Starving Cancer: A Surprising Treatment To Reverse Aging & Prevent Disease | Dr. William Li

There was an interesting study recently that showed that if you actually increase your omega-3 level by an extra serving a week or two from wherever you are from your starting point, you can increase your longevity and your survival by 4.7 dr years.

william

lee welcome to the thank you very much, it's a pleasure to be here man, I'm excited to have you, as I was saying before we started filming, you have a very interesting perspective on health and what was a real hook for me and where I think it is . The right place to start is a quote you said, which is that health is not the absence of

disease

.

Now I found it very

surprising

, then I heard your answer and said: "Okay, I'm with him, so why isn't health absence?" of

disease

s, so as a doctor I train in internal medicine, which means I care for men and women young and old, healthy and sick. You know, I've spent most of my career not just in kind of a hub. In the midst of the current of modern medicine, which is largely about prescriptions and knowledge largely about diagnosing and treating diseases, what is different about me is that I began to realize all the successes we have had , you know, in the

treatment

of new

treatment

s for 12 different types of

cancer

. that didn't exist before you knew we were really only addressing part of the equation because wouldn't it be so much better if we could

prevent

the disease in the first place?

And the interesting thing is the same science that teaches us how to intercept it. and addressing a disease using drugs actually teaches us a hell of a lot more about how to

prevent

the disease in the first place, how do we really know, not just pick up the pieces after the time bomb or the stick of dynamite goes off, but how do we get the fuse or do we disarm the time bomb correctly? That's what really got me interested in shifting my scientific focus away from treatments to look at prevention. Now, if you are talking about diseases, it is quite easy to diagnose them. a treatment write a prescription refer to a specialist if you're talking about prevention you're really talking about health and this brings me back to square one where you started what we're starting so what is right health?

I mean, I'm just like everyone else, well if I'm not, are you healthy? Well, if I'm not sick, I'm actually healthy, so in most people's minds, including mine, Not being sick is kind of the default definition of being healthy, but that's very problematic. because the absence of something, the absence of disease, is very impossible to operationalize, you can't do something about the absence of something else, so that's what I started to ask, well, what is health if not Is it just the lack of illness? Well, it turns out that and this has been my research, it turns out that health is not just the absence of disease, it is the result of our body's own built-in defense systems.

The health defense systems we are born with are defense systems that form in the womb. Before we are born and the moment we appear on planet Earth, our health defenses go into overdrive from day one to our last breath, and suddenly that gives us a whole new canvas to understand what we can do. To support health, what can we do to increase our body's health defenses? Yes, I love this idea. When you think about disease, it's happening inside of us all the time and right now I've heard you say this in interviews, literally right now, you and I'm both forming

cancer

s but they're very small and the body has defense mechanisms against that and it goes and it attacks it and you talk about the five defenses that the body has and when those five defenses are working well, then even though you are being assaulted from the outside, you have things going wrong inside, you can achieve this, I will call it homeostasis, it that we consider health and you really take your approach of saying okay, there are these five defenses that would be great for you to explain to us what those five are, but there are things that you can do on a daily basis that support them and that's what I really want you to do. people understand your message, so what are those five defenses and how do we keep them optimized?

Yes, so our body has five very simple health defense systems that have now been discovered. They are number one. Something called angiogenesis. Those are the blood vessels. This is how our blood body develops blood vessels. Angio means blood vessels. Genesis is the way the body develops blood vessels. We have 60,000 miles of blood vessels packed into our body and these are the highways and pathways for our oxygen, our nutrients, everything we breathe, everything we eat, so we can get the benefits of the critical elements of life. being transported by blood vessels, that's so critical to our defenses, that's healthy, number two, our stem cells, you know, when we were kids we were told that starfish and salamanders can regenerate, but humans can't.

Guess what that textbook was thrown out the window. because humans regenerate slowly and we know that we generally regenerate because our hair grows back. You know, our skin can heal and grow back on its own, but some of the crazy things we're starting to discover is that, if you cut off a piece of your lung and it will grow back at the tip. If you cut it, remove two-thirds of your liver. Okay, let's say you have a tumor in your liver. You can remove two thirds and that. The third will cause the rest of the liver to grow back, sort of like a salamander's leg.

It's crazy, and of course our nerves will regenerate, which is why biotech companies have been trying for decades to figure out how to inject stem cells. Well, Mother Nature already beat them to it. because stem cells are present in our body as a defense and we are continually regenerating from the inside out, repairing problems. You know that there is a road team inside our bodies, yours and mine, here and now, that are fixing things that are invisible to us. microbiome we can talk more about this, you know, it is the spearhead of a whole new frontier about the human body that we are just beginning to understand, but the important part is that we know that when we have good health Gut bacteria and this microbiome are the ecosystem of our intestinal bacteria.

