← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Scientist with New Data on fat, weight loss and longevity | Dr. William Li Pt 2
01:07:08
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- [00:00]
Dr. William Lee
A vacation rental shouldn't come with surprises. It should come with Verbocare and 24. 7 life support. If the hot tub's broken, that's a Verbo Care thing. If my teenager starts calling me Leslie, that's a family thing. Leslie VRBoCare and 24. 7 Life Support. If you know you're VRBO, terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [00:46]
Tom Bilyeu
What's up guys? I'm really excited about the second part of this conversation with Dr. William Lee talking about one of the most important topics that you can focus on, which is your health. Dr. Lee has been a key part of developing 40 FDA approved therapeutics and devices for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and more. So when I say this guy knows his stuff, I really do mean it. And in his latest book, Eat to Beat yout Diet, he's upending some of the most long held beliefs in the medical community about how exactly you go about addressing your overall health and your body fat through diet. I was blown away by a lot of the things that he had to
- [01:21]
Dr. William Lee
say and I know that you guys
- [01:22]
Tom Bilyeu
are going to be as well. In the second part of the conversation, we talk about how to activate your own body defenses and why Dr. Lee often turns to food instead of the prescription pad to cure people's illness. We get a masterclass on the magic powers of brown fat and what you can do to create more and why a Mediterrasan diet will get your health optimized for longevity. If you want more conversations like this, let us know by leaving a review. And following the show makes a huge difference in helping us get the show out to more people. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Would I get the same or different diseases if I'm overeating by 5,000 calories? In those two paradigms, you get different diseases. Interesting. Am I going to get a disease on both sides? Like if I'm overeating healthy foods, but I'm overeating, like I'm packing on the fat every year, year after year? Just yeah, you know,
- [02:18]
Dr. William Lee
you probably will get different diseases. But I would sell and I would tell you that your, your curtailment of your longevity will probably be faster with the ice cream.
- [02:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So I'm going to die younger. What does that play at a cellular level? Why is that true? Can we boil it down to just sugar? Like the amount of glucose that I'm going to have to deal with?
- [02:48]
Dr. William Lee
Well, so that's, if you're fixing all the calories the same, that's going to be the same on both sides. Your engine's got to rev up higher because you're eating, you're overeating your, the needed amount of calories every day, right? You're doing 5,000, you're going over. So you're going to have to, you're going to have to burn more. Your engine is going to have to race faster to be able to actually just metabolize those, those calories. But on the other hand, the ice cream is adding saturated fat, adding extra sugar to you. Okay. Or maybe it was a sugar free ice cream. Now you're adding, let's make it sugar.
- [03:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Because what I'm really trying to contrast is one is taxing my, what I think about as triggering all of the metabolic problems, which is insulin, and the other one, because, I mean, maybe I should have framed it more as like I'm getting the vast majority of my calories from fat, right? So I'm eating salads, a ton of plants, but I'm just drowning it in olive oil. I'm not even gonna put seed oils. Nothing crazy. Like all things that most people would say, yeah, that's great for you. But on one hand, on the one hand, I am forcing my body to process an unimaginable amount of glucose, and then on the other one, I am not. So I'm overeating calories, so it's gonna get stored as fat, but I'm not asking it to process blood sugar.
- [04:06]
Dr. William Lee
Okay, so let's move it from ice cream to cans of soda.
- [04:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay.
- [04:11]
Dr. William Lee
All right, so you're gonna have 5,000 calories a day based only on soda. It's got a lot of sugar in it. Ton of sugar. Soda, you know, 12 ounce can has like nine table teaspoons of sugar. All right? It's a lot of sugar. Like a, like a horrific amount of sugar. If I gave you an empty glass and put nine teaspoons of cane sugar in it and gave it to you to chug down, you wouldn't do it. It'd be repulsive. Now you got a salad. Let's just Use that extreme of a salad. You put some olive oil. Go ahead. But that salad's going to have leafy greens, it's going to have tomatoes, it's going to have carrots, it's going to have. And I can tell you what the fiber content is and the polyphenol content. We know what those things do. All those other natural chemicals, we call them bioactives, activate systems in your body that counteract the disease process. They'll work hard to try to protect you against the disease. Whereas the soda, no such activation. So you're. The soda is just degrading.
- [05:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Is there a lack of the bioactives in the soda or is it because I've always assumed that this is. That sugar is the blunt force trauma that ends up killing you. If you're dying of metabolic disease, you have a sugar problem. You have in taken too many carbohydrates, full stop, period, end of story. It's that simple or.
- [05:29]
Dr. William Lee
No, it's not that simple. Because, you know, effectively, food is not sugar or no sugar. All right? And.
- [05:37]
Tom Bilyeu
But is metabolic disease sugar or no sugar?
- [05:40]
Dr. William Lee
No, I think metabolic disease, there's enough chemical reactions tied to sugar, but tied to other chemical reactions that have nothing to do with sugar. It could be a domino effect.
- [05:49]
Tom Bilyeu
So I could give myself metabolic disease with fat.
