Starve Cancer & PREVENT DISEASE
Dr. William Li & Lewis Howes
William W. Li, MD, is a world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author of EAT TO BEAT DISEASE – The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. He is best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. His groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity.
His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views, and he has appeared on: Good Morning America, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Voice of America; and in The Atlantic, TIME, and The New York Times. An author of over 100 scientific publications in leading journals such as Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet, Dr. Li has served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School, Tufts University, and Dartmouth Medical School.
Transcript
0:00things that used to be like instant foods gotta be really careful about that
0:05because if you take a look at the packaging and i’m telling you there’s one thing your viewers can get from me
0:12about things to watch out for i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness yeah please welcome
0:19you share a lot of science behind how we can beat cancer and other diseases by changing our diet but it doesn’t seem
0:25possible for most of the population to even think about that so how is this possible
0:31yeah well you know uh first of all thanks for having me on i love talking about the uh
0:37the making the impossible possible and usually first of all you just have to
0:42kind of think through uh what your goals are and so i’ll explain sort of what my
0:48goals were when i got into this whole thing so i’m a medical doctor i’m trained as an internal medicine doc
0:53and that means that i take care of men and women young and old healthy and sick
0:59and one of the things that i uh trained myself more or less to do
1:04is a little bit different than how most medical doctors think which is you know we’re trained to
1:10diagnose disease chase it with drugs and keep chasing with drugs right
1:15so my view has always been we start healthy every now and then we get sick but the
1:22real question is how can we actually get back to health and how do we prevent getting sick in the first place so a
1:27little bit of a different orientation and my goal has always been to keep health protect health or to to get you
1:34back to health um i’m also a researcher as a medical doctor you’re not what i’ve been told is
1:40you’re not taught about nutrition and actually teaching how to eat properly to
1:45reverse disease or to prevent disease i should say so how come you seem to be
1:52you know one of the the few that have tried to have gone outside of the box to say hey listen we’re not going to just pump everyone with drugs and and put a
1:59band-aid on something we’re going to get to the root cause yeah well so here here’s a little bit of the kind of the
2:04under-the-skirt truth about this um medical schools teach
2:11medical students that would usually get less than one month worth of nutrition education in their entire four years and then it
2:18never gets revisited throughout your entire career and in fact nutrition when i went to medical
2:25school was kind of dismissed as something that that dietitians actually did and when i trained in the hospital
2:31now i trained at massachusetts general hospital it’s one of the harvard teaching hospitals okay so i can run a
2:36coveted unit i could run an emergency room not a problem but what i realized
2:42after many years of taking care of patients is that when my patients would ask me hey doc
2:47what should i do for myself i realize i was never taught that answer so i thought that was wrong now my background
2:53as a researcher actually comes into play in terms of how i got into this whole field because
2:58um i’m what you call a vascular biologist so that really means that i study the
3:04science of blood vessels and uh blood vessels are important because we’ve got 60 000 miles worth of blood vessels
3:12packed inside our bodies so you can imagine how important this network actually is it delivers every bit of
3:19oxygen we breathe and all the nutrition we eat to go through the bloodstream you need the circulation to bring it to
3:25every cell and every organ so that’s what i study my science so when i actually started yeah you know almost 30
3:31years ago uh in medicine my my goal was to figure out how could we actually first conquer
3:38diseases so i i went into the biotech area and you know we tried to figure out common
3:45denominators of disease and and it comes back to food because food is one of those common solutions but
3:52common denominators of disease actually means when you take a look at how we do research on alzheimer’s and diabetes and
3:59obesity and aging and heart disease and cancer these are vertical silos they’re
4:04about an inch wide and a mile deep and you get specialists that actually come in and they’re really knowledgeable
4:10about what makes one disease different from another okay and i thought look you
4:16know we should actually look at what makes diseases the same so if you drain the pacific
4:21you get to figure out how the islands are connected right and so that’s what i was interested in because i figured if you could figure out the common
4:27denominators of a disease then you had a shot at pulling the bow back and sending a single arrow
4:34through multiple diseases now i looked at angiogenesis which is how the body
4:39grows blood vessels that’s my area as one of those common denominators and we were right
4:45so i run the angiogenesis foundation we figured out that when the body loses its
4:51control over its circulation either you don’t have enough blood vessels and wounds don’t heal or you have too many
4:57blood vessels and you either go blind your cancers grow and so through biotechnology
5:04over a couple of decades i actually been involved with developing 41 fda approved
5:10new treatments for cancer diabetes and and prevent blindness prevention of blindness okay
5:16so that’s my street cred so when somebody basically says oh you know how’d you get into nutrition
5:21uh you know like are you one of those doctors that don’t believe in modern medicine and i basically no i i actually
5:27develop modern medicines right but what i realized when i was actually working with my patients is that although we can
5:34actually come up with better more sophisticated more higher tech treatments for diseases these days
5:41the fact of the matter is we should be preventing disease in the first place and when you’re talking about prevention
5:47you can’t talk about drugs you got to talk about something like food and when i thought about it and this is how i got into nutrition i realized i wasn’t
5:54taught about it but i did have these skill set of actually having developed drugs and
6:00having invented many of the systems that drugs are being are tested in you know what why don’t we just throw some food
6:06into those systems and see what happens and so for me i’m one of those people that actually
6:12not just says food as medicine but i actually study food as medicine that’s how i got here okay very cool so what
6:19are the i mean so it is possible through food to beat cancer and diseases and is that
6:26what i’m hearing you say well here’s basically what i i actually learned myself is that when
6:34it comes to food and health food is actually a medicine that we all take three times a day
6:41right we we try not to take prescription meds whenever we can avoid and even if you write prescription meds you don’t
6:46want to be taking them forever but food is something that you take three times a day from the time we’re
6:53born to our very last breath and when it comes to food and health there is it’s not just about the food
6:59it’s actually about how our body responds to what we put inside it so that’s the real kind of underlying
7:05secret if you feed your body something that’s not good for it it’s going to resp it’s going to react poorly not
7:11going to be good for you if you feed your body something that is good for it it’s going to activate its health
7:17defenses and that’s what i read about my book e2b disease is uh how does a body actually
7:24maintain its health and then what can we eat to help the body do it better
7:30interesting so i mean what are the key things we should be knowing about the body are all
7:35bodies the same when it comes to how foods i guess are consumed and assimilated
7:40through the body in the bloodstream and all these different things or is everybody different where some nutritional foods might impact
7:47positively but negatively in other bodies what should we be knowing about the body yeah it’s a great question and
7:54first of all i’m a scientist so i will tell you how you can tell that i’m a scientist is
