Dr. William Li On The Top Foods You Should Eat To Prevent Disease, Heal Your Body & Live Longer

welcome back to our episode of Adversity Advantage. I'm

your

host Doug Bobst and today's guest is Dr. William Lee. Dr. Lee is an internationally renowned physician-scientist and author of the New York Times bestseller: Eat to Beat Disease, the New Science of How Your Body Works. You can

heal

your

self. His groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and impacts care for more than 70

disease

s, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart

disease

and obesity. Ted's talk, Can We Eat to Starve?, Cancer has garnered more than 11 million views. His most recent book Eat to Improve Your Diet, Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer will be released tomorrow today on the podcast.

Dr. Lee and I discuss how to improve the quality of your diet, how to optimize your diet for greater longevity, why eating a high amount is so important. fiber diet why you might want to avoid the carnivore diet why excess

body

fat is bad for your

heal

th how to improve your metabolism and much more, so let's start this conversation and welcome Dr. William Lee to the Adversity podcast Advantage Dr. Lee, welcome to the podcast thanks Dougs. It's fantastic to be in it. I'm glad you're here too and one of the things that I think a lot of people will appreciate knowing about you is that a lot of your work is based on using food as medicine using food to help people

live

healthier

live

s and live

longer

and I think a good place to start is it's no secret that people struggle with what to eat, you know, the obesity epidemic continues to get worse and people's habits continue to get worse. to become increasingly unhealthy and unhealthy as the years go by, what would you say are five tips that you could share with the audience on how people can improve the quality of their diet?

Yes, I'm happy to give you the five tips, but let me frame this. By saying that there is so much negativity associated with food, I am coming from a completely different perspective. I would say that the negativity was out there and also the misperceptions and the lack of accurate information, so I like to turn the whole formula on its head and Let's get to this with how we don't fear our food number one and number two, how Do we really use facts and signs to really be able to inform? How can we embrace food? And you know, this has to do with my experience as a doctor as a scientist and as someone who has been involved with biotechnology and the development of treatments for cancer and diabetes and treatments for blindness and for almost 30 years the reality is that Food is really one of the most powerful healthcare interventions that we can do for ourselves and I'm going to give you five tips right off the bat that could be really helpful and this is something that you already know across the board for anyone who has to eat. , that is, for everyone.

I would give you the five general principles number one. stay hydrated because dehydration actually makes everything in your

body

work harder and therefore if you want your food to work for you, you need to make sure that your body has enough water content to be able to keep all those metabolic processes going really good. Number two. I would say eat whatever you want, but make sure that the majority of what you eat and the priority of where your head goes when you choose something and make good decisions really fall into the category of what we call plant-based

foods

, which is quite wide.

It means there are hundreds of plant-based

foods

and it doesn't have to be broccoli and kale, it could be beans, it could be mushrooms, it could be onions, it could be garlic, all the things that you think go back to those delicious traditional recipes. that came from the grandmothers of the Mediterranean, whether it be Italy, Greece, Spain, France or Asia, whether it be Japan, China or Thailand, I mean all those delicious things that you can see on a menu. I want people to think about healthy eating is when you look at a menu or when you're shopping look for things in the produce section first or look for things that actually have vegetables in them, it doesn't have to be the only thing, but if you use it like a kind of filter, you're going to do something really good for yourself, that's the second and third thing, I would say, as much as possible, avoid ultra-processed foods and we all have things that we like, with the that we grew up and that they are snacks and We all have lives that take us to different places in our communities or even around the world and we can't always get the healthiest foods, but what I want to emphasize is whether you can reduce, if not eliminate, the ultra-processed foods. which actually have a lot of artificial preservatives artificial colors artificial flavorings, you know, those are the things that actually taste great and that we're kind of addicted to marketing from our childhood, so you have legitimate reasons why we like things because they taste pretty good if you can reduce them, if I eliminate those things that are really going to tilt your dietary pattern in your favor, the other thing that I would say would be really helpful is to try to avoid foods with added sugars whenever you can, this is your usual soft drink , it's actually even your diet soda, which actually has added artificial sweeteners that ruin your gut health and your gut microbiome and actually throw off your metabolism, but stay away from added sugar because we can get a lot of sugar from the usual foods that we eat.

We eat, but if you start filling candy bars, you'll know the habit we had as kids on Halloween, take that pillow and fill it like a burlap sack and go out and stick all night, look, that's a lot of artificial sugar. and even as adults we end up snacking that way subconsciously and then if you overload our metabolism, that's the fourth thing and the fifth thing I would actually say is I want to go back to drinks for a second, you know? Besides water, there are two other drinks that I think are great for health and one is tea, it could be green tea, it could be oolong tea, it could be black tea and the other is coffee.

Surprisingly, you know, water, coffee for teenagers is the ideal drink. and health now, what you add to them can make a big difference, but you know those are five general rules that I think will get anyone on the path to health and by the way, you'll notice that I didn't give any absolute rules and I didn't say things that are really unreasonable, so that's probably a good place to start this conversation. Yes, I love it and I imagine that the five tips you shared probably match what you would recommend to someone in terms of a dietary pattern to follow for longevity, so I guess in addition to making sure you eat plenty of plants, drink plenty of water, and limit ultra-processed foods, what are some others, like staple foods, that you think people

should

include as a dietary pattern if they want to increase their longevity, okay?