- [05:56]
Dr. William Lee
This is an interesting cross examination of a scientist because the way you're asking the question is really loaded. You're handing me a grenade with every question, all right? And I'm tossing it back at you saying, I'm not pulling a pin, all right? I'm asking you to put the pin back in or trying to reframe it so that I'm not giving a purposefully controversial answer. What I would say is if you overload on anything, first of all, your brain runs on sugar. If you had no sugar, you would die probably within a day. If it just depleted all your sugar, you wouldn't survive. Your body tries to create sugars and as a substitute, tries to create ketones so you can actually stay alive. So this idea about sugar, you know, the tendency is to try to villainize, you know, demonize food or food substances. It's all bad or it's all good. It's my God or my devil. Not true. A little bit of sugar is totally fine for most normal healthy people. You can eat a little sugar. And by the way, tomato, a salad will have some sugar in it. All right? If you actually have a tomato salad, tomatoes have sugar. Ripe, ripe fruits have. Fruits have sugar. But if you look at all the clinical studies, people who eat more fruits and vegetables, including those that contain sugar, they're better than people who eat ice cream and sodas the whole time. So it's the degree of taxation on your metabolism. A lot of sugar is going to overtax your body, all right? For sure it's going to cause your metabolism to keep on firing as high as it possibly can to metabolize that sugar. And eventually the wear and tear is, is going to show it's poor quality fuel, period. Now if you eat a plant forward diet, throw in some chicken, throw in some seafood, what have you, maybe even throw in a couple, a little meat every now and then, a little red meat now and then. But mostly plant forward diet, you're getting all these other polyphenols and dietary fiber, okay? All these other things that, you know, go ahead, fix the amount of calories the same. But now you're adding through plant based foods and seafoods and even olive oils, healthy oils, you're adding all these other polyphenols that activate your body's defensive mechanisms and fat opposing mechanisms that might start to counter what the soda can't do by itself because it's lacking that. So it's not like the soda is 100% harmful. It's pretty harmful. If you, if, look, you and I have a soda right now, we'll be fine. But if we keep on having a soda every day, week in and week out, year in and year out, and we have a six pack of soda or two or 24 sodas a day, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're going to completely annihilate our metabolism. All right? So what I would say is that diets that are healthy for your metabolism contain polyphenols and dietary fiber, which are happen to be found mostly in plants. Mother Nature's imbued lots of good stuff in our plant based foods. I'm not a vegan and I'm not a vegetarian, although I eat mostly vegetables. But I'll eat other things too. And what I do know is that the foods that I eat that are plant based are loading me up in addition to calories with other bioactives that actually fire up my body's health defenses, fire up my metabolism in beneficial ways, and in fact can help fight harmful body fat. So it's not like, are you fat? Are you not fat? We are, we all have fat. It's the degree of fat. And by the way, you know, when we're actually not eating, our body is hardwired with A program that just burns down extra fat. So when we're, when we're not eating, which, like when we're sleeping, which is fasting, which we break our fast when we wake up, which is why we have breakfast, you know, our body is actually automatically trying to right. Size and itself to kind of burn down some of that extra fuel that might have been formed or stored during the day, but it might not have been just during the day. Maybe it's the night before, maybe it's the weekend before, maybe it's during the holidays, maybe it's over a decade of abusing and overeating and having low quality food. Those are the things that, you know, you're hardwiring, your body has a hard time overcoming earlier in life that we get set in our minds that we have control of our metabolic destiny by lowering the amount of sugar we have. Correct. By lowering the amount of overall calories we eat, regardless of whether it's plant based or not. Okay, Is better for us. Eating less is healthier. Caloric restriction in an experimental model just shows, you know, like it's an exemplar of saying, you know, we probably are left to our own devices, we probably tend to overeat. All right, we don't have enough control. So now if you know that we tend to overeat, eat less, it will be better for you. And the benefits, the longevity benefits of caloric restriction, I would say a corollary to that is that you live longer by eating less. You live less by eating too much. And so it's a matter of degrees. We've been talking about in this conversation, which I love is really, we've been exploring the fringe areas, extremes, you know, the sumo wrestler, you know, the anorectic, you know, like that, or the prisoner of war, okay, none of those are healthy. Okay? And even though, and even though there's surprises, it is true. Super skinny people with ultra lean mass who get on a cardiac catheterization table. Cardiologist, okay, looks at them, look, they, they tend to have more complications and they tend to die more from the complications compared to somebody who's overweight that has a heart disease.
- [11:47]
Tom Bilyeu
So this is the, the crux of the thing that I'm trying to get to with the, okay, if I overeat soda versus I overeat fat is I, I have a, perhaps just novice's understanding of metabolic disease. And so everything that's ever been referenced as metabolic disease to me has sounded like, oh, this is a, an insulin glucose problem, period. And so in my Overly simplistic mind. Metabolic disease is a disease of over consumption of glucose. But now I'm realizing that that might only be what, that might just be the common way that people get metabolic disease in modern lifestyle food is hyperpalm,
- [12:30]
Dr. William Lee
the most common way.
- [12:31]
Tom Bilyeu
So is there another type of metabolic disease that would manifest from overeating fat? And the reason that you just triggered that thought in me by explaining that somebody who's underweight still goes in for cardiac catheterization makes me then ask the question, okay, if I'm a doctor and I'm looking at the two hearts, can I tell, oh, this is somebody who's underweight and this is somebody who's overweight. I'm guessing you're going to say yes. And so then I'm like, oh, wow, okay, then there's two different disease types. It's just one is really common and one is not common.
- [13:03]
Dr. William Lee
That's the case. And by the way, metabolic diseases, there are hundreds of different kinds. Because any defect in a chemical reaction that's tied to generating energy at any stage, whether it's connected directly to insulin or not, whether it's connected to sugar or not, I mean there are tons of. Our body has to detoxify as part of its metabolism. Right? You need energy, you need to get rid of the toxins. It's kind of like the carburetor of your car. All right, you know, look, there's no problem with the gas tank and the engine looks. Fuel lines look fine, carburetors busted. All right, now your car's not going to run well. So the metabolic health and metabolic disease is actually very, very complicated. Sugar happens to be excess sugar happens to be the hallmark of modern industrialized life with because of the food industry and marketing, you know, and by the way, a little bit evolutionary, our brains are hardwired to crave sugar. I mean, you know, troglodytes probably crave sugar whenever they can find it. A berry, let's go pick all the berries. Because we want to store all that energy into our body. I think what, what's, you know, if I could sort of character assassinate. One aspect of our society is that we live in abundance. We have poor self knowledge and self control. We're beginning, and the science is now beginning to unreveal exactly how we really work and how bad things that we always assumed were bad, how bad it can actually be. And also maybe not as bad as we thought in some instances as well, Skinny was always thought to be good. Well, except unless you're A prisoner of war, right? Fat's always thought to be bad. Well, wait a minute. Basuno wrestlers for that period of time in their life, it's not all bad. So we need to rethink body fat. We need to rethink metabolism and to have a better understanding of like what's really going on. That's what I do as a scientist and as a doctor talking to patients. I've got to really be able to be the honest broker to say we don't know everything. So just because you assume that, that your metabolism slows down at middle age automatically doesn't mean that it does. The new research begins to reveal that other things are actually happening to make you gain weight, to change your body shape. And because of that, there may be newfound solutions to it as well.
- [15:28]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, I want to put another thought experiment out for the underside. So now if we were doing the same experimentation. So one is just what we'll call terrible quality diet. So we'll give them soda again. Uh, but you're drinking like 1200 calories, so you're, you're going to lose weight. You definitely won't be accumulating fat. At least I can't. I'll be surprised if that's your answer. And then over here, you're eating that healthy diet again, getting most of your calories from fat, you know, drizzled over better greens, et cetera, et cetera. What is that going to look like? Are they both going to be fine? Is this, does it really boil down to as long as you don't tip over into overeating, your body will be just fine, even if all you're doing is drinking soda?
