Dr. William Li on Food as Medicine and Your Five Health Defenses
10,000 cancers deleted daily—how food helps your shields stay up.
I just sat down with Dr. William Li.
Harvard-trained physician-scientist and Angiogenesis Foundation founder, author of Eat to Beat Disease.
In this episode you’ll learn
A 5-defense blueprint: angiogenesis, stem cells, microbiome, immunity, DNA repair
Three daily swaps to cut inflammation and protect your gut
How food pairs with treatment to improve outcomes (vaccines, immunotherapy)
We dive into the details later in the conversation.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
13:50 Food as Medicine: where food fits with treatment
25:52 The Five Health Defense Systems
31:28 Balancing defenses (the Goldilocks principle)
34:51 Angiogenesis: starving tumors, healing tissue
38:42 Family cancer stories and risk
40:26 Immunotherapy, personalization, questions to ask your oncologist
44:20 Foods that raise shields
49:30 Build a personalized, sustainable protocol
55:02 Ultra-processed foods, chocolate, seafood: practical guidance
1:00:39 Meaning, fulfillment, and healthy aging
Listen
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Here’s the full transcript:
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How do we eat to make our body heal itself? Dr. William Lee, Harvard trained physician and the New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Beat Disease. What is your thesis around treating disease through the foods that you eat? Mother Nature has engineered and imbued her food with more natural substances than any drug company could have ever produced. Where did
We go wrong in the understanding of nutrition as a tool. What I encourage people to do is think about the approach as mixed martial arts, MMA. Previously there has been some cancer experiences in your family. One in two men, one in three women over the course of a lifetime are going to develop cancer. Cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence. It’s time to wake up to the new reality that we’ve moved forward enough where it’s actually possible to succeed in a fight against cancer.
Welcome to That One Time with Adam Metwally, the podcast bridging the gap between health, hustle and happiness. Today I’m with Dr. William Lee, Harvard trained physician scientist behind the Angiogenesis Foundation and the New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Beat Disease, known for
translating rigorous science into everyday actionable outcomes to prevent and reverse disease. Hi, Dr. William Lee, how are you? I’m very well. Thanks for having me on, Adam. Of course, my friend, of course. So I want to get started with a quote. Hippocrates once said, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times. And it seems that there has been a recent resurgence in the idea that an ownership of our health outcomes
is extremely important and a reliance less on the external world to heal our body. So at the core of it, what is your thesis around treating disease through the foods that you eat? Well, I’m a physician. Internal medicine is how I’m trained. So I take care of men and women, young and old, healthy and sick. When I went to medical school, my own personal bent, my orientation has always been to try to keep people as healthy as possible. Although the medical system
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doesn’t train us how to do that. It trains us instead how to diagnose and chase illness, primarily using pharmaceuticals and other types of modern interventions. So for me, and I’ve been involved with helping with biotech treatment development. So I’m a big believer in the right treatment for the right person at the right time. One of the things that I realized even when I was in medical school is that the missing tool in the toolbox
that was not being taught to most doctors during medical school was how to use diet food as part of our toolkit as a tool in our toolbox. And what’s really amazing is that we’ve now come to rely on these remarkable pharmaceutical tools to treat many different kinds of disease. So I want to clarify that, for the people that say, screw it with drug companies and pharmaceuticals. Listen,
If it wasn’t for those, most of us probably wouldn’t make it beyond 40 or 50 years old. There was a time before we actually had antibiotics and things that, you know, like most of us didn’t make it to the age that, you know, to pursue longevity, which is what’s what’s what people are talking about now. Having said that, it’s important to know that we’ve only had pharmaceuticals for about 70 years, a little bit under 100 years. And
Before that, before drugs, we only had diet and lifestyle. That was all we had. We think about it. And yet somehow we lost track of all that. And so now what’s happening is bringing that old knowledge that we’ve always had back into the fold. But the difference now, Adam, is that we have the same powerful sites that has been used to develop state-of-the-art biotech pharmaceutical treatments.
Now we can apply that to understanding our food. And that’s what I do. I actually take hardcore science and direct it towards, you know, examining food so we can have a better understanding of what are the facts. Because what we’re discovering is not just about a super food or super supplement. It’s every bit as much about how our body responds to what we put inside it. came down this route personally as well.
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the difference between acute and systemic. The Western medicine approach seems to be very good at acute problems, but struggles with systemic problems. But then you go down the Eastern medicine route and it’s very systemic. So I’m always trying to also integrate those two components into how I approach health. And it’s really nice to see that it’s starting to become more and more mainstream because it wasn’t for a while there. You mentioned that you saw food act in very powerful ways
alongside treatments through for disease. So what beliefs did you have to let go of when you saw food act so powerfully in your testing? Okay. Well, first of all, you know, I grew up in a town in Pennsylvania that was multicultural. And as I was as I was growing up, I came to see how valued different types of foods connected to cultural traditions were.
So although I went to college, I studied science, I studied biochemistry. Before I went to medical school, I did a gap year. And in those, in that time, gap years were not that common. So I had to buck the system to be able to take a year off is how they viewed it. I actually discovered it was not a year off, it was a year on because...
I learned more during those period, those gap year periods and I, I’ve learned actually sitting down in front of a textbook in school. Where did I do my gap here? I was very interested in food, culture and health. And so I went to the Mediterranean and I lived with and lived in, towns in Italy and in Greece where I got to walk the walk long before anybody was talking and talk about the Mediterranean cuisine. And I saw,
how food and markets and recipes and preparation techniques, how they actually became, were actually part and parcel with how actually people lived. Now, when I went to medical school, I immediately saw that that was not being taught. That in fact, food was just, if it wasn’t being disparaged, which it sometimes was,
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It was completely being ignored, purposefully, intentionally being ignored. We used to say, our professor would say, well, you know, there are some dietetics and dietitians and registered nutritionists who do that. We do the real stuff, which has to do with drugs. And that always rubbed me the wrong way. I always felt to really look at health, we need to be able to recognize something really important. You go to the doctor or the hospital for sick care because you’re there because you’re sick.
Healthcare is what happens between visits to the doctor’s office. Healthcare is what happens at home. Healthcare is what you do for and to yourself when you open the refrigerator, when you look at the pantry, when you stand in front of the stove top or look at the, plan something in the oven. And so that was an area that I just knew was missing. And when I had the opportunity,
I didn’t have to let go of anything, which is what you were asking. Rather, what I did is I pulled an earlier interest into the system. And so I’m all by the way, you’ll, you know, if you know anything about me, I’m all about inclusion rather than exclusion. What do we add? Not that we not what we subtract. So I think the good news part of the modern appreciation of the importance of nutrition and food is medicine is that we get to add things. And by the way, the
surprise, the great surprise is that many of the things that we can add taste great and are the things that we already love. And so that gives us permission to upend the battle against food as something that’s bad or damaging to us. We can actually lean into our food to love our food, to love our health. And then the question is what foods? Yeah. And we’ll dig into that in a lot more detail later on in the episode. So I want to dig into a little point here.
And it might be a bit nuanced, but the Hippocratic oath says to do no harm. Yeah. Isn’t the goal of medicine and health to be a healthy person. So where did we go wrong in the understanding of nutrition as a tool when it was kind of a part of this whole thing to begin with? Yeah. So, you know, I don’t think this is a blame game. I actually think that what has happened with nutrition is that it was so much a part of our DNA.
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sort of from health perspective. And don’t forget, it wasn’t too long ago, even 100 years ago, where people didn’t live as long as we do today, you go back 200 years, you know, neither you and I would probably be here today. All right. So what happened is that back then there was no drugs, there was no real sophisticated medicine, the science was still really pretty primitive, very early days. And so when the discovery of pharmaceuticals,
And then the growth of the pharmaceutical industry came that we could actually conquer diseases that would have killed us. I think what happens that it just commanded our mind share to focus on that excitement. But, and so we kind of lost track of things. It’s kind of like, you always know something’s in a rear view mirror in a car, but all of a sudden there’s something on the horizon that’s so exciting that you don’t pay attention to the rear view mirror anymore.
Well, nutrition is not just in every rearview mirror, it’s caught up. And now it’s driving side like like a sidecar to us. And what I’m, you know, I’m happy to kind of share is that in fact, in some cases, we’re seeing nutrition zoom ahead of even pharmaceuticals and working together with our medicines, because we’re beginning to understand that Mother Nature has engineered imbued her food with more
natural substances, natural chemicals than any drug company could have ever produced. Yeah, I was thinking some more as you were saying that we had a solid baseline of simple foods, let’s say in the 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s, very simple foods, no red dye, none of this stuff. think as this is the first time I thought about this, but at the same time as the pharmaceutical industry took off,
The food companies also took off with their ability to understand the science of food. And things were going to get created in ways that were really powerful on a taste basis, but really bad for us on a health basis. So I think you’re right with the baseline being there when the pharmaceutical industry began really taking off, but then it changed.
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And then we didn’t catch up to that change until only quite recently. And you’ve got things like, I’ve heard stories of the tobacco industry moving into, know, Philip Morris buying Jell-O, Bird’s Eye in the 80s, all those sort of things, and applying those marketing and those marketing and product techniques to food.
So anyway, it’s just an interesting side note that I wanted to explore. Yeah, no, I mean, I think you’re you’re you’re onto something there. Maybe the way to think about it is this over history. Human endeavors have led have have kind of come upon and then driven some really remarkable innovations. You know, the invention of the steam engine, which then led to the car, which then led to the airplane, which led to the rocket. You know, I mean,
These things are transform the human transform human history. Same thing as pharmaceuticals transform modern medicine. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a really great thing. think food innovation, food engineering that came out of post World War Two prosperity because you you were talking about, know, in the 40s and maybe the 50s, you know, we had a simpler food. True.
and it was harder to get and a lot of people were hungry because they couldn’t get food. And so I, the part of the, I think the transformation of the food industry was the discovery of this ability to be able to create food at scale that people liked inexpensively that would stick around on the shelves for a long period of time. And at the time it seemed like such a miracle, something really to embrace. And so I,
You know, I think it’s very important for us not to kind of like backhand the people or the our own history. You know, it it happened. Now we’re actually smarter. And so now it’s time for us to have another transformation to be able to say, well, given what we know now, how do we do even better? So I think that if you want to take an optimistic approach towards human society, you know, the one thing is that when we recognize something,
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We tend to figure out how to actually solve it and come up with an even better solution. But maybe there’s a little bit of a warning, a hidden warning that comes with any modern revolution transformation. Think about the internet. Think about social media. Something amazing.
winds up also having, you know, the little warning sign inside that we need to be cautious about as well. So I, you know, like I think that we tend to go after good versus evil, you know, white versus black, you know, like it’s not that life is all about gray. Life is about progress. You know, something we thought is great today, maybe not so good tomorrow. We have to accept our own humanity and just recognize that overall.
I think humans have done pretty well for themselves. We just need to hold ourselves to a continuously higher standard. I like that. think you’re right. There’s probably a lot less, it’s more of like not understanding versus direct malevolence of we’re going to do this for us. most people act generally.
with an idea that they’re trying to help people and they think they’re doing the right thing, even if objectively down the line it comes out as being the wrong thing, people generally think they’re doing the right thing. yeah, I think you’re right. I want to dig into food as medicine a little bit more specifically, but before we do that,
Where does food in your experience realistically sit as its own treatment of disease versus a combination of, sorry, let me rephrase that. Where is the limit that you found food to get to that medicine and intervention then needs to add on to? that question makes sense, I’m not sure if I’m determining it. I’ll tell you how I approached it in my career. First, as a doctor,
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I became skilled in prescribing things and seeing good outcomes primarily with the right medicine for the right person for the right time, but it couldn’t solve everything. And we always were left feeling we could do a little bit more. And so rather than simply think we just need better drugs, which we still do, there’s this opportunity to say, is the food that we eat that you know, the patients not getting at the drugstore?
at the prescription to pharmacy, when they go to the grocery store, which might be where the pharmacy is located, is there an opportunity for them to do something for themselves at home that can amplify and make medicines work better? And in fact, there is, for example, we now know that if you eat foods that can improve your gut, your healthy microbiome, the healthy gut bacteria in your in your gut, you know,
you actually can lower inflammation. whether you, if you have lots of inflammation, your body, any number of chronic diseases, eating foods that help power up your gut defense. So your microbiome is healthier, it’s going to naturally lower inflammation. And that’s going to pair up with your steroid or your nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medicine. So that’s an example of something. Now, another example that’s been discovered is, you know, flu season comes up.
We recommend that, you know, most medical people recommend that, you know, get a flu vaccine. It’s just, you know, good practice. And I know people are all sort of up in arms about vaccines these days. But, you know, let’s talk about the facts. Vaccines can be helpful against the flu. And it turns out that research has been done to show that certain foods combined with the vaccine can make the vaccine, make the immune system.
even stronger against the flu. What are those foods like broccoli sprouts? So again, this is not about food versus medicine. But it’s about food and medicine. So then it comes to the point. So where is it that food can be used alone? Well, let me flip the flip the script on you to say where is it that medicine really can’t be used alone? And that answer to that is medicine pharmaceuticals.
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are not appropriate for prevention for the most part. Okay? Like you would never want to prescribe a drug just to prevent a future disease unless it was gonna really work super well. We had the evidence, all drugs have effects and side effects, but you know what? Foods are perfectly suited for disease prevention. Now, how does that work? Well, that’s what I do. That’s my work. My research is really to figure out the foods that we encounter.
on a daily basis that we make decisions on. What do they do once they disappear in your mouth and you swallow them? OK, you’re not tasting it anymore. You’re not smelling anymore. It’s in your gut. Now, what is the component? What are the components of that food? Where do they go and what do they do for your body? And the remarkable thing is that for many foods, especially whole plant based foods, they actually light up our body’s own hardwired health defenses.
And when they light up our health defenses, that helps our body like shields up for our health. And that makes us less vulnerable to disease. And so that’s why food is perfectly suited for prevention, because it naturally boosts health. And that’s why for medicine, you know, when you actually start using thinking about prescription drugs, for example, oftentimes, like our shields have been down.
We weren’t able to stop all the incoming. We’ve gotten, you know, we’re dealing with some kind of problem. Now, what are we going to do? We have a tool to pull out that can actually be aimed at that particular disease. But the food is still going to help shields be up. Right. So you never want to forget about those shields. And that’s one of the remarkable opportunities, I think, that we recognize today that
only has come into focus within the last few years is that we are all responsible for raising our own shields. Yeah, I like it. So you’ve mentioned this is perfect lead into my next next question for you. Remind me how many DNA copying mistakes? How many? I know the DNA copying mistakes, but how much DNA is copied in a day for a human? Oh, I mean, look, we’ve got we’ve got
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trillions of cells in our body, each one of them have DNA, they have to multiply themselves every single day, copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. And what I like to tell people is that when there’s a mistake, when DNA copies itself, which is part of how we’re why we’re still around today, compared to yesterday, why we’ll still be around tomorrow compared to today, our body’s being copied. All right. Most natural process in the world.
and our DNA gets copied and our DNA is our instructions for our cells to make proteins. When there’s an error in our DNA copying, okay, one of the problems is that that actually is the setup for the development of cancer because cancer is really an error of DNA, a mutation in DNA. The cell that would normally be normal suddenly becomes abnormal because of this mutation.
All right. So the question is, like most people say, well, why did I get cancer? Why did I get lung cancer? Why did I get breast cancer? Why did I get colon cancer? Why did I get brain cancer? You know, and we naturally it’s very human to want to have an explanation like what did I do wrong? But actually, there’s a more complicated answer that I came at the same question from the other end. I mean, this is what I this is what I think a lot of researchers do.
think with the end in mind. you flipped a script on the question. You know, when somebody says, did so and so get cancer? You know, sure, when I’m working with a patient, I try to give them the most accurate and humane answer that I possibly can to that question. We may not know. But then when I walk away, the gears of my head turn to say, actually, you know,
The more profound question is, why don’t we get cancer more often? Right? If our DNA is copying itself every day, we must be making mistakes not copying, right? And when we make mistakes as cancer, let me just give you an example, Adam, I think your listeners will be fascinated by. How many mistakes do you think out of 40 trillion cells copying and pasting itself every day, how many mistakes do you think your body and my body makes?
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We’re both healthy. How many mistakes do you think it makes every day? I did this research. So it’s around 10,000 from what you’ve said previously, right? 10,000 mistakes are made. So that’s 10,000 cancers. Is that what you’re kind of applying? 10,000 cells have a mistake that can become a microscopic cancer every single day. All right. And by the way, how do these mistakes occur? Well, think about it. When you copy, when your body
copies itself, your cells copy themselves naturally to still continue to survive and be around. know, copying and pasting is not an easy thing. So if I wrote a sentence, you know, for you, Adam, and I asked you to get on a word processor, get on a laptop and copy a sentence 10 times, you seem like a really careful person. So I’m sure you’ll get it perfect. All right. If I asked you to copy it 100 times, you might make
a couple of mistakes and thank goodness we have spell check, right? And, you know, even the best of us always know that there’s something that your spell check will catch up. All right. That’s a hundred times. If I ask you to do it 40 trillion times, okay, I guarantee you’re going to make some mistakes. would also take a while. Yeah, you probably lose. So here’s the thing though.
our body has a remarkable ability to fix itself and prevent that damage. And that’s really part of the health defenses. we don’t, so we can, we can develop microscopic cancers every single day. Like cancer, probably all have little microscopic cancers, but they never become clinically important, lethal cancers for the most part. can’t diagnose that. They’re just like pimples on your back, right? Like if you saw a pimple in your face, when you looked in the mirror, you’d find it right away. A pimple on your back, unless somebody’s
calling it out in your bag, would never know pimple on your butt. You never even know it. Okay. so, and, by the way, most of those pimples go away by themselves. So one of the interesting things is what makes cancers go away. If we know that they form every single day, just as a matter of copying and pasting, all right. And making mistakes. Well, it turns out our immune system back to our immune system is a incredible army of super soldiers that patrol our body.
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every single day looking for trouble. So think about a cop on a beat, a policeman in a squad car patrolling a quiet, peaceful neighborhood. They’re not expecting trouble, but they’re looking for trouble. And if they see something odd happening in a neighborhood, you know, that individual looks like a drug dealer, you know, with a suspicious looking backpack sitting in a corner. They shouldn’t be there. And they’re acting weird. What does a cop do? They’ll actually stop them, question them. If there’s anything at all wrong, they’ll put them in the back of the squad car and drive them away.
Same deal with our immune system. They’re patrolling, they see that mistake of a cell, microscopic cancer. Dude, you shouldn’t be there. We’re getting rid of you. All right. And that’s really why we don’t develop cancer more often. So let’s flip it back. What happens when you do get cancer? Guess what? Oftentimes it’s a failure of your shield. Your immune system is down. Right. And we know in people who have low immunity.
OK, for example, after an organ transplant, you give people immune suppressants, powerful drugs to lower the immune system so that their own body won’t reject the organ, kidneys, livers, lungs, you name it. OK, well, it turns out when you really suppress the immune system, you know, what is the kind of an unintended consequence of that? The organs stays intact, but you can increase your dramatically increase your risk of developing cancer.
shields down, mistakes made. Now mistakes grow. And our body also tries to prevent, if let’s say that they don’t get taken out, then they’re growing, our body has this remarkable ability to cut off the blood supply as a way of choking off a cancer’s growth as well. know, whoa there, we’re taking away those lifelines. Now you don’t have oxygen, you don’t have nutrients, the tumor can’t actually grow quite as well. So again, another shield.
And that’s really what my work has been all about. What I wrote about in my book, Eat to Beat Disease, is what are we learning about our body that is so remarkable, that allows us to live actually pretty long and pretty healthy lives overall and not get those diseases early? Why don’t kids get cancer all the time? Why don’t people develop dementia at a much younger age? You know, it’s because when we’re in our prime, as they say,
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our health defenses are firing in all cylinders. And as we get older, just like an old car, know, maintain it, things are going to start to break, you know, break down. You know, is it the alternator? Is it the spark plug? Is it the brake lining? Is it, know, whatever it is, something’s going to happen. And, and, and that’s really when shields are down, we get those chronic diseases. Yeah, that makes sense. I thought of an idea as you were saying this,
That’s quite a good analogy for life as well, which is getting the mistakes while they’re small. Yeah, it sounds like where our bodies naturally can get these mistakes while they’re small, but the bigger they get, the harder they become to resolve. So you mentioned a number of times keeping shields up, but I’d love you to walk us through the five main health defense systems that results that are these shields. So, there’s five.
critical health defenses in our bodies that are hardwired, like an operating system. And they these health defenses formed long before we were born. So when your dad’s sperm at your mom’s egg and you were a ball of cells, okay, as you were forming your arms and legs and heads and organs and brains and big toes, basically, your health defenses were also forming over during those nine months. And when you were born,
five systems basically sprang into action to protect you against the outside world and against the challenges of life itself. So what are they? Number one, the first self defense is called angiogenesis. Sounds like a complicated word, actually pretty simple to understand angioblood blood vessel, genesis, how your blood vessels grow your circulation. our circulation, how our blood vessels develop.
which by the way is a 60,000 mile network of highways and byways to our body. Powerful brings oxygen, brings nutrients to and brings medicines to every single cell in our body. That’s one of our health defenses. When your blood vessels are healthy, you can actually optimize your health. Your blood vessels are sick. Doesn’t matter what else you do. You’re not going to be able to optimize your health. Second, another
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powerful health defenses is our defense is our regenerative system. Now, regenerative system is really made of stem cells and stem cells. Many people have heard, I went to the corner mall to get my elbow injected, to get some stem cells put into my knee. That’s not what we’re talking about. Our whole body is made out of stem cells when we were in our mom’s womb. And when we were born, there were some extra stem cells hanging around that
didn’t get used. How many? About 70 million. And so once the umbilical cord was cut, he took your breath, climbed up to mom, suckled the first, you know, the mouthful of milk. Basically, the stem cells that were left over, the overage, gets stored in our bone marrow primarily, but also in our body fat and our skin and a few other organs. And those stem cells, just like when we were in our mom’s womb, can rebuild literally
any organ at any time whenever it’s needed. So we actually regenerate from the inside out. Think about it, when you were a kid in grade school, your teacher, your kindergarten teacher probably said the same thing my teacher said when I was that age and said, you know what starfish can regenerate, salamanders can regenerate, but unfortunately, humans can’t regenerate. Totally wrong. Now we know like that the entire textbooks been that chapters been torn out and thrown out the window, the new chapter.
that’s being written in a textbook of life is that we do regenerate pretty powerfully from the inside out every single day. Okay. And we know we regenerate now when you think of when you look back, we’re like, of course, our hair grows back, you know, of course we should skin you know, we got dandruff that’s that’s skin that’s regenerated and sloughed off our gut grows back and even remarkably, we now know that
Although to a much lesser extent, our heart can even regenerate. Our brain can even regenerate after a stroke. Some parts don’t do it fast enough for what else does, but the fact is we’ve got this tremendous power. So regenerative stem cell system, second health defense, third health defense, our gut. Everybody’s heard about gut health now, and many people have heard about the gut microbiome.
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The gut microbiome is really just healthy gut bacteria that lives inside our intestines. There’s about 39 trillion of them. Not getting destroyed by this diet coke I’m drinking. We can talk about that if you like. Yeah, yeah, we’re down in a little while. But I will tell you that the gut bacteria... Now look, when I went to medical school, I can tell you in the first couple of months of class,
It was emphasized to us that must memorize bacteria, must learn about bacteria, then must kill bacteria because bacteria are bad. Like that was like a mantra for us, for doctors going through medical school. In point of fact, while we do encounter some bad actor bacteria and treating them with antibiotics can be life saving. The reality is that the majority of bacteria that we meet in our lives across our lives.
our healthy bacteria and they’re inside us and that’s our gut microbiome. Our gut microbiome helps smooth our metabolism, streamline our metabolism, lowers inflammation, helps us heal from the inside out, controls our hormones and our gut bacteria even text messages our brain, SMS to our brain to release social hormones that make us friendlier and happier as well. Really powerful and our gut bacteria also improve our immune system, helps groom our immune system.
How do they do it? Well, you know what? When I was in medical school, was taught, the immune system lives in lymph channels and in different parts of your body like that. Actually turns out 70 % of our immune system lives inside the wall of our gut. In the wall, okay? And our gut bacteria talk inside our gut, talks to the immune system inside the gut wall, just like college students do. So remember your first year in college, you lived in a
cheap dorm with cheap walls. And so, you know, you could literally shout to the wall at your room, your, you know, your next door neighbor, Hey, what do want on your pizza? And they could shout right back at you. Right. Okay. And that’s what our gut bacteria does to our immune system. And it helps to groom and give instructions to our immune system. So when your gut bacteria is unhealthy, your inflammation goes up, your brain function starts to go haywire, hormones, metabolism, all go haywire and your immune system.
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goes to pot. All right. And so this is why it’s so important to be able to have a healthy immune system. And when your immune system is strong, which is another health defense, basically, what does it go after? Goes after the bacteria and viruses that might be invading your body and those microscopic cancer cells we talked about. So androgenesis, one, stem cells, two, gut microbiome, three, immune system, four. And the last one is our DNA. We talked about that. The DNA fixes itself.
It’s not just a series of instructions for proteins in our lives and we inherit from our parents. Sure, that’s true. But in fact, our DNA is continuously exposed to things that can harm us and mutate that DNA as a health defense system. Our DNA knows how to block, like raise the shield to block an incoming missile. Okay.
the iron dome of our health. It can also, by the way, fix itself. So you got a damage in the road quickly, let’s put some let’s put the road crew out there to pave the pothole. So people don’t flatten that flatten their tires. That’s really quite amazing. And our DNA is also has the ability to slow down its burn rate. Okay, of a section called telomeres that actually reflect our cellular aging. So we can actually, our DNA is actually designed to help
guide a healthy life away from damage over the course of a long natural life. Those five health defenses, they’re hardwired in us. When they start going down, we start getting sick. But the great news is that when you eat foods, you can boost your health defenses, shields up, and now you’re less vulnerable against disease. Got it. Got it. I want to zero in on angiogenesis. So you spoke about what it is.
But there’s a more nuanced component that you’ve spoken about in the past, which is you found that the process of good quality, I might butcher this completely, but the blood vessels can starve tumor cancer causing cells without harming healthy tissue. So what’s going on there? And then further to that point, I’d love to dig into
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the foods that you’re finding are really helpful for that. Yeah. Well, first, let me kind of talk about a generality of all five health defenses, including angiogenesis, which we’re going to talk about in a moment. And that is that our health defenses are not an on and off switch. Again, I think we’ve touched on this earlier in our conversation. You know, I think it’s kind of a part of our human instinct to say good or bad, on or off, right or wrong.
never that way. It’s all about degrees of change, right? Like a volume switch in your car radio, you can make it really loud and intolerable, or you can make it really soft, you can’t hear it at all. Well, that’s what our health defenses do as well. They know how to actually adjust the volume of the defense to suit complete perfect health. It’s not switch on switch off. It’s more a little bit louder, a little bit softer. Okay. And in fact, there’s a term
for a health defense system that’s not too overactive or not underactive. And that’s called the Goldilocks zone. Goldilocks like the fairy tale, you know, the three bearers, you know, home invaded. And then basically, they’re looking for seats and porridge and beds. All right, not too hard, not too soft, but just right, not too hot, not too cold, but just right. And that’s exactly what our health each health defense does. Not too much of it. If you have too much immunity, it’s autoimmunity. Not good.
attacks yourself. Not, immune deficiency. Oops, not enough immune, the volume is too soft for that health defense. Now you’re super vulnerable to all kinds of problems, right? So where is that sweet spot that Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold for our health defense. And that’s exactly what every health defense is able to do. Your DNA, your gut microbiome, your, your immune system, your stem cells and angiogenesis. So when it comes to angiogenesis,
Let’s just talk a little bit about that. got all your body’s got all the blood vessels it actually needs until it needs some more. Okay. So what’s an example of needing more blood vessels? Well, if a mom of a woman gets pregnant, she becomes a mom, guess what to grow that baby, you got a lot of you got to grow a lot of blood vessels. In fact, the whole placenta, which which is the life support system for the fetus, the developing baby.
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actually is made of blood vessels. So pregnancy is a great example of where you need suddenly need a lot more blood vessels and maintain them over nine months. Here’s another one. You injure yourself, whether it’s with trauma, fall off a bike, cut your knee, okay. Or, you know, you’re, you’re cutting something in the kitchen, slice your finger. Okay, you’ve injured yourself or you’re undergoing surgery. All right. Guess what? In order to heal that wound where the blood supply was interrupted,
right? Your body has to grow new blood vessels to heal. So angiogenesis, absolutely critical for healing wounds for supporting pregnancy. And that’s where the body knows how to do just right. What’s the right volume that we need for that? Don’t worry, your body’s got it. It’s got your back. Now, on the other hand, what cancer cells can do, and there are other conditions that can also hijack
your body’s health and your Genesis health defense and grow too many blood vessels. And when you got too many, that’s like turning in your car radio volume button to way high. Everybody’s going, please turn that down. I can’t hear a thing. All right. I can’t concentrate on driving. You know what that’s like. You know, some some car pulls next to yours at a traffic light and they got, you know, some their favorite rap song on like super loud. You’re like, geez, you know, turn that thing down. Right. So
cancers can do that. They can hijack your system and grow lots of blood vessels to them. And once those blood vessels grow, they start to feed the tumor brings oxygen and nutrients. All right. So your body knows how to basically, we’re not going to allow that. So it can actually, trim off those extra blood vessels like a Gardner, on an, on an edge. Nope. We’re going to trim that down. Okay. And so this is what our body normally does. It prevents too many or too few.
Think about a country club. Okay, you go to a country club, you look at the lawn, the grounds, perfect lawn for golf or whatever. Okay. Well, you know what, somebody is sitting on a mower, driving over that continuously every single day, so that if any sprouts get too tall, they get mowed right down to that sweet spot for the for the for the grounds.
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Okay. If it gets too small, some just a bulb patch, landshaper goes out and throws some seed down. Okay. And patches it and it grows back up. So this is exactly how our system actually works. The question I often get is that, you know, if I’m eating foods that can stop androgenesis and cancer, am I starving or preventing my body’s ability to heal? Is it bad for pregnancy? No, it’s actually not because your body will keep on
toying with that volume switch to get it just right. Just quickly though, I love doing this podcast. If it’s positively impacted you in some way and you would like to support us, please subscribe. By subscribing, it allows us to build a much bigger base of listeners, which results in better guests, better production and a better show overall. Alternatively, please take a look at the affiliate links of the products that I use and love in the comments below.
and consider purchasing using those links. They’ll give you a discount and they’ll also provide the podcast a small kickback. These are two very easy ways for you to support us as we continue to grow the podcast that we absolutely love doing. Thank you for your support. And now back to the episode. I know previously there has been some cancer experiences in your family and I think personal anecdotes are really powerful to explore topics and ideas. So,
It was your uncle, two of your uncles, correct? Many years ago that didn’t, that passed away from cancer, is that correct? Yeah. I mean, look, we’ve all been touched by cancer in our family. One in two men, one in three women over the course of a lifetime are going to develop cancer, right? That’s a scary thing if you think about that, you know, a group of guys in an elevator or a group of women in an elevator, they look around and that’s what the statistics say.
if we don’t take steps to change our own odds. I was going to ask you is knowing what you know now, if you were to go back to that time, what would you have told them to do and how would you have approached even I know 10, 12 years ago, your mom also got cancer and she got through that with much better treatments that weren’t available.
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earlier on, what would you tell them now with everything you know, what would that crash course be at the dinner table when you’ve been told that that cancer is occurring? What I would tell with my uncles, my own family members is what I would tell any patient, which is that today we actually have really exceptional knowledge that we didn’t have 10 years ago. What is that knowledge? Well, first of all,
one day, if you were to go back in the time machine, we’re going to actually have cancer treatments that can raise your shields, improve your immune system, cut off the blood supply, help your body, it’s androgenesis and cut off the blood supply to cancer. We’re not going to be reliant only on the slash and burn of chemotherapy. We’ve got, we’re going to have much better tools. All right. So I think the
A better way to ask your question is, you know, or another way to ask your question is if I could go back on time machine and tell them what the future is going to bear and what they could do for themselves. They won’t have those medicine. They won’t have those technologies at that time. guess if it happened today, right now. Yeah. Well, I mean, so, so number one is that now that we know about our health defenses, what can we actually do to use the best of medicine, the best of food to be able to help
our body overcome these diseases. What we know immunotherapy is really important for cancer. In fact, I would say anybody watching or listening to this, you know, working with your doctor and oncologist is somebody who you need to rely on to be able to get you through, you know, treatment and hopefully to the other side of, of a successful encounter with cancer where you make it, you should be asking doc, can I get immunotherapy?
All right. And this is still pretty new. So not every medical, not every oncologist is even using it. All right. More and more are. It takes about seven years for a medical breakthrough to actually make it into standard practice. Can you believe that? If I discover something new today and got it approved, it would be seven more years before you are likely to get it as just part of the standard of care. All right. Seems unfair, especially if you’ve got cancer. So immunotherapy is something everyone should be asking for.
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Number one. Number two is that, you know, there isn’t a one size fits all way for treating cancer. It’s really about personalizing the care to fit the individual. You know, what might work for me might be slightly different than what works for you because we have different genetics. We’ve got different backgrounds. We’ve got different life exposures. get to life experiences. We got different vulnerabilities.
You know, maybe my immune system needs to be boosted up. Maybe your androgenesis system needs to be boosted up. And this is where personalization of medicine, you hear about personalized medicine. If you’re talking to doctors, you know, that people talk about that a lot personalized medicine. That’s what’s going to move us from one size fits all that cafeteria approach to medicine. All right. We all know how crummy it was to eat just cafeteria food every day, you know, in school.
Right? Well, now we can personalize it. So Adam, what do you want to eat? What do you fancy today? That makes a big difference if because what I fancy and what you fancy might be different today. So personalization is where we’re going with cancer care. And how do we do this? Well, we’re able to get the tumor biopsy. We’re able to sequence the genetics of the cancer. We’re able to use artificial intelligence to mine the genetic sequence and the proteins to figure out what makes
that tumor would look completely different in one person compared to another person. So we don’t just pull off, you know, chemotherapy like was a paint color, you know, we’re to make a paint a blue wall. It’s going to be the same no matter whose house it is. This is, this is something I would tell anybody where we are today. Immunotherapy and targeted therapies, personalization, and then the opportunity to be able to help to support
The natural question that every patient I’ve ever had asked me after I tell them what type of cancer they’re being diagnosed with, say, Doc, how long do I have and what’s the treatment? You know, I used to say, they used to put their coat on, walk out the office and then literally five seconds later, pop their head back and one more thing, Doc, what should I be eating? What can I do for myself? We’re, we don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re beginning to have the answers of what you can do. Anti-inflammatory foods, cancer,
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Inflammation is like gasoline pouring onto the embers of a fire for cancer. You do not want inflammation. Better gut health. You know, that’s not something we do in the doctor’s office. That’s something you do at home. right. Optimizing your gut health. Staying away from some foods that can lower your shields and damage your health defenses. mean, you you held up a soda.
earlier, I’m not going to use any brand names. So does one of the most popular beverages not only does it have a lot of sugar in it. But if you took the sugar free version, there’ll be other artificial sweeteners and a whole bunch of other additives in there, including coloring. All right, and flavoring. Well, new research is starting to make us sit back and say, Wow, you know, we’re now beginning to realize some of those things can damage our gut microbiome. Shields down.
So maybe I should swap it out with green tea instead. I I would swap it out with green tea, pomegranate juice, you know, or just whole fruit, whole juicy fruit. You know, one of my favorite. I always say like, you know, when you want to get liquid, if you can get something very, very juicy, that’s seasonal. So in the summertime, it might be watermelon or juicy peach. All right. You get your you get your hit of liquid. OK. But on top of that, you get a
big dose of dietary fiber and a gigantic dose of polyphenols. And those things, guess what they do? Activate your health defenses, shields up, right? So think about that. You do that three times a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Most of us encounter food about five times a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, maybe a couple of snacks, all right? Every time you encounter food, if you’re able to do something, introduce something into your body that boosts your health defenses, you know what?
on the whole, you’re going to be a lot stronger in terms of your overall health. And then every now and then, look, we’re all human. Every now and then we’re, we want to eat one of this. So we want to drink one of that. Or we want to, you know, like, I don’t call it cheating. I just call it, you know, bowing to our, our humanity, you know, like, who doesn’t want a soda, slaked their thirst on a super hot day. But look, if that’s what you do day in and day out.
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guarantee you that lowering those shields with ultra processed foods and, you know, added sugar and foods, a lot of additives, guess what we do know that that increases your risk of developing chronic diseases. All right. And if those habits don’t change, your health defenses stay compromised, you’re going to stay sicker and then you’re going to be put into the this this system, this silo, this torpedo tube.
where the medical systems usually keep throwing drugs at you. In fact, one thing I want to emphasize that this whole conversation is kind of bringing to the forefront. I think most people who follow health topics will know that there’s been a conversation about chronic disease. know, so and so is a chronic disease, diabetes is a chronic disease, obesity is a chronic disease. All right, well.
We’re trained that way in medicine to diagnose chronic diseases and treat diseases chronically, which means that everybody goes on medication forever. Okay. Now, what have I told you to consider a different way of approaching it? If your shields went down and that’s why you went to get a chronic disease, but we could raise the shields to reset your body, reboot your body back to how it wants to be. Could we then not?
stop the chronic disease treatment because your body will take over and begin to make everything, put all the pieces back together again, and then you can come down or come off your medication. That’s really important to think about. I believe that many of the chronic diseases that we are dealing with today are not only preventable, but they the research is telling us that many types of chronic disease, especially if you get them before they are well entrenched in the body and
destructive, we can actually reverse some of these diseases. Nobody ever thought we could reverse heart disease. We can, you know, there’s even some evidence that we can actually change conditions like dementia. So, so again, you know, I think that what I love about what I do as a medical researcher is, you know, I am drinking from a fire hydrant of new discoveries that are happening every single day.
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not every discovery is of equal importance and not every discovery is going to change lives. But you know, I live for those discoveries that can be converted into helping somebody live longer and live better. And that’s really the conversation that I like to have when it comes to longevity. know, and aging is really, how do we live longer and live better? You know, it’s not necessarily about a tech device or
some kind of gizmo or a supplement or, you know, any magic powders or even any exercise regimen, you know, the bottom line is our body’s hardwired. The secret lies within us. And, you know, the body is able to heal itself. And I think that is also something that Hippocrates also talked about. Yeah, that’s right. And
I read a book recently about inflammation and the argument of that book was that inflammation is the cause of all of the chronic diseases and similar to what you’ve written about. And the solution is, one of the solutions is using foods and some of the foods you’ve recommended. Getting actionable and wrapping up, for a busy but health conscious person listening right now, I’d love to map out what a
solid week and a baseline protocol would look like in managing these risks and managing disease prevention. What would that look like? So a protocol is like a diet and like a set rigid diet is what you get with the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, the keto diet. And I have a much, I think, more versatile way of approaching overall health for your health defenses to optimize your health, no matter where your starting point is.
And again, this is what I wrote about my book, eat to beat disease. When we get to the point about, know, like, what’s the meal plan or the protocol? What I encourage people to do to think about the approach as mixed martial arts, MMA, right? So unlike karate or judo or fencing, you know, alone anywhere, there’s like a very specific way or even traditional Western boxing. The bottom line is that if you have all the skill sets to be able to use whatever techniques
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you have at hand at that moment to serve yourself in the optimal way. That’s actually how the best approach a meal plan. So, you know, in my book, I actually have tables and charts of foods that I’ve done the heavy lifting to show you that are actually good for you. So what I tell people to do is if you buy my book, take a marker, Sharpie, what have you. OK. And just circle the foods that you immediately like when you see them.
And there’s a big list. I’ve seen a huge list that you’ve 200 foods in there. Yeah. Yeah. So we can add that to this. Yeah. So if you then realize that if you start by eating the foods over the next week or month from the ones you’ve already circled, you’re already head of the game because the foods that you already like are the ones that are also healthy for you. That’s a big head start as opposed to saying, you know, I gosh, how do I how do I figure out this complicated diet and
I’m not really happy about it. I’m telling you make yourself happy by choosing the foods that you love already that actually tastes great and are also healthy. Number one. that’s that’s number two. So you should always eat the foods that you like that are healthy. Number two, you should recognize the foods generally that are healthy for you are going to be the things that you find in the you know, this is actionable. Go to the grocery store, recognize that most of the things in the produce section, which is usually the first thing that you encounter when you enter a grocery store.
That’s where the good stuff lies. Not the only place, but it’s almost anything you buy in the produce section is going to be good for you. So when you encounter, you know, broccoli and carrots and kale and all that stuff, of course, you know, that’s good for you. Apple day keeps the doctor away. Let’s say you come up with something you’re not sure of. Starfruit, pomegranate, globe artichoke. Look, in this day and age, you got a solution. All right. You should be. I encourage you to be curious.
type, go to Google, type in Globar to choke, okay, recipe, hit video and have somebody quickly show you how to actually prepare it in a way that is super easy and super tasty. And now you know what you could do should you actually buy that. So again, this is actually, I think something like those types of foods, but I don’t want people to neglect the middle aisles of the grocery store either.
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Again, you know, sort of this character assassination. The middle’s got nothing good in it. Stay away. Only go around the perimeter. OK, generally true. But like anything else, if there’s some details in there, you got beans, dried, canned. You’ve got all extra virgin olive oil. Look for the high polyphenol mono varietal version and not in plastic. In glass, in glass, in glass or metal for olive oil.
You got to realize that, you know, the oil itself really helps to degrade the plastic. So I absolutely encourage people to choose the traditional way of storing olive oil is in a dark tinted glass bottle, right? Easy to find in most grocery stores or in a tin. Okay. Big tin of olive oil. That’s a healthy way to do it. Because the sunlight degrades the quality of the oil as well, right? Something along those lines. If they’re not
Yeah, it’s not a dark tinted glass container. don’t want you don’t want like, you know, and then I think the other thing is that, you know, you got to realize that you don’t want microplastics in there. get the glass version. Okay, or the metal one, or there’s a ceramic one, you want natural, natural substances to contact that oil. You’ve got dark chocolate in the middle aisles. Okay, you’ve got whole grain items, you’ve got dried nuts, you got all these spices, hot chili peppers activate your metabolism, you know, improve your immune system.
all kinds of things that are good in there. You just need to, call it a treasure hunt when it comes to the middle aisle. On the dark chocolate front quickly, what’s your thoughts around the heavy metal in dark chocolate and what’s dark chocolate that you’re liking that is low in heavy metals? Yeah. Okay. So first of all, the, how does this whole heavy metal thing even come up? A few years ago,
the Consumer Reports magazine conducted a study of about 30 different types of dark chocolate and found that about a third of them actually had super high levels of heavy metals. arsenic, Yeah, was lead, arsenic, cadmium, those kinds of things. right. Look, go to go to just Google out the Consumer Reports and dark chocolate and heavy metals and you’ll find
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quickly identify. It’s quite depressing. Well, actually, no, actually, I will tell you that although there were some bad actors that stood out, most of the chocolates actually were perfectly fine. All right. And so I would say the glass helpful approach is say now you know what to avoid and go for the ones that were not found to be harmful. Hopefully the companies that made the dark chocolate with heavy metals switch their supplier changed out their process. Nobody wants to be tagged with that reputation.
All right. So, you know, and so we don’t know if they’ve cleaned up their act or not. Always, you know, do your own research. That’s one thing. But the second thing about heavy metals, by the way, is where do they come from? Why are they in dark chocolate? Well, you know, do you know why? Why? Why does your chocolate have heavy metals? It’s the cacao beans potentially. That’s my guess. Exactly. Why do the cacao beans have heavy metals?
Because they’re, I don’t know, from the soil and the soil has heavy metals? Excellent. You’re absolutely correct. Cacao, which is the bean pod used to make chocolate. So the more the darker the chocolate, the more cacao, more bean pod, more plant based polyphenols coming from the cacao plant. Those trees love to grow in volcanic soil. Okay. They thrive in them. They build Costa Rica and Africa and Ecuador, they’ve got volcanoes.
All right, Mexico, they grow, they got volcanoes there. All right. Now, what does a volcano do? It actually brings material from the center of the earth to the surface of the earth. What’s in the center of the earth? Heavy metals, right? So if you want to sort of like, we don’t need to accuse anybody of doing anything nasty. That’s, you know, that’s the conspiracy theorist. It’s not. It’s really this is Mother Earth, you know, recycling or or or
tilling the soil, so to speak, through a volcano. And yeah, the trees that actually grow there tend to sop it up. So what’s the solution? Do your research. Here’s a simple way of doing it. Go look up that Consumer Report article. There’s been quite a few newer ones as well over the last few years. It’s been updated quite a lot. Yep. And then look at the most updated version. And maybe take one color marker and circle the ones that are high.
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still and the ones that are not high circle those and just go by the ones that aren’t high. Right. Which ones aren’t high off the top of your head? You know, I don’t off the top of my head because I haven’t seen the latest report and also, you know, like I’m sort of really not talking about brands. Yeah. I love to do brand assassination. I actually think that, know, like again, this is all about personal empowerment. Do your own research. It’s up to you. There’s no as we talked about, there’s no good guy, bad guy here. It’s all about choice. Right.
So for me, you know, and by the way, I think if I I enjoy dark chocolate whenever I can, but I also don’t eat dark chocolate every day all the time. So, again, everything in moderation is probably a good rule of thumb. And diversity is also really, really important. And again, if you spend most of your time eating things that are good for you, you can.
you know, you can bounce back from the old you’ll you’ll be resilient against a couple of hits against your system every now and then because you feel like it. So we talked about like this whole plant based food. And I think the other kind of like program, I would say is that whatever you do, cut down or cut out your ultra processed foods, we all encountered ultra processed foods, you know, take a trip, go to the store on your way to the airport, they the flight attendant hands you some free snacks.
That’s ultra processed. You know what, do you really need to eat that? If you really want to be a jockey, you know, maybe just say no. Okay. And then look for something else or pack or pack your own snacks. You know, it’s all possible to do. And I think that so cutting down on those ultra processed foods. And then, you know, the other thing I would say is that there’s a couple of things that I’m not a vegan. Although I eat when I eat a meal, I’m eating mostly plant based foods. You know, I would say
recognize that seafood actually turns out to be pretty healthy. Overall, people who eat seafood live longer, they have lower instances of disease. All right, we’re not going to go into the microplastics in the ocean. What about the mercury side of things? It’s another consideration I’ve thought about. Yeah, totally. Eat lower on the food chain and you’ll be having less mercury because of what’s an example of smaller fish that are also rich in omega-3 fatty acids, mackerel, sardines,
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All the ones that don’t taste as good. Well, know, mean, halibut, pod, they’re all fine. It’s like the big ones, the tuna, the swordfish, the shark that winds up actually, they’re big predatory fish. They’re, you know, apex predators tend to actually have just accumulated more of the mercury. And by the way, if you really love swordfish, knock yourself out one time, but just don’t do it all the time. That’s what I’m saying is it’s sort of like a
the food of choice, know, and enjoy what you enjoy, but recognize overall, if you kind of build up your health offenses, you should be just fine. But there’s plenty of seafood lower on the food chain. And then I would say cut down on your red meat. You don’t need to, if you choose not to eat meat for ethical reasons, that’s totally fine. That’s what veganism is about. It’s an ethical decision. But if you eat lots of red meat, just remember,
If you think about healthy cultures, traditional cultures that have that do eat meat, they treat the meat more as a condiment or as a side dish rather than the entree, or they have lots of different choices and you sample lots of things together. It’s, know, so I think that would be my general approach. And then don’t try to stay away from processed meats, you know, the salamis and hot dogs, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, got it. it. Got it.
So I’m conscious of your time. just wanted to ask you what’s one lesson now that you’d hope that everyone takes away from this conversation? Yeah, you know, I think the lesson is the secrets to health lie in your own body and the choices you make to let your body do what it already wants to do, which is to protect your health. Your health shields are inside and the choices that you make when it comes to food are a
easy, low hanging fruit way literally to be able to raise your shields. Great, great. And is there anything you’re excited about the moment you’d like to let the listeners in on? You know, I’m very excited by what we’re discovering about healthy aging and the foods that help us maintain a sharp brain and our strength and our ability to have energy. You know, I think that while we’re not
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We haven’t figured out all the answers yet, like which some people feel like we figured out most of the answers. The reality is that this is a new frontier that’s opening up that will hopefully benefit all of us who naturally want to live longer and live well at the same time. Great. And where can people find you if they’re interested to learning more, reading your book? Yeah. Well, you can come to my website is dr. Dr. William Lee, L.I. Dot com. My handle is at.
Dr. Dr. William Lee, L.I. You can find me on all the social channels. I have a YouTube channel where I put up new information all the time with useful tips. It’s again, Dr. William Lee. And yeah, I, you know, subscribe and hit like. For sure. And I highly recommend the YouTube. There’s a bunch of great information in there. Very well edited videos. It’s really solid.
Thank you for your time. We’re a little bit philosophical here. We didn’t really get into much of it because there’s so much to get into with the health side of things. But my last question I’d like to ask you is, and completely aside from everything we’ve been talking about, is what do you think the meaning of life is? Like, why are we here? You know, I think that for me, the answer to that for me personally has evolved over the years.
You know, I think the meaning of life for me at this stage is to to be fulfilled. How were you defined that? And, you know, it could be in small things or big things. We don’t all have to, you know, change the world, make a ton of money, invent the next big thing, which is, kind of like that, the carrot that gets dangled when we’re younger. But I think personal fulfillment is really powerful.
for making us feel grateful for the things that we choose to do every day. Yeah, great. Thank you, Dr. Lee. I appreciate you. Thanks very much, Adam. Also, my man. And look, if anyone’s made it this far, please go to YouTube. Search that one time with Adam Metwally. Click Subscribe, like the video and leave us a comment.
