Using Food As Medicine: How To Protect Yourself From Disease & Illness Everyday | Dr. William Li
nlLVimdS56Q • 2024-12-05
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Kind: captions Language: en on a global level uh we are actually having a different type of problem that needs a solution as well and this is actually published from last year F by funded by The Gates Foundation and the journal Lancet um talking about uh from the global burden of disease study 11 million deaths attributable to dietary risk factors specifically the low intake of fruits and vegetables uh nuts legumes and whole grains and so we are looking at a problem that's right in front of us that actually where the solutions may also appear in front of us as well how do we actually reconcile this problem with Innovation and how do we find new Solutions what I'm going to share with you now is how biotechnology Life Sciences pharmaceutical development is giving us a new appreciation of how foods can be used for health and to fight disease and the way that I'm going to introduce this to you is by describing the drug development uh progress has been made over the last 30 some years I've run a nonprofit organization called the androgenesis foundation we have been involved with the development successful development of 34 FDA approved drugs and devices against this backdrop of the last 25 years more than 800 new drugs approved so the interesting thing to ask is what knowledge human knowledge scientific knowledge have we gleaned over this period of time that allowed drugs to be approved I want to share with you something you already know which is that genomic medicine or knowledge about the human genome has led to gene therapy but this has been a long course of about 30 years remarkably in 13 years we went from not knowing about the human genome to actually sequencing it so what do you think we've actually learned in this span of time we learned many things we don't understand everything yet but we actually are able to get the information among things that we've learned is the human kinome and these are the enzymes that our cells use to produce proteins and we pretty much know everything in the body that actually represents the kinome think about it as an evolutionary tree of sorts of chemical reactions in the body we've also deciphered inside cells many of the cell Pathways from the outside of the cell seen on the top all the way down to the nucleus which is sort of the command center and each of these uh colored shapes represents a potentially druggable Target meaning that if you were in charge of a biotech company you're trying to do a startup and you had some University brain power behind you you might actually choose one of these in order to be able to develop a new drug and indeed of those 800 drugs that have been developed most of them actually Target one or more combinations of these Pathways so what's interesting is that these drugable targets that tell us something about how our body responds to drug drug treatments also respond these Pathways also respond to the foods that we also eat and we know that foods can actually act on these Pathways because of our knowledge of the biotechnology um uh drug development uh system and in fact we've also been able to dive into foods to look for some of the chemical structures that are Mother Nature has laced into our food supply and we call these bioactives broadly speaking this is just a partial list many of these chemicals actually give Foods their color or their flavor and most of them are designed to be Health defenses for the plant that from which they're derived so they either allow reproductive uh defense so that they can they attract bees for pollination or they actually may become natural insecticides to prevent uh insects from eating them uh over the course of summer for example so again plant defenses when humans begin to eat the plant defenses they suddenly start to interact with our own uh body's uh systems and I just wanted to show with you uh share with you one of the uh experiments that I've done uh comparing foods and drugs this is actually in the top black line an assay system that we use to study whether or not a drug or chemotherapy drug or another pharmaceutical might inhibit bad blood vessels that are are growing in our body these bad blood vessels could be feeding cancer for example so as you can imagine the shorter the bar the more powerful the effect on the cells to prevent cancers from growing in this case blood vessels I'll show you in a second so this is actually a a gold standard essay developed for the pharmaceutical world that I was involved with and when I was doing this experiment I realized that you can you could FedEx overnight a chemical a drug and find what its effect is within a few days but you could call a pizza in uh to the same lab in 15 minutes and you wouldn't be able to study it so we then set up across breaking down the food system and then when you actually begin breaking down the system and testing food components in the same system as drugs you can see this is Pharma versus Farm head-to-head in the same drug development assay and remarkably many of the same elements that actually uh are in plants have similar or even better potencies than we see in drugs and so again if you if I were to disguise the names of the foods here and put the a chemical name pharmaceutical name uh you might be impressed at some of the activity the potency of some of these agents but it's really not just about the food that we're learning about it's it's really when it comes to Food and Health it's