← The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #101 Featuring Dr. William Li! Insights from a true scientist! Masterclasses on the the gut, heart health, the spinach/oxalate debate, simplifying nutrition, olive oil selection and more!
01:25:32
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- [00:18]
A
Today's episode is sponsored by Apollo Neuro. Apollo Neuro is the leading doctor Recommended wearable technology. Apollo's award winning smart vibes AI works effortlessly behind the scenes, automatically integrating into your life to deliver gentle personalized vibrations that activate your vagus nerve, helping you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer and wake up balanced, focused and ready each day. Not only that, but the Apollo Neuro is the first and only wearable that improves your hrv. Apollo is effortless. Simply wear it throughout the day and night and let it do the work for you. It's safe for anyone and everyone with no side effects and is the only wearable that can be worn anywhere on your body. Optimal health requires both the mind and body to be in in line and Apollo is the key to establishing that connection. Check the description below to save $90 with my special discount. Take control over your health today with Apollo Neuro. All right everybody, welcome back to the Dylan Gemelli podcast. So I say this a lot and I mean this from the bottom of my heart. I am one of the most blessed individuals on the planet because I have the job, I guess, and I don't consider it a job to speak to the most brilliant and well educated people and informed people all over the world. That's my job and I value every second, every moment that I have. But also I'm human and I have a short list. It's, it's a bucket list of interviews that I've wanted to do and you know, I, I, I've never really shared this with anybody other than my wife and in prayer, you know, about who's coming on and whatnot. But my guest today has been on that list for almost the entire time since I started my podcast. So today is extra special to me. I can't wait to talk to him. I have not met somebody with such a plethora of knowledge so I'm going to try to give him the best introduction that I can, but I can't do him any justice whatsoever. But he's a physician, he's a scientist, he's a best selling author. I just got his book, it's called eat to beat disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. And he also has a book, eat to beat your diet. Burn fat, heal your metabolism and live longer. He is everywhere with his knowledge and his videos and he is a prominent speaker and you can find him all over the place. I am honored and pleasured to bring you today, Dr. William Lee.
- [02:46]
B
Well, thank you, Dylan. It's a pleasure to be here awesome, man.
- [02:50]
A
Well, you know what, I know you're busy. I appreciate your time. Like I said, I have been really looking forward to this. And after speaking with you briefly and realizing that you were going to be far more than I expected and I already had high expectations, I want to take advantage of every second I have with you. So what I want to start off with first is you are so brilliant and you know, a variety of things I appreciate about you is that you're. I, I, I tend to find people that, I call it political answers because when you ask them a question, they kind of dance and you have zero hesitation in everything that I see you talk about and that you do. And so my first question would be to you is how do you stay so sharp on such a variety of topics? What is it that you practice or that you do that keeps you that in line where it just seems like no matter what you get asked, it's pinpoint.
- [03:42]
B
Yeah. You know, I'm really fortunate because I've been working in the same direction, building brick by brick my career, looking as a scientist, I'm a vascular biologist. As a physician, I'm trained in internal medicine, which is extremely broad. And in internal medicine, you know, I, I've gone whole hog. So I've run intensive care units, I've run emergency room. So I've gone far beyond the usual family practice of fair weather medicine area. So I, you know, I fly through the eye of the hurricane kind of thing and you know, I think over time and I'm a researcher, so I literally am excited to plunge into the unknown and, and pull back the cloak and discover new things. So I think I've just learned how to stay on my feet and, and I've always been a very grounded person. So, and I always tell people this, I'm sort of a scientist first. And a lot of people think that people who are not scientists think that scientists go around being brainiacs talking about everything that they know. But in fact real scientists like me, we spend most of our time in kind of a treading water in a sea of humility because we spend most of our time thinking about what we don't know and asking questions and being curious. So I would say, you know, I'm a pretty grounded person who spends most of my time scratching the itch of curiosity and figuring out like what questions we need to ask next.
- [05:12]
A
I love it. And one of the things I love about you is how fact based that you are and that data driven I am the same way. I don't like hyperbole. I don't like over exaggeration, and I don't like mythical answers and thoughts. I like facts. I like grand groundwork, and I love that you do that. And I know that there's some things that you're constantly working on that you found, but some of the things that I know that, that we kind of talked about, that you found out that are newer. I want to get into some of that stuff. I want to share that with everybody and I want to talk about it. So we were talking about the, the brain having its own microbiome. And I am so intrigued by that. And I want to, I, I'd love for you to just kind of dig in and explain what you found and, and, and what that means for all of us.
- [05:59]
B
Right. So listen, when I went to medical school years ago, within the first week, what I was taught is that bacteria are bad. We had to memorize hundreds of bacteria and that we must kill bacteria by memorizing antibiotics. And really the practice of medicine for decades, you know, really has been, since the advent of antibiotics, which is about 100 years ago, has really been using this incredibly important tool as a blunt instrument to smash bacteria whenever we can. And I literally thought years ago, taught by, taught in medical school, that most of the bacteria that I'm going to encounter as a physician are bad bacteria. So I needed to be prepared, like a gunslinger to be able to whip out my weapon, you know, like John Woo style. You know, you, a gun in each hand, an antibiotic each hand to be able to knock out the bad guys. Well, actually, I have to say, in the last decade and a half, my understanding of that has completely been inverted, where I've now realized that most of the bacteria that humans meet in their lives are good bacteria, and most of them are inside our bodies. And of course, everybody by now has heard about gut bacteria. You don't have to be a biohacker to have heard that. This is like basically common parlance. Now, 39 trillion good bacteria lives in our gut. They do all kinds of things like lower inflammation, produce short chain fatty acids, they can improve our metabolism, help our lipids, text message our brain, communicate the brain, gut brain axis. So I started to really begin digging in as somebody whose research went into the gut microbiome. So I actually studied the gut microbiome to be able to say, is there something about this gut, these gut bacteria that is totally unknown to us, that would be surprising to us? Well, this is that gut brain axis, right? So assume that most of our gut Bacteria live in the last part portion of our gut, the colon. Right. So by the way, do you know, Dylan, what part of the colon the gut bacteria mostly live in?
- [08:16]
A
No, I do not.
- [08:17]
B
Okay, so let me give you a quick anatomy lesson. Okay. Colon starts from the right side of the body. You take an elevator up, it's a tube that goes up, and then you take the escalator, it goes across your belly. So there's a horse, a horizontal part of it, and then on the other end of it, which after you're crossing your gut, you got the down elevator. And as the tube goes down and that down part of your descending colon then winds up in your rectum and then it's your poop shoot and you're done. Now the, the part that, that you start going up on the right hand side of the, of the colon, the, the, it connects to the small intestines and there's a little pouch there called the ilium. I L E U M ilium. It's actually where the appendix is.
- [09:03]
A
All right.
- [09:04]
B
And it turns out most of the gut bacteria, the healthy gut bacteria microbiome is right there in this pouch. And in fact, its location is so particular that we're beginning to ask anew whether or not the appendix actually might have a job that we didn't realize. In fact, where begin. Some people are beginning to think that the appendix is a kind of an ammo clip for healthy gut bacteria. Like a Pez dispenser, if you remember those old candies. Yeah. Literally, it's just loaded with the new a refill for healthy bacteria when you need it. Now, we don't know that for a fact, but it is kind of a mind blowing idea that, you know, for, for decades surgeons always thought, you don't need that appendix out with the appendix. It's inflamed. Get rid of it. Doesn't do any good. Like the tonsils. Tonsils are useless as well. Totally not. The tonsils are part of our immune system. Okay. So like most of us have grown up in this with these ideas that we're beginning to realize just weren't quite right. Okay, so cecum and a colon, being that the home for most of the gut bacteria? Well, interestingly enough, what do they do? They communicate with our immune system. So when I was in medical school, and I'm just giving you reference because I want to share with the people listening that, you know, how, you know, you were kind enough to characterize me, you know, for my expertise, but, you know, expertise is hard won. And what we know today might be very different from we know yesterday, and what we know tomorrow is going to evolve again. And so I don't really look at this huge explosion of research as misinformation or disinformation. I look at it as a continuum. We're always trying to stay on top of what's the latest thing. Okay, so the 70% of our immune system is actually found inside the wall of our gut.
- [11:02]
A
Wow.
