#56: Food as Medicine with Dr William Li

17th Jun 2020

My guest today is the truly inspirational Dr William W. Li, MD. An internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times Bestseller ‘Eat to Beat Disease - The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself’.

Listen now on your favourite platform:

His groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments, has impacted more than 50 million people worldwide, and covers more than 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views. Dr. Li has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, CNN, and CNBC and has been featured in USA Today, TIME, The Atlantic, and O Magazine. Dr. Li is President and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation.

We talk  about a range of  topics from his latest book including the 5 defence systems of  the body:

Your Microbes, stems cells, immune system , angiogenesis, your genes and how nutrition and lifestyle can positively influence them. As a food as medicine pioneer who started these conversations way before I even thought of The  Doctor’s  Kitchen, Dr  Li has been a true inspiration of mine.

On  this episode we talk about

  • The microbiota, how certain foods can improve  your  body’s ability  to regulate sugar
  • What stem cells are and the different types of foods that can help promote regeneration
  • The difference between pro and anti-angiogenesis and why both are helpful and harmful depending on the circumstance and how food can positively help with both.
  • The benefits of food for the immune system support
  • The utility of combining epidemiology, lab studies and human trials to determine which foods we should consume.
  • The future of food prescriptions and how medicine could look in  10-15 years time
  • The impact of food to positively impact  the efficacy of medicine in the field of cancer, cardiology and neurology.

And definitely go and check out Dr William Li’s book - ‘Eat to Beat Disease - The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself’ - it’s a fascinating book and most certainly well worth a read.

Episode guests

Dr William W. Li, MD

William W. Li, MD, is an internationally renowned physician, scientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers “Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself” and “Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer.” 

His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 40 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases including diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views. Dr. Li has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, Rachael Ray and Live with Kelly & Mark, and he has been featured in USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, O Magazine and more.

He is President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation, and he is leading global initiatives on food as medicine. For the latest cutting edge food as medicine science, check out Dr. Li's YouTube Channel

Unlock your health
  • Access over 1000 research backed recipes
  • Personalise food for your unique health needs
Start your no commitment, free trial now
Tell me more

Relevant recipes

Related podcasts

Podcast transcript

Dr William Li: Precisely, that's exactly what I think the medical community needs to begin uniting is to figure out how our diet and how food becomes a tool in the toolbox so that we don't become solely reliant on medications, surgery and other more traditional procedures and we have a more truly patient-centred approach that is more comprehensive. And you know, I also believe very strongly that health care is actually what happens to a patient between their visits that they have to a doctor's office or a hospital. And so how do we address and amplify our understanding?

Dr Rupy: I'm Dr Rupy and this is the Doctor's Kitchen podcast, the show about food, medicine, lifestyle and how to improve your health today. And today I have the pleasure of introducing Dr William Li. He's an internationally renowned physician, scientist and author of the New York Times bestseller Eat to Beat Disease. His groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical drugs and has impacted more than 50 million people worldwide and covers more than 70 different diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease. And really he is one of the true pioneers of this food as medicine movement that started way before I even started thinking about the Doctor's Kitchen. And we talk a little bit at the start about how he, along with my mum and a few other pioneers in this field, were really the inspirations behind me even looking at the research. And his talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer, which is on Ted, has had over 11 million views and counting, has appeared on a number of different news stations, CNN, CNBC, has been featured by USA Today. He's definitely one of the most sought after doctors in this field. And he's super passionate about the future of health as well. He firmly believes that a better future can be achieved by using science to shatter the barriers of the past and he collaborates with like-minded leaders, innovators and cultural changes striving to make the world a better place and he's a huge foodie at that as well. He's authored more than 100 scientific publications in leading journals and his book Eat to Beat Disease is really a catalogue of different studies that range across lab studies, animal models but also human trials, looking at how food can impact positively your immune system, your genetic integrity, your microbiota of course, the process of angiogenesis, which is something that we get into during the during the podcast, as well as your ability to regenerate or stem cells as well. As a hard-lined clinical researcher, someone who's been involved in pharmaceutical development, to bring this level of rigour to the science of food as medicine is something that he is a true believer of in. Um is an absolute pleasure and and a real sort of uh huge credible addition to this field. And that's why I was so keen to have him on the podcast. And unfortunately we had to do it um over Skype. Um there were some bandwidth issues, but luckily we managed to edit it so it's nice and seamless so it should be a good listening experience for you. Um but I I really do uh advise you you you pick up a copy of the book because I think it will give you a lot more rounded perspective on why I'm so passionate about this and why I really do think the future of medicine involves nutrition as a as a clinical tool in our toolbox that is in addition to medicines and surgical interventions, things that I still perform and and prescribe every single day that I'm working in the NHS. Um but uh something that I think has been massively overlooked and he's a real pioneer as well looking at future developments of things that we're not even thinking about right now. Um I I really think that I could do another podcast with him about some future developments in a whole bunch of other fields that we didn't have time to go into, but um I I think you're if you're a foodie and you you love uh flavour as well as function, which is my motto in the kitchen, you are going to absolutely love this episode. Um and I I just want to let you guys get into it. So without further ado, this is Dr William Li talking about Eat to Beat Disease. Uh enjoy this podcast. I wanted to start by uh saying a heartfelt thank you to you. Um you won't know this but back in 2009 I uh had atrial fibrillation, um a heart condition you know well about, um where your heart beats irregularly and very fast. And at the time I was um just qualified, uh left six years of medical school, was working as a junior doctor and I was going through the whole uh conventional treatment, was about to have an ablation. And my mum um suggested to me that I should look at my lifestyle and look at my diet. And as a conventionally trained doctor who hadn't had any nutrition training or anything to do with sort of lifestyle or anything outside of the conventional paradigm, I was very, very sceptical. And then I came across uh your work and eventually some of your talks and and that really uh in conjunction with my mum who's not a medic, um and a few other things was really uh the path that I started taking and that actually led to a resolution of a lot of my medical issues and has started me on this journey. So I just wanted to start by saying a heartfelt thank you to all the work that you've done, you continue to do because it it certainly impacted me personally and is impacting thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Dr William Li: Well, thank you, uh Rupy. It's a pleasure to be uh on your podcast. I uh like you, uh didn't have much nutrition research uh during medical training and I felt that was wrong. Uh but what I did have is I had a lot of real scientific training combined with clinical training and what that allowed me to do is to combine to join those forces um to have a really rigorous and scientific understanding of of how food influences our health. And what led me to write the book Eat to Beat Disease uh is the fact that, you know, I like so many people uh am confused by all the news and misinformation that's out there about, you know, a particular superfood or a super supplement that, you know, on one day is uh curative and the next day is completely uh debunked. And so uh I I really wanted to um take a serious approach to understanding how food influences our body. And when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food. What I discovered is that it's as much about how our body responds to what we put inside it. And just like how we think about pharmaceuticals uh in uh traditional medicine, this approach of understanding how the body responds to um what we consume gives us a new way to um think about how to eat to beat disease.

