"This Food Can Repair DNA & Starve Cancer" - Eat One Of This Per Day | Dr. William Li

1. WLDr. William Li0:00

   Some amazing research has been done, uh, uh, looking at which foods can help protect our DNA, and, and some of them are, are very ordinary, like the, uh, a, a kiwi fruit that you might eat at breakfast. You know that brown fuzzy ball, you cut it open, it's got this emerald green, uh, interior with a little white starburst. You know, it's kind of, um, tart and sweet at the same time. Well, that, uh, kiwi is packed with vitamins and antioxidants, and it's been shown that eating just one kiwi a day can actually, uh, protect your, cause your blood to be fortified to neutralize about 60% of the incoming damage from DNA. And if you eat three kiwis a day, okay, which is pretty easy, right? I mean, y- you peel it, you cut it up, you can put it into a yogurt. Okay, it's something that simple. Uh, uh, actually will build, help your DNA build itself back up so that damaged DNA will be repaired. So don't, don't forget, like think about the way of protecting your DNA. Um, I remember an old video game called Missile Command, and this is where from the top of the screen, there are all these missiles that are descending down on your planet. And what you had to do is to be able to, you know, you know, fire and, and try to neutralize all the missiles, and that's what antioxidants actually do.

2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:19

   Mm.

3. WLDr. William Li1:20

   But it's really hard to prevent all the missiles from coming in. And so occasionally you actually have one that cr- that gets through the shields and creates a crater. That's damage. And so neutralizing the incoming is like antioxidants, but building back the damaged DNA, well, that's important too, because that's like patching a pothole in the highway, in the roadside so that y- so other cars don't have a problem on it. And, and so here's a, a l- an example of a food, a kiwi, that can actually do that, but there are other foods that can also have varying degrees of protection of your DNA as well.

4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:55

   Yeah, it makes me happy, that example, because my dad, who's no longer alive, I remember as a kid, Dr. Li, he used to say to me, you know, "Keep eating kiwi fruits." He'd come back from the supermarket with, you know, uh, these bags of kiwi fruits. He said, "They're really, really good for you. They're rich in vitamin C," which of course is true, but obviously you're taking it up a notch now. You're saying, yes, it's rich in vitamin C, but actually it's also helping us repair DNA. And I guess to me, there's a wider point here, which is, you know, my dad, what, 20, 30 years ago probably said it's rich in vitamin C, so thought there was a value on feeding his children that food because of the impacts on our health. And as science progresses, we, I guess we're learning more about the magic of this, you know, quite ordinary food, the, the kiwi fruits. It makes me wonder, how much about food do we still not know? Like we're, we're learning.

5. WLDr. William Li2:55

   A lot.

6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:55

   Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like-

7. WLDr. William Li2:56

   Yeah

8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:56

   ... we think we know so much, and we, of course we know more than we knew 20 years ago, but what are we gonna find out in 10 years, in 20 years about the magical properties of these foods?

9. WLDr. William Li3:05

   Well, what you're actually talking about is what I'm working on, which is the, a new field of research called food as medicine. So the, the slogan or the saying food as a medicines was attributed to Hip- Hippocrates, you know, 3,000 years ago. But in fact, back then there were no medicines, so food was the only thing that was around. Today we have a lot of medicines and, and it's because we, in the quest to develop medicines, we've e- employed some really deep science, molecular biology, genomics. We can drill right down inside the cell to figure out what happens and why, and what the consequences are, and how the cells work together. Well, one of the reasons that I, uh, uh, went into nutrition was because I realized that food was something that could be used for prevention. You wouldn't wanna use drugs for prevention. But the problem with food, nutrition, the criticism that many of us in the medical world have, you know, about the idea of, of using food for healing was, historically, it was the lack of evidence, right? So we have a lot of evidence about drugs. We almost have nothing about foods. I mean, that's the dismissive tone that I think you probably were exposed to, as well as I, uh, for most of our education. However, what's happening now, and this is, I'm leading, I'm one of the people leading the charge in this, we can use the same technologies that are used to develop pharmaceuticals, and instead of throwing a drug into the system to see what happens, we can actually start to throw foods into those system and, and see what happens as well. In fact, you can even compare foods and drugs and see which one wins, and that's something that I've been doing for the last decade, is really trying to use the same rigorous scientific methodology used for drug development-

10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:48

    Yeah

11. WLDr. William Li4:48

    ... in order to be able to study the impact of food.

12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:51

    Yeah, and I think you are in many ways uniquely placed to do this and move this field on, because you've got so much experience in the developments of drugs and in research, so obviously you know how that whole system works. And because you are this way inclined to see the healing potential of foods, you can actually do that. And I, and I feel that's really important to get that kind of traction, primarily with the medical profession, but also I think across wider society. You know, I've had on the podcast all kinds of people on in the past talking about various aspects of food. You know, like, you know, Professor Felice Jacka from Australia, who conducted the SMILES trial showing how food can impact and in some cases reverse depression. Uh, Dr. Drew Ramsey, this nutritional psychiatrist in New York, using food to help people with their moods. But I do think there's something very fresh about your approach that, um, I, I really, really like and resonate with. This idea that food and drugs can be compared, can you give us an example of that where you've seen that food might have equal benefits, if not more benefits than a drug?

