Dr. William Li: Food, Fear, and Control

In this re-aired favorite conversation, Dr. William Li makes the case for a more reasonable way to think about health, one that gives people agency without trapping them in food fear, rigid rules, or social media panic. He reframes some of the biggest anxieties around aging, including cancer, inflammation, glucose, vascular health, and protein, with a physician-scientist’s insistence on context. The practical takeaways are clear: support blood vessel health, feed the microbiome, choose protein intelligently after 50, and understand how added sugar and natural sugars do very different things in the body. This is a conversation about using food as medicine in daily life, without turning health into another source of stress.

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Key Moments

“One of the biggest myths about inflammation is that it is categorically bad. And that's just not true.”

“But we all have cancer in our body, even children. Everybody has cancer.”

“Health care isn't what actually happens in the medical clinic. Medical clinics are used for disease care. Sick care. Health care is what actually happens at home.”

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Tune in to hear more on this episode of The AGEIST Podcast or check out the full interview transcript.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Well, look, you know, one of the biggest myths about inflammation is that it is categorically bad. And that's just not true. And I can tell you this as a physician, as a doctor, and also as a scientist. Inflammation, thank goodness we've got inflammation in our body. Inflammation is our 911 first responder system of our body. So a little bit of inflammation is good. Where we wind up getting into problems is chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is where the little bit of inflammation grows to a lot of inflammation. And instead of coming and going, which is what happens when you cut yourself, the inflammation comes, it grows, and it never goes away. Our health isn't up to the doctor or up to the hospital, but it's up to us. And health care isn't what actually happens in the medical clinic. Medical clinics are used for disease care, sick care. Health care is what actually happens at home. We're doing it every single day. You know, we are prescribing ourselves something useful, food as medicine three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we're eating three meals a day. And we're, I think that our society as a whole is beginning to wake up to that fact. And that's a really a good thing. But you can take that to an extreme. And I love the idea that we can measure blood glucose, we can measure our pulse, we can measure oxygenation. I mean, how fantastic is that we have wearables. However, if you take that to an extreme where you're not going to make a move until you actually check your continuous glucose monitor levels on your phone. All right. Or if you only are going to eat certain, like rigidly, I'm only going to eat organic this or organic that, and it can't be GMO. And you know, you wind up actually pinning yourself into this really, really narrow vertical canyon.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

I know it's a bit of a buzzword right now, but the science shows that protein matters more as we age. That's where true nutrition comes in. Strength, recovery, body composition, all of it depends on getting enough of the right protein. What I like about the protein I get from True Nutrition is the amount of control I have over the ingredients. I get to build my own protein powder, and the tool lets me decide exactly what goes into it calories, protein, fat, carbs, fiber, sugar, the whole thing. My current favorite mix is pea protein with marine collagen, cacao flavor for that dark chocolate creaminess, plus lion's mane, cordyceps, and supergreens. It tastes good, no chalky aftertaste, and it feels like something designed for me rather than some generic tub of powder. Wanna try it? Go to TrueNutrition.com slash AGIST and use code AGIST for 20% off your first custom protein blend. That's trueNutrition.com slash AGIS, code AGISIST. Go build your own mix. Once you've had a protein you actually look forward to, you won't go back. Every movement we make starts with energy, and that energy starts inside our cells. As we age, our mitochondria, the little engines that power us, can become less efficient. That affects strength, recovery, resilience, all the things we actually care about. Timeline developed MITAPURE with Urolithin A to support metophagy, the process that helps clear out damaged mitochondria so our cells can work better. I think of it as working closer to the source. Timeline's clinically proven formula is now available at a new, lower price. MidaPure now starts at $79 when you go to Timeline.com slash AGIST. That's Timeline.com slash AGIS. This season I've been paying more attention to the energy curve. Coffee can be useful, but too much of it and I end up wired than flat. Alement Lemonade Iced Tea has been a better afternoon move. It uses full black tea extract with electrolytes, so the caffeine feels steadier and there's no sugar, artificial colors, or dodgy ingredients. Sharp and clear is the goal, especially when it's hot out and hydration matters. Get a free eight-count sample pack of Element's most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase at drinkelement.com slash agist. Find your favorite flavor or share with a friend. That's D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T.com slash agist. Welcome to episode 291 of the AGIS podcast. I'm David Stewart. This week, we're bringing back a standout conversation with Dr. William Lee. Dr. Lee's a physician, scientist, vascular biologist, and president and medical director of Angiogenesis Foundation. He's the author of Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet. Suffice to say, he's got quite the resume. Dr. Lee brings real science to food without getting, how do I say, preaching? He's not here to scare us about a peach or to tell us how to live by some rigid spreadsheet of biomackers, despite the fact that we're discussing factors that influence crucial aspects of health, ranging from blood vessels to cancer, to inflammation, to protein, glucose. This approach is practical, nuanced, and refreshingly reasonable. If you're curious about what food as medicine actually means when you strike away the marketing, stay tuned. A little quick update here. Last week we did our first prototype day for all the challenges that we basically invented from scratch for the Superage games. And we put a whole range of people through it. People who we had a couple people I don't think who'd ever set foot in a gym in their lives. We had one former world-class elite athlete. We had a couple other people who were pretty fit. And what we found was that really anybody can do these challenges. And if you're not in top shape, you just do a little slower. If you are an elite athlete and you really want to challenge yourself, you will. It will be hard, I can tell you. We had to make a couple of adjustments to some of our inventions. We have one called the Overunder, and we found that it was like way too easy. So we had to make the over a little higher and the under a little lower. We tested out the net, which is my personal invention, and I was a little curious how this was going to work. It's a horizontal net, 40 feet across. It's like a cargo net, but it's not up and down. It's across. And so the the only way the way you get across it is you essentially have to bear crawl, and you have to be careful about where you place your hands and where you place your feet. So there's a cognitive element to it, there's a little bit of a strength element to it, and there's a very large proprioception element to it. And it went great. Everything, I think people were some of the people who were like really super fit athletes um were kind of amazed at how challenged they were. The the balance beam that we have set up, because you're you're holding um a water-filled aqua tube as you go across it. So it's one thing to walk across a balance beam. It's quite another thing to walk across with this water-filled tube because every time you move, your balance is going to be thrown off by this sloshing water. And then you get to the end of the beam and you're faced with this dilemma. What do you do? You can turn around, which with the water-filled tube has to be done very slowly and carefully. Or you can go backwards. And I don't know. There was no one there who ever in their lives had walked backwards on a balance beam. So that was um, it was all really interesting. It was a great day. So we're gonna make some modifications. We're gonna do another prototype day with a larger group of people, I think in September, so that we get this all dialed in for all you guys for November 7th for the Super Age game. So anyway, really hyped about all that. So let's get back to Dr. Lee. Before we get into this, uh, a quick favor from everyone: if you enjoy the Ages podcast, please give us a five-star review. It helps more people find these conversations, and we'd really appreciate it. Let's give Dr. William Lee a call right now. Dr. Lee, it is so great to have you here. I love your Instagram feed. It's so information dense. Before we get going, I would love for you to tell our audience a little bit about your background, where you came from, and your interest in nutrition.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah, well, thanks for having me on, uh, David. I am a scientist. I'm actually a vascular biologist, which means that I study blood vessels, your circulation. Uh, very important because what drew me to study blood vessels is that it's a common denominator for both health and disease. We've got about 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels packed inside our bodies, and these are the highways and byways of health. And when your blood vessels are healthy, you stand a chance to optimize your health. And when your blood vessels are sick, there's not a chance you can actually be optimal in your health. And so I was drawn to study this. I'm also a physician, an MD. I studied internal medicine. And my interest in internal medicine was really whole person. Men and women, young and old, healthy and sick. My own personal orientation, despite the fact that doctors are really trained to diagnose and to chase disease to the nth degree, my orientation has always been about how to keep people healthy. And when people do get sick, how do you put them back on the pillar of their own health? Um, I also run a nonprofit called the Angiogenesis Foundation. This is a third-party group that actually looks at blood vessels and how can we advance the goals of better disease treatment, better disease prevention, treatment using new biotechnologies, prevention using food as medicine. I've been leading that for 30 years. And I became an author, you know, late in my career because I really felt actually an old friend of mine uh convinced me that the knowledge I had about food and medicine had such immediacy that it would be sort of part of my duty, and I do feel it's part of my purpose now, to be able to get out information that people could translate right after hearing about it into an action that very day that could start to impact on their life in a better way. So I I thought, you know, let me go write a book. My two books, Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet, they wound up becoming New York Times bestsellers, and that's like being put into a canon and shot out to say that, you know, now I'm really communicating to the public and I really enjoy it. But at the same time, my real background is in science, the real science behind, you know, everything we're talking about, including aging, food is medicine, all the diseases that are countering the health goals that we all have.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Wonderful. And because you're a vascular biologist and you're an MD, my understanding, I believe three of the top four causes of death cardiovascular disease, there's cancer, and dementia. And all of these have a vascular component to them. That's right. If you were to advise people on foods to eat to increase their vascular health, what would you say?

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Well, so everybody always says, you know, give me the top three foods for X, Y, and Z. I actually find it much more useful rather than give people sort of magic bullets to try to memorize or have tattooed, you know, on the back of their eyelids. What I would actually tell you that you need to understand is that the reason that blood vessels, vascular problems, underlie the top three killers of our aging population is because blood vessels are in the brain, okay, hence dementia. Blood vessels are in the heart, and our blood vessels are fed by the heart, hence heart disease. And tumors hijack our blood supply, our blood vessels, in order to feed themselves selfishly, so they can grow like parasites in our body, uh, imbibing the oxygen and nutrients that are meant for healthy organs, they steal it for themselves in order to grow. So keeping our blood vessels in a healthy state where you're not getting too many blood vessels, like in tumors, and you're not getting too few blood vessels, such as in the heart or brain, is the beating heart of what I actually study, what I actually do. And the good news is that there are foods that can actually help us achieve that. And to understand how foods can help achieve that, I got to tell you one more thing about blood vessels. Our blood vessels are not just simple tubes, they are tubes, but they're also tubes with a lining. So think about the inside of your blood vessel as being very, very slip-slidey. So nothing sticks to the inside wall of the blood vessels. As you can imagine, if blood were to stick inside the blood vessel, you'd form a clot and then game over, right? And that's exactly what a heart attack is or a stroke. The body wants to keep in health and your blood vessels as slippery as possible. And the way it does this is through a lining that's kind of like a layer of saran wrap, okay, inside the tube of the blood vessel. It's called the endothelial lining. Endothelial is just a fancy word that means the cells of the blood vessels. And it's slippery. How slippery? Well, think about if you've ever been to an ice skating rink, you know that when the rink is just opening or they've just cleaned the ice, you could take a sweater and throw it onto the ice and it'll slide all the way across the ice. But after a session of ice skating with tons of people scraping up the ice, all right, or after a hockey game, if you just throw that sweater down, it'll stick. It wouldn't go anywhere because the ice is so cuffed up. Same deal with the blood vessels. Healthy blood vessels are like the ice of an ice skating rink after the samboni cleaned it up. It's ready for a smooth skate, slippery, all right. But if you actually have atherosclerosis, clogging, narrowing, damaging of the blood vessels, which is underlying the most common causes of cardiovascular disease, and underlying the causes of vascular dementia, which is the most common cause of dementia, not enough blood vessels in the brain, then you wind up actually having things sticking to the lining. They could be cholesterol, they could be lipids, they could be inflammatory cells. And at the very end, before you start to call game over, all right, it's the clots, the clots that stick there. So the name of the game when it comes to food and vascular health is to eat foods that keep that vascular lining, that slippery surface smooth and as healthy as possible. And there's a number of foods that can actually do that. I'll name one food and one beverage and one snack, all right. So one food that actually is really, really good for your blood vessel lining are brassica vegetables. Broccoli, buck choy, twistard, ridiculous. Those vegetables which you find in objection contain a natural bioactive called isothiocyanates. Okay, and these actually keep that lining slippery, nice and smooth. Very, very important. Keeps them healthy and slippery and smooth. That's a food. A beverage would be green tea. Now, there's many different benefits of green tea. And the the polyphenol is the catechans, EGCG in green tea. For people go, okay, well, what is EGCG? I'll pronounce it once, but don't worry about trying to spell it. Epigalo catechin three galate, EGCG. It's a polyphenol in tea. All right. When you sip tea, tea does a lot of good things. One of the things it does is keep your blood vessels nice and slippery and smooth and healthy. And the snacks that'll do the same thing are tree nuts. Tree nuts, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, pecans, macademia, pine nuts, the tasty nuts you might have in a trail mix. All right, those also contribute dietary fiber, which actually helps to feed your gut microbiome. And your gut microbiome actually produces natural substances that keep our blood vessels healthy and lower inflammation, which also is critical for vascular health. So these are, you know, I mean, the list goes on, but I think those are three categories of foods, three types of foods, that would be an example of how we can actually try to maintain our vascular health.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

