Shocking New GLP-1 Side Effect: Can GLP-1s Reduce The Risk of Cancer? - With Dr. William Li

30:24Shawn Stevenson:They've got their golf shoes as well. They've got designs for hiking. The list goes on and on. If you want to live an active life, definitely check out paloova.com forward slash model to show your feet some love. And now back to the show. And what we're seeing, what we need is time, you know, and as time is going on, just being able to see all of these either warning signs, or as you just mentioned, a potentially beneficial side effect that wasn't expected. And using the analogy of a target or a bullseye is such a great one for what I want to ask you about, because we potentially have a very powerful weapon in this battle against cancer, but we don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot.

31:12Shawn Stevenson:Correct. Right. And so it's having access and awareness and education around tools like this, around treatments like this, and really being mindful of the other end of the equation. right so you mentioned a little bit about um you know the potential for protecting our muscles and muscle loss sarcopenia right we have to be even more as the data is indicating even more proactive for people who are utilizing glp1s to protect their muscle gotta exercise gotta stay active so this isn't just this one-stop shop you just take this and all your problems are solved You got to work out it. You got to do the stuff as well.

31:54Shawn Stevenson:Yep. And so that part of the education, as well as, and I want to ask you about this as well, because we can see potential benefit. As you just mentioned, there's a myriad of benefits in relationship to cancer. So prevention, treatment, reducing the risk of reoccurrence, which is something that's not talked about enough. Incredible. one of the early concerns as the semaglutides were hitting the market, Ozempic, Wagovi, and this is from the Mayo Clinic, and this is a quote, Ozempic and other formulations of semaglutide like Wagovi have been associated with an increased risk of thyroid cancer. And according to their drug data, and so I want to make a clarity point here, quote, Ozempic has caused thyroid cancer in animals.

32:51Shawn Stevenson:It's unclear if this drug also increases thyroid cancer risk in humans.

32:56Dr. William Li:New data. It does not. So it's now that the nail has been putting a coffin on that in a recent clinical study that looked specifically for thyroid cancer. And the answer is no. So again, this is where we got to be careful about what kind of information from the lab is ready for prime time to be announcing. And I think this is true for longevity. This is true for, you know, all these other kinds of remarkable, even peptides, remarkable things that we hear about so easily with all the voices out there in social media. What's from the lab? Does it translate to humans? What kind of evidence is there?

33:33Dr. William Li:Does it make sense? And what's ready for prime time? And what needs a little bit more time in the oven to bake? You know, that's how I think about it.

33:41Shawn Stevenson:one of the things that I saw back when this data came out, and you actually go and look at the data, it was in regards to thyroid cells with these rodents having far more receptor sites for GLP-1. Like their receptor sites were operating differently than ours. And so, but it still had to do with this powerful, as you've been mentioning, the receptor sites for GLP-1, It's connected to so much more in our bodies than just this metabolic pathway that we might think about, you know? And so with your experience, your massive influence in this conversation around blood vessels and cancer and this, and I want to tie this all the way back to something that we don't often think about in this whole weight loss equation.

34:33Shawn Stevenson:Well, by the way, a matter of fact, I'm just going to share some data on this. that weight loss is very powerful as an anti-cancer modality as well so according to the NIH at least 13 types of cancer significantly the risk goes up when we're overweight or obese this includes higher risk of colon cancer breast cancer pancreatic cancer two times higher risk of liver cancer two times higher risk of kidney cancer four to seven times higher risk of endometrial cancer if we're overweight or obese. And so addressing it on that front and what people don't think about, and I know I sure didn't in my university education, when we're talking about blood vessels, blood vessels are needed for us to grow, as you mentioned, to get oxygen and nutrients.

35:21Shawn Stevenson:And the same thing holds true for cancer cells. They'll hydract those blood vessels, as you've shared with us over the years. But fat cells are the same. Our fat cells need that nutrient supply for them to grow. And so we're looking at the potential of tapping into an intelligence and immunomodulation in a way, like what's actually getting fed and what we're starving, if that makes sense. So can you talk a little about that in the context of our fat cells? Oh, yeah.

