The TOP FOODS You Absolutely SHOULD NOT EAT! (Avoid These Foods) | Dr. William Li

There are a lot of

foods

that really impair our health defenses, our circulation, our stem cells, our healthy gut microbiome, our DNA's ability to protect our bodies from the environment and also our immune system, your body can't handle some of those.

foods

we have. I got used to eating. I think one of the best things about food and health is that it actually puts the power of choice in our individual hands and therefore we make our own decisions. One of the interesting things that is very clear is our body's health defenses the five we talked about last time our circulation our stem cells our healthy gut microbiome our DNA's ability to protect our bodies from the environment and also our system immune these systems uh for us to reach our health potential we want to make sure that they don't get inadvertently crushed by foods that we've become accustomed to eating so let's talk a little bit about some of those foods that really impair our health defenses that's probably the Best way to think about what to

avoid

now.

We know that added sugar is something that affects the body's metabolism a lot, so if you have a little bit of sugar in fruit, you know, from the natural sugars, that's okay because you also get a lot of other things in fruit. In fact, it helps your metabolism and it helps your body's ability to be able to digest and metabolize fructose and glucose and use that fuel in your body, but if you drink soda, you know that you have those 10 teaspoons of refined sugar that dissolve invisibly in any colored liquid that could be drinking it, it tastes great, it quenches your thirst, it's kind of a mental model that you know this is something you use to quench your thirst on a hot summer day and I can tell you that the state hyperglycemic that your body can't handle 10 teaspoons of sugar at a time and I think about people who drink a whole can of soda, right?

I mean, I've done it myself, there's no way that's good for us, so that overwhelms a lot of our systems, overwhelms our stem cells. Stem cells cannot function properly to help us regenerate when there is too much sugar around. You know sugar is a concentrated material, it's a solute, which means it's dissolved in water and when there's a lot of stuff, think about when you're in a pool or you're in, you know, or if you're swimming in the ocean for a long period of time, what happens? Water runs off your skin or even in a bathtub, your skin wrinkles because you've sucked it in. all the water and that's basically what happens to these cells in a high sugar environment in your blood, so I would say that the added sugar with sodas that are so popular is something that settles into their defense systems Of the health.

Too much sugar also literally damages the ecosystem. of your gut microbiome that's connected to your immunity um gut immunity unhappy, you know we all want to be as immunologically strong as possible and then by the way, let's step up to the kissing cousin of regular soda, which is diet soda, so This is what I just told you, you know we may want to reduce or eliminate regular soda, so what are people saying? Well, don't worry, doctor lee, we just move on to diet soda, don't worry, I drink. the diet version is much better for my metabolism, well science tells us that's not true and the irony is that people who drink a lot of diet soda for the purpose of not getting too many carbs from refined sugar actually continue to gain weight. of a paradox that now makes sense because scientists have discovered that many of the artificial sweeteners used in diet sodas actually harm our gut microbiome and therefore when you drink that soda and that artificial sweetener, you know you're getting that hit of sugar on your tongue. go to your brain, man, it's pretty sweet, but all those chemicals go down your gut and feed our gut bacteria and gut bacteria don't really like these synthetic compounds, these artificial sweeteners, so they rebel and while they rebel.

They're actually literally drowning in these artificial sweeteners and that's pretty bad because our gut bacteria actually helps reduce inflammation, but our gut bacteria also control metabolism, our insulin sensitivity, so when that gets messed up, guess what? it increases our blood sugar and we actually have a poorer metabolism of our energy and we start to gain weight anyway, so you know, two, just two, just two examples, but there are many other foods that we Maybe we want to be careful. Can you explain that term metabolism? because it is something that I think the public hears a lot, but I think it is not always understood so well.

I'm glad you asked that question, this is what I'll tell you because I'm actually working on a project now about metabolism, yeah, metabolism isn't. Doctors understand that well and in reality scientists don't even understand it that well and that is part of the mystery of the human body, that gigantic question mark, what is our metabolism, so here we are thinking about metabolism, I think classically as energy. , You already know how. Our metabolism? These are some assumptions. Our metabolism is something we are born with. You know, I have a lot of body fat, so I was unlucky in family genetics.

Look at my sister, she is thin as a stick, she is lucky to have inherited the same. thin gene for your metabolism, right, that's an assumption that we make about metabolism and that infers and by the way, it's incorrect, um, but that infers that our body's metabolism is the machinery that is used to take in the energy that we put in our body, which is our food. we eat how our body processes that energy to be able to fuel up and then how our body takes that fuel into the fuel tank, like filling the gas tank with gasoline, and then uses that fuel when we hit the road and drive, that's not wrong , okay, but what we're really starting to realize is that metabolism is much more complicated than that because it's connected to our immune system, it's connected to our inflammation, it's connected to our ability to maintain our health in the sense of Body fat is not necessarily bad, it is actually very good and a lot of the assumptions about energy metabolism and all the negative aspects that you know an athlete has is that whoever is in their best shape has a great metabolism, while than someone who is actually obese. terrible metabolism, it's not as simple as we thought, yeah, thanks for that, I think it's really helpful, so in terms of categories and types of foods we

should

think about limiting or

avoid

ing, the first thing you had were those drinks with added sugar . soft drinks fizzy drinks soft drinks help you know whatever country you're in whatever you want to call it I hope it's well known that actually those things are harmful to our health our immune system our teeth and you explained wonderfully why that's the case now before move on to diet drinks, because I'm so glad you brought up the issue of high sugar sodas, is it just the sugar that's causing problems because it overwhelms our system and we can't process it or is it something else, is it the sugar and chemicals and the impact they have on other aspects of our body's health and potentially those five defense systems that you've written wonderfully about in your book.

What is happening there? Is it just the sugar or is it something else? Yes, soft drinks, soft drinks. that we see so commonly around us is part of everyday modern life, you know, for the last 100 years. It's interesting, the history of soft drinks is really fascinating, it goes back to Europe, where people are trying to find additional ways to be surprised and delighted with drinks, so the traditional drinks were always tea or coffee, of course, the drink most popular in the world was just drinking water, um, the most important, actually, it was also closely followed by tea and coffee, and then there was a wine, I mean these.

