0:00 I've had patients go from stage four cancer to stage zero. So, I have now seen where the end of cancer's coming from. I've seen how the war is going to finish. And here's how. Dr. William Li is a Harvard-trained physician and medical scientist. Whose work is revolutionizing the way we understand and fight some of the most devastating diseases facing our world today. I'm going to give you a brand new view of thinking about cancer. And this is shocking to some people to hear, but every 24 hours there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body. Each of those is a microscopic cancer. But the reason that we don't become more sick from all kinds of diseases, including cancer, is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems. But here's a problem. We are presently seeing the fallout of some of the
0:46 not-so-good moves that we made in the 1950s and '60s and '70s. For example, people might consume as much as a credit card's worth of plastic every single week, which is very worrying, and I will tell you why. But there's also the foods you eat, which contribute to taking your health defenses down. But the good news is that you can actually put shields up as well. So, this is like our experiment. And we're trying to discover drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments. So, we said, "Let's remove half of them, and let's swap them out with food." I was a skeptic, but when I saw these results, it made my jaw drop. Because the holy grail in the pharmaceutical industry is to find something that can kill cancer stem cells. And we don't have a drug that can do that. Turns out mother nature beat us to the punch. And there's more than 200 foods that I've studied that can actually starve cancers. And if you had to pick five based on the science you've seen, what would those
1:32 top five be? The good news is that it's food that we can eat every single day. So, number one, This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Dr. William Lee. If someone has just clicked on this conversation, and they're asking
2:18 themselves, they're wondering what they're going to get out of spending this time with us for the next couple of hours, what would you say directly to them that they will learn, gain, and how will their life improve? I would say that you're going to hear about food in a brand new way that you didn't realize that a decision that you can make after this, listening to this or watching this, that you could put into action to your life immediately could actually help you for the rest of your life. It could stave off disease, help you feel stronger, even help you with longevity. Uh, so there's no single moves that you can make, but it's the beginning of taking steps that can actually allow you to live the rest of a long, enjoyable life.
3:03 And what are the the key diseases that people are and should be most concerned about today based on their correlation to the food that we eat? Yeah, if you look at the biggest health crises in the world today, in developed countries, um, you know, you're really talking about cardiovascular disease being the number one killer, diabetes, and all the consequences, the devastating consequences that come out. Listen, your blood sugar is not being very well regulated, that's the definition over time of diabetes, but the knock-on effect of having high, uncontrolled sugars is really underlying metabolic chaos. There's a whole litany of terrible conditions that happens every downstream from that, from eye disease
3:48 to wounds that don't heal, etc., etc. Cancer is another one. Dementia is a big bigger and bigger problem as our population ages. And a lot of people don't really recognize this, but you know, the the saying that inflammation is a root cause of chronic disease scientifically correct. But there are many many inflammatory diseases that are out there that don't get enough airplay that really take away the quality of your life as you get older. And so I think all of these things it's not just about mortality, it's about morbidity. It's not just about living long, it's about living well and feeling good along the way. And where do you think we are as a society, you know, especially as Westerners as it relates to our relationship with health and food? Because when I look at some of the stats
4:34 around life expectancy, there's been a bit of a been a bit of a stagnation in the I think it was 2020-ish time. But then also when you look at a lot of these chronic diseases, whether it's diabetes, whether it's cancer, these things seem to be on the rise. So as a nation it feels like we've got more information than ever before, but when you look at the objective numbers, yeah, for some reason we're not going in the right direction. What's your your 30,000-ft view on it? 30,000-ft There's more and more people in the world. So once you get the huge numbers, uh the diseases that affect most people are going to magnify. So just as a a matter of math, we're going to see more of these chronic diseases. Um but we're also going to be seeing two things that are happening that uh
5:21 actually oppose each other. One thing is that the lifestyle and dietary harms that have occurred over 20, 30, 50 years from in the industrialization of food, from the industrialization of health care, from degradation of the environment, those are all things that take time to manifest. And so to some extent, we are presently seeing that the fallout of some of the not so good moves that we made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and so on and so forth. So, decades later we're beginning to see the consequences, the devastation of things that happened decades ago. That's one side of elevating, increasing the
6:07 incidence and prevalence of of health conditions, bad health conditions. There's another side that is countervailing. And the other side, which is the side I That's the team I play on, is it really exciting because one thing that's different is that we have now have tremendous scientific power to get in there and probe diseases and also indeed probe probe health, which is something we're not doing often enough. And in so doing, we're actually able to find solutions to the problems that that counter some of those harms. So, we're beginning to discover now how do we actually prevent diabetes? How do we prevent cardiovascular disease? Can we reverse heart disease? And even conditions that seemed like no-win situations. And I like to talk about
6:54 this is that in my career, I never thought as a physician I would actually see the cure to cancer, the end of cancer. But actually I have to tell you, I have now seen where the end of cancer's coming from. I've seen how the war is going to finish. And because I've had well over a dozen patients and there are hundreds of people like this that are started in form that can go from stage four cancer, that's game over cancer, to stage zero. We can do this. And it's not for everybody yet, but we're beginning to see where the light at the end of the tunnel is and it involves your immune system. And some of the remarkable scientific breakthroughs are teaching us that our body heals itself against diseases as serious as cancer in ways
7:40 that the pharmaceutical industry can't by itself do, but it really relies on the body. So, when you talk about food as medicine or medicine as medicine, none of them are as powerful as what the body is hardwired to do by itself. When I think about something like cancer, it's slightly terrifying because it feels like a game of roulette. It feels like the the people that get cancer, it's completely random, and that our outcomes are also a game of roulette. And this is as someone that knows very little about cancer. I hear someone that I thought was very very healthy get cancer, and then their outcomes, whether they they beat it or not, also seem to be largely down to chance sometimes. That's how it seems. What do you think of that view? Yeah, I'm going to give you a brand new
8:25 view of thinking about cancer. And that is that we are all forming cancer in our bodies all the time, from the time we were kids. You don't have clinical cancer, you haven't gone to the doctor to get a diagnosis, still started forming cancers. And let me tell you why. Cancers are like pimples in our body. All right? And this is shocking to some people to hear, but our the human body is made up of about 40 trillion cells. That's more cells in our body than stars in a clear sky. All right? And these cells have to divide uh to be able to reproduce themselves, copy and paste. Every cell has its own genetic material called DNA. It's our instructions for how our cells are work.
