blood supply, anti-angiogenesis, cuts off the blood supply to tumor. No blood vessels, no oxygen, no interest can't grow. Then your immune system comes by and wipes them out. All right? Amazing, right?

The other reason is that cancer is triggered by mutations in our DNA. Cancer is just a normal cell. The DNA is going to mutation, and now that mutation makes the cancer cell grow in haywire. It's like having a virus in your operating system or your laptop. You know, weird things start happening. That's what happens when it happens on a laptop. You've got to, you know, take it to an antivirons.

program or reboot it. And your body, the thing grows into a cancer. Unless your body's hardwired defense system against DNA damage, it's like a mutation fix. It's like an anti-mutation fix. It's like the geek squad. Geek Squad that you call instead of installing, you know, right, you got my large screen TV is broken. I can't watch the game this weekend.

That's right. So you call the Geek Squad. And our body's geeks squad comes in two-fix broken DNA. And it can actually repair it. And it can also put a shield up so that it actually prevents more damage from occurring. Amazing. And then, of course, our gut microbiome, you know, everyone knows about the gut microbiome. I'm now.

Healthy gut bacteria, 39 trillion of them, it lowers inflammation. Cancer loves to flare up with inflammation. So, you know, when you go to a barbecue in the summertime and you're watching the grill, whenever a fat drips into the grow, you get this big flare up, right? And so this is what the flare up is inflammation. And cancer is sort of like the rib eye cooking on top. And whenever it flares up with inflammation, that cancer loves to grow even more. So the gut microbiome, about many things that it does, lowers inflammation.

So if you're a woman and you want to lower your risk of breast cancer or ovarian cancer or cervical cancer or uterine cancer, you want to lower that inflammation. and the best way to do it is already hardwired in your body. It's your gut bacteria. So this is a health defense system. And then connected to that, and we talked about this already, is your immune system, which kind of wings by conducting surveillance. And by the way, if you actually have a big honking cancer that's already grown.

So here's a stat about breast cancer that most people don't know. All right. Cancer researchers know it, but most people don't. So we tell women to just be vigilant and make sure, like you really, you're in a shower, just naturally just have to do with self-exams. So you check for lumps. Check for anything that might be abnormal because the earlier you find it, the earlier something can be done. Earlier that something's done, the more likely you're going to be cured and dodge problems later on.

So we feel for lumps in our breasts. And the smallest breast lump that you can really feel with your two fingers, that's how you're supposed to feel for them, is about one centimeter in size and diameter. Now, that's a small early breast cancer, so that's why it's so important to feel for that. Now, a lot of people don't realize this, but do you know how, I mean, I'm going to, this is not a trick question for you, Mindy, but has anybody ever told you how many cancer cells are in a one centimeter tumor? Yeah, no, no, please tell me. Okay. It's one billion cancer cells are already in the smallest tumor you can feel in the shower.

Okay. So one billion cancer cells, that's way more than the drug dealer in the corner than the cop and a B picks off, right? That one centimeter cancer has already recruited a blood supply. And I can tell you as the cancer researcher working in a lab, if we isolate the tumor from the blood supply, it'll stay there forever, it won't grow. The moment you allow a blood vessel to touch that cancer, it will start to feed it. It'll give it oxygen.

It's like handing it a scuba tank, all right, then giving it nutrients. Now you're giving in a bag of junk food. All right. And now that cancer will grow 16,000 times in just two weeks. 16,000 times in size. It's explosive. All right. So how do we get this under control?

All right? My first thought is how do you make sure you don't get the blood supply there? That seems like the key. Bingo. The key. Bingo. If you can actually fortify your body to turn the clock back, keep the blood vessels from growing to the cancer, and,

strengthen your immune system so the cops and the beat will wipe out more of those bad guys. You're going to be in much better shape than if you just don't know what to do and just don't do anything about it and wait for disaster to strike. Okay. So how do we do this? Well, this is my field. I run the angiogenesis foundation. Blood vessels are critical for our livelihood, for our health. We've got 60 miles worth of blood vessels in our body.