I call it the great barrier reef in our body. You know, 39 trillion bacteria live there and what we know is that the important thing for your viewers and listeners is that they help when they are healthy, they help reduce inflammation in our body, which then reduces all kinds of diseases. They help optimize your metabolism. Everyone is always worried about their metabolism. Good gut bacteria help fight fat. They help avoid insulin sensitivity and prevent glucose. The surges are very important, they control our hormones, you know, so that our mood and our brain, so our mood is also healthy and can fight cancer and regulate obesity, all kinds of things in our gut and by the way, it's very easy to disrupt the gut, I mean, think about a tanker spill, uh, that destroys, you know, a coral reef, that's what we can accidentally do to ourselves by eating the wrong things, you know, if you were taking a boat over the great barrier reef and you took a bottle of toxic material and pouring it right on top of the coral reef guaranteed that the fish and the anemones were going to be dead, well, that's what we make ourselves, so this higher level of consciousness that we have, we have to take care of our The gut microbiome is so important to defend our health.

Our intestine defends our health. Fourthly, our DNA defends us from the environment. That's why most people think of our DNA as our genetic code. Yes, it is, it is the blueprint of our proteins in our body that we inherit half of. from our mother, half from our father, etc., etc. However, the really interesting and unrecognized part of our DNA is that it is one of our bodies. Five health defense systems. What are you doing? It repairs itself. What do I mean by facing himself well if we go out? you know, during the summer and you go to the beach and you enjoy lying down, you know, enjoying the weather, the beach weather, the ultraviolet radiation is coming in and mutating your DNA.

How come we don't get cancer all the time after we come out? the beach because our DNA is programmed to repair itself when it's damaged by the environment and the beach is one thing and I'm not even talking about the tanning bed, but I always ask people when you're filling up your car with gas like, do you know? What are you in the gas tank? Are you standing upwind or downwind of the pump and people say hey, what are you talking about? I say, well, if you smell the fumes, the solvents, then you're standing downwind and if you smell them you're breathing solvents that can mutate the DNA in your lung so how come we don't get lung cancer because our DNA gets mutated? repair alone?

An incredible defense system, um uh, that our DNA plays and ultimately our immune system, which of course you know, after the last year and a half, everyone knows how important a good strong immunity actually is, but Most people don't know that even as we age, our immune system still has the ability to fight invaders, not just external invaders like viruses and bacteria, but internal invaders like cancer, so now we can and this It is one of the most remarkable things I have seen in my medical career to provide people who have cancer, even metastatic cancer that spreads immune treatments that alone do not kill the cancer, but unmask it so our immune system can go after it. him and even if we have metastatic disease, even brain metastasis, it is now possible in some cases for our own immune system to erase all traces of cancer and not just put it into remission, okay, that's what chemotherapy does, it can put it in remission, but immunotherapy can actually turn back the clock and reset you so that you no longer have cancer.

I hope you enjoy the episode brought to you by our sponsor. Prosper, get 50 off. your gut health test at home when you go to test bar impact theory from thrive dot com enjoy the episode so five health defense systems what is the mechanism when you talk about uncovering what is really happening from what I understand is that you are basically obtaining a sample from the tumor cell, you are sequencing the tumor itself and in some way you are programming the immune system to go look for it. It's that exact. Well, there are different types of immunotherapy.

Broadly speaking, immunotherapy involves harnessing your body's own immune system to fight cancer. It's different from inventing a toxic drug or even a smart bomb. You know, a drug aimed at fighting cancer, so immunotherapy depends on your immune system. It's true what you just said, there are some very specific types of immune systems where you can eliminate your immune system, reprogram it, you know, turn it from an ordinary immune cell into a super soldier, okay, and then inject it back into the body and it will go and go after the cancer, but there are other forms of immune therapy where what you are doing and this is what I was talking about, cancers like to develop these sneaky ways of hiding from your immune system, they They cover up, you know, like in the old Star Trek that the Klingons would do. turn on the cloaking device and now you can't, the company can't find the enemy ship, well that's what cancers really do.

Some immunotherapies only remove the layer of cancer and the immune system becomes normal. The immune system says, huh. See you, I'm going to come after you and I'm going to get you because what's stopping you and me from developing deadly cancers here and now, Tom, is that our immune system is detecting harmless little microscopic cancers and saying, I see. You're gone, okay, you're dead meat and they just leave. It's like taking an eraser, just erasing the cancer from the board. Okay, so when you discover cancer, you allow your immune system to do this. The best example of this.

