Dr. William Li

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. One of the things that we all need to do is to take a chill pill and step away from the fear factor of food and begin to appreciate the fact that, you know, actually, like our ancestors, other generations, and many other cultures around us, including cultures where we like their food, they do it differently.

Today, I have the honor of talking with doctor William Li, an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and best selling author of several books, including Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. Doctor Li, president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, shares his groundbreaking work to develop new therapeutic strategies for chronic disease. In addition, he walks us through his concentrated focus on food as medicine, a nutrition based approach to activating the body's health defense systems to prevent and reduce human suffering. This is a fascinating conversation, so let's get to it. Doctor William Lee, welcome to the Puck.

I am excited to have this discussion with you today. I'm a fan of your works. And before we get into the meat of the interview, can you, for our listeners who aren't familiar with your background, just take a moment and give us a little bit of rundown on your history? Sure, Jim. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on.

It's a pleasure to be speaking with you. And for those who don't know me already, I'm doctor William Li. I'm a physician trained in internal medicine. So that means that I take care of men and women, young and old, healthy and sick. And my personal orientation has always been to try to preserve and maintain health.

I'm also a scientist, a real lab scientist, a medical researcher. I'm what's known as a vascular biologist. All that means, vascular, is that I study your blood vessels, your circulation. Circulation is important because we've all got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies. And these are the highways and byways that bring the oxygen that we breathe and the food, the nutrients that we eat to every organ in our body.

And I'm also an author. I wrote two New York Times bestselling books. One of them was called Eat to Beat Disease, and the other one was called Eat to Beat Your Diet. And neither of them are diet books. They're really health books about our body and how our body responds to what we feed it.

And I'm also somebody, I suppose, you'll find out in our conversation is that, you know, I'm a foodie. I actually enjoy food. I don't fear food. And so one of the things that I try to do is to reset people's expectations out there when they think about food as health, not to fear our food, but rather to embrace it as part of our humanity. Well, I just learned something new about you.

I did not know you were a foodie. And when my wife hopefully listens to this podcast, it's gonna be exciting because she's a foodie, and I've been influenced by her, love of food and so forth. So let's go back to again, with all your free time being a physician and scientist, you wrote a book, Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. Can you take a moment and walk us through what caused you to write the book? Yeah.

It's a great question. So, Jim, my background is in medical research and medical practice. And like most doctors, I was trained to diagnose and treat disease. And treating disease in the medical community, the western medical community, really means to chase down your adversary and hunt it down for as long as it takes. And that's why we wind up prescribing drugs for chronic diseases.

And in fact, that's why we even call them chronic diseases because we're always managing things and never really getting back to health. And that's something that always bothered me when I was in medical school, which is why are we not trying to prevent disease and why are we always relying on pharmaceuticals? Now that said, I pursued the mainstay of my career, the first twenty some years of my career, very excited to be part of biotech, developing new, very sophisticated treatments for difficult diseases like cancer. How do you actually bring cancer under control? Can we starve cancer by cutting off its blood supply?

Or diseases like vision loss. You know, for me, as somebody who is very visually oriented, I found among all of my senses, my vision is always been one of my most precious and I would freak out if I lost my vision. And so I set out to really try to develop new treatments, help to develop new treatments that could stop vision loss and in some cases, even reverse it. And then things like wound healing. You know, when you fall off your bike or injure yourself, you know, in the wood shop, your wounds normally heal.

You you wash them off, you put a band aid on them or dressing, and they'll normally heal. But there are millions of people walking around with wounds that don't heal because they're elderly. They're diabetic. They've got other health conditions that prevent their wounds from healing. It is a silent epidemic.

And so I set out to figure out how could we develop better treatments to speed up and help our bodies zip the wounds shut. So over twenty plus years, I was very successful in doing this. And in fact, through my nonprofit organization, the Angiogenesis Foundation, angio blood, blood vessels, Genesis, how they grow. I created a whole foundation around this. We were lucky to not only develop one cancer drug starting in 2003 and 2004, but we've since then have been involved with 45 FDA approved new treatments for cancer, vision loss, and diabetes.

And so that could be a career I could easily, you know, just sort of retire from, but I was still never satisfied with this idea that we're still chasing disease. So somewhere along this journey, I decided that I would do the research looking at the new ways to develop drugs. And instead of testing drugs, I would throw some foods into the same test system as drugs. And I by the way, I did this at the National Institute of Health, National Cancer Institute, as a matter of fact. And what we found, of course, I, quote, blinded the test so that the person who was running the experiment had no idea what they were testing.

And when the results came out, the drugs worked really well that we were testing. But guess what? 50% of the foods that I threw in there secretly were as or more powerful than the drugs that we were testing. And so to me, that was like a eureka moment. The light bulb went off in my head, and I said, oh my god.

Foods are medicines. We just haven't studied them with the rigor of science. And so that's really what I built my second half of my career, sort of the second chapter, around really getting into what are the healthy foods, what's in them, and how do they affect our body? How does our body respond to what we feed it? And because I'm a foodie, I wanted to study foods that are delicious, not the foods that we should avoid.

