How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li

Welcome back, my friend, to the School of Greatness. It is a beautiful day.
It's a blessed day, and I'm grateful for another opportunity to live on purpose. I hope you're doing well today.
I've gotten so many messages lately from so many of you who have just been so grateful for the content we've been providing, for the interviews, for the guests, and it means a lot to me every time I get a message from someone on social media, or when someone comes up to me on the street and just says hello, and their biggest takeaway from the show, it really means a lot to me. And I was traveling the last couple weeks doing some press for the new book that's coming out called Make Money Easy.
It's coming out very, very soon. If you haven't got your copy yet, make sure to go to Amazon right now and get your copy of Make Money Easy, Create Financial Freedom, and Live a Richer Life.
But so many people have just

been coming up to me lately and really thanking me for the show. So it means a lot to me.
If you

see me out on the streets anytime in LA, or if you are coming to one of the book tour stops,

that's right. I'm going on tour, seven cities.
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Boston, Massachusetts, Nashville, Tennessee, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. Just

Thank you. We have got a big one.
His name is Dr. William Lee.
He's a physician, a scientist, and a researcher. And we had him on the show before.
It got millions of views over on YouTube and the audio, but he is back. And Dr.
Lee reveals how our gut bacteria communicates with our brain, our immune system, and overall health in ways that we are just beginning to understand. He's going to share some simple changes to our diet and lifestyle that you haven't heard before on any other show on how it can nurture beneficial gut bacteria and potentially adding healthy years to our lives.
We all want to live longer and we all want to live healthier with the current days and years that we have. His practical approach proves that optimizing your longevity isn't about expensive biohacking, but about working with your body's natural healing systems.
And he's going to share the four specific gut bacteria that stand out in people who live beyond 100 years and which foods help them flourish. This is going to be so powerful.
Please share this with one friend and really send this out to a friend that you think could improve the quality of their health, or maybe their mind's been a little bit foggy or they've been feeling stressed or anxious. There is so much that's connected to the gut, what we eat, and our mood and our brain health and our brain function.
So it's not always about losing weight or something like that, but it's about optimizing the way our brain and our immune system work in tandem. And that's what this is about.
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Thank you for all of your support, as always, for being here and listening to this show. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode with Dr.
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Copyright 2025 Bank of America Corporation, all rights reserved. Welcome back, everyone at the School of Greatness.
Very excited about our guests. We have the inspiring Dr.
William Lee in the house. So good to see you.
Thank you for being here. Good to see you, Lewis.
Thanks for having me. Very excited about this because you've been on the show a couple of times and you've been a researcher, a scientist, a physician for many years, mostly helping people figure out about how to cure cancer.
That's kind of where your background is around the cancer world, but you've also gone in different places around medicine and science and research. And currently you're diving in deep into the longevity topic, which is really interesting.
We were just talking off camera about a new approach to what you're seeing that the, you know, super centurions, I guess, are experiencing. And a lot of people want to know right now how to live longer, but also how to live healthy longer, how to have a good health span as well.
Because it's not fun if you live to 100, but for 25 years, you're on machines, you can't walk, you can't move, and you're not healthy. And so I think that's what a lot of people want.
So the first question I want to ask you is, why do you think people care so much about being immortal or living for as long as they can? And what are some of the new things that you're seeing in the longevity world? Great questions. Okay.
So first of all, I am a cancer researcher, but I will tell you how I got into cancer research and then ultimately into longevity research. I'm interested in common denominators of health or of disease.
So in other words, you know, in academic research, you see people taking an inch of a territory and diving a mile deep. And they're super experts in this stuff.

I took a different approach. I wanted to figure out how everything was interconnected and what are the common denominators between cancer, heart disease, blindness, arthritis, Alzheimer's.
If you could drain the Pacific Ocean, how do all those islands connect? and my feeling is that if you could you could economy of scale of knowledge, if you could figure out those connections, you could pull the bow back and send a single arrow through multiple conditions at the same time. That was my approach, which is why I started the Angiogenesis Foundation.
It's a not-for-profit organization. It's focused on the common denominator of blood vessels.
Wow've got 4,400 miles worth of blood vessels in our brain. And that's a fraction of the 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our body.
And it connects every organ, every cell. And so these are the highways and byways of health.
And when they're messed up, compromised, diseased, that becomes the common denominator of disease. That's really my unique angle to look at diseases, anything from cancer to blindness to wound healing.
And now I'm looking at aging, you know, in a slightly different way, which is I've had a whole career of building brick by brick, looking at what are the hallmarks of, hallmarks of cancer, hallmarks of diabetes, hallmarks of aging now. All right.
And that is actually how we advance the science. That's how we advance our understanding of ourselves.
And the quest for longevity, immortality, okay? I like how you said the quest for immortality being an ages-old enterprise, okay? Pursuit. Pursuit is, I think, is part of our humanity.
We always want to know how we can actually go beyond our own limitations. I think that's probably ultimately what has led this interest.
And of course, it's a huge interest now. I mean, if you look at the success of books like Outlived by Peter Tia and David Sinclair's books, people, they go gon, like, incredible books written by really amazing people.

But I'll tell you, the first emperor of China, okay, set off to try to find that little elixir, the vial.

Remember that Indiana Jones movie where they're looking for some, like, vial of immortality?

Hey, you know, this has been going on for a long time. And the first emperor of China didn't find it.
He wound up dying. And before he died, he built like the 10,000 terracotta warriors to look over his tomb.
That was his ultimate solution to immortality. That was before science, before Google's calico to try to conquer blindness, before all the amazing work that's going on right now to build up those brick by brick by brick, you know, and putting in the grout in between to be able to build up that wall of understanding.
So we are still looking. We're beginning to have a better understanding.
But my approach to it is to say like, all right, so what are the common denominators of people who live a really long time? What are we finding? And, you know, my friend, and I think yours is Dan Buehner, you know, from the Blue Zones. The guy is amazing because he found like, oh, it's place.
It's where you live and what you do in terms of where you live that actually can contribute. So I'm a researcher, so I ask that same question from a slightly different perspective.
Right, right. Yeah, he has a number of different things, which is community and your activity level and the foods you eat and having a purpose.
He's into beans. Beans.
They get into beans, right? Yeah. But that may not necessarily, I guess, be the only solution, right? If you follow these kind of core tenets that he has from the blue zones.
And we're also seeing that some of those blue zones are no longer blue zones, I think, or they're diminishing in their blue zones because of the way people are changing their food intake or things like that, I think, right? Like the place in Japan. And there may be more blue zones that haven't been discovered yet.
Interesting. And so what are the new things that you're observing that most people aren't noticing about people that live well into their hundreds? All right.
So let me take you on a little bit of a journey into our gut. Now, everybody knows that gut health is important for overall health.
And even the people who are the experts, you know, and I've gotten into this space now, we don't know entirely. We don't have the whole answer.
All right. And you know, you're talking to a real scientist when, because real scientists tell you we don't know everything.
Right. All right.
So, but what good scientists do is they observe. We take a look at what's going on and we see what is common, what we've come up with ideas.
And so what's really interesting is to think about gut health, not just in terms of somebody in the middle of their life, you know, like a 30 or 40 or 50 year old person who,

