HEALTHY FOODS That Heal The Body

Starve Cancer & PREVENT DISEASE

Dr. William Li & Lewis Howes

Discover How Specific Foods Can Boost Your Health, Starve Cancer, and Support Longevity

In this insightful video, Dr. William Li and the host explore how strategic choices in your diet, backed by science, can help the body heal, prevent disease, and even fight cancer, offering practical tips for anyone interested in a healthier and longer life.

Visit Dr. Li’s Website… https://drwilliamli.com

Dr. William Li, a renowned physician and researcher, reveals how certain foods have the power to transform our health outcomes by supporting the body’s defenses against disease. He discusses his journey from traditional medicine to nutrition science, sharing compelling evidence that diet can impact cancer risk, inflammation, and the body’s ability to heal. The video simplifies cutting-edge research into practical guidance, showing viewers that making informed food choices is not only possible but can have profound benefits for disease prevention and longevity.

Summary

Science shows certain foods play a significant role in healing and protecting the body from disease, including cancer.
Conventional medicine often focuses on treating disease with drugs, but nutrition science offers proactive strategies for prevention.
Dr. Li presents research on foods that can starve cancer cells and enhance the body’s natural defenses.
Practical examples illustrate how everyday dietary changes can yield impactful long-term health benefits.
The host and guest highlight the challenges and misconceptions around dietary change and sustainable health habits.
The video addresses commonly asked questions about nutrition, wellness, and implementing science-backed healthy eating.
Emphasis is placed on realistic, attainable lifestyle improvements suitable for a wide audience.

Transcript Summary

The Problem With Conventional Foods

Dr. Li opens by warning about the hidden dangers in processed and instant foods, urging readers to become more aware of their daily food choices and the impact on health.

Rethinking Medical Practice

He reflects on his experiences as an internal medicine physician, describing a shift from drug-focused treatment to proactive health strategies grounded in nutrition and disease prevention.

Making Healthy Choices Possible

The discussion pivots to the science that enables everyday people to incorporate evidence-based nutrition into their lives, making “the impossible possible” and demystifying wellness for the general public.

Key Nutritional Research & Cancer

Dr. Li shares findings that support the idea of “starving” cancer through specific dietary adjustments, breaking down which foods are most beneficial and why these changes work on a cellular level.

Empowering Sustainable Health

The video concludes with a motivational call for viewers to adopt small, sustainable changes that can add up to significant improvements in their long-term health, longevity, and overall well-being.

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Full Transcript

Things that used to be like instant foods, you gotta be really careful about that because if you take a look at the packaging—and I’m telling you, if there’s one thing your viewers can get from me about things to watch out for—I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness… Yeah, please, welcome. You share a lot of science behind how we can beat cancer and other diseases by changing our diet, but it doesn’t seem possible for most of the population to even think about that, so how is this possible?

Yeah, well, you know, first of all, thanks for having me on. I love talking about making the impossible possible and usually, first of all, you just have to kind of think through what your goals are. And so, I’ll explain what my goals were when I got into this whole thing. So, I’m a medical doctor; I’m trained as an internal medicine doc, and that means that I take care of men and women, young and old, healthy and sick, and one of the things that I trained myself more or less to do is a little bit different than how most medical doctors think, which is—you know, we’re trained to diagnose disease, chase it with drugs, and keep chasing with drugs, right? So my view has always been—we start healthy, every now and then we get sick, but the real question is, how can we actually get back to health, and how do we prevent getting sick in the first place? So a little bit of a different orientation, and my goal has always been to keep health, protect health, or to get you back to health.

I’m also a researcher. As a medical doctor, you’re not—what I’ve been told is you’re not taught about nutrition and actually teaching how to eat properly to reverse disease, or to prevent disease, I should say. So how come you seem to be, you know, one of the few that has tried to have gone outside of the box to say, hey listen, we’re not going to just pump everyone with drugs and put a Band-Aid on something, we’re going to get to the root cause.

Yeah, well, so here’s a little bit of the under-the-skirt truth about this: Medical schools teach medical students that would usually get less than one month worth of nutrition education in their entire four years, and then it never gets revisited throughout your entire career. And in fact, nutrition, when I went to medical school, was kind of dismissed as something that dietitians actually did. And when I trained in the hospital—now, I trained at Massachusetts General Hospital, it’s one of the Harvard teaching hospitals, okay, so I can run a COVID unit, I could run an emergency room, not a problem—but what I realized after many years of taking care of patients is that when my patients would ask me, “Hey doc, what should I do for myself,” I realized I was never taught that answer. So I thought that was wrong.

Now, my background as a researcher actually comes into play in terms of how I got into this whole field, because I’m what you call a vascular biologist. So that really means that I study the science of blood vessels. And blood vessels are important because we’ve got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies, so you can imagine how important this network actually is. It delivers every bit of oxygen we breathe and all the nutrition we eat to go through the bloodstream—you need the circulation to bring it to every cell and every organ. So that’s what I study in my science.

