Dr. William Li | How to Eat to Support Optimal Well-Being from the Groundbreaking New York Times Bestselling Author of “Eat to Beat Disease”

Written By Kristel Bauer

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You are what you eat. We chat with Dr. William Li about effectively using food as medicine, wisely modifying eating patterns, and strategically adjusting diet to help you combat diseases. Make healthier choices now and learn more by tuning in.

Key Takeaways from This Episode

  • Benefits of herbs and spices for your health

  • What is the Mediterranean Diet and its benefits?

  • The truth about dairy products

  • Insightful thoughts on metabolism and body fat

  • How to eat well to support your health and beat disease

 

Disclaimer: All information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and are not intended to provide medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified health professionals when you have any questions regarding your specific health, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.

 

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

 

About Dr. William Li

William W. Li, MD, is an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times bestseller “Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself.” His groundbreaking work has led to more than 30 new medical treatments, and impacts care for more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views. Dr. Li has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, and the Dr. Oz Show, and he has been featured in USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, and O Magazine. He is president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and leads research into COVID-19.

Connect with Dr. Li

 

About “Eat to Beat Disease”

Eat your way to better health with this New York Times bestseller on food's ability to help the body heal itself from cancer, dementia, and dozens of other avoidable diseases. 

Forget everything you think you know about your body and food and discover the new science of how the body heals itself. Learn how to identify the strategies and dosages for using food to transform your resilience and health in Eat to Beat Disease.

We have radically underestimated our body's power to transform and restore our health. Pioneering physician-scientist Dr. William Li empowers readers by showing them the evidence behind over 200 health-boosting foods that can starve cancer, reduce your risk of dementia, and beat dozens of avoidable diseases. Eat to Beat Disease isn't about what foods to avoid but rather is a life-changing guide to the hundreds of healing foods to add to your meals that support the body's defense systems.

The book's plan shows you how to integrate the foods you already love into any diet or health plan to activate your body's health defense systems: angiogenesis, Regeneration, Microbiome, DNA Protection, and immunity to fight cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative autoimmune diseases, and other debilitating conditions.  

About The Masterclass

Join world-renowned scientist, physician, and New York Times bestselling author Dr. William Li as he shares his wealth of knowledge and research that has impacted more than 50 million lives. Dr. Li is a true pioneer in food as medicine and has discovered more than two hundred foods that activate the body’s hardwired health defense systems: angiogenesis, regeneration, microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity. During this sixty-minute free masterclass, Dr. Li will break down each of the health defense systems to help you understand how they function and then share specific foods that you can use to activate each one. These are the same foods that Dr. Li has studied in detail to understand their abilities to combat and prevent things like cancer and cardiovascular disease.

 

About Vegamour

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Vegamour simply models nature’s holistic approach to healthy growth & function by combining bioavailable plant-based actives, enzymes, and proteins in a 360, inside/out approach to create the optimal ecosystem for hair wellness.

Vegamour uses the world’s finest, hand-curated, natural ingredients to ensure quality and efficacy. They cared enough to set up their own sustainable supply chains to bring beautiful, natural ingredients into everything they formulate.

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Connect with Vegamour

To obtain 20% off from Vegamour, visit their website at www.vegamour.com and use promo code GREATLY20.

 

Kristel Bauer, the Founder of Live Greatly, is on a mission to help people thrive personally and professionally. She is a corporate wellness expert, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Keynote Speaker, TEDx speaker & contributing writer for Entrepreneur.

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To Book Kristel as a speaker for your next event, click here.

Episode Transcript

Disclaimer:

Now for a quick disclaimer, all of the information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors. They are not medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or qualified health professional for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions you have regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.

Kristel (Guest’s Introduction)

I am so incredibly excited to have Dr. William Li here for the second time. Dr. Li is an incredible human being, a physician, scientist, president, and medical director of The Angiogenesis Foundation. And he's the author of the New York Times bestselling book “Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself”.

He also has an incredible TED Talk, which has received over 11 million views called “Can we eat to starve cancer?” So Dr. Li and I are going to chat about how to eat to support your overall well-being and how to eat to support a healthy weight and so much more. I cannot wait to share this with you. Let's go ahead and welcome Dr. William Li to the show.

William:

Always great to chat with you Kristel.

Kristel:

So we've been talking now for what? 35 minutes before recording, I got to hit this record button because I could just talk to you all day long. You are a wealth of knowledge and I'm super excited. So to start, I would just love to hear a little bit about what you're currently up to and what things are getting you excited these days.

