Scientifically Proven…THIS One Food Regrows Stem Cells & STARVES CANCER | Dr. William Li

What I love about stem cells is that while the industry is still figuring itself out, our body has already done it for us. The 70 million stem cells that are packed in our body, well, you don't really need to inject anything. You can just call them out yourself. So the ways that you can do that is by eating food. It turns out that certain foods will call out stem cells like bees coming out of a hive and they'll just fly into your bloodstream and they'll circulate around your bloodstream, and they will home into only the places that need to be regenerated. This is being healed from the inside out. Happens every day, by the way. We just don't hear about it. We're breaking down inside all the time. Don't worry. The SWAT team of stem cells, they're taking care of the problem. And one of the crowd-pleasing foods is this. Chocolate. We'll actually do a dark chocolate. 70% is dark. Go higher, 80, 85%. You can go to like 100%. The higher percentage of cacao here, the more of the plant-based material called cacao, which comes from the cacao pod, is in this food. So the darker the chocolate, the higher percentage of cacao, the more plant-based stuff you've got in there. What's in this seed pod are polyphenols, proanthocyanidins, and many, many others as well. But the proanthocyanidins have been studied. One of the things that these proanthocyanidins do, back to stem cells, is when we eat dark chocolate, the plant-based cacao, the polyphenols in it, actually mobilize. They call out stem cells, like bees come out of a hive, in order to be able to fix things. Now this has been studied in people in their 60s who have heart disease, cardiovascular disease. They've got kind of crust inside their arteries, and their blood vessels are very stiff, not functioning really well. And a research study looked at giving people two cups of hot chocolate made with dark chocolate for a month, every day for a month. And they were able to up to double their stem cells in their bloodstream. And in this chocolate study, they were able to find that that dark chocolate was able to recover, reverse, improve damage flow mediated dilation, vascular resiliency, blood vessel resiliency, in 60-year-old people who already had hardened arteries, who can actually get back. This is something that I think should be acknowledged. If you don't do anything about it, you're going to get a chronic disease. But you could actually recover, and you can reverse chronic diseases. We know you can reverse cardiovascular disease. We know you can reverse even dementia in some ways. We know you can reverse cancer. There's plenty of evidence that we can actually improve cardiac function and improve cardiac function around a rebound kind of effect. So if you think about why haven't we thought about this earlier, we can reverse high blood pressure. There's things that we can do to lower blood pressure. What makes us think that diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia are irreversible? The remarkable thing is that the foods that we eat, and you know, people talk about superfoods and super supplements. I'll tell you, there's no such thing as a superfood. It is the stuff inside foods, the bioactives, the polyphenols, the dietary fiber that we eat, and how our body responds to what we put inside it, and activating our health defenses. That's really the secret to unlocking what we should eat to be able to enhance ourselves. Back to the athlete example, so you know, if you basically go for a walk after dinner for 30 minutes, it's good for your metabolism, it's good for your blood flow, good for all kinds of things. It's the kind of thing that an older person could easily do, you know, for the second half of their lives. You should be able to do that. But if you're actually training for a marathon, you know, in the beginning you're going for a mild run, but then you're actually going to really pound it, and you're going to really hit it, and you're going to, like, overshoot your goals every time in order to be able to, you know, get to the race, and it's like, okay, that's a no-brainer, I know my body can do that. Well, heavy training actually causes your immune system to be lower. And when your immune system is lower, not surprisingly, you get sicker easier. That's why, you know, we talk to people who run the Boston Marathon, the New York Marathon, I mean, you know, like, they are exhausted and exhilarated afterwards. They celebrate with crowds of people who have supported them coughing and sneezing, and, you know. And not surprisingly, they tend to get sick for a few days, and sure, they'll bounce back. So blueberries contain anthocyanins, and anthocyanins are a natural dye. It's a polyphenol. Just eating one cup of blueberry, so this looks like it's maybe a cup, maybe a little bit more than a cup. A cup of blueberries a day for three weeks before