9:12 So, you got to copy and paste your DNA. All right? Now, copying and pasting is a tricky thing to do really well. So, if I gave you a sentence to write, Stephen, and I said, "Copy it 10 times on a word document," you'll do it perfectly. If I get told you to copy it a thousand times, you're going to make a few mistakes. Good thing that we have spell check to fix it to catch it and fix it. But if I asked you to copy a single sentence 40 trillion times, you're going to make so many mistakes that your spell check isn't even going to be able to catch all of it, okay? And that's what's happening in our body every single day as we are replicating ourselves. We're going to make mistakes, and whenever there's a mistake that's being made that isn't caught and fixed,
10:00 that's a mutation. And so we have mutations that are forming in our body just a matter just as an outcome of being alive and doing our thing, and we're not sick from those mutations, but every mutation is the beginning of a microscopic cancer. Take a guess of how many mistakes in DNA of copying and pasting your own body are made every 24 hours. Take a guess. This has been calculated. Randomly. I you there's so many cells in my body, so it's going to be a big number, a million? Okay. Every day, every 24 hours, there are 10,000 mistakes that are made in your body that your body doesn't catch, that keep on that propagate in the document of our body as
10:47 it goes on. 10 10,000. Each of those is a microscopic cancer. A microscopic cancer is just that, it's microscopic. It's too small to be seen with the naked eye, but it's abnormal, and that thing could turn turn into a big tumor that could eventually kill you. So why don't we die from cancer all the time? Now this is actually something that I see as a physician. I have a patient diagnosed with cancer, they always ask me, "Dr. Lee, why me? Why did I get breast cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain tumor?" A very, very natural question, and I do my best to try to provide an empathic answer to that question. But as a researcher, I have a more interesting question. Given the number of mutations that occur in our body every single day, why don't
11:34 we get cancer more often? Why don't we all get cancer as kids? You know, cancer can happen in children, but not as often as we have mutations. And it turns out this was the great unlock for me in terms of health. The reason that we don't become more sick from all kinds of diseases, including cancer, is because our body is hardwired with its own health defense systems. So, that we've got these swashbuckling defenses that are firing on all cylinders all day long from the from the moment we're born until our very last breath, these systems that are inside our body defend our health, including the microscopic cancers, spots them, takes them out, kind of like a police cruiser patrolling a quiet
12:20 neighborhood, sees a drug dealer on the corner, pops him in the back of the police vehicle and takes him away, cleaning up the neighborhood. That's how our body naturally cleans up these microscopic cancers. And so, when you talk about cancer as a scary disease, you're thinking about the person whose body has failed to detect and eliminate the microscopic cancers and it's become large enough to actually become a threat. Now, here's a question for you. So, we tell women to actually do a self breast exam when they're taking a shower. You know, look for lumps or bumps and you know, if you find one, you know, certainly go to your doctor immediately for an exam. The smallest cancer that you could feel with a trained person can feel with their with their hands in the breast is
13:08 1 cm in diameter. A 1 cm breast cancer already has 1 billion cancer cells that have already multiplied. That microscopic cancer multiplied a billion times. That's the smallest one you can feel. Now, immune system's not taking that them out, all right? So, you need a better immune system if you want a shot at this, not just chemo or hormonal therapy. And that's where some of these incredible advances are taking place. But, there's another one. In order to feed a billion cancer cells, you need blood vessels to feed them. So, the cancers as they get bigger, they hijack our own circulation to feed themselves, okay? It's kind of like terrorists kicking in the cockpit door
13:53 to take over the controls of the plane. They want to actually get your blood vessels to feed themselves. Now, normally the body knows how to control those blood vessels. It's called angiogenesis. Angio blood blood vessels, genesis how the body grows and controls them. That's my area of research. So, naturally our body knows how to prevent blood vessels from feeding cancers, and yet knows how to direct blood vessels to feed healthy tissues. So, guess what? A 1-cm tumor with 1 billion cancer cells is fed by 100 million blood vessels coursing into the tumor to feed them. And we've studied this in the laboratory. The moment that a single blood vessel touches a tumor, tiny microscopic tumor, it will grow 16,000 times in size in just 2 weeks.
14:39 Wow. All right. So, I've told you some scary statistics, but now let me kind of give you the where the breakthroughs are coming through, right? So, with this kind of knowledge, what do we what can we do with cancers? Not just breast cancers, but in general. Number one, we know that if you boost your immune system with foods, with exercise, diet, lifestyle, you're going to actually make your immune defenses a lot stronger to patrol your body to wipe out those microscopic cancers. That's why healthy diet lifestyle lowers the risk of cancer. That's why eating the right foods that boost your immunity can substantially lower your risk of cancer, as well. We also know that you can eat foods that support prompt up fortify
15:25 your body's natural ability to control blood vessels. Keep those blood vessels where they're supposed to be and get rid of those blood vessels where you don't want them to be, which is kicking in the cockpit to take over your circulation to feed cancers. So, if you eat foods like that are anti-angiogenic foods like at on stable, you've got um coffee and tea. Both of those contain natural substances that cut off the blood supply and starve cancers. That's a good thing. So, that's why we know our what we do with our diet can actually help to lower the risk of cancer as well. I'm assuming the opposite also applies. I mean, I can eat foods, I can drink things that cause my body to malfunction. I mean, makes the blood vessels unregulated, makes and starts to
16:10 feed the cancer, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, let's talk let's talk a little bit about that. So, So, I told you the body's hardwired with these defenses, shields up, right? That's what we want to do. Cuz shields are already normally up, you want to raise them higher. But, what about and this is a brilliant question you're asking, a very probing question. What are the things that take your shields down? Right? What are the things that turn off the smoke alarm in your house, that unlock the doors? Can I take a guess? Is it this? Okay. Now, I know the answer that you're setting this conversation up for, which is a burger with meat. Uh is that actually uh disease causing? And I would I would tell you that yes and no. A
16:57 burger is something that many people enjoy eating and I would say eating meat, eating burgers, even eating ultra-processed foods once in a while is not going to harm you if your health defenses are naturally strong. But, if you make it a habit, a regular habit of eating this at the expense of eating healthier foods, more plant-based foods, less processed foods, okay? Um you are actually going to tip the uh your odds where the diseases are more likely to get you. What that What that means is that overeating fast foods like burgers will actually contribute to taking your
17:43 uh health defenses down. Shields down. So what are those things then that bring the shield down you were saying? Okay, excess sodium, too much salt, which it can be present in a lot of restaurant foods. People eat out a lot, go to restaurants all the time. You ever You ever go to the back of a kitchen of a restaurant to see how they're salt and season their food? Patrons love salty food. It makes food taste really great. There's a you know, our brains uh respond very well to salty food. That high sodium levels actually speeds up accelerates our cellular aging. So we actually age faster, but it also um uh is a huge wear and tear on our health defenses, specifically our circulation. Our our blood vessels, our angiogenesis system is taken down by excess salt.