you know, has inflammation and how do I actually get over my autoimmunity? That's important too. But I got interested in it because we're beginning to understand that people who have dementia actually have problems with their gut health.
And what is the connection between your gut and your brain, well, that's a gut-brain axis. But what if the problem with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, you know, vascular dementia, what if the common denominator actually isn't the little sticky plaque or the little single molecule that people have been diving on and billions of dollars have been spent? What if there is another factor that has been hidden in plain sight which is our gut bacteria wow on how the gut impacts the brain the brain yeah and until recently we didn't have the tools we didn't have that um the tools in a toolbox to be able to look at it but today and, and this is pretty new, we can actually take a sample of poop, okay, send it off to a testing machine.
And I'm oversimplifying, obviously. And get the lab details on the bacteria.
And get the lab details. And we are able to do the crime scene investigation of our poop to figure out what bacteria are in there.
And we get a pretty good approximation and we can find out what are the standouts. Okay.
So look, there's 39 trillion bacteria. You can't count every single one.
39 trillion? Yeah. In your gut microbiome.
Wow. So we can't get every single one.
But if there are standouts, oh man, you've got like four or five really bad guys that are like popping out in high levels. We know you got a problem.
Or if you're missing a handful of really good guys, all right, we're beginning to say, maybe these good guys are playing a bigger role. And this is the story that's emerging on dementia, that your gut bacteria, and by the way, it's not just in your poop, your gut starts in your mouth.
And we're beginning to realize that gum disease and bacteria that are either growing or not growing in your mouth might actually be one of the trigger points for dementia. Gum disease.
Gum disease. Wow.
Gingivitis. All right.
So, okay. So it sounds like it starts with the mouth and then it's the gut.
Because what you put in the mouth is going to be in the gut as well. For food, yes.
But all throughout, from your mouth all the way to your tailpipe, you've got bacteria growing. Yes.
By the way, so the two biggest concentration of bacteria, when you talk about gut bacteria, one is in your mouth. Our mouth is packed with bacteria.
Good bacteria. When bad bacteria overgrow, you get bad breath.
You get cavities. You get gum disease.
You get all the things that you know pretty quickly, right? Sure, sure. Okay.
When you're ... So there's a big concentration in your mouth, and we're still beginning to

figure out what those are.

Your lower gut, which we classically think as gut bacteria, your gut microbiome, you know where

it is in the gut? Do you know what part of the gut anatomy-wise? What section of the gut?

The lower gut?

Yeah, lower gut.

I have no idea.

Okay. So imagine your gut from mouth to end, anus, 40 feet long.

Is that what it is? Yeah. The last 25% is your colon, right? You've heard of colon cancer and everything else, or colonoscopy.
So that's the last part. It's basically where everything gets, all the stuff gathers before you get rid of it.
But that's actually where the gut bacteria is. And it's in a particular part, a little sack in your colon called the cecum, spelled C-E-C-U-M.
And you know what's in the cecum? It's the appendix. Now, a lot of people have had their appendix out.
Okay. We used to think it's an unnecessary organ.
Maybe, just maybe, that appendix plays a role that we didn't suspect. What's that role? We don't know, but we suspect it might play some air traffic control role for your gut microbiome.
Wow. All right.
So what I get excited about is new discoveries about our body that we didn't know. By the way, we're talking about gut brain.
Do you know that recently we've discovered that your brain has its own microbiome? We've got bacteria that grow naturally, healthily in our brain. Wow.
And it's 20% of the same bacteria that's in our gut that's actually found in our brain. So they're connected.
We believe so. Because we used to, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but we used to treat Alzheimer's and dementia as focusing on the brain, correct? Like, let's look at the brain and see what's wrong or what's off and try to treat the brain.
Yeah. Versus now you're saying, well, it's the gut, it's the whole body that's connected to the brain, so we have to look at everything.
And we're beginning to sort of ask new questions about what might be some of the contributing factors, not just the tiny little plaques in Alzheimer's disease. Because, by the way, we've actually made a little bit of progress in that area.
But after billions and billions of dollars, like, we haven't made enough. Really? Right? I mean, if you think about it, like, if you want a return on investment, you would not actually call Alzheimer's research to be good.
Because for the bang for the buck that we put in there, we're actually getting very little bang. We still don't know how to reverse Alzheimer's or prevent it, I guess, or? Not really, but I'll tell you that what I'm excited by is this idea that maybe there could, this is the theory, could there be some bad bacteria or the absence of some good bacteria in your mouth even, okay, or the lower gut that actually is a trigger for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's? Wow.
You know, by the way, there is a bacteria, a probiotic has been researched to show that it can actually really slow down the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. It's called lactobacillus plantarum, and it's a probiotic called PS128.
And it's surprising that a probiotic could have such a profound effect on the brain. What is that called again? PS, like Paul and Sam, 128.
And the actual bacteria is called lactobacillis plantarum. Okay, so I'm just sharing with you discoveries, okay, about the brain.
And so what I got interested in terms of longevity, I'm not a neuroscientist and I'm not a dementia specialist, but I am somebody that is sort of really good at framing out. If there's a connection between gut and brain, maybe we should be looking at the connection between gut and longevity.
And that's where some of the really exciting new stuff is coming out as well. And so what is the main things that you've been able to observe then about the gut and how it relates to people that live over 100? So first of all, people who live to 100 are called centenarians, right? Cent like 100.
And we think that if you could live to 100, like that's 100 candles on your birthday cake. It's a big deal.
That's a big deal, right? That's the big birthday. That is.
All right? Now, I have to tell you, my great uncle lived to 104. Wow.
Okay. I was at his 100 birthday party.
And I saw 100 candles on his cake. That's impressive.
Yeah. So I know it can happen in my own family.
Did he have the energy to blow all the candles out? Not only did he have the energy to blow the candles out, he planned the party himself. Wow.
Okay. He invited the guest list.
He actually, I mean, he made the guest list. He planned the meal.
You know, he hosted the thing. So it's possible.
Okay. Now, most people think that, you know, living to 100 would be like a crapshoot, a long shot.
Like, oh, if I could, in a healthy way, and I live to 100, it'd be great. But you know, because I've been doing some research on this, it turns out today, you know how many people are 100 years old now? I think you said it was close to a million or over a million.
Today, there are 722,000 people who are centenarians living in the world. You know, almost a quarter of, three quarters quarters of a million people that are 100.
That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people.
A lot more than most people suspect. And what that means is that it is possible to actually get there, which means that we can begin to study these people.
And that's where I think some of the most exciting and provocative stuff actually is, right? And people are studying their gut bacteria. Yeah.
And now we can actually study the poop and the microbiome of people who are 100 and older. Too many people stay in relationships that no longer serve them.
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That's 20% off your first order with code LEWIS at liquidiv.com. So centenarians are people who live to 100.
but it turns out that there's something called a super centenarian or an old name, a super ager. And these are people that live to 114, 115 years old.
All right. And like, they're really interesting.
So a research study was done out of Italy, looking at people across the lifespan from young adulthood, you know, like 20 to 40, 40 to 70, 70 to 90, 90 to 100. And then like the superagers, okay, like 100 to 115 or under 14.
And in today's technology, all right, like, believe me, I think that wearables are great. I think that, you know, biohacking devices are quite amazing.

But I think it's even more amazing that we can actually study the gut microbiome of like these super agers.

Sure. So the question is, is there something in the gut microbiome in super agers, 100 and above, that pop out as important? It's not present in people who don't live that that long okay it turns out uh there are four bacteria that are standouts in people that live to 100 and beyond does that mean there are four bacteria in people that live 100 beyond in their gut bacteria that people under 100 don't

have? They have more of it. Gotcha.
They have more of it. For them, it really stands out as

super big spike. Okay.
These four bacteria, you want to hear about them? Yes. All right.