So when I actually started, yeah, you know, almost 30 years ago in medicine, my goal was to figure out how could we actually first conquer diseases. So I went into the biotech area, and you know, we tried to figure out common denominators of disease, and it comes back to food, because food is one of those common solutions, but common denominators of disease actually means—when you take a look at how we do research on Alzheimer’s and diabetes and obesity and aging and heart disease and cancer—these are vertical silos. They’re about an inch wide and a mile deep, and you get specialists that actually come in, and they’re really knowledgeable about what makes one disease different from another. And I thought, look, you know, we should actually look at what makes diseases the same. So if you drain the Pacific, you 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 denominators of a disease, then you had a shot at pulling the bow back and sending a single arrow through multiple diseases. Now, I looked at angiogenesis, which is how the body grows blood vessels—that’s my area—as one of those common denominators, and we were right.

So I run the Angiogenesis Foundation. We figured out that when the body loses its control over its circulation—either you don’t have enough blood vessels and wounds don’t heal, or you have too many blood vessels and you either go blind, your cancers grow—and so through biotechnology, over a couple of decades, I’ve actually been involved with developing 41 FDA-approved new treatments for cancer, diabetes, and prevent blindness. Okay, so that’s my street cred. So when somebody basically says, “Oh, you know, how’d you get into nutrition, are you one of those doctors that don’t believe in modern medicine?” I basically—no, I actually develop modern medicines, right? But what I realized when I was actually working with my patients is that although we can actually come up with better, more sophisticated, more higher-tech treatments for diseases these days, the fact of the matter is, we should be preventing disease in the first place, and when you’re talking about prevention, you can’t talk about drugs, you gotta talk about something like food.

And when I thought about it—and this is how I got into nutrition—I realized I wasn’t taught about it, but I did have these skillsets of actually having developed drugs and having invented many of the systems that drugs are being tested in—why don’t we just throw some food into those systems and see what happens? And so for me, I’m one of those people that actually not just says, “Food is medicine,” but I actually study food as medicine; that’s how I got here.

So what are the—I mean, so it is possible through food to beat cancer and diseases, and is that what I’m hearing you say? Well, here’s basically what I actually learned myself: when it comes to food and health, food is actually a medicine that we all take three times a day. We try not to take prescription meds whenever we can avoid it, and even if you write prescription meds, you don’t want to be taking them forever. But food is something that you take three times a day from the time we’re born to our very last breath. And when it comes to food and health, it’s not just about the food, it’s actually about how our body responds to what we put inside it—so that’s the real, kind of underlying secret. If you feed your body something that’s not good for it, it’s going to react poorly, not going to be good for you. If you feed your body something that is good for it, it’s going to activate its health defenses—and that’s what I write about in my book Eat to Beat Disease: how does a body actually maintain its health, and then what can we eat to help the body do it better?

Interesting, so I mean, what are the key things we should be knowing about the body—are all bodies the same when it comes to how foods, I guess, are consumed and assimilated through the body in the bloodstream and all these different things? Or is everybody different, where some nutritional foods might impact positively but negatively in other bodies? What should we be knowing about the body?

Yeah, it’s a great question and, first of all, I’m a scientist so I will tell you how you can tell that I’m a scientist is that real scientists tell you we don’t know everything, okay, and it’s the kind of humility that we have to start with. Because so often you think about scientists being very smart in things—real scientists spend their time talking about what we don’t know, not what we do know. But you’re asking me what we do know, all right, so I’ll give you that answer. Look, our bodies are hardwired to be healthy. So when we’re growing in our mom’s womb, our body, as we’re forming our bones and our heart and our organs and our limbs inside the form of the human that’s being created, are these health defenses. So if you think about the body like a fortress—you know, you’ve seen a bit, we’ve all seen a medieval fortress, a castle, right? And basically, like it’s a happy community that lives inside there—you got a king, you got a queen, you got a princess, you got everything else going inside there. But that fortress has got to protect itself, so it’s designed to repel enemies: it’s got a moat, it’s got a drawbridge, it’s got the little slits you fire arrows out of, it’s got sloping walls so enemies can’t crawl up, it’s got traps. By the way, you know, like a medieval fort—the thing that I never realized, having been to quite a few castles, is that when you go to the entrance, there is a hole right above you and it’s called a murder hole, and it’s basically if people breached the drawbridge they would just drop boulders down through that hole.

