Eat Your Way To Health w/ Dr. William Li

25:10And guess what? It's not just kale, although kale can do it too. Everett kale. Not just broccoli and kale. All right. But lots of tasty foods. Everything from tomatoes to watermelons to guava. Okay. Pineapples. You name it. The foods that actually we like to eat that are tasty. They happen to be whole foods. They happen to be fruits and vegetables. You can find them in the regular grocery store. They don't cost a lot of money, but they're very common in traditional food cultures in the Mediterranean and Asia. I think that that's part of what we've done. We've drifted far away from the roots of our humanity into this sort of mechanized industrial wasteland that actually is very pro-inflammatory.

25:51And if we just kind of rediscover our own past, you just got to go to traditional Mediterranean or Asian cuisines. You'll actually find these are blue zone cuisines, by the way, as you've heard, where people actually live long and healthy. Blue zones. This is like the Mr. Spock of health. Live long and prosper. That's where these guys are. They're not doing anything special. They've got anti-inflammatory ingestion most of the time. They're exercising, sleeping. They've got good lowering of their stress. And they're eating whole fresh foods. I think that about exercise. Yeah. Can exercise cause inflammation?

26:24Ah, very interesting. Yeah. So when you work out to exercise, you're actually breaking down muscle if you're deliberately exercising. And why you build up muscle, which is what we're looking for usually, looking better, getting bulking up, all right, is actually we've broken down the muscle and the body naturally repairs itself, regenerates. And during the regeneration, you're growing new blood vessels to grow more muscle. you're actually recruiting stem cells. These will actually, they're all packed in our bone marrow, and they come flying out like bees in a hive in order to regenerate the muscle that got broken down.

26:58So it's sort of like one step back with working out, and then two steps forward, and you're building up new muscle mass, new blood vessels, stem cells are regenerating the muscle, and you're going to be bigger and better. So the recovery process is the beneficial stem cell blood vessel process. The breaking down, though. I just wondered, this is a super layman question, but a lot of the same people who break their bodies down eat a lot of processed foods because they're eating a lot of protein bars and processed stuff like that. So I've just always, not always, recently thought, hmm, all these real fitness folks, they drink a lot of pre-workout, right?

27:41Pre-workout stuff that's got all that crap in it or sugar in it. or, you know, and then they break down the muscle and then they're eating a protein bar. And so it's a lot of the combination I just wondered about. I've never asked anybody that that's been on the show. Look, you know, here's what it is. The whole fitness industry, bodybuilding, weightlifting, high-performance world, you know, is all about trying to take, break down the processes of growing muscle, improving fitness and endurance, and seeing if we can actually add the specific things that we've identified to enhance that process.

28:19What we're realizing with food as medicine research, which is what I do now, is that food's not that simple. You can't actually just add a whole bunch of protein from one source or bone broth is going to fix everything because it's got collagen in it. When you do that reductionist, there's two things. Number one, I think you mislead, we mislead ourselves into thinking that there's easy fixes for it. The second thing is that we might actually inadvertently avoid the more complex nutrients that we get from whole foods. This is the point you brought up earlier. By being hardcore and focusing on a few products to build yourself up one way or the other, you might not be actually eating a balanced meal, so you're missing nutrients.

29:02It's not just you know, the macros. We're talking about this whole new galaxy of micronutrients that we're discovering every single day that are absolutely amazing, including micronutrients that can fire up your metabolism and you can eat foods to burn fat, believe it or not. Okay. Let's go there. But I want to finish. So good. So, so good. So my audience knows when I'm really in it, I'm in it. So tomatoes, kale, watermelon. Give us two or three more. Just great ones. Green tea, coffee, dark chocolate, avocados. Let's come with chestnuts, lingonberries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries,

29:49chicory, escarole, radishes, carrots, artichoke. I mean, you name it. And by the way, it's not just veggies, all right? I mean, listen, I am all for plant-forward diets, but I don't like to call them diets. I just call them like eat delicious foods that you can actually find in the produce section. But actually, it turns out that seafood, fish, omega-3, marine omega-3 fatty acids, not just fish, shellfish, crabs, crustaceans, squid, octopus, things that you would find on the typical coastline, all right, all can actually activate your body. in lots of your body's health defenses, keep your blood vessels happy, activate your metabolism.