They were for thousands of years sort of the elixirs, so to speak, of our drinks and the carbonation was actually added to the fruit juice first. It was a mistake, I think it was made when they invented it, but then it became something to delight the people you know. It's like at a carnival, you know, and you see a show that's actually just some of you passing by and thinking, oh my God, that's so unusual, that's delicious, that's how they drank the sodas and then one time , really Big industries came in and turned it into a marketing rumor, it started to take on a life of its own and this is where it transformed, it went from food juices that actually had some carbonation, which is just gas, you know, CO2 , and that's fine, but what ended up happening?

It's that they started having less fruit, but they figured out how to put in chemical flavorings that actually mimic the taste of fruit and then, of course, no one wants to just drink a watery-looking carbonated drink, so they started adding artificial colors and then I started to add preservatives and this refers to the importance of reading a label every time I buy something to drink, you know, in a store or supermarket. You know, uh, I'm an explorer, so I love trying new things if I saw a drink in a store that I found appealing or intriguing.

I could buy it, but the first thing I do is look at the label, what's on there, so it

should

be mostly water, so I look for that. And then most people don't know this, but the order in which the ingredients appear on the label, at least in the United States, is synonymous with their relative concentration in the drink, so what you have to do is which is usually water and then it's sugar, so we talk about that or artificial sweetener and then you start to see the other things behind it and I think most people will be surprised and rightly disappointed, so that natural fruit juice is usually pretty low on a list of 10 or 20 ingredients, so if you're scared of not being able to pronounce, understand, identify the ingredients in a drink, you should follow your instincts, that's probably not something you want put into your body because your body is not programmed to handle those chemicals.

Yes, I think that's great advice, something I also use on my patients. People say there are always exceptions. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's a general principle when I look at ingredient labels. I completely agree that if you don't recognize it, maybe give it a miss and choose something else instead, you also mentioned marketing when you were talking about fizzy drinks and that's something we're really struggling with. You know you're trying to promote all this amazing, colorful food, but what we're fighting against is this marketing machine. And in particular, I think around soft drinks, fizzy drinks and soft drinks, it's really tragic to see sports stars looked up to by kids.

You know, you've certainly seen this in the UK for many years. You see this big time in India. where like the big cricket stars they are often sponsored and seen drinking a can of soft drink and in fact I think this is one of the big problems that we face because that just instills in the minds of these little kids I really want to be like that. person or are they drinking that drink oh I want to drink that and be like them how much of a problem do you think marketing is? You know, sponsorship, product placement, commercial deals, it's something we have to fight against.

I think we all have the freedom that most of us make our own decisions and I try to think of any arguments like the one we are discussing now from both sides of the coin if you run a company and then your company is making a product your job is marketing it, be it a soft drink, a tennis shoe or a wristwatch, on the one hand. I don't blame companies for doing marketing and the ones that actually do it really well, hey, you know what that is? that's their job, okay, on the other hand, I think the fight we're having is really not against the company, but against the inertia that many of us have in the community to do our homework and get back in touch. with our body because I think if we really looked in the mirror and started getting familiar with what our body is telling us, I mean, you know, look, this is how I think about it in the morning, you wake up in the morning. in the morning you take a shower you get out of the shower you look you go to see the mirror you look in that mirror most people are not that happy most people are not that happy with what they see they can always find something wrong with it they yourself you know it and then you know it and then you can step on a scale and you might not like that number okay um and then you like it those are the few moments of clarity in a day when you might actually be thinking about yourselfsame and then we arrive We get dressed and we leave and we let ourselves go with the rest of our lives, be it our jobs, our families, where there are other responsibilities and we leave ourselves behind.

A lot of times we deprioritize what our body needs and I think one of the inertia things we're fighting against is actually all of those other distractions in our life. In fact, I think you know one of the things we could do to teach children and one of the things we could do to teach young parents one of the things we could do to help teachers, whether in school primary school, high school or college or beyond, is to re-emphasize the fact that we all need to be in touch with our bodies, we must know ourselves first, knowing ourselves first allows us to discern.

Whether or not a message that you're seeing on TV or being promoted by a sports star or something being promoted to you in a grocery store is something that you want to participate in, so I think yes, we should be aware and we should enact policies that prevent predatory marketing practices that target people who are uninformed and very vulnerable, like marketing to children, you know, with certain ads like that. I think that's something that works and therefore it's something that we really need. We're actually going backwards, but on the other hand, I think companies are just doing their job.

I think we have our own decision. We need to reject the predatory practices of companies that prey on the vulnerable and we also need to be able to encourage consumers to be smarter, wiser, more in touch with themselves and then be able to discern what they should order or buy, that really can help yourselves, yes, I really appreciate that nuanced response looking at it from both of you. On the other hand, you mentioned sugar and these soft drinks that we know even small amounts consumed regularly can be quite detrimental to our health and then you moved on to the artificial sweeteners in these diet drinks.

Now I share the same perspective as you on this, but it seems to be a very divisive topic among the public, but even within science and medicine, this whole issue of whether artificial sweeteners are good, bad, or neutral seems to have support. of many people. I know Professor Tim Spector, who has been on the show before and he is also pretty clear that we should avoid them. you seem to be quite clear that I certainly take the precautionary principle with my patients. He says listen, I've seen enough data to suggest that it's having a negative impact on the gut microbiome, so I'd rather take that precautionary approach and say, let's try something else.

What is your opinion on this and why do you think it is such a divisive topic? Well, first of all, all kids love candy, right? I also remember when I was a child. I know in the US you know on Halloween and who didn't expect to collect all the candy from the neighbors and I think you know that candy is delicious and there is nothing wrong with being haunted and I think we take with us a lot of pleasant memories and funny, I think the brain is also programmed to chase sweet babies, yeah right, I mean it's part of our instinct as animals, you know, just like the lion in the savanna chases the antelope, I think humans know that on the street going after candy is one of those things that we are simply programmed to go after sugar.