All right, so the body is designed better than a medieval castle. We’ve got our own defense systems, and there are five of them that I know about, and I helped to kind of put together this picture—partly because I studied the biotechnology, how do you actually treat diseases using these systems. And when you forget about the disease part and you think about the health part, these are the systems, these five systems, that maintain our health. So I’ll tell you what they are, okay? First health defense system is called angiogenesis—that’s what I study—blood vessels, a 60,000-mile channel that delivers oxygen and nutrients everywhere, gotta have enough of them or your body is in trouble. Second, angiogenesis—this is the channel of blood vessels, this is how the body grows blood vessels, okay—it is a whole system of growth. When we have just the right amount of blood vessels, our body is healthy. Now, are you going to work out? All right, you’re going to pump some iron; your muscles got to grow, now you need a few more blood vessels, all right. If you skin your knee and fall off a bike—gotta heal that wound. Underneath that scab, you got new blood vessels growing to heal. Now, the body never lets too many blood vessels grow or it causes problems. For example, cancers are forming in all of our bodies, because we’re filled with these dividing cells, and some of them make mistakes. But a microscopic cancer is completely harmless because it doesn’t have a blood supply, and so our body prevents cancers from growing naturally by controlling the angiogenesis. So we’ve just got enough for our good cells, not enough for the bad cells—so that’s one of our health defenses. And there are treatments, including ones that I helped to develop, that can cut off the blood supply to cancer by starving it. So that’s called anti-angiogenic therapy, and the same approach has been used to prevent blindness, all right, so you don’t have blood vessels leaking in the eye. However, turns out that sometimes your body needs a little help, so now you can actually use foods to actually amp up your body’s angiogenesis defenses—so that’s just one of the defenses.

That’s the first one—what’s the second one? All right, second one is our stem cells, right? So, when we were kids, Louis, you know, our grade school teachers told us salamanders can regenerate, starfish can regenerate, but people can’t regenerate, right? Wrong. You lose your hand, it’s not going to grow back—well, it turns out that people do regenerate. We can’t regenerate that quickly, but we regenerate from the inside out. Like, a lizard can regenerate a limb or tail, but we regenerate our organs continuously. Our lung regenerates, our liver regenerates, okay, the lining of our mouth regenerates. If you’ve ever eaten a chip, all right, and scratched the inside of your mouth and it hurts—next day, all fixed, right? Because of regeneration. All right, now here’s the thing—turns out that the way we naturally regenerate is through stem cells. Not the kind you go to a strip mall to have injected into your knee, but this is the kind that we’re born with, because you know, like when you and I were like sperm and egg meeting in our mom’s womb and dividing—that’s what we were. These are stem cells—we were all formed from these primitive cells that could be anything; it could be an eye, it could be a nose, it could be a heart—and they formed our whole body. And there’s always some overage, okay, and so you have more than you need to form your in into a person, and when we’re born, about 750 million stem cells are left over, and they are packed up in a suitcase and stuffed into our bone marrow. All right, and so when we’re born, even a little baby, inside their bone marrow, in this hollow of their bones, are 750 million stem cells, and they are stored there like bullets in a bandolier, waiting for when they’re needed.

So that when we grow up and we need to be regenerated—you know, you have too much to drink, now your liver needs to be regenerated, you cut yourself, now you need to actually heal that wound—these stem cells come flying out of our bone marrow like bees out of a hive, who regenerate, renew us from the inside out. And there are biotech efforts that I’ve been a part of to try to grow new heart, grow new brain, regenerate nerves—not ready for prime time yet—but it turns out that foods can coax these stem cells out of our bone marrow so we regenerate faster. Huh, which foods? This is the second one, but I’m curious— which foods can help us? There are a number of them; I’ll give you one right from the get-go: dark chocolate. Oh, you’re speaking my language now. Okay, can you eat too much dark chocolate, that’s the question? You know, I have never seen anything about an overdose of cacao, but I will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream just by having two cups of hot chocolate made with 80% high flavanol chocolate, dark chocolate.

Come on. Yeah, it’s been done in people—60-year-olds with heart disease. So wait: what happens when you drink or you eat this dark chocolate, okay, it happens? Yeah, the polyphenols in this dark chocolate that we know what they are, they’re called proanthocyanidins—so I’m a scientist, so my job is to actually know what the inside chemicals actually 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, but I’ll tell you, these natural chemicals found in cacao actually trigger a reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells—so it is literally like bees flying out of a hive—can double the number of stem cells. And what’s the practical impact? Well, there was a study done at UCSF in San Francisco that looked at 60-year-old men with heart disease—so these are people whose blood vessels were already not doing so well and their blood flow wasn’t going so well either, and their blood vessels were kind of sick (that’s kind of the definition of heart disease). By having the stem cells coming out, they were able to actually double the resiliency, the function of their blood vessels, so they got better rebound, better agility, their blood vessels were in better shape because their stem cells are regenerating their circulation. Wow.