They've got names that... One of the names you might've heard of, I think we talked about it

my last time I was on a podcast, but there is four bacteria. One of them is called Odorobacter.
Odorobacter? Odorobacter. Okay.
Okay. One of them is called Oscillobacter.
One of them is called Cristencinella. And then the fourth one is our old friend, Ackermansia.
Okay. And we've talked about Ackermansia before, which, you know, it's sort of been making the rounds as an important gut bacteria.
I think the last time I was here, I was telling you that there have been discoveries that if you have cancer and you're on immunotherapy, which jacks up your own immune system to attack the cancer, it's not chemo. It's one of the most natural ways of approaching cancer.
It's resulting in complete responses, meaning stage four to stage zero. Okay.
Wow. Turns out acromantia, having this gut bacteria may wind up being one of the critical pieces that you have to have to connect the dots to, for that to happen.
Okay. To really get a great response.
To help you reverse cancer. Yeah.
Help your own immune system. Wow.
Okay. Interesting.
Gut bacteria talks to your immune system. 70% of your immune system lives in your gut.
All right. And so you've got the right bacteria.
They know how to speak the right language to your immune system to tell it to do what it's supposed to do. 70% of your immune system lives in the gut.
Yeah, exactly. Where's the other 30%? Scattering different tissues in your body.
Really? Wow. But you know, by the way, you know where the immune system lives in the gut? It's actually in the wall of the gut.
Think of your gut as a garden hose. Cut that garden hose open and look in the cross section.
There's a little empty stuff in the middle. That's where the bacteria live.
That's where your immune system is. Your immune system lives in the wall of the garden hose, inside the wall.
And the bacteria is- And the bacteria live inside the cavity of the garden hose. Wow.
And they talk to each other like college students shouting at each other through a cheap wall in a dorm room. So the immune system is kind of like the insulation in a house.
Is that right? In the walling of the house? The immune system lives in between the drywall of the house. Yeah.
So it's kind of like the insulation or whatever inside the drywall. Yeah.
And whatever's in the house is the bacteria. Exactly.
The people, the dogs, the cats, all moving around. Plants, whatever.
Exactly. So what do we eat that affects our gut microbiome, the healthy bacteria, directly affects our immune system.
And impacts our brain. And then it impacts our brain.
How much of what we eat impacts our brain? More than we think. More than we think.
Like either giving us clarity and focus versus cloudiness, giving us... You know, that's what I'm working on right now.
And I do know that there are people that are working on this. So, you know, you laid it out the right way, Lewis.
You eat something, it goes into your mouth, it tumbles down through. Whatever our human body, our human cells don't absorb, goes on to feed our gut bacteria, okay, or poison our gut bacteria in the case, maybe.
So, you know, you put something good in your system, it's going to do something good. Put something bad in your system, it's going to like mess up the bacteria, all right? And then our bacteria then begins to talk to our immune system, our brain.
It helps to work on our healing mechanisms as well. I, you know, I study angiogenesis, how our blood vessels grow, you know, that circulation.
I've done research. There's one bacteria called lactobacillus ruteri.
Okay. And we found that if you have a wound in the lab and you feed these animals with a wound, this probiotic in their drinking water, you'll actually double the rate of wound healing from the inside out.
Really? Yeah. It's like Wolverine.
So you become Wolverine. Without the claws.
So there's a probiotic that you can drink as a human now also? Well, it's a tablet or you can chew it. Chew or swallow it.
Lactobacys Ruterai. So Lactobacys Ruterai, by the way, is an amazing bacteria because it's normally in the gut.
It's a healthy gut bacteria. So, you know, like we pulled it out and made it in something, but it's normally in the gut.
It used to be present in everybody.

After the 1930s and 40s, with the advent of antibiotics coming out, it became maybe it's there, maybe it's not, not surprisingly. And so a lot of people don't have it.
But this bacteria lowers inflammation, improves your immune system. And by the way, we do know for a fact, this is one bacteria that text messages your brain to release a social hormone called oxytocin.
Oxytocin is the social hormone that your brain releases when you are super happy to see somebody. Go to the airport to meet a friend or a relative you haven't seen for a long time.
You give them a big hug. You feel great.
Yes. Oxytocin.
Wow. Oxytocin is what your brain releases when you have a kiss.
I'm not talking about like peck on the cheek. Passionate kiss.
Deep, passionate, like French kiss. Yes.
Oxytocin. Oxytocin is also what your brain releases when you have an orgasm okay so this is a very important brain hormone this bacteria makes your brain release it okay now and this isn't a drug this is just like this is like i'm just telling you normal no well i'm telling you this is a normal physio i'm talking about the physiology How does it normally works? Okay.
By the way, moms would give the babies, her babies, this bacteria because, and this is like a crazy story, that normal gut bacteria at around seven or eight months of pregnancy, there'd be a signal sent to the gut. Hey, you know, the cake's almost done.
All right? Bun's almost ready to come out of the oven. Right, right.
All right? And then these bacteria would hit your ride at a blood cell. It's like calling an Uber.
Sent it to the baby. And then take the bacteria, your normal blood cells would take the bacteria, drop it off at the nipple, right? Uber.
Okay. Destination.
And then when the baby takes their first suckle, they get the rush of the bacteria. That's another way that moms have to give babies there.
They get the injection of bacteria, including lactobacillus reuteria, right? Okay. Now this bacteria- So it's important to do breastfeeding then? Oh yeah.
It's part of the reasons. You also get immune cells and a lot of other good stuff from breastfeeding.
Side note, how long should a mother breastfeed a newborn? You know, I think it's very individualized based on the mom and the baby, but I would say that the categorical yes, unless there's a medical reason not to do it, is you should definitely breastfeed. That's like the non-controversial thing.
100%. 100%.
Breastfeed. Don't go right to a bottle or formula or something like that.
Because mom, I can tell you that the companies that make formula, they can't mimic mother nature. They cannot.
They can try, but they can't do it. Not anywhere close.
Right. So unless there's some reason the mother is unable to do it.
Yeah. I mean, there are legitimate medical reasons where it's impossible.
There's complications, all that kind of stuff. And I totally get it.
Then you got to make accommodations for it. But still, you know it is always better for the baby, uh, for the, um, uh, for the mom to actually, uh, breastfeed.
By the way, so I'm, you know, diving into all this stuff. You find all this like fascinating stuff out, uh, about the gut microbiome and from the beginning of life, like babies, all the way to the, um, to the far reaches of life, like these superagers, if these four bacteria, by the way, the odorobacter, the oscilabacter, the chrysanella, the acromantia, they all do, they all play functions in the body.
And we're figuring them out. They improve your metabolism.
They lower inflammation. They help your immunity.
They lower your cholesterol. Okay.
They help your brain health. Wow.
So all the things that we know are important, these bacteria seem to be doing the job in the superagers. And there are foods that we can eat to grow these bacteria, to cultivate these bacteria.
Oh, yeah. What are the key foods that we can eat to cultivate the best bacteria to help us live longer? So, you know, among all these four, let me kind of just throw a few out there for you.
It turns out pomegranate is really good. It's got bioactives like elagitannins that actually help your gut nurture the acromantia.
Okay. It turns out that chili peppers can do the same thing.
Black raspberry, it turns out, can do the same thing. Oh, by the way, for acromantia, here's like a new discovery as well.
So I'm all about, like, my science background is all about discovery and, like, pushing the frontiers of things. Heal an acromantia, it's a bacteria.
A bacteria has a shell around it, like a beetle has a hard shell around it. Recently, they've discovered that around Acromantia, the shell of Acromantia, there's a piece of the Acromantia that they named, they gave it a name.
It's called P as in Peter, Peter not P nine. All right.
They've now discovered that that P nine bacteria, the back P nine fragment of acromantia actually causes your body to secrete its own GLP one, which is the fat burning, which is the same thing that we use for prescription weight loss drugs. Your bacteria has been doing this.
Your healthy bacteria has been doing this behind the scenes this whole time. Interesting.
Right? So this is what I'm saying is like, you know, we learn a lot from pharmaceuticals, but we might actually learn a lot more from what the gut bacteria are doing. Mother nature is kind of like.
So fascinating. So it seems like how much disease stems from the gut? More than we think.
Yeah. You know, probably a good number of our neurodegenerative diseases like dementia.
I think that a lot of diseases of aging, for sure, the chronic diseases. We do know that...
Diabetes is from... Oh yeah.
Oh yeah. Absolutely.
Cancers are from the gut. Probably cancer, probably cardiovascular disease.
The big ones, all the big ones are diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases, probably even lung diseases. Because the society is talking a lot in the last few years about mental health.
Like, it seems like there's a lot more anxiety, depression, ADHD, and these types of mental health conditions or diseases that are accelerating in mass numbers. Based on what I'm hearing you talk about, it almost sounds like if we stop thinking about mental health, not stop thinking about it, but focus more on gut health, it sounds like it connects to the brain and the mind and it'll create more alignment and ease versus dis-ease.
More, it's a new frontier. It opens up the avenue for more solutions.
And by the way, because the gut also connects to other parts of our body as well. You know, again, remember I told you, like, I'm all about the common denominator.
Pull that bow back and send a single arrow through as many things, many problems as you can. Imagine if we could actually tackle mental health, mental wellness, and physical wellness all at the same time.
And, you know, gut bacteria clearly plays a role. It's not, you know, it's not the only thing, but, you know, it is the undiscovered country.
Because there's a, who is the doctor? Dr. Emmerin Mayer, I think it is.
I don't know if he's got a book called Gut-Brain Connection. I think it's somebody that's talking about these things as well.
And it seems like a lot of the things that are stemming from the brain disease or challenges is in the gut. Yeah.
And it's also linked to longevity, it sounds like as well. Exactly.
Well, this is what we're beginning to really, I would say, unravel and go into the layers of the onion to say, all right, if gut health is important for you in your normal active adult life, which we now know it is, what role could it play towards actually fostering, supporting, maybe even triggering those signals for longevity? I mean, maybe, listen, I mean, so I always talk about our body like this. We're all different.
You know, we've got different genetics. We've got different, you know, like, of course, most people say they've got different metabolisms, but it turns out that when we are born, it's like taking a laptop out of the box.
Our operating system is all set. When you and I are born, my operating system and your operating system are pretty much the same.
Our OS was exactly the same. Yeah, exactly.
All right? And so why is it that our, I mean, maybe your metabolism, my metabolism are closer than more different, but, you know, cause we take care of ourselves, but, uh, why is it that people develop such divergent, so different, um, uh, metabolisms, for example, or maybe longevity patterns. And it turns out, you know, just like your laptop, uh, you know, if you take care of your laptop, you turn it off at night, you clear the case.