- [11:03]
B
Not in our lymph nodes, not in our spleen. It lives inside our gut. Right. So you have gut bacteria talking through the wall of the, of of the gut talking to the immune system, which is really, really important. And I, I spent a lot of time thinking about that, because that conversation between healthy gut bacteria and immune system, very important to overcoming cancer. We can talk about that later. But the other thing that is found in the wall of the gut are nerves. Nerves that start in the brain and go and, and go down to the gut. So what nerves are those again? Back to med school. I know you didn't go to med school, so I'm giving you a, I'm giving you a crash course. Learned about the cranial nerves. Cranial meaning brain. Coming out of the brain, one of the biggest cranial nerves is called the vagus nerve. I know people in the biohacking world have heard of, you know, vagus stimulation and stuff, but this is actually a gigantic trunk of nerves. You got a left one, you got a light, right one. They come out of the base of our brain. They, they, they crawl down these nerves like telephone poles, crawl down telephone wires, crawl down our neck. They get into our chest. They wrap around our esophagus like a fishnet stocking, all right? Then they go a little bit lower to our diaphragm. Punch right through the diaphragm, all right? And then they're in our gut and they're in our belly. And once again to our belly, these big, thick trunks that would say. Think about it like a big fat pen, you know, like those old pens, big fat pens, that's about how thick they are. But once they get down below our diaphragm into our gut, the, the, the wiring, the nerves play out like the, they fan out like the tail, like a horse's tail, like a paintbrush, but really long. And then they're going all over the gut. All right? Now what's interesting is the gut brain axis, a lot of the communication between the gut and the brain and the brain, and the gut goes through the vagus nerve. Now, once again, I'D always thought years ago that it's the brain communicating with the vagus nerve, the parasympathetic relaxation digestion system was communicating a one way street from your brain down to your gut. Because, you know, how smarter is your gut anyway, your brain's a lot smarter. So it's downstream signals telling our gut what to do. Squeeze, baby, squeeze. I keep on digesting. Well, that's now been overturned, that whole idea. So I'm just telling you what's exciting about being a medical researcher like me, looking at the data and following this, the, the narrative of science as we're beginning to understand the human body is that, you know, there the old chapters being ripped out and thrown out and new chapters are being written. So it turns out by the way, along the vagus nerve, which goes from the brain down to the gut, only 20% of the nervous signals, of the electrical signals going along your vagus nerve come from your brain. 20% go from top down to the bottom. 80% of the electrical communication go from the gut back to the brain.
- [14:07]
A
Wow.
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B
And that 80% of those signals, a lot of them are dictated by our gut bacteria. And so think about it as the channel, the that from which our gut bacteria sends text messages to our brain. Okay, right. Pretty profound. So, okay, we haven't even gone to the brain microbiome. So for a long time until recently actually, we thought that that's how the gut brain axis actually works. You know, this back and forth channel, there's a blood, brain barrier, blah, blah, blah. Well, within the last couple of years, people have been looking into brain tissue and brain fluid and found that the brain has its own microbiome, healthy bacteria that naturally live in the brain. Not a lot of them. So you're not talking about a hornet's nest of bacteria, but there's enough back there. They're doing something. Do we understand exactly what they're doing? Well, not really. We know they're not infecting the brain. They're not giving you meningitis, Right? Okay. They're not causing brain inflammation. They are communicating somehow. And it's the story of healthy bacteria in our brain. We're also now finding it in other formally considered sterile, no bacterial tissues. Breast milk once thought to be sterile.
- [15:29]
A
Nope.
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B
Got, got bacteria. By the way. In the eighth month of pregnancy, the pregnant mom's uterus sends a text message to her gut to say, you know, we're almost there, we're almost ready to pop baby about a month out. All right, and, and then the gut says, all Right. We're going to get some bacteria called Lactobacillus rudi ready to go. So then these Lactobacillus rudoli bacteria in the gut at eight months, hitch a ride like an Uber in platelets, blood cells, and these platelets take the bacteria, as in an Uber, up to the nipple and drop them off. That's where the Uber drop off is.
- [16:14]
A
All right?
- [16:15]
B
Now this gut bacteria is sitting at the nipple a month early, ready to rock, waiting for the baby to be born, to take that first suckle and get that first mouthful of milk. And then that's how the mom injects her healthy gut bacteria back down into the baby. Right into the gut. All right, so I'm just telling you, these are. These are paradigms. Yeah. Are brand new. That are mind blowing because it actually tells us how much we don't know. By the way, human semen out of the testicles thought to be sterile. Nope. Got bacteria in it. Wow. The bladder urine, supposed to be sterile. Gut bacteria in your bladder. It's a urinary tract infection, right? Wrong. It actually, there's naturally normal little bits of microbiome sitting around. So what I'm telling you is that this discovery that there is healthy bacteria in the brain is consistent with what we're finding in other parts of the body. And the assumption that all bacteria are bad, totally off base. The new kind of field of understanding of the human body is that we have to be looking for keeping our eyes open and not be too surprised when we find bacteria in places we didn't expect. And then ask the question, what are these bacteria doing? Are they controlling our mood? Are they controlling our neurotransmitters? Do they actually help us with vision, with cognition, by the way, when we have dementia, brain fog, you know, is. Is there a problem with the bacteria? Do we treat the brain with bacteria in the future? Like unload bacteria into the brain in order to treat brain disease? Can you imagine a future, you know, in which we're actually delivering probiotics for the brain? Well, there's already clinical evidence that some gut bacteria actually can modify Parkinson's symptoms.
- [18:13]
A
Wow.
- [18:15]
B
So assume nothing, expect anything. That's what a real scientist does in today's world, looking at biomarkers, looking at microbiome, looking at health defense systems. And so that's really kind of my field is eyes wide open. Yes. And trying to put together the new story of human health.
- [18:42]
A
So I've got multitudes of things, but I want to say a couple things. One, I'm Not a scientist by trade, but you and I share the same mindset. Where I have the same belief system as you is that there's always a way to find something new or improve or at least look and question and ask. And I have always felt that some of the most important things to do are ask, always ask, that that never hurts. And there should always be an explanation. And if there's a strange explanation, then you dig and you know, it's. It's terms, it's terminology. And I think you'll agree with this. I. I'm a nutritionist, and I lived in a fear of fats for 20 years until I overcame it. And I think it's the same sort of thing with bacteria, where you hear the word and you just assume it's a sickness and an illness, and you don't understand and correlate the fact that it has a multifaceted meaning. So I'm. I love this. I'm going to make an inference here, and you correct me if I'm wrong. And this is based on the facts that you just gave me. So you said 70% of our immune system is in our gut. So if we have gut problems, leaky gut problems, etc. That is why we're so susceptible to illness and problems and disease. Correct? Because the immune system has the. The 70% in the gut.
- [19:55]
B
Well, there's a lot of things that can cause inflammation in the gut that can. Can shift our immune system and tackle our immune system. Think of our immune system as an army of super soldiers with lots of different types of cells, immune cells that are trained like special forces. Each one has its own weapon, each one has its own skill set. You know, you got the seals, you got the rangers, you got the Marines. They all do different things, right? And. But they got to cooperate. They got to collaborate. And what happens with leaky gut and other autoimmune conditions and inflammatory conditions is you're really disrupting the chain of command. And in some cases, you're actually causing some of the troops to actually do the wrong thing. They're stationed in the wrong place, they're given the wrong instructions, and that can actually be really devastating. And so I think that, you know, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's ulcerative colitis, you know, celiac disease, you know, many of the irritable bowel, these clearly have inflammation. They clearly disrupt the gut barrier. They clearly interfere with normal, healthy immune function. And once you get out of balance, you know, you think about them like our. Our bodies are like cirque. Du Soleil acrobats, they are able to do the high wire act while they're riding the bicycle, while they're, you know, flipping upside down in the swimming pool. It's really quite amazing what we're actually able to do. Like, that's why to me, no matter what kind of medical device you think you are developing, that's amazing. What kind of pharmaceutical. We can't beat mother Nature. Like, you know, people are like, oh, AI is going to like, you know, outstrip us into creating. I doubt it. I mean, our biology is so complex that whatever it is that we're understanding can only make us sit back and marvel that we don't get sick more often. Yeah, like we're in balance all the time. Occasionally we fall off the wagon and then we got to kind of pick ourselves back up again. But, you know, while most, many people ask, why did I get sick? My work as a researcher is really based on why don't we get sick more often? What is it that our body does to defend itself? And to me, that's one of the. I love flipping questions around and asking the things that other people might not be asking.