So this is human studies, right? Like, most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice or cells. I’m talking about human studies, and that’s kind of where we are with food as medicine: it’s not the kind of guesswork—like we can do serious research to get down to exactly what’s actually happening at the human level. So that’s the second health defense systems. Okay, third one. Third one is our gut microbiome. Now, people have been talking about gut health and microbiome, it’s almost like a buzzword these days, and people are saying, “Well, we can actually scoop 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.” Again, I’m a scientist, so I will tell you that there are 39 trillion bacteria in the typical body. That’s more stars than in a night sky, all right? So we barely understand the gut bacteria, but what we do know is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism, communicates with our brain, actually can help us heal from the inside out, and very importantly, our gut bacteria basically lives—if you think of your gut like a garden hose, it’s a tube, and you were to cut a garden hose in half and you look inside it, there’s a lining, okay. The bacteria is inside the hose, but inside the wall of the garden hose, that’s where your immune system—70% of our immune system—lives inside our gut.

So if you’re feeding your gut a lot of bad foods, you’re probably poisoning your immune system. You’re preventing your gut bacteria. Now, I’ll tell you what’s interesting about the gut bacteria—your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the walls of your gut. Immune system’s in there—70%—like a jelly roll, like the jelly in a jelly roll, that gut bacteria is inside. So think about like a college student in a freshman dorm, they’re talking to their roommate by pounding on the wall, right? “What do you want? What kind of pizza do you want?” All right, and they can answer you, and that’s basically what our gut bacteria says to our immune system. So we gotta keep that gut healthy. By the way, interestingly—and I’ve done research on this—certain gut bacteria can actually signal to your brain (it’s a gut and brain axis) and cause your brain to release social hormones, okay, and can affect your mood. So you know when you’ve got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut—guarantee you, it’s not just because you’re irritated, it’s affecting your brain as well.

So, yeah, we had Dr. Amaran Mayer on, who—he’s got the gut, I think it’s the gut-brain connection or the good immune connection or something like that—so he’s got a lot of great research on that. Yeah, so the key thing, though, is that foods can actually help right-size your gut health. Think about like an ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef—so certain foods can support the ecology, the ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef, and certain ones actually kill the coral, all right. And so, our continuously—you want to keep it in good shape all the way through our lives, and by the way, even conditions like autism, Alzheimer’s, and schizophrenia are all now seemingly connected to our gut bacteria. Really?

Yeah. Now, is there a way—if someone has—those, are they pretty easy to reverse though, or is that hard? Well, listen, we’re just figuring this out, because right now medically we prescribe medications to try to treat those things, and a lot of times those medications just blunt the symptoms. Okay, they cover up the symptoms, they don’t get at the underlying cause. Now, we don’t know exactly how the gut bacteria communicates to the brain completely yet, but there’s one giant nerve called the vagus nerve. It’s like a giant chute, about the thickness of a shoelace, and it hangs from our brain all the way down into our gut, okay, goes right near, wraps around our esophagus on the way down, and we think the gut bacteria basically sends text messages up to the brain through this big nerve, okay. So the key, though, is that foods can actually influence our gut bacteria—either good bacteria or bad bacteria—so that’s important. So that’s the third health defense system.

Okay, so what the—first, angiogenesis number one, stem cells number two, gut microbiome number three, okay. The fourth one—number four—our DNA. Now, if you watch CSI, DNA is just sort of like a genetic fingerprint, a code that you can find on a crime scene, or if you’re actually trying to do ancestry, look for your ancestors, you figure out how much of you is Neanderthal, right? So that was one percent Neanderthal when I did it, yes. So, the key though is it’s—DNA is a lot more than our genetic code—it actually protects us from the environment. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, you know how if we are exposed to—we get a sunburn, ultraviolet light, you damage your DNA, and what happens? Cancer, skin cancer, right? If you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant, it’s going to actually damage your DNA in your lungs, you get lung cancer, right? But think about it, if you are in Los Angeles and you’re driving on the I-10, or if you’re just walking on a beach, you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation. So how come we don’t get skin cancer all the time? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself from damage, and so the DNA is a protective mechanism from the environment.

I always tell people, when you’re pumping gas—if you still drive a gas vehicle as opposed to an EV—I always ask people, do you stand upwind or downwind? What do you do? Are you upwind or downwind, do you know? Upwind, right? So you’re not getting the fumes in, is that what you mean? Right, right, well, if you’re standing downwind, you can smell the fumes—yeah, right—and if you’re smelling the fumes, you are poisoning the DNA in your lung. So how come we don’t develop lung cancer after pumping gas? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself. And so our DNA is sort of like a self-defense mechanism against the environment—radon from your basement, okay, off-gassing from the new car you just got or the Uber that you’re riding in, or the furniture that you got, right? So this is this incredible defense mechanism against our environment, and then—and foods can actually speed up the repair, help fix holes that are in our DNA. And then the other kind of pièce de résistance for 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 talk about telomeres? Yeah, yes, these are—they see if the longer the telomere, the longer you can live or something, or they can, right? Well, I’ll tell you, basically, what the—to remind you, to remind your listeners and viewers, basically, if your DNA is like a shoelace, the telomere is like the little plastic cap at the end of the shoelace, and over time that little cap kind of wears down, just like a shoelace.