So longevity means not only having more birthdays but also having a good quality of life on the road, so we want a good healthy life expectancy, not just a long life if you're tired, you know, at 100 years old. or you're blind and you're 100 years old that wouldn't be worth it so I think the key to longevity and you know this is a very important and popular topic I think it's really science driven there's a lot of really interesting things about the longevity I want. to make sure people don't forget that you want we really want to be able to enjoy our lives even if we live

longer

no one wants to add more miserable years to their life okay so having said that what are the things that are important? to us and I'm going to give you some concrete things about food, but you know what you're going to hear me talk about is framing because I think a lot of times when we hear about nutrition or food medicine, we hear about individuals. individual food substances, individual recommendations without going into context, so I think context is important, how can we really maintain good later years in our life if we want to expand them?

Our brain needs to function. We need good cognition. What does that require at a minimum? Brains need to have good blood flow, so we need to protect our circulation, so foods that can really help protect our circulation to keep it active are really helpful. Research has shown that there is actually a natural chemical found in many foods called bersolic acid that actually helps our blood vessel system stay healthy so we have better blood flow. Where is ursulic acid obtained from? Comes in chestnuts. It comes in Fruit peels found in dried fruits which are a healthy way to get lots of dietary fiber which feeds our gut microbiome our healthy gut bacteria in our body and the healthy gut bacteria send text messages to our brain and help us to release social hormones so that we are happy to do things and see the people we see and this is kind of a little It's a contextual idea of ​​some of the foods that we can eat and the reasons why, in order to have a long and healthy life, I think number one would be really good, having a really well functioning brain.

The second one, I'm just telling you. You know we want to be able to move? In reality, you know that you don't want to be in a wheelchair, or paralyzed, or that weak. We cannot be independent. There is only so much independence we can, so we need our muscles. Being able to function properly now that muscles are built and broken down daily, which is why you know toddlers are so active and teenagers exercise, and you know why we try to encourage people to actually exercise, is that you know how to use it or lose it is absolutely true, so we want to use it well, in addition to just doing physical exercise, we need to be able to build our muscles now, how does our body build our muscles from the moment we are born until we are born?

The elderly use stem cells now, these are not the stem cells that you would get injected at the mall in your knee, you know, in your tennis elbow or in your

should

er, these are stem cells that we were born with and a lot of people are not. I know this, but humans regenerate, we are actually made up of stem cells when our mother's egg met our father's sperm and we were just a ball of cells, all the stem cells and these stem cells that you will want from your jaw and our face, our ears and our livers and hearts we have a lot left over when we are born, about 70 million extra cells, they are stored like on the shelves at Home Depot, you know, extra cans of paint that you can draw on them when you need them. and these stem cells will actually be involved in building our muscles over time, so what are some of the foods that actually help us build our stem cells so they can help regenerate well?

It turns out that extra virgin olive oil turns out to be really useful for our stem cells, it protects them as we age and it is not surprising that in the blue zones, those parts of the world where people actually live to mature and healthy ages, more 100 years old, for example, centenarians tend to eat extra virgin olive oil. oil which by the way comes from a plant is a healthy fat of plant origin number two there is another fact that you should know that it is associated with the protein found in seafood and that is omega-3 fatty acids Omega-3 trees too They help our stem cells regenerate, they keep our body renewed, which is important for aging, where you get good omega-3s in addition to salmon, anchovies, mackerel and sardines.

You hear a lot about it, it turns out there are many, many different types of seafood and even seaweed, actually edible seaweed. I actually have omega-3s, so one of the things I write about in my new book Eat to beat your diet is going to the seafood section of the supermarket, where you know some people already like seafood, but others They are not familiar and I want to dispel people's apprehension and say dive in there because there are many wonderful things that are also a secret to longevity. It turns out that in many of the blue zones and in many places where people live to an old age they eat reasonable amounts. of seafood regularly and, as expected, this omega-3 is found there.

Now I'm going to offer one last type of delight and surprise that can help stem cells, which help rebuild the brain, heart and muscles, it's actually dark chocolate. It turns out that chocolate is a candy, okay, it's a candy, but to make dark chocolate you need high quantities 70 80 percent 90 cocoa Cocoa actually comes from a pipe c, the cocoa plant, and that is a source foodvegetable. It turns out that there are natural bioactive chemicals in cocoa made in dark chocolate and high concentrations that help our stem cells go out and rebuild our muscles, our circulation, many other parts that need to be renewed and, as we age, one of the things What we want to do is continually renew ourselves instead of breaking down. those are some of the ways we think about diet and longevity those are some great tips and some great foods while you were naming those foods I thought yeah definitely eat that yeah definitely eat that and it seems like it's pretty consistent too with uh.

I like the Mediterranean dietary pattern, right? Would you say that's pretty accurate? Lily, and this is what I think is really important to understand about the Mediterranean diet, since you said it's a pattern, it's not a single recipe or a single commercial package. It's not just Italy, Greece and Spain that people can tell apart in two seconds, but it's actually made up of 27 different countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and most people don't realize this, but Tunisia in Israel , Croatia, are all Mediterranean countries. and what that means is that there's a really rich diversity of traditional foods that people have enjoyed, so you know, for people who say, well, you know, I don't really like Italian food or not, I don't know who doesn't. .be into Italian food, but you know that some people are very picky about their food, what I am saying is that if you want to see the Mediterranean pattern, you must appreciate that there are more than 20 different countries that have something to offer for you and of course Similarly, the Mediterranean is a healthy eating pattern but the other healthy eating pattern is not Asia because Asians live there there is a long pattern of longevity they are traditional patterns a lot of seafood a lot of plant-based foods and this is the good thing, Doug, is that the Mediterranean in Asia If you think about restaurant menus, it may seem like there couldn't be more differences, but then they are two different types of cuisine, but in reality the eating pattern and the things in them couldn't be more connected because 2000 years ago there was something called The Silk Road and it was a series of dusty trails that linked China to the Mediterranean and merchants who traded silk, but many other things also exchanged their ingredients and recipes, so whenever you want think about healthy eating patterns, please.

