Dr. William Li on The Foods You Must Add to Your Diet to Heal Your Body, Stop Inflammation and Prevent Cancer
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The way you live your life, the things that we've been told are safe, in many cases are simply not safe, and that's why so many of us are sick. Who do you know with diabetes, with heart disease, who's had a stroke, who's had cancer, dementia? All of those conditions are preventable.

This is not normal. We should not see the rise in these diseases as something like, "Oh, it just happens." We form about 10,000 microscopic cancers every single day as little pimples in our body that never bother us. There are 10,000 mistakes made in our DNA's copy-paste. It doesn't get caught. Just natural.

We make so much about genetics and testing for cancer genes. Actually, genetics play 5% of our fate. 95% lies in our hands. This is breaking news. Our body is hardwired with health defense systems. When our defenses go down, that's when the bad guys come in.

Microplastics that we're eating and breathing and washing into our hair, inflammation of our body are like gasoline on the embers of a fire. We got a real problem here. We actually have the potential of preventing and fighting and also overcoming and reversing many of the diseases that previously we just either succumbed to or outsourcing our care to a specialist. What you're telling us is, guess what?

The days of pretending like it's fine are over. This global wake-up call that we all actually have the agency, the power of actually health starts with us and not in the health system. Before we dive into today's episode, I'm going to ask you to do something very quick, very easy, but super helpful. I'm going to ask you to hit the subscribe button.

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Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. Welcome to our breakdown. Before we get into what we're breaking down today, we want to impress upon you how important it is for you to tune in next week. We have an exciting announcement about the podcast.

that we are so excited to share. We've been gearing up to announce this for quite some time, so please tune in next week. We cannot wait to share this extremely exciting announcement. With that, let's talk about what we're breaking down today. What if getting sick was only determined by 5% of your genetics and the rest was actually fully in your control? Today, we're going to be talking about...

Some of the most pressing concerns that many of us have as humans when we think about what to eat and how. And this impacts not only our physical well-being, but our emotional well-being. We talk about the connection between our physical health and our mental health, specifically with regards to

the gut-brain connection. We're also going to talk about something that I'm fascinated by. Why are so many young people getting cancer? Is there anything we can understand about our diets that might be contributing or that can help us prevent, delay, or repair our bodies when they have experienced a trauma? What if our health was much more in our control than we have ever known? What if...

We can eat in a way to increase our natural defenses, to repair cancer, to be healthy, to increase our immune system. We're also going to be talking about metabolism. What are we getting wrong about weight loss? What are we getting wrong about fat?

And the person who's going to explain all of this and more is William W. Lee, MD. He's an internationally renowned physician. He's a scientist and he's the author of Eat to Beat Disease, Eat to Beat Your Diet. His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 40 new medical treatments. He is an expert.

in vascular science, in particular how it impacts things like cancer, hypertension, diabetes. His TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, has more than 11 million views. He's the president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. He is leading global initiatives on food as medicine. We cannot wait to welcome him to The Breakdown. Welcome, Dr. Lee. Break it down.

Hello, Mayim. How are you? Thank you so much for being here. We're very excited to talk to you about so many aspects of eating to beat my diet, my life, everybody's. I wonder if we can start with what are some of the challenges that you encountered when trying to help people understand myths about what we've been told about food?

Big question. So I will tell you, I come at this as a physician. I'm an MD. I'm trained in internal medicine. So I'm supposed to be able to talk to patients about a variety of health topics. But actually, doctors are trained to talk to patients about disease, not about health, and about drugs, not about food. And so like many people who have gotten into the health and food space, I'm

I've had to learn a new lexicon and also how to communicate that lexicon to people so they can actually receive that information and use it in a meaningful way. I'm also a scientist. I'm a vascular biologist, meaning I study blood vessels, and there are 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels in our body. And these are the highways and byways of our nutrients as well as the oxygen that we breathe.

And so how I, my worldview on sort of how to communicate about food as a medicine and food as not just part of our diet, but part of our everyday health has really been explained

Food is fuel, fuel that we need for energy. We eat it the same way we eat our fuel, the same way that we would actually put petrol or gasoline into our car to give us energy. And then we drive off in the car in a way that we drive off with our body. And how our body uses that energy is very much similar to the guts of a car that most people don't see, right?

But if you're a mechanic, you really understand how every part of that works. And most of us journey through most of our lives as if we're sitting in a car without any problems. But when you hear that rattling, when you hear that knocking, when you feel something not working right, suddenly that's all you can think about is what's going on. I need to get to a

a service station to have my body looked at. And, you know, although you can take apart the entire car and we can actually go into the body to look for problems, the benefit of food

It's really putting that good quality fuel in our body in the first place and making sure that overall we're maintaining the mechanics of our body, the biology of our body, everything from our gut to our brain, to our muscles, to our vascular system in the very best way possible. And I think that's where we are arriving today.

as a society is really this kind of national global wake-up call that we all actually have the agency. The power of actually health starts with us and not in the health system. It's a really helpful framework and one that, I'll be honest, is completely foreign to me. I was raised with this notion of like,

Just live your life and hope that nothing goes wrong. And if something goes wrong, there's a specialist, you know, at Kaiser that you need to get a referral for and they will, you know, treat the particular part of you that's not working, that's misbehaving, whatever it is.

To go on with this car analogy, every mechanic knows that if one thing goes wrong in a car, it's going to have downstream effects. We don't operate that way when we think about our body at all. And like that's literally still how a lot of medicine, I think, is processed.

practiced is like, oh, you have an allergy problem? Let's stop your histamines from behaving. Oh, you have a thyroid problem? Let's shut it down. I have Graves' disease, so that's my thyroid reference. It's only when

people like you, right, start talking to us about sort of the global picture of health. And it's only when people have complicated things like autoimmune conditions that we start going outside of the realms of traditional understanding and try and access what's going on in the whole body. So can you speak a little bit, especially with your, you know, your scientific background, your research background, what is it

about this whole body system that we don't understand. Wow. Okay. So listen, I'm a vascular biologist talking to your neuroscientist to a broad audience. And you're telling me that there are things that are new to you, and I'm telling you that there are things that are new to me. So I think for everyone watching or listening, let's just face it.

We are still discovering new things about the human body on literally a weekly basis. And that's actually a remarkable thing and maybe news to some people that we're still discovering new organs in our body. You know, the interstitium, the space between our organs is actually an organ itself.

communicates hormones and all kinds of other important things. We're just still discovering new cells, cell types in our hearts and in our brain. I don't know, Mayim, if you have seen the news about the new rose hip neuron that was discovered in the brain. And it actually looks like a rose hip, you know, what you would put for herbal tea. And it is one of those new nerves that is now being discovered in

to help counter our natural tendency to be depressed. So again, new discoveries, layers of the onions being peeled back every single day. And so what I think is both humbling and exciting is the fact that we have a whole inside inner potential in our body that mother nature provided each and every one of us. We are hardwired for success.