30:32This is what we're discovering is that whole foods prepared in healthy ways, delicious healthy ways, actually can do more for your health than, we started this conversation on, a single injection that cuts off your appetite. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to talk one more question before foods that go into metabolism. I want to ask you, I want to go back to the soda sugar thing that we were talking about earlier. So friends of mine go, yeah, that's why I don't drink Coke anymore. I drink Coke Zero. Or it's why I put Stevia in my coffee and not sugar. So there are sugar substitutes now. Are any of them better than other ones that you would recommend?

31:14Are there some that are just as dangerous as the sugar? Because a lot of the stuff we eat that we go, hey, it's got less carbs or protein. It's got these substitute sugars in them. Right, right. I'm thinking of stevia, splenda, these various other ones. Is raw stevia better than—is there any of those any good? Look, it's a big question, right? Because our bodies, our brains naturally crave something sweet, right? And it's hardwired into us to, like, search out for energy. So I don't like to demonize food, but I do want to call out specific foods. By the way, for sodas, like regular sodas, it's not just that it's got sugar.

31:53It's got a lot of sugar, okay? It's the quantity, the volume, and the frequency. The dose makes the poison, as I actually say in medicine, right? A little bit, not so bad. Once in a while, huge amounts on a regular basis. That's where you actually get into trouble. So the added sugar overwhelms your metabolism and derails your metabolism. So that's no good. Now, what about those artificial sweeteners that are so popular, you know, the zeros? It turns out that, by the way, I was in medical school years ago when they first started to put these non-nutritive sweeteners, artificial sweeteners in sodas.

32:28Something didn't sit well with me from the get-go. Like the sweetened lows back in the day. You know, like, it doesn't, you know, you talked about, like, people that you know is like, something's a little off. I always felt like when I tasted, like, artificial sweeteners, like the diet sodas, you know, it's not the real deal. I'm not getting satisfied myself. myself with the, with the purity, like the experience wasn't real. All right. It's kind of like a virtual sweetness. Okay. It's true. Right. And, and here's the thing, and we're beginning to discover this now, certain people who take, you know, some people who actually drink artificial sweetener sodas, they actually gain weight.

33:09And that was a big mystery. Like, wait a minute. Right. There's no calories. It's, it's called zero for a reason, right? Well, it's true that the sugar, there's no sugar in there that would actually spark your insulin and, you know, cause you to kind of have extra fuel in your body. But here's the problem. It turns out these non-nutritive sweeteners, and this is very new research, tumbles down, unabsorbed by your body, not, insulin doesn't rise, but they tumble down to your lower gut, your colon, where they actually start to destroy, disrupt, poison your gut microbiome. They actually destroy your gut health.

33:46And so, although, you know, a lot of the big soda makers actually say, well, you know, the evidence isn't in yet. I'm a researcher. I can tell you, I got to call a shoe a shoe. The data is pretty compelling. Whether you're talking about a Spartans, Sucralose, you know, Saccharin, you know, you start naming them, make the list. And in fact, you know, I've started to see things like Stevia also in this category. Some of the research is being done now. It's a new research, but it's pretty, it's starting to build up. The evidence is starting to build up. All right. The smoking gun is starting to appear is that these non-nutritive sweeteners don't actually cause our insulin to spike.

34:21But what happens, they damage our gut microbiome, healthy gut bacteria. When our ecosystem of healthy gut bacteria is damaged, we are not gut healthy. Turns out our gut microbiome helps to streamline our metabolism, helps us our glucose sensitivity, helps our insulin. So you start damaging that, guess what? You're going to start gaining weight. Your metabolism's derailed. So inadvertently, ironically, you miss the sugar hit, but you still wind up gaining weight, and your metabolism's still messed up. Really interesting.