I mean, it's easy. There are throngs of people that will tell you what you should cut out of your life. I didn't want to just get lost in one of those shouting crowds. I wanted to do something that I felt needed to be done, which is to identify the healthy foods that we enjoy and then to bring some explanation to why they're good for us. So fairly substantial shift in terms of focusing on, as you would say, the historical method and changing it.

What's been the general reaction to your new approach? Well, okay. That's a great question. And I'll tell you what I eventually found. Because as I just described, I have built you know, I was very fortunate to start my medical research career quite early.

I mean, I was in my early twenties and had already published in some of the big medical journals, Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, you know, things that people spend their entire careers aiming to reach. And I think because I was fortunate to be able to get to the top of Mount Everest, so to speak, professionally, I kind of felt like, you know, I wanted to challenge myself by doing something else. But it's because I had already established my credibility in many of the medical pillars that I was able to do this other research to study what's in food and how it would actually affect the body and our human cells and our organs. I think that was the real kind of tipping point that allowed me to have my work, my voice to feel credible. You know?

And by the way, I have to tell you, Jim, I'm also one of the doctors who believes in prevention, believes in food as medicine. I lead national programs on it. But I'm not a doctor that has sworn off of pharmaceuticals. Alright? You know, there are those doctors that basically say, I've had enough of whole the whole medical industry.

It's all about turmeric, and it's all about a leaf of kale. I don't do that. I believe that the right treatment for the right person at the right time is exactly what can be very helpful and even life saving. And I'm still involved with drug development, by the way. But the missing tool in the toolbox in our modern world has been the power of food as a tool in that toolbox.

That was all we had for millennia before the dawn of the pharmaceutical industry, and we just lost we just lost it. We lost the formula of how to use what was around us that people could have. So what I'm doing is really resurrecting what we've always known for generations, for millennia, but putting a modern spin of science to explain and nail down why certain foods are good for us using state of the art science. And so I think that's why my message has been well received from almost every community. And I have to say over twenty years or so, Jim, the public is now really ready to receive this message.

The health care community recognizes very clearly that just treating disease with expensive interventions ain't gonna fly too much longer. Our whole system is collapsing under the weight of the and the cost and the burden of the way we used to do things in the pharmaceutical and medical industry. And then finally, even the industry itself, pharmaceuticals are big of companies are beginning to pivot and take a look at the natural world and look at foods to see how they could actually interact to make the drugs work better. For example, I'll give you, like, a really dramatic example. One of the biggest breakthroughs for a disease that we all fear, cancer, is the development of immunotherapy.

Now immunotherapy is not chemo. Immunotherapy is the most natural treatment you could possibly imagine made by pharma. It wakes up our own immune system to tackle cancer. Alright? So basically it's giving our body permission to scrub out, to dry erase cancer.

It works really, really well in about twenty percent or less people. I mean, I have seen things that I never thought I would see. People with end stage cancer, stage four going to stage zero when they're on immunotherapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for everyone. And we didn't know for a long time what might make the difference between working or not working, responding or not responding, living or dying.

Right? I mean, come on. Like, if you've got cancer and you've got this breakthrough, you wanna be in that twenty percent. Alright? So one of the big challenges of modern medical research is to figure out why.

What makes those twenty percent responders respond? And it turns out that our diet can make that difference. It turns out that what we eat affects our gut bacteria, our gut microbiome. You've heard of gut health. Sure.

Good, healthy gut bacteria. If you have good, healthy gut bacteria, you're likely to respond to this kind of cancer therapy. And that makes the food that we eat a matter of life and death. And so pharma is now sitting up straight and saying, woah, we really need to understand how to make our products work better. And the medical community is similarly waking up to this.

Now we look, we've got decades of kind of lack of attention. So there is a heavy lift ahead. But, you know, I think so far when I've actually had the privilege of being able to kind of deliver a message, tell people about the work I'm doing and the discoveries that are being made, it's been pretty well received, and I've been really grateful for that. So for our listeners, how would you then summarize your methodology in terms of incorporating this into your own life? Great question.

You ask it in a perfect way, which is how does someone like me that has been doing the research and reviewing the research, how do I put the rubber on the road for my own life? Right? So first, I'll tell you that I came from a Asian background. My parents were Chinese, and they came from Taiwan and China. And so but I grew up in America.

And so I ate Twinkies and Cheerios and donuts and all the other stuff that we're all fed in grade school, you know, baloney, you know, all that kind of stuff. Sure. Cracker Jacks, you know, you name it. But I did grow up in an environment where food was valued. And I think that as you describe, you know, your own wife's interest in food and being a foodie, you know, look, if you appreciate food, you're gonna take notice about food.

So one of the things that I've always been paying attention to is do I like what I'm eating and do I'm enjoying what I'm eating? Is there something new that I haven't tried before that I might enjoy? Like, I find that to be pleasurable, but what's different is as I've studied what's in bok choy, what's in purple potatoes, what's in strawberries, what's in olive oil, what's the best kind of olive oil, are tomatoes good or bad? And if if good, what are the best kinds of tomatoes, and how would you cook them? These kinds of things became part of my natural interest.