really about how our body responds to the in the the substances we put inside the body remember those Pathways I showed you that's where the secret is let's talk a little bit about stem cells and the food that we eat you know quite honestly I am still so confused about stem cells I've read tons of articles about them but at the end of the day I'm still wrapping my head around how they work how do they work and why do we need to keep them in mind when we're eating well listen stem cells are um they are really complicated but I'm going to give you and your viewers a really simple way of thinking about them we're all made from stum cells okay so when sperm meets egg in the womb in the uterus and starts to grow and form our little baby bodies um everything is made of a stem cell and when every baby is born you know every baby that's born looks exactly the same more or less right it's like a Hershey Kiss PP being punched out right all these little babies in a nursery you know um all made the same way of stem cells because our stem cells that made those little bodies all knew exactly how to form the little baby heart the little baby um liver the little baby lungs the little baby cheeks okay and we're all made out of stem cells from the very beginning now most of our our cells we're forming wind up becoming organs but our body reserves the right to keep a few stem cells around in order to regenerate ourselves and re um restore replenish ourselves when we need it so where do those stem cells live mostly inside our bone marrow so if you look at a chicken you ever break a bone um it's got a little Hollow Middle and it's actually filled with stuff okay that stuff our cells um that include a lot of stem cells it's the Beehive where most of our stem cells actually live as we grow up into being adults as we get older those stem cells there fewer stem cells if you get diseases like diabetes you got fewer those stem cells and that's why aging people and people who have diabetes for example um uh wind up having a harder time healing and and and their organs tend to be a little more vulnerable fewer stem cells sticking around these stem cells actually come out of the bone marrow like bees coming out of a hive and they circulate in bloodstream just to fix things they're like our fixers and they come out you get some damage you know what we don't even know it but the dam but the stem cell is fixing it from the inside out now um how do we know that we regenerate well it's simple when our hair falls out it grows back it's regenerating you know um the um uh skin sloughs off you know you think about um dandruff as Skin coming off just replenishes itself stem cells are replenishing those our gut turns itself over every 24 36 hours and and some amazing organs we're now realizing regenerate our lungs can regenerate you snip off a piece of your lung Grows Right Back liver okay um you know why people can actually drink so much alcohol is because it's continuously regenerating and in fact you can remove twoth thirds of your liver you can knock out two-thirds of your liver or you can just cut it right out okay and oneir will grow the rest of it back like a salamander regrowing its tail or its limb it's really amazing now we can't grow back our arm obviously but we can actually grow back other organs and so that's the power of stem cells now when you read about stem cells often times you hear in the media about you know some Corner Clinic taking stem cells and injecting it into your um you know your knee or your joints or your tennis elbow to fix it you know I'm I'm working in that area I'm biotech not ready for prime time yet it's really complicated we don't have an FDA approved stem cell therapy in that sense of regeneration um but we do do it for Cancer Treatments like we can do stem cell transplants which can be really important and we of course we do blood transfusions all the time which includes giving back uh stem cells so so that's basically the 101 on on stum cells but here's the part where food actually comes into it it turns out that some foods and I I thought this was so cool you know when I got into the research some foods actually stimulate stem cells to come out of your bone marrow to help improve healing now what are some of those Foods well nobody's going to um protest when I tell you that one of the most powerful foods that stimulates regeneration in your stem cells is dark chocolate dark chocolate cacao cacao flavanol now you know chocolate is a confection it's made in a candy factory a chocolate factory but if you and it's got sugar and all kinds of other stuff so again depends on what you put in it but dark chocolate is mostly cacao cacao comes out of an orange Bean let it's a seed pod bright orange and then later on it turns brown when it matures it's got all these little seeds in it it's cacao nibs okay that's the real deal and when you have dark chocolate it's really really rich with cacao it's got fiber in it which is good for our microbiome it's got these polyphenols in it and really good dark chocolate you don't have to have it as a candy bar chocolate bar you can also even mix it into um like hot chocolate for example you can make a cacao drink and that's how the traditional Incas and peruvians actually had their cacao like the ancient societies that understood the power of cacao had it as kind of like as a beverage like was like like the coffee the chocolate ritual you hear about right um so turns out Studies have been done in people even in their 60s who have heart disease and they need more regeneration they need more stem cells check