I think there are industrial interests that actually make counterarguments to the harm of sugars and artificial sweeteners and for the In fact, I want to mention this because I think it's important not to malign categories, I think that's really important, so artificial sweeteners, Let's be specific, what I was referring to are things that are not refined sugars, the white powdery substance you would use. buy in a supermarket, artificial sweeteners are the ones that are chemically synthesized, not the natural ones, which have actually been designed to activate sugar receptors on the tongue and mimic sweetness, okay, and there are many different types, so I think if someone were to Google and search for categories of artificial sweeteners, they will start to see that this is not one product, it's many different types, some people might consider artificial sweeteners, stevia.

Now stevia is a natural sweetener, but it's still artificial compared to refined sugar, etc. What about some people who use monk fruit, which is also a natural sweetener that is not the same as refined sugar? It also activates the sugar taste buds, it's more natural and then what about aspartame and circles and all those other types? There are a lot of chemical names that you can't pronounce, so I think as we talk about this now we need to categorically say, you know, I think that excess natural sugars in product form added to foods, these added sugars tend to be unhealthy. if consumed in excess.

That and soda is just one of many examples with a lot of added sugars, artificial sweeteners are not a category, it's a lot of different types of things that are used in place of refined sugar and what I would say as a smart consumer, you know? I just know that there are more natural versions of those, I think stevia is fine, however, there is stevia, um, which are actually not all stevia, you take the package, look at the ingredients and find that even though it says stevia, you look at the ingredients. and in fact you see other things added to it that we can't forget when you buy ultra-processed foods in a package, it's almost certain that things have been added to it even to keep it on the shelf that may or may not be good for you.

And one of the great advantages we have now is that each of us carries one of these, a mobile phone. So if you don't recognize something and are curious, write it down and look for that chemical to learn about. something about it that could really make the difference between whether you put it in your cart or not, yeah, I love that empowering way of looking at this to put the information in the hands of the consumer and tell them to start as hard as possible to do this. better decisions because you know this one will lead to health, this one probably won't promote my health over a period of time, I mean look what happens when we sit down at a restaurant, you open a menu and the waiter comes over. and he says: do you have any questions? so we've all done this, you've picked one that you think is interesting and you ask what's the question we're asking you, ask the waiter, hey, what's in this?

Okay, what's on this plate? and they tell you, and based on the information that you requested as a consumer about the food that you are about to buy and eat, you could say "well, that sounds pretty good, I'll have it" or you could say "um you." I know that doesn't sound so good to me, I think I'll choose something else and I think the power, you know, the powers in the pocket of the consumer and it's our money, our resources that we're spending and by I mean, you can see this now With the global and geopolitical events going on, if we choose not to support something, it can have a powerful impact and that impact actually comes from our pockets, yes, aside from these drinks we've covered. so far, any other type of foods that we should generally try and avoid, say when we're at the grocery store or at the grocery store, anything that we should think about, yeah, so I think you know that for a lot of the same reasons as the ones that put chemicals in our bodies that we really don't want ultra-processed foods foods that come in a box foods that have a lot of ingredients and a lot of preservatives and chemicals inside things that say that if your grandmother showed it to her she might not recognize her food or great -Grandma and maybe ultra-processed foods as a group tend to be associated when we look at populations with worse health outcomes due to diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and even cancer, so again, you know, though I said we must be careful not to overdo it. generalize, it's true: things in a box, things in a can, things that you know are made to scale and are meant to sit on the shelf for months or maybe even years, tend to get attention anyway, my attention , that it really pays to read the label and know what you're putting in your body, so ultra-processed foods I think alcohol is another thing that's popular, it's social, I mean, look, if you look beer and wine, these go back millennia as part of human culture. and beer and wine distilled and fermented for thousands of years, you know, in the coliseum in Rome they're still doing excavations to find out what the gladiators actually ate and drank and they discovered that they found in there, you know, wine barrels and things like that. as if it were a cherished tradition of humans, but what we do know is that it is easy to consume in excess and we know that there are healthy properties in the liquid of the wine due to the Fermentation takes things out of the skin of the red grape or takes out things from barley hops in the case of beer like xantho humeral and beer or resveratrol and red wine.

The fact is that none of the benefits that you get from any alcoholic beverages come from ethanol, the alcohol itself, the thing that turns you on does nothing for your health, okay, some of the other things that are in the fermentation broth might be good for you, so that's something you know Well, well, they discovered that and I think recently there was research showing that even a glass of red wine could also have an impact on brain health and I think that you know we have to be. I'm very careful not to do that. throw a spear at every food you know we want to malign for health reasons.

I think wine is a treasured tradition. Alcohol is a cherished tradition, but people need to know that its benefits and that it's okay to have a drink or two now and then, but I think people who really strive for it see in addition to the obvious liver disease and problems of nutrition and brain health, I mean, alcohol is a toxin for the brain. um we really want to be aware of that. the amounts that are consumed, you know, processed meats are another food product that is actually classified as a carcinogen by the world health organization. What type of processed meats are we talking about?

We're not talking about air-cured salami from Sardinia. You know you know they've been made the same way for thousands of years that people eat moderate amounts of you know as part of a more balanced traditional Mediterranean meal. I'm talking about the deli foods that you go in there and you're cutting things up, you know, from a big lump that doesn't look anything like the animal you came from and some of these cured sausages, if you visit a sausage factory that I had, once I had a patient who actually worked as an inspector at a commercial sausage plant. and he told me that he had to change his boots every month.

Rubber boots going in there because the stuff that splashed out of the pool that the sausages were in essentially, um uh, embalming them to preserve them and give them flavoring, they actually dissolved. the rubber soul of him does that mean a big impression on me? I'm still talking about it 20 years later, yes, and we are in some ways removed from that process, right? We don't see that we don't see that. in the videos we just see the pretty packaging and the clever marketing copy there, so I think that's really, really important and I really like the way you made that distinction there.

