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Dr William Li, New York Times Bestselling author of Eat to Beat your Diet and Eat to Beat Disease, is back on the podcast today talking about everything to do with food as medicine.
We discuss a huge amount today, across a range of subjects including:
Warning signs that people have too much sugar, refined carbohydrates in their diet
Alcohol and whether there is any amount that is healthy in the diet
Coffee and whether we should be drinking alternative sources of polyphenols
Williams thoughts on the lectin debate and whether we should be avoiding high lectin foods
Why and how food can burn specific types of fat
Organic vs conventional produce
Oils for cooking and the types of oils William prefers to use in his cooking and recipes
William W. Li, MD, is an internationally renowned physician and scientist. His research has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases including diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. He is also President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, and he is leading global initiatives on food as medicine.
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CHAPTERS:
Timecodes:
00:00 – Warning signs you’re having too much sugar
01:25 – How is sugar sneaking into your diet?
06:25 – Fuelling your body
13:30 – William li’ thoughts on alcohol
27:25 – Tea and Coffee: a deep dive
52:45 – William li’ take on lectins
01:02:00 – How healthy are oils?
01:09:00 – Organic vs Conventional produce
01:18:00 – Fat burning foods
01:39:00 – What ingredients William li is experimenting with
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You know, one of the things that people need to look out for, which is sensed by how you feel as an individual, so everyone’s different when you actually have overloaded yourself with sugars or carbs is really a feeling of lethargy or not having as much energy. Right. And it sounds ironic because sugar gives you energy. Right. Anybody knows you drink energy drinks. It’s like loaded with sugar and caffeine. You’d think that it would actually pump you up. But it’s really the fact that the aftermath of having too many of an overload of sugar and carbs tends to make you feel tired. A lot of people talk about, you know, the glucose spikes and dips, and that’s part of it as well. But I think that there are many other things that can actually occur, especially if you’re a cereal overload or of sugar and carbs. Yeah, I wanted. Okay, So what you’re talking about is the person who feels like they’re actually pretty healthy, yet they’re not feeling that well. And they will tell you or me as doctors, you know, I’m actually I’m a pretty healthy person, right? I mean, we all have people like that. When you really question them and ask them in detail what they’re actually doing, you find out that they’re drinking soda. Now, soda is probably one of the secret agents or evil agents of sugar that loads you down, you know, like anywhere from 7 to 9 teaspoons of refined sugar. And I always tell people who are surprised by that, right. You drink a can of your favourite soft drink the colas and they’re like, I can slug one of those down on on a hot day or when I’m really thirsty. Or I remember when I was in medical school, I had classmates that would drink a six pack of sodas every single day while they were studying. And and this is long before I really got into I was really researching food as medicine, but it would astound me. Right. So think about that. A can of soda having 7 to 9 teaspoons of refined sugar. If I. I always tell people if I gave you an empty glass in your kitchen and filled it with seven teaspoons of sugar and just handed to you to say down that people would go, No way, I’m going to do that. So I think soda is a sneaky way that you get actually a lot of an overload of of refined sugar. Now, what about the other person who basically and of course, if you’re snacking, you know, the ultra processed foods often taste good because they add sugar. But also. So do you know the pastries and cakes and things that people have around sort of eating nonchalantly without realising they’re getting the sugar? It now there is an alternative at culprit, frankly, where people who overdo things. Right. So here is the athlete, right. The the marathoner who basically said, no, no, no, listen, I’m really healthy. Let me tell you, I’ve got like 0% body fat and I eat fruits and vegetables. I’m like, you know, Mr. Plant based. But then you find out that they’re somebody who does extreme things. So they’ll sit down and they will actually eat ten oranges a day or they will, you know, have, you know, a bucket of blueberries. And yes, I think the other thing the other extreme is that you can actually get a lot of sugar by eating a lot of fruits that actually contain that sugar. So although, you know, I think that this is where I try to get people to understand that fruits are a safe form of safe route to get sugars because you get so many other good things with them and your body does need sugar. But like everything else, moderation is the key. You can have some too much of something that’s good and tip over at the point where you’re actually getting a little too much of it. So those are some of the sneaks, I would actually say, or, you know, the person for carbs, you know, somebody who is a real pasta lover. Right. And by the way, you see this in people who work in restaurants, especially people who work in the kitchen. They make these incredible dishes. And all of a sudden, you mentioned their blood pressure. Their blood pressure is really high and their blood sugars are really high. And they’re like, well, you know, I don’t even have time to eat. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I go to the gym and you find out that they’re eating, you know, pasta and and salted restaurant food all the time. So I think that’s another another place that it’s very sneaky to get carbs and sugar in is if you eat out all the time, you know, busy people who are travelling that don’t have the luxury of being able to plan everything, you know, mindfully. Sometimes they’re just downing whatever they can. And that’s another source, sneaky source of getting too many sugars and carbs. Yeah, yeah. What do you want. That like and why is that? Yeah, well, you know, the whole thing about calories is that it’s one word that has become a loaded time bomb because everyone feels that you can have that magic bullet. Simple answer solution to all of your health ailments. Calorie in and calorie out is way to oversimplistic and it’s really an outdated idea in itself. Back in the day. Let’s go back into a time machine and step 30 years behind to where we are today. And yes I mean I think that the state of the art of thinking about nutrition was looking at calories and proteins and fats and carbs. But we are way beyond that now. And so in today’s world, what we realise is a calorie is simply a unit, a measure of energy that we get from our food and that energy is sort of the fuel that the gasoline, the petrol that we load into our body, the same way that we actually go to the gas station and get fuel, petrol to load into our car. If you drive a car that uses still uses petrol and you know you fill it up and then you drive off. But I like to use that analogy about the car and petrol, because if you think about it this way, we, we all know that our cars run on fuel, but we don’t think about that fuel very much and we don’t think about all the interconnections between the fuel tank and the fuel injector and all the carburettor and the, you know, all the complicated things in the car engine. We just get it and go about our way, just like we go about in our life. The only time we start to focus on the fuel of the car is when the gas metre runs down the fuel tank gauge runs down, and then all of a sudden that’s all we can think about. I got to find a station to be able to fill up. Right. And that’s really the same thing in our body when our fuel body’s fuel tank runs low, our fuel gauge registers low. And it’s a complicated system. But think about our the gut brain axis as being our fuel tank, using hormones to signal our fuel gauge is that all of a sudden all you can think about is going to the kitchen or to the refrigerator or to get something to eat, grab something out to eat. Right? So that’s kind of that. And then the more you are hungry, the lower your fuel is, the more panicked you actually get about it. Just like when your fuel gauge is almost empty, like like you’re on the red line, all of a sudden, like your your pulses racing to find that petrol station so you don’t run out of gas in the side of the road. That’s that’s when we get hangry. Right. You go you’re like totally agitated. All right. So the point is that when you go to the gas station to fill up your tank with petrol, we in our bodies fill up our our, our body with fuel, which are the unit of fuel is not gallons, but it’s really calories. But just like the car, you know that you have a choice of different types of petrol you could put in. There’s the poor quality, cheap stuff. There is the more expensive stuff that’s higher quality and you know that you fill up your car a few times once in a while with really crappy fuel. It’s going to be okay, no problem. Your car’s going to be able to do it. But day after day, week after week, all you’re doing is using the cheapest, poor quality fuel. All right. Eventually your car’s really just not going to run very well because that car needs to be cared for. Same deal with calories. If you’re putting in fuel calories, that is higher quality, meaning having those polyphenols, having the fibre, all the good stuff like eating whole plant based foods, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes, it’s all giving us fuel and but all the other stuff really enriches the engine of our body so that we’re going to run longer and better, just like a lot of you. And by the way, here’s the other thing. If you owned a jalopy, an old crummy car that’s been handed down from, you know, an older sibling and then maybe from an uncle and it’s like barely chugging along, you know, that the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang kind of like gel jalopy. All right. You might you might be tempted to put poor quality fuel. Those a crappy car is going to break down faster if you don’t feed it quality fuel. All right. So that’s one thing, too. And a lot of people start out with not such a great health. And so you want this is if you’re starting out behind the eight ball. All right. If your body is sort of the jalopy and you want to get better, you want to actually immediately putting put higher quality, feel easy farmers market produce section of the grocery store, you know, choose the right fuel, not just calories, but all the other good stuff and your car will run better. You’ll notice it right away. On the other hand, if your car is a Ferrari, I guarantee you if you’ve invested that much into that beautiful Ferrari red vehicle, when you pull over to the station, you are not going to be putting the cheapest quality gas in there. So you need to actually step up your game regardless of what end of the spectrum you are. And that’s why a calorie is not