They're all important for they bring the oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body. However, Kansas will hijack that. So can we cut off the blood supply, make it harder for the cancers to grow? Let me take you back a couple of decades to when we were thinking about, because I was part of the pioneering team to do this, now there are dozens of drugs that can actually do this. But back then, when we were hunting for things, we were looking in natural sources. What does Mother Nature have that can actually help our body cut off the blood supply to cancers like breast cancers? Well, the first one, by the way, was soybeans. Amazingly.

I was just going to say, if you soy. It was soybeans. And I'll tell you the story. Here's a story that most people don't know. I love to share these little nuggets that people just don't know about. It turns out that there was a young researcher at the time, Ted Fotis, who had moved from Greece to Switzerland to do research. And when you're a young researcher in a lab, they kind of give you the junior guide, the least interesting stuff to do. And they give you kind of the leftovers. So he got in there, and it was a hormone lab, by the way. It was a lab about hormones. And this hormone lab in Switzerland pioneered, the ability to look for estrogen in urine, in women's urine. So we're going back to the really late 1970s, early 1980s, all right? And it turns out they gave this young researcher Ted Phocis. They gave him a crate of old urine samples from women that they didn't want to use anymore.

And they're like, here, this is your project. Go figure out something interesting to do with it. So he looked into urine and he found the estrogen, right, because these are women. And what he found, though, when he was analyzing the urine, there was this weird spike that came out of the urine that he'd never seen before. In fact, nobody had actually seen it before. So in the lab, he cut the spike out. This is how you do it. You cut the spike out and you analyze what is the spike.

That spike was a natural compound from soy called genocine. And so his lab basically said, so what? You know? Because it didn't come from humans. Don't forget, this lab was studying human estrogen. And so he found this weird estrogen like spike out of women. It cut it out. And they said, well, it didn't come from humans.

Didn't come from the women. Where did it come from? It came from soy. So, and they're like, well, tell us that it's useful or don't tell us at all. All right. And so what he did is he actually studied the genocine, which is a phytoestrogen, a plant estrogen, which came from soy. All right. And this is one of the origins to how the whole urban legend about soy being damaging came from, phytoestrogens.

And he tested it in the systems used for drug development, ultimately, to see if you can starve cancer. And when he drops the soy genocine in there, boom, it knocked out all the blood vessels that, like, for example, a breast cancer in the lab would actually recruit. And he was like, Eureka, wow, that's amazing. All right. And it came from soy, and that led to a research publication that changed everything, including for me, because it led us to understand that foods have natural substances that can cut off the blood supply to cancer. And that's led to my dead talk and lots of other things that are going on right now. But the origin, the first food that was discovered was soy.

Now, let me tell you. That was where it all came from. That's where it all came from. Yeah. Now, from a hormone lab. See, from a woman. It came from a woman. And it came for a woman.

Exactly. Exactly. Now, let me just tell you how this urban legend came about that soy is actually harmful for breast cancer. So, and, you know, it's like so many other things that are out there in the blogosphere, in the social media space, and the rumor mill. I think most urban legends on health come from well-intentioned people who are trying to put one-on-one together. And somebody heard that some, that human breast cancer, some human breast cancers are estrogen sensitive, and they are. And then that same person also read somewhere that soy beans have something called a phytoestrogen and didn't think about the phyto part, just thought about the estrogen part. And again, well intentioned saying, well, in that case, you don't want to put any estrogen from soy into the woman.

And that's where this took off, like this whole idea that women shouldn't eat soy. But unfortunately, they were wrong because they weren't scientists and they didn't know the data. So this is where, by the way, I think for anybody listening, having partial knowledge really requires you to keep looking for more information and not just take that halfway mark and say, I'm done. I'm the expert. Because what happened is that if you actually, as a scientist, look at what a phytoestrogen. looks like. Let's say this is the chemical structure. And look what the human estrogen looks like. They don't look anything alike. If you had one on the left screen and the right screen, they're completely different. The chemistry looks completely different. And in fact,