I'll pick the software yeah you update the software you make sure that you pad it when you're traveling clean it clean it all that kind of stuff and let's say i'm not so careful i i drop it it stays gets really hot in the car i spill coffee on it or whatever you know what do you think is going to happen to our operating system? Or I download all kinds of stuff. Let's go break.
Well, what's going to happen is that your computer operating system and mine are going to diverge. You're going to go this way.
I'm going to go that way. And actually, definitely for our metabolism, but probably for our longevity as well, that's actually what happens.
We start to diverge our patterns. We're all born the same way.
And the reason I'm bringing this up, because I think for anybody who's listening to this or watching this, people tend to think I'm the fate of my genetics. You know, there's nothing I can do about it.
So screw it. I'm just going to do whatever I want to do.
Eat whatever, drink whatever. Yeah.
You know, what I want to really emphasize is that we are all hardwired to actually heal we can get back to that healing we can heal to get back to our original state which is designed like the laptop to function its entire life of the device with an intact operating system you know what do you do with your up what do you do with your computer you know uh you know hopefully you don't have to reinstall the operating system take good care of it but if you don't take good care of it clean the cache clear do a virus scan you know like clean it up yeah take good care of it and that's kind of how i think people should think about longevity is that it's not like just set a number okay this is not like booking a seat in the movie theater online i going to get that number and that's what I want. Okay.
Good luck. You know, I think that, you know, it's a journey.
We need to focus on today and keep focusing on as far as we can actually see and keep doing that. You know, it's like longevity, you know, there's a quote from E.L.
Doctorow, who is a novelist, who once said, like, writing is like driving at night. You can't see beyond your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
And that's kind of how I think about longevity, living as long as you can go. I mean, you know, but you want to actually make sure that you're enjoying yourself and you're fully aware of what you're doing along the same way.

Yeah, 100%.

And seeing what's in front of you, not just only focusing on how do I make it to 100 or 110, just enjoying the moment.

The rise is important, but honestly, like, so is what's directly in front of you. Sure.
If someone watching and listening has maybe neglected their health for many years, and they're now living in excess weight or maybe

even obesity, and they've been on a pattern and a routine of eating poorly, drinking a lot of

excess alcohol, whatever it might be, and just not taking care of their health. And you were to

prescribe just a 90-day game plan to reset their metabolism

and try to get the right things going again,

what would you prescribe that individual?

And how much do you think they could actually recover

and start to heal from years of not taking care of their health?

First of all, I think that we're able to recover a lot of our health

Thank you. start to heal from years of not taking care of their health? First of all, I think that we're able to recover a lot of our health and heal ourselves by making small moves.
And this is really important. Not extreme moves.
Big moves are, some people can do them. Most people can't maintain big moves.
All right. Small moves, almost anybody can actually do.

And of course, you know, people are very complicated and, you know, that the scenario you described is somebody who's like, you know, been super unhealthy their whole lives and,

you know, not done the right things and are overweight and they're alcohol. I mean,

I think you were stacking, you know, I mean, maybe it's not that extreme, but maybe it's,

you know, you know, like 20 to 40 pounds overweight. How about this? Like the typical

person who hasn't taken care of themselves for most of their life. Maybe not too extreme.