a calorie and a calorie in and a calorie out is way too oversimplified. Not to mention the fact that there’s many ways I was just talking about the calorie in part not to mention there’s many other ways of thinking about the calorie out of. Which. Body is. Yeah. Rupi I’m glad you asked me about that because I have a maybe at a very humanistic way of thinking about alcohol. And I will talk about the science of the medicine in one second. But here’s what I want people to know from my voice. First of all, alcohol is part of our humanity as far back as humankind has been growing things and fermenting things. And, you know, whether it’s hops for beer or grapes for wine, we didn’t make an alcohol and fermented products can actually have some good things. You know, other fermented foods we know is good for gut health, but alcohol, which is a by-product of fermentation, is first and foremost something that’s been part of human ritual for tens of thousands of years. We drink together as a community in celebratory ways, in times of of special occasions, holidays, weddings, funerals, New year. And I think that it’s something that we can’t just brush off with this sort of paternalistic view about alcohol and sickness and illness. And the reason I put that out there is because I don’t want to say, you know, abstinence versus is indulgence. Now we’re starting to talk about feast or famine, gluttony, you know, and all those other kinds of humanistic words. Right. But here’s what I so so I do think that alcohol plays a very important role to to who we are as human beings. That said, I think that if you start taking alcohol in some of the context that we often see it drinking alone, drinking too much, whether you’re alone or with other people drinking hard liquor, not just for celebration, but drinking it for to treat anxiety or depression or loneliness or having another addict, some other addictive issue that you should get as a as part of of a salve for other ailments. And then, of course, genetics also play a role, can play a role in to overconsumption of alcohol. That overconsumption is is quite tricky because and here is really the second main point I want to make. The first being alcohol is part of our humanity and part of human ritual. The second part is that there is no data that I know of and I study this stuff that alcohol itself, ethanol, eto. For those of us who have studied chemistry, is actually beneficial to your health in any way, shape or form. Ethanol, which is alcohol or methanol, if you actually want to get the toxic form of it, is a toxin. It it actually does make you disinhibited. It does make us feel great. It does it does make you drunk. All right. But in no way, shape or form is ethanol beneficial for you. Ethanol poisons the liver. Ethanol poisons the heart. Ethanol poisons the brain. Again, take a drink. No problem. Your body will recover. Take two drinks. Still going to recover. Take two drinks every day. Okay. Which is what was the healthy amount that people was thinking? Two glasses of wine a day is probably good for you. That alcohol and those two glass of wine still is a poison for you. And so people who are going to embark on scheduling two drinks a day, we’re we’re going in the wrong direction. And I think this is what you’re talking about, this course correction, which is that the alcohol isn’t good for you. What what? So what is it that’s actually potentially beneficial or what did we recognise were what do we now recognise as maybe some upside of beverages that contain alcohol. Well, those fermented products of the grape skin in the case of wine. So red wine being better than white wine is really the fermented poly. The polyphenols that get extracted from grape skins is what makes red wine. Red, not what makes wine capable of making you feel tipsy. It’s the it’s the polyphenols. And so what’s really interesting and this is a research area that I’m actually pursuing now, is that if you were to actually take fermented you take wine and you take the same from the same place that grew that wine and process that wine and you take a look at the grape juice that fermented and you compare the polyphenols and the sugars. So they’re largely the same minus the alcohol I’m really interested in. And this is my area, one of the areas research I’m looking into. So are there real differences between grape juice versus wine? And and if you took wine itself and then remove the alcohol because you can remove alcohol, there are lab techniques to do that. Now you’ve got alcohol free wine. Do you actually have the same polyphenols and other healthful benefits? Because I think this is what we really need to be doing. Studying food is medicine is not character assassinate an entire beverage or night or any food on the basis of like what we thought it was good. Now it’s going to be bad. This is what causes whiplash. I say, for those of us who study this, let’s take a measured approach. And so what I just told you is that, number one, why alcohol’s part of our humanity. Number two, rituals are probably fine. You know, it’s just part of who we are. Number two is that, you know, alcohol itself, ethanol, the stuff that makes you tipsy is never healthy. It’s always a toxin Your body can recover most of the time. And number three, is that the good stuff associated to wine and beer are really in the juice and the liquid that’s not alcoholic. It’s the hops in the beer. It’s the fermented grape skin in the wine. And by the way, the reason we know this is almost certainly true is because if you take vodka, if you take pure straight liquor and you look at the health benefits of that, there’s none. When you remove most of the other stuff, you get no benefits And all downside and no. All right. You’re asking a really interesting question and I’m going to answer it first as a scientist, because I do research and I want to be fair to your question, but then I’m going to answer it again in a way that I think is more common sense for for people who are not scientists. So as a scientist, what you’re asking me is that, you know, like everything else, is the poison in the dose, you know, and this is an old concept that, you know, if you give a low dose, you actually get the cure. If you do a high dose, you get the poison hermit hormones. This is really this idea that a little is not enough. A little bit more is better, a little bit more, get you the best result and then you keep going. You actually get harm. And what’s that sweet spot, the bull’s eye from a dosing perspective. And so that would be a that would be a really, really worthy area of research to take a look at is are there commonly consumed substances we could talk about sugar as well. Okay. Another demonised substance where, you know, what’s the what’s the sweet spot that we could actually find in the lab in cells and animals. I think what you get the people, Ruby, where the systems are much more complicated, there’s gender difference. Our males and females the same, there’s age differences. Is that different on a teenager versus a middle age versus an elderly? There are genetic differences, of course, which probably are somewhat minor, although for when it comes to alcohol, there are people, particularly Asian descent, people that often are have low or missing levels of alcohol dehydrogenase. So a tincture of alcohol to many Asians will cause them to compete red and tipsy. When, you know, to a good Irishman or a Scotsman would never touch them, it would like they would bounce off their breastplate. So, you know, I think that there’s a genetics. I also that there’s a co-morbidities, right? People have different underlying conditions. So I think this would be worthy to study conceptually in the lab, but I hesitate in saying that there’s even a little bit of alcohol that might be beneficial because we don’t have the evidence for that, although in theory it may be true. I mean, here’s here’s a way to think about it. If you trigger a little injury, you’re actually going to trigger your body’s health defences to repair. In triggering that repair, Could we be setting off a domino effect for repair and other areas? Okay. So so, you know, I think theoretically that’s that’s actually a really good question. In practice it’s probably difficult to measure. And then here’s the other kind of common common sense concept when it comes to alcohol. And, you know, you and I have talked about this before on the show and and I know a lot of people are curious about this because of the role of alcohol in our society, in our and in many of our individual lives. This is the whole thing. If you actually practice moderation and you don’t drink too often and you don’t drink too much, you’re probably going to be just fine. But if you start to pursue or find an excuse to regularly drink alcohol day in and day out, week after week, you know, this is sort of the pattern that I, I often see in patients. You know, you’re setting yourself up for a problem. It’s going to happen. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but eventually you’ll reach the tipping point in your body because, you know, as we all get older, we become more vulnerable naturally, especially if you don’t take care of yourself other in other ways. And these other ways. This is a complex global nature of health. Well, we’re talking about health. We’re talking about shoring up this remarkable thing called the human body that has many different ways that it protects who we are, it protects our wellbeing. And so I’m also, while I’m hesitant to justify any benefits of ethanol alcohol, I’m also very hesitant to demonise anything categorically because our body can actually stand back. So I’m saying that if you’re actually toasting somebody at New Year’s or at a wedding, I would say, please celebrate your humanity. That’s going to be just fine. I love that. Excuse that that was. Good. Me too. All right. I’m going to confess, I am somebody who loves coffee. I grew up as a as with an Asian background in a family that drank tea all the time. Green tea, oolong tea. I was around my parents, my grandparents. They drank 6 to 10 cups easily a day. You could never find them without a cup of tea. But when I went to college, I started drinking coffee and I did. And I drank it, you know, kind of to stay up to do my homework and study for exams. That changed for me, actually, because I did it before I went to medical school to get, you know, to learn medicine. I did a gap year and in my gap year, what I was what I set out to do was to study the connection between food, health and culture. That was something that’s always interested me personally. So I spent a year doing that in Italy and in Greece. And so this was long before people talked about the Mediterranean diet. I, I was just naturally curious about this intersection of culture and food and health. And the first thing I noticed was a difference in the way that people drank coffee. There. And so something that was sort of a side side habit in college suddenly became something that I learned. You know, you could become an aficionados. You could actually become sort of a true student of coffee and you could taste the differences. So I developed a lifelong habit of having an espresso or two in the morning, occasionally a