7:59that real scientists tell you we don’t know everything okay and it’s the kind of humility that we have to start with
8:04because so often you think about you know scientists being very smart in things
8:09real scientists spend their time talking about what we what we don’t know not what we do know so but you’re asking
8:16me what we do know all right so i’ll give you that so i’ll give you that answer look um uh
8:22our bodies are hardwired to be healthy so when we’re growing in our mom’s womb
8:29our body as we’re forming our bones and our heart and our organs and our limbs
8:35inside the form of the human that’s being created uh are these health
8:41defenses so you think about the body like a fortress you know you’ve seen a bit we all seen in a medieval fortress a castle right
8:48and basically like it’s a happy community that lives inside there you got a king you got a queen you got a
8:53princess you got everything else going inside there but that fortress has got to protect itself so it’s designed to
8:59repel enemies it’s got a moat it’s got a drawbridge it’s got the
9:04little slits you throw you fire arrows out of it’s got sloping walls so enemies can’t crawl up it’s got traps by the way
9:11you know like a medieval fort um the thing that i never realized having been to quite a few castles is that when you
9:18go to the entrance there is a hole right above you and it’s called a murder hole and it’s basically if the if people
9:25breached the the drawbridge they would just drop rocks boulders down through that hole all right so the body
9:33is designed better than a medieval castle we’ve got our own defense systems and
9:39there’s five of them that i know about and i helped to kind of put together this picture partly
9:44because i studied the biotechnology how do you actually treat diseases using these systems and
9:51when you forget about the disease part and you think about the health part these are the systems these five systems
9:57that maintain our health so i’ll tell you what they are okay first health defense system is called angiogenesis
10:03that’s what i study blood vessels a 60 000 mile channel that delivers oxygen and nutrients everywhere
10:09got to have enough of them um or your our body is in trouble second angiogenesis this is this is the channel
10:17of blood vessels this is the this is how this this is how the body grows blood vessels okay it is a whole system of
10:24growth okay when we have just the right amount of blood vessels our body is
10:29healthy now are you going to go to work out all right you’re going to pump some iron your your muscles got to grow now you
10:35need a few more blood vessels all right um if you skin your knee and fall off a
10:40bike got to heal that wound underneath that scab you got new blood vessels growing to heal
10:46now the body never lets too many blood vessels to grow or causes problems for
10:52example cancers are forming in all of our bodies because we’re filled with these dividing
10:59cells and some of them make mistakes but a microscopic cancer is completely harmless
11:04because it doesn’t have a blood supply and so our body prevents cancers from growing naturally
11:10by controlling the angiogenesis so we just got enough for our good cells not
11:16enough for the bad cells so that’s one of our health defenses and there are treatments including ones that i helped
11:22to develop that can cut off the blood supply to cancer by cutting off it by starving it so that’s called
11:28antiandrogenic therapy and the same treat same approach has been used to prevent blindness all right so you don’t
11:34have blood vessels leaking in the eye however turns out that sometimes your body needs a little help
11:41so now you can actually use foods to actually amp up your body’s angiogenesis defenses so that’s just one of the
11:47defenses okay that’s the first one what’s the second one all right second one is our stem cells
11:53right so our s when we were kids uh louis you know like our great school teachers told us
11:59salamanders can regenerate starfish can regenerate but people can’t regenerate right
12:05wrong you lose your hand it’s not going to grow back well it turns out that people do regenerate we can’t regenerate
12:11that quickly but we and we regenerate from the inside out like a lizard can regenerate like a limb or tail but we
12:19regenerate our organs continuously our lung regenerates our liver regenerates
12:24okay the lining of our mouth regenerates if you’ve ever eaten a chip all right and scratched the
12:29inside of your mouth and it hurts next day all fixed right because of
12:34regeneration all right now here’s the thing uh um
12:40turns out that the way we naturally regenerate is through stem cells not the kind you
12:46go to a strip mall to have injected into your knee but this is the kind that we’re born with because you know like
12:53when when we were when you and i were but we’re like sperm and egg meeting in our mom’s womb and dividing
13:00that’s what we were these are stem cells we were all formed from these primitive cells that could be anything it could be
13:07an eye it could be a nose it could be a heart and they and they formed our whole body and and there’s always some overage
13:14okay and so you have more than you need to form your in into a person and when
13:19we’re born about 750 million stem cells are left over and they are packed up in
13:25a suitcase and stuffed into our bone marrow all right and so when we’re born even a little baby inside their bone marrow in
13:32this hollow of their bones are 750 million stem cells and they are stored
13:38there like a like bullets in a bandolier waiting for when they’re needed so that
13:45when we grow up and we need to be regenerated you know you have too many too much to drink now your liver needs
13:50to be regenerated you cut yourself now you need to actually heal that wound these stem cells come flying out of our
13:56bone marrow like bees out of a hive wow who regenerates renew us from the inside
14:02out and there are biotech efforts that i’ve been a part of to try to grow new heart grow
14:07new brain regenerate nerves not ready for prime time yet but it turns out that foods can coax these stem
14:15cells out of our bone marrow so we regenerate faster huh which foods this is the second one but
14:21i’m curious which foods can help us there are there are a number of them i’ll give you one uh right from the
14:26get-go is dark chocolate oh you’re speaking my language now okay
14:35can you eat too much dark chocolate that’s the question you know i i have never seen anything
14:40about an overdose of cacao but i will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the
14:47number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream just by having two cups of hot chocolate made
14:54with eighty percent high flavonol chocolate dark chocolate come on yeah it’s been done in people 60 year
15:00olds with heart disease so wait what happens when you when you drink or you you eat this dark chocolate
15:06okay it happens yeah the polyphenols in this dark chocolate that we we know what they are
15:13they’re called pro-enthocyanin so i’m a scientist so my job is to actually know what are what the inside chemicals
15:20actually are these are natural chemicals all right most people don’t need to know that but you drink it it tastes good that’s all you need to know
15:26but but i’ll tell you these these natural chemicals found in cacao actually
15:31trigger a reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells so it is
15:37literally like bees flying out of a hive can double the number of stem cells and what’s the what’s the practical impact
15:45well there was a study done uh at ucsf in san francisco that looked at 60 year
15:50old men with heart disease so these are people whose blood vessels were already
15:55not doing so well and their blood flow wasn’t going so well either and their blood vessels were
16:01kind of sick that’s kind of the definition of heart disease by having the stem cells coming out they
16:07were able to actually double the resiliency the function of their blood
16:12vessels so they got better rebound the better agility um their their blood vessels are in better shape because
16:19their stem cells are regenerating their circulation wow so this is human studies
16:24right like most most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice or cells
16:30i’m talking about human studies and that’s kind of where we are with food is medicine it’s not the kind of
16:36like the guesswork like we can do serious research to get down to
16:41exactly what’s actually happening at the human level so that’s the second health defense systems okay third one
16:47third one is our gut microbiome now people have been talking about gut