Think about Mediterranean food and realize that the Mediterranean is much more than Italian food, there are many different foods, but now I want you to open this up to a kaleidoscope of cuisine that includes Asia and the interconnections between Mediterranean Asia and I, actually, in my new book. I call this meditation because it really is something that is not new but is thousands of years old and now is the time for us to go back and tap into that well of culinary genius that has always existed and that also tastes great and sticks around. On the topic of eating certain foods that can improve our overall quality of life, we talked about olive oil, you talked about seafood containing omega-3s, you talked about dark chocolate.

I know you're also a big fan of polyphenols, so I think this would be a good kind of segue into talking about why you're such a fan of them, what exactly they do, and what are some foods that contain them. First of all, polyphenols is a research term that describes hundreds of thousands of natural chemicals that there are others, so it's kind of a catch-all term for a lot of these natural chemicals that Mother Nature puts in foods. Now I call these chemicals Mother Nature's Pharmacy, not with a pH Pharmacy but with an f like on the farm, because these are the things. that farmers have been growing some of our agriculture and many of our plant-based foods.

Now polyphenols alone are pretty amazing if you study what they can actually do, they're antioxidants, they can activate epigenetic changes that help our DNA work better, you know? and there is a lot of popular information about polyphenols and I am telling you the person in many different types of foods, including those that we have talked about so far, but I will also tell you that when it comes to food, health and polyphenols it is not It's not just about foods and their polyphenols, but about how our body responds to the polyphenols it ingests, so I will tell you that I have researched how we stay healthy and it turns out that our health is not just a passive state of being but, in fact, In fact, the reason we are healthy is a result of Our own bodies are wired Health defense systems We have five of them Androgenesis Angio blood vessels How our body grows Our circulation talked about how important that is for longevity in our brain number two, stem cell regeneration, we regenerate all the time, that's why we're still here tomorrow, it's just that today we're regenerating, we talk about the stem cells that make our muscles grow, the really important polyphenols are also activated.

Also, our intestinal microbiome, we already mentioned today, polyphenols actually help prepare healthy intestinal bacteria that represent part of our ecosystem. This ecosystem of our intestinal bacteria controls our immunity. It helps us reduce inflammation. It helps our metabolism and our intestinal bacteria. healthy detects our brain, as I mentioned earlier, to release social hormones and therefore the polyphenols that help our gut microbiome, our gut health are absolutely critical. Polyphenols are also antioxidants, as I mentioned, they protect our DNA from damage that can occur now. Most people say well, why do I need? take good care of my DNA because healthy DNA is responsible for healthy proteins, healthy cells and unhealthy DNA are mutations and mutations are the reason we develop cancer and that's why you have to be careful and that's why you worry about that. and if you don't fix your DNA to repel incoming missiles that try to develop damage to your DNA from the environment, you'll actually end up at a higher risk of being mutated and we're not talking about the X-Men, us.

We're talking about the average cancer patient out there, no one wants to be that person and if you're someone who's dealt with cancer, you don't want to get it again and that's why polyphenols may be important for DNA and by the way, Another thing, polyphenols slow down the fuse that involves DNA burning at the end of our cells so you know it's like mission impossible Strike a match Light the wick, the wick starts to burn, well that's really our hope of life as our DNA begins to wear out and burn our lifespan becomes shorter and our cellular health our longevity becomes shorter and shorter, so polyphenols slow down combustion and in some cases can make the wick longer again. long, which is cellular longevity and that also counts and the fifth thing that polyphenols do and it is part of our health defenses because they illuminate our immune defenses and who must have thought about immunity in recent years, we know that a good The immune system protects us from the common cold and other viruses that might be out there, but I think it's really profound to know that our normal, healthy immune system protects us from cancer because we are forming these little microscopic cancers in our body all the time and The reason they never grow is that our immune system will eliminate them.

The system is normally how it works like a police officer patrolling through the blood vessels or the circulation, you know, the alleys and the neighborhoods, the highways of our body and our immune system, when they actually find and detect a microscopic cancer, they do the What a police officer would do. a bad guy and throw him in the Paddy Wagon and take them away and that's basically why good strong immunity is so important on a day to day basis to avoid catastrophic illness and polyphenols can do that too so you ask a very simple question why do I care about polyphenols?

What I'm saying is that polyphenols activate our health defenses and when our health defenses are activated we stay healthier longer and we are able to repel diseases and talking about our immune functions and talking about gut health. I know. that one of the things that's really important for our gut is fiber, as you mentioned a few minutes ago and it sounds like based on the dietary patterns that you're talking about, these plant-rich diets are going to contain a lot of fiber. Naturally, if you could explain why high fiber diets are so important for people and maybe some potential dangers that can occur if people don't eat enough fiber, that's fine, so I'll give you a very authentic perspective on this.

MD in MD and when I went to medical school my professors taught me that dietary fiber is good to eat because it actually helps you, they call it fiber and in fact when you get it into the colon it scrapes along. along the colon. colon and you know and you keep your bowels moving so it's regular and you won't get constipated and people used to say well if your poop doesn't move and it just sits there like a toxic waste dump that's actually what causes colon cancer . This was years ago, when I was in medical school, the entire textbook was torn up and thrown out in a new way of thinking about dietary fiber, I mean, this fiber, so when we eat something with dietary fiber, let me give you An example. be a celery broth but I'll tell you something that doesn't look very fibrous which is a pear it doesn't look like it has a lot of fiber but it has six grams of dietary fiber a lot of dietary fiber and when we eat a pear, we're absorbing our you know, kind of our gut. top, all the polyphenols and the vitamins and all these great bioactives and then what trickles down to the bottom of our intestine is the dietary fiber, that's the quote now. what we don't absorb goes down our gut to feed our bacteria, so the dietary fiber we eat is actually the food we feed our gut microbiome now if you have a pet if you have a dog a goldfish budgie cat, it's almost I'm sure you are conscientious about feeding your pets every day and you know that many people think about you, you know what is the best food to feed them because you care about them and they pay you back with affection, and you know. help reduce stress, this is the same with our gut bacteria if we consciously feed our pet the gut bacteria that live inside us, by the way, the number of human cells we are made of is about 42 actually in cells humans and the number of intestinal cells.

