 So, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Today we live in a world where your doctor is far more likely to prescribe an expensive medication than a handful of kale. But my guest today says that we need to start thinking of food as medicine. Imagine that. And realize that we already have all the tools we need to fight disease and to live longer, healthier lives. He's Dr. William Lee. Dr. Lee is a world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author. He's written over 100 scientific publications in his 2010 TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer has been viewed more than 11 million times. He's also the author of the best-selling book, Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. On today's episode, Dr. Lee and I are going to talk about your five natural health defense systems and how to boost them, his five-by-five-by-five technique, and why he thinks beer might actually be good for you. Dr. Lee, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. It's a pleasure. And thank you for having me. Thank you so much for coming. This is going to be really exciting. Let's start with the title of one of the chapters in your new book, Starve Your Disease. Feed Your Health. What do you mean by that and how can people actually do that? Well, you know, as a physician, as fellow physicians, we know that what we eat can really impact our bodies. But when it comes to food and health, what really matters is how our body responds to what we put inside it and why we stay healthy at all. Like, why don't we get sick more often? And cancer is one of these diseases that everybody cares about because it is such a feared condition. And what I write about is that, in fact, we're forming cancers in our bodies all the time. We've got trillions of cells that are making divisions and they're going to make mistakes. And these mistakes lead to microscopic cancers that are completely harmless because our body defends against their growth. One of the way that they defend against their growth is that they don't allow blood vessels to grow into them. But when cancer's hijack those blood vessels, there's a process called tumor angiogenesis, growing new blood vessels, to feed the cancer, a tumor can grow up to 16,000 times in only two weeks. So, the question is, how can we boost our bodies' defenses against cancer blood vessel growth and foods can help starve a cancer by cutting off its blood supply? Really? Come on now. I mean, there's actually foods, and I know we're going to get into this, that can actually starve cancer. Yeah, well, look, the story goes back into the early 1970s when the first idea of controlling cancer without chemotherapy came about. And that's a biological approach. So rather than just trying to slash and burn everything, could we clip those blood vessels? It's like a, you know, like a harmful scuba diver, a frogman, an enemy frogman. You clip its air hose, right? Now I can't breathe, gotta come to the surface, you can pick them right out. And so the idea of, can we do the same thing for cancer, came about in Boston in a laboratory by the name of a guy named Judith Oppen who I trained with, and that ultimately led to biotechnology companies developing anti-angiogenic drugs that are super powerful, FDA approved, more than a dozen of them, but they're super expensive. And so what I did is actually as somebody who's been involved with that drug development uses same approaches that are applied to drug development, but to study food. And when food is studied in the same systems we use to study medicine, you get some real science behind it. So yes, there are foods that inhibit angiogenesis. So what you're saying is you're a doctor who actually helped develop these drugs, expensive drugs, right? Right, exactly. And then you said, well I'm very proud of developing these drugs, but surely there's a better, less expensive way of doing this. Is that putting words in your mouth? No, that's exactly what happened. I mean honestly, when I was involved with doing cancer research I was marveling at the fact that you could go online, order an experimental chemotherapy drug, FedEx it, the next day you could test it into in the research lab in a test tube or an animal, and within a few days you would know if this was effective against cancer. But yet you could call a food delivery service and have something delivered within a half an hour or 15 minutes if it was a pizza, and researchers wouldn't know how to actually deal with that. Like how would you study that? And I thought that was wrong, so what I actually did was figure out how to break things down from a food perspective down into ways that we could study using real science. Yeah, I think that's why you and I have hit a common bond is that, you know, I was obviously developing life-saving surgical techniques to treat heart disease, for instance, and actually lung cancers. And I said, gosh, wait a minute, there's got to be a better way of doing this. And of course I changed my career. So I think it's really exciting to have two individuals who kind of came from the medical side of developing techniques and then said, wait a minute, maybe we should look at foods as the option. What I think what it means is that we can actually speak the same language across almost any area of medicine. And that allows us to actually communicate with our peers and colleagues in medicine, as well as our patients, as well as families. And I think that's what's really important. You know, I'm sure we went into medicine for the same reasons, which is that we wanted to help people. To help people, you have to communicate to them. No, that's absolutely true. OK, so you've got five health defense systems. What are they and how do they affect your health? Right, so what is health, right? So if you were to ask a doctor or ask an athlete or a school kid, they'd probably tell you the same thing, which is that health is the absence of disease, right? You're not sick, you're healthy. I actually argue in my book that's exactly not true. Health is much more than the absence of disease. It's the presence of our hardwired defense systems that we've been born with health defense systems that are firing on all cylinders from the day we're born until our very last breath. And these health defense systems actually are the reasons why we don't get sick more often. And some of them relate to, and these are all based on biotechnology. So we know our angiogenesis system, our circulation is critical, brings oxygen and nutrients to every cell. Our stem cells, there's plenty of drug companies trying to, biotech companies trying to develop stem cell therapies. But guess what? Our body produces its own stem cells that we can actually use. And foods can mobilize those. The microbiome, everybody knows