16:52health and microbiome it’s almost like a buzzword these days and people are saying well we can actually
16:59scoop your poop and we can actually measure your microbiome and we can tell you what you need to eat and what you don’t need to eat
17:05again i’m a scientist so i will tell you that there are 39 trillion
17:11bacteria in art in the typical body that’s more stars than in a night sky
17:17all right so we barely understand uh the gut bacteria but what we do know
17:24is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism
17:30communicates with our brain um actually can help us heal from the inside out and very importantly
17:37our gut bacteria basically lives if you think of your gut like a garden hose
17:43it’s a tube and you were to cut a garden hose in half and you look inside it there’s a lining okay uh the bacteria is inside
17:50the hose but inside the wall of the garden hose that’s where your immune system 70 of our immune system lives
17:58inside our gut so our gut bacteria so yeah so if you’re feeding your gut a
18:04lot of bad foods it’s probably you’re poisoning your immune system you’re preventing your gut bacteria now
18:10i’ll tell you what’s interesting about the gut bacteria your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the
18:16walls of the of your gut immune system’s in there 70 right like a jelly roll like a like the jelly in a jelly roll that
18:22gut bacteria is inside so think about like a college student in a freshman dorm they are talking to their
18:29roommate by pounding on the wall right what do you want what kind of pizza do you want
18:35all right and they can answer you and that’s basically what our gut bacteria says to our uh our immune system so we
18:41got to keep that gut healthy by the way interestingly uh and i’ve done research on this um certain gut bacteria uh can
18:50actually signal to your brain it’s a gut and brain axis and
18:55cause your brain to release social hormones okay and can affect your mood
19:02so you know when you’ve got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut i
19:07guarantee you like it’s not just because you’re irritated it’s affecting your brain as well
19:13so yeah we had uh we had dr amaran uh mayor on who he’s got the gut i think it’s the
19:19gut brain connection or the good immune connection or something like that so he’s he’s got a lot of great research on that
19:25yeah so well the key thing though is that foods can actually help right size your gut health
19:33think about like an ecosystem the great barrier reef so certain foods can support the ecology the ecosystem the
19:39great barrier reef and certain ones actually kill the coral all right and so our continuously want to keep it in good
19:47shape all the way through our lives and by the way even conditions like autism
19:53alzheimer’s and schizophrenia are all now seemingly connected to our gut
19:59bacteria really yeah now is there a way if someone has those
20:04are they pretty easy to reverse though or is that hard we’re well listen we’re
20:09just figuring this out because right now medically we prescribe medications uh to
20:15try to treat those things and a lot of times those medications just blunt the symptoms okay they cover up the symptoms they
20:20don’t get at the underlying cause now we don’t know exactly how the gut bacteria communicates to the brain completely yet
20:27but there’s one giant nerve called the vagus nerve it’s like a giant shoot it’s about the thickness of a
20:33shoelace and it hangs from our brain all the way down into our gut okay goes right near wraps around our esophagus on
20:39the way down and we think the gut bacteria basically sends text messages up to the brain
20:45through this big nerve okay so the key though is that foods can actually
20:51influence our gut bacteria either good bacteria or bad bacteria so that’s important uh so that’s enough that’s the
20:57third health defense system okay okay so what the fur fir angiogenesis number one
21:03stem cells number two gut microbiome number three okay the fourth one number four our dna now
21:12if you watch csi dna is just sort of like a genetic
21:18fingerprint a code that you can find on a crime scene or if you’re actually trying to do ancestry look for your
21:25ancestors you figure out how how much of you as neanderthal right so that was one
21:30percent neanderthal when i did it yes uh so the the key though is it’s dna is
21:37a lot more than our genetic code it actually protects us from the environment now what am i what do i mean
21:42by that well you know how if we are exposed to uh
21:48we get a sunburn ultraviolet light you damage your dna and what happens cancer
21:53skin cancer right um if you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant
21:59it’s going to actually damage your dna and your lungs you get lung cancer right but think about it if you are
22:06in los angeles and you’re driving on the i-10 or if you’re actually just walking on a beach
22:12uh uh you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation so how come we don’t get skin cancer all the time
22:17because our dna is hardwired to fix itself from damage and so the dna is a
22:24protective mechanism from the environment i always tell people when you’re pumping gas if you still drive a gas vehicle as
22:31opposed to an ev um i always ask people do you stand upwind or downward
22:37what do you do are you upwind or downward do you know up up uh well upwind right so you’re not
22:42getting the the fumes in is that what you mean right right right well if you’re standing downwind you can
22:49smell the fumes yeah right and if you’re smelling the fumes you are poisoning the dna in your lung
22:55so how come we don’t develop lung cancer after pumping gas because our dna is hardwired to fix itself and so our dna
23:02is sort of like a self-defense mechanism against the environment radon from your basement
23:07okay off-gassing from the from the new car you just got or the uber that you’re
23:12riding in you know or the furniture that you got right so like this is this is
23:18this incredible defense mechanism against our environment and then and foods can actually speed up the repair
23:25help fix holes that are in our dna and then the other kind of ps the resistance
23:31for our dna’s defense is that there’s something called a telomere i don’t know if you’ve ever had anybody on your show
23:36talk about tea limiters telomeres yeah yes these are these are they see if you’re at the longer the telomere the
23:43the longer you can live or something or they can right well well i’ll tell you basically what the you know like to to
23:49give a to remind you to remind your listeners and viewers basically if your dna
23:55is like a shoelace the telomere is like the little plastic cap at the end of the shoelace
24:02and over time that little cap kind of wears down just like a shoelace and you know when they when that cap is gone man
24:07that your shoelace just falls apart yeah and that’s what happens to our dna so we need that cap that’s called the telomere
24:14and it burns down like a life fuse so you know like mission impossible light diffuse right so this thing is burning
24:19down and when it burns down that’s it your cell’s done so what you want to do is to slow down your cellular aging
24:27and harsh things that you do to your body smoking cigarettes being in a couch potato being exposed to damaging
24:35oxidative stress actually just being stressed out um like we are now with this friggin pandemic um those things
24:41all shorten our teenagers they burn the fuse faster stress yeah but foods can slow it down and some
24:48foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere which is really cool for from
24:54an aging perspective right one of those what are those top three foods that help lengthen the telomeres
25:00green tea is one of them coffee i got it i got a yeah it’s amazing i got
25:07i got a little i used to live in italy and i just got into this habit of drinking espresso uh so i got a little
25:12cup here amazingly coffee actually lengthens your telomere come on i i kid
25:18you not it’s it’s quite amazing um uh and uh leafy greens some of the
25:24polyphenols and leafy greens can also slow down and some of them actually look like they can like the new telomeres as
25:29well so the key thing is that we you know we are not just
25:36hapless pawns of aging we can actually do something about it and we can also fight
25:41against our environment um because look the the tax that we pay for being on
25:47planet earth is we’re exposed to stuff all the time and we need to we count on
25:52our bodies health defenses to fix it so that’s a fourth defense and our fifth defense is our immune system which
25:59you know after two years uh over the last two years we all know how important our immune system is