The bacteria that live inside this are 39 trillion, so we are almost one to one with our bacteria. We have to feed those guys and we provide them with room and board, which is what we are feeding them and they pay us for that by releasing these. signals and hormones that control our metabolism help us use glucose better so that we have enough energy and do not develop prediabetes and active diabetes help us heal our wounds faster, so when we get cut or have surgery we heal faster they help us to control the amount of body fat we have.

I mean, as you and I sit here, it may not look like we have a lot of extra body fat, but I'll actually tell you that you don't have to look big to have it. a lot of dangerous body fat packed into a thin frame, they call this, you know, lean obesity and there's a dangerous fat called visceral fat that can accumulate around your organs like a baseball glove holding your kidneys in your heart and your liver that type of fat. It actually predates all kinds of chronic diseases and good healthy gut struggles, plus all the things that are good for our health and mental well-being, so what I'm saying is that when we feed our gut properly, it pays off for us.

Let's go back to all these benefits and all the different aspects of our health and when our gut is unhealthy and damaged, what happens is the bad bacteria overgrows the good bacteria, the bad bacteria doesn't give us all those benefits and then what happens is all of those functions start to break down, our metabolism goes crazy, our blood sugar goes up, we get prediabetes, our wounds don't heal as well, our immune system goes down, and then mentally we start to become more agitated, You know, dysbiosis is interesting. which is a problem with our gut bacteria, has been linked to depression, schizophrenia, even autism, so this connection between our gut and our brain is so deep that it really represents one of the new frontiers of medical research and That's why it's simple that Everyone needs to know who is watching and listening to this.

If you have a cat and adog and you are feeding your cat and your dog, remember that you have intestinal bacteria to feed them well. Give them some dietary fiber. they will thank you and you will actually be healthier overall and I know what you said that you don't like to talk in absolute terms in terms of diet, but it sounds like you are big on fiber. about vegetables and there's a lot of information out there, I guess, online, where people see that it's super healthy to be completely carnivorous and that your diet is mostly red meat and that vegetables are bad, what do you tell people that believe?

Yes, look, I tell people that I am a scientist and the interesting thing about science is that it is based on evidence and you look for new discoveries that help us understand something better and sometimes new discoveries are based on old discoveries. that make you more confident that something is true and of course there are a lot of ideas online and I think the topic of diet, nutrition and food philosophy, you know, there is a real science of new nutrition and food as medicine and then food and Nutrition also has a kind of very emotional component, psychological component, where it's almost like a religion, you know, you believe in a religion god, a belief, a philosophy, a school of thought and or are you for or against?

Well, that's not how science works, so I can only speak as a scientist, all the evidence has been accumulated to date with really solid scientific evidence, so it is shown that fruits and vegetables, nuts, cereals and seeds, healthy oils, seafood, actually, in general, they're good for you, okay? I know there are caveats of course, but you know you can always overdo it, but overall it's a healthy pattern. Listen. I'm not, again you mentioned a carnivore diet. I'm not against red meat. Actually, I'm not vegan. I'm not a vegetarian. but I eat mainly vegetables. I'd say I'm probably an 80's vegetarian.

I'm a very reasonable guy and I really enjoy food. I enjoy the tradition. I am a food enthusiast. I'll eat some meat from time to time, but I really don't think the evidence shows that eating a mostly red meat diet is good for you; In fact, I will tell you that it is quite the opposite, most of the evidence is that if you eat heavy protein, red meat with high saturated fat and then you know that you can even turn to ketogenic diet and other sources where you have a lot of butter and all that kind of stuff.

All the evidence shows that in the long term that dietary pattern does not pay off with good health. Enjoy that rib eye, you know, topped with a little melted butter, but I can tell you that if you do it every day, year after year , your body will pay for that, so I think it's more of a concept of understanding where the body is. Health lies in being a practitioner of moderation and you know what if you really like to eat something this is the kind of doctor I am no I'm an absolute talk to me tell me what really matters to you I'm kind enough to train you a little, it's okay you can have a little of that but just make sure you don't have too much, spend more time thinking about the good things and there will be less space for the things that are not so good for you and you can treat yourself from time to time.

I'm okay with that, yeah, I love that advice. I love that you know that you have to do what works for you in moderation and really just master the foundation of your dietary pattern and make sure that you check off certain boxes that you mentioned, like the dietary tribes food religions, if you will, and I think that that also exists in the fasting world, where you see people who are super dogmatic about fasting, as if fasting is the only way to do it. this and that I know this is one of the things you talk about in your new book, so what do you think about fasting?

Do you think it's really worth it? Listen. I'm really glad you asked me about that because My new book is called Eat Your Diet and it's not a diet book, in fact, it's kind of an anti-diet book because it actually shows you that it's kind of a title. deceptive that actually shows you how you can be. healthy without having to jump on board from an extreme point of view or an extreme practice and let's talk about fasting for a second, you know, this is the reality and I think you're probably feeling it in our conversation today.