- [22:15]
A
I think you would actually learn more by learning about our defense mechanisms and what we need to do to strengthen them and how they work to, to protect ourselves. I love that. And that's the beauty of what you do, is that you look at all sides of things and don't just accept just because somebody said something that that's it, because it's not. And I, like I said, I'm not a scientist, but my assumption has always been that science is a never ending search for answers and questions that need to be asked to overcome belief systems that are nonsensical to me at times. But here's another question for you. I feel like in the past, and you correct me if I'm wrong here, two to three years, there's been certain things that have become just popularized and leaky gut is like at the top of that list, whether it's mitochondria, leaky gut, at least in biohacking spheres that everybody wants to talk about it. But I feel I get such a vague answer on leaky gut and strange differentiations. And I, I think it's confusing to a lot of people. I would love it if you would first just explain what it is in simple terms. And two, how to really take care of your gut. What, what do people really need to do to treat it and take care of the gut?
- [23:33]
B
Yeah, well, look, you know, I'M a, I'm a physician, so I'm trained on anatomy and physiology and pathology. Like that's been decades of what I do. So I, I gotta come at this, you know, answer your question and, and explain things in a way that is consistent with my, my training and experience. So I think about the gut as a tube. It's about 40ft long, you know, from end to end, from the mouth all the way to the anus. And you know, it's got a lining. And the reason it's got a lining is to protect the stuff inside the gut from leaking out. Think about it. When you're eating food, drinking coffee, having whatever booze or whatever, you know, and then having your stomach acid, you're churning and that stuff that's churned up, that digested food is kind of acidic. It can burn. It's not, not very clean at the beginning, you know, and it's just like, just like making its way down through the gut. Thank goodness we've got a lining that protects the entire part of the gut. Right?
- [24:32]
A
Right.
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B
Lining is really important because if, and it's, and it's airtight, I mean it's like watertight.
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A
Right?
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B
So think about that. If that lining started springing holes in it or leaks, what's in your gut is going to leak out from the wall of the tube into the belt, the cavity of your belly, where you don't want to have acidic stuff, you don't want to have bacteria from the gut, you don't want to have poop leaking out. Right. So think about like the burst diaper. We don't want that. No. Good. So that lining is actually, the gut lining is actually really, really important. By the way, it's not just a passive lining. It's filled with cell, it's made of cells and is riddled with cells pebbled with cells that secrete various hormones, including GLP1 and serotonin and all these other important regulators for our behavior and digestion and our overall physiological function. So you don't want to be messing with the gut lining, but sometimes the gut lining becomes disrupted. Okay? And when the gut lining becomes disrupted, a lot of things can cause that inflammation is one of the easiest ways to kind of rub their gut lining the wrong way. Little inflammation causes edema, it spreads apart the cells. Now you've got well intentioned immune cells getting in there, but you got chronic inflammation. You're gonna blow apart a hole in the gut. Okay? And now what happens? Leaking from the inside out. Exactly what you don't want and basically that triggers a domino effect of more inflammation and more problems and your body wants to wall it off. By the way, you know, I know the, the wellness and health and biohacker space. They talk about leaky gut all the time. I'm gonna kind of stick a landing on a medical condition where the leakiest, most problematic gut occurs. And that is something called bowel, meaning gut perforation. You can actually have a pinhole size leak that goes all the way, not just the lining, but goes all the way through the entire wall of the gut. Now you've basically punched a hole right through the entire wall of the gut. Like a garden hose, you put a nail through it. All right, going to happen. Spray out junk from the inside of the gut. Think poop, think acid, think all kinds of bacteria spraying into your gut. Now that is a life threatening crisis. It's not leaking. It is leaking, but it is a crisis. And you know how our body responds to that crisis. That's like the ultimate leaking gut. A perfect leaking gut. Do you know something? Have you heard of an organ in the body called the omentum? No, I have not. The omentum is like a big apron. You know, when you go to the dentist, they put on an apron on you. Yeah. Okay, so this is, this will be good for, for, I think you'll, you'll probably quote me on this. So there's an organ in the body called the omentum and it's like an apron, it's kind of made out of fat and other kind of tissues. This thing is like a baseball glove that moves around your belly continuously and it is making sure there are no leaks in your gut, no perforations. And when it finds a perforation, this thing is like an octopus. It'll zoom over to that leak and like a baseball glove, it'll grab that gut and it'll wall off that perforation so you don't actually wind up having a life threatening injury. So the omit, you know, I'm, you know, and I'm sharing this with you because this is the kind of stuff that a physician, an MD will tell you, right? Not on, you know, speculation, not on woo wooism, not on, you know, cool new areas of science, but just like really fundamentals. And this is part of the remarkable balance in our body. And by the way, that momentum walling off the gut, that's life saving. Okay? You will, it will hurt like crap. You will go to the emergency room, they will do a scan, they will find your momentum stuck right in that area. And in fact, it actually pinpoints where the leak is. Surgeon opens you up, goes right there, sews up the hole that is like the mother of all leaking guts. So I'm just telling you it's real, it's a problem. But your body's already set up to deal with it. But that's an acute hole, an acute leak puncture. But this chronic inflammation can actually wear down the lining of the gut. And that's where you wind up having this erosive, really destructive thing. Because it's not in pinpoint anymore. You can't wall it off. It can be in big areas. And so then you've got leaking all over the place. And it's that leaking that just causes a wildfire of inflammation and a whole lot, a whole world of problems.
- [29:40]
A
So this omentum is, is that something that could potentially ever get damaged? And if so, how would you know and what would you do to protect that? Because clearly you want that protected and functioning properly now.
- [29:53]
B
It is, it's a pretty extensive organ. It's rooted in our, like kind of in deep inside our belly. I mean, literally, if you were to take an octopus, you know, you see on, I don't know, YouTube or Instagram, all these like cool undersea things of octopus, just throw an octopus in your belly and that's the omentum. It goes all over the place. And it's, by the way, you know what they call it? We call it, we call it in medicine the policeman of the abdomen.
- [30:21]
A
Makes sense.
- [30:22]
B
It's the cop that, that has the beat of making sure your gut is not leaking in a life threatening way.
- [30:30]
A
I love it, man. So then that would pose the question because there's some, as always, when there's any sort of condition there, you're flooded with, take this to treat it and do this and use this. And this is the answer and this is the key. Can you just explain maybe a little bit when it comes to like prebiotics, postbiotics, etc, what, what is actually good that someone implements and what is nonsensical or could actually cause an adverse, you know, reaction? Because I know that you can create more problem by taking the wrong stuff.
- [31:04]
B
Well, listen, if you want to talk about leaky gut and how to actually address it, okay, this is sort of the background inflamed leaky gut that is kind of non specific, but it's a problem, right? So what you got to understand is that the body wants to heal itself anyway.
- [31:18]
A
All right?
- [31:19]
B
And what we want to do is to leverage what the body wants to do. You don't want to fight the body. That's like swimming against, against a riptide. You know, you're not going to make it. You want to go with the flow. That's how you get out of the riptide. Okay, so what does the body want to do? Well, it secretes mucus in order to be able to protect the gut, because mucus is a covering. You know, just think about, like, you got a hole in a tire, you put some, some, some silicon there, it's gonna gum it up and, and maybe stop it. So mucus in our gut, lower gut, is actually a very natural way to plug up leaks, number one. Number two is the cells lining our gut actually grow. They grow pretty fast. In fact, they grow so fast that they will turn over, meaning replace themselves literally overnight. Okay. Because if you think about it, we got, we got a lot of cells in our gut. They are shed when you take a poop every day. You're, you're, you're crapping out a lot of old dead cells from your gut. They grow right back. They go right back to realign it. So we've got this incredibly regenerative capacity of our gut lining. We want to encourage regeneration, we want to encourage healing, we want to encourage that mucus that can actually be helpful. So. And we want to stay away from things that could irritate, inflame, or otherwise activate further inflammation. So, so what I would tell you is that, oh, and then the gut bacteria are there to lower inflammation all by themselves. Right? So healthy gut bacteria will secrete short chain fatty acids, and those short chain fatty acids actually naturally lower inflammation. Think about inflammation as an irritant to the gut. So if you have a little bit of inflammation and. And then there's more inflammation because of leaky gut. Now you've got like a domino effect, like a wildfire. It's not a campfire. Now you got a forest fire. All right, that's a problem. So you want to actually calm down the forest fire. How do you do that? Well, your gut bacteria sort of act like inside your body. Firemen, they're trying to spray down the inflammation to begin with. Right. So nurture our gut bacteria in a healthy way. What can we do? Well, we know that fermented foods like yogurt, for example, can be very helpful to restore some of the balance in our gut. So I think probiotics, which are really just bacteria that we can ingest that will help to adjust the balance in our gut could be really Helpful, number one. And yogurt, you know, arguably for some people, a little easier sell and easier to tolerate than kimchi, you know. Yeah. For example. But there's different ways of actually doing it. You know, I think that any kind of fermented food could be helpful, but yogurt is particularly helpful. It's kind of coating. And by the way, little pro tip here, not any yogurt. Whole fat yogurt.