And, you know, when that cap is gone, man, your shoelace just falls apart. Yeah, and that’s what happens to our DNA. So we need that cap, that’s called the telomere, and it burns down like a life fuse. So, you know, like Mission Impossible, light the fuse, right? So this thing is burning down, 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, and harsh things that you do to your body—smoking cigarettes, being a couch potato, being exposed to damaging oxidative stress, actually just being stressed out (like we are now with this friggin’ pandemic), those things all shorten our telomeres. They burn the fuse faster. Stress, yeah. But foods can slow it down, and some foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere, which is really cool from an aging perspective, right? What are those, what are those top three foods that help lengthen the telomeres? Green tea is one of them. Coffee, I got it, I got a, yeah, it’s amazing. I got a little—I used to live in Italy, and I just got into this habit of drinking espresso, so I got a little cup here. Amazingly, coffee actually lengthens your telomere.

Come on. I kid you not, it’s quite amazing. And leafy greens—some of the polyphenols in leafy greens can also slow down and some of them actually look like they can lengthen telomeres as well. So the key thing is that we, you know, we are not just hapless pawns of aging, we can actually do something about it, and we can also fight against our environment because, look, the tax that we pay for being on planet Earth is we’re exposed to stuff all the time, and we count on our body’s health defenses to fix it. So that’s a fourth defense, and our fifth defense is our immune system, which, you know, after two years, over the last two years, we all know how important our immune system is. But what if I told you that your immune system is so powerful that when it’s in its best shape, even when you’re 80 years old, it is strong enough to fight cancer—in fact, it can even wipe out metastatic cancer that’s spread all over your body. That’s how strong your immune system is if you give it the chance. And so here’s what the immune system does—it’s like an army of super soldiers: Rangers, SEALs, as you know, Marines, special forces—they’ve all got, these are all parts of the immune system, all cells of the immune system, and like the special forces, they’ve got their own weapons, their own training, their own tactics, but they all work together for, you know, the collective good.

And what happens is that when you’ve got good strong defenses, you can fight off invaders from the outside—bacteria and viruses, for example. And, but it’s not just outside invaders, you’ve got inside invaders as well, and those little microscopic cancers are inside invaders. And so our immune system patrols our body—okay, cops on a beat—and they’re looking for things that don’t look right. And you see that microscopic cancer that is—it can’t grow because it doesn’t have blood vessels feeding it (angiogenesis)—basically, the immune system goes there 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 immune 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 the immune system? Blueberries are a food that definitely boosts immune system; it’s—in young people as well as older people, that they boost the natural killer cells, which is really cool. Broccoli sprouts can boost our immune system—now, these are the three daily—these are like the three-day-old sprouts, right?

Okay, okay, here’s something, here’s something most people don’t know: the big broccoli, when we eat broccoli, we’re really—you know, our moms told us to eat the tree tops, right? You go to the freezer section of a grocery store and you buy some frozen broccoli and they all look the same—they’re all the same size—that’s not really what broccoli looks like. If you go to the farmer’s market and you see a real broccoli, it’s this gigantic stem, with a little bit of tree top, okay. So what’s in a broccoli? It’s called sulforaphane—so that’s what gives broccoli that unique taste, it’s a little sulfurous, okay. You gotta put a little olive oil, a little bit of garlic, you know, you can sauté it up, okay. So the sulforaphanes—we’ve done research now looking at what’s in the treetops, and it turns out that these sulforaphanes can starve cancer—anti-angiogenic—help your body cut off the blood supply to cancer. Broccoli tree tops have it, but guess what? The stalk of the broccoli has twice as much of the good stuff than the tree tops. Eat the stalks. Eat the stock. So, man, like if you don’t want to eat, if you don’t want to sauté the stalks, like a lot of cultures will just cut the stalks and sauté 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 of good things you can do. Put a little broccoli stem, a little oregano powder, you know, you can do, liven it right up, a little turmeric, it’ll be really good, smoothie or a soup.