Look,

Thank you. You know, I mean.
Maybe it's not that extreme, but maybe it's, you know, 20 to 40 pounds overweight. How about this? Like the typical person who hasn't taken care of themselves for most of their life.
Maybe not too extreme. What can they actually do? You know, and maybe it's not 90 days.
I would say, you know, like, hey, you know, I think you should take a look at things that you can actually do in a month or two. Give yourself a little runway.
All right. Take it easy on yourself because stress and, you know, putting too much pressure on yourself doesn't actually help.
But some of the principles I will tell you that is supported by evidence, scientific evidence and clinical evidence is number one. I would say switch to eating more of a plant based diet with whole foods.
All right. So I just said a mouthful there because what I'm saying is that eat more foods that you are buying whole and fresh and cook them yourself.
Not processed. Not processed.
Okay. So you can cut down on your ultra processed foods and focus more on your whole fresh foods.
Immediately, you're going to be flooding your body with more of Mother Nature's pharmacy. That's pharmacy with a F, not a PH.
Yes. All right.
And that's going to start healing and prompting your gut to start doing it as well. But you're going to start getting a lot of stuff that is not prescription.
Before you go to the next point, can you make a distinction, if you can explain to people, because I don't think people truly understand, when you eat one processed meal, what is happening with a processed food, whether it's ultra processed or just processed and not it's complete whole food that you cook, what happens when it enters the mouth of ultra processed food or something that's processed and goes through the gut and out, what is happening to your body with that versus just single ingredient whole foods cooked and in the system? First of all, I think that this idea, the word, I mean, we're now beginning to have this conversation about ultra processed foods as a society, right? And it's damn well timed that we actually did, all right? Because we do know that ultra processed foods aren't good for you. But the word process and ultra processed often gets confused.
So let's start there. Okay.
So raw foods are, I mean, whole food ingredients are like going to the grocery store and just eating the food without doing anything to it. Banana, apple.
Exactly. Spinach.
Right. Carrot.
Right. Single ingredient.
Yeah, single ingredient. The salad bar is a great example of really just like whole individual ingredients that you put into a bowl and just eat them one by one.
Most foods that we cook, by cooking them, we're processing. Okay.
I don't know if you've ever seen... So anything that we do to manipulate food is processing.
So if you've ever made pasta by yourself, you take a big pile of flour and you crack some eggs in it and you just take your fingertips and work it and you then roll it up and roll it out and cut it up and... Okay, so that's processing.
Yeah, course. So that's different.
Than ultra processing. Than going to ultra processing, which is having a factory, extrude the ingredients, shape them into animal crackers or whatever, and then adding flavors.
Food coloring. Adding coloring, adding stabilizers, adding olsifiers, and then throwing in all these chemical ingredients that you can't pronounce.
You have no idea what they do in there. That's ultra-processed.
Okay. So the difference between something minimally processed versus ultra-processed, what happens to the gut, the bacteria in your gut, and the body and the immune system with having those different options? Yeah.
And I'll tell you what we know as a release of longevity. So first of all, I try to break it down really simply.
Our body is like your car. Our food is our fuel.
When you go to the filling station, you get a choice. You're going to actually put in, like you got four different kinds of fuel you could put in.
All right. If you put in good quality fuel, your car is going to drive better.
Over the long haul, it's going to drive better. Every now and then you put in some crummy cheap fuel, it's all right.
You're not going to notice. But if you do that day in and day out, you're going to notice it for sure.
All right. So you put something good into your body, your body's going to respond really well.
You put something bad in your body, your body's also going to respond accordingly in a negative way. So simply, in simplest terms, that's actually what the difference is between ultra process, which isn't really good for you, and your body's going to revolt.
And it's going to trash your body from the inside out. In ways, some ways we know, in other ways we don't even know yet.
By the way, the whole conversation about ultraplastics,

about microplastics, all right?

Hey, you know what?

If you ever see the amount of machinery and plastic that has to, you know, the machines

that the processed food has to go through,

who knows how much microplastics

are actually found in ultra processed foods. It's like leaching through, yeah.
That remains to be seen, you know? And so what I say is that the least amount of processing you can have for your food, the more you can be assured that it's going to be a quality food that you're actually going to put into your body and your body will react well. So what's going on when you feed your food minimally processed whole foods? Your body is going to extract immediately as many of the polyphenols as it can out of it.
It goes in your stomach, it's absorbed into your bloodstream. Those polyphenols go to town.
The effect of a polyphenol, of eating polyphenols, and there's a lot of polyphenols in foods, strawberries, blueberries, an orange, an apple, broccoli, all those polyphenols basically get into your bloodstream and think about it like starting a symphony of effects. you know if you ever go to like to a symphony orchestra, it's not just usually one instrument that goes off.
The whole orchestra goes off. And that's what happens when we eat foods with polyphenols.
The dietary fiber tumbles down. We might absorb some of it.
Some of it we don't absorb. It tumbles down all the way to your lower gut what does it do it feeds our gut microbiome we've got 39 trillion hungry little baby birds in the nest waiting to be fed okay and the dietary fiber we eat actually feeds them how important is this so we know it's really important not only because dietary fiber seems to be eating dietary fiber lowers the risk of diseases like dementia, diabetes, cancer, improves outcomes for cancer.
But for cancer, for example, there was a study from the MD Anderson Cancer Center that looked at people with melanoma, okay, deadly form of skin cancer, getting immunotherapy. So they're getting the state-of-the-art treatment requires their own immune system to go to town that's the 70 in your gut requires a gut bacteria gut bacteria need to eat okay gotta feed them turns out for every five to six grams of dietary fiber it decreased mortality by 30reased it.
Decreased it by five to six grams of dietary fiber per day. Now, what does that look like? Dietary fiber, five to six grams? You get a medium-sized pair has five to six grams of dietary fiber.
Not a big ask. Okay.
You do one of those a day. One of those a day or the equivalent to get the dietary fiber.
All right. So, and again, now you get all the polyphenols.
And so like powerful effects. How quickly does it actually, does dietary fiber and these polyphenols, how quickly can they change the fate of your gut bacteria within 24 hours? Come on.
You can start getting changes. So, and I wrote about this in my book, Eat to Beat Disease.
You have kiwis, okay? And you measure the gut microbiome and you can, within 24 hours after eating one kiwi, you can start to grow more healthy gut bacteria in the first day. All right.
By four days, you start growing other bacteria that are healthy as well. So, you know, like you're asking me, what about the, what about the dude who actually hasn't been taking care of himself? Look, this is what I'm telling you.
Go eat some whole fresh foods that you prepare yourself. Okay.
Cut down some of that ultra process stuff. I'll talk about what the ultra process stuff does in a second.
And you'll start to get these changes. You're hardwired to do this.
Your body wants to do it. Let it do its job.
Yeah. Okay.
And you'll start to feel the effects, or at least your body will feel the effects within 24 hours. Well, the changes start fast.
And so definitely within a few days, you will start to feel much better. I mean, listen, you ever go on like a crummy food bender, and then, right? Don't feel good.
Don't feel good.

And then you say, you know what, this is, this sucks. I'm going to actually like eat healthy now.
You start getting it back pretty quick. You're like, I am so glad I'm doing this.
Right. So the changes happen fast.
So I think, you know, uh number one, it is within everyone's power to be able to actually make these moves, okay, that count, simply by shifting to whole good healthy foods. Because, you know, the bad stuff with the artificial preservatives and artificial coloring and all that, you know, the simplest way to think about what they might do besides dump chemicals into your body is they can kill your gut bacteria.
That's not what you want to do. Killing the gut bacteria, by the way, is like, we're talking about the symphony, Beethoven's Fifth, where Handel's Messiah, big choir in a big concert hall, hurting your gut bacteria, like ultra processed foods with all these artificial things.
It's like sending in, um, uh, uh, it's like sending in hooligans from our, from a, uh, British, uh, football game screaming into a concert hall and kicking over all the instruments. Wow.
That's what processed foods do. Ultra processed.
What are other things that ruin the gut bacteria then?

Besides- All the instruments. Wow.
That's what processed foods do. Ultra processed.
What are other things that ruin the gut bacteria then besides ultra processed foods? Well, alcohol will do it. Smoking also can affect it.
Not getting enough good sleep. Not getting exercise can also affect your gut.
What about vaping? Vaping? Oh, yeah. Vaping is also...
I mean, look, cigarettes, vaping, cigars, pipes, it's all part of the same continuum.

There's nothing better about vaping.

In fact, research has actually shown that the flavoring that they put in vapes are actually

probably even worse than some of the stuff that you have just in a plain cigarette.

So, you know...

So, vaping or smoking or cigars, that doesn't help the gut bacteria. No, not at all.
Does it impact it in a negative way? Yeah, it impacts it in a plain cigarette. So, you know- So vaping or smoking or cigars,

that doesn't help the gut bacteria. No, not at all.
Does it impact it in a negative way or is it- Yeah, it impacts it in a negative way. Really? Yeah.
Because guess what? All those chemicals, instead of eating them, now you're inhaling them and they go right into your bloodstream. Instead of from your gut, your stomach, it just goes right into the bloodstream for your lungs.
And now, you know, everything is affected. That 60,000 mile channel of highways and byways is delivering whatever the menthol flavor or the whatever flavor you've got all over the place.
You really don't want that. How much of a block, if someone is smoking every day or vaping or doing cigars or pipes every day, or they're inhaling some type of smoke.
How much of a dam are they creating in the flow of health throughout their nervous system, their bloodstream? I don't have a number for you, but it's pretty significant. Really? In fact, it's so significant that some of the researchers looking at environmental toxins have been even looking, not only smoking and vaping, all right, but looking at even like cooking.
Think about the line cooks at a restaurant. The smoke, you mean? And all the fryer smoke.
The grease and everything coming up. Listen, like you and I.
That was good. We probably have spent more time.
We've probably done our time standing in the front of a grill in the summer, right? Of course. And we're flipping the burgers or grilling the steaks.
Hey, you know, like that's part of the, that's part of the, the, the, you know, that's, that's part of growing up, you know, and, and doing your, doing our thing. All right.
Think about all that stuff that we're breathing.