- [16:17]
Dr. William Lee
No, because I would say that the caloric restriction in which all the calories are coming from soda are going to still over day in and day out, is going to really overload. Overtax your insulin, it's going to overtax that axis of metabolism. It will, even though you're not overloading it. But that's all it's getting. It's not getting any of the other balanced, diverse repertoire of bioactives that come from eating a more balanced meal. And by the way, the other thing that's important that can't be underscored in the scenario you talked about is the contribution of our gut microbiome. All right, when we eat normal calories with plant based salad, with greens or whatever, we're eating dietary fiber and that fiber is feeding our gut bacteria, that 39 trillion population, that ecosystem in our gut, that actually lowers Them helps it when it's happy and well fed, lowers inflammation, helps our insulin work more efficiently, contributes to healing organs that might be injured and regenerating tissue from the inside out. Text messages our brain so we're able to be clear minded. Better cognition, better decision making. Okay? Healthy gut below, healthy body upstairs, including our brains. Now, you give people caloric restriction or any amount of calories, normal calories, let's call it out of soda. No dietary fiber, no prebiotics, no bioactives that feed your gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome is starving. Now your starving gut microbiome is going to change that ecosystem. It's going to be a sick ecosystem. You can't see it in a mirror. You can't judge it from across the street or across the table. But I guarantee you that disintegrating ecosystem inside your gut is now going to cause inflammation to rise in your body. All right? It's going to actually cause your hormones to kind of start raging and wild ways. The messages that it texts to your brain aren't regular messages anymore. Now you're less happy, you're more depressed. You've got brain fog. Now when you're presented with a choice of something to eat, I don't know, maybe you're going to make the wrong choice. Maybe you're going to overeat something, right? And so again, and should you be exercising when your gut is telling you you shouldn't be happy, you should be depressed? Probably not. All right? And now you're not going to be sleeping as well either. And so you can kind of see it's. I think you're correct in many respects that overloading on sugar or sugar alone as a dietary staple is harmful. But the reasons it's harmful are not as simple as insulin or non insulin body fat and non body fat, that's. And the benefits by the way of eating healthy salads or eating plant based foods. Again, I'm not a vegan or vegetarian. Even I do eat a lot of plants. It's not simply because you're having the color of the rainbow. You know, it's that there are explanations that we're beginning to unearth now of how these foods, when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food. It's about how our body responds to what we put inside it. Back to this quality of fuel. Soda, poor quality fuel. Salad, good quality fuel. Ice cream, tasty. Probably not the best quality fuel. You shouldn't be having it all the time. But you know, there's A lot of people who make a habit out of eating soda and ice cream most of the time. And those are the people in an era of abundance, in a society where we can pick and choose anything we want at any time. All right. Where when you make the wrong choices, most of the time your body and your metabolism is going to pay for it. Yeah.
- [20:15]
Tom Bilyeu
So, man, I'm always surprised that diet isn't the thing that people just say that's the only lever, because it seems so much more important than exercise. But I get it. I get it. I don't know enough about all of that, so I acquiesce to smarter people than I. But on diet. So I want to talk a little bit more about sugar. So clearly more complex than I was thinking before this interview, which has really been great. But what does it look like to start pulling sugar out of your diet? So what are the things that I'm going to avoid? And I think this will be a good way for us to transition into a lot of the stuff you talk about in the book about the bioactives and what people need to add to the whole point about eating to beat your diet. What do I get by removing sugar? And then how do I combat some of the mistakes I may have made that leave me with more adipose than I would like?
- [21:19]
Dr. William Lee
Right. Okay, So I think everyone, let's get some practical things that people can actually do something about. Cutting down or cutting out food. Any kind of food that has added sugar is a good, healthy move to make. If you want to optimize your health or if you just want to actually incrementally make your health a little bit better, think about whether or not somebody has added sugar to whatever it is you're about to put in your mouth. Okay. I'm not talking about a restaurant meal. All right? What I'm talking about is an ultra processed food where you can actually look at the ingredients. And based on how far up or how close to the beginning sugar actually sits in that ingredient list, that tells you how much is actually in there relative to everything else. Soda is water and sugar and flavoring and preservatives and stabilizers and coloring, you know, and so you can sort of see, cut down on those types of foods. It's going to be. Your body's going to thank you for it. That's an easy, super simple way. And if somebody's added sugar to a food, cut it down or cut it out to immediately start to unload your metabolism and to allow it to actually start to breathe and Relax and do what it wants to do. You're unpacking it, unburdening your metabolism by not loading added sugar onto it. All right? Now the other thing that you can be doing is eating foods that might be sweet. So, like, everyone likes a hit of sugar, right? I mean, that's just our bodies, we like it. So. But if you eat something sweet, like a piece of fruit, it doesn't have to be a very sweet fruit, a pear, sometimes the pears are not that all that sweet. Apples not usually all that sweet. But guess what? You can get that sugar hit, all right? Your brain will register it. But now you get all these other things that are part of the plant, part of the fruit, part of the vegetable. You're going to get in an apple, you're going to get the nice juicy apple liquid, but you're going to get dietary fiber. You're going to get chlorogenic acid in the flesh of the apple. That chlorogenic acid, by the way, is going to improve your immune system. It's going to protect your stem cells from regenerating. It's going to help to burn down harmful visceral fat. And so is the part of a bioactive called ellagic acid in the skin of the apple, right? So I'm somebody that studies food as medicine. You sit down maybe and you order something, you're just going to eat it because you, you, you're hungry and you want to eat. This is what you want to eat. I sit down or I go to work and I look at a piece of food and I'm wondering what's inside it, what is it made out of and what, what based on what it's made out of, how does that stuff affect the body? How does the body respond to it? Does it respond in a good way or a bad way? So I would say that, you know, one of the things that you want to be able to do is eat more of mother nature's pharmacy. That's pharmacy spelled with an F, like stuff out of a farm, as opposed to a ph, like pharmaceutical, right? Because what happens when you actually gain too much body fat? Your metabolism is down. You got to resort to pharmaceuticals, right? I mean, that's what, that's the bummer, you know, if you abuse your body and you're dealing with the fallout of dietary not taking care of a good diet, over time, you're going to wind up being on insulin or being on metformin, or now you can see this crazy raging trend of prescription weight loss drugs to try to prevent you from overeating, by the way, you know how those drugs work. Ozempic, wegovy, all these things you got injected in your belly, okay? It's originally developed for diabetes. And what it does is it, it affects your brain by keep on pressing a button in your brain that signals that you're full, all right? That's how these weight loss drugs. So here's how I come at this. This is how I talk about the whole topic of weight loss drugs. I know it's very popular and I know it works, all right? And absolutely there are people who have morbid obesity, okay, who might look like sumo wrestlers, but they don't. They're not. All right? Those people whose lives are in danger might need these prescription drugs. That's why they're FDA approved. However, the trend, the rage, the demand, this craze towards weight loss drugs is not necessarily a good thing for two reasons. Number one, it blocks something in your brain that tells you that you're hungry. So yeah, sure, you might calorically restrict, but you might also be un, you might under. Nourish yourself of the healthy bioactives, which is why I'm bringing this up. All right? This is very popular right now, but the people are, you know, they're losing weight in weird sort of ways. You've heard about Ozempic face. They're, they're, it kind of melts fat away, including changes the fat the way you look in your face. People, some people don't even look normal. Okay? So just. And the other thing is that we don't know what the consequences are for people who are, who don't suffer from obesity, Frank. Obesity. To be able to do this for a long period of time. It's also depriving diabetics of the drugs that they need for their health. Like this popularity of like, because they
- [26:42]
Tom Bilyeu
need Ozempic or because they need.
- [26:44]
Dr. William Lee
They're using Ozempic as a treatment for diabetes or medically indicated. And now all the supplies of Ozempic are depleted and, and they can't even, they have to wait for the supplies to replenish, meaning other people are going to just hog their Ozempic supplies. All right? And they don't. They're not, and they're not medically in need of this. It's a vanity issue. All right?