The former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, when he was 90 years old, developed melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain, and you know it was at that time this was about 10 years ago, now almost 10 years ago , a brain metastasis from a skin cancer, melanoma is practically a death sentence, so I was happy to be one of the first people to receive a treatment that stripped away the mantle of melanoma cells in his brain and other parts and allowed your 90-year-old immune system to see that cancer and even at that age, even with that spread, everythingthis cancer was eliminated from her system and I used that knowledge to help treat my own mother, who actually had metastatic endometrial cancer, so this really came home to help me. on a personal level and you know we were able to replicate that type of finding not from skin cancer but from endometrial uterine cancer, so you know we haven't completely defeated cancer yet, but I will tell you that I didn't expect in my career in my life to be able to see that it is possible to take someone with advanced cancer and turn back the clock and literally wipe it off the board using immunotherapies and that's why I'm talking about drugs, I mean, I talked a lot about drugs and stem cells and you know all that kind of thing, but what's amazing is that with this deep knowledge I've now worked in biotechnology, so I know what it takes to develop technologies that go after these aids to improve these health defenses, but what's amazing.

It is very difficult to defeat Mother Nature and you can talk about drugs when you talk about treating diseases, but when you talk about prevention and raising the shields and increasing the defenses of health, you cannot talk about drugs that are they must take. talk about something like food and food is a medicine that you take three times a day and that's what I wrote about my book The Ecobee Disease, before we move on to food because we're going to spend quite a bit of time on that. I want to understand this mechanism of uncovering what happens on a cell phone.

Level that down to what the layer itself is, it's like a biofilm like what happens with bacteria, that seems strange but maybe that's what happens and then what the removal mechanism is. Yeah, okay, so there are a lot of different ways we hide. We are discovering new ways and there are many ways in cancer, the one that has really been susceptible to immunotherapies has been a protein called pdl1 it is called program death ligand one, so this pdl1 protein is produced by many different cells to help our Healthy cells protect to protect us against our immune system, so why not?

Why don't most of us have autoimmune diseases? Because our immune system is strengthened and ready to attack anything it doesn't want. You can recognize yourself. or I heal from the disease because our healthy cells have created this protein called pdl one and it basically raises the flag, okay, like on the grass that says hey, you know what we are normal, please don't attack us, so cancers they have taken over pdl1 and they do a lot of pdl on themselves and basically their immune system has wings so these super soldiers, their regular immune system is with all these soldiers patrolling their body, our body, all the time, no They can see the cancer.

Because they're completely undercover, he's just using another type of assassin in the crowd waving a flag and so he ignores it and yet there it is, it's there, so when you actually take that flag down and let the secret service of the body detect that thing. Okay, so your immune system will find the cells that are not formed by waving the flag that says the pdl1 protein, uh, I'm coming for you. Okay, this is absolutely fascinating, so let me put this in my simplest terms and see how close I am. I'm understanding that we have autophagy that your body is going through and it says, oh, here's a damaged cell, I'm essentially going to take it apart into pieces so you know if it's a senescent cell that's just failing or if it's a cell that's literally broken we are cleaning all that now I never stopped to wonder how the body knows that that cell is damaged it knows if I understand you correctly because it stops producing this protein that you are talking about in the absence of the sign that says I am healthy, the body then okay you're damaged and I need to strip you so that's part of autophagy so autophagy is basically like recycling you know you take the plastic parts and the parts and stuff after you take out what you're carrying or you're carrying it out, you want to put it back so it can be reused in some useful way or throw away the rest of the stuff, so that's autophagy and yes, these types of signals are used to help distinguish. between what you're going to keep and what you're not going to keep and what you should attack, what you shouldn't is that what we're triggering here is normal autophagy or is there another layer where it's a totally different response, yes, this is another layer, autophagy will happen after the immune system actually finds it, but before that it actually detects the enemy, it's a cellular profile, okay, so if you think about the security force, you know you have a vip.

In the city you have a large crowd coming out to listen to the VIP and you want to make sure there are no murderers or trouble makers in the crowd. You actually ask your security to come out and check who is coming to the party and when. They, when they get to the party, they're scanning the crowd for um, they're profiling people, that individual, that cell looks like they have a problem, okay, um, and most of the people look innocent, so That's what they have, you know, they have the pdl, the proteins that basically say hey, no, no, I'm you, I'm fine, don't attack me, but that cancer hides, it disguises itself, it pretends to be a good guy, it's fine, So what immunotherapies can do is remove the mask of mission impossible, how do you reveal?

How do you know how to selectively remove the pdl? How do you prevent the pdl from simply being removed from everything? Yes, it is because tumors produce a lot. make tons of extra PDL and that's actually how we can tell if you're a good candidate for this type of immunotherapy. It's called checkpoint inhibitor checkpoint, just like checkpoint Charlie, just like checkpoint for a security team to create profiles to make sure there's no bad guys in the crowd and um uh and The tumors, the cancers that are going to respond to this do a ton on this checkpoint and what happens is that the treatments have been designed so that they can peel off.

