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 This is episode number 1207 with Dr. William Lee.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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 Welcome back, my friend.
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Today's guest is Dr. William Lee.
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He is a world renowned physician, scientist, and speaker.
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His groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity.
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 His TED Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, has reached more than 11 million views.
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He has served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School, Tufts University, and Dartmouth Medical School, and he's also the bestselling author of Eat to Starve Cancer.
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 to beat disease the new science of how your body can heal itself this has been an inspiring interview and i love everything we talk about here all about how to heal yourself in this episode we discuss the science behind using food to beat diseases so cool the five different defense systems that our body has the importance of the gut microbiome which we've talked about a lot in the past on this show as well the top foods
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 to help you live longer the harmful foods that cause the most inflammation and disease these will shock you the groundbreaking discoveries dr lee is expecting us to find in the next 10 years and so much more and if you're enjoying this at any moment make sure to subscribe to this show
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 Share it with a few friends that you think would be inspired by this message as well.
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And I want to give a shout out to the fan of the week from Stevie who said, I've been listening to the School of Greatness for the past couple of months and it's truly been awesome to say the least.
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Through Louis and his inspirational guests, I have learned so many life skills to better understand myself and build better relationships with others.
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 I am so much more positive and believing in my full potential.
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Now learning from successful people who have gone through similar struggles in life has been very motivational and encouraging.
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So Stevie, big thank you for being a fan, for subscribing, for leaving a review over on Apple podcasts as well.
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You are the fan of the week.
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Okay.
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And just a moment, the one and only Dr. William Lee.
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 Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness.
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I'm very excited about our guest.
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Dr. William Lee is here.
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And you've got an incredible book called Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself.
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And I'm excited about this because I think a lot of people have been struggling with
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 figuring out what to eat.
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You know, I've had many different fasting experts come on here, longevity experts, and people that talk about reversing type 2 diabetes or even cancer by fasting and the process of how that supports you.
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But I've only talked about how to eat correctly to beat disease.
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Now,
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 There's, you share a lot of science behind how we can beat cancer and other diseases by changing our diet, but it doesn't seem possible for most of the population to even think about that.
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So how is this possible?
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 Yeah, well, you know, first of all, thanks for having me on.
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I love talking about making the impossible possible.
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And usually, first of all, you just have to kind of think through what your goals are.
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And so I'll explain sort of what my goals were when I got into this whole thing.
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So I'm a medical doctor.
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I'm trained as an internal medicine doc.
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And that means that I take care of men and women, young and old,
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 healthy and sick.
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And one of the things that I trained myself more or less to do is a little bit different than how most medical doctors think, which is, you know, we're trained to diagnose disease, chase it with drugs and keep chasing it with drugs, right?
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So my view has always been, we start healthy.
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 every now and then we get sick.
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But the real question is, how can we actually get back to health?
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And how do we prevent getting sick in the first place?
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So a little bit of a different orientation.
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And my goal has always been to keep health, protect health or to get you back to health.
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And I'm also as a medical doctor, you're not what I've been told is you're not taught about nutrition and actually teaching
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 how to eat properly to reverse disease or to prevent disease, I should say.
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So how come you seem to be one of the few that have gone outside of the box to say, hey, listen, we're not going to just pump everyone with drugs and put a Band-Aid on something.
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We're going to get to the root cause.
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 Yeah, well, so here's a little bit of the kind of the under the skirt truth about this.
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Medical schools teach medical students that usually get less than one month worth of nutrition education in their entire four years, and then it never gets revisited.
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 throughout your entire career.
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And in fact, nutrition, when I went to medical school, was kind of dismissed as something that dietitians actually did.
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And when I trained in the hospital, now, I trained at Massachusetts General Hospital, it's one of the Harvard teaching hospitals, okay?
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So I can run a COVID unit, I could run an emergency room, not a problem.
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But what I realized after many years of taking care of patients is that when my patients would ask me, hey doc,
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 What should I do for myself?
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I realized I was never taught that answer.
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So I thought that was wrong.
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Now, my background as a researcher actually comes into play in terms of how I got into this whole field because
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 I'm what you call a vascular biologist.
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So that really means that I study the science of blood vessels and blood vessels are important because we've got 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies.
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So you can imagine how important this network actually is.
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It delivers every bit of oxygen we breathe and all the nutrition we eat that goes through the bloodstream.
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You need the circulation to bring it to every cell and every organ.