what was since discovered is that the phytoestrogen from soy blocks the human estrogen, it's mother nature's tamoxifen. All right? Yes. It actually blocks the growth of breast cancers. Estrogen sponsored breast cancer. So just completely the opposite. And it starts the cancer. So people would say to me when I was talking about this earlier in my career, they'd say, you know, that's a nice theory, Dr. Lee. But look, I'm a woman. I'm not going to take the chance, all right? Well, so what I say is let's look at where the rubber meets the road in people. Let's look at real women with real clinical trials that had only women in it, right? Women with breast cancer. And one of the most famous ones that I talk about is the Shanghai Women's Breast Cancer Study,

where they studied 5,000 women who were at the highest risk for breast cancer. And you know why they were at the highest risk? Because they already had breast cancer, right? They're at super high risk. And here's what they found. They found that the women who ate more soy had lower mortality. Wow. Because it's protective.

Because it's protective. About 30% lower. And those women who already had their breast cancer removed by surgery and well treated by chemo radiation or hormonal therapy that didn't have any cancer left, those women who ate the most soy over a period of years had a 30% reduction in the chance of breast cancer would come back. All right? So, survival.

Now, then the critic goes, and it's fine. I think anybody wanting to have an intelligent conversation, got to be open-minded, ask questions. I always tell people to ask questions. They're like, okay, well, that's one study. Even though there's 5,000 people in it, you know, has been repeated. And what I say is that actually, it's a great question because there are 14 other studies that have come out since. And in 14 clinical trials involving women only with breast cancer, in every single study, looking at soy intake and breast cancer outcomes, eating soy led to less mortality.

And in every study, eating soy led to greater survival. All right. So this is the rubber maced rubs. This is the clinical part of it. And that's a great example. And I know you wanted to talk about hormones, which is why I wanted to bring up some of the biggest advancements in this field in the field I work in androgenesis came from this hormone lab when it comes to food as medicine.

That's crazy. You know, so I'm about to put out another book. It's called Eat Like a Girl. And it's a companion book to Fast Like a Girl. And so my publisher asked me, you know, would you do like how to break a fast and how women should eat? and I told them only under one condition, if I can bring the conversation on soy back. We have to talk about soy because I have no, and I didn't know the backstory.

So you just really help me understand the backstory. Because I was like, why are we walking around, like putting other chemicals, really toxic chemicals on our skin and in our body? And yet we're like, nope, no soy. And like soy has a phytoestrogen component to it. And in my clinic, we used to run hormone tests, urinary hormone tests, like thousands of them. And what I saw is women that had the highest diet soy also had the highest amount of 2-oh-h estrogen metabolite, which is the protective estrogen.

So you just cleared up something for me because I've been walking around like, why are we villainizing soy? There's so many other things to villainize, but there's something really helpful in soy that we need to bring back. Yeah, well, I'm happy to contribute more back matter to help you tell this story as you write it. But I'll tell you, I think that for anybody watching this and listening to this, there is something important that we need to say. We're not talking about generic soy, like soy fillers or soy burgers or ultra-processed soy. Because actually, you take a look at the fake meat that's out there, the different burgers and hot dogs and weird things that they're making. Those are super ultra-processed. So soy, unfortunately, has become also an ingredient.

that is used in ultra-processed into foods that, you know, are not, it's not even arguably anymore. It's very clearly that eating ultra-processed foods is bad for hormones, bad for cancer risk, bad for metabolism, bad for cardiovascular dementia. You know, so let's be clear when we're talking about the benefits of soy. We're talking about whole-sourced soy foods. So edamame, tofu, soy milk, not ultra-processed. And by the way, people go, well, you know, I don't know how any soy products I can actually eat.

There's like three of them in my grocery store. What I tell people to do, if you actually have an Asian market by you, just search out on your Google Maps. You type in Asian market and see where they are. Take a drive out to them one day, just like a field trip, okay, just explore. And go ask somebody where the foods with soybeans are or soy. And they're going to take you on there are hundreds of soy food. that are around in Asia, right? Amazing.

Yeah. And by the way, there's one last thing I need to tell you about the urine that was studied by Ted Phocis, the samples. They came from a previous study on female hormones from women who were farmers in a village outside of Kyoto, and they were almost all vegetarians. And of the vegetables they were eating was mostly soy-based foods. Interesting. Interesting. That's incredible.