The pdl is called a pdl1 inhibitor, a checkpoint inhibitor and literally, you rip off the cancer's mask, it doesn't rip it all off, otherwise your entire immune system would chase you with an autoimmune disease. Do you have to inject it? on the site or something, no, it goes directly into your bloodstream and, uh, you want, you want this to go everywhere, to your brain, to your toes, to your kidneys, to your liver, to all of them. parts, okay, and that's the

surprising

part, like we're moving away from you. I have to open the patient and look for the thing or you have to scan, you can, these are these biological therapies, harness the power of our health defenses, yes, this is very interesting and forgive me, I'm starting to do it piece by piece.

Understand it better, okay, so I want to keep harping on this, so I really get it. What exactly am I injecting? Well, first of all, not all tumors will produce tons, so some tumors will not respond to immunotherapy. You easily have to find a different way to attack them, but the ones that do this is what we do: there is actually a bag of fluid that contains an immunotherapy drug, they are called checkpoint inhibitors and most of them are what we call monoclonal antibodies, so we're hearing a lot about antibodies in the news, we get a vaccine that your body produces antibodies.

Antibodies are actually a kind of ammunition that your immune system uses, they are the bullets that the immune system uses to attack things like viruses or cancers, so what? um uh but you but then the body of the ant can be designed okay so you can create a designer and a body to address and remove the pdl uh the cloaking mechanism so literally what's in a bag you would actually drip into like an infusion? uh it's a bag full of antibodies that goes directly to your body, okay it's like receiving an antibody if it's infused, that's exactly what it is and these antibodies have been designed, dosed and prepared so that all they do is spread All over the body.

They are patrolling everywhere and they don't last forever so with one shot they rip anywhere there is extra pdl and extra cloaking take it off immediately how did we get to the point where we were able to design something that only takes it off if it's extra ah well, that's the hard work of biotechnology you have to look at the normal you have to look at the abnormal so you have to value it you have to discover that recipe you know how grandma makes how does nona make that red? sauce so delicious it seems to taste exactly you know they've tried this over and over again different dosages different levels different formulations until they found the right one mate that's so brilliant that's really amazing okay so about 20 people if you remember correctly, we're like a species of hyperresponders to that.

You have an interesting hypothesis that will lead us to another of our defense mechanisms, which may be the place to go before we get to the food, which it is and I'm not. I know if it plays into the role of antibodies, but certainly just in treatments in general there are certain things that may be happening in your microbiome that metabolize the medication in a way that works for or against you. Can you give us something? color that, yeah, absolutely, you know, you're setting this up perfectly for me to tell you how our health defense systems don't work in their own silos, they actually work together, our health defenses collaborate and through these connections they can it really helps us resist diseases like cancer so you know the microbiome is something I can tell you when I went to medical school they never taught me in medical school they taught us that bacteria are bad you really want to clean them, clean them, treat them. with a good antibiotic, we now know that actually most of the bacteria in our body are good, there are some bad actors, but most of them are good and many of the good ones live in our gut, and the gut bacteria, as I mentioned a bit.

Before they do all kinds of amazing and crazy things, one of the things they do is the gut bacteria communicate with our immune system, which connects again with immunotherapy, so you need to have a good immune system that is ready to work well, ready to respond. The immunotherapy that they can treat you with is what's hanging in the bag, so if you hang something in the bag, the antibodies that go into the bloodstream and that rip off the cloaking device, you still need the other half of your immune system. , the other half is the The immune system has to be good enough to chase it, now it turns out that the microbiome is practically the coach of the immune system, one of the trainers, one of the caregivers, one of the housekeepers of the immune system , so if your microbiome is not.

If you are not in good shape, your immune system will not be in good shape either. Now this is what's a little crazy, most doctors that are in practice now, when we were in school, told us that our immune system, where is your immune system? system is in our lymph nodes it's in our spleen it's in our thymus, you know, people like it if we had a check box of places where the immune system is, just when you get a lymph node after having sore throat. throat or a flu or something is transmitted that's not where the immune system is, now we know there's something there, but actually 70% of our immune system lives inside our intestine, so think about your intestines, right ?

It's a big, long tube like Sasha wrapping around a garden hose. cut a garden hose in half it has a layer inside that layer think of jelly rolls think of it like a jelly roll now inside the middle of that layer is 70 percent of our immune system inside our wrapped gut like a jelly in a jelly roll now, where is the bacteria, the bacteria is inside our intestine, that ecosystem is inside our intestine, like inside the tube, and then the jelly roll, where the immune system is, 70 of our immune system, so what's going on, what's the connection, what's the collaboration, is our gut talking? to our immune system like college roommates living in a dorm, so you go to college, paper thin walls, right, some guy wants pizza, what are we going to eat tonight?

You know, you just hit the wall and yell through the wall and the guy knows what you want to order, it's the same thing that your gut bacteria can communicate with the immune system through the walls of the bacteria and help incite them and give them orders and how to get in good shape. Scroll down and give me 50. You know, that's actually what our gut bacteria can do for our immune system. Now there is a bacteria that is actually different bacteria that are important for different things. We're just starting to figure this out. There is a bacteria that seems to be particularlyimportant.