this out I've got a free guide on my favorite breakfast food to eat for longevity from what's in my mug to what I look for when I buy these staples at the grocery store it's all right here all you have to do is click on the link and enjoy what do you do you actually measure take a blood blood out measure their stem cells then you give them dark chocolate in the form of hot chocolate have them drink it twice a day just eight FL ounces you know that's that's not very much that's a little bit more than this um Down the Hatch polyphenols in the body and for 30 days okay um then they measure their stem cells again on an individual basis and guess what the dark chocolate doubles the number of stem cells coming out of bone marrow into your circulation for regeneration so now what about so cells are interesting but it doesn't make a difference in terms of your body function turns out they actually measured blood flow using a test called flow mediate dilation and flow mediate dilation is where you have to do a blood pressure cuff and you blow up the blood pressure cuff it squeezes the circulation so your arm feels a little numb now you use an ult ound probe to take a look at your blood flow and then you release the cuff turns out the people who had the dark chocolate had double the responsiveness um uh the healthy responsiveness of their blood flow as well so improve blood flow double the number of stem cells coming out of dark chocolet you know who who doesn't think that's a good thing right so a number of foods can actually do that as well um and it's just really cool this is a new area of research of foods that actually stimulate regeneration so cool Dr Lee could you please talk about the link between our DNA and the food that we eat I believe it is teir time okay so um our DNA protects itself um we talked about you know DNA that can be inherited from our parents you know why you have the color eyes you have or the color hair you have for example um those are beneficial things those are good things good attributes and also inheriting cancer genes are is really dangerous right like we don't want that but it turns out that on a day-to-day level um our DNA is um being subjected to all these harms you go to the beach um we know ultraviolet light damages our DNA and causes skin cancer so you don't want to burn you don't want to go to a tanning salon but you know what what about when you're just walking in the Sun what about when you're stuck in traffic and it's you know and it's like a an hour traffic line and you're sitting there and it's a bright Sunday day and sun is comeing through your windshield you get your windshield done you get your arm out the window how come we don't get skin cancer and and and by the way just on a typical day um our DNA in our body makes 10,000 mistakes that can turn into mutations when they're dividing every single day so the question is how come we don't become mutants like the X-Men you know how come we don't develop cancers all the time turns out our DNA is hardwired to fix itself so if you have some damage it would just repair it it's like you know our handyman our DNA is it own hand man to fix itself um and so foods can actually help that so antioxidants which you know everybody thinks oh it's so great again we've heard it so often about antioxidants we've lost touch of what it actually means antioxidants are like heat seeking missiles that take out incoming missiles um uh that can damage our DNA it takes out these oxida free radicals why are Fe radical bad because it damages our DNA so we want to basically like fire the Missile Command actually knock out out all those incoming missiles and that's what antioxidants do so we know that foods that contain a lot of vitamin C which is a great antioxidant can actually neutralize um uh uh uh incoming DNA damage protect our DNA and in fact um some really cool foods that can do this what my favorite story I like to talk about is kiwi so you know that brown kind of fuzzy fruit that it's kind of rough on the outside you slice it down the middle you open it up bright green little black seeds a star burst on the inside amazing not too sweet but kind of Juicy you can cut it up for breakfast you can cook with it you bake with it amazing fruit packed with vitamin C also other polyphenols that protect our DNA um eating one uh kiwi actually can protect our DNA from damage by about 60% eating three kiwis will rebuild our DNA fix the potholes by about 60% as well so again that's an example of something really simple that we can actually do that has antioxid and DNA protecting benefits now what about teir the teir are the protective caps on the end of our DNA it's in our chromosome our genetic material and it's like the the plastic tips of at the end of a shoelace now you know that plastic cap helps us not only um tie our shoelaces but it protects it from damage so that if you actually damage or lose that plastic cap what happens your shoelace starts unravel and now man you got to rethread that that shoelace it's it's a it's a real pain and that and it starts to unravel and and your your whole lace becomes frazzled and that's when that actually happens to our DNA we are in trouble so that plastic tip that cap of our DNA is called the tiir and as we age and as our cells age that teir cap burns down like the F like a fuse like a candle it's I call it a life fuse the shorter it gets the sooner that cell is getting older and aging and becoming damaged so we want to actually slow down that burn and in fact we want to increase the length of that uh we want to keep it longer if we can