cappuccino, and then I would drink coffee throughout the day. Of course, in med school all the time. I drink coffee. Probably not very good quality coffee, in fact, definitely not very good quality coffee. But. But now. Now in my home, I actually do like coffee. So let’s circle back. You know, now that I’ve actually made my confession to Father Rupi. I will. I will. I will. I will now tell you that, you know, as a food medicine researcher, coffee like wine is a goes way back. In fact, we don’t even know where the origins of coffee came from, other than probably around Ethiopia in that part of Africa at some point where the coffee plants naturally grew and coffee was, you know, cooked in different, I mean, prepared in different ways. You could boil the green coffee beans, you could roast them. What we see now at the at the coffee, at the cafe, you know what the baristas actually do or what you might do in your own little, you know, kitchen espresso maker, totally different than how traditional coffee was actually made. And so there’s so many ways of doing it. You get largely the same flavours and you get different amounts of caffeine. I’m going to talk about caffeine in a second, but I am putting this cultural context around it. So so people don’t feel like, again, this whole paternalistic, judgemental character assassination, there’s a there’s a real component to this. I remember when I went to Italy for the first time and lived there, I was amazed that depending on how finely you ground the coffee, the taste would change and the amount of caffeine that you would actually get also changed completely. And then I was dumbstruck and I think you would say gobsmacked when when I went to Greece and I watched people just dump coffee grounds into a container, they would just boil and then pour the whole thing into the cup and you’d be drinking in the coffee grounds. And I’m like, Wow, that’s amazing because you get this giant hit of caffeine, right? I mean, Greek coffee is like the equivalent of a machete. You’re just drinking everything. All right. So the fact of the matter is, is that caffeine is very much part of the neurone activating components of coffee that we tend to assign to coffee. But going way back to the origins of this beverage, which we don’t, which we don’t really know about, but it really, again, transcends different cultures where the plant was encountered or beans were traded not so much in Asia, but but mostly in sort of the Europe European side. I think Asia was mostly tea. The fact of the matter is that this became one of the common beverages, you know, after what drinking water that was consumed, the amount of caffeine is is what we attribute it to. But there’s many other polyphenol sales and even some dietary fibre that’s found in the coffee bean. And depending on whether you filter it and how finely you ground it, you get other benefits. So look, I want to come back to caffeine in a second. Is this what everybody thinks about? But a lot of people don’t know this, but coffee contains a natural bioactive. Natural chemical from Mother Nature’s pharmacy with an F, not a patch that’s called chlorogenic acid. Chlorogenic acid. All right. And Chlorogenic acid does a lot of great things for our body. Number one, it promotes healthy circulation. All right? It helps the lining of our blood vessels. The endothelium function better. Chlorogenic acid in the lab has also been shown to actually cut off the blood supply to cancer. So it actually can sort of act as a volume switch to control where the healthy blood vessels are growing. So that’s a really good thing. Chlorogenic acid also helps promote our stem cells for recovery, so it actually helps us, our stem cells repair our own body from the inside out. Chlorogenic acid also is a prebiotic for our gut bacteria, healthy gut healthy body, healthy immune system, healthy brain coming from a cup of coffee has nothing to do with caffeine. All right. Chlorogenic acid, a powerful antioxidant to protect us from environmental exposures to the chemistry chemicals that we might have from our water bottles, from the off gassing of our cup carpet, from the ultraviolet radiation, from the sun chlorogenic acids protective against that like many other bioactive. And then chlorogenic acid also lowers inflammation, improves immunity, and it actually triggers our metabolism to burn down harmful body fat. So in fact, it’s good for our metabolism as well. And studies have actually shown that coffee or chlorogenic acid in the lab and in clinic and caffeine, but also caffeine free coffee will do the same thing, will help you burn down excess harmful body fat. So all this to say that there is a plethora of natural chemicals of food as medicine, people are studying. and one more thing I got to tell you. Why do why does coffee even have what is a coffee bean even contain caffeine and chlorogenic acid? All right, here’s the thing. Tea also contains some caffeine. Right? So if you were a botanist and I’ve spoken to many in my research, I was amazed to learn that tea and coffee plants both produce caffeine because caffeine made by naturally by the plant is a natural pesticide insecticide. So bugs, it keeps down, it keeps away the bugs from ravaging the coffee plant and to the later in the season you harvest the bean. The it deeper into the summer when the bugs and gnats and flies and everything are flying all around. They produce more and more caffeine. Okay, so late harvest pigs have much more caffeine right now same as chlorogenic acid before a different reason Chlorogenic acid. Again, I learned this from a botanist and then really dug into it myself. And eureka, like the light bulb goes of my head, like, I really get that now. So chlorogenic acid is a natural substance made by the plant as a wound healing response and, and you might say, What do you mean? Well, look, when you actually grow a plant in a natural way, no pesticides. The bugs are out there. The coffee is going to make more caffeine to keep the bugs down. Protect them. Keep the bugs. Okay. So, yeah, you know, I don’t want to be eating that. But then but there are some will get through and the bugs nibble on the leaves in the stems of the coffee plant. And as a result of that injury to the leaf or the stem, the plant heals itself with chlorogenic acid. So it produces more. So when you actually are having organic coffee grown without pesticides, you will actually get more chlorogenic acid. In fact, up to three fold, more chlorogenic acid than coffee beans grown in a conventional pesticide setting. So not just less of the bad stuff. Nobody wants pesticides in their coffee, but more. It’s a good stuff. And that’s what that that would that would excite me. That would make give me reason to invest in organic coffee. So, yeah, so. So every individual is different. Someone like me, I can drink a lot of coffee and the caffeine doesn’t actually do that. I’m not that sensitive to caffeine. All right? In fact, I don’t drink my coffee for the caffeine. I like the taste. But for some people and I know and I have many friends that are like this, they’re exquisitely sensitive to caffeine. If they have even a sip of coffee after 5 p.m. in the afternoon, they’ll be up all night. They just, you know, maybe some of it psychosomatic. But but the bottom line is that they it really, really agitates them. Some people who have trigger happy heart rhythms like atrial fibrillation. If you drink coffee, coffee with a lot of caffeine, it can trigger your A-fib, which we as doctors know is a dangerous condition and that you need to really try to prevent your heart from being from getting into that situation. And so another example of it could be in your brain, it could be your heart. And and caffeine, by the way, is not just activating in one way. Caffeine can also actually by itself can stimulate your metabolism as well. So a little bit actually is not going to be bad for you. And when you have decaf coffee, let’s say your sense of the caffeine, but you like the taste of coffee, definitely go for the decaffeinated. But I’ll tell you, the way they do, the way that the manufacturers do Decaf Nation, it’s impossible to remove all the caffeine. They can remove 90% of it, but there’s still a little tiny bit a league. I still get a little bit of caffeine and so you might so even decaf coffee you’re getting a little bit of that. And again, caffeine is not a categorically good guy or bad guy. If your body can tolerate it in the decaffeinated side, you’re probably fine. If you like the taste of coffee, if you find any amount of coffee, it’s somehow makes you feel uncomfortable. I always tell people, first and foremost, listen to your body. All right. Don’t follow a trend or recommendation from anybody, ourselves included. If when you try the food or the beverage, it makes you feel bad, that’s a warning signal. That’s a red flag, a distress signal inside your body. You should always pay heed to that. And that will. Yeah, I want to I want to make a comment about mushrooms because I think that’s really important. I’ve been, you know, I’ve studied mushroom. First of all, I love to eat mushrooms. I’ve studied mushrooms, I like to cook mushrooms as well. And I and I and I have an opinion about the current state of mushroom or mycology, you know, the fandom of mushrooms. Okay. And first of all, mushrooms are pretty powerful subject. You know, they’re and they’re the way easiest way to think about mushrooms that there’s culinary mushrooms that are used in cooking. You know, your portobello, your white button mushrooms, your morales and yes should mushrooms mushroom also is a culinary mushroom. Okay. But then there’s medicinal mushrooms and you’ve got your lion’s mane, you’ve got your chaga, you’ve got your reishi, a whole bunch of turkey tail, etc., etc., etc.. Should Turkey also fall into that category as well? Okay. My turkey also bridges culinary and medicinal, but what I tell people to do is that if you’re trying to incorporate mushrooms into your everyday life, think about that in the culinary sense, because you’re going to get the vitamin D, you’re going to get the dietary fibre, the beta glucans, the healthy things that activate your body’s health defences and activate your metabolism, help you burn body fat just by having the culinary version. And I think in the let’s call it the Western world, that world of trend making and trend setting, some very excited person reached over into the canon of Asian medicinal mushrooms. Okay. And started pulling out these mushrooms that were never eaten regularly but only used for healing purposes. And this is the ratio that the cordyceps, the, you know, the turkey tail, everything, all that kind of stuff. Ghetto dano elicit them. Look, it’s the stuff that you can find easily in social media. You can find them actually in a grocery store. Now, believe it or not, those contain a researchers like me have now discovered that those medicinal mushrooms contain previously undiscovered polysaccharides, peptides and other small molecules that actually are not present in the culinary mushrooms. They’re not present in the edible stuff. The portobello is opportunities, but they’re present in these medicinal mushrooms. Medicinal mushroom, by the way, tend to be