Humans have coevolved with food and its medicinal actions on our bodies, meaning we have actual cell receptors for specific food-derived molecules. So why aren’t doctors trained in how to use food as medicine? We’re taught all about using pharmaceuticals to affect our biology, but the power of food is left high and dry. I think this is a foundational area of medical training we need to change. That’s why I’m so excited to talk to one of my favorite people and thinkers in the world of food and medicine on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, Dr. William Li. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, ButcherBox, Beekeepers Naturals, and ARMRA. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,500 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. ButcherBox is giving new members two pounds of ground beef for FREE in every box. Visit ButcherBox.com/Farmacy and use code FARMACY. Head to BeekeepersNaturals.com/HYMAN and use the code ‘HYMAN’ to get 20% off sitewide. Save 15% on your first order of ARMRA Colostrum and unlock the power of 400+ functional nutrients. Just visit TryARMRA.com/Mark or use code MARK.
Chapter 1: What are the key principles of using food as medicine?
You're not necessarily going to get a deficiency disease, but you're going to get a chronic disease if you don't eat them. And there's massively protective foods. And we were chatting earlier before the podcast that right now in science, and it's advancing so fast that we are understanding the mechanisms by which food actually has its action and how we can use it in a pharmacologic way.
It's not like, oh, just eat healthy. Just like there are thousands of drugs, there are thousands of molecules in food. And we can use those in very specific, targeted ways to... do different things in the body to create health or if we eat the wrong things to create disease. So you're this extraordinary scientist.
You've been published in all the major medical journals at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Tufts. And somehow you come back to this simple notion that Hippocrates said 5,000 or how many years ago, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. What made you take that left turn? Or maybe it was a straight ahead, every elbow else is going left.
And how do you sort of begin to sort of unpack this notion that was so critical for you to understand that you could eat to beat disease?
Yeah, well, so Mark, like yourself, you know, as an MD, we're trained to identify diseases, diagnose diseases, and write prescriptions and send patients to specialists to take care of the disease. But we all know that the ways that we have been trained in medicine fall short of what it is that patients really seek.
And if you've ever been a patient yourself, you certainly know what we want is really to be healthy and to be well. It's okay to get sick once in a while, but if you are, you wanna kind of bounce back. And so that led me as an internal medicine doctor to ask the question that nobody in medical school ever taught me, which is what is health? Health is not just the absence of disease.
That's an extremely unsatisfying definition. The absence of something, like what's a good day? It's the absence of rain. That doesn't make any sense. So you wanna actually have a definition. And the working definition that I came to emerged out of 25 years that I had involved with drug development. I'm still doing it.
But the idea with drug development is that we have to understand the body inside and out. We have to identify those molecular pathways, those receptors, the kind of the Achilles heel of disease. Well, turn that inside up, up in that idea. You still need to know what the mechanisms are and the receptors are. But rather than looking at the Achilles heel of disease,
Let's take a look at the struts that support the infrastructure that support health. And if you take a look at everything that is unpharmaceutical with a pH, you wind up actually with pharmaceutical with an F, which is why I love being on the doctor's pharmacy. Right. So look, I mean, like you and I have had many of these conversations before. And for me.
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Chapter 2: How can we reduce inflammation through diet?
in terms of what's in them. In terms of the way that foods and drugs work together, I think you're sort of bringing up a very interesting point here. I think there's a lot of conversation about you know, drug interactions and how you shouldn't take certain things with certain, like people say, oh, don't have fish oil if you're on a blood thinner, and it's more a negative.
But it turns out that there's a lot of kind of power in combining food with medicines to activate the power of the medicines, but also to mitigate some of the effects and side effects of the medicine, because they contain compounds that help to benefit.
Yeah, well, so what is the first thing that doctors learn when they enter the clinical phase of medicine is that old adage, first do no harm. I actually think that's the wrong priority. I think the first thing we should do is to deliver benefit. And you flip that around to first deliver benefit. Why are we thinking about the bad stuff when we can actually focus our minds on the good stuff?
If you're going to first deliver benefit, you have to think about food. And this is where the reliance on the prescription pad that so many people encounter when they see their primary care doctor. I think every patient knows that there's something that's not being discussed. There's something that is so important that isn't being part of the dialogue.
Well, you know, I can tell you that my mind opened on food and medicine, not food versus medicine, right? So you got these kind of extremists who are, you know, the guy that quit clinical medicine, they stand up at a soapbox, they wave a frond of kale, and they basically say, you know, eat this and everything will be cured. And
I think that that is as wrong as somebody who only writes prescriptions. Absolutely. We all need to bring to do first, do good first, deliver benefit. What we need to do is to think about all the tools in our toolbox we can give them.
And so, you know, one of the studies that I thought was really interesting was done by the University of North Carolina, where they were taking young, healthy people who were just getting a flu vaccine. you know, wintertime flu vaccine. And they wanted to see if they gave them some food on top of that, it would make a difference in terms of how well their immune systems responded to the vaccine.
So they actually took broccoli sprouts baby three to four-day-old broccoli plants, which contain lots of sulforaphanes. These are the natural biochemicals. A sprout, broccoli sprouts, contain 100 times more sulforaphane than the grown-up broccoli. And so you turn them into a shake, and they just gave them two... cups of shake, two shakes to drink every day.
Plus they got the flu vaccine and they gave half of the people a placebo shake with no broccoli sprouts. Probably didn't taste very good. And then they measured they swabbed their nose to measure the number of bacteria or viruses that were present, flu viruses. And then they did a blood test. So this is just like you would do in a pharmaceutical trial.
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Chapter 3: What foods should we prioritize for better health?
Yeah, yeah. I had a patient once who did not want to take any supplements, and she came to see me, and she said, look, I know I need this much zinc, and I need this much magnesium, and I need this much folic acid, and I need this much... And she basically showed me, she's like, I need 17 pumpkin seeds, and I need like 12 almonds, and I... She's like...
I was like, wow, that's impressive because she literally did the research to find out what nutrients are in the food. Now, hopefully she was getting it from sources where actually the food she was buying had the nutrients that are supposed to be in there. But it's really quite amazing. And I think, you know, William, I think that most doctors don't understand the power of food.
Because if I said, oh, do you have a headache, William? Okay, well, I'm a doctor. I'm going to prescribe aspirin for you, and you need to take 650 milligrams of aspirin. That will help your headache. But if I just gave you a milligram of aspirin, I would conclude that aspirin doesn't have anything to do with headaches. But we're not prescribing the right drug in the right dosage.
And I think we don't see the outcomes that we can see as such as reversing heart failure, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, chronic digestive problems, skin diseases, mood disorders. I mean, you just go on and on down the list. And it's like, wow, we're missing this entire pharmacology that is so critical.
Years ago, I wrote an article called Food is Pharmacology, Eating Your Medicine, basically based on this Chinese meal I had in a restaurant in Hong Kong that was like ginkgo nuts and Chinese wood ear mushrooms and this thing and that thing and everything had its medicinal properties. And Chinese folks have known this forever.
In fact, the word for take your medicine is chur yao, which means eat your medicine, right? Exactly. Which was the name of my PBS show that did really well. I think they're onto something. I feel like it's so critical.
I think you're right. Here's something in real time I can tell you that I'm in the process of working on. You're going to like this because this comes from one of your home-based institutions out of Ohio. There was a study that did a computational analysis.
Artificial intelligence to take a look at what medicines might be associated with lowering the risk of some serious disease like Alzheimer's disease. And so here here is the Cleveland Clinic. They were taking a look at seven million people's medical records.
and putting a computer program into mine and see like 1600 different kind of medicines that people are taking all these different disease states that people are having and trying to figure out what was there any connection interconnection of the pattern at the genetic level and what they found was truly amazing because at the end of the day and here's the punch line for the study they found surprisingly that men who were taking viagra sildenafil
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Chapter 4: How does food diversity impact our health?
All of it is really derived from raw materials of food and the quality matters. And just like the study you talked about, depending on where the food's grown, how it's grown. how it's stored, transport, shipped, all of that, how it's cooked, all that matters.
And I think now that we're beginning to understand this from a scientific point of view, it's no longer sort of a platitude to say that food is medicine, but it literally is medicine. Right.
Well, I mean, and I think that, again, we have just come through this really, really dark tunnel that we're starting to really get back to see the light that Again, this medicine, this form of medicine, food, is something that doctors are not prescribing for us because they don't need to. It's something that we can actually do for ourselves. This is the power, the agency of actually food.
It's something that we can take control of our own lives. And that's one of the things that happened to me personally is that as I was staring out the window, realizing that
that pharmaceuticals were not able to play a role at the very beginning of the pandemic i started realizing that the messages that we deliver you and i and many other people that work in our field out there is an incredibly important thing for us to be able to share with the community thanks for listening today if you love this podcast please share it with your friends and family leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts
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