- [34:17]
A
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [34:18]
B
Not low fat yogurt.
- [34:20]
A
Okay?
- [34:21]
B
And this is actually a big surprise because for years we've been told that low fat yogurt's the way to go. Whole fat's dangerous. Raises your lipids totally wrong. We don't fully understand it, but actually the healthy bacteria, that restoration does not raise your cholesterol, lowers. It actually does not cause more heart disease. Lowers your heart disease, lowers the risk of heart disease. And in fact, there's some evidence that it lowers the risk of some cancers like colorectal cancer as well by eating whole fat yogurt. Now, what's the problem with low fat yogurt, actually? Well, no problem intrinsically, but if you look at the ingredient label of low fat yogurt, you will find where the problems are. Because low fat yogurt, if you take the fat out of yogurt, okay, think about what happens. So it collapses. It's kind of like this sloppy mix doesn't taste like yogurt at all. So many yogurt companies will add thickeners, emulsifiers into it. And that might be okay from a mouthfeel perspective, but some of these emulsifiers we're beginning to discover, can actually damage your gut microbiome. They inadvertently damage the very thing that yogurt is trying to help. All right, they damage the bacteria, not help the bacteria. Now then you talk about the sweetened yogurts, which everybody loves. You know, you pick em up and they've got a layer of jelly, you know, some colorful jelly. Look, hey, listen, it tastes great. It's sweet. But when you look at the ingredient label, it's got artificial sweeteners, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring. Totally no good, because those can damage the gut microbiome as well. So what I tell people, if you want to heal your gut, yogurt's a great choice. Whole fat yogurt, which is not that easy to find anymore, by the way. I mean, like, I do a lot of research in the Mediterranean. You go to Greece, no problem finding whole fat yogurt. Like, like just turn to the right, turn to the left. You'll find it in America. It's not that easy to find. You gotta really, really search, you know. So what I say, get whole fat yogurt. If you want to make it sweet, do what the Greeks do, get honey, get some organic honey, dribble a little bit on there. And now you've got this natural anti, you know, like this, it's got antimicrobial, it's great, it's sweet. It's got some good bioactives in honey. And then take some fresh fruit, seasonal fruit, berries, toasted nuts, pistachios, walnuts, whatever, crush them up, drop them in there. Oh, the dietary fiber from your berries or your nuts on the yogurt, they will actually feed your gut microbiome and help to restore that balance. So I like to think about solutions to problems not by reaching for the most highest tech, most expensive, most complicated thing. But I like to think, I like to boil it down. The fundamentals are pretty easy. Feed your gut, get it back in balance, lower inflammation. Your gut is the most powerful, non steroidal, anti inflammatory kind of the strategy there is, there's not, there's no amount of Motrin you can take. Ibuprofen can actually do what your gut can do when, when treated properly. Now prebiotics also feed the gut microbiome. They're like fertilizer for gut bacteria. But you know, Mike, I know there's all these colorful capsules and supplements and you know, stacking that people do, that's okay, you know, but I, I think that, you know, I like to say supplements are for topping off. Start with the fundamentals. Food is the fundamental for anything that you want to do for healing. And if you eat colorful foods, eat the rainbow, so to speak, berries, peppers, you know, even greens. Like, think about it, like greens have a variety of colors. If you're a painter and you know, pantone colors for green, think about it, you go to the produce market, they've got so many different pantone versions of green and purple and blue. It's amazing. They, all those colors, those pigments in foods actually help to feed the gut microbiome, right? So, you know, without digging too far into this, what I would say, I like the idea of quelling inflammation using a dietary approach first that allows your gut to reset itself naturally for healing, regeneration. If you can get that gut back on balance, all right, that actually is going to start to heal naturally. Now you also do want to avoid those things that can damage the gut. Alcohol, ultra processed foods as diet, diet soda, you know, like all in a heavy meatload. You know, I know protein is big, but like for the carnivore diet, like heavy, heavy, heavy meat intake and also kind of rough on the gut. So I tell people, take a kinder, gentler approach. Let your body heal itself.
- [39:10]
A
I agree. So, and this is gonna transition us too because of the points you made. But so you know how angry I am, Dr. Lee, that I spent so many years eating that terrible tasting fat free and low fat yogurt until I came to the conclusion of all the fats that I was missing. And when I changed to the whole fat and I changed to, I went from 1520 grams of fat a day to about 120 grams of fat a day. Like I'm talking massive transition because I just woke up one day and said I can't do this anymore. And my skin, my focus, my health, my, the, just the way that I function throughout the day has just drastically changed. And I, I will argue to, to the end of time that the low fat diet caused some of the heart issues that I ended up kind of dealing with and overcoming here and some of the plaque potentially, which is where I'm going to go with some of this with you. But what you do with the yogurt. Exactly what I do, I do the berries, I put protein powder in mine. But I have so much yogurt every day and it is, it's not only is it good like you said, but it's satiating. And it started my morning.
- [40:17]
B
Yeah, I mean yogurt and yogurt protein and the fat in it actually helps to activate those satiety hormones. And again that's kind of a homeostasis, a rebalancing of what's actually happening in the brain, the signals for satiety. And then you add a few things to your yogurt to make it, let's call it more traditional Mediterranean. And you've actually given yourself kind of a complete approach to things. So I, I, I know that it's not the only solution. You know, everyone looks for black and white, simple things. What I would say is that this is, this is an example.
- [40:54]
A
Yeah.
- [40:55]
B
Now a relatively straightforward approach can actually go a long way towards healing.
- [41:00]
A
I want to get into some foods and cholesterol and heart stuff. But I have one more question pertaining to spinach and oxalate type foods because that's another thing that I feel like just goes, it just goes insane with some people where they just go to the extreme on, oh, you can't eat spinach and you can't eat certain foods because of the oxalates. Can you just briefly touch on. Is that really that big of a problem? And do we need to avoid some of these foods? Because I find things like spinach and other things have such high value within them in terms of what we get. Is there fear going on here or is there some fact behind it?
- [41:38]
B
Well, look, I think most people recognize, especially in the biohacker space, that the idea of personalized nutrition simply means everybody's requirements are different, everyone's body is a little bit different, and everyone's going to tolerate foods and process what's in a food in a slightly different way. And that's actually where this idea of oxalates come in. Some people tolerate it really well and have no problem at any level. Some people are very sensitive to oxalates, and they tend to take the oxalates out and turn them into stones. Whether it's a kidney stone or a gallstone, you know, can be. Or into a gout, into your joint could be actually another problem. All right, this is a medical issue, but not everybody actually, in fact, I would say the minority of people, most people have no problem at normal, healthy, regular doses of spinach. Because, I mean, unless you are an extremist. And I think this is maybe one of the messages that I want to communicate is that most people who are generally healthy can tolerate a range of almost anything for a little bit of while. But if you kind of go whole hog and you take things to extreme, this is where something healthy could actually be unhealthy. Like water. You can actually cause water toxicity, believe it or not, by having too much water. You know, that's. That's the stuff of life. So I think for most people, oxalates and spinach perfectly fine. And as you point out, spinach is not just oxalate. People like to oversimplify. Oh, this is an oxalate containing food. Must be bad, must avoid. All right, you know what? Spinach has got all kinds of other goodies. And the one that I like to put point out is that spinach growing low to the ground like beets are a great source of natural dietary nitrates. Nitrogen from the soil naturally found at high levels in spinach. All right, when you and I don't know, you know about this, but when you chew, when you eat your spinach, you know how our mom's like, don't bolt your spinach down, you know, like just you. You chew, you put in your mouth and you just try to swallow it so you have to pay them. Like, that's what all kids do, right? But actually, you want to make your spinach tasty. Little extra virgin olive oil, a little bit of garlic, a squeeze of lemon or lemon zest. Add some golden raisins, you know, maybe a little. Some chili flakes. That's like a Spanish dish that I make. All right, Very tasty. But if you have a really good, tasty dish of spinach cooked, you want to chew it, you want to savor it. When you savor it, you're chew, chew, chew. Amazing flavors, right? That dish, I was just telling you, come over to my house, you're going to be. You'll be loving it. And I can tell you when you chew it, you are exposing the nitrates from the spinach, the natural ones, to your tongue microbiome, the bacteria on your tongue. I see that healthy gut bacteria on your tongue. Because a, the gut starts in your mouth, converts that nitrogen from the soil in the spinach into a form that when you swallow that spinach gets absorbed into your bloodstream as. Wait for it, nitric oxide. Ah. Nitric oxide is a natural signaling molecule that does a lot of things. One of the things it does right away in your bloodstream is it causes your blood vessels to relax. And by relaxing, I mean dilating. Okay, Vasodilation. So what happens when that, when you vasodilate with nitric oxide, your blood pressure falls. Do you know that for every 1 unit of 1 millimeter mercury that your blood pressure falls systolically? You decrease your risk of fatal stroke by 4%.
