How food can starve tumors and lift your cancer defenses

1. 0:00 – 2:17

   Intro

   1. WLDr. William Li0:00

      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 gonna finish, and here's how.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:10

      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.

   3. WLDr. William Li0:20

      I'm gonna 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 the problem. We are presently seeing the fallout of some of the 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." And I, 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.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett1:29

      And if you had to pick five based on the science you've seen, what would those top five be?

   5. WLDr. William Li1:33

      The good news is that it's food that we can eat every single day. So number one...

   6. SBSteven Bartlett1:40

      This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this 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 wanna 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 Li. If someone has just clicked on this conversation,

2. 2:17 – 3:03

   What Will People Out of This Conversation?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:17

      and they're asking themselves, they're wondering what they're gonna 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?

   2. WLDr. William Li2:30

      I would say that you're gonna 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 it's not 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. 3:03 – 4:24

   What Key Diseases Correlate to Diet?

   1. WLDr. William Li3:03

   2. SBSteven Bartlett3:03

      And what are the, the key diseases that people are and should be most concerned about today based on that correlation to the food that we eat?

   3. WLDr. William Li3:12

      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 meta- metabolic chaos. There's a whole litany of terrible conditions that happens every downstream from that, from eye disease to wounds that don't heal, et cetera, et cetera. Cancer is another one. Dementia is a big- bigger and bigger problem as our population ages. And a lot of people don't real- recognize this, but, you know, the, the saying that inflammation is a root cause of chronic disease, it's 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

4. 4:24 – 7:56

   Where Is Our Society at with Health and Food?

   1. WLDr. William Li4:24

      good along the way.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett4:24

      And where do you think we are as a society, especially as Westerners, as it relates to our relationship with health and food? Because when I look at some of the stats around life expectancy, there's been a bit, 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-

   3. WLDr. William Li4:57

      Yeah.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett4:57

      ... for some reason, we're not going in the right direction. What's your th- your 30,000-foot view on it?

   5. WLDr. William Li5:02

      30,000 foot, there's more and more people in the world, so once you get to huge numbers, uh, the diseases that affect most people are gonna magnify. So just as a, a matter of math, we're gonna see more of these chronic diseases. Um, but we're also gonna be seeing two things that are happening that, uh, 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 healthcare, from degradation of the environment, those are all things that take time to manifest. And so s- to some extent, we are presently seeing the, 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, devastation of things that happened decades ago. That's one side of elevating, increasing the...... 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 really exciting because one thing that's different is that we have now 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 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'll tell you, I have now seen where the end of cancer's coming from. I've seen how the war is gonna finish. And because I've had well over a dozen patients and there are hundreds of people like this that are starting to form that can go from stage four cancer, that's game over cancer, to stage zero. We can do this. And it... 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 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.

5. 7:56 – 14:40

   How Cancer Works in Our Body

   1. WLDr. William Li7:56

   2. SBSteven Bartlett7:56

      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 s- 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?

   3. WLDr. William Li8:23

      Yeah, I'm gonna give you a brand new 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 start, uh, 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 b- 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, uh, copy and paste. Every cell has its own genetic material called DNA. It's our instructions for how our cells are work. So you gotta copy and paste, uh, 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, Steven, and I said, "Copy it 10 times on a Word document," you'll do it perfectly. If I get... told you to copy it 1,000 times, you're gonna make a few mistakes. Good thing that we have spellcheck to fix it, to catch it and fix it. But if I asked you to copy a single sentence 40 trillion times, you're gonna make so many mistakes that your spellcheck isn't even gonna 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 gonna make mistakes. And whenever there's a mistake that's being made that isn't caught and fixed, that's a mutation. And so we have mutations that are forming in our body just as 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, uh, a- are made every 24 hours. Take a guess. This has been calculated randomly.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett10:28

      (laughs) Uh, well, I... you... there's so many cells in my body, so (laughs) uh, it's gonna be a big number. A million?

   5. WLDr. William Li10:33

      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 it goes on.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett10:48

      Mm-hmm.

   7. WLDr. William Li10:48

      Ten, 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, uh, 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 we get cancer more often? Why don't we all get cancer as kids? Uh, you know, uh, c- 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 neighborhood, sees a drug dealer on the corner, pops them in the back of the police vehicle and takes them 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, uh, a trained person can feel with their, with their hands in the breast is one centimeter in diameter. A one centimeter breast cancer already has one 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 them out, all right? So you need a better m- immune system if you, uh, want a shot at this, and not just chemo or hormonal therapy. And that's where some of these in- 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 kinda like terrorists kicking in the cockpit door to take over the controls of the plane. They wanna 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, uh, 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, uh, direct blood vessels to feed healthy tissues. So guess what? A one centimeter tumor with one billion cancer cells is fed by 100 million blood vessels coursing into the tumor to feed them, and we've studied this in a laboratory. The moment that a single blood vessel touches a tumor, tiny microscopic tumor, it will grow 16,000 times in size in just two weeks.

6. 14:40 – 15:59

   How to Lower Your Risk of Cancer

   1. WLDr. William Li14:40

   2. SBSteven Bartlett14:40

      Wow.

   3. WLDr. William Li14:40

      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 cancer? Not just breast cancer, but in general. Number one, we know that if you boost your immune system with foods, with exercise, diet and lifestyle, you're gonna actually make your immune defenses a lot stronger to patrol your body to wipe out those microscopic cancers. That's why healthy diet and 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 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, uh, that are anti-angiogenic foods, like on a staple, 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.

7. 15:59 – 17:46

   Foods That Fuel Cancer

   1. WLDr. William Li15:59

   2. SBSteven Bartlett15:59

      I'm assuming the opposite also applies, i.e., I could eat foods and I can drink things that cause my body to malfunction, i.e., makes the blood vessels unregulated, makes, and starts to feed the cancer, right?