You also know that when you talk about things like alcohol or anything else, it doesn't just depend on that one thing it depends on everything else that's going on in your life we ​​also like to take these things in isolation, good or bad, it's like, well , it depends in a way, isn't it like that in our first conversations together, that if people haven't listened? I highly recommend that you go back and listen to one of the things that I really liked about his approach was that he said, well, let's put foods into our bodies that support these five defense systems and if we can do that and support them, we'll raise the bar.

We become more resilient, therefore we have more room to deal with the insults that will come in life, whether they are insults to DNA due to pollution or whether it is something strange that we introduce into our diet that we probably know not to. It's like that. the best for us, but you know, we like it from time to time and I really like that approach and I know that we're starting this conversation by focusing on some of the things that we should avoid and that we're going to get to very quickly. the things that people can bring to the table, but yeah, I really appreciate that the most important thing that we as doctors can do is listen to our patients and listen to them and try to understand where they're coming from and what's important to them.

I always ask my patients, do you know what you eat? What do you like to eat? What brings you joy when it comes to food, although the ant, that question can usually elicit a response likenever. I try, I'm very careful not to. Ask that question judiciously: What kind of negative foods do you eat? How much steak do you eat? I never asked that. I always say something like Tell me what you like to eat. What brings you joy. What are some of your favorite things that you like? I like to eat and you know again it's that conversation that invites someone to look deep inside themselves.

I think, you know, when I was a kid I studied martial arts and one of the greatest martial arts artists of all time was Bruce Lee, who I actually read a lot of his writings, he wrote them in a philosophical way and he wrote one of the More important things: If to be successful in life, whether in martial arts or otherwise, is knowing yourself to truly know yourself and me. I think very often we get distracted and don't have the opportunity to ask ourselves something simple like: if we had the choice, what would we want to eat?

What brings us joy and my firm belief is that if we want people to get along. a better diet to get them started and keep going, we want them to really feel like it's not hard work, it's something that's doable and I think there's nothing easier than saying, hey, you know what, something that already brings you pleasure and joy something you like to eat is already healthy so let's start with those things because you already know you love them so what's in my stash could be a disease. I have lists of like 200 foods that I always tell people, yeah, I have my book and get a bookmark.

Well, I would say a marker like permanent marker. Yes, because it's permanent, you have to make a commitment, okay, take a marker, a black marker, and circle the foods that you record and that you already like, actually, that you love, and I don't care if They are only one or two. Everyone I've met has been able to tick off like 10 of them, so me or more, but if you find a food that you already love, that is healthy and good for you and that activates your health defenses, you are already way ahead of the game. We'll get back to the conversation in a moment.

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I want to talk about olive oil and why it is so beneficial, but before I address olive oil in the spirit of the types of foods we should think about limiting when we are in our grocery store. or at our grocery store and we are looking to buy oils to cook food and sprinkle on food to pour on our salads, what kind of oils should we try to avoid and then what kind of oil should we try to buy instead? This, unlike the debate over artificial sweeteners, is a loaded topic, so I want to start, you know, this component of our conversation by saying that the jury is still very much out on which oils are bad for you and are most bad for you. you, but I think it's less controversial which oils are best and good for you.

I want your listeners to know that I want to give people some real practical things and not just dive into the science of petroleum products, which is what oils are, let's talk about this number one rule, regardless of what oil you have. What I would say is don't consume too much because oils are fats and fats can be healthier, but in reality there is no such thing as healthy. fat that you would like to drink a lot of every day, okay, so the point is that there are healthier oils, but we should all limit the amount of oil that we actually put into our body.

Okay, number one, number two, it's that one and this one. Generally speaking, it's not reusing the oil, okay, most oils are reused when we heat them for cooking, whether we actually know that, I mean, again, frying is something that's generally not very healthy, the frying process actually changes the chemicals the natural chemicals that make up the oil in the oil itself and then they paint it on the food, stick it on the food, so we are eating some of the chemicals that change when we actually eat fried food, Now look, I mean, I've had I've had some amazing fish and chips, um, uh, when I visited England before, um, and again and again, as we speak, you know, from time to time, if you spend the most part of your time shoring up your health defenses, raising your own bar.

You know eating a rare treat is totally fine, but when you fry things in hot oil you're also changing the chemical structure of things, that whole, golden, golden, crispy browning of the food actually changes the chemical structure of the food itself. and in ways that are potentially carcinogenic and so you just have to be careful with that, the third one, so I think you know how to reuse the oil. Here's what's a bit risky. You go to a restaurant to eat. You have no idea if they are reusing the oil. and over and over again, you know, I mean, think about Asian restaurants, whether it's an Indian restaurant or Chinese rice, they have these giant bats where they fry up tasty little bits, but they might reuse that oil for days, so um uh, reused oil is not good for you for sure and things that are fried in oil can also change over time, so let's now start talking about the properties of the oils themselves, this is where I think, instead of walking in the shifting sands of I'm trying to say that palm oil is better than corn oil.

Is coconut oil dangerous for you? You know, we can go into that jungle with you, but I think you need a machete to get out of there and therefore the best way to think. To clarify, you know if there are healthier oils to use and how to use them, and this is where I think olive oil really stands out first, it is part of a healthy eating pattern that has been revered for thousands of years and that It is in the traditional Mediterranean diet and the olives are seasonal, they are pressed, extra virgin olive oil contains not only poly monounsaturated fatty acids that are better for the body and less harmful to cardiovascular health, but there are also many polyphenols that They come from the olive itself now a lot of people don't understand this, but when you look at olive oil, the reason we say extra virgin olive oil, you know that's what supermarkets and restaurants are proud to use now is because it's not just fat. it contains the polyphenols in the oil, so by the way, this is a good experiment for your lawyers, buy a small container of olives at your supermarket, make it easy for you and literally, you know, drink it. home and take a heavy glass or take a board like a heavy cutting board and press those olives yourself and you'll see if you press hard enough you'll see a little bit of oil coming out now on one olive. oil factory, I mean, that's so you can appreciate where your food comes from, where your olive oil comes from and when you press it you'll see that you've crushed the olives and some of the pieces of the olives are actually in the oil olive, the reese's, that olive oil tastes so good, it has that kind of spicy vegetable, kind of quality, it has an umami flavor, it's not because the fat is tasty, it's because the pieces of olives that were crushed there in They're actually there giving it flavor, now those pieces and what comes from the flesh of the olives contain polyphenols, one of which is hydroxythyrozole, hydroxytyrosine, it sounds like a very complicated chemical name, you know, your listeners don't memorize it either in any way. but you should know that that comes from the olive, now the olive oil will have a part of only about twenty percent, but if you really press that olive, eighty percent goes into the olive water and gets trapped in the pulp and so on. one.