18:30 Okay, I've got a question here. Obviously there's a a big movement at the moment around hydration Mhm. and electrolytes. And these electrolytes have magnesium, potassium, they have sodium in them. Yeah. So a lot of people are now taking electrolytes to hydrate themselves. Is there a a risk here? So the great news is that the healthy body has got its own titration system for electrolytes. If you drink uh a electrolyte-fortified beverage, you get Your body's going to take everything it needs and it's going to pee out the rest. You're going to eliminate through your urine, all right? However, sodium uh is one of those electrolytes is present like you're not drinking electrolyte fluid all day long, but sodium you're eating it in almost every food that you
19:15 actually have, except perhaps dessert. But maybe even then. And so, this is one of the things that we realized is sodium is a high risk for hypertension, high blood pressure, inflammation of the lining of your circulation, and that that sets up for a lot of badness downstream when it comes to your health, and it takes down your circulation health defenses that we talked about. High blood sugar can also do the same thing. So, if you're eating an excess of added sugar, we all have heard by now glucose spikes and glucose crashes. I don't actually use those words, by the way. I don't like to actually cast our body's metabolism in terms of spikes and crashes. I think those are fear words that get attention. They they do make you pay attention to it, but in fact, really our the healthy
20:01 body sort of has, you know, smooth ups and smooth downs. They're gentle slopes up and down of our blood sugar, and that's completely fine. All right? And and it should be like that. However, if you have an uphill climb of your blood glucose, and it continues to stay up, that can actually happen if you're eating too much added sugar. Okay? Added sugar, ultra-processed foods. What happens is that your blood sugars your intake of the sugar, glucose, rises up up up up up, and now your body has to your metabolism has to chase that blood sugar down, and it's got to work harder and make more insulin, and eventually you just wear out that system, and then you have a high high blood blood glucose and an insensitive metabolism, and that's the beginning of sort of the the dominoes
20:49 starting to fall apart in your body. And so, sugar, high blood sugar, added sugar is a problem. You get it from fruit, not a problem. Okay? No one's going to be eating a crazy amount of fruit. This is why extremes aren't good. Diversity. Switch it out. Keep it interesting for yourself. This is what our human nature wants anyway. It's how we're hardwired. You'll actually be fine. So, salt, sugar, those are two offenders, okay? Alcohol is another one that actually can take down your health defenses over time. You know, people say, "Well, what about red wine? Isn't red wine healthy?" What I would say is that actually the fermented products the or the bioactives that come out of red grapes from the skin of red grapes that's found in red wine,
21:35 those there can be some healthful properties of the resveratrol and other polyphenols that come out of that are in wine, but it's never the alcohol. It's not the alcohol in the beer, the wine, the whiskey. Nope. None of that is The alcohol is is a universal toxin. Toxic to your brain, toxic to your liver, toxic to your heart. Can't get away from that. Your body will recover. Shields up. Little it can take a ding. It's like a you know, like a drink is sort of like a driving behind a truck and it flings a little pebble right into your windshield. You might get a little spider in the windshield. Okay, don't worry. It'll repair itself. You'll you'll fix yourself. You'll bounce back. It's not going to break your windshield. But if you keep on drinking, you're actually going to smash your windshield and that's why alcoholism is so devastating to the health. But you know,
22:22 regular a small amount of alcohol So, alcohol itself is is a toxin. Do you drink? Uh I I rarely drink and when I drink, it's in a moderation. Mhm. And I was thinking about stress as well. Does that bring down the So, besides the foods you eat, other things that can compromise your health defenses. And by the way, there are five health defenses. We talked about blood vessels, we talked about immunity, but there are three other ones that are core to functioning in the healthiest way possible. You want to If you want longevity, you need all five of your health defenses and more to be working in your favor. But stress, what does stress do? Lowers your immune system. Shields down. All right? Those microscopic cancers, whoa. That's why stressful people are more vulnerable to
23:07 developing diseases like cancer, all right? Stress also causes your blood pressure to go up and causes neurotransmitters, hormones to be released from your brain and your kidneys, your adrenal glands that actually wear down your circulation. Now, your angiogenesis system is also not functioning as well to protect yourself and keep good blood flow going where it needs to go. Now, your circulation is actually down. Um so, again, stress also can actually damage the DNA. We talked about naturally copying, pasting, and having errors. Add some stress to it. Now, it's kind of like you're trying to copy that sentence I was telling you perfectly. Now, I'm going to come and just smash your fingers down every now and then and let's see if you actually make a mistake. You will, all right? Stress will actually do that. It's devastating
23:53 to have so much stress continuously. Listen, by the way, I want to be really clear to anybody listening or watching this. A little stress is actually good for you. You know, like just being coddled all day long and living in a happy bubble, that doesn't That's not That's not good for our health, either. We kind of get lackadaisical, we let our guard down. Little stress, I mean, anybody who's hardworking, you know, successful knows that, you know, it's not the no pain, no gain. It's that the the the grit that goes along with it, which gives a little stress. Keeps us sharp, you know? Which is a Which is a good thing. You want to be on You want to be on. So, little stress is good, but when that stress is unabated, it literally sinks your health defenses. It is just taking those shields down.