now that gut health is important. And this is the frontier of a whole new area of medicine, which is how do we treat our gut bacteria in healthy ways so that our gut bacteria can treat our body in the right way. And prebiotics and probiotics and other things that we can do can help that. Our DNA, which most people think about as our genetic code, the code of life, much more than that, our DNA is hardwired to protect us against the environment and against aging. It actually has got built into it defense systems to prevent the harm that can occur. And then our immune system, which every grandma told their grandkid that the immune system is important. But we now know the immune system is more powerful than we ever thought because even if you're in your 80s or 90s, if you have cancer, your immune system is potentially powerful enough to wipe out all cancer in your body if it's given a chance. And so we're beginning to revisit what health is using the same knowledge and wisdom that have come out of the biotech community that they're looking at disease, they're looking at drugs. And what I'm looking at, and I think what you've been looking at, and what we're talking about today, is how do we use what we already have, our natural tools to defend against the diseases that we fear the most. So are you trying to put your drug discoveries out of business or is there a place for these? Well, look, I mean, I think that being healthy, being well and getting sick and recovering is the natural part of our life cycle. I'm somebody who truly believes in the power of medicine. People are gonna get sick, they're gonna need to be healed. They're gonna need surgeons, they're gonna need medicines. But the missing tool in the toolbox actually is our diet, our foods and how we think about them because when we're young and when we're healthy and as we're getting older and becoming more exposed to toxins in the environment and other harms, that's when we need to be able to do the healthcare that doesn't occur in a doctor's office or the hospital. It occurs at home between visits to the doctor. That's where food comes in. Great. So I know you're a big fan of eating foods that promote VEGF. For viewers and listeners at home, what the heck's VEGF and how can they promote it? Well, so VEGF is a protein, lots of foods have proteins, legumes are good sorts of protein, but our body makes proteins themselves. In fact, the body makes proteins out of DNA. It reads the code and makes the protein. Some proteins are universal proteins that help us live and VEGF is one of those proteins that stands for Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor, VEGF, really discovered in the late 1980s. I was in the lab that actually was in the early race to discover it. The body makes it when it's injured, when it needs better circulation, more blood flow, and when it makes this protein, blood vessels start sprouting all over the place in order to be able to nourish, refeed and recirculate oxygen and nutrients to where it needs to go. Like if you cut yourself, which is a paper cut or a bigger injury, that tissue will release VEGF right away and it'll start to heal up and grow those blood vessels under the wound. I always tell people that if a scab comes off too early, that bright red stuff you see under there, that's the eagle's eye view of thousands of new blood vessels stimulated by VEGF protein in order to be able to heal that wound. And there are foods that can actually stimulate that as well as medicines that actually do that as well. So I have a new puppy. So you're saying that the more my puppy scratches me and bites me, it's probably good for me because I'm gonna make lots of VEGF in my hands? Well, it's never good to actually be injured, but I will tell you that VEGF does a lot of things in addition to heal wounds. It actually can help restore nerve function, which can be really, really important as we age. It's important for helping to maintain clear vision. You need, it's a neuro-protectant. Actually, it helps the retina actually maintain its function. Really important for the cardiovascular system for the heart as well. Okay, so can I go to the grocery store and buy VEGF? Is there a section? Nope, there's no VEGF section. You can't go to the, either the food section or the supplement section actually go look for it. But this is what's amazing that I write about in my book is that researchers have figured out that certain foods that we eat can prompt our body's health defenses to make VEGF in order to be able to up the ante of our own circulation because is that always what we want? We want better circulation, right? So some of the foods that can do this, by the way, are peels of fruit. So there is a natural acid called Ursulic acid that is very common in apple peel and the peel of pears and other stone fruit. And that peel part actually contains is a great source of Ursulic acid. Ursulic acid, when it's fed to the body, wherever the body needs more blood vessels, it'll prompt VEGF to actually grow those blood vessels and accelerate healing. Some of the research is really amazing is that actually if you have a system in a lab where there's such poor blood flow that you're getting wounds and even a whole limb that might not survive, if you feed that lab animal Ursulic acid derived from fruit peel, you'll actually bring new blood vessels and you'll save the leg. Wow. So you're saying that if I'm gonna grab an apple, I should peel it, eat the peel and throw the rest of the apple away. Even better yet, you can actually eat the whole apple, including the peel, but this is the reason, by the way, why sometimes buying organic is helpful because a lot of the pesticides will stick to the peel, the outer rind of the fruit. And what I try to do is to keep in mind that if I'm gonna eat the fruit peel, which I encourage anybody who wants better circulation to do because of VEGF to really be mindful of what's been, what kind of environment and what kind of pesticides or chemicals this might have been exposed to, that's where organic actually can count. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And isn't rosemary a good source of your Ursulic acid? Another great source is rosemary, one of my favorite herbs. Mine too. I like to cook. I believe that food and health is rooted in culture and great cultures have always been involved with developing great foods, whether it's Asian culture, Mediterranean culture, Latin cultures. It's always been, there's always been a passion about food and rosemary is one of these sacred herbs and spices that's used to light up a meal. I mean, who doesn't like to have rosemary as a spice? And now when you know that there's Ursulic acid in it, you actually can appreciate an additional benefit for adding it to your diet. Yeah, you know, I write about it in the longevity paradox that the villagers of Etchioroli, Italy, South of Naples, one of the fundamental parts of their diet is rosemary. They chew on rosemary, they put it in all their foods and it's recently been discovered that one of the tricks of their longevity and their brain health is the fact that they consume rosemary every day. Well, rosemary also has something called rosimerinic acid which also really helps your circulation. So, you know, one of the things that happens as we get older, aging is not kind to our circulation as you know as a heart surgeon. And so anything that we can do to help our blood vessels stay healthier is a big favor to us. I want to continue on that note because I was a student of history and food history and I've always been fascinated with the spice trade in the Middle Ages and the mortality of sailors on ships on in the spice trade routes was about 50% chance of dying. And the prices were ridiculous for spices, for pepper, for cinnamon, for cloves. And I got interested in why would people risk their lives for this? And it was a drug trade. And the only reason now in our modern society people will risk their lives is for drugs. And these people didn't know that these were drugs. Nobody knew that black pepper was, you know, had incredible properties of bioparam. They didn't know the effect of cinnamon and yet people were willing to risk lives and to pay large amounts of money for spices and that. Yeah, well, you know, maybe they intuitively knew more than that it was good for you. And therefore it was valuable, right? What we know is good for us, we value. And I think that's very different than, you know, writing a prescription and going to the pharmacy and having it filled that somebody else called insurance company pays for, we've kind of been disconnected from value. But food and spices and herbs are really valuable. I'm glad you brought up the spice trade because what's really interesting was a connection between the East and the West, both in terms of materials, but also in terms of philosophy. And so much of health, if you think about the totality of health was second nature in Asian and Eastern cultures. And so I think along with the spice route and the spice trade and all the foods that came along with it, including not only spices, but fermented foods. That's true. Right? You know that horseradish, which, you know, sort of most people think about a Northern European food actually came from cabbage from China that was brought over and it was adopted into the cuisine of Germany and other places. But so I think that this is where history becomes really important. It's useful to know and to appreciate where our best foods come from. And when you look into it, you realize that there was value long before what we're talking about. Now, we're kind of going back to the future. We're rediscovering our own past. Yeah, I've got some cookbooks that were written in ancient Venice. And almost everything had huge amounts of cinnamon. And you often showed your wealth by the amount of cinnamon that you were able to put in dishes. And now we come full circle and we go, oh my gosh. Cinnamon is one of the ways we potentiate insulin's action. Exactly. So it's amazing. It wasn't a flavoring. It had a medicinal benefit. They didn't know what it was doing, but they certainly were willing to do it. And they could incorporate it into their cuisine. Another one is like licorice, the actual licorice root, which was brewed into teas, star anise, which actually tamiflu is made from, the antiviral. Antiviral. So I mean, again, I think that there's so much to be learned from the spice trade. Now what I really believe is the modern interpretation of all this is how do we take cutting edge science? How do we take the stuff that people can count on, believe in? It's not myth. It's fact, just like anything else in medicine. And how do we actually put that right in front of people? How do we teach doctors and patients to really have the same language? I think that's really important. And when it comes to food, that's what unites us all. That's true. Everybody's got to eat. Exactly. Well, I mean, look, we are all influenced by where we came from, where our parents lived, and what they ate, and our grandparents, and their parents as well. This is the whole thing about individuality when it comes to food and health. One thing that's very clear is, for example, our microbiome, our gut health, is very much influenced by whether we're breastfed or not, and actually even where our moms might have lived, and whether they were breastfed. And research studies show that if you actually have a healthy gut microbe like lactobacillus rudorii, and it's transferred from mom to baby. By the way, you know some of the most exciting recent discovery is that around eight months of pregnancy, the uterus with the baby sends a signal to the gut and tells this one bacteria, lactobacillus rudorii, it's about a month away, so let's get ready. The bacteria send a signal to blood cells called neutrophils. It's like calling an Uber. And they get into these cells. The cells come by, the colon, they get into the cells, get into the bloodstream. So now you have bacteria in the bloodstream, but you're not sick. So it's changing our way of thinking about it. And those cells drop off the bacteria in the breast like getting out of the Uber. And then just waiting for the child to be born so during the first episode of breastfeeding, they're injecting this bacteria into the baby. In lab studies, it shows that this bacteria, lactobacillus rudorii, can protect the mom against breast cancer and the baby against breast cancer for four generations. Whoa, we need more of this stuff. Yeah, well, and again, so can you get it as a probiotic? Yes, but can you find it in food? Turns out lactobacillus rudorii is the exact bacteria used traditionally in making sourdough bread. It's what makes the bread tangy. It's also used in making Parmesan cheese in the Mediterranean. And so, again, what we're really discovering is that a lot of the things that are good for us are also good, they taste good too. You know, my mentor at the NIH, Dr. Moro, Andrew G. Moro, always said that there is nothing new that hasn't been known before that the purpose of research is to re-search, to look again. And I think this is exciting, particularly for our listeners, is what we're saying is people somehow knew so much of this and was passed down from generation to generation to generation, but we're just now discovering all these ancient wisdoms that are in food and in the preparation techniques of food. Let me give you one example. I was recently in Tuscany working with some chefs and winemakers and bio-dynamic wine. And we were walking through an organic garden and there were, of