I'm a pretty reasonable person, but I don't make compromises when it comes to science. Here's the fact that we all fast anyway, fasting is what happens when we sleep and don't eat, that's the definition of fasting, so whether you sleep for five hours. one day six hours a day hopefully seven or eight hours a day which is healthy sleep during that period of time it's okay we don't eat and that's called fasting and when we get up we take a shower we get dressed we leave the kitchen and we know how to help ourselves to something we are breaking our fast, that's why it's called breakfast, so there's really no religion or crazy idea about fasting, it's how the body is wired when we sleep, don't eat or fast when we eat.

We are actually breaking our fast now, what is new and what really helps argue for increasing the period in which we do not eat, that is, increasing our fasting time, is that when we fast we allow our metabolism the way our body is programmed, okay, our operating system is capable of burning extra fuel. Let me explain this to you, so when we eat, okay, when we break the fast, okay, which is breakfast, lunch, dinner, maybe some snacks, what are we? do and this is what metabolism is all about, it's all about fuel, just like when you drive a car you have to fill your car with fuel at the gas station, when it's full you can get in your car and drive away and the engine uses that fuel to keep you energized, that's what we do when we eat, we put fuel in our body and then we go about our day, we actually burn our gasoline, our fuel now, what happens is our body is programmed so that when we eat we don't we can burn that fuel, like our body is not completely in storage mode, only when we don't eat well can we burn that fuel, so think about this.

The longer we go without eating, say sleeping in, okay or just not eating before bed, not having a midnight snack and maybe having a late breakfast or even skipping breakfast, you are extending the period of time in which your body can burn. OK, what happened? You're actually clearing your pipes, you're burning that extra fuel that you might have built up from the day before to the day before and your metabolism is actually burning that fuel because you're working on that wiring. system that operating system where when you're not eating you can burn fuel so you want to stay fit and lean you want to lose extra harmful body fat reduce inflammation fasting actually does that for you and by the way other systems respond well to that too energy burning stage that burns fuel your circulation improves your stem cells improves your gut micro or biome use that as a period to reset your DNA is able to stay away from all the things you can put into the body and into your immune system too it gets better on restart, so fasting is actually normal and a good thing for you, this idea, so I'm trying to tell you that we already fast intermittently just by going to bed, and we can modify it now because we're starting to understand. if you have spouses a little longer, it's better for you, but this idea that you have to fast until you get into ketosis and then if you fast for days and days, you know these kind of extreme ideas, okay, they might be okay for you.

In the short term your body is not going to like it, in the long term I guarantee it, and it will eventually wear down your health, so it's like you want to fill your car with fuel on a regular basis and never want to overfill it, so that's another kind of caveat to this whole thing, but you want things to run normally and for people who want to live long and prosper, you know that old Spock from Star Trek kind of thing, you want to be reasonable and you want to enjoy your life and you want to do things that are not too unreasonable and that's why these extreme patterns are really unsustainable and don't give you pleasure, so I mean the pleasure of sustainability and biology at the same time, and I think fasting can be a great It is also a tool to keep your calories under control if your goal is to lose weight and trying to lose weight because it reduces your eating window.

I know weight loss is also a topic in your new book and you talk about some new things related to it. To that I know that normally when people think about weight loss, they say you know it revolves around energy expenditure and calories and calories out, what you are like, what you're consuming versus what it's like, how much you move and those things. So, what are your thoughts on weight loss and what other ideas do you have to share about that that appear in your new book? Yeah, well my book talks a lot about weight loss and foods that have been shown in human research that allowing you to lose weight now is not the quick fix to lose 20 pounds in two weeks.

I mean, there are things you can do to achieve that, but it's not healthy for you, it's not sustainable, but what I'm really talking about is How I Find Out How the Human Metabolism Works. So how many of us have heard this idea that, well, you're born with a genetically fast metabolism or a slow metabolism and people will point out? Look at my sister, she was so lucky to have been born. with a fast metabolism that's why she is thin as a stick and eats anything, another has a problem and then they always point out to me that, on the other hand, I was born with a slow metabolism, my genetics are not very good and that is why I have been struggling with my weight all the time and that is a very common type of common idea that exists, but it is an urban legend and I will tell you that when this urban legend was overturned about a year ago, there was a historical study that changed everything we know about the human metabolism and this was done by a study done by a researcher called Herman Ponzo from Duke University and he studied 6,000 people in 19 countries and he studied the metabolism in people throughout the human life span from two days to 95 years. entire human life and study 6,000 people in exactly the same way, by the way, these people were men and women, men and women, girls and boys, they were young and old, they were healthy and sick, some had diabetes, some had structural big bodies, some They were all skinny and when they studied metabolism in exactly the same way, this is what they did, they gave them all a drink of water.

H2O is what we call water in which the H in hydrogen and the O in water's oxygen had a special, non-radioactive atomic signature. but everyone drank the same thing. Now you can measure hydrogen and oxygen in the laboratory and, therefore, your metabolism in your breath, in your urine, in your blood, so imagine these 6,000 people throughout their lives. human, from days to 90 years, in exactly the same period. in the same way and looked at the metabolism, what do you find in the entire scatter plot of the map? It's all completely confusing and then they said, well, you know, isn't this what we expect?

It's just that everyone has a different metabolism, well, that's not where the breakthrough occurred. The big breakthrough came, they developed an algorithm in which they could actually subtract the contribution of excess body fat from the results of this study. Well, we call it fatty adipose tissue when in reality you employed this algorithm to eliminate from the scatter of data that eliminates the The effects of excess body fat were like bada. Human metabolism emerged only four phases of metabolism among humans throughout life. They all followed the exact same pattern, so the inner workings of our metabolism are exactly the same.