24:39 Yeah, I I've noticed that with myself. I've I've spent the last 10 years running businesses, a little bit more than 10 years now, but probably like the last 13 years running businesses. And the only times when I really get sick, where I'm like out for a week, and I really, really feel it, is 1 week after 2 weeks of stress. So, when I say 2 weeks of stress, what I mean there is when something happens in my life, business, where that it's kind of chronic and it's enduring stress, I can deal with having a stressful day. I can deal with having two stressful days in a row, but when I've had like 2 weeks of an enduring issue, like an enduring angst or a problem, almost perfectly predictably, a week later, I'm sick. And I'm extremely rarely sick, cuz I think I sleep really
25:24 well. Like, I think I eat really clean. And so, it's taught me something about if I zoom out on that and see what's going on in my body. Well, eventually, like my body's kind of my immune system is running out of energy almost. More than your immune system. So, when you're super stressed, it also interferes with your ability to sleep well. Yeah. When you're sleeping well, you know, sleeping is something that I was taught when I was a kid, when you're sleeping, you're resting, and when you're resting, you're not active, right? Well, that's just our physical self. It turns out when we're sleeping, even though our muscles may not be moving like we are during the day, in fact, a lot of other systems, including our health defenses, are being repaired, renewed, regenerated, rebooted while we are sleeping. So, in those ideally 8 hours,
26:10 7 to 9 hours, 8's the sweet num- sweet number, you know, our brain is cleansing itself, detoxifying itself, releasing Do you know about the glymphatic system in the brain? No, it's what it's you do. Okay. Well, the there's a there's a um sewer system of the great of in our brains that's called the glymphatic system, and it's shut tightly during the daytime when we're using our brain, doing our work, uh whatever we're doing. And during the day, we accumulate a lot of uh toxins in inside our brain during the day. It's just a matter of functioning. All right? And what happens is that those toxins accumulate, which is that, you know, at the end of a really, really tough, hard day, you got if not a headache, you've got your you feel like your brain is
26:55 it's full. It's cup runneth over, right? All right. So, when you go to sleep, guess what? This sewer system, it's like the sewers of pair underneath Paris. The grates open up suddenly and it drains those toxins out while you're sleeping and only when you get good sleep. So, when you're stressed and you're not getting good sleep, you start to accumulate these toxins that are never quite cleaned up and your brain is not that cleaned up. When your brain's not that cleaned up, you're feeling foggy. So, think about the you know, when you're in college, you're pulling all-nighter or go to a party or whatever and you're and you're staying up all night. You're never quite the same. It takes a while for your brain to clean up itself. When your brain is foggy, you tend to not make as good decisions. I'm too tired to work out. I'm too tired
27:40 I don't care what I eat. I'm just hungry. I'm going to eat anything. You start to make bad decisions when it comes to diet and lifestyle. You see? So it's the stress can cascade on your health like that. Is there a certain stage of sleep where the glymphatic system kicks in? Yeah, it's during like the deep REM sleep. Okay. That dreaming sleep. Okay. And that usually comes later in the night as well. Correct. Correct. And and in more quali- quantity later in the night. So, you need to really be getting a lot of sleep. Now, the other thing about about deep sleep is while you're sleeping really deeply, your metabolism is also burning down fat. So, you think that you're not working out during the night? You're right, you're not actually exercising, but in fact, your metabolism is burning fat. Because while you're sleeping and your insulin levels don't need to be
28:27 high because you're not eating, insulin levels go down, your metabolism is shifts gears. I I started to give people the analogy, it's like your your body is a race car, sports car, like a Ferrari. During the day, you are in gear to drive, accumulate speed, and and your your revenue engines at night, you shift gears where you're actually burning down fat. You you don't need to accumulate more fuel. Now you're burning down the fuel. So when you're sleeping, aren't you burning away fat? But when you don't sleep well, when you don't sleep long enough, you're not burning down that fuel. That fuel accumulates. Day or two of not good sleep, that's that's okay. Think about flying overseas, getting some jet lag, you got
29:13 to catch up once you get Catch up, you feel better. All right? But think about this like day in and day out chronically stressed people are never getting good sleep, add a little booze, alcohol to the to the equation, you can kind of see the problems that are going to build up. Your brain's going to be foggy, your metabolism is going to be out of whack, you're not burning as much fat from the calories that you ate during the day. Now inflammation starts to rise in your body, and that inflammation really takes down your health defenses, and now you're much more vulnerable. So in your own example of where chronic stress leads to poor sleep, and then you get sick, no surprise. If we go back up the thread that we were talking about the sort of individual perspective on cancer, and I was looking at some stats here, and it says that the number one Google search related to
29:59 cancer is breast cancer. One in two people will develop some form of cancer during their lifetime. That's according to the NHS. Cancer is the second highest leading cause of death worldwide, and by 2040, there will be 28 million new cases of cancer each year worldwide. But one of the most shocking things that I saw was that globally early onset cancer incidence has risen by about 80% by 1990 and 2019. And there was an article which I had sent to my team a couple of weeks ago. It's it's called the worrying puzzle behind the rise of early onset cancer. And it says that there are rising cases of breast, collateral, and other cancers in people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. And it posits the question, what is going on? Over the last 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49 year
30:45 olds has increased in 24 different countries including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway and Argentina. I mean what is going on? Yeah. That's a big question. So, are we seeing the results of more harms in our environment that we're being exposed to that are more toxic and leading to earlier incidence of clinical cancer? They're talking about clinical diagnosed cancer, not the invisible microscopic ones that are forming all the time. Um it's yes, it's very worrying. Are are we being exposing ourselves to something that is more commonly encountered today than before? Number one. Number two, are our defenses being taken down by
31:32 forces that we didn't appreciate are compromising us? Most likely both. It's most likely uh I mean the human makeup hasn't changed. And so it's got to be the fact a combination that we're being exposed to more harmful things and though some of those harmful things are actually that they are provoking more cancers but and we're also being exposed to things that take down our health defenses. So, the balance is being tipped against us and it's true. I can tell you that when I went to medical school, I mean colorectal cancer was something that you rarely saw in people even in their 50s. It was for much older uh people. Uh now to see uh I mean there's even teenagers that have actually developed colorectal cancer which was unfathomable. So, I will tell you one thing that's
32:18 actually arisen in terms of like what are some of the clues of these things that could be a happening, right? So, we are talking about climate change and all the things that are happening in the environment. That's a that's almost too big a conversation to have to answer a question like this but we I think we cannot afford to ignore the fact that the environment, the climate that we live in has changed. But, there are other things that we're beginning to unearth that we didn't realize until just within the last few years. And one of them is the is how many inflammatory microplastics we are ingesting. When I was growing up, uh my mom, very uh well-intentioned, would store foods in plastic, leftovers.
