Foods Every Woman Should Eat – with Dr. William Li

Mindy Pelz  

On this episode of The resetter podcast, I have such a deep conversation for you all. I have brought you Dr. William Li. And if you don’t know, Dr. Li, he has written a couple of books. One of my favorite is called Eat to Beat disease. And you’re gonna hear him talk a lot about some of the research that he discovered around cancer. Specifically breast cancer, we tie we really dove into hormonal cancers, you’ll hear us talk a lot about foods you can eat to support hormones and burn fat. So his background and his books on different strategies to use food as medicine is profound. What I think is the most interesting about Dr. William Li is really that he originally got his his start from a TED Talk like his public start, I should say he’s had a cancer clinic for years, treating patients with cancers, you’ll hear he is a researcher deep in researching medications, you’ll hear that here in the beginning. So he has a really beautiful balance that you rarely see in a medical doctor where he’s got one foot in research. If he had three feet, he had one foot in purse, medication and one foot in lifestyle. So and his TED talk was actually really life changing. I remember watching it over a decade ago, and he was one of the first to bring to us, this idea that it’s all about the blood supply to a tumor that matters. And what you’re going to hear in this conversation is there are foods that you can eat to cut off that blood supply. And here we go deep into breast cancer. So if you want to prevent breast cancer, if you want to know how to manage breast cancer, or heal from breast cancer, this is the episode for you please pass this out into the world. And then from there, we went deep into the microbiome. And you’re going to hear at the end, we geeked out on two specific bacteria that helped break estrogen down. So for my menopausal women, this is a really important conversation, because you’re not making as much estrogen as your younger self. So how that estrogen gets broken down is really important. And there are two bacteria in your gut that will help you do that. And we just geeked out on the foods that will help grow those two bacteria. So he is personable. He is a great storyteller, he is incredibly intelligent. He has this unique lens in which we can look at health through the lens of research and what medication does for the body. And then what he did is he took all of that and asked himself what can where can food be medicine, and then he applied it clinically. So it’s a really, really cool conversation. What I’m going to tell you here is that what I love about the way he teaches is he sets you up to understand why the foods he’s recommending are so powerful in a world where we have social media, that people just want to be spoon fed, like just telling me what to eat so that I can be a better version of myself, where Dr. Lee and I really connect is that we want you to understand the why. So please listen all the way through because the first half of this conversation is really setting you up to understand why these foods should not be dismissed, why these foods become your true health care. He talks a lot there’s a statement he has in here that just I couldn’t agree more with, which is when you go to your doctor’s office, you’re getting sick care. And when you come home and you look at your refrigerator and and pantry, that’s where health care exists. So listen all the way through so you get the depth of what he and I are talking about. And I am so proud to bring you this conversation. Welcome to the resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back. This is the podcast for you. So I’m just gonna start off Dr. Lee by not just welcoming you, but I’m maybe one of the original people who saw your TED Talk years ago. And it was largely because I had a patient that I loved so dearly that had cancer. And we were trying to work with lifestyle and your TED Talk came out and I is trying to, you know, take your concepts and turn it into food ideas. So I just, I’m a huge fan of your work. And I, of course have to welcome you to my podcast. But I have to tell you how much I love that TED Talk. Is it the thing that kind of launched you into this social media world?

Dr. Li  

Yeah, no, thanks for having me on. And thank you for your kind words about my TED talk. I had no idea, the impact of Ted in 2010, when I gave that talk, I think it’s great to give everyone an opportunity to operate and explain Yeah, and to try to show their enthusiasm as much as the knowledge and the content is really giving people a chance to communicate at the time, but my whole career was really based on biotech, and helping to create new treatments that could move the needle in big ways and cancer, healing wounds and diabetes and reversing blindness or preventing vision loss. And it was really because of the success in that area. And I don’t remember how many was that they want to give a TED talk. But I can tell you that as of today, there are 46 new FDA approved treatments for cancer, diabetes wounds, and vision loss I’ve been involved with that success really led me to ask, you know, like, art, what if we’re missing the biggest opportunity of all, which is to prevent disease, not just chase it. And no matter what you’re tasting it with, you know, drugs always have side effects. They’re always expensive, and they’re not always equitable. And so I thought, you know, maybe there’s something I could pull out of my own value system, which is, food is part of our humanity. You know, I grew up in a city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we were multiethnic I, I grew up really appreciating how proud people were, you know, if you are Latvian, if you are a Greek, if you are Italian, like everybody was proud of something. But then I realized that that’s the one thing in a world of differences that joins us is really that we’re all connected to our foods. So I’d love that idea. What I also realized is that food as medicine, is an ancient concept. Because until we had pharmaceuticals, that’s all we had, we only had food, right? I mean, and a few other things as well. But they were all diet and lifestyle, we had to use it as medicine, food was our medicine, we didn’t have any choices. And it was our best choice at the time. And what happened, I think, in the last 100 years, let’s just throw a dart and hit the board in the early 1930s, when antibiotics started coming out, and then everything else afterwards, we sort of somehow lost the food as tools in the toolbox. And we were only left with advancing technologies. And so what I thought was that, let’s go back and look at food as a tool in the toolbox. But we have a huge advantage today, which is that we’ve got the power of science, to really get down to the nitty gritty, the mechanisms of action, what happens at the cellular level, the molecular level, the genetics, and because my background was in drug development, developing new treatments to overcome cancer, for example, we have those tools to be able to study that nobody was throwing food into the system. So that was one of my things was to throw food into drug development system for cancer, and see what would actually come out. And when I saw the results that 2% of the foods that I had tests in the very beginning, were as or more potent than the cancer drugs that we were developing and testing. Like my jaw dropped. And I’m like, you know, this was my eureka moment. This is actually how we actually tried to really move forward in a way that connects to people because of our own humanistic connection to food.