- [27:04]
Tom Bilyeu
And, and, but for type 2 diabetics, they can control it through their diet entirely.
- [27:10]
Dr. William Lee
They can. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely not everyone can. But most people with diet and lifestyle.
- [27:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Type 2 diabetes.
- [27:16]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah.
- [27:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Who that has type 2 diabetes can't control it through lifestyle.
- [27:22]
Dr. William Lee
I think there are people who are have multitude of other comorbidities and it may be that, you know, they develop type 2 diabetes long after they were already morbidly obese. You know, they may not be able to just simply exercise and eat their way back into metabolic health.
- [27:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Really is it, is it the fat cells are kicking off?
- [27:45]
Dr. William Lee
Could be, it could be like over excessive inflammation. If you're super elderly, I mean there's a whole host of diseases you might have other autoimmune diseases that are actually affecting your body.
- [27:57]
Tom Bilyeu
You have to tell me more about this.
- [27:58]
Dr. William Lee
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- [28:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so at the risk of derailing us, but this is very, very interesting. So someone I know and love very much has a lot of comorbidities and I was encouraging this person to fast, intermittent fast, and they pointed out that they do like a 13 to 14 hour intermittent fast every day. And I was like, okay, that's actually more impressive than I thought. There's still a lot of room to go. But it just got me thinking, is she going to struggle more because of her, she has a thyroid condition, you know, a couple other things going on just to keep it spicy. And it, it did get me started thinking like, is this going to be a more complicated thing? So there you can basically break your metabolism. I don't know if you'd use those words, but you can break your metabolism to the point where even though something like diabetes type 2 when caught early enough, I don't know how to say it is entirely lifestyle controllable. You're saying you can be sort of too far gone, that It. Not that it's impossible, but that it's. You're going to have a lot of pushback.
- [30:10]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah, absolutely.
- [30:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [30:12]
Dr. William Lee
Absolutely. The resilience of the body, by the way, is compromised by the magnitude and the number of oppositional conditions that it actually has. If you're relatively healthy and you've got type 2 diabetes, you know, from lifestyle, if you fix your lifestyle, your body's resilience, it'll bounce back, you'll actually be able to reverse it for sure. That is a 100% sure. But if you have a whole host of other comorbidities, other conditions that are weighing you down, thyroid problems, pituitary problems, adrenal problems, you know, you name it. And they could be autoimmune, they could be inflammatory, they could be all kinds of other things, could be from surgery. You know, you had, you know, and so then all of a sudden, these other complications make it harder for your body to bounce back simply by eating more healthy and also exercising more.
- [31:05]
Tom Bilyeu
What would you do with a person that's in that situation where they've got enough comorbidities that this is really going to be a tough unwind? How do you start? I mean, are you just like, look, at some point, there's no coming back, or is there a path?
- [31:22]
Dr. William Lee
I can give you that answer from my vantage as the kind of doctor I am sure I'm trained in internal medicine. It means that I take care of men and women, young and old, healthy and sick. My own vantage point has always been to try to keep people from requiring medication. I'll use it when I need to, but if I prescribe a medication when it's necessary, I will always think, when I get somebody, when I prescribe a medication, I will always think in my head, what is my plan gonna be to get them off that medication? How can we actually get them to a point where they don't need it anymore? Come down on the dose first and then come off of it if possible. It's not always possible, but I've always thought about it. Now, that's not actually how most medical professionals are trained to think. And I'm just telling you, I was cut from this bolt of cloth. Where you go to medical school, you're trained to ignore health, only focus on disease, usually very advanced disease. You make the diagnosis, and then we throw pharmaceuticals and technology at it. And because we're not thinking about getting people back to health, because we ignored it from the beginning, we wind up just chasing chronic disease with chronic treatments. And now that our healthcare System is clearly breaking. It's collapsing under the weight of these chronic diseases. Everyone, insurance companies, medical systems, doctors, medical education, medical educators, everybody's having a rethink. We cannot sustain this too much longer. And not only does the system fail, but individual lives and quality of life is compromised. And so that's why, you know, someone like me, you know, I have long had, from the very beginning of my career, this idea, let's keep people healthy. Let's understand what that actually means. Let's use food, diet, and lifestyle as the primary tool to keep people healthy. Let's make people feel empowered. Healthcare happens at home, not in the doctor's office. You know, all we can do is to counsel and advise and try to help people understand what they can do for themselves. And, you know, they come back to the doctor's office when they're sick. All right? And if we can get them back to health, that's a win. So for me, I score my performance in medicine as being able to keep people from medications, Getting them off medications, and getting them to bounce back to health. And food as a tool in the toolbox is one of the most important things that I learned on my own, and then as a researcher, just how powerful it actually is.
- [33:54]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so bioactives. Let's get into those. So you go into a lot of detail in the book about bioactives. Um, how much of that. Like, I've. I've never been, like, a big believer in supplements. I don't supplement with basically anything. Vitamin D occasionally, but other than that, not at all. Because I probably oversimplify the way that I think about food. And so your book was really intriguing in terms of, like, hey, there are compounds in this, this, this, and this. And they're very useful for. For instance, how do we get brown fat turned on? Which I don't think we ever defined brown fat. So it'd probably be good. Take a second to define brown fat. Talk to me about these bioactives, how we trigger things like brown fat to consume the white fat. It gets pretty interesting. And if I could, do you consider bioactives to be signaling molecules? Like, are they telling your body, go do this, or is there a more mechanistic, like, it goes in and it flips the enzyme that's being used to break down fructose? Something like that.
- [35:02]
Dr. William Lee
Okay, let's pick up that thread from defining fat. We talked about white fat, subcutaneous and visceral, and inflammation and all the leaking and all that kind of damage it can do, but that actually, within the right amounts. It's actually incredibly helpful. And white fat I mentioned to you is lumpy, bumpy, wiggly, jiggly. It's the stuff you can see in the mirror. Okay? But there's another kind of fat in the body, and it's called brown fat. And brown fat actually is not wiggly, jiggly. It's actually paper thin. And it's not close to the surface, so you can't see it. It's close to the bone. It's plastered along our neck. Okay. It's plastered under our breastbone, and it's a little bit. It's under our arms like a girdle, and a little bit in our belly. All right?
- [35:49]
Tom Bilyeu
And we all hold it in the same place.