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So that's what I study, my science.
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 So when I actually started almost 30 years ago in medicine, my goal was to figure out how could we actually first conquer diseases.
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So I went into the biotech area and we tried to figure out common denominators of disease.
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 And it comes back to food because food is one of those common solutions.
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But common denominators of disease actually means when you take a look at how we do research on Alzheimer's and diabetes and obesity and aging and heart disease and cancer, these are vertical silos.
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They're about an inch wide and a mile deep.
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And you get specialists that actually come in and they're really knowledgeable about what makes one disease different from another.
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 And I thought, look, you know, we should actually look at what makes diseases the same.
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So if you drain the Pacific, you get to figure out how the islands are connected, right?
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And so that's what I was interested in, because I figured if you could figure out the common denominators of a disease, then you had a shot at pulling the bow back and sending a single arrow through multiple diseases.
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 Now, I looked at angiogenesis, which is how the body grows blood vessels, that's my area, as one of those common denominators, and we were right.
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So I run the Angiogenesis Foundation.
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We figured out that when the body loses its control over its circulation,
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 Either you don't have enough blood vessels and wounds don't heal, or you have too many blood vessels and you either go blind or cancers grow.
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And so through biotechnology over a couple of decades, I actually have been involved with developing 41 FDA approved new treatments for cancer, diabetes, and prevent blindness, prevention of blindness.
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Okay.
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So that's my street cred.
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So when somebody basically says, oh, you know, how'd you get into nutrition?
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 Like, are you one of those doctors that don't believe in modern medicine?
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And I basically said, no, I actually develop modern medicines.
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But what I realized when I was actually working with my patients is that although we can actually come up with better, more sophisticated, more higher tech treatments for diseases these days,
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 The fact of the matter is we should be preventing disease in the first place.
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When you're talking about prevention, you can't talk about drugs.
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You got to talk about something like food.
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When I thought about it, and this is how I got into nutrition, I realized I wasn't taught about it, but I did have the skill set of actually having developed drugs and having invented many of the systems that drugs are tested in.
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 You know what, why don't we just throw some food into those systems and see what happens.
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And so for me, I'm one of those people that actually not just says food as medicine, but I actually study food as medicine.
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That's how I got here.
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Okay.
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Very cool.
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So what are the, I mean, so it is possible through food to beat cancer and diseases.
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And is that what I'm hearing you say?
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 Well, here's basically what I actually learned myself is that when it comes to food and health, food is actually a medicine that we all take three times a day, right?
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We try not to take prescription meds whenever we can avoid.
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And even if you write prescription meds, you don't want to be taking them forever.
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But food is something that you take
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 three times a day from the time we're born to our very last breath.
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When it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food.
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It's actually about how our body responds to what we put inside it.
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That's the real underlying secret.
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If you feed your body something that's not good for it, it's going to react poorly.
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 not going to be good for you.
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If you feed your body something that is good for it, it's going to activate its health defenses.
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That's what I write about in my book, Eat to Beat Diseases.
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How does a body actually maintain its health?
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Then what can we eat to help the body do it better?
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 Interesting.
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So, I mean, what are the key things we should be knowing about the body?
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Are all bodies the same when it comes to how foods, I guess, are consumed and assimilated through the body and the bloodstream and all these different things?
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Or is everybody different where some nutritional foods might impact positively but negatively in other bodies?
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What should we be knowing about the body?
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 Yeah, it's a great question.
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And first of all, I'm a scientist.
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So I will tell you how you can tell that I'm a scientist is that real scientists tell you, we don't know everything.
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Okay.
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And it's the kind of humility that we have to start with because so often you think about, you know, scientists being very smart and things, real scientists spend their time talking about what we, what we don't know.
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 Not what we do know.
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But you're asking me what we do know.
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I'll give you that answer.
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Look, our bodies are hardwired to be healthy.
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When we're growing in our mom's womb,
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 Our body as we're forming our bones and our heart and our organs and our limbs inside the form of the human that's being created are these health defenses so you think about the body like a fortress.
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 You know, we've all seen a medieval fortress, a castle, right?
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And basically, it's a happy community that lives inside there.
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You got a king, you got a queen, you got a princess, you got everything else going inside there.
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But that fortress has got to protect itself.
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So it's designed to repel enemies.
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It's got a moat.
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 It's got a drawbridge.
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It's got the little slips you throw, you fire arrows out of.