William:

Well, you know, so as a physician and as a scientist, I'm always trying to move the needle using science and the great thing about science is that it doesn't sleep. So when I'm sleeping at night, there's new discoveries happening in the lab and the clinic. And I wake up, there's always something that's coming out of the oven that's super smoking hot.

So some of the things that I've been looking at are, you know, relate to my work and food is medicine. A couple of really interesting things that I've been talking about recently, have to do with cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer of women. And it's actually the number one killer of, of anything actually, even in the pandemic, when was so bad with people dying in the early days, heart disease was still trumped, every other condition.

So what causes heart disease? Well, besides genetics, besides an activity, it's really a lot of crappy diet stuff. So some exciting research came out, showing that, uh, patterns of eating are really important. So one pattern that became important is the Mediterranean diet, which isn't about a superfood. It's about the manner in which you eat, right?

So people in Italy, in Greece, in Spain and the 14 or 20 other Mediterranean countries, they just leave their door and they eat the way that they eat. A lot of modern Mediterranean, by the way, it's not that healthy. But if you go back to more simple, traditional ways of eating, it is very healthy. Mostly plant-based, healthy fats, minimal red meat, very low ultra-processed foods, coffee, red wine, uh, fruits and vegetables, whole, whole grains, that kind of stuff.

What study actually showed is that those people. Who eat a Mediterranean, uh, uh, style pattern of eating have a 26% decrease in the risk of sudden cardiac death. That's pretty amazing, right? So sudden cardiac death is what you see on TV. The person out for a jog, they clutch their chest, they fall to the ground, bystanders come by and do CPR, they shot them once they get to the hospital or the EMT has arrived.

So 26% reduction with a dietary pattern is really eye-opening compared to just regular on American-style eating. Now, other thing that was really interesting that this research did, they actually looked at people who were eating the Southern-style diet.

They were looking at different patterns, Southern-style diet, and lots of fried foods, lots of saturated fats, lots of ultra-processed foods, lots of sodas, things that we know that are not that good for health. Those people had a 40% increase in the risk of cardiac death. So when you add that together, you're talking about a 60% difference.

So we know that the pattern you eat can make a difference. So we've spent all this time focusing on superfoods. Is it the acai berry? Is it that, you know, is it goji berries? Honestly, I think pattern is actually really important if you're looking at this really fascinating. It's not just only food, whole foods.

It can even be the seasonings that you use for your foods. So there was a study from Penn State University that did something really cool. They took like 24 common kitchen spices. Herbs and spices, dried stuff. You know you go to the middle aisle. You go to the spice section and you see all these little canisters, right?

And of course who uses the entire bottle, right? So they save themselves for a long time.

Kristel:

They’ve been sitting in my cabinet for like years. I probably should go through and check the expiration date. 

William:

You got to, well, look, I'm gonna tell you why you want it. The, the reason is that all of these dried spices have mother nature's bioactive chemicals in them, that activate your health defenses.

And so over time, it's not just that the flavor goes stale, the bioactives, kind of go away. So you want to actually have a relatively fresh, I think you can keep spices for like a year or so, but then beyond that, like if you're on your third Thanksgiving using the same bottle of whatever, probably time to switch it out.

All right. But anyway, so what they did is they create a spice mix and they found that just having a third of a teaspoon of a spice mix can actually start to lower your blood pressure, which is really, really cool. So it's not just that it seasoned your food, makes your food tastes better, also is better for your health.

Now, why is that important? Is that this study showed you can lower your blood pressure, your systolic blood pressure, which is the first number by three points using spice. Spice mix. And every single point that you lower your blood pressure, you lower your risk of stroke by 5%.

Kristel:

Wow.

William:

It's down 15% reduction in stroke, which is cardiovascular disease.

So, this is one of them doing now is I'm sort of, uh, really interested in patterns of eating. And then of course looking at what the things are specifically and why, but really trying to take this whole idea that we need to kind of get away from the superfood super supplement idea and get towards, you know, get real and get more natural about it.

Kristel:

I love that. And I want to dive a little deeper in a couple of those topics because they're really fascinating. So first I would love for you to share a little bit about the Mediterranean diet. That's something that I learned a lot about during my training in integrative medicine, and I love eating that way.

And I would love for you just to share a little bit so that the listener can understand what that actually entails.