However, here’s the thing—so, imagine adult broccoli having these sulforaphanes. Well, it turns out that these big broccoli plants used to be sprouts, and the sprouts, pretty much, were born, or sprouted from the seed, with all the sulforaphanes it’s ever gonna have, all right? So when it gets bigger, it just gets distributed, with the stalk closer to the ground having more of it, of course. But the broccoli sprouts have 100 times more—wow—of the sulforaphane, the good stuff, as a grown-up broccoli. So, sprouts, broccoli sprouts, now studies have been done to show that if you give people a flu shot—people in the winter should get a flu shot so you don’t get the flu, all right, just go to your drugstore to get one—it turns out that if you, people—they did a study looking at people getting the flu shot and they gave half the people a little shake made with broccoli sprouts and the other group just got a placebo, and the people who got the broccoli sprout shake and the flu shot, their beneficial response of their immune system is 22 times higher.

Like, it totally rocked if they actually had a broccoli sprout shake. So that’s not food versus medicine—that is food and medicine, which is really cool, right? Interesting, so we never want to throw out—we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, we want to figure out how to make everything go work even better. Absolutely, wow, this is fascinating.

Okay, so I’m curious, because you talked about this process where all these diseases or cancers seem to have this thing in common, right—these heightened blood cells that it is, or too many blood vessels that are feeding the cancer. So I’m curious: do you know, is there a specific cancer or disease that’s easier to reverse? Okay, so let’s take a look at what we know from the cancer treatment perspective. So, I work in this area, and, you know, I’ve been involved with helping treat cancer patients. So, we do know that there is a new type of medicine that’s not chemo; they’re called anti-angiogenesis. So, they cut off the blood supply feeding the big cancers. By the time—so here’s a research experiment that was done a couple of decades ago in the lab that I worked in—if you grew tiny little cancer cells up to the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen (that’s about three millimeters in diameter), and you kind of floated them in a broth and didn’t allow them to touch blood vessels, they would just stay there at that size almost indefinitely. Okay, and in our body, that’s the size that the immune system would wing by and take out. The moment you allow blood vessels to grow into that microscopic mass, that tumor will grow sixteen thousand times in two weeks—it’ll explode. This is like a trigger that gets pulled in order to have cancers grow up, and for that reason, biotech companies started to develop anti-angiogenic drugs to treat cancer by cutting off the blood supply.

So, there are about a dozen anti-angiogenic drugs that have changed the game for treating kidney cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, and even brain cancer, all right? So, we know that we can actually do this with drugs. The question is, can we do it with food? Not so much when cancer is out of the barn, horse is out of the barn, but what about prevention? What are foods that can prevent cancer? Well, it turns out that two apples a day actually can lower the rate of lung cancer and colon cancer. Why? Because there are natural substances in apples, like quercetin (that’s one of the natural chemicals) that are naturally anti-angiogenic. Green tea actually has been shown to lower risk of colorectal cancer, particularly in women, and what’s in a cup of green tea are these polyphenols, EGCG, and when you drink it, it gets in your bloodstream—why? Because the blood vessels are carrying it, and now your blood vessels are loaded with this cancer-starving stuff. These little tumors don’t have a chance. Wow, yeah.

Okay, is it the same as eating two apples a day and, you know, eating these specific foods as it would be just putting all those ingredients in a supplement and taking the supplement? Would that work just as well, to have like a super supplement that is just the killer of all cancer and diseases, you know, all these different nutrients? Well, look, I’m a researcher, and so—and I’ve been involved with drug development, and so if it were that easy, it would have been done a while ago. But I can tell you that the whole—what I tell people is that the whole food is always going to be a little bit better for the following reason: number one, for a supplement, you reduce it to a couple of different elements, you know, that you try to pack into a capsule. The whole food, man, it’s got the hundreds, if not thousands of natural goodies and chemicals, including like an apple’s got the skin, it’s got ursolic acid, it’s got fiber, which feeds your gut microbiome, it’s got quercetin, which cuts out the blood supply, so you’re getting all that in there, compared to just one thing you try to pack into a little capsule.

That said, supplements are useful, and I’m involved with, you know, designing and developing supplements as well. What we want to do—supplements, the term means topping off, right? So you’re supplementing, you’re not replacing. And this is what—you know, like what you were just asking, Lewis, is so important. Like, can we just not bother eating and just have a supplement? No, man, like you should be eating because you enjoy food, it’s good for us, it brings people together, it tells us something about our traditions, our culture, our family, our community—everybody’s from someplace, everybody’s got something that they love to eat, and of that list, there’s some good stuff in it, and so we should really lean forward. So that’s the other thing that’s a little bit different for me, compared to a lot of other doctors that tell people what not to eat—I try to tell people what you should add to your life, not what you should take away. Plenty of people will tell you what to take away, right? I’m telling you what to add, and we should add foods that activate your health defenses, and supplements can be useful to top things off.