Yeah. So, okay. So do we have other foods that can cut off the blood supply if we look at it through the lens of like breast cancer or. Yeah, I mean, cancer or cervical cancer. Yeah. So, I mean, it's a long laundry list. Ah, nice. I wrote all, I created a list of foods in my book, Eat to Beat Disease. Anybody who wants to get a laundry list of foods that can cut off the blood supply of cancer. It's in my book. And I talk about them all the times. Have you come to my YouTube channel or you go to my master classes?

You'll actually hear me talk about them quite frequently. But I will tell you some of them. All right. I'll just give you a sampling of them. Tomatoes. Let's throw out the myth about nightshades and lectins. All right. Tree nuts, walnuts, pistachios, almonds, macadamias, pine nuts.

They also lower the risk. And they can also cut off the bliss of life cancer. We're also talking about the brassica vegetable family. Yes. So we're talking about not just broccoli, the regular broccoli. We're talking about, even turnips,

which are part of the Brasca family, all have sulforaphanes that cut off the blood supply feeding. Cancer. Berries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, strawberries have something called elagic acid, cuts off the blood supply to tumors.

This is all based on actually research I did years ago with the National Cancer Institute where we were studying things to cut off the blood supply for breasts and other cancers with drugs. And when we threw it, Through a strawberry extract in there, boom, like we got a score. We hit a home run.

That's crazy. And so these are not replacements for your doctor, your oncologist, and not for drug therapy or women's health specialists. But these are things that you can do for yourself that's part of health care. You go to the doctor's sick care. All right. That's how our system is set up. When you go home from the doctor's office, then it switches over to health care.

We take care of ourselves. This is how the pool within our own toolbox for ourselves, green tea. cuts off the blood supply to breast cancer. And by the way, macha, which is the specific kind of green tea. Have you had matcha? Do you like macha? Yeah, I don't like the taste of it, but every time I go out to a like, you know, I live near Air One, which is a really fancy supermarket, I want a match a drink. I just haven't fallen in love with it. Maybe this will, maybe this will influence your thinking about it a little bit. Green tea is good for you. And green tea, when you sleep a cup of green tea, the polyphenols, the catechins that are naturally present in tea leaves float out

because of the hot water into the brew, and then you're sipping the brew and you're actually getting the catechins, the polyphenols in your body. They cut off the blood subprotic cancer, all right? That's very, very clear. Now, but you don't get all the catechins out of the tea leaves because, well, you're just soaking. There's still some left. You know how in a sponge, if you just put a sponge in a bucket and fill up the bucket? Even if you empty out of the water, the sponge is still going to have some stuff in it, some water in it. You got to squeeze it out. Right?

So nobody squeezes out all the catacons from their tea leaves when you brew a cup of tea. However, there is something different about macha. Macha's green tea, regular green tea, except about 20 days before they harvested, they put a shade over it, and that actually causes more polyphenols that be produced. So all by itself, there's more polyphenols, more catacins and matcha, just by putting a little covering over it. Then when they harvest it, they harvest it very carefully, then they, unlike regular tea, which is just drying the tea leaves.

Here, and then selling it, here they dry the tea leaves, the whole leaf, and then they pulverize it into a fine powder. So now you get 100% of the polyphenols and the tea leaves in macha. And you get the dietary fiber from the leaf itself. You got the polyphenols. You got the dietary fiber. everything. There's nothing left behind in a tea bag, nothing left behind. It's all there, which is why a cup of matcha is really, really dense green. You can't see through it. All right? And in fact,

you whisk it to mix it up and you sip it. And I can tell you it's really amazing because you get a lot more polyphenol, a lot more cancer-starving stuff out of out of macha than you do are a cup of green tea. Yeah. And then if you put soy milk in it, like a good high-quality soy milk. Now you've stacked it in your favor. And you've got the dietary fiber from macha that actually stimulates your gut microbiomes. And now you're lowering the inflammation. And there's one last thing that I didn't tell you yet. The last thing about macha, and this was based on research done by scientists in England, they found that matcha can actually kill breast cancer stem cells. Oh, wow. Now, what's the cancer stem cell? listen, we're all made of stem cells.