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It's got sloping walls so enemies can't crawl up.
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It's got traps.
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And by the way, you know, like in a medieval fort, the thing that I never realized, having been to quite a few castles, is that when you go into the entrance, there is a hole right above you, and it's called a murder hole.
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And it's basically, if people breach the drawbridge, they would just drop rocks, boulders down through that hole.
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 All right.
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So the body is designed better than a medieval castle.
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We've got our own defense systems and there's five of them that I know about.
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And I helped to kind of put together this picture, partly because I studied the biotechnology.
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How do you actually treat diseases using these systems?
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And when you forget about the disease part and you think about the health part, these are the systems, these five systems that maintain our health.
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So I'll tell you what they are.
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Okay.
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 The first health defense system is called angiogenesis, that's what I studied.
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Blood vessels, a 60,000 mile channel that delivers oxygen and nutrients everywhere.
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Got to have enough of them or our body is in trouble.
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 second angiogenesis.
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This is this is the channel of blood vessels or this is the this is how this this is how the body grows blood vessels.
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Okay, it is a whole system of growth.
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Okay, when we have just the right amount of blood vessels, our body is healthy.
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Now we're gonna go to work out.
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All right.
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 You're going to pump some iron, your muscles got to grow.
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Now you need a few more blood vessels.
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All right.
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If you skin your knee and fall off a bike, got to heal that wound.
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Underneath that scab, you got new blood vessels growing to heal.
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Now, the body never lets too many blood vessels to grow or causes problems.
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For example, cancers are forming in all of our bodies because we're filled with these dividing cells and some of them make mistakes.
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 but a microscopic cancer is completely harmless because it doesn't have a blood supply.
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And so our body prevents cancers from growing naturally by controlling the angiogenesis.
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So we just got enough for our good cells, not enough for the bad cells.
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So that's one of our health defenses.
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And there are treatments, including ones that I helped to develop that can cut off the blood supply to cancer by cutting off it by starving it.
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 So that's called antiandrogenic therapy.
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And the same treat, same approach has been used to prevent blindness.
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All right, so you don't have blood vessels leaking in the eye.
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However, turns out that sometimes your body needs a little help.
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So now you can actually use foods to actually amp up your body's androgenesis defenses.
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So that's just one of the defenses.
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Okay, that's the first one.
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What's the second one?
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 All right, second one is our stem cells, right?
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So when we were kids, Louis, you know, like our grade school teachers told us salamanders can regenerate, starfish can regenerate, but people can't regenerate, right?
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Wrong.
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You lose your hand, it's not gonna grow back.
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 Well, it turns out that people do regenerate.
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We can regenerate that quickly, and we regenerate from the inside out.
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A lizard can regenerate like a limb or a tail, but we regenerate our organs continuously.
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Our lung regenerates.
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Our liver regenerates.
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The lining of our mouth regenerates.
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If you've ever eaten a chip and scratched the inside of your mouth and it hurts,
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 Next day, all fixed because of regeneration.
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Now, here's the thing.
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It turns out that the way we naturally regenerate is through stem cells, not the kind you go to a strip mall to have injected into your knee, but this is the kind that we're born with.
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 When you and I were like sperm and egg meeting in our mom's womb and dividing, that's what we were.
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These are stem cells.
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We were all formed from these primitive cells that could be anything.
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It could be an eye.
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It could be a nose.
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It could be a heart.
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They formed our whole body, and there's always some overage.
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 Okay, and so you have more than you need to form your into a person.
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And when we're born, about 750 million stem cells are leftover, and they are packed up in a suitcase and stuffed into our bone marrow.
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 When we're born, even a little baby, inside their bone marrow, in this hollow of their bones, are 750 million stem cells.
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They are stored there like bullets in a bandolier, waiting for when they're needed so that when we grow up and we need to be regenerated,
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 You have too much to drink.
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Now your liver needs to be regenerated.
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You cut yourself.
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Now you need to actually heal that wound.
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These stem cells come flying out of our bone marrow like beans out of a hive to regenerate us, renew us from the inside out.
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 There are biotech efforts that I've been a part of to try to grow new heart, grow new brain, regenerate nerves, not ready for prime time yet.
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But it turns out that foods can coax these stem cells out of our bone marrow.
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So we regenerate faster.
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Huh?
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Which foods?
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This is the second one, but I'm curious which foods can help us.
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There are there are a number of them.