Is called. acromancy mucinophila acromancy mucinophila I'm going to come back to the name in a second, so this cancer immunotherapy therapy, I mean, it's really remarkable what it can really achieve in its best form, okay, but yeah, only about 20 people are the kind of responders that I wish we were all right, Jimmy Carter's or my mother's, for example, and one of my colleagues in Paris, Dr. Laurent Sitbogel is an immuno-oncologist and he took 200 people who had different types of breast cancer. breast, colon, pancreas and her. and they were all treated with immunotherapy and of course only 20 percent had a good response, a beneficial response, the other one was average, that's a malicious response, okay and she analyzed everything that made the difference between those who responded and those who did not respond, that's how it is. a typical thing an analyst would do what makes it good what makes it bad what are the differences she couldn't find any difference between the responders and the non-responders except for one bacteria that bacteria was acromancium mucinophila the people who responded had a bacteria in her gut and the people who didn't respond to the immunotherapy had a bad outcome they were missing out that's very interesting you're so crazy so she took the so she replicated it in the lab and found out that if she had mice with cancers and she gave them immunotherapy if she gave them an antibiotic to kill the necromancer man the cancer just grew grew grew grew they did not respond to the treatment if she returned the acromancy to their intestines the tumors responded they shrank frankly trying to disappear incredible true um uh and by the way he got the acromancy from human patients he put it back in the mouse so okay so what does it have to do with um how to increase akkermansia right because it's very sensitive what do you have if I were to give him a zpac okay to treat a bronchitis that would end the acromancy your body will eventually grow back slowly but surely but if you had cancer and are receiving this treatment you can't afford it you don't have time time is not on your side right then we can't eat the acromancy in this moment as a supplement it does not exist, it is not a probiotic, okay, not yet, the only thing we can do is grow acromancy, so we have to be our own gardeners of our microbiome to grow acromancy and our immune system. is in good shape so that the acromancy can talk to the immune system so that part is in good shape to respond to immunotherapy how do you do that right?

It's all in the name. Okay achromacia mucinophila mucina. This bacteria loves to grow in mucus. it grows in the mucus of the intestine our intestine normally secretes mucus so the more mucus we have it's like a fertilizer the more it will grow more acromancy so how do we culture mucus well? You can eat foods, pomegranate, pomegranate juice, elacha tannins, natural chemicals and pomegranate. actually one of the few things that can stimulate our intestine, natural natural intestinal substance and art for our intestine to secrete more mucus naturally so that it can regain its acromancy, so that's basically what we're doing now with some of these cancer patients: making sure that before they get immunotherapy, they're actually getting acromancy again, this is crazy and this brings us right to food.

One of the most profound things about his approach is that he has compared the response to all kinds of illnesses to a medication and then the response to food as a drug and I actually literally have chills right now. I'm just saying it's amazing how you can get a response from eating foods, whether it's pomegranates that increase the mucous layer of your intestines or many other things. I'm sure it will be mentioned shortly to some here that if they saw a drug that gave that kind of response, it would be a multi-million dollar drug and people would be losing their minds, but the fact that it is food becomes even harder to understand. test to explain to us some of the early understandings that you had about that and I heard you talk about how as an oncologist it's easy to know, oh God, what the chemotherapy drugs are and test them in your lab, but if you ask the same thing about what would be the answer for broccoli or something, it's like no one looks askance at you, um, tell me about food as a drug, yeah, first of all, food is medicine, it's an ancient concept and if you go back to societies and cultures ancient, like Greek culture or Asian culture, food is not just food, it's not sustenance, you know, it's actually part of our lives and part of our lives is actually what we eat, it influences our bodies, that's right. how did I arrive.

In this, you know very honestly that I am not one of those doctors that you basically know abandoned modern medicine and then despised and avoided prescription drugs like I just told you. In fact, I've been involved in the development of biotech drugs, so I think new drugs can be really important for the right person at the right time and in the right situation. However, I began to realize that because I helped develop many of the systems for developing drugs, we were not taking full advantage of all of these testing systems. um and to just elaborate on how I explained it.

I'm a cancer researcher so I've done a lot of research in oncology labs and I can tell you you can go online, click on some chemo drug or whatever I fedex it to you via mail order did it arrive the next day ? Put a little bit, a spoonful of the chemotherapy drug, in an experiment and within a few days or maybe even a few hours you will know using this testing system. whether or not the drug is effective against cancer where there is activity, well, now you can pick up the phone and order a pizza or a salad and have it delivered in 15 minutes and ask the same cancer researcher how do I study what is the onions do what do they do? anchovies what they do you know what lettuce does and they were scratching their heads and saying I have no idea so that's what I did 10 years ago is take on the challenge of uniting two worlds The two worlds of mug making collide in the world from biotechnology, where we have like you can't believe how sophisticated some of these testing systems are and that's what's amazing because you can also add the drugs and the foods and then you can compare.