course, very large tomatoes grown organically, San Marzano. It looks like a Roma tomato. And I said, and what are you gonna do with those? And they said, oh, we're gonna make pasta sauce. And I said, well, how do you do that? And they said, well, it's easy, you just peel and de-seed the tomato and then cook it. And I went, so why the heck do you peel and de-seed the tomato? And I said, oh, anybody knows you can't make pasta sauce with the peels and seeds, they've got a toxin. And they said, who taught you that? My mother, who taught her, my grandmother? And these culinary traditions are just fascinating to figure out, okay, tomato's probably good for you, but maybe there's parts of the tomato that we don't want and we should get rid of them. And what are the parts that we want? We want, actually, what we've discovered is that the lycopene in the tomato is really great for us. This is a carotenoid. It's what makes carrots orange and what makes tomatoes red and watermelon red as well. I mean, it's good stuff. And what's interesting about lycopene is that when it appears in Mother Nature, like a tomato off a vine, if you were to eat it in the salad raw or eat it like an apple, most of the lycopene isn't really absorbed by your body. However, if you take the peeled tomatoes and you simmer them gently, and lycopene is what we call fat soluble, so it likes to dissolve in oil. So what's the best way to cook it is with some? Olive oil. Tomatoes, olive oil, simmer it. You actually gently convert the chemistry of lycopene as it occurs in nature into a form the body loves to absorb. So once again, you can actually, you know, just look back at history and culture and realize that some of these old wisdoms that, you know, grandma's working in the kitchen had really were aimed at lighting up the body's health defense systems, which is really a modern view. So speaking of health defense systems, how do we underestimate the power of our immune system to help us? Well, look, immunity is something that has been known for well over a hundred years. It's, it protects us against the cold and viruses. And we know when we have a bad immune system and bad can be not active enough. A great example that everybody knows how bad it is is with AIDS, you know, when your immune deficiency is really a horrifying situation where you become vulnerable to everything, the boy in the bubble, so to speak. But you've also an overactive immunity, autoimmunity. That's where you attack yourself. And so just like every other defense system, the immune system functions perfectly for health when it's in a middle, when it's got that balance. Whether you're talking about angiogenesis or stem cells or microbiome or DNA repair or immunity, it's really about getting your body to sort of stay in that happy state, that middle balance. When do we know when the immune system needs to be powerful to be reared up? I think one of the most striking advances in modern medicine is in immunotherapy against cancer. Won the Nobel Prize, this whole field in 2018, recognizing that rather than just throw chemo at the body to kill normal organs as well as cancer cells, why not just kind of guide and urge the immune system to do what it is designed to do, which is clean up cancer? By the way, that's why even though we form microscopic cancers all the time, why they never mostly turn into anything dangerous. Today, I mentioned to you that there was an autopsy study done of women in their 40s, between 40 and 50, and they died of other things besides cancer, and they didn't have cancer, but when they actually did the autopsy, they found 40% of women between the ages of 40 and 50 already had microscopic breast cancers that most of them will never turn out to be anything because their immune system won't wipe them out. 50% of men between 50 and 60 have microscopic prostate cancers, and over the age of 70, almost everybody has thyroid cancer, but it's our immune system that actually does the job of doing surveillance, security, and it takes out these microscopic cancers. So immunotherapy jacks up our immune system to find, search out and destroy the cancer. Here's what's interesting. President Jimmy Carter, who is the oldest living former president today, had melanoma that spread to his liver and his brain from the skin, and he actually was given no hope, but then was given an immunotherapy, one of the first patients to receive this, and by activating his 90-year-old immune system, his body could destroy all the cancers. So today he's cancer-free. My mother also had metastatic endometrial cancer, cancer from the uterus that had spread, and it was given really little to no chance. She was in her 80s, and we gave her an immune therapy that ripped off the cloak from the cancer so her own immune system could find the cancer and destroy it. After three treatments, all of the cancer disappeared, and she's cancer-free today. But here's why food is important, because as remarkable as these treatments are, they really only work in about 20% or less of people. Super frustrating for doctors, like how come we can't achieve this miracle for most people? Well, it turns out our diet and our gut microbiome may actually hold the key. One of my colleagues, Laurent Zittvogel, who's a cancer immunologist in Paris, took, looked at 200 consecutive patients, cancer patients on immunotherapy, and separated them into the people who responded and did well, versus the people who didn't respond to this breakthrough and didn't do well. And she looked at everything, compared everything, left and right, figure out what the differences are. It turned out the difference wound up being in one bacteria in the gut called acromansia musinophila. Right, a lot about her. And it's actually one of the surveillance protecting bacteria in our gut, important for a lot of things, including helping us properly monitor how well we do when we're aging. But for cancer, it seems to be very important. And in the patients who responded, they all had acromansia, and the patients who did not respond, and some of them were on antibiotics, they had no acromansia. So what she did is she took the acromansia from the responders, and went back to the lab and stuck them into mice that had no bacteria, but had a tumor growing, and they would actually respond to the treatment. When she gave an antibiotic to wipe it out, they stopped responding. And so now, even in oncology, we're beginning to reconsider the importance of gut health, not just for irritable bowel or inflammatory diseases, but really thinking, this could be life or death in terms of whether one of the breakthrough drugs of our century is gonna work or not. And so this is why I think this idea of gut health is so important. And by the way, there's no probiotic for acromansia right now. You can only manipulate it by eating food. One of the best, pomegranate juice. Studies have shown that the elagertanins of pomegranate juice, and you only need eight ounces a day, can actually cause your gut to secrete the mucus that this bacteria loves to grow in. So how do you actually grow your own acromansia with pomegranate or cranberry juice or concrete grape juice? You know, my great-grandmother, who lived one month shy over her 100th birthday, and I write about her. She actually lived on the third floor of her house, and her bedroom was on the third floor. And my sister and I thought she was nuts. In her 90s, going up to her bedroom on the third floor every day, multiple times a day, and saying, what an idiot, she should move her bedroom down to the first floor or it'd be easy. She's pretty smart. But she always actually, before bed every night, had a small glass of Morgan David Concord grape wine. And we thought, you know, that's silly. Well, there you go. She was actually feeding. Her acromansia. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, she was smart and wonderful until the day she died, she just went to sleep, which is what I think we'd all like. So you're saying that we can actually change our body's immune system or our ability to deal with cancer cells by foods that we eat. Now, are you saying that if I've got cancer, the first thing I should do is drink eight ounces of pomegranate juice? No, I mean, look, this is where it's not food versus medicine. It's really a new way of thinking about food and medicine. I mean, this is a continuum. Right. Look, if you're well, use your diet. If you're not well, use your diet and real medicines. You got to combine it all together. Cancer is one of the diseases of aging. It's considered a chronic disease, but a preventable disease in most cases. If you've got cancer, you really need to go to the doctor and get an accurate diagnosis. I mean, today we can actually take the tumor. We can bust it down to its fundamentals in terms of genomics and discover things we couldn't do even three years ago in order to be able to find smoking guns that we can use to design treatments. One of the things that I think is so important though is to recognize that the same vulnerabilities that we might find for drugs could also give us clues to what we can eat and how we can actually treat ourselves. Every cancer patient I've ever seen, by the way, after, besides you tell them all the medical stuff, they always say, hey Doc, what should I eat? What can I do for myself? And in fact, that's one of the things that prompted me to write my book and to get into nutrition itself is that I felt like I was never educated about nutrition. There's not a lot out there to educate doctors in a structured, rigorous, trustworthy fashion. And I thought that was just wrong. So it was time to really put some real muscle behind the science and up our ante as you've done yourself to look at the science behind nutrition. On that note, in your book, you described the five by five by five framework as a way to eat to beat disease. What the heck is that and how does it work? When I actually set out to write a book about food and health, of course, everybody asked me, so what's your diet gonna be? What's the plan? And I felt like diets are difficult because they tend to put you into a box that you've gotta stick to every day for the rest of your life. And how many of us can really do that? I mean, life is for the living. Everybody's life is different. We enjoy certain things. And so I felt like how can you have a diet without dieting, right? So, you know- It sounds like an idea. Well, listen, there was this, the great martial artist Bruce Lee said, his skill was the art of fighting without fighting. And so it's really how do you adapt to your circumstances at a given time and use the weapons and assets that you have in hand to help yourself? So what I came up with is just a simple way to think about how to eat healthy. And I call it the five by five by five kind of strategy or framework to approach it. In my book, I read about more than 200 foods that can activate one or more of your health defense systems, angiogenesis, stem cells, microbiome, your DNA protection or your immunity. One of these five can be activated. In some cases, there are certain foods that activate all five. I call them grand slamming foods because single food will like knock it out of the park and so five by five means that five health defense systems, on average, we encounter food about five times a day. If you think about it, breakfast, lunch, dinner, a couple of snacks, you know, most people, somehow they meander through the day, encounter the opportunity to choose food about five times a day. That's an opportunity to make a choice. You don't have to eat, but if you're gonna eat something, you can select something, you can think about which of your health defense systems you're activating. And so what I say is take five foods, each one to activate one of your health defense systems, every time you encounter food, five by five by five, super easy way to think about this. And one of the things is that there's 200 plus foods. So I made it possible, I actually created a shopping list according to how you would find foods in the grocery store that anybody who's listening to your podcast or watching can actually download for free on my website at www.doktorwilliamleeli.com. And really, you know, this is sort of the opportunity just to get familiar with the things that are good for you. So give me three easy ways for people who are listening to us to do this at home. Where do you start? Well, the first thing to do is to realize where you encounter food. The first place is usually your home someplace. Always keep things that are healthy in your home. And I break that into two categories. One is fresh plant-based foods, always good to actually get something that's fresh and seasonal in the market. Organic, if you're gonna be eating the skin or anything else where you're careful about that. And the other thing is dry goods. Cause it's a surprise, you know, like we used to always say, don't shop in the middle of the grocery store. But in fact, there are some good things that are in the middle. Nuts, different sources of fiber, whole grains, those are good things that you can actually get in store to really help you. So what you have at home. When you go out to eat or when you're encountering food, if you're at work or you're running an errand or you're traveling someplace, that's another choice to make. I always try to go for the fresh plant-based material first. If I'm in a restaurant, for example, and I'm looking at a menu, right? This is always the dilemma everybody has. Man, what am I gonna eat? What's good for me? Okay, what you want to eat might not be good