34:55Really interesting. All right, metabolism. I did not know this. So there's this adage that, hey, when I was young, my metabolism was faster. And then I hit 30, and it slowed down. Or so-and-so's got a faster metabolism than I do. So the first thing, let's establish a basis that your research tells you that there's really like four phases of metabolism or four types of metabolism. That's not necessarily true, these adages of age and metabolism necessarily, correct? That's right. This is huge, everyone, right here. Huge. Listen, I'm going to throw myself under the bus as somebody who went to medical school and went into practice and I keep up with medical research.

35:36I thought the same things that everyone else thinks is that, you know, somebody skinny has got a fast metabolism. They don't need to worry about the food they eat. Somebody who's heavier, they got a slower metabolism. I also thought that people reach middle age, their shape's going to change, their metabolism is going to slow down, and it's just natural. And that's the way it actually is. Well, I can tell you everything changed about two years ago when a massive research study. In fact, the largest study of human metabolism ever conducted was published in the journal Science. Now, Science is a journal, a medical journal, a scientific journal, that publishes fundamental human discoveries.

36:14Things in science change the way we understand who we are and the world around us. All right. So it's a big study. And it was led by a researcher named Herman Ponser, who's at Duke University. And he actually led 90 other researchers. This This is a big research study. Usually you've got a handful of people involved with the research study, 90 people, researchers, from 20 countries, every continent except for Antarctica, okay? No researchers on the ice, okay? No one wanted to go there today. But 20 countries, and they studied 6 ,000 people, all right? And they studied them all the same way for metabolism.

36:52So this is the largest human metabolism study. They gave everybody a drink of water, okay? And that drink of water, what they did was really clever. All right. The scientists manipulated water, which is H2O, H for hydrogen, O for oxygen. They tweaked the hydrogen, tweaked the oxygen, so you can measure them. All right. And so they gave everybody the drink of water, and they measured the metabolism on their breath. When their breath comes out, how did the body's metabolism change the hydrogen and the oxygen? Process it. You can measure it in a bloodstream. You can measure it in your urine. So they can measure it.

37:22And by the way, there's one last twist to this research that is the jaw-dropper. Of the 6 ,000 people, they studied the entire human lifespan. They included people that were two days old, newborns. They gave them the same drink of water. Okay. All right? And people that were 90 plus years old at the tail end of life and everyone in between. All right? So what did they find? Well, when they actually looked at what does metabolism look like for 6 ,000 people from 20 countries, different shapes, different ages, different races, different diet, different everything. All right? Here's what they found.

37:55The first look, first blush of research, they had metabolism was all over the map. Just like you'd expect, right? But now we're in the age of supercomputing. We have data crunching in our power. What they did that was really clever, they created an algorithm that on every single subject, and they knew what the size of the subject was, their age, their body size, their weight, they could subtract from their metabolism output the effect of excess body fat, excess body fat. And when they did that 6 ,000 times, okay, and then they said, all right, when we remove the effect of excess body fat and metabolism, what does it look like?

38:37It was like pulling the cloak off the statue of David for the first time. What they found, and this was really the mic drop for human metabolism, They found that all humans are born with the same metabolism and actually all go through, we all go through four phases of metabolism over the course of our life. Every single person participates in exactly the same way. It is the operating system, Ed, in our body, like a laptop that you buy from a computer store. If you went to the computer store, I went to the computer store, bought the same model of a laptop. You went to your house, I went to mine, plugged it in, booted it up.

39:13The operating system would make it run exactly the same way. And that's exactly how our metabolism is. That's crazy. All right. But you know what? Actually, it makes sense. When we're born, our hearts and our brains, your mind, are wired to work the same way. Our kidneys are wired to work the same way. Somehow we can work with this thing that metabolism is different in all of us, right? Well, we started to kind of make up that story because it kind of made sense. But let me tell you the real surprise. So not only are we all—let me just go through the four phases. Yes. Phase one is when we're born, for the first year of life, our metabolism skyrockets like a spaceship.

39:49It goes sky high. It's 50 % at one year old, faster than when you're an adult. And by the way, that's why it's so important, like what we're exposing our kids to. Endocrine disruptors and the plastic bottles we're feeding kids, the pacifiers that are all rubber, all that kind of stuff. Like all those phthalates and things that are in materials we feed our kids can potentially affect and disrupt their metabolism because it's going sky high. At one year old, 50 % higher than an adult. Now, phase two is from one year old to 20 years old, right? We're going right through adolescence now. Anyone who's seen a teenager, right?