- [35:51]
Dr. William Lee
We all hold it in the same place. Okay. And this discovery of brown fat is relatively recent. It's like, within the last 20 years that we didn't realize that we have so much brown fat. And now we're beginning to understand what it does. Let's talk about what it does. It's a space heater in the body. It actually turns on heat. It burns energy to create heat. And what do I mean by burning energy? Well, if you have a gas range stove in your house, what do you do when you actually want to boil some water? You go, click, click, click, whoosh. It burns on. You see the flame? All right? And. And that flame is being fed by fuel. It's got to consume the fuel from someplace. Well, brown fat does the same thing, okay? It goes whoosh. It generates heat under certain circumstances. We're going to talk about that in a second, all right? I can tell you cold temperatures and bioactives will do it. Okay? It goes whoosh. And it has to burn down fuel. Where does brown fat draw the fuel from? It draws it from the harmful white fat, draws it from visceral fat. So brown fat can burn down white fat. It depletes the fuel tank and burns it down. Fat versus fat. And it's turned on by cold temperatures and bioactives. Now, I want to go back and tell you how we discovered it, because this is an interesting story. You know the history of discovery in science. I find it so fascinating. So go back to the 1700s. There was a guy named Conrad Gessner who's a researcher, he's a naturalist. He studied the natural world. What's a tree look like? What's a muskrat look like? And he wound up studying a. A little furry mammal that, like a. That looked like a woodchuck called an alpine Marmot, and it was a hibernating animal, which means that he had to go find them hiding in little cave when it was in the middle of the winter. And when he basically, and this is what they did back then, would actually dissect it in the lab to see what kind of organs it actually has, because nobody knew about organs. He found that in this hibernating animal that he had removed from a cave during the middle of the cold winter in Europe, that there was a little thing between his shoulder blades that was a brown looking organ. And he didn't know what it was called. They actually named it a hibernoma because they thought it was just in hibernating animals. And they found it in hibernating bats and hibernating squirrels and other hydrating animals over time. They never knew what the, what the purpose of this thing was. All right? So they just. This is, this is what's in the literature, all going all the way back then. In the, in the early 1900s, a scientist at UCLA actually put this hypernoma, this brown tissue, under the microscope. And by now we had better ways of looking at cells. We had names for cells and we had more powerful microscopes and looked at it and said, oh my gosh, this hybrnoma is actually filled with fat. It's actually fat. And it's an interesting fat because it's brown. Now why is this brown fat brown? Well, it turns out that the brown fat, when you look even closer into the microscope, the brown fat cells are filled with these little mini organs called mitochondria. Now, some of you guys might have heard of mitochondria before in the health and wellness space, in the biohacking space. But mitochondria are energy generators. They're like little bad nuclear fuel tanks inside our cells. When I was in medical school and I had to memorize hundreds of things, I. I always called mitochondria mitochondria because they are small and mighty. They burst out with heat. All right? And one of the characteristics of mitochondria is there's a lot of mitochondria and brown fat. And mitochondria has a lot of iron in it. What does iron do when you leave it outside? It rusts. It oxidizes. And so what all this, like super packed mitochondria in fat does is, is it oxidizes. And now it's brown like rusty nails. So that's why brown fat is brown. It's packed with these mitochondria, these nuclear Fuel cells. And that's how it fires up the heat. And it's got to draw that heat from white fat. So good fat. Now we know what it is, why it works. And we didn't think it was in humans for a long time. And the way that was discovered in humans is really, really interesting. We always knew babies had maybe a little bit between their shoulder blades. Or he's like, ah, it's an evolutionary artifact. You know, kids are born with incubators now or, like, warm delivery rooms. We don't need that stuff. And that must go away when you're an adult, right? Because nobody's got a little lump between their shoulder blades. Pretty smooth, usually, or muscular. Well, it turns out there was a woman in just about 20 years ago in Boston who came in with a tumor in her chest. And they did a scan and to look at metabolism, because they. Because at the time, PET scannings. The PET scan, that positron emission tomography, we call it a PET scan, picks up metabolism. It's a way of measuring tumors actually are particularly metabolically active. It consumes a lot of sugar. It's very super active. You can find tumors by looking at the PET scan. When they scan this lady, her tumor lit up like a Christmas tree. Not surprising. Cancers light up. They consume a lot of sugar, all right, and so it's a tumor that's lighting up. But when they biopsied it, they removed it from her chest, and it looked under the microscope. Guess what? It was brown fat. It was brown fat, not a cancer.
- [41:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Sucking up more glucose. Is that what they were reading?
- [41:39]
Dr. William Lee
They were reading the metabolism, the firing up, the consuming of the fuel, metabolic activity that it was doing. Anything that generates metabolism will be picked up on a PET scan, including glucose. But in this case, it was the brown fat was drawing energy from white fat and lighting it up. So they found it and they're like, oh, my gosh, an adult actually has brown fat. And they found it on a PET scan. Now, PET scans 20 some years ago, still pretty new. And so what the researcher did is they like, you know, I'm wondering if we've been seeing brown fat. It wasn't a cancer, by the way. I'm wondering. We've been seeing brown fat in these PET scans that have been done thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, and we just missed it because we never thought about it and we never biopsied it. So he went back and he looked at thousands of PET scans in the radiology record room, and you know what? There was some brown Fat that was lighting up. You could see it around the neck and be under the chest, under the breastbone, under the arms. All right, but not everyone had it. And so the researchers were like, wait a minute. This is weird. It's not consistent. It doesn't make sense. Until they looked at the season, the date in which the PET scans were taken. Remember, this is Boston, New England. Cold winters. Every time they saw brown fat on PET scan was in the winter with cold temperatures just like the hibernating animals. So cold temperatures signal to our body to light up the brown fat in order in humans to. To be able to burn down energy. So this is, by the way, you hear about cold plunges now. Now you know why it actually makes sense. It actually works. Okay. But here's the cool thing. When it comes to food and bioactives, we also discovered exactly the pathways that cold activates the brown fat. So I'll walk you through this quickly, because then actually, you'll understand why the bioactives do it as well. We know that cold temperatures cause the brain to release a hormone called norepinephrine. It's kind of a stress hormone. You know, fight or flight, a little bit of stress hormone. And when the. When the hormone runs down the. From the brain to the nerves to the brown fat, it hits a receptor that basically is a trigger, a switch to, say, turn on the engines, baby. Click, click, click, whoosh, like on the top of your flame of your stovetop, and the brown fat will turn on. Well, it turns out when you map out all these signals, it's not just cold temperatures that will cause that brain to release the hormone. Chili peppers will do the same thing when you eat spicy food, capsaicin, which gives you the burn, the zing on your tongue, that capsaicin, a bioactive from chili peppers, activates a receptor in your tongue, that your tongue will then send a message to your brain to say, hey, release some of that norepinephrine. Release some of that hormone. And so if you eat chili peppers in a quiet room where you're by yourself and you're able to close your eyes, and you'll feel the zing up to your brain. You'll actually feel the hormone being released down the side of your neck, down your nerves, activating your brown fat. So chili peppers activate brown fat. And we can prove it with a PET scan.
- [44:49]
Tom Bilyeu
You can see that's actually been done.
- [44:51]
Dr. William Lee
It's been done.
- [44:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow.
- [44:52]
Dr. William Lee
With chili peppers. Okay. And if that chili peppers work now, and we know all the other ways of Doing it now, we can actually start to realize, man, maybe there's other foods that activate brown fat as well. Tomatoes contain lycopene. Lycopene actually activates brown fat so you can trigger the burning down of visceral fat, white fat, by activating your brown fat. So profound.
