Transcription
What we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day.
Meet Dr. William Lee, a world-renowned, Harvard-trained medical doctor, researcher, and president and founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation. His work has led to more than 40 FDA-approved therapeutics and devices for cancer, cardiovascular disease, wound healing, and vision loss. He is also a New York Times best-selling author with "Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself," and he recently published a new book, "Eat to Beat Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer."
In today's video, we have extracted Dr. William Lee's teachings over the years and focused on how food works as medicine for our bodies to protect ourselves from diseases like cancer. In the final part of the video, we will list out five healthy and potent fruits that Dr. William Lee frequently mentions in many of his seminars and talks, so stay watching until the very end for all the juicy details.
Diet accounts for 30 to 35% of environmentally caused cancers, and in fact, we're probably forming these microscopic cancers all the time in our bodies. Autopsy studies from people who died in car accidents have shown that about 40% of women between the ages of 40 and 50 actually have microscopic cancers in their breasts. About 50% of men in their 50s and 60s have microscopic prostate cancers, and virtually 100% of us, by the time we reach our 70s, will have microscopic cancers growing in our thyroid.
Food is medicine. Food, in fact, is really one of the most powerful health care interventions that we can do for ourselves because food is the medicine that we put into our bodies three times a day. That's called "food is medicine." You put good stuff into your body; your body's going to last longer. The science is now telling us that there are things that we can deliberately choose. It's not food versus medicine; it's food and medicine that can help our treatments work better.
In order to educate and share the knowledge with the public, Dr. William Lee wrote a book on food as medicine. It is important to note that it's not just five fruits that we will look at in detail in the video, but many varieties of natural foods that can be considered as food medicine and help our body to become healthier.
First of all, in my book, I read about 150 foods. I think this is the first book that ever did this—150 foods that have been shown by human clinical research that they can actually improve your metabolism, decrease the amount of body fat, reduce your waistline, and improve things like your blood sugars and your insulin sensitivity, along with the healthy hormones that relate to your metabolism.
In many seminars and interviews, Dr. William Lee frequently mentions some fruits more than others. Here are the top five fruits that often come up in his narratives, starting with tomatoes. Well, the best example I know is a study of 79,000 men followed over 20 years in which it was found that men who consumed cooked tomatoes two to three times a week had up to a 50% reduction in their risk of developing prostate cancer.
Now, we know that tomatoes are a good source of lycopene, and lycopene is anti-androgenic. But what's even more interesting from this study is that in those men who did develop prostate cancer, those who ate more servings of tomato sauce actually had fewer blood vessels feeding their cancer.
Lycopene is a fat-fighting bioactive. Here's what it does: it actually takes our harmful fat and helps to burn it down by activating a special kind of fat we have in our body called brown fat. So brown fat, or "good fat," can burn down white fat, which is harmful, dangerous fat, and eating tomatoes will light that up, improve your metabolism, improve your metabolic profile overall, and lower bad cholesterol. This is all with tomatoes and actually shrinks your waistline as well.
One study that was done actually took normal, healthy young women who were not overweight or obese. Okay, because much research is done with people who are already overweight, but this study took young, healthy female grad students who didn't have extra weight—they were considered normal body size, whatever that means. Okay, that can be debated. But the bottom line is that they had just one tomato to eat before lunch every day, and they were able to lose weight and improve their metabolism. Very achievable dosing, so tomatoes can actually do it.
With foods, it is important to know how best to prepare them to maximize the intake of the good components. So here is how you prepare tomatoes: The lycopene is in a form that's called trans, and it's very difficult for your body to absorb. It's one chemical form of the lycopene. If you heat it, you change the chemical structure naturally, and you change the trans to the cis form, and suddenly your body can absorb it.
So at two minutes of heating tomato sauce, you suddenly make it 50% more available, and after you simmer it for 30 minutes, that's 250% more available. So again, how we treat our food makes a difference as well. There have been studies looking at cooking tomatoes in water, and you can actually get the lycopene out. You can see that there's some lycopene that goes into the bloodstream, but lycopene is fat-soluble—it's an oily molecule. It dissolves better in oil than in water, right? So oil and water don't mix; lycopene loves oil. If you cook tomato sauce in olive oil, the lycopene gets into your bloodstream a lot more easily because it doesn't get flushed through. Now, it gets absorbed into your body a lot.
What kind of olive oil would you want to use? If you look across many of the olive species, there are three varieties of olives that have the highest number of anti-androgenic, cancer-starving polyphenols. One's Italian from Umbria, Morola. One is Greek from Peloponnese; it's the Koroneiki olive. One's from Spain; it's called the Pica olives.