William:

Okay. Well, I'm actually working on my next book right now and I'm going to be talking a lot about the Mediterranean diet. But I'm actually somebody who's walked the walk as well, because I lived for a time in the Mediterranean.

I lived in Italy and I lived in Greece and I spent a lot of time traveling to those places. Most people don't realize, you know, you think about Italy, Greece, maybe Spain. Um, but a lot of people aren't, don't realize there's like 20 some countries that rim the Mediterranean sea, and so the Mediterranean diet, isn't just about red sauce and pasta and the Greek salad.

It really represents this incredibly, rich, diverse, multicultural set of food cultures. Actually, they all come together to represent this pattern of eating. So what do they all involve? What's their common denominator, the Mediterranean diet. They all rely on fresh foods, fresh whole foods. So what are whole foods? Fruits, vegetables, legumes, things that you get in the produce section or the fruit and vegetable section if you go to a village market.

They tend to be seasonal. So these food cultures are really in touch with and very proud of like, Hey, it's fall, it's porcini season. This is what's coming out of the woods. Or it's pear season and look at the citrus that we actually have. It's taking the time and having pride of seasonality, you know, and then just sharing with family, like, look what I got.

And I think that's something that we've lost touch with in sort of fast paced, you know, 24/7, 12 months a year, you can get all the food, you want this and they call it abundance. Right? I would call it overabundance, over convenience, and we've lost touch with who we are and where we are, and what we can get from the land and the time that we are.

But I think Mediterranean people are very much in touch with that. They use healthy fats, so there's no, they're not frying with Crisco. And there are, you know, every culture has some deep-fried stuff. It's a rarity. And so you wind up having lots of fresh fruits and vegetables that are seasonal, herbs and spices, like I just talked about is good for your blood pressure, activates your inter genesis, the way your blood vessels grow better for your circulation, uh, healthy fats, like or healthy oils, I should say, like olive oil, uh, that have natural polyphenols that come from the olive itself.

And by the way, a study of 20,000 people for like 20 years showed that if you actually just have a teaspoon full of olive oil it lowers your risk of cardiovascular coronary artery disease, uh, pretty substantially like by 20%.

So again, these patterns are, they pay off over a period of time. But the greatest part about Mediterranean-style eating is that it's really tasty. Um, you don't have to have tons of steak, and not a lot of red meat. There's more seafood, not a lot of ultra-processed food, stuff in a box, and not a lot of processed meats either frankly.

So although we think about where you go to get an Italian sub and you get all these things cold cuts in the deli. That's really not how the Mediterranean actually operates. And so I encourage people to go on Google search up Mediterranean diet, but first, take a look at the countries that rim the Mediterranean.

You'd be surprised. Turkey, Israel. Egypt, you know, Spain south of France. Oh my gosh, there's a wealth of this. And then you look up recipes from and then just pick the ones that really appeal to you and try them out.

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Kristel:

I love that. And you're bringing me back to a trip before we had kids. We went to Greece and it was one of my favorite trips, and the food was so incredible. And I still remember like those Greek salads with the fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and olives and onions. They're so, so good.

And I, curious what your take is on cheese because I remember feta cheese was a thing when we were there and I've heard such mixed things about this, you know, dairy versus then coming from goats or sheep. And what's your thought on? 

William:

Well, look, here's the truism. Okay. Cheese is an important part of food culture.

In fact, it's one of the oldest man-made foods that we have. I think cheese actually predates recorded history. If that actually tells you how far back it goes, like before the Rosetta stone kind of thing. And, uh, and it shows how connected we have been as humans with animals and trying to use every resource that we can from them.

All right. So dairy products by themselves get vilified. And I think I'm totally not into vilification. You know, it's part of culture, human culture. There's no good and evil to this, but, and it is true. Another truism is that dairy can have a lot of saturated fats and dairy products or cheese can also have a lot of sodium, could be really salty, high saturated fats.

You know, if you eat a lot of that stuff, it's not good for your body. And I would dare say that in the cultures that really value cheese. I mean, look at France. For example, people are not stuffing themselves with cheese. They're sampling it. Now, let's take a look at the positive side because there's, every coin has two sides to it.