   3. WLDr. William Li16:11

      Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk, let's talk a little bit about that.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett16:14

      Okay.

   5. WLDr. William Li16:15

      So I told you the body's hardwired with these defenses. Shields up, right? That's what we wanna do, 'cause shields are already normally up. You wanna 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?

   6. SBSteven Bartlett16:37

      Can I take a guess? Is it this?

   7. WLDr. William Li16:42

      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, uh, I would tell you that yes and no. A burger is something that many people enjoy eating, and I would say eating meat, eating burgers, even eating ult- 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 gonna 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, uh, uh, health defenses down, shields down.

8. 17:46 – 18:29

   Debunking “Superfoods”

   1. WLDr. William Li17:46

   2. SBSteven Bartlett17:46

      So what are those things then that bring the shields down? You were saying...

   3. WLDr. William Li17:49

      Okay. Excess sodium, too much salt, which 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 the kitchen of a restaurant to see how they're salting, seasoning 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

9. 18:29 – 19:36

   Risks of Electrolytes

   1. WLDr. William Li18:29

      excess salt.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett18:30

      Okay. I've got a question here. Obviously, there's a, a big movement at the moment around hydration-

   3. WLDr. William Li18:35

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett18:35

      ... and electrolytes, and these electrolytes have magnesium, potassium. They have sodium in them.

   5. WLDr. William Li18:40

      Yeah.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett18:40

      So, a lot of people are now taking electrolytes to hydrate themselves. Is there a, a risk here?

   7. WLDr. William Li18:47

      So, the great news is that the healthy body has got its own titration system for electrolytes. If you drink a, a electrolyte-fortified beverage, you're g- your body's gonna take everything it needs and it's gonna pee out the rest. You're gonna 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 actually have, except perhaps dessert, but maybe even then. And so this is one of the things that we realize, 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, um, health defenses that we talked about. High blood sugar

10. 19:36 – 21:16

    Lowering the Body's Defenses: Risk of Consuming Added Sugars

    1. WLDr. William Li19:36

       can also do the same thing. So, if you're eating an excess of added sugar, we all f- have heard by now, glucose spikes and glucose crashes. I don't let you 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. Uh, they, they do make you pay attention to it. But in fact, really, our, the healthy body sort of has, you know, smooth ups and smooth downs. There are 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, y- your intake of the sugar, glucose, rises up, up, up, up, up. And now your body has... Your metabolism chase that blood sugar down, and it's gotta work harder and make more insulin. And eventually, you just wear out that system and then you have h- high blood, blood glucose and an insensitive metabolism. And that's the beginning of sort of the, the dominoes f- 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? Uh, uh, no one's gonna be eating a crazy amount of fruit. Th- this is why extremes aren't good. Diversity, switch it out. Keep it interesting for yourself. This is what our human nature, uh, wants anyway. Uh, it's how we're hardwired. You'll, you'll actually be fine. So, salt, sugar, those are two offenders. Okay? Um,

11. 21:16 – 21:57

    Alcohol

    1. WLDr. William Li21:16

       alcohol is another one that actually can take down your health defenses over time. You know, pe- 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, those, there can be some healthful properties of the resveratrol and other polyphenols that come out of, uh, that are in wine, but it's never the alcohol.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett21:43

       Yeah.

    3. WLDr. William Li21:43

       It's not the alcohol in the beer, the wine, the whiskey. Nope. None, none of that is... The alcohol is to- 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.

12. 21:57 – 22:32

    Risks of Drinking Alcohol

    1. WLDr. William Li21:57

       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 your sh- you'll bounce back. It's not gonna break your windshield. But if you keep on drinking, you're actually gonna, uh, smash your windshield. And that's, uh, why alcoholism is so devastating to the health. But, you know, regular, a small amount of alcohol. So, alcohol itself is, is a toxin.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett22:27

       Do you drink?

    3. WLDr. William Li22:27

       Uh, I, I rarely drink. And when I drink, it's in a- moderation.

13. 22:32 – 24:39

    How Does Stress Impact Immunity?

    1. WLDr. William Li22:32

    2. SBSteven Bartlett22:32

       Mm-hmm. And I was thinking about stress as well. Does that-

    3. WLDr. William Li22:36

       Oh, yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett22:36

       ... bring down the...

    5. WLDr. William Li22:37

       So, besides the foods you eat, other things that can compromise your health defenses... Uh, and by the way, there are five health defenses. We talked about blood vessels, we talked about immunity, but there's three other ones, uh, that are core to functioning in the healthiest way possible. If you wanna... 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 dese- developing diseases like cancer. All right? Stress also causes your blood pressure to go up and causes, uh, 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, uh, not functioning, uh, 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 and pasting and having errors. Add some stress to it, now it's kind of like, um, you're trying to copy that sentence I was telling you perfectly. Now, I'm gonna come in and just smash your fingers down every now and then, and let's see if you actually make a mistake.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett23:50

       (laughs)

    7. WLDr. William Li23:50

       You will. All right? Stress will actually do that. It's devastating to have so much stress continuously. Listen, by the way, I wanna 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 kinda get lackadaisical. We let our guard down. A 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, uh, that, that grit that goes along with it, which gives a little stress, keeps us sharp.... you know, uh, which is a- which is a good thing. You wanna be on- you wanna be on. So a little stress is good, but when that stress is unabated, it literally sinks your health defenses. It is just taking those shields

14. 24:39 – 26:19

    The Relationship Between Stress, Sleep, and Sickness

    1. WLDr. William Li24:39

       down.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett24:39

       Yeah, I- I've noticed that with myself. I've, uh, spent the last 10 years running businesses, a little bit more than 10 years now, but probably la- 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 one week after two weeks of stress. So when I say two 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 two 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 'cause I think I sleep really 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 cannot- my immune system is running out of energy-

    3. WLDr. William Li25:35

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett25:36

       ... almost.