right so reverse cellular aging not just a slogan we've been able to study this using real science um and the science of the tiir by the way won a Nobel Prize that you know the the researcher um Elizabeth Blackburn um in California won a Nobel Prize for her work setting the tiir so there's a lot of foods that can actually influence our teir one of them is coffee turns out that drinking like black coffee slows down not only slows down the burn of the tiir so it protects the cap it actually lengthens the cap it reverses cellular aging so that's kind of a crazy thing right like you think about you know coffee I mean everybody kind of just swigs down their Morning Joe um don't doesn't really think much about it but really coffee which again is a traditional beverage you know ritual ceremonies around coffee beans picked and roasted um you know we we think about about it like driving to going to the drive-thru to get it but you know traditional societies really understood there was something special about these beans and that's what science is doing we're coming back to ReDiscover what the benefits are and one of the things that coffee can do it slows down the burn and increases the life fuse um uh that called the tiir look our gut is filled with healthy bacteria I'll tell you when I went to medical school we the the young doctors to be were taught that bacteria is bad and I would say that you know in society as we're growing up you know our our our moms and dad told us bacteria is bad and we have antibiotics to kill the bad bacteria well there are bad bacteria for sure but I will tell you most of the bacteria in our body in fact is good bacteria so it's just the opposite like it's mostly good guys a few bad guys as opposed to they're all bad guys now these good guy bacteria they live in our gut um in fact you know we've got if you compare the number of bacteria to human cells it's almost one to one so you know if you were to take a biopsy and count the number of cells uh in the biopsy and then multiply it to your whole body how many human cells do you think you'd have about 40 trillion human cells that's a lot of cells okay um if then if you were to actually count the bacteria in how many bacteria we have we've got 39 trillion so almost one to one now how much is 39 trillion I can tell you 39 trillion is more stars than you can see in the night sky die okay that is huge and I can tell you that um those bacteria mostly do good things for us when and when we eat food we're feeding our human selves okay and we our digestive system absorbs a lot of those good phytonutrients and polyphenols the things we've been talking about and then everything that our human bodies don't digest goes down to our bacteria and we feed our bacteria it's like feeding your dog to leftovers kind of thing all right now the bacteria the healthy bacteria if you feed them uh good stuff they're really happy they they flourish uh and how do they how do they what do they do for us when they flourish well they produce something called short chain fatty acids scaas don't need to worry about the special names for them except that all these things they produce lower inflammation help us streamline our metabolism help our blood sugars be better help us lose weight um uh uh impact our skin health impact our hair growth and our healthy bacteria by the way really cool they send signals to our brain to release social hormones so this is the gut brain axis in fact our bacteria pretty much text messages our brain and tells our brain to release these hormones so our gut bacteria is incredibly important it's almost like an organ system all by itself so gut is connected to to lowering inflammation inflammation is important in psoriasis we see it on the skin and and we do know that by the way I I've done research on gut bacteria and on um healing of your skin if you make a cut on your skin if your gut bacteria is healthy it'll help you heal up much better all right so that's something I'm telling you all the good stuff that you can do for your gut B now what happens if you do something bad for your gut bacteria um if you feed your gut bacteria things it doesn't like you're going to kill some of it um and by killing it you're changing the neighborhood the ecosystem uh think about the ecosystem like the Great Barrier Reef you know if you start killing it's beautiful great bar you've had the privilege of actually you swimming there once if you actually you start killing off the fish in the sea an enemies and the coral you bleach it you change that entire ecosystem becomes a very unhealthy ecosystem n does it look bad but it can't do what it's supposed to do for the planet and that's the same thing that happens in our gut bacteria when we feed it bad things so what are some bad things extra sugar added sugar you overload it your gut bacteria really doesn't like that um artificial sweeteners okay also not good the synthetic ones like Stevia is okay but syn artificial sweeteners mess up your gut bacteria doesn't really like Ultra processed foods a lot of those chemicals that you can't pronounce on the side of a box of ultra processed food or a can your gut you know again our bodies don't absorb them but they go right down to the gut bacteria and you screw up your gut bacteria the payback is actually your inflammation goes up your metabolism goes Haywire you gain weight you don't feel good mentally and socially right because you've undone all those good things that bacteria do so gut bacteria is really important what's how do I simplify gut how do we treat our gut bacteria really well like okay