One of the things I always say is that you know, if you really love olive oil and you want to get the most out of it, just eat the whole olive, you know, and you can cut up an olive and you'll get some. with a little bit of fat you'll get all that flavor and you'll get a lot more polyphenol now if you're cooking with olive oil. I always say go for extra virgin for that reason, I would say don't go deep. fry, but you can baste, you can put a little on the food, you can actually sauté it, not too much.

All the studies show that about three tablespoons of olive oil is something like which is probably about the maximum of what you would want. day so no one drinks olive oil and then the other thing is if you want to choose which olive oil because I feel overwhelmed when I walk into a store and see all this like a whole wall full of olive oils right everyone is promoting this is what to do again I pick the olive and the oil and look at the ingredients what I'm looking for I'm looking for monovarietal olive oil monovarietal means it's made with only one type of olive and I'm looking for the type of olive that that The oil is made from three different varieties of olive in Spain.

Spanish olive oil. I'm looking for picuol p-i-c-u-a-l. Choose your olives from those with the most polyphenols in the oil so that the olive oil is loaded second. Greek olive oil, the koroneki olive, which is from the Peloponnese, both, the picuan koranicki, are very common olives, so that's good news, it's not very expensive, the highest amount of poly, one of the three main polyphenols and the third for Italian olive oil. I am looking for oil that has been extracted from a single varietal. It's called Moriolo and it comes from Umbria and it's less common, harder to find, a little more expensive, but I just gave you three olives, eh, picuelle Kornicky Mariolo, which are not.

Most of them are not good for eating olives, but they are excellent for olive oil. full of polyphenols, if you get olive oil that is single varietal pressed only from each of them, you can be sure that you will get the best kind of capitocapo of the polyphenols in the olive oil, yes, I love it, in fact In my kitchen , since we are sweet now, there is the demanding olive. Well, I would have called it single origin, but that's because I'm probably used to picking coffee, but as you described, there was such a wonderful energy in your voice and your body language reminded me of a wine connoisseur talking about the different varieties. of wine or a coffee connoisseur talking about it.

You know I get a single origin grain from this particular farm, but I guess it's not that different, it's all about going. Return to Where does this come from? How was it processed? Which is actually in my hand right now that I'm about to buy. Yes, and you know, there is a great pride that we as humans have always had and it is still within us to know something about. the food around us, I mean, you know, if you talk to a farmer, they're proud of what they have, talk to a villager, they're very proud of what their community grows around their community, and again, I think you already know. something that maybe we're fighting because I want to pick up on the jargon that you brought up at the beginning and I think it's helpful to think about who we are, what we're really fighting against, you know, I think we're fighting against our distracting ourselves from knowing who we're fighting against. knowing how to slow down so that we can understand our own pace we get distracted by the pace of what we are expected to do and so we don't have time for ourselves, I mean, all young working parents certainly feel that way, you know, I'm very busy with time for myself and yet when it comes to food and health, we all need to have that time for ourselves and I think we should be very proud to say what we really love.

Yes, many people talk about the healthy properties of vegetables. Of course, all kinds of vegetables are promoted that have different impacts on the body, but sometimes we are told to sprinkle or pour a little olive oil on vegetables because it helps us absorb the nutrients from them. What's your perspective on this given what you just said about the oil and knowing that maybe don't consume too much of it even though it can be healthy? Yeah, well there are two, let's look at that because there are two things that you were describing. One is that in plants, let's take a tomato as a great example, there are natural substances, natural chemicals like lycopene.

Lycopene is a carotenoid that helps tomatoes turn red. It has many healthy properties and is a powerful antioxidant. I have studied lycopene in a laboratory and it can actually helpto starve cancers by cutting off their blood supply. It can slow telomere shortening to slow cellular aging and can protect our DNA even from sunlight and ultraviolet rays. There's a lot of good things about it now, lycopene is actually a uh, it occurs naturally in a tomato on a vine in a chemical form that our body doesn't absorb as well, so if you take a tomato off the vine and cut it up and throw it away to a salad, it may taste delicious, it only has a little vitamin C, it's a great source of hydration, and it has great flavors, that's fine, especially if it's like a homegrown type of heirloom tomato, but you won't get the light that you need.

You're not going to get as much lycopene, you're probably only going to get maybe 20 percent of the lycopene that's there, but you want it. For me, I want to get as much of the good stuff as possible, so this is what research has shown. I found that if you wanted to convert that chemical structure of lycopene into a form that you can absorb better, your body can absorb on average what you want to do is heat the tomato like in a frying pan and with the heat it will change the chemical structure in a way that your body it doesn't absorb as well in a way that your body eagerly absorbs it loves to absorb it now you go from twenty percent absorption to eighty percent absorption you completely turn it around you finished that equation completely now that you're really I'm absorbing it now here's a additional thing, although how would you heat a tomato in a frying pan?