- [45:28]
A
Really?
- [45:28]
B
Okay. And by the way, high blood pressure is the silent killer. As you get older, your vessels get stiffer and stiffer, your blood pressure goes higher and higher, affects your brain, and actually, eventually it sets you up for a stroke. Spinach, nitric oxide relaxation, blood pressure comes down. It is, it is brain protective.
- [45:49]
A
All right?
- [45:50]
B
There's no more clever biohack than to actually get more nitric oxide in your body.
- [45:56]
A
All right?
- [45:56]
B
And chewing your food by having tasty spinach is just one way to do it. Beets will also do it. Now, the other thing that I, I think people that are really into biohacking might find super interesting, and I, you know, I made YouTubes on my YouTube channel about this is nitric oxide is a natural trigger in our body. Remember, you can get it from spinach if you chew it and swallow it. Nitric oxide is a natural trigger for the recruitment of natural stem cells in our body.
- [46:28]
A
Really?
- [46:28]
B
Nitric oxide in your bloodstream, you know, what it does, it signals. Come here. It triggers stem cells that live in our bone marrow, natural stem cells, all right, we got about 70 million of them that live in our bone marrow. And nitric oxide will cause stem cells to come flying out of our bone marrow like bees coming out of a hive. And they will buzz around inside our bloodstream, circulating everywhere. And these stem cells are just looking for what I need to fix. Do I need to fix something in the brain and the liver and the heart? And they're fixing stuff. So the other benefit of nitric oxide coming from food, okay, which could be spinach or beets, for example, or arugula, is that you wind up actually stimulating your own stem cell, regenerative stem cells from inside the body. This is like a little biohack that a lot of people might appreciate that it doesn't require anything expensive. It's. It's just part of nutrition, you know. And so again, nutrition is the, is the bedrock for helping the body heal itself, which is really one of the principles of biohacking. Right. So I always think let's start with the basics. Let's see what we can do with the basic. Let's take that as far as we can before we start adding other things to top it off, which is what you get into supplements.
- [47:48]
A
I agree, man. You know, I, I find spinach to taste quite good actually, and I don't Popeye it by any stretch, but just
- [47:54]
B
a little bit of, just a little
- [47:56]
A
bit of saute and the butter and like some of the stuff you said, and I think it is phenomenal. I mean, it's like, okay, so now talking about the nitric oxide, because I know how beneficial. What do you find in terms of like, with the heart related, like, do you find that nitric oxide is important for say, ejection fraction improvement or anything to do with like heart failure or lack of work there? Because I've, I've read literature on that. But I'm curious your thought on how that could potentially have a positive effect.
- [48:26]
B
Well, look, I mean, nitric oxide and stem cell recruitment in the cardiovascular system at the heart level, whether it's the coronary arteries, which are the blood vessels of the heart, or the heart muscle itself, you know, is a substantial player. It's an active area of research in cardiology. So people who study the heart are really looking, continuing to look at nitric oxide. By the way, you know, a colleague and friend of mine, Dr. Luis Ignaro, discovered the function of nitric oxide for heart health. He won the Nobel Prize for this, okay. That's how important nitric oxide is for heart health.
- [49:04]
A
All right.
- [49:05]
B
Um, they call him Dr. No N O for nitric oxide. You know, like, like the old James Vaughn thing. He's a great guy. Ingenious. And, and still thinking about new roles for nitric oxide. So very important. Okay. It's important for getting good blood flow in the heart. Nitric oxide is good for helping to regenerate heart tissue that might be damaged. Um, we're still trying to figure out how to leverage it. But I'll tell you a really amazing food and a study that, that can deliver nitric oxide. That which is dark chocolate. Really dark chocolate is a food that nobody thinks sucks. Right. Very popular. You know, when I, you know, do my keynotes and stuff like that, if I show piece of dark chocolate, like everybody gets up in class because they, they, they're rooting for it, right? But here's the science. Chocolate as a, as in chocolate bar is a confection, which means it's a candy made, you know, manufactured, but it's a candy that's actually made at the start from, in terms of dark chocolate. It's a plant based food. Okay. Because the cacao pod. If you've ever been to a jungle to look at cacao pods, where chocolate comes from, like in Costa Rica or some of these other places that, that you know, like, where does your chocolate come from? It comes from jungle and it comes from trees that grow these football shaped orange and brown pods. I mean, literally, it looks like a football, you know, like a, like a Tom Brady thing. You can throw something far and you can deflate it. All right? And, and you shake it, you, you feel something kind of shaking back and forth.
- [50:49]
A
There's.
- [50:50]
B
You open it up with a knife and split it open and you've got this, these, how many should I say like silver dollar shaped seed pods. They're covered with this white fruit. And by the way, if you eat the fruit of a fresh cacao pod, delicious. It's a little sweet and salt, it's a little bit sweet and sour. Anybody who's got a chance to do this, if you're vacationing or you want to order some exotic fruit, order yourself a cacao pod. Okay. A ripe one. And open it up and just eat around the skin, around the cacao pod. Like this is you interacting with nature. Yeah, yeah, you got vitamin C and other things in there. Now that seed pod is dried, roasted, fermented, Fermented and roasted, ground up into a powder and that plant based powder coming from the seed pod actually is the basis for dark chocolate. When you see 70% dark chocolate, 80% dark chocolate, that's the percentage of the powder that comes from the plant. The higher the percentage of dark chocolate. Right, you can see the percentage. The higher the percentage, the more of this plant based stuff in there. Now, what's inside this, the plant? Well, mother nature is pretty amazing, I always say, you know, plant based foods are mother nature's pharmacy. Not with a pH, but with an F like farm. And one of the things that we know is that dark chocolate cacao has a polyphenol called proanthocyanidin. That's just a complicated chemical name. Most people can't pronounce it. I, I'm, I'm. My job is to pronounce this kind of stuff. So I, I have a lot of practice. But this proanthocyanidine, you know what it does? Recruits stem cells. Ah, okay. And studies have shown that if you give people with coronary artery disease and depressed ejection fraction and a sluggish, non resilient stiff blood vessels, that's a setup for a problem back in their 60s. All right? Like that's heading towards some event like a heart attack or ischemia. You're probably heading to a stent at that stage. All right? At some point you're gonna get it. Well, if you give people high polyphenol dark chocolate, 2 cups of hot chocolate made with super polyphenol dark chocolate a day for a month, and you measure at the very beginning. These are people with heart disease, and you measure at the beginning their stem cells, and you measure how stiff their blood vessels are. Not a lot of stem cells and pretty stiff blood vessels, not so good. All right, you give them two cups of hot chocolate a day made with dark chocolate 80% or higher for a month. And at 30 days, you measure their stem cells, they can have double the number of stem cells in their bloodstream recruited into their bloodstream for healing and regeneration of the cardiovascular system by cacao. Paranthocyanidins. This is a clinical study, by the way. And when you test the resiliency of the blood vessels, the stiffness. So do you know something? Have you heard of something called flow mediated dilation fmd? No, I haven't. All right, so this is like something that a biohacker should know. All right. It's actually from cardiovascular research. So you want to find out how resilient your blood vessels are. Resiliency is the name of the game for longevity and Healthy aging, right? So here's what you do. You take a blood pressure cuff, pump it up, you squeeze your arm, right? And now you squeeze it, puff, puff, puff, puff. And now there's no blood flow into your arm. Like you barely squeeze it up high. Now you've cut off blood flow to your arm, you get little tingles, all right? And then you take an ultrasound probe. It's like a pen tip connected to an ultrasound and you put it right at the crook of your elbow. And you're now measuring with the blood flow cut off, you're looking at the waveform to see the waveform get extinguished. All right? So normally when blood's pumping in there, it's gonna have a wave and it's gonna go down, it's gonna go up. That's normal blood pumping in and out, right? So you're pumping it up and you're watching that waveform get extinguished from normal to shut down. Now, if you are healthy, you the flow mediated dilation, you suddenly release the blood pressure cuff. Now what happens is the blood comes rushing back naturally. If you're young and healthy with good resilient blood vessels, guess what? That waveforms go boink. It's going to come right back, nice and big, big stiff peaks, blood flow coming in, it's going to get a nice peak and it's going to go back down, nice peak and come out. That's resiliency. In cardiovascular disease, when you've got stiff blood vessels, you got plaque and blockages and, and your muscles aren't, your spoon muscles are not working very well. And your blood vessels, I study blood vessels. So this is like my wheelhouse. I can tell you that the waveform isn't healthy, right? Kind of sluggish, not so high, not so low. That's not responsive. No. Good. Now with this cacao experiment, 2 cups of hot chocolate, dark, made with dark high polyphenol dark chocolate for a month. You tested the baseline. It's kind of not so good because of the heart disease. You test after a month after stem cells will come out. Now you've actually retrained and regenerated and re healed the lining of the blood vessels. Guess what? You can double the resiliency. The flow mediated dilation that ultrasound probe shows, you bounced right back. This is actually what I'm talking about. When, when I say that the body wants to heal itself, the food that we choose, the diet and lifestyle choices, we make, exposures that we actually have to our environment, they can actually help our body bounce back.