This idea you were born with. fast or slow completely wrong and all four phases are absolutely fascinating zero to one your metabolism skyrockets when you're a baby up to one year a year your metabolism is 50 faster than an adult's, okay? which is amazing from age 1 to 20 and throughout puberty when you see kids sprouting when they are super active when they eat two teenage dinners okay metabolism is going down, down, down, down, well completely different than we thought from ages 20 to 60 the metabolism is completely stable as a rock this is how we are programmed this is through your first job this is through your pregnancy this is through your menopause okay, it's exactly the same and then from age 60 to age 90 it decreases a little bit only about 17 percent when you are 90 years old compared to when you were 60, which is the same compared to when you were 20.

So when you are 90 years old, our metabolism scheduled is only 17 percent lower. than when you were 20. Now this is what happens, so that is the pattern of human metabolism like a bomb, this is how we areconnected. Now what happens is when you start adding the effects of body fat back into that equation, what if you think that happens, you take this beautiful four-stage pattern and you start suppressing it, then you crush the metabolism, so it's not That slow metabolism causes you to gain body fat and gain weight, it's extra body fat and the weight crushes your metabolism, it's completely the other way around and the reason why that's important and going back to your question about what I think about weight loss weight.

I think not everyone needs to lose weight, but everyone needs to understand that excess body fat, including thin people, who may not be thin. able to see your body fat, it could be packaged like peanuts inside a thin frame like, okay, you're going to FedEx, you're going to send, you know, some long fluorescent lights, you're going to put the lights in the box that you're going to add. peanuts in it, you can pack excess peanuts, tape it still like a thin box, but it's over, and in our skinny bodies, in a skinny body, you can have those extra peanuts, that harmful fat that suffocates your organs and releases really harmful inflammatory substances, so here you go What I think, I think we should all try to try to get back to our baseline metabolism so that we can be who our body wants us to be from a metabolic perspective and part of that is that by fighting the extra body fat, we can achieve it with exercise and We need to stay active, but we can also do it by eating food, and this is the irony of what I write: you can eat to fight fat and there are even more surprises because you can actually use and use fat good. to burn bad fats and that's how there are all these serious surprises that change the equation don't be afraid of your food use your food don't be afraid of your fat because we need some fat to live you need to tame your fat and so on and so forth on the Which is about weight loss, that's a really interesting thing because I was also always one of those kids that was like, man, that person is lucky to have a fast metabolism or he's just lucky to have a fast metabolism and you're right.

We hear this all the time, so let's say we have that person who might be reading your book, is listening to this podcast, and says, Wow, I have a lot of extra body fat to lose. I want to be able to do it. kind of jump-start my metabolism and do what I can to control my metabolism so I can get rid of these things as quickly and healthily as possible, like what are some things that you think science shows or that you can recommend. To help you do that, yes, I'll give you a couple of examples.

First of all, in my book I read about 150 foods. I believe this is the first book to contain 150 foods that have been shown through human clinical research to actually improve your metabolism, decrease the amount of body fat, reduce your waistline, and improve things like your blood sugar and sensitivity. to insulin and how healthy hormones relate to your metabolism, so I think this is the first book that brings together this compendium of all these foods so Let's pick a few, okay, because we don't have time to go through them all, but I will choose some highlights. It turns out that tomatoes have a lot of good things, they are a great source of vitamin C.

They have some dietary fiber, but they also have these bioactive natural chemicals called carotenoids, one of them called lycopene. Many people may have heard of lycopene, but lycopene is a fat-fighting bioactive. This is what it does. It actually removes our harmful fat and helps burn it by activating a special type of fat that we have in our body called brown fat, so brown fat can burn white fat, which is harmful fat, dangerous fat and eating tomatoes will turn it on, it will light up the heater and use fuel so you can improve your metabolism improves your overall metabolic profile reduces bad cholesterol this is all with tomatoes and it actually reduces your waistline also one study that was done actually took normal healthy young women who didn't were overweight or obese, it's okay because many Researchers have done a lot of research with people who are already overweight, but in reality these are young, healthy graduate students who do not have extra weight, they are considered to be of normal body size, whatever Whatever that means, okay, that can be debated, but the bottom line is that they just ate one tomato before lunch every day and were able to lose weight and improve their metabolism.

In very achievable doses, tomato can really do it. Here's another one. Strawberries have also been shown to improve your metabolism and so on. The really interesting thing about eating strawberries is that although strawberries may be sweet when measuring blood sugar level, eating strawberries to improve metabolism not only reduces weight and waist size, it reduces weight and decreases fat body, but it also doesn't increase blood sugar, so this idea completes another type of common idea which is like a brush idea and not like fruit has too much sugar it has too much fructose it may seem like it makes sense on a casual level but Science doesn't really prove that and the reason is that the bioactives and strawberry trigger your body to start burning bad fat.

Yes, okay, then you can metabolize even faster. By the way, this is not about trying to become a supermodel, this is about optimizing your body's engine and I think that's something we really want to be able to emphasize. Look at people who really want to look like you. You meet a supermodel who wants to fit into a bikini body. put on a wedding dress, they really need to take you to a bodybuilding competition, those are short term things that people do extreme things for, okay, I'm not categorically against that, I'm just saying that and what I write about myself book. his diet is that we should all try to do things that are good for our health throughout our lives if we want to live long and prosper and prosper, that's what longevity is all about, so another food that can really have incredible benefits Actually , it has been shown that drinking green tea also decreases excess body fat, so remember that I told you about this experiment where you know that when you eliminate the effects of body fat, your real metabolism starts to shine and when you add unhealthy foods and Add extra fat and you will start to suppress your metabolism, so this is really the concept: we have a hardware program inside of us that goes through four phases of metabolism, if you want to be all that can work in the sum of fat work bodily.