26:04but what if i told you that your immune system is so powerful that when it’s in its best shape
26:11even when you’re 80 years old it is strong enough to fight cancer in fact it
26:16can even wipe out metastatic cancer that’s spread all over your body that’s how strong your immune
26:22system is if you give it the chance and so here’s what the immune system does it’s
26:28like an army of super soldiers so uh rangers seals as you know uh
26:35marines special forces they’re all they’ve all got these are all parts of the immune system all cells of the
26:41immune system and like the special forces that got their own weapons their own training their own tactics but they
26:46all work together for you know the collective good and what happens is that
26:53when you’ve got good strong defenses you can fight off invaders from the outside bacteria and viruses for example
26:59and but it’s not just outside invaders you’ve got inside invaders as well and those little microscopic cancers are
27:06inside invaders and so our immune system patrols our body okay cops on a beat and
27:13they’re looking for things that don’t look right and you see that microscopic cancer that is it can’t grow because it
27:18doesn’t have a blood vessel blood vessels feeding it angiogenesis basically you if the immune system goes
27:24there and takes them right out okay and takes a sniper shot and it’s gone and so that’s why we got to protect our
27:30immune system and there are lots of foods that can actually boost our immunity as well what would be those what would be those top three that boost
27:36the immune system uh blueberries are a food that definitely boosts immune system it’s uh
27:43in young people as well as older people uh that they boost the natural killer
27:49cells which is really cool um broccoli sprouts can boost our immune system now these
27:55are the three daily these are like the three day old sprouts right okay um okay i mean okay here’s something here’s
28:01something most people don’t know the big broccoli that when we eat broccoli we’re really you know our moms
28:08told us to eat the tree tops right those they’re all same you go to the freezer section of a grocery store and you buy
28:14some frozen broccoli and they all look the same they’re all the same size that’s not
28:19really what broccoli looks like if you go to the group farmer’s market and you see a real broccoli is this gigantic
28:25stem with a little bit of tree top okay so what’s in a broccoli it’s called
28:32sulforaphane so that’s what gives broccoli that unique taste of broccoli it’s a little
28:37sulfurous okay you got to put a little olive oil a little bit of garlic you know you could
28:42can saute it up okay so the sulforaphanes we’ve done research now
28:48looking at what what’s in the treetops and it turns out that these sulforaphanes can starve cancer
28:54anti-androgenic help help your body cut off the blood supply to cancer broccoli tree tops have it
28:59but guess what the stock of the broccoli has twice as much of the good stuff than the tree tops eat
29:07the stalks eat the stock so man like if you don’t want to eat if you don’t want to saute the socks like a lot of cultures will just cut the stocks and
29:13saute them stick it in a blender you can make it into a smoothie or make a soup out of it you know and so there’s a lot
29:20of good things you can do put a little broccoli stem a little oregano powder you know you can do lighter light it
29:25right up a little turmeric it’ll be really good um smoothie or a soup however here’s the thing so this
29:32imagines adult broccoli having these sulforaphanes well it turns out that
29:38these big broccoli plants used to be sprouts and the sprouts
29:43pretty much were born or sprouted from the seed with all the sulforaphanes it’s ever gonna have
29:49all right so when it gets bigger it just gets distributed with the stock closer to the ground
29:54having more of it of course but the broccoli sprouts have 100 times more wow of the sulforaphane the good
30:02stuff as a grown-up broccoli so sprouts broccoli sprouts now studies
30:07have been done to show that if you give people a flu shot people in the winter should get a blue
30:13shot so you don’t get the flu all right uh just go to your drugstore to get one uh it turns out that if you uh people
30:19they did a study looking at people getting the flu shot and they gave half the people a little shake made with
30:25broccoli sprouts and the other group just got a placebo and the people who got the broccoli
30:30sprout shake and the flu shot their beneficial response of their immune system is 22 times higher huh
30:39like it totally rocked if they actually had a broccoli sprout shake
30:45so that’s not food versus medicine that is food and medicine which is really cool right
30:52interesting so we never want to throw out we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water we want to figure out how to make everything go work even
30:58better absolutely um wow this is fascinating okay so i’m
31:04curious because you you talked about this process where all these diseases or cancers seem to
31:11have this thing in common right this these heightened blood cells that it is or too
31:17many blood too many blood too many blood vessels that are feeding the cancer they’re
31:22feeding the cancer so i’m curious do you know is there a specific cancer or disease that’s easier to reverse
31:30okay so let’s take a look at what we know from the cancer treatment perspective so i i work in this area
31:38uh and uh you know i i’ve been involved with helping treat cancer patients so
31:44we do know that there are there is a new type of medicine that’s not chemo
31:50that if you uh they’re called anti-angiogenesis so they cut off the blood supply feeding the big cancers by
31:57the time so here’s a research experiment that was done a couple of decades ago in the lab that i worked in
32:02if you grew tiny little cancer cells and up to the size of the tip of a ballpoint
32:08pen that’s about three millimeters in diameter and you kind of floated them
32:13in a broth and didn’t allow them to touch blood vessels they would just stay
32:18there at that size almost indefinitely okay and in our body
32:23that’s the side that the immune system would wing by and take out the moment you allow blood vessels to
32:28grow into that microscopic mass that tumor will grow sixteen thousand times in two
32:36weeks it’ll explode this is like a trigger that’s get pulled in order to have cancers grow up
32:42and for that reason biotech companies started to develop anti-angiogenic
32:49drugs to treat cancer by cutting off the blood supply so there are about a dozen anti-angiogenic drugs that have changed
32:56the game for treating kidney cancer and liver cancer and lung cancer and even
33:02brain cancer all right so we know that we can actually do this uh with drugs
33:07the question is can we do with food not so much when cancer is out of the barn
33:12horses out of the barn but what about prevention what are foods that can prevent cancer well it turns out that
33:18two apples a day actually can lower the rate of lung cancer
33:24and colon cancer why because there are natural substances in apples like quercetin that’s one of
33:31the natural chemicals that actually are naturally anti-angiogenic green tea actually has been low lower
33:38risk of colorectal cancer okay uh particularly in women and yeah and
33:44what’s in a cup of green tea are these polyphenols eg cg and when you drink it
33:50it gets in your bloodstream why because the blood vessels are carrying it and now your blood vessels loaded with this
33:56cancer starving stuff these little tumors don’t have a chance wow yeah okay
34:03is it the same as eating two apples a day and and uh you know eating these specific foods as
34:09it would be just putting all those ingredients in a supplement and taking the supplement when would that work just as well
34:15to have like a super supplement that is just the the killer of all cancer and diseases
34:20you know of all these different nutrients well look i i’m a researcher and so and
34:25i’ve been involved with drug development and so if it were that easy it would have been done a while ago but i can
34:31tell you that the whole what i tell people is that the whole food is always going to be a little bit
34:36better for the following reason number one uh for a supplement you reduce it to a couple of different elements you know
34:42that that you try to pack into a capsule the whole food man it’s got the hundreds if not thousands of
34:50natural goodies and chemicals including like an apple’s got the skin it’s got ursolic acid it’s got fiber which
34:56feature gut microbiome it’s got quercetin which cuts out the blood supply so you’re getting all that in there um compared to just one thing you