33:05 Uh and we'd buy foods that came in plastic packages, right? We didn't think a think second have a second thought about it. A plastic cup, Styrofoam cup. Go to a picnic, you're eating off of a plastic plate, right? I mean, these are all common uh experiences that we all have uh in the modern developed world. Well, what if I told you that we now realize that the plastic touching food can shed the plastic itself as microparticles into the food, and then we eat the food? And okay, we've known this for maybe more than a decade. Maybe there are small plastic particles uh that come off. But, you know, hey, there's no harm, right? We don't We haven't been able to discover it. I I used to say that. Now, just within the last few years, we're beginning to pinpoint that
33:53 number one, it does plastics can actually embed themselves in our body. We you know where. We also know that these plastics uh are associated with inflammation. That is a big red flag. The clock's on alarm should start going off. And third is that the volume of plastics that we're consuming is crazy. There was a study that came out recently that showed that in normal autopsies of people that didn't die of a brain problem, that when they were doing the autopsies and looking for plastic, that we could find them. And the amount of plastic that was found in the average human brain is about the amount you'd find in a typical plastic picnic spoon.
34:39 Just distributed throughout the brain. This is like normal It's a person who has died of something else. Wow. Does that mean that, you know, like you and I are actually you got a plastic spoon worth of plastic in our brain? There's been some people that calculated, and this has been the actual calculate the math has been challenged, but there was an estimate that, you know, some people might consume as much as a credit card's worth of plastic every single week in their food if they're not careful about it. And let me just tell you where we're finding microplastics. And, you know, I want to get to the point where we're talking about the healthy foods that can actually turn the ship around. How do we turn the battleship of of unhealth back to health? So, we're back on the course that everybody wants to go to. We want to go to that north We don't know how do we find our north star for health? So, I do want to get to that, but let me just say something about microplastics.
35:25 We've now found microplastics in the brain, as I mentioned to you. We found it in the bloodstream. A group in Italy actually looking at men who had narrowing of the carotid artery. That's the blood vessel feeding the brain from the comes from the heart right to the brain, the carotid artery. Up through the neck. Through the neck. They found that the narrowing that can occur in some men can accumulate plastic. They can actually find plastic particles as photographs of the chunks of plastic, the particles, fragments of plastic in there. And they followed them over a period of time. Those men who had plastic embedded in their blood vessel lining had a fourfold increase in the chances of having a fatal heart attack or a stroke like years later. Okay. 400%
36:10 Four fourfold, yeah. Okay. Now, that's that's not kidding, right? So, now you're Now, we're beginning to take notice of this, but we're also finding microplastics in breast milk. We're finding microplastics in testicles. We're finding microplastics in human semen. How's it get there? And urologists who are doing surgery on the penis are finding that in in the human flesh, when they look into the microscope, we never used to look for this. Now we're looking for it. That there's even microplastics in the flesh of the penis. Okay? So, if anybody listening to this isn't taking notice about microplastics now, it's time to start thinking about this. So, one of the questions is I and I'm not saying that the rise and rate
36:56 of cancers that we're seeing is due to microplastics. What I mean What I am saying is that we're beginning to wake up to the fact. So, let's close off on microplastics. What are the the easy wins in our lives, do you think, when you think about microplastics? Is it just removing anything plastic that I eat from? Or are there some sort of easy, cheap wins? Is it my shampoo? Is it my frying pan? Is it a container? Yeah, so I always tell people that the easiest way to lower your exposure to microplastics is to throw out your plastic cups, your plastic plates, and your plastic silverware. Mhm. Okay? And get ceramic or glass. Uh that's the best way to actually avoid those. And also, when you're buying food, try to avoid food that comes
37:41 clearly packaged in plastic. All right? Now, I do want to point out one thing cuz right here on this table, we are looking at a tray full of beverages, and I can already identify the matcha, and this looks like a cup of coffee, and we've got English breakfast tea. I've done a lot of research on tea, all right? But I'm noticing something that green tea, which is universally healthy, the polyphenols in green tea lower the risk of inflammation, they actually improve your metabolism, lower your risk of cancer, they're heart healthy. Before you take that sip, though, let me tell you, I see a tea bag in there. Okay? And there's different ways of brewing your tea. It turns out research from the University of Montreal have now shown that
38:27 tea bags can shed microplastics. So you can have a billion particles of microplastic shed from a single tea bag. Okay. All right, so I just changed your mind, right? So look, this is the power of awareness and understanding. I probably should have stopped you before I would have you were like, "Why didn't you save my life?" You let me drink it first, but I I spat it out. I I I just as you were doing it I was like, "Uh uh." All right, but look, there's another there's another one there that's got lemon ginger tea. This is like a herbal tea, that's fine. Listen, I I would also tell you with flavored teas just be cautious. Like always check anything that's been machined to be a little bit more than nature. Tea bags are supposed to be paper, right? Well, in order to prevent the paper from ripping, the manufacturers of the tea