- [56:43]
A
So in Relation then to foods that could potentially increase nitric oxide, which then in turns releases more stem cells. We've got you. You mentioned that spinach would do the nitric oxide benefit. And beets was also beneficial there.
- [56:59]
B
And arugula.
- [57:00]
A
And arugula. Can you name a couple more that would be nice to fit into a diet for somebody, you know, struggling with potential heart failure or, you know, the dilated blood?
- [57:11]
B
You know, I. I would say there's a lot of. What I would say is that the. That the foundation of knowing where the research has been done has looked at spinach and beets, and beet juice is a really good way to do it. I wouldn't overdo it. If I don't like beet juice, switch to something else. You know, you can make a. You can make your own smoothie or your own, you know, mix with arugula and spinach and. And beets. You know, you want to grind it up. Listen, I encourage people to be creative to make it work for them. Right, right. You want to make your own, like the old V8, you know, make your own vegetable mix. That, that. That's fine. You know, throw some protein in there if you like. You know, so. And I. And I also think that dark chocolate's a way to actually further use polyphenols to actually get those stem cells going as well. So the name of the game is repair. Oh, and by the way, did you know that if you want to protect the stem cells you already have in your bloodstream, do you know that there are some food that you can eat that you can use every day that can help to protect those stem cells from oxidative stress? From, you know, mostly oxidative stress. And that food is extra virgin olive oil. All right, well, then I'm full with polyphenols. What are some of the names of them? Hydroxy, tyrosol, oleocanthal. You know, those are just some of the names of what we re. We study. They are potent protectors of our stem cells. Okay, so that's why the olive oil shot or just. I like to cook with olive oil. And by the way, you. This is your polyphenol, so you want to get high. Polyphenol olive oil. Did you know not all olive oils are equally beneficial? You want to look for the extra virgin and for extra virgin. I like to tell. I like to talk about this if you want to get the highest. Right, because we always want to know what's the best one we should get. You know, you want to get the Best ROI for whatever you're spending money on, even regular food. What's the, what's the best, highest polyphenol extra virgin olive oil? You know what they are?
- [59:22]
A
I'm going to write it down as
- [59:23]
B
soon as you tell me. All right, so first you want to look for mono varietal olive extra virgin olive oil. What that means is that that olive oil is made with one variety of olives only.
- [59:35]
A
Yes.
- [59:36]
B
Yep. If they're made with mixes, sometimes they dilute them, sometimes not even olive oil.
- [59:40]
A
You know one country that it's coming from, right?
- [59:43]
B
Just one country. I'm gonna tell you three countries. But, but, but it's one variety. Yeah, yeah. Mono varietal.
- [59:49]
A
Right.
- [59:49]
B
By the way, you can tell that instantly. There's a dead giveaway. Just pick up bottle and look for mono varietal.
- [59:55]
A
Right. Okay.
- [59:55]
B
So you know in this wall, a sea of olive oils. When you go to the grocery store, all right, like how do you choose? But most people just choose whatever their mom bought or whatever you would normally have in your house. I will go on a treasure hunt by looking, picking up the bottles and looking for mono varietal. Then I'm not done. Now. I'm looking for specific varietals. I'm looking for specific olives. All right, and there's three if you want high, mono, high polyphenols. This is like little, like pro tip. All right. Little trick. You want to look for it. So there's, there's three countries that have the highest polyphenol olives. One is Spain.
- [60:38]
A
Uh huh.
- [60:38]
B
I was going to say a specific varietal of olive is called picual P I C U A L. You can order it online, you can go to the grocery store. You'll usually find it. Look for monoiro picua olives. Tasty, really great. You ever have like, know if you've ever been to Spain and have tapas, like that's what they cook with regularly, every day. Super high polyphenols.
- [60:59]
A
All right.
- [60:59]
B
And some in, in Spain, some of the Spanish people have some of the largest community of centenarians, people who live to a, a hundred and older. Okay. Does olive oil contribute to it? I would say so. All right. Having good quality. All right, that's one monovaro picuo Spanish olive oil. All right, let's say you're, you want to go Italian. Um, like I'm, I'm going for the Italian one. I like it. Italy. All right, well there's two types of olives in Italy that are super high Polyphenol. And I only learned about one of them recently, within the last month. So I used to always tell. In Umbria of Italy, there's a varietal olives called Moriolo. M O R A I O L o more Iolo. Kind of hard to find. You gotta order online occasionally. You might be lucked out if you go to an olive oil store to find it. It's not a very common olive oil. Even in Italy, you don't find it that commonly. Really high in polyphenols. Then I found out that there's another Italian olive oil that can even be higher in polyphenols. Literally. I was doing research in Italy and I discovered this. And the olive is called coratina. C O R A T I N A. Right. Listen, the specifics matter, right? Because you're. You want to know what's the best one? I'm telling you. Cortina or Mario Cortina. You'll find. Where does it come from? Italy comes from Puglia, the region called Puglia.
- [62:26]
A
I know.
- [62:27]
B
Now, you got two places that you can go look for it, right? You're Italian. You know. You know, that's right.
- [62:31]
A
That's right.
- [62:32]
B
Like your, your blood is resonating on this. Right? So, okay, so that. Those are two good Italian ones. Now what if you want to keep going in the Mediterranean, you want to go to Greece.
- [62:45]
A
I was just going to say that.
- [62:47]
B
I knew it. I did a gap year and I spent part of my time in Greece. So I, I know a lot about the. The healthy diet aspects of Greece. You know, what's particularly healthy about Greek diet as one of the Mediterranean diets? Traditional ones is actually very simple cuisine. Yeah. They don't overdo a lot of things, you know. Right. Completely different than French cuisine. Actually different from Italian cuisine. It's elemental.
- [63:12]
A
Okay.
- [63:14]
B
Like the Greek yogurt. Very elemental, very simple and pure. So the good news is that the most popular extra virgin monovarietal olive in Greece is called Coronaki. K R O K O R O N E I K I. I'm spelling it out. If you're listening to this, because you might want to go back and rewind and hear it again. Kore, all right. Happens to be one of the most popular olives out in Greece. Super high polyphenol. If you, by the way, take a typical Kore monoviral olive oil, which you can buy in the United States. All right. I like a. You know, I, I don't usually promote brands, but this one impressed me so much because they test for heavy metals, None. And they test for microplastics.
- [64:02]
A
None.
- [64:03]
B
Okay. And it's a, it, it. So you want to look for that kind of. I just tell you because I, I, I'm a big believer in. It's Costarena is the brand.
- [64:14]
A
That's the one I use. I was just looking it up to see if that was. I was eating the right one, man.
- [64:19]
B
I was just pulling it up. I'm telling you, if you have a company that cares enough about you to give you not only the most potent monoviral olive, but also cares about serving you up to make sure there's no heavy metals and no microplastics.
- [64:34]
A
Right.