We are hardwired for health. We actually have the potential of preventing and fighting and also overcoming and reversing many of the diseases that previously we just either succumbed to by saying, well, I don't know what else we could do or, you

outsourcing our care to a specialist, as you say. Now look, there's nothing wrong with actually going to a specialist who will have an inch wide and a mile deep expertise in an area. But herein lies the problem. While we go to the experts for these really narrow band, very deep expertise,

You lost the forest for the trees and you then can't figure out how the hip bone is connected to the rest of the body. And I think that old kind of idea that are, you know, the interconnectedness of us is

You can't talk about the brain without talking about the heart, without talking about the gut, without talking about the muscles, and without talking about your hormones. And this is, I think, the more enlightened, modern view of medicine. Forget about people in my generation or yours, you know, out there practicing medicine. Look, we came out of the Stone Age of teaching.

I think that the new, young, next generation of doctors that are going to be hitting the pavement over the next few years, they themselves are already cottoning on to the fact that the secrets to health already lie within our body. What we have to do is crack open the textbooks, the new textbooks that are being written to figure out how we can actually harness those to our own benefit, only some of which is actually in the hands of the health system.

much of which is actually in our own hands at home.

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Talk a little bit about how we are hardwired, because I think people want to believe that they have the ability to heal. We hear more and more about this, and yet so many younger people are experiencing cancer. The epidemics of seemingly preventable diseases are increasing.

And I think some people are like, well, is my body just broken? Do I have that ability to heal? Talk to us a little bit about the discrepancy between those two or how we are hardwired to be resilient and to heal ourselves. Yeah, well, this has been the focus of my research for the last 30 years. And I wrote a book, A to B Disease, that actually directly addresses this. So first of all, as a doctor, my patients, when I

diagnose a health condition, a disease on them, they always ask, why me? What did I do? What could I have avoided? What happened to me? That's natural. It's human nature. And nowhere does that become more profound than when you actually receive a diagnosis of cancer.

I'm also a cancer researcher. I've been involved with helping to develop cancer, over a dozen cancer treatments. So I know a lot about the field of cancer. And in the health and wellness field, I can tell you people tiptoe around the topic of cancer because it's so scary and overwhelming and seemingly unknown. But I can tell you as a cancer researcher, I have no problem wading right into that jungle to talk about what we do know and don't know. Okay. So

When a cancer patient asks me, why did I get breast cancer or colon cancer? You talked about young people getting cancers that shouldn't be in young people like colon cancer. I'm going to come back in a second because just this week, there's a new discovery that's out that is jaw-dropping about what might be going on there. And it has to do with our body's health defenses. All right. So I might be breaking some news for you guys to translate it anyway for your audience. But here's the thing.

I try my best in those circumstances to give an explanation to a patient, a cancer patient, newly diagnosed cancer patient, what might have happened and trying to make it not their fault, but really kind of showing that, in fact, most likely,

There is some breakdown in a system that was defending us against cancer. When I go back home or I leave that patient, you know, I don't ask why they got cancer as a researcher. I ask a different question. The question I ask is, why don't we get cancer? We all get cancer more often. How come everybody doesn't get cancer? How come more people don't get cancer left and right? Think about it.

You go outside and you know that if you actually lay out in the sun and get repeated sunburns, you're going to have high risk for melanoma, skin cancer. But you know that it's the same sunshine that if you're stuck on the highway,

in Los Angeles commuting for a few hours every day with the sun hitting your face, how come you don't get skin cancer on your face? Or an airline pilot who's actually flying above the clouds and being exposed to ultraviolet radiation, how come they don't get cancer more often? Or what about the off-gassing from the new car if you work in a car factory or the carpet or the brand new clothing that you're wearing? How come we don't actually pop up with more cancers? Well, the answer

to cancer is in fact, we do develop cancers all the time. And here's how. And it's only because our body's hardwired with health defenses that it doesn't turn into a clinical problem. So let me kind of set it out for you just as an example of how powerful our health defenses are. Our body's made of about 40 trillion human cells. It's a lot of cells, okay? Packed and molded together into our organs and then packed inside our skin, all right?

In order for us to stay alive and to be around tomorrow, our cells, our body have to copy and paste itself so that we're still around. Because we lose our old cells, we get new ones. That's why we're still here today compared to yesterday and why we'll still be here tomorrow. Now, copy and pasting is a big task, as anyone knows. If you had to copy one sentence 10 times, you'll probably get it perfect.

If I ask you to copy it a hundred times, you might make one mistake. If I ask you to copy it 40 trillion times –

Guarantee you there's going to be spell checking all over the place. Well, our body spell check is our health defense to repair errors in that copy pasting. That's our DNA repairing itself. OK, but every single day, every 24 hours, there are 10,000 mistakes made in our DNA's copy paste. It doesn't get caught.

just natural. Okay. And those little tiny mistakes are mutations. Those mutations are microscopic cancers. So in fact, in theory, we form about 10,000 microscopic cancers every single day as little pimples in our body that never bother us. We'll never see them. It's kind of like a pimple that forms in your back. Can't see it. Can't feel it. Not a big deal. Eventually your body will take care of it and your skin will clear up and you won't even know you had it. And that's the power of our health defense.

Here are some of our health defenses. Our body has this incredible immune system that basically patrols our body, every corridor in our body like a suburban street cop on a beat, driving up and down a peaceful neighborhood looking for problems. And when they see that individual who looks like a drug dealer hanging out in the corner where they shouldn't be, they stick them in a paddy wagon and take them away.

All right. And that's basically how our immune system cleans up surveys and cleans up microscopic cancers. Oops, you missed one of those bad guys. Guess what? Our body is another health defense. It involves blood vessels because cancers without blood vessels have no nutrition, no oxygen. They cannot get big. All right. And this is the field I studied.

So our body has a natural ability to control angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels, our circulation. So if you try to make sure any bad guys that are sticking around can't get a blood supply, no problem. It still stays there, stuck in place, tiny, until your immune system sees it the second time they make their rounds to look for the bad guys. All right? We also have the ability to lower inflammation because we know that inflammation is one of those triggers.

That whether you have autoimmune disease, whether you have cardiovascular disease, whether you have diabetes, whether you have cancer, inflammation in our body is like pouring gasoline onto the embers of a fire. Whatever's going on is going to flare up 10 times, 100 times worse. So how do we naturally lower inflammation? Our gut microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria.

actually lowers inflammation, among other things that our gut bacteria does. And then, you know, other things that are really quite amazing is our body can regenerate itself, you know, and we can rebuild our own tissues from the inside out as another way of repairing ourselves. So our circulation, our stem cells to regenerate, our gut, right?

our DNA to repair and prevent damage, and our immune system, which can lower inflammation and boost those street cops that actually patrol to protect us from invaders and infections. They are the five core health defense systems in our body. And the reason that we don't get sick more often, and the reason we don't get cancer more often, is that these systems are raring to go

From the day we're born until our very last breath, they are firing on all cylinders to protect our health. And the great news is that while medicines can manipulate these health defenses a little bit, our diet and lifestyle have a much larger role.