Depending on your metabolism, you can eat foods like tomatoes, strawberries, and green tea, and there are 150 other foods, including seafood, that I have there that can work in harmony to help you achieve that, so it's not a fad diet. about a lifestyle and trying to embrace and enjoy your life too, yeah, and I think from what I also understand, a lot of this also translates to satiety and that's why you know people who eat a decent amount of protein. , it can be good. for your metabolism and weight loss because it keeps you fuller longer and it sounds like that's the same with what you're saying, especially with some of these foods that contain a decent amount of fiber because one of the other benefits of fiber is that It keeps you fuller longer, that's right, that's right, so when you eat like you're in a bean burrito, that's fine, as long as it doesn't have a bunch of unhealthy stuff in it, you'll feel fuller longer, it's not because the beans are heavy. it's because there's a lot of fiber in beans and fiber introduces a gut microbiome and that really sets in motion this series of signals in your brain that can make you less hungry.

Now there is a hormone that actually does this, it is produced by body fat called Leptin. Some people may have heard of leptin, but we all know that it is part of this. Remember I told you that intermittent fasting is natural. Leptin is natural, so we have some fat in our body that we need and when we eat and in our stomach. gets full one of the things that happens is a full stomach sends a signal texts is body fat and our body fat releases some leptin the leptin is fine it travels in our bloodstream to our brain and our brain receives the leftist signal, texting and stuff leptin says, hey, you know, man, slow down, like if you're full, just slow down and stop, and that's basically what happens when we feel full in front of a plate. , as if it's because our fat is telling our brain to say, "Okay, you know, relax." man, like stop, slow down and stop now, this is what happens when you have too much body fat, a lot of leptin is produced and the funny thing that we don't fully understand is that your brain stops reading the leptin that it no longer reads the signal and even if you produce more leptin, you will always be hungry and you will never stop eating, so basically what you want to do is control that fat so that your brain becomes more sensitive to leptin and leptin will tell you. you relax and by the way, when you eat, if you eat too fast, you will outpace your signal that your stomach is full and your fat will produce leptin so you can dump a ton of food into your gut and you can overeat with a lot of food. easy if you eat super fast, so this is another kind of trick to optimize your metabolism: eat the healthiest, eat the right thing but eat more slowly, don't scarf down your food because you will defeat your body's ability to signal to turn on the switch off and then you will overload, yeah, yeah, I mean, you have to eat slowly.

I've also heard that you should eat until you're full like 80 or something. I think Caesar can be a great tool. What you can do while you eat to not eat so much and if your goal is to lose weight, this will probably help you do it too. I want to change gears a little bit, you talked about how someone can be thin, but also quote unquote obese in your research, even in your practice, do you think obese people can still be metabolically healthy? Well, here's a way I want people to think properly about the idea of ​​body size and I wanted you to think about it. healthy people super healthy people can have different body sizes and how do we know this look at the Olympic athletes you have your tiny gymnasts you have your weight putters you have your skinny track stars you have your slender figure ice skaters, there is a champion, there is an Olympic athlete in each body size category and then if you want to take a look at another sport like boxing, you have 14 weight classes from featherweight to heavyweight and there is a champion, there is a world champion every day and then Yes you really want to see an extreme look at Sumo, these are three to four hundred pound giants, the right people would call them obese, and yet they don't really suffer from the diseases you would normally think of: heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

I don't actually have them and they're still in pretty good shape, so the first thing I think is really important is that we reconsider this idea that large body size equals bad health science questions. but it's not the only thing that matters, what really happens on the inside is much more important, so coming back to your question, if someone has a large body size, can they ever be healthy or are they stuck without being healthy? What I would say is that science says With us, you can unleash your internal metabolism by focusing on ways that allow you to burn harmful body fat, including the things you can't see that are stored inside your body, whether whether you are thin or big, and you will really start to improve your overall health, so I think there is a different measurement as the true Health is not visible in the mirror, that is the key and it cannot be automatically measured on a scale and, However, that's what we've come to think is that when you get out of the shower in the morning in the corner, yeah, you look in the mirror and you see some lumps and bumps, you know, oh man, that really sucks.

I shouldn't be as healthy as I can be. I have to go to the gym or I'll step on it. on the scale, the number that appears is not the one you want to see and you like knowing that you hate yourself for it, that's the wrong way to think about it, the fact of the matter is that we are all programmed to be healthy, we have defenses of health, our metabolism is there and so what we want to do if people haven't thought about this before, it's never too late to take advantage of new science and it says we can make these little moves.

Small adjustments and eating delicious food at the same time help us move towards better health regardless of your body size. I love that you said that because I think a lot of people get stuck focusing on the scale as their only option. metric and I think obviously it could be a great tool depending on your fitness goals, it's something that could be used constantly to make sure you're on target.good path, whether your goal is to gain weight or lose weight or whatever, but sometimes it also gets masked. as the only way to determine if you are healthy or not and there are many people like the ones you mentioned who are not, quote, physically overweight, but they are internally overweight because of the way they eat and their poor food choices and maybe not being active and whatever, so I think it's important, like you said, to control what you can, to make sure you're feeding the right types of foods for longevity, to make sure you're moving your body, and then to make sure, I think you would also say that it's also important to do lab work to make sure that markers for things like cholesterol and APO B and glucose and things like that, you can monitor those things as well, yeah, look, I mean.

I'm a biologist, but I would say philosophically I'm not a biohacker, but I think as a doctor it's very important for people to get an annual physical and part of that is getting a blood test and you have to monitor it and ask your doctor. , I should have this conversation, how is my metabolism, doctor? You know, my liver is fine, my cholesterol, my blood, lip, it's fine, it's fine, and, by the way, there's one thing that some doctors don't. order and that I think is a good biomarker for your health and maybe for the internal body fat that you carry is something called C-reactive protein or CRP, which is a simple blood test that you can order almost anywhere now and it tells you how much inflammation is there in your body and is there a normal range and if you're above that normal range, that could be kind of a red flag to start doing something about it and one of the easiest things to cause one of the Logical things that can trigger that extra inflammation is extra body fat, so that might be kind.