35:52Dr. William Li:Well, so this is a really important and I think unappreciated, underappreciated aspect that fat, which everyone knows about, even a kid, you know, like a, like a grade school kid knows how to use the word fat. And then, and usually assigns a negative meaning to it. You go to the grocery store, you go to the meat section or wing by it. And you see, you know, a ribeye with a big thick rind of white fat and like, Ooh, I hope nobody buys that. Nobody eats that. Fat has a negative connotation in our modern society. However, biologically, and this is what's important, fat is actually an organ of the human body.

36:38Dr. William Li:Fat is one of the first cells that forms when your dad's sperm meets your mom's egg and you were just a bunch of a ball of cells. First organ system that gets laid down is blood vessels. Soon after, fat cells form. Long before you have a chin or an arm to wobble underneath or a midline to, you know, a waistline to have a muffin top, fat cells are forming. And you know where fat cells form? They form as a cuff around blood vessels. This is long before you had any visible, recognizable body parts, very early on. And the question is, why does that happen? Because fat performs an organ-like function.

37:23Dr. William Li:it's near the blood vessels because fat is our fuel tank for energy and that energy comes from the food that we eat which is turns into blood sugars and and it's in and sent through the blood vessels so you want the fuel tanks to be near the fuel pump to get actually to store the energy like a car you want to pull up to the gas station and make sure your tank your fuel tank cap is on the same side as the gas station pump, right? How many times have we done that? Oh man, it's on the other side. I got to go around. Well, you want to line them up just like fat cells do with blood vessels. And that, as we begin forming, you, you wind up actually seeing that fat actually plays not only a metabolic function for energy, but it also plays a hormonal function as every woman knows around menopause and obesity, like fat, fat, fat, the accumulation of fat can change the way your hormones work.

38:22Dr. William Li:And not enough fat also affects your hormones. Think about those women, ultra athletes that have zero body fat. What's the first thing that happens? They stop menstruating. your hormones are whacked okay you you need fat to be the um uh to be the negotiator of hormones in your body as well as the fuel tank for energy so this role of fat is fat's not bad fat is good until you got too much of it you got too much fat it now becomes inflammatory and it can leak out the fuel. And now you got like the using the gas station analogy. If you overflow your gas tank with fuel, look, the thing, a good thing about cars and gas, gas stations that you fill up your tank when it's full, there's a clicker goes click, no more gas comes out.

39:20Dr. William Li:Could you imagine if you didn't have the clicker, the gas kept on going there, you're distracted, the fuel comes right out of the tank, rolls down the side of the car, around the tires, spills out onto the ground, big pool of toxic, flammable gasoline, mess, fuel surrounding you. That is very dangerous. And that's exactly what happens in our body. When we overeat, we have too many calories. We are filling up the tank way more than the fat cell announced. Now look, gas tanks in cars are hard and they're structured, they're metal. It's basically like a rectangle or a square or a cube. Fat cells are round.

39:59Dr. William Li:The gas tank in a car can't expand, so it's just gonna spill out. Fat cells can expand 300%, and they can enlarge three times larger than they're supposed to. And then the body will make more fat cells, more fuel tanks, which can expand three times larger, 300%. Do that day in and day out, week after week, month after month, year after year. What do you think is gonna happen? to your waistline or the viscera in your body, your visceral cavity, you're going to accumulate a ton of visceral fat. You're going to get bigger because the fat cells, the fuel tanks are bigger. And now you actually have disrupted the physiology of hormone control, energy balance.

40:40Dr. William Li:And that's why fat is good until it's bad, just like so many other things in our body, right? So back to this whole idea about GLP-1 and lifestyle. Listen, we're all born, pretty much most of us, to have a normal physiology. Everything is doing what it's supposed to do. You know, the machine of the body is quite remarkable. Everything is hardwired to work well. You know, it's kind of like a complicated laptop. You go to the computer store. It doesn't matter whether you're on a PC or a Mac. What you pull out of that box, it's pretty amazing what it can actually do, right? And your laptop and my laptop, we get the same model, it's going to work exactly the same way.