Like when our dad's sperm met our mom's egg, we were a little ball of cells. Our stem cells are what allowed us to grow a face, ears, heart, lung, fingertips, toenails. So we were all formed as stem cells. But when we were actually formed and born, all the other stem cells got stored away to repair and regenerative cells over the course of our lives when we need to. Now, when cancer's form, that mutation, where you got the bad guy forming, if it turns into a tumor, that one centimeter tumor, a billion cancer cells, a one centimeter cancer, the small as you can feel is a billion cancer cells in it, is already fed by 100 million blood

vessel cells. Oh my gosh. This is why the point you made, Mindy, earlier, is so important. Let's prevent it in the first place. Let's stop those blood vessels from forming. Let's show up the immune system. These are simple steps that can actually be taken by healthy people. And if you have cancer, now's the time to, you know, hubba, hubba and get with it because this is not something your oncologist is going to be doing for you.

This is something you're going to be doing for yourself. And then the researchers that you found that you see, what happens is that after you completely treat breast cancer, right, the women who are in remission, you know, thank God I'm in remission, right, the five year mark. Unfortunately, about 20% of people who are in remission over five years comes back. Where the heck did that come from? How did that cancer come back? Well, it turns out that cancers also develop stem cells and they can renew themselves. Now, we know this occurs in breasts and other cancers. We don't have a medicine that can treat cancer stem cells.

There's nothing. I mean, I can tell you, as somebody who's, you know, doing therapeutic development for cancer, we ain't got nothing for that. Guess what? Mother Nature already beat us to the punch because matcha. Of course she did. Can actually kill breast cancer stem cells. Amazing, right?

I'm convinced. So next time you go to your sushi bar. Yeah. I'm totally convinced. Okay. So I love the way you're explaining this because so many people, when they started fasting, they started to watch their body heal. And my brain went to, yeah, because you're taking a break from the horrific food.

So then I started to shift some of the way that I was educating this. And I was trying to let people know, like, fasting is a healing state. but then when you go into food, you really need to look at food as medicine. And that led me into some interesting research and studies on what controls our taste buds. And one of the things that I found out was what controls our taste buds is actually the microbes in our gut. And then when you start to go into this microbe area and you're talking about inflammation and immune system, we also have microbes that start to break estrogen down, called the estroboloom. So all of a sudden, like for me, food, all roads point to the microbiome.

So my question then leads to you is, okay, what foods can support those specific bacteria that break down estrogen? Do we know any of those? And are there ways to use food to change what we crave and our taste buds? I know those are two separate questions. No, no, these are great questions. and the area of the microbiome, that sort of ecosystem in our body is one of the most exciting frontiers of understanding ourselves.

And, you know, when I've had the opportunity to mentor young people who are going to medical school or trying to choose their career, I tell them that if I were starting out now, I would immediately know to dive into the microbiome as a place that's going to change everything in the future. So, you know, I read about this that need to be diseased. We have so many bacteria in our body that we are, it's about one to one, actually, the last estimate. Some people say we've got 100 times more bacteria. It's about one to one.

So we're part human and part bacteria. The important thing about the research that is being done about the gut microbiome is we're understanding some of the things that gut microbiome does. The gut microbiome lowers inflammation, which is really important for all cancers, including women's cancers, right? Number two, including breast cancer, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer, cervical cancer, melanoma, you know, lung cancer, colon, colorectal cancer. So, you know, we can't easily just slot cancers. This is the women's cancer. This is a men's cancer. It's not that easy. But women are actually increasingly affected by colon cancer and lung cancer, women who never smoke get lung cancer. So I think that, you know, we don't want to put an artificial gender line either

by saying, well, we need to actually think. So gut microbiome actually critical for lowering inflammation, boosting immunity. 70% of our immune system, by the way, lives inside the walls of our gut. Now, I was never taught that. When I went to medical school, that wasn't even known. I think we thought that the immune system