    5. WLDr. William Li25:36

       More than your immune system. So when you're super stressed, it also d- it interferes with your ability to sleep well.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett25:42

       Yeah.

    7. WLDr. William Li25:42

       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 eight hours, seven to nine hours, eight's the sweet num- sweet number, you know, our brain is cleansing itself, detoxifying itself, releasing. Do you know about the glymphatic system

15. 26:19 – 27:49

    Why Lack of Sleep Contributes to Stress: The Glymphatic System

    1. WLDr. William Li26:19

       in the brain?

    2. SBSteven Bartlett26:19

       Not as well as you do. (laughs)

    3. WLDr. William Li26:20

       Okay. Well, the- there's a- there's a, um, sewer system of the brai- uh, 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- you're- you feel like your brain is- it- it's full, it's- uh, cup runneth over, right? All right. So when you go to sleep, guess what? This sewer system, it's like the sewers of Par- 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 cleaned up, you're feeling foggy. So think about the, you know, when you're in college and you pull an all-nighter or, uh, 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-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett27:32

       Mm-hmm.

    5. WLDr. William Li27:32

       ... for your brain to clean up itself. (clears throat) When your brain is foggy, you tend to not make as good decisions. "I'm too tired to work out. I'm too tired, I don't care what I eat, I'm just hungry. I'm gonna eat anything." You start to make bad decisions when it comes to diet and lifestyle, you see? So it's a- it- it- c- the stress can

16. 27:49 – 29:50

    Deep Sleep Clears Your Mind and Burns Fat!

    1. WLDr. William Li27:49

       cascade on your health like that.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett27:51

       Is there a certain stage of sleep where the glymphatic system kicks in?

    3. WLDr. William Li27:55

       Yeah, it's during like the deep REM sleep.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett27:57

       Okay.

    5. WLDr. William Li27:57

       That dreaming sleep.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett27:59

       Okay. And that usually comes later in the night as well?

    7. WLDr. William Li28:01

       Correct. Correct.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett28:02

       Kind of. And- and- and in more quali- quantity later in the night, so you need to really be getting a lot of sleep.

    9. WLDr. William Li28:07

       That's right. Now, the other thing abou- 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 high because you're not eating, insulin levels go do- down, your metabolism shifts gears. I- I sort of 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 you're- you're revving your 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, you're actually burning away fat. But when you don't sleep well or you don't sleep long enough, you're not burning down that fuel, that fuel accumulates. Day or two of not good en- enough sleep, that's n- that's okay. Think about flying overseas, getting some jet lag. You gotta 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 who are never getting good sleep, add a little booze, alcohol to the s- to- to the equation, you can kind of see the problems that are gonna build up. Your brain's gonna be foggy, your metabolism's gonna be out of whack. You're not burning as much fat from the calories that you ate during the day. Now inflammation starts to, uh, rise in your body and that inflammation really takes down your health defenses and now you're much more vulnerable. So i- in your own example of where chronic stress leads to poorer sleep and then you get sick, no

17. 29:50 – 32:43

    Why Are Cancer Cases in Young People Increasing?

    1. WLDr. William Li29:50

       surprise.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett29:51

       If we go back up the thread there, 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 cancer is breast cancer. One in two people will develop some form of cancer during their lifetime. That's a- 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 sh- most shocking things that I saw was that globally early onset cancer incidents has risen by about 80%.... by 1990 and 2019. And there was an article which I'd 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 w- the question, "What is going on?" Over the last 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49-year-olds has increased in 24 different countries, including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway, and Argentina. I mean, what is going on?

    3. WLDr. William Li30:54

       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 incidents of clinical cancer? They're talking about clinical diagnosed cancer, not the invisible microscopic ones-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett31:16

       Mm-hmm.

    5. WLDr. William Li31:16

       ... that are forming all the time. Um, it's... Yes, it's very worrying. Are, are we be- exposing ourselves to something that is more commonly encountered today than before, number one? Number two, are our defenses being taken down by 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 gotta be the fact, a combination that we're being exposed to more harmful things and tho- some of those harmful things are actually, they, you know, 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 actually arisen in terms of like, what are some of the clues of these things that could be ha- happening, right? So we are talking about climate change and all the things that are happening in th- our environment. That's a- that's almost too big a- 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

18. 32:43 – 37:05

    Microplastics in Our Bodies

    1. WLDr. William Li32:43

       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, uh, and we'd buy foods that came in plastic packages, right? We didn't think e- think a 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, 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's little plastic particles, uh, that come off. But, you know, hey, there's no harm, right? We d- 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, number one, it does... Plastics can actually embed themselves in our body. We know where. We also know that these plastics, uh, are associated with inflammation. That is a big red flag. The klaxon 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 just distributed throughout the brain. This is like a norm- it's a person who's 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 ch- the actual calcul- 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 un-health back to health so we're back on the course that everybody wants to go to? We want to go to that north s- well, 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. 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 th- comes from the heart right to the brain, the carotid artery, they-

    2. SBSteven Bartlett35:42

       Oh, through the neck.

    3. WLDr. William Li35:43

       Through the neck.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett35:44

       Yeah.

    5. WLDr. William Li35:44

       They found that the narrowing that can occur in some men can accumulate plastic. They can actually find plastic particles just 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 lat- years later. Okay.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett36:09

       400%?

    7. WLDr. William Li36:10

       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 does it get there? And urologists who are doing surgery on the penis are finding that in, in the human flesh, when they look under 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 is the time to start thinking about this. So one of the questions is, I, and I'm not saying that the rise in rate of cancers that we're seeing is due to microplastics. What I am, what I am saying is that we're beginning to wake up to the fact.