Mindy Pelz  

Yeah, oh my gosh, I love that. So okay, so with that in mind, when we look at women’s health, specifically looking at balancing hormones, starving out cancer, burning fat, are there foods that women should be eating to accomplish those three

Speaker 1  

things? Yeah, well, you know, first of all, I’m so glad that your show and your scope is really focused on women’s health because as as we are all now beginning to recognize and admit, most of the medical research that has been done, and still a lot today is focused on enrolling men into clinical studies. Now, you know, without going into the politics of gender bias, the reality is that we’re all different. But there’s a very distinct difference between males and females just using that kind of term rather than gender rising it. And it has to do with very important brain, hormonal organ, you know, what our role, you know, as humans on the planet between male and females is fundamentally different. So it’s interesting. And so this is one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to recognize when you’re looking at clinical studies and people are talking about clinical trials, you know, you want to ask that very important question. So in the study, they include both men and women. You know, one size doesn’t fit all. You

Mindy Pelz  

know what I find, though, is that nine out of 10 times the answer is It was either a man, it was a mouse, or maybe a mixture of men and women, like one of the most profound studies on fasting, and I’ve been in the trenches, looking at all the fasting studies for years was one that said that fasting is not a good tool for weight loss. And I was like, This is crazy. I’m seeing people lose weight left and right, how can this be? So I went immediately to the sample size. And when I went to the sample size in the sample, there was a good size, who was like 1000 plus people, but you had everything from a 17 year old man, all the way up to a 65 year old woman. And I can tell you as a 54 year old woman, please don’t compare my metabolism to a 17 year old man,

Speaker 1  

right? Well, think about it. You’re sitting next to a 70 year old person of a different gender on an airplane, and you’re asking somebody sitting in front of you to see what the differences are. And they’re obvious, right? So, you know, but but you’re bringing up a really, I think, important point for those of us who communicate information to people who are interested in terms of understanding something about their own bodies. And that is that understanding that we’re all different, and that these differences matter. And trying to be as specific as possible, when it comes to gender is actually something that’s really, really useful. It’s a super helpful thing. So okay, so to your question, you know, in my work as a scientist, and as a physician, and also as an author, I wrote two books to be diseased to be your die, both of them became New York Times bestsellers, I actually try to cone in on the best possible clinical trials for whatever situation, if it’s about children, let’s make sure it’s well designed. If it’s about elderly, let’s make sure it’s well designed, right? The two, the two bookends of our lifespan, if it’s about anywhere in between, I think we need to take a look at you know, the females in a trial, Are they male Central? If they’re mixed, it’s okay to make some but then in the interpretation of the results, let’s make sure that we’re actually analyzing and thinking about that, yes. So yeah, we were talking about powering the trial, that’s a term for the people who don’t understand who may not be familiar with clinical trial design, the power of a study, all right, we’re not talking about, you know, the Avengers and superpower, we’re talking about a little bit of basic math, which is, do you have enough people of the same type in a clinical trial so that whatever the results are, the results are fairly reliable from a mathematical and statistical perspective. And so that’s the power of a trial, you get a chance to actually design the power of the trial for beginning of a study. And so one of the things that happens is if you’re mixing men or women, and then you’re interpreting them, let’s take a look at the male part, let’s look at the female part. Well, you might have actually cut the power in half. So then did you need a bigger study to begin with, and this is something that should be done at the very beginning, and not just at the end of a sudden. But that said, what I do is I actually look at, I love to look at trials that actually look at women only. And oftentimes, you know, those studies are about the conditions that women care about the most. All right, and think about breast cancer, which is an area that I working on a cancer research as well as a vascular blood vessel specialists. But if you look at cancer, this is perhaps one of the most feared diseases of all the diseases out there. Very common in women, very common in women and breast cancer being the one that immediately jumps to mind. And, you know, all of us know somebody that has been touched by cancer, but especially breast cancer. And, you know, the good news is that there are increasingly better treatments for breast cancer. And we’re beginning to detect it earlier and earlier. But nonetheless, what about when it comes to diet and lifestyle? What is it that’s actually good for women in the context of breast cancer? Preventative? What can improve treatment, what can prevent cancer from coming back? And this is actually an area that I think is super fascinating that I wanted to share with you and your audience. And one thing is that there’s a lot of urban legends that are out there. When it comes to food and health and food is cancer. You know, back in the day, and you may remember this is that cancer treatments for either chemo or you had to go over the border in Mexico to go fish oh, yeah, no, totally Africa.

Mindy Pelz  

I live part time in LA and so that there was a lot of border crossing to get some crazy alternative, right.

Speaker 1 

So But here, if you fast forward to where we are today, what’s wonderful, is that we are now not looking at food as medicine as alternatives. We’re now actually starting to blend them together to see how they actually interact. And so I want to give a couple of examples where there’s some urban legends about food and breast cancer. How that’s the kind of like all coming together into a more cohesive story. But people are complex, but we’re whole people, we’re not little body parts. And we’re not even cellular parse. Everything kind of works together. So what’s important is to integrate our knowledge about things, and particularly when it comes to women, like not to overgeneralize. So here’s the thing. Breast cancer, like everyone’s heard this, that soy, and soy foods are harmful for breast cancer. All right. I remember hearing this for years. And I remember when I was in medical school and training my, my, my patients who are women with breast cancer, you know, they’d always sort of asked me like, okay, yeah. Do you have anything do you recommend to eat for breast cancer? And, and then they would have a laundry list of things that they wanted to ask me about, it’s natural to ask that. So one of the top level kind of fears is that, you know, maybe I should stay away from soy, soy can cause breast cancer, right? And it has an estrogen a plant estrogen, right. And so isn’t that really bad? Well, so in my work, I’m agnostic to urban legends. In fact, when I find them, I try to smash which is kind of like being at a picnic, you know, outdoors with a flyswatter. When you see the fly, boom, see if you can knock it out. All right, so I’ll tell you in my field of angiogenesis, which is studying blood vessels, very early on in my field, it was discovered that tumors are cancers are completely harmless, they form in our body all the time, until they are able to recruit a private blood supply. A tumor isn’t born with a blood supply, a mutated cell doesn’t actually have a blood supply, it’ll sit there, it’ll grow about the size of a tip of a ballpoint pen or tip of a pencil. And then it can’t get any bigger because the scent of the oxygen doesn’t have any nutrients. But when cancer cells, like breast cancer cells are able to hijack our body’s own circulation, they begin to selfishly recruit blood vessels to grow into them. And what we found is that we take a tumor, isolate it from blood supply, it’ll stay there forever. Now in our bodies there without, without problem. Yeah, it can only get to two to three millimeters in diameter, that’s the size of the tip of a pencil. That’s it, okay. And then our immune system Wings by like cops on a beat in a suburb, and they spot a drug dealer on the sidewalk, all right, they don’t have to be dealing, oh, they’re just sitting there looking like they shouldn’t be there. What their immune system does put that cancer cell in a paddy wagon and drives off with it, and gets rid of it. Okay. And that’s how our body naturally resists cancer, like many women will ask me, Doc, why did I actually get breast cancer? And, you know, I would try to give an intelligent answer to that, obviously, you know, being empathic to the situation, the state of mind that they’re in. But you know, when I walk away from somebody who asked that question, I asked myself a different question. I asked myself, Why don’t we get cancer more often? Ooh, it’s much deeper, right? Yeah.