Got it. I’ve been told many times that inflammation is also a big, I guess, warning sign for diseases and cancers, and the more inflammation, the more your body is less capable of defending itself and its immune system is weaker, is what I’ve been told. What would you say are the best ways to reduce inflammation in the body quickly? Is it through food? Is it through medicine? Is it through fasting? Is it through, you know, more sleep? Is it through a better environment? What would you say is that? So, you know, a lot of people, I think, when they hear about inflammation, they think about it as a bad guy, and what I want to tell you is that inflammation is normal, and it’s just part of our immune system. So when you actually have a bacteria or virus invade in your body—let’s say you get a cold—your immune system sets up a little bit of inflammation in your nose, okay, which is why we have a stuffy nose, a runny nose, and then it tackles the invader right then and there, and then hopefully that’s all that matters. And by the way, another sure sign of inflammation is if you cut yourself in the kitchen and you see that little cut will pretty quickly swell up, turn red, swell up—inflammation. That’s your immune system trying to tackle all the bacteria that might be trying to get into their skin.

Inflammation is good, but it goes up to protect you and then it comes right down. I think I call it like the volume switch in a car radio, right? You get in a car, you want to hear some tunes, gotta turn it on. But the problem with inflammation is when it doesn’t go back down—it keeps on going more, more, more, it’s chronic, and it keeps on going up. And that’s like getting in your car and having somebody, a passenger, turn up that volume and keep cranking that volume, and you’re like, hey man, turn that thing down, right? It doesn’t go down, and you just can’t go on, right? And that’s what happens inside your body. So what are some of the different ways to actually deal with that? Well, the first thing to do is think about lifestyle because we can actually give anti-inflammatories—I could tell you to go out to take some Motrin, Tylenol, whatever, that’ll take down your inflammation—but actually there are ways of actually doing it if you actually just, if you stopped and just calmed yourself and took some breaths and start to meditate, your inflammatory body’s inflammation will start to calm down, okay? If you actually got a good night’s sleep, your body will start to—the inflammation will start to calm down. It’s kind of like, you know, everything is going crazy, just let the things settle a little bit, so that’s your inflammation settling down.

Now, there are foods that have a lot of anti-inflammatory properties that can be very helpful. So, for example, cranberries have a lot of anti-inflammatory polyphenols; chocolate even also has anti-inflammatory properties; vitamin C is pretty anti-inflammatory; strawberries, guava, red bell peppers—all really good, really good. And, you know, I think that the other thing to think about is lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of fruits in particular have anti-inflammatory properties. So the key about inflammation is that you don’t want to get rid of it all together. Okay, like if you got pumped up on steroids, it would shut down your inflammation—you might get infected because you don’t have any inflammation. You want your body to get its set point; you want to get back to balance. So I think that, you know, there’s lifestyle, there’s diet, foods you can choose, there’s sleep—all these things can actually help to calm inflammation. It’s not a single on-and-off switch.

I’m curious, what would you say are the most harmful foods, then? If you said, here are three foods that we should be eliminating, what would be those most harmful foods that cause the spike in inflammation consistently and cause a lot of these other diseases and cancerous cells to occur? Right, well, I’ll tell you three foods that actually harm the body’s health defenses—including the immune system—by ratcheting up inflammation and then lowering the defensive properties, but also harm your DNA, also harm your microbiome, also blunt and stun your stem cells, and also wreck your body’s ability to control its blood supply. So it’s a lot worse than simply causing or triggering inflammation. And by the way, that’s the whole point, right? We try to take the silver bullet approach to everything: let’s match this with that, smash that. What I’m telling you is that the body is this system. So either you introduce something good to it and you’ll probably light up a lot of good systems, and if you put something bad to it, you’ll probably trash a lot of it, right?

Okay, so what are some three foods that actually we know can trash your body’s health defenses? One is soda. So, sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, all right? So, you know the favorite ones. It’s tough, right, because I wish I could go 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 years old, man. Well, and I’m telling you, like, this is one thing that I always try to coach people on: if you really, really love sodas, okay, try to come off it—you know, just by going down one can a day, because most people drink multiple cans, go down one can a day, and get to as low as you can, because the added sugar actually overloads your body, your body’s ability to be able to handle the sugar, and then it makes you inflamed just by the nature of the sugar. I cut out soda years ago. I mean, maybe I have it once in a couple months or something for like a treat, but it used to be almost an addiction, probably, for how much I drank it growing up as a kid in the summer—you’re just drinking it nonstop like water. But then when I learned about nutrition more, when I was playing sports and realizing this is making me tired, it’s not quenching my thirst, that’s when I said, oh, okay, I needed more of a competitive edge and kind of cut it out of my life.