From another sign for you look, we navigate Our Lives, successful people navigate their lives looking for signs about what they should do and what they should not do. I think the point you just made about going to the doctor and getting a blood test. I wouldn't obsess over it, you don't need to do it every month, you won't know you can do it, but I really think if you do it maybe a couple of times a year, I think it could be a good idea and esp. As you get older and older you might want to stay on top of things and if you find something that's not working well, yes, check it more often to see if you're making progress, that would be the way I would do it.

The last question I have for you focuses on this topic of medical practice, going to the doctor and having lab tests. I know he's obviously a doctor and he also talks about food being medicine. If you could explain the difference between the two like, when do you think it's a good time to look at food and then when do you think medications and stuff are really necessary? Yeah, look, first of all, I've built an entire career developing biotech drugs, I mean, I've helped develop 43 FDA-approved drugs for the complications of cancer, diabetes, and even blindness, so I'm not one to shy away from medicine.

I'm actually trying to develop better drugs to help us overcome invincible diseases, so I think it's important. However, medications are just one of the tools in the toolbox and, in fact, you go to the doctor to get a prescription or you go to the hospital if you are sick enough to receive an intervention that might involve medications, but that does not It's medical care. Medical care doesn't happen in your doctor's office. In-office health care happens between visits to your doctor's office and health care is what we do for ourselves, we take care of our own health, doctors are trained to try to fight disease, now doctors should really be trained to help.you too stay healthy but I'm just telling you the fact that in fact most doctors are trained and the way I was trained is actually to diagnose and treat diseases largely with pharmaceutical products.

Health care is up to us and it's something that you know we can do and that's where food comes in because food is the medicine that we put in our body three times a day, that's called food is medicine, you put good things in your body , your body will last longer, you add bad things. in your body it's not going to last as long and by the way, I use the analogy that we talked about about the car again in fuel, food is not just fuel, but food is also medicine, but look at the fuel if you put it in disrepair.

Quality fuel in your car, your engine will not last as long. Okay, if you put good quality fuel in your car, that's part of the care you take to make sure your vehicle lasts longer. That's where food comes in now, what's really interesting, Doug, is that there's new research that shows that even when drugs like cancer drugs are used to try to help people survive cancer, the foods that consumed, dietary fiber, polyphenols, the things that mentioned above can actually make cancer treatments some of the cancer treatments work better and it doesn't get any deeper than this in some research studies done by the MD Anderson Cancer Center where they looked at deadly melanoma and skin cancer treated with immunotherapy that stimulates your own immune system to fight and eliminate the cancer and found that people would do much better.

Their cancer would respond much better to their own immune system boosted by immunotherapy if they ate dietary fiber. In fact, what they found was a depth of six grams. of dietary fiber per day would reduce the risk of mortality by 30 percent 3-0 that's huge, that means the foods you eat and by the way, what's six grams of dietary fiber? We talked about this, an average size, medium size. The pear has six grams of dietary fiber, imagine if more people knew about that, more oncologists knew that that difference is something that is not made in a doctor's office, they are not giving you a bag of pairs, that's what they say the people you know, like most oncologists. your patients go and eat whatever they want just don't lose weight, eat as much as you want, go eat junk food, that's fine, no, science now tells us that there are things we can deliberately choose, it's not food versus medicine.

It's foods and medications that can help our treatments work better, obviously, ultimately, this is my goal as a doctor is to help people get off their medications, if they can get off statins so that their cholesterol in the blood improve if you stop metformin so your blood sugar levels are better, that would be the goal we all have: use medications when you need them, the goal should be to stop taking them, but your doctor will not do it for you, You will have to participate and be the leader in that, so that you can go back to being who your body wants you to be, how it was programmed, that is what my books are about, eating to be a disease, it should be, your diet really takes advantage of you and It empowers us to make those decisions that are within us, that to me is really the secret sauce to health and longevity, that's great wisdom and insight, Dr.

Lee, and like you said, medicine is obviously a great tool. , but during the times when you're not using medication or you're not taking medication or whatever, you need to work on your overall health and make sure you're eating right, making sure you're exercising, making sure you're spending time with great people, and living a healthy and healthy life. so I think people will really connect with you, they'll want to buy your new book. They will want to see more of your work. Where is the best place for people to do it? Yes, well, you can buy my books, including my new book Eat to Improve Your Diet anywhere books are sold, whether online or at your local bookstore.

I'm a big believer in local, low-cost family bookstores, but if you really want to, stay up to date too. science because I drink from a fire hose of new research come to my website Dr Dr William Lee l i.com Dr William Lee subscribe to my newsletter I teach a mini metabolism course I do master classes that I give away you know like tips and recipes and sheets like that I feel like this is kind of my mission is really to get information out to people that they can translate into their own lives, so go to my website drdr

william

leyli.com and learn more because we've had this.

I like a broad conversation today, but there's a lot more that people can really learn, yes, there's a lot more there and I'll be sure to include the links to those things in the show notes and for those listening, I invite you What to do is share. one takeaway maybe it was something Dr. Lee shared about tips for people to improve the quality of their diet or some of the things people can do to extend longevity maybe it was something he shared about fiber, loss weight, polyphenol metabolism, whatever the conclusion, be sure to Tag Dr. Lee and tag myself because we would love to hear your feedback and once again we thank you for listening to this episode of Adversity Advantage.

I'm your host Dougs, see you next time.