Mindy Pelz  

What’s the answer to that?

Speaker 1  

In? The answer is because our immune system Wings by conducts surveillance, and every time it sees a little microscopic cancer, it puts it in a paddy wagon and gets rid of it. All right. And that’s one thing. The second thing is that our body has a powerful way of trying to prevent tumors from getting their own blood supply, Anti angiogenesis, cuts off the blood supply to tumor, no blood vessels, no oxygen, no interest can’t grow, then your immune system comes by and wipes them out. All right, amazing, right. The other reason is that cancer is triggered by mutations in our DNA. Cancer is just a normal cell, the DNA is going to mutation. And now that mutation makes the cancer cell going haywire. It’s like having a virus in your operating system or your laptop, you know, weird things start happening. That’s what happens when it happens on a laptop, you got to, you know, take it to an anti virus program or reboot it. And your body to think grows into a cancer and less your body’s hardwired defense system against DNA damage. It’s like a mutation fix. It’s like an anti mutation fix. It wreaks squad, Geek Squad that you call, instead of installing the other way, you gotta buy large screen TVs but broken I can’t watch the game this weekend, right? So you call the Geek Squad and our bodies Geek Squad comes in to fix broken DNA. And it can actually repair it and it can also put a shield up so that it actually prevents more damage from occurring. Amazing. And then of course, our gut microbiome. Everyone knows about the gut microbiome now healthy gut bacteria 39 trillion of them, it lowers inflammation. Cancer loves to flare up with inflammation. So you know when you go to a barbecue in the summertime and you’re watching the grill, whenever fat and trips into the grill, you get this big flare up, right? And so this is what the flare up is inflammation. And cancer is sort of like the ribeye clicking on top and whenever it flares up with inflammation And that cancer loves to grow even more. So the gut microbiome, among many things that it does lowers inflammation. So if you’re a woman, and you want to lower your risk of breast cancer or ovarian cancer or cervical cancer, uterine cancer, you want to lower that inflammation. And the best way to do it is already hardwired in your body. It’s your gut bacteria. So the health defense system, and then connected to that we talked about this already use your immune system, which kind of wings by conducting surveillance and by the way, if you actually have a big honkin cancer, that’s regrown. So here’s this, here’s a stat about breast cancers that most people don’t know. All right, cancer researchers know it, but most people don’t. So we tell women to just be vigilant, and make sure like you were in a shower, just naturally just have do a self exam. So check for lumps, check for anything that might be abnormal, because the earlier you find it, the earlier something can be done earlier that something is done, the more likely you’re going to be cured, and dodge problems later on. So we feel for lumps in our breast, and the smallest breast lump that you can really feel with your two fingers. That’s how you’re supposed to feel form is about one centimeter in size in diameter. Now, that’s a small early breast cancer. So that’s why it’s so important to feel for that. All right. Now, a lot of people don’t realize this. But do you know how I’m gonna? This is not a trick question for you Monday. But has anybody ever told you how many cancer cells are in a one centimeter tumor?

Mindy Pelz  

Yeah, no, no, please

Speaker 1  

tell me it’s 1 billion. Cancer cells are already in the smallest tumor you can feel in the shower. Okay, so 1 billion cancer cells, that’s way more than the drug dealer in the corner that the company beat picks off, right? That to what that one centimeter cancer has already recruited a blood supplier. And I can tell you as a cancer researcher working in the lab, if we isolate the tumor from the blood supply, it’ll stay there forever, it won’t grow. The moment you allow a blood vessel to touch that cancer, it will start to feed it, it’ll give it oxygen, it’s like handing it a scuba tag. Alright, they’re giving it nutrients, now you’re giving it a bag of junk food. All right, and now that cancer will grow 16,000 times in just two weeks. 16,000 times the size is explosive. Alright, so how do we get this under control? All right. Well,

Mindy Pelz  

my like, my first thought is, how do you make sure you don’t get the blood supply there, that seems like the key