Next in the list is pears. The reason pears are so great is the fact that they've got chlorogenic acid, which is a bioactive also found in apples that can actually activate your metabolism and help you burn down harmful body fat. Chlorogenic acid is also anti-angiogenic, meaning it actually stops blood vessels from growing to tumors. Pretty cool!
One of the things that I love about pears is that it's got a lot of dietary fiber. An average pear has about five or six grams of dietary fiber per pear, and a study from MD Anderson showed that just having that amount of dietary fiber can lower the risk of tumor progression or death by about 30% in one study where they looked at people with melanoma on immunotherapy. So here is actually a food that can make medical treatments work better: dietary fiber.
With pears, you can eat the skin, so you’ve got to wash it really, really well. Next in the list is kiwi. Kiwi is packed with vitamins and antioxidants, and it's been shown that eating just one kiwi a day can actually help protect your blood to neutralize about 60% of the incoming damage from DNA. If you eat three kiwis a day, which is pretty easy, right? You put it into yogurt—it's something that simple. Actually, it will build itself back up, so that damaged DNA will be repaired.
This is a study—a very small study but an important one—that shows proof of concept. Out of Singapore, they gave female volunteers two kiwis a day for four days and then looked inside their stool to see what happens. In the first 24 hours, they had more than 35% more lactobacillus in their stool just from eating the kiwi. The fiber and the fruit fed the bacteria, changing the population, and the bifidobacteria increased by 177% over the four days.
These two bacteria, lactobacillus and bifidobacteria, actually make other metabolites called short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that are anti-inflammatory. They alter lipids and energy metabolism and actually help our gut have a protective mucus layer, so you have less leaky gut kind of syndrome. So kiwi—who would have thought that kiwi would be beneficial to us on the basis of our microbiome? But now you have it.
Next are berries. We started talking about berries having the elagic acid and anthocyanins. Dark berries like blueberries, blackberries, and even strawberries—you know anthocyanins are a kind of reddish-purple natural dye that has anti-androgenic immune-boosting activity. Eating berries is actually really helpful for your health defenses.
By the way, if you have berries, please don't put tons of sugar on them. Let Mother Nature's sugar do its work. Most berries are not that sweet. Dr. William Lee often talks about strawberries. Strawberries have also been shown to improve your metabolism, and what's really interesting is that although strawberries can be sweet when they measure blood sugar, eating strawberries improves your metabolism. Not only does it decrease weight and waist size and lower weight, but it also doesn't raise blood sugar.
So this whole idea—another kind of common idea that might sound sensible—“Don't eat fruit; it's got too much sugar in it; it’s got too much fructose”—might seem like it makes sense on a casual level, but the science actually doesn't show that. The reason is that the bioactives in strawberries activate your body, so it starts to burn down the bad fat. You can actually metabolize even faster.
Finally, Dr. Lee frequently emphasizes the goodness of pomegranate juice. I also drink pomegranate juice because it turns out pomegranate juice can help us grow healthy gut bacteria that boost our immunity. Here's what's in the juice: it's got something called ellagitannins. These are bioactives that can do a lot of great things. One of the things they do is cut off the blood supply to tumors, so they can starve cancer by cutting off the blood supply.
But the other thing that they do is improve your gut health by helping to grow bacteria called Akkermansia. This is a guardian of the gut and a guardian of health, and it actually comes from the pomegranate. So don't be afraid to pick one of these things up, eat the seeds, and juice them if you dare. The bacteria Akkermansia, which can be grown by drinking pomegranate juice or Concord grape juice or cranberry juice, seems to be present in every patient who's a positive responder. They benefit; the tumor is wiped out by your immune system, and people who get checkpoint inhibitors for their cancer.
Because we don't know who responds and who doesn't respond, we're beginning to find out that what you eat and how it happens to change the ecosystem of your gut bacteria looks like it can actually make a big difference. And that big difference could be life and death.
As a final remark, this is how Dr. William Lee summarizes his study on foods as medicine: eat fresh, whole foods, mostly plant-based, and cut down or cut off red meat and ultra-processed foods. It's super easy, and remember, there are no superfoods. There's no single food that's going to protect you; it's all the foods that you choose to eat—the diversity that can help keep our body strong. The choices we make every single day can make a big difference in our immunity.
Don't forget to check out Dr. Lee's latest book and his website for more information. We will have the links down below.