19. 37:05 – 37:43

    How Can I Lower My Exposure to Microplastics?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett37:05

       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?

    2. WLDr. William Li37:20

       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.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett37:31

       Mm-hmm.

    4. WLDr. William Li37:32

       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 clearly packaged

20. 37:43 – 40:06

    Benefits of Green Tea—but the Danger of Teabags!

    1. WLDr. William Li37:43

       in plastic. All right? Now I do wanna point out one thing, 'cause 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, 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, (laughs) 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, um, tea bags can shed microplastics. So you can have a billion particles of microplastic shed from a single tea bag.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett38:36

       Okay.

    3. WLDr. William Li38:36

       All right? So I just changed your mind, right? So look, this is the power of awareness and understanding. I probably should've stopped you-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett38:43

       Yeah. (laughs)

    5. WLDr. William Li38:44

       ... but, uh,

    6. NANarrator38:44

       (laughs)

    7. WLDr. William Li38:44

       ... when, when you were like, "Why did you save my life?" (laughs)

    8. SBSteven Bartlett38:46

       You let me drink it first, but I've, I spat it out.

    9. WLDr. William Li38:48

       Well, I, I, I just, as, as you were doing it, I was like, "Uh, uh."

    10. SBSteven Bartlett38:52

        (laughs)

    11. WLDr. William Li38:52

        All right. But look, there's another, there's another one there that's got, uh, lemon ginger tea. This is like an herbal tea, that's fine. Listen, um, 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, the manufacturers of the tea bags spray it with a small amount of plastic to h- 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, uh, potential exposures to toxins that come from ultra-processed food. So all this conversation about, you know, avoid ultra, ultra-processed foods and watch 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 gonna make it yourself and

21. 40:06 – 41:22

    Which Tea Has the Best Health Benefits?

    1. WLDr. William Li40:06

       it's, uh, absolutely easy. Now I will tell you in, something interesting about English breakfast tea. We did research at the Angiogenesis Foundation, the nonprofit I, I work at, to look at, um, 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's gonna be the best. I'd always heard that Japanese green tea's gonna 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, 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, it's a, it's 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

22. 41:22 – 42:21

    Is Matcha Good for Me?

    1. WLDr. William Li41:22

       provides the superpower. But I do see matcha on this, uh, uh, tray. I wanna tell you about matcha, 'cause it is a... Matcha is truly a super enriched polyphenol-enriched tea. A lot of people don't realize it. There's, uh, no tea bag in it, so don't worry. (laughs)

    2. SBSteven Bartlett41:40

       Mm-hmm. (laughs)

    3. WLDr. William Li41:40

       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, uh, 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.

23. 42:21 – 45:59

    The Link Between Cured Meats and Cancer

    1. WLDr. William Li42:21

       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, or loose leaf tea, you are getting all the polyphenols suspended in that. So now you get hundred percent polyphenol, okay, in matcha. So go ahead. You're, go ahead and do it. (laughs)

    2. SBSteven Bartlett42:40

       I'm gonna do it.

    3. WLDr. William Li42:40

       You're- 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, uh, 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 breast cancer stem cells. What's a breast cancer stem cell? What's a stem ce- 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 get cancer, you get it treated, one thi- 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, ki- 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 a lab, okay, at Penn State University and have been shown to kill colon cancer stem cells, which contribute to the colon cancer coming back.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett43:55

       So full disclaimer, I am, I made a very, very big investment, uh, a seven-figure investment into a matcha company a couple years ago. And if you look at the search trend data on the subject of ma- 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... 'Cause 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.

    5. WLDr. William Li44:34

       What I, what I am, what I am saying is that drinking green tea in its most healthful form, okay, um, raises your body's health defense systems.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett44:43

       Yeah.

    7. WLDr. William Li44:43

       And by having better health defense systems, better immunity, better control over 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 gonna be in your favor as well. That is overall gonna 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 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-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett45:33

       Mm-hmm.

    9. WLDr. William Li45:33

       ... 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 ten cups of green tea a day, and this has been his whole life. He sat with his, uh, uh, close friends who were also very vibrant and, and elderly. Um, social connection.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett45:53

        Mm-hmm.

    11. WLDr. William Li45:54

        All right? Watch the sun rise. It's co- very calming.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett45:57

        Do you drink it?

    13. WLDr. William Li45:58

        Absolutely.

24. 45:59 – 58:39

    My Personal Story with Cancer

    1. WLDr. William Li45:59

    2. SBSteven Bartlett45:59

       Um, I've got to, just going up the, the thread again a little bit, you mentioned the word colorectal.

    3. WLDr. William Li46:04

       Hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett46:04

       Where is the colorectal cancer?

    5. WLDr. William Li46:06

       All right. So we have a little, um, model here.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett46:09

       'Cause I'm asking this because I'm wondering why that type of cancer is increasing. So is there, is there a particular reason why?

    7. WLDr. William Li46:16

       Well, okay, so let's do a quick, uh, medical school, uh, course, crash course for podcasters. Um, the, the gut. 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 feet worth of stuff, organs, uh, your esophagus, your stomach, your small intestines, your large intestines. By the way, these squigglies are your small intestines.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett46:48

       Mm-hmm.

    9. WLDr. William Li46:49

       All right? This blue is your large intestine, so this is like a, it's shaped like a horseshoe. It's big, thick, uh, tube that r- that's kind of, um, framing your small intestines. And then it goes down, the poop chute, 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, angled turn right across your belly, kind of like a belt, right across your belly. This is the colon here, and then it goes to the descending colon. You 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 and your anus. Okay.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett47:42

        Right, so the blue thing is my colon.

    11. WLDr. William Li47:44

        Okay.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett47:44

        So this is where cancer incidence is rising in young people.