Speaker 1  

thing, go, if you can actually fortify your body to turn the clock back, keep the blood vessels from growing to the cancer and strengthen your immune system. So the cops on the beat will wipe out more of those bad guys, you’re gonna be in much better shape than if you just don’t know what to do and just don’t do anything about it. Wait for disaster to strike. Okay, so how do we do this? Well, this is my field, I run the angiogenesis Foundation, blood vessels are critical for our livelihood. For our health. We’ve got 60 miles worth of blood vessels in our body, they’re all important for they bring the oxygen and nutrients to every cell in our body. However, cancers will hijack that so can we cut off the blood supply and make it harder for the cancers to grow? Let me take you back a couple of decades to when we were thinking about because I was part of the pioneering team to do this. Now there are dozens of drugs that can actually do this. So back then, when we were hunting for things, we were looking in natural sources, what does mother nature have that can actually help our body cut off the blood supply to cancers like breast cancers? Well, the first one, by the way, was soy beets. Amazing safety, soy, it was so big. And I’ll tell you the story. Here’s a story that most people don’t know, I love to share these little nuggets that people just don’t know about. It turns out that there was a young researcher at the time 10 foetus, who had moved from Greece to Switzerland to do research. And when you’re a young researcher in a lab, they kind of give you the junior guy, the least interesting stuff to do. And they give you kind of the leftovers. So he got in there. And it was a hormone lab. By the way, there was a love about hormones. And this hormone lab in Switzerland, pioneered the ability to look for estrogen in urine in women’s urine so that we’re going back to the really late 1970s, early 1980s. All right. And it turns out, they gave this young researcher Ted Ted posters, they gave him a crate of old urine samples from women, that they didn’t want to use any word. They’re like here, this is your project, go figure out something interesting to do with it. So he looked into Europe, and he found the estrogen, right, because these are women. And what he found though, when he was analyzing the urine, there was this weird spike that came out of the urine that he’d never seen before. In fact, nobody has actually seen it before. So in the lab, he cut the spike out. This is how you do it. You cut the spike out and you analyze what is this spike? That spike was a natural compound from soy He called genocide. And so his lab basically says, so what? You know, it because it didn’t come from humans don’t forget this lab was studying human estrogen. And so he found this weird estrogen like spike out of women it cut it out. And they said, well, it didn’t come from humans didn’t come from the women where to come from came from soy. So they’re like, well tell us that it’s useful or don’t tell us at all. All right. And so what he did is he actually studied the Genesis sign, which is a phyto, estrogen, a plant estrogen, which came from soy. Alright, and and this is one of the origins. So how the whole urban legend about soy being damaging came from phyto estrogens. And he tested it in the systems used for drug development, ultimately, to see because starve cancer. And when he dropped the soy genocide in there, boom, it knocked out all the blood vessels that like, for example of breast cancer in the lab would actually recruiting it was like, Eureka. Wow, that’s amazing. All right. And it came from soy. And that led to a research publication that changed everything, including for me, because it led us to understand that foods have natural substances that can cut off the blood supply to cancer. And that’s led to my TED Talk and lots of other things that are going on right now. But the origin the first food that was discovered was soy. Yeah. That’s where it all came from. That’s where it all came from. Yeah. Now Wow. From from from one hormone Lassie, and from a woman from it came from a woman and it came from. Exactly, exactly. Now, let me just tell you how this urban legend came about that, yeah, boys is actually harmful for breast cancer. So and you know, it’s like so many other things that are out there in the blogosphere in the social media space and the rumor mill, I think most urban legends on health come from well intentioned people who are trying to put one on one together. And somebody heard that some that human breast cancer, some human breast cancers are estrogen sensitive, and they are. And then that same person also read somewhere, that soy beans have something called a phyto. Estrogen, and didn’t think about the phyto part just thought about the estrogen part. And again, well intentioned, say, well, in that case, you don’t want to put any estrogen from soy into the woman. And that’s where this took off, like this whole idea that women shouldn’t eat soy. But unfortunately, they were wrong, because they weren’t scientists, and they didn’t know the data. So this is where by the way, I think for anybody listening, having partial knowledge, really requires you to keep looking for more information, and not just take the halfway mark and say, I’m done. I’m the expert. Yes. Because what happened is that if you actually as a scientist look at what a phyto estrogen looks like, let’s say this is the chemical structure and look what the human estrogen looks like. They don’t look anything alike. If you had one on the last screen on the right screen, they’re completely different. The chemistry looks completely different. And in fact, yeah. What was since discovered, is that the phyto, estrogen from soy blocks the human estrogen, its mother nature’s tamoxifen, all right, yeah, actually blocks the growth of breast cancers. That’s true sponsor person. So just completely the opposite, and it serves the cancer. So people would say to me, when I was talking about this earlier in my career, they’d say, you know, that’s a nice theory, Dr. Lee, but look, I’m a woman, I’m not going to take the chance. All right, right. Well, so what I say is, let’s look at where the rubber meets the road in people. Let’s look at real women with real clinical trials that had only women in it, right women with breast cancer. And one of the most famous ones that I talked about is the Shanghai women’s breast cancer study where they studied 5000 women who were at the highest risk for breast cancer. And you know why they were at the highest risk because they already had breast cancer, right? They’re at super high risks. And here’s what they found. They found that the women who ate more soy had lower mortality. Okay, about protective because it’s protective, about 30% Lower. And those women who already had their breast cancer removed by surgery and well treated by chemo radiation, or hormonal therapy that didn’t have any cancer left. Those women who ate the most soy, over a period of years, had a 30% reduction in the chance of breast cancer would come back. Alright. So survival. Now then the critic goes and it’s fine. I think anybody wants you to have an intelligent conversation. Gotta be open minded. Ask questions always tell people ask questions. They’re like, Okay, well, that’s one study, even though there’s 5000 people in it, you know, because it’s been repeated. And what I say is that, actually, it’s a great question because there are 14 others studies that have come out since in in 14 clinical trials involving women only with breast cancer, in every single study, looking at soy intake and breast cancer outcomes, eating soy led to less mortality. And in every study, eating soy led to greater survival. All right, so this is the rubber meets the road. This is the clinical part of it. And that’s an it’s a great example. And you know, I know you want to talk about hormones, which is why I wanted to bring up some of the biggest advancements in this field that I feel I work in. And in angiogenesis came from this hormone lab when it comes to food and medicine. That’s crazy.