40:25Eating two or three dinners, bouncing off the walls, growing like a beanstalk, you would think their metabolism is going sky high. Wrong. wrong. This research showed that between the ages of one and 20, our metabolism, human metabolism goes down, down, down, down, down. That's how it's hardwired. All right. You're getting bigger, but your metabolism is going down towards adult levels. Okay. All right. Now, phase three, and again, this is really the eye opener, I think, for the whole scientific world. Phase three is between the ages of 20 and 60, guess what? That's right through middle age. Metabolism is designed to be rock stable, does not change, doesn't decrease by itself.

41:07The operating system wants to make it our adult metabolism to be as stable as possible from 20 to 60, right? There is no, I'm 40, 45, not my shape. It's automatically declining. No, that's not how we're designed. All right, Only at 60, phase four, 60 to 90, you have about a slight decrease, okay? Only about 17%, all right? So when you're 90, your metabolism is about 72 % of what it is when it was 60. Okay. But it should be 17 % of what it is when it's 20. So really, 60 can be the new 20 if you will let your metabolism do its thing. Now, what about hormone levels? This is the reason when a teenager is losing weight because they're just spiking with growth hormone.

41:48All right. And the fact that you begin to potentially gain weight in your 40s or 50s is hormone reduction? Is there potential for that? Right. So listen, hormones play a big role because hormones affect our brain. Okay. All those, you know, we talked at the very beginning, we talked about the trigger that weight loss drugs are trying to push that trigger all the time, that button. All right. Well, it turns out that hormones don't just push one button. Okay. They play the accordion. Yeah. There's all the buttons are being pushed all the time. And what happens is that the tune that it plays, that accordion plays with the hormones actually allows us to not just when you're adolescent, not just to actually start to slim down, but actually, in fact, quite differently, deposit fat in ways that are appropriate for our gender.

42:39That's why women get shapely hips. You know, their chest gets bigger, their butt gets bigger. You know, all the, let's say the Renaissance idealism, you know, Michelangelo's, you know, that's basically all due to hormones instructing where body fat gets placed. Now, what happens, by the way, middle age, if metabolism is rock solid, why do some people actually gain weight and change their shape? Yeah. Here's what happens. Life happens. Yeah. All right. First, let me just tell you, when I say life happens, I'm talking about when you're 40, 45, most of us, you know, we're in our careers, we got families, and we have all the stressors that derail us from doing healthy things.

43:23You know, you've got financial stress and relationship stress and real estate stress. You worry about your kids, right? All of a sudden, you've got so much going on in your plate, you're not able to focus your attention like you were younger on working out, staying active, getting good enough sleep. And when you're stressed, you're not sleeping well. When you're not sleeping well, it derails your metabolism. And by the way, it affects your brain, so you start making different types of decision. And now maybe I will reach for that bag of chips because it's nearby as opposed to doing it. And maybe I won't work out because I'm a little bit too whipped tonight to actually do that.

43:57So all those things now enter the hormonal changes. They actually, you know, I've heard many women in the middle age say this, like, pickle your brain in different ways. Okay? And so now your behavior is also going to change. So it turns out that it's not that a slow metabolism can cause you to gain body fat. It's the other way around. Excess body fat causes you to slow your metabolism. There we go. So that's why when the study stripped body fat out, the readings were more consistent. So the actual presence of body fat is what's trashing your metabolism. Exactly. Right. So it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

44:28Exactly. Okay. Okay. So, but, but that's great news because if you can get rid of that excessive body fat that one time, your metabolism is just like everybody else's in your age bracket. Okay. So that's huge. Number one, just knowing that alone is a huge discovery. Let's talk. We're going to, we're out of time and I want to get to a bunch of cool stuff. So let's, first off foods that are immediately triggers or anything we've missed on that, that will just speed up metabolism, anything on that you want to make sure that we add prior. And then also I want to ask you about the gut microbiome simultaneously because I've had Amy Shaw a couple times who's an expert in that.