And so, yes, I do navigate my day, my world, by keeping one part of my eye on food. And because I'm so interested in how to incorporate food as medicine to my life, I naturally just may gravitate towards translating what I've learned into making better choices. And it's not difficult. If I had to boil it down for listeners to think about how to do it easily, I'll tell you what I do. Number one, I don't eat too much at any point in time.

You don't wanna overload your body with calories. So just cut it down. There's a Japanese Confucian saying actually called hara hachi ban mi. That's stop eating when you're 80% full. Leave the party before it's over.

That's a really easy kind of tip. Don't take seconds. Quit the clean plate club. That is a very important tip because we tend to even for healthy food, you can overeat and overload your body, number one. Number two, I would say, look.

I mean, no matter where you look, the truth of the matter is that all the signs shows that eating plant based foods is good for us. Doesn't mean you have to be a vegan. Doesn't mean you have to be a vegetarian. But what it means is that you should really focus on the produce section of the grocery store as much as you focus on the butcher or the seafood section. Alright?

And as long as you make good, healthy choices from the produce section in fact, what I do is when I'm planning a meal or ordering at a restaurant, I choose a vegetable first. I'm not sort of saying that's the side. I make it kinda like my main and I add other stuff to it. The other thing I do is I try to stay away from ultra processed foods. Stuff in a box, stuff in a can, stuff that has 20 more ingredients on this ingredient label that even me as a scientist, I can't pronounce the words.

Artificial seasonings, artificial coloring, flavorings, artificial preservatives, those things lower our shields, the shields in our body that protect our health, and I stay away from them. And then I generally veer towards a Mediterranean or an Asian diet, and I call that Mediterranean style eating. Because after all, if you went to a Mediterranean restaurant or you went to an Asian restaurant, who couldn't find something on the menu that they would be happy to order? Totally makes sense. Complicated, but makes sense.

Although, I guess, the key is don't bite off more than you can chew, no pun intended, and just, you know, if you can take one takeaway, for instance, as you said, eat till you're 80% full. I love that. So let's talk about people's conceptions about food. I mean, how do you navigate people's preconceptions surrounding diet and metabolism? Okay.

Those are two different but related questions. First of all, with regard to metabolism, which I wrote about in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, there are recent research just in the last several years that have completely upended and flipped everything we knew about human metabolism. And I want to start with this because I think listeners will be really surprised and I hope delighted, as delighted as I was. Right? So let's start with the assumptions that everybody has that, you know, probably you have as well.

We all have this idea that, you know, everyone's has a different metabolism, and maybe my sister is lucky, has a fast metabolism, skinny as a stick, never had to worry about food in her life. And me, well, I have had a slow metabolism. I struggled with food my whole life. Sure. We hear that all the time.

Number two, if you have teenage kids and you've got these kids that are bouncing off the wall with energy and eating two or three dinners, right? Anybody with who's raised a family will have seen kids go through this phase. They're sprouting like a weed and they're full of energy and eating a lot. All right? And you gotta assume that kids at that stage, their metabolism must going skyrocketing.

Sure. Right? Because they're growing after all. And then the third thing we always assume is that when you hit their middle age, you know, then you're gonna slow down. And when you hit your forties and your fifties, everyone, most people are gonna have to go, well, I'm gonna have to adjust to my body because there's nothing I can do with it.

My metabolism is gonna change. Bummer. Alright? And then final assumption is that a slow metabolism causes you to gain weight, gain fat, body fat. Alright?

That's the almost opposite. Right? All four of those things I just told you are false. Wow. Okay.

Recent research has upended everything. So let me just explain what we discovered. There was a study by a guy named Herman Ponzer at Duke University who collaborated with 90 other researchers, nine zero, across 20 countries, and they studied 6,000 people to try to understand what is human metabolism actually like across the human lifespan. Right? So what they did in the 6000 people, they studied people that were babies that were one week old, and they studied people all the way across the ages until they were 90 years old.

That's the lifespan right now. Okay? So and they studied them all exactly the same way to look at their metabolism. What they did is they gave them a drink of water, h two o. Now what do you do with water to study metabolism?

Well, if you're a scientist, you can tweak the h, the hydrogen in h two o. You can tweak the o, the oxygen in h two o. And now whether the baby drinks it or the elderly person drinks it or the middle aged person drinks it or the 20 year old drinks it, the body's metabolism will crunch and metabolize the hydrogen and oxygen exactly the same way. Now you can measure metabolism in your breath that you exhale, in the blood you withdraw, and the urine that you form, release. Now when they actually looked at the results of 6,000 people from 20 countries by the way, Jim, different sexes, male, female, different races, youth, all the races out there, different cultural backgrounds, different foods, different comorbidities, different economic status.

Alright? This is like the real world study. What they found in the beginning was that human metabolism in the 6,000 people were all over the frigging map. Undecipherable, just like you would have thought. Right?

Okay. But now we live in this age of supercomputing. So what the researchers are able to do that was never done before is they could develop an algorithm that would take the result, the metabolism of every individual of the 6,000, and it would correct for excess body fat. So in other words, let's say you took part in this experiment. You would be drinking the water.

Your metabolism would be out. My metabolism would be out. How do we correct it? Well, this algorithm would would know your age, your gender, your height, and your weight, and calculate how much excess body fat lives inside you. Alright?

And then subtract that excess body fat. And when these researchers did this, it was like pulling off the cloak of the statue of David for the first time. You know, the statue in Florence Michelangelo did. Sure. And what was revealed is that human metabolism is actually hardwired in our bodies, and we all go through only four phases of metabolism in our life.

And I wanna go through them with you quickly because it's surprising. Phase one, we're all born with the same metabolism. The same way that when you buy a computer, if you were to go buy a computer where you live and I were to go buy a computer where I live, the same model, plug it in, boot it up, the operating system of your computer and mine will work exactly the same way. Alright? Now same deal with our human metabolism.

Babies are all born with the same metabolism. There's diseases that make it an exception, but by and large, this is true. Second, phase one of metabolism, zero to one year old, human metabolism skyrockets. Like, it goes 50% higher by one year old compared to when you're an adult. Babies are absorbing tons of energy as they're growing.

Alright? They are supercharged. That's phase one. Phase two, from one year old to 20 years old, human metabolism is going not up when the when the teenagers are bouncing off the wall. It's going down, down, down, down, down to adult levels.

Alright? The kids are getting bigger. They're flushing themselves out, but their metabolism is actually heading down to what they're gonna be as an adult at 20. That's phase two. Phase three from 20 to 60, and here comes the mic drop discovery.

Okay. From 20 to 60, human metabolism, when you remove the effect of excess body fat, human metabolism is hardwired to be rock stable. 20 to 60. Our operating system tells us, our bodies, that our metabolism throughout our entire adult lives should not change. Alright?

And it's only from 60 to 90 that we have a slight dip in our metabolism, about 17%, less than 20% by the time that we're 90 compared to when we're 60. Now everything I just told you tells you that the way that our operating system, the IOS, so to speak, of our metabolism is the way it's designed. It means that 60 could be the new 20 if you allow it to be. Now remember what I told you. The way we got to this result is by removing the effect of excess body fat.

Now that's human metabolism. If you throw that body fat back into the equation, you shut down the metabolism. So it's not that a slow metabolism causes you to gain excess body fat. It's the other way around. Excess body fat sits on your metabolism and slows it down.

So I just upended everything that I used to think I was taught about human metabolism. And the take home message is that we have the power to change our metabolism by tackling our own body fat. Fascinating and a lot to absorb there and unpack. If, as you say, our metabolism slows down as we put on excess weight. Is there a scientific reason why the excess body fat causes our metabolism to slow down?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So a lot of people don't realize this, but body fat is an absolute critical organ in our body. That's right.

You heard me correctly. Body fat is not excess. Body fat is an organ just like your heart, your brain, your kidneys, or your liver. So it's one of the first tissues that get formed when we're still in our mom's womb. When our dad's sperm met our mom's egg and we were just a ball of nothing forming, our blood vessels got laid down first, then our nerves got laid down, and then our body fat gets laid down.

And the reason the body fat gets formed early is because our fat cells are the storage tank for energy that we will later absorb through our food. So that fat runs our metabolism. We need fat for our metabolism. Fat is healthy. Fat is really important for us.

And fat even makes hormones that actually command our brain when we're hungry and when we're full. So what actually happens? Because, obviously, when we get to middle age, obviously, bodies do change. Obviously, we do gain weight. Right?

So what's up with that? Well, it turns out that as we get older, our behavior is gonna change. When women go into menopause, their brains are marinated with a different hormonal soup than before. That changes behavior that, you know, leads to maybe less exercise, maybe making different choices when it comes to food, maybe different levels of stress. Same thing, by the way, when men reach middle age as well.

Right? We, you know, like people always say, well, you know, my muscles aren't quite as strong or, you know, I'd be I have to work a lot harder. But, you know, one of the things we don't take into account, Jim, is that as we get older, our responsibilities, our stress levels, our role in the community around us changes. And so we internalize that. And so people who are your age and my age, we've got a lot more stress in our bodies and in our minds than what we were when we were 20.

Alright? So those stress levels upset those metabolism hormones as well, which then upsets our decision making, which upsets so this is not a blame game that, you know, you're a bad person by making bad choices. But this is saying that as we get older, things change in our lives at the internal level, at the hormonal level, at the brain level, and at the metabolism level where we start to make decisions that lead us to gain excess body fat. When that happens, we set off inflammation in our body. We derail the hormones that keep our operating system running smoothly.

And now we're off to the races of gaining extra body fat. But the get out of jail card here is that new science is also showing us how we can eat foods to reduce body fat. Eat foods to reduce fat, which is a big surprise. Right? Because you don't think that you could eat to lose.

Most people say you gotta stop eating in order to lose weight. Now, actually, we know that you can actually kill off your body fat, your excess body fat by choosing specific foods to eat. Well, you piqued my interest. Let's go further on that. We're talking about, it sounds like, that it is critical for the body to operate to its fullest potential to have a healthy body fat and that there are these issues that affect our metabolism.

But we all know that most of us like to eat, and so if there's ways to eat other foods that actually help reduce body fat, can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. Well, before I dive into a laundry list of foods, let me give the listeners a good example of how we know our body normally handles the food that we eat. Okay.

Our body is like a car. Okay? And, you know, anybody who drives a gas car still knows that the metabolism is like the transmission of the car, the car engine that connects the fuel tank to the engine to the wheels. And when you drive a car, you don't give any thought to how that car actually functions. Right?

You get dressed, put your coat on, get into the car, start it up, and you go do your errand, run to wherever you're gonna go. Alright? Don't give any thought to it. And that's basically how we get up in the morning and go about our way. We don't think about our metabolism at all.

When you're in the car, however, there is a point where you do think about your car and its function, and that's when the fuel gauge starts to read empty. Right? All of a sudden, your whole brain is riveted towards thinking about getting fuel. Where's that next gas station? I got a quarter I got an eighth of tank left.

I wonder how far I can get to. Right? And you become obsessed with finding fuel. Well, this is how our body, our metabolism works as well. We don't think about it until our fuel tanks run low, and then we wanna load up on fuel.

So what's the fuel for our body? Well, if you're in a car, your fuel is gasoline at the gas station. You pull it over. You turn off the engine. You, you know, choose an octane, you stick the nozzle in your gas tank, and you just pull the handle and it fills up until it's full, and then it goes click, and you're done filling up the tank.

Right? Okay. Then you get back in the car and you go on your way. You're happy again. When we actually are in our body, when our metabolism is running low, our food, our fuel is our food.

So we go to look for when our tank starts to read empty, which we can sense in our brain. Alright, our metabolism tells us, oh, we're running low on fuel. That whole, you know, hanger, you're hungry and a little pissed, you know, like the kind of thing that people talk about. You're desperate. We don't look for the gas station.

We look for the refrigerator. We look for the pantry. We look for a restaurant. Okay? And all of us go through this.

It's our body telling us a fuel tank's low. Let's go load up. Now when we go choose food to eat, just like at the gas tank. Alright. We have a choice.

You want the high grade stuff, or do you want the low grade stuff? Same with the food. We got all these choices that we can choose from. Now if you're in the car filling up your tank with fuel, it's okay if you're low on cash, okay, and you wanna take the cheapest el cheapo grade fuel and load up fill up your tank once in a blue moon. Like, you shouldn't feel good about doing that for your on your on behalf of your car, but you could do it.

And then you get back in your car, you won't even notice it. Alright? Same deal if once in a while you have some crappy low quality food. You know, snack in a box kind of stuff, you put it in a microwave, nuke it up and eat it, or fat the drive through, the fast food stuff. If you do it once in a while, fine.

You're not gonna notice it. But like the car, if day in and day out, week in and week out, year after year, all you do is use the cheapest, lowest quality fuel, I guarantee you that car is not gonna run as well or as long as a car where somebody is consistently caring for the car and taking care by putting in good quality fuel. Same deal with our food, which is our energy, which is our fuel for our body, which controls our metabolism. When you have a choice for the quality of fuel we put in our body, it's the quality of our food. So plant based foods, high fiber foods, organic foods actually count because organic foods have more polyphenols in them.

Staying away from the low quality stuff and biasing towards a high quality. And by the way, remember what I told you, not too much. Don't overeat because let's go back to the car. You're filling up the car. Thank goodness.

In gas stations, when the tank is full, there's a click, and now there's no more gas that comes out. Right? Imagine if that clicker were broken and you were distracted. You fill up the cast. The tank would load up.

Now it's full. It's gonna spill over. The gas runs out of the car, down the side of the car, around the tires, pools around your feet. And guess what? You are now standing in a toxic, flammable, harmful, dangerous mess.

Right? Nobody wants to do that. When we eat, if we overeat, have seconds or thirds think Thanksgiving dinner. Right. Think buffet in Las Vegas.

Right? Oh my gosh. I can do anything. What we're doing is we're overloading our fuel tank, and there's no clicker. We don't naturally have a clicker.

And so what happens is we overload the fuel. And just like the dangerous gas overflowing on our tank, so too, if you do it often enough, you'll overflow and you'll the calories of fuel will overflow your body, which is why you don't want to do this on any regular basis. You want to avoid overeating at all costs. And now think about this. Low quality fuel, overloading a low quality fuel, which is what, you know, the average standard American diet and behavior is.

Eating a lot of not that great quality stuff. Alright? It's overloading your fuel tank with the poorest quality fuel for our entire lifetime. This is actually what's led, I think, our nation, our society into the health crisis that we see today. And that makes sense.

And you're talking about and I love the analogy. My father-in-law talks about this, that you can go to a certain extent until you're 50. Like, in a sense, you can take a car and not change the oil so often, but at some point, it really, really is gonna catch up on you. And it's the same thing with us as human beings. Right?

We can take certain shortcuts, so to speak, when we're younger, but again, it's less is better, and it catches up with us. When you're looking at the challenges people have, and it is hard to diet and change. I mean, I know for me that eating can be very comforting, and sometimes just the process of eating can be very comforting. In terms of helping people and in terms of making it something that is not so daunting, what strategies have have you found that you've shared with people that have been beneficial? Yeah.

You know, I ask people to, as a starting point, to record what you eat. No judgment, but create a food diary. You know, whether it's on your mobile phone and you open up the notes section, every time you eat, just write down what it is. Alright? And if you do that for a week or a couple of weeks would be the ideal, two weeks.

And you look back at that, you'll actually get record of what you encountered and what you chose to eat. Now, a lot of people don't think about that. It might be hard for you to recall. Like, I honestly, I couldn't remember what I ate two nights ago. Alright.

I have to sit down to think about it. And I think that's true with a lot of people. But if you actually do a food diary for two weeks and just dedicate yourself to recording breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, okay? And also the time that you ate those, what time it is that you ate it, that will give you a pretty good snapshot of what your dietary pattern is actually like. And a lot of people wind up being surprised.

I had no idea I ate this much junk, or maybe they might be surprised. I had no idea that actually I eat pretty healthy. It could be either way, but I think you have to approach that with an unbiased way. Now when you look at that list, you separate the foods that you documented, you audited into two categories, junky food versus healthy food. Junky, meaning ultra processed, including processed meats.

Healthy, meaning everything else. And, you know, in my books, one of the things I did is I made lists and lists and lists of more than 300 foods across two books that are I already pre vetted. Okay? I did the heavy lifting. These are all the healthy foods in the produce section, in the middle aisle, even in the meat section, seafood section.

It's all there. And what you do is you take a look at the healthy foods and see if you can match them to the list. Now this is the good news part. If what you realize is that the foods that you already eat or some of the foods that you already eat fit into the healthy category, I like to encourage people to say, man, you are already ahead of the game because you already like healthy food. That's the great news.

And I think that the you know, part of the thing, Jim, that I think that we need to do better, And maybe this is a way to get away from the past where food is harmful, food should be feared, we should dislike eating. Turn it around into how they do it in the Mediterranean countries, in Italy, Greece, Spain. There's a whole bunch of Mediterranean countries or in Asia, China, Japan, Vietnam, you know, Thailand. Look, in those countries, food is revered. People love their foods.

By the way, another thing about my background a lot of people don't know is that before I went to medical school, I did a gap year. And what I did in my gap years, I went to Italy and to Greece. And this is long before anybody talked about the Mediterranean diet. And I lived there to study the relationship between food, culture, and health. So I was walking the walk long before I was talking the talk.

I was so curious. And one thing that I noticed, Jim, that was so obvious, Now remember, I grew up in Pennsylvania, so typical Rust Belt community, you know, working class people, good people, just still going about their way, eating post nineteen fifties processed ultra processed foods, the usual stuff. But one thing I noticed, the moment I got to Italy and embedded myself and was eating with families and friends, I noticed something very just different. In Italy, people don't snack a lot. They wait for their meal because they don't wanna spoil their appetite because that meal is gonna be freaking delicious.

Alright? So you don't wanna spoil your appetite, number one. Number two, when you sit down, right, you're sitting down as a group. In America, we eat by ourselves and we eat fast, and, you know, we gotta get back to work. Well, in Italy, people take their time to sit down with a group of people to eat and everybody celebrates the food.

So in America, if you're eating with somebody else, what do you do? You talk about your problems. You talk about the things stressing you out. You talk about whatever. You talk about work.

All right? You don't talk about your food. You're just eating to survive. In Italy, I remember distinctly, and in Greece, people sit down and the first thing they talk about is the food. Oh, isn't this great?

Oh, my mom makes it this way. Oh, when I cook it, this is what I do. Thank goodness this is the season of this, x, y, or z. And what you're doing is you are appreciating your food. And I think that one of the things that we all need to do is to take a chill pill and step away from the fear factor of food and begin to appreciate the fact that, you know, actually, like our ancestors, other generations, and many other cultures around us, including cultures where we like their food, they do it differently.

And if we take our time to eat and we eat with people and we don't eat too fast and we don't eat too much, like, you know, you might say, man, what you just said sounds really complicated. It's not. It's practice every single day as part of second nature in many parts of the world. Somehow we've just lost our way, I think, in things. And the good news is that I think the attention is now coming back to enjoying our food and to healthy eating.

And so one of the things that I try to do is to pour fuel on that fire, you know, and light it up so people can really feel comfortable with their food again. When we look at our desire to live longer and when we look at the challenges that we all have with diet, because these are habits that we've built up for a long period of time and otherwise, and some of us are more predisposed than others to gaining weight, so to speak. What's your feeling about the use of these new treatments and protocols with respect to losing weight? Yeah. Jim, it's a really important topic today because these prescription weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy that are FDA approved now for treating weight loss.

And in fact, recently, the FDA approved one of them to reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease. I mean, that's a kind of a almost unprecedented reason to approve a drug. So number one, these drugs actually work. People who take them lose a lot of weight. But I think that it's a complicated situation because what is the motivation for you to do this?

Is it health? Is it vanity? And, you know, certainly, as a physician who's been involved with developing new treatments, new medical treatments, wow, what a breakthrough this whole category of prescription weight loss drugs are. Who would have thunk that we could actually control that? Well, you know, the mechanism of action or how does this thing even work is really important.

We don't know everything about how they work to cause weight loss. But one thing we do know is that when you take the Ozempic or Wegovy, which by the way, you have to pretty much slam it into your belly. You know that scene, there's a movie called The Rock, you know, with Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. Sure. You know, at the very end, there's this, like, nerve gas and he has to take a needle and plunge it into his heart.

Right. Okay. Well, look. You gotta plunge this stuff into your belly. Okay.

Alright. So it's not for the squeamish, and you gotta do it every month. And it costs, like, over a thousand bucks. And insurance companies, I might not pay for it, but there's an awful lot of people, billions of dollars up that are being spent on it. What I tell you is that there are people who medically need the right treatment.

Remember I told you my philosophy, right treatment for the right person at the right time. But here's the deal. We are always looking for this magic silver bullet kinda thing. And in reality, one of the ways that these drugs work is it turns off your appetite. You just don't wanna eat anymore.

And we're not gonna talk about the side effects, but they're we're just not gonna wanna eat anymore. To me, as somebody who enjoys exploring food, enjoys cooking food, enjoys eating with my family and friends, gosh, what a bummer is that for me just not to be interested in eating anymore? So that's one kind of limitation. And I think that beyond the poundage that you measure on a scale, there are so many other dimensions of health that look, these foods that you don't wanna eat anymore, they contain polyphenols, they contain dietary fiber. We don't yet even fully understand because this trend of weight loss drugs is so recent.

We don't know what the long term consequences might be, but I can tell you, I would not trade my incredibly delicious home cooked Mediterranean or Asian dinner, okay, for slamming something into my gut that I have to pay a thousand dollars for. I would rather take some of that money and have five delicious meals that I don't eat too much of in a tasty way. So I think that sometimes might be considered controversial. Here's what I would say. Gotta talk to your doctor because the doctor has to write the prescription.

And if your doctor is doing the right thing, they will actually walk through the pluses and minuses and try to help every individual decide whether it's appropriate for them. Look. Even, Jim, if you were to come to me as a patient and you're like, doctor Lee, I want this stuff no matter what. If I felt that there was another or a better way or something you should try first, It's my responsibility to communicate that to you. You're gonna make your own decision, but I gotta write that prescription.

And so the thing for me is that I think the medical community has gotta step up to be able to actually determine what's right for every individual. If I'm hearing what you're saying right, it's that the good news is that for those people that really, really need for health reasons and otherwise, but ideally for health reasons, really need to lose weight and have been unable to do it, there are now tools out there that can really facilitate that. So that's the good news. What I also hear you saying, if I'm getting this right, is that there are other things you can explore that may be safer, may also continue to bring you more joy and bring you together with people and so forth. And so you shouldn't immediately default to using these drugs if you can experiment with and really try to work through getting those excess pounds down in alternative manners.

Yes. That's exact well said, perfectly said. And look, you know, I'm not making a judgment against vanity. Vanity is part of human nature. We all step out of the shower and see our reflection in the corner of eye in the mirror.

And if you see a lump or a bump you don't like, you know, you you're gonna react to it. So I'm I'm cool with that. And if you got a wedding dress you gotta fit into or a bridesmaid's dress or you're an actor and you gotta get into shape for something, Look. We gotta do what we gotta do. I think you said this earlier.

We are, as a society, collectively aiming to live longer and better, and we want joy in our life as we do this. And so I think that, again, finding that silver bullet isn't gonna pay off the way that we want it to. Trying to find more reasonable, naturalistic ways that involve our diet and our lifestyle as part of what we do is really going to be the way to actually get the most fulfilling the the squeeze of most juice out of our longevity. Look. What I hear you saying is it is process.

And, also, for those people that have struggled with this, and and I know for someone who always is, you know, concerned about trying to stay healthy and not eat too much, Extremes are easier than the middle way. You know, it's far easier to see things as black or white than really, really hitting the middle. And we're we're never gonna get it exactly right. But what I hear you saying is that trying to live in a more balanced way and recognizing that it doesn't have to be all work because you can share it with friends, you can really explore different types of foods, different types of cultures, and it's really an opportunity to bring more joy into life and do it in that kind of healthy, balanced way. But to be kind to yourself and realize it's not gonna happen overnight.