very, very bitter. You know, they’re hard to actually have by themselves. And so, you know, the bitter, bitter, bitter tends to be kind of a sign of a Buddhist. So property, Right. So what I tell people is don’t mix mushrooms into one category. You got your culinary mushrooms that you can cook with every day and enjoy them and eat good source of dietary fibre, good for gut health, good for your metabolism. Then there’s their healing mushrooms, medicinal mushrooms. Take a look. If you’re going to do your research on this, take a look at their traditional medicinal uses. You know, were they used for illnesses that were characterised by hot versus cold? You know, the Asian way of thinking about it? Look at their use as an aggravating medicine. They were not used on a daily basis to be ground up in your pepper mill, to actually put into your coffee or sprinkle on your salad. This is a modern translation of things that were used originally in medicine. By the way. You would not go into your medicine cabinet and take a puddle pills and open them up and put them in a spice grinder and sprinkle them on your on your salad either. So I would say be careful with these medicinal mushrooms. We don’t know enough about them when they’re and outside of the healing setting, supervised healing setting to know what they do. So this is an area of research. I think the whole mycology field is super fascinating. We are sure to discover more health benefits from these incredible medicinal mushrooms, but I just caution people that if you want to get the real benefits of mushrooms, for the most part, you can get them just from the culinary side that you would get. You would see a home chef, your mother or your grandmother would have cooked with them. But you okay. And so this is what I love to talk about, is the of food, right? So what is matcha? I mean, much is this beautiful green powder, fine green powder. That is so fine. You need a whisk to really kind of get it to stir into hot water properly. That’s the traditional, what they call it, ceremonial matcha. You can also buy just simple powdered matcha you put into a hot water and dissolves instantly. Okay, Crystallised matcha. But here’s the thing. If you understand tea, you’ll realise that. And I’ve been actually and tea plantations in Asia. My my great uncle, who lived to 104 lives at the base of a team out. And so he used to take me walking around the tea plantations and you know, when he was in his nineties he was walking independently and he was drinking, attributing his longevity to tea drinking. Okay. So mostly little ladies would go out there with a bamboo hamper and then pick leaves at different times of the season in the spring, they get the early buds, which there’s not many insects out. So the caffeine is low later on in the summertime and later in the summer, more bugs out there. They pick the leaves and a second crop of picking, there’s more caffeine. So again, the time the season of picking the time in the season also matters in the amount of caffeine that’s in there, number one. So it depends on your matcha, what part of the season it was picked on in terms of the caffeine content. Now, the other thing about matcha is, that it’s quite different from loose leaf tea that you might find in a Chinese restaurant. It’s very different than the tea. You would have it in English, afternoon tea ceremony, even a tea in a bag, you know, or steeped tea or you get the pure liquid, but you don’t see the leaves or you have the Dunkin bags. Now, matcha is actually the powder. How much meat? Well, about three weeks before harvest in Japan, where the original matcha was, the methodology was developed. They they throw a canopy over the leaves so that they don’t get direct sun anymore. That canopy or shade mellows out. The strong flavours of tea. Okay, we don’t know exactly how, but it changes the chemical makeup to make it a little bit more mellow. Right? Less direct sunshine. You don’t need as much sunscreen. You’re right. Your skin’s not going to react as much. That’s what they do. They actually put a canopy over to shade that moisture plant. I want to say it’s 21 days or 20 days before harvest. And then when they pick them, they take the leaves, they dry them, they’re dried in the open air, and then they kind of roast them very, very slightly. They’re not oxidised. All right. Most tea, especially English breakfast tea, you know, or Earl Grey, highly oxidised. So it’s a processing. The processing changes, the flavour alters chemical structure, the chemicals in them a little bit. But for matcha they don’t really, really oxidise it deeply. Then they ground the entire leaf into this powder. So whereas if you are steeping tea in a bag or in a pot, you are not getting any of the leaf. There’s fibre, you’re not getting all of the polyphenol, so you’re just getting whatever dissolves out into the water. For matcha you are getting every bit of die of fibre that’s in the tea leaf. That fibre means that you are actually activating your gut microbiome. It is a powerful prebiotic that feeds your gut microbiome. So much is much more gut healthy than other teas because you’re getting that big bolus of fibre. It also contains all of the polyphenols. You’re not leaving it to chance that some of it might dissolve out, some of it might be stuck in the leaf. Right in the tea bag. You throw the tea bag away, you’re throwing away some polyphenols here, you’re grounding everything and you’re drinking everything. Now you’re getting the full dose, everything that that tea plant can actually contribute to. And in addition to the Catechins and the Theia flavonoids and the theobromine and all these other things that are found in tea that can activate other parts of your your brain as a part of your metabolism, other parts of your body’s health defences. You’re just getting more with matcha because of the nature of what it says. So if you ever go to a Japanese restaurant and you’re sitting at the sushi bar and they ask and they want some green tea, oftentimes they’ll for you so much tea and you know, you’re getting really high test stuff. Matcha is the espresso of tea. Yeah. So that’s that’s about. All that. Yeah. Okay. Lectins have become known in the public as sort of a harmful, deadly aspect of foods you must avoid. And I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. And the reason I say that with authority is that as a researcher, I study blood vessels and and I study the body and I study what’s inside the body. Our own body is filled with lectins. There are hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of lectins You can’t you can’t just say that lectins are bad for you. You must stay away from them because they’re filtered through our bodies, our inside our body. In fact, lectins inside our body are part of the connective tissue that holds us together. They are like the grout between bricks on the brick wall. They help us stop. They help our stick together. They help us function. You know, if you want your teeth to stick into your jaw and not fall out, you need lectins, you know? So every aspect of our body will have lectins and listen, as researcher, we we, we stand for Lectins. We know this because we do special stains for lectins when we’re studying human cells or animal cells and you can see them everywhere, okay? And they are performing in important biological healthful functions. Form and function are what Lectins actually do. Now there are same similarly of the present in humans are probably present in our food system as well. The President Animal foods, seafood, poultry, livestock. They’re also present in plant based foods because they hold things together. They’re not the only thing to hold things together, but they hold things together now of the hundreds and hundreds of different types of lectins. Indeed, there are some a few that are actually deadly poisons. And you can order from a chemical warehouse if you’re studying those poisons. All right. But they are not the things that you would find in the grocery store or the farmer’s market. I want to really kind of take down everybody’s anxiety and do a reset. So if you were a laptop, I would just, you know, control shift and reboot you hard reboot. Okay. To say lectins are inside us. They’re perfectly fine. They’re everywhere. There are some poisonous like things, but they’re not in your tomatoes, they’re not in your eggplants. And you know, it’s one of these urban legends I want to say rupi that probably. And I like to think the positively of most people, probably some well-intentioned person read about Lectins as a poison and then started to do their research and found, my gosh, tomatoes have lectins. my gosh, all these other foods are Lectins Well, then they just started to connect the dots. And I will say inadvertently, a assigning a negative attribute without understanding the all the details between the different families elect and that are that are out there. Same thing by the way you know happens with phyto oestrogen ends in plants like soy. Some well-intentioned person said human breast cancers are oestrogen sensitive, some are humans have certain sensitive and soy has phytoestrogens. They ignore the phyto part oestrogen oestrogen. Wow. Must avoid astronauts. We would never do this as sort of scientists or physicians. If you actually look at the chemical structure, they don’t look anything the same plant, phytoestrogens block human oestrogen. It’s just like Mother Nature’s tamoxifen. For those of you you’re familiar with, you know, hormonal therapy for breast cancer. So again, one of the things that I think is so important that, you know, your podcast is able to do is to surface these controversial topics and bring out people who, you know, are able to who study them and who are able to bring a different perspective to help clear up the confusion. And in some cases, if there’s an urban legend, kind of a false notion, a commonly held false notion, just to clear that up, do the reset so that people are don’t fear their food. I think there’s way too much fear about food. It’s not that it doesn’t help us embrace the healthful properties of of what we can get in the kitchen. Yeah. Well yeah, yeah. Well, I know. And I’ll also tell you that if you look at the so-called blue zones, they, you know, where people live long and live well, okay. Or live well as they age as long as possible. I heard that in Okinawa, which is one of the blue zones, there are as there’s like a 90 year old lady female rock band that goes on tour. And that’s how healthy these people are, you know, beyond the the obvious things that they’re eating a lot of plants and and they’re exercising and good social good social is the fact that the healthiest parts of the world happen to come from some of the healthiest cultures of the traditional cultures of the world, which is in Asia and in the Mediterranean. Asia is not one country or a few countries. Asia is a whole plethora of countries, dozens of countries, as is the Mediterranean, all the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. the Mediterranean Sea. So if you take a look at how people, societies in those areas of the world have lived for generations, maybe hundreds of years, you know, think about it. I mean, have you ever been back to, you know, your ancestral land or. I’ve been back to China? If you go if you go back to there and you’re and you to a restaurant or you eat at someone’s home or you have somebody come over to help you prepare some food every day, it’s a different cornucopia of ingredients and flavours. People don’t do the same thing. They don’t rinse and repeat every single day like we often do in Western modern Western countries. Same soup and salad, the same, you know, the same veggies over and over and over again. Diversity that only is beneficial for the soul and beneficial for our brain because diversity actually exercises our brain. When you’re recognising different foods, it’s a brain workout so you don’t have to go to the gym. You can just go to the kitchen to get a little brain workout every day. But it’s also good for our gut, our gut microbiome craves diversity. The more diverse foods you eat, the more diversity, the more that the eco system of our gut flushes itself out, which ultimately helps us lower inflammation in our body. So something easy, which is to actually eat a lot of different things that are good for you. Actually, we get the payoff from inside our gut. Yeah, I get that. You know? Okay, look, oils are all fats, and our body needs some fats, but not too many fats. So regardless of which fat you choose, if you have too much of it is going to overload your body the way that we started this conversation. Talk about overload of sugars and carbs. And this is we need sugars. We need carbs to run our engine, the Ferrari of our body. We need that. And we need oil, too. We need some fats. But if you overload on it, you’re going to run into trouble. Okay. So that said, I will tell you that the oils that I like to use in my own kitchen, I think we’ve had this conversation before, but I really cook with two types of oil. I like to cook with olive oil. Extra virgin olive oil is my preferred and I can I also well enjoy extra virgin olive uncooked like outside of cooking, but also cook with it as well. I’m always mindful of how much oil I use. All right. And I never deep fry things because that’s just automatically inviting a huge amount of oil. That’s just my preference. In my kitchen, I will use avocado oil as well. That’s also a healthful oil. And it’s very light and you can actually cook it high heat. I like to cook in different techniques and so I like to use oils that are able to actually take high heat, like avocado oil can be looked at a higher temperature than olive oil. Olive oil, by the way, can also be cooked at high temperature. That’s also a little bit of a urban legend, but it has a lot of extra flavour to it that avocado oil doesn’t allow. Both of those happen to be healthier oils. But again, the quantity the amount is is is important. Now, when it comes to olive oil, you know, most of the studies epidemiology studies looking at the correlation between the association between olive oil and health has shown, you know, people who have olive oil, who use olive oil, consume olive oil, are healthier than people who don’t consume olive oil. Well, how much is how much is a dose? I’m always into the food dose, the healthy amounts tend to revolve around three tablespoons of olive oil a day. Generally. No, I don’t recommend that people go out and, you know, take a measuring spoon and then drink that. I know some people hearing this are going to go immediately. I’m going to go out and by measuring spoon for olive oil. Look, if you cook foods using olive oil, try not to use three more than three tablespoons or if you do try to drain the oil. So you’re not getting too much more than that. So that’s kind of like this. The reasonable man’s way or reasonable person’s way of looking at this. Okay. So we know olive oil is healthy for you. It’s a healthier fat. It also has lots of bioactive which give you the flavour of of the olives, the back of the throat, a taste for olive oil. That’s because it’s still got an extra virgin means that it’s not filtered. You’re getting the little bits of the olive again, like wine. You’re getting the kind of the good stuff from the plant itself. It’s not the fat, it’s actually the stuff that is floating around in there. Extra virgin olive oil, avocados, avocados have something called avocat and B that’s also present in the flesh and therefore and a little bit in the oil and activates your metabolism. So not only do you get some healthier fats, you also get some extra bioactive as well. That’s one way to think about these oils. Now back to your question about like unhealthy oils. Yeah, my this is my feeling is that because I’m very reluctant to do character assassination of foods. All right. not oils are bad. Let’s let’s let’s put a scarlet A in all of them and then let’s imprison them all. I don’t, I don’t go for that. I would say that if you are using oil in moderation, it’s probably fine. Be very careful about saturated fats, even that. But even for that, the jury is still out about ghee. I mean, ghee appears to be a healthier way of using know. The clarified butter is better because of the clarification process. We’re still actively researching this. So I think that, you know, a lot of the stuff out there in in social media and on the Internet that categorically denounce one entire category of food on the basis of a theory is probably the, you know, kind of the premature death kind of concept. I think I would stick with the things that we know are beneficial, consume those in moderation, and then try not to overload on anything. Because, by the way, let’s say you found this magic oil, health, oil that’s good for you. You still wouldn’t want to drink at drink that, consume that in large quantities anyway, every day. Yeah. Yeah. Give it, give it it, give it a shot. Give it a shot. Well we’ll make well we’ll do a chilli oil taste test with different oils. The one. Yeah. Again. You know I’ve been learning along the way as you have about organic. I originally when the concept of organic first came out and I think it was in the nineties, we started seeing this more commonly certainly in the later states I actually rebelled against organic and the reason was I was seeing all these beautiful foods that, you know, look like they were painted by, you know, Rembrandts and they were super expensive. BV And I just thought and the argument was you get less pesticides by grown by grown more naturally. And I just felt bad I literally had this internal revulsion about paying more money for less harmful ingredients or chemicals. Why would I want to do that? You know, like what kind of what kind of sick world are we in where we actually have to pay more for less harmful things? And so but I have actually changed my mind because over time, the botanists have actually been educating me about, as we were talking about with coffee, the role of a plant living in its natural ecosystem that’s unperturbed by artificial chemicals. All right. And so I thought about it less from the health side. I learned about it from the plant side. And I’m one of these really curious people. So when somebody is an expert in something that I, you know, that I happen to encounter, I want to know everything about it. And so the botanist told me, you know, the best way for a plant to grow for a fruit or vegetable that we eat, the edible part to be produced is really to grow with natural sunlight, with natural rain, with natural soil, irrigation, and and surprisingly to me, with natural insects. So you’ve got another, another creature. So by the way, you’ve got the microbiome of the soil. We think about gut microbiome, but there’s actually a microbiome of the soil. There’s also a microbiome that grows around the plants itself. Natural bacteria on the plants. Yeah, you’re rinsing off for 60 seconds and when you take the plant home, you think you’re getting rid of all that bacteria? Nope, we’re eating. Most of these vegetables are slightly probiotic. All right. But but the bacteria on the plants that you play a huge role. But these insects that we don’t see and if we saw them, we probably wouldn’t want to see them. For most of us that are flying around, crawling around, nibbling on the leaves and the stems, this is the whole thing. Most of the insects don’t. Birds will eat the fruit or eat, you know. But but insects actually eat the leaves, they like the leaves form. Okay. And so they never want to leave. They nibbling stems and and a universal part of plant biology seems to be when grown in the most natural setting which is better for the plant that the plants reaction to wounding by having these little nibbles and injuries is to produce more polyphenols, more bioactive, more chlorogenic acid. The Case of Strawberries, which was published in the journal Nature Organic strawberries compared to grown without pesticides compared to strawberries grown with pesticides, the plants definitely looked better when there was pesticides used because you got the leaves. Are intact, there are fewer bugs, there were more the fruits that were harvestable because the yield was better, because there was less bugs and nibbling on the plant. But when you looked inside each strawberry that the ellagic acid, which is one of the bioactive was found in strawberries, was in the organic part was 30% higher because the ellagic acid is produced by the plant as a wound healing response to heal that area that the bug nibbled on. They make more ellagic acid like the coffee plant makes more chlorogenic acid. Okay. And so I as I started to realise that this was a universal phenomenon, it’s the same thing for Brassica You have to have, you know, leafy greens, kale grown in an organic environment. You’re going to get more of the sulforaphane that are beneficial for every aspect, every defence system in our body and our metabolism. I started to realise that this discovery of nature, you know how like Darwin discovered, you know, natural selection by going to the Galapagos and looking at finches and turtles and things like that? Well, look, botanists are really discovering another part of how nature has developed the program to protect plants that are growing. And then most natural environment. By the way, the other thing that has made me more given me higher affinity for organic growing, okay, I still have a little bit of catch in my chest when I think about paying a lot more money. And so that price has to come down. The governments need to make the price come down. But but also pesticides are not good for planet. They’re not good for our soil. All right. And in some cases, like a strawberry, for example, or an apple or a peach, the pesticides they’re sprayed on actually penetrate the skin. You cannot wash those off. All right. I mean, think about how if you tried skinning a strawberry, forget about it, All right? It never and you’re getting like there’s I think a and I think one study by the University of Massachusetts showed if you spray with pesticides 20%, it’ll penetrate the pesticide. Well, penetrate 20% into the skin and stay there. You cannot wash it off. You know, that’s enough to convince me that I’m not for especially the thin skinned fruits and vegetables that, you know, I think I’d rather I want more the good stuff, the good polyphenols. And I don’t want to be I definitely don’t want to be eating those artificial chemicals. We now know that that stuff is going to be bad for our gut microbiome. We know that gut microbiome and gut health protects brain health, protects know immune health, lowers inflammation. So I don’t want to go there. Just a quick one. If you enjoyed this content, you will love my mini series on inflammation. I go through the different types of foods that you should be having. What inflammation actually is. Plus lifestyle practices to reduce inflammation, you can get it for free right now in the link in the caption below. Back to the podcast. Well. Well, and this is where policy, you know, like, you know, I don’t like to get into public conversations about, you know, one of the fence or the other side politically. But I will say anybody who’s listening to this or watching this, you know, if you have a voice to support officials who are making governmental policies or rules that help to make our planet healthier, it’s likely to also make our bodies healthier as well. To me, if you only had one reason to vote in a positive direction, regardless of what it is, vote for yourself. Because that’s that that’s, you know, like I always vote for myself. And I think that that’s the reason we need planetary policies. It’s not about the country. It’s about the whole planet. Better for the planet, better for the planet, better for the plant, better for our person. That’s just how it works. Okay, So earlier we were talking about the body like your car that you are filling up with fuel. The car uses petrol, the body uses food to get its fuel. Whatever you eat is going to be turned into fuel. That fuel gets stored in our muscles and in our body fat. And and many people don’t realise this, but I wrote about this in my book Eat to Be Your diet that are in your car, your fuel tank is on the side of the car and you put the petrol into a little through the nozzle into a little hole and you fill it up, the tank fills up with petrol and then the nozzle goes click and now you can’t put any more in there and then you put it away and you drive off into the sunset. Okay. Now in your, in the body, what actually happens is that we are pulling over not to the petrol station, we’re pulling over to the kitchen table and we’re loading up on our fuel. We’re what? We’re a conversation. We’re is to please, please load up on higher quality fuel because weather, weather, regardless of what you believe your body is, a Ferrari So please take care of it as you would you know the rate to make your car the race make your body the race car it is that fuel goes into your fat is stored in your fat. Our fat cells which are called adipocytes, are actually fuel storage tanks and actually fuel those fuel source tanks formed while we were still in our mother’s womb. Okay. In the uterus right next to blood vessels. So, you know, most people don’t realise this when because when you step out of the shower and out of the corner, your eye, you see, you know, a lump or a bump on your arm or the muffin top or under your chin, you don’t like, you don’t like that. That’s not where fat started in your body. That healthy fat, that’s our fuel tank started when we were when your mom, when your dad’s sperm met your mom’s egg and you were just a ball of cells. Blood vessels were first formed, nerves were formed. Next it need circulation. You need electrical signals to power your organs. And then the third thing that formed third important organ that formed was body fat. These adipose tissues formed like bubble wrap around blood vessels. They wrapped around the blood vessel. Right. And so people were listening to go, Wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense, that don’t have fat around my blood vessel. Yes, you do. That’s where they formed. And the reason that fat first formed around blood vessels is because when you eat food, your fuel, the fuel goes into your circulation, your bloodstream, and you need to be able to put the fuel into the fuel tank, which are your fat cells, the adipocytes. So naturally, it makes sense to put the fuel tank right next to where the fuel is running through. Okay. Now, when we go about our ordinary day with normal body weight, this is what’s happening. We we ate, we store fuel when we’re eating. Our body is focussed on storing fuel when we’re not eating, including intermittently fasting when we’re sleeping, our body, our metabolism switches gears like in a car and now we’re focussed on burning fuel. So yes, we do burn fat, we burn we do burn fuel from our fat while we’re sleeping. You’re not working out, you’re not exercising, you’re not swimming, you’re not lifting, okay? You’re not doing you’re not doing anything exertional. You’re sleeping in your body, your metabolism, burning body fat. Okay. Now this is how we’re hardwired eat load of fuel. We’re focusing a loading of fuel, just like when you’re at the gas station. What do you do when you’re at the gas station? You turn off the engine, Don’t burn the fuel while you’re filling up the tank. Right. Okay, So but what do you do when you’re done filling up the tank? Turn the car back on and go. So we’ll work. So when we’re not actually loading up on fuel, we’re burning it. That’s how our body is. Hardwire Now, what happens if we ate that? If we all ate the perfect amount every day? Just what our body needed to see. They call it you caloric. All right. You caloric means, you know, you’re not getting too much. You’re not getting too little. This would be the the the idealistic, you know, calorie in, calorie out. If that’s all you cared about. You didn’t have one extra calorie in that you didn’t burn that day. It’s a complicated mathematical equation and it’s not practical and it’s not healthy. But if you did that, you know, you wouldn’t need to burn. I mean, you would be burning all the fat from your fuel that you need. You never accumulate any extra fat. Okay? You’d have just the right amount of body fat. That’s not reality. In reality, Rupi and every one of your listeners and viewers knows this. We sometimes eat too much and we sometimes don’t eat the right things. All those things conspire to putting more fuel, more low quality fuel into our body. And what does our body have to do that’s loading into our fuel tanks, which is into our fat. Now, because our fat gets loaded up, we can fill up our our fuel tanks pretty large. Unlike a car which has a metal fuel tank, you can’t make it. You can’t overflow it. If you if you did have the clicker on the fuel tank, what would happen? You fill up the tank if you if it kept on overloading, it would run right out of the car down the side of the car along the wheels. It pool around your feet and what would happen? You’d be standing at the petrol station in a deep in a pool of a dangerous, toxic, flammable mess. Same thing in the body. If we overloaded our fuel. Unfortunately, our body isn’t hardwired with a clicker. Okay? We. Our body is designed evolution to give us store as much fuel as possible because we did not always live in a land of abundance where you can drive down to the corner convenience store to buy something to eat. We used to have to like work pretty hard to get our fuel. So if you had it, you ate it. Now, here’s the deal. Day after day, week after week, month after month that we’re actually on fuel, that a fat cell adipocyte can expand from its normal state three times 300% of size. Small Fat cells are fuel taking it big, big feels like think about it like a water balloon. Right. You remember when you were a kid at a birthday party? You take a small balloon, you could blow it up much larger. Okay. And it feels kind of tenuous. It’s sloshing around. You know, if you dropped it, it would actually explode. You’d be careful with your big water balloons. That’s what happens when we overload in our fuel. Okay. And poor quality fuel. What you allowed to spend even faster now in our body? We don’t. We don’t. We can overload and spill out our fuel. That happens when you when your fat cells are, like, way overloaded. But our body has this unique ability to make more fuel tanks. Your car can’t do it, but our body can. So if you load up on a fat cell and it’s completely full, that water balloon stretched to the hilt is tied off. And now you’ve got to get a new one on there. That’s what our body does. Our body uses stem cells, adipocyte stem cells. It just grows more fat, grows fuel tanks, that new fuel tank. Now I can fill that up. Now you fill up three times larger than it’s supposed to be tied off. you’re still eating more calories. Let’s go take some more fat and make some more fat. So this idea that we that I went to medical school with, like you’re born with all the fat cells you ever have, and it just they just get bigger, raw. We now know we can make more and more fat. So you can see now, you know, and I’m hoping the listeners are getting this if you have years, a lifetime of overloading your fuel into your fuel tanks and your body’s making more fuel tanks, you are just going to have a larger and of a large supply of fat. You’ve got more fuel than you need and you’re carrying it around. All right. And that’s why people actually grow this very harmful body fat. And by the way, if you keep on overloading it, keep on overloading it, keep on overloading it, at some point, your body, your body’s fat system goes, gives up. They’re like, All right, I cry, uncle, we can’t take this anymore. And then you know what the fat does from those fuel tanks? It leaks out. And when fat leaks out, it leads to something called like bo toxicity, because fat itself, when it comes out, is toxic. All right. Like like the fuel that comes out of your tank lipo and your body races in an emergency, like a fire engine, like like a firehouse to put out a fire to try to deal with that and the body’s fire department to try to put out like no toxicities in the liver. So the fat gets sequestered, trapped in the liver. Okay. And now the liver becomes fatty liver. And so, as you know, we know as doctors, one of the silent epidemics in modern society is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And it’s due to overload fuel overload over the course of a lifetime of eating ultra processed foods, overloading on calories, not getting enough exercise, putting poor quality of fuel into our bodies. This is what we’re paying with in terms of the health of people in society today. Okay. So back to the original question. How do you actually reverse that? How do you prevent that? How do you deal with you know, many of us are walking around at probably with a lot of extra fuel tank in our body. Well, the good news is our bodies are also hardwired to burn down body fat if we eat the right foods. Mother Nature’s pharmacy. Some of these bioactive s like chlorogenic acid. We talked about ellagic acid. We talked about anthocyanins in blueberries and strawberries and blackberries that give them their colour. The natural dye quercetin, onions, Allison and garlic hydroxy tarazi all in extra virgin olive oil. Okay. And I don’t want to overwhelm people with chemical names. I just want you to know that we’re making these discoveries in modern food as medicine research to find out that these natural chemicals found in the foods that we eat more when the food is