    13. WLDr. William Li47:47

        So you're talking about the rise in incidents of colorectal cancer. That could be a cancer that's typically, uh, either on the right side of the colon, uh, either the, going up the, up, the upside, up the elevator-

    14. SBSteven Bartlett47:59

        Yeah.

    15. WLDr. William Li48:00

        ... or down the elevator, on the right side or the left side.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett48:02

        Okay.

    17. WLDr. William Li48:03

        Uh, okay? And 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, uh, deli meats, delicatessen, meats you find in delicatessen. All right? Um, tho- those would be, uh, considered, uh, carcinogens.... and w- and they're, they're, they are, uh, highly linked to an increased risk of bowel cancers. Now why would that be? Well turns out that, think about it, if you're eating a ton of meat, all right, y- 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.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett49:04

        This term, angiogenesis, you 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 of our body, right? And in the case of cancer, there's this, the angiogenesis system is making a mistake. Is that a simplified version of it?

    19. WLDr. William Li49:27

        Yeah, so angiogenesis, which is a field I stud- study, we break it down, uh, it, to, to what its elemental parts are. 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 miles 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 they, 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 that are going into our bloodstream and our blood vessels, our angiogenesis system devel- delivering it 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 something negative. Now inside the blood vessels, um, 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, uh, uh, too much salt, d- hypertension, when you have diabetes, where you're actually wearing down the lining of the blood vessels, endothelial layers being damaged, it's like, um, 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? Uh, if you actually have a lot of ice skaters on a rink, after a while, it's un-skateable, right? You can't get on it, and what'll happen in your bloodstream is then elements in your blood get caught-

    20. SBSteven Bartlett51:19

        Oh.

    21. WLDr. William Li51:19

        ... along the walls and they build up and that's actually how blood vessels narrow up. So that's one of the areas of, of, uh... So angiogenesis actually is intended to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the tissues that need it for, to maintain your health, 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.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett51:53

        I've got this graph which shows different things that cause more or less angiogenesis, if you've seen this graph, but...

    23. WLDr. William Li52:00

        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 up, put it over here so... Um, so we were studying, at one point, drugs and were trying to discover drugs that could be developed as cancer treatments. So what we were looking for are 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 to 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 v- 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 a cancer treatment?" Ultimately yes, the answer was yes, but we were looking for them. And we would f- and so we developed 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, uh, shorter bars, uh, uh, are, uh, cancer drugs. Uh, you can see them, uh, in this color in blue. Not surprisingly, some of the d- 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 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 wanna be disruptive, you gotta 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 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 can see the green tea, you can 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." Uh, I was, I was a skeptic, all right? And, uh, and it made, it just made me 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, 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. If you discover something amazing about a food, whether it's matcha, whether it's purple potatoes, whether it's a strawberry, that could, 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.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett55:55

        So I'm gonna ask some stupid questions here. So on here I can see that, for example, soy extract causes less angiogenesis-

    25. WLDr. William Li56:03

        Yes.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett56:03

        ... which what I understand is the, the growth of these blood vessels. But does that mean that if I have lots of soy ex- extract, or arco- artichoke, or parsley, or berries, that it's gonna cause other parts of my body not to grow blood cells?

    27. WLDr. William Li56:18

        Uh, so this is the, great question, that, let, 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?

    28. SBSteven Bartlett56:38

        Yeah.

    29. WLDr. William Li56:38

        All right? Answer is no and here's why. As a health defense system, our angiogenesis system is completely designed to yolk 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 fairytale. 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 h- 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 in that tissue. I c- I call it, like, a landscaper on a 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 gonna actually, uh, carve out a bald spot, uh, uh, in, on, in a country club. You're gonna get just the right amount. Similarly, and, um, w- 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 that can prune away the bad, b- extra blood vessels and that can grow them whenever you need them. So your body is sort of like the gardener 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

25. 58:39 – 1:02:28

    Groundbreaking New Studies with AI

    1. WLDr. William Li58:39

       the lawn.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett58:40

       Have you ever had cancer in your family?

    3. WLDr. William Li58:42

       Yes. Um, cancer's 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 l- lay hands on, I could feel the hard liver, I could feel the masses, and I felt, at the time, helpless even though I was doing the research, cancer research and finding future paths, I felt like this was, we- we're, we're not there yet and we can't, uh, I couldn't help him. I felt, I felt powerless. Fast-forward, uh, 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 radiation was supposed to take care of it. Uh, unfortunately, for, in her case, those little cancer stem cells, and it was microscopic cancers that, that were present, took off, raced off in her 80-year-old body, which, you know, l- 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. Li, 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, 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 or an old person, it can wake up your immune system, all right? And my mother had immunotherapy. She was one of the early patients that got 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, would be as strong as possible, shields raised, as we've been talking about, and we gave her a little bit of radiation to, to s- to help the, uh, 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, like total nine weeks of three treatments, all right? Uh, 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 firsthand, close up in my own family, the ability to harness your body's own health defenses

