Dr. William Li
Appearances
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And the actual bacteria is called Lactobacillus plantarum. So I'm just sharing with you discoveries 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If there's a connection between gut and brain, maybe we should be looking at the connection between gut and longevity. Interesting. And that's where some of the really exciting new stuff is coming out as well.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 100th birthday party. Come on.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And I saw 100 candles on his cake. That's impressive. Yeah. So I know it can happen in my own family.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. He hosted the thing. So it's possible. Yeah. Okay. Now, most people think that, you know, living to 100 would be like a crapshoot, a long shot.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Like, oh, if I could, in a healthy way, live to 100, it would 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 people. Today, there are 722,000 people who are centenarians living in the world.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Almost a quarter, three quarters of a million of 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 to 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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah. And now we can actually study the poop in the microbiome of people who are 100 and older. So centenarians are people who live to 100. But it turns out that there's something called a super centenarian. or an alternate super ager. And these are people that live to 114, 115 years old. All right. Um, and like, they're really interesting.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 a hundred. And then, and then like the super agers, okay. Like a hundred to 115 or under 14, um, And in today's technology, believe me, I think that wearables are great. I think that biohacking devices are quite amazing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But I think it's even more amazing that we can actually study the gut microbiome of 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 long, okay? It turns out there are four bacteria that are standouts in people that live to 100 and beyond.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
They have more of it. Gotcha. They have more of it. Like 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 odoribacter. Odoribacter? Odoribacter. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
One of them is called oscillobacter. Um, one of them is called Kristin Sonnella. And then the fourth one is our old friend, Akkermansia. Okay. And we've talked about Akkermansia before, which, you know, it's sort of in making the rounds as a important gut bacteria.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I think the last time I was here, I was telling you that there've been discoveries that if you have cancer and you're on immunotherapy, which jacks up your own immune system to attack the cancers, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 for that to happen. Okay. To really get a great response. To help you reverse cancer. Yeah. Help your own immune system reverse cancer. Wow. Okay. Interesting. Gut bacteria talks to your immune system. 70% of your immune system lives in your gut. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
The immune system lives in the... The walls. In between the drywall of the house. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Plants, whatever, yeah. Exactly. So what do we eat that affects our gut microbiome, the healthy bacteria, directly affects our immune system.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
More than we think. More than we think.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. Yeah. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 study antigenesis, how our blood vessels grow, that circulation. I've done research.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
There's one bacteria called Lactobacillus ruderi. 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 actually double the rate of wound healing from the inside out. Really?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Well, it's a, you can, you can, you can, it's a tablet or you can chew it. Chew or swallow. Lactobacillus ruderi. So Lactobacillus ruderi, by the way, is an amazing bacteria because it, 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. Used to be present in everybody.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
after the 1930s and 40s with the advent of antibiotics coming out like it became maybe it's there maybe it's not not surprisingly okay and so a lot of people don't have it um 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
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
This is just like a- No, this is like, I'm just telling you a normal- Well, I'm telling you, this is a normal physio- I'm telling you about the physiology, like 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
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 on a blood cell. It's like calling an Uber. Send 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And then when the baby takes their first suckle, They get a rush. They get the rush of the bacteria. That's another way that moms actually give babies there. They get the injection of bacteria, including lactobacillus reuteri, right? Okay. Now, this bacteria- So it's important to do breastfeeding then? Oh, yeah. It's part of the reasons.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 like, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah. I mean, there are legitimate medical reasons where, you know, it's impossible. There's complications, all that kind of stuff. And I totally get it. Like, then you got to make accommodations for it. But still, you know, it is always better for the baby, for the mom to actually breastfeed. By the way... So, I'm, you know, diving into all this stuff.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You find all this, like, fascinating stuff out about the gut microbiome. And from the beginning of life, like babies, all the way to the far reaches of life, like these super-agers. These four bacteria, by the way, you know, the odorobacter, the ocilobacter, the christinella, the acromantia, they all do... They all play functions in the body, and we're figuring them out.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
They improve your metabolism. They lower inflammation. They help your immunity. They lower your cholesterol. 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 super-agers. And there are foods that we can eat to grow these bacteria, to cultivate these bacteria.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 akkermansia. Okay. It turns out that chili peppers can do the same thing. Black raspberry turns out can do the same thing. Oh, by the way, for acromantia, here's like a new discovery as well.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I'm all about like my science background is all about discovery and like pushing the frontiers of things. Hewn 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 gave it a name. It's called P, as in Peter, P9, acromantia.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
All right. They've now discovered that that P9 bacteria, the P9 fragment of acromantia, actually causes your body to secrete its own GLP-1. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Probably cancer, probably cardiovascular disease. The big ones, all the big ones are diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases, probably even lung diseases.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Imagine if we could actually tackle mental health, mental wellness, and physical wellness all at the same time. And gut bacteria clearly plays a role. It's not the only thing, but it is the undiscovered country.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Exactly. Well, this is what we're beginning to really, I would say, unravel and take, you know, 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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
When you and I are born, my operating system and your operating system, 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 and my metabolism are closer than more different, but, you know, because we take care of ourselves, but why is it that people develop such divergence, so different?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Metabolisms, for example, or maybe longevity patterns. And it turns out, you know, just like your laptop, you know, if you take care of your laptop, you turn it off at night, you clear the case. Yeah. 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 drop it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It gets really hot in the car. I spill coffee on it or whatever. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And actually, definitely for our metabolism, but probably for our longevity as well, You know, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So screw it. I'm just going to do whatever I want to do. Do whatever, drink whatever. Yeah. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, what do you do with your what do you do with your computer? 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, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Okay. This is not like booking a seat in a movie theater online. I'm 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 line.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Good to see you, Luis. Thanks for having me.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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, people are very complicated. And the scenario you described is somebody who's like...
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Take it easy on yourself because, you know, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 an F, not a PH. Yes.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
First of all, I think that this idea that 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 time 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 process often gets confused. So let's start there. Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. Oh, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 OK, so that's processing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So that's different than going to ultra processing, which is having a factory extrude the ingredients, shape them into animal crackers or whatever, and then Adding flavors, adding coloring, adding stabilizers, adding emulsifiers, and then throwing in all these like chemical ingredients that you can't pronounce. You have no idea what they do in there. That's ultra-processed.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah. And I'll tell you what we know as it relates to longevity. So first of all, I try to break it down really simply. Our body is like your car. When you put 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 ultraprocess, 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 and other ways we don't even know yet.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
By the way, the whole conversation about ultraplastics, 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 that you found in ultra processed foods. It's like leaching through. Yeah. That remains to be seen, you know.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 the symphony of effects.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If you ever go to listen 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 that we don't absorb goes tumbles down all the way to your lower gut. What does it do? It feeds our gut microbiome.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We've got 39 trillion hungry little baby birds in a nest waiting to be fed, okay? And the dietary fiber we eat actually feeds them. How important is this? And 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
But for cancer, for example, there was a study from the MD Anderson Cancer Center that 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 the gut bacteria. Gut bacteria need to eat, okay? Got to feed them.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Turns out for every five to six grams of dietary fiber, it decreased mortality by 30%. Mortality, death. Okay. Death. Decreased 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 pear has five to six grams of dietary fiber. Not a big ask. Okay. You do one of those a day.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
One of those a day or the equivalent to get the dietary fiber. Of course. 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? Yeah. Within 24 hours. Come on. You can start getting changes.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So, you know, 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. OK, cut down some of that ultra processed stuff. I'll talk about what the ultra processed stuff does in a second. And you'll start to get these changes. You're hardwired to do this.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Your body wants to do it. You know, let it do its job.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Well, the changes start fast. And so, you know, 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 sucks. I'm going to actually like eat healthy now. You start getting it back pretty quick.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You're like, I am so glad. I'm doing this, right? So the changes happen fast. So I think, you know, so 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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, right? That's not what you want to do.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, killing the gut bacteria, by the way, is like, we're talking about the symphony, Beethoven's fifth, you know, where Handel's Messiah, big choir, you know, in a big concert hall, you know, like hurting your gut bacteria, like ultra processed foods and all these artificial things. It's like sending in, um, uh, uh,
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It's like sending in hooligans from a British football game screaming into a concert hall and kicking over all the instruments.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. In other words, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Well, alcohol will do it. Smoking also can affect it. Not getting enough good sleep, not getting exercise can also affect your gut.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
No, not at all.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
In fact, it's so significant that some of the researchers looking at environmental toxins have been even looking at not only smoking and vaping, but looking at even cooking. Think about the line cooks at a restaurant.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And all the fryer smoke.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Listen, you and I- That was good. We probably have spent more time, we've probably done our time standing in 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, you know, that's part of growing up, you know, and doing our thing, all right? Think about all that stuff that we're breathing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Okay? Fortunately, you know, like most people aren't grilling everything. It's minimal, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And researchers and public health and policymakers, I think that there's starting to be a convergence And recognizing that, you know, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Now's the time to think about it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Less ultra processed.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
No, I think that's probably a good first step. I mean, of course, there's a lot of little bitties. 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, right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Easy excess, okay? And easy excess is the cheap stuff, which is the ultra processed stuff, which is definitely the bad stuff, right? So not the good stuff.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You know, honestly, I would tell you, don't even, 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 are designed to take in food as fuel. All right. Like remember I gave you the analogy, the gas, the car at the filling station, getting your tank filled up. Right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 fuel tank goes, you know, your tank's running low.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Now, like, OK, I got to get something to eat. OK, 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 when the gas tank in a car fills up to the top, it goes click, and now no more gas comes out.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We get out, we put it away, okay? And then we drive off, right? Our tank's full. Our body doesn't have the clicker.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
If we had a clicker?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Don't burn it now. Don't 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, 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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And you want more and more.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. Don't feel like you have to clean the plate. Take your time eating so that when your stomach starts to get full, you'll start feeling that you're satisfied. You don't have to feel full. Like we're trained to eat until we're full. Yeah. All right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
and you're eating okay and you're like oh my god i gotta 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 you got 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
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And my feeling is that if you could get an 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. Really? 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Third thing is something that everybody can do. By the way, Lewis, I'm telling you, all things don't cost a lot of money. Exactly. In fact, they will save you money.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
All right? That's the key thing. You don't have to be 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. OK, I get up. I take I take my time. If I if my workday starts early, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We were told by our moms, we got to eat breakfast in order to learn something at school, have enough energy. Totally not true. By not eating breakfast, what we are immediately doing is, It's 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
You've extended your, quote, fasting period. Yes. Maybe 12 hours. OK, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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, OK. You'll be fine. Yeah. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 it is just walk.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
By the way, have you heard of the glymphatic system in the brain?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 are called glia. G-L-I-A. So glymphatic system is a sewer system that's normally closed during the day.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We've got 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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're building up toxins in our brain, oxidative stress, all kinds of stuff that's going on in our brain. When we sleep, two nights, Okay.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 of 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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And if you don't, by the way, you get brain fog. You know why you get brain fog?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Okay. Now, I think in general, what I would say is that I have an opinion about alcohol, okay? And my opinion about alcohol is this. From the time that humans started to grow grains 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 it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So to me, I think that, you know, drinking some wine, having some alcohol is really part of our humanity. All right. The problem becomes 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So whether you drink a little or a lot, you know, the bottom line is it's still a toxin. So the more you have, the more toxicity your body's... The more toxin your body's got to purge. Yes. Every now and then, it's probably not a big deal. Like, sell a... have a great glass of wine or bottle of wine on your birthday. Don't drink the whole bottle. Sure, sure. Enjoy it with some friends, okay?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 is different. You know, your liver might work a little bit more efficiently than mine. So you're going to clear a little bit better.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 got to regenerate those. So you're going 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I think, you know, like, you know, you got to you got to enjoy if you're going to want you want to live for a long time. You want aiming for longevity. You know, life is for the living. So you've got to live your life. I'm a big believer in that. But just but you got to be aware of what it is you're putting into your body and how your body is responding to it.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
When you actually change the starch so it becomes a little harder to digest, like you refrigerate day-old rice, okay? It becomes a resistant starch. A potato. You're going to roast some potatoes. All right. You stick them in the fridge. The next day, the natural chemistry of the potato, the starches changes. You got some resistant starch.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
So that's really kind of like 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Resistant starch can grow some of those bacteria that are found in ultra agers, super agers. Okay. Also some natural foods, green bananas, resistant starch, plantains, resistant starch. All right. So any roasted potato, stick 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Amazing.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
We don't know, and it's going to be different for different medicines. I will tell you that some medicines might actually be very harmful. And I think that we're just still at the beginning of discovering. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 4000 years of medical knowledge. You graduate medical school with your stethoscope around your neck, figuring that, you know, like, OK.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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, you know, like some other thing is going on in our brain, inevitably the gut's going to be affected in some way. Really? As I said, like we don't have it all figured out yet. But it's impacting it. Probably not for the better.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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, but... You know, there's beneficial gut-brain interactions.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. And we can actually take a science-based approach to look at, you know, how everything is connected. It's that idea of like draining the Pacific Ocean and seeing how the islands are connected.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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? Suit. I think it's part of our humanity. Like we always want to know how we can actually go beyond our own limitations.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 life. where we're going. You want 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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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-negotiables. I just don't get enough. And I think most people don't get enough either, honestly. Because I do work in this area, you know, I have an unfair advantage of seeing the results of research and thinking, oh, wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 ruderi, 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Lactobacillus is what makes the sourdough bread tangy, which people like, but you can't eat that much sourdough bread. Lactobacillus ruderi is also in... the Italian version of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. It's so good. Big. Yeah. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
It text messages your brain for that oxytocin. What's that one called again? Lactobacillus ruderi. And by the way, it's lactobacillus ruderi. It's spelled R-E-U-T-E-R-I. I'll give it to you so you can put in the show notes. Yeah, please. Lactobacillus ruteri. And I'll tell you, I actually order the kind, like this is stuff you get on Amazon. I get the kind that you can chew. Okay, I like that.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. Now I'll chew up a couple of these babies. I'll swish them around and then I'll swallow it. Good for the upstairs, good for the downstairs. I'm in. Right?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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, you know, they go gonzo over these like incredible books written by really amazing people.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 say it's been so talked about on, you know, on social media and YouTube and podcasts. I like, I do the research on it. Okay. So I, and my colleagues are doing the research on it. So I I'm looking at it and this bacteria actually is really, really important.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And I'm a cancer researcher, so I know just how important that can be. So I do take that probiotic, but I also don't rely on probiotics. From my acromancy, I also drink some pomegranate juice and I'll have dried cranberries. I use supplements as a top-off. which is what supplement means. Yeah, yeah. All right. But I try to get most of my- Of foods. Things from foods, yeah. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. Okay, gotcha.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Those are the main ones I do. Gotcha. 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 out. 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
This is what I do, and people always ask me, so I'm happy to share it with you. That's great.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Yeah, three times a week. And then we actually add more content whenever I can. And the way that I train my YouTube is that I look really closely at what people, my audience and people who hear about me, they want to ask me. So I get lots of, I could collect information, like what are the questions that people want to know?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
And then I create my YouTube content based on answering what people want to know.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I'm a scientist, so if I don't know it, I'm going to tell you I don't know. That's okay, because we can't know everything. 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. Health is not elitism. Health is universal. It's something we can all do because we're all hardwired to actually heal.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. Just follow your own signals with a little bit of guidance and you can get there.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
Thanks for inviting me.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 Buettner, 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
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I'm a researcher, so I ask that same question from a slightly different perspective. Right, right.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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's 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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, 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?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
What if there is another factor that has been hidden in plain sight? which is our gut bacteria.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
The brain, yeah. And until recently, we didn't have the tools. We didn't have the tools in the toolbox to be able to look at it. But today... 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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...
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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 vector, and by the way, it's not just in your poop.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
When bad bacteria overgrow, you get bad breath, you get cavities, you get gum disease, you get all the things that, you know, like, you know pretty quickly, right? Or your bed partner actually knows. Sure, sure. Okay. So there's a big concentration in your mouth, and we're still beginning to figure out what those are.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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. So imagine your gut from mouth to end, anus, 40 feet long.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
The last 25% is your colon- Uh-huh. 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 sac in your colon called the cecum, spelled C-E-C-U-M. And you know what's in the cecum?
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
I mean, if you think about it, like if you want to 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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
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.
The School of Greatness
How To Prevent & REVERSE Disease With THESE FOODS To Live Longer | Dr. William Li
By the way, there is a bacteria, a probiotic that's 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 PS-128. And, you know, 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.