wasn't like in the thymus gland, some other places, lymph nodes. Nope. Actually, it's mostly in our gut. And so our gut bacteria talks to our immune system in order to be able to shore it up to be able to knock down, answer. And, you know, I always tell people the analogy of how our gut bacteria talks to our immune system is that our gut wall is kind of like the thin, cheap walls of a freshman dorm in college,

right? If you've got two roommates that live next to it, that wall is paper thin, you can hear everything. And so what did you do on a Friday night? You yelled through the wall, hey, what kind of pizza do you want? What kind of top of you want your pizza? And they could give you the answer right back through the wall. And that's basically what our gut bacteria in our immune system do. They're talking to each other through that. And the gut bacteria can text message our brain in ways that actually can influence our mood. Now, something that I learned from this amazing researcher, Dr. Susan Erdman, who is a veterinarian at MIT, Massachusetts Institute Technology in Boston, she taught me that there's certain

bacteria in the gut. And you can eat these bacteria. And the bacteria also found in food. can get it as a probiotic. And one of them is called lactobacillus ruderi. Okay? That lactobacillus ruteri in the gut text messages our brain. And what it does is it causes the brain to release oxytocin.

Ooh. Now, oxytocin is a social hormone. It's the hormone that when the one-minute old infant is given skin time and starts to suckle on their nipple, it releases. oxytocin releases the milk letdown. Oxytoastin is also important for uterentrine contractions when you're delivering the baby. And also oxytocin is important for social connection. So when you're at the airport or at the train station or the bus station and you haven't seen a relative in a long time or a good friend,

and they come through the arrivals area and you run up there and you give them a great hug and you're really just happy to see them. Your brain is flooded with oxytocin. Oxytocin also comes out of your brain when you get a kiss. And I'm not talking about grandma's peck on the cheek. When you get a good, deep French kiss, oxytocin is that same feeling that when you're seeing your friend at the airport. And the other time that oxytocin floods out of your brain is during orgasm. All right. So this is actually an incredibly important social hormone that has in women a very, very important, reproductive, and also a connection between mom and baby.

So you know this is an important hormone. Well, it turns out that lactobacusus ruteri texmusis your brain to be able to release this. So there's been studies that have been shown that in the lab, lactobacillus ruderi, when fed in the lab to animals, just do their drinking water. You know, like, you ever had a hamster or gerbil

and you've got to put the water bottle up with the little metal nozzle and the animal goes up there and starts licking it? If that's all you do is you put the lactobacillus ruride powder into the water, mix it all up, shake it all up, and let them drink it. No biggie. If these animals were prone to develop breast cancer, guess what?

It would reduce the size and reduce the incidence to development of breast cancer. Wow. Amazing. Wow. Right? No, I want to make sure we stay in the rudderi thing because William Davis wrote a book and he had a whole community online that I remember. I brought him on this podcast a couple of years ago and they made lactobacillus ruderi.

They took it out of a supplement. and put it into yogurt and fermented it. And then they had everybody eat a cup of this yogurt for X amount of days and measure what they noticed in moods. And it was an incredible mood booster. Yeah. Do you be familiar with that? There you go.

The gut, being happy and having a new partner, the elect of a Cicidori, text messages of the brain, releases social hormones, which influence your mood. And it can really be quite profound. But here, also lowering inflammation, also boosting immunity, the cops on a beat, winging by. And maybe that's how they were actually working. The other thing about lactobuses ritori that's really interesting is that when you eat it in foods, lactobuses riteri is also in your mouth fights the bacteria that causes cavities.

Ooh. All right. Okay, so what foods do you get it in? I only note it through the yogurt technique. Yeah, well, so first of all, going back. to the original yogurt. I want to talk about yogurt in a second because it's so important from gut health and overall human health, and women's health, by the way. So old-fashioned yogurt that it's hard to find anymore used to have many more organisms when it was sort of made on a small

scale, you know, small local farms are making the yogurt and supplying it. Once it became a big factory, the probiotic quality started to go down. But like a busisoridae, it can be found in some yogurt, I don't know which ones, but I'm always on a hunt. So if anybody knows, you can look for it. Yeah, definitely look for it. And please, you know, DM me on social media on Instagram or something. And let me know if you find one that has Lactopacusus ruride, that would be a winner. But you can also find Lactopolis ruderi in sourdough bread.