everybody wants to know so so what do I do here's the simplest thing uh eat foods with dietary fiber there's a lot of foods with diet fiber because that fiber we don't absorb in our own body we just pass it down and again this is one of the things that I was taught in medical school tell your patients to eat a lot of fiber because that fiber is going to tickle the colon and then you'll be more regular and you'll poop all the time okay as opposed to being constipated way more than that that's like not even I don't think that's even regarded as true anymore what happens is that dietary fiber feeds our gut bacteria our gut bacteria Thrive and they produce all these anti-inflammatory compounds so what are some foods um that that are good for dietary fiber well great news legumes uh white beans Navy beans black beans um edamame soybeans all grapefruit leafy greens lettuce kale broccoli great sources of fiber fruits apples got about 4.4 grams and an average Apple pair about five grams of dietary fat uh of dietary fiber uh in a average size pair uh tree nuts great fiber you're just you're you're snacking snack on tree nuts almonds macadamias pecans walnuts great sources of healthy fats plant-based omega-3 fatty acids which is good for your psoriasis and dietary fiber which is good for your gut microbiome which then takes down inflammation so you know again the gut is connected to the rest of our body including our skin and the foods that we eat can have a big now I just want to close by showing you something about the microbiome our healthy gut bacteria and our immune system because we've got 37 trillion bacteria in our body uh just about as many bacteria as human cells and these bacteria are actually incredibly important because they live in our intestines um and we know that 70% of our immune system actually resides in our intestines in fact if you were to actually um uh uh slice the intestines um in through the middle it' be like cutting through a garden hose um you would actually see the bacteria is inside the hose in the lining and then the the um immune system is filled like a layer of jelly within the lining of the hose itself and just like a college student that's living with roommates in a dorm that has very thin walls the bacteria can pound on the intestines and signal and communicate with the immune cells like college roommates can through the cell walls so this is the close interrelationship between our gut bacteria and our immune system and in fact this has been studied in the context of covid um this was a study from uh China where they looked at healthy people and tried to find out what type of markers were present in their blood that would protect them against Co getting covid-19 and it turned out that there was one marker called interferon gamma which is an one of our body's natural uh immune virus fighting cyto kind so it's a good kind that helps fight virus and then they actually took a look at which of um uh which gut bacteria in people correlated with that good beneficial antivirus cytoid and they found various bacteria that was that seemed to be correlate with our body's ability to produce that cyto which lowered the risk of getting covid then they went back to take a look at which foods were eaten by these people that actually had the unique bacterial signature that correlated with that important virus fighting cyto so you can kind of see the chain reaction between what we eat and our gut bacteria and our gut bacteria and our immune system and our immune system with the ability to defend against the virus this is really a daisy chain uh a domino effect of how our food is connected to our health in a in a pretty profound way so this is an early days of research because we're still learning a lot about um uh this disease state but what was amazing is they found a number of foods that were beneficial and I just want to show you two of them that were found to actually be beneficial so it turned out that green and black tea but especially green tea contains a natural chemical called egcg it's a cakin you've probably heard of it if you are an afficianado of tea one of the healthful polyphenols but in that study it was correlated with lactobacillus in the gut a particular species that was then correlated with interfer and Gamma this is the body's natural virus killer you know so it's our defense system and intake of green tea correlated with that microbiome which correlated with the virus killer another uh VI correlation was found with um a dietary fiber and polyunsaturated fatty acids healthy fats which are present in nuts for example pecans which are one of my favorites so easy to eat and roast and cook with and and and the polysaturated fatty acids was correlated with another healthy gut bacteria called ruminococcus this ruminococcus was then correlated with a body's ability to produce interferon gamma the virus killer again so I've written about more than 200 Foods in E to beat disease and if you want to follow me and learn about more foods that I'm continuously I'm analyzing and Publishing and and spreading the word on you know you can come F follow me on social media but I what I really wanted to be able to do is to talk about transformation because the transformation is really recognizing that indeed food is our medicine but it's not about salesmanship it's not about snake oil it's about the real Bonafide science of understanding how foods contain substances that when placed in our body help our body to respond including through our immune system in meaningful ways so where are some of the future of food transformation I'm going to give you a couple of of of of ideas or I think where we're going to go I think that in the future we're going to be talking about the functionality of foods um uh what can the food do uh alone and in combinations how do they synergize and combine with each other so that 1 plus one is equal to three or five um we're going to be looking at dosing of foods if food is medicine and medicines have doses how much do we need to eat and how often that is a simple question that still has a lot of research to be done but what an amazing thing to know exactly how many apples a day you need to eat to keep a doctor away um every individual is different so personal ized and very precise nutrition tailored to an individual at a particular time in their lives um is is incredibly important to get away from generalizations that are out there prescription diets uh I foresee a future in which medical doctors Physicians will become much more educated in the kind of material I shared just shared with you and they may in fact in the future be writing prescriptions a few doctors are doing that in the United States already uh for their patients with diabetes and heart disease and other conditions uh to try to help them improve their overall lives and they take literally uh the prescription to the grocery store as a shopping list and in some cases in in the United States some insurance companies are actually paying for um uh the the foods or underwriting some of the foods that are actually purchased um uh Fresh Foods we know are good a real opportunity for Innovation is to say you know can we process the foods in a way that can be scaled fresh is difficult to scale but is your a way of preserving the goodness um we know that dried is okay we know that um long storage of some foods like purple potatoes can actually enhance the polyphenols but are there ways that we can actually develop uh food Technologies to preserve the benefits of foods whether it's drying whether it's powder rizing a number of different ways um right now Ultra processed foods are really regarded as villains and and perhaps for justifiable reasons but that doesn't mean that the future has to be that way we could actually work together uh someone like me taking life science with food scientists with food Technologies with innovators and Business Leaders and put together a plan a roadmap to be able to really create scalable food um uh that actually contains the goodness of Mother Nature and then finally I shared with you an example of food plus medicine not food versus medicine I'm a doctor who believes profoundly in the importance of the right medicine for the right person at the right time but food is a missing tool in the toolbox that might make our medicines better they might also uh help us avoid the need for medicines but if we did need medicine what should we we be eating so I'll just close with this quote by um an astronaut named Ronald Garen uh who said awe and wonder are the secret ingredients to creating a better future and I think that out of the pandemic we are actually beginning to shine a new light on the secret ingredients of creating the future of food as medicine there is a uh uh potato most people don't think there's that many nutrients and potatoes but a purple potato was once that was once considered ink and gold you know like it it was because it came out of um Latin America beautiful potato you cut them in half they're kind of dark and Bluey and M you know Dusky colored on the outside when you open them up and show them man they're like this beautiful dark they look like blueberries and then if you refrigerate them in in cold you actually change the the the the dye suddenly turns bright purple so you want to see an amazing explosion of color take a purple potato cut it in half um and put it in a refrigerator and it'll just light up for you um uh turns out that that dark purple comes from a natural Dy called anthocyanin by the way same Dy it's in a blueberry as a matter of fact but that purple potatoes been shown whether you bake them where whether you make them into chips whether you eat them raw um no matter what you do to whether you mash them they target cancer stem cells which is amazing so um colon cancer stem cells is where they've been studied are little tiny baby stem cells that make cancers come back that's the one kind of like the one nightmare for cancer patients is like once you got it treated if it comes back cancer stem cells do that now we're finding foods that can actually build up your good healthy system your immune system but at the same time uh as a fringe benefit it can actually kill cancer stem cells as well so again another way of just our looking at our body's Health defenses I you know when I set out to write my bookie to be disease and long before I started to to create the course around it I thought about an analogy that I could tell people why plant-based foods are are good hey there are you ready to use food to improve your health I Do cover a lot in my YouTube videos but there's only so much time to dive deep into how to use food as medicine that's why I created my eat to beat disease course in my course I walk you through how to use everyday foods that you can find in your grocery store to boost your body's Health defenses this is all based on my research and everything is rooted in science and I've made it super easy to follow with practical everyday tips whether you're trying to prevent disease or just want to optimize your health for longevity my e to be disease course gives you all the tools to make it real and to help you