45:06And is there something that we should be doing for our gut health in addition to any other things you're recommending that would help with metabolism, weight loss, and just overall wellness? Well, let's just dive right in for the bullseye here. Look, body fat is important to our health because it's a padding. Our fat is an organ that actually releases its own hormones that help us draw in energy and can cooperate with insulin. Our body fat is also really unique because one of the other things it does is it can fire up. Certain kinds of body fat can fire up. And people who are in fitness will know this.

45:45Brown fat actually fires up like a gas range in your kitchen. All right? You know, like that click, click, click, whoosh, and now you can boil your water? Yes. Okay, or cook your food? Well, there's white fat and brown fat. All right? White fat is wiggly jiggly. It's under your arms, under your chin. It's a muffin top. It's in your thighs and your butt. All right? That's the stuff that you can see. You don't like to see. A lot of people don't like to see it, but that's white fat. But that's not the... It may be unsightly, but it's not the most dangerous fat. The most dangerous fat is also white, but it's packed inside the tube of your body.

46:19It's called visceral fat. And think about that as like packing peanuts inside a thin shipping box. Great analogy. You could pack a lot of those peanuts in there. In fact, you can almost crush what's inside that thin box. At arm's length, when you tape up that box, it still looks thin, but it's really, really crushing inside. Visceral fat is like a baseball in excess. It's like a baseball glove choking your organ. Then you light it on fire, and now it's causing inflammation. That's the stuff where you've got whole body inflammation, which sets up for heart disease, damages your blood vessels, puts you at risk for blood vessels feeding your cancer, okay?

46:55And probably dementia as well. And it accelerates cellular aging. All bad. All right? That's excess body fat. And by the way, that inflammation derails the normal hormones that you're supposed to think. Now your body goes, should we be absorbing more energy? I can't tell. Should we be hungry? I can't tell. All right? So now everything has gone haywire. Excess visceral fat is bad. Now, that's white fat. Need a little bit of it. Too much is not good. You want to tame your fat. You don't want to suck it out or burn it out. You want to right-size it.

47:29But the other kind of fat, brown fat, is amazing. All right? Brown fat is not lumpy bumpy, and it's not close to the skin. You can't see in the mirror. Brown fat is paper thin, wafer thin, and it's close to the bone. It's plastered around our neck. It's actually underneath our breastbone. It's under our arms like a girdle, all right, and a little bit in our belly. And what happens is that in cold temperatures, you've heard about cold plunges, right? Cold plunges fire up our brown fat. It's like a butane lighter, but a torch. Whoosh, okay? And now you've got a flame. It lights up. And what it does, the brown fat does, in order to get that flame, it's got to draw energy from someplace.

48:08Where does brown energy draw that fuel for its flame? It draws it from white fat. Brown fat fights harm. Good brown fat fights harmful white fat by drawing down the energy. It uses the ammo of the fat, okay, which is the harmful fat. So cold plunges will actually do it, activate it up, but so will a large number of foods that we've also discovered, right? Things you can find in the produce sections, tomatoes, avocados, carrots, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, onions, garlic, all those things will actually light up your brown fat, which is pretty amazing. Pears will actually do it. And by the way, this has been studied not just in a lab, but in humans.

48:51You can actually watch people's brown fat lighting up. You can do scans on it. And then you can watch their visceral fat shrinking. How do you see that? You can measure waist circumference. You could do a DEXA scan too, but basically you can watch people's waist circumference shrink. Their belt size gets smaller, tighter. Why? Because inside the tube of your body, that visceral fat, that baseball glove is starting to shrink. So your belt size gets smaller. So we've actually proven this. Now, what's really amazing is that it's not just in the produce section. You know how you're not supposed to shop in the middle aisles?

49:27Yeah. Turns out that there are metabolism-activating, fat-fighting stuff in the middle aisle. Beans, lentils, chickpeas, olive oil, capers, dried mushrooms, chili peppers, all these things. You do talk about chili peppers. Oh, yeah. Yeah, chili peppers. By the way, chili peppers are really cool. Yeah. Chili peppers, you take pepper flakes, you put it in your pizza, right? Well, it turns out that that zing that you feel in your tongue, all right, is caused by a natural substance in chili peppers called capsaicin. There's a capsaicin receptor in your tongue. By the way, it's not sweet, salty. it's not the umami kind of thing.