41:29Dr. William Li:We can count on it. And that's how our bodies are engineered. That's how our fat system's engineered, metabolism's engineered that way. And it's only when we go off the reservation and lifestyle makes a huge difference and going off that reservation, that we need to find ways to debug, to reprogram, to clear out the viruses. Sometimes you need to take it back into the genius bar to get it looked at and find out how you're going to fix it. And so I think, you know, going back to this whole GLP-1 story, I'm not advocating that everybody gets on a GLP-1 or microdose or DIY or anything like that. If you weren't thinking about this, listening to this episode, what I want, the take-home message I'm trying to send is that we are learning something about these drugs, but we're learning something much deeper about biology of our body, how our bodies actually work.

42:20Dr. William Li:That's the question. That's the opportunity. And we should be respecting our body fat. We don't want to get too low. We want to get to just right. That Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold, not too hard, not too soft, but just right. That's where we want to aim for. And if you want healthy aging, you want to get towards longevity, that's what you should be aiming for.

42:43Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. I love that so much because we wouldn't be here without our body fat. It's our human body fat in particular is incredibly intelligent. It's helped us to survive, but the conditions that we're in now today are not what we evolved in. And as you mentioned, having that capacity eventually create more fat cells, and they're all going to be signaling to do what fat cells do, which is I'm here to store energy. So of course, our fat cells do have this capacity to release or signal the release of satiety hormones as well once they're filled. But we know that that sensitivity can go down as well.

43:19Shawn Stevenson:And also those fat cells are still going to be sending signals because they need more fuel in here. And so this is one of those reasons why long-term weight loss, it can be a struggle. You know, like what happens when those fat cells have become accustomed to carrying a a lot of extra energy and now you've made more fat cells. And so the biology piece here and understanding what our bodies are doing and the intelligence and not trying to go to war against these fat cells, but respect them. How do we create conditions so that all this stuff works in synergy? And this leads me to asking you about, again, there's a huge movement today, thank goodness, where people are really owning the agency that they have for their health, right?

44:06Shawn Stevenson:We've outsourced our health a lot in recent decades and the environment around us has been conducive to rapid weight gain, to put it bluntly. And so people are really paying more attention to their nutrition, their lifestyle, all that kind of stuff, which is awesome. And then we have this, obviously, this movement of new medications. and we finally found one that is incredibly effective, incredibly effective. And now we're finding out what's happening long-term. Now, my question for you is, what happens once we start this process? Because the largest study that's been conducted on this subject, this was published in Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism.

44:51Shawn Stevenson:The title of this study is Weight Regain and Cardiometabolic Effects After Withdrawal from semaglutide. And so the researchers found that after withdrawal for a year, again, these people are losing, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds. One year later, they regain two thirds of the weight and their cardiometabolic numbers go back to where they started and basically just progress back to that point. Very similar to conventional weight loss, right? We do all this stuff, we lose the weight, people gain it back, and then some. And so are we looking at a situation where in the context of weight loss, insulin resistance, diabetes, but specifically the reason that you know most people are using it for, which is the vanity piece, happen to be on this forever.

45:45Shawn Stevenson:Is there a way forward where these drugs can be utilized? Or is there a workaround for us to get some of these results without needing to be on these drugs for the rest of our lives?

45:57Dr. William Li:Yeah, those are all good questions. We don't really know, you know, the, the rebound that you're talking about and the, you know, like it's what I call it that there goes to neighborhood kind of effect, right? You spend all this time trying to get a community to be good. And then you get a couple of crack houses set up and that's it, you know, all of a sudden you're, you're back to where you were and all that work you did kind of got just got unwound. I think this speaks to that complex biology that you're talking about. Once you take this perfect machine that we most of us are when we're born, that perfect laptop out of the box, and you kind of take it off the reservation, you start dropping water on it, you drop it a few times, expose it to intense heat, download stuff you shouldn't be downloading, and the viruses get on there.

