Episode #101 Featuring Dr. William Li! Insights from a true scientist! Masterclasses on the the gut, heart health, the spinach/oxalate debate, simplifying nutrition, olive oil selection and more!

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with my special discount. Take control over your health today with a Palo Nero. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Dylan Jamelli podcast. So, I say this a lot and I mean this from the bottom of my heart. I am one of the most blessed individuals on the planet because I have the job, I guess, and I don't consider the job to speak to the most brilliant and well-educated people and informed people all over the world. That's my job. And I value every second every moment

that I have. But also I'm human and I have a short list. It's a bucket list of interviews that I've

wanted to do. And, you know, I have never really shared this with anybody other than my wife and in

prayer, you know, about who's coming on and what not. But my guest today has been on that list for almost the entire time since they started my podcast. So, today is extra special to me. I can't

“wait to talk to him. I have not met somebody with such a plethora of knowledge. So, I'm going to”

try to give him the best introduction that I can, but I can't do him any justice whatsoever. But he's a physician, he's a scientist, he's a best-selling author. I just got his book. It's called Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. And he also has a book, Eat to Beat your diet, burn fat, heal your metabolism, and live longer. He is everywhere with his knowledge and his videos and he is a prominent speaker and you can find him all over the place. I am honored and

pleasure to bring you today, Dr. William Lee. Well, thank you, Bill and it's a pleasure to be here. Awesome, man. Well, you know what? I know you're busy. I appreciate your time. Like I said, I have been really looking forward to this and then after speaking with you briefly and realizing that you were going to be far more than I expected than I already had high expectations. I want to take advantage of every second I have with you. So, what I want to start up with first is,

you are so brilliant. And you know, a variety of things I appreciate about you is that you're, I tend to find people that I call it political answers because when you ask them a question, they kind of dance and you have zero hesitation and everything that I see you talk about and that you do and so my first question would be to you is how do you stay so sharp on such a variety of topics? What is it that you practice so that you do that keeps you that in line where it just

seems like no matter what you get asked, it's with pinpoint. Yeah, you know, I'm really fortunate because I've been working in the same direction building brick by brick my career looking as a scientist. I'm a basket of biologists. As a physician, I'm trained in internal medicine which is extremely broad and in internal medicine, you know, I've got a whole hub. So, I've run intensive care units, I've run emergency room. So, I've got far beyond the usual family practice, kind of fair

weather medicine area. So, I, you know, I fly through the eye of the hurricane kind of thing. And,

“you know, I think over time and I'm a researcher. So, I literally am excited to plunge into the”

unknown and pull back the cloak and discover new things. So, I think I've just learned how to stay

on my feet and and I've always been a very grounded person. So, and I always tell the people this,

I'm, I'm sort of a scientist first. And a lot of people think that people who are not scientists think that scientists go around being Brainiacs talking about everything that they know. But, in fact, real scientists, like me, we spend most of our time in kind of a, uh, trading water in a sea of humility because we spend most of our time thinking about what we don't know. And, uh, and asking questions of being curious. So, I would say, you know, I'm a pretty grounded person

what questions we need to ask next? I love it. And one of the things I love about you is how

“fact-based that you are and that data-driven. I am the same way. I don't like hyperbole,”

I don't like over-exaggeration and I don't like mythical answers and thoughts. I like facts, I like groundwork and I love that you do that. And, I know that there's some things that you're constantly working on that you've found. But some of the things that I know that we kind of talked about that you found out that are newer. I want to get into some of that stuff. I want to share that with everybody and I want to talk about it. So, we were talking about the brain

having its own microbiome. And I am so intrigued by that. And I want to, I love for you to just kind of dig in and explain what you found and what that means for all of us. Right. So, listen, when I

went to medical school years ago, within the first week, what I was taught is that bacteria are

bad. We had to memorize hundreds of bacteria and that we must kill bacteria by memorizing antibiotics and really the practice of medicine for decades. You know, really has been, since the advent of antibiotics, which is about a hundred years ago, has really been using this incredibly

“important tool as a blunt instrument to smash bacteria whenever we can. And I literally thought”

years ago taught by taught in medical school that most of the bacteria that I'm going to encounter as a physician are bad bacteria. So, I needed to be prepared like a gunslinger to be able to whip out my weapon, you know, like John Wu style, you know, a gun in each hand, an antibiotic you can change to be able to knock out the bad guys. Well, actually, I have to say in the last decade and a half, my understanding of that is completely been inverted, where I've now

realized that most of the bacteria that humans meet in their lives are good bacteria. And most of them are inside our bodies. And of course, everybody by now has heard about gut bacteria. You don't

want to be a biohacker to have heard that this is like basically common parlance now.

Thirty-nine trillion good bacteria lives in our gut. They do all kinds of things like lower inflammation, produce short chain fatty acids. They can improve our metabolism and help our lipids. Text messages are brain, communicate the brain, got brain access. So, I started to really begin digging in as somebody who's researched when into the gut microbiome. So, I actually studied the gut microbiome. And to be able to say, is there something about this gut, these gut

bacteria that is totally unknown to us that would be surprising to us? Well, this is that gut brain access, right? So, assume that most of our gut bacteria live in the last part portion of our gut the colon, right? So, by the way, do you know, Dylan, what part of the colon, the gut bacteria mostly live in? No, I do not. Okay. So, let me give you a quick anatomy lesson. Okay. Olon starts from the right side of the body. You take an elevator up. It's a tube that goes up.

And then you take the escalator. It goes across your belly. So, there's a horizontal part of it. And then on the other end of it, which after you're crossing your gut, you got the down elevator. And this tube goes down. And that down part of your descending colon then winds up in your rectum. And then it's a proofshoot. And you're at your gut. The part that that you start going up on the right, the hand side of the colon, the connects to the small

intestines. And there's a little pouch there called the ilium, IL-U-M, ilium. It's actually where the appendix is. All right. And it turns out most of the gut bacteria, the healthy gut bacteria. Microbiome is right there in this pouch. In effect, its location is so particular that we're beginning to ask a new, whether or not the appendix, actually, you might have a job that we didn't realize. In fact, some people are beginning to think that the appendix is a kind of an ammo clip

“for a healthy gut bacteria, like a pez dispenser. If you remember those old candies, you know,”

literally it's just loaded with the new a refill for a healthy bacteria when you need it. Now, we don't know that's our fact, but it is kind of a mind-blowing idea that, you know,

for decades, surges always find you don't need that appendix. Out with the appendix, it's in

flame, get rid of it, doesn't do any good, like the tonsils. The tonsils are useless as well. Totally not. The tonsils are part of our immune system, okay? So, like most of us have grown up in

seek them in a colon being the home for most of the gut bacteria. Well, interestingly enough, what do they do? They communicate with our immune system. So, when I was in medical school, and I'm just giving you reference because I want to share with the people listening that, you know, how, you know, you were kind enough to characterize me, you know, for my expertise, you know, expertise is hard one. And what we know today might be very different from what we know

yesterday. And what we know tomorrow is going to evolve again. And so, I don't really look at this huge explosion of research as misinformation or disinformation. I look at it as continuum,

or always trying to stay on top of what's the latest thing. Okay. So, the 70% of our immune

system is actually found inside the wall of our gut. Wow. Not in our lymph nodes, not in our spleen. It lives inside our gut, right? So, you have gut bacteria talking through the wall of the,

“of the gut talking to the immune system, which is really, really important. And I spent a lot of”

time thinking about that because that conversation between healthy gut bacteria and immune system very important to overcoming cancer. We can talk about that later. But the other thing that is found in the wall of the gut are nerves, nerves that start in the brain and go and go down to the gut. So, what nerves are those? Again, back to med school. I know you didn't go to med school.