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I'll give you one right from the get go is dark chocolate.
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 Oh, you're speaking my language now.
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Okay.
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So dark.
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Yeah.
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Can you eat too much dark chocolate?
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That's the question.
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You know, I have never seen anything about an overdose of cacao.
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But I will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream just by having two cups of hot chocolate made with 80% high flavanol chocolate dark.
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Come on.
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 Yeah, it's been done in people 60 year olds with heart disease.
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 So wait, what happens when you, when you drink or you, you eat this dark chocolate?
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Okay.
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Yeah.
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The poly phenols in this dark chocolate that we, we know what they are.
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They're called pro anthocyanidin.
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So I'm a scientist.
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So my job is to actually know what are, what the inside chemicals actually are.
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These are natural chemicals.
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All right.
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Most people don't need to know that, but you drink it and it tastes good.
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That's all you need to know.
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But, but I'll tell you these, these natural chemicals found in cacao actually trigger.
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 a reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells.
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It is literally like bees flying out of a hive, can double the number of stem cells.
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What's the practical impact?
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Well, there was a study done at UCSF in San Francisco that looked at 60-year-old men with heart disease.
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These are people whose blood vessels were already not doing so well, and their blood flow wasn't going so well either, and their blood vessels were sick.
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 That's kind of the definition of heart disease.
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By having the stem cells coming out, they were able to actually double the resiliency, the function of their blood vessels.
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So they got better rebound, better agility.
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Their blood vessels are in better shape because their stem cells are regenerating their circulation.
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Wow.
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 So this is human studies, right?
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Like most, most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice or cells, I'm talking about human studies.
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And that's kind of where we are with food is medicine.
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It's not the kind of like the guesswork, like we can do serious research to get down to exactly what's actually happening at the human level.
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So that's the second health defense systems.
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Okay.
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Third one.
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 Third one is our gut microbiome.
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Now, people have been talking about gut health and microbiome.
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It's almost like a buzzword these days.
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And people are saying, well, we can actually scoop your poop and we can actually measure your microbiome and we can tell you what you need to eat and what you don't need to eat.
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 Again, I'm a scientist, so I will tell you that there are 39 trillion bacteria in the typical body.
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That's more to stars than in a night sky.
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We barely understand the gut bacteria, but what we do know
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 is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism, communicates with our brain, actually can help us heal from the inside out.
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And very importantly, our gut bacteria basically lives, if you think of your gut like a garden hose,
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 It's a tube and you were to cut a garden hose in half and you look inside it.
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There's a lining.
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Okay.
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Uh, the bacteria is inside the hose, but inside the wall of the garden hose, that's where your immune system, 70% of our immune system lives inside our gut.
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So our gut bacteria.
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So if you're feeding your gut, a lot of bad foods, it's probably, you're poisoning your immune system.
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You're preventing your gut bacteria.
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Now I'll tell you what's interesting about the gut bacteria.
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 your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the walls of the, of your gut immune systems in there 70%, right?
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Like a jelly roll, like a, like the jelly in a jelly roll and the gut bacteria is inside.
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So think about like a college student in a freshman dorm, they are talking to their roommate by pounding on the wall, right?
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What do you want?
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What kind of pizza do you want?
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 And they can answer you.
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And that's basically what our gut bacteria says to our immune system.
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So we got to keep that gut healthy.
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By the way, interestingly, and I've done research on this, certain gut bacteria can actually signal to your brain, it's a gut-brain axis, and cause your brain to release social hormones.
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 Wow.
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And can affect your mood.
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So, when you've got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut, I guarantee you, it's not just because you're irritated, it's affecting your brain as well.
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That's crazy.
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Yeah, we had Dr. Emron Mayer on who has got the gut, I think it's the gut-brain connection or the gut-immune connection or something like that.
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So, he's got a lot of great research on that.
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 Yeah.
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Well, the key thing though is that foods can actually help right-size your gut health.
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Think about like an ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef.
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Certain foods can support the ecology, the ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef, and certain ones actually kill the coral.
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We continuously want to keep it in good shape.
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 all the way through our lives.
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And by the way, even conditions like autism, Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia are all now seemingly connected to our gut bacteria.
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Really?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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Now, is there a way if someone
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 has those, are they pretty easy to reverse though?
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Or is that hard?
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Well, listen, we're just figuring this out because right now, medically, we prescribe medications to try to treat those things.