13. WLDr. William Li6:03

    Yeah. Well, so we, um, have been developing treatments for cancer that are designed to starve a cancer by cutting off its blood supply, and that's the process of angiogenesis that is hijacked by tumors, by cancer cells to get, selfishly develop their own blood supply, right? So I told you the body has normal circulation to feed healthy tissues. Well, cancers can sometimes hijack that. So, uh, one of the way, new ways to treat cancer is actually to, uh, give a drug that can intercept a cancer's ability to recruit a private blood supply. That's starving a cancer, cutting off its blood supply. Can't get oxygen and nutrients, can't grow. Okay. So I, I was one of the people to help develop the systems to develop those drugs. There have been over a dozen drugs that have been approved by health authorities to be able to achieve this in colon cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, so on and so forth. Now, in that same system, we've actually thrown different food substances and as an example, we took a drug, uh, that is, uh, a designer drug to stop angiogenesis, and then we actually, um, also through blinded, so we didn't know what, which one was which, um, uh, a substance that turned out to be the powdered extract from just regular green tea, a cup of green tea. And we found that they were, um... In that system, they went head-to-head against each other, and you could actually get the same effect in that test system. So now the question is, you know, um, we, we've, uh, uh, looked at this in a lab, how does this actually play out in real people in the real world? Well, uh, you know, there are studies now that show that even two to three cups of tea a day can lower your risk of developing ovarian cancer, for example, by up to 50%. This is a gigantic study in Europe called the EPIC study, that have looked at all the different food patterns and, and dietary consumptions over time to look for these correlations. And so food as medicine research is different from pharmaceutical research. Okay? Pharmaceutical research, you take one pill or one drug, and you get a group of people to make them as similar as possible, and then the only thing you do to, to people is give them that one drug, and everything else is we hope to control it so that there's no other variables. Well, foods can't be studied like that. You can't give somebody only green tea to drink for, you know, months at a time, um, or a tomato to eat. That's the only thing that you can eat. And foods don't work like drugs. I mean, a drug you could, you could squash a headache, you know, in 20 minutes with a powerful drug or a migraine. But with food, the benefits of food, because it's so much more natural and because it leverages your body's own defense systems, the benefits take time and they build up over time. And so you're talking about s- research studies that could take months or years even to fully appreciate just how beneficial that is. So this is how we do food as medicine research. We look for, um, benefits in real populations of real people, like people drinking green tea. How well does that prevent different types of cancer? Then we back it up to say, can we run a small clinical trial, a small group of people that we can control to see if we get a similar effect? Then we go back into the lab and we kind of say, "Well, now what happens if you feed animals that actually with green tea?" Uh, like, can we, you know, an animal subject, um, can we actually see that benefit? Then we can even go deeper and go dive that... Go start going that mile deep. What happens at the cellular level? What happens at the genetic level? And so food as medicine is really taking that macroscopic community-wide level view and then drilling it right down to that molecular pathway. And so I'm... I happen to be one of the people that actually can traverse that entire journey-

14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:50

    Yeah

15. WLDr. William Li9:51

    ... um, with what, what I've done.

16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:53

    It, it's just so fascinating, very, very exciting about the future. That study you mentioned about, um, a few cups of tea a day reducing your risk of developing cancer, um, was that black tea or green tea?

17. WLDr. William Li10:07

    Green tea. Um, uh, but black tea actually also has, um, different benefits, uh, as well. So, um, a study out of Italy did something really amazing. Well, so look, let's back up for a second. So what everybody would recognize is green tea. It's kinda like ja- the kind of tea that you get in a sushi restaurant, Japanese restaurant, you know, uh, matcha, and it's very trendy. And, and of course the trend goes back thousands of years in, in Asia. Um-

18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:34

    Sorry to interrupt. If you're enjoying this video and want to dive deeper into the topic of nutrition, I have created a free special guide which contains the five most important changes I think we all need to make when it comes to our diet. If you wanna get hold of this free guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below.

19. WLDr. William Li10:56

    Uh, and then there's black tea, a classic English breakfast tea or Earl Grey tea. In fact, I have a little tin of it. I happen to have a tin, tin of Earl Grey tea here, right, right here. Um, uh, I, I love tea, and most people have said, this was the thinking previously, that green tea is really great for you because it's green. It's got, filled with antioxidants. Um, uh, and it's got all these polyphenols in it. And black tea, well, you know, when the British brought it back from Asia, they couldn't actually bring fresh green tea, and with this long ocean voyage, they fermented, dried it, and that drying and fermenting actually destroys those polyphenols, so it doesn't have much good. Like it might taste good, but it doesn't really have the healthful properties. Well, this is where science, again, you know, is able to heat up that knife and cut through the, uh, the butter to kinda see exactly what the story is. And it turns out that black tea actually is quite active. I studied, uh, Chinese green tea, Japanese green tea, and, and studied, um, Earl Grey. And we can... And so you can, besides comparing foods with drugs, you can compare foods with foods to find out which is the best kind. I was interested in is Japanese sencha or Chinese green tea, uh, jasmine tea, or is, um, Earl Grey, which one is better when you throw them into the system? And we found actually surprisingly that Earl Grey, the black tea w- flavored with bergamot, actually was the most potent tea when you combined all th- when you looked at all three side by side. Other thing about black tea that's really amazing that's been studied by researchers in Italy is that black tea actually can call out those stem cells from your bone marrow, uh, to increase their levels in your circulation. And when your stem cells are circulating in your blood, uh, they come out of their hiding spots in your, their storage, uh, container, their, the, the garage that the pa- can- paint cans were stored in. They come out like bees flying out of a hive, and then they cir- circulate in your body looking for organs to repair. So wherever you need a little bit of renewal, regeneration, your stem cells will fix it invisibly.

20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:04

    Yeah.

21. WLDr. William Li13:04

    And so black tea can actually spark that repair and regenerative process.

22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:08

    [upbeat music] If you enjoyed that short clip, I think you are really going to enjoy the full conversation, which you can check out here.

Episode duration: 13:30