for you. But if you wanna actually make those things marry, what I try to do is I personally just look first and look at the foods I recognize that are good for me. This is why getting familiar with this language of food and health becomes so important. And then I will build my choices around the vegetables usually that I see. And that's sort of another trick that I actually do. And the third trick is really don't eat as much as your eyes or your mind might want you to eat. So think about that classic dilemma of being in front of the buffet line, right? I mean, you get a plate, it's completely empty. You get this big line of food, take as much as you want. You know, that's probably one of the biggest pitfalls, pratfalls you could actually have, take only about a third of what you might wanna eat. And you don't even have to finish it. I always tell people, quit the clean plate club. And better yet, don't even put as much on the plate. Yeah, use the salad plate rather than the dinner plate. Absolutely, absolutely. And eat more slowly because really you wanna be able to savor and enjoy what you're eating. And this is why eating with people, community eating is what happens in these so-called blue zones where people age gracefully and healthfully as they tend to eat together by having conversation, meaningful conversation at low stress, you get oxytocin secreted, you're too busy to just wolf food, you're talking. And you're also enjoying the food that you're eating. Ideally, you know, fresh prepared healthy foods. Yeah, one of my good friends, Tom Guy, he used to tell me that a menu only tells you what the chefs got in the back. And never, you know, just accept what, you know, is on a particular entree. He said, the menu tells you what he's got back there. And if they won't give you the pieces that you want, you know, one from column A, one from column B, then don't go back, because they're not actually interested in your health. You know, it's so interesting you mentioned that. So, you know, how many of us have been to a restaurant where we see something and we want a dish and you're like, but you know, I'm allergic to this or I prefer not to have that, can you remove it? Imagine going to a restaurant and seeing something you want and you want to ask the chef if they can add something healthy to it. Could you add some turmeric to it? You know, fresh cracked pepper. Might be interesting. Or where's the olive oil? And where's the olive oil? Yeah, exactly. And probably the olive oil isn't actually olive oil in many restaurants. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the other thing I think is authenticity, right? One of the things that I think we're all realizing in, you know, this day and age, you know, even with, you know, honestly, the internet brings us to this point, this brink where we got so much information. We don't want fake stuff. We want real stuff. And I think that's where, you know, we're beginning to realize our minds tell us. We know when something's real and something's not real. And so I think when it comes to food, we got to use those same instincts to go for the real stuff, which is why, you know, it's in a box and it's ultra-processed. You can't pronounce most of the stuff. That's probably not real food and it's probably not real good for you either. Very good. So why do you think the medical community has been so resistant to seeing food as medicine? I mean, you and I both came from training that, you know, we maybe got 15 minutes on proteins, carbs and fats. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that originally, medicine and food was tied together very closely. I mean, Hippocrates was the guy who said, let medicine be my food and food be my medicine, right? So really what's interesting is it's not, when did food start to become part of the medicine? It's kind of like, when did we lose track? When did we lose our way? When did our focus change? And I think, you know, probably the focus started changing during wartime, particularly during World War I and II where you had to feed masses of soldiers, inexpensive, highly preserved foods. I think that the industrial revolution, the industrialization of food, you know, when you can make a lot and make it cheaply, right? So think about after World War II, you know, when people were worried about having enough food after, afterwards you had prosperity. Prosperity meant you could what? You could get cheap TV dinners wrapped in foil that you can sit in front of the boob tube and just wolf down. And it was like a whole cooked meal, right? Yeah. I think we started to lose our way when things became manufactured and cheap and convenient because it's true. It's not as convenient to actually grow your own food or to cook your own food, but man, it is just so much more satisfying. So as we've become more detached from our planet, and by the way, that's one of the things that's really becoming clear is that what's good for our bodies is also tends to be good for the planet. We should be thinking about more than ourselves. I think this is where the movement is now. We're beginning to revest the past, think about basics, consider not only ourselves and our families, but also consider the planet. And just trying to do good things all around. Yeah, I like to remind my patients that during World War II in the United States, 40% of all the food in the United States was grown in victory gardens, home victory gardens. 40% of all the food we ate. And if we could just realize that actually wasn't a long time ago, and maybe we should be turning our front lawns back into victory gardens. And rooftops. And rooftops. Right. And balconies. Exactly. You can grow food in very limited space. And by the way, gardening itself is calming for the soul. There's something that is relaxing about going into your own garden and tending to it, taking care of it. Yeah, actually, when I was a resident of the University of Michigan, we planted a victory garden in Ann Arbor and my kids. We'd go out and you'd pull out a carrot and we didn't wash the dumb things off. You shook off the dirt and munched it. Well, look, this is the victory against the war against disease, right? So that's really, I think, that would be a good campaign to mount. There you go. We're kind of touching on this. What's gonna change the status quo? Now your book is a great start. I happen to think my books are a great start. How do we get buy-in into this? Well, I think that the medical community at large is being forced to consider new ways of thinking about managing health and disease because everything that you and I were trained in is unsustainable. Correct. Just taking care of sick people, dealing with the train wrecks, on sweeping up the train wrecks on the highway after the cars have already crashed. I