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And a lot of times those medications just blunt the symptoms.
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Okay, they cover up the symptoms, they don't get at the underlying cause.
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Now, we don't know exactly how the gut bacteria communicates with the brain completely yet, but there's one giant nerve
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 called the vagus nerve.
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It's like a giant shoe.
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It's about the thickness of a shoelace.
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And it hangs from our brain all the way down into our gut.
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Goes right near, wraps around our esophagus on the way down.
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And we think the gut bacteria basically sends text messages up to the brain through this big nerve.
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So the key though, is that foods can actually influence our gut bacteria, either good bacteria or bad bacteria.
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So that's important.
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So that's a third health defense system.
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SPEAKER_00
 Okay, so with the first... Antigenesis, number one.
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Yes.
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Stem cells, number two.
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Stem cells.
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Gut microbiome, number three.
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Okay, the fourth one?
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Number four, our DNA.
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Now, if you watch CSI, DNA is just sort of like a genetic fingerprint, a code that you can find on a crime scene.
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Or if you're actually trying to do ancestry, look for your ancestors, you figure out how much of you is Neanderthal, right?
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 I think I was 1% Neanderthal when I did it, yes.
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The key though is DNA is a lot more than our genetic code.
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It actually protects us from the environment.
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Now, what do I mean by that?
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Well, you know how if we are exposed to, we get sunburn, ultraviolet light, it damages your DNA and what happens?
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Skin cancer.
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 right?
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If you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant, it's going to actually damage your DNA in your lungs.
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You get lung cancer, right?
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But think about it.
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If you are in Los Angeles and you're driving on the I-10, or if you're actually just walking on a beach, you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation.
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So how come we don't get skin cancer all the time?
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Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself
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 from damage.
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The DNA is a protective mechanism from the environment.
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I always tell people when you're pumping gas, if you still drive a gas vehicle as opposed to an EV, I always ask people, do you stand upwind or downwind?
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 What do you do?
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Are you upwind or downwind?
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Do you know?
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Well, upwind, right?
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So you're not getting the fumes in, is that what you mean?
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Right, right, right.
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Well, if you're standing downwind, you can smell the fumes, right?
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And if you're smelling the fumes, you are poisoning the DNA in your lung.
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So how come we don't develop lung cancer after pumping gas?
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Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself.
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 And so our DNA is sort of like a self-defense mechanism against the environment, radon from your basement, off-gassing from the new car you just got, or the Uber that you're riding in, or the furniture that you got.
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 Right.
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So like this is this is this incredible defense mechanism against our environment.
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And then and foods can actually speed up the repair, help fix holes that are in our DNA.
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And then the other kind of piece, the resistance for our DNA's defense is that there's something called a telomere.
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I don't know if you've ever had anybody your show talk about telomeres.
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SPEAKER_00
 Yeah, yes, these are these are see if you're at the long of the telomere, the the longer you can live or something like that.
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Right.
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Well, I'll tell you basically what the you know, like to to give a to remind you to remind your listeners and viewers.
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Basically, if your DNA is like a shoelace, the telomere is like the little plastic cap at the end of the shoelace.
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 And over time, that little cap kind of wears down just like on a shoelace.
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And you know, when they, when that cap is gone, man, that your shoelace just falls apart.
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And that's what happens to our DNA.
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So we need that cap.
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That's called a telomere and it burns down like a life fuse.
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So, you know, like mission impossible, like the fuse, right?
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So this thing is burning down and when it burns down, that's it, your cells done.
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So what you want to do is to slow down your cellular aging and.
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 Harsh things that you do to your body, smoking cigarettes, being in a couch potato, being exposed to damaging oxidative stress, actually just being stressed out like we are now with this frigging pandemic.
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Those things all shorten our telomere.
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They burn the fuse faster.
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Stress.
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Yeah.
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But foods can slow it down and some foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere.
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 which is really cool from an aging perspective.
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What are those top three foods that help lengthen the telomeres?
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Green tea is one of them.
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 Coffee.
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Really?
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Yeah, it's amazing.
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I used to live in Italy and I just got into this habit of drinking espresso, so I got a little cup here.
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Amazingly, coffee actually lengthens your telomeres.
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Come on.
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I kid you not.
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It's quite amazing.
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Leafy greens, some of the polyphenols in leafy greens can also slow down.
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Some of them actually look like they can lengthen the telomeres as well.