39:13 bags spray with a small amount of plastic to have it hang together better, and that's the plastic that comes off. But what about the lemon and ginger in this lemon ginger tea that that sounds so appealing and calming, right? And and something that most people would find nice as an herbal tea. Well, listen you're you're relying on a factory to actually put that lemon flavor, ginger, ginger flavor. Is it real lemon or is it real ginger? Always look at the ingredient label to know what's in there, or just buy your own tea and squeeze your own lemon and and add your own piece of ginger. These are ways to actually kind of avoid the potential exposures to toxins that come from ultra-processed food. So all this conversation about, you know, avoid ultra- ultra-processed foods and watch
39:58 out for all those harmful things, you know, it's actually quite easy to dodge them if you just have in your mindset that you're just going to make it yourself and it's absolutely easy. Now, I would tell you in something interesting about English breakfast tea. We did research at the Angiogenesis Foundation, a nonprofit I I looked at to look at different types of teas, different types of green tea, Japanese tea, Chinese jasmine tea, uh English tea. And we were always assuming, again, this is the power of food as medicine research. We were always assuming that the green tea is going to be the best. I'd always heard that Japanese green tea is going to be like the ultra best. And what we found was that English tea, specifically Earl Grey tea, actually was the most potent when it actually supported your blood vessels,
40:45 your body's defense system for angiogenesis to keep your circulation healthy. Wow, what a surprise that is. And this spoke to me about the fact that we can't make assumptions. We need to look at facts. We need to look at data. And so, I'm a big fan of Earl Grey now. Now, what could what what might make Earl Grey give Earl Grey its superpower? Well, this is where knowing a little bit about what you're eating is actually useful because Earl Grey is a fermented uh is a is a black tea. It's got bergamot in it, and bergamot is a kind of a citrus, so maybe it's combining those uh ingredients that actually provides the superpower. But I do see matcha on this uh uh tray. I want to tell you about matcha cuz it is a Matcha is truly a super enriched
41:34 polyphenol enriched tea. A lot of people don't realize it. There's I don't No tea bag in it, so don't worry. So, a lot of people think about matcha uh as just another green tea, but it's not another green tea. It is made with green tea leaves, the same kind of green tea leaves, but uh the as you would find in any green tea. However, it's what's the composition of matcha. Matcha is green tea that is before it's ready for harvest is grown under a shade that changes its chemical structure, natural chemical structure a little bit, so it's got a lot of potency to it. And what happens with matcha is they take the tea leaf they take out the stem of the green of the of the green tea leaf and they ground up the actual leaf into a powder.
42:21 Now, what's in that green tea leaf? You've got not just some of the polyphenols that might steep out in the cup whether you're using a tea bag or loose leaf tea, you are getting all the polyphenols suspended in that. So, now you get 100% polyphenol, okay, in matcha. So, go ahead you're Go ahead do it. Okay good. That one's good. All right. Okay, for matcha. And because you're getting the tea leaf ground to it, you're also getting your dietary fiber. That dietary fiber's good for your gut health, your microbiome, good for your metabolism, good for lowering inflammation. And the polyphenols found in green tea have also been uh matcha matcha tea have also been found in the lab to kill
43:06 breast cancer stem cells. What's a breast cancer stem cell? What's a stem cell cancer stem cell? Well, look, stem cells are these renewable cells. All right. And um cancers contain stem cells that help the cancers come back, right? If you got cancer, you get it treated, one the one thing you don't want it to do is to come back. So, um and by the way, other foods can also do kill cancer stem cells. Purple potatoes uh that you might have seen in the market, they're um kind of purpley looking on the outside, slice it open dark purple on the inside. All right. Turns out that those purple potatoes have something called anthocyanins. Purple potatoes have been studied in the lab, okay, at Penn State University and been shown to kill colon cancer stem
43:52 cells which contribute to the colon cancer coming back. So, full disclaimer, I am I made a very very big investment uh a seven-figure investment into a matcha company a couple of years ago. And if you look at the search trend data on the subject of matcha. I don't know if you've seen this, but that's I'll throw it up on the screen for anyone that's watching on video, but you can see how it's just come out of nowhere, it seems, it's exploded. And when you say that matcha cells have an impact on breast cancer cells, what does that mean in reality? Does it Cuz obviously the the the conclusion one might jump to is that if you drink matcha, you're lowering your risk of breast cancer. But that's not necessarily what you're saying. What I What I mean What I am saying is that drinking green tea in its most
44:38 helpful form, okay, um raises your body's health defense systems. And by having better health defense systems, better immunity, better control of your blood vessels, better control over your DNA and those mutations, and if you can actually kill some of those stem cells, cancer stem cells, that's going to be in your favor as well. That is overall going to actually lower your risk of cancer. And so, I think that And by the way, the other thing that green tea and matcha can actually do is improve your metabolism. It It's really pretty much all good. My My great uncle, by the way, lived to 104 years old. Vital, intact, uh independent. He told me that he attributed his longevity and his
45:23 vitality to the fact that he lived at the base of a mountain that grew tea. That every morning he got up and he walked up He walked up stone steps, a stone path, to a tea garden, and he had freshly picked tea. It's all organically grown and everything. And he And he drank tea all day long. He probably had 10 cups of green tea a day. And this has been his whole life. He sat with his uh uh close friends who are also very vibrant and and elderly, um social connection, all right? Watch the sunrise. It's very calming. Do you drink it? Absolutely. Um I've got to just going up the the thread again a little bit. You mentioned the word colorectal. Mhm. Where is the colorectal cancer? So, we have a little um model here.