We know that grilling meat puts carcinogens into the meat. What do you think we're breathing in? Oh, man.
Fortunately, most people aren't grilling everything. But if you're a line cook in a restaurant, you're going there doing that- Eight hours a day.
At the station, eight hours a day, every day. okay? So what I'm saying is that what we expose our bodies to makes a big difference.
So these are choices that we make. And researchers and public health and policymakers, I think that there's starting to be a convergence in recognizing that if we want a healthier society and healthier individuals, all right, We got to just be a little bit more alert to the fact that what we're exposed to can have like a really, really big impact in ways that we didn't think about before.
Now's the time to think about it. Okay.
So number one, I think I took you off track for a second. Number one is eat more plant-based whole foods.
And less ultra processed foods. Less ultra processed.
Was there more to this? Was there more steps to this? No, I think that's probably a good first step. I mean, of course, there's a lot of little minis.
Second thing I would tell you is don't overeat. Don't overeat.
Look, we live in a culture of abundance. The more there is, the more you want to eat.
Eat the access too. Easy access, okay? And easy access is the cheap stuff, which is the ultra processed stuff, which is definitely the bad stuff.
Right. So not the good stuff.
Forget to overeat, overeat fiber, overeat like the healthy stuff. You know, honestly, I would tell you, don't even, don't even overeat the good stuff.
And here's the reason. Really? Oh yeah.
Because the fact of the matter is, is that our bodies, um, are designed to take in food as fuel. All right.
Remember I gave you the analogy of the gas, the car at the filling station, getting your tank filled up. Right.
So that's basically how we interact with our food. We're just like in a car.
You don't really think about your fuel until the meter runs low, the gauge runs low. Then you're like, shoot, where can I find a gas station? That's all you can think about.
And that's basically how our body works. Like we don't think about eating until, you know, our- Ganagri.
The fuel tank goes, you know, your tank's running low. Now like, okay, I got to get something to eat.
Okay. So that's the same way.
And what happens is that when we go to the filling station with a car, we put hopefully high-quality fuel into our gas tank, which is a metal container in the side of the car. We fill it up, right? And what happens is when the gas tank in a car fills up to the top, it goes click, and now no more gas comes out.
We get out. We put it away.
Okay. And then we drive off, right? And our tank's full.
Our body doesn't have the clicker. Wouldn't that be amazing? If it did.
If we had a clicker? Yeah. If we had a clicker and it said, okay, you've eaten all you need to fill your tank today.
Stop eating. Go burn it now.
Go run. I'm going to tell you what the...
We kind of do have a clicker. And I'm going to tell you what it is.
If you eat slowly... Yes.
You will actually feel satiated, full. And if you stop there, stop.
Before you're full, you're satisfied before you're full. Now, this requires a little bit of finesse for you to know yourself, okay? Well, also when I eat ultra-processed foods, I never feel full.
It's like I can have two pizzas and candy. And you want more and more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the clicker doesn't turn on with ultra processed foods like it would with whole foods where you feel like, oh, I got a lot of good fiber in me.
I got some good grains. I got some, you know, meat or beans or vegetables.
Like I feel satisfied. So that's the key thing.
Feeling satisfied, knowing you're satisfied, and stopping.

No matter what else.

Like, I don't care if you haven't cleaned your plate.

Stop.

Stop.

Quit the clean plate club.

Yeah, that's good.

Okay?

You got to quit it.

All right?

In that case, you shouldn't have put so much food in your plate to begin with.

Exactly.

Right? So this is my overarching second piece of advice for somebody who wants to take better

care of themselves.

Don't put too much food in the plate.

Like, don't have to feel full. Like we're trained to eat until we're full.
Yeah. All right? But, you know, like, listen, anybody who's been at a big Thanksgiving dinner will know this, right? So you've been hungry all day.
You can't wait for that meal with all the amazing food and all the amazing family. Look forward to it every year.
And you go there and it's time to eat and you pile your plate up and you're eating, okay? And you're like, oh my God, I got to go back and get more, right? So you go back and get more. You take one forkful of that second plate and you cross that line.
And you're like- And all this food left over. Yeah, and then you feel like, oh man, I don't think I can eat anymore.
And then you are on the couch feeling crummy for the rest of the day. That's crossing the line.
You ate so fast, you didn't pay attention, right? So second piece of advice for people don't overeat. Okay.
Third thing. Third thing is something that everybody can do.
Like I'm, by the way, Lewis, I'm telling you all things that are, don't cost a lot of money. In fact, they will save you money.
Yeah. All right.
That's the key thing. You don't have to be, you know, like a super wealthy person and buy all this and order all these supplements and do all this crazy stuff and track your glucose and all that.
You don't need to do all this stuff. This is a simple way to heal yourself and get started because your body's got the operating system already hardwired into you.
Yes. It's an easy first step for anybody.
Now, third thing is every now and then skip a meal. I do it about three times a week, two to three times a week.
Easiest meal for me to skip is breakfast. Okay? I get up, I take my time.
If my workday starts early, if I've got a ton of stuff I got to do, sometimes I'm so busy, I just don't even have time to eat breakfast. And that's totally okay.
We were told by our moms, we got to eat breakfast in order to learn something at school. Or have enough energy.
Totally not true. Yeah.
By not eating breakfast, what we are immediately doing is extending this fasting period from overnight when we weren't eating after, you know, when we went to sleep. Now you're still not eating until, let's call it lunchtime.
You've extended your, quote, fasting period. Yes.
Maybe 12 hours. Okay.
That's the easiest way to do intermittent fasting. You don't have to, like, go into a schedule and do anything else.
I always tell people, like, don't bother going into these crazy plans. Just skip a meal or two.
And even if you don't do it every single day, which, you know, it's probably hard for everybody to skip breakfast or skip lunch every single day. But if you do it two or three times a week, okay, you'll be fine.
These are the easy steps. This is the third thing I would do.
Fourth thing I would do is say, get on your feet and go for a walk after dinner. Yes.
Okay. And by the way, when I'm saying a walk, I'm saying like a brisk walk.
Like, you know, don't drag your feet. Walk until, you know, like you're feeling it, you know, like you're feeling like you're getting some good exercise.
If you can do it with a friend or a family member, even better. Catch up on things.
If you don't have anybody to walk with, hey, there's something called podcast. Yeah, exactly.
Listen to School of Greatness. Yes.
Okay. Listen to an episode, listen to this episode.
All right. And by the time it's done, you'll have actually gotten some pretty good exercise and movement.
If you can squeeze it in to do a workout plan or join a gym or go swimming or cycling, more power to you, but I'm saying you can do it. Walk.
The really, really easy way anybody can do is just walk. Unless you're in a wheelchair, okay, this is something you can do to actually start to gain your health back.
All right? That is the next thing. And then the final thing that I think is a start, because you can't stack too many things on, is try to get some good sleep.
Yes. Just get some good sleep.
And by the way, you know why? Because when you sleep really, really well, and look, even if you don't sleep well now, there's at some point in your life you did get good sleep. So we all know how to do it.
All right. When you get good sleep, deep REM sleep, dreaming sleep, what happens is that your body regenerates itself.
Your stem cells start to regenerate. Your brain cleans itself out.
By the way, have you heard of the glymphatic system in the brain? I've heard it, but what does it do? Okay. So there is a hidden sewer system in our brain called the glymphatic system.
You've heard of lymphatic system, but the glymphatic system, they say glymph because the cells in our brain called called glia g-l-i-a so glymphatic system is a sewer system that's normally closed during the day and so you know like here we are during the day you know we're doing this podcast we're doing other things you know you prep before you got to do some stuff afterwards me too all right you know what's happening we We're building up toxins in our brain, oxidative stress, all kinds of stuff that's going on in our brain. When we sleep tonight, okay, hopefully I'm going to get some good sleep and hopefully you too.
Yes. All right.
When we get good sleep and only when we get good sleep, the glymphatic systems open up. It's like the sewers to Paris, drains the toxins from your brain.
All right. And that's how we regenerate the freshness of our brain.
That's why they say, get a good night's sleep before an exam. All right.
And if you don't, by the way, you get brain fog. You know why you get brain fog? Because you've kept those toxins out.
Wow. If someone, say, has one glass of wine or one drink of alcohol before they go to sleep,