And humans wouldn't have been eating cheese if there wasn't some benefit. So what are some of the benefits? Well, turns out that cheese, which is really a fermented food. Bacteria on a dairy product that stored away in cool temperatures until a mold and a rind grows around it, and then it cures itself. Actually winds up being, uh, filled with healthy gut bacteria. And so you wind up actually having a probiotic food. Cheese, I'll give you a couple examples. Camembert cheese has healthy gut bacteria, and we know that when you actually feed someone camembert and you measure the bacteria in camembert, you can find it in the stool.

So it gets all the way through. It's a healthy gut bacteria. Should you be eating a lot of camembert cheese? Probably not, but it's not harmful, tt's not universally harmful.

What about, um, parmigiano reggiano? I love Parmesan reggiano, okay? So just a nutty umami, mouthwatering cheese. And by the way, in Italy, people are not eating blocks of parmesan cheese.

You grate it, they might eat a little tiny piece of it. It's made with a bacteria fermented with a bacteria called Lactobacillus reuteri. This is a healthy gut bacteria that is supposed to be in mother's milk for breastfeeding. It helps to really social hormones in the brain. It controls our emotional health, helps us heal, good for our immune system.

Should you eat a lot of parmesan cheese? Absolutely not, but every coin has two sides. And so, yes, you want to be careful about the saturated fat and the salt, but there are some upsides to it as well. And I think that this is where cultures, particularly the Mediterranean cultures have figured out how to actually create a, you know, a reasonably healthy mix.

Life is for the living, and so, you know, you should have the right to indulge in a little bit of what really pleases you, but not too much.

Kristel:

That’s a really, really great perspective. And I just need to like, tell my son, he dumps Parmesan on his pasta. I'm always like, oh, just a little bit. It's like remembering that, that moderation. Enjoying it.

William:

Uh, so I'll tell you a little trick for that. So if you have to grate the cheese yourself, and it's not coming out of a big job, it's work. My arm’s getting tired. Okay. So, so that's a way of actually self-control.

Kristel:

Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm going to try that next time its pasta night. And talking a little bit about this Mediterranean diet.

I would love to see, does this translate over for people who are working on their weight or trying to maintain a healthy weight? Is this an avenue you would suggest, or would you have any other thoughts around that?

William:

Yeah, well, so this is an area of research I'm working on right now. In fact, it's the basis for my next book.

I'm actually looking at metabolism and body fat and how, what we eat activates our health defenses, and how our health defenses are connected to our adipose tissue. And it turns out that you know, that there's a lot of mythology concerning fat. I mean, most of us step out of the shower and look in the mirror, and then at a certain age, we kind of, don't like what you see.

And so, you know, you wish for something more. So most of us don't associate that with something pleasant or something beneficial, but it turns out fat is actually really helpful for your body. It's an endocrine organ. It's uh, fat, our fat is actually an organ.

And so what I would say is that a lot of whole foods are good for fighting unhealthy amounts of fat. We need fat to survive, and so if you actually eat things like carrots and tomatoes, herbs, and spices, uh, you can actually see there's fat-fighting properties to it. Seafood, which contain Omega-3 fatty acids also have this incredible ability to be able to right-size um, our fat cells.

And so while people think of slicing and dicing and sucking and chopping and lasering and freezing fat, that's really kind of a blunt instrument approach. And it's much better to actually combine a healthy diet. Nuts, by the way, are also a great way to slim down.

I was just doing a episode on the Rachael ratio, where they asked me. Come up with a food that actually is good for your metabolism and good for your weight. And I said I'll do one better. I'll talk about research that's been shown to decrease your waist size and it turns out studies have shown that if you take plain old, low brow Navy beans out of a can from the middle aisle of the grocery store, okay.

It doesn't get any more plain every day than that. And you have five cups of that, so five cups. One cup’s not that much. So one day, every day during the workweek, or are 0.7 cups every day for a week, uh, over the course of a month, it decreases your waist size by an inch.

Kristel:

So interesting.

William:

How does that work?

How does that work? That's what's important. Turns out that the dietary fiber in Navy beans and it probably applies to lima beans and lentils and you know, and garbanzo beans are, probably applies to all the beans as well. But this study was done on navy beans. Uh, the dietary fiber feeds our gut microbiome - the healthy bacteria in our gut - then helps our body.

It up our game in terms of our metabolism, so that we can actually process fats and right-size our blood sugars and use our nutrients and use the fuel more efficiently. So you can burn down the bad fat, you can kind of store the energy where it's needed to. And you know, this regularity is probably important as well.