46:44Dr. William Li:Listen, it's hard to restore it back to its pristine state. So the fact is that there are, in medicine, many drugs that we do give over the course of a lifetime once we are off the reservation, right? So a great example of something simple is blood pressure. If you have hypertension, which a lot of people have, it's a silent killer. You know, you tend to see it after the age of 40. You know, even people who look healthy, who are fit, who are working out, they wind up just automatically, maybe someone's genetic. They wind up actually having high blood pressure to dangerous levels, which sets you up for stroke and cardiovascular disease and heart failure.

47:23Dr. William Li:And for those people, if you want to keep them in good shape, you got to give them some blood pressure medicines. We had a lot of them out there. They're not very expensive. They're pretty well tolerated. Most even a family doctor, GP knows what to do to manage blood pressure. And it's a lifesaver. And so we are used to thinking about chronic medication. Is that sustainable for an expensive drug that actually, you know, drug companies were having trouble keeping up with supply because the demand was so huge and it's expensive. OK. And yeah, maybe the federal government is going to cover it, but not for everybody.

48:00Dr. William Li:And, you know, and if you think about everybody who wants to prevent cancer and heart disease, we didn't even get to dementia yet. But there's actually benefits that look like they're happening for people from a brain health perspective and even potentially Alzheimer's. But dementia, for sure, with GLP-1, there's no way in heck we can actually afford to use a costly drug to treat everybody, nor should we necessarily. So back to this agency thing. actually before we go to the agency, I think I'm going to say again, really, really clearly. And I don't want to be beat around the bush on this. If you are listening to this episode or watching it and you're thinking of going on a GLP-1 drug, you must, you must talk to your doctor about it.

48:45Dr. William Li:This is not a DIY thing. Okay. I know microdosing is really, I know formulation. You can get it all kinds of places, but please talk to your doctor. I'm a doctor. Like I want my patients to be able to talk to me about it. And I will give them the best possible advice given their entire situation on what's safe, what's reasonable. And if you run into any complications, you want the Coast Guard to pull you out of the surf. And you can only do that if you're having your medical doctor involved with, you know, getting you on it to the first place. So that's my first thing I want to say. The second thing is really about agency.

49:21Dr. William Li:because it turns out, if you rewind back to where we started, I told you that the body naturally makes GLP-1. It's a normal human hormone, makes a little puff of it in order to be able to absorb that energy, the blood sugar, and also to your brain to tell you the wind down on the food. It takes a little time, so you don't want to be eating too quickly, but your body will respond to these signals, you know, like clockwork, literally. So what's the difference between natural GLP-1 versus a drug? Well, natural GLP-1 that your gut makes after you eat something only lasts for a few hours, max. Okay.

49:59Dr. William Li:The drug, the semaglutides, Ozempic, was it, Munjara, Wegovi, Jardians, you name it, they last for a week. So what I would tell you is that you get the puff from your body, just what you need, okay? And the drug is like a sledgehammer. That's why it's so powerful. That's why we might be seeing some of these ultra effects from it. And that's why you need to talk to your doctor about it. And that's why we don't know whether it's a good idea to scale this up for everybody and whether or not vanity is a good enough reason to be able to justify it for everybody. These, you know, listen, with medical discoveries, usually you wind up opening a little bit of a Pandora's box about some social conversations as well.

50:47Dr. William Li:Can we afford the cost of treatment? Should everybody get access to treatment? Once you scale it up, you're going to get these side effects that you might not have seen with a smaller population. Some of them might be really scary. Is that a responsible thing to do to unleash, you know, the, the Kraken, so to speak, and like everybody deal with it. I don't know. I mean, these are what science kind of like shows you something new and it inspires awe and wonder about our human body. For those of us who are working in this space, it's like, oh man, tomorrow is going to be a better day because yesterday we didn't know this, but tomorrow, wow, what can we do with this information?

51:28Dr. William Li:It's going to be wonderful. back to agency though but we all can control our body's production of glp1 again this is a whole other area of research turns out our gut microbiome can help our intestines our gut make glp1 um once again you can't escape from a healthy gut uh if i we've listened people ask me dr lee if you can tell people to do one thing to keep themselves healthy because there's so many things you can do What would that one thing be? And what I tell them when it comes to food is, make sure you're taking care of your gut health. Because that gut health has scalable impact for all the other systems of your body.