35:03try to pack into a little capsule that said supplements are useful and i’m i’m
35:10involved with you know designing and developing supplements as well what we want to do supplements uh the term means topping
35:18off right so you’re supplementing you’re not replacing and this is what you know like
35:23what you were just asking louis is so important like can we just not bother eating and just have a supplement no man
35:30like you should be eating because you enjoy food it’s good for us it brings people
35:36together it tells us something about our traditions our culture our family our community everybody’s from someplace
35:43there’s everybody’s got something that they love to eat and of that list there’s some good stuff in it and so we
35:49should really lean forward so that’s the other thing that’s a little bit different from me that compared to a lot of other doctors
35:55that tell people what not to eat i try to tell people what you should add to your life not that what you should take
36:01away plenty of people will tell you what to take away right i’m telling you what to add and we should add foods that
36:07activate your health defenses and supplements can be useful to top things off got it
36:13i’ve been told uh many times that inflammation is the is a also a big
36:20i guess warning sign for diseases and cancers and the more inflammation the more your body is less capable of
36:27defending itself and its immune system is weaker is what i’ve been told what would you say are the best ways to
36:33reduce inflammation in the body quickly is it through food is it through medicine is it through fasting is it
36:39through you know less you know more sleep is it through a better environment what would you say is
36:45that so you know a lot of people i think when they hear about inflammation they
36:51think about it as a bad guy and what i want to tell you is that inflammation
36:56is normal and it’s just part of our immune system so when you actually have a bacteria or
37:02virus and made in your body let’s say you get a cold your immune system uh sets up a little
37:09bit of inflammation in your nose okay which is why we have a stuffy nose a runny nose and then it takes it tackles
37:16the invader right then and there and then hopefully that’s all that’s all that matters and by the way another sure
37:22sign of inflammation is if you cut yourself in the kitchen and you see that little cut will pretty
37:29quickly swell up turn red swell up inflammation that’s your immune system trying to tackle all the bacteria that
37:36might be trying to get into their skin inflammation is good but it goes up to protect you and then it comes right
37:42down i think i call it like a like the volume switch in a car radio right you get in a car you want to hear some tunes
37:49got to turn it on but what the problem with inflammation is when it doesn’t go back down it keeps on going more more
37:56more it’s chronic and it keeps on going up and that’s like getting in your car and having somebody a passenger
38:02turn up that volume and keep cranking that volume and you’re like hey man turn that thing down right it doesn’t go down
38:08and you just can’t go on right and that’s what happens inside your body so what’s what are some of the different
38:13ways to actually deal with that well the first thing to do is think about lifestyle because we can
38:21actually give anti-inflammatories i could tell you to go out to take some motrin tylenol whatever that’ll take
38:27down your inflammation but actually there are ways of actually doing if you actually just if you stopped and just calmed yourself
38:35and took some breathe did some breaths and start to meditate your inflammatory
38:41body’s inflammation will start to calm down okay if you actually got a good night’s
38:47sleep your body will start to the inflammation will uh start to calm down it’s it’s
38:53kind of like you know everything is going crazy just let everything let the things settle a little bit so that’s your inflammation
38:59settling down now there are foods that have a lot of anti-inflammatory properties that can be very helpful so
39:06for example cranberries um i have a lot of anti-inflammatory polyphenols
39:12chocolate even also has anti-inflammatory properties vitamin c is pretty anti-inflammatory strawberries
39:19guava red bell peppers all really good uh really good um and uh
39:26and uh you know i think that the other thing to think about is uh lots of fruits and vegetables lots of
39:31fruits in particular have anti-inflammatory uh properties so
39:37the key about inflammation is that you don’t want to get rid of it all together okay okay like if you if you got pumped
39:44up on steroids it would shut down your inflammation you might get infected
39:50because you don’t have any inflammation you want your body to get its set point you want to get back to balance
39:56so i think that you know there’s lifestyle there’s uh diet uh foods you
40:02can choose there’s sleep all these things can actually help to calm inflammation it’s not a single on and
40:08off switch i’m curious what would you say are the the most harmful foods then if you said here are three foods that we
40:14should be eliminating what would be those most harmful foods that cause the spike in inflammation consistently
40:20and causes a lot of these other diseases and cancerous uh cells to occur right
40:25well i’ll tell you three foods that actually harm the body’s health defenses and including the immune system
40:32by ratcheting it up inflammation and then lowering the defensive properties
40:37but also harm to your dna also harm your microbiome also blunt and
40:43stun your stem cells and also wreck your body’s ability to control its blood supply so it’s a lot worse than simply
40:50causing triggering inflammation and by the way that’s the whole point right like we try to take the silver bullet
40:56approach to everything let’s match this with smash that what i’m telling you is that the body is this system yes so either you introduce
41:03something good to it and you’ll probably light up a lot of good systems and if you put something bad to it you’ll
41:09probably trash a lot of it right okay so uh what are some three foods that
41:14actually we know that can trash your body’s health defenses one is soda so sugar sweetened
41:21beverages like soda all right so you know the favorite ones it’s tough right because i wish i could
41:27go back to my younger self and say put down the doctor eight cans of dr pepper a day you know when you’re like eight
41:33years old man well and i’m telling you like this is one thing that um i always try to
41:39coach people on if you really really love sodas okay try to come off it you
41:44know just by going down one can a day because if most people drink multiple cans go down one can a day and get to as
41:51low as you can because the added sugar actually overloads your body
41:56uh your body’s ability to be able to handle the sugar and then it makes you inflamed just by the nature of the sugar
42:03i cut out i cut out soda years ago i mean maybe i have it once in a couple months or something for like a treat but
42:09yeah it used to be almost an addiction probably for how much i drank it growing up as a kid in the summer as you’re just
42:14drinking it non-stop like water um but then when i learned about nutrition more when i was playing sports
42:20and realizing this is making me tired it’s not quenching my thirst that’s when i said oh okay i needed more
42:25of a competitive edge and kind of got cut out of my life so not only not only does it does soda actually the sugar and
42:32soda cause inflammation it really wrecks your microbiome your gut bacteria as well your gut bacteria just can’t
42:38tolerate that much sugar okay um and then guess what uh and then you know
42:44you say well wait a minute uh that’s why we have diet soda right turns out that those
42:51artificial sweeteners and soda screw your microbiome your gut bacteria
42:56even more ooh more than regular cannabis more more than a regular candida come on so if it says zero sugar and it’s a soda
43:04or a pop you’re saying that could be more harmful than for you for your gut microbiome
43:09gotcha right because because a zero sugar is actually to prevent you know um
43:14glucose spikes in your body but in point of fact it actually wrecks your gut microbiome and remember what i told you
43:20the microbiome communicates your brain communicates your immune system communicates your healing systems that
43:26is not a system you want to screw with and so that’s why you know i try to tell people
43:31um you really got to watch out for those uh artificial sweeteners they are they they do some bad things so
43:39that’s one thing so what are the best before we go to the next thing what are the best sweeteners