So not only does soda—the sugar in soda—cause inflammation, it really wrecks your microbiome, your gut bacteria as well. Your gut bacteria just can’t tolerate that much sugar, okay? And then guess what, and then, you know, you say, well, wait a minute, that’s why we have diet soda, right? Turns out that those artificial sweeteners in soda screw your microbiome, your gut bacteria, even more. Ooh, more than regular can does? More, more than a regular can, come on. So if it says zero sugar and it’s a soda or a pop, you’re saying that could be more harmful than—for your gut microbiome—gotcha. Right, because zero sugar is actually to prevent glucose spikes in your body, but in point of fact, it actually wrecks your gut microbiome. And remember what I told you: the microbiome communicates with your brain, communicates with your immune system, communicates with your healing systems—that is not a system you want to screw with. And so that’s why, you know, I try to tell people, you really got to watch out for those artificial sweeteners—they do some bad things.

So that’s one thing. So what are the best—before we go to the next thing—what are the best sweeteners we should be looking for when we’re adding something into food or we see it on the packaging? Well, natural sugars in fruits and vegetables—people go, well, I don’t want any sugar then, but what about in a peach? There’s nothing better than a summer peach, to me, and that natural sugar is okay because when you eat the peach, you’re not just getting the sugar, you’re also getting all these other bioactives and the fiber and everything else—hundreds, the hundreds of thousands of natural chemicals that are good for you, from Mother Nature’s kind of pharmacy with an “f.” Okay, so that’s different than just, you know, having sugar in a glass or corn syrup, right? High fructose corn syrup—not good for you. Maple syrup, a good way to sweeten. Honey is also a good way to sweeten as well. Monk fruit is actually a really, really sweet-tasting gourd that’s really a shell that is also a decent sweetener. Stevia—actually pretty powerful sweetener, I’ve been doing some research on, I haven’t been able to find anything wrong with, but for people that are looking at stevia, be very careful—pick up the package and look at the side of the box and watch, and read what’s on there, because a lot of things that are called stevia actually have a lot of other things added to it.

Oh, yes, so you want to get the pure stuff. I always tell—if it’s in a box, look at what’s inside it before you buy it. There you go. Okay, so soda and pop is the number one thing that is one of the worst things you could be eating to, or the things that could cause more disease and cancer in your body. Okay, that’s number one. Number two: processed meats. Now, all of us, our kids grew up, you know, eating deli meats—turkey and ham, right? I mean, that’s basically, what did your mom pack in your lunch bag, right? Yeah, exactly, okay. Well, that’s a relic of the 1950s, you know, this sort of ultra-processed foods that are everywhere, laden with chemicals. That’s not what we want to be doing. Now, I have to say, it doesn’t mean categorically that hams or sausages are bad for you, because if you go to Italy, or if you go to places in Asia or Latin America where they create dried meats kind of the old way, they’re not putting chemicals in there and they’re not manipulating it. But here, you know, where you go to the deli counter and, you know, like, yeah, take a look at that deli meat. Like, that’s not—meat doesn’t come like that, okay?

So here’s the thing: processed meats are actually classified by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen, and, you know, linked to the causation of cancer. You’ve got to eat a lot of it, but a lot of people actually eat—I mean, how many hoagies or something, yeah, right? And I got to say, you know, like, when I was growing up as a kid, I loved those kind of fancy kind of, like, the deli meats and stuff like that. Absolutely, totally not—

—Absolutely, totally not the best. And the reality is what we now know is that these processed meats—it’s not just the meat, it’s the nitrates, it’s all the other chemical preservatives, it’s the way that they’re manufactured now, that is what is really problematic for our health. When you actually take a look at cancer risk, when it comes to processed meats, we’re talking about a totally different category than, let’s say, eating a steak or whole cuts of meat. The processed stuff behaves differently in our body and there’s some tremendous science on that. That’s number two.

Number three, I would say, ultra-processed foods in general, including packaged snacks and lots of things with a long shelf life that have a lot of completely unpronounceable ingredients on their packaging. If you look at it and there are things that you would never find in your own kitchen or would rarely find in a kitchen, those are things to avoid. A lot of the same chemicals—preservatives, colorings, flavor enhancers—there’s a real interaction with not just your DNA but also your gut, stem cells, blood vessels, and immune system. Ultra-processed is so prevalent, we almost get used to it—but just because something stays good for eight months on a shelf doesn’t mean it’s good for your body. That’s not the kind of food you want to be putting in your body if you’re trying to give yourself a competitive edge or live a long, healthy life.

So really, one of the main takeaways is avoiding sugar-sweetened sodas and soft drinks, processed meats, and ultra-processed foods. Instead, focus on the foods that light up your health defenses, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, minimally processed ingredients—these activate health, help your immune system, your gut health, even support your DNA and stem cells. And when it comes to sweets, use fruit or natural sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, or pure monk fruit. Be careful with anything labeled as “stevia” on the front—read the back and make sure it’s actually pure stevia and not a blend with other less healthy additives.

When you start to add up all the meals, all the snacks, and all the years, these simple choices really do add up, and the impact can be dramatic over time, both in terms of cutting risk of disease and keeping you healthier longer.