50:02It's a whole other, it's a whole other deal. Basically, it's the capsaicin pulling, pushing the trigger on your tongue. When that happens, all right, you feel the burn. Your tongue sends a text message to your brain and says, hey, this switch has been ignited. Your brain will actually release a hormone, norepinephrine, that travels down the nerves in your neck to light up the brown fat. Now, next time you do this, Ed, if you're actually eating some spicy food with hot chili peppers, all right, see if you can do it in a quiet room. All right. Close your eyes and feel the burn and you will feel your brain releasing those hormones going down your neck.

50:40You'll actually feel the nerves lighting up and your brown fat will actually light up. So hot chili pepper basically is, by the way, this hormone that lights up the brown fat, it actually is a stress hormone, fight or flight hormone, which is why you sweat, which is why your nostrils kind of flare. All right. That's natural. So we're beginning to put the picture together. Yeah. It's all been hidden in plain sight. Back to this whole idea. Should we be injecting ourselves with stuff that affects our brain to block our human nature? It just doesn't make sense. I have not said one food that somebody— Would gain a bunch of weight, right, if you ate it, right?

51:16Exactly. You can't have too much food. Sure. All right? And there's timing of food. Like, there's important—there's ways to eat around the daytime to actually be smarter for your metabolism. But to me, part of our humanity is enjoying the food that we like to eat. You just said something I want to ask you. I assume that means you're a fan of intermittent fasting. You believe in feeding windows? I do. You said times of day. I do. But here's what I tell people about intermittent fasting. It's a trend. It's a fad. It's very real. And it's very real because it's how our body is hardwired to actually work.

51:48When we're sleeping, we're actually not eating. We're fasting. And that's why they call it break fast, breakfast in the morning. But if you want to actually, by the way, so here's the other thing. When you're not eating, your insulin goes down. When your insulin goes down, your metabolism shifts gears into fat burning mode. So here's the deal. During the day when we're eating, put food in your mouth, insulin goes up, the talmud goes, hey, it's time to store some fuel. It switches into fuel storing mode. It's going to take that energy, move it into your cells, store extra energy into fat. So you're putting into your fuel tank.

52:24You're putting fuel in your fuel tank naturally, but when you're sleeping, not eating, i.e. fasting, your metabolism switch gears to say, let's go burn. Let's go burn it down. So when you're sleeping, you're actually burning fat. Now, here's the thing. Well, basically when you're not eating is what you're saying. When you're not eating. So you're saying when you eat, your body goes, we're going to store. And when you are not eating, your body goes, we're going to burn. Yeah. So here's the thing. Some of the really simple ways to actually get your body to do the heavy lifting for you from a metabolism fighting fat kind of perspective.

52:54The night before you go to sleep, eat dinner. Let's say you eat dinner at 7 o 'clock. Eat for an hour. Put your dishes away at 8 o 'clock. Don't snack. Don't eat after that. All right? And let's say you go to bed at 11 o 'clock. I'm just going to say, and it's going to eat hours of sleep, 11 o 'clock to 7 o 'clock in the morning. All right? During 11 to 7, when you're sleeping, you're going to be fat burning. You're burning. All right? But if you don't snack after dinner from 8 o 'clock to 11, you've gained three extra hours of fat burning. Plus eight hours is 11 hours. And then here's what I do.

53:25All right. Knowing the science of how my body works. When I get up in the morning, I do not do what my mom taught me to do, which is get up, roll down, eat some breakfast quickly, catch the school bus, get to school in time. I take my time. I take a shower. I get dressed. I will take a walk. I'll go check my emails, whatever it is. I wait for about an hour. And why do I do that? Three hours the night before, eight hours of sleep plus one extra hour is 12 hours. Now I've spent 50 % of my day. Burning. 12 out of 24, burning fat. Very good. That's actually letting your body do the heavy lifting for you.