52:06Dr. William Li:One of them being GLP-1. So it turns out, and I think we talked about this in a past episode, there are healthy gut bacteria, 39 trillion of them in the gut. They live in the part of the colon. Most of them live in part of the colon called the cecum. That's the beginning of the ascending colon. So anybody who looks at the colon and it looks like an arch, you got the ascending part that goes up on one side, you got the transverse part that crosses the bridge, and then you got this ascending colon that goes down the arch for the other side of the arch. And then it goes to your rectum and then the poop chute, then it's a tailpipe.

52:43Dr. William Li:All right. That's how our gut is. A lot of the microbiome lives in the beginning of the ascending part of the colon called the cecum, spelled C-E-C-U-M, happens to be where the appendix is. And we used to think the appendix is a useless - Throw away. Throw away organ. But it turns out that we think that the appendix is related to the immune system, related to the gut microbiome. And like a PEZ dispenser, it might be the reload, like the ammo clip for more microbiome than when you need to restore it. So keep your appendix if you can. All right. Now, what's interesting is that the healthy bacteria are eating whatever we eat.

53:24Dr. William Li:So you don't want to be, we eat junk. We're also ditching the junk on our bacteria and they're eating the junk too. And that can actually screw up the neighborhood, right? So you don't want to, and so your healthy bacteria, when you eat fiber polyphenols, prebiotics, they pay us back by making their own metabolites called short-chain fatty acids. We've talked about this on the show. You've got plenty of episodes talking about healthy guts, but one of those short-chain fatty acids made by healthy gut bacteria called butyrate actually helps our gut produce GLP-1. So our gut bacteria, as a consequence of being fed by whatever we choose to feed it, will make the substance that will help our body create natural GLP-1, that little puff that we want, okay?

54:13Dr. William Li:Why shouldn't we optimize our puff if we know that this natural hormone is going to be important for us, maybe for prevention, maybe for cardiovascular health, maybe for survival. This is a way we can do it. And the gut is something that's pretty easy to think about if you are intentional about it. And of all the bacteria, one of the bacteria has been shown to produce glp1 which i've talked about before called acromantia mucinophila that is a glp1 producing bacteria bingo back to the basics it's back to that interconnectedness it's back to the machine all the parts working together and acromantia you can grow your own by eating the right polyphenols the elagitannins the pomegranates the cranberry dried cranberries the Concord grapes.

55:07Dr. William Li:Now there's an increasing number of foods that help to foster the growth, the natural growth of acromasia. Peach juice, summertime, love peaches. Hot chili peppers, you know, sprinkled onto a pizza kind of thing. Chinese black vinegar, recent discovery. You know, you go to eat soup dumplings at a restaurant. They always have a little canister of soy sauce. They got another canister of black vinegar. That black vinegar helps your body create the conditions to grow natural acromantia. Amazing, right? So acromantia, you can also get as a probiotic, obviously. And that's recent development. So you can actually have that.

55:48Dr. William Li:These are ways that we can actually support our body's own natural GLP-1 production. And so back to this agency, back to the diet and lifestyle. How do you get good bacteria? Well, you want to stay active, exercise. You want to lower your stress. You want to lower your catecholamines. You want to be as chill as you can to allow your gut bacteria to recover. Because sympathetic stress, epinephrine, not good for your gut bacteria. Long periods of stress, what happens? Your gut feels weird. I'm having to run to the bathroom more often. You know, like that's what happens when we're in a position of high cortisol continuously.

56:33Dr. William Li:Got to reset back to basics. It's all connected, right? And sleep, our gut rebuilds itself during sleep. When we're sleeping, we think we're inactive. Well, physically, our whole body looks pretty inactive, just like a lump line in bed under the covers. But inside that shell of our skin, there's a ton of activity that's going on. The rebuild of our immune system, lowering information, the purging of our brain toxins, and the rebuilding of our gut bacteria, the rebooting, that's all going on. So the biology that I'm talking about coming from the discovery of beneficial side effects of a weight loss, popular weight loss drug class is leading us to rethink about what our body does all by itself.