- [64:35]
B
That's like a kind of corporate responsibility that, you know, like resonates with me.
- [64:40]
A
Yeah.
- [64:40]
B
Oh, good stuff. No bad stuff. Anyway. And it's really tastes. So that is the highest potency of the Greek ones.
- [64:49]
A
Right.
- [64:49]
B
So now I've just told you how to protect your stem cells using something so you like, you're gonna, you were talking about. I can't remember what you were talking about. Using butter for spinach. Listen, you're gonna get some scrambled eggs. Cause eggs are actually good for you. All right. Get some organic eggs. You know, rather than use butter for eggs, use a little extra virgin olive oil. It's a great way to get those polyphenols right at the get go. With some scrambled eggs, for example. Great way to get your input in. By the way, what's the dose that is generally thought to be good per day of extra virgin olive oil is about roughly three to four good tablespoons of olive oil. It's quite a lot. Okay. Think about it. If you're in the Mediterranean, you don't have to work very hard to get that right. Okay. Because they cook everything with it. So, you know, I, I think that again, I'm trying to boil down some of the practical aspects of this conversation. You know, I mean, we can tackle the stem cells, we can tackle the proanthocyanidins, we can talk tackle the nitric oxide and the tongue microbiome and all that kind of stuff in the brain. Microbiome, all good stuff. You know, the leaky gut, the policeman of the abdomen. Those are all really cool, important fundamentals. But at the end of the day, most people just want to know what to do in a simple way. And that's really why I always want to stick my landing by talking about foods that are not that difficult to get and quite easy to incorporate into your everyday life.
- [66:17]
A
One of the things that is probably the biggest problem with everybody that watches that listens. That research is. It's just too much. It's too overwhelming. It's not simplified. I, I would love to sit here and talk with you for 20 hours on science, and I hope that we get to. But I also want to make sure that everybody has this sense of comfort, knowing it's not that difficult. In, in many aspects, there's simple things that we could do. Now, obviously, conditions will require more intricate types of things that we need to get into. And of course, some people want to know the science, but I love what you do because we make it very easy here. And, and I want people to not get that sense of hopelessness because a lot of people have it. I read comments and the biggest complaints that people have are, well, what can we actually do?
- [67:05]
B
What are we supposed to do?
- [67:06]
A
Because everybody's throwing 50,000 different things at them and scaring them. So I'm thankful that you're actually giving the factual side of things and making it easy to understand. Look, if you, if you eat too much of something, yeah, you're going to have a problem. But here's the benefit and I love that and I appreciate the way that you do it because it's real, matter of fact, but it's easy to understand. So I really appreciate, I just want to say I appreciate the hell out of that.
- [67:30]
B
Well, I, you know, listen, I also like to cook. And I think that, you know, if I could encourage one activity, if you're not already there is, you know, I mean, go do all the interesting biohacking kind of things that you're exploring. I, I'm, you know, I'm super fascinated by that. I'm working in the longevity space now and healthy aging. You know, there's so many interesting things about biomarkers. But if I could encourage you to, anybody listening to, add one activity that is going to be helpful to you that will give you tools to really amplify your own ability to biohack your own health. I would say learn how to cook. Yeah, it's not hard. And these days I just tell you, Dylan, what I tell people to do is I want to make life interesting, right? So go into the grocery store, go to the produce section, identify a vegetable or fruit that you've never seen before, and you don't know what to do with that you would normally ignore. You know, like, I can tell you might be a star fruit or dragon fruit. You know, if people are not familiar with that or, or it might be, I'll Tell you, I ran into a farmer's market. I saw something called a fairy tale eggplant plant. It's like a tiny little eggplant with this incredible purple and white design around. I had no idea what to do with it. But here's what I encourage people to do. Punch into Google the name of the food that you're not familiar with. Type in recipe and hit video, and watch somebody who knows what they're doing teach you in a couple of minutes how to turn it into something absolutely delicious. And if you've got sort of like the gumption to try it yourself, maybe not the first time, but maybe second time you see it, then try it out, you know, and then start to look up what are the healthy things in it. You know, everyone's got access to AI now just, you know, dictate in there, like, what's healthy about fairy tale eggplant? What's healthy about, you know, starfruit or whatever, and let, you know, use the technology that we have available to us to serve it up to us, to empower us to make that simple decision. Throw it into your basket, okay, in your cart. Take it out with you and, you know, and have the kind of excitement, like, I'm going to try something brand new. This is going to be fun. You know, a lot easier than skydiving, dude.
- [69:55]
A
I eat out per year twice. And I normally don't even eat. I just go to appease my wife. We don't eat out. We cook everything at home. And I'll tell you this, and you, you probably love this 90% or 95% of my food right now in my diet that staples are things that I told myself I didn't like, wouldn't eat, always thought I didn't like based on assumption. And, and I, I said to myself one day, I said, what are you, three years old? Like, just try it.
- [70:21]
B
If you don't like it, spit it
- [70:22]
A
out, get rid of it.
- [70:23]
B
Like, what is it going to do hurt you?
- [70:24]
A
And I'll tell you what, Dr. Lee, I some like avocados, for example. I used to tell my wife I hated them, and I literally cannot live without them. So same with salmon. Like these foods, and then you see how they make you feel. So I like you try to just cook them, make them good, try different things and figure out.
- [70:41]
B
Can I get. Can I give you a little, little fun tip about salmon, please? So salmon is really rich with healthy omega 3 fatty acids, which also protects your stem cells, by the way. Okay. And it's in the flesh of the salmon. If you get actually a, you know, a responsibly raised, regeneratively, you know, kind of farmed salmon, it should be pretty good. Better than the other stuff that might not be so well raised. Okay. Right. Do you know where the omega threes mostly are?
- [71:14]
A
No.
- [71:14]
B
So you get by a piece of salmon, right. So you get a. They put it in a parchment, you take it home, and you got the thing. Yeah, it's in the skin. Yeah, it's hugely in the skin. So what you want to do again, this is like, because I like to cook. I like to kind of tell, talk to people. Look, I'm not a food. I'm not a food network guy, but I love to watch it. But I mean, I think that, you know, we should be. We should feel comfortable talking about food that should be. If you're going to actually cook your salmon. What. Watch a video on how to do this. You got to dry it really well and get your. Get your pan really hot and put skin side down and let that skin side crisp up.
- [71:53]
A
Oh, man. I do that.
- [71:54]
B
And what you're doing is you're. You're really creating a difference of texture. You're mobilizing those omega threes, and then literally, you flip it once and it's going to be done, you know, in a very short period of time, like, like, you know, like less than. Less than a couple of minutes, you'll be done. And now you can actually eat that crispy skin. It's like an extra treat. But now you're getting the omega threes. You know, go ahead and take a supplement if you like. Sure. And most of us don't end enough Omega 3s to begin with, but I want people to feel like we can harness, we can biohack ourselves with food just as easily, maybe even more sophisticated than we can with all these devices. And it'll save us a boatload of money. And plus, we get all the polyphenols, all the other nutrients, micronutrients, all the dietary fiber, you know, that we actually can get. So this is about making great choices. So I'm a food is medicine guy, but I'm now applying it to healthy aging, longevity, and, you know, looking at those. Those hallmarks of aging and to figure out, like, how do they apply, what can we amplify? I like starting with the natural, starting with the basics. Sure, we can always reach for the high tech, the more. The more expensive stuff, but, you know, life is for the living, you know, and if you're spending all your Time stressed out, looking for the most complicated thing I think that takes away from the quality of life.
- [73:17]
A
I agree. You know, I, I've talked about this a lot. I, I was a model and I was around bodybuilders and then fitness and I've had an eating disorder most of my life and this struggled with how I view myself. And I woke up one day and went in the kitchen, I told my wife, I'm done. I'm just like, I'm one of those people, like, I'm spur of the moment, right. And she's been praying and praying. And I'll tell you what, you just nailed it to, to do this, to enjoy it, to have the good relationship with it, to make it fun, because it is, and to test things and to see, wow, my body's responding. Like, I sat here and, and being a nutritionist 15 years and knowing, but still saying, oh, you're the exception, that I hate that. And then I, I did, I said, you know what? I know how to lose weight. If this doesn't work, I can do it like this and doing it and then seeing the changes and seeing the body response and then seeing the health and then seeing my production go from like, here to way up here. Even days, I feel like I still feel good because of the, the food. And you know, bodybuilders that always want to take steroids and supplements. And then I, I realized, man, the answer is in the food. It really is in the food.