46:09 Cuz I'm asking this because I'm wondering why that type of cancer is increasing. So, is there is there a particular reason why? Well, okay. So, let's do a quick uh medical school uh course crash course for podcasters. Um the the gut When we talk about gut health, most people think of the gut as sort of lower down in your belly or maybe even just your stomach. But, the gut actually starts in your mouth. And it runs down down down about 40 ft worth of stuff, organs. Uh your esophagus, your stomach, your small intestines, your large intestines. By the way, these squigglies are your small intestines. All right? This blue is your large intestines. This is like a It's shaped like a horseshoe. It's big, thick
46:55 uh tube that that's kind of framing your small intestines. And then, it goes down the poop shoot, the rectum, the anus. That's the end of your gut. All right. So, the colon is really the large uh framing thick part of the gut. It's near the very end. All right? So, all this squiggly small intestines winds up here uh at the beginning of the colon. The colon goes up. It's called the ascending colon. And then, it makes a sharp angle turn right across your belly, kind of like a belt, right across your belly. This is colon here. And then, it goes to the descending colon. Take the elevator down down down down down down. You see the blue down it's going down. And then, it kind of takes a little jog at the very end and goes down into your rectum
47:41 and your anus. Okay. Right. So, the blue thing is my colon. So, this is where cancer incidence is rising in young people. So, you're talking about the rising in instance of colorectal cancer. That could be a cancer that's typically uh either on the right side of the colon either the going up up the up side up the elevator Yeah. or down the elevator on the right side of the left side. Okay. And okay. And it turns out that we've known for a long time that unhealthy diets are linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer, specifically processed meats. So, the World Health Organization contain considers processed meats, salami, bologna, ultra-processed, you know, kind of deli meats, delicatessen meats you find at a delicatessen. All right.
48:28 Um tho- those would be uh considered uh carcinogens. And and they're they're they are uh highly linked to an increased risk of bowel cancers. Now, why would that be? Well, it turns out that think about it, if you're eating a ton of meat, all right, you're actually exposing the gut to a lot of those processed meat carcinogens that when it sits around in your colon, not one not not once in a while. Go to the ballgame, have a hot dog, enjoy yourself, but if you eat it day in and day out, you're giving a lot of exposure uh to your gut. This time, angiogenesis. You've talked about the link that that has to cancer. Angiogenesis, from my um novice understanding, is how the blood cells provide blood to different parts
49:16 of our body, right? And in the case of cancer, there's this the angiogenesis system is making a mistake. Is that simplified version of it? Yeah, so angiogenesis, which is a field I study study, you break it down uh it to what its elemental parts of angio, blood, blood vessel, genesis, how the body grows and maintains them. So, angiogenesis is how our body grows and maintains our circulation. A lot of people don't know this, but our circulation is one of our body's health defense systems, and it's so extensive that in a typical adult, there are 60,000 mi worth of blood vessels packed inside our body. These are the highways and byways that deliver blood to every organ and tissue. But, that means that
50:03 they also deliver the air we breathe, the oxygen we're breathing in, and the nutrients that we're eating. So, we eat good things, they're going into our bloodstream, and our blood vessels are angiogenesis system develop delivering to every cell in the body. Now, you eat something bad, similarly, or you breathe something in bad, similarly, your those blood vessels are delivering negative. Now, inside the blood vessels is a lining. It's called a the lining is like a clear, like a plastic wrap inside the blood vessel called the endothelial layer. That's like a layer of ice, like on an ice skating rink, to ensure that everything in the blood vessels are flowing smoothly without getting caught on the walls. So, when you have cardiovascular disease, too much
50:48 too much salt, to hypertension, when you have diabetes, where you're actually wearing down the lining of the blood vessels, endothelial layer is being damaged. It's like damaging the lining of your angiogenesis defense system has really deadly consequences because it's like scraping up the ice on an ice skating rink. You know, if you actually have a lot of ice skaters on a rink, after a while, it's unskateable, right? You can't get on it. And what will happen in your bloodstream is then elements in your blood get caught Oh. along the walls, and they build up. And that's actually how blood vessels narrow up. So, that's one of the areas of So, angiogenesis actually is intended to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the tissues that need it for to maintain your health.
51:34 But, because it's so critical, it's also very, very carefully controlled, so you don't have blood vessels growing where they should not be growing, like in your joints, in your eyes, or of course to cancers. You don't definitely don't want to be feeding cancers by delivering oxygen and nutrients to them. I've got this graph which shows different things that cause more or less angiogenesis. You've seen this graph, but Okay. So, you are showing a graph that I I generated, my my organization generated. And this is actually, you're looking at the experiment that got me into food as medicine. Let me explain to you the experiment. Um I'll just put it I'll put it over here. So, um so, we were studying
52:20 at one point drugs. And we're trying to discover drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments. So, we were looking for our drugs that could cut off the blood supply to tumors. So, we were screening uh lots of chemicals that biotech companies were developing and inventing and professors were inventing and said, "Hey, can you take a look at this see this could be a worthwhile drug that could cut off the blood supply to a tumor as a cancer treatment?" All right, and at the time there were no such treatments, so it was all discovery. Like this was, you know, a like the like the golden age of discovery when it came to angiogenesis. We were testing, "Oh my gosh, this thing could really stop blood vessels. Could we develop this into our cancer treatment?" Ultimately, yes. The answer was yes, but we were looking for them. And we would And so, we developed
53:06 a system where we could add a substance into a laboratory test system to see if blood vessels would grow or shrink. And so, here on this graph, you can see at the very top a very long bar of blood vessels growing. That's normal healthy blood vessels growing out as long as they can. And then what we would do is we'd throw drugs into it. And we would see if we could actually shrink them up. And so, some of the uh shorter bars uh are cancer drugs. Uh you can see them uh in this color in blue. Not surprisingly, some of the cancer drugs were making the blood vessels smaller. Hey, this could be a good candidate drug. And we were also testing other uh drugs that were available, not used
53:52 for cancer, to see if they would work. Sure, we discovered some of those, too. But, I did something a little bit subversive, and as you know, you know, if you want to be disruptive, you got to sometimes um disrupt yourself in order to be able to do this. So, this is like our experiment that we were doing at the Angiogenesis Foundation. We decided to disrupt ourselves. So, we said, "We have a whole system of drugs to test. Let's remove half of them, and let's swap them out with powders that came from food." All right? Just to see what would happen. And when we actually tested foods in the same system used to develop drugs, food as medicine, tested in the same system that medicines are developed, we found what you see on this bar chart in red, we actually found that dietary factors, stuff that's found in