grown in an organic setting because of the nibbling of the bugs. Okay, more of the good stuff. They actually trigger your body to burn down extra fuel, burn down body fat. Now, how do they do that? There’s a lot of different ways to burn down extra fat. The way one of the most surprising to me as I was doing my research is that many of these plant based bio actives and by the way, I know you know, of course we want to emphasise the importance of eating produce, but even fish containing omega three fatty acids and you can get omega threes from to a much lesser extent from eating plant based foods. But omega threes. Okay, we’ll also do this will trigger a kind of fat in your body that is not wiggly, jiggly, not unsightly, not disgust provoking does not cause the number nor scale to increase, but it is a kind of fat that is a hero kind of fat. So there’s good fat and bad fat you want to in our body. And the first let me tell you, the good fat is called brown fat. Brown fat is actually the colour of the fat first. Brown fat is not close to the skin. Therefore you can’t see it under the chin. You can’t see it under the arm. You can’t it’s not your muffin top, not on your thighs, it’s not on your butt. All right. So brown fat is not there. The hero fat, Brown fat is not close to the skin. It’s to the bone deep around your neck under your breastbone and a little bit in your belly, a little bit behind your shoulder blades. In fact, if you were to actually scan the body to look for where the brown fat in. It’s kind of like a girdle that sits around our chest area and around our neck, close to the bone. All right. Now, what does brown fat do? Well, brown fat is it does something called thermogenesis. Its job is to fire up like the gas range on your in your kitchen if you cook with gas. So what happens when you actually cook with gas? Right. You want to heat some soup up, You put the pot on the stove, you turn on the handle, you go click, click, click, click, woosh. Now you’ve got the flame. Now you’re heating up the stove. That’s what brown fat does when you turn on brown fat. And these plant based bioactive is like ellagic acid. Chlorogenic acid quercetin lycopene, tomatoes, onions and strawberries and blueberries and blackberries. And, and that sulforaphane is like kale, cabbage, all those kinds of things. Click, click, click, woosh. They turn on your brown fat, they turn on the fire of your brown fat. Thermogenesis means making heat thermo heat genesis making brown fat. Those thermogenesis. Now, to make any kind of heat, you’ve got to actually burn fuel in the kitchen. Your gas burner draws the gas. Natural gas from a tank might be in the street, might be in the side of your house or your apartment, destroying that fuel it If you didn’t have fuel, if the gas line wasn’t there, you wouldn’t you wouldn’t be able to heat create that. The fire the flame. Right. Makes total sense. Brown fat is, able to create the flame because it actually draws the fuel it needs to create heat from your white fat, from the bad fat, from the excess fat that’s accumulated in your body. When your brown fat is triggered and turned on, it siphons off that harmful extra fuel that you’ve loaded up year after year in your body or maybe over the holidays. And it burns it off by firing up and creating heat. All right. How does it create heat? How does it create heat if the fuel is actually coming from harmful fat and your brown fat is like the gas burner, burning it down, consuming the fuel. All right. Because you overloaded on it, how does it how does it actually do that? What’s sparking the fire? It turns out your mitochondria. Now, some people have heard about the concept of mitochondria as as you know, for anti-aging and first prevent cell senescence and activating your energy and rupi. You and I, we were in med school and doing biochemistry before med school. All those recommendations like we’re studying the mitochondria. The mitochondria is the battery of all of our human cells. It’s a little nuclear fuel tank. It’s like a watch battery you put in your watch. It it, it has its small but mighty, it generates all the energy. Forget about the ATP and the Krebs cycle and all that kind of stuff. Most people are not going to be interested. I mean, I’m sure if you’re like me, I could. I, I’m so glad that I’m not even thinking about that stuff anymore, but I am thinking about mitochondria because brown fat has a lot of mitochondria now. Mitochondria is the engine that helps to trigger the fuel to burn and create heat. Mitochondria being the fuel cell creates the heat to burn down the fuel so that you’re going to burn away. Harmful body fat triggered by healthy plant based foods and the bioactive. Now why is brown fat brown Because it turns out that mitochondria have a lot of iron in it. And iron. What happens when you have a lot of iron? You get a pile of nails, bit of iron. You put out in the porch outside. What’s going to happen? The silver nails turn brown. Indeed, brown fat has so much mitochondria to be able to fire up the gas range to burn down the extra fuel in your body that that there’s a lot of mitochondria with a lot of iron that oxidises and that’s why brown fat is brown that’s why because it’s got these fuel tanks in it that happen to be very have a lot of iron and now you’ll never forget why brown fat is brown. Okay so there are lots of foods. And in my book Eat to Beat Your Diet, I list all the foods that can activate them. The good news is that many of these foods are those same foods that you would find in recipes you would cook from the Asian food traditions or the Mediterranean food traditions. You know, you’re talking about whole plant based foods, healthy oils, mixing them together, you know, maybe adding a little bit of seafood once in a while and, you’ll get nothing like gums. All the things that we already know are healthy. Now we’re having a new interpretation, a new, deeper understanding of like in addition to just, I don’t know, good for gut health or making us feel a little bit better or less saturated fat or whatever. Now we know that many of these foods light up our brown fat to burn down harmful white fat, and that when you burn down the harmful white fat, by the way, this big pile of growing this blob of white fat that grows because you just keep on making more and more fuel tank as it gets bigger. Your white fat growing blob of fuel tanks accumulating okay are actually grow like a tumour or a tumour expands and its size and when it eventually expands bigger than its blood supply is able to handle the middle of it starts to die because it’s not fed by it doesn’t have a circulation. Remember we told you blood vessel circulation is critical for for life of every organ. This fat mass amount is bigger than the blood supply feeding it, the inside starts to die, becomes hypoxic, not of oxygen. And so what happens is that it starts to become inflamed. That inflammation within growing mounds of fat that grows like a tumour leaks out of the amount of fat. And guess where it goes into your bloodstream and now your whole body is inflamed, which is why we know that the condition of obesity and even pre pre fall on obesity, you know, if you have excess body mass pre-diabetes, for example, a large waistline, you probably have too many fuel tanks, extra stored in you and you’re probably leaking some of that fuel. Not good for your liver, likely toxic. You’re probably also having inflammation. It’s leaking out from the middle. You want to activate your brown fat, you want to burn away those excess stores of fat with exercise and, you know, like you want to use up that fuel so that you can lower the inflammation in body gut. Healthy gut microbiome also helps to lower the inflammation as well. This is how our whole system’s connected. And so, you know, people are going, well, what’s the diet that I should follow like a slave in order to be able to burn down my, my extra fat? I don’t think you need to be on a diet. That’s why I wrote my book, How to Eat to Beat a Diet. You don’t need to go on a robotic regimen. You just need to be aware that there are foods that you can eat in moderation, prepared in absolutely delicious ways that give you diversity, that you to choose from The plant based foods, whole plant based foods, not suddenly groom spices and healthy oils that allow you to do in addition to all the other healthy things they do, they light up your brown fat to burn down the harmful fat, thereby lowering inflammation. And by the way, as a side effect of all of this, you get better metabolism and more energy. So this is actually the reason to do it. And your shrink, your waistline annual fit into clothing a lot better and you’ll look better and you’ll feel better and you’ll have more cognitive energy, more mental sharpness as well. This is really why the simple question of Dr. Lee, you know, what are the your favourite fat burning foods? I wanted to explain this because it’s not as easy as just putting up five foods. I could do that, but it’s much more powerful to explain to people how I learned this, how I arrived at the lists of foods and why they’re actually good for you. By the way, tea and coffee will also activate brown fat. And don’t forget chocolate. Don’t forget chocolate. Dark chocolate. Yep. Well, you know, I. I regularly experiment with different foods. So in my kitchen, mostly because I enjoy doing that for eating purposes. But some of the things that when I when I find that there’s a food I’m playing around with that has a new property, that makes me doubly interested in it. I’ll tell you one. There’s one called the Persimmon cookie I think you find in the Mediterranean it looks like a tomato about the size of an apple. It’s got kind of a firm skin and it’s a kind of firm fruit until it’s actually really ripe, in which case it gets really soft and and the skin can be a little astringent. But when it’s really ripe and soft inside, kind of like an over like a super overripe tomato, you can cut it and literally with a spoon, you can eat it like put it and it’s bright red, It’s incredible. It’s got a very nice sweetness to it, mellow sweetness. It’s not overly sweet. It’s actually the it’s one of the national fruits, I think, of Japan persimmon, but you can find in the Mediterranean. So it’s cross-cultural, but there’s, there’s carotenoids in it. Lycopene, beta, krypton, santon persimmons actually have been shown to actually improve your immune system and good for your gut health and also improve your metabolism by by activating brown fat. Now there’s so different ways you can eat persimmon like I’m I’m still at the joyful discovery of just letting it ripen and finding different varieties and just eating it with a spoon or cutting it. I love it, but I do know that there are I was just talking to a chef yesterday who was telling me, you can make a jelly out of it. You can make a puree out of it for them. You know, you can put a bit of other food on top for it. So I’m designing a meal for a charity event. A good friend of mine from college. And in New York City, it’s a celebrate a dance institute that actually called City Step that brings youth and allows them to discover self-expression and creativity through body movement. It’s been around for 40 years