Here's the thing. Lactobacillus Routre. Lactobacillus is named. So Lactobacillus is a first name. Routre is the last name. It's actually genus and species, but it's called it first name and last name. Everybody understand that. Lactobacillus is called that because it creates lactic acid.

Lactic acid is what makes sourdough tangy. But we like about sourdough. And so people going back hundreds of years, like in France, where they started on sourdough bread, they actually would take a little pinch of starter material that had lactobosusousouserite and use that into the yeast to make the dough for sourdough bread. And then before they baked it, they would pinch it off and save it for next. So there are hundreds of years of saved lactobacillus ruderai that have been pinched off and saved over the year. So if you're going to try this, by the way, make sure that you're getting real sourdough bread and not sourdough bread made in a factor where they didn't want to waste time.

And they just put a little vinegar in there to make it seem like a taste of tangy. You want the real lactic acid from lactobacillus. Now, that's only one place to get it. A lot of people might not realize that Acdo bacillus root rite is the starter bacteria, not only for sourdough bread, but also for the real Italian parmesana regina or cheese. Really?

Yep. You know, it's funny because you're just named two foods that I love, and I can't quite figure out why I love them. They're because I typically don't eat wheat and I don't do a ton of cheese, but those two pull me. And I'm wondering if it's because of the oxytocin.

It might be. But, and by the way, I'm not talking about factory made, you know, copy paste, you know, something that's called Parmesan cheese, you know, the stuff you shake out from my can. No, no. We're talking about big blocks that you would see in Italy. And you can find them in the US. You can order it that way. And it's expensive, okay?

And so you don't need a lot of it. And you shouldn't have a lot of cheese anyway. I mean, you know, cheese is a probiotic food, but it also has a lot of satiotic food. but it also has a lot of saturated fat and a lot of salt. So moderation can be good for you, but many people are surprised to find out that lactobacillus root also found in Parmesan, Regina cheese. Yeah.

The real Italian stuff. That's amazing. Okay. That's amazing. So, yeah, so we, and I did some research on lactobacillus roterine, and we found that in a lab, if you are studying wound healing, that animals that eat rudderi,

they take that it actually speeds up the healing of the wound as well. That's crazy. So it, in fact, it doubled the rate of wound healing. So amazing. And the real point is really that we're just beginning to discover the, we're at the beginning of the journey to discover the miracle of our gut bacteria. And so you're asking about, like, do we know the right bacteria that actually metabolized estrogen? And I don't know what it is, but I don't know everything there is to know about the gut bacteria microbiome.

I think that, you know, like when you're talking to a real scientist like me, I'm really quick to tell you what I don't know because that's what real sites is too. I don't know. That's right. Do you know? Do you know what? Is there a bacteria that doesn't?

So lactobacillus raminos. That's the other one. I'm curious because so I went down a path of what's in the astrolome. Like can we just figure out what set of bacteria break estrogen down? And then I was going to go and look at things like, you know, if you ferment different vegetables, you get a different bacterial. byproduct. And so that's how I discovered rudderi. But Romino's, R-H-A-M-N-O-U-S, is another one that has an effect on estrogen. So that was going to be one of my questions. In what direction? Does it

actually metabolize it, it breaks it down? Or does it keep it build up? No, it metabolizes it. Because here's one of my things on hormones is that we, you bring up a really interesting point. We have to look at three different things when we are using food as medicine as hormonal medicine. One is that it can help us make the hormone. There is food that will help us break that hormone down, and then there's foods that will help us detox it. And when you start to really dive into food,

you realize that there's a lot of that. So the metabolizing, though, all points at the microbiome, and that's how I geeked out on Romino's. Yeah. And I think it may come from the fermentation of certain vegetables, and I haven't figured out which one. Maybe kimchi. Maybe.

Maybe. Right? So, Kim Chi, yeah, Kim Chi has one of the reasons that kimchi is so great for the immune system is the fermentation of scalyons. That actually has an immune component to it. Huh. Interesting. I got you curious now, huh?