Dr Rupy: I wanted to ask um before we get into your incredible book, um I love the framework, you know, the the um the different uh food systems or the different bodily systems that you talk about, angiogenesis and the microbiota, etc. Um before we get into that, I kind of want to know a bit more about your story because you come from an Asian background, uh you clearly didn't have that much nutrition training during medical school. Um was there anything that kind of compelled you to go down this path um beyond the beyond the fact that it was quite unfair to to not have nutrition training during medical school?

Dr William Li: Right. Well, you know, I I was a uh I I practiced for a time uh in a hospital for veterans. And these uh specialized hospitals in the US uh are um designed to serve the people who served the country in the in the active military um at some point in their life. And later in life, uh provide healthcare for them. We call that the Veterans Administration uh medical centres. And when I was at the VA, as we called it, um these were some of my favourite patients. They were in their 60s and 70s and some in their 80s. So you're talking about people who, you know, um are quite advanced in age and many of them were, you know, um massively overweight with all the problems you'd expect, heart disease, diabetes, lung disease, cancer, um a host of of um uh uh conditions that were that are serious and very costly. Uh so what would I do is I would do the diagnosis and I would write them prescriptions or send them to see other specialists um for their care. And I was very confident in that part of it. And these very grateful and gracious patients would put on their jackets and they'd say, well, how long do I have and how serious is it? And then I would hand them the prescriptions and they would leave my office. And before the door closed, they would pop their head back in and say, hey doc, um one more thing, what could I do for myself? Is there anything that I should be eating? And that really caught me like a deer in the the proverbial headlights where I realized without the training, without an answer, uh it seemed like I could do I could do everything else for them except answer that really fundamental question. And here's here's really the irony of it. Um the veterans uh that I was taking care of, uh they could not serve in the US military unless they were in top physical condition when they were in their 20s. And they were in horrible condition and I realized that their diet and lifestyle must have played a role in taking these fit, cut, buff um defenders of a nation and and really uh uh uh jeopardizing their health. And I realized not only did I not have an answer to their question, I needed to actually delve further into understanding what led to the kind of the deterioration of their health. And that those two forces kind of converged to um make me passionate not just about treatment. So I am a a fully trained conventional medical doctor and I helped to develop drugs. So I believe in the judicious use of the right medicines at the right time, but I also realized there was a missing tool in the toolbox to prevent disease and also to be able to help answer that question, how foods could amplify the the treatment of disease. And that really led to my my journey uh uh to write the book.

Dr Rupy: And I think, you know, your experience as yes, a conventionally trained uh medical doctor but someone who's also been involved in the um procurement and development of uh many FDA approved uh pharmaceuticals, um and other interventions, you know, really does add a lot of credibility and gravitas to this field of food as medicine that can be, as you said, um misinterpreted and uh over-sensationalized in the media. So I think it's super important to have pioneers like yourself, you know, really leading the conversation in this and actually providing a framework uh for for people like myself and and the public to think about food choices in the prevention uh and in some cases treatment of ill health.