and they say to themselves, it's not that much, it's just one glass or one drink,

how much is that impacting the brain to not be able to recover, flush out those toxins, and feel fully rested?

Different for everybody.

Okay. Okay.

Now, I think

in general, what I would say is that I have a, I have an opinion about alcohol. Okay.
And my opinion about alcohol is this from the time that humans started to grow grains and, uh, you know, and ferment them. All right.
We've been having alcohol and alcohol is part of human ritual. We celebrate birthdays and funerals and wakes and holidays with us.

So to me, I think that, you know, drinking some wine, having some alcohol is really part of our humanity. All right.
The problem comes when we actually start really abusing it and drinking too much of it. And here's a reason.
The alcohol in all alcoholic beverages, the ethanol, okay, which is present in all of them, that's a toxin. So whether you drink a little or a lot, you know, the bottom line is still a toxin.
So the more you have, the more toxicity your body's, more toxin your body's going to purge. Yes.
Every now and then, it's probably not a big deal. Like, have a great glass of wine or bottle of wine on your birthday.
Don't drink the old bottle. Sure, sure.
Enjoy it with some friends, okay? Like, social drinking in that context, I think is okay. But if you're doing it every night, just one glass.
What I would tell you is this. You know, your body's got to work against that to clear it, and everybody's body's different.
You know, your liver might work a little bit more efficiently than mine, so you're going to clear a little bit better. And the faster you clear it, the better the sleep you're going to get.
And by the way, alcohol itself is a brain toxin, so it knocks out a few neurons. You've got to regenerate those, so you've got to regenerate them when you're sleeping, right? So it's all interlinked.
And so I don't like to character assassinate any food, really. I think, you know, like, you know, you got to enjoy, if you want to live for a long time, you want aiming for longevity, you know, life is for the living.
So you got to live your life. I'm a big believer in that.
But you got to be aware of what it is you're putting into your body and how your body is responding to it. So again, these four bacteria that are in the gut of people that are living well beyond 100, we talked about those before.
You gave a few different foods that can support you in, I guess, the fourth one. Yeah, there's more for all these bacteria.
Let's not go through every single one because this is still a relatively new area of research for me, but I'll tell you, I was surprised to discover that resistant starches can grow some of them as well. You know what a resistant starch is? Starch, right? It's a carb, right? Like rice and all this other kind of stuff.
Banana, all right? When you actually change the starch so it becomes a little harder to digest, like you refrigerate day-old rice, it becomes a resistant starch. A potato.
You're going to roast some potatoes. You stick them in the fridge.
The next day, the natural chemistry of the potato, the starches, changes. You've got some resistant starch Resistant starch can grow some of those bacteria that are found in ultra-agers, super- Interesting.
Okay. Also some natural foods, green bananas, resistant starch, plantains, resistant starch.
All right. So any roasted potato, stick it in the fridge, have it the next day.
You actually have created your own resistant starch. So those actually also can help grow some of the healthy gut bacteria as well.
What are the things that are blocking us beyond the processed foods, beyond smoking, alcohol? Here's actually a question I have for you about this. If you're eating all the right foods, but you say take a Tylenol once a day or take a ibuprofen once a day or take some type of chemical compound that is a drug, even if it seems like it's safe over the counter, what does that do to the gut microbiome when you take a Tylenol, Advil, ibuprofen, or some type of pain killer? We don't know.
And it's going to be different for different medicines. Like, I will tell you that some medicines might actually be very harmful.
Okay? And I think that we're just still at the beginning of discovering. Like, our consciousness has only been recently raised as researchers to think about the gut microbiome.
There's a lot more work to be done. A few years in.
We're just a few years in. But I'll tell you, there are some surprises.
And I know that on your program, you've actually had people coming in to talk about longevity drugs like rapamycin and metformin. You know that metformin has been discovered to improve your gut microbiome.
Really? Yeah. So medicines aren't always bad.
Some of them might actually be good. We're just starting to figure this out and understand it.
Yeah. Interesting.
I guess I'm curious if there's side effects that would also hurt. Maybe they'd help in some way, but then hurt in some other way.
I'm not sure. We don't really know yet.
And I think that's really part of this new frontier. I'm really excited about because I think that, you know, when I went to medical school and I was learning and studying and reading all these books and, you know, like we're digesting 4,000 years of medical knowledge.
You graduate medical school with your stethoscope around your neck, figuring that, you know, like, okay, I probably know most of what there is to know. Heck no.
We are still discovering new cells in the body, new organs in the body, new pieces of our physiology and how our body works that we didn't even imagine. So that's what's exciting to me as a medical researcher, as a physician, as a scientist.
And then, you know, like part of what I do is, you know, as I write books, I like to translate some of the most exciting, but also pragmatic, like practical things we're discovering that you can actually do something about. This may sound a little woo-woo, this question, but how much do our thoughts and our mindset impact our gut, but also our overall health? Oh, I think it's huge.
As it relates to the gut, we do know that it's a two-way street. So if we're depressed or some other thing is going on in our brain, inevitably the gut's going to be affected in some way.
Really? As I said, we don't have it all figured out yet. But it's impacting it.
Probably not for the better. So stress, overwhelm, anxiety, depression, bad thoughts.
And it may actually, it may be a... A gut signaling the brain? Signaling back to the brain.
You know, like two people playing pickleball. Interesting.
You know, like batting, you know, like nastiness back to each other. That could well be happening, okay, with brain and gut.
We do know that it can be good. You know, there's beneficial gut-brain interactions.
So it makes sense that there might be some negative ones. But I can tell you that I think that too often we disconnect mental wellness with physical wellness.
We call them two separate things. You know, the psychiatrist or the therapist deals with this and, you know, medical doctors say, oh, well, I deal with the liver or I deal with the kidney.
You know, what we're beginning to realize is there's all this interconnectivity. And again, back to what I do.
I'm all about the common denominator of health and the common denominators of disease. If we can actually take a science-based approach to look at how everything is connected, it's that idea of draining the Pacific Ocean and seeing how the islands are connected.
We get a lot more mileage out of that than just taking an inch wide and going a mile deep and thinking that you've got the answer. Yeah.
It almost sounds like if you're eating unhealthy foods, ultra-processed foods, it's more than likely going to have an impact on the way you think because you're going to feel a certain thing or maybe the signals are setting something up of, this is not enough. I need more nutrients.
I need something else. And therefore, it's going to create some type of fogginess in your thinking or in your mind.
And if your thinking or mind is a lower energy, a lower frequency, thinking, I'm tired, it's going to send it back to the gut. It seems like it's kind of connecting at the same time.
So when you eat something healthy, hopefully it's impacting your mind or your brain to think better. And if you're thinking better, hopefully your gut is being impacted in a better way also.
And that's connected to longevity because one of the goals that we all want to have is we want to be clear in mind. We want to have good cognition.
It's not just about memory. It's really about decision-making.
What am I going to do today? What am I going to do next week? And making good decisions, right? I mean, you know, like I just think that rather than pick a number, you know, I'm going to do 150 or whatever, let's think about this whole journey and everything we need to do to enjoy where we're going. You're going to go on vacation, right? You want to really plan your vacation.
Where are you going to eat? What are you going to pack? You know, what's the weather going to be like? Like all these, all these components I think are, at least from my perspective, longevity is not just about the big number. It's really about your health span and the quality of your life along the way.
And that's to me is really exciting thing, is really the science of that enjoyment along the way. I'm a big believer in joy and in pleasure and in making life worth living.
100%. And if you could, I've got a couple final questions for you, but if you were to focus on a few supplements you think people should be taking to just non-negotiables that you think is going to help their gut, their lifespan, everything.
What would those few supplements be? I can only tell you what I do. Okay.
All right, because I don't think I can really fairly address, this should be for everybody, the non-negotiables. But I'll tell you, for me, I know that it's hard for me to get enough vitamin D.
So I'll take a vitamin D supplement. I know it's, even though I enjoy seafood and I like plant-based sources of omega-3s, it's hard for me to get enough.
So an omega-3 supplement is good for my brain, good for my heart. It's good for my muscles.
So I take an omega-3 supplement. I think those are, for me, non-negotiable.
I just don't get enough. And I think most people don't get enough either, honestly.
Because I do work in this area, I have an unfair advantage of seeing the results of research and thinking, oh, wow, why don't I do this if I've been seeing this? So I do take some probiotics, and it's all based on the research that I've actually seen. So that bacteria I told you, Lactobacillus ruteri, you can find it in food.
Sometimes it's in yogurt. It's in sourdough bread, but I don't want to eat too much sourdough bread.
It's a carb. Lactobacillus is what makes the sourdough bread tangy, which people like, but you can't eat that much sourdough bread.
Lactobacillus rurore is also in the Italian version of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. It's so good.
Big, you know, orange wheels. Okay.
It's a starter bacteria for it. You don't want to be eating too much of that.
Shave a little bit on, okay, but you're not going to be eating like mouthfuls of it. So I can't get enough of that.
And I've seen enough research from what I've done to know that it's good for my immune system. It lowers inflammation.
I've seen really good data in animals from the lab that it reduces the development of colon tumors and breast tumors. It also improves your metabolism, your lipids.