- [45:15]
Tom Bilyeu
How much do you have to eat to get that effect?
- [45:17]
Dr. William Lee
Not that much. There was one study that was done. It was really quite remarkable in Spain, where they gave young women who are carrying a little extra weight just one ripe tomato to eat before lunch. That's it. One tomato. That's it.
- [45:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Get your lectins.
- [45:33]
Dr. William Lee
Forget about the lectins. That's a myth. That's a myth. It's fake news. I'm a researcher who studies lectins. I can tell you there are hundreds of lectins. The idea that lectins are a single thing present in a tomato and it's poisonous, it's just not true. Okay.
- [45:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Why do so many people struggle with nightshades? I always assumed it was.
- [45:53]
Dr. William Lee
The nightshade is also a. A. A misnomer. There's a whole history I read about.
- [46:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Is it a miscategorization or.
- [46:02]
Dr. William Lee
Okay, we're gonna go there. So when Spaniard went to Latin America, South America, and found tomatoes and brought them back to Southern Europe, okay, as. As prizes, they didn't just bring back the tomato. They brought back the tomato and the vine, and they were given as presents to wealthy patrons of the expeditions. And they didn't know what to do with these things. They kind of looked like apples, and they weren't red. They were golden. In the beginning, in fact, the Italians called it palme apple douro, gold apple, because it kind of looked like an apple and it was gold. That's why it's called pomodoro. Right. That's why the Italian word for tomato is pomodoro. Okay? And what. They didn't know what they was, and so they sent some of the leaves up to England, where the horticulturists and the botanists were trying to identify this leaf that they hadn't seen before. You know, they had never seen one before. It was brand new, but it kind of resembled nightshade. All right. A deadly nightshade. So they're like, well, I don't know. It kind of looks like a nightshade. It's not a nightshade, but it kind of looks like a nightshade. Let's throw it in that category. So that's how this idea of the nightshade stuck. It's not a nightshade. In fact, the nightshade family there is nightshade. It is one member of a bigger family of plants now popularly known as nightshades, eggplants and everything else. And there is one plant of the nightshade family called belladonna that actually is poisonous. You can poison yourself if you have belladonna plants. Among many nightshade plants, that's the only one that really is deadly. Maybe there's two of them. That's the one that's really deadly toxin. But guess what? Doctors use belladonna alkaloids, that nightshade to treat glaucoma. So even the nightshade has beneficial use. Anyway, so this is the false association of nightshade to tomato.
- [47:58]
Tom Bilyeu
People who claim to have problems with peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, they probably have a
- [48:03]
Dr. William Lee
sensitivities to some other aspect within the plant. You can't just like throw nightshade. I can't eat any nightshades. Deadly nightshades, deadly plants. Not true. Okay, now, by the way, the myth of tomatoes being poison and deadly, I told you that the expedition gave them to wealthy people, okay? And they were used as ogeer d', art, these beautiful golden tomatoes with their vines. And guess where they placed them on display in their homes, in their villas. They put them on lead trays to display.
- [48:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoops.
- [48:39]
Dr. William Lee
Now, the acidic tomato, as it's ripening on a lead tray, will absorb the lead. Now, you try to eat that tomato, you're going to get lead poisoning. So a lot of the early reports of tomatoes being poisonous was lead poisoning. So what did the rich people do? And I'm obviously oversimplifying a historical story. They're like, man, no more of this out the window. And guess where the tomatoes landed in the peasants yard. Peasants don't have, weren't wealthy. They didn't have lead. So what do they do? They ate the tomatoes because it's food, all right? And they planted them and they cultivated them and never put them on heavy metal. All right? And so that's why peasant food, often, in a Mediterranean, often come often tomatoes, cooked tomato dishes, recipes come originally from peasant food. And it was never considered to be toxic because the peasants never put them on lead trays. And I hope I've kind of debunked a little bit, put some context into things that you may have heard about tomatoes, nightshade, nightshades, poisonous. Tomatoes are poisonous. Oh, and by the way, you know, like, and there's a, there's a, there's a story behind that. Okay. And then this whole idea of the lectins, hundreds of lectins in nature. Tomatoes do have some lectins, as do many other foods. Our body has lectins in it too, by the way. Most selectins are not poisonous, including the ones that are in tomato. If you. Only if you. And normal diet, no caloric restriction. Eat whatever you're going to eat in Spain. No special exercise, no trainer, no work, no workout. Special workout, no gym. However you moved, you keep on moving. However you ate, you kept on eating. One tomato a day would actually shrink their. Light up their brown fat, shrink their. Burn down their harmful white fat and shrink their waistline by an inch. Hmm. So that's visceral fat disappearing. All right. Not very much. A dose is not that much. Another study at the University of Toronto looked at a very, very inexpensive middle aisle food. Remember the forbidden middle aisles. Don't go there. I'm telling you to go pick out the treasures that are in there. And one of the treasures, beans. Canned, edible, canned, prepared beans. So they studied one cup of canned beans for five days a week. Everybody ate everything else that they normally ate. No extra exercise, no caloric restriction. Just five cups of beans a week. Five out of seven days, they would actually. Over the course of one month, they began to shrink down their visceral fat. Their waistline, waist circumference started to shrink. They. Their metabolism improved. If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our everything's on sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com sleep number to a good life sleep.
- [51:47]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [52:56]
Dr. William Lee
we, we don't know that this is, this is right now we're just starting to just study one thing at a time. But it's, what you're asking is to me where the ball is going to be. What happens when you combine foods? Now I will tell you one combination that already we already know about and that is tomatoes and olive oil. So remember we talked about lycopene, which activates your brown fat. And there's 150 foods I write about in my book that can all do this, all kinds. Oh yeah. So lycopene lights up brown fat, but the lycopene in a, in a plain tomato is absorbed in the body, but it actually gets absorbed much better in the body if you cook it with olive oil. You simmer it. The heat from simmering tomatoes, okay, actually changes the chemistry of mother nature's lycopene on the vine in a way that your body can absorb much more avidly. Okay. Like, like three times more adidly, 300% more.
- [53:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Literally. Sliced tomato, olive oil heat.
- [53:57]
Dr. William Lee
That's it. Okay. Or crushed tomato. However, have it your way. And, and, and, and because lycopene, the chemistry of lycopene is it's a fat soluble molecule chemical, which means that it likes to dissolve in fat. You know, like, I mean, you've gone into your kitchen before and you know, some things that you put into a cup of water will readily dissolve and some things will just kind of like sit on the top. It doesn't mix very well. Right. So, so same thing in oil. Some things will readily dissolve in, in, in oil, but not water. Lycopene dissolves in oil. So olive oil with cooked tomatoes, where you're changing the chemistry will actually then be the delivery system to really get a lot of lycopene into your system. So that's a combination tomatoes and olive oil cooked in a particular way. That's what I'm actually working on right now is how do we go from these individual foods to think about how do we combine them, how do we prepare them, how do we treat them in ways that actually can do even more than what we know they can do alone. So we talked about the beans, but I'll rattle off a couple of other things without necessarily going into all the data. Green tea will do it. Dried mushrooms will actually do it. Lentils will do it.