57:24Dr. William Li:And then it naturally leads to what can we do on our own without a prescription, without an insurance company, you know, without medical supervision in order to be able to optimize ourselves. And this is about not high performance, like we're not talking about winning the World Cup, winning the Olympics. We're talking about winning the game of life. We got to just get through day by day, month by month. If you want longevity, you got to find ways to dodge the diseases that will take you out. And then you want to enjoy your life along the way. And that's why lifestyle and diet, I'm a big believer in finding those combinations that give you joy and pleasure in your life.

58:11Wow.

58:12Shawn Stevenson:I love this. You know, you said something that we simply just don't think about in the context of disease. And when it comes to our microbiome, when it comes to cancer prevention, the impact of stress, and there's a system in our brains that's wired for calm, wired for happiness, and chocolate has been found to influence that pathway. This was something that you were just recently sharing. And obviously it's been around for thousands of years, but the science is so cool to see it, to, to, to see clearly how, and you are the pioneer in this movement with food as medicine backed by science. And I just gave you a gift.

58:56Shawn Stevenson:My wife went and got you a mug that has the L for William Lee. Yeah. I'm very, very thankful. And I gave you some Nandaka from peak. And I know that we have a shared appreciation for Peak and how they do things. And so the highlighted ingredient in there is the highest quality cacao. There's Pu-erh in there. There's Lion's Mane in there. And it's just like one of those drinks that's really designed for longevity to support the microbiome and also calm and reducing stress. So talk a little bit about that.

59:30Dr. William Li:Well, okay. First of all, I think that unlike pharmaceuticals, natural compounds, and particularly whole foods, are actually a matrix of different substances together. And so when you talk about products that have lots of different ingredients to it, the people who make these are always very proud about their formulation. I sort of say this is our best attempt to mimic what Mother Nature naturally does by putting things together. The advantage we have is we can draw from different pots to combine them in new ways, right? That's creativity. And I think science and the health of science or the science of health, both together, are actually quite a creative act, right?

1:00:15Dr. William Li:So you were talking about cacao.

1:00:22Dr. William Li:Cacao defines what chocolate is. You can't have a chocolate really without cacao. In other words, it's not chocolate. But chocolate, the term, the name chocolate, the product, is a confection. It's a candy. It's made by adding different things to cacao. But cacao, and a lot of people don't realize this, makes chocolate a plant-based food by definition. Because cacao pods are plant-based. They're this big football-shaped pods that come out of trees. Have you ever played around with a cacao pod? Of course. It's cool. It's heavy. You can shake it. You can feel things rattling around in it. I mean, you can throw it like a football, actually.

1:01:00Dr. William Li:And it's also really interesting colored. You got the brown ones that look like chocolate. And then you've got these bright yellow ones, too. So again, Mother Nature is so interesting, so beautiful, actually. And I don't know if you ever did this. A friend of mine sent me a box of cacao pods, these footballs. And I didn't know what to do with it. So I had to look up and have a little AI guidance. So like, how can you make your own chocolate? Well, you know, you get these things to ripen, you cut open the pod. The seeds inside them are surrounded by a white colored skin. Looks like a bunch of teeth.

1:01:35Dr. William Li:Looks like a bunch of teeth. Like teeth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a bunch of teeth. Did you, have you tried to taste the fruit around? Of course, yeah. It's a little sweet and sour, like a little lychee, but a little bit of sourness to it. Actually, it's quite delicious. It's too hard, too much work to get at it. But anyway, you peel it off, then you dry out and ferment those seed pods, and then you crush them, roast them, and then you're on your way to having cocoa or cocoa powder or cacao. And that's the root base ingredient to make chocolate. All right. So like what's in it? Well, like many plant-based foods, got polyphenols.

1:02:16Dr. William Li:You got all kinds of bioactive. we haven't begun to identify even the tip of the iceberg is just the beginning but we do know there's proanthocyanidins those actually help to recruit stem cells like chocolate is one of those things that can mobilize stem cells naturally we talked about in a past segment pretty amazing that you can actually improve your circulation by eating chocolate that's kind of crazy and through stem cells like chocolate's a regenerative food yeah it is if you get the right dark chocolate and and And, you know, and this has been studied clinically in people who have cardiovascular disease.