Mindy Pelz  

You know, so I’m about to put out another book. It’s called eat like a girl. And it’s a command companion book to fast like a girl. And so my publisher asked me, you know, would you do like how to break a fast and how women should eat and I told them, only under one condition. If I can bring the conversation on soy back, we have to talk about soy because I have no and I never, I didn’t know the backstory. So you just really helped me understand the backstory because I was like, why are we walking around? Like putting other chemicals really toxic chemicals on our skin and in our body? And yet, we’re like, Nope, no soy. Unlike soy, soy has a phyto estrogen component to it. And in my clinic, we used to run hormone tests, urinary hormone tests, like 1000s of them. And what I saw is women that had the highest diet soy also had the highest amount of two Oh H estrogen metabolite, which is the protective estrogen. So you just cleared up something for me, because I’ve been walking around like, why are we villainizing? soy, soy, there’s so many other things to villainize. But there’s something really helpful in soy that we need to bring

Speaker 1  

back. Yeah, well, I’m happy to contribute more back matter, to help you tell the story as you write it. But I’ll tell you, I think that for anybody watching this or listening to this, there is something important we need to say. We’re not talking about generic soy, like soy fillers, or soy burgers or ultra processed soy, because that you can take a look at the fake meat that’s out there, the different burgers and hotdogs and weird things that they’re making. Those are super ultra processed soy soy, unfortunately, has become also an ingredient that is used and ultra processed into foods that, you know, are not it’s not even arguably anymore. It’s very clearly that eating processed foods is bad for hormones, bad for cancer risk, bad for metabolism, bad for cardiovascular dementia, you know, so let’s be clear, when we’re talking about the benefits of soy, we’re talking about whole sourced soy foods. So edamame, a tofu, soy milk, not Ultra processed. And by the way, people go well, you know, I don’t know how many soy products I can actually eat. There’s like three of them. And my grocery store. What I tell people to do if you actually have an Asian market nearby, you just searched out on your Google Maps a type in Asian market and see where they are. Take a drive out to them one day, just like a field trip. Okay, just explore and go ask somebody where the foods was soybeans are or soy, and Dogan they’re going to take you and there are hundreds of soy foods that are around in Asia. Right amaze me. And by the way, there’s one last thing I need to tell you about the urine that was studied by Ted foetus. The samples. They came from a previous study on female hormones from women who were farmers in a village outside of Kyoto. And they were almost all vegetarians and of the vegetables they were eating was mostly solely based foods. Interest,

Mindy Pelz  

right? That’s incredible. Yeah. So okay, so do we have other foods that can cut off the blood supply? If we look at it through the lens of like breast cancer or? Yeah, I mean, cancer, cervical cancer.

Speaker 1  

Yeah. So I mean, it’s a long laundry list. Oh, nice. I wrote all I created the list of foods in my book, Eat to Beat disease. Anybody who wants to get a laundry list of foods that can cut off the blood splatter cancer, it’s in my book. And I talk about them all the time. So if you come to my YouTube channel, or you go to my master classes, you’ll actually hear me talk about them quite frequently, but I will tell you, some of them all right, I’ll just give you a sampling of them. Tomatoes. Let’s throw out the myth about nightshades and lectins. All right, tree nuts, walnuts, pistachios, almonds, macadamia is pine nuts. They also lower the risk and it can also cut off the blood supply of cancer. We’re also talking about the brassica vegetable family. Yeah, so we’re talking about not just broccoli kale, the regular Broccoli Broccoli we’re talking about even turnips, which are part of the brassica family. All have sulforaphane that cut off the blood supply feeding cancer, berries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, strawberries. There’s something called the allergic acid cuts off the blood supply to tumors. This is all based on actually research I did right years ago with the National cancers to where we were studying things to cut off the blood supply for breast and other cancers with drugs. And when we threw a strawberry extract in there, boom, like we got a score, we hit a home run crazy. And so Wow, these are not replacements for your doctor, your oncologist and not for drug therapies, or women’s health specialist. But these are things that you can do for yourself, that’s part of health care, you go to the doctor sick care, all right, that’s how our system is set up. When you go home from the doctor’s office, then it switches over to health care, we take care of ourselves. And this is how the food is in our own toolbox for ourselves. Green tea, cuts off the blood supply to breast cancer. And by the way, moksha, which is the specific kind of green tea, do we have much to do like matcha?

Mindy Pelz  

Yeah, I don’t like the taste of it. But every time I go out to like, you know, I live near Erawan, which is a really fancy supermarket, I want a lot to drink, I just haven’t fallen in love with it,

Speaker 1  

maybe maybe this will maybe this will influence your thinking about a little bit. Green tea is good for you. And green tea, when you sip a cup of green tea, the poly phenols, the catechins that are naturally present in tea leaves float out because of the hot water into the brew. And then you’re sipping the brew and you’re actually getting the catechins of poly phenols in your body, they cut off the blood supply to cancer. All right, that’s very, very clear. Now, but you don’t get all the catechins out of the tea leaves. Because while you’re just soaking, there’s still some left, you know how in a sponge, if you just put a sponge in a bucket and fill up the bucket. Even if you empty all the water, the sponge is still going to have some stuff in it. Some water, you got to squeeze it out, right. So nobody squeezes out all of the catechins from your tea leaves when you brew a cup of tea. However, there is something different about matcha much this green tea, regular green tea, except about 20 days before they harvested, they put a shade over it. And that actually causes more polyphenols that do produce. So all by itself, there’s more poly phenols more catechins in Matcha, just by putting a little covering over it. Then when they harvest it, they harvest it very carefully. Then they unlike regular tea, which is just drying the tea leaves here and then and then selling it here they dry the tea leaves the whole leaf, and then they pulverized it into a fine powder. So now you get 100% of the poly phenols. And the tea leaves in much. Yeah, and you get the dietary fiber from the leaf itself. You got the poly phenols, you got the dietary fiber, you got everything. There’s nothing left behind in a tea bag, nothing left behind. It’s all there. Which is why a cup of matcha is really really dense green, you can’t see through it. All right, no. And in fact, you whisk it to mix it up, and you sip it. And that can tell you it’s really amazing because you get a lot more poly phenol a lot more cancer starving stuff out of out of mushroom than you do a cup of green tea.