anyway, so there’s a big charity event celebration. So I decided they wanted to do a healthy menu in celebration of the body. And so one of the things that I wanted throw in there is, I’ll tell you so. So I wanted to throw in some persimmon. So we’re going to do a salad with a kind of radicchio called Castle Franco. It’s a very, very mild food. You like that? man, that is a it is almost it’s Swedish, sweet ish. It’s very delicate. It’s got beautiful little speckles of colour in it. It really makes a salad much more than a salad. And and we’re going to dress it up with some persimmon in it as well. So any help that I that’s an ingredient that I found really new and delightful because of its health benefits. But I’ll tell you something old that has something new to it for me are strawberries. I know we’ve talked about strawberries a couple of times on this, but I was astounded to learn just a few months ago that strawberries are also, we know is good for immune health and inflammation, lowering inflammation and and gut health and good for your circulation. Strawberries are good for brain health as well. Brain health. There was a study published by the university by researchers from the University of Cincinnati in the United States where they took a look at 30 people who are middle aged men and women with mild cognitive deficits. All right. So we’re not talking about full on dementia. We’re talking about people who are having trouble remembering things. Okay. If anybody listening, this sounds like you, you know, what was that again? You know, there’s a there’s a there’s a continuum. But what was interesting is they date and this is a small study, but it’s a clinical study they actually compared they did to groups one had a placebo, one had strawberries, and they took fresh, ripe strawberries. They drive them up the crushed them a powder and they had them put them into a drink. So it’s really one cup of strawberries a day. And they found after six weeks of eating just one cup of strawberry strawberries a day, that memory in this group compared to the control and depression due to and frustration lack due to the lack of a being able to remember decreased as well. And they were able to perform cognitive functions better. Strawberries one cup of tea that’s eight medium sized strawberry is eight. Right. So like to me, like I always feel a sense of elation when there’s a food that is accessible that tastes good that I already work with, that there’s a new benefit and you don’t need to eat a lot of it. So anyhow, like those are, those are two foods that have come up recently. I love them. So one. We should definitely do it. Nothing would be more fun for me than to get together with a fellow physician who also has a passion for cooking in the knowledge of and the creativity to be able to mix it up and do fun things together. You know what? I talk about my style when people say, Dr. Lee, what’s your diet. I always tell people I’m not on a diet. You know, diets to me are impossible to stick to. They’re all about extremes. They’re more about philosophy and ideology and, you know, sometimes a little bit of science, but they’re more importantly, they’re just really tough to stick to. I’m somebody who enjoys my food. I don’t want to fear my food. I want to enjoy it. I have a great respect for ingredients. I love the flavours of food and I love to I wouldn’t say I don’t like to pig out, but I do love to sample foods and I have my taste buds lit up. It’s part of my quality of life. And so I tell I don’t have a diet I’m on, but I have an approach to my food, my eating, and the approach that I take is I call it the Mediterranean way of eating. I lived in the Mediterranean. I have an Asian background. I also lived in Asia. If I go to a restaurant and I’m looking at a lots of choices on a menu, I will automatically gravitate towards the more Mediterranean or the more Asian choices. If I’m entertaining at my home or cooking dinner just for myself, thinking, what should I have, what should I have? Which I make? I’ll automatically gravitate towards those genres of ingredients and and techniques of preparation. If I’m at a buffet, you know, and I’ve got all this a huge spread of choices you could actually have, you know, recently I did a little video. I went to see an incredible performance of U2, the rock band U2 at the Sphere, which is this f f epic live performance with a huge definition and audio visual. Now, look, if you’re in Las Vegas, it’s impossible to avoid the classic Las Vegas buffet. I did a video literally because I because I was overwhelmed and I was watching people piles much food on their plate. And it just made me realise, O-M-G, there needs to be this is this is a teaching moment. So I took out a video. I busted out a video, and I did a video of like walking through the buffet line saying, This is good, this is not so good. Don’t take this much, take this much, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I always think that. But I but the things that I focussed on and gravitated on, thought about with a mediterranean preparations or the Asian preparation. So my style of eating is Mediterranean. I challenge people who are listening and watching this to go to a restaurant and say, if you went to a mediterranean restaurant that there’s nothing that you could find on the menu that you wouldn’t like, or an Asian restaurant, there’s there’s like nothing I can find here. I think most people are like, do something in these genres. And that the food of the idea of healthy eating much more approachable. It’s something that is pleasurable to do. You can embrace a healthy diet. You don’t have to fear your food, you can lean into it. And as I say, you can love your food to love your health. But let’s do it If you like this episode on the Doctors Kitchen podcast, you will APS. You love this episode that I did with Dr. William Lee. It is fascinating. We talk about food as medicine or the different types of foods that can increase metabolism as well as the defences that food can provide to you. Check it out right now by clicking on the link.
44 Comments
Have both books and happily reading and learning such invaluable information , brilliant interview , thankyou.
Dr Li, is Monk Fruit ok to use as sugar substitute for cancer patients?
Then you have people like Richard Arvin Overton. He lived to be a 111.
Hi Michael! In my younger days I would feel that way how about the brain connection. I drink so seldomly now I don't really have that desire anymore for the alcohol. I love the taste of non-alcoholic Heineken and the health benefits from non-alcoholic red wine
Like many other listeners, PLEASE make these videos shorter and get to the main points and info alot more quickly Most of these videos could be done in 20 min. Is there a point of pay off if you creat such lengthy talks with a lot of filler?
Is Sesame oil ok to use for stir frying?
I don’t eat sugar for more than a year now and I am still alive and healthy. Eat more fruits and vegetables and good meat. Coffee and tea without sugar at all…. I feel better every single day and exercise 3 times a week 👍👍👍
No carbs
No calories
No processed foods
Monk fruit sweetener is always mixed with Erythritol – haven’t heard much thought on this .
How about the sugar content of grape juice ? Any solution on that as well?
I'm a fan of the MIND (Mediterranean + DASH) diet which encourages the use of a 5oz glass of wine daily. I appreciate the discussion about alchool minimum use. My question would be if there is any beneficial use of alchool due to its interactions with other foods that are also encouraged in that specific diet.
volume too low….
This guy is either an idiot or is lying to you…fruit sugar is not harmful AT ALL
This discussion is a gem! I'm celebrating my daily organic dark coffee, matcha, & green tea! And I'm bringing back the lectins! Thank you both!
When Dr Li mentioned lectins, I immediately thought of Dr Gundry. Thanks for your clarification n "reset" Dr Li… we need to hear that❤
Luvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Dr Li
FYI: many cardiologists say that coffee does not trigger afib. Many studies support this.
There are two camps regarding cooking w/ olive oil. Some say that around 350c, the properties change and transform the oil oil into a trans fat. There's a doctor on YT that made this claim in the last month or so so is it a myth? Why do so many doctors contradict each other when it comes to what is healthy / unhealthy? It seems like most of this would be proven facts by now. Maybe it is but if so, why do so many highly educated people disagree? Who can you trust?
Thank u for every thing u r teaching us, how can I talk u about my health issues, I need second opinion please?
The chocolate I used to eat contains soy lectins and always bothered my stomach. After changing vendors I no longer have stomach issues when eating chocolate.
Speaking of India. I've noticed that Indian women do not age well. Pay attention when you're out and about and pay attention to the older women.
Please do a session on food as medicine to shrink ovarian fibroids naturally. Thanks
Zero beneficial value in alcohol 🍸 but very valuable benefits in emotional and feel good vibes!
🍷🍹🍺🍻🥂
Ice cream😢
The whole time you’re the doctor your head is bouncing up and down, indicating you agree I guess
We’re laughing watching you interview Doctor Li watching you bounce your head up and down agreeing with everything he says, but my goodness your head is bouncing like crazy
👎 This guy poisons ppl telling them plant based lectins are ok. He probably could even sell you on oxilates too. So much 🗑️ in this interview.
Where is the science that says plants are necessary for humans?
Talk about lipolymphoedema! Could that be some disfunction of brown fat?
What about using organic soy milk to make a coffee latte would you still get those great benefits of drinking black coffee?
Would a soy matcha latte be healthier than drinking a soy coffee latte ?
Dr Gundry is huge on not eating lectins , I love your research Dr !!
Asian 90 year old Rock band❤The paint thinner chemicals to extract caffeine removed from the grinded beans is toxic.
There are wild native persimmons here in MO. We harvest them and besides eating them fresh, we make cookies and bread with them.
Dr Lee, you are brilliant!
❤I learned a lot from this podcast, Thank you Dr. Li and Dr. Rupy for the educational information.
It's also the aspartame that's bad too ……… and saccharins.
Is monkfruit ok?
Lectins ?? Dr Gundry says lectins and tomatoe are bad for gut health !
What does he think of black seed oil ?
If you want organic grow your own ! You can’t even trust all farmers markets . Start a kitchen garden or garden towers. – you can get organic nutrients for hydroponic gardening
The national organic association only classifies as organic as growing in that dirt microbiome
Legumes and soy I have read cause inflammation. As well as chick peas ? I’ve tried to find a diet to help inflammation and combat Hashimoto’s thyroiditis
Re sugar…when you recommend tea without sugar…coffee without sugar Dr Li … does that also take in the use of honey? I thought honey was beneficial… i.e. local honey or Manuka honey…please expound and enlighten us, as needed … thank you!
I love Dr Will!