- [55:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have a sense of which ones are more powerful than others? Because some of those things you're saying I like and some I don't.
- [55:19]
Dr. William Lee
Yeah, and so diversity is the name of the game.
- [55:23]
Tom Bilyeu
So for other reasons, or the brown fat starts to get numb to the signal of 1.
- [55:27]
Dr. William Lee
No, actually for other reasons. I mean. Well, first of all, diversity is the name of the game for our humanity. All right, I want to say. I want to say that it's very important. Food has so for so long, food and health, food in the health conversation has been for so long associated with, you know, negative attributes. You know, food is harmful, cut down, eliminate, restrict, deprive. Like that's how we think about diet. That's why I write, by the way. That's what the reason for my title, eat to beat that Diet. Go away from the diet and lean into the food. Because food is our humanity. For thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, you know, look, food has been where people gather and we take care to harvest our food, we prepare our food, we have recipes that get handed down over the generations, over centuries. No matter where we are, who we are, we're all different, but we all come from someplace. And where we come from, there are food traditions. And the ones that stuck around for hundreds of years generally are healthier. Right? So it'll be interesting in two or 300 years that people are still passing down Pop Tarts, right? So probably not.
- [56:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I'm going to guess not, right? AI better clean that one up for us.
- [56:47]
Dr. William Lee
But the point is that the point I'm making is that we should love our food to love our health. And what food is medicine research is doing is taking a lot of these foods that have been used in traditional recipes, looking at what the bioactors are in them, studying them in the lab and in humans to see what they do to our metabolism and what they do to our health defenses. And we're realizing that one of the things that, for example, one of our health defenses, our gut microbiome, our gut bacteria, our gut bacteria thrives on diversity. You feed it the same thing every single day, it's not very happy. That's why when you eat only the same thing every day, your stomach doesn't feel so Great. You might have some loose stools every now and then. All right. Our gut demands diversity. So some things you like, eat them, don't eat them all at the same time. Switch it out. Some things you don't like, no problem. The reason you don't like them, maybe you react poorly to them. Listen to your body. And so we talked about tea, capers, olives, olive oil, fresh chili peppers, dried chili flakes, prunes, apples, pears, fresh foods, bok choy, fresh mushrooms across a whole range.
- [58:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Go down the mushroom path a little bit. So mushrooms freak me out. I absolutely hate them. But they come up so much that even I'm like, should I be finding a way to get these into my diet?
- [58:16]
Dr. William Lee
Why do mushrooms freak you out?
- [58:17]
Tom Bilyeu
They feel weird in my mouth. They taste like dirt, and they live off of other things.
- [58:24]
Dr. William Lee
I don't know.
- [58:24]
Tom Bilyeu
They freak me out.
- [58:25]
Dr. William Lee
Okay, so like, the. The. The idea of the nature of a mushroom freaks you out.
- [58:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So I'd be okay with that if they felt good in my mouth and didn't taste like dirt.
- [58:34]
Dr. William Lee
All right, well, so here's. I always tell people, like, if they. If you don't like a particular food, you probably haven't yet had the opportunity to have it prepared for you in a super delicious way.
- [58:46]
Tom Bilyeu
100%. I used to fear sushi in ways you can't imagine until you.
- [58:49]
Dr. William Lee
And now.
- [58:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Until I found the one that I like, and that's the gateway. And then it opens up the whole culinary experience. And now I love, love gateway foods.
- [58:56]
Dr. William Lee
I like that idea. All right, so first, let's talk about what's good in a mushroom. Mushrooms contain a fiber. It's kind of funny to think that mushrooms are packed with fiber because they're soft and squishy for the reasons that you described. But they contain a soluble fiber called beta D glucan. We know what it is. It's found in the cap of the mushroom. So if you buy mushrooms, you bring them home, you put them on a cutting board, you cut off the cap, usually throw away the stems. Don't do it. The stems. The cap has beta glucan. The stems have twice as much. And beta glucan, when we eat them, whether you saute them, you bake them, you fry them, I don't recommend frying, but you can also puree them. If you pureed mushroom parts into a soup, you might not think that it would have a completely different mouthfeel for you. And then you add the seasonings or herbs to give it a different flavor. Or maybe combine it with something else. You might actually. I might be able to convert you into a mushroom lover.
- [59:58]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm super open to that. Trust me.
- [60:00]
Dr. William Lee
The gateway. The gateway dish. So you'll have to, you know, have me over in your kitchen sometime. I'll cook. I'll cook you dinner. Because I have to, like. By the way, the reason I talk about food this way is I like to cook.
- [60:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Dude, you lit up as soon as we started talking about, like, the specifics of the food.
- [60:13]
Dr. William Lee
I'm telling you, I love. I love food and food culture. I don't like to eat. Like, I don't. Gorgeous. But I. I live for tasting things. I love to explore all the.
- [60:25]
Tom Bilyeu
But you actually like to cook.
- [60:26]
Dr. William Lee
I like to cook, yeah.
- [60:28]
Tom Bilyeu
So I love food. I love, like, going to a restaurant and having it made and trying new things. And I learned because I used to have food trauma as a kid, but I've really learned to be experimental and try things, and it's opened a lot of cool, like, culinary doors for me. But I hate cooking.
- [60:44]
Dr. William Lee
Okay. But that's okay. You know, you'll find. You're going to find another way to try things. By the way, the other day, I just want to say this. This is not off topic, but talking about trying, I saw at a restaurant that there was a dish, it was a Spanish restaurant that had arroz negra. It's black rice, a black paella. Paella negra. Okay. And the blackness comes from squid ink. Whoa. Squid ink is pretty intense. It's jet black. Taste of the sea. It's actually really delicious. But I had just been reading about the fact that squid ink has been studied in the lab, and when fed to animals that have gotten chemotherapy, it protects the health of the gut. So you know how chemo people get chemo? They have diarrhea because the chemo totally scorches their gut. Squid ink protects it.
- [61:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Hmm.
- [61:41]
Dr. William Lee
It's pretty interesting.
- [61:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Do they know how or why?
- [61:44]
Dr. William Lee
You know the superficial answers. It must be an antioxidant. But actually, it turns out squidding can actually stimulate healthy blood vessel growth. Angiogenesis. It can help to protect stem cells.
- [61:55]
Tom Bilyeu
That's so random. Do you know the story of rapamycin and how they found it?
- [62:00]
Dr. William Lee
It was in Easter Island.
- [62:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [62:04]
Dr. William Lee
In Rapa Nui. Yeah.
- [62:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Like in the swamp. And the people for however long would go there when they weren't feeling well. And supposedly it made you feel better.