Mindy Pelz  

Yeah. And then if you put soy milk in it like a good high quality soy milk. Now

Speaker 1  

you’ve sacked it in your favor, and you get the dietary fiber from matcha that actually stimulates your gut microbiome. So now you’re lowering inflammation. And there’s one last thing that I didn’t tell you yet. The last thing about matcha and this is based on research done by scientists in England, they found that matcha can actually kill breast cancer stem cells. Oh, wow. Now, what’s the what’s the cancer stem cell? Listen, we’re all made of stem cells, like when our dads permit our mom’s egg. We’re a little ball of cells. Our stem cells are what allowed us to grow a face ears, the heart, lung, fingertips toenails. Alright, so we’re all forming stem cells. But when we were actually formed and born, all the other stem cells got stored away to repair and regenerate ourselves over the course of our lives when we need to know when cancers form that mutation. And where you got the bad guy for me. If it turns into a tumor, that one centimeter tumor, a billion cancer cells, one centimeter cancer, the small tree, you can feel a billion cancer cells than it is already fed by 100 million blood vessel cells.

Mindy Pelz  

Oh my gosh, this,

Speaker 1  

this is why the point you made Mindy earlier is so important. Let’s prevent it in the first place. Let’s stop those blood vessels from forming let’s shore up immune system. These are simple steps that can actually be taken by healthy people. And if you have cancer, now’s the time to you know hubba hubba and get with it because this is not something your oncologist is going to be doing for you. This is something you’re going to be doing for yourself. And then the researchers have found that you see what happens is that after you completely treat breast cancer, right, the women who are in remission, you know, thank God I’m in remission, right their five year mark. Unfortunately, about 20% of people who are in remission over five years comes back Where the heck did that come from? How did that cancer come back? Well, it turns out that cancers also developed stem cells, and they can renew themselves. Now we know this occurs in breast and other cancers. We don’t have a medicine that can treat cancer stem cells. There’s nothing. I mean, I can tell you as somebody who’s, you know, doing therapeutic development for cancer, we ain’t got nothing for that. Guess what Mother Nature already beat us to the punch because much of course, she can actually kill breast cancer stem cells. Amazing. Right? Um, so next time you go to your

Mindy Pelz  

best, yeah, I’m totally convinced. Okay. So I love the way you’re explaining this, because so many people, when they started fasting, they started to watch their body heal, and my brain went to Yeah, because you’re taking a break from the horrific food. So then I started to shift some of the way that I was educating this. And while I was trying to let people know, like, fasting is a healing state. But then when you go into food, you really need to look at food as medicine. And that led me into some interesting research and studies on what controls our tastebuds. And one of the things that I found out was what controls our tastebuds is actually the microbes in our gut. And then when you start to go into this microbe area, and you’re talking about inflammation and immune system, we also have microbes that start to break estrogen down called the strobe alone. So all of a sudden, like for me food, all roads point to the microbiome. So my question then leads to you is, okay, what foods can support those specific bacteria that break down estrogen? Do we know any of those? And are there ways to use food to change our what we crave in our taste buds? I know, those are two separate questions.

Speaker 1  

These are great questions and the area of the microbiome, that sort of ecosystem in our body is one of the most exciting frontiers of understanding ourselves. And, you know, I, when I’ve had the opportunity to mentor young people who are going to medical school or trying to choose their career, I’d tell them that if I were starting out now, I would immediately know to dive into the microbiome as a place that’s going to change everything in the future. So you know, I wrote about the need to be diseased, we have so many bacteria in our body, that we are about one to one, actually, the last estimate, some people say we got 100 times more bacteria, it’s about one to one. So we’re part human and part bacteria. The important thing about the research that is being done about the gut microbiome is we’re understanding some of the things that gut microbiome does the gut microbiome lowers inflammation, which is really important for all cancers, including women’s cancers, right? Yeah. Number two, including breast cancer, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer, cervical cancer, melanoma, you know, lung cancer, colon cancer, colorectal cancer. So, you know, we can’t easily just slot cancers. This is the Women’s Cancer, this is a men’s cancer, it’s not that easy. But women are actually increasingly affected by colon cancer and lung cancer. Women who never smoked, get lung cancer. So I think that, you know, we don’t want to put an artificial gender line either by saying, well, we need to actually think so gut microbiome actually critical for lowering inflammation, boosting immunity 70% of our immune system, by the way, lives inside the walls of our gut. Now, I was never taught that when I went to medical school that wasn’t even known. I think we thought that their immune system wasn’t like in the thymus gland, spleen, some other places, lymph nodes, nope. Actually, it’s mostly in our gut. And so our gut bacteria, talks to our immune system, in order to be able to shore it up to be able to knock down cancer. And you know, I always tell people, that analogy of how our gut bacteria talks to our immune immune system is that our gut wall is kind of like the thin cheap walls of a freshman dorm in college. Right? If you got two roommates that live next to each other, that was paper that you can hear everything. And so what did you do on a Friday night? You yelled through the wall? Hey, what kind of B city or what kind of topic on your pizza? And they could give me the answer right back through the wall. And that’s basically what our gut bacteria and our immune system do. They’re talking to each other through that. And the gut bacteria can text message our brain in ways that actually can influence our mood. Now, something that I learned from this amazing researcher, Dr. Susan Erdman, who’s a veterinarian at MIT, Massachusetts, through technology in Boston, he taught me that there there are certain bacteria in the gut and you can eat these bacteria and the bacteria are also found in food, but you can get into the probiotic, and one of them is called Lactobacillus ruder i Okay, That microbuses router right in the gut, text messages our brain. And what it does is that causes the brain to release oxytocin. Now, oxytocin is a social hormone. It’s the hormone that when the one minute old infant is given skin time and starts to suck a longer nipple, it releases oxytocin is really releases the milk letdown. Oxytocin is also important for uterine contractions when you’re when you’re delivering the baby. And also oxytocin is important for social connection. So when you’re at the airport, or at the train station, or the bus station, and you ever seen a relative in a long time or a good friend, and they come through the arrivals area, and you run up there and you give them a great hug, and you’re really just happy to see them, your brain is flooded with oxytocin. Oxytocin also comes into your brain when you get a kiss. And we’re not talking about grandma’s peck on the cheek when you get a good deep French kiss. Oxytocin is that same feeling that when you’re seeing your friend at the airport, and the other time that oxytocin floods out of your brain is during orgasm. Alright, so this is actually an incredibly important social hormone that has in women of very, very important reproductive and also a connection between mom and baby. So you know, this is an important hormone. Well, turns out that lactobacillus ruder I TextPlus is your brain to be able to release this. So there’s been studies that have been shown that in the lab, lactobacillus ruder I, when fit in the lab to animals just to their drinking water, you know, like, you ever had a hamster or gerbil and you got to put the water bottle up with the little metal nozzle and an animal goes up there and sort of licking it. If that’s how you do is you put the electrolysis router, I powder into the water, mix it all up, shake it all up and let him drink it. No biggie. If these animals were prone to develop breast cancer, guess what? It would reduce the size and reduce the incidence, the development of breast cancer? Breast Wow, amazing. Wow. Right? No,