43:45we should be looking for when we’re adding something into food or we see it on the packaging
43:50well natural sugars in fruits and vegetables people go well
43:55i don’t want any sugar then but what about in a beach there’s nothing better than a summer peach to me and that
44:01natural sugar is okay because when you eat the peach you’re not just getting the sugar you’re also getting all these
44:08other bioactives and the fiber and everything else hundreds the hundreds of thousands of natural chemicals that are
44:14good for you from mother nature’s kind of pharmacy with an s okay so that’s different than just you
44:22know having sugar in a glass or corn syrup right high
44:27fructose corn syrup not not good for you um maple syrup a good way to sweeten okay honey is also a good way to uh
44:35sweetened as well monk fruit is actually a really really sweet uh tasting uh
44:41gourd that’s really a shell that is also a decent sweetener stevia
44:47actually pretty powerful sweetener i’ve been doing some research on i haven’t been to find anything wrong with
44:52it but but for people that are looking at stevia be very careful pick up the package and look at the side
44:59of the box and watch you and read what’s on there because a lot of things that are called stevia actually have a lot of
45:06other things added to it oh yes so you want to get the pure stuff i always tell if it’s in a box
45:12look at what’s inside it before you buy it there you go okay so soda and pop is the number one thing
45:19that is one of the worst things you could be eating um to uh or or the things that could
45:24cause more disease and cancer yeah in your in your body okay that’s number one number two
45:29uh processed meats now all of us our kids grew up you know at the you know eating
45:36deli meats turkey and a ham right i mean like that’s basically you what is your mom what did your mom pack
45:43in your lunch bag right yeah exactly okay well that’s that’s a relic of the
45:491950s you know of this sort of ultra processed foods that are everywhere
45:54laden with chemicals that’s not what we want to be doing now i have to say it doesn’t mean
46:00categorically that uh that hams or sausages are bad for you because
46:08if you go to italy or if you go to places in asia or latin america where they create they
46:15they create dried meats kind of the old way they’re not putting chemicals in there
46:22and they’re not manipulating it but here you know where you go to the deli counter and you know like yeah take take a look
46:29at that deli meat like that’s not meat doesn’t come like that okay
46:34so here’s the thing uh processed meats are actually classified
46:39by the world health organization as a carcinogen and you know linked to the uh causation
46:46of cancer you got to eat a lot of it but a lot of people actually eat i mean how many hoagies or something
46:52yeah right um and i gotta say you know like when i was growing up as a kid i loved those
46:57kind of like fancy kind of uh like the deli meats and stuff like that absolutely totally not
47:03good for you so that’s not good for you uh it also damages the gut microbiome uh oh and it
47:09can actually damage your dna so you want to kind of be cut down or cut out sodas and processed meats and then the
47:16other thing is really a category and i call these ultra processed foods
47:21so things are in a box or in a can that you know like are instant this or
47:28you know uh scooping out and eat it quick you know i don’t want to name any particular products um uh i don’t want
47:35to call any products out but i think we all know the stuff a lot of stuff we grew up with and or advertise on
47:40television to kids you know the frosted this the pop that the things that you that
47:47you know they’re like the tv dinners like things that used to be like instant foods
47:53gotta be really careful about that because if you take a look at the packaging and i’m telling you there’s one thing your viewers can get from me
48:01about things to watch out for whatever you buy pick it up if it’s in a box or in a can
48:06and look on the side don’t look just at the the label look at the i mean the name of it look at the
48:12side and see if you recognize the ingredients if that if you start
48:17you know if you lose start losing track and you can’t pronounce and you don’t know what most of that stuff is
48:23it’s an ultra processed food that harms your dna that lowers your immunity that
48:28screws up either gut microbiome it impairs angiogenesis it actually causes our cells to age faster those telomeres
48:35burn down faster oh man by those processed foods yeah ultra old ultra
48:41processed foods ultra right between ultra and products so look processing is technically any
48:48type of food you manipulate i like if you pick a tomato and you cut it up and you make spaghetti sauce at home that’s
48:55processing you’re processing it okay if you’re taking flour and an egg and you’re making homemade pasta you’re
49:00processing it i’m talking about ultra process you know there’s a term called extrusion have you heard of this yes
49:07okay so basically you’ve got these die-cut machines that like this goop gets thrown into
49:13and like the big oil like crazy oils get thrown in there and then it just like pushes out uh like play-doh chunks of
49:21food that get cut and dried that’s what i’m talking about like that’s the ultra processing it takes i guess maybe the
49:27definition it takes food and transforms it into a form you don’t recognize got it okay you don’t recognize that food
49:34yeah you don’t want that i’m curious dr lee what do you think has been [Music] the
49:41the biggest aha for you in your decades of work through from medical school to your
49:48research to your practice to these things what is what was the biggest aha when you learned this thing
49:54it it changed everything for you you know there’s been so many instances
50:00of that like scientists i’m seeing new things uh literally on a weekly basis
50:05things are like my jaw drops virtually you know like last week uh louis i read
50:11about a new discovery that we just discovered a new type of human
50:17cell in our heart last week like you know like that that’s like i
50:23hit my head like oh my god really we a couple years ago we discovered a new uh brain cell
50:29called the rose hip neuron okay and it seems to be linked to depression so i
50:34i’m always amazed i mean as a scientist i’m amazed by the um
50:40by the marvelousness of the body and how much we don’t know about it and still so we have
50:46to respect it did you know by the way that we had it also um this is just this past year
50:522021 there was a landmark discovery that changed everything we knew about our
50:58metabolism right well so everybody says that you know like um
51:06when you’re uh uh a teenager you’re grown tall you’ve got a high
51:11metabolism you’re just basically calories right okay totally wrong the time is going down when you’re team okay
51:17and then people say when you’re um in your 20s or 30s
51:23you know and you’re starting to gain weight and getting out of shape and they’re like man my metabolism is slowing down and then some people
51:29basically say that uh you know i was unlucky because i was born with a bad
51:34metabolism look at my sister or look at my cousin she’s real thin she’s so lucky
51:40she’s got a fast metabolism right all that has been turned up ended completely
51:46it turns out that all humans go through only four phases of
51:51metabolism in their whole life tell me okay actually i’m going to show you this because it’s actually right here on my
51:58desk you got a chart you got a you got a graph you got a chart no no i got it i got this baby right here it’s in a journal
52:04science okay this is how researchers do it like all around my office man like i am reading this stuff and this paper uh
52:11i’ll tell you i i gotta look at this it it’s studying 8 000 people from like 30 countries and it studied people from
52:19eight days old to 90 years old
52:25across 20 different countries all right this is the largest study of human metabolism
52:31ever undertaken and here’s what they found that if you subtracted out body fat
52:39and which is different for everybody okay and you were to just go right down to the core of real metabolism
52:45energy usage uh energy generation are here’s here are the four phases when
52:51we’re born we got the same metabolism as our mother makes sense synchronized okay
52:58from zero or from from from the day you’re born to one year old your
53:04metabolism skyrockets in fact it’s twice high when you’re one
53:09year old as when you’re 20 years old wow okay so from one year old down to
