"This Food Can REGROW STEM CELLS & Starve Cancer" - Eat This Every Day | Dr. William Li

When I was in grade school, my teacher told me about what regeneration was. He said that starfish can regenerate an arm, a salamander can regenerate a leg, but unfortunately, people can't regenerate, right? Well, that's not true anymore. When we get good sleep, and only when we get good sleep, the glymphatic systems open up. It's like the sewers to Paris. It drains the toxins from your brain. In Alzheimer's binge, indeed, you see poorer blood flow, but it turns out, immediately relaxes your blood vessels, lowers your blood pressure, which is a big killer, improves blood flow in every organ in your body, including your brain. The question I ask is, why don't we all get cancer more often? Stem cells are primitive cells that can turn into anything you need them to be. Turn into a brain, heart, lung, liver, skin, hair. Our stem cells actually regenerate us from the inside out. Now, you know that one of the things that happens as we get older is our brain atrophies and can start to degenerate. It shrinks. Literally, a scan of an older person, the brain matter, the mass of the brain shrinks inside the skull. It's like a cotton shirt that shrank. You see this, actually, in a scan. And so, in order to be able to try to keep the shrinking from happening, you want to make sure there's good blood flow going, which actually helps to keep the brain growing in a healthy and maintained in a healthy sort of way. 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. By the way, have you heard of the glymphatic system in the brain? I've heard it, but what does it do? 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. 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 is going on in our brain. When we sleep, tonight, okay, 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. 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. And if you don't, by the way, you get brain fog. You know why you get brain fog? Because you've kept those toxins in. We were all composed of stem cells, and we had so many stem cells that form who we each individually are, that we had an overage. It was more than we needed. So when we were born, all the extra stem cells that no longer needed to be used to form us, actually got packed away. It's kind of like, you know, extra supplies. Yeah. And the stem cells that we were born with get packed into our bone marrow, packed into our skin, even packed into our heart, into our body fat. And they just sit there ready to regenerate us from the inside out. So this is a new definition of healing that hasn't been talked about a lot, is that our stem cells heal us from the inside out. I'm not talking about going to the strip mall to get your knee injected. That's not really ready for prime time. As somebody who's been involved with developmental therapeutics for stem cell therapy, not ready for prime time yet. However, what is ready for prime time is what we were born with. Our stem cells continues to regenerate. How do we know we regenerate? Our hair grows back. Our skin grows back. Our gut grows back. By the way, surgeons know this. If you cut off two thirds of your liver. It grows back. It grows back over two years. If you cut off the tip of your lung, the tip will grow right back. We do regenerate. Kind of like a salamander when you cut off a limb. Well, we can't do the limb yet, but we can do many other organs. We just don't do it very, very quickly. But that's an internal health defense that we don't feel and we don't see. We don't see our stem cells, but they're there. By the way, if you cut yourself, paper cut, or you scrape your knee, and your scab comes off, you see all this bright red bubbly stuff underneath the scab. Those are your blood vessels that are growing. They're also regenerating. Two to five percent of those cells that are in underneath the scab are stem cells that are regenerating that wound, that tissue right there. That's your second health defense. Just like the circulation, there are foods that you can eat for your circulation and your stem cells that boost it. The idea that we can eat foods that stimulate our regeneration, to me, is one of the most mind-blowing, exciting things that are out there. One of the best foods is actually cacao, plant-based food, cacao. It's actually used to make chocolate. Yum. Dark chocolate, obviously. Studies have been done to show that the flavanols in cacao stimulate stem cells to come out of your bone marrow, like bees in a beehive, in your bloodstream, and they go out and they find wherever it needs to be repaired. If it's in your heart, they'll fix it. If it's in your liver, they'll fix it. If it's in your skin, they'll fix it. We can eat foods like high-flavanol cacao in order to be able to actually get the stem cells to work a little bit better. How do we know this actually works in people? Well, clinical studies have been done with high-flavanol cacao to show that men who are in their 60s with heart disease, they could actually eat, just have two cups of dark chocolate hot cacao a day for a month, and they doubled the amount of stem cells in their bloodstream, and their circulation improved measurably. Then what's even more important and impressive is that there was a study called the COSMOS study that was completed recently that showed that eating high-flavanol cacao decreases the risk of cardiovascular death over a period of a day. Like a statin, exactly. Except maybe by eating the same thing that you used to make chocolate. We're not telling people to go out to have chocolate, which is a confection. It's got a lot of sugar and all kinds of other stuff in it, but it's the stuff underlying it, the core of it. I studied Chinese green tea, Japanese green tea, and studied Earl Grey. Besides comparing foods with drugs, you can compare foods with foods to find out which is the best kind. I was interested in this Japanese sencha or Chinese green tea, jasmine tea, or is Earl Grey, which one is better when you throw them into the system? We found, actually surprisingly, that Earl Grey, the black tea flavored with bergamot, actually was the most potent tea when you looked at all three side by side. The other thing about black tea that's really amazing that's been studied by researchers in Italy is that black tea actually can call out those stem cells from your bone marrow to increase their levels in your circulation. When your stem cells are circulating in your blood, they come out of their hiding spots in their storage container, the garage that the paint cans were stored in. They come out like bees flying out of a hive. Then they circulate in your body looking for organs to repair. Wherever you need a little bit of renewal, regeneration, your stem cells will fix it invisibly. Black tea can actually spark that repair and regenerative process. By restricting calories, intermittent fasting, our body's defenses and angiogenesis help to starve cancer. It helps our body cut off the blood supply to cancers. We know that when you actually intermittently fast, you call out more stem cells. Your stem cells reboot and then the fresh ones come out. It's like changing the batteries in a flashlight. You get refreshment. We know when you intermittently fast, it also reboots your gut microbiome. It takes away some of the bad neighbors and some fresh neighbors, better neighbors that reorganize the neighborhood. We also know that intermittent fasting helps to repair your DNA, and it even slows down cellular aging. Science tells us that if we restrict our calories, that's called fasting, periods that we don't eat. By the way, we all fast. When you're sleeping, you're fasting. That's why they call it the morning meal breakfast is because we're actually breaking our evening fast. Fasting is something we do. It doesn't have to be extreme, but we do know that when we actually restrict our calories, wonderful things happen to our health defense systems. It all comes back to our health defenses. It turns out it helps your body. By restricting calories, intermittent fasting, our body's defenses and angiogenesis help to starve cancer. It kind of helps our body cut off the blood supply to cancers. We know that when you actually intermittently fast, you call out more stem cells. Your stem cells kind of reboot, and then the fresh ones come out. It's kind of like changing the batteries in a flashlight. You get refreshment. We know when you intermittently fast, it also reboots your gut microbiome. It kind of takes away some of the bad neighbors and some fresh neighbors, better neighbors that reorganize the neighborhood. We also know that intermittent fasting helps to repair your DNA, and it even slows down cellular aging at the level of the caps on the end of your DNA, the telomeres, that burn down normally during aging. Intermittent fasting slows that aging process down at the cellular level. Intermittent fasting, by the way, helps us develop a more fortified immune system because part of the reboot at the stem cell level is to make new immune cells. We've got fresh super soldiers produced, coming right out of the oven to help our immune system. These are ways that intermittent fasting has been shown to help our defenses. It doesn't mean that you have to do it all the time. It means that this is another technique we can use to kind of up our game periodically when it comes to our health. Listen, when I was in grade school, my teacher told me about what regeneration was. He said that starfish can regenerate an arm, a salamander can regenerate a leg, but unfortunately, people can't regenerate. Well, that's not true anymore. We know that humans can regenerate. We do it slowly, and we do it from the inside out. True, we can't grow a new arm or leg, and we don't have a tail to grow, but I will tell you that we regenerate using stem cells. That's what starfish use and salamanders as well. And these stem cells are tiny little regenerative cells that can turn into whatever they need to be turned into. That's why they're called stem, meaning that they're just at the stem of, they haven't figured out what they want to be yet. Maybe a liver, maybe a tooth, maybe a hair follicle, whatever it is they want to be. And that stemness is really important. In fact, we were all formed from stem cells when we were still in our mom's womb. So when your dad's sperm met your mom's egg, and you were just a ball of cells forming, you didn't have a face, you didn't have an organ, and you didn't have any organs, no kidney, no liver, no lips, no ear. Bottom line is you're just stem cells. Those cells, which were stem cells, had to figure out what they were going to become to form the future you. Now you had nine months to do that, to have all these stem cells form perfectly. Your fingernails, your toenails, every aspect of your body. And at nine months, you're born. And guess what? Your mother nature made sure that we had more than enough stem cells to form everything. So when you're born, you've got some extra stem cells that wind up getting packed away in our body after we're born, and they live in our bone marrow. So think about these extra stem cells like, you ever paint a room like a project? Like a home project, right? So what do you do? You gotta go to the paint store and buy, how many cans of paint are you gonna buy? Well, you know, you don't want to have too little. So you're gonna buy maybe an extra can or two. Because man, would it suck for you to paint, and you're done except for one little section, and now you're out, right? Mother nature did the same thing with stem cells. We got 70 million extra stem cells, overage, so that when we're born, that 70 million still in our body, they just get packed away. It's kind of like extra socks in a drawer. They get put together, meshed up, folded up, put into the drawers. Now the stem cell drawers in our body when we're born is our bone marrow and our skin and our body fat. And literally, these stem cells just get packed away It's like a beehive. They just get popped away and then later on throughout life, when we need to regenerate, when we need to repair something, you might not feel it, the need for repair. Might be your heart, might be your kidney, might be your lung, alright? The signals inside your body will call out your stem cells. This is part of our health defenses, your stem cell system, will call out the stem cells like bees coming out of a hive. And they will circulate in your bloodstream, they'll find just the place they need to actually fix, repair, and regenerate, and they will home in there, fix it, and all the other stem cells will just go back to base. It's really quite remarkable. Now I'm somebody who's worked, I've been involved with cancer research, I've helped to develop cancer therapies, I've also been involved with developing stem cell therapies. It's still in development. I'm not talking about stem cell treatments you'd get at a strip mall to inject in your knee or your elbow. To me, that's not ready for prime time. The stuff I've been involved with are really repairing spinal cords, or trying to grow new heart tissue after a heart attack, or even grow new brain after a stroke. I mean, you know, the potential is huge. Or even to regenerate your eyes, you know, if you have a problem and you go blind, like how amazing would that be to regenerate your optic nerve, right? So, we're on the cusp of being able to do this. It's very early days, but we're beginning to see some early progress in clinical trials. You know what? Mother Nature beat us to the punch. We already do that inside our bodies. And the foods that we eat can light up our stem cells and make more of them come out to do their job. What are the things that can damage our stem cells when they're trying to do their job? They're on their way to repair or regenerate something inside us that we don't even feel, we don't know about, but really important. Well, alcohol. You want to have a lot of alcohol in your bloodstream? That stuns our stem cells. A lot of fat. If you have a lot of cholesterol racing around in your bloodstream, high fat will stun your stem cells, slow it down. High blood sugar, hyperglycemia, that's a term that we use when we refer to, you know, like a lot of people talk about glucose spikes and glucose crashes. As a scientist and as a clinician, I tend to focus on what's the average amount of blood sugar that's running around. And if the average amount is really high, the water line is high. It's kind of like the tide zone is high. That's actually a danger because hyperglycemia, high blood sugars, stun your stem cells. High salt will also do it as well. Fortunately, your body can actually titrate the amount of sodium or salt that's in our bloodstream. But again, you can kind of see how this ties to lifestyle factors, diet. These things can actually keep your stem cells in good shape. The question I ask is why don't we get cancer? We all get cancer more often. How come everybody doesn't get cancer? How come more people don't get cancer left and right? Think about it. You go outside and you know that if you actually lay out in the sun and get repeated sunburns, you're going to have high risk for melanoma, skin cancer. But you know it's the same sunshine that if you're stuck on the highway in Los Angeles commuting for a few hours every day with the sun hitting your face, how come you don't get skin cancer on your face? Or an airline pilot who's actually flying above the clouds and being exposed to ultraviolet radiation, how come they don't get cancer more often? Or what about the off-gassing from the new car if you work in a car factory? Or the carpet? Or the brand new clothing that you're wearing? How come we don't actually pop up with more cancers? Well, the answer to cancer is in fact we do develop cancers all the time. And here's how. And it's only because our body's hardwired with health defenses that it doesn't turn into a clinical problem. So let me kind of set it out for you just as an example of how powerful our health defenses are. Our body's made of about 40 trillion human cells. That's a lot of cells, okay? Packed and molded together into our organs and then packed inside our skin. In order for us to stay alive and to be around tomorrow, our cells, our body, have to copy and paste itself so that we're still around. Because we lose our old cells, we get new ones. That's why we're still here today compared to yesterday and why we'll still be here tomorrow. Now, copying and pasting is a big task, as anyone knows. If you had to copy one sentence ten times, you'll probably get it perfect. If I ask you to copy it a hundred times, you might make one mistake. If I ask you to copy it 40 trillion times, I guarantee you there's going to be spell-checking all over the place. Well, our body's spell-check is our health defense to repair errors in that copy-pasting. That's our DNA repairing itself, okay? But every single day, every 24 hours, there are 10,000 mistakes made in our DNA's copy-paste that doesn't get caught. It's just natural, okay? And those little tiny mistakes are mutations. Those mutations are microscopic cancers. In fact, in theory, we form about 10,000 microscopic cancers every single day as little pimples in our body that never bother us. We'll never see them. It's kind of like a pimple that forms in your back. Can't see it, can't feel it, not a big deal. Eventually, your body will take care of it, and your skin will clear up, and you won't even know you had it. And that's the power of our health defense. Here are some of our health defenses. Our body has this incredible immune system that basically patrols our body every corridor in our body like a suburban street cop on a beat, driving up and down a peaceful neighborhood, looking for problems. And when they see that individual who looks like a drug dealer hanging out in the corner where they shouldn't be, they stick them in the paddy wagon and take them away. And that's basically how our immune system cleans up surveys and cleans up microscopic cancers. Whoops, you missed one of those bad guys. Guess what? Our body has another health defense. It involves blood vessels, because cancers without blood vessels have no nutrition, no oxygen. They cannot get big. And this is the field I study. So our body has a natural ability to control angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels, our circulation. So if you try to make sure any bad guys that are sticking around can't get a blood supply, no problem. It still stays there, stuck in place, tiny, until your immune system sees it the second time they make their rounds to look for the bad guys. We also have the ability to lower inflammation because we know that inflammation is one of those triggers that whether you have autoimmune disease, whether you have cardiovascular disease, whether you have diabetes, whether you have cancer, inflammation in our body is like pouring gasoline onto the embers of a fire. Whatever is going on is going to flare up 10 times, 100 times worse. So can we, how do we naturally lower inflammation? Our gut microbiome, our healthy gut bacteria actually lowers inflammation, among other things that our gut bacteria does. And then, you know, other things that are really quite amazing is our body can regenerate itself, you know, and we can rebuild our own tissues from the inside out as another way of repairing ourselves. So our circulation, our stem cells to regenerate, our gut, our DNA to repair and prevent damage, and our immune system which can lower inflammation and boost those street cops that actually patrol to protect us from invaders, okay, and infections. They are the five core health defense systems of our body. And the reason that we don't get sick more often and the reason we don't get cancer more often is that these systems are raring to go from the day we're born until our very last breath. They are firing on all cylinders to protect our health. And the great news is that while medicines can manipulate these health defenses a little bit, our diet and lifestyle have a much larger role. If you had to pick five of your favorite foods based on the research that you've done, the science you've seen, what would those top fives be? I would bring coffee because of all the polyphenols in coffee. I'd bring tea. I tend to drink coffee in the morning and I have tea at night. And I'm not caffeine sensitive so I can have the tea at night. If you allow me, I'll actually lump those into my beverages into one category. I'll bring tree nuts. Tree nuts? Walnuts, almonds, macadamias, pistachios. I love nuts. Tree nuts. Not the prepackaged kind, but I like to toast them up myself and flavor them myself. I would bring that because of the dietary fiber, it's a good source of protein, some healthy fats in it as well, and it can kill some cancer stem cells while we're at it. Okay, so tree nuts are actually good. I would bring tomatoes because I love tomatoes. It's a great source for hydration, a good source of lycopene, which we talked about. Good for metabolism. I would take berries. Berries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries are among my favorites. Raspberries, you might be surprised at this, but raspberries are pound for pound, or weight for weight, one of the most fiber rich foods out there. They're light, they're hollow, packed with fiber, and they've got polyphenols that are useful for lowering inflammation as well. Berries are actually really good. And then, you know, because I follow what I call the Mediterranean style of eating, I love to have those vegetables that are actually used in both the Mediterranean and Asia, Mediterranean style cooking, the bok choy, the kale, chicory, escarole, you know, all of those types of leafy greens. So those would be the five I would actually take with me. One of the most important things that I want people to walk away with is that there's more than 200 foods that I've studied and I've written about in my books, Eat to Beat Disease and Eat to Beat Your Diet, that, you know, I've done all the heavy lifting to help you figure out what foods are healthy that you could consider adding to your diet. But, if you notice, I didn't actually give you a formula or a set menu on what to do for health. Because the most important thing I want people to walk away with is that my humanistic approach to this is you should love your food to love your health. And if you could actually do both at the same time, you have to find out what are the foods that resonate with you? What do you prefer? What do you enjoy? So if you could look at 200 healthy foods, which is what I have in my books, and just take a highlighter or a pencil and circle them. Circle the ones you already love. Start and stick with those. You're already way ahead of the game. And that builds confidence that you're actually doing the right things. Hey, if you liked that video, then you're going to love this one. Check it out.