Dr William Li: Right. Precisely. That's exactly what I think the medical community needs to begin uniting is to figure out how our diet and how food becomes a tool in the toolbox so that we don't become solely reliant on medications, um surgery and other more traditional procedures and we have a more truly patient-centred approach that is more comprehensive. And, you know, I also believe very strongly that health care is actually what happens to a patient between their visits that they have to a doctor's office or a hospital. And so how do we address and amplify our understanding and help people become more uh uh empowered uh to really perform that type of healthcare. That's something I'm very committed to.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, and I love that sort of uh understanding of, you know, healthcare exists on a on a continuum and actually the snapshots by which we as practitioners see patients is a very minuscule amount in terms of their actual healthcare journey and actually a lot of the health and well-being is is happening outside of the clinician's office. And this is where, you know, your your book beautifully dovetails what we can uh what we can do to patients and give them the tools to um to to look after their health. And so let's uh segue beautifully into that. So I I love the framework of the book. I love the symmetry of it, you know, the five different defense systems, um the uh more that the exploration into the evidence behind food as medicine as the second part of the book. Um why don't we dive into some of the different areas? And I think angiogenesis is something that is dear to you, uh being the foundation lead. Um why don't we describe exactly what we mean by angiogenesis and how this fits into the idea of the homeostatic mechanisms of the body, something that's kind of foreign to most conventional doctors because we don't really talk about balance in that respect as as other sort of traditional medicine systems do like Ayurveda or Chinese medicine.

Dr William Li: Right. No, no, that's a that's a really great starting point for what um uh for our conversation. So, look, um uh uh we all know that uh uh foods some foods can block our circulation like the ones with saturated fat and uh you know, some of the fatty foods and red meats and all. But, you know, it's a wonderful discovery that there are some foods that can actually help us grow our circulation to get better blood flow. And there's a number of foods that can do this. You mentioned, you know, sort of grains and grains and seeds. You know, um ancient grains were the staple in the diet of of humans, you know, in in in sort of earlier civilizations. And what's amazing is that processed foods, which we know aren't good for you, often also are made with a lot of grains except that the processed foods have removed a lot of they've they've kind of basically processed the grain, removed all the good stuff on the shell um uh around the grain. And and what's now been studied is if you go back and look at uh grains like barley, for example, uh and and look at other the shell of other grains, um it's very rich in a natural chemical called beta-D-glucan. Uh and what beta-D-glucan does, it does a lot of things, but one of the things it does is it actually helps grow blood vessels in oxygen-starved tissues. And the research I read about, which I found fascinating, was done in Italy where they took um uh the beta-glucan from barley and they made it into a pasta. And then they fed it in the laboratory to uh animals, mice in particular who that actually needed better blood flow. And they found that it could indeed be very, very effective in growing blood flow. And in fact, what it did is it actually helped to uh reduce the amount of damage that could be caused by a heart attack. So this is like a research um model to look at um what might happen in a human heart attack and and just putting the uh uh uh the beta-D-glucan from barley uh into the food could have a dramatic effect by growing new blood vessels. But it's not just barley, there are other and it's not just beta-D-glucan, there's other natural chemicals um like these lignans. Now, you know, the lignans are are interesting because they're not a single substance. I think this is where the public also gets confused. What's a lignan? What's a lectin? Are they bad guys? Are they good guys? Look, what science allows us to do is to pick out very specific ones that are studied and demonstrated. So there's one lignan, which is a natural bioactive, um that has been shown to stimulate angiogenesis. Again, you know, in the context of an experimental heart attack, um just feeding uh the uh uh uh the lignan uh from from grain. Uh by the way, what are the grains? The grains are the grains that were studied were things like seeds, like flax seeds, sunflower seeds, you know, those are the pepitas, uh sesame seeds or pumpkin seeds, um even chia seeds. So, you know, what's very popular in the health food sections actually now the science is starting to help us define in what ways they're beneficial. So, um uh by eating the lignan that comes from seeds, uh the researchers were able to find that you could actually increase the protein in the injured tissue in the heart that could help grow blood vessels. And in fact, you know, you could actually grow uh uh 33% more blood vessels if you're feeding these seed-based uh lignans. And in fact, you had more efficient pumping of the heart because it's being fed um uh uh given more oxygen and and being fed better by the circulation. So that's just one example, seeds and grains. But also, you know, there's other interesting uh food products that can grow blood vessels including fruit peel. So there is a another chemical called ursolic acid that's found in the peel of uh of uh fruits like um uh apple peel, for example. Uh you know, many times people who eat an apple, well, we know an apple a day is supposed to keep the doctor away, but many people peel the apple and throw the the skin away and they're just eating the flesh, which, you know, is very tasty. Turns out that that peel is highly enriched with something called ursolic acid that can grow new blood vessels in your under your skin, in your legs, in your muscles for circulation. So, um so I I think that I'm I encourage people to really think about eating the fruit skin. You got to wash the fruit obviously really well. And here's, you know, another um consideration when you're trying to choose between organic versus non-organic. Um uh you know, the organic uh fruits haven't been sprayed with pesticides, which would make them um uh a little safer to eat if you're going to eat the peel.