mean, that's what we were trained to do. And that's what most of the technology has actually been around. And by the way, as you mentioned, I've been involved with drug development. It takes 10 years on average, more than a billion dollars in the odds of 10,001 that you're not gonna succeed. And so everything is expensive. You can't afford it. We're waiting too late. The outcomes aren't satisfactory. And I think this is just the United States. This is worldwide. So I think the pressure of economics is a wake-up call for the system at large. So what do we have to do? What role do we have to play? I think the medical community needs to find champions internally, yourself and me and other colleagues that we actually have. And we need to educate our own brethren. We need to educate our colleagues in medicine to be able to help that because one doctor with a panel of 3,000 patients, that's a scalable impact. Number one. Number two. I think we need to give consumers real facts. We need to be able to answer their questions when they say, hey, Doc, what should I be eating? We should be able to feel comfortable that what you're saying to somebody is the same thing I would say to somebody because it's based on science, in fact, the same way it would be if we were talking about a medicine or a diagnosis. And so one of the big problems I think that consumers have is they're not trusting what they're hearing about food and health. So we have to work to give them that trust. The third thing I think is that, we need to be able to apply science to really support marketing as opposed to have the marketing overwhelm the science. I have no problem of finding great, interesting ways of finding appealing messages to people as long as the science is real. But I think when you don't have really solid science or you have piecemeal science and then what you wind up doing is just creating marketing around it, it confuses everyone. By the way, doctors like us, we're just consumers as well. We're seeing the same stuff everybody else's. So everybody's confused. So I think these are three things that will actually move the needle. So tell me a few foods that you think we ought to be eating that might surprise people. Ah, okay. So I have a whole chapter in a book called Exceptional Foods that are really the surprising foods that most people wouldn't even think about. And a couple that I'll bring up is, I mean obviously let me just say green leafy vegetables are good for you and fruits and vegetables in general have incredible healthful properties, all the research supports that. But what are some of the uncommon things or that aren't not normally connected to health? One of them is oysters. Yeah. Oysters, I love oysters by the way. Oyster meat contains an amino acid that actually helps protect our DNA. It is a powerful antioxidant. And although most of us don't live by the ocean and even if you do, you're probably not shucking oysters in your kitchen at home. The fact of the matter is you can actually get the same benefits of oyster sauce which you can actually find next to the soy sauce in a grocery store. Wow. Now here's what's interesting. Oyster sauce is really oysters cooked down. There's polysaccharides and proteins that are found in there. And they've been actually found to activate your immune system in addition to protect your DNA. So I'm not trying to tell everybody that should go out and rush out to eat oysters. Everybody's going to be different. But this is a real surprise to me is that you can actually measure immune system function with blood tests after feeding, giving people oyster sauce. And it actually makes an increase of their T cells or natural killer cells, which can be helpful. That's one surprise. Another interesting surprise food is omega-3 fatty acids and polyunsaturated acids are really good for you. And of course, a really good fish oil supplement is a super simple and easy way to actually get what you need. But people who live by the sea or people can get fresh seafood can find amazing sources. So we always think about, oh, eat your salmon. Well, most of the omega-3 in salmon, a lot of it is actually in the skin. Not everybody eats the skin. So I encourage people to eat the skin. But what about, what if it's not salmon? What are some other sources you can actually find? Well, it turns out that clams, manila clams, are one of them and cockles are another source of omega-3 fatty acids. And so again, there are entire tables that I put in my book that where they've measured the different amounts of different healthy fatty acids and other bio-actives in different foods. That's another one. And another thing that is surprising to me when I encountered this, as a scientist we just look at data and we're reading it critically and sometimes you just see stuff that's just wow, surprising. There was a publication that was presented by cancer researchers at ASCO, which is the big American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting a few years ago, 2017, where they studied 700 patients with stage three colon cancer. So this is advanced colon cancer, undergoing treatment, and they wanted to figure out what people were eating. And what they found was that those patients with stage three colon cancer who were eating two handfuls of nuts, tree nuts a day, had a 50% decrease in the chance of death. Yeah. Amazing, right? So what could that be? Well, nuts not only have good healthy fatty acids, but they also have great fiber that feed our microbiome. Oh, that's the same microbiome that might be acrimacia that may actually help to promote our immune system to fight cancer. So again, the secrets are in our body. Our body is the most highly engineered system. There is that we can actually even imagine. And so finding foods that can activate our health defenses is really clearly the way to go. Now you mentioned beer, really? Beer is good for you? I was surprised when I saw that, too. It was a fascinating surprise. I mean, I'm a researcher and a doctor, but I sometimes feel like one of these science journalists where I'm finding myself so amazed that I have to tell the narrative of how I discovered this. Well, look, we know that there are healthful beverages, green tea. We know that coffee, green tea is good for your circulation, loads your cholesterol, loads your blood pressure. We know that coffee lengthens your telomeres. And naturally improves your cardiovascular outcomes. Red wine, another well-known, especially biodynamic red wine, grown properly, rich with polyphenols. And so that led me and others to ask, well, what about other fermented beverages like beer? Well, look, beer is made with hops. And you drink the suds, but actually the beer. But the hops are on the bottom. Well, it turns out that the hops actually contain a natural chemical