1:02:56Dr. William Li:You can improve vascular function with dark chocolate. I find that to be mind blowing. You do that. But back to this whole brain effect for a second. There's a whole other class of substances in cacao, dark chocolate called anandamides. and anandamides, when you eat the dark chocolate, work on your brain and the part of the brain that it works on. You know what part, what receptor it binds to? The endocannabinoid.

1:03:26Shawn Stevenson:I'm sorry. Endocannabinoid system.

1:03:30Dr. William Li:Yeah. So it's a little bit of a thumb twister, even for me, but the anandamide from dark chocolate activates this receptor system, lock and key in your brain. it's called the endocannabinoid system and there's a couple of different types of receptors different types of locks and when you trigger the key into the lock the endo the anandamide from dark chocolate into the endocannabinoid receptor in your brain it actually produces feelings of elation feelings of joy anandamide is actually known as a also known as a bliss molecule makes you feel happy and that's probably one of the reasons why you know when you talk when I talk to people about, you know, food is medicine.

1:04:15Dr. William Li:And when I bring up chocolate, like everybody stands up and claps and cheers, like chocolate's a food that doesn't suck. Everyone loves it, right? Like you cheer on for like chocolate's good for you. Yeah. That's, you got some really positive attributes to it and anandamide and activating the endocannabinoid system brain, making you feel bliss and happiness is one of them. There's another food that actually has anandamide that, that activates the brain as well. That way, do you know what the other food is is it spirulina what is spirulina nope it's actually truffles hmm fascinating now these are the now i'm talking about chocolate truffles yeah those would too if they're made with dark chocolate i'm talking about truffles that pigs and sniff out of the ground yeah in you know in france and in italy you know they're listen this is a little bit of bougie food okay it's super expensive You're not having it.

1:05:08Dr. William Li:Nobody has it all the time. It's pretty potent. But these are little kind of fungus-like balls that are dug out of the ground. Pigs can smell them. They're seasonal, like in the fall and sometimes in the summer. Black truffles, white truffles. You've probably seen them on a menu in a restaurant, a fancy restaurant. Pasta with white summer truffles. Actually tastes very, very tasty. I have to say, I find it to be delicious, but it can be overwhelming if you have too much of it. It really affects your brain. You feel it. It also has anandamide. And so when you eat it, you also activate this part in your brain.

1:05:53Dr. William Li:And by the way, those endocannabinoids, those receptors are the same types of receptors that marijuana, THC, the real cannabis actually activates as well. So again, this whole lifestyle thing, understanding the biology of the brain, connecting it back to food, connecting it to behavior and mindset and mood, all of this is really part of the marvel of the human body. Yeah.

1:06:18Shawn Stevenson:Wow. Incredible. And it speaks to why humans have prized these foods for so long as well. Like our ancestors figured some stuff out about them. And I mentioned spirulina. I was thinking about phycocyanin and spirulina and the relationship with stem cells because I had the stem cell conversation still on my mind in relationship to GLP-1, which is again, another like mind blowing revelation that we're getting here first, exclusive here on the Model Health Show with Dr. William Lee. And by the way, if people are interested in that chocolate drink that I was talking about, Nandaka, go to peaklife.com forward slash model.

1:06:57Shawn Stevenson:and you're going to get up to 20 % off there. So it's P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E.com forward slash model up to 20 % off. And it's my wife's favorite beverage from Peak and Chocolate. You were telling me about some research around the microbiome when it comes to Pu-erh as well. So that's in there. And it's just tasty, good longevity-based, feel-good beverage. and listen having you here is always extraordinary there's always some revelation some new way of looking at something i appreciate you so much for staying on top of the data because i know you got a lot going on but you're just so curious as well and you were giving me the analogy before we got started about this octopus and the tentacles going this way and that way with this emerging research and innovation with what we're doing as humans when it comes to food, when it comes to medicine and seeing the intersection and how do we stack conditions in our favor?