We're going to pause here for a brief word from our sponsors. When we come back, Dr. Lee and I talk about inflammation and why it is not automatically the enemy and how food can help you keep that fire from getting out of control. Protein is one of those key foundational elements that sounds simple until you actually try to get it right. With True Nutrition, I found a customized solution that supports my strength, recovery, and capabilities. Most protein powders are made as though everyone has the same body, the same goals, the same digestion, and the same taste buds. True Nutrition is different because they let you build the mix yourself. That is what really impressed me. The customization is actually really fun, at least for me. You can control the protein source, flavor, sweetener, boosts, and even the nutrition profile. How many calories, how much protein, fat, carbs, fiber, and sugar you want in the mix. My favorite so far is pea protein with marine collagen, cacao flavor for that dark chocolate creaminess, and then lion's mane, cordyceps, and super green boosts. It feels like a smart, practical formula built around what I actually want. To build your mix, you pick a base from more than 20 options, including whey, plant, and dairy-free. Next you choose your flavor, your sweetener, and the flavor intensity. Then you add boosts like collagen, fiber, probiotics, aminos, colostrum, you name it. Once you have the mix right, you save it and refill the same formula every time, or play around with different combos. This is a high quality product. That means non-GMO, no fillers, no additives, no gluten, third-party tested, and first party verified. For me, the big thing is that I actually look forward to my daily protein shake now. No chalky aftertaste, no weird heaviness, and no compromise on what I'm putting in my body. Go to true nutrition.com slash AGIST and use code AGIST to save 20% off your first custom protein blend. That's true nutrition.com slash ageist codeAGIST. Most of us think about muscle health in terms of lifting weights and consuming protein, but there is a deeper layer underneath all of it, and that is cellular energy. Your muscle cells are packed with mitochondria because muscle takes a lot of energy to do its job. As we age, mitochondrial function naturally declines, and that can show up as lower energy, less strength, slower recovery, and a little less bounce back than we used to have. Timeline has spent more than 15 years researching mitochondrial health and developed mitopure, which contains urolithin A. Urolithin A supports metophagy, the body's process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and recycling cellular components. In one study, participants saw a 12% improvement in muscle strength in four months with no change in exercise. That gets my attention. For me, healthy aging means protecting capacity, the ability to move, train, recover, and keep showing up for the life I want. Supporting the cellular machinery underneath strength and energy feels like a very smart place to start. Timeline's clinically proven formula is now available at a new, lower price. Midopure now starts at $79 when you go to Timeline.com slash ageist. You mentioned anti-inflammatory. So a lot of us lead a fairly inflammatory lifestyle. I think just being a modern human, there's a lot of stress on us and inflammation. I'd had a hard workout this morning, so there's, you know, some inflammation in my body. What would you suggest as far as foods that bring down acute inflammation of the muscles and such? Are there specific foods you think would help with that?

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah. Well, look, you know, one of the biggest myths about inflammation is that it is categorically bad. And that's just not true. And I can tell you this as a physician, as a doctor, and also as a scientist, inflammation, thank goodness we've got inflammation in our body. Inflammation is our 911 first responder system of our body. So that if you cut yourself, you fall off a cliff, you know, in troglodite terms, you know, we injured ourselves, we cut ourselves. Today's world, you cut yourself in the kitchen, you scrape your knee playing tennis by falling on the court. All right. That calls 911 in your in inflammatory cells, the cells that make up inflammation, they race to the site of injury. All right, they're their first responders. And the thing that those inflammatory cells do is they look for bacteria to attack and kill. They want to make sure that you get injury, that you need that inflammation there to clean up the problem. So you it doesn't wind up becoming an infection that grows and gets into your body early. First responders, okay? So a little bit of inflammation is good. Where we wind up getting into problems is chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is where the little bit of inflammation grows to a lot of inflammation, and instead of coming and going, which is what happens when you cut yourself, the inflammation comes, it grows, and it never goes away. Another example I'll give you of about inflammation that helps makes it easier for people to understand. Inflammation is good like fire, like a campfire is good when you're going out camping. You have to warm your hands, warm your feet, tell ghost stories, have your hot toddy or whatever. Okay, that's good. But what happens at the end of the evening? The fire goes out, or you put it out before you go to bed, and that's fine. It's served its roles. Chronic inflammation is when the campfire comes out of the fire pit and lights the forest on fire, and now the whole place is burning down. There's not a chance you can put that out by yourself, and now everything is destroyed, and that's chronic inflammation. So when you ask that question, you know, what types of foods can we eat to actually camp down chronic inflammation? I think we need first need to understand that a little bit of inflammation is fine. We're not trying to get rid of your body's complete ability, but you want to actually lower chronic inflammation. All right. What are some of the foods that have been shown to counter chronic inflammation? Well, it turns out that foods that contain vitamin C, C is in Charlie, are really good anti-inflammatory foods. And this has been shown in clinical studies of women with lupus out of Japan. There's a prefecture called Miyagi Prefecture in Japan. There's a lupus clinic there. There was a really amazing research study, important research study, looking at women with lupus and trying to figure out based on diet, what they ate, who had more lupus flares, flares of Inflammation and who had fewer flares, less inflammation. It turns out the correlation occurred with lower inflammation, fewer flares, with women who ate more foods containing vitamin C. What are foods containing vitamin C? Tomatoes, red bell peppers, broccoli, strawberries, papaya, guava, they all contain vitamin C as and charlie. And vitamin C foods actually lower the inflammation, and that's a good thing. Now, some of those foods also contain a lot of dietary fiber. Broccoli is a great source of dietary fiber. That dietary fiber feeds your gut microbiome. And when your gut microbiome is fed, so look, here we are, you know, uh planning our meals, eating our food. I want nutrition, so our food hopefully is feeding our human tissue needs. Whatever we don't absorb in our stomach, in our gut, tumbles down our GI tract, okay, 40 feet long, down to the bottom, into the colon, and that's actually where the gut microbiome is. We feed our gut microbiome with our leftovers, so to speak. And our gut microbiome loves to eat dietary fiber. Okay, it is their staple food. And it pays us back for feeding them by creating anti-inflammatory substances. These are called short-chain fatty acids. They lower inflammation in our body. And so that's another way to actually lower inflammation is to eat foods with vitamin C and dietary fiber in order to be able to actually achieve that goal. Another way of actually lowering inflammation is to eat foods containing omega-3 fatty acids, whether it's seafood or whether it is plant-based foods that contain the precursor to omega-3s that we eat in our body than makes our own omega-3s. Omega-3 is also a really powerful way to actually achieve anti-inflammatory status. And not surprisingly, people who eat more omega-3 containing foods actually have lower risk of cardiovascular disease and in inflammatory chronic conditions as well. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on how to keep our vascular system slippery. I love that. And I love the I'm just thinking of like the Zimbose machine, right? Like how slippery that is. Cancer is this other thing, right? So some cancers, solid tumor cancers, and help me out, I'm not a doctor here, hijack our blood supply. Other cancers, I'm guessing blood cancers is sort of a different thing. How do we think about that? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

So cancer is an interim disease, a very important disease in modern society. It's the one disease that probably we fear the most, but ironically, it's also the disease where we fear the treatment for the disease the most as well, right? Chemotherapy. Well, that all that's changing. And recently I gave a keynote in London where I talked about the transformation, how we're now moving into a completely different era about cancer, partly because we understand better now how cancer forms. So here's something that might be surprising to your viewers and listeners, but we all have cancer in our body. Even children. Everybody has cancer. And here's the reason why. All right, they're like little pimples that form in our body. We all have pimples forming in our backs, and we just don't see them, so we don't pay any attention to them, and they go away by themselves. So is the situation with cancer. Here's the deal. Our bodies are made out of 40 trillion cells. All right. That's how many cells are in the human body, approximately. Those cells have to reproduce themselves, copy and paste themselves. And that's why we're still going to be around tomorrow from today. And that's why we're here today compared to yesterday. Copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. All right. Every time there's copy-paste, you've got to copy the DNA that's in every cell as well. And copying DNA is a complicated task. How amazing it is that we can copy and paste ourselves, you know, 40 trillion times without making a mistake. Well, the truth is our body does make mistakes making this copy. So here's an example, Dave. If I gave you a single sentence and I asked you on a word processor to type it 10 times perfectly, you're going to do it perfectly. You're going to be careful. You're going to make sure every punctuation is there, the spelling's correct. All right. You're going to do it perfectly. If I asked you to do it a hundred times, yeah, you might make a mistake or two. It's inevitable. If I asked you to type that sentence 40 trillion times, I guarantee you you're going to make a mistake. All right. And that's exactly what actually happens in the human body. Our body makes mistakes. Every mistake has mistakes in the DNA. A mistake in the DNA in a copied cell is a mutated cell. A mutated cell is the basis for cancer, and little tiny microscopic cancers form all over our bodies, and they are completely harmless, harmless. And the reason they're microscopic and harmless is because they don't have a blood supply, they can't grow up, they're tiny, and they sit there until our immune system wings by. So think about our immune systems like cops on a beat patrolling a peaceful neighborhood, all right? And everything looks good. Let's keep on going to the next street. Everything looks good. Oh, you see that microscopic cancer? That's like a cop on a beat in a suburban neighborhood, seeing a drug dealer on the corner. Drug dealer doesn't have to be dealing anything, just sitting there looking like a drug dealer. You're going to put them in a paddy wagon and take them away. And that's what our immune system normally does. So the little pimply microscopic cancers that are forming every single day in our body never are a problem. Okay. This is actually a fundamental reconceptualization of cancer that we all need to understand. Large diagnosed cancers that are growing as big masses, those are scary for sure. We need to understand our cancer is like a natural occurrence in our body. All right. So the key is how does a tiny microscopic harmless cancer turn into a deadly cancer? This is actually what we begin understanding. There's a weakness in our body's defense against cancer. When our body fails to be able to prevent cancers from growing, blood vessels towards the cancer, then it's a fail of our defenses. Shields down, vulnerabilities go up, blood vessels feed cancer, cancers grow. I can tell you, I worked, I trained in a lab that pioneered this type of work. And what was found is that if you have a cancer first, what happens is that the body's defenses go down. So when a tumor is able to figure out how to dodge or get around the body's fail-safe mechanism that prevents blood vessels from growing into cancer, a tumor grows blood vessels into a cell, it will grow explosively. Now, I worked in a laboratory where this was figured out. And we were able to grow tumors in a way in a system that where blood vessels couldn't reach the tumor and it would stay microscopic more or less forever, wouldn't it could never grow up. The biggest it would grow is about two or three millimeters in diameter. That's the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. Okay, harmless. Now, then we could actually allow blood vessels to grow into the tumor, and the moment that the first blood vessel started feeding the cancer, other blood vessels would follow along, and that tumor would grow 16,000 times in volume in just two weeks. Explosive growth once angiogenesis is hijacked by the cancer in order to be able to allow blood vessels to grow. Angioblo, blood vessel, genesis, how they grow. Tumor antigenesis is actually hijacking the normal system of maintaining our circulation. So that's one of the things that can actually happen that cancers can grow. Another thing that makes cancers dangerous is when our immune system goes down. Now we know people, for example, who are in immunosuppressants. If you have a transplanted organ, a transplanted kidney, or a transplanted liver, you're on these super immune suppressors so that your body doesn't reject organs, man, those people are really, really vulnerable to developing cancer. So are people with HIV, immunosuppressed? They also pop up cancers as well. And so anything that actually lowers our immune shields, remember, I told you your immune system is like cops on a beat cruising around your body, looking for little cancer cells to throw in the paddy wagon and take them away. When that system goes down, it's like all the cops are on strike, off duty, or you don't have enough staff to patrol the neighborhood. Watch out. That drug dealer is going to actually start to round up, and now you're going to get more of them in the corner. Oops, there goes the neighborhood. And that's exactly one of the things. Oh, and by the way, and the other thing that actually triggers cancers to grow vigorously, aggressively, is inflammation. Cancer loves, thrives in an environment of inflammation. If you take a group of tumor cells and you allow inflammation to gather around them, it is like pouring gasoline onto the embers of a fire. All right. You get this gigantic flare of growth. And that's why, if you think about those three things, angirogenesis growing into tumors, tumors figuring out how to do that, all right, immune system going down, making you much more vulnerable. You can't clean them up, you can't get rid of them. Now, inflammation, that's like putting that gasoline on fire. You got a real problem. And this all happens very early on, long before we actually wind up diagnosing breast cancer with a mammogram or with a colonoscopy or a chest x-ray, for example. The reason a diet comes back into this, all right, is that there's an opportunity to prevent cancer to begin with. And that's the best solution to cancer of all, if we can just keep it from turning into a problem, right? So how do we do this? Well, we eat foods that sure up our body's ability to be able to cut off the blood supply that tumors might want to grow to hijack. No hijacking. That's like putting TSA into your body. Oh, anti-angiogenic foods, all right? Number one. Number two, you want to boost your immune system. How can you raise your shields, your immune shields, so that if there is a cancer, you got plenty of those cops on the beat to take out those bad guys. They're ready to rock, okay? You've got super soldiers ready to take out all the bad guys. That is immune-enhancing, immune-boosting foods. And then the third thing you want to do is eat anti-inflammatory foods, foods that lower inflammation. So you're putting that those jerry cans of gasoline far away from the campfire, so you don't wind up actually accidentally starting a forest fire. There are foods that can actually lower inflammation, boost immunity, and cut off the blood supply, feeding cancers. And all of these things are found in our grocery stores, on our farmers' markets, and in our pantries. And so this is really where this is the true science of food as medicine. There is a type of definition which is about prescription foods for people with diabetes, et cetera, medically tailored meals. That that makes sense. It's an interesting dimension, it's a long, long and coming uh solution for people in the hospital if you're ever eaten hospital food. But I can tell you that what I'm talking about, this is a food as medicine approach that is an every person approach. You could be at any age, you could be healthy, you could be sick. This is something that's going to actually be in your best interest to be able to optimize your health at any point in your lifespan. Definitely as you age, you want to actually do this even better.

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Let's take a quick break. When do we return? Dr. Lee takes on some of the big nutritional questions out there: sugar and cancer, protein after 50, plant versus animal sources, and why personalized health advice should leave room for real life. I used to think the afternoon fade was a caffeine problem. Have another coffee, push through, keep going. But caffeine mostly mutes the signal that tells you you're tired. The fatigue is still there, building underneath, and when it wears off, you feel the drop. What I like about Element Lemonade Iced tea is that it takes a different approach. It uses a full black tea extract. So the caffeine comes with L-theanine and polyphenols, the way it exists in the plant. Then it adds a meaningful dose of electrolytes, sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the same foundation as Elements Core Hydration Mix. For me, that makes sense in the summer. Heat, training, travel, long work days, all of that asks more from the system. I reach for lemonade iced tea when I want something that feels clean, steady, and actually refreshing, with no sugar, artificial colors, or strange ingredients. Get a free eight-count sample pack of Elements most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase at drinkelement.com slash AGIST. Find your favorite flavor or share with a friend. Once again, that's D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T.com slash AGIST. Talk to me about glucose load and cancer growth.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

Okay. Complicated topic. I'm going to try to break it down really simply. The common belief is, and I'm going to state what people have already heard. Sugar feeds cancer. If you have cancer, stay away from all sugar. If you eat a lot of sugar, it's going to increase your risk of cancer. All kind of false. All right. And I'll tell you why it's kind of false. And by the way, I have a real passion for myth busting. So I'll take out Thor's hammer and I'll smash apart the things that are actually just not true. Most of these urban legends come from well-intentioned people that don't have medical or scientific knowledge, but hear certain facts and put the facts together in a way that is understandable how you put them together, but in fact is not how it really happens. Okay, so let me back up to tell you sugar is absolutely critical for life. Our bodies run on sugar, our brains run on sugar. If candy were outlawed, we would actually still need sugar. If soda were outlawed, we'd still need sugar to live. Sugar is found in our foods. I mean, the juicy, sweet summer peach, the juicy pear in the fall, you know, a nice juicy orange, pineapple, you name it, how much sweeter can you get than a ripe mango? All right. Those don't cause cancer. They don't make cancer to get worse. So you need to understand that our body needs sugar. Your brain needs more sugar than any other organ in your body. It is absolutely critically dependent on sugar. If you don't want brain fog, you know, if you don't want to actually like really be stunned, unable to think, you need to power it up with sugar. In fact, it's so important that your body will produce alternates to sugar if it can't get it from diet. Okay. So that's the general truth. Now, some people do have difficulty with sugar, and that's like, you know, processing sugar, insulin insensitivity, glucose intolerance, type 2 by diabetes, metabolic syndrome. All right, those people are having difficulty managing regular blood sugar. So sugar rises, like the water level in your bathtub, it's dangerously close to overfilling the bathtub. All right. That's what happens in metabolic syndrome. That's what happens in type 2 diabetes. That's a dangerous situation, right? Like you're about to have a spillover, a flood into your bathroom. In that case, you want to actually make sure you lower your water level in the bathtub or lower your glucose. That's pretty important to do for your overall health and your long-term health. But what about for cancer? Where did this whole idea that trigger feeds cancer even come from? Well, in the 80s, there was an amazing technology advancement where they invented PET scans, P-E-T, positron emission tomography. This is the scan where you put the body in there and you're looking for areas where there might be cancer. And the way that it picks it up is that you have to inject into the bloodstream some sugar, and it's called FDG, fluorodioxyglucose, glucose, all right, and it's radio labeled, it's radioactive, all right. And when you inject that in there, because cancer is metabolically faster than every other organ in your body, except maybe your brain, your cancer is is really metabolically active. Whenever there's sugar in there, the cancer is going to take it up and it's going to process it. And under the PET scan, you're going to see where those tumors light up, where they're processing this radioactive sugar. So under a PET scan, you do see tumors gobbling up the sugar and lighting up. And that's how we discover where the tumor is on a PET scan. So the well-intentioned person said, Well, look, this is how it's working in a PET scan. So if you actually eat a piece of birthday cake, you're going to be feeding your cancer. No cancer patient should be anywhere near sugar. All right. Well, that actually doesn't, that doesn't really take place. I mean, we need sugar normally. And if you're able to process sugar normally, when you eat any kind of food, even a healthy food, even broccoli, it's got some sugar in it, okay, your blood sugar is going to rise, okay? And then your insulin and all your cells, you're going to, muscles and body fat, gonna take in that sugar, that energy, and you're gonna go up and you're gonna go down. It's gonna be a sine curve, okay? Gentle wave, all right? Go up and down and up and down, and that's perfectly normal. And the cancer, look, it's growing, all right? It's gonna try to get some of it as well, but you're not gonna be feeding it to make it get a lot worse. I mean, that's not how you starve cancer by cutting off sugar in your body. That's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Doesn't work that way. All right. And so this idea that cancer patients shouldn't eat fruit, wrong. Shouldn't eat vegetables with sugar in it, fructose, wrong. Should cancer patients be drinking soda and eating as much candy as they can? Probably not. Okay. I mean, that's that's just metabolically not good for you anyway. That's pro-inflammatory. And what did we say about inflammation and cancer? That's gasoline on the fire. That's the real reason, not because you're feeding the cancer. Now, the topic of glucose spikes and glucose crashes, I think has been way overblown in social media. I'm saying this as a scientist. I know other scientists are talking into it. I think they're just buying right into this whole thing that using the terms glucose spike sounds scary. Sounds like you don't want it. Okay, glucose crash. It sounds like that's a bad thing too. Nobody wants to crash. But really, in healthy physiology, we're aiming for health. It's a steady rise and a steady fall, steady rise, steady fall. It should be just fine. If you aren't metabolically healthy, you might not be able to process the sugar in the right way. And it might climb a little higher. And if your metabolism is unstable, which people with metabolic syndrome might be, you know, the glucose might fall a little bit quicker, but you're not bottoming out. You're not crashing through the ceiling and bottoming out. I actually find it not helpful to the general public or to patients to hear words that are used, you know, like these are loaded words that evoke a sense of crisis. I think it's perfectly fine for cancer patients to be able to eat plant-based foods that contain natural sugars, including fruits and vegetables, all right, that have sugar in them, not to be worried about that. But like every other situation, but especially if you've got cancer, you don't want to be eating foods that promote inflammation. And eating a lot of added sugar foods will promote inflammation, and that's not what you want to do. So I hope I put that into a little bit of context for you that might be helpful for your viewers and listeners.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

Talk to me about protein intake, kinds of protein. What do we need? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

So, first of all, protein that we eat could be animal or plant, they contain amino acids, and amino acids are the building blocks of life. We didn't have protein, we didn't have amino acids in our body. We die. All right. I mean, think about it. When you go look at these planets in our solar system that appear to have no life, I mean, we don't know. Maybe they do have life, but we haven't been able to find any yet. Okay. There's no protein on there, there's no amino acids. In fact, the origin of life on Earth required amino acids somehow to be around, to mix together to be able to create other proteins, right? And proteins is what developing blocks of life. So we need proteins in order to support life. Now, when we are young, let's say under the age of 50, just an arbitrary cut point, you know, we generally are more active. We have enough protein, hopefully eating a balanced nutritional meal. You don't want to overeat your protein. So this is sort of like the young NFL players like downing as much steak as they can. Look, you know, they're going to pay for that later. And they're they're getting protein, way more protein than they probably need. They will need more than the average person because they're athletically, they're trying to build themselves all the time. But that's not a habit you should be doing all the time when you are younger. When you get older, okay, and I say this is sort of like over the age of 50-ish, okay, we go into a more catabolic state where our protein, protein in our body starts to be broken down and we build it up a little bit less, um, and our life changes. And so this is where I would say people in the second half of their lives should really try to focus on eating more protein. Okay, let's say 50, 55, and above. Try to eat more protein. All right. And the protein that you want to eat really can be coming from a variety of sources. It could be from plants, it could be from animals. And I think that you know, you got to realize we do know that people who eat a heavy red meat-based diet, they tend to be at higher risk for many different types of diseases. This is just epidemiology. The correlation of eat a if you eat a preponderance of red meat, higher risk of cardiovascular disease, higher risk of cancer, higher risk of dementia. All right, it's an association, but it holds true. We also know that people who eat plant-based foods have lower risk of cardiovascular disease, lower risk of cancer, and lower risk of dementia as well, all right, and metabolic disease. So completely in the opposite direction. Both sources can provide protein. But it doesn't mean that you have to only eat plants or only be a vegan in order to be healthy. You can pick and choose from different sides, but just know you gotta approach this with eyes wide open, primarily getting Protein from red meat is not an overall long-term strategy that's going to be healthy. Plant-based proteins are going to be healthy, but you got to be kind of deliberate about choosing plant-based proteins so that you know what you're actually getting. By the way, plant-based proteins got to be a little careful because there's this whole other mythology that, you know, anything that's plant-based is going to be healthy. You know, there's a lot of plant-based, ultra-processed foods that are out there, including these fake burgers and fake hot dogs and all that kind of stuff. You know, that's ultra-processed food. We also know that ultra-processed foods are not going to be healthy for you. So the answer to your question isn't a simple, yes, no, do this or not, do that. But to choose wisely, and this is where individual, you know, personalized nutrition matters. What is your age? Where are you in your life? How active are you? Do you feel like you're able to actually switch to a mostly plant-based diet? That's a good thing to do. Get your proteins from there. Where do you get your proteins in that situation? Beans are a great, and legumes are a great source of protein. Soybeans, lentils, great source of plant-based protein. You should go for it. All right. They also have dietary fiber. Now you're not only getting the protein, but you're also getting the stuff to feed your microbiome. Now you're getting anti-inflammation. So, you know, you're getting additional things besides the protein and plant-based foods. Red meat, you know, you do get a lot of protein. You get iron. You got a lot of minerals that you can't very easily get enough of from just eating only plants. Well, that's okay. If you're eating plants, you can take vitamins and supplements, but if you're eating meat, that's okay. But there's a lot of saturated fats in there. So you're getting some bad things along with the protein, right? So plants, you get the protein and you get other good things like dietary fiber and polyphenols. For meats, you get protein because we get saturated fats. And sometimes you actually get other metabolites that are not so good. So one of them is TMAO. This is actually a domino effect of your body processing the components of meat-based proteins, and it turns into a basically a toxin. And you can find it in your poop of meat eaters. You know, you eat a steak, you know, you're going to be forming it in your poop. You're going to poop it out. A little bit, probably not a big deal, but if you're a heavy meat-based eater and that's all you're eating, you know, think about the people that are eating barbecue all day long. Now you're adding the other stuff in the barbecue. Think about it. Protein is pretty elemental. It's amino acids. Eat proteins that have other good things for you. You're going to actually, you get a twofer. All right. You eat proteins that have some negative things associated with it. Now, you know, you've taken one step forward, but maybe two steps back. And this is really, I think, the personal choice you're going to be making, right? So we live in a free society. You get to choose your own destiny. You want protein, you know, start focusing on protein over the age of 50 or 55. Choose wisely. You know, if it were me, I'd choose the plant-based protein every single time. All right. But you know, hey, I'm not a vegan. I'm an omnivore, and I'm a foodie too. I like to sample different types of foods. I respect different genres of food. And so when I people say, well, like what side are you on in the food wars and in the food religions? And I basically said, listen, I try to make my food choices, my protein choices, based on practicality, based on preference, and based on reasonableness. And I think I practice the reasonable form of diet because we can't all live in this idealistic world that's based on, you know, kind of like principles only. We live real lives. You know, same thing as fasting when people talk about intermittent fasting. Do I intermittently fast? Sure, I do. Do I do it all the time? Do I go 16, 8? You know what? It's not practical for me to do that kind of thing. So I try to do as much as I can in a reasonable way. You've got to be mindful about it. And that's just true for protein selection as well.

SPEAKER_01 47:46

I find that these questions, as you mentioned, it's really about personalization and sort of figuring out what works when. For me, fasting doesn't work because I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm hungry. It messes up my sleep. So I'll have like, you know, a few spoonfuls of cottage cheese before I go to bed, and then I don't wake up in the night. I know some people have their last meal at two or three in the afternoon and they're fine. I find that the question around protein is one of the more divisive ones. Figuring out how much and where it comes from, I weigh about 170 pounds. Some people have said I need about 170 grams of protein a day. That's work. I you know, that to me strikes me as a I'm a very active athletic guy. That's still like a huge amount of protein to me.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

Well, this is why, you know, I've been careful in trying to frame this conversation or not around hard and fast numbers. You know, it depends on your body size, it depends on what else is going on in terms of your health, it depends on your activity level, depends on your stress level. And that's why, you know, when we come up with numbers, you know, what should my blood pressure be? You know, should it be 120 over 70? Well, you know, it depends. And people don't like that kind of answer. But it but I I think that the the reality is, is it's gotta work for you. It's gotta be tailored and personalized to you. And anybody who looks at what's happening in modern medicine realizes that the cookbook approach to treating disease is now being ripped out of the textbook and thrown out the window. And we're really moving towards personalization of cancer, heart disease, you know, obesity, diabetes. And why would that be any different for root for nutrition?

SPEAKER_01 49:28

That's right. You know, my background was as a mechanical engineer, and the physical sciences are wonderful. Simple. They're so they're so simple. Biological sciences, a very different animal. The word that I'm keying on that you said, Dr. Lee, is reasonableness. And I think that that is really the watchword for all of this is reasonableness. And and what works for you. What do you essentially what do you feel good with?

SPEAKER_00 49:55

Well, and I and I think about the fact that, you know, there's a there is a mindset that I am, I think is really great, which is that as a society, more and more people are waking up to the fact that we have agency over our own health. Our health isn't up to the doctor or up to the hospital, but it's up to us. And health care isn't what actually happens in the medical clinic. Medical clinics are used for disease care, sick care. Health care is what actually happens at home. We're doing it every single day. You know, we are prescribing ourselves something useful, food is medicine three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we're eating three meals a day. And we're I think that our society as a whole is beginning to wake up to that fact. And that's a really a good thing. But you can take that to an extreme. And I love the idea that we can measure our blood glucose, we can measure our pulse, we can measure oxygenation. I mean, how fantastic is that we have wearables. However, if you take that to an extreme where you're not going to make a move until you actually check your continuous glucose monitor levels on your phone, all right. Or if you only are gonna eat certain, like rigidly, I'm only gonna eat organic this or organic that, and it can't be GMO, and you know, you wind up actually pinning yourself into this really, really narrow vertical canyon. You know that true story got turned into a movie, I think it was called 128 Hours, where the dude got his arm stuck in a cliff, right? And he couldn't get out. Well, I think that's actually what happens. You know, we have to be careful. If you're not reasonable, you wind up getting your brain stuck in this. It's not just orthorexia where, you know, you're addicted, your OCD to healthy foods, but really, you know, you wind up actually rigidly pinning your life into unreasonable situations. You know what that does? It causes stress. You know what stress causes, it causes inflammation. Now, whatever it is that you were trying to do with your glucose level or your pulse rate or your oxygenation status or your mitochondrial health, you've pretty much undone just because you've been overly focused and anxious about one or two numbers. This is why reasonableness is so important. And by the way, in my most recent book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, I wrote a whole chapter that I thought my publisher was going to get freaked out that I wrote about. I wrote, I wrote a chapter about Bruce Lee, the martial artist. All right. And I'm sort of like, so when does the doctor writing about nutrition and food like talk about Bruce Lee? Well, I did that because Bruce Lee was a hero of mine when I was a teenager. But as I got older and I started to really figure out what his contributions were, I'm an aficionado, but I'm not like uh obsessed. All right. But what he did was really quite amazing. He created a new form of martial arts that was not rigid, that was flexible and reasonable. And his form of martial arts was hey, look, take the best elements of all the other styles that are out there: karate, jujitsu, waikita, whatever it is, boxing, fencing, whatever you can find, learn all those skills and learn how to read your environment and adapt those skills to the situation you happen to be in, that's the most effective way to actually move forward. And so I wrote about it because eat your diet isn't a diet book, it's an anti-diet book that talks about how do you navigate with reasonableness, how do you use the science to navigate with reasonableness. And I put that section in there because look, if you are actually confident in your knowledge on how to adapt to different situations, you don't have to stick to the black and white. I think black and white gets people in trouble when it comes to nutrition.

SPEAKER_01 53:28

I believe Bruce Lee said be like water. Exactly. Exactly. Dr. Lee, this has been fascinating. I love that you are reasonable. Yeah. Such a relief. If someone wants to get in contact with you, if they want to see what you're up to, where would they go?

SPEAKER_00 53:42

Well, I got a website. The people are welcome to come, Dr. William Lee, D-R William Lee L I. I'm super excited that I actually have been supercharging my YouTube channel, Dr. William Lee, DR William Lee L I. And I'm I'm on social. My handle is at Dr. William Lee. I'm on TikTok, Instagram. But, you know, my YouTube is like my thing where I'm actually answering the questions and having conversations about the topics that people are sending me emails and text messages about all the time on the information you need to know. I'm like, you know what? I'm just gonna go out there and put it out there. My mission is to really help give people information that can help empower them so they can make better decisions.

SPEAKER_01 54:24

Absolutely. It is a delight, Dr. Lee, to have you on here. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm wishing you a wonderful, healthy, well-fed week. Thank you very much. A real pleasure to be on. All right. Take care now. Bye-bye. So good to have Dr. Lee on the show. What I like about this interview is the word that he uses reasonableness. We need to be reasonable. We live in a time when health advice tends to arrive like some kind of a command, like eat this, check this box, never eat that, fast for this many hours, hit the protein number. I mean, there's a lot of stress keeping track of all that stuff. Let's just be reasonable about this stuff. I really think that there's rigidity itself creates stress. And as Dr. Lee points out, stress has biological consequences. So uh the better question may be: what supports our health in a way that we can live with? And I think that's really the thing. You know, we talk here a lot about aliveness. And yes, I think we need to be careful about what we eat. We need to be mindful of what we eat, but we need to be reasonable also. Um I think that as somebody we've had on this podcast said, you can you can take anything to excess. I keep coming back to this, as I said, maximum aliveness. And the idea of what do we want out of exercise, out of diet, all of this you know, the the language that comes to mind is durable capacity. So how long can we do the things that we want to do and enjoy life along the way? So circling back to Dr. Lee, I also appreciated his refusal to reduce nutrition to slogans. Sugar is not simply evil. Inflammation is not simply bad. And protein is not going to fix everything in your body. Plant-based does not automatically mean healthy if it comes from some form of ultra-processed food. And red meat is not the only way to get strong. There's a lot of ways to do this. The more useful idea is context. We'd like to say eat for the day that you're having, which means paying attention to calories and protein, but hey, live life. Don't become obsessive. Think reasonable, reasonableness. This is our watchword for the day. It's not an excuse to ignore the science, but it's a way to make the science usable. The best plan is the one that improves your life without shrinking it. That's it for this week. Stay strong, stay vibrant, and we'll see you next time. Take care.