53:59Never, ever, ever heard it explained that way. All right. So when you're putting food in your mouth, you're storing. And when you're not doing that, you're burning. That's right. This is really simple, really good. Super simple. And makes sense. Because I've had other people on the show go, no, the only reason you lose weight under intermittent fasting is it's caloric restriction because you're not eating as much. There's actually validity to smaller windows of fat storage telling your body when you're eating food as opposed to when you're burning. That's really good. And by the way, and when you're eating, if you eat those foods that I write about in my book, It'd be Your Diet, there's 150 of them, by the way.

54:29There's a lot of foods. Then you're actually eating foods that are going to trigger your brown fat. So the other 12 hours, let's say that you're actually eating, I'm going to talk to the hours in a second, you're actually burning fat as well. You can burn at night and you can burn also during the day when you're eating. The right foods that trigger that. The right foods. Now, one thing that I want to point out, because I know a lot of people probably listening to this will know something about intermittent fasting. You know that 16 and 8 thing about intermittent fasting? All right, two things.

54:59First of all, if you fat for 16 hours and you only eat 8, you're going to lose some weight. You're going to have a lot of fat-burning time. But if you only fast for 12 and you eat for 12, it still works. You just, it doesn't burn quite as intensely. And you know where that 16-8 came from? You ever hear the real story, the backstory of why it's 16-8? This was not a clinical trial, okay? Although it's just been done. It does work in people. 16-8 came from a mouse study in which the researcher that was doing the mouse study, he was a postdoc, okay? And she was in a relationship where the deal that they made of doing these feeding studies, is this researcher was not going to be allowed to work in a lab more than eight hours.

55:44And so she fed the mice for eight hours and then took all the food out and then went home to have a regular life. So it was relationship necessity, not some scientific formula. Exactly. Exactly. And so while it does work, you know, a lot of people who aren't researchers don't realize how arbitrary timelines are sometimes designed. It's like researchers are people too, and they wind up actually, you know, bowing to the pressures of their significant other. That's how 16 and 8 came about. Okay, so good. All right, last question I got for you. By the way, we need to do 100 of these interviews. I knew today was going to be different, but I've done a lot of stuff on health and a lot of stuff on wellness, and I've learned a lot today, like a lot.

56:25I feel like we're stopping in the middle, don't you? Oh, yeah. I feel like we're on a roll. But I want to do, let's drop weight loss, let's drop fat burning, and let's just talk about aging. Okay. So like telomere length, things like that. Anything in our diets and our nutrition that we should be doing to also reduce or slow the aging process or these same things do that by just staying at the right body fat, the right body weight, anything in there. And you can throw alcohol in there if you want. Sure. Well, here's the deal. Aging, you know, we're starting to get old the moment we're born. A lot of people think, well, you know, I get 60 and above, I'm starting to age, and I want to live longer.

57:06Actually, our life fuse is starting to burn down, okay? You know, we've lit the fuse the moment we actually get spanked and take our first breath, right? Okay. So the issue is what do we do to ourselves that speed up our cells' natural aging process? So, you know, we're on a clock no matter what, but we do do things in our lives that speed up the burn, all right? So the wick of the candle burns faster than certain things. What are some of those things? Smoking causes your cells to age much faster, which is why, by the way, people who smoke, their skin doesn't look good. That's just a manifestation.

57:43Does that include cigars? What's that? Does it include cigars? Well, that's it. Cigars are sort of got a different - Just say no. No. I'm being prompted. I'm kidding. That's what the teleprompter says. So smoking. All right. So smoking will actually make you age faster. You're drinking excess alcohol, too much alcohol. Look, you know, some people say red wine's good, beer's good. It's true. There are some studies that show the benefits, but none of those benefits are due to the ethanol that's present in alcoholic beverages. Ethanol actually is a toxin for your cells. It causes your cells to age more quickly.

58:19All right. By the way, sun exposure, ultraviolet exposure also cause you to age more quickly. You know, anybody who's a sun worshiper, you don't have to go to a tanning salon to cause your skin to age faster. all you have to be doing is going to the beach or even stuck in traffic in Los Angeles on the I-10. For hours, you will actually get, on a sunny day, you're, you know, so what does your body have inside it to counter the speed up? Well, number one, our body's health defense, one of them is our DNA can fix itself. So when it's damaged by sunshine, cigarette smoke, alcohol, it will actually repair that damage.