Kristel:

Amazing. Okay. So I've learned a lot. This has been incredible. We are coming towards the end, and before we do that, I want to hear a little bit about your masterclass, your courses. Then we're going to go to a fun, quick wellness lightning round before we close.

William:

Okay. Cool. Well, look, I mean, during the lockdown, at the very beginning of the pandemic, I was staring out the window realizing that even though I'm a doctor, I had nothing to offer medically to people who were afraid of the pandemic in the early days.

And when I realized is that we're all locked into our homes, but we still needed to eat. And that was the moment I realized, even as a doctor that eating to beat disease was the one thing that every human on the planet can do for their health. So I created a masterclass that's part of my mission to get information out, to empower people to make good decisions, no matter what the outside environment is.

If the doctors can't help you, the pharmaceutical canopies, the hospitals can't help, that’s okay. You can still help yourself by getting, making good choices. And so I created this free masterclass and then for the people who want to do a really deep dive, I took the time to create a, an online course.

It's a four-week online course that's a real deep dive into how to eat, to beat disease. With tips on what to buy, how much to eat, you know, how to store it, how to prepare it all kinds of like put the rubber on the road, that kind of stuff.

But you can, anybody, your listeners of yours can actually check it out on my website. It’s uh, doctor drwilliamli L-I dot com or I'm @drwilliamli, and you can find me on Instagram and any of these other social channels, but I would love for people to just, you know, sign up for free.

Download. That actually gets you started on eating to beat disease, the stuff in the masterclass. And then for people that really want to make a kind of like jump into better health, my online course.

Kristel:

Amazing. And I'm going to put links to that in the episode details. So to make it easy, you can just go in there and click on those to check it out. So amazing. Incredible. Now, quick wellness, lightning round.

First question, I'm really curious what your answer is going to be on this one. You are on a deserted desert island. You can only bring three foods with you. What are your three foods? 

William:

Uh, I would bring green tea because it also gives me uh, hydration and it gives me all the bioactives. I'm here, I'm going to cheat a little bit. I'm going to say a fruit basket. I haven't figured out what fruits, but I do know from history and history teaches a lot.

I encourage everybody to squeeze all the juice out of history that we possibly can. Speaking of which, maybe some citrus fruits, because we know that if you don't have enough citrus foods, your teeth are gonna fall out from scurvy. Okay. If I was on a desert island, you're gonna need your teeth in order to be able to eat.

And to be able to talk and to be able to do everything else. And honestly, I think this is going to sound funny, but I suppose if I had, if the third food, uh, would be a small piece of fish that I could put onto a hook to catch other fish. The fish, now you can actually catch more and then I'll be self-sustaining.

Uh, that would be probably the third thing that I would want to do so I can actually have some protein. I'll make fatty acids from the sea, local. Uh, I mean, that's a tough call. What would you put it?

Kristel:

Now? You're putting me on the spot? Okay. Black beans, avocado, and quinoa.

William:

You’d want…

Kristel:

Well, okay. That's what came to my mind, but I bet you not thinking, but I kind of would like more of a vegetable in there. So now I'm, second-guessing, I don’t know.

William:

You ever heard of the island? We could, we were sailing together. We catch, we can get seaweed, seaweed, polysaccharides, and all kinds of other healthful properties.

Kristel:

Yeah. I'm hoping that they're going to have like some fruit on the island that I could eat. That would be my hope, but your answers were very, very, wise answers and really, really amazing.

Okay. Last question, cause I know we are coming to the end. You got another meeting in a couple of minutes. So, knowing what you know today, what advice would you give to yourself from 10 years ago?

William:

Wow. I would say focus on mastering the rules of the establishment around you so that you can actually break them and make better rules to improve the world.

Kristel:

Whew! Wow. Amazing. Well, Dr. Li, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. I loved talking to you today. 

William:

Yeah, that's great. Thank you, Kristel. By the way, I want to say for anybody who has not seen your TEDx Talk yet, I want to encourage people to check out Kristel Bauer’s, TEDx Talk. It's awesome. I've been sending it around to my friends and family to check out.

It is a great example of how to deliver, not only deliver a great TED Talk, but really have a powerful short, and sweet message that anyone can actually use. So thank you for doing that.

Kristel:

Thank you so much. Well, that was really comforting and nice surprise. I'm like, so touched right now. I don't even know what to say. Well, thank you so much.

This has been amazing.

William:

Thanks Kristel.

Kristel Bauer
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