Ep. 354 Metabolism Myths Debunked: Weight Gain Insights with Dr. William Li

I am delighted to have the remarkable Dr. William Li joining me again today. He was previously with me on Episode 260, which became one of the most popular podcasts in 2023. 

Dr. Li is a world-renowned physician-scientist and New York Times bestselling author known for his role as President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. 

In our conversation today, we dive into the vocabulary surrounding health and microbiome-supporting foods, exploring how to measure the microbiome, the benefits of fermented foods, and the role of the appendix. We also look at pre, and post-biotics, strategies for supporting the microbiome after a colonoscopy prep, foods to avoid, immune function, and metabolic nuances, and discuss the differences between subcutaneous visceral fat, brown fat, and white fat, and polyphenol-rich beverages. 

I know you will find today’s conversation with Dr. William Li as enlightening as I did. I eagerly anticipate inviting him back to the podcast later this year.

“We all carry a great responsibility when deciding what to eat to ensure that we feed our gut bacteria properly.”

– Dr. William Li

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN

• Dr. Li explains the importance of the gut microbiome 
• The interrelationship between the microbiome, body fat, and the metabolism
• How to measure your gut microbiome
• Foods that promote gut health and support the microbiome
• The role of the appendix
• How a colonoscopy prep impacts the gut microbiome
• How excess body fat can fuel the metabolism rather than slowing it down
• Why sleep is crucial for metabolism
• The role of brown fat in weight loss
• The benefits of polyphenols in coffee and tea

Bio:

William W. Li, MD, is an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and New York Times bestselling author of “Eat to Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism, Live Longer”. His groundbreaking work has led to the development of 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, LIVE with Kelly and Ryan, and the Rachael Ray Show, and he has been featured in USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, and O Magazine. He is the president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation.

Connect with Cynthia Thurlow

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Connect with Dr. William Li

• On Social media: @ Dr William Li
• On his website
• Sign up for Dr. Li’s free newsletter

Ep. 260 Eat To Beat Your Diet: Achieve a Balanced and Healthy Lifestyle with Dr. William Li

Transcript:

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness podcast. I’m your host, Nurse Practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.

[00:00:23] Today, I was joined again by the amazing Dr. William Li, who last joined me on the podcast on Episode 260 and was one of the most popular podcasts of 2023. He is a world-renowned physician, scientist, and New York Times bestselling author. He is also best known for his role as President and Medical Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation.

[00:00:52] Today, we spoke at length about vocabulary around health and the microbiome, foods to help support it, how to measure the microbiome, the role of ferments, our appendix, pre and postbiotics, how we can support our microbiome after a colonoscopy prep, foods to avoid, immune function, metabolism [unintelligible 00:01:16], differences between subcutaneous, visceral fat, brown fat, and white fat, and polyphenol rich beverages including coffee, green and black teas. I know you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it. I look forward to bringing Dr. Li on later this year as well.

[00:01:38] Dr. Li, always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome back. 

Dr. William Li: [00:01:42] Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:01:43] Absolutely.

Dr. William Li: [00:01:44] Once again. 

[laughter]

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:01:46] Definitely a fan favorite on the Everyday Wellness Community. I would love to talk about the interrelationship between the health of our microbiome and body fat as it relates to metabolism. I know that for many individuals and especially for those of us that trained in the 1990s, early 2000’s, the microbiome has really exploded in terms of how influential it is on our bodies and systemically but I thought it would be interesting to weave this connection together, maybe helping to reinforce why nutrition is so important vis-à-vis the microbiome and our metabolism.

Dr. William Li: [00:02:23] Great gateway to walk through to talk about a lot of exciting things. Look, microbiome is now kind of I wouldn’t even say it a buzzword, it’s part of the vocabulary of health. And it’s a good thing too, because as a scientist and as a physician, I think that it’s really important and exciting to see when new discoveries become part of the mainstream of thinking and of conversation. And it’s really from that point of view, I want to just give a couple of examples of how important the gut microbiome is. So, for example, in 2017, I helped to organize a conference in Paris about cancer. And we wanted to bring together, it was called Beyond Cancer, Beyond Drugs or something.

[00:03:05] It was a cancer meeting in which we didn’t allow you to talk about chemo and didn’t allow you to talk about new-fangled therapies. And so, when you remove all that from a credible cancer conference, what do you got? You’ve got mental health, you’ve got diet, you’ve got exercise, all the things that are important to patients. Well, enter the microbiome. And there was, at the time, a research study that was about to be published the next week, and so was under embargo. And embargo which just means under wraps. It was a secret, but we were able to share that information. And the most stunning thing that I learned that day was the importance of your healthy gut and whether you’re going to respond to cancer treatment or die.

[00:03:48] And to me, as a researcher, it stunned me that the difference in 200 people who are getting state of the art cancer treatments of different cancer types, that whether they actually made it or didn’t make it, whether they responded to treatment or whether they didn’t respond to treatment, relied on in that research study one bacteria, which everybody now talks about called Akkermansia, and this was published in the Journal Science, which is one of the most credible journals out there, came out a week later, and I literally said, OMG, this is like proof of principle how important gut health is. I don’t really care if you’ve got irritable bowel, if you’ve got all these other things with gut health and you want better body shape, body composition. 

[00:04:26] But when it comes down to the black and white of cancer, which affects everyone, including myself, my mom had cancer, my two uncles died of cancer. The reality is that you pay riveting attention to it. Now, fast forward to just a couple of months ago, another study came out that again opened my mind yet again to the importance of the gut microbiome. And I hope I’m getting people’s attention talking about this as just an intro to dive into gut microbiome and metabolism. But here’s a recent study that looked at a bacteria called PS128. It’s a kind of lactobacillus and it was studied in Parkinson’s disease. Now, we don’t really have good treatments for Parkinson’s disease. And the treatments we do have actually either don’t work very well or they have side effects, some bad ones, some serious ones. 

[00:05:13] And everyone knows the work of Michael J. Fox and the tremendous effort that’s been invested to find better treatments. Well, enter the gut microbiome, this one bacteria which can come into a probiotic, PS128, seems to be able to lower the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease as an intervention. And I looked at it, again, published in a real journal, like a serious journal, to go, wow, this is like confirmation that the health of our gut makes a huge difference in terms of our health. So, if I haven’t gotten their attention yet, I’m talking about the gut microbiome, healthy bacteria. I’m talking about life or death with cancer, and I’m talking about a neurodegenerative disease that up until now, we didn’t think there was really much of a path forward. And addressing our gut health makes a difference. And so, this is actually the reason why I’m passionate to talk about this subject with you, to get into the material. 

Cynthia Thurlow: And I think it’s so important for people to understand. I think the microbiome seems intangible, especially for individuals maybe that are not clinicians or researchers. But I think for a lot of individuals, the concept of the gut microbiome is so intangible. So, having those concrete research examples can help many people understand that, although they cannot see it, that it is something that’s incredibly important. And I want to jump back and talk specifically about Akkermansia. I just interviewed Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe, and so this is her area of expertise, is the Akkermansia and the gut microbiome. And what I found really interesting about this keystone bacteria is that it is not just important for the mucin lining, so the lining of that small intestine, but it’s also implicated in things like our endogenous production of GLP-1.

[00:06:56] So, I think a lot of people are familiarized with GLP-1 agonists, Semaglutide Wegovy, they’re very popular right now. But understanding that by supporting particular keystone bacteria, we can also then support these bacteria and have them work more effectively. Have you found that there are specific foods that are tied to supporting the microbiome in much more profound and beneficial ways than others? I would imagine things like fermented foods, etc., would be of benefit, polyphenol rich foods. 

Dr. William Li: [00:07:27] I’m going to talk about that exactly. But I want to bring one more piece of articulation to the microbiome for people that are still having a little trouble getting their arms around it. Let me tell you how to measure the microbiome. Let me tell you how to measure your microbiome or mine. Basically, you get sent a kit. Your doctor can give you a kit, or you can mail away for a kit. And it comes with a clear tube with a screw top on it. In the lab, we see these tubes all the time. And there’s a cotton applicator like a COVID testing. You don’t put it up your nose. Please do not put this up your nose because you’re going to put it on toilet paper that’s got some of your poop on it, and you just twirl it around and takes you five seconds.

[00:08:05] And then once you actually have a bit of that poop on there, you stick it in the tube, screw it shut. Now, no germs are going to go in or come out, and you stick it in an envelope and it gets mailed away to a lab, and the lab, just like after you actually get your blood drawn, the nurse will come up and the phlebotomist and draw your blood. And you see it in a tube. It’s the same deal. Goes away. And just like we can’t see our blood cells, we see just the tube of the blood going away, so too is the gut microbiome. 

[00:08:31] You send it away and you let these people with very sophisticated equipment crunch down to look for what kinds of bacteria are there. How many are they there? How similar are they? And are there any good guys there or bad guys there in the gut? And that’s really how it’s done. It takes about two to three weeks to get a result, and then it comes up on your patient portal just like everything else. And so, for anybody who’s really just had this question mark cloud over their head, “I hear this all the time, I don’t have an idea about what it’s like.” I’m bringing it right down to earth because this is exactly how it’s done. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:09:05] Do you have a particular company that you recommend or use or one that you have a preference for? 

Dr. William Li: First of all, I don’t get paid to tell you this. I’m somebody that just likes to share what I do. I think there are many different companies that are out there. I’m not promoting anyone, but I’ll tell you the one that I’ve worked with because I trust with the technology that they use and the rigor that they do. Look like you, I’m a healthcare provider, and we operate with a certain level of standard that we’re expecting. And so, when you find somebody that or a group or a lab that meets that standard, you feel comfortable with it. And when you’re not sure about the quality, we tend to be cautious about using them. So, I use a group called Sun Genomics out of San Diego, and they have done really a fantastic job. 

[00:09:51] I’m sure there are others as well, but for me, that’s been really my go to. Now, let’s talk about foods that actually help the microbiome, because measuring your microbiome is the first step to knowing what you need to do just like the blood test. “Doctor or nurse, I’m feeling a little weak. Let’s draw some blood. Let’s see. Are you anemic? Is your blood count low? If so, what can we do with nutrition? Do we need to give you a blood transfusion to tank you up?” This is part of the modern vocabulary. With the microbiome, is we have to measure first to know where we are and then we can actually make a decision about it. 

[00:10:24] So, one thing I would actually just communicate about first, since we’re talking about the measurements first, and the diseases as well, is before you just jump around and start buying probiotics, because this is where people get confused. I would say if you have a serious interest in your own gut health, go ahead and get it measured. Check it out. Ask your doctor or gastroenterologist should be able to do it or do research online and find a place that is well reviewed and credible. As I mentioned, I use sun genomics, but there are many others and get it measured. Know where you stand. That’s the first thing. If you’re going to sell, figure out what you need to do to sell your house. Get it appraised. Take a look at what you need to do before you actually invest any money in. 

[00:11:02] That’s my recommendation. In order to be able to address problems, and then also to know where you’re good, because you’re probably going to be good in some areas. Get credit for the things you’ve already done before you start reaching for the stars.  Now, having said that, let’s talk about food, because the things that we can do every single day, with or without a microbiome test. I appreciate when people are biohackers and they want to know everything about themselves, but many people, myself included, I don’t need to know what’s happening every second. But I do want to do things that are good for me on a regular basis and this is where food comes in. So, if you want good gut health and good metabolism with good gut health, you want to eat foods that are either giving you healthy bacteria and you get fermented foods. 

[00:11:48] So, what are some fermented foods that you can get in any grocery store these days? Yogurt. And I want to come back to yogurt in a second. You can get kefir, which is a fermented dairy product. You can get sauerkraut, which is fermented. You can get kimchi in a lot of places now they’ll have jars of kimchi. Can certainly go to an Asian market to get kimchi. Those are all really, really good because they contain natural bacteria. Now, I know this might sound a little controversial, but because I talked about yogurt, which is a dairy product, let me talk about cheese. 

[00:12:19] Because what researchers are finding that is quite surprising is that the epidemiological studies are showing that cheese isn’t as heart harmful as we used to think it is. In fact, it’s actually pretty good. There have been studies that have shown eating cheese can actually lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. Well, that on the surface didn’t make sense until we’re now beginning to rethink the fact that most cheeses are fermented dairy products and fermented with bacteria. They are probiotic foods. In fact, we know that Camembert, we know that Parmigiano Reggiano, the Italian stuff, the good stuff, they’re fermented with lactobacillus and other types of bacteria. The mold in a cheese that goes in a cheese cave, the blue cheese, the taste, the wonderful taste. If you like cheeses, that’s all because it’s been fermented.

[00:13:06] When you eat cheese, you’re seeding your own gut with healthy gut bacteria. And amazingly enough, when cheesemakers over thousands of years have figured out how to do this, they figured out how that the good bacteria, in using the cheesemaking process outcompete get rid of all the bad bacteria. More good than bad. There’s no drug dealers in the neighborhood. There’s only good citizens in the neighborhood. And yes, you do wanting to be careful about eating too much cheese. I’m not endorsing or telling people to eat cheese. I’m just telling you it’s another product that’s actually got probiotic properties to it. Now that’s eating the bacteria.

[00:13:38] But just like you have a dog or a cat or bird or goldfish, if you’re actually keeping a pet and think about our healthy gut bacteria as not one pet, but actually, I don’t know 39 trillion pets that are inside our gut, by the way, just to also bring it down to reality, like, people go, “Well, where is it in my gut, is it in my stomach? Is it in my esophagus? Where is it?” Most of our healthy gut bacteria lives in our colon. And if you’re above 50, you should have had a colonoscopy. And in a colonoscopy, a doctor gives you some relaxation medicine so you don’t remember it. And they put in a tube, a colonoscope that goes in through the rectum and snakes up through the colon.

[00:14:17] It goes up, it goes across your belly, and it comes down to a place where your appendix lives called the cecum. That cecum, which is a soft bag of the colon, is where most of the gut bacteria live. Your gut microbiome tends to live there. And in fact, I mentioned it’s where the appendix is. We are now beginning to believe that the appendix may play a role in air traffic control of our gut bacteria. So, whip out your appendix anymore. And I think in the future, surgeons are not going to be taking them out quite as quickly. So, when you eat good, healthy gut bacteria, that’s where it actually sits. 

[00:14:52] The healthy gut bacteria seeds, it fertilizes that garden in our colon right where that soft part of the colon, the baggy part of the cecum, where the appendix is, and the bacteria grow there. And that’s the good, healthy ecosystem. But like a pet, you got to feed your pet. You have a dog. I mean, come on. If it’s dinner time and you haven’t given Fido the kibble, you’re going to get the barking. They’re going to follow you all around, and they’re going to start rooting into the pantry. And so, we actually have to feed our healthy gut bacteria, which we call the bacteria, we call them probiotics if you’re ingesting them. Probiotic foods like sauerkraut, kimchi. But if you’re actually, what is the food for the bacteria, you got to feed them.

[00:15:31] Goldfish flakes for the goldfish. Bird seed for the parrot. Kibble for the dog. Cat food for the cat. For your gut microbiome. We give them prebiotics. Prebiotics are the food for our gut bacteria. Now, what are the prebiotics that we want to eat? Well, listen, almost everything you’ve heard about going to the produce section and eating the rainbow, colorful foods, the brassica, the green, the broccoli, the Brussels sprouts, the bok choy, the radicchio, the yellow bell pepper, the green bell pepper, and the mushrooms and all these other things that you find in the produce section, they all contain natural substances called bio actives. Yes. They used to be famous because people tagged them as antioxidants. Now we’re beginning to have a much more sophisticated view. They do a lot of different things. 

[00:16:15] One of the things, many of these bio-actives, natural chemicals in the foods in the produce section, plant-based foods, they are prebiotics. They feed our gut bacteria. So, when we eat a salad or a bean stew or a pesto. When we’re eating that stuff, we’re, of course, enjoying the taste, and we’re absorbing the micronutrients. And of course, those bio-actives are good for our health defenses and good for our metabolism. But some of that gets tumbled on down below to your gut. And before you poop it out, your future gut bacteria. And that gut bacteria takes their food and they metabolize the food that we ate for ourselves that they eat and they create from the food that we feed them, wonderful, healthful metabolites, other natural chemicals called short-chain fatty acids.

[00:17:04] And so that neighborhood of healthy bacteria in our gut, they eat dinner time, lunchtime, they nibble on the stuff, they digest it, and then they release these metabolites, short-chain fatty acids, that get into our bloodstream. We can measure these things, and when they get into our bloodstream, they go to our brain, they go to our heart, they go to our muscles, they go to our body fat, they go to our kidneys, and those short-chain fatty acids improve our overall health and mental well-being. That gut brain axis is real. The gut metabolism axis is real. So, this is actually part of the new teaching that in the future, if you’re going to go to medical school, nursing school, nutrition school, this is going to be part of the first-year curriculum because it’s the basics.

Cynthia Thurlow: That’s really so fascinating, you did such a beautiful job making it relevant to listeners. I do have a question, though, and this is something I’ve been asked with some frequency. It must be the beginning of the year and everyone’s getting their colonoscopies. The prep for the colonoscopy induces quite a bit of defecation, diarrhea. Do you have any sense of the impact on the gut microbiome from all of that forced evacuation prior to having the scope? 

Dr. William Li: Yes, it’s been studied. That’s been studied. Okay. And it’s been studied because we can measure it, and that’s the key thing. So, right now, for people listening or watching, we’re two medical professionals that are able to communicate really clearly with each other. And what we’re doing on a podcast is we’re really trying to exchange this information and have a conversation in a way that other people can understand. So, you just asked a question that a doctor or a health provider or nurse should be asking their colleagues in the clinic when you do a clean out before colonoscopy prep. If you had one, you know exactly what I’m talking about. 

[00:18:53] And if you haven’t had one, let me just tell you when they’re actually checking out and making sure you don’t have cancer or polyps or whatever as part of the check up after you’re 50, you got to get rid of all the stuff that might be in your bowels. So, you drink this big vat of stuff, and what it does is it cleans us out. So, you wind up actually having a bowel clean out, got a bunch of diarrhea that occurs usually the night before you start drinking it. And in the morning, you’re clear, and you go in there and now at the tube that your gut, colon is really easy to look at. You can shine a light around. It’s like going caving. There’s no bats in the belfry. It’s completely clean. [Cynthia laughs]

[00:19:31] And you can go check out for cancer, ulcers, and polyps and stuff like that. Now, what happens with the gut microbiome? Because, indeed, when you have a lot of diarrhea, you’re flushing out the gut. And it turns out they’ve measured after the bowel cleanout, you actually do change the gut flora. That’s the neighborhood. The makeup changes a little bit. But our healthy gut is so resilient that after a bowel prep, it starts to get back to normal in 24 hours. It starts to rebuild itself, and by the end of a week to 10 days, it’s pretty much back to normal. Normal being what it was before you cleaned yourself out, but maybe not as normal as you want to be. 

[00:20:09] And this is the point about eating healthy, because if you actually realize that every time you make a decision to eat something, snack, breakfast, lunch, dinner, you’re not deciding for one. You know how pregnant moms say, “I’m eating for two” Well, now you’re eating actually for 39 trillion plus yourself. And so, we all carry a great responsibility when we make a decision about what we’re going to eat to make sure we’re also feeding our gut bacteria properly. So, what are some of the things that damage our gut bacteria? Because I know everyone always writes that, what do I need to stay away from? So, “Dr. Li, you’re telling me maybe it’s good for my brain, maybe it’s good for my mental health, maybe it’s good for my heart, maybe it’s good for– What do I need to avoid?”

[00:20:49] Okay, let me tell you that eating a lot of added sugar in your foods damages your gut microbiome. We don’t know exactly how or why. And many things that have a lot of added sugar also have a lot of other artificial chemicals, preservatives, colorings, flavorings. So, maybe it’s also not just the sugar, but the other stuff in these ultra-processed foods. So, you want to cut down or cut out your ultra-processed foods. You want to optimize your gut health, try to eat whole natural foods that are fresh. Now, when I say fresh and I say whole, I don’t mean that you have to just eat at the salad bar, because as it turns out, when you go to the grocery store, some of the healthiest foods for our gut are actually found in the middle aisle. 

[00:21:27] So, if you actually look for beans, canned beans are also really good. Dried beans are also really good. Whole grain foods, also really good. And by the way, dark chocolate, 80% cacao as well, also good for the gut microbiome. Coffee, tea, things, you would go into the middle aisle those have been shown to actually be beneficial for our gut microbiome. Tree nuts, you know, the bulk nuts you go to in the grocery store, and you’re seeing these big plastic canisters with a shovel below it, and I don’t know what the heck I would do with if I got stuff. Well, listen, here’s what you want to do. That is gut microbiome food. 

[00:22:01] And so, what I tell people to do is take a little tub, the smaller tub. Don’t buy a lot. You don’t have to go to the big box stores. Buy enough in a little plastic tub and get a mix of the nuts, the tree nuts you like, macadamia, cashew, pecan, almonds, walnuts, and mix them up, buy it up and then bring it home. And that’s much better than buying the pre-seasoned nuclear colored stuff that you have to rip out of a bag that might taste great, but it has a lot of chemicals in it. Buy the fresh stuff. I like to cook, so I’m just telling you. Spread it out into a cookie sheet, dribble little olive oil on it, salt if you like it salty, and just roast it or you could put it into a cast iron pan and just roast it by moving around. Just does not take long at all. 

[00:22:43] And then you have your own nut mix, which you can then start adding things to it. Dried fruits, pieces of dark chocolate and now you’ve made yourself a healthy snack that you might not have otherwise realized feeds your gut microbiome, helps your overall health. And by the way, listen, what did we all come out of around the world as humans four years ago, is the great pandemic thing that made everybody realize how important our immune system is, if nothing else. Immune system suddenly became another part of our vocabulary. Look, forget about the pandemic. Let’s talk about the common cold. Let’s talk about the flu, nobody wants to get sick. You want a good, strong, healthy immune system. Your gut microbiome, healthy gut bacteria live inside the tube of the gut.

[00:23:28] They are inside the garden hose of your gut, in the wall of your gut. So, imagine if you took your garden hose and you just cut it with a pair of garden chairs. There’s a wall. 70% of our immune system is found inside the wall of our gut. 70, that’s not what they taught me in medical school, but that’s actually the case. And so, our gut bacteria talk directly to our immune system, and a good healthy bacteria system, good microbiome, means a good healthy immune system. And so, if you want to be just generally immune healthier, make sure your gut is healthy as well. 

[00:24:01] Again, we’re beginning to discover why the old adage of eating whole, fresh, plant-based foods and some of the dried ones as well are good, some of the canned ones are good, is actually better for our health. A lot of it has to do with our gut microbiome. There’s so many other reasons as well, but because the microbiome has become part of the modern conversation, the lexicon, I think it’s important to point out that this is not difficult. It’s pretty easy, because the foods that are good for our gut are all around us. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:24:29] Well, and I think that message is so important, especially as we become more polarizing. And I say we– sometimes on social media, there’s very polarizing messages. This food group is bad, this one is good. I love that you talk about that. You can find healthy foods in the middle of the grocery store not just on the perimeter. And I think for a lot of individuals, helping them understand that, thankfully, four years ago is behind us. But looking forward, we want to ensure that we are remaining as healthy as possible and that we do have some control over this in terms of food choices.

[00:25:02] I know talking about metabolism is always a hot topic. Most of my listeners are women in perimenopause and menopause, and that in and of itself, I mean, andropause also happens to men, but helping men and women understand some of the changes that are happening. But I know in our last conversation, we talked about how the research shows that our metabolism as adults doesn’t really change again until we’re closer to 60. But helping individuals understand what’s happening to our bodies as we are making that latter stage, as we’re navigating middle age up into the next stage of life, what is happening that’s impacting our metabolism so significantly? 

Dr. William Li: [00:25:38] Okay, so I’m going to give another mic drop scientific finding here. I mean, I told you about the gut bacteria making the difference of whether you respond to cancer. I talked about the bacteria that actually helps Parkinson’s, improve Parkinson’s symptoms. Now, look, metabolism is something that we have so many assumptions about. And some of those assumptions, it turns out, are just myths that have been passed on from person to person, and not just among ordinary, everyday people, but also even among healthcare professionals. And even the medical professors that taught me, taught me the wrong thing. And this is what I love about science, because I’m a scientist and I roll out of bed every day, and I’m looking at what’s the science, both the work I do, but also work other people do and it’s discovery. And there’s nothing more joyful. 

[00:26:27] Regardless of what’s going on around the world, there’s nothing more joyful than learning about something new that we’re realizing about ourselves, that is empowering, that gives us the power. Okay, so when it comes to metabolism, what are the big assumptions that turn out that everyone has? Number one, we’re all born with different metabolisms. It’s a roll of the dice. My sister was so lucky. She got a fast metabolism. She’s skinny as a rail and can eat anything. I was unlucky. I was born with a slower metabolism. I’ve always had to watch my weight and watch what I eat. So, I struggle with food. Like, that’s not me, but I’m just saying, “Oh, I have heard of that.” 

[00:26:59] Number two, we assume that when kids are teenagers and everyone who’s had a child knows this. They get to be teenagers, and all of a sudden, they’re eating two or three dinners, and they’re bouncing off the walls, and you’re like, that kid’s metabolism is going through the roof right now. That’s the only explanation. Third assumption, once you go to college, you’re going to gain those Freshman 15, and then it’s going to be a battle, because now you need to work out, go to the gym, workout, look good, blah, blah, blah. And then when you hit that magic age, 50, middle age, oh, my gosh, your body’s going to change. There’s nothing I can do about it. I got to work out harder. And so, people go, my shape’s going to change. I got to adjust my expectations. I’m not going to be able to wear this stuff anymore. 

[00:27:42] And people throw their hands up because they’re like, you know, there’s not much to do. Turns out all of that is wrong. Everything I just said is not quite correct. And here’s the deal. Metabolism is hardwired in our bodies. Our metabolism starts forming when we are still in our mom’s womb. And that makes a lot of sense, like our hearing, our sense of taste, our brain, our heart, all is formed. Our heart functions all formed when we’re in the womb and we’re born, we are like little Hershey’s kisses, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We’re all the same. We’re all created from the same blueprint. And so, our metabolism is more or less the same. 

[00:28:17] Now, of course, there are some rare diseases, unusual diseases that do take people off the main grid, but I would say, for the most part, we’re all born exactly the same way now. But the moment we actually start living real life, using energy, taking in energy, burning our fuel that we’re eating, and I’m talking about, like, childhood. I’m talking about mom and dad fed us. 

[00:28:36] That’s when our metabolism starts to be different from one another, right then and there, it’s like, Cynthia, if you were to buy the same laptop and you go to your computer store and I go to my computer store across the country, we pull out the same model out of the box, plug it in, charge it up, and boot it up, that operating system, which is the metabolism of the laptop, is going to work for you the exact same it works for me. But if I’m pounding on my computer because I’m writing my next book, and, “Oops, I spilled some coffee on it, I took it on a trip with me and I dropped it.” All those life experiences and accidents and little things that I might not notice are going to influence mine. 

[00:29:09] You’re going to keep your computer perfect on your desk and you’re going to take good care of it. You’re going to take the dust blower. Everything’s going to be perfect. [Cynthia laughs] Listen, it’s not going to be too long before my computer’s metabolism is not going to work the same way as yours. This is actually what happens in terms of diverging people. Now the other thing that happens is we’re beginning to discover, so what does the hardwiring actually look like? What’s the operating system look like? So, a study was done and published at the end of 2021. And this is, I would call a landmark research discovery in human medicine. And I’m reassured that we’re still making these discoveries. We knew everything. Life would be no fun and we’re at the end of the line. 

[00:29:49] But I love the fact we’re still discovering things. There’s a researcher at Duke University named Herman Pontzer who worked with 90 other colleagues from 20 countries and they wanted to ask a question. They said, “What does human metabolism look like over the course of a lifetime?” So, they got 6000 people from 20 countries, men and women, young and old. When I say young, I’m talking about one week old baby, newborn to old age, 90 plus years old. I think for most people that would be considered the end, the final chapter of life. And they studied their metabolism and everything in between. They studied the metabolism all in the same way. How do they do this? They gave everybody a drink of water. “Whoa, what do you mean they give them a drink of water?” 

[00:30:26] Well, in the lab we can actually take water, which is everyone knows is H2O, H is hydrogen, O is oxygen, and you can actually tweak it. You can tweak it so you can measure it. And so, if everybody drinks the tweaked water and then you can measure how your metabolism influences the hydrogen, the H and the O the oxygen of H2O in the breath, in the bloodstream, in your pee, in the urine. And that’s how they measured this for 6000 people across 20 countries, exactly the same way, never been done before. Now I want to give you the context for something. Think about this. 20 countries, 6000 people across the ages. Some people, they’re different races, different foods, different lifestyle practices, different genetics. I mean, you’re really talking about the alphabet soup of humanity here.

[00:31:13] And that’s what it also makes this study really profound is that it really did a real world study, meaning the entire world. I think they got most of the continents. I can’t remember exactly which– I can’t name them offhand, but quite a profound study. When they looked at metabolism from one week old to 90 years old, what do you think they found? Well, the first results that they came out was human metabolism with the course of lifespan was all over the map. Everyone had a different one. It was no rhyme or reason. It was just like somebody threw paint against the wall. Just like you’d expect. Just like, “Oh, there’s some lucky ones and some unlucky ones,” Actually, we now live in the age of supercomputing. 

[00:31:50] So, what these researchers did, very cleverly, is they said, let’s do an analysis of this. And what we want to do is to– we know every individual’s gender. We know their height, we know their age, we know how much they weight, so we can calculate how much extra body fat every person had and how much they’re supposed to have. So, what they did is they created an algorithm to subtract from their results the effect of excess body fat on metabolism. So, every person just had the effect of excess body fat removed. And you know what that did? It gave a result of what human metabolism was like by removing the effect of excess body fat and it turned out to be like removing the cloth from the statue of David for the first time. We suddenly saw exactly how human metabolism is hardwired from birth to the end of life.

[00:32:41] And there’s only four phases we go through. Everyone’s the same at the beginning. From zero to one year old, our metabolism skyrockets, like, one of those SpaceX rockets blasts off. And in fact, a baby’s metabolism, one year old’s metabolism is 50% higher than what their metabolism is going to be as an adult. It’s absorbing everything, moving really quickly. And by the way, this gives us pause to think about what are we exposing our babies to? Should we be giving them the microplastics in the sippy cup? What about the stuffed animals that are shedding all those little polyester micro part plastics? What about when we drive them around and they’re breathing in fumes, the new carpet they’re rolling around in? All these kinds of things are– This is what research does, is it makes us rethink what we always assume. 

[00:33:24] One year old, 50% higher than adults. Now, from one year old to 20 years old, adolescents, bouncing across, bouncing off the walls, eating two or three dinners. Guess what’s happening in metabolism when you remove the effect of excess body fat, human metabolism is going down, down, down, down to adult levels. All right, they’re getting bigger, but their metabolism is getting faster. In fact, it’s actually slowing down. That’s the second phase of human metabolism. Third phase of a human metabolism is from 20 to 60. And get ready for the mic drop, because what they found was that from 20 to 60, human metabolism is rock stable. Let me repeat that. The way we are hardwired for our adult lives, 20 to 60 years old, our metabolism is hardwired to be rock stable.

[00:34:08] This is a laptop that hasn’t been dropped, doesn’t have had coffee or tea or water spilled on it, hasn’t been banged on. It’s supposed to be rock stable. And then at the age of 60 to 90, there is about a 17% drop. But listen, what this means is that the way that our body is designed, when we come out of the factory ready to roll, is that 60 can be the new 20 if you take good care of your metabolism. Now, for those who’ve been looking carefully, you’ll know that one of the ways that they got to the statue of David picture of human metabolism is by removing the effect of excess body fat. So, you know what happened when they threw the excess body fat back into the equation? You crush the metabolism. Now, why is that surprising? 

[00:34:48] Because we’ve always assumed that a slow metabolism causes you to gain extra body fat. Now, we know it’s the opposite. Excess body fat, which is actually how our body stores fuel from the food that we eat, crushes our metabolism completely the opposite. So, this is research that’s less than four years old, it’s about three years old, and it is changing everything that we know about human metabolism. Old metabolism textbooks are being ripped up and thrown away, and the new chapters are still being written today. And this actually gives us power. And the reason it gives us power is that our metabolism is not dictated by fate. 

[00:35:20] We have the agency. We have the power to be able to use our diet and lifestyle to be able to control how much fuel we’re putting into our body and the quality of fuel we’re putting in our body so we don’t grow that excess body fat. And for those of us who have excess body fat, we can do things that can actually burn it down. And when we burn down the excess body fat, guess what happens? I mean, for anybody who’s listening, who is in that middle age and wondering, like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s nothing I can do wrong.” The new science tells us you can burn down your excess body fat, and that starts immediately to unleash your inner metabolism, to raise it back to the level, towards the level where it wants to be. 

[00:35:59] It might take a while to do it, but the agency and the powers in our hands and that’s what I wrote about in my second book, Eat to Beat Your Diet. The whole point is that you don’t need to be on a diet. It’s anti-diet book. Here are the different ways with a little bit of intermittent fasting, with choosing the right type of plant-based foods, by cooking with healthy fats, and by not overeating quantities of foods, and, of course, by exercising, by protecting your gut health, which helps your metabolism, by sleeping properly, to reboot our gut bacteria, and also to burn down body fat. Did you know that when you sleep, this is actually really interesting. When we’re sleeping and not eating, meaning fasting, we’re always intermittently fasting when we fall asleep.

[00:36:36] That when we are actually not eating, when we’re sleeping, our metabolism shifts gears like the gearbox of a Ferrari. That’s how I want you to think about your body. You’re shifting gears like a Ferrari when you’re sleeping. And your metabolism shifts from storing energy into body fat to burning energy away from body fat. So, when you’re sleeping, you’re burning fat, which is pretty cool. And so, for those people who are thinking, I don’t ever need sleep or I have difficulty sleeping, now’s the time to actually rethink that. Because when we sleep, we’re actually helping to right size our metabolism.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:37:09] And I think that’s such an important distinction. When we’re sleeping, we are burning fat. So, we’re tapping into fat stores for energy and perhaps describing that there’s different types of fat. So, for people that are listening, a lot of the pesky fat that we don’t love generally is white fat, which is not metabolically active. And you’re alluding to the fact that with targeted lifestyle changes, including nutrition, you can take the white fat, beige it to make it brown, and then that is a metabolically rich type of fat that we can use to our advantage. 

Dr. William Li: [00:37:41] Yeah, I’m glad you brought up in the last sentence you just said, Cynthia. You actually packed a lot of stuff in there, [Cynthia laughs] and maybe you’ve talked about this before, but let me unpack it for the listeners in a way that I have found useful when I’m explaining white fat and brown fat to people. You ever have a project in your house where you got to paint the walls, repaint a room? So, what do you got to do? You’re going to go to the paint store, the hardware store, and you’re going to go to one of those whatever sections, the paint section and they got a million colors there. And you got to pick up the little swatch and make sure you pick the right swatches. 

[00:38:12] And something that’s really nice for the house is if you don’t paint all your walls the same color. And even in one room, if you paint it one color and then you pick a matching color or a complementary color on the other wall, it really lights up the room. And really, this is how mother nature designed body fat. Because our fat isn’t something to be feared. Our fat is something that we should really love. And for people who are confused about that, like, “No, I don’t love my fat. I hate my fat.” Wrong. When your mom’s egg met your dad’s sperm and you became a ball of cells, the first thing, the organ that formed in your body was your circulation, because everything needs a blood supply. 

[00:38:44] Then nerves started forming because we need an electrical system to be able to power up our organs. And then soon after that, body fat formed. So, fat is one of the first organs. Yes, organ to form in our body. And you know where the first organs form a fat, they form around your blood vessels. You didn’t even have a belly yet. You had no chin to double up and you only had blood vessels of circulation. So, fat forms like bubble wrap around our blood vessels. And the reason it formed that way is because our body fat formed before birth are the fuel tanks for the energy, the fuel that we’ll eventually eat, which is our food. The same way that you have a gas tank in your car. In our body, the fuel tank is our adipose tissue, or fat, fat cell.

[00:39:25] So, don’t fear your fat. It is why you’re able to move around. Elementally, and by the way, people always go, “No, no, no, I can’t get over that.” I don’t buy that. And I would say, “First of all, look, I’m like you. I totally get it.” If you go shopping in the grocery store and you go by the butcher section and you see that T-bone or ribeye and you see that big, thick rind of fat around it, immediately I go, I hope nobody eats that. Like, that’s the visceral effect we see we think of body fat, but there is a situation that we smile when we see fat, and that’s when we see a newborn, who doesn’t smile when they see a baby, chubby, big tummy, big fat arms, big cheeks, always makes us fat. 

[00:40:06] And in fact, if you saw a baby that had fashion model chiseled cheekbones, long, thin arms, and long, thin thighs, you’d freak you out. You would say, there is something seriously wrong with that child, and you’d be right. And that’s why body fat is part of our health. It’s an organ in our body and it comes in two different colors. So, Mother Nature designed body fat just like if you’re going to the hardware store to get colors to paint your house, your room. And one color is white, and one color is brown, and the white fat is packed into two places in your body. First place is under your skin. We call that subcutaneous, under the cutin, under the skin. And that’s the stuff you can see. Subcutaneous fat is the wiggly jiggly under the arm, the double chin, the muffin top. It’s the stuff on your thighs, it’s the booty.

[00:40:48] That is the white fat, the subcutaneous fat. And, yeah, okay, admittedly, we might not want to see that. We might want to have less of it or none of it. But I will tell you, that’s not the most harmful, dangerous kind of fat. The fat you should fear, the fat you should be repulsed by is inside visceral fat. Because when you have too much of visceral fat, it’s inflammatory. And that inflammatory fat increases your risk for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and dementia. All right, and so what am I talking about, visceral fat? Look, if you are any body size, you can have too much visceral fat. If you are a large person, you’ve got a big frame. You can have too much visceral fat. It’s all packed inside. You can’t see it. 

[00:41:27] But if you’re skinny as a stick, all right, and you have a thin tube for your body, you can still have excess body fat. And that visceral fat, you need some of it. But when you overfeed, put too much fuel in your body, the fat that grows first, most aggressively is its visceral fat. And by the way, visceral fat is like a baseball glove of fat wrapped around your organs. It is really nefarious and inflammatory to everything in your body, and it leaks the fat and the inflammation to the rest of your body. And that’s why it increases the risk of all these chronic diseases. Okay, so that’s white fat. It’s all good until you’ve got too much of it, especially the visceral fat. And it’s really bad. 

[00:42:04] And if you’ve got too much of the subcutaneous, you get bummed out when you’ll stare at the mirror. Okay. Now. But some of it’s important. It’s a fuel tank. Then Mother Nature created brown fat because you mentioned brown fat or beige. Beige is mixing white and brown you get beige. But let’s talk about the other side, brown fat. Now, brown fat is actually not wiggly, jiggly. It’s not lumpy, bumpy, it’s not around your waist. Brown fat is, in fact, not even close to the skin, not subcutaneous. Brown fat is close to the bone, and it’s wafer thin. Brown fats are on our neck, it’s under our breastbone, a little bit under our arms, like a girdle or a bra, a little bit in our belly and a little bit between our shoulder blades. 

[00:42:40] And what brown fat does is it is, I think you use the word energetic. Brown fat actually is like a space heater that ignites heat. It burns fuel. It’s called thermogenesis because it makes heat thermo heat, genesis making heat, brown fat does that. And by making heat, it actually burns fuel from the harmful body fat. So, brown fat can burn down harmful fat, like visceral white fat. How do you understand? Like, we’re like, oh, man, you just said a mouthful. I can’t understand it all. Think of your brown fat like the gas range in your kitchen. If you got a gas range, okay, you’re going to boil some water or heat up some soup, you’re going to put it on the gas range. What happens when you have a gas range? 

[00:43:20] You go to the range and you turn the knob, turn it up and it goes click, click, click, click whoosh. That’s what brown fat does. It’s energetic. When you activate brown fat, you actually turn on the clicker, and there’s specific molecules that can do that. The beta 3 adrenergic receptors. For anybody who’s like, “Oh, you’re too basic. Don’t go there with me. I’ll take you down to the [unintelligible [00:43:40] [Cynthia laughs] and the mitochondrial energetics. But I’ll tell you for a simple explanation. Click, click, click, whoosh brown fat, lights up like the burner on your stovetop. And on your stovetop, it’s getting the gas, the fuel from your gas line from your town or tank outside of your house, your brown fat is getting its fuel to burn from your white fat. Good fat burns down bad fat. Brown fat burns down white fat. 

[00:44:05] And you talked about beigeing. Beigeing is sort of like, “Come on, white fat. Let’s be the good guy this time.” Let’s learn how to brown fat. But one thing I wanted to tell you and I think people always remember this. You know why brown fat is brown, Cynthia? 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:44:18] No. 

Dr. William Li: [00:44:19] Okay. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:44:18] Oh, mitochondria. That was, I guess, what I knew of it. Yeah.

Dr. William Li: [00:44:23] Exactly. So, in order to actually burn fuel and create heat, brown fat has a lot of this little tiny organ of cells called mitochondria. Now, mitochondria are like your nuclear-powered batteries, like for a pacemaker. Lasts forever, works a long time, and it can get super hot. And that’s basically what the mitochondria are. All right? Now, mitochondria happen to have a lot of iron in them. And what happens when you take a pile of nails and stick them outside for a couple of days? 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:44:50] They rust.

Dr. William Li: [00:44:51] They turn brown. They rust. So, what happens and why brown fat is brown is because it’s got so much mitochondria, and mitochondria has so much iron that when the iron oxidizes, it turns the fat brown. That’s why brown fat is brown. People like to know why. And so now you know the reason why. So, you can eat certain foods to activate brown fat. Tomatoes activate brown fat. Dark chocolate activates brown fat. Brassica, like broccoli, activates brown fat. Green tea, black tea, fermented teas activate brown fat. It’s amazing the amount of thing that activate brown fat.

[00:45:23] I came up with a whole bunch of foods, probably close to 100, in my second book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, that activate brown fat. And some foods also coax your white fat to be browner and to beige and as the white fat turns to be brown fat, it’s kind of like the reverse of Star Wars. You’re getting the bad guys, the evil empire, to become the good guys, to be the rebellion. They wind up becoming the good guys. And so, this is also really cool because it means that our body is resilient. It’s capable of shapeshifting. 

[00:45:55] And again, back to the listeners who are like, man, I’m so bummed out. There’s nothing I can do now. Absolutely not. We now know, when you are middle age, regardless of where you are in your health journey, it’s never too late to take these steps to be able to revert your health, fight your excess harmful fat, activate your brown fat, get your gut microbiome healthier. We have that agency. That’s the good news. That’s wonderful news. And even better news is that we can do it by eating foods that taste great. This isn’t about elimination. This is about addition. But you have to watch the volume that you eat because like any fuel tank, it only can hold so much. 

[00:46:34] And if you overflow the fuel tank in your car, what’s going to happen? The gas will run down the side of the car, around the tires, pull around your feet, and what are you going to be doing? You’re going to be standing, you’re going to be embarrassed, for one thing, but then you’re going to be standing in the middle of a dangerous, toxic, flammable mess. It’s going to be very dangerous. In the body, we don’t have a clicker of the gas station nozzle. We can eat, we can eat, we can eat, we can eat, even good quality food, we overeat it. The fuel that we overstuff into our fuel tanks, i.e., our fat cells, will just get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And now we are filled with visceral fat, too much of it dangerous and inflammatory. And so, volume quality makes a big difference.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:47:18] Such an important point. And I’d love to round out the conversation talking about beverages, because there were a lot of questions that came in. Obviously, we’ve touched on green tea and fermented teas. I would love touch on that, as well as coffee and anything else you’d like to add in. I was listening to a podcast where you talked about how dairy added to beverages can have a huge impact on whether or not you’re able to access some of the benefits from the polyphenols. 

Dr. William Li: [00:47:45] Right. Okay, so let’s start from the beginning. Coffee and tea are the number two and number three most popular beverages in the world. The number one is drinking water, just plain old water. And it turns out that actually all three including drinking water, can actually start to burn down some of that harmful visceral fat that you don’t want. The way that coffee and tea does it, it has got these polyphenols, catechins and teas, chlorogenic acid and caffeic acid and coffee and many, many other molecules, some of them we haven’t even discovered yet. Okay, so there’s active research in this, but we do know that they light up our healthy processes in our body to be able to have a stronger immune system, lower inflammation, better metabolism, burning down harmful body fat as well. So how do you get the most out of these polyphenols? 

[00:48:27] Well, before I talk about the dairy, how do you get the most? Right, that’s always want to ask. Well, it turns out that many of these polyphenols are the plant’s reaction. Coffee is a plant, it’s a berry, and tea is a leaf that they make these polyphenols as a wound-healing mechanism, meaning the plant, when it gets injured, it’s got to heal itself. So, it makes the stuff, these polyphenols. Well, how does the plant get wounded? Well, if it’s growing naturally in the most pristine environment, what’s going to happen during the summer when the fruits are forming and the leaves are forming? You’ve got insects naturally buzzing around, landing on, nibbling on the leaves and the stems. That’s an injury. So, most of these polyphenols are made in response to injury from bugs. 

[00:49:13] I will tell you that when you have organic tea, organic coffee, you’re going to get more of the polyphenols. So, that’s how you get more. Now how do you make sure you’re getting into your system? So, how do we get the most out of these polyphenols? Because they’re present in any tea or any coffee. Is that you want to drink the tea or the coffee in a pure state and when gets into your stomach and your gut, it absorbs into your bloodstream and that’s where you get to do all the good stuff. And for your metabolism and burning down body fat and starving cancer and doing all kinds of other good things. 

[00:49:46] Now who hasn’t had coffee with milk or cream and who hasn’t actually had an English breakfast tea or an English afternoon tea that didn’t have a little bit of milk or cream in it, right? So, this is like part of what we expect. Now, Asians tend to drink their tea straight. Go to a sushi bar and you get little green tea completely straight. They’re not giving you any cream with that. Same thing as a Chinese restaurant. You’re getting the straight tea. I think in Thai tea they actually do add cream to it. But okay, turns out that dairy, not milk, but dairy like cream or half and half or will actually or milk is fat. 

[00:50:22] And when fat goes into a liquid, you know that old saying that oil and water don’t mix well, the dairy fat doesn’t dissolve in the liquid of the tea or the coffee. And so, sticks to like, so the dairy fat forms a little soap bubble around itself. At the microscopic level, you can’t really see it. It just looks all the same to you in the cup. But that little microscopic bubble of dairy, the dairy soap bubble, the little soap bubble will actually trap the polyphenols. And when you drink soap bubbles, all right, they tumble through your gut. They don’t get absorbed as easily. And so, you’re not getting as much as you could get out of. You’ll get some but you won’t get as much. You’ll get about 20% as opposed to the whole of the benefit. 

[00:51:00] So, that’s why if you drink tea straight or you drink coffee straight, black, you’re actually going to get the most. If you want to actually cut it with something and still get some of those benefits, I tell you to use a nut milk or a soy milk, almond milk, cashew milk, and macadamia milk. All those things are fine. You know why? Because they’re not dairy. They’re not made of dairy fat. They don’t form soap bubbles. And so, if you want to cut your coffee or tea, use that rather than dairy. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:51:25] Such a helpful tip and one that I would imagine many people are unaware of. Dr. Li, always a pleasure to connect with you. Please let listeners know how to purchase your books, how to connect with you online, and curious to know if you’re working on any new books. The question in the back of my head is, what are you working on now? 

Dr. William Li: [00:51:43] As a scientist, we continue to explore the new frontiers. So, I’m actually working on healthy aging, but from a way that’s very different than most people think. I can’t talk about it right now because I want to save it for when I actually do write my book. My next book will come out in a couple of years, but the research is so exciting, I can’t tell you. And again, just like my other books about food, it’s not about fear. It’s about leaning into. It’s about enjoyment. I think the way that I write and what I write about is really about getting as much joy out of our lives as possible. Along the way, taking advantage of the fact that some of the most joyful things can actually be good for us and we shouldn’t fear those things. 

[00:52:27] So, if you want to see all the setup and examples of my writing and hear about more than 200 foods that light up your health and fight fat and improve your metabolism, you can get my books Eat to Beat Disease or Eat to Beat Your Diet. Okay, think about it as Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, there’s a sequel. You can watch each one independently and it’s a good flick. You can read each book independently, but if you want to start with the beginning, Eat to Beat Disease and then Eat to Beat Your Diet follows the same characters move into a new battlefield with new discoveries. You can get them anywhere books are sold, you can click, and it’ll be on your doorstep the next day or you go to an independent bookstore or go to one of the big chain bookstores. 

[00:53:06] And if you want to hear what I’m actually doing and some of the things that I’m seeing, I encourage people to follow me on social. My handle is @drwilliamli or sign up for my free newsletter which is link in bio or come to my website drwilliamli.com. Sign up for my free newsletter because my mission is to get information out to people that can actually help change their lives and give them the agency, give them the power so it doesn’t cost you anything. I got a whole team of people talking to me every day about the new things to actually put out to folks. And so that gives me joy to be able to share this information. And I thank you so much for inviting me onto your podcast to do it again. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:53:46] Absolutely. Such a pleasure.

[00:53:50] If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review, subscribe and tell a friend.