26. 1:02:28 – 1:08:51

    Successful Cancer Treatment Linked to Specific Gut Bacteria

    1. WLDr. William Li1:02:28

       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 immune system. Another way that I'm working on now that, um, uh, a colleague of mine in Germany is working on is also absolutely jaw-droppingly amazing. Imagine this, somebody has cancer and you're gonna, they're gonna get a biopsy no matter what. They're gonna take some tissue out to look at it under the microscope. What kind of cancer is it? Is it brain? Is it co- breast? Is it colon? Is it pancreas? Where is it coming from? You're gonna get a diagnosis. Right now, up until recently, that's all we did with the tissue, the biopsy. You just got a result and it's kind of like a death sentence depending on what type of cancer, and you're supposed to then go to the guidelines and open up the r- the, the, the treatment book to say, "Well, what's the pathway we should, what's the recipe we should follow for treatment?" Too often, those recipes don't work very well or for very long. What if I told you that where we are headed with cancer therapy is a new frontier where you take the tumor with a biopsy. Sure, look it into the microscope, call it out, uh, uh, define what it is, and then you send it to a lab where you do complete full-on genetics. You sequence the entire cancer genome, all right? Right now we do sequence, we take a dozen, two dozen, three dozen. I'm talking about doing 20,000, 30,000 genes, all right? Right now most people say, "It's not worth it. We don't know what we'd do with all that information." What if I told you if you took a tumor and sequenced all the genes, you find every mutation, every typographical error that we talked about earlier that's in that cancer? Those are the smoking guns of the cancer. Now what if I took a piece of n- uh, a little normal blood, normal cells, and sequenced that too? Mm-hmm. All right? Now people are, b- hearing me talk who are o- oncologists or scientists would say, "I don't know what you're talking about. That's double the waste of effort 'cause now you're gonna sequence the human genome twice in a single patient? Now what are you gonna do with all that information?" Ah, this is where technology f- sits in, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Let's now have a computer compare normal cells with tumor cells back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, subtract out all the mutations that are found in normal cells, leaving only the smoking gun mutations in the cancer. Couple hundred are gonna be left. Those are the smoking guns. Those are the doers that led to this cancer. Now imagine, and I'm gonna give you an analogy here, do you remember that Tom Cruise movie, uh, Minority Report? Yeah. So you remember the, like, he was wearing these gloves and you have a glass pane and you can actually move the, uh, things around on the glass with your fingertips, right? Mm-hmm. So now imagine you can take these human, uh, the, the, the cancer mutations on the bottom of this glass screen and you can just randomly with your fingers pick out 20 random mutat- tations and move them up on the screen. All right? Now you've just picked out the mutations and now you can connect the mutations together. I call it a pearl necklace. Imagine every mutation's a pearl and you connect them together with a string that connects the pearl necklace. N- now you get what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. Like, now we've taken the tumor, find out the doers, the, the, the, the, uh, the smoking guns. Now we've strung them together, okay? This is the most wanted sign that you would actually place out for the criminal. And now imagine you hit print technology and now you have a protein printer that prints out those smoking guns as a protein, as a protein full of your own individual cancer of that particular person. Now you take that protein and you inject it under the skin and you're challenging your own immune system. You're vaccinating yourself with a ca- with your own cancer and you're cau- causing your own immune system to say, "Aha!"This is a bad guy. We're gonna develop antibodies to go find our immune system. We're, we're gonna get ratcheted up to go find that cancer. Well, this is happening right now in clinical trials. I have a, a colleague named Saskia Biskup that is actually developing peptide vaccine treatments against cancer, and if you wanna see some amazing results, um, there was a paper we published in Nature, uh, Communications, uh, about a year ago that showed in more than 100 people with glioblastoma, that is a game over brain cancer, nobody lives more than a couple of years with this, all right? That with this treatment, we've been able to actually show that some patients with their own immune system woken up can actually keep them alive and cancer-free. Brain cancer, like that is no-win situation, impossible to possible. And actually somebody who, uh, I've just recruited as an ambassador to my non-profit organization, The Angiogenesis Foundation, I strongly encourage people who want to have a modicum of hope, who wants to see what I'm talking about in real life on social media, there's a woman named Rebecca Devine, she's okay with me giving her name. Her handle is That Brainy Blond. It's a, it's a triple entendre. She's blond, she's very smart, but she had a glioblastoma seven years ago, and she is thriving, alive with this immunotherapy. So between my mother, Rebecca Devine, I'm just telling you, like I've had well... I've known well over a dozen people who there's no way they'd be here today if it wasn't for the scientific advances that all shore up the body's health de- health defense systems, specifically the immune system, but that's, uh, but the drugs alone aren't enough. You really can take advantage at home of your own diet and lifestyle to be able to tip those odds in your favor.

27. 1:08:51 – 1:12:53

    What’s the Best Food Diet?

    1. WLDr. William Li1:08:51

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:51

       I've heard you say that immunotherapy is more likely to be successful if you have certain bacteria in your gut.

    3. WLDr. William Li1:08:58

       Yeah. That is-

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:59

       What is that?