Mindy Pelz  

I don’t want to make sure we stay in the router, I think because William Davis wrote a book and he had a whole community online that I remember I brought them on this podcast couple of years ago, and they made lactobacillus root arrived, they took it out of a supplement, and put it into yogurt and fermented it. And then they had everybody eat a cup of this yogurt for X amount of days and the measure what they noticed in moods, and it was an incredible mood booster.

Speaker 1  

Yeah. There you go. The gut, being happy and having a new partner, the electric buses arrive, text messages, the brain releases social hormones, which influenced your mood, and it can really be quite profound. But here, also lowering inflammation, also boosting immunity, the cups and a beat we can buy. And maybe that’s how they were actually working. The other thing about lactose is written right, it’s really interesting is that when you eat and foods Lactobacillus reuteri, also in your mouth, bites the bacteria that causes cavities. Ooh, all right. Okay, so

Mindy Pelz  

what foods do you get it in? I only know that through the yogurt technique. Yeah, well, so

Speaker 1  

first of all, going back to the original yogurt, I want to talk about yogurt in a second because it’s so important from gut health and overall human health and women’s health, by the way, so old fashioned yogurt that it’s hard to find anymore. Used to have many more organisms when it was sort of made on a small scale. You know, small local farms are making the yogurt and supplying it. And once it became a big factory, the probiotic quality started to go down. But like a sister would I can be found in some yogurts. I don’t know which ones but I’m always on a hunt. So if anybody knows for it, yeah, let’s definitely look for it and please, you know, DM me on social media on Instagram or something and let me know if you find one that has like of Asus router I, that would be a winner. But you can also find like it was food right, in sourdough bread. Here’s the thing. Lactobacillus reuteri, lactobacillus is named like so. Lactobacillus has a first name, root arisal. Last name. It’s actually genius. This species Bella’s called first name, and last name. Everybody understand that? Lactobacillus is called that because it creates a lactic acid. Lactic acid is what makes our dough tangy. What we like about sourdough, and that’s so people going back hundreds of years like in France, where they started with sourdough bread, they actually would take a little pinch of starter material that had Lactobacillus reuteri. And use that into the yeast to make the dough for sourdough bread. And then before they baked it, they would pinch it off and save it for next. So there are hundreds of years of saved lactobacillus ruder i that have been pinched off and saved over the year. So if you’re going to try this, by the way, make sure that you’re getting real sourdough bread and not sourdough bread made in a factor where they didn’t want to waste time. And they just put a little vinegar in there to make it seem like a tasty candy. You want the real lactic acid from lactobacillus. Now, that’s only one place to get it. A lot of people might not realize that, though bacillus rudeboy is the starter bacteria not only for sourdough bread, but also for the real Italian parmesan reggiano cheese.

Mindy Pelz  

Really? Yeah. You know, it’s funny, because these, you’re just named two foods that I love. And I can’t quite figure out why I love them there. Because I typically don’t eat wheat, and I don’t do a ton of cheese, but those to pull me. And I’m wondering if it’s because the oxytocin

Speaker 1  

might be but um, by the way, I’m not talking about factory made, you know, copy paste, you know, something that’s called poverty, poverty, John fees, you know, the stuff you think I’m from, I can, no, no, we’re talking about the big blocks that you would see yes, in Italy, and you can find them in the US, you can order it that way. And it’s expensive, okay. And so you don’t need a lot of it. And you shouldn’t have a lot of cheese anyway. I mean, they know cheese is a probiotic food, but it also has a lot of saturated fat and a lot of salt. So moderation can be good for you. But many people are surprised to find out that lactobacillus are also found in parmesan reggiano cheese. Yeah, the real Italian is amazing. Okay, that’s amazing. So yeah, so we and I did some research on lactobacillus root Orion, we found that in the lab, if you are selling wound healing that animals to the brewery they take that it actually speeds up the healing of the wound as well. That’s great. So infected doubled the rate of wound healing. So amazing. Well, and the real point is really that we’re just beginning to discover the we’re at the beginning of the journey to discover the miracle of our gut bacteria. And so you’re asking about like, do we know the right bacteria that actually metabolize estrogen and right, I don’t know what it is, but I don’t know everything there is to know about the micro about the gut back to your microbiome. I think that you know, like, when you’re talking to a real scientists like me, I’m really quick to tell you what, I don’t know, because that’s what site, that’s what real scientists do. I don’t know. Do you know, do you know? What is there? Is there a bacteria that does it?