get lasting changes that will help you live longer and live better to learn more click the link below or scan the QR code on the screen I can't wait to get started together in my course now back to the video um uh because they take care of our body uh in the way that you would if you were the uh trying to make sure a a medieval Fortress was being taken care of so you know um everyone's seen the picture of the Disney Castle um uh and if you've gone to some of these beautiful castles there's a few castles in the United States ton of them in Europe um but they're fortresses they protected the the people that lived inside them and that's how our body is designed our our Body Fortress and just like a fortress there's lots of different ways that um uh people who built these medieval castles designed the fort there's the moat there's the drawbridge there's the little slits in the wall that people can fire arrows at the enemies um there's the sloping walls you know so you couldn't climb up very easily you slide back down the wall and then there's even these like tricky things that most people don't know about in the castle um uh you know you go visit a castle you buy the ticket to go visit the castle in Europe right like you don't realize when you're walking in the main gate look up sometime look straight above your head in the ceiling will be a hole and that hole was part of the defense and people used to drop uh rocks or boiling oil and Invaders coming in that's how our body is designed we've got tons of these defenses all over our body our immune system our angiogenesis our stem cells our microbiome our DNA is ability to protect itself we are just a Body Fortress we're made with human cells we're also packed with bacteria so we're the hob you know that's our ecosystem and how we and how we make decisions of what we eat um mostly plant-based foods go back to the traditional cultures um those recipes you know they were designed um not only to taste good but to actually be good uh for us um you know that's why I just think that this whole idea of plant-based nutrition food and health is really about bringing us back to Our Roots bringing us back to what we enjoy doing which is eating um uh taking us and putting us more in touch with our bodies and that's you know what I think is really awesome about your program is really being able to help people understand uh this is who we are since we live in a world that's changed to understand that this is another reason take care to avoid just protect yourself you know in the same way that you would for anything else these are the things that we know how to do and very importantly eat to improve your immune system because the stronger your immunity the more likely you're going to resist everything a cold a flu covid cancer you know those are all good things to actually have good shields on and eating the right way can decrease and lower inflammation in your body as well which is the thing that you don't want to begin with so I think there's you know a lot of insight that research is giving us um uh about how to act how important diet and lifestyle actually are all right so a fun quick question if uh you could only eat five foods for the rest of your life what would they be what are your top five anti-inflammatory immune supporting Health supporting Foods I'm gonna give you five because people always ask me you know what you know Dr Lee what do you what do you like to eat and and what I tell people it's it's less about what I eat but how I eat and the patterns of food because I I actually really enjoy food like I don't I don't like picking out um but I I love the idea that food has culture and history and I love the taste of of food so I love food I wouldn't say I love eating um but uh uh and because I'm a researcher I happen to know there's in my book I wrote about more than 200 foods that can boost your body's Health defenses including make your blood vessels healthier your stem cells your gut microbiome healthier antioxidants anti- anti-inflammation and boost your immunity as well um and these are things that I talk about in my free master class that I give every other month but I will tell you that if I were to just if I were to be stuck on a desert island and I I could and I only had five foods what that I packed what would they probably be um well thinking about what I like in thinking about what I would eat uh and what's good for me uh I would say green tea would be one of those things I because I really enjoy green tea by the way side footnote matcha which is the whole Leaf of green te powdered up has been found by researchers to kill breast cancer stem cells quite amazing um those are the baby cells that help that help the cancer keep coming back um but does so much other as well so anti-inflammatory good for psoriasis and lowers stress as well so that's number one number two dark chocolate so um most people don't realize this but dark chocolate is made with cacao lot High cacao 80% or more uh the caca part is a plant-based food so although there's plenty of stuff you can put into a candy bar to make it less than healthy the higher the cacao content the healthier it ISS you dark chocolate anti-inflammatory um helps to calm the blood vessels also just generally emotionally calming as well it actually improves depression um so that's the second one that I would uh actually eat um I happen to love um if I could if I could uh be on a desert island I want to have a food you know I would love to have a juicy Peach a ripe summer Peach one of my favorites um and yeah okay it's pretty sweet but I don't