No, you got me curious. I'm actually looking it up right now. I'm going to see. Right. It's something fermented. For sure, it's going to be a byproduct of something fermented, just like you said, sourdough. How do we get Rominoes? What vegetable do you ferment to get L. Romino's?

Yeah. No, I listen, these are the types of questions. Oh, look at this. Kimi. Yep. Sourcrap. Tempe and miso. So it's the soy.

So maybe it's in the soy, which would make sense. The fermentation of soy would help with the breakdown of estrogen. And then if you stop and you think about that, you're like, nature is so brilliant, it created a phytoestrogen that will help you make estrogen or bring that estrogen into your system. Then when you ferment that phytoestrogen, it helps you break it down. That would make perfect sense. Well, we're talking about balance, right? I mean, this is the – this is really sort of like the whole idea of hormesis. Like, it's – the body doesn't allow you to do too much of one or the other.

The natural balance is to sort of keep things in this Goldilocks zone where everything is – hunky dory within a certain zone. Yeah. Oh my God, that was so good. Well, Dr. Lee, I want to go have a meal with you. So the next time I'm in Boston visiting my sister, I'm going to look you up and we can geek out. Or the next time I'm on Los Angeles, we should actually go out and go check out some of this tasty stuff. Listen, I mean, I am so, again, I'm going to just repeat this, I think what you're doing to help raise the attention and also the comfort level of talking about hormones, women's health, the concerns of women is so very important because it's something that every clinician needs to be able to not only own, right? Like, this is not something that you

kind of leave for somebody else. Like, we all need to own it because we are taking care of and people in our own families and our friends and with patients. You know, we have to actually understand these gender differences are really incredibly profound. And to learn everything we can from your podcast and your YouTube channel. Like we should be all watching it. Yeah, thank you. You know, I always wonder, how do we get to 2024? And we're just now having this discussion

that we need to look at health care from a gender, from a gender lens. I don't know why it took us this long to get here, but I'm just grateful that we're having the conversation to your point. So how do people find you? If people want to go buy your book or enroll in any of your courses?

Yeah, come to my website. It's Dr. William Lee.com. My handle is at Dr. William Lee. My YouTube channel is at Dr. William. It's Dr. William Lee. And, you know, that's the best way to find me. You search my name with Ted or on Amazon. You'll actually find my books.

Yeah, amazing. Okay, I have to ask you my last question that I ask everybody. And it's one that I've geeked out on for many years, which is this idea of health. Everybody is trying to achieve health, but we don't really have a good definition of what health is. So what is your definition of health and how do you know when you're healthy? Yeah, great question.

Same question I asked when I was in medical school because my professors never taught me about health. They taught me only about disease. So my work has really been about answering that question, what is health? So for me, what I know is health isn't just the absence of disease. It is that. But health is actually the result of my body's hardwired defenses, all working on my behalf. They started when I was born, and they're going to keep, you know, cranking away until my last breath. And we talked about some of those health offenses already.

Genesis, your circulation, your stem cell, your microbiome, your DNA protection system, your immune system. They're all working on our behalf. I know I'm healthy because my own feelings of what I'm experiencing, this is interception. When you're in touch with your own body's sensations are always better, always more in tune with who I want to be when I'm eating healthy foods. So that's how I kind of like my knowledge about what health is, what's responsible my health, and then the connection between the actions I take on an everyday basis. Amazing. Amazing. Okay, are we going to see another book from you one of these days? I'm working on the next one. And as a fellow author, you know, this is a marathon, not a sprint,

at least for people like us that are trying to really do some original things. So all I'm able to share because you know when you're writing a book you have a big idea but the real task of writing a book is getting in those details that nobody else sees and nobody sees that journey it's a lonely it's a lonely it's a lonely so yeah you know totally get it it's very lonely well whatever it comes out i want to have you back on when you get it into a form that we can all benefit from let me know we'll geek out on it great thank you very much but yeah thank you this was wonderful really appreciate you. Thanks, Wendy. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it,

so please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.