you run a marathon will up your immune water line, so you're actually at a higher level, functioning at a higher level. Who wants to get sick before a race, right? You've got to be in good shape, and after a race, guess what? When they've studied natural killer cells and T-cells in people who have eaten blueberries, athletes who have competed in marathons, their immune system actually doesn't go down. It stays elevated. Let's talk about inflammation. So first of all, there is a myth out there that all inflammation is bad, must get rid of inflammation. Totally wrong. Inflammation is very good if it's present in very short, small amounts for a short period of time. You're riding a bike, and you fall off the bike, and you scrape your knee, all right? So after you wash off the stuff on your leg, it starts to swell up around there. That's inflammation. That's your body naturally responding to an insult, injury, to basically say, hey, you know what? Let's clean things up a little bit here. It's like the janitorial's housekeeping, coming in to actually make the bed, clean it all up, remove the trash from your hotel room, and that's really what inflammation is actually supposed to do, but hey, housekeeping doesn't hang out in your room. They leave after a while, and so that kind of short inflammation called when you need it, you hit that housekeeping button, all right, is exactly what you want. Chronic inflammation, which is a problem, is actually when the inflammatory cells go to that place or go to any place and maybe even expand and bleed over, and then they stick around. When you actually exercise, you are actually injuring your muscles, which is okay. Totally fine. It's cool. You're stretching your muscles. You're working your muscles. No pain, no gain. That's actually the definition of that, and there's a little bit of inflammation that goes in there because to grow your muscles, you need to break it down so that when you fix it, you're fixing it in a better way, right? It's kind of like renovating your kitchen. Yeah, it's functional, but let's break a few things down, and now let's build it back up really nicely, so you're going to get some inflammation with working out, any kind of exercise, and we talked about this earlier. If you run a marathon, you're really going to be super inflamed, and so the foods that you eat can help to quell inflammation. These polyphenols are really great for quelling inflammation, things that I love seasonally. In the fall, you have apples. In the winter, you have citrus or pears. In the summer, nothing better to me than a juicy peach. All of these fruits and berries, of course, they actually contain anti-inflammatory polyphenols that just generally, they stand guard to make sure that that campfire stays in the pit and doesn't actually spill over, and they can actually help you put out the campfire as well when it's time to go to bed. I don't want to sleep too much, Doc. I don't want to be called lazy, and I'm like, well, your body might not be moving on the outside, but you are anything but lazy. You're not inactive. Your body is super active when you're sleeping, and in a way, it's sort of like, in a day when we're moving around, got to disperse the energy everywhere to go from point A to point B, to open up a jar, to do whatever it is that we're actually doing, solve the Rubik's Cube, but when we're sleeping, it's like we get to divert all our energy to regenerating all those health defenses. Our immune system resets. Our gut microbiome kind of cleans up the Lego blocks that were kicked over by the kids all day long and puts them in a nice, neat pile, the toy, back in the toy box. Our DNA repairs itself overnight, which is amazing. Our stem cells come out and they look around, they do their patrol, seeing what needs to be fixed and fix it up. So much is going on to rebuild our health defenses when we're sleeping, and I would love to hear from you, like what your research has actually revealed about the timing of sleep and brain health and diet and nutrition, but I will tell you one thing about nutrition is that if you back away from eating as much as you can from the time you sleep, you are allowing your brain not to do double duty to deal with all the calories and all the nutritional aspects it has to run. So you're really allowing it to perform its car wash function without a lot of distractions. And I think one of the things that needs to happen in the medical community is that we need medical schools and continuing medical education to be able to train doctors in this way of thinking circadian, eating, metabolism, reaching your goals. All those things are not really taught to doctors and, you know, patients don't have a trusted resource to go to, and then they just reach out for the web. There's a way, there's a structure to think about how to actually boost immune health. First of all, our gut health is directly connected to our immune system. When I