Mindy Pelz  

So lacto back sylius Ramos? That’s the other one. I’m curious. Because so I went down a path of what’s in the Austro below. Like, what count? Can we just figure out what set of bacteria break estrogen down and then I was going to go and look at things like, you know, if you ferment different vegetables, you get a different bacterial byproduct. And so that’s how I discovered Rudra I, but Rama knows our h a m n o u s, is another one that has an effect on estrogen. So I’m that was gonna be one of my questions

Speaker 1  

in what direction? Does it actually metabolize? It breaks it down, or does it keep it?

Mindy Pelz  

No, it metabolizes it, because he here’s one of my things on hormones is that we you bring up a really interesting point, we have to look at three different things when we are using food as medicine as hormonal medicine. One is that it can help us make the hormone there is food that will help us break that hormone down. And then there’s foods that will help us detox it. And when you start to really dive into food, you realize that there’s a lot of that. So the metabolizing, though all come points at the microbiome and that’s how I geeked out on raw minnows. Yeah, and I think it may come from the fermentation of certain vegetables and I haven’t figured out which one

Unknown Speaker  

maybe kimchi

Mindy Pelz  

maybe right so Kim Chi. Yeah, Kim Chi has one of the reasons that Kim Chi is so great for the immune system is the fermentation of scallions that actually has an immune component to it.

Unknown Speaker  

So thing

Mindy Pelz  

I got you curious now I know

Speaker 1  

you got me curious. I’m actually looking at it up right now. I’m gonna see

Mindy Pelz  

right. It’s something fermented for sure. It’s gonna be a byproduct of something fermented just like you said. sour dough. How do we get Romanus? What vegetable Do you ferment to get? El Romanus?

Speaker 1  

Yeah, no, I listen. This is these are the these are the types of questions. Oh, look at this. Kim T. Yep, sauerkraut, Kim pay, and miso.

Mindy Pelz  

Soy soy, soy maybe it’s in the soy, which would make sense the fermentation of soy would be helped with the breakdown of estrogen. And then if you stop and you think about that, you’re like, nature’s so brilliant. It created a phyto estrogen that will help you make estrogen or bring you know that estrogen into your system. Then when you ferment that phyto estrogen, it helps you break it down. That would make perfect sense. Well,

Speaker 1  

we’re talking about balance, right. I mean, this is a yeah, this is really sort of like the whole idea of hormesis like it’s the The body doesn’t allow you to do too much of one or the other, the natural balance, is there sort of keep things in this Goldilocks zone where everything is hunky dory within a certain zone. Yeah.

Mindy Pelz  

Oh my god, that was so good. Well, Dr. Lee, I want to go have a meal with you. So the next time I’m in Boston, visiting my sister, I’m going to look you up, and we can geek out

Speaker 1  

or the next time when we should actually go out and go check out some of those tasty stuff. I listen, I mean, I am. So again, I’m gonna just repeat this, I think what you’re doing to help raise the attention. And also the comfort level talking about hormones, women’s health, for the concerns of women is so very important because it’s something that every clinician needs to be able to not only own, right, like, this is not something that you kind of leave for somebody else, like we all need to own it. Because we are taking care of that people in our own families and our friends and with patients, you know, we have to actually understand these gender differences are really incredibly profound, and to learn everything we can from your podcasts and your YouTube channel, like we should be all watching it. Yeah,

Mindy Pelz  

thank you. You know, I always wonder how do we get to 2024. And we’re just now having this discussion that we need to look at healthcare from a gender from a gender lens. I don’t know why it took us this long to get here. But I’m just grateful that we’re having that conversation to your point. So how do people find you if people want to go buy your book or enroll in any of your courses?

Speaker 1  

Yeah, come to my website. It’s Dr. William lee.com. My handle is at Dr. William Lee, my YouTube channels, not at Dr. William is Dr. William Lee. And you know, that’s the best way to find me, if you search my name with Ted or on Amazon, you’ll actually find my books. Yeah,

Mindy Pelz  

amazing. Okay, I have to ask you my last question that I asked everybody. And it’s one that I’ve geeked out on for many years, which is this idea of health, everybody is trying to achieve health. But we don’t really have a good definition of what health is. So what is your definition of health? And how do you know when you’re healthy?

Speaker 1  

Yeah, great question. The same question I asked when I was in medical school, because my professors never taught me about healthy taught me only about disease. So So my work has really been about answering that question, what is health. So for me, what I know is that health isn’t just the absence of disease, it is that, but health is actually the result of my body’s hardwired, defenses, all working on my behalf that he started when I was born. And they’re going to keep, you know, cranking away until my last breath. And we talked about some of those health defenses already. Genesis, your circulation, your stem cells, your microbiome, your DNA protection system, your immune system, they’re all working on our behalf. I know I’m healthy, because my own feelings of what I’m experiencing, this is the interoception when you’re in touch with your own body sensations are always better, always more in tune with who I want to be when I’m eating healthy foods. So that’s how I kind of like my knowledge about what health is what’s responsible for health, and then the connection between the actions I take on an everyday basis. Amazing,

Mindy Pelz  

amazing. Okay, are we going to see another book from you one of these days,

Speaker 1  

we’re working on the next one. And as a fellow author, you know, this is a marathon, not a sprint yet, at least for people like us that are trying to really do some original things. So all I’m able to share because, you know, when you’re writing a book, you have a big idea. But the real task of writing a book is getting in those details that nobody else sees, and nobody sees that journey. It’s a lonely, it’s a lonely path. So, yeah, you know,

Mindy Pelz  

I get it. It’s very lonely. Well, whatever it comes out, I want to have you back on whether you get it into a form that we can all benefit from. Let me know we’ll geek out on.

Unknown Speaker  

Thank you very much. But yeah,

Mindy Pelz  

thank you. This was wonderful. I really appreciate you. Thanks, Randy. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai