The Incredible Benefits Of Eating Mushrooms For Longevity | Dr. William Li

And I was really interested in the mushroom section. Mushrooms are also very popular right now, you know, for lots of reasons. Some psychedelics, some, you know, the more sort of rare forms like lion's mane and chaga. But even your regular store cupboard mushrooms are fantastic. Let's dive into that a bit because it's got multiple attributes, right? First of all, I love mushrooms. It happens to be one of my favorite foods. Look, this is like, I'm on the Doctor's Kitchen podcast, so I got to talk about my enjoyment of food. And I like to cook like you. So, you know, there's nothing... Whenever I go to the market and I see really good mushroom specimens, especially the ones that are seasonal or not that common, I'll buy them right up. They are mother nature's like umami bomb. They taste great. They're easy to cook. And, you know, from a medical food is medicine perspective, I can tell you they contain a bioactive called beta-D-glucan. Happens to be a soluble fiber. So this beta-D-glucan is not only a bioactive that activates your health defenses and activates your metabolism, it's a dietary fiber that feeds our gut microbiome. So mushrooms are good for gut health and overall health and our metabolism at the same time. Now, what's really interesting about beta-D-glucan is where is it found in the mushroom? Most people who buy mushrooms and cook with mushrooms get the cap. They cut off the stem, throw away the stem. And the cap does have beta-D-glucan, but the stem of the mushroom has twice as much beta-D-glucan. So if you're cutting mushrooms up, cook with the stem or do something else with the stem. You can put it into a smoothie. You can actually make a soup out of it, make a stew out of it, saute it. Whatever you're going to do, don't throw them away because they actually have a lot of this great natural resource that's good for your health and good for your metabolism. Now, this has been studied, by the way, in clinical studies where they actually looked at substituting just... So they took a group of meat eaters. These are carnivores. They eat red meat almost every day. They just asked them to swap out the beef for the meat for mushroom, which is kind of meaty-like, just two times a week. So these are people that ate meat seven days a week, two days out of the week, eat some mushrooms instead of the meat. So think about it. That's five days of meat eating, two days of mushroom eating. At the end of the year, they actually found that the meat eaters actually gained weight, increased their body fat, their waist size increased, the full meat eaters, just like you'd expect. But the people who swapped it out for mushrooms just twice a week, okay, was something that can be made to taste like meat, actually. Put it on the grill, barbecue, saute them. You can really get a really, really nice, unctuous kind of like flavor out of this umami bomb. They actually shrank their waistline by an inch. They lost by body composition some of the harmful body fat, the visceral fat. Their blood pressure came down. So mushrooms are really, really powerful. And by the way, these are culinary mushrooms. You know, you mentioned chagas and lion's manes and cordyceps. You know, one of the things that I like to tell people is that medicinal mushrooms, we have to be careful about them because they're separate from culinary mushrooms. And although they're very popular these days, you don't want to treat medicinal mushrooms just like you would treat culinary mushroom. Culinary mushrooms, what are those? Well, they're all over the place. White button, portobello, crimini, maitake, porcini, enoki mushrooms. I mean, the list goes on. Trumpet mushroom, king trumpets. So many to choose from. They don't have medicinal, psychotropic, or any other immuno-influencing properties the way that certain medicinal mushrooms do. Medicinal mushrooms tend to be very expensive. And there was a reason, dating back thousands of years, where healers, traditional healers, reserved medicinal mushrooms for specific ailments. And I think that's one of the cautions I want to give is just because they're called mushrooms and just because you can buy them and just because they're not regulated as such, look at the wisdom of the elders. People were not eating chaga mushrooms. They weren't making a chaga mushroom omelette, for example, whereas they would actually make a white button mushroom omelette. Be careful. Yeah. It's a very good point. And I think food, I mean, as you talk about in your books, food is medicine. And there are certain foods that are particularly and uniquely powerful that we need to be careful. I get this a lot from my parents as well, growing up in an Indian household, having lots of Ayurvedic traditions. There are certain foods, things like ashwagandha or even ginger, something that we want to make sure that we're not overdoing because it can have a negative impact in overuse. And I think that's why diversity is very important, actually exploring all the other foods available to us. That's right. Diversity is very important. Moderation is very important. Finding unique new combinations of things are really important as well. This is all, by the way, not news. But this idea was present in the culinary traditions of India, Southeast Asia, Thailand, China, Japan, Indonesia, some of these really amazing cuisines. They chose these very same ingredients that I write about. In my new book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, I write about 150 ingredients that all have metabolism-activating properties. They come from Asian cooking traditions found in the recipes, and they're also largely in the Mediterranean traditions as well. I call it Mediterranean because that's how I actually eat and navigate between these two worlds, Mediterranean and Asia, because I spent a gap year living in Italy and in Greece. I think the last time I talked, I spoke to you about this. And by the way, Mediterranean, which is the term I give it, of how I eat, and I encourage other people to eat for a healthy metabolism, isn't a new concept. It's a very old concept that dates back 2,000 years, back to the days of the Silk Road, which is the greatest trading route in human history that connected Asia to the Mediterranean. Back then, 2,000 years ago, traders riding on camels and working in caravans, when they met each other on this road, they traded ingredients, they traded recipes, they shared food with one another. They stopped at the roadside and they ate other people's foods. They had diversity. And that's what I want to encourage people to lean into, to realize that, yes, in this era of really sophisticated science, and my gosh, there are pharmaceuticals now that can actually help you lose weight, fight body fat. But you know what? And I think you would agree with me, Rupi, there are certain patients with pathological obesity, life-threatening obesity, that probably would really benefit from some of these pharmaceutical approaches and other whole body approaches to treating excessive body fat. But for most people to jump on that bandwagon, I really discourage it. And the reason is, there's many reasons, because they're toxic, they're expensive, you know, there's side effects. And by the way, because they're also approved for diabetes, people that are actually diving at using, you know, the ozempics and the wagovis, the somaglutide class of GLP inhibitor drugs, agonist drugs, what they're doing is they're depriving diabetics for the medicines they need to treat their diabetes. There's shortages of these drugs that are now going on around the world. It's kind of ridiculous. But I'm on the Doctor's Kitchen podcast, so I got to give you my biggest reason for it, okay? These drugs, the GLP-1, agonist, somaglutide, wagovi, ozempics of the world, you know what they do? They work by cutting off the appetite in your brain. They make you not hungry. They kill the pleasure. They kill the joy of food. How sad is that for a typical person who doesn't need that? I personally find joy every single day. I look forward to every meal in which I can make a choice of something that's going to light up my taste buds, light up my health, and give me joy as well. So for me, I tell people that it's time to get off the bandwagon of these weight-loss drugs, and it's time to rediscover the joy of food. And for people like you and me, Ruby, where we're doctors, we know the science, we also know how to cook, it's really time to lean forward into your food, and you can love your health and love your metabolism and love your food all at the exact same time. Yeah, I 100% agree. I couldn't have put it better myself. And in the context of pharmaceuticals versus pharmaceuticals, F-A-R-M-A, the purpose and the reason why I started The Doctor's Kitchen in the first place is to increase that time span by which we don't need to use drugs, and we can push that further along. So actually, we can sometimes avoid or at least minimize the amount of time that we have before we have to use things like drugs if it gets to that point. So I completely agree with, especially in the context of overuse, and we have the same problem over here in the UK. Polypharmacy has been very recognized by the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians. So it's definitely something that hopefully will allow food to come more so into the discussion, but also from the perspective of pleasure and enjoyment. It's one of the fastest routes to joy and hopefully we can inspire more people to do that. You mentioned the stems of mushrooms there, and that reminds me of another section in the book where you talked about the stems of broccoli, in particular, having a high concentration of sulforaphane. And sulforaphane is something that I think is absolutely fascinating. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about brassica vegetables and broccoli, if you will, because having your greens every day, that's definitely something that's high on my agenda. Yeah, well, look, I want to talk about a whole class of brassica vegetables. Most people go into the grocery store and the word brassica doesn't come into their mind. But what I write about in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, in the second section where I talk about foods, and there's 150 foods in there, I write it with the reader in mind, imagining the reader to be riding in the grocery store of my shopping cart the way that you might have when you were a child, riding in your mother's shopping cart and having her push you along through the grocery store. So I actually take people on a journey, on a tour of the grocery store, the supermarket, and whispering in the ear what to pick out to put into the cart. So brassica actually is a big family of leafy, stocky vegetables that all contain sulforaphanes. Now, sulforaphanes, they're called sulforaphanes because that's a natural bioactive that has a slightly sulfurous tinge to it. That's why broccoli tastes the way it tastes. That's why cauliflowers taste that way. That's why bok choy has not only a little crispy bite, it's got a little bit of a spicy, smoky taste to it, right? So wonderful things. And so the key is that walking into the grocery store, it turns out that broccoli has sulforaphanes and most people eat broccoli, eat the treetops. And if you get frozen broccoli, that's okay too, because they're often flash frozen. But the thing is, you're only getting the treetops, which does have sulforaphane. The research I and other people have done has shown that the stems of the broccoli... Broccoli plant, by the way, is not just a bunch of treetops, all right? It is one giant stalk, like a telephone pole with a treetop on top of it. And so most people who go to a farmer's market will know that when you bring home the broccolis, from the farmer's market, you cut off the stem. A lot of people used to throw away the stem. For God's sakes, keep the stem, cook with it, saute it, slice it up into medallions, puree it and make it into a soup, add a little oregano, a little extra olive oil. You know, there's all kinds of delicious things you can actually do with the stalk because there's twice as much of the sulforaphane. And by the way, there's also baby brassica. Baby brassica is like broccoli sprouts. It turns out, if you look at the sulforaphane of a grown-up broccoli, if there is such a thing, adult broccoli, mature broccoli, I should say, the baby broccoli is only three to four days old. It's just picked, it's a tiny little sprout, a little nutty flavored. Actually, it's quite nice. You can sprinkle it on a salad, you can sprinkle it on some fish, however you cook. But it turns out that the sulforaphane levels in broccoli sprouts is 100 times higher than the sulforaphane levels in an adult broccoli. So small but mighty are the broccoli sprouts. But it's not just broccoli, bok choy, Swiss chard, cauliflower. There's a whole gamut of these incredibly delicious plant-based brassica vegetables that you can go to the regular grocery store. This is not difficult stuff. I write about some unusual foods in my book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, that require a little bit more searching online to find them. But for the most part, the things that you would just normally wheel your cart by and maybe ignore, I'm asking people to take the time, read the book, realize that these things are actually wonderful. They taste wonderful and they're wonderful for your metabolism. Please try them. Oh, and by the way, not everyone could be, is handy in the kitchen. And some people will go, bok choy, I don't know how to cook a bok choy. That's too much for me. I try to say, there's really great news. You should be an adventurer. Tap into your adventurer spirit. If you've never cooked bok choy or Swiss chard or endive, anything like that, no worries. Even when you're in your grocery store, you can actually type in the bok choy, for example, in Google, hit recipe, and then hit video. And you will up, the search will come up videos of people who know how to cook this food, this bok choy. And they will show you with passion, with love, exactly what kind of ingredients you need to knock out a dish that's going to look great. Your mouth will be watering at the end of that short video. Yeah, absolutely. And you might even serve some doctor's kitchen cooking videos, you never know. So I'm going to ask you some impossible questions now about spices. Now, what are your go-to spices? If you're anything like me, with my spices just behind me as well, there's just way too many for me to dial into exactly which ones I want to have in my pantry all the time or in my cooking. So what are your go-to spices, particularly through the lens of eat to beat your diet and fat control? Yeah, well, look, let me describe that from the flavor and culinary cooking perspective because I think that's what most people relate to. I could name every spice and I can tell you what is known about the bioactive in them. And I can tell you what the mechanism is. But you know what? People are not going to remember that. But what people will remember is I approach spices using that lens of Mediterranean cooking and eating. All right, so what are the spices that are used in both the Mediterranean and Asia? Chili peppers, white peppers, black peppers, turmeric, lovely ways of actually cooking. Saffron, that's sort of a Near East spice. Lovely flavor, very kind of expensive, but really good. Then you start going into like in the Mediterranean, basil or basil, rosemary, sage, incredible flavors to it. Some of them are exquisite flavors that are very unique, like lavender. You can also use that to actually flavor your food. Allspice, cloves, cinnamon. Cinnamon, by the way, actually is originally from Asia. They imported the cassia bark from China around the world and it became, it was traded on the Silk Road as part of Mediterranean trading of ingredients because it's a dried bark. Those are some of my favorite types of spices I naturally go to. Curries, you can either buy a pre-mixed curry powder. You can mix your own curry and have some fun doing it. These are just kind of my go-to's that I automatically think about. Paprika, smoked paprika, pimenta split. I mean, these are the things that you would find, if we went to my kitchen and opened up my cabinets, these are the ones that you would actually find with low filled, quarter filled bottles because I use them so often in my cooking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a similar way in which I describe it. You know, people always ask me about the benefits of turmeric or the benefits of cinnamon. And I always say, look, you can find a similar sort of collection of bioactives in your typical culinary herbs that you find in a UK kitchen, whether it's basil, whether it's thyme or tarragon or whatever it might be. You don't always need to go for the exotic ones. It's great if that's the way you want to cook and that's the way you like to cook. But really, it's just a case of getting the spices and herbs in your diet because it has all those benefits.