They are next to each other, so my area is in the field of angiogenesis, how the body produces blood vessels over the years. Cancer researchers are trying to find ways to cut off the blood supply that feeds cancers so that the cancer does not receive a blood supply. it's just this microscopic thing and it can't grow, in fact, tumors can't grow any bigger than the head of a pen, the tip of a pen, until it gets a blood supply, there's no oxygen, there's no nutrients, there's no growth, okay, but when the cancer can really get this blood supply, they start to take off, they can make sixteen thousand dimes in two weeks, so it's an angiogenesis that's a trigger to drive cancer growth. , so finding drugs that can inhibit angiogenesis or stop blood vessels from going to tumors was at one time kind of a holy grail, you know, how do we get so many drugs?

I've been involved in the whole thing and now there are actually a lot of real drugs that are approved by the FDA, but we were able to study foods in that same system, some of which were foods soy grapes strawberries lemons and it was crazy to see them because it had the credibility street of being able to study against biotech drugs that pound for pound ounce for ounce molecule for molecule um, in many cases, the foods held their own against the In some cases, the drug is more powerful, obviously, some foods are not as powerful , but that actually opens the door to a whole new future and I think that's a really exciting thing to see, no joke, do we know what's happening at the molecular level?

Is it a metabolite that our microbiome produces when it breaks down grapes, that stops angiogenesis or is it something else, yes, so mother nature in creating foods, has mixed these foods with natural chemicals, right, these are called bioactives and they are called bioactive because they are biologically active and in a plant, let's look at a strawberry, for example, okay, the acidity of strawberries, you know their strawberries are sweet and sour, the acidity comes from an acid, as you would expect, called ellagic acid , okay, so you know when a strawberry is a little bit more acidic because it's got more ellagic acid, so electric acid is a powerful cancer killer, so the cuts end up in our bloodstream.

Can I eat strawberries and then you could draw my blood and it'll be like you have seven strawberries? That's crazy, okay? now, but here's the even crazier part, what are these, what are these bioactors doing in the plant? They are part of the plant's health defense system, so these natural chemicals help the plant defend itself when we eat them, they have another job description that they do. double function and actually help activate our own body's defenses. Now, here's one thing that I think is of practical value. You know, for a long time people talk about something like you should eat more organic and you shouldn't.

I don't need pesticides and stuff like that, here's a whole new take on this, okay, and this is some hot information, um, pesticides actually kill bugs so the plants look better, the leaves aren't so chewed up and, Fruits or vegetables usually look better. a little better too, that's just that farming makes it look better and the product looks better on the shelf. Organic doesn't use that and a lot of times you get it more natural, you know the insects bite the leaves and chew. up the stems, guess what mother nature created things like lactic acid as natural insecticides and basically when you chew the plant, strawberry plants, more lactic acid is produced to repel insects, it's a healing response injuries and such an organic defensive response.

Foods have more bioactives as a reaction. I was simply involved in a study. I met yesterday talking about organic coffee versus conventionally grown coffee. Coffee grown conventionally with pesticides. Organic coffee without a doubt. This is a study at the University of Warsaw. consume pound for pound of coffee beans, organic coffee has more bioactives than coffee treated with pesticides because insects, natural things in the environment, create more natural defenses for health, friend, yes, this is It becomes incredible, I can't believe it's like this. Deep in my journey to health and all that, I never realized that the actual chemical compounds in food I always thought were the metabolites of the digestive process that got into the bloodstream, which I know happens too, yeah , that's it, that's it.

Really intriguing, one thing we haven't talked about much, what your specialty is, is angiogenesis, so when we eat something that has an antiangiogenesis benefit, is it ubiquitous in every blood vessel in the body or is it doing something that creates something? kind of a chain effect, like the trickle of antibodies that we're getting, that somehow selectively targets things that are overproducing something great. Question, let me frame it in a first frame about androgenesis in general, so when we were in our Mom's uteruses were fine and the sperm met the egg and started to form a little ball of cells that still didn't look anything like to a person, but they began to create small organs and began to create forms.

The first organs created are blood vessels. Our circulation is the first thing that is created so our blood supply, our circulation, is a big part of who we are and I mentioned that we have 60,000 miles of blood vessels just to give you an idea of ​​how extraordinarily large that is if you were to throw it away. . Take out all the blood vessels in you or me and line them up end to end to form a thread that would go around the Earth twice as long, okay, it's crazy now that every single cell in our body that every organ needs depends on the correct. amount of blood flow so that they are fed with oxygen and nutrients, um, they don't need more than the right amount, but if they don't have enough, our body has to be able to grow more.