53:16throughout your teenagers in puberty that time you think that you’re eating a lot and your metabolism is going sky high it’s actually coming down from its
53:23peak interesting why does it seem like you’re burning so many calories well you you just you you
53:29um well you’re more active and you’re growing yeah uh so you may be burning more calories but
53:34your metabolism isn’t changing this is the key thing we are hardwired to go through these phases now it’s going down
53:40to 20 years old from 20 years old to 60 years old
53:47okay from college to retirement it doesn’t change it is rock stable
53:53all right so it’s our and then after 60 it starts to diminish but not as fast as you think it’s a slow deep it’s a slow
54:00grade down okay four phases of human metabolism we never knew this before this year all right this is how it knew
54:07it is so here’s the key thing what makes all the difference between people like how why is your metabolism different
54:13than mine and why is somebody why is a sumo wrestler’s metabolism different than you know
54:19somebody who’s on a runway okay and it has to do with the fact that
54:24our metabolisms are all the same but the lifestyle choices that we make can actually
54:31push our metabolism one way or the other so it our metabolism doesn’t cause us to be fat
54:36our fat slows down our metabolism it’s the other way around
54:42interesting completely right so what so how do we burn more fat then
54:48to all right so that’s my metabolism that’s what i’m working on right now and that’s that’s a that is the topic of my
54:54next book by the way which i’m writing right now yeah so so stay tuned for that answer because i i’m on to something
55:00really hot on that um and i will give you a little bit of a sneak peek what’s
55:06that yes well you can eat certain foods to burn your fat down absolutely so so
55:15while while uh caloric restriction and fasting uh
55:20can actually also do it it turns out there are certain foods that you can actually eat that will
55:26trigger it you want to give me something else i i don’t i don’t want to give you a too much i don’t want to give your viewers
55:32as a spoiler because i i’ll have you come i’ll have you invited back in the show well yeah we’ll have you been waiting
55:37for sure we’ll have you back for sure you can give us the whole debrief but what would you say are a couple of these foods at least that you think that
55:43are are now researched and proven to be powerful fat burning uh well i’ll give
55:49you i’ll give you i’ll give you one that’s actually just a surprise is seafood actually seafood
55:55yeah helps burn fat yep does it help burn fat or it starts to
56:00trigger and activate the fat triggering process it’s it triggers so there are there’s certain elements in food that
56:07are newly discovered in research like i just told you i just told you some new stuff
56:13that’s coming out of the hot off the presses but i can tell you like this is where this is what i do the research
56:20that if i told you about research about biotech developments
56:26it may not actually mean anything to you for 10 years maybe every never okay but
56:32when there’s when there’s research about food or about your health a lot of times there’s stuff that you
56:37that has immediacy you can put it to use right away so cancer starving foods regenerative foods
56:45gut health foods that can also help your brain foods that slow down cellular aging
56:50foods that lower inflammation and boost your immune system at the same time you
56:55know that’s what i’m talking about because the power of healing rests inside our body and health care is not
57:03something that we need to rely on when we go to the doctor’s office right every year you go once healthcare is
57:10everything in between that we do for ourselves and food is a medicine that we take absolutely
57:15i’ve talked about this many times on on my show before that i grew up in a specific religion called christian
57:21science where it was more the practice of spiritual awareness and that were spiritual ideas
57:28and and less on using medicine to heal but more using the mind and awareness to heal
57:35you know thought which would then heal the physical body so medicine was never a really thing i
57:41studied or really took growing up it was just kind of like when we got sick or when something happened we we used
57:48thought prayer spiritual prayer to kind of remind ourselves of who we are but the
57:54uh i’m curious do you think that people could live without modern medicine if they eat
58:00properly like all the things that you talk about in your book eat to be diseased do you think we could
58:06live longer lives healthier lives without the need of certain medicines
58:11um or are you saying we should be using here and eating food when we need them
58:18well we should be eating to enrich our lives from the time
58:25we’re young all the way until our last breath and that should actually be able to
58:32tackle about two-thirds of all the chronic diseases and by the way about a third of all cancers are thought to be
58:39due to diet and lifestyle one-third of cancers all right we ought to be able to
58:44dodge but you got to start early right i mean this is not one of these things where i’ve been smoking my whole life
58:49and now i’m going to actually turn over a new leaf it’s never too late to quit by the way however the fact of the
58:55matter is is that uh you know like so you grew up you know as in christian in the
59:00christian science um framework which you’re in you’re in the boston area so you yeah that’s where the hub is the
59:05mother church is incredible yeah it’s in boston yes it’s uh it’s amazing it’s an amazing place
59:11a really a spectacular uh place to visit and a very special place actually
59:17but i will tell you that the idea of of um
59:24having formative years uh uh groomed in a healthy
59:31mindset yes which is i think what you’re talking about uh is so important so that if you’ve got
59:38kids and if you’re involved with teaching and if you’re involved a business where you can actually impact on kids think
59:44about the impact that you have now could actually influence their health
59:5030 40 50 60 years from now and that to me is big responsibility it’s a giant
59:56opportunity to make a better society that’s beautiful i’m curious
1:00:01we’ve got a few more minutes left um what do you think you’re telling me that every week you’re essentially finding
1:00:06these aha moments based on the research papers you’re finding and things that you’re discovering yourself and
1:00:12what do you think in your mind if you could predict the future ten years out five ten years out what are gonna be the
1:00:18brown groundbreaking things that we as humans discover in the next five to ten years that is going to transform
1:00:25our health wow um based on what you’ve seen in the
1:00:30last five to ten years and we’re like these are unbelievable every year findings what do you think
1:00:35is on the horizon for us well one thing that i think is most uh
1:00:42one of the big aha jaw droppers for me in the kind of the journey that i’ve actually had in my career
1:00:48is the fact that we can regenerate ourselves okay and i never thought that was even
1:00:55possible i had been working in stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine and
1:01:01you know it’s a real struggle it’s an uphill climb to really try to show that we can actually regenerate the heart or
1:01:06the brain or nerves and yet the body does it every single day and when i discovered that you know you
1:01:13could regenerate um uh tissue by uh
1:01:19uh barley you know eating barley which is beta d glucan or with uh
1:01:26chocolate as i mentioned too cacao polyphenols or even olive oil there’s something
1:01:32called hydroxy tyrosol it’s a natural chemical in extra virgin olive oil it helps to kind of make that distinctive
1:01:38olive oily taste that that can actually help to protect your stem cell or if you are not a vegan
1:01:45but you eat seafood and and you and you’re really adventurous you know that black pasta
1:01:51squid ink uh that they have sometimes on menus i i happen to i you know i like to
1:01:57explore different kinds of food squid ink actually protects your stem cells it’s like a shield okay and so the
1:02:05fact that you we can actually eat to regenerate so i’m very excited by this idea that we can um
1:02:11uh eat foods and we’re still discovering what foods can help our propel our
1:02:16body’s regenerative capacity i think that’s going to actually be
1:02:21groundbreaking and then something that i’m actually working on that is really you know future forward right so you’re
1:02:28asking like what what’s going to be mind-blowing in the future yes all right well look um
1:02:34i’m a i’m kind of like a pretty down-to-earth guy like i believe that we should be