58:55So how can we create better repairmen? How do we actually speed up the, the fixing, foods can actually do it. So tomatoes, for example, also watermelons, guava, have something called lycopene. It turns out that if you have a glass of tomato juice or two slices of watermelon an hour before you go out into the sun, go to the beach, it'll protect your DNA from damage, from aging damage from the sun by 60%. Okay. All right? Before. Doesn't fix it afterwards. Yeah. It'll fix it before. But there are some other things that can actually fix it afterwards. So watermelon is a prophylactic from UV rays.

59:30Yeah. Okay. It's a lycopene that's actually in it. So those of us who study food as medicine, we're diving in to figure out what it is that's there. And by the way, a watermelon also is full of water, so it hydrates you, so it also prevents you from getting dehydrated. Right. So, again, this is better than getting lycopene pills before you pop out into the sun. Back to the whole argument of like, okay, what's the totality of the food that we're eating? Okay. So the other thing about the thing that can actually help to slow down the burn rate of the fuse naturally, this is what's amazing to me.

1:00:02It turns out coffee, drinking coffee, anywhere from a cup to four cups a day will slow down the burn of your life fuse. Wow. Okay. And in fact, coffee, some studies have shown that coffees can reverse the burn. What? It's like increasing the wick. Wow. You can gain months or even years with coffee drinking when you measure the burn rate on your cells. It's pretty amazing. Wow, that's amazing. Now, you can't be putting chemicals in there. So that incredible pumpkin, seasonal pumpkin flavor, that's not what I'm talking about. Adding a whole bunch of sugar, adding a whole bunch of cream, that's what I'm talking about.

1:00:38But I'm talking about coffee. By the way, what's in coffee that helps out? We've figured it out. There's something called chlorogenic acid, among many other things. Chlorogenic acid is present in coffee beans. It's also present in apples and pears as well, but it's present in coffee. It seems to be slowing down the burn rate of your aging. Now, how do you get more chlorogenic acid in your coffee? What's the best coffee to have? Organic coffee. Okay. Okay. Now, you know why? Because chlorogenic acid actually is produced by the coffee plant, like many of these other natural chemicals, bioactives, in response to being injured by bugs.

1:01:12So when insects nibble on the leaves and stems of the coffee plant, the strawberry, whatever plant you're talking about, okay, which is organic growth, no pesticides, bugs are swarming everywhere, nibbling on the leaves. They produce more chlorogenic acid and other bioactives as a defense mechanism. It's the plant's defense. So when you actually spray with pesticides, hey, fewer bugs, don't need to make as much, right? This is why organic is actually better for you. I was a big skeptic of organic, Ed. I'm like, I don't want to be paying more money to have less harmful stuff to my body. Real reason.

1:01:45But I am willing to pay more money to have more good stuff. Me too. And to live longer. Yeah. So am I. I want to say something to you. Today's episode has caused people to live better and longer. I know this. Everyone's listening. They're like, would you please have him back? Because don't you kind of feel like we're just getting, like we're just tapping the surface of this food as medicine idea. This is the appetizer. This is the appetizer. I like that. See, kept the food analogy. He's good, people. He's good. I'm telling you. I really learned a lot today And I know when I'm recording something When like the share button's going off It's sort of a sickness that I have And my producers are nodding too But I kind of know during an episode Okay, that got shared, that got shared, that got shared, that got shared And I'm also so sick I'm like, that's an Instagram clip, that's an Instagram clip There's like 900 clips in this interview already And so I'm so grateful to I guess it's Rich DeVinney that connected us But a lot of different people did So Rich, thank you for today Dr.

1:02:40William Lee, you are amazing, buddy You are amazing. And you guys should go get his book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, and Live Longer. Grab The Power of One More by this Ed Milet guy while you're grabbing his book. And please share today's episode. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. It was so good. It was a maxed out hour. It was awesome. All right. God bless you, everybody. Share the show. Take care. We'll see you next week. This is the Ed Milet Show.

1:03:11We'll be right back.