Dr Rupy: Dr Lee is back on the podcast. I love the way he shares a similar belief in food as medicine and that simple, delicious food is key to health. The way he researches, describes and cooks ingredients is testament to his immense knowledge on the subject. If you don't know, Dr William Lee is an internationally renowned physician, scientist and author of the New York Times bestseller Eat to Beat Disease. His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and impacts care for more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. And if you haven't seen his TED talk, you should definitely check it out. It's called Can We Eat to Starve Cancer? and it's had over 11 million views. Next year, I'll be having a full-length conversation with Dr Lee in anticipation of his next book. So please enjoy this short conversation with William and Sakina for now. And remember, you can also watch this podcast on YouTube. It's a no-cost way of supporting the podcast. And if you like subscribing, then you'll love the newsletter Eat, Listen, Read. Every single week I send you recipes and mindfully curated content to help you have a healthier, happier week. And do check out the app. It's on the App Store, hundreds of recipes, new features all the time. We have our own nutrition calculator now because most nutrition calculators are incorrect, so we actually built our own one. There's going to be a lot more information on that in the next coming months as well. Enjoy.
Sakina: So it's lovely to have you on. I know you've been on the podcast before, but quite a while ago, I think around when your book came out, right?
Dr William Lee: Yes, I've done the podcast twice and each time has been incredibly enjoyable and the great topics and great conversation.
Sakina: Amazing. So maybe you can tell us about what has changed since you published this book and since last podcast. Are there any new advancements? Have you changed your opinions on some things?
Dr William Lee: That's a great question. Actually, what I, because I'm a physician and a scientist and I work in food as medicine, I would say that I've, I'm deeper into the material. So deep, in fact, that I'm actually working on my next book now and that will come out in 2023. But what I started to really think through is how our the the needs of society have become even wider in terms of the impact of food on climate, really the industrial aspect of food and and also just the public needs. A really big formative event for me was at the very beginning of the pandemic. As a doctor, I realized that this was a new human disease and we had no knowledge about it and certainly there were no treatments. There were no drugs, there were no vaccines, nothing. And so it was a very unusual place for me to be, except that I also work in food as medicine. So without drugs, I began to really dive even deeper into thinking about, you know, what are the lessons that we're learning now that can help us appreciate even further the need for food as medicine.
Sakina: Interesting. Um, mentioning the pandemic, I know you've been doing some work in COVID, COVID research. Um, could you tell us more about that? And have you been looking at food for long COVID, for example, or not at all?
Dr William Lee: Yeah, so at the very beginning of the pandemic, I wanted to contribute something to the mystery. And what we very quickly discovered because my my area, my field of research is in blood vessels. It's a field called angiogenesis. That's angio blood, blood vessel, genesis, how the body grows blood vessels is what I do. And what we actually found was quickly at the very beginning of the pandemic that the that the coronavirus actually not only causes a respiratory problem, a disease, but it actually damages your circulation in a pretty profound way. And this is now almost three years later, led us to understand the same thing is happening for long COVID. And while this the emphasis has shifted in many locations towards thinking beyond the acute pandemic, long COVID is a very interesting area because hundreds of millions of people are at risk for it. So one of the things we looked at is what are the problems and what how might diet and food be a solution. So what are the problems? Chronic inflammation. Well, there's anti-inflammatory foods. We also know that there's autoimmunity. Well, we do know that there are foods that can be useful to treat or reduce the consequences of autoimmunity. Third is microvascular damage, damage to the small blood vessels. And there are foods that can also address that. So for me, this has opened a new window into thinking about how do you take the basic principles of food as medicine and adapt them into sort of an environment that's changing.
Sakina: So you're looking at food in the terms of maybe supporting the symptoms. So what about risk factors? Could could diet have an impact on the risk of developing long COVID, for example?
Dr William Lee: We don't know that. We what we what we believe is that if you are infected and your the viral load, you have a bad infection, you're more likely to get long COVID. But the the issue about risk factors is really interesting because I think that one of the other take-homes that I have is how important it is for us to support our own body's health defence systems. And that's really what I work on. You know, when it comes to our health, at this conference that we're at, the the opening was, you know, the the discussion was what is actual health? And health is not just the absence of sickness. Health is actually the result of our body's own hardwired defence systems firing on all cylinders, is the saying, working very hard in our behalf to repel disease. So our our health on a daily basis is hard won. And what's interesting about food is that how what we put into our body can either result in is sort of how our body responds to what we put inside it. We put something bad inside our body, our body's going to respond in a negative way. We put something good into our body and our health defences can also respond in a positive way. So my research is really focusing on what are the positive things that we can add to our body to not only maintain our health, but how do we build our health? How do we grow our health? And the good news that I would say is that it's not about deprivation. You don't have to just keep eliminating things. There's no guilt, no shame in eating healthy. You can actually lean into the foods that we already love, many of which come from traditional food cultures that teach us foods of the Mediterranean, foods from Asia, foods from Latin America. These are, these have been associated with pleasure for thousands of years. If you can address your hunger, get your nutrition, address your health and address your pleasure in eating and your sense of community, that's even better.
Sakina: Yeah, that's a very good point. We were talking about pleasure, the pleasure of food and reconnecting with that on the the podcast as well. And I think it's important to remind people of these, the important part that pleasure plays and community and sharing and the social aspect of food as well. So could you give us some example of what you recommend? I know on your website you give on Amazon, you give some food and read essentials. So what is in your cupboard? What is in your food cupboard? What are those grand slammer foods that you speak about? Could you give us some essentials that that you have in your cupboard?
Dr William Lee: So, look, the great news that I've discovered is that there are more than 200 foods and the list is growing even larger that we can eat that activate our body's health defences. They make our blood vessels healthier, one of our health defences is angiogenesis. They make our stem cells assist us in repairing and regenerating ourselves from the inside out. They help our gut microbiome, which is a topic that is very increasingly important now is how healthy our gut is and how our gut heals the rest of our body. Antioxidants protecting our DNA and slowing our cellular ageing. And then of course our immune system, which has got inflammation, which is a positive thing when in short, brief amounts, but when large amounts is not good. And of course, protective immunity. And immunity is not just protecting us from invaders from outside the body, but also invaders from inside the body, like cancer cells. And so foods can activate all five of these health defences so that we can ward off many of the chronic diseases and acute diseases that we fear the most. So what's in my cabinet? People always ask, what do I eat? What do I keep? Look, I would say if you were to look in my refrigerator, I always have market fresh foods. I actually shop about once a week. You know, in traditionally, in whether it's in Europe or in Asia, you go to the market, the market opens once or twice a week and people go there and you only buy, you know, small carts, you know, what you have, what you wish for the week, right? So that's very different than the industrial mentality of the supermarket where you have a gigantic cart and you load it with cheap stuff that's not good for you, right? So, I like to have fresh fruits, vegetables. I look for seasonal things and and it's part of the joy for me to go to the market, to the supermarket or regular market, farmer's market to discover what's new. For example, the other day I found some garlic scapes. Don't know if you know what those are, but the garlic is under the ground. It's white and it's got the skin you peel and the cloves. The green part above that curls and twists after the garlic is coming out, that is a delicious allium part of that plant. It's a it's way of eating garlic sustainably, right? So you eat the below the ground, now you eat the top above. So what I did is I took my garlic scapes, I cleaned them, I cut them into two-inch, two-inch sections. I cut some shiitake mushrooms very fine, threw them in the oven with a little olive oil and a sprinkling of salt, roasted and caramelized the garlic scapes. Now you got this incredible aroma with the mushrooms. It's 10 minutes, that's it. And then, you know, you cook some rice, some pasta, some something else, or even a salad, and you just cool those, you scrape it off, you put it right on there, and you have this incredible seasonal topping. So those are the kinds of things you'd find in my refrigerator.
Sakina: That's that's great that you talk about the process of cooking. I can feel that you enjoy doing it as well. So it make it's making me hungry even though I just had lunch. But it's great because it's all from very beneficial foods and supportive foods that can be cooked in a way that is delicious and enjoyable and as you were saying, sustainable because it's using all parts of the plant.