Okay, having just the right amount I call it the Goldilocks zone, so Goldilocks remember the story, you know, the bears went in there and it's not too hot, not too cold, not too hard, not too soft. , or our health defenses, including angiogenesis, are exactly the same way, not too much. a lot and not too little, but just the right amount, so there is this perfect zone for our blood vessels, our stem cells, our microbiome, our type of DNA balance and our systemimmunological. It's all about homeostasis, the term you used before, just the right amount now. That means our body knows how to grow more when it's necessary and then when there's enough it stops and there's too much, it's like a gardener who sees his grass growing too tall, cuts the lungs and cuts it again until he reaches the height. correct is fine, the health defenses of our body when they are working at their maximum there is like a perfectly manicured lawn neither too much nor too little the right amount to be able to walk like playing like rounds of golf on a perfect course Now what tumors do is to hijack this process and they like a tumor to be on a golf course, it just grows extra weeds and grass just for itself, so that's what it focuses on your body, it tries to fight it, but sometimes we need help additional.

For that extra help it can be a smart bomb drug that we design to target those extra blood vessels or we can help our body cut the grass by eating foods that have antiangiogenic capabilities or to cut blood vessels that we can never get rid of. They all simply return to the body's set point, so what is an example of a medication that can actually do this? There are monoclonal antibodies that are designed as smart pumps to kill tumor blood vessels, but foods can do it too now, why can drugs do it? and food targets a tumor blood vessel and does not destroy the aorta or the blood vessels that feed the brain, such as the carotid artery, it is because when we build the healthy blood vessels that we take, our body takes great care to build them to be very, very strong, it's like building a skyscraper, okay, the architects, the contractors and their craftsmen do everything perfect, as perfect as they can, when a tumor does it, you know, no, it's not careful, the contractor is like a lousy contractor who just throws the thing in and then The blood vessels that grow are flimsy, they're fragile, they're unstable, so think about yourself, you know a hurricane like Eric and Ida hits the area and strong, sturdy structures are healthy blood vessels that They will stay upright even when the wind blows. there, all those that are not well built, the wind knocks them down and that is why a tumor blood vessel is much more vulnerable to food or medications.

Wow, that's really amazing. Okay, so you wrote the book Eat to Beat the Diseases We've Touched. I've made some progress, but now I think it's worth what your type of general is. I know there will never be one size fits all. It's very important for people to understand, but in terms of general eating patterns. be disease, what are those general patterns? Yeah, well, first of all, when I wrote about the disease on YouTube, which became a New York Times bestseller, uh, the point was not to write about a diet, it's not keto, it's not South Beach, it's not about lose weight, even if it's really about health and because when I was researching different foods that would activate our health defenses, this is the first thing that surprised me, it's not like one food or two foods or five foods or yes, it was more than 200 types different. of foods and they were fruits and they were vegetables they were spices and they were legumes and they were different types of seafood, including shellfish, and they were different types of fish besides salmon, okay, and there are even some dairy products that can actually have some benefits, including fermented foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi, and these foods are so ubiquitous that they are found in the traditional cultures of every society, but especially in the Mediterranean diet, which we know is healthier for us as a patron, and in Asian food , which we also know is healthier, so what I started to realize is that eating to beat disease isn't just about choosing a particular food. illness and trying to discover what recipe works for everyone, but in reality it is a journey that we have throughout our lives, from when we are little until we grow old, we become older, parents have the opportunity to start feeding us. your children when, as soon as they take solid foods, foods that can really help them beat disease, in fact, breastfeeding actually helps your child beat disease by shaping and sculpting their microbiome, one of the health defense, so I came up with 200 different foods, I placed them all according to the health defense systems that they activate, in some cases they activate all the health defense systems.

I call them grand slammers because, man, just one food knocks out the park's five health defenses, you know. It's a home run not to eat those things and I explain that all the research has been done by me and other people to show how they really work. So what is the principle for eating to defeat diseases? You can love your food to love your health, love your food. loving your health that seems so contradictory to what we used to think about healthy eating, because the old thinking is that, well, you have to eat healthy, you have to eliminate everything that you love, you know and and and and I'm turning that upside down, from the inside out.

Outside, I'm reversing the whole equation, what I'm saying is if you look at those 200 foods I put in my book, you might be sick, take a marker and circle the ones you already love. I like this. like that one, tomatoes, I like them, oh man, I like this one, okay, it's a great starting point because if you start eating those foods, you're already ahead of the game because you already love foods that you can actually eat and that can activate your health defenses. You can explore, broaden your horizons, by choosing these other foods that also exist.

If you sit on TV and watch a meal on the Food Network, you can find all these people experimenting with different ingredients. If you go to YouTube, you can search for an ingredient. I don't recognize it or the melon, heck, it's a bitter melon, well it's an Asian squash, it's absolutely bitter, but there are ways to cook it so it's not so bitter and has medicinal value. Well, how would I do it? Click on youtube and search. in the recipe to cook bitter melon and you will see someone teach it to you, so love your food to love your health, explore with your life and only know the foods that I put in the book, activate your body's health defenses and some of the things I know historically you've recommended mostly plant-based, you talk about getting some omega-3 from marine sources, whether it's fish or uh, I think you're talking about seaweed, you'd have to refresh my memory, you personally eat some. meat, although I don't know if you eat red meat or not, I know that you recommend that people reduce their consumption extra virgin olive oil things like that, am I missing any of the most important tips?