You put heat in water or nothing, no actually, you put a little bit of olive oil in it now, why is that and is it because lycopene is a substance? What we call fat soluble is a lipid that loves to dissolve in fats, so a little bit of olive oil on tomatoes in a pan sauté, such a gentle change of chemical structure, the flavors are really great now and you have it now when You eat that tomato sauce. sautéed in olive oil the oil the olive oil with the lycopene is transported even more efficiently to the body than if it were cooked in water and, again, that is an example of thousands of oils with fat-soluble foods, by the way, if not You might want to look at olive oil, here's another common snack in the United States anyway.

It's like tearing out a book of pages of Latin American cuisine, you have these tortilla chips and then you end up eating salsa and guacamole. The salsa often has stewed tomatoes, cooked tomatoes served at room temperature or cold and then the guacamole is just avocado. that's been mashed up now avocado has a lot of healthy fats it's a fat soluble vegetable it's actually quite nutritious and surprisingly people who eat avocado actually reduce their waistline because actually even though you're eating fat you're actually burning Reducing bad fats is another story, but if you eat guacamole, avocado with tomatoes, you get more lycopene, which is why it happens to be a popular snack in the United States.

Yeah I love it so the right combination of foods can help you absorb nutrients I think black pepper can also do that well with certain nutrients so black pepper is so this is kind of interesting most From us we have heard that turmeric, which is a kind of root, when you open it, it is this bright orange, beautiful and bright, it has a lovely color and turmeric is also a dried spice used in Southeast Asian cuisine, including Indian cuisine, is where I first encountered it. It not only makes the food beautiful, but also makes it delicious.

It has quite a lovely flavor. you know it's a spice within turmeric it's curcumin curcumin is one of those natural chemicals like lycopene it's one of those treasure chests of mother nature mother nature's pharmacy with an f, not a ph and curcumin has many anti-inflammatory properties, it's an antioxidant, it cuts off the blood supply that feeds cancers, it's actually useful for stem cells and it also activates almost all of the body's health defenses and it's good for the gut microbiome, so what? Why not just enjoy turmeric? like a spice in itself because it's so potent that our body doesn't actually absorb as much as it could, in fact, our body takes in a lot of it and it gets eliminated, you know, eventually, and then, what we want. what to do to improve our body's extraction of the good, the good, turmeric, it turns out that if you have freshly ground black pepper, there is a substance in fresh ground black pepper called piperine, pepper is one of mother nature's , once again, you know?

These notable chemicals that actually influence the body and pepperine help the body retain curcumin, so if you have freshly ground black pepper with your turmeric, you're actually creating a double whammy that allows you to absorb more curcumin, yeah. I love it, so the right combinations can help us get more out of these amazing whole foods. Sorry, interrupt. If you're enjoying this content, there's plenty more like it on my channel, so take a moment to hit subscribe, hit the notification bell, and now. Let's get back to the conversation, but I think the wrong combinations can also make certain foods less beneficial.

An example I've heard you talk about before is what happens when you put milk in tea. I know you're a big fan of tea last time. In the conversation you talked about many of the benefits of tea, but I think I heard you say that if you add milk to your tea, you actually reduce some of the beneficial effects. That's right, you know those scientists who make television shows? uh, making science accessible to people, this is where we need to go with this topic, so look at tea, green tea especially has a natural polyphenol called catechins, for example, epigallocatechin gallate, for example, and cat and catechin are really just part of the natural. substance in the tea leaf, so whether you're brewing tea with a bag or whether it's loose leaf tea or whether it's matcha, which is just powdered tea leaves, the fact is that in brewing, the hot liquid enters the liquid. all these phytochemicals, including these catechins, so when you drink black tea, the catechins go right in and your body absorbs them easily, so you know our blood levels of catechins increase so many things that catechins can do one of the things The important thing is that it's actually a relaxant, it actually helps reduce stress, it reduces catecholamines and other things that help lipids, it actually also helps fight cancer, it's an anti-inflammatory, kind of like curcumin, It's a substance that has so many beneficial things that at least when I drink tea I want to get as much out of my food as I can right now iris, I deeply respect the traditions of yes, of eating and drinking and one of the things that, you know, I know that It's a tradition in England, do you know that you put or in Ireland do you put a little milk or cream in your tea?

It actually changes the flavor profile, uh, and it's lovely. You know, I've had a lot of teas in England before and I think it tastes so incredibly um uh nice I feel great you know, kind of like having an English tea with dairy this is what you need to know about dairy and I'm talking about cow's dairy, so no, no, no, no, this applies to the cow. here we'll go back to nut milk in a second cow dairy, okay it's actually fat, milk has fat like butter that's made from milk and um, and fat when you put it in your tea it changes the taste of it, but That's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about the fact that when you put milk or cream in tea, the fat molecules in the cow's milk form little soaked bubbles, these are microscopic soap bubbles, they're called micelles, fat likes to stick. with fat, so the tea is mostly water, so when you pour milk into the tea, the bubbles, the milk fat sticks and kind of forms a little soap bubble and what does it do?

Those sub-bubbles trap the polyphenols in the tea and they trap the catechin, so you have some good stuff wrapped up in a soap or dairy bubble and now when you drink the tea, the catechin gets trapped in the soap bubble, it doesn't absorb as easily into the stomach and just rolls through the intestine. and a lot of it comes out the other end, okay, so you're missing out on a lot of the good stuff, you get a great flavor, you know, you get a nice flavor, so what I'm telling you is if you're drinking milk or cow's milk , but in your tea you get a good flavor, if that's what you like, but you're missing out on everything since most of the polyphenols, so be careful. aware that that's what you're really doing now, if you still want to cut your tea with something that's milk, like nut milks, those are fine because they don't really have the same fatty reaction that dairy cow milk has, so than almond milk, uh. cashew milk or soy milk, they're all good, I mean, it's really interesting and I like the way you frame it with this deep respect for cultures and traditions because I hear that and I think for someone who might be listening or watching this and think you got it, you know what it's just a part of what I do.

I love putting milk in my black tea or I know some people even put it in their green seed, which I certainly haven't tried before. They might hear that and they might not want to change what they do, but this is where supplements could potentially come in, let's say someone likes the taste of milk tea, but hear that, I think well, I want all those benefits. of those polyphenols and catechins from that doctor I was talking about. Maybe you can improve that another way by taking a supplement. Is there any merit to that way of thinking?