Dr William Lee: Exactly. And you know, and it doesn't have to be fancy food either. You know, I think that the key thing is that this is why I talk about going back to the traditional cultures. You know, some of the most time-honoured foods came from peasants, people who did not have a lot of money, but they had access to the land, right? So they picked, here's another example of something that I really enjoy are very simple beans. You know, you know that they've actually found beans that are 10,000 years old. In Israel, they look for the archaeological sites and they find jars of beans that go back, beans that go way back. I don't think they're, they would taste very good, but the fact is that that they have a history. And so beans are not only a great source of minerals and some vitamins, but it's an incredible source of healthy fats and dietary fibre. So now let's jump from the medieval era all the way to the present day and some amazing things have been found. So one research study from the University of Toronto showed that eating five servings of of canned of cooked white beans, just a little under a cup, three quarters of a cup, can lower, can lower your cholesterol, improve your metabolism and reduce your waist size by one inch if you ate every day, if you ate five out of seven days for one for one month. So here's an example of something that actually improves your metabolism. So this is eating to become more healthy as opposed to removing food. So I I think that the my emphasis has always been, how do we find foods that people are already love? Make sure we can match them with the foods that research is telling us is healthiest. And then encourage people to eat in moderation. So this is, you know, we talk about a culture shape, a culture change that's needed. You know, I agree with that, but I I would say maybe in many cases, the culture is already here. We just need to bring it to the surface again.
Sakina: Yeah, that's a very good way to see it because we do speak about changing our food environment all the time and it is also an aspect, but there are a lot of things that are already part of us and how our ancestors used to do things. So tapping into those things can be a good approach as well. You mentioned the cups, so the dose. So I was wondering, you wrote this article, I don't know, there's an article on your website that talks about how much of certain foods you need to eat to have protective effects, because we do have those long lists of ingredients, but what about how much do we need to eat them every day? And how do you study that as well? How you said that it's similar to medicine, so how do you study that in a similar way to medicine to know?
Dr William Lee: Yeah, no, I'll tell you, this is something I've carried with me for many years, which is when I started first hearing that blueberries are good for you, okay? I was able to believe that. I wanted to see the science and now the science is here. The first question I asked is, well, how many, how much blueberries do you need to eat? Or beans? How many beans do you need to eat? Or tomatoes? How many tomatoes do you need to eat? And because I study food as medicine and I also have been a background in biotechnology. Now, if you're developing biopharmaceuticals, everything has a dose, a safe dose, an effective dose, a reasonable dose. Those are all concepts in drug development. So food is medicine and has and many times have the same properties, maybe the same potency as medicines, same potential. The question is, what about the dose, right? So you can't have food as medicine without a food dose. And people want, people are practical. If if you tell them something that's good to eat, if I told you eating tomatoes is good for your health, you would naturally say, so how many do I need to eat? My answer to you is half a cup of cooked tomatoes two to three times a week. So that's not very much because if you are just having some pasta with tomato sauce and I only gave you a half cup each time, you would ask me for more. Okay? So, that's the other lesson coming out of the research on food doses, and I'm going to talk about how that's done in a second, is that the amounts we need are very reasonable for health. They're not unreasonable. It's not that you have to drink a gallon a day. You know, half cup two to three times a week is almost nothing. Seafood is also very healthy. You know, people fear fish or don't like fish. I could never eat that. You know, the the amount of seafood that gives you healthy omega-3s is only about three ounces. It's the size of a deck of cards. One per week? Usually about twice a week. So very little. Okay, about the same thickness as a deck of cards too. So, how do you study food dose? Well, there's a number of different ways. The the most powerful way is when you actually look at epidemiological studies where you're correlating a particular food with a health outcome and you have questionnaires or a clinical study where you give people doses, amount of food, you tell them how many times a week to eat it per day or per week or per month. And then you look at the outcome and you record just like you're doing drug development, what the dose was. What is the food? What is the amount eaten each time and how often do you give it? That's the the idea of a dose. And then you have to have a good outcome.
Sakina: When we talk about these studies, there are sometimes limitations that come with those. And so how do you handle these limitations, the research gaps and the nuances in those results?
Dr William Lee: So, you know, as somebody who has been involved with drug development, and as a research scientist, I have 30 years in the lab and in the clinic, my bar for evidence is very high, very rigid. And so one of the criticisms I used to have myself was that, you know, with the drug, you can do a randomized controlled trial with a placebo and you can make sure all the patients are as similar as possible and you can control it for all. Very valuable for drug research, but even in drug research, we realize that one size doesn't fit all and we realize that what's important for society is to be able to accompany to account for the heterogeneity, the differences among people. You want many people to benefit, not just one narrow band. Okay. So we still have to do it for drugs. But for food, we have different ways of generating evidence. You can study a community, a population, you can study them over a decade or decades, and you can study them with the foods that they're eating and the doses and the different outcomes. So that's really kind of public health evidence. It's associative. It is not cause and effect, but it's powerful because if you then use that and you take it to the next level, okay, so there's different, it's like a cake. You've got different, like a wedding cake. You got the top layer, then you got the deeper layer, and then you got the even deeper layer. So the top layer really that everybody can see with the figurines on top is really the population study. You go a little bit deeper, you can do a clinical trial. So there are smaller clinical studies where you give a particular food in a dose and then in a research setting, a controlled setting, you can look for measurements and see if you can find it. Ideally, you see if the clinical study correlates, matches what you see in a large population. Then you can go even deeper. That's the bottom of the wedding cake. Okay. Now you're really going into animal studies, cellular studies, genetic studies, where you can isolate very specific signals. What's the receptor? What's the ligand? What's the protein? What's the cell pathway? What's the gene that's been affected? Does it turn up or does it turn down? What's the protein that's made? So, for food as medicine, I would tell you all of these types of evidence help to give us the composite amount of evidence. In fact, it's stronger than drug evidence, I would tell you, because the drug evidence is so narrow, it tends to actually be work apply to only a very, very narrow group of people. All right? But food, if you take a a holistic the view of the totality of the evidence, you have a much better idea. Oh, one more thing I'll tell you about food. Food is also interesting to study because drugs are always studied in isolation. So if I'm developing a new cancer drug, you're only going to get that cancer drug. Food is about combinations, right? You put your garlic with your extra virgin olive oil, with your tomatoes, with your red onions, with your oregano. This is how things are much more complex. So food itself has complexity to it that needs a different kind of evidence.
Sakina: I'm glad you brought up the synergistic effect of food and how they work together to provide effects. Do you have a new favourite food combinations or are there any studies on certain foods that combine provide more effects on health than individually? And maybe any thoughts on supplements as well in that.
Dr William Lee: Sure. Well, let's see. Let me see if I can come up with a couple of good combinations for you to think about. Well, one of them actually is with olive oil. So, so olives are also tens of thousands of years old and the olive oil, which is crushed from the pulp of the of the ripe olive, contains water, olive juice and it contains olive oil. The juice runs into a drain and the olive oil floats to the top, you collect the oil. And if it's first press, you keep the polyphenols because all the bits of the olive is still in there. Right? So we purify the olive oil. So, how you process also makes a difference. Of course, extra virgin olive oil is considered the best. It has the most polyphenols. One of those polyphenols is hydroxytyrosol. It's a powerful antioxidant. It it also cuts off the blood supply feeding cancers. It's good for the gut microbiome. It's one of the reasons why the Mediterranean diet is so healthy is because of the use of olive oil. Now, how that stuff floating in the olive oil, it's oil, fat. So, what can you combine with fat to make it useful, even more useful? Fat soluble phytonutrients. So if you take a look at a phytochemical like lycopene, which is found in the tomato, okay, that's what helps to make the tomato red, red and orange. If you pick a tomato off the vine and eat it like an apple, okay, tastes great, you get some vitamins. Lycopene is going to most of it goes right through you because it's not in a chemical form your body likes to absorb. Lycopene is also dissolves in fat. All right? So, when you combine tomatoes with olive oil and you heat it slowly, simmering, and you cook it, you change the chemical structure of the lycopene into a form your body loves to absorb. And because lycopene dissolves in oil, when you eat it together, it goes into your bloodstream much more easily. So that's an example of a cooking combination. Another example for tomatoes is to mix with avocado. Avocado also has fat, the lycopene in the tomato also mix with the avocado.
Sakina: Oh, that's fascinating. Thank you. I'm going to look at the studies behind that because it's very, very interesting. Maybe we can talk a bit about the masterclass you've been doing. So since your book, you've been starting to do a few courses, I think courses and masterclasses online. Some are free, some are for professionals. So how has that been? How how have you been using digital solutions to spread the message and maybe help implementation?
Dr William Lee: Yeah, well, you know, I have been lecturing and teaching and, you know, getting people the community involved for almost 10 years. I gave a TED talk in 2010 and have been travelling, but during the pandemic, everything travel stopped. And so what I realized that was a powerful tool to reach as many people around the world as possible was to use digital platforms. So Zoom is just one of them. But to really deliver, share my knowledge. I wouldn't say it's really teaching people, it's sharing information. And to me, when it comes to food as medicine, one of the most important parts of my mission is to really touch as many people and as broadly as possible. I've always worked on a global scale. So, you know, some people do very important work by working locally. They work in their community or they work in their city or they work in their region. I think that's so important that people are doing that. For me, my my work has always been on a much larger national or international level. So travelling allows me to do that, but when you're not travelling, the digital technology works even better. So I've been really periodically, two or three times a month, giving masterclasses completely free to the global community. I had one masterclass, I've been doing this for a year, that had 8,000 people from 40 countries sign on, okay? So this is for one hour. And you can imagine the the impact, the ripple effect it has for that many people coming on to listen and to to share. And what's great about the digital platforms, right? So you're sharing information, I'm sharing information. I will do demos sometimes, so I'll bring foods and like because I like to cook, I'll show them a technique or something to make it more than just talking at somebody. And but what's really cool with the platform like Zoom is that they can people can interact with each other too, right? So if you're in a lecture, you're not supposed to talk, right? Here, you can actually listen and learn and share information and raise more questions. It's a wonderful platform. So my masterclasses are completely free. If you come to my website, which is drwilliamlee.com, DR William Li.com, you can find all the schedule for the masterclass. You can sign on to my newsletter. And then I also decided to teach a course. So for people who, you know, they usually take my masterclass first to just to learn more about what the the directions I go in. But then I realized there are, I created a course because some people really want to go deep and they basically say, I think it's time for me to transform my life and I want to not just hear about it, I want to practice it. So my online course really is a month-long virtual course that has videos that people can take on their own time, but then masterclasses where I answer questions. You know, not masterclass, it's called an office hour. So, you know, like when you're in college, you have your professor has, you know, sits in the office and and is waiting to answer questions for students to come by. So we do this and it's a it's a way to actually communicate and develop the community. And then what's really cool is I've had now over 2,000 people take my course from around the world. They get to continue to develop a community with themselves afterwards. And so my whole goal is really, you know, how to how to catalyse actions and how to get people to feel that they're empowered to be able to make better decisions and even more importantly, how do they stay connected and how do they continue to share long long after the course is done.
Sakina: So community building helping drive the change and implement the advice from your book. So apart from those those classes you've been working on, is there anything else as we close that you've been working on in the past few months?
Dr William Lee: Well, I am working on my next book. My next book actually is taking everything that I talked about in my first book to a whole next level. It's a true sequel to my first book. I was just, you know, jokingly tell people, you know, because everybody wants to know, I can't, my publisher made me commit not to talk about my book until I'm still writing it, so I don't have the whole story yet. But I always say it's a sequel. So think about Star Wars and then you have The Empire Strikes Back. So I'm working on the next one. And it's exciting because it's the same cast of characters, the health defence systems, in a new adventure with new characters that come in that also face new villains that they didn't, the old characters didn't have a chance to fight before and finding out new ways that your body is really the hero in the story. And again, the theme that's so powerful to me is that there's many foods, there's abundance of foods. It's really about using the knowledge that you have to select the right foods that can help your body do the work that it wants to do with moderation. And then I think I'm going to emphasize even more in this book, the idea of going back. I mean, you know, we always looking for the latest trends, the cutting edge, but I I'm I really also want to really emphasize that we should not go, we should not forget and in fact, we should lean into traditional food cultures because there are some real treasures there that fit with the modern science.
Sakina: Thank you. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for dropping by. And I hope your talk goes well later, your your end talk later. It was lovely to meet you.
Dr William Lee: Very nice to meet you. Thank you for having me on.
Sakina: Amazing.
Dr Rupy: Thank you so much for listening to this week's podcast. Remember, you can check out Dr Lee's books, Eat to Beat Disease and more on his website or the show links are on thedoctorskitchen.com and I will see you here next time.