went to medical school, I had no idea where the immune system actually lives. You know, in your lymphoid tissue, your spleen, your lymph nodes, actually no, 70% of our immune system is actually found in the walls of our gut. So you think about a garden hose and you cut the garden hose in half and you look down the hole. There's a thick wall, right? It's a reinforced wall, it's a garden hose. That's where your immune system lives inside there, which is pretty remarkable. And then the gut bacteria lives in the center of the hose, right? They're living inside the tube. And they basically talk to your immune system and back and forth, the gut bacteria and immune system. I say they talk like college roommates, like college freshmen roommates in a dorm with cheap thin walls, right? So your gut bacteria can shout across like you did when you were in college, what do you want on your pizza? You know, and then you can shout back through the wall and they can hear each other. And so when your gut health is great, your immune health is going to be great. They communicate that way. So I would say that, you know, the principle of where the list comes from, first, what can you do to support good gut health? Because good gut health will boost your immune system, your immune function. It'll also lower inflammation, right? So you want to lower inflammation with short chain fatty acids. So that's an easy way to do it. And to get good gut health with good healthy gut bacteria, it's very easy to think about. You want to eat foods, plant-based foods primarily, that have polyphenols, colorful foods are a great way to do that, including blueberries, but you know, anything that's colorful, strawberries, you know, bell peppers, you know, all of the things that are of color. And you know, people say, well, what about the greens? Take a look at the produce section and the variety of greens. The Pantone greens are actually in the produce market. It's really remarkable. And the reds and the oranges and the things that are also found in there. But those polyphenols actually feed your gut bacteria. That's why they call them prebiotics. Really the biotic part is just your gut bacteria. And the other important prebiotic is dietary fiber. So many foods have dietary fiber. Dietary fiber is what the Pac-Man of your gut bacteria love to eat. You know, like the image of the baby bird in a nest with their mouths open, okay? And the mom bird comes with the earthworm. That's dietary fiber to your gut bacteria. They are craving that. They're waiting for it. Not all dietary fiber is created the same. You've got soluble fiber, you've got insoluble fiber, but to make it simple for people, I would say most fruits and vegetables have some dietary fiber. You want to, and some of them are really surprising because they don't- Four grams in a cup of blueberries, right? That's right. Yeah. And kiwis have dietary fiber, great source of dietary fiber. Kiwi is this health bomb. First of all, it's not too sweet, so it doesn't hit you with a sugar bomb. It's tart because it's got vitamin C. Vitamin C is necessary for immune health and joint health and all kinds of other, and lowering inflammation. All by itself, vitamin C is anti-inflammatory as well. It's got dietary fiber in the green stuff or the golden stuff, if you get a golden kiwi, great for you. In fact, it's so good for your gut microbiome, a kiwi, that studies have been done to show that after eating a couple of kiwis a day, just overnight, you can change the healthy gut bacteria to improve it. So there's fast action that can be happening. So again, we can really drill down deeply into this, but dietary fiber will help your gut health. Polyphenols will help your gut health. So I would say for anybody who wants to boost your immunity, like, okay, so what is that laundry list of things? So kiwi, pomegranates, oh, some of the surprise ones, of course, celery, broccoli, broccolini, Brussels sprouts, anything that's fiber C is going to have it, but here's some surprises. You might be surprised to know that avocado, which is really soft, is a great source of dietary fiber. Right? You can spread it on some sourdough bread and you've gotten some dietary fiber and you didn't even know it. But the other thing that's interesting is another soft vegetable that is really good for dietary fiber are mushrooms. Mushrooms when you cook them, they soften up and they're kind of like bendy and soft. They are packed with dietary fiber. The kind of dietary fiber that a mushroom has is called beta D-glucan. All right, beta D-glucan does a lot of things. It's a dietary fiber. It actually stimulates angiogenesis. It helps your blood vessels get, it helps you improve your circulation, lowers inflammation, and it actually feeds your gut microbiome. Oh, the beta D-glucan also stimulates your stem cells to help your body regenerate. Hey, if you liked that video, then you're going to love this one. Check it out.