I guess you could expand it broadly to what your opinion is on supplements as a huge category, but there are some really good quality ones out there. supplements that exist maybe you could talk a little bit about those topics, please, yes, well, let's pick up the thread for a second because I had this discovery that could be useful for your listeners who are in exactly that situation where they like flavor milk in your tea I found out that there is something called milk tea and it's actually from Taiwan, it's grown in the mountains and it's actually just pure tea leaves that when you brew it it tastes like it has dairy in it oh wow, it's quite It's quite amazing, I mean, if I made you a cup of that and then made a cup of English tea with milk, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference, it's quite noticeable.

Milk tea, it's a type of, I think it's an oolong style tea, so it's lightly fermented and it still has green properties, it has polyphenols, but it literally has to do with the whey, the climate, the way it's grown. naturally and the type of tea, it's very good, so let's move on. aside for a second um uh um okay so what about the supplements? Know? I think we should look at the word itself, a dietary supplement means something to supplement, so I always tell people you know if you have the option to get it. whole foods whole foods will tend to have a lot of other things that are good for you if you eat whole foods from plant sources, for example, you'll get the fiber, you'll get the polyphenols, you'll get a lot of other chemicals, you'll get the natural peptides. that are found in foods that, if you get a pure supplement, you might get one molecule or two molecules that it's made for, like a vitamin C supplement.

If you want to top off your vitamin C, it's pure vitamin C that you're going for. to do. you're going to get a lot if you take a multivitamin, but you know if you take citrus you're going to get all that flavor, you're going to get the different kind of flavor that you're going to get. uh you get sugar, you get fiber, you have limonene and all these other hesperidins, all these other bioactives that you can't get just with a regular supplement, that said you're

absolutely

right, supplements can be really important, especially for people who They have difficulty obtaining them. a lot of some nutrients or their foods, so for example, I think omega-3 fatty acids are a great supplement if you get a high-quality omega-3, not everyone eats oily fish, you know, every day. and two or three times a week.

You know you only need to eat the amount of each serving the size of a deck of cards, so you don't need to eat a lot, but you know that's not something most people do, people who live on the coast. They may be doing it, but many people don't, so omega-3s are very important for our health. I mean, this has been proven time and time again, it is a supplement that is definitely worth taking and is much easier to swallow. omega-3 than it is to actually go to your fishmonger and then see what the catch of the day is.

That's an example. Another example of a supplement. I think really what we're taking is probably vitamin D3. Well, vitamin D. you know, for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, where we don't have as much sun all the time all year round and where it's cold, so we're inside a lot and not always outside in the sun , so I'm notpesticides and drying it Fruit versions are also ways to get the skin and that's the other reason again if you get dried fruits buy dried organic fruits yeah super interesting I'm time conscious there's so many things I want to talk about with you, um, yeah, come on.

Go here, frankly, autoimmune diseases are increasing massively around the world and I would love to hear a little bit from you about the relationship between food and the development of autoimmune diseases and I want to add before you answer that you already know. I've been practicing as a doctor for almost 21 years and you know, maybe 10 years ago, when I started to really tune into how you could start using food as a therapeutic tool with your patients, I realized that when certain patients with certain autoimmune diseases as I can remember one clearly this lady with hypothyroidism was taking levothyroxine but she still wasn't feeling very well when I changed her diet I helped her switch to a completely whole foods diet from a standard western diet that she was eating at that time Moment, his symptoms subsided.

We could reduce the dose of levothyroxine by half. I think within a few months it was really amazing, so maybe you know talk about that if you can, a little bit about the relationship and potentially why that might. I've worked with that patience, yeah, I mean, you know, I've also realized this, you know, over decades of my clinical practice, that autoimmune diseases, by the way, let's make sure that our audience, the listeners, really appreciate this, it's not one. disease is dozens of really different types of diseases that share a kind of common denominator and the autoimmune part is that somehow, for some reason, the immune system becomes activated in a way that the immune response actually causes damage to the body itself. it's kind of the body attacking the body or the body responding, the immune system responds in ways that cause incredible distress at the organ level, so it could be lupus, it could be rheumatoid arthritis, it could be psoriasis, it could be Hashimoto's, it could be be celiac those are some of the more common ones that people actually talk about, but in fact, there are probably a lot of autoimmune diseases that we don't even recognize and, by the way, a new one that's coming that we think has been covered for a long time and that Many people have already done this and I think we will see a completely different emergence of prolonged greed as a major medical problem in the next decade that also appears to be autoimmune and where the body's immune system has overreacted or is going overboard to attack ourselves people.

Healthy people are fine, so if we are talking about a panoply of different diseases that share this common denominator, what is the role of food? Well, one thing we actually do know is that celiacs are a great example of this gluten and gluten enteropathy. some foods in the case of celiacs is gluten, which is found in wheat and whole grains, um uh, for reasons that we don't fully understand, the body sees that and just has a bad reaction, that's how you know , the family member. that you know the black sheep in a family that comes to your family Christmas gathering and you just don't have a good reaction to them, all of us that we have, we all have one or two of those people in our families, um and that's how their system The immune system reacts to something in the food that it just doesn't like and gets angry and when it gets really angry it starts to have this reaction that makes the whole body unpleasant, like that visitor to your house that you just don't react well to like you want to stay. in a different room well that reaction is what autoimmune diseases are and that's why when you talk about um you know levothyroxine just so your listeners know that it's actually trying to replace something that's damaged because of this reaction that you really want to see, we can undo the damage a little bit, and autoimmune diseases are often treated with steroids.

What do steroids do? They close? They lower the volume of the immune system. Hey, this rock music is too loud. let's play it, the house music is too loud, let's turn it down a little, okay, that's what steroids do, it turns out that if we go back to see what some of the root causes might be, increasingly we're wondering if any of these additives Chemicals in ultra-processed foods are actually triggering immune responses that are unintended, these are unintended consequences, so there is a theory that in people who say they have gluten or celiac disease, they are actually not, in They don't actually have full-blown celiac disease, but they are reactive allergies, they are a reactive immune response to something found in packaged foods that also contain gluten, so, then, it's you.

In some ways, there are things in these chemical-filled foods that we may not fully appreciate, but now we go back to what you observed with your patient. So what happens when we take people and there are a lot of people who spend most of their lives eating things? out of a box, for the convenience of leaving a factory, it sits on the shelf for months or years and you switch it to a whole plant-based, mostly plant-based diet or a whole foods diet. Well now you are talking about not shopping in the middle aisle of the store and I have nothing against the middle, there are good treasures there, but you spend time on the products or you know, if you live in a town, you will go to the town market and you will go first to the fruit. and vegetables at a herb stand and you're buying all the stuff and now you're getting fresh foods that have all of these phytonutrients.

You have to take the time to prepare them in a tasty way. You're staying away from those boxes. you can preserve chemically preserved foods, you're allowing your immune system to calm down and you're allowing the phytonutrients to also reduce inflammation and we're returning to a more natural state, that's how I explain the kind of broad observations. what you really had is probably allowing the body to unload, making it less angry and allowing the body to return to a more natural state, that's where it is able to become less inflamed, allow the health defenses to reassert themselves, yes, I love that explanation and moving. to a whole foods diet, no matter who you are, no matter what your current health status is, there are very few side effects or negative side effects, I must say there are many effects, mostly beneficial effects, very few side effects negatives in doing that, I must ask Dr.

Lee, before we end this conversation, in our first chat you mentioned many foods that have super useful properties. Two that come to mind are kiwis. You mentioned how they can help repair DNA, which is remarkable how many people have stopped me on the streets since then to say since that conversation I'll buy kiwi. I've been buying kiwi. I've heard it over and over again, so credit to you, doctor lee, but also tomato, as you mentioned. I know we covered lycopene in this. I also chatted, but a lot of people contacted me, including some family members, to say: listen, I can't tolerate kiwis, I have a very bad reaction when I eat them.

I can't tolerate tomatoes, I have a very bad reaction when I have them and of course, Of course, this is individual because not everyone has intolerances or reactions to certain foods, but for the people who listened to your excellent advice and wanted to incorporate it but thought, I can't allow that, how would I respond to them? What would I say to them? to them to give them some kind of hope, yeah, look, what I always tell people is that when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food or any food, whether it's a kiwi or a tomato , but it's really about how our body is responsible. put it in, so if you don't like kiwis, you can't find kiwis or you're allergic to kiwis, okay, those are three easy reasons or you can't afford a kiwi, you can make a trade, okay?

So what is it? in kiwis kiwi has vitamin C it has fiber What are some other foods that actually have vitamin C that also have fiber? Red pepper may actually have that. And if you like it? Well, I'd like something a little sweet. Okay, guava, which also has vitamin C and fiber. Now, the research that we discussed last time on kiwi was done with the kiwi itself, but the properties of kiwi, which is vitamin C, fiber, and some of the other phytonutrients, can also be found in other fruits, so I always say than kiwi, if you want to continue with the research, you have to go with the food that was actually studied, but the properties and principles allow you to think about how to exchange things.

Look, what a great example of a tomato, I don't really like tomatoes, I'm allergic to tomatoes, some people have hypersensitivities as a reaction to histamine. I have tomatoes. I remember in college I had a classmate who never went to the salad bar and she stayed so far away. as far as possible because the tomatoes gave him this mast cell super histamine reaction, his whole face was swollen, uh, when in reality he had something like tomatoes and, well, guess what lycopene if you want to get the benefits of lycopene, you know what reduces the risk. of breast cancer by 20 percent reduces the risk of prostate cancer by almost 30 percent protects your DNA against sunlight what else is lycopene? watermelon watermelon also has lycopene so maybe you don't like tomatoes maybe you can't get tomatoes right how about a slice? of watermelon, yeah, and again, these exchanges are really and this is something that I think is very important and this is what I hope to be able to convey through my book and, you know, I created a free master class that I've been to .

Trying to teach people periodically online how to do this is thinking about why something is beneficial to you and then if you can get that food, that's perfectly fine if you need to change it because you can't find that food or you can't. allowing yourself that food think about what else might be a good standard, yeah right, and at the end of the day it still has to taste good to you, so maybe you don't like tomatoes, but you like watermelon, maybe not you like kiwi, but I actually like guava, yes, I love it and in my experience, also when we consume more of these whole foods than we can tolerate over time, I actually find that we often repair our gut and then We become more tolerant of foods that we couldn't before. manage, I'm not talking about excessive allergies, but about many food intolerances.

I've definitely seen that happen. I just want to echo what you just finished, Dr. Lee, with that for people who want to trade things from your book to eat. being sick, I think it's a fantastic resource for people because you can see the properties and you can find a food that you like and that suits your culture, your background, your tastes and I think the master classes that you organize for people I can see why. many people around the world really enjoy them because they are very beneficial, they are developed, they are really delivered with passion, commitment and quality information, so I want to thank you for all the work you are doing to raise awareness of these little things that we can all do. do every day to have a great impact on our health.

Any final words for my audience who might be confused. Inspired. Empowered by what you said. Any final thoughts for them. You know, I have a motto that. I want everyone to try to take to heart that when it comes to food and health, I truly believe that you have to love your food to love your health. Both of those things can happen at the same time, you know, we need to find the foods that we love that are good for us and we really lean into it and that's the best way to have a long and enjoyable life.

You are an incredible person. You are an amazing doctor. You are doing wonderful things for the world. Thank you very much for joining. Me on today's show, thank you for having me if you enjoyed that conversation about the foods you should stop eating. I think you're going to really enjoy this one about inflammation. Inappropriate chronic inflammation is the root of much of our coronary artery cancer. disease obesity diabetes type 2 hypertension and so on