- [74:26]
B
It's.
- [74:26]
A
Don't, don't depend on supplements, don't depend on protein powder. Use them for what they are, but get everything from food.
- [74:35]
B
Yeah, I mean, start with food. You let Mother nature do the work for you, the heavy lifting and then anything you need to top off, that's what the word supplement means right off. And you know, I, I, you know, I'm a proponent of wise, judicious supplementation, but, you know, I, I'm also somebody that likes to take the real complicated science and make it as practical as possible. You know, let the, you know, I'll geek out on my own, you know, on all the complicated stuff. But, you know, when I'm talking to people, I, I know most people like myself, you know, when we, when we want to make an, take an action, I don't want to have to think too hard about it. I want it to be in a second nature. And if I can communicate, you know, in this kind of conversation we're having, that we can do, we can do a world of good to ourselves and let the body do all that heavy lifting. We just need to make a few good decisions. And then you'll feel it. You will feel it. This is not, this is not voodoo and it's not rocket science. Our body does all that work for us.
- [75:42]
A
I told you beforehand that we would get through a fraction of, a fraction of what we wanted to talk about. I warned you because I, I just knew how good this was going to be. I would like to just ask you one more thing and I know you got to go. I just want you to just briefly tell people just a little bit about your book because I started to get into it. I just got it. It got sent to me too late, so I started to get into it. But I just want you to maybe just touch on some of the things in there because I, I've already found so much value in just a brief bit that I've looked at. So just, just give people a little bit of insight and we'll get into it more next time we talk. But just, just a little brief synopsis of what they can expect to get from it.
- [76:24]
B
Right. So I wrote two books. Both, both became New York Times bestsellers. One of them is called Eat to Beat Disease. It's not a book about disease, it's a book about health.
- [76:32]
A
Yeah.
- [76:33]
B
And then I wrote a book called Eat to Beat yout Diet. And it's not a diet book, it's an anti diet book to beat your diet. So you don't. You can be metabolically healthy without going on a diet. Right. So I'm sort of setting out like what my books are actually about now. In my first book, Eat to Beat Disease, I write about 200 foods. But it's really not about the food alone. It's really about how our body responds, what we put inside it. So I explain, using state of the art science, how our body has five health defense systems that are hardwired from the day we're born into our very last breath. And these health defense systems, like our circulation angiogenesis, which I study blood, blood vessels, our stem cells, which we talked a little bit about on this episode. Number three, our gut microbiome, which we also talked about. Number four, our DNA, not just instructions for proteins, but actually it protects us from the environment. And then finally our immune system. Really powerful to have in good balance to be able to tackle enemies both from the outside world, like viruses and bacteria, but also from inside our bodies like cancer cells. So what I talk about is this overall schema where if you actually take good care of your body's five health defense systems. And feed those systems with foods that amplify your defenses. That's called shields up. All right? We're just able to go through longer, harder, stronger through life without being susceptible to disease. In fact, what I say in my book, when we get sick, which we all do get sick, it's really not that we got ambushed by some bad guy. It's really that one of our shields went down. Your lower door doesn't work anymore. Your window latch went out. Your front gate, you know, is broken. And so what you want to do to heal is just to restore your health defenses. So 200 foods with recipes and kind of like a protocol and how to actually harness your health defenses. What? My first book, second book, is a sequel to the first one. And I literally wrote it in the.
- [78:38]
A
With the.
- [78:39]
B
I had no idea my first book was me that successful because I just wrote what I knew. And when it became this like, runaway bestseller, I got the. I was invited, I got the privilege to write a second book as a follow up. And I thought, you know, how do I follow up? My first book that became so successful is built on 25 years of research. And I thought, you know what? I'm always just researching more things myself anyway, I'm just going to write about what I'm doing, which was on metabolism, right? Big topic. And so if. And. And I wrote it as a sequel, saying, like, all right, what are the great sequel movies? So I actually asked people who are screenwriters and, and directors in Hollywood, like, what's the secret to writing a good sequel? Because, I mean, I knew the science of it. And I said, well, you know, there's actually not that many great sequels out there in movieland, right? So Star wars with the sequel, Empire Strikes Back, one of the great sequels, Godfather 1, Godfather 2, great sequel, Terminator 1, Terminator 2, great sequel. And there are elements to all of these movies that made their sequels, like, rock. So I literally tore a page from that playbook to figure out, like, what are the through lines? What are the characters that gonna bring from my first book into my second book? And, and then who are the new bad guys and the new threats and the new ways to overcome it? And then, you know, just like at the end of Star wars, at the end of the day, you gotta throw everybody down the Death Star and deliver the, deliver the, the payload to blow it up, right? So my second book is about body fat and how everything we thought we knew about body fat rings true and how fat is actually an organ in our body like your liver, like your spleen, like your brain, like your heart. Fat is an organ and it does all kinds of hormonal things. It's a protective organism organ and it's actually the fuel tanks in our body. And I write about in this book, this landmark earth shaking recent study that showed that over our entire lives, from birth to death, over, let's say eight plus decades, that our human body only goes through four phases of metabolism. We're all hardwired to go through just four phases, really. And guess what? And here's the mic drop part of it. The middle phase, which is rock steady metabolism, how we're hardwired starts from age 20 and goes to age 60. Our metabolism is hardwired so it doesn't change during that period.
- [81:21]
A
Wow.
- [81:22]
B
Okay. Anyway, so that's my, that's, that's between all foods and all the foods you can eat to activate your metabolism, to get good balance. And there's some really great recipes as well because as you can tell, I like to cook. So I put all kinds of like fun foods that I have in my own kitchen into the book.
- [81:39]
A
Man, you weren't kidding that. And that's something to really end on because now I am so damn intrigued. As you could see, I'm the most inquisitive guy on the planet. So I got to know all of this. But this is good. So we have, I mean we have plenty of ammunition for future if you will come back. Because I tell you what, I had an extremely high expectation for this. Like, very high. I was telling my wife about it this morning because normally I, I love my interviews, but I was like, I was up earlier this morning and I told her and dude, you exceeded it by like a hundred. And I'm telling you I had a very high expectation. I, I really did. And, and I knew, but I didn't know. And I really appreciate not just your knowledge, but your delivery of your knowledge, how genuine you are and, and how I, I could just see the amount of time that you put into this. There's no way on the planet Earth that a human could be this smart without really, really spending countless hours reading and researching and mastering what they do. And I for one know what that's like and I appreciate that because it says a lot about you and your care and, and I know the, the mission here. And so I'm directly in line with you and I truly, truly appreciate it.
- [82:51]
B
Well, it's been my pleasure to speak with you, love to come back and I'm sure we can delve into other areas of health, wellness, longevity, biohacking that you know, that your audience is interested in. We, I kind of, we kind of just scratched the surface.
- [83:06]
A
Oh, we. Dude, I got like hours of, of things. Cancer related, heart related, food related. I got a lot of episodes with you. If you'll do them with me. I swear I, I don't even know. I'm excited, man. I'm like a little kid happy with, with everything here. So tell everybody and I'll link everything, obviously. But what are the best places to see your content and follow you and etc.
- [83:30]
B
Yeah, well, you know, I have a YouTube channel. My handle is @Dr. Dr. William Lee. L I, I put up content regularly to talk about these interesting nuggets and dimensions like our conversation. But I always try to make sure I'm giving people practical information maybe that they didn't know about before. And that same handle, you can find me on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and then, you know, my website is Dr. William Le dot com. Check it out. I, you know, I regularly will do programs where I'll bring people together. I actually just launched a program called Grand Rounds. And Grand Rounds is kind of a masterclass, but I do it the way that doctors get together to talk, to really exchange serious information because, you know, I think we live in a, we live in a time where there's an overload of information, information and you're not really sure what to trust or what's important. And so, you know, I, I decided to go unplugged and strip down some of my masterclass material to say, look, let's just give, let's just get right down to it. Let's get down to the important stuff. And because doctors do it, we do it with ourselves all the time to share information. That's my Grand Rounds program. So I invite people to check it out.
- [84:48]
A
Love it, man. Well, thank you so much for coming here today and then giving me this amount of your precious time. I thoroughly appreciate it. I can't wait to talk to you more. I can't wait to show you to more people than you already have, hopefully. So thank you, Dr. Lee, and I will look forward to having you on soon, my man. And that wraps up another one, so stay tuned for more. Plenty more to come. Dylan Gemelli and Dr. William Lee signing off.