called xanthohumeral. And the xanthohumeral actually cuts off the blood supply of feeding cancer. So actually, ironically enough, if you drink a small number of beers a week, there's been a study to show it reduces the risk of kidney cancer. Now, it's not the alcohol. Let's be clear. Correct. It's the stuff that the alcohol coaxed out of the hops. And the xanthohumeral also mobilizes your regenerative stem cells. So now there's something about beer that could be non-alcoholic beer will do the same thing, by the way, that mobilizes your stem cells, good for regeneration, good for aging, helps to stimulate repair and maintenance of your heart, and can help your body fight cancer. Hard to beat that kind of science if it's actually in something that we enjoy drinking. Yeah, I think the hops is the important part of beer. I would disagree with you that beer is good for you because of the lectin content in wheat or corn, where most beer is made of. Non-wheat beers, I'll put in with you. That might be a good compromise for us. Well, look, I mean, this is the whole thing. If you can understand the best ways to actually produce a product, and you can preserve the good stuff, the best stuff, the stuff that actually has the activity, that's the best of all possible worlds. Yeah, in fact, I take a hop extract every day. It's been extracted, but maybe that's not the right thing. So, Dr. Lee, where can we find eat to beat disease? You can find eat to beat disease anywhere books are sold online or at your favorite bookstore. I'm a big proponent of going to your local bookstores. That's where you can go in there and browse and discover new things. And again, I want to sort of just emphasize to your viewers that if you want to get something I felt was the most useful thing for me to have, which is a free downloadable shopping list of all the 200 foods that are in my book. And I went to a series of grocery stores and I actually organized this list in the order in which you encountered them in a grocery store. Just makes your shopping a lot easier. All you got to do is come to my website at www.drwilliamlea.com, that's drwilliamlea.com. We can follow me on social at Dr. William Lee. Perfect. Okay, so it's time for one of my favorite parts of the show, the audience question. And I want you actually to please maybe take it first. So there are, I've had David Asprey as my guest on this podcast and he hates kale. So here's the question. Joy on YouTube asks, I love high oxalate veggies like kale and Swiss chard and eat them five times a week lightly saute. Is it okay to consume them that often? What say you? Well, so this is where I think it's important to use science. Yeah, I mean, you know, there are some green leafies that actually contain oxalate. And if you are normal and healthy and your kidneys are working fine, you can handle a pretty good oxalate load and just pass right through, you'll be fine. What's interesting about kale is that although some people don't really like the slightly bitter taste to it, if you cook it, you're looking to mellow it out. And kale and chard all belong to sort of Brassica. It contains isothiocyanates. These are other chemicals and there are hundreds of isothiocyanates, such like there are hundreds of lectins too. And the thing is that by and large, the isothiocyanates in Brassica actually are good for you. They actually can boost your angiogenesis system. They can actually help your stem cells. They're good, the fiber is actually good for your microbiome. What I would say is that you can feel safe to eat kale five times a week if you enjoy it and if you don't have any other active medical problems, always talk to a doctor if you do and if you're concerned about it. And the best thing I think of that I discovered in writing Eat to Beat Disease is that you got more than 200 foods you can choose from. So maybe you don't like kale because you don't like the taste of kale. But that's okay, you can choose something else within that family that's actually good for you. And I would try to encourage people not to get too fixated on any one molecule that's found in any one food because foods are made out of hundreds of molecules. It's Mother Nature's factory for bioactives. And most of the bioactives in foods were originally in the plant to protect the plant. Correct, right? So what happens is when mankind, humankind started to eat the plants, they had a new job description. They had to figure out how they worked in the body and sometimes they're not so good for you. Sometimes they're really great for you. Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. You know, our ancient ancestors probably encountered 250 different plant species on a rotating basis. And those plants were all grown in six feet of loam soil. Everything was organic. And even the animals that we were eating were eating those plants and getting those polyphenols. And as I tell anyone who will listen, the average person will probably eat 20 different vegetables in a year, maybe if they're lucky. And if they think, even if they're eating organically, that they're acquiring those polyphenols of 250 different species. I got oceanfront property in Palm Springs to sell. It just can't be done. And so I think you're right. The more varied our diet, the more we change, even seasonally change, the better off you're gonna be. It's really interesting. If you look at these healthy aging populations, the so-called blue zones, right? There's five of them around the world. These are people that are not on strict diets. You know, they're not depriving themselves. They're living really good lives. They enjoy, they would tell you they're having great meals every day. But you know, the thing is that they're eating diverse, very diverse repertoire of foods. They're not limiting. They're actually broadening their menu. So I would actually encourage anyone, if you wanna eat well, you think broadly. Don't eat too much and eat mostly what's fresh. Yep. And in answer to Julia's question from my end, I actually have a couple of female patients who have gone on kale kicks, kale smoothies in the morning, kale salads for lunch and dinner. And they have over the course of a few months suppressed their thyroid function to the point that I can pick it up. And when we, and they don't have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, when we back off on kale in particular, that their thyroid returns to normal. So just again, be careful. Don't become focused on a single food as the key to health. And vary these things, change it up. More is not more. That's true, yeah, that's true. So that's it for the Dr. Gundry podcast and we'll look forward to seeing you next week and thank you again for coming on, Dr. Lee. My pleasure. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.