54:39 food, could actually cut down the blood supply that would be growing to feed a cancer. In other words, there's anti-angiogenic foods. You could see the green tea, you could see the onions and garlics and red grapes and strawberries. Um it was really an eye-opener to me for when I saw these results, it made my jaw drop. And I said, "My god, foods have potency just like drugs." I I I was a skeptic. All right? And I And it made me just kind of realize like this is something that I had to pursue. This was an area of research that I absolutely had to actually look further into. A drug takes a decade and a billion or more dollars to be able to develop from
55:25 uh from scratch to reaching a patient, and then not everyone who needs a treatment can actually get the drug. But, a food has immediacy. You discover something amazing about a food, whether it's matcha, whether it's purple potatoes, whether it's a strawberry, that could be that that that immediacy could be used beneficially without toxicity. All right? Uh and affordably. And so I just saw this as this was this experiment is what brought me into the realm of food as medicine. So I'm going to ask some stupid questions here. So on here I can see that for example soy extract or this less angiogenesis, which is what I understand is the the growth of these blood vessels. But does that mean that if I have lots of soy extract or arc-
56:11 artichoke or parsley or berries, that it's going to cause other parts of my body not to grow blood cells? this is the great question. But let me kind of reframe the question as you're asking it. If uh experiments are able to show that certain foods can uh prevent blood vessels from growing, will that actually cause a problem with your body's health defenses to keep uh blood vessels from growing in healthy tissues? All right? Answer is no. And here's why. As a health defense system, our angiogenesis system is completely designed to yoke in the right number of blood vessels to give just amount just the right amount of blood flow. Not too much, not too little. I call it the Goldilocks zone. You know Goldilocks the
56:58 fairy tale? Um you know, the bears were home invaders, they broke into the house, and they were looking for chairs and porridge and beds. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. All of our health defenses, including the angiogenesis health defense, is hardwired to keep the body just right. So, what that means is that eating foods like artichokes or strawberries or soy can actually help your body prevent extra blood vessels from growing towards cancer, for example, and and other disease tissues, but it will not override the body's natural ability to get the right amount of blood vessels to the right tissue. So, you don't have to worry about starving your healthy tissues, you're just uh cutting off the uh uh bad blood vessels that you should I can I call it like a landscaper on a
57:45 golf course that that breaks out the lawnmower to mow that uh the the golf course so that it's got a perfect level um of the lawn. You're not going to actually uh carve out a bald spot uh uh in on in the country club. You're going to get just the right amount. Similarly, and um we're not talking about this graph, there's another graph that can actually show foods that you can eat that can grow blood vessels, healthy blood vessels where you want them. And it turns out things like fruit peel uh uh can actually do that, and barley can grow new blood vessels, and dark chocolate can actually help to support blood vessels as well. And some of these things can also work on both sides of the equation. They can prune away the bad extra blood vessels, and they can grow them whenever you need them. So, your body is sort of like the gardener
58:30 extraordinaire. It knows exactly how to actually tend. You give them the right ingredients, they know exactly where to put the grass seed, and they know exactly where to mow the lawn. Have you ever had cancer in your family? Yes. Um cancer has touched my family like it has for most people. Um I had two uncles uh years ago that passed away. One passed away from colon cancer, one passed away from liver cancer. And I you know, I was a doctor at the time, and so I felt so uh helpless uh because as a doctor I could I could diagnose, I could lay hands on, I could feel the hard liver, I could feel the masses, and I felt at the time
59:16 helpless. Even though I was doing the research cancer research and finding future paths, I felt like this is we we're we're not there yet, and we can't I couldn't help him. I felt I felt powerless. Fast forward. We're now at a point where we're beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And my mother when my mother had cancer, so my uncle's sister, my mother, wound up having endometrial cancer. She was 80 years old. One day um had some bleeding, went to the hospital, found a mass. She had a hysterectomy to remove her uterus and ovaries and they found in there an endometrial cancer. That's a cancer of the lining of the uterus. The surgery and a little bit of
1:00:01 radiation is supposed to take care of it. Unfortunately, in her case, those little cancer stem cells, and it was microscopic cancers that were present, took off, raced off in her 80-year-old body, which, you know, weaker immune system when you're 80. All right, and within a few months after successfully recovering from the surgery, she had stage four cancer everywhere. All right. And her oncologist told me, uh uh Dr. Lee, you know, you're a doctor as well. You know this is serious and this is pretty much the time of game over. And now, times have changed. Science had advanced. Progress has advanced. At that time, when my mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer,
1:00:47 immunotherapy, the latest and greatest, I think, advancement in cancer treatment had just broken through and become approved. Immunotherapy is not chemotherapy. It doesn't actually poison the cancer. Immunotherapy is a medicine that you give a cancer patient that wakes up your own immune system. Whether you're a young person old person, it can wake up your immune system, all right? And my mother had immunotherapy. She was one of the early patients to get immunotherapy. And her own 80-year-old immune system woke up like a super like an army of super soldiers and went after that cancer. Now, we completely adjusted her diet to so that her body between treatments
1:01:34 would be as strong as possible, shields raised as we've been talking about. And we give her a little bit of radiation to to to help the the her immune system spot the cancer. Guess what happened? Three treatments of immunotherapy, three three weeks apart. So, time zero is the first treatment three weeks later, the next treatment, three weeks after that, the next treatment. All right? So, we're talking about you know, like total of nine weeks of three treatments, all right? Of these three treatments, we scanned her. Stage four went to stage zero. And she never had chemotherapy. Now, chemotherapy can be helpful, too, with immunotherapy, but this was where I saw
1:02:20 first hand, close up, in my own family, the ability to harness your body's own health defenses in a way that I couldn't do for my uncle 15 years ago before, and we lost him. And we were to save my mom, and I can tell you I literally had dinner with my mom two days ago, and she's 90 91, 10 11 years later, completely healthy, completely cancer-free. And by the way, this immunotherapy, if we could only get this to work as well for everyone. This is where we are in the history of medicine. We can see an end. We know how we can get to an end. We've actually seen successes. We just can't get it to work for everyone yet, and there are different ways to actually wake up your
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