    5. WLDr. William Li1:08:59

       Okay. So in 2017, I c- helped to convene a cancer research conference in Paris, uh, and we called it Rethinking Cancer, and we brought the world's best minds out there, and one of the, um, researchers, uh, uh, uh, named Dr. Laurence-Zitvogel, she's at the, in Paris, works in Paris at the Institut Gustave Roussy. She is an immuno oncologist, so she studies immunotherapy for cancer, and at the time, we had, uh, we, we asked her to present, uh, some, uh, groundbreaking results that were embargoed at the time, so our research, our conference was the first time it was ever presented. And she said in 100 people who were receiving immunotherapy for, uh, different types of cancer, that if you looked at the difference between people who responded, lived, did well, versus people who didn't respond, didn't do well, died, all right? And that's the frustration. With the types of treatments my mom had, um, you know, some people do well, some people don't do well. We pull our hair out trying to figure out like, "What's going on? How do we make people do better?" Well, it turns out that when you compare everything, gender, age, comorbidities, uh, uh, uh, all the other f- genetic factors, the research that was presented showed that there was no differences between the groups of responders, people who did well versus people who didn't do well for immunotherapy, except for one thing. That one thing was one bacteria. The responders had one bacteria called Akkermansia muciniphila, so most bacteria have a genus and species, first name, last name. First name is Akkermansia, uh, last name is muciniphila. Okay. It likes to grow in mucus, muciniphila. Where's there a lot of mucus? In the colon. Where's the colon? That's the, on this model, the blue area, so Akkermansia grows right here in the cecum, which is the pouch, uh, in the colon right at the beginning before you take the up elevator to the top, uh, of, of the colon. That's where it grows. If you, if the people had that Akkermansia, they would respond to immunotherapy. So what, what the researcher did, they, she took out the Akkermansia and brought it to her lab of the responders from humans and, and gave it to mice who were not responding to immunotherapy. Boom. She'd reco- she'd resurrect the immune response to kill the cancer. So this is one of the first bacteria, and there, there may be many, many that we haven't yet discovered. All right? So like my whole career has all been about discovery. There may be more bacteria, but we discovered at least one, the presence of which seems to be absolutely vital if you are a patient receiving immunotherapy, uh, the type of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors, uh, if you want to, uh, uh, tip the odds in your own favor of being a responder. Now, how do you get Akkermansia? Well, at the time, uh, there was no Akkermansia probiotics. Now you can actually find Akkermansia probiotics, but b- but at the time this was coming out, you, you had to grow your own Akkermansia, DIY Akkermansia. All right? So how do you grow it? Well, it turns out that there are certain foods you can eat that grow Akkermansia. What are those foods? Pomegranate, pomegranate juice, pomegranate seeds will grow Akkermansia. Cranberries, uh, uh, cranberry juice, dried cranberries will grow Akkermansia. Concord grape juice, uh, concord grapes will grow Akkermansia. Chili peppers will actually grow Akkermansia. Chinese black vinegar. You ever go to dim sum and have s- soup dumplings?

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:43

       Oh, yeah.

    7. WLDr. William Li1:12:44

       The black, uh, vinegar sauce that they use for, for, as a condiment to the soup dumplings?

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:48

       Mm-hmm.

    9. WLDr. William Li1:12:49

       Chinese black vinegar. That will prompt your body to grow Akkermansia

28. 1:12:53 – 1:16:19

    Why Is Japan Considered One of the Healthiest Countries?

    1. WLDr. William Li1:12:53

       as well.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:12:53

       So what is your diet of preference, then? There's so many different diets that we've...... people speak about when they talk about cancer and other chronic diseases. Um, as I think I said to you beforehand, I'm ex- on an extremely low-carb diet.

    3. WLDr. William Li1:13:05

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:06

       Um, which is, like, verges on keto, but I kind of bounce in and out of ketosis. Wh- what, what do you think of... Let's start with the k- the ketogenic diet. Do you have a view on, on that kind of diet?

    5. WLDr. William Li1:13:15

       Yeah. Well, so let me just give you my, my perspective on diets. Lots of different diets out there. They're all designed, uh, with kind of a specific perspective and a particular goal in mind. Oftentimes, diet, whether you're talking about South Beach, or keto, or carnivore, or vegan, you know, um, they're all designed to achieve a certain kind of goal. Uh, most of them are very, very difficult to maintain for a long period of time. Now, people are vegans, uh, and vegetarians, and there are... And that's something that because of the diversity of the food that you can... You can actually maintain that. But, you know, if you're only doing pure keto, that's very difficult to do. So most popular trending diets are short-lived, short-term solutions, and they'll kind of force your body to do something. All right? But you can't keep it up. And so a diet that you can't keep up isn't, to me, a very practical diet, because you're going to bursts of activity that you just can't do your whole life. I find that it's much more healthy in the long run if you can find a sustainable way of eating that works for you personally, that you can maintain, and that you're gonna enjoy your life as well. Most people who are on just really strict diets, they're not enjoying their diet.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:39

       Mm-hmm.

    7. WLDr. William Li1:14:39

       You know? Like, people who only eat meat, only eat carnivore diet, or only eat raw food. Listen, you can't... Don't con me. You ca- you can't be enjoying eating raw food, you know, your entire life. You know, navigating through society and seeing other people, you know, eat a big, steaming plate of pasta or something, you know, or going to a Chinese restaurant. So, what I'm saying is that trending diets are well-intentioned, they often are designed to do one thing, but you can't keep it up. So it doesn't really, at the end of the day, contribute to the ultimate, uh, goal. What I prefer and where I think the science takes us, where the next frontier for, like, lifetime health is tearing a page from the playbook of some of the healthiest cuisines in the world, and I would say Mediterranean is the hotbed, the crucible of a lot of healthy diets. Not just the Blue Zones, I think, but, but they're, but there are Blue Zones in the Mediterranean. Also Asia. Uh, there's a Blue Zone in Asia as well. But, you know, look, there's also a Blue Zone in Latin America. If you take a look at the common denominator of what's going on in the Mediterranean and Asia, is a very healthy, plant-forward, fresh, seasonal, uh, healthy cooking oils, healthy preparation style, absolutely delicious way of eating. I mean, come on. Take... If I were to take you to a Mediterranean restaurant or to a Asian restaurant, I would find it hard to believe that you wouldn't, uh, you and I opening the menu couldn't find something that we would enjoy eating, right?

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:11

       Mm-hmm.

    9. WLDr. William Li1:16:12

       So, Mediterrasion is what, how I tell people I actually eat. That's my, quote, "diet".

29. 1:16:19 – 1:29:31

    The Different Body Fat Types and How They Affect You

    1. WLDr. William Li1:16:19

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:16:19

       Why do the Japanese seem to do so well on, when we think about the world's healthiest countries? Looking at some data here, some, a variety of different graphs that I have in front of me, and Japan seems to continually come out on top as it relates to health span.