So much has changed, you know, in in the last, let's say, 50 years. Right. I think about technology. I think about workload. Think about also the demands of a modern society and new social pressures, things like that. Besides the fact that people are living longer, not necessarily living longer and better, but in many cases we are.

It does seem like a lot more people are getting cancer than used to get cancer. Meaning, you know, I grew up in the era when it was still whispered. You know, my grandmother had breast cancer, you know, somewhere in the 1950s and no one talked about it. They did a radical mastectomy. That's just what they did. And no one talked about it. It seems like so many people are getting cancer now.

This cannot be the normal evolution of our genome in 50 years. Can you talk about some of the larger factors that are shifting why we're seeing so much more cancer?

Yeah, so let's address one of these stunning observations that younger and younger people are getting colon cancer, which used to be when I was in medical school and in training, you know, colon cancer was not that common in 50s, more common in the 60s, even more common in the 70s. And now we're seeing teenagers with colon cancer and people who are 20-year-old. It's stunning and seemingly inexplicable.

Let me give you the big picture of what might be going on first. First is our environment has changed. Our environment has become a much more hostile environment that actually –

breaks down our body's health defenses. Okay. When your immune system is broken down, oh, you don't have fewer cops on the beat looking for those bad guys, those bad cells that might be in the body. When you're exposed to more inflammation caused by toxins in the environment, microplastics that we're eating and breathing and washing into our hair and getting into our mouth and, you know, washing our silverware with like those microplastics causing inflammation on our body.

are like gasoline on the embers of a fire around a cancer to spark and make it grow faster, more and faster, right? So those kinds of environmental insults and also causing more DNA damage, making it harder for your body to repair. I told you that copy-paste problem is just, you know, on a basic copy-paste. Now throw in something that's going to gum up the copy and pasting and cause more mutations. And we got a real problem here. I mean, how,

I want to put, press pause here. This is a huge, huge statement that you are making, meaning you are literally saying that there's not a mystery here. As Gabor Mate said when he was here, this is not normal. We should not see the rise in cancer, the rise in these diseases as something like, oh, it just happens. You're actually proposing, guess what?

The way you live your life, the stress that you're under, the things that we've been told are safe...

in many cases are simply not safe. And it's not just the hippies who are refusing to use those shampoos or those soaps or whatever. It's not just the hippies being paranoid. That this is a mainstream problem, the downstream effects of which are increased inflammation, increased mutation, and that's why so many of us are sick.

This is a new study that just came out this week that looked at – it was a big study published in Nature that looked at people who were older getting with colorectal cancer versus people that are –

younger and doing a genome assessment and to look at what's going on. It turns out the genes, the mutations in people with young colorectal cancer are different type of mutation than the standard older individuals, colon cancer. And what was really stunning in this discovery was

is that the genes that are being damaged in the younger people look like they're being damaged from a specific toxin. The toxin is actually called colibactin, okay? Colibactin. And colibactin is a toxin, it's a protein that's released from, wait for it, E. coli. And the E. coli

uh exposures seem to be in the first 10 years of life and so here's an example where young kids possibly being exposed to more e coli that then reside in the colon releasing toxins

Up through the age of 10. I mean, these are kids. All right. They can't drive yet. All right. They're not adults. This lingering toxin that builds up over time is causing more and more DNA damage that piles up and bada bing. You're talking about in the late teens into the early 20s or 30s.

leading to the discovery that these are the kinds of mutations that this toxin is actually causing. So this is a new discovery, by the way. Again, speaking to the environment, speaking to the fact that having a harmful bacteria releasing a toxin overcomes our body's ability to repair that DNA, overcomes maybe good, healthy bacteria to overcome the E. coli. So we're just at the beginning of having the first smoking gun clues, right?

at least for the colon cancer in young people. A lot of people have been speculating all kinds of things, but this run discovery I think is really important. It's definitely worth pursuing further. How are people getting exposed to the E. coli?

Well, so E. coli has different – there's different types of E. coli. And, you know, again, this is breaking news. And so now as the scientific community, we've got to go back and ask exactly that question. So it would not be appropriate for me to kind of be smarty pants and tell you that answer. But I will tell – what I will say –

is that E. coli can come from fruits and vegetables. They can come from our foods that are not properly washed, okay, that are not properly cared for or stored. It can come from contamination, right? So let me ask you this, John. You know, I don't know if you, on your sink, when you wash your dishes, if you have a sponge, and how often do you change that sponge? I don't know.

I don't use a sponge just for this reason. We don't use sponges. We're crazy people. We don't even use sponges.

OK, but I bet if you ask the listener if they have a sponge, I bet they do. They're washing their vegetables with a moldy E. coli infested sponge. Right. Right. Or on a cutting board. Also, is this also undercooked beef? Right. Can have E. coli and everybody's favorite conversation. Don't tell RFK Jr. unpasteurized dairy.

That's right. I mean, listen, this is one of humankind's greatest advances over recorded modern history is being able to make our food safer, right? I mean, listen, we are not knights from the medieval age, you know, eating, you know, raw bones, gnawing on raw bones over a campfire outside of a castle that we're going to invade. Speak for yourself. We...

Well, listen, I know you don't have the sponges, but so the idea is that we can't, you know, listen, public health science, our ability to advance as humans builds brick upon brick upon brick.

And I think one of the things that we really need to be able to do is to appreciate just how many bricks we've already built to be able to understand how to become safer. And in some cases, we need to take a pause in terms of advancement and go back and look at how we've actually built our wall. Are people washing their fruit wrong? One of the greatest and most common problems.

arguments I have with my son is we leave the grocery store and he's eating the grapes out of the bag before he's washed them. And I'm like, you should wash them. And he's like, it's just a few. What's the problem? Yeah.

Well, listen, let me reassure you that for the most part, what's sold in grocery stores in the United States are pretty safe to eat. And actually, you know, arguably a little dirt is actually good for us. A little bacterial challenge is good for us. Where I get my B12.

Yeah. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right? I mean, that's the adage and kind of true. You know what, by the way, we're finding out now that children who are kind of raised by paranoid parents in hermetically sealed environments, their immune system isn't as strong as they get to be young adults and older adults. This is what I wanted to ask about, because in the name of safety, what has happened is we have gotten an entire industry that is built around safety.

antibacterial stuff, antibiotics in all the places, all the antibiotics whenever you have a virus. Like this is something that has become it's its own sickness that everyone thinks that the more sterile and the more medication and the more shutting systems down, the better we're going to be. And I'm

And I am a person who believes in vaccines. But a lot of the conversation around vaccines is also geared around this kind of conversation. Right. Don't ever get sick. I mean, I was talking to my kid the other day about how he's never had a flu shot. He's like, maybe I need one. And I said, maybe sometimes people get sick.

the flu and they get better. You know, we were talking about how many COVID vaccines do we need to get? And I'm not trying to get political, but this is sort of part of the thinking is that, oh, we need more cleanliness and more regulation and we want to be safe and wash your meat, throw out your sponges. But where is that line and how do we communicate to more people the nuance here?

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and produced by PTZ Insurance Agency Limited. The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. Yeah, well, I mean, listen, let me add a little kindling to the fire you just set by saying, let's take it to the biohacker level. How many people need a glucose implantable monitor? How many people need infrared light? How many people need a cold plunge? You can keep stacking and stacking. This guy, you're looking at him. You're looking at the man who needs all the things.

Okay. And what I'm actually trying to get back to is as a scientist and as a doctor who's really trying to kind of go to the future by reflecting on the past is that I think we need to go back to basics to understand that health starts inside our body. We are born hardwired with these health defenses. Our metabolism is also hardwired into us. And we can talk about the common misunderstandings about how human metabolism works.

that are now being overturned. There's a lot of, you know, I think throughout history, there's always been when it comes to health, a lot of urban legends, a lot of rumors, a lot of fear mongering that goes out there. But again, when you go back to the basics, we're hardwired for health. We have health defenses. What can we do to

to actually manage our health defenses, tip things a little bit in our favor, as opposed to just expose ourself. As you said at the very beginning, I'm like, oh, you know, we just go about our lives. And then if something breaks and we got to actually go to the specialist, what can we proactively do, mindfully do to live our lives in the healthiest way possible? Because mother nature actually gave us a lot of what we need. Okay.

So, as it relates to fruits and vegetables, because I want to go back to John for a second, you know, even though everything is largely safe.

I would say that it's still prudent because all it takes is for one contaminated grape or strawberry or whatever to actually make you sick. It's prudent to go as make it a habit to actually wash your fruits and vegetables. Now, a lot of people don't know how to do this properly. The best way to actually wash fruits and vegetables is to run it under cold water.

running water for 60 seconds. So I don't know how fast you sing happy birthday, but basically if you can do 60 seconds worth of it and then in cold running water, not soaking in something, but running water, so you're rinsing it off, then you're good. Now, why is this important?

Number one is any natural bacteria that might be around. The other day I posted this on YouTube. I cook some fiddleheads. These are little seasonal ferns that are wild picked from the woods and they're little curled things. They're incredible vegetables. By the way, they're one of the few plant-based sources of omega-3s. One of the few.

Okay. And, and they're packed with them and also vitamin C. Anyway, I love them. It's a, it's a springtime thing. You can find them in, on the East coast and in the Pacific Northwest. And, and these things are picked out of the woods, literally wild forage. You bet. I actually washed those things really, really well because they came out of the woods. Well,

Well, they're covered in the soil from the woods, right? Now, here's the thing. When you're actually putting something in your mouth, you want to really make sure that you're washing it really carefully. And by the way, I put the video of my cooking because I knocked it out in five minutes. I like to cook. And I think that part of the joy of health can be aligned with the joy of eating, which I think is a great thing. So wash your vegetables. I think it's really, really important.

And, you know, there's some practical things that you can separate, you know, when you cut meat and when you cut, if you eat meat and how you even cut your vegetables and how you take care of your cutting boards and what kind of cutting boards, all those things. These are the nuances that,

Listen, our grandmothers probably knew really well. Our great grandmothers probably knew well. But in this era of consumerism and cheaper and more different kind of materials, like we've kind of just like focused on the consuming part of it as opposed to the common sense part of it. Now, as it relates to exposures, our body is an ecosystem where we respond to challenges and get stronger by challenges. Think about when you go to the gym.

You know, you're doing strength training. What are you doing? You're lifting weights. And the more weight you lift, the stronger your muscles are going to be. And to some extent, this is actually the natural process of being exposed to the environment on which we live on Earth. As we encounter bacteria and viruses and other things, dirt, so to speak, it's okay. Because so long as we don't

get into that dangerous territory of having a, you know, a lethal bug get into us. You know, what it does is that trains our immune system, just like strength training. Think about encountering nature, you know, as strength training for our immune system. The more we work it out, the stronger it's actually going to get. Now, you don't want to actually drop, you know, a

a dumbbell on your head, that would be like, you know, taking a misstep and just eating a really contaminated, you know, as you say, like feces contaminated piece of food. You don't want to do that. By the way, I got to tell you one thing. I went to a regenerative farm for a visit. It's called the Chef's Garden in Ohio. Amazing place. I went there on a tour to just learn

more about regenerative farming. And I'm doing some research with them now. We made some interesting discoveries about how that can impact the micronutrient quality of food. But as I was taking a tour, the owner basically said, is there anything else you want to see? And I said, I want to see where this triple washing of the leaves, actually the salad leaves come from, right? You see that in the package, triple washed? Well, because I was always very, very skeptical. All right.

What the heck does that mean, triple wash? Well, they showed me. There are three sluices with really, really intense running water that we're cleaning off through one wash, cleaning off through another wash, cleaning off a third one. You know what? It actually made me more comfortable that there was care taken for a triple wash. Now, I still wash it again myself.

But I know that great care was taken for that. So, again, you know, the more we can educate ourselves about where our food was coming from, these are coming from how it's been treated. You know, again, this is on us. This is on us to educate ourselves to make those wise choices. Why? This is a controversial question, but I hope you can speak to it, you know, from from really a human perspective and as a physician.

Why is the government not more interested in helping all communities have access to healthier food? Meaning a lot of the solutions for rinsing are let's dunk it in hydrogen peroxide. It's quicker. It's cheaper. You know, a lot of the things that you're talking about and a lot of the stuff that's in your book, which is so helpful, it's not accessible to everyone.

the vast majority of, you know, people who maybe don't have access to a lot of these finer ingredients or unprocessed foods. Why is this not more of a priority to our government? We spend so much money treating cancer, hypertension, obesity related things. Like, why is this not more of a priority? And and how can it be?

Yeah, well, I think that, you know, change comes from people, communities, voters. And I think that one of the things that I'm

really excited by is this groundswell of interest in questioning the quality of what we're actually being expected to consume, to eat and to buy. You know, it is a darn good thing for a consumer who might've saw this on social media to go to the grocery store to wonder in this package, wait a minute,

Are there additives? Should I be looking at the ingredient label? I mean, something that's simple. They may not know the science behind it, but just merely looking at it puts the seller, the manufacturer, on notice that it matters. Now, as you know, there are some signs that change is happening. The ban on the first red dye, number three, I think lurks.

long overdue over multiple administrations, you know, for 60 years based on data that's been known for a long time. Okay. That of cancer causing and animals. Gosh, why did it take until now to actually make a move? And then. Because my kids want their red Skittles. Okay. But, but you know what? Their kids might not ever see the same red that, that, that, that our kids see the red, those, the same color red. Right.

The same thing could be said about Kool-Aid. I'm sure you guys grew up at like Hawaiian Punch Kool-Aid, right? Who doesn't remember the jingles and the ads that we saw on TV and the summer vacations, you know, by the beach? It was the life that I dreamed of. Well, listen, this is part of the Kool-Aid that we all drank growing up is that, you

are the product of a system that developed after World War II in the 1950s and 60s and 70s that became an industrial revolution where it was more colorful, more artificial, more synthetic, more cheaper. Everywhere it's colorful. Then you have the power of marketing and music and entertainment. It was the American dream, right? That was the American dream. Exactly.

Yeah, I mean, we and we were living the dream. OK, and many of us, I'm certainly, you know, I throw myself under the bus on this. My mom bought all that stuff and and the kids growing up loved it. OK, I think times are changing where one of, you know, among the the bright spots of having of the of the information age is that it's easy for anybody to go look something up.

And I think if there's one thing that I could help communicate to anybody listening or watching this is that when you go to the grocery store or a farmer's market and they're selling something that's prepackaged, okay, like in a box or a can or a jar,

please, I don't care if it looks like it's going to be good for you. It says healthy on it. Read that ingredient label, pick it up, look at it. All right. And if there's something you don't understand on it, you catch up. If you've got a phone, look it up. And if it feels like it's something that might not be you want in your body, then don't buy it. Look for an alternative. This is how I think change happens is by people.

paying attention, being alert, and the signals are being there. Like, look, after the first red dye was banned, now we've got six other dyes that are actually being banned as well.

Too little, too late in a way. Right. But it's happening. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was yeah. You say these fantastic things, but like I want you to be like underlining it. An exclamation point, because to most people, if you say to them, if there's an ingredient that you don't recognize, it's probably not good to put in your body. Right. A lot of people would say, it's fine. I'll be fine. What you're telling us is, guess what?

The days of pretending like it's fine are over. It's over. Listen, here's a simple way to think about this. No matter who you are, look around you or think about the community, the people around you. Who do you know with diabetes, with heart disease, who's had a stroke, who's had cancer, all right, or maybe have dementia? Recognize that all of those conditions are preventable.

Not 100%, but largely preventable, or you can actually delay the time before it happens. That delays suffering, okay? And if you realize that we can all take steps at a younger age, our body bounces back pretty fast, so you feel like you're Superman when you're younger. But listen, why would you want to actually suffer the things that those people that you know in your community are suffering? So this is where, and again, I come at this at the science level,

What is actually happening? What do those additives do? You know, what does the carrageenan, as it uses a thickener, or the sodium benzoate, or the artificial sweeteners, what do they do to our health defenses? Well, I'll tell you. One thing it does is it breaks down our gut microbiome, the healthy bacteria, 39 trillion bacteria in our gut that protect us, part of our health defenses, when we eat those additives.

Okay. That are very commonly used in ultra processed foods.

we're actually lowering our own shields inadvertently. Maybe every now and then, not a big deal. I'm also a realist. Life is for the living. So if you really want to enjoy yourself, go for it. Just don't do it every day. And by the way, I remember in medical school, I had a classmate who proudly told me he drank two six-packs of soda, regular soda, every single day. First of all, I couldn't believe that because I could never believe

I imagine doing that kind of stuff. But then if you think about the fact how much sugar, added sugar, that individual is putting into his body over time, over at least four years when I knew him. Okay. That is a frightening amount of salt to your vascular system, to your microbiome, you know, that –

why would you want to do that? So we didn't know that before, but we know that now, how do we communicate that? I mean, listen, part of the reason that I am honored to and love to come on to your podcast is really because this is an opportunity to communicate that our body is hardwired with health defense systems. We have no excuse not to celebrate the

the fact that we can prevent our, most of our own diseases. Our fate is actually in our hands. The younger we think about that, the more our fate is in our hands. Genetics, you know, we make so much about genetics and testing for cancer genes and all that kind of stuff. Actually genetics play less than 10%, more like 5% of, of our fate, 95%, 90 to 95% lies in our hands. So anybody who says, yeah, you know what? Look at me, I'm,

I'm fine. I bounce back. You bounce back now, but you keep on doing this. I guarantee you, you're actually going to stop bouncing and you're actually going to be flat. And that's not a good thing. This is where we're going now. My work in food is medicine is to understand the foods that can light up our health defenses, make us healthier, improve our metabolism, actually help us live longer lives.

lives, more vibrant lives, better health span, as well as what foods we should actually try to cut down or cut out. You know, that's really that life is about balance. And I think this is, from my perspective, the exciting part is that we can align, we can love our food and love our health at the same time. It's not about suffering. It's about being mindful.

The other thing that I hear you saying, which is, I think, sounding an alarm, is that we have been seeing all these diseases as different. Diabetes is different. Cancer is different. Hypertension is different. Even dementia as this totally unrelated experience. Yet you're saying they're all interconnected based on our health defense systems. That's right. I mean, when our defenses go down,

That's when the bad guys come in. Think about it. You have a house. You've got a door lock. You've got a window lock. You've got an alarm system. You've got a smoke alarm. You've got knobs on your stove to turn off the fire. Imagine if you just took everything down and let everything go, depending on the neighborhood you live in, the home invaders are going to be coming. And I think that's really where we are.

are today in society, we're suddenly waking up to this fact that there's the burden of chronic disease, not just in terms of economics, but in terms of human suffering.

We're realizing we can't be doing this anymore. In fact, the health system itself, the medical system itself is going down on a knee to say that we can't be doing this anymore. We can't treat enough people to be able to really avert the disaster that's actually happening in society. So we need to do things in a different way.

That difference is actually using food as medicine as a start. Diet and lifestyle make a big difference. So does stress management. So does sleep. So does exercise. And these things are not new because we've been talking about them for decades, actually. What is new is the level of specificity of the science, the data that helps us understand why they're important.

I want to talk a little bit about the five by five by five framework. This is from Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. I love a list. I love a checklist. I love an appendix. And what.

What never occurred to me, you know, I'm told to eat a diverse variety of fruits and vegetables and eat whole grains and things like that. But it never occurred to me to learn about the categories that these foods fall into. So you break it into kind of different defense categories, angiogenesis, regeneration, microbiome, DNA protection and immunity. And

I really like this method because what you do is you present a whole list of foods

And I get to go in and decide what are the things that I actually enjoy eating. But once I know which category those fit into, the idea is to not overload on one of these categories. The diversity that many of us are taught about, right, eat a variety of things, you're taking it to this next level of eat a variety of foods that are tackling different aspects of life.

metabolism, protection from cancer, right? Can you talk a little bit about this framework? And Jonathan wants to know why the only meat on there is dark chicken. Ah, okay. First of all, um,

You're absolutely right. People love to have lists. It's helpful. It's helpful to sort of somebody else who's done the heavy lifting to organize it for you. What I do in my book is I, by creating these lists, I further invite you to take a highlighter or a pen or whatever works for you and circle the foods. Just go to the page, circle the foods on the list that you already like. All right. And if you want to cross out ones you don't like, that's fine too. All right. And if there's a food there that, you know, like you scratch your head and say, you know, I never, I don't have, I haven't had this before. I don't know.

Put that on your to-do list to try at some point because you just might like it. You might have a new favorite food you haven't actually experienced before. That's life. It's part of the adventure of life. Now, the way that I actually came up with a rubric that I think anybody can follow to eat to beat disease, how to use food as medicine, is to make it as second nature as possible. So,

On average, well, first of all, so we have five health defense systems. Androgenesis, our circulation defenses, our regeneration, our stem cells, our gut microbiome, our DNA protection against mutations and slows down aging too, as well as our immune system to slow down inflammation, but give us defenses, all right? These are our five. You get five fingers, you get five health defenses, easy to remember. Now, if I told you that on average, most of us encounter food five times a day,

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, maybe a couple of snacks or dessert. All right. Every single time we encounter food, it is a shot on goal that we can have to activate at least one of our health defenses. Why would you take that advantage and to activate one of your health defenses? That's doing something good for you. And the reason I put these lists together is that guess what?

Take a look, just take a look at the ones that you circle that you already said you'd like and go right for those. Because if you choose a food you already love, you're already way ahead of the game. And now, you know, you're activating your health defenses. So as you get what I found, listen, I teach a course, an online course. This is my fifth year on it now. I have 6,000 people from 90 countries who've actually taken this course. And it teaches people how to actually eat to beat disease and make it second nature like me.

All right. In the beginning, you know, you want to refer to the lists and things like that.

That's why we have a phone you can take a picture on and you can put it onto your photo album and you can flip it open the next time you're at the grocery store, the farmer's market. There's always something that you can actually find that's healthy. The other thing that I wanted to do by making this list is not to make people a slave to eating only one or two or three things. I personally hated the idea that you have to be tethered, chained to the salad bar

I couldn't do that in my life. You know, like that's not interesting enough to me. And so I love the fact that as I was doing my research, you can find bok choy, you can find kale, you can find spinach. And by the way, when you start combining these ingredients, like one of my favorite dishes for spinach is not raw spinach, like

I think Popeye had it out of a can, I think. But you know what I do? Here's something I'll tell you. Here is a five-minute healthy spinach dish that's good for your brain. So I take extra virgin olive oil. I heat it up. You got some polyphenols in high-quality extra virgin olive oil, some healthy monounsaturated fats.

I chop up a little garlic, throw it in there. You season up the olive oil. Smells really great. Garlic is allicin. It's anti-inflammatory, helps your immune system and lowers your cholesterol at the same time. All right. I'm just getting started now. Right. We're into like only 60 seconds of preparing the this dish. I wash some lettuce. 60 seconds running water. John. OK. Make sure everything's good. I dry pat and try. All right. I throw it the spinach right in there.

to wilt it. On top of that, I throw in some golden raisins, some toasted pine nuts. If I have a little bit of vegetable stock, if I just want to keep it vegan or if I put a little chicken stock, and then if you have some white wine left over in your fridge, put a little splash in there. Sprinkle some dried chili flakes a little bit

Boom, your acromance is growing. The nuts giving you dietary fiber. Okay. You get wet drift. Five minutes. I'm done. I am serving you a Catalan Spanish dish from the Mediterranean that is so delicious. And the natural nitrates in the spinach, when they encounters the healthy gut bacteria in your tongue,

your tongue microbiome will actually convert the nitrogen from spinach, natural spinach into a form when you swallow it, gets absorbed into your body, into your bloodstream as nitric oxide. That nitric oxide immediately relaxes your blood vessels. So you chill out from a vascular perspective, lowers your blood pressure, which is a big killer, secret killer, hidden killer, silent killers for your high blood pressure, lowers your blood pressure, improves blood flow in every organ in your body, including your brain.

So, this is just an example of how I make it second nature to do something that I like to eat that I will cook in order to be able to turn it into something that actually is healthy for me. And if you don't want to hear about all that physiological mumbo jumbo about why it's good for you, just come over to my house and I'll cook you that dish. Talk a little bit about protein in particular. The only meat

I happen to be a vegan person. The only meat that I happen to notice, it says chicken, dark meat. You've got a lot of seafood options, which I know there's a lot of issues with fish and sourcing and all these things. What's your take on meat? What's your beef with beef?

Okay. Listen, first of all, I'm not a vegan and I'm not even a vegetarian, although I eat mostly a plant-based meal. So I'm an omnivore and I enjoy food. So I unapologetically somebody who really wants my food to be tasty. All right. And I'm open to different types of food.

The question is, what are the best foods for you and why? So when I wrote my book, Eat to Beat Disease, I put in dark chicken meat because it turns out that the dark meat, which is the thigh meat of healthy chickens, I'm not talking about factory-raised chickens, you know, like, you know, stacked like prisoners. They're not healthy, okay? But, you know, chickens are allowed to run around and, you know, and eat healthy foods.

they develop in their meat, in their thighs, something called vitamin K2, K2.

K like, you know, Karen, number two, that vitamin K2 is a powerful regulator of healthy circulation and it can cut off the blood supply to cancers that are growing in your body as well. So here's a reason besides it's a moisture, more tender meat, less expensive, easier to cook chicken thigh compared to the breast meat. So here's the other thing is like, you know, we've been marketed conditioned to think that you need to have a gigantic amount

you know, a piece of white chicken breast to actually get the good stuff. No, chicken thighs are actually the better choice, actually. Now, if you want to actually make it more optimal, please trim off the fat because there's a lot of fat that often gets sold, sold along with it in a package. So that's the chicken aspect of it and why it's actually good. Now, I will also tell you that if you look really, really closely in my book,

I also do mention a few exceptions to the rule. If you really wanted to knock yourself out and treat yourself to something that, you

it might be considered categorically bad. Yeah. You know, maybe that's maybe not as bad as you think. All right. And, and every now and then, if you want to treat yourself to it, maybe there's a reason for it. So it turns out I actually put the couple of hams actually types of types of ham in that book. One is prosciutto di Parma.

Okay, because it turns out and the other one is is Serrano ham, Balota, you know, the Spanish ham. These are actually from pigs raised in Italy and in Spain. Okay.

They are carefully fed chestnuts and natural tree nuts. And what happens is that the healthy omegas from the tree nuts actually winds up lacing their fat. So you can actually get some of the healthy fats from eating that. And the reason I actually put those down is that most people don't eat a lot of it. You just have a couple of slices to wet your taste buds. So again,

If you're vegan or a vegetarian, you're not going to be worrying about that. Same thing with cheese. By the way, we talked about lactobacillus root rye and sourdough bread. Do you know what else is a starter for lactobacillus root rye? I feel like the stinkiest cheese you can think of. Yeah.

Actually, no. A very popular one. Parmigiano-Reggiano. That's very stinky to me. Really? Okay. Well, it's a chef's delight to be able to use that. And it's a starter bacteria. So again, I am somebody who really tries to...

step away from the politics of food. Try not to be right, wrong, black, white, good, bad, and really say, let's see what mother nature's delivered to us. Let's use science to examine the things that you might like to eat, or maybe the things that we shouldn't be eating. Come up with a reason, come up with an excuse why we should eat it or come up with a reason why we shouldn't eat it, and then try to incorporate it in a really pragmatic way in our everyday lives. And that's what the five by five by five system is for my book, Eat to Beat Disease.

I wrote another book afterwards about metabolism because where do you take things after that? Once you get your health defenses shored up, what's the next step? And that next step is to really try to fine tune your metabolism because we all want energy. But mostly people want to be skinny.

Well, okay. So, and that counts too, because how we feel and how we look, you know, I never have a problem with, you know, when people say, I really want to lose a lot of weight because I want to look better. I celebrate people's instincts for that because look, you want to feel good about yourself. That's great. Please do. But there's much deeper reason to actually try to lose that extra body weight because it lowers inflammation when you lose weight.

And extra unneeded harmful body fat actually interferes with your ability to process, have your metabolism work in the right way. And so what I sort of, where my research took me then is what are the foods that we can eat? Not the foods we don't eat. What are the foods that we can eat that helps our body burn down extra body fat? And a lot of people are really surprised that you're telling me to eat foods to burn fat.

Absolutely. That's actually something that can be done. And so again, that's the next level. And then my research, I write about my research. I don't write about trends. But now my research is saying, okay, you get your health defenses. Then you want to take it to the next level. Now you want a better metabolism.

And then the next level where my research now is on is looking at longevity, but not the regular, you know, kind of textbook way or the internet or the Instagram way of looking at longevity. But I'm really looking at health span and what is the science behind that and how do we actually get the most out of our lives? And so, again, you know, this is to me.

My journey, my contribution, my passion is really how do we use the foods that we already love to be able to light up what Mother Nature gave us, both from an ingredients perspective, but also from our own body's hardwiring perspective. And how can we

enjoy that journey of our entire life that way? I remember many years ago, you know, my kids are 16 and 19. And when my older one was born, we were at the height of what seemed to be the spike in autism. And everybody was kind of losing their minds. What's going on? What is changing? Like, what is happening with this increase in diagnoses? And I remember there were some doctors at the time and a couple celebrities who spoke publicly about this, about how changes in diet for children are

were changing some of the behavioral features of autism. And it got erroneously reported. It got reported as like, people claim that you can cure autism. No one was saying that. But what we now know, and this is not just for children, what we know for adults as well, is that certain foods activate

inflammation in the gut, which is directly connected to your brain, and people who are neurodivergent, people who are somewhere on the spectrum, and people who experience ADHD can actually get

alleviation of certain aspects of their symptoms from food. This is enormous and it would change so much of people's lives. Can you please explain what are some of the food changes that people can make, both in children but also in adults, that can cause differences in the expression of neurodivergence and ADHD?

Yeah. So I wish I could give you a gift-wrapped, simple answer to that important question, but I'll try to frame it in a way that makes sense for across the board for many different types of behavioral changes, mental health issues that are going on. So for years...

And starting when I was in medical school, for me personally, you know, I was always taught that bacteria are bad. We touched on this a little bit earlier, you know, like on food and bad bacteria. Must kill bacteria, must memorize bacteria, must memorize antibiotics, must kill bacteria. That was sort of like the mantra in medical school.

And we had to, gosh, my brain was so overflowing with bugs and drugs that I had to memorize. And it turns out now I realize so clearly that most of the bacteria, we do encounter some bad bacteria in our lives, but most of the bacteria that the typical person encounters in their life is good bacteria, healthy bacteria, and it's in our gut. And if it's in our gut, it's going to be exposed to the food that we eat.

And the food that we eat can either be good for our gut bacteria or it can be damaging for our gut bacteria. So let's take a look at what our gut bacteria does.

Well, this idea of our gut talking to our brain is really, really profound because it's not the tube of our gut that's talking to our brain. It's the ecosystem, the great barrier reef of incredible organisms that live inside our gut that are continuously communicating with our brain and telling our brain, prompting our brain to actually send out

Hormones create neurotransmitters that make us feel good, or if they don't send them out, make us feel bad. And so it's too easy to say, well, we've got 39 trillion bacteria, so we just need better bacteria. This is where the research is. We're really trying to get as specific as we can with the best possible research. Are we finding certain bacteria that maybe negatively influence brain development?

So you wind up actually being less connected when you're small, maybe even on the autism spectrum. Are there ways that you can add certain beneficial bacteria that can alter that? There are studies now looking at bacteria like acromantia, certain lactobacilli. These are just categories of bacteria that, whoa, or, or, or, or,

there's something called PS128. It's a kind of healthy gut bacteria. It really clearly can alter Parkinson's symptoms, autism symptoms. This is not like, this is not rumor. This is research. This is real science helping us move forward to show just how important that gut brain connection is. All right. Now, listen, we, if you,

So here's a simple way of thinking about it. When you eat food, if you have something you really, really enjoy eating, if you're like a bon vivant or you're somebody who just really enjoys some favorite food, you actually feel good even when you see it. And when you start eating it, you also feel really good. If you eat too much of it, you start feeling crummy. And we all know that there are certain kind of foods, if you eat a bunch of it, you're going to feel like crap the next day.

Okay. So we do know our gut influences how we actually think the science though, is that our gut can actually influence our mood.

There is a bacteria called Lactobacillus ruteri, R-E-U-T-E-R-I, Lactobacillus ruteri. Natural human bacteria normally found in the gut became much less predictable in the human gut after the antibiotics came out in the 1930s and 40s. Okay, maybe you have it, maybe you don't have it now. Pretty sensitive to antibiotics, by the way. This bacteria is amazing.

Because research has now shown this bacteria helps us have better blood sugar, better metabolism. This bacteria helps lower inflammation, lactobacillus ruri. This bacteria also text messages our brain to release the social hormone oxytocin.

Oxytocin is a hormone that we feel when you hug a friend at an airport when you haven't seen them for a long time. Oh, it's the orgasm one. Come on, Dr. Lee. It is orgasm. Also, the deep French kiss one. It's also just when you're feeling really good with people that you're with, along with dopamine, along with serotonin. These are all a collection of hormones that actually make us feel good. Right.

All right. Here's one bacteria that we know, we're teasing it down, that can actually have a positive influence. So where do you find lactobacillus root rot? Well, you can buy it as a supplement. I take it every day, by the way, because I don't get paid for it. I'm just telling you, this is why wouldn't you do something that you know can actually put you in a better mood that we don't have enough of often in our body. But there are other foods that actually can have lactobacillus root rot. It turns out that sourdough bread.

The tanginess of sourdough bread is actually – the starter bacteria is lactobacillus rooteri. Amazing. Don't eat too much of it because it's a carb. But having a little bit of it, if you had to have a starch or bread, that's a good choice. By the way, you might say, well, when you're baking bread at 400 degrees in the oven, doesn't that kill the bacteria? Yes, it does. However, studies have shown that if you take lactobacillus rooteri and you pulverize it with ultrasound, so you just like –

Turn it into fragments, okay? And you put it in drinking water in a lab and you feed it to mice. Guess what? Even the fragments of the lactobacillus rubratum will cause the brain to release oxytocin, okay? So by the way, Ackermansia is this other bacteria that I've been studying.

It's actually super important to have this bacteria in your gut. If you are a cancer patient and you're getting immunotherapy, which is the most advanced type of therapy, you need to have acromantia. If you don't have acromantia, you're very likely not going to respond. Your immune system isn't strong enough because the acromantia helps to control your immune system. Now, guess what?

more research has shown not only does acromantia control the immune system, it controls our metabolism. And in fact, the piece, one piece that controls the metabolism. So think about acromantia as a gut bacteria. Think of it like a, like a ladybug. Okay. It's like a little tiny piece with wings and like a, like a shell on it. There's one piece on that shell of acromantia called P9. P as in Peter. Nine. Okay. This one piece, you know what it does?

It causes our gut, this gut bacteria, it causes our gut to release its own natural GLP-1.

which is what prescription weight loss drugs try to do. Here's a bacteria that can actually get some of this into your system naturally, make your own body produce it, right? So this is, again, the type of deep dive work that we're doing. Like scientists like me, you know, people who study food as medicine, we're beginning to understand if we want to have a better brain, we need to have a better gut.

And our gut is part of our health defenses. And by the way, better gut health not only protects your brain, but it also protects your vascular system, better blood flow, better heart, better protection against cancer, better immune system, and also more resistant to infections from the outside world as well. How do you get that acromancia and

the sourdough starter, which I don't remember the name of. Oh, sourdough starters, lactobacillus and rooteri, R-E-U-T-E-R-I. So you can, first of all, you can get it as a supplement if you wanted to. But anybody who makes real traditional sourdough bread, any baker, any French baker, okay, they actually save the mother of the starter generation after generation. It's all lactobacillus rooteri. By the way-

This is a dyslexia. Bacillus rudorii has been around for centuries in the baking word world for sourdough. This it's, it's actually evolved into its own subspecies that's specific to sourdough bakers. All right. So it's amazing. Like, you know how we've actually participated in evolution. But again, you know, this is, I'm not telling people to eat sourdough bread. I'm saying that if you're going to eat bread and don't eat too much of it, sourdough is actually a pretty good choice. Now,

The other question about acromantia, okay? How do you grow your own acromantia? Well, acromantia loves to grow in our body and we can grow it just like spring flowers. You want to grow tulips? How do you grow tulips? Well, you got to get some bulbs and you got to plant them in the garden. You got to feed them all the right things at the right time. They'll actually blossom, right? And you have a beautiful garden. So think about your gut microbiome in the same way. We can influence it by, you know, the soil, the quality of the soil they grow in.

And then just actually giving them the right starter material. So for Acromantia, it turns out there were some foods that,

Maybe I should give back up two seconds to give you the little context. 2017, I helped to convene with some other world leaders, a cancer conference, a research conference in Paris called Rethinking Cancer. And we had one rule in this state of their cancer research meeting, which is that you can't talk about chemotherapy, can't talk about surgery. You got to remove all the drugs out of it. All right. All the chemo stuff. How do you have a cancer meeting without talking about chemo or radiation?

Well, it's very interesting what surfaces when you put that filter through it. All right. Now you talk about diet and lifestyle and mental health and all the other things and exercise, things that are really important, right? That are blocked from normal cancer conferences where it's all about the drugs. Well-

We had an amazing speaker. Her name is Dr. Laurence Zittvogel from Paris. She's an immuno-oncologist who basically had an embargoed study, meaning that she had research results that were ready to be unleashed onto the world in a major publication. We were the first ones to actually hear about it.

And she looked at 200 patients who had different types of cancer being treated with immunotherapy, which is not chemo. It actually boosts your body's own immune system to knock out the cancer. Instead of having the patrolman looking for the drug dealer in the quiet suburban street, now you're actually taking Navy SEALs and patrolling the street with immunotherapy to really knock out cancer in your body. It turns out that only 20% of people actually respond to immunotherapy.

man, does that suck? Like, you know, why not more people? Turns out that the difference between responders and non-responders is

is that the people who responded had acromantia in their gut. And if you didn't have it, you probably were not going to respond. This is not nice to have. This is like life and death kind of stuff. So at the time, there were no acromantia probiotics you could possibly get. Now you can buy them. All right. But at the time, this was like smoking hot research, which is really the world that I live in, is all this breaking new stuff. We only had food to be able to grow acromantia. What grows it?

pomegranate seeds and pomegranate juice. All right. The elagertanins, these natural bioactives in pomegranate seeds actually will grow and juice will actually grow a gychromansia. What else? Turns out dried cranberries will actually grow it. Okay. Hmm.

They can be whole cranberries, but whole cranberries are pretty tart. Dried ones, a little easier to eat. You can eat more of them. Concord grape juice. You ever like when you were a kid have, I don't mind, you probably like me, grape candy. That grape flavor was modeled after the Concord grape.

which is grown in Concord, Massachusetts. Actually, there is a real grape that actually tastes like that. That's natural, not artificial. Well, it turns out Concord grape juice or Concord grapes actually can grow acromantia. And so can chili peppers. So spicy chili peppers, you want to put some dried chili flakes or you want to have some sriracha sauce. That actually can grow acromantia. And so can Chinese black vinegar.

You ever go to eat soup dumplings at a Chinese restaurant for dim sum? They serve it with this little black sauce on the side. They do have some sometimes soy sauce, but this is black vinegar. That's it. That black vinegar will grow acromantia. So we now know that there are different kinds of dietary approaches to coax our body, naturally fertilize our gut to be able to grow this key bacteria.

This is kind of where we are with food as medicine. We're not at the end. We're really at the beginning. But what we're seeing already is so exciting, so empowering. Anybody listening to this can go out now and take one of these tips that I gave. Pomegranate juice, by the way,

By the way, in studying food as medicine, I always study, I also think about food doses. If food is medicine and medicine has a dose, how much pomegranate do you need to have? That was going to be my question. About eight fluid ounces, two shot glasses worth of pomegranate juice. And that's enough to grow your acromantia. The reason you don't want to have more in this case is that pomegranate juice is very, very sweet.

And you don't want to have too much of the sugar from that fruit. So all you need is about eight fluid ounces and you'll actually get what your body will get what it needs to start growing it. Jonathan and I both use the really bitter, disgusting pomegranate juice. We put it in our smoothies. That's fine. Whatever floats your boats, whatever works for you. I would say again, anybody buying pomegranate juice, please look at the ingredient label to make sure it's not sweetened apple juice with a little pomegranate flavor in it.

We're going to pause here. This is a great place to stop because there is so much more information Dr. Lee is going to share with us about practical ways to change your diet, be in control of your diet and your health. If you're a subscriber, you'll be notified when part two of this drops. But if you're not a subscriber, now's a great time to do it. Make sure to follow so that you can be notified when part two of our interview with Dr. Lee is online. And we can't wait to share all of these practical tips with you. See you next time.

It's my B.R.L.X. breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience Ph.D. or two. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.