Kind: captions
Language: en
if i took your liver and we cut off two
thirds of your liver and left one third
left it would regenerate the rest of the
two thirds
and in your book you really highlight
that in addition to angiogenesis there's
really there's with angiogenesis there's
five areas there's five sort of key
areas that we have to look at
these sort of systems in the body to
understand what happens when we go from
being healthy to being in a place of
disease but let's walk through them
starting off with the you know you can
pick which one you want to start off
with next and and we'll give a little
bit of an overview just like we did with
angiogenesis
yeah sure drew i mean this is such a
great question i i'll tell you how i got
into it because i think that's the best
way
to to
to articulate this for your viewers
um
you know as a doctor i was i was always
trained to one wonder why somebody got
sick what did they do what was going on
in their bodies that led to an illness
and in fact most patients always ask me
you know like well so what happened how
did i get this you know how did i
contract this uh condition um and
that's how i was trained to think for
for decades but reality is um and and as
a researcher that's what i was looking
at is what is the underlying cause of
illness
but i think i i discovered it was a much
more interesting question and that more
interesting question is why don't we get
sick more often
we think about it like kids are help
usually pretty healthy and actually when
you're in the prime of your life you're
generally pretty healthy yeah you might
get a flu or might get a cold every now
and then it's only when you get older
that you start getting sick and the more
interesting question is like why don't
kids get cancer more often than they do
why don't healthy adults get more heart
disease why don't they get diabetes you
know like more often than they do i mean
some people do at a younger age and so
that's really by turning that question
about why did i get sick into why aren't
i getting sick more often that led me
down this direct path to saying what
does a body doing to prevent illness and
and and what is health itself
if you know that that the question the
way that i would used to answer the
question what is health is like yeah
well you know you're healthy if you're
not sick and i think that's how most
people answer it
turns out health is not just the absence
of disease
health is the result
of our body working firing on all
cylinders to keep us that way and for a
ward off illness and
and what keeps us healthy
what wards off illness what is firing in
all cylinders are health defense systems
now i found five health defense systems
and i wrote about five in my book eat
the beet disease because
i've worked in the drug development
field in each of these areas
androgenesis is one of them let's talk
about all five of them first blood
vessels i've done drug development in
helping to grow blood vessels and stop
blood vessels
second are stem cells i'll come back to
that i've done work decades of work in
developing regenerative medicine to try
to regenerate organs uh it's amazing
what you can actually do in the biotech
world with that third is the microbiome
i've done research on the microbiome
with colleagues at mit and elsewhere
fourth is
genes our dna and most people think of
our dna as sort of the genetic code
i've done gene therapy so i've actually
helped to develop gene therapies
and fifth is our immune system and our
immune system which is hardwired and
this is more important than ever before
in immunotherapy
for cancer for example is one of the
most powerful breakthroughs in in
medical in the medical world today so
i've got the street cred of doing drug
development in each of these areas but
rather than thinking about using
drugs to activate these systems if we
turn the sock inside out and take a look
at okay so how do these systems actually
defend our health bar circulation
prevents um
that the fees are prevents disease by
feeding our healthy cells and preventing
bad diseases from growing like cancer
our stem cells
by the way
um you may not know this but all of us
have about 75
million stem cells that are in our
bodies at any given time and we're
actually made of stem cells because when
when we were in our mom's wombs the only
reason our bodies were able to even form
a human figure like you know the little
plato that forms humans in the womb is
is because of stem cells and we retain
some of those after we're born and we
lock them up in our bone marrow and in
our skin and elsewhere and our bodies
regenerate continuously
that's one of our health defense systems
because you know you know as we age we
need to repair ourselves from the inside
out like we know
our hair regrows for most people we know
that um even our
our mucous membranes are our
the sort of skin in our mouth we grow
anybody who's ever you know um had a
really hot
uh something a hot piece of food and you
burn your mouth and like man like it it
totally screws you up
next day you're back to normal because
your your skin in your mouth your mucous
membrane regenerated okay it's like
eating a dorito and you scrape the top
of your mouth next day you'll be fine
because of regeneration
um but it's what's amazing is that our
organs are generated from the inside out
if i took
your liver
and we cut off two thirds of your liver
and left one third left
it would regenerate the rest of the two
thirds just like a starfish you
regenerate an arm of your lung if i cut
off the tip of your lung
it would grow right back and what we're
starting to realize is that the playbook
of human biology is being written is
being rewritten because when you and i
were kids i'm sure our great school
teachers taught us the same thing
starfish and salamanders regenerate but
people don't wrong people regenerate and
so now we can actually try to coax this
regeneration to go faster
it's one of our defense systems but um
and while biotech people are trying to
figure out ways to make us regenerate
foods can also cause us to prompt
regeneration as well which is really
cool um foods like chocolate foods like
dark cacao like dark chocolate cacao
polyphenols can actually stimulate
regeneration um
there's all kinds of other uh uh
uh
biotech kind of things that can actually
do this but mother nature has laced um
things that can be regenerative like
ursulic acid and fruit peel
can coax our stem cells to come out of
our bone marrow to stimulate
regeneration as well i mean imagine a
future in which we understood how to
match
the uh the substance in a food that
naturally occurs with something that we
need like brain regeneration for
dementia for example that would really
be a game changer
and so that's where the future of
understanding our bodies hardware
self-defenses for regeneration goes
microbiome you know we've got like 39
trillion bacteria in our body most of
them in our colon and we know that when
our gut bacteria is healthy
it controls our hormones it controls our
cholesterol metabolism it controls how
our how our body uses blood sugars when
we screw up our gut bacteria it screws
up everything like literally we've got
an ecosystem inside our body that if we
don't take care of that ecosystem um it
destroys it wrecks the rest of our body
and and something that's stunning to
know for example is that um
uh
is how vulnerable the system is
artificial sweeteners like you find in a
diet soda
can
in 24 hours overnight start to destroy
your gut microbiome the healthy gut
bacteria start to change they don't like
that artificial sweetener because
they're trying we don't absorb those
those calories right those are the those
are the non-caloric sweeteners so we get
the taste in the front end and the back
end we don't absorb it so we don't get
the calories but guess what our bacteria
are eating those things too and they
don't like it we're poisoning
the field
when those bacteria um don't like it and
they start dying it affects our
metabolism it affects it um even our
hormone our brain hormone so we want to
keep our our gut defense system which is
tied to our immune system by the way
really really healthy
our dna is another defense system
people don't realize this but we make 10
000 mistakes in our dna every single day
that causes mutations which then can
cause cancer so
fortunately our dna system defends us by
fixing itself and our immune system of
course is um like our ultimate shield
to prevent us from
bad guys coming in from the outside
whether it's covid or whether it's the
flu or whether it's you know some other
uh germ
but also our immune system protects us
from bad guys on the inside of our body
and that's those cancers that we started
talking about our immune system conducts
surveillance to take out those bad guys
inside our skin as well