Well, I mean, here's the basics. all the scientific research has been done and public health epidemiological research shows that eating a primarily plant-based diet is pretty broad, you know, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, healthy oils, good for you, you should eat most of it. . that doesn't mean and by the way, being plant-based could be complicated because a lot of ultra-processed foods also contain plant materials, processed soy, all kinds of other things, all kinds of unhealthy oils made from plants, however They are whole foods of plant origin. It's the kind of thing you'd find well at a grocery store or a farmers market, as I'd say go mainly for those.

Shellfish has been shown to improve survival and decrease the risk of death if you eat two or three servings. from the seafood shelves, it could be fish or shellfish, you get healthy omega-3 fatty acids per day per week, two to three servings per week and the amount you would eat. I write a whole chapter on food dosages and how much you would eat. about three ounces, so people like, well, I'm not a human scale, I have no idea what three ounces is, which I would say is a lot less than you think. It is a piece of fish the size of a deck of cards. put it in the palm of your hand, it's about an eighth, it's as thick as a deck of cards, it's not a big deal, and you know, people who love seafood can get a lot of it that way recently, there was a study interestingly it showed that if you actually increase your omega-3 level by an extra serving a week or two from wherever you are from your starting point, you can increase your longevity and your survival by 4.7 years, so an extra serving from seafood rich in omega-3 will increase your survival for lifetime survival is 4.7 years now you can get it if you are vegan or vegetarian you can get omega-3 from plant-based foods, so chia seeds flax seeds some of You can get walnuts too, but what about? plant-based foods, you get a different type of substrate to produce omega-3s, so you have to eat a lot more of them, so you know, I like diversity, so, plant whole plant-based foods, seafood, if you really eat fish, if not Don't explore it if it's not for some ethical reason, and then you know, look into dairy, by the way, you know that when it comes to food and health, there are no universals, okay, some dairy products, already you know, honestly, cheeses are good for the microbiome because a lot of traditionally made cheeses, not in large quantities, have saturated fats and a lot of salt, but some cheeses actually have lactobacilli and other healthy gut bacteria that we can use as a probiotic food, yogurt, a dairy product, probiotic food, so I'm ready. about science wherever science takes me is where the evidence takes me there is a great American novelist called the doctor and he had this great quote he once said writing is a novelist writing is like driving at night, you can't see beyond the headlights but you can do the whole trip that way and that's science, you can only see where your headlights are going and you focus on the evidence ignoring all the darkness that is actually out there, so what about the meat?

Well, I can. tell them that most of the research has been pretty convincing that if you eat a lot of red meat, you're fine, which was really only done over the last 70 years, as you know, since the 1950s, before most of societies did not have "We are not prosperous enough to have a ton of meat, okay, and now we have this abundance of meat because we have industrialized meat and all the things that are not so good for us, but all the studies They show that we eat a lot of red meat and all the studies have shown that by eating processed meats, we're talking about our sausages and pepperonis and all kinds of hot dogs, all those kinds of things that have been classified by the world health organization as carcinogens from the way processed meats are consumed.

Know from time to time, especially if that is something you really enjoy, don't worry, enjoy it, but don't do it all the time and if you can reduce or eliminate it, more power to you. , better for you. So this whole idea that you know life is for the living we have to enjoy how we do things. You know that some things we enjoy aren't so good for us. You know some people like to roll down the windows or put the top down and drive. very fast on a highway faster than the speed limit just don't do it all the time because one of these times you're going to have an accident so I think that idea of ​​moderation but if you're informed by science and then you can listen to your body you feel terrible after eating something don't do it don't eat it next time or eat less science is so rich at this moment in history that Do you know that anyone who wants to dedicate themselves to food as medicine, as science , not as a friend, but as a real science, has a great future ahead?

That's all amazing, this has been absolutely wonderful, where can people follow you? Are you on social media? Where can they get the book? Yeah, well, first of all, you can continually post new information that I find on social media and through uh, and you can find it on my website, visit my website, Dr. William Lee. dr

william

lee li dot com dr williamleecott.com I'm also on dr william lee on social media on facebook um I also do free master classes from time to time I'm a super mission driven person so I always from time to time I'll feel like I have to go out and I just have to give a master class and I'll go out for free and people can find out on my website dr williamlee.com and you know, an hour goes by. with me and I'll give you an update on what's new, what's going on, how your health defense systems work and I also have an online course for people who are really interested in digging deeper, thank you all so much. to watch and be a part of this community, if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe, you will receive weekly videos on how to develop a growth mindset, cultivate grit andunlock your full potential.