It text messages your brain for that oxytocin.

What's that one called again?

Lactobacillus ruteri.

And by the way, it's Lactobacillus ruteri.

R-E-U-T-E-R-I.

I'll give it to you so you can put it in the show notes.

Yeah, please.

Lactobacillus ruteri.

And I'll tell you, I actually order the kind. Look, this is stuff you get on Amazon.
I get the kind that you can chew. Okay, I like that.
Children's chewable version. You know why? Because there's other data in humans that this healthy bacteria in the gut, remember I told you the gut starts in the mouth, actually kills the bacteria that causes cavities.

Really?

I brush my teeth, and I'll chew up a couple of these babies.

I want some of these. I'll swish them around, then I swallow it.

Good for the upstairs, good for the downstairs.

I'm in.

Right?

And remember I told you, we're beginning to see links between gum disease, gingivitis,

bad bacteria in your mouth, and dementia.

Okay?

So, you know, I didn't have to convince you very hard on that one.

No, I'm in.

All right?

I'm in.

Thank you. diabetes, bad bacteria in your mouth, and dementia.
Okay. So, you know, I didn't have to convince you very hard on that one.
No, I'm in. All right.
I'm in. You take these every day? I do.
And then, you know, and then I happen to be involved with the research on acromantia. And I know that there are people saying it's been so talked about on, you know, on social media and YouTube and podcasts.
I do research on it. Okay.
So I, and my colleagues are doing the research on it. So I'm looking at it and this bacteria actually is really, really important.
And I'm a cancer researcher, so I know just how important that can be. So I do take that back.
I do take that probiotic, but I also don't rely on probiotics. Like I, you know, from my acromromantia i also drink some pomegranate juice and i'll you know have dried cranberries and you know i i try to make um i use supplements as a top off which is what supplement means yeah yeah all right but i try to get most of my foods things from foods yeah yeah so what is that one called the acromantia A-K-K-E-R-M-A-N-S-I-A.
That's the probiotic name or not? That's the name of the bacteria and the probiotic. Oh, it is.
Okay, cool. Yeah.
Gotcha. So those four things are the main that you take, vitamin D, omega-3, and these two probiotics.
Yeah. You might throw some other stuff in there, but those are the main...
Those are the main ones I do. Gotcha.
You know, I mean, look, everyone's going to be different. Everyone's going to have different needs.
I might add some, you know, based on research that's coming on. So, you know, I try not to create a little, you know, a box of things that to say, you have to do this.
Of course. Or, you know, you're not going to be healthy.
This is what I do. And people always ask me, so I'm happy to share it with you.
That's great. You've got some amazing books, Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat in Your Diet, that cover all the research that you've done and give people way more tips than we've talked about here.
This is a great starter. And you're on YouTube every week.
People can check out YouTube slash Dr. William Lee to see your content where you dive into the research and you share more.
And you're doing it, what, two, three times a week right now? Yeah, three times a week. And then we actually add more content whenever I can.
And the way that I trim my YouTube is that I look really closely at what people, my audience and people who hear about me uh they want to ask me. So I get lots of, I collect information, like what are the questions that people want to know? And then I create my YouTube content based on answering what people want to know.
What's the biggest pain that people are facing around their health today that you've been answering? You know, confusion about what they should do. They get so much misinformation, it becomes confusing for them.
And so what I always try to tell people to do is that I'm trying to give you information that's based on science that I know to be true as well as we understand it now. You can count on me to be a trusted source of information.
I'm a scientist. So if I don't know it, I'm going to tell you I don't know.
And that's okay because we can't know everything. And I think that, and just like what we talked about today, I'm a pragmatic, I'm a practical person.

Do what's practical.

You don't have to do what's expensive.

You can't, you know, this is not, health is not elitism.

Health is universal.

It's something we can all do because we're all hardwired to actually heal.

We're all hardwired to have good metabolism.

We're hardwired to have our health defenses.

So if you have been off the path, don't worry. You can get back on it.
You know, just, you know, follow your own signals with a little bit of guidance and you can get there. This is powerful.
I want people to go subscribe to your YouTube, check you out, all your books, drwilliamlee.com. You're going to be updating people there.
You have have a newsletter all these different things people can check out um also i want to get a link or a list of all the supplements you talked about and add it to the show notes so i'll get that from you later and i'll add it to the show notes on youtube and and uh all the different audio platforms but this has been very powerful i appreciate you for for revealing some of the new research that you're discovering and you're seeing that I haven't heard anyone talk about, which is kind of understanding the gut bacteria connection to longer-term health and longevity. And I think it's really important that we need to start exploring more of this.
And I'm assuming over the coming years, you're going to be talking more about this on your YouTube channel, about what you're discovering and sharing the research and the science that people can have for themselves. Yeah.
It's so exciting what we're actually finding out in terms of how to live long and live well. To me, that's the alignment.
You want years and quality at the same time. That's what I'm focused on like a laser beam.
Dr. William Lee, thank you so much for being here.
I appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me again.
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