So, I'm giving you a, I'm giving you a crash course. Please, or in about the cranial nerves,

cranial meaning brain coming out of the brain. One of the biggest cranial nerves is called the Vegas nerve. I know people in the biohacking world have heard of big, you know, biggest simulation and stuff. But this is actually a gigantic trunk of nerves. You got a left one. They got a light right one. They come out of the base of our brain. They crawl down these nerves,

“like telephone poles, crawl down, telephone wires, crawl down our neck. They get into a chest.”

They wrap around our esophagus, like a fish net stalking. All right. Then they go a little bit lower to our diaphragm, punch right through the diaphragm. All right. And then they're in our gut. And they're in our belly. And when take into our belly, these big, thick trunks that would say, think about it like a big fat pen. You know, like those old pens, big fat pens. That's about how thick they are. But what's it get down below our diaphragm into our gut? The, the, the, the wiring, the nerves,

play out like the, they fan out like the tail, like a horses tail, like a paintbrush. But really long. And then they're going all over the gut. All right. Now, what's interesting is the gut brain access, a lot of the communication between the gut and the brain.

And the brain and the gut goes through the biggest nerve. Now, once again, I'd always thought

years ago that it's the brain communicating with the biggest nerve of the parasympathetic relaxation digestion system was communicating a one way street from your brain down to your gut. Because, you know, how smudders you're good. Anyway, your brain's a lot smarter. So it's downstream signals telling our gut what to do. Squeeze baby squeeze, keep on digesting. Well, that's now been overturned at whole idea. So I'm just telling you what's exciting about being a medical research

like me looking at the data and following the, the narrative of science as we're beginning to understanding human body is that, you know, the old chapters being ripped out and thrown out the new chapters of being ripped. So it turns out, by the way, along the biggest nerve, which goes from the brain down to the gut, only 20% of the nervous signals of the electrical signals going along your biggest nerve come from your brain. 20% go from top down to the bottom.

80% of the electrical communication go from the gut back to the brain. Wow. And that 80% of those signals, a lot of them are dictated by our gut bacteria. And so think about it as the channel that from which our gut bacteria sends text messages to our brain. Okay. Right. Pretty profound. So okay. We haven't even gone to the brain microbiome. So for a long time, until recently, actually,

“we thought that that's how the gut brain X is actually works. You know, this back and forth channel,”

there's a blood brain barrier, blah, blah, blah. Well, within the last couple of years, people have been looking into brain tissue and brain fluid and found that the brain has its own microbiome, healthy bacteria that naturally live in the brain. Not a lot of them. So you're not talking about a hornets and a bacteria, but there's enough back there. They're doing something. Do we understand exactly what they're doing? Well, not really. We know they're not infecting the

They are communicating somehow. And it's the story of healthy bacteria in our brain. We're also

now finding it in other formally considered sterile, no bacterial tissues. Rustmel, let's say that to be sterile. No, got back to your. By the way, in the eighth month of pregnancy, the pregnant mom's uterus sends a text message to her gut to say, you know, we're almost there. We're almost ready to pop, baby, about a month out. All right. And then the gut says, all right, we're going to get some bacteria called electobacillus root or I ready to go. So then these

electobacillus root or I bacteria in the gut and eight months, hit your ride like an Uber in platelets, blood cells, and these platelets take the bacteria as a new Uber up to the nipple and drop them off. That's where the Uber drop off is. All right. Now, this gut bacteria is sitting at the nipple.

A month early, ready to rock, waiting for the baby to be born, to take that first

“suckle and get that first mouthful of milk and then that's how the mom injects her healthy gut”

bacteria back down into the baby. Right. You've got. All right. So I'm just telling you, these are, these are paradigms. Yeah. Our brand new that are mind-blowing because it actually tells us how much we don't know. By the way, human semen, out of the testicles, thought to be sterile. Nope, gut bacteria in it. Wow. The bladder. You're in supposed to be sterile. Gut bacteria in your bladder. It's a urinary tract infection, right? Wrong. It actually, there's naturally normal

little bits of microbiome sitting around. So what I'm telling you is that this discovery that there is healthy bacteria in the brain is consistent with what we're finding in other parts of the body. And the assumption that all bacteria are bad, totally off-base, the new kind of field of human understanding of the human body, is that we have to be looking for, keeping our eyes open, and not be too surprised when we find bacteria in places we didn't expect. And then ask the question,

what are these bacteria doing? Are they controlling our mood? Are they controlling our newer transmitters? Do they actually help us with vision, with cognition? By the way, when we have dementia, brain fog, you know, is there a problem with the bacteria? Do we treat the brain with bacteria in the future? Like unload bacteria into the brain in order to treat brain disease? Can you imagine a future, you know, in which we're actually delivering probiotics for the brain? Well,

there's already clinical evidence that some gut bacteria actually can modify Parkinson's symptoms.

“Wow. So, assume nothing, expect anything. That's what a real scientist does to into”

day's world, looking at biomarkers, looking at microbiome, looking at health defense systems. And so that's really kind of my field. It is eyes wide open. Yeah, and trying to put together the new story of human health. So, I've got multitudes of things, but I want to say a couple things. One, I'm not a scientist by trade, but you and I share the same mindset where I have the same belief

system as you is that there's always a way to find something new or improve or at least look

and question and ask. And I have always felt that some of the most important things to do are ask, always ask, that never hurts and there should always be an explanation. And if there's a strange explanation, then you dig. And, you know, it's terms, it's terminology and I think you'll agree with this. I'm a nutritionist and I lived in a fear of fats for 20 years until I overcame it.

“And I think it's the same sort of thing with bacteria where you hear the word and you're just”

to assume it's a sickness and illness and you don't understand and correlate the fact that it has a multifaceted meaning. So, I love this. I'm on a making inference here and you correct me if I'm wrong. And this is based on the facts that you just gave me. So, you said 70% of our immune system is in our gut. So, if we have gut problems, leaky gut problems, et cetera, that is why we're so susceptible to illness and problems and disease correct, because the immune system has the

70% in the gut. Well, even there's a lot of things that can cause inflammation in a gut that can shift our immune system and tackle our immune system as an army of super soldiers with lots of different types of cells and immune cells that are trained like special forces. Each one has its own

Marines, they'll do different things. Right. And, but they got to cooperate, they got to collaborate.

And, what happens with leaky gut and other autoimmune conditions and inflammatory conditions is you're really disrupt disrupting the chain of command. And in some cases, you're actually causing some of the troops to actually do the wrong thing. Their station or wrong place are given the wrong instructions. And that can actually be really devastating. And so, I think that, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's ulcer of colitis, you know, celiac disease, you know,

many of the irritable bowel. These clearly have inflammation. They clearly disrupt the gut barrier. They clearly interfere with normal healthy immune function. And once you get out of balance, you know, you think about it. Like, our, our bodies are like, um, uh, surrogacyly acrobats. They are able to do the high wire at while they're writing the bicycle,

while they're, you know, flipping upside down to the swimming pool. It's, I'm really quite amazing.

“Well, we're actually able to do like, that's why to me, no matter what kind of medical device”

you think you are developing. That's amazing. We're kind of pharmaceutical. We can't beat mother nature. Like, you know, people are like, oh, AI is going to like, you know, outstrip us a new crate. I doubt it. I mean, our biology is so complex. Um, that whatever it is that we're understanding can only make a sit back and marvel that we don't get sick more often. Yeah, like we're balanced all the time. Occasionally, we fall off the wagon and then we got to kind of pick

ourselves back up again. But, you know, while most many people ask, why did I get sick? My work as a researcher is really based on, why don't we get sick more often? What is it that our body does to defend itself? And to me, that's one of the, I love flipping questions around and asking the things that other people might not be asking. I think you would actually learn more by learning about our defense mechanisms and what we need to do to strengthen them and how they work to

to protect ourselves. I love that. And that's the beauty of what you do is that you look at all sides of things and don't just accept just because somebody said something that that's it.

Because it's not. And I, like I said, I'm not a scientist, but my assumption has always been

that science is a never ending search for answers and questions that need to be asked to to overcome belief systems that are nonsensical to me at times. But, here's another question for you. I feel like then the past and you correct me if I'm wrong here. Two to three years, there's been certain things that have become just popularized and leaky gut is like at the top of that list. Whether it's mitochondria and leaky gut, at least in biohacking spheres that everybody wants to talk about it.

But I feel, I get such a vague answer on leaky gut and strange differentiation

“and I, I think it's confusing to a lot of people. I would love it if you would first just explain”

what it is in simple terms and two, how to really take care of your gut. What, what are people really need to do to treat it and take care of the gut? Yeah. Well, look, you know, I'm a, I'm a physician. So I'm trained on anatomy and physiology and pathology. Like that's been decades of what I do. So I, I got to come at this, you know, answer your question and explain things in a way that is consistent with my training and experience. So I think about the gut as a tube. It's about

40 feet long, you know, from end to end, from the mouth hole to the anus. And, you know, it's got a lining. And the reason it's got a lining is to protect the stuff inside the gut from leaking out. Think about it. When you're eating food, drinking coffee, having whatever booze or whatever, you know, and then having your stomach acid, you're churning. And that's stuff that's churned up. That digested food is kind of acidic. It can burn. It's not not very clean at the

beginning. You know, and it's just like just like making its way down through the gut. Thank goodness, we've got a lining that protects the entire part of the gut, right? Right. The lining's really

“important because if, and it's, and it's airtight, I mean, it's like watertight, right? So think about”

that. If that lining started to poke the spring and holes in it or leaks, what's in your gut is going to leak out from the wall of the tube into the cavity of your belly, where you don't want to have acidic stuff. You don't want to bacteria from the gut. You don't want to have poop leaking out, right? So think about like the burst diaper. We don't want that. Very good. So that lining is actually the, the gut lining is actually really, really important. By the way,

it's not just a passive lining. It's filled with, it's made of cells and is riddled with cells.

other important regulators for our behavior and digestion and our overall physiological function.

“So you don't want to be messing with the gut lining, but sometimes the gut lining becomes”

disrupted, okay? And when the gut lining becomes disrupted, a lot of things can cause that inflammation is one of the easiest ways to kind of rub their gut lining the wrong way. Little inflammation causes a deema. It spreads apart the cells. Now you've got well-intentioned immune cells getting in there, but you've got chronic inflammation, you've got to blow apart a hole in the gut, okay? And now

that happens leaking from the inside out, exactly what you don't want. And basically that triggers

a domino effect of more inflammation and more problems. And your body wants to wall it off. By the way, you know, I know the wellness and health and biohacker space and talk about leaking gut all the time. I'm going to kind of stick a landing on a medical condition where the leekiest, most problematic gut occurs. And that is something called bowel, meaning gut, perforation. You can actually have a pin hole size leak that goes all the way,

not just the lining, but all goes all the way through the entire wall of the gut. Now you've basically punched a hole right through the entire wall of the gut. Like a garden hose you put a nail through it.

“All right, it's going to happen. You spray out junk from the inside of the gut. I think poop”

think acid think all kinds of bacteria spring into your gut. Now that is a life-threatening crisis,

it's not leaking, it is leaking, but it is a crisis. And you know how our body responds to that crisis, that's like the ultimate leaking gut, about the gut. Do you know something, if you heard of an organ in the body called the omentum? No, I have not. Omentum is like a big apron. You know when you go to the dentist, they put on an apron on you? Yeah. Okay, so this is, this would be good for, for, then you'll, you'll probably quote me on this. So there's an organ in the body called the omentum

and it's like an apron. It's kind of made out of fat and other kind of tissues. This thing is like a baseball glove that moves around your belly continuously. And it is making sure there are no leeks in

your gut, no perforations. And when it lines a perforation, this thing is like an octopus.

It'll zoom over to that leak. And like a baseball glove, it'll grab that gut and it'll wall off that perforation. So you don't actually wind up having a life-threatening injury. Well, yeah. So the omentum, you know, and I'm sharing this with you because this is the kind of stuff that a physician and MD will tell you. Right. It's not on, you know, speculation, not on, woo-woo-woo is not on, you know, cool, new areas of science, but just like really fundamentals.

And this is part of the remarkable balance in our body. And by the way, that omentum walling up the gut, that's life-saving. Okay, you will, it will hurt like crap. You will go to the emergency room. They will do a scan. They will find your omentum stuck right in that area. And in fact, it actually pinpoints where the leak is. Surgeon opens you up, goes right there, so's up the hole. That is like the mother of all leaking gut. So I'm just telling you, it's real. It's a problem.

But your body's already set up to deal with it. But that's an acute hole, an acute leak puncture. But this chronic inflammation can let you wear down the lining of the gut. And that's where you wind up having this erosive, uh, really destructive thing. Because it's not in pinpoint anymore. You can't wall it up. It can be in big areas. And so then you've got leaking all over the place. And it's not leaking that just causes a wildfire of inflammation and a whole lot, a whole

world of a problem. So this omentum is, is that something that could potentially ever get damaged. And if so, how would you know and what would you do to protect that? Because clearly, you want that protected and functioning. Right. Now it is, it's a pretty extensive organ. It's rooted in our, like kind of, in deep inside our belly, admittedly. If you were to take an octopus, you know, you see on, I don't know, YouTube or Instagram, all these like cool,

undersea, things of octopus. Just throw an octopus in your belly. And that's the omentum.

“It goes all over the place. And it's, by the way, you know what they call it? We call it?”

We call it in medicine. The policeman of the abdomen makes sense. It's the cop that, uh, that, uh,

So then that would pose the question because there's, as always, when there's any sort of

condition that you're flooded with, take this to treat it and do this and use this. And this is the answer, and this is the key. Can you just explain maybe a little bit when it comes to like prebiotics, postbiotics, et cetera? What, what is actually good that someone implements in what is nonsensical or should actually cause an adverse, you know, reaction because I know that you can create

“more problem by taking the wrong stuff. Listen, if you want to talk about Lee, he got and how to”

actually address it. Now, yeah, this is sort of the background in flame Lee, he got that is kind of nonsensific, but it's a problem, right? So what you got to understand is that the body wants

to heal itself anyway, all right? And what we want to do is to leverage what the body wants to do.

You don't want to fight the body. That's like swimming against, uh, against the ripped side, you know, you're not going to make it. You want to go with the flow. That's how you get out of the ripped side, okay? So what, what does the body want to do? Well, it's a creeps mucus in order to be able to protect the gut because mucus is a covering, you know, just think about like, uh, you got a hole in the tire, you put some, uh, some, some silicon there, it's going to come

it up and maybe stop it. So mucus in our gut lower gut is actually a very natural way to plug

“up leaks number one. Number two is the cells lining our gut actually grow. They grow pretty fast.”

In fact, they grow so fast that they will turn over, meaning replace themselves literally overnight.

Okay? Because you think about it. We got, we got a lot of cells in our gut. They are shed. When you take a poop every day, you're, you're, you're, you're crapping out a lot of old dead cells from your gut. They grow right back. Right, we need back to reline it. So we've got this incredibly regenerative capacity in of our gut lining. We want to encourage regeneration, want to encourage healing, when to encourage that mucus that can actually be helpful. So, um, and we want to stay away from

things that could irritate in flame or otherwise activate further inflammation. So, uh, so what I would tell you is that, oh, and then the gut bacteria are there to lower inflammation all by themselves. Right? So healthy gut bacteria will secrete churching fatty acids, and those churching fatty acids actually naturally lower inflammation. Think about inflammation as an irritant to the gut. So if you have a little bit of inflammation and, uh, and then there's more inflammation because of, uh,

leaky gut. Now you've got like a domino effect like a wild fire. So I can't fire, and I get a forest fire. All right, that's a problem. So you want to actually calm down the forest fire. How do you do that? Well, you're gut bacteria sort of act like inside your body firemen. They're trying to spray down the inflammation to begin with, right? So nurture our gut bacteria in a healthy way. What can we do? Well, we know that fermented foods like yogurt, for example, can be very helpful

“to restore some of the balance in our gut. So I think probiotics, which are really just bacteria”

that we can ingest that will help to adjust the balance in our gut could be really helpful. Number one. And yogurt, you know, arguably for some people, little easier sell and easier to tolerate than kimchi, you know, example, but there's different ways of actually doing it. You know, I think that any kind of fermented food could be helpful, but yogurt is particularly helpful. It's kind of coding. And by the way, little pro tip here, not any yogurt.

Whole fat yogurt. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Not low fat yogurt. Mm, okay. And this is actually a big surprise because for years, we've been told that low fat yogurt so way to go. Whole fat st� risk is your lipid. Totally wrong. Mm-hmm. You don't fully understand it, but actually the healthy bacteria that restoration does not raise your cholesterol. Lowers it, actually. Um, does not cause more heart disease. Lowers are heart disease.

Lowers are risk of heart disease. And in fact, there's some evidence that it lowers the risk of some cancers like colorectal cancer as well by eating whole fat yogurt. Now, what's the problem with low fat yogurt? Actually, well, no problem, intrinsically, but if you look at the ingredient label of low fat yogurt, you will find where the problems are. Because low fat yogurt, if you take the fat out of yogurt, okay, think about what happens to a colopsis. It's kind of like

the sloppy mix. It doesn't taste like yogurt at all. So many yogurt companies will add thickeners emulsifiers into it. And that might be okay from a mouth-feel perspective, but some of these emulsifiers were beginning to discover, um, uh, can actually damage your gut microbiome. They inadvertently

help the bacteria. Now, then you talk about the sweeten yogurt, which everybody loves. You know,

you pick them up and they've got a layer of jelly, you know, yellow jelly. Look, hey, it looks in the taste grade. It's sweet, but when you look at the ingredient label, it's got artificial sweeteners, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring, totally no good cause those can damage the gut microbiome

“as well. So, what I tell people, if you want to heal your gut yogurt's a great choice,”

whole fat yogurt, which is not that easy to find anymore, by the way. I mean, like, I do a lot of research in the Mediterranean. You go to Greece, no problem finding whole fat yogurt, like, like, just turn to the right, turn to the left, you'll find it. In America, it's not that easy to find. You've got a really, really search, you know. So, what I say get whole fat yogurt, if you want to make it sweet, do what the Greeks do. Get honey, get some organic honey, dribble a little bit on there,

and now you've got this natural antide, you know, like this, it's got anti-microbial, it's great, it's sweet, it's got some good bioactives in honey. And then take some fresh fruit, seasonal fruit, berries, toasted nuts, pistachios, walnuts, whatever, crush them up, drop them in there. Oh, the dietary fiber? From your berries or your nuts? On the yogurt, they will actually feed your gut microbiome and help to restore that balance. So, I like to think about solutions to problems,

not by reaching for that most of highest tech, most expensive, most complicated thing. But I like to think, I like to boil it down the fundamentals are pretty easy.

Feed your gut, get it back in balance, lower inflammation. Your gut is the most powerful,

non-steroidal anti-inflammatory kind of the strategy there is. There's no amount of motron you can take. I'd be broke, you can actually do what your gut can do when treated properly. Now, prebiotics also feed the gut microbiome. They're like fertilizer for gut bacteria. You know, like, I know there's all these colorful capsules and supplements and, you know,

“stacking that people do. That's okay. You know, I think that, you know, I like to say supplements”

are for topping off. Start with the fundamentals. Food is the fundamental for anything that you want to do for healing. And if you eat colorful foods, eat the rainbow, so to speak, berries, peppers, you know, even greens, like think about it. Like greens have a variety of colors. If you're a painter and you know, pantone colors for green, think about it. You go to the produce market. They've got so many different pantone versions of green and purple and blue.

It's amazing. They, all those colors, those pigments in foods actually help to feed the gut microbiome.

Right? So, you know, without digging too far into this, what I would say, I like the idea of quelling inflammation using a dietary approach first that allows your gut to reset itself naturally for healing regeneration. If you can get that gut back on balance.

“All right? Then actually is going to start to heal naturally. Now, you also do want to”

avoid those things that can damage the gut alcohol, ultra-processed foods as diet soda, you know, like, all in a heavy meat load, you know, I know protein is big, but like for the carnivore diet, like heavy, heavy, heavy meat intake, and also kind of rough on the gut. So I tell people take a kinder channel approach. Like body healed self. I agree. So, and this is going to transition us to because of the point you made. But so, you know how angriam doctor Lee that I

spent so many years eating that terrible tasting fat free and low fat yogurt until I came to the conclusion of all the fats that I was missing. And when I changed to the whole fat, and I changed to, I went from 15, 20 grams of fat a day to about 120 grams of fat a day. Like, I'm talking massive transition because I just woke up one day and said, I can't do this anymore. And my skin, my focus, my health, my, just the way that I function throughout the day has just

drastically changed. And I, I will argue to the end of time that the low fat diet caused some of the heart issues that I ended up kind of dealing with and overcoming here. And some of the plaque potentially, which is where I'm going to go with some of this with you. But what you do with the yogurt, exactly what I do. I do the berries. I put protein powder in my end, but I have so much yogurt every day. And it is, it's not only is it good like you said, but it's satiating. And um, it is starting

I'm warning. Yeah, I mean, yogurt and yogurt protein and the fat in it actually helps to activate those satiety hormones. Uh, and, and again, that's kind of a homeostasis of rebalancing of what's actually happening in the brain, the signals for, for satiety. And then you add a few things

yourself, uh, kind of a complete approach, you know, to things. So I, I know that, um, it's not the only

solution, you know, everyone looks for black and white simple things. Um, what I would say is that this is, this is an example. Yeah. Now a relatively straightforward approach can actually go a long way towards healing. I want to get into some foods and cholesterol and heart stuff. But I have one more question pertaining to spinach and oxalate type foods because that's another thing that I feel like just goes, it just goes insane with some people where they just go to the extreme on,

oh, you can't eat spinach and you can't eat certain foods because of the oxalates. Can you just

“briefly touch on? Is that really that big of a problem? And do we need to avoid some of these foods?”

Because I find things like spinach and other things have such high value within them in terms of

what we get. Is there fear going on here or is there some fact behind it? Well, look, uh, I think most people recognize, especially in the biohacker space that the idea of personalized nutrition simply means everybody's requirements are different. Everyone's body is a little bit different. And everyone's going to tolerate foods and process what's in a food in a slightly different way. And that's actually where this idea of oxalates come in. Some people tolerate it really well and have no

problem at any level. Some people are very sensitive to oxalates and they tend to take the oxalates out and turn them into stones. What's the kidney stone or a gall stone, you know, can be a or into a, the gout into your joint could be an attribute of the problem. All right, this is a medical issue, but not everybody actually. In fact, I would say the minority of people most people have no problem at normal healthy, regular doses of spinach because I mean, unless you are

“an extremist, and I think this is maybe one of the messages that I want to communicate is that”

most people who are generally healthy can tolerate a range of almost anything for a little bit of while, but if you kind of go whole hog and you take things to extreme, this is where something healthy could actually be unhealthy. Like water, you can actually cause water toxicity, believe it or not, by having to reach water. You know, that's that's the stuff of life. So I think for most people oxalates in spinach perfectly fine. And as you point out, spinach is not just oxalates. People

like to over simplify. Oh, this is an oxalate containing food must be bad, must avoid. All right, you know what, spinach has got all kinds of other goodies. And the one that I like to point out is that spinach growing low to the ground, like beads, are a great source of natural dietary nitrates, nitrogen from the soil, naturally found at high levels in spinach. All right, when you, and I don't know about, know about this, but when you chew, when you eat your spinach,

you know how our moms like, don't bolt your spinach down, you know, like just you chew, you put it in your mouth and you just try to swallow it so you don't have to pay it.

“You know, like, that's what all kids do, right? But actually, you want to make your spinach tasty.”

Little extra virgin olive oil, a little bit of garlic, a squeeze of lemon or lemon zest, add some golden raisins, you know, maybe a little some chili flakes. That's like a Spanish dish that I make. All right, very tasty. But if you have a really good tasty dish of spinach, cooked, you want to chew it. You want to have saver it. When you saver it,

you're chew, chew, chew, chew, amazing flavors, right? That dish I was just telling you,

come over to my house, you're going to be, you'll be loving it. And I can tell you when you chew it, you are exposing the nitrates from the spinach and natural ones to your tongue, micro biome, the bacteria on your tongue. I see. That will feed gut bacteria on your tongue, because the gut starts in your mouth converts that nitrogen from the soil in the spinach into a form that when you swallow that spinach gets absorbed into your bloodstream as weight for it, nitric oxide.

Ah, Nutric acid is a natural signal in the molecule that does a lot of things. One of the things it does right away in your bloodstream is it causes your blood vessels to relax and by relaxing, I mean dilating, okay, vasodilation. So what happens when you vasodilate with nitric oxide? Your blood pressure falls. Do you know that for every one unit of one millimeter mercury that your blood pressure falls systallically, you decrease your risk of fatal stroke by 4%. Really, okay?

And by the way, high blood pressure is the silent killer as you get older, your vessels get

eventually it would set you up for a stroke. Spinach, nitric oxide, relaxation, blood pressure comes down. It is brain protective. There's no more clever biohack than to actually get more nitric oxide in your body and chewing your food by having tasty spinach. It's just one way to do a

“beach wall, so do it. Now, the other thing that I think people that are really into biohack,”

you might find super interesting. And I, you know, I made YouTube's on my YouTube channel about this is nitric oxide is a natural trigger in our body. Remember, you can get it from spinach if you chew it and swallow it. Nitric oxide is a natural trigger for the recruitment of natural stem cells in our body. Really. nitric oxide in your bloodstream, you know what it does? It signals. Come here. It's a trigger stem cells that live in our bone marrow. Natural stem cells. All right, we got about

70 million of them. They live in our bone marrow. And nitric oxide will cause stem cells to

come flying out of our bone marrow, like bees coming out of our hive. And they will buzz around inside our bloodstream circulating everywhere. And these stem cells are just looking for

“what I need to fix. You need to fix something to brain and the liver and the heart and they're fixing”

stuff. So the other benefit of nitric oxide coming from food, okay, which could be spinach or bees, for example, or arugula is that you wind up actually stimulating your own stem cell, regenerative stem cells from inside the body. This is like a little biohack and a lot of people might appreciate that it doesn't require anything expensive. It's just part of nutrition, you know. And so again, nutrition is the bedrock for helping the body heal itself, which is really one of

the principles of biohacking, right? So I always think let's start with the basics. Let's see what

we can do with the basics. Let's take that as far as we can before we start adding other things to top it off, which is what you can to supplements. I agree, man. You know, I find spinach to taste quite good actually, and I don't pop by it by any stretch, but just a little bit of just a little bit of saute and the butter and like some of the stuff you said, and I think it is phenomenal. I mean, it's like, okay. So now talking about the nitric oxide, because I know how beneficial

what do you find in terms of like, with the heart related, like, do you find that nitric oxide is important for, say, ejection fraction improvement or anything to do with like heart failure or lack of work there, because I've read literature on that, but I'm curious, you are flawed on how that could potentially have a positive effect. Well, look, nitric oxide and it's stem cell recruitment in the cardiovascular system at the heart level, whether it's a coronary arteries,

which are the blood vessels of the heart or the heart muscle itself. You know, is a substantial player. It's an active area of researching cardiology, so people who study the heart are really looking, continuing to look at nitric oxide. By the way, you know, a colleague in friend of mine, Dr. Lewis Ignaro discovered the function of nitric oxide for heart health. He won the Nobel Prize

“for this. Okay. That's how important nitric oxide is for heart health. All right. Well, I'd like”

to call him Dr. No, and, oh, which for nitric oxide, you know, like like the old James Bond thing, he's a great guy, ingenious and still thinking about new roles for nitric oxide. So, the very important. Okay. It's important for getting good blood flow in the heart. Nitric oxide is good for helping to regenerate heart tissue that might be damaged. We're still trying to figure out how to

leverage it. And I'll tell you a really amazing food and a study that can deliver nitric oxide

that which is a dark chocolate. Really dark chocolate is a food that nobody thinks sucks, right? Very popular. You know, when I, you know, do my key notes and stuff like that. If I show pieces of dark chocolate, like everybody gets up in class because they're rooting for it, right? But here's the science. Chocolate, as in chocolate bars, a confection, which means it's a candy made, you know, manufacturing. But it's a candy that's actually made at the start from, in terms of

dark chocolate, it's a plant-based food. Okay. Because if you ever been to a jungle to look at cacao pods where chocolate comes from, like in Costa Rica or some of these other places that, you know, like where's your chocolate come from? It comes over jungle. And it comes some trees that grow these football shaped orange and brown pods. I mean, literally, it looks like a football,

And you shake it. You feel something kind of shaking back and forth there. You open it up with

“an eye if you inflate it open. And you've got this, um, these, uh, how I want to say, like Silver Dollar”

shaped, um, uh, seed pods, they're covered with this white fruit. And by the way, if you eat the fruit of a fresh cacao pod, delicious. It's a little sweet and sour. Anybody who's got a chance to do this if you're vacationing or you want to order some exotic fruit, order yourself some a cacao pod. Okay. A right one and open it up and just eat around the skin around the cacao pod. Like this is you interacting with nature. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you got vitamin C and other things in there. Now that seed pod

is dried. Roasted fermented fermented and roasted ground up into a powder and that plant-based powder coming from the seed pod actually is the basis for dark chocolate. When you see 70% dark chocolate, 80% dark chocolate, that's the percentage of the powder that comes from the plant.

“The higher the percentage of dark chocolate, right, you can see the percentage. The higher the”

percentage, the more this plant-based stuff in it. Now, what's inside this, the plant. Well,

Mother Nature is pretty amazing. I always say, um, you know, plant-based foods are Mother Nature's

farm must-see, not with a pH, but with an F, like farm. And one of the things that we know is that dark chocolate cacao has, um, a polyphenol called pro anthocyanidin, assisted complicated chemical name, most people can't pronounce it. I'm, I'm, my job is to pronounce this kind of stuff. So I, I have a lot of practice, but this pro anthocyanidin, you know what it does? Recruit stem cells. Okay. In the studies have shown that if you give people with coronary artery disease and

depressive injection fraction and a sluggish non-resilient stiff blood vessels, it's a setup for our problem. Yeah, can there exist these? All right. Like that's heading towards some events, like heart attack, or a scheme of, you're probably headed to a stent at that stage. All right, at some point, you're going to get it. Well, if you give people high polyphenol dark chocolate, two cups of hot chocolate made with super polyphenol dark chocolate a day for a month. And you measure

at the very beginning, these are people with heart disease, and you measure the beginning of their stem cells. And you measure how stiff their blood vessels are. Not a lot of stem cells and pretty stiff blood vessels, not so good. All right. You give them two cups of hot chocolate a day made with dark chocolate, 80% are higher for a month. And at 30 days, you measure their stem cells. They can have double the number of stem cells in their bloodstream. Recruited in their bloodstream for healing

in regeneration of the cardiovascular system by cacao, poranthocyanidins. This is a clinical study by the way. And when you test the resiliency of the blood vessels, the stiffness. So, um, do you know something, have you heard of something called flow mediated dilation FMD? No, I haven't. All right. So, this is like something that a biohacker should know. All right. It's actually from cardiovascular research. So, you want to find out how resilient your blood vessels are. If you're resilient,

it's the name of the game for longevity and healthy aging. So, here's what you do. You take a blood

pressure cuff, pump it up. You squeeze your arm. Right. And now you squeeze it up, puff, puff, puff. And now there's no blood flow into your arm. Like you really squeeze it up high. Now you've cut off blood flow into your arm. Get a little tingles. All right. And then you take an ultrasound probe.

“It's like a pen. You have to have connected an ultrasound. And you put it right at the”

crook of your elbow. And you're now measuring with the blood flow cut off. You're looking at the wave form to see the wave form get extinguished. All right. So, normally when blood's pumping in there, it's going to have a wave and it's going to go go down. It's going to go up. That's normal blood pumping in and out. Right. So, you're pumping it up and you're watching that wave form get extinguished from normal to shut down. Now, if you are healthy, the flow-mediated dilation, you suddenly release

the blood pressure cuff. Psh. Now, what happens is the blood comes rushing back naturally. If you're young and healthy with good resilient blood vessels, guess what? That wave form is going to go a buoyant. It's going to come right back. Nice and big stuff peaks. Blood flow coming in. It's going to get a nice peak and it's going to go back down. Nice peak and come up. That's resiliency. In cardiovascular disease, when you've got stiff blood vessels, you've got plaque and blockages

So, this is like my wheelhouse. I can tell you that the wave form is in healthy. Right.

“And of sluggish, that's so high, not so low. Does that responsive? No good.”

Now, with this cacao experiment, two cups of hot chocolate, dark made with dark, high polyphenol, dark chocolate for a month, you tested the baseline. It's kind of not so good because of the heart disease. You test out for a month after stem cells look come out. Now, you've actually retrained and regenerated and re-healed the lining of the blood vessels. Guess what? You can double the resiliency, the flow-mediated dilation. That ultrasound probe

shows you bounce right back. This is actually what I'm talking about when, when I say that the

body wants to heal itself, the food that we choose, the diet and lifestyle choices we make,

exposures that we actually have to our environment, they can actually help our body bounce back. So, in relation to foods that could potentially increase nitric oxide, which then

“interns releases more stem cells. We've got, you mentioned that spinach would do the nitric oxide”

benefit, and beets was also beneficial there, and arugula, and arugula. Can you name a couple more that would be nice to fit into a diet for somebody struggling with potential heart failure, or, you know, dilates a bit more? I would say there's a lot of, what I would say is that the foundation of knowing where the research has been done has looked at spinach and beets, and beets is a really good way to do it. I wouldn't overdo it, and I don't think beets just

switch to someone else. You know, you can make a, you can make a your own smoothie or your own, you know, the mix with arugula and spinach and beets, you know, you want to grind it up, because I encourage people to be creative to make it work for them, right? You want to make your own, like the old V8, you know, make your own vegetable mix, that's fine, you know, throw some protein in there, be like, you know, so, and I also think that dark chocolate's a

way to actually further use polyphenols to actually get those stem cells going as well. So the

“name of the game is repair. Oh, and by the way, did you know that if you want to protect the stem”

cells, you already have in your bloodstream? Do you know that there's some a food that you can eat, that you can use every day that can help to protect those stem cells from oxidative stress, from, you know, mostly oxidative stress, and that food is extra virgin olive oil. All right, what are some of the names of them hydroxy-tavrasal, aloeocanthal, you know, those are just some of the names of what we recently studied, they are potent protectors of our stem cells.

Okay, so that's why the olive oil shot, or just I like to cook with olive oil, and by the way, this is your polyphenols. So you want to get high polyphenols all about, did you know not all olive oils are equally beneficial? You want to look for the extra virgin, and for extra virgin, I like to talk, I like to talk about this. If you want to get the highest, right, because we was want to know what's the best one we should get, you know, you want to get the best ROI for

whatever you're spending money on, even regular food, what's the, what's the best highest polyphenol extra virgin olive oil? You know what they are? We're going to write it down as soon as you tell me,

all right, so first you want to look for mono-verietal olive extra virgin olive oil. What that means is that

that olive oil is made with one variety of olives, oh yeah, yep, if they're made with mixes, sometimes they dilute them, sometimes not even olive oil, you know, but it's like we want it on three that it's common for them, right? Just one country, I'm going to tell you three countries, but it's one variety, yeah, yeah, mono-verietal, right? Oh, wait, you can tell that instantly, there's a dead giveaway. Just look up, I don't want to look for mono-verietal, right? Okay,

so I mean, this wall of sea of olive oils, when you go to the grocery store, all right, like how do you choose? Most people just choose whatever their mom bought, or whatever you wouldn't want me having your house. I will go on a treasure hunt by looking, picking up the bottles and looking for mono-verietal, then I'm not done. Now I'm looking for specific verietals. I'm looking for specific olives, all right? And there's three, if you want high polyphenols, this is like little

like pro tip, all right? Little trick, you want to look for it. So there's there's three countries that have the highest polyphenol olives. One is Spain. Uh-huh, I was going to say it was a specific

you'll usually find it. Look for mono-verietal, Picquale olives. Tasty, really great. You ever have,

“like, you know, you're going to Spain and have topists, like that's what they cook with, regularly,”

everyday, super high polyphenols, all right? And some in Spain, some of the Spanish people have some of the largest community of centenarians, people who live to a hundred and older, okay? All of oil could contribute to it. I would say so, all right? And then having good quality, all right? That's one. Monovario, Picquale, Spanish all of oil, all right? Let's say you, you want to go Italian. Um, like, I'm, I'm going for the Italian. When I like it, Italy, all right? Well, there's two types of

olives in Italy that are super high polyphenol. And I only learned about one of them recently within

the last month. So I used to always tell in Umbria, Italy, there's a variety of olives called Mori-O-LO.

M-O-R, AI-O-L-O, Mori-O-LO. Kind of hard to find. You've got to order online, occasionally, you might be lucked out if you go to an olive oil, sort of find it. It's not a very common olive oil, even in Italy. You don't find it that commonly. Re-behind polyphenols. Then I found out that there's another Italian olive oil that can even be higher in polyphenols. Literally, I was doing research in Italy, and I discovered this. And the olive is called Corrattina, CORA-T-I-N-A.

Right? Listen, the specifics matter, right? Because you're, do you want to know what's the best one? I'm telling you, Corrattina or Mori-O-L-LO. Corrattina you'll find. Where does it come from

Italy? Come from Puglia. The region called Puglia. I know. Now you've got two places that you can

go look for. Right? You're Italian, you know? That's right. That's right. Like, your blood is

“resonating on this, right? So, okay. So, those are two good Italians. Now, what if you want to”

keep going in the Mediterranean, you want to go to Greece? I was just going to say that. I knew it. I did a gap year, and I spent part of my time in Greece. So, I know a lot about the healthy diet aspects of Cristina. What's particularly healthy about Greek diet as one of the Mediterranean diets, traditional ones, is that she's very simple cuisine. Yeah, you don't overdo a lot of things, you know? You're right. Completely different than French cuisine. Actually,

different from Italian cuisine. It's elemental, like the Greek yogurt, very element, very simple and pure. So, the good news is that the most popular, extra virgin, monovarietal olive, in Greece, is called Corrattinaki. K-O-R-O-N-E-I-K-I. I'm spelling it out. We're listening to this because you might want to go back and rewind and hear it again, Corrattinaki. All right? Happens to be one of the most popular olives out in Greece, super high polyphenol. If you, by the way, take a typical Corrattinaki

monovarietal olive oil, which you can buy in the United States, all right? I like it. I don't usually promote brands, but this one impressed me so much because they test for heavy metals. None, and they test for microplastics. None. Okay. And it's a, so you want to look for that kind of,

“I just tell you because I, I'm a big believer in it. It's Costa Rina. Is the brand?”

That's the one I use. I was just looking it up to see if that was that was eating the right one, man. I was just pulling it off. I'm telling you, if you have a company that cares enough about you, to give you not only the most potent monovarietal olive, but also cares about serving you up to make sure there's no heavy metals and no microplastics. Right? That's like the kind of corporate responsibility that, you know, like resonates with me. Yeah. Oh, it's stuff. No bad stuff. Anyway,

and it's really takes a set of light news. That is the highest potency of the Greek ones. Right? So now I just told you how to protect your stem cells, using something, so like, you're going to, you were talking about, I can't remember what you were talking about using butter for spinach. Listen, you're going to get some scrambled eggs because eggs are actually good for you. All right, get some or get eggs. You know, rather than use butter for eggs,

use a little extra virgin olive oil. It's a great way to get those polyphenols right at the get-go with some scrambled eggs, for example. Great way to get your input in. By the way, what's the dose that is generally thought to be good per day of extra virgin olive oil? It's about roughly three to four good tablespoons of olive oil. Okay. It's quite a lot. Okay. Think about it. If you're in the Mediterranean, you don't have to work for your heart to get that. Right? Okay, because they

cook everything with it. So, you know, I think that, again, I'm trying to boil down some of the

the permeability of the cyanidins. We can tackle the nitric oxide and the tongue microbiome and all that kind of stuff and the brain microbiome. All good stuff. You know, the leaky gut, the policeman

“of the abdomen, those are all really cool, important fundamentals. But at the end of the day,”

most people just want to know what to do in a simple way. And that's really why I always want to

stick my landing by talking about foods that are not that difficult to get and quite easy to incorporate into your everyday life. One of the things that is probably the biggest problem with everybody that watches that lists is that research is it's just too much. It's too overwhelming. It's not simplified. I would love to sit here and talk with you for 20 hours on science. And I hope that we get to. But I also want to make sure that everybody has this sense of comfort knowing

it's not that difficult. In many aspects, there's simple things that we can do now. Obviously, conditions will require more intricate types of things that we need to get into. And of course, some people want to know the science. But I love what you do because we make it very easy here. And I want people to not get that sense of hopelessness. Because a lot of people have it,

“I read comments and the biggest complaints that people have are, well, what can we actually do?”

What are we supposed to do? Because everybody's throwing 50,000 different things at them and scaring them. So I'm thankful that you're actually giving the factual side of things and making it easy to understand. Look, if you eat too much or something, yeah, you're going to have a problem. But here's the benefit. And I love that. And I appreciate the way that you do it. Because it's real matter of fact, but it's easy to understand. So I really, I just want to say I appreciate the

hell out of that. Well, I, you know, listen, I also like to cook. And I think, you know, if I could encourage one activity, if you're not already there, is, you know, I mean, go do all the interesting biohacking kind of things that you're exploring. I'm, you know, I'm super fascinated by that. I'm, and I'm working in the longevity space now and healthy aging. There's so many interesting things about biomarkers. But if I could encourage you to anybody listening to add

“one activity that is going to be helpful to you that will give you tools to really amplify your”

own ability to biohack your own health. I would say learn how to cook. Yeah, it's not hard. And these days, I just tell you, Dylan, what I tell people to do is I want to make life interesting, right? So go into the grocery store, go to the produce section, identify a

vegetable or fruit that you've never seen before, and you don't know what to do with.

That you would normally ignore, you know, like I can tell you, I'd be a star fruit or dragon fruit, you know, if people are not familiar with that or, or it might be, um, I'll tell you, I, I ran into a, a farmer's market. I saw something called a fairy tale eggplant. It's like a tiny little eggplant with this incredible purple and white designer. I had no idea what to do with it. But here's what I encourage people to do. Punch into Google, the name of the food that you're

not familiar with, type in recipe and hit video, and watch somebody who knows what they're doing, teach you in a couple of minutes, how to turn it into something absolutely delicious. And if you've got sort of like the gumption to try it yourself, maybe not the first time, but maybe second time you see it, then try it out. You know, and then start to look up what are the healthy things in it. You know, everyone's got access to AI now, just, you know, dictate in there, like what's

healthy about fairy tale eggplant, what's healthy about, you know, star fruit or whatever, and let, you know, use the technology that we have available to us to serve it up to us, to empower us, to make that simple decision, throw it into your basket, okay, in your cart, take it out with you, and, you know, and have the kind of excitement, like, I'm going to try something brand new, this is gonna be fun, you know, a lot easier than skydiving, too. I, I eat out per year twice, and,

and I normally don't even eat, I just go to appease my wife. We don't eat out, we cook, everything at home, and I'll tell you this, and you, you probably love this. 90% or 95% of my food right now, and my diet that staples are things that I told myself I didn't like,

wouldn't eat, always thought I didn't like based on assumption. And, and I, I said to myself

one day, I said, what are you three years old? Like, just try it. If you don't like it, spit it out, get rid of it. Like, what are you going to do? Hurt ya? And I'll tell you what, Dr. Lee. I, some of, like, avocados, for example, I used to tell my wife, I hated them, and I literally cannot live without them, same with salmon, like these foods, and then you see how they make you feel. So, I, like, you try to just cook them, make them good, try different things, and figure out,

you know, can I give you a little, little fun tip about salmon? Please. So, salmon is really rich with

flesh of the salmon, if you get actually, you know, a responsibly raised, regenerally, you know, kind of farmed of salmon, it should be pretty good, better than the other stuff that might not be so well raised, okay? Right. You do know where the omega-3s mostly are? No. So, you get by a piece of salmon, right? So, you get a, they put it in the parchment to take it home, and you got to say, yeah, it's in the skin. Yeah. It's hugely in the skin. So, what you want to do, again, this is like,

because I like to cook, I like to kind of tell thoughts about, like, I'm not a food, I'm not a food

“network guy, but I, I, I love to watch it, but, I mean, I think that, you know, we should, we should”

feel comfortable talking about food. It shouldn't be so. Yeah. If you're going to actually cook your salmon, what, watch a video on how to do this. You got to dry it really well and get your, get your pan really hot and put skin side down and let that skin side crisp up. Oh, man. Right. You, what you're doing is you're, you're really creating a difference of texture. Your mobilizing those omega-3s, and then literally you flip it once and it's going to be done, you know,

in a very short period of time, like, like, you know, like less than, less than a couple of minutes, you'll be done. And now you can actually eat that crispy skin. It's like an extra treat. And now you're getting the omega-3s, you know, we're going to take a supplement if you like, sure. And most of us don't end up omega-3s to begin with, but I want people to feel like we can harness, we can bile hack ourselves with food. Just as easily, maybe even more sophisticated,

then we can with all these devices and it'll save us a little money and plus we get all the polyphenols, all the other nutrients, micro nutrients, all the dietary fiber, you know, that we actually can get. So this is about making great choices. So I'm a food is medicine guide, but I'm now applying it to healthy aging, longevity, and looking at those, those hallmarks of aging and to figure out, like, how do they apply? What can we amplify? I like starting with the natural starting with the basics.

Sure, we can always reach for the high tech, the more expensive stuff, but, you know,

“life is for the living, you know, and if you're spending all your time stressed out looking for the”

most complicated thing, I think that takes away from the quality of life. I agree, you know, I've talked about this a lot. I was a model and I was around body builders and then fitness, and I've had an eating disorder most of my life, and this struggled with how I view myself. And I woke up one day and went in the kitchen and I told my wife, I'm done. I'm just like, I'm one of those people, like, I'm spur of the moment, right? And she's been praying and praying,

and I'll tell you what, you've just nailed it. To do this, to enjoy it, to have the good relationship with it, to make it fun, because it is, and to test things and to see, wow, my body's responding. Like, I sat here and being a nutritionist, 15 years of knowing, but still saying, oh, you're the exception, that I hate that. And then I said, you know what, I know how to lose weight if this doesn't work. I can do it like this, and doing it, and then seeing the changes and seeing the body

response and then seeing the health, and then seeing my production go from like here to way up here. Even days, I feel like shit. I still feel good because of the food. And, you know, body builders

always want to take steroids and supplements, and then I realized, man, the answer is in the food.

It really is in the food. It's don't depend on supplements. Don't depend on protein powder. Use them for what they are, but get everything from food. Yeah, I mean, start with food. You let Mother Nature do the work for you, the heavy lifting.

“And then anything you need to top off, that's what the word supplement means, right?”

Off. And, you know, I, you know, I'm a proponent of wise, judicious supplementation. But, you know, I'm also somebody that likes to take the real complicated science and make it as practical as possible. You know, let the, you know, I'll geek out on my own, you know, on all the complicated stuff. But, you know what I'm talking to people, I know most people like myself, you know, when we, when we want to make an, take an action, I don't want to have to think too hard about it.

I wanted to be, it's going to second nature. And if I can communicate, you know, in this kind of

conversation or having, and we can do, well, we can do a world of good to ourselves and let the body do all that heavy lifting. We just need to make a few good decisions. And then you'll feel it. You will feel it. This is not, this is not voodoo. And it's not rocket science. Our body does all that work for us. I told you beforehand that we would pit through a fraction of a fraction of what we wanted to talk about. I warned you because I, I just knew how good this was going to be.

briefly tell people just a little bit about your book because I started to get into it. I just got it. It got sent to me too late. So I started to get into it, but I just want you to maybe just touch on some of the things in there because I've, I've already found so much value and just a brief bit that I've looked at. So just just give people a little bit of insight and we'll get into it more next time we talk, but just just a little brief synopsis of what they can expect to get from it.

Right. So I wrote two books. Both of the came near 10s best sellers. One of them is called E to B disease. It's not a book about disease. It's a book about health. Yeah.

“I remember a book called E to B. You're diet and it's not a diet book. It's an anti-diaboke to beat”

your diet. So you don't, you can be metabolically healthy without going on a diet. Right. So

I'm first setting out like what my books are actually about. Now, in my first book E to B disease,

I write about 200 foods, but it's really not about the food alone. It's really about how our body responds when we put inside it. So I explain using the state of the art science, how our body has five health defense systems that are hard-wired from the day we're born into our very last breath. And these health defense systems like our circulation and your genesis, which I study blood blood vessels, our stem cells, which we talked a little bit about on this episode.

Number three, our gut microbiome, which we've also talked about, and before our DNA, not just not just instructions for proteins, but actually it protects us from the environment. And then

“finally, our immune system really powerful to have in good balance to be able to tackle enemies”

both from the outside world, like viruses and bacteria, but also from inside our bodies like cancer cells. So what I talk about is this overall schema, where if you actually take good care of your body's five health defense systems and feed those systems with foods that amplify your defenses, that's called shields up. All right, we're just able to go through longer, harder, stronger through life without being susceptible to disease. In fact, what I say in my book,

when we get sick, which we all get to get sick, it's really not that we got ambushed by some bad guy. It's really that one of our shields went down. Your lower daughter doesn't work anymore. Your window latch went out. Your front gate, you know, is broken. And so what you want to do to heal is just to restore your health defenses. So 200 foods would recipes and kind of like a protocol and how to actually harness your health defenses of what my first second book is a sequel to the

first one. And I literally wrote it in the with the, I had no idea of my first because of me that's successful because I just wrote what I knew. And when it became this like runaway best seller, I got the, I was invited. I got the privilege to write a second book as a follow-up. And I thought you know, how do I follow up my first book that became so successful was built on 25 years of research.

And I thought, you know what, I'm always just researching more things myself anyway. I'm just

going to write about what I'm doing, which was on metabolism, right? Big topic. And so

“if, and I wrote it as a sequel, saying like, all right, what are the great sequel movies?”

So I actually asked people who are screenwriters and directors in Hollywood, like, what's the secret to writing a good sequel? Because I, I mean, I knew the science of it. And they said, well, you know, there's actually not that many great sequels out there in movie land, right? So Star Wars with the sequel Empire Strikes Back, one of the great sequels. You know, Godfather 1, Godfather 2, great sequel, Terminator 1, Terminator 2, great sequel.

Yeah. And there are elements to all of these movies that made the sequels like rock. So I literally tore a page from that playbook to figure out, like, what are the

through lines? What are the characters that can bring from my first book into my second book?

And then who are the new bad guys and the new threats and the new ways to overcome it? And then, you know, just like at the end of the Star Wars, at the end of the day, you got to throw everybody down the dust star and deliver the deliver the payload, the blow it up, right? So my second book is about body fat and how everything we thought we knew about body fat, the ring screw. And health that is actually an organ in our body,

like your liver, like your spleen, like your brain, like your heart, fat as an organ. And it has all kinds of hormonal things. It's a protective organ is organ. And it's actually the fuel tanks in our body. And I talked right about in this book, this landmark earth-shaking recent study that showed that over our entire lives from birth to death, over, let's say, eight plus decades that our human body only goes through four phases of metabolism,

part of it. The middle phase, which is rock-stating metabolism, how we're hardwired,

starts from age 20 and goes to age 60, our metabolism is hardwired so it doesn't change during that

“period. Wow. Okay. Anyway, so that's my, that's, that's what happened. Yeah. When all foods,”

and all the foods you can eat to activate your metabolism, to get good balance. And there's some really great recipes as well. Because as you can tell, I like to cook, so I put all kinds of like fun foods that I have in my own kitchen into the book. Man, you weren't given that and that's something to really end on because now I am so damn intrigued. You could see, I'm the most inquisitive

guy on the planet. So I got to know all of this. But this is good. So we have, I mean, we have plenty

of ammunition for future if you will come back because I tell you what, I had an extremely high expectation for this like very high. I was telling my wife about it this morning. Because normally, I, I love my interviews, but I was like, I was up earlier this morning. And I told her,

“and dude, you exceeded it by like a hundred. And I'm telling you, I had a very high expectation.”

I, I really did. And, and I knew, but I didn't know. And I really appreciate not just your knowledge, but your delivery of your knowledge, how genuine you are. And, and how, I could just see the amount of time that you put into this. There's no way on the planet Earth that a human could be this smart without really, really spending countless hours reading and researching and mastering what they do. And I for one know what that's like. And I appreciate that because it says a lot about you and your

care. And, and I know the, the mission here. And so I'm directly in line with you. And I truly, truly appreciate it. Well, it's been my pleasure to speak with you. I'd love to come back in the measure. We can delve into other areas of health wellness, longevity, biohacking that, you know, they got, and this is interesting. And we, I kind of, we kind of just scratched the surface. Oh, we, too. I got like hours of of things bait cancer related, heart related food related. I

got a lot of episodes with you. If you'll do them with me. I swear, I, I don't even know. I'm excited. But I'm like a little kid to happy with with everything here. So tell everybody and I'll link everything, obviously. But where, where are the best places to see your content and follow you and, et cetera? Yeah. Well, you know, I have a YouTube channel. My handle is at Dr. DR William Lee, L.I. I put up content regularly to talk about these interesting nuggets and dimensions like

our conversation. But I always try to make sure I'm giving people practical information.

Maybe that they didn't know about before. And that same handle you can find me on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook. And then, you know, my website is Dr. William Lee L.I. dot com. Check it out. I, you know, I regularly will do programs where I'll bring people together. I actually just launch a program called Grand Rounds. And Grand Rounds is kind of a masterclass. But I do it the way the doctors get together to talk to really exchange serious information. Because, you know,

“I think we live at a, we live at a time where there's an overload of information information.”

And you're not really sure what to trust or what's important. And so, you know, I decided to go unplug and strip down some of my masterclass material to say, look, let's just give, let's just get right down to it. Let's get down to the important stuff. And because doctors do it, we do it with ourselves all the time to share information. That's my Grand Rounds program. So I invite people to check it out. Love it, man. Well, thank you so much for coming here today.

And then giving me this amount of your precious time, I thoroughly appreciate it. I can't wait to talk to you more. I can't wait to show you to more people than you already have, hopefully. So, thank you, Dr. Lee. And I will look forward to having you on soon, my man. And that wraps up another one. So, stay tuned for more planning more to come, Dylan Jamelli, and Dr. William Lee, signing off.