Dr Rupy: I think, you know, at the end of uh your book, what people would recognize is actually I mean it's fascinating to find out about angiogenesis and how foods impact particular pathways. Then you get like a whole plethora of different uh parts of the body and different uh ways in which people can improve their their health using the singular foods because it has a essentially pleiotropic effect. And this is a nice segue into the different effects that it can have on the microbiota, stem cells, genetic integrity and immune support. Um I specifically wanted to speak to you about stem cells because I think this is absolutely fascinating, particularly in an era where people are thinking more about biotech industries where, you know, injecting stem cells to regenerate uh lost tissue and there is a huge uh interest in the field of gerontology, which is something that we've spoken about previously in the podcast with David Sinclair and a few other folks. Um but we can really do this with food. And I was really interested in uh cacao or cocoa uh and a few of the studies there as well as the other sort of more uh generally accepted uh fruits and veggies that you can find in most grocery stores and how that can impact um your EPCs.

Dr William Li: You know, when we were so stem cells and regeneration is a topic that's kind of a biotech uh topic often. Um you know, when you and I were in grade school, we were probably taught like most of your listeners as well, that that, you know, some animals can regenerate, starfish can regenerate an arm if they lose one, a salamander can regenerate a limb if they happen to lose it. Um and unfortunately, we were taught that we were taught that unfortunately humans can't regenerate. Um so what we what we have is what we got. Um but actually the science is actually telling us it's not true. In fact, that entire um chapter in the textbook of of of how humans heal has been ripped out and thrown out. We now know that humans do regenerate. We regenerate every single day. That's why our hair grows back. That's why, you know, if you ever ate, you know, um any uh uh crisps and you, you know, really sharp and you uh scraped your your mouth and like really had a terrible experience with that, you know, within a day, your your your the lining of your mouth heals back up and you can eat regularly again. That's the type of regeneration. But um it's much more powerful than that. Our liver regenerates. In fact, you can cut out two part two-thirds of our liver. Um a surgeon can remove two-thirds of our liver and and leave only one-third and the rest of the liver will grow back and regenerate exactly like it's supposed to be. Um we know that our organs regenerate as well and they regenerate using stem cells. You mentioned the word EPC, which is endothelial progenitor cell. But but there's a number of different types of stem cells, including in our skin. What is interesting is that we don't regenerate very quickly. I mean, some organs can regenerate pretty quickly, but most of them don't. They kind of work on a slower uh pace. And and so um while the biotech companies are trying to develop stem cells you can inject into the joints or, you know, the the the the primarily the joints but other parts of the body, um what I got interested in is looking at the science on how foods can actually stimulate stem cells as well. And, you know, the the one that you mentioned first, which is cocoa or cacao, you know, cocoa is coming from cacao, which is the seed pod that from which um chocolate is made. Now, chocolate's a confection. Um cocoa is a powdered version of uh uh that's from the cacao that's actually used to make uh the confection, the the candy. Um but but cocoa is, you know, what you hear about when they're saying like, is it 70%? Is it 80%? Is it 90%? Um uh uh cacao? That's number is what we're looking for. That's the original like the full test stuff uh from the the from the seed pod. And it turns out that that cocoa uh contains flavanols. These are natural chemicals that actually do a lot of things including they can uh recruit and prompt and activate stem cells in our bodies. So, I read about this amazing, really fascinating uh research study in uh 60-year-old men who actually had heart disease. Uh so these are people who already have compromised circulation. And they were given um a hot chocolate, a hot cocoa drink. Um uh that uh is is using cocoa that's like really dark cocoa. They drank um the hot cocoa for 30 days. And what they found is that drinking the hot cocoa alone, it's the only thing they did that was different from their regular lives, uh doubled the number of stem cells circulating in their bloodstream by drinking just uh two cups of hot cocoa a day for for a month. And then they measured the blood flow because the stem cells can help to improve your circulation and improve your blood flow by uh repairing and regenerating the lining of your blood vessels. Um uh that actually they doubled their blood flow as well. Double the stem cells, double the blood flow um with two cups of of hot chocolate. You know, what I when I talk about this, um I often have to preface this by saying, uh you know, who needs another excuse to like chocolate? But I'm going to give you a really surprising uh scientific fact that's been studied in humans and it really is um it it it's not only good news if you're a chocolate lover, but it but it also um uh uh helps to uh show just how much we still have to discover about our foods.

Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, some of the techniques that we're currently using when it comes to uh testing the efficacy of food, things like flow-mediated dilatation, uh looking at the nitric oxide uh synthesis in vessels, you know, it's it's really encouraging to see this amount of research. In fact, um I actually met one of the researchers on my master's uh uh course, uh which is quoted in your book from the University of Reading and they they do a lot of work with uh berries and flavanols and just the the mechanisms that are being proposed really do mirror some of the things that or the degree of um accuracy that, you know, that we're looking at with pharmaceuticals. So it is super encouraging to see this like a real rigorous scientific approach to this. One of the things I'm just conscious of of your time as well, Dr Lee. Um uh one of the things that I found really astounding was in the microbiota section or your your gut health section, um looking at kimchi and the impact on oral glucose tolerance tests, something that we perform in primary care in the UK quite a lot. And how increasing uh probiotic consumption could have a marked impact on glucose sensitivity. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I I personally found that absolutely fascinating and someone who's obsessed with the gut microbe, the gut microbiota, that that was brilliant.

Dr William Li: Well, uh here's here's another kind of uh uh exploding area of discovery that is, you know, good news. In a world where we are surrounded almost daily with bad news of some sort, um uh you know, I think medical research is really helping us get some good news that I like to talk about and that is we're beginning to realize that our um that uh our bodies are filled with bacteria. And while most doctors, I'm sure you and I, were um going through medical school, we were taught that most bacteria were bad. We didn't really know what the good bacteria are. We now know that the that the good bacteria um in in many ways uh is the it overwhelms the bad bacteria and that's why we're healthy. But we need to understand more about the good bacteria and what the role is. And it turns out that good bacteria don't infect us. They kind of form an ecosystem, a a a beneficial neighbourhood of good actors, you know, in our gut. Now, they're actually present in our skin, they're present in our mucous membranes, anywhere we have an orifice, um there's also bacteria, but in the gut is, you know, they they estimate, you know, in the trillions, like as many as 39 trillion bacteria that actually live in our bodies. Um so in fact, we're not actually technically only human. We are also, you know, almost a one-to-one level bacteria as well. So there's a I write about in my book this interesting concept of of um there's a term that describes a single organism or a single entity that's made of different organisms, more than one species of organism, and that's called a holobiont. And so what's kind of an amusing uh construct is that as we learn more about our microbiome, we are no longer just human. We're really kind of a holobiont. So, um what we when we when we want to do well by our gut bacteria, we can eat prebiotics, which feed which are foods that we might not absorb but are but feed our bacteria. We can also eat bacteria itself. And among, you know, the kinds of fermented foods that we have, fermented foods are a great source of bacteria because that's what happens when you're fermenting, the bacteria grow on the food. And then they're all and then they change from, you know, maybe some sketchy bacteria to mostly good bacteria to all good bacteria and into tasty foods. The food itself becomes transformed not only in terms of its taste and its texture, but also in terms of the makeup of the bacteria. Kimchi, which, you know, many people love to eat, it's a, you know, the national food of Korea, um is cabbage and spices and garlic and chilies all mixed together. And they used to bury them in the um ceramic pots in the ground in cool weather. And I mean it's amazing, like it's a it's like a flavour bomb if you've ever had almost anything with kimchi makes it, you know, gives you like this umami, um delicious mouth-watering flavour. And it can be spicy. But what's interesting is that eating eating kimchi actually uh feeds the bacteria in part by contributing bacteria, but also the kimchi which has got cabbage and stuff, also providing prebiotics. So it's, you know, it's usually not only one thing, like a fermented food like kimchi is giving some prebiotic and probiotic, helping to flush out the neighbourhood of good bacteria in your gut. And when the neighbourhood of bacteria is happy and healthy, what here's what the surprise is, we're beginning to realize that that there's a gut connection to our brains, gut connection to our immune system, and gut connection to our metabolism where when the gut is really happy, um like you would get after eating kimchi, it actually metabolizes blood sugar more effectively. And so you mentioned something called the glucose tolerance test and that's basically kind of a uh a simple way that doctors use to um give uh an individual a swig of sugary water and then measuring uh in their blood um some minutes after, a couple of hours after, um how well the body processes that and absorbs and takes down the sugar. And it turns out that um eating kimchi in a research study showed that it improved um the sugar metabolism by 33% in improvement. Um and that's in the same patient, by the way. So they tested this before eating kimchi, how well they, you know, handled sugar, and then after eating kimchi. So just eating kimchi, um you you can improves an individual's ability uh to be able to uh improve uh the the glucose uh tolerance. And then, you know, kimchi is not just um fermented, there's you can also have freshly made kimchi. So, you know, the stuff that hasn't been sitting around and all the bacteria doing their thing, but you can just make the same flavouring of cabbage and chili and garlic and stuff like that fresh. The fresh doesn't have the same makeup as the uh bacteria. So it's mostly a prebiotic as opposed to a probiotic. Turns out that when you compare the fermented uh probiotic kimchi compared to the fresh, that the glucose tolerance test is improved three and a half times better with the fermented stuff compared to the fresh stuff. So, you know, anybody who loves Korean food, you know, or go to your Asian market and find um kimchi. I mean, especially now, you know, everybody's concerned like, you know, the virus idea, uh coronavirus, everything is on everybody's mind. Look, um we don't have a vaccine yet. We don't actually have a cure yet, but what we can do is make decisions of things that we can eat that can actually help um stack the deck as much as possible in our favour. So besides isolating and all that kind of stuff, you know, I mean, actually eating kimchi might be something that people might want to consider.

Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think uh I was recently putting out some posts about how we can uh improve and support our immune health um through the choices that we make every single day in addition to the obvious ones of hand washing and uh isolating when necessary. Um I I also love the section of the where you talk about a study where they actually pulverized the probiotic to the point where you had the dead bacterial uh material in the food and yet it still exerted some of those beneficial effects on the uh on the host. Um which I think is is good for people to know as well that it doesn't always have to be probiotics, although there are benefits from a taste perspective and uh a potential uh um uh impact perspective as well. This is a lovely segue into the immune section, um which I think is uh of particular relevance uh due to your interest in in cancer therapy and immunotherapy. And it's certainly something that I think a lot more people are beginning to understand a lot more about. Um I discussed inflammation in a chapter on my my last book and how it's kind of a mis-uh understood concept where everyone everything about inflammation is thought of as bad and we have to remove all inflammation, but inflammation is a very important process that has allowed us to survive and evolve and uh and actually fight off pathogens. But um you describe some of the the foods and the ways in which we utilize uh immune health beautifully in the book and I thought it'd be great uh great place to to to talk about considering the the current viral situation.