That's right. And, you know, one of my personal philosophies that I always wind up my lectures and my podcasts and my, you know, my master classes and the courses that I teach that I always say is that, you know, my motto in life is to love your food, to love your health. And I think that if you kind of think about food as medicine in a way that is deeply personal, that's aimed at joy, you're not gonna actually have a far away to go in order to be able to get to a healthier place. You know, as I listen to you talk about this and I think about some of the episodes we've done in the Puck in terms of things like polarization and things like, again, bowling alone and and the lack of cohesiveness in our society and people being lonely and and rushing and looking for immediate cures for things. What's what's fascinating to me is I'm listening to this is in the religious traditions, forget the g word and the things that are polarizing, just the rituals that most religions have about sitting down and having a Sabbath meal and having the opportunity to break bread with others.

What I hear you saying is that as we shift into wanting to live a longer, healthier life, that our whole attitude as a society towards food can change, and we can instead lean into it, love the food, realize it's here to fill us up and to make us healthy and bring us together in a sense of community, and that it's not just living longer, it's also living in a more joyful, balanced way. 100%. I think you just said it so well. Food is part of our humanity. It makes us whole.

It brings us together. And especially, you know, look, it's obvious that we are now in a very different type of society than you and I grew up in. Even seemingly of not so long ago, we seem to be able to be united more and society is so polarized these days. You know, it's hard to describe and maybe only we'll only figure this out in the history books someday that'll be written. But the wonderful thing about food is that it's something that we all need as humans to be able to surround ourselves by and eat, and it's better done together.

It's better done in a way that actually nourishes our not only our body, but nourishes our souls. And, you know, I know that, you know, this isn't a religious podcast, but, you know, you mentioned religion. And I think that it's really there's a spiritual quality about having community together that if you think just about that and tie that into the food, it changes the way we even think about things more so than a snack. You fend for yourself, you forage, a piece or whatever you want to call it. Now, this is actually part of what brings us together even as other things, seemingly, pull us apart.

Yeah. You know, it's in a modern society where we reinvent things and we think we know better and we forget some of the wisdom that's been passed down. And then all of a sudden, we look back and we go, this isn't working quite as well as and we start to think about this stuff. And so as again, as you're talking and I think about some of the problems we're having, and you think about sitting down for that Sunday meal or whether or not families come together and eat a meal together, and whether or not business people come together and eat a meal. And, you know, we eat three times a day.

And so I mean, culturally, at least. I mean, in in the presumably, not necessarily. But in American culture, we generally see we're supposed to eat three meals a day. And it's fascinating to me that some of these very simple things that have been going on for thousands of years, that if we just start bringing back a little common sense to it, it can really, really, really enhance our lives. That's so true.

And we talked about, you know, metabolism being hardwired. I think our relationship to food is also hardwired. And what we've done in our modern world is sort of develop these very sophisticated ways to mask and to overshadow our own human nature. You know? If we strip ourselves back to our core identity, You know, one of the things that so another part and I write about my book Eat to Beat Your Diet.

I have a whole chapter that my book agent and my publisher, they were surprised I wrote about because, you know, I'm a doctor, I'm a scientist, I'm running food as medicine. I wrote a chapter about Bruce Lee. You know, like, you know, he was a guy that still seventy years after his death, you know, or whatever, it was fifty years after he's still relevant today, and a lot of people still follow him. But he was this iconic martial arts figure, brought kind of kung fu martial arts to the Western world in a way that was acceptable. And what a lot of people don't know is that he studied philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle.

And so a lot of his writings today, which people are paying attention to now, again, going back to the past, is he urged simplicity. He encouraged people in the pursuit of excellence, whatever it might be, to strip themselves down to the simplest part of their own human nature, so to discover yourself. And I think that that's something that, you you know, as we get older, as I certainly get older, I start to realize just how important that is not to build up higher layers and layers and layers and layers of stuff, but really try to remove those layers to try to explore, you know, what is it that actually makes me tick? What is actually important to me? What do I truly believe in?

And, you know, it's just something funny that I want to point out in our conversation. You know, the whole idea of a bucket list, right? Sure. So bucket list, you know, the movie about it, All those things that you do when you retire that you wanted to do, that you never did before, and you put that list, you check them off until you die. Right?

Well, I read an editorial, an essay on something called the anti bucket list, Making your anti bucket list. It's in a publication called The Medium. It's worth really reading. It's online. And it was talking about as you kind of go through your years, not trying to dream about other layers you wanna add to yourselves, but what are the things that you don't want to do anymore?

Anti bucket lists are the things that you will never go back to. No way. I'm not gonna do this again. And I thought that's an interesting way to think about stripping off this excess that we sometimes find ourselves piled on in order to be able to find that simplicity. If I have a single message that I wanna send out to, you know, people listening is that, look, there's a awful lot of exciting things that are happening in this world of food as medicine, and scientists like me are figuring them out.

But that's not what people need to know about. You don't need to know about everything, all those details. We can have 10 podcast episodes on this. But what you need to know is that it's very easy if you follow your own human nature to make good healthy choices. Don't eat too much, make good choices, eat with other people, don't eat too quickly, you know, it's how we're hardwired just like our metabolism.

Wonderful. Doctor Lee, thank you so so much. This was a wonderful conversation. What a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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