worry about the sugar because you know a fruit has fructose it does have natural sugars in it but more importantly it's got all these other things the fiber the skin of the fruit it's got orsolic acid all these other delicious things so I consider a peach a beautiful ripe Peach to be of those treats that I love to eat fourth blueberries I love blueberries uh blueberries do a lot of things the dark blue of blueberries actually is a natural dye called anthocyanin anthocyanins lower inflammation good for psorasis and raise your immunity which is good to protect you against all kinds of infections um and cancer as well and so I I I love blueberries and by the way the frozen blueberries have the same amount of the good stuff those polyphenols as fresh blueberries so you know if you want to make a get frozen blueberries and put them into your smoothie that's just as good as picking them off the bush um fresh so you know like don't worry about like what the source of those are the weeds if you want to get into that and then you know probably the final thing that I really enjoy I like snacking on nuts you know I like tree nuts um I would say I like um cashews I like to snack on Macadamia is I like to snack on but I I really like all kinds of different types of nuts it's a great way uh to um take the edge off of your hunger between a meal it's just to get a a couple of handfuls or a handful of nuts and just a snack on those let me tell you how powerful nuts are uh there was a study of almost 800 people with colon cancer stage three colon cancer that's colon cancer that's spread in your body okay it's really serious and um they were getting treated by their oncologists and the research study found that those people with stage three colon cancer ate two fistfuls of nuts a week seven days okay had a 57% reduction in mortality so it's not a swap for cancer treatment but just eating those nuts feeding your microbiome getting those healthy plant-based Omega-3s uh lowered inflammation jacked up your immune system uh controls blood vessels the feeding tumors I mean you know you can't argue against the power of something like that plus I love the taste of all those Foods so those would be my five not food is medicine is food and medicine all about activating our body self defenses the future there's this this is going to take us into really distant um uh locations that we can't even predict yet the flavor roam is actually looking at what are the substances that mother nature is imbued into foods and how they relate biologically and so when we think about all these amazing things that I showed you earlier that people might be enthusiastic about U because it really is today's Innovations I hope I've shown you a little bit about what is possible in the future by really taking really the best of what we've got got that we've done already in biopharmaceuticals and applying that same kind of thinking and I'll just close with this quote by Andre GID who uh won the Nobel Prize he said man can't discover new oceans unless he's got courage to lose sight of the shore and I think that's where we are with food and medicine this is about losing sight of the shore that we always talked about just go vegan you know eat sustainably like yeah we need to do all those things look at how much further we have to go anybody who wants to learn more about um the details of what I've shown you and get the lists of the foods that can activate androgenesis stem cells microbiome DNA protection and Immunity um I wrote this book uh e Tob disease um feel free to connect with me and uh I I hope this is something that will impact decisions you make this evening thank you thank you for that CH of force two quick questions I don't think I ever had broccoli till I was 20 as my mom is here thanks Mom I never really uh ate was good with my veggies all those sort of green powders that combine some of these things concentrated broccoli can that help me question number one as opposed to the natural way we all want to cheat don't we well look I mean I think that it's completely legitimate to try to take uh uh versions of Whole Foods and try to create simplified uh ways to actually get as much goodness as you can but really as what we've heard at this at exponential medicine is that we are just scratching the surface of being able to monitor how well we're doing and we can have an objective measure that can show that the green stuff will do just as well as a a serving of steamed broccoli then we'll actually be able to compare those things in the meantime I would encourage you to eat the whole food e Your Greens last question real quick when you and I went to medical school barely any uh nutrition how do we encourage clinicians Beyond nutritionist to start prescribing food for both prevention and therapy right well look medically indicated meals is actually already starting and I showed you the insurance companies our payers and uh are and uh uh self-insured employers are now beginning to actually reward people for making better choices doctors are really at the back of the bus on this and I think one of the things that we all need to do is to encourage the young people coming through the ranks and and also the administrators who are actually looking at curriculum and the board test uh designers to be able to put more information about nutrition so we're not only thinking about medicines we're actually thinking about food hi there if you enjoyed watching this video I know you'll love the next one stay here and check it out and I'll see you there
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