1:02:40protecting our planet doing everything we can we can to take care of nurture this
1:02:46ball that we live on and we should be doing better for our community but i also i think from the time i was a
1:02:53kid i appreciated and i was excited by this idea space travel which is now happening
1:02:59more often right all right so here’s something i think is going to happen over the next decade
1:03:05um as humans become extraterrestrial we’re going to be the first
1:03:11extraterrestrials are ever going to meet is ourselves and we get beyond near-earth orbit we’re going to be
1:03:16our bodies are going to be bombarded by galactic radiation and and and have the effects of negative
1:03:23gravity um changing our body we’re going to find what kinds of foods
1:03:29or supplements that we got to eat to protect ourselves that’s crazy so i’m working on that that’s cool so i i’ve
1:03:36been meeting with astronauts i’ve been talking to people in the space program flight surgeons and what i’m figuring is
1:03:41that if we can figure out what we’re going to need in the future for that
1:03:47we could probably bring that right down to earth right now to actually do something good for us so that’s you know so i’m excited by that
1:03:53that’s cool that’s really cool um i’ve got a couple final questions for you but you’ve got a lot of this
1:03:59information and more in your book eat to beat disease the new science of how your
1:04:04body can heal itself and you’ve also got a master class that people can check out if they want to learn more about this
1:04:10and get these trainings from you over at doctorwilliamlee.com you’ve got some great stuff over on your
1:04:16instagram and facebook and twitter dr william lee as well over there we’ll have it all linked up uh and then the
1:04:22new the you know in the future we’ll have you back on about the next book about burning fat and the metabolism that sounds like a really cool topic
1:04:29which i’m sure people will love um this is a question i ask everyone at the end of our conversations it’s called
1:04:35the three truths question so i’d like to imagine a hypothetical scenario
1:04:40um that it’s your last day on earth dr lee and it’s many many years away you get to
1:04:47live as long as you want to your telomeres uh they continue to extend you live
1:04:52as long as you want to live right but for whatever reason it’s your last day and you’ve accomplished every dream
1:04:58and goal that you can think of but for whatever reason you’ve also got to take all of your work with you to
1:05:05another place all your books and your content and master classes and videos and ted talks in this interview it all
1:05:11goes away but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true three lessons that you’ve learned from your life that you
1:05:17would share with the world and this is all we have to remember from your content and your
1:05:23information what would you say would be those three truths for you
1:05:31well that is a big heavy um i i would say
1:05:38one of the truths is that um we got to be good to the people around
1:05:44us and at the end of the day one of the things that i try to do is to
1:05:50make sure that i uh uh practice acts of kindness
1:05:56uh to the people around me um and i think that that’s just an important thing that
1:06:02uh makes the world a better place yes uh and makes me a better person and because
1:06:07i remind myself of it it keeps me on my toes um you know when there’s all these
1:06:12stressors around so that’s one thing is just sort of be kind to people around you the second
1:06:18thing i think is um that i would leave with people is
1:06:24believe in the impossible you know um you know the impossible
1:06:31actually contains the word possible in inside it and so for me
1:06:36part of what i’ve realized in my my own life journey
1:06:41professionally is that um and i’ve and i see this i’ve seen this as a doctor you can take people who
1:06:48like nobody else thinks there’s any hope for and they’re at the end of the line and every doctor is giving up there’s
1:06:54nothing else we can do for you and if you believe something is possible
1:07:00and you’re informed and you’re and you’ve got the audacity to think that maybe maybe we can do it
1:07:07i’m just telling you i’ve i’ve personally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat
1:07:13wow in people who had no hope uh by the way including my own mother who had metastatic cancer and we got her
1:07:20on this immune therapy and three treatments nine weeks later all of the cancer melted away wow
1:07:26because we allowed her immune system to rear up and clean up
1:07:31the act and her and she’s alive today seven years later there’s zero cancer
1:07:36okay that’s you gotta put you gotta believe i mean this is not this is not just hope
1:07:42it’s an informed hope and you have to commit yourself to actually doing it so i’ve and by the way i’ve done that a
1:07:48number of times so that’s something that i think that i would leave people you
1:07:53believe just remember that that you know you can convert the impossible into the possible and then the third thing i
1:07:59think is that i believe as a truth is that science leads the way
1:08:05and uh uh it’s going to take us to the future and if you’re somebody who’s helpful
1:08:11and you’re somebody who believes in a better place and and a better existence in the future
1:08:17follow the signs of science and and um one of my mentors a guy named judo folkman
1:08:22used to end some of his lectures with this great quote from an american novelist named el doctoro he um and he
1:08:29was describing his process of writing right so i’m an author and i went through this whole process and
1:08:35what he what he what doctors said was that the act of writing is like driving at night
1:08:43you can’t see beyond your headlights but you can make the whole journey that way
1:08:48and that’s what science is like research is like you know you got to follow the headlights of science just to kind of
1:08:54see where it’s going to go and you’re always going to get to a different destination than where you started so
1:09:00those would be my three truths those are beautiful and your second one sounded like christian science was rubbing off
1:09:05on you the mindset the belief belief when there’s no hope um
1:09:11dr lee i want to acknowledge you for a moment before i ask a final question for your continued
1:09:19trust and faith in directing your headlights in a certain way without seeing too far ahead of them and being
1:09:25consistent with that for many decades and finding these solutions to help us heal the body help us heal
1:09:31the different uh causes of inflammation and disease and cancerous
1:09:36things um with your research so i really acknowledge you for your consistency on this
1:09:42um and i’m just grateful that you continue to put it out there in in ways that we can consume it you know a lot of this
1:09:48science and research seems overwhelming you’re holding up the research paper i’m like i don’t know how to read this stuff but your ability to translate that into
1:09:56tangible uh bite-size information for us to start
1:10:01taking those actions is really powerful so i acknowledge you for for all that you do to communicate this wisdom um and
1:10:07my final question is what is your definition of greatness
1:10:12wow you know you’re like you’re like the uh you’re like the the college professor
1:10:18that gives all these extra credit questions [Laughter]
1:10:23um hopefully a good one hopefully the one that you liked yeah yeah yeah exactly you know i i
1:10:30guess you know the definition of greatness i think is um anything that’s better than you thought
1:10:37you know because i think that that there’s so many different definitions but we all come to the table with
1:10:43certain assumptions about almost everything and almost everyone and to me great
1:10:49is anything better than what you expect and i think that that that allows us to be grateful
1:10:56by the way for what we got around us and uh again i think that we
1:11:02uh no matter how accomplished you know somebody might be we always have to take a couple of steps
1:11:08back just to be humble to recognize that it’s a privilege to do what we do no
1:11:14matter what you do and we have to just remember that it’s it’s part of our
1:11:20duty to keep doing good for the world when you actually look at the science of what happens very fast fasting it’s
1:11:25actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint
1:11:30assuming of course you’re not malnourished right i mean i’m assuming if you’re the average american who’s
1:11:36still 10 20 30 pounds overweight then this is something that actually has a lot of benefit
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