Dr William Li: Right. Well, uh the in the popular community, uh uh most people have considered uh inflammation to be a bad guy, something that you don't want to have in your body and you want to get rid of it. So, you know, thinking about diet and health, most people are talking have been talking about anti-inflammatory foods. But like everything else in the medical world and in the scientific world, things aren't always black and white and, you know, as I say, the God is in the details. So we need to have a finer understanding of the immune system. And as medical doctors, as as as physicians, we are given the education to understand that the immune system is very, very complex. I mean, so basically, again, as a defense mechanism, protecting us against the bacteria that, you know, we breathe in every day. You don't have to go to a, you know, a dirty, disgusting area to be breathing in bacteria. All you have to do is to open your refrigerator, you know, and and you're probably smelling some bacteria or or, you know, when you're um sitting down on a couch, um you know, um as as you displace the pillows and the couch, there's bacteria that are being um uh mobilized into the air, we're breathing it in. We don't get pneumonia, we don't get terribly sick, most of the time. So what's actually happening? Well, it turns out that our our body is coated with mucous membrane. Well, first of all, our skin protects bacteria from invading inside us. So it's kind of like a shell. You know, we're not a crab with a crab shell, but we're we have a sort of a soft leathery surface, our skin that protects us from invasion. But if we do actually have invasion, whether it's through the skin or through your mucous membranes, so, you know, through your eyes, through your mouth, through your nose, um other mucous membranes as well, um could be the vagina, could be the anus, uh could be the urethra. The the bottom line is that there's a first line of defense uh in which specialized immune cells are like uh uh they're they're like policemen that will run to the mucous membrane. These are immune policemen uh as first responders, right? Um to be able to see what's going on. And if they see um uh some action happening that shouldn't be happening, like an invasion uh by bacteria, by an unwanted bacteria, an unrecognized bacteria, what they'll do is they will immediately surround the bacteria and they will take it out. In order to take out the bacteria at that level, there is a little bit, you know, the policemen kind of get there as first responders, they sound their whistle, they call in other um uh uh forces to, you know, particularly if it's uh a really bad uh bacteria. And these other forces are really the immune, they're all part of the immune system, um launch a bit of inflammation. And that inflammation is like putting a flamethrower to the bacteria. It goes there, it actually just like, you know, lights a match and blows away the bacteria. And then there's a cleanup crew that comes and just removes them. This is all part of immunity. So you want the first responders, you want the, you know, the destroyers of the bacteria, and then you want the cleanup crew uh to be there. So when we talk about immunity inflammation, we are actually talking about way more than, you know, simply uh a process of of destroying things. Now, if the inflammation gets out of control, yeah, it can actually be damaging to normal systems. But we really need to understand that a little bit of inflammation is actually very important to our health. So we we we want to be able to protect our our our immune system, needs to protect our points of entry. We need some inflammation to be able to come wipe out um bad players. We need other immune cells that circulate in our body and look for bad guys that might have gone into our bloodstream. And then we need to be able to clean up and clean out uh uh uh invaders that have been uh tackled already. And you know, that's probably the simplest way to explain this and different foods activate different parts of that immune defense.

Dr Rupy: And we've spoken a bit about the different types of foods already in different sections of your book uh with regards to probiotics and and gut-friendly uh ingredients, lots of different fibres and legumes, uh nuts and seeds. Um are there any specific ones that you uh you would talk about in with with regard to inflammation and um and immune health?

Dr William Li: One of the one of sort of the follow-ons to the explanation of the immune system is that when the immune system is overactive in terms of inflammation, that can cause a problem. So if you have overactive anything, any of these defenses, if they're overactive, like angiogenesis we talked about, too much angiogenesis bad, too little angiogenesis bad, immunity, too little immunity bad, like an HIV or AIDS. Um too much uh immunity, like in lupus uh or in many of these autoimmune diseases, that's also bad because then the inflammation winds up not just destroying the bad guys that are invading your body, but they also start to destroy your normal tissues as well. A couple of uh things that I think are noteworthy for um calming the inflammatory part of uh of your immune system is vitamin C. Uh and that's simple enough because you can you can take a a vitamin that you can take a vitamin C vitamin tablet um or you can actually um eat citrus fruit, which I prefer. Um and uh there was an interesting study to look at this in women in Japan uh who actually had lupus. So this is a bad autoimmune disease where their bodies get inflamed, they go, you know, they have these flares, these terribly painful, debilitating flares of lupus. Um uh and they found that the women who actually ate lots of vitamin C containing foods like oranges had a much lower rate, um like a 74% decrease rate of actually having lupus flares, meaning their immune system calmed down if they ate foods containing vitamin C. And they figured out that, you know, it was about the to get this benefit was about people who were eating about 154 milligrams of vitamin C a day, which is about the amount you'd find in, you know, about a one and a half oranges, which is about the amount you'd, you know, if you were to fresh squeeze into a glass of orange juice, um very easy to eat. Um but not but oranges aren't the only ones. You can actually get that amount of vitamin C from a cup and a half of sliced strawberries, which some people may be surprised that strawberries contain vitamin C. And also not just fruits, but broccoli also has it, like two cups of broccoli um uh have that that amount of vitamin C or cherry tomatoes. Um it turns out the equivalent to actually get the lupus calming amount of vitamin C was about um eight cups of cherry tomatoes. Now, eight cups is quite a lot, but if you think about cherry tomatoes, if you were to cook those down into a sauce, a red sauce, eight cups, you know, eight cups of raw tomatoes turns into almost nothing, like, you know, just a very small amount to put in your pasta. So, anyway, so that so it turns out that vitamin C containing foods are good for calming, but what about activating? Like, you know, I think that that's among the most important aspects of activating your immune system. It turns out that mushrooms, again, contain that beta-D-glucan which we started our conversation about. In addition to the um blood vessel growing uh uh part of beta-D-glucan, it turns out that beta-D-glucan feeds the microbiome, which we talked about, helps the bacteria uh get happier, and the bacteria communicate with the immune system. Uh and the immune system actually ramps up to help protect us against uh infections. And those infections could be bacterial or virus. Um another um food that I write about that I thought was so amazing, um uh that the research has been done that uh I I strongly recommend people think about this, incorporating this into their own lives is broccoli sprouts. You know, as you get into the springtime, you go to any of these farmer markets, um you can buy sprouts, right? These are young tendrils of different plants like broccoli. It's like three or four days old and it it kind of looks like a little patch of grass that they actually have. You can get them in a canister. And um most people put them into a salad, but you can also put them into a blender uh and uh create a shake out of it, right? You can add some berries and create a shake. What's amazing is they did a study in young healthy people um during the flu season and they um gave everybody the flu vaccine, uh which most people should get. Uh and then they actually uh gave half the people, half the group, um a shake containing broccoli sprouts. And it's two cups of the broccoli sprout shake. So if you were to take a measuring uh cup out and look at two cups of a of a shake, like two cups is not that much, easy to to down in the morning. And but but what they found was really amazing. Like obviously getting the flu vaccine is going to um uh ramp up your immune system uh because you're actually mostly giving a little bit of a a weakened version of the live flu uh virus to you to prompt your immune system to to um develop antibodies against it. It turns out the people who drank the um broccoli sprout shake and got the flu vaccine had an amazing um improvement, amping up, boosting of their immune response by 22 times. A broccoli shake plus the flu shot ramps up your immune system 22 times better than just getting the flu shot alone. And the immune cells that that were produced had more virus-killing power. So, you know, these are just a few examples of foods that of how powerfully foods can turn up or turn down um our immune defense systems in ways that might be able to help us navigate our lives um more uh more effectively.

Dr Rupy: And you know, the more research I come across uh from from people like yourself, your books, which is a great, you know, collection, a huge library of these different studies, the more enthusiastic I become about the future of food as like you described it, another clinical tool in our toolbox against disease and uh promoting well-being. What I'm really interested to in your opinion on, when do you think we're going to get to the point where not only when you see your doctor, you're giving preventative medications and in some cases treatment, but also you're going to be given a food prescription for want of a better word where it can support your natural body defense systems and and is that something that you're currently working on? Um because if not, I reckon this could be a huge area uh that would be intriguing and interesting to a lot of uh new doctors who are coming around to this way of thinking.

Dr William Li: Yeah, I think uh Rupy, exactly what you're describing is that new doctors are going to be the more comprehensive physicians of the future. I think most of the doctors who are out in practice today, um were educated and trained in an era where nutrition science was pretty weak or considered to be weak. And without the training, and by the way, I'm sure this may have been your experience as well, uh I would say that the access to healthy food during the medical school years, which is four years and training, traditionally has been pretty poor. Like if you want to talk about a food desert, go go into a medical school. Um and uh and so, you know, how can we expect doctors to, as they say, um uh talk the talk if they don't walk the walk? And so it's only these younger generation people, thankfully, that will be learning this new information and they're going to want to incorporate in their lifestyle and then certainly be able to practice it. Now, what's interesting, beyond teaching doctors simple nutrition, because this is, by the way, this isn't about just sustenance, proteins, calories, fats, sugars, you know, carbs. What we're talking about is really a whole new area of life science, really understanding not just food, but understanding how the body responds to food. I think it's really um uh there there needs to be a new field that that is that goes beyond simply nutrition. It's like physiological nutrition or or or pathological or pharmacological nutrition, this food as medicine uh bit. And it turns out that some foods can be combined with medicine. So I'm actually working in this area as well, which is to say, if you're sick and you're prescribed a medicine for your doctor, what else could be recommended to you, if not yet prescribed by your doctor, um that you can actually take to help uh boost yourself. So for example, I just based on what we just talked about, if you had a virus, I mean, I don't know about coronavirus, but you know, I would dare say this could be helpful. Um uh you could try, you know, you've got to eat something. What are you going to eat? There's no guidance to that and there's no drug companies or government studying that, although there should be. I mean, look, broccoli eating broccoli sprouts or having a broccoli sprout shake, you know, if that could boost your defense against a flu by ramping up your response to a flu vaccine by 22 times, why wouldn't you actually, you know, want to um try a broccoli sprout shake? So, again, I think that food, it's not just food as medicine that meaning that foods can prevent disease so then you don't need medicine. I'm a big believer that it's food and medicine as well where we can combine foods at home between the prescriptions you get in a doctor's or treatments you get in a doctor's office or a hospital that can really is a whole other future. And we're beginning to already see this um uh in cancer uh immunotherapy where there's new categories of treatments for cancer that boost immune system. And uh and what we want to be able to do is um what we want to be able to do is to um uh amplify the body's uh ability to respond to immune boosting cancer therapy. So you're your system uh is more active. And a great example of a food, a practical food is that is pomegranate juice. It turns out that, you know, responders to immunotherapy tend to have a bacteria called Akkermansia muciniphila. When you don't have that bacteria, it's been now found in cancer patients, it's not as likely you're going to respond to the treatment, which could be life-saving. And you can't eat an Akkermansia muciniphila probiotic yet at this time, but you can drink pomegranate juice which helps to secrete the mucus in your gut that that bacteria loves to grow in. So a good way to grow Akkermansia is to actually drink pomegranate juice. And so this is now something that cancer oncologists are doing, cancer treatment specialists are doing by encouraging their patients to um uh drink pomegranate juice uh if they're going to be on immunotherapy. Another amazing uh study was uh done by 13 hospitals including Harvard teaching hospitals, um where they looked at colon cancer patients uh getting just regular chemotherapy. So, you know, basic, nothing fancy, chemotherapy, um uh that's available to everybody. And they found that the people who ate two handfuls of tree nuts a week, um so, you know, that's not like tree nuts are a walnut, an almond, pistachio, macadamia, the common stuff. Um had a 50% reduction in death from their colon cancer. 50%. Published in major oncology journals, it made the headline of the major American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting and these were all done by like not naturopathic doctors, these were done by oncologists that made this observation. Now, if you're a cancer patient, you can't ignore that if you got colon cancer. If you're an oncologist, you shouldn't ignore that because even though you weren't taught about nuts, the research really, this came out in 2017, so it's 2020, three years now out there, there's no excuse not to know about this um as a doctor. So I think that, you know, the medical community is starting to change, although perhaps it's like an aircraft carrier, you know, in the ocean, that the turning radius is very, very uh uh big, very wide, it's very slow to change. But this is why um podcasts like yours, your shows like yours are so important because it's a way to get the word out. And if the doctor doesn't know, the patient can call it to their doctor's attention.

Dr Rupy: Yeah, no, I I I totally agree and I appreciate that as well. Um Dr Lee, uh this has been incredible. I can't wait to promote the book more and uh for more people to to get it in their hands over in the UK as well. Um it's uh it's definitely been a pleasure and I really hope we can connect in person where I can actually cook you some of the delicious foods that you've been talking about in your book. And I know from one foodie to another, uh I I know just from reading your words that you're you're a huge advocate of like the taste of food as and the flavour as well as the function of food.

Dr William Li: Absolutely, it'd be a pleasure to uh uh dine and cook with you. I also enjoy cooking and so we should plan on doing that at somewhere in the future. Uh looking forward to uh uh you know, more discoveries to be able to share.

Dr Rupy: Absolutely, yeah. And Rachel Ray uh definitely passes on her her good words. I was very fortunate to to be on the show with her at the end of last year and uh we mentioned you on the show and she mentioned you before as well and she's a huge fan and I think, you know, it's uh it's amazing to have the opportunity to speak to uh foodies, clinicians, uh researchers alike and uh to to, you know, really push this message of food as medicine and food and medicine. I really do like that concept and I think it's got a huge a huge amount of legs and um it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future.

Dr Rupy: I bet you didn't think that we were going to be talking about stroke, flax seeds, pumpkins, uh mushrooms, beta-glucans, macular degeneration, kimchi, or glucose tolerance tests all in the same podcast, but it really is just a snapshot of just how incredible this man's work has been over the last 20 years and counting. Um his genuine story, his narrative, and the way he uh the way he approaches this food as medicine field as well, I just think is something that we can learn a lot of um a lot from on the side of the pond. Um but also I think this is uh certainly one of the podcasts that I hope to listen back to in about 10 years time and just think, oh yeah, we do that already now. Like this is something that we just do intuitively and something that the new generation of medics and healthcare professionals understand intuitively. Um and for that reason, I'm I'm super grateful for people like him and the ability to, you know, promote his kind of work on my podcast and promote the message as well using culinary medicine, um the nonprofit in the UK and beyond. So I really hope you enjoyed that. Please do give it a five-star review if you enjoyed it too and share this with your colleagues, your friends, if you feel that they could be benefit from the information in this podcast. It really does help. Subscribe to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast, um and subscribe to the doctorskitchen.com where we give you science-based recipes every single week based on a lot of the research that we talked about on today's show and more as well. I will catch you here next time. Take care.

© 2025 The Doctor's Kitchen