- [62:12]
Dr. William Lee
Right.
- [62:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So this guy ends up taking some of the dirt back, looking at it.
- [62:16]
Dr. William Lee
And they found the fungus. Yeah.
- [62:18]
Tom Bilyeu
And was like, oh, Maybe this is something and it ends up being this huge something. And I'm just like, so weird. These compounds.
- [62:26]
Dr. William Lee
Let's talk about it. Rapamycin inhibits a pathway called mtor. Okay. MTOR is critical for fast aging. So rapamycin and its derivatives slow down aging. And one of the diabetic drugs called metformin actually is slowing down aging as well. Hits that same target. So again, you know, if you follow the trail of science, you kind of find all kinds of interesting things. But now, where were we? What were we talking about? We're talking about cooking.
- [62:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
- [62:56]
Dr. William Lee
We were talking about bioactives and you were asking about combinations and diversity. So our gut microbiome, the more diverse food that we eat, and this has been studied, the more diverse, especially healthy foods it could be. It doesn't have to be plants, but mostly plants and seafood, things like that. The greater the diversity of the food that you eat, the happier the gut microbiome. The more diverse, the more different organisms you can grow. The more diversity of the population, of the ecosystem, the, the healthier your gut microbiome is. Healthier. Gut microbiome lowers inflammation, helps your metabolism, helps you heal faster. So again, you know, don't be afraid of saying, well, I don't really like this, so I'm not going to be able to eat this obsessively and exclusively, you know, for a whole week. So therefore I can't be healthy. No. There are like, I read about more than 200 foods that can light up your brown fat and help you reduce and burn down your white fat. So the whole idea of eating to beat your diet is connected to being able to rediscover the joy of eating the traditional foods that have recipes that include all these ingredients. That's what I'm talking about. Like, okay, don't eat too much. We started talking about don't overload your fuel tank. All right, so you don't want to. Gorgeous. Eat diversely, mostly plant based stuff because, you know, it's got all the, it's, it's got meaningful calories. It's not the soda, it's. It's high quality fuel, high quality calories. Got the bioactives. What do those bioactives do? They do a lot of things. They light up all kinds of systems in your body for health. But one of the cool things and the foods I write about need to beat your diet. It lights up brown fat. What does brown fat do? Well, it's that hibernating fat that goes whoosh and it actually fires up and it burns extra fuel, and it steals that fuel from your harmful white fat, especially the visceral fat. How do you know? Because human studies have been done to show eating these foods. Not very much. Watch you shrink your waistline because your waist isn't being pooched out by the visceral fat. Your belt size, you can tighten your belt a little bit further, slip into those jeans. Wait a minute. Aren't we back to a diet? Nope. Because you're eating foods to be able to shrink down your excess fat. So is fat protective? Well, yeah, some fat is protective. I'm trying to hit all the things we started with. Yeah, you need fat because it's part of your metabolism. But should we be eating too much food, have too much fat? Nope, that'll actually outstrip the blood supply, cause inflammation, and cause that domino effect that wrecks your metabolism. So don't overeat. Eat the right. Eat high quality fuel, eat diversely, and refer back to the foods that come from the Mediterranean and come from Asia. Those are two I sort of try to simplify for people. Like, they people always ask me, Dr. Lee, how do you eat? What kind of diet are you on? And I'm like, I'm not on a diet. I don't believe. I don't go for diets for myself. I respect other people who try them, but I don't. But I do have a way of eating. And my way of eating, I call it Mediterrasan. I'm Asian. I've lived in Asia before. I've lived in the Mediterranean. And naturally I gravitate towards dishes and ingredients and recipes in one of those two genres. If I'm at a restaurant, I'm looking at a whole bunch of offerings. I'll kind of say, well, what's kind of Asian? Ish, and what are the Mediterranean offerings? And I'll try to go for those automatically. All right. It's easy to do, not expensive. The stuff that I talk about, the beans, dirt cheap. So this is not a rich man's folly to pursue that you can't sustain. This is actually tapping back into our humanity to be able to eat foods that we enjoy. And if you don't like mushrooms, which are one of those healthy foods, you know, I would love to cook a dish for you, a mushroom dish that doesn't give you that weird texture to see if you like it. And that's part of the fun and of sharing enthusiasm for food as well. You know, in America, one of the things that I, you know, I did a gap Year before I went to medical school and I lived in Italy and I lived in Greece. The first thing I noticed is that when you're in the Mediterranean, when you're in America, you know, like, you're eating by yourself. You're wolfing down your food, you know, and when you're sitting with people, what are you talking about? You're talking about your problems. You're talking about the things that you need to do. You're. You're. When. The first thing I noticed when I was in Italy, when you sit down, first of all, you never eat by yourself. You're always eating with somebody else. And when they serve that delicious Mediterranean food, All right, you don't talk about your problems. What do you talk about? They talk about the food. They talk about. This is how my mom prepared it. This is what I love about this food. This is the season for this food. You savor the experience of the food. And so that's why I think even though we were kind of like biohacking into the kind of the mechanisms, I. I want to kind of bring this conversation into the point that you want to eat to beat your diet. It's not about going into a diet. It's tapping back into our humanity to go back into those foods that come from the Mediterranean, come from Asia, they come from other places as well, but they've been codified in recipes and in traditions that we can get behind. This is not hard to do if you don't want to go into the science. If you want to geek out into the science, it's all there. You want to talk to me about it, I'm happy to take it as far as, yeah, I can go a mile deep with this conversation, but honestly, at the end of the day, it's like you and me sitting across a table, ordering some food and just really enjoying what's in there and talking about the food that's actually how to eat to beat your diet. And I think that this actually overcomes the stigma about food and health, that you have to stay away from it, that you know, it's. And don't demonize your food. Look, there are demons out there for sure, but look for the angels. Wouldn't you rather actually surround yourself on a daily basis, three times a day with something that gives you peace and gives you pleasure? That's the joy of health. That's the joy of eating. And I think that's really how we can actually best protect our metabolism. And by the way, one last thing about those prescription weight loss drugs, man, What a bummer it is to actually take a medicine that blocks your appetite so you don't want to eat that delicious food. That's my kind of pet peeve about this trend, in addition to all those other caveats that I actually gave is like who would want to actually block their humanity of enjoying food? You like food. How would you like to not care about your food anymore? That's a bummer. So to me it's really reigniting this joy of eating. I love it, man.
- [69:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Where can people follow you and connect with you over your love of eating?
- [69:39]
Dr. William Lee
You know what? Come to my website. It's drdrwilliamlee l I.com drwilliamleigh.com Everything's on there. Sign up for my newsletter. It's completely free. It's the stuff that comes from human research because that is information that relates to all of us.
- [69:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Eat to beat your diet everybody. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Click here to learn now the top five foods you should never eat. I have done the vegan thing. I have tried the low protein thing. It will provably make you feel like crap, which will make you wish you didn't live longer.
- [70:25]
Dr. William Lee
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