    3. WLDr. William Li1:16:33

       Yeah. Okay. Well, um, there's no one single factor I think that re- is responsible for it, but it is true. Um, the, the Japanese, uh, demographics, uh, show, uh, consistently some of the oldest, longest-living people. You know, they tend first and foremost, okay, before we talk about what they eat, let me tell you what they don't do. They don't overeat. And I'm giving a purposeful pause there because overeating, caloric loading, okay, uh, is very damaging to our metabolism. It actually counters, uh, our ability for lon- to, to live long. It actually speeds up our cellular aging. It's, it, it sets up inflammation. So by cutting down on your caloric intake every day, that's one of the things is that the Japanese culture, the, the, the culinary and gastronomic approach to food in Japan tends to, uh, favor modesty, uh, uh, uh, undereating rather than overeating.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:41

       I've got a question here.

    5. WLDr. William Li1:17:42

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:42

       How do, how do I know if I'm overeating?

    7. WLDr. William Li1:17:45

       Okay. So, so there's a Confucian saying, uh, that's been translated into the Japanese that they, that's a mantra, which is hara hachi ban mi, which means stop eating when you're 80% full.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:17:58

       I ask this question-

    9. WLDr. William Li1:18:00

       Yeah.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:00

        ... because I have a friend who was, I think it was on this podcast. So, um, don't think I'm revealing anything. He actually sat next to me, um, when Peter Attia was talking to him. He's Jack, who, um, runs production for us. He had his DEXA scan done, which looks at your visceral fat, subcutaneous fat, muscle mass, bone density, those kinds of things.

    11. WLDr. William Li1:18:18

        Yeah.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:18

        And he's a slim guy. He's much slimmer than I am. And the diagnosis that came back from the doctor basically said, "You're over-nourished." And when I look at him, he doesn't look like someone that's over-nourished. And the, the doctor essentially said to him that, "You need to reduce your calories." Now, I'm looking at this guy thinking this is a slim guy. This guy's, like, much, much slimmer than I am. Yet the doctor's telling him that he's overeating.

    13. WLDr. William Li1:18:46

        Yeah. So I wrote a whole book on this called Eat To Beat Your Diet, which is not a diet book. It's an anti-diet book that really, um, uh, uh, uncloaks the new science of your metabolism. And what I try to say in terms of sharing that science is that, first of all, a.... body fat, which societally is regarded as a bad thing, we don't, nobody wants fat, right? Um, it's actually a good thing. Body fat's a, an organ in the body. Did you know that? Like, it's, it's one of our body organs, um, our body fat. It is distributed throughout our body. And what does it do as an organ? Well, it's got some cushioning effect. So, you know, like if you didn't have any body fat, by the way, you tripped on the stairs and you hit the ground, you might rupture your organs. All right? That's the... So it has a little bit of a cushion effect, marshmallowy cushion effect. But our fat also is a fuel tank to store fuels from what we're eating, calories. Our calories are energy. We're eating food, we're eating calories, that's our energy. That's, that's a fuel our body runs off of. I always tell people, if you have a car and you're filling it up with gasoline at the petrol station or the gas station, um, you don't even think about your gas until your fuel gauge starts to run low. And the same thing for our, our, our bodies. We don't think about our fuel until we're hungry. And our, our hunger and our brain and our gut is really as, our fuel tank that signals, "Oh, you know, we're getting towards that red line, better go fill, fill up." Now, unlike a gas station or petrol station, there's no clicker on our body. We can keep stuffing food into our system. We can very easily overload our fuel tank. Okay? That is, you've got, you've gotta cut back on your calories. That's what you, your f- your friend heard when the doctor was saying, "You gotta cut back on your calories because you're overloading on fuel."

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:38

        He's thin.

    15. WLDr. William Li1:20:38

        So where does, so where does the fat build up? It's, there's different areas that fat in your body builds up. Now, the fat ch- can... There's white fat and there's, uh, uh, uh, brown fat. White fat can be under your chin, could be under your arms, could be in your thighs, in your butt, could be your, your, the, the muffin top, you know, around your waist. But that's not where the most dangerous fat builds up. The most dangerous fat, inflammatory fat, is a fat that builds up in the, inside the tube of your body. So if you think of your body like a poster tube, okay? Inside that tube, and all this gut i- I'm sorry, the, the body cavity, if you were to slice this body in half and look at a cross-section.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:21

        Mm-hmm.

    17. WLDr. William Li1:21:21

        All right? It's a tube. You can fill a- you, any of these, uh, interstitial areas between organs, you can pack with fat. So think about you're gonna FedEx something to somebody overnight mail, uh, uh, uh, a vase or, or a glass or bottle of wine or whatever, you're going to pack it full of peanuts and you're gonna put it into a package. Well, look, you can get a big box and put a lot more peanuts on, or you can take a skinny box that would just fit it and you'll put it in. So it doesn't really matter the size of your tube. You could be a skinny person and you could pack it with a lot of peanuts, in this case, visceral fat, and that's what you're talking about in a skinny person with too much visceral fat, too many peanuts packed in there, and that is a result of overconsumption of calories, that fat, that energy, the fuel tanks building up within a skinny body.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:06

        Yeah.

    19. WLDr. William Li1:22:07

        And that's what we call skinny fat.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:08

        I w- I'm still, like, s- mildly in shock about it because, because I saw his results, I, I panicked. So the next day, I also went to the same clinic as him, I had my DEXA stan- scan done, and it came back and said that I had, quote, "Zero visceral fat." So my results from Pete- Dr. Peter Attia said I had zero visceral fat, which he said was rare, but I had subcutaneous fat, which is the fat on the outside, more than Jack did. So Jack had visceral fat, which is the fat inside us, and he had, he has like n- almost no subcutaneous fat, and I'm kind of the inverse of that. And I don't underst- What, like... I was trying to figure out why is my body, when I eat something, putting the fat subcutaneously on the outside, whereas Jack's body is putting the fat on the inside, which is the, the dangerous fat?

    21. WLDr. William Li1:22:58

        Here is, um, an interesting thing. Let's look at the opposite of building up subcutaneous fat. Uh-

Episode duration: 2:06:07