1:08:00Shawn Stevenson:And that's what it's really all about. So again, we're seeing these targets with GLP-1s, but being aware enough to not shoot ourselves in the foot. So we're stacking conditions. How do we use this with efficacy in the right situations for the right people at the right times? And also stacking our conditions with food as medicine, what are those foods that are going to support our body's production with all of the satiety hormones, which I know scientists are working on trying to target those as well, adiponectin and CCK and all these other things. And right now we're at a very, very interesting and powerful time.

1:08:35Shawn Stevenson:And so I encourage everybody to stay up to date, stay connected with you. Where can people follow you? Where can they pick up your incredible bestselling books as well.

1:08:44Dr. William Li:Yeah, well, you know, I wrote two books, New York Times bestsellers, Eat to Beat Disease, Eat to Beat Your Diet. You can get them anywhere that books are sold on Amazon or whatever. But one of the things that I'm so glad you mentioned is, is I really try to stay on top of the bleeding edge science. And because there, this is a time, you know, one of the first times in history where anybody can get on there and spread information, which is a good thing, but misinformation is also everywhere. So I feel really strongly about contributing to the information that people can access by being a credible voice that is a scientist that I can parse through what's real and what's ready for prime time.

1:09:31Dr. William Li:And anybody who wants to keep up, you know, and follow on with what we're talking about here, come to my YouTube channel. It's at Dr. Dr. William Lee, L-I. I put out stuff every single week, new things every single week that are practical. Like that's a key thing is that, you know, I'm a science geek, so I can talk about all kinds of stuff that is in the clouds. But I think when it comes to communication, what's most important for what people want to know is what can I do about it?

1:10:00Shawn Stevenson:And that's what I put out in my YouTube channel. Amazing. Well, thank you for being here with us today. I look forward to many more conversations. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Of course. The one and only Dr. William Lee, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. There's so much for us to explore and to process and to consider in this conversation, all the way from the Gila monsters and the development of pharmaceuticals to their rampant use in our society today. and for us to continue to question things, to analyze the data, and most importantly, for us to continue to find that balance and respecting the innovations when it comes to this pharmaceutical model, but also deeply respecting the evidence and the efficacy when it comes to food as medicine and our lifestyle practices and exercise as medicine and joy as medicine as well.

1:11:04Shawn Stevenson:And that's another innovative field that Dr. Lee has been doing some work in. He's been sharing some of the early data and it's fascinating. And so we are able to influence our biology in a myriad of ways. And for us to be open to the possibility of this pharmaceutical model really having some innovation when it comes to this field of cancer treatment. And cancer rates have obviously just grown precipitously in the last few decades for specific types of cancers. And, you know, and cancers are happening at higher and higher rates in younger and younger populations. We've got to find some solutions.

1:11:48And also, as important, we've got to address the environment that is causing the development of more and more cancers as well.

1:12:01Shawn Stevenson:because this stuff doesn't just happen. That was my fear. That was my fear and my belief when I was in college. Like, I hope cancer doesn't happen. And this is abandoning laws of physics and causality. There cannot be an experience or expression of something without a cause, cause and effect. And we know what many of these carcinogens and the environment that we have allowed to be created around us and the catalyst that they can contribute in the development of cancer, stacking conditions against us. And so we've got to address that piece and also address when lives are on the line, what can we do to help survivability?

1:12:44Shawn Stevenson:But also what was so interesting, one of the things that was so interesting is the reduction, 25 % reduction, if I remember correctly, that he mentioned in the recurrence of cancer. Like that's incredible. That's incredible. So again, this is something for us to keep our eyes on, also for us to remain skeptical. All right. And to continue to ask questions, to advocate for ourselves, for our family members, for our communities, and stay connected to cutting edge information like this and teachers like Dr. William Lee. And this is why I'm so grateful for you being a part of this community. and with that being said, we have a significant number of people who listen to the Model Health Show on a consistent basis who aren't subscribed.

1:13:36Shawn Stevenson:Hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss a thing, whether you are listening on Apple or watching or listening on Spotify, whatever platform you're listening on or even pop over to the YouTube channel so you can join us in the studio for these episodes. Subscribe there as well. Again, you don't wanna miss a thing. we've got some incredible, incredible world-leading experts and game-changing masterclasses coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon.