Cancer Can't Stand This Diet: Dr. William Li's Anti-Cancer Nutrition Breakthroughs

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:00)
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.

**Dr. William Li** (0:02)
This is the beginning of a new understanding of our human nature, because we're beginning to understand that the biggest nerve coming out of our brain, called the vagus nerve, communicates from the brain down to our gut. Our brain talks to our gut bacteria.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:17)
Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And today this conversation about food is really important because we're talking with one of the world's experts in many aspects of nutrition and food, Dr. William Li. He's a renowned physician and scientist. He's the author of The New York Times bestseller, Eat to Beat Disease, the new science of how your body can heal itself. We're gonna talk about how that works with food. His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 40 new medical treatments impacting the care for more than 70 diseases. He's a legend. And these diseases include diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. His Ted Talk, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer has garnered more than 11 million views. He's appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, Rachel Ray, Live with Kelly and Ryan. And he's featured in many, many newspapers, including USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, O Magazine and lots more. He's the president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and he's leading global initiatives on food as medicine, which is why I love him so much. His latest book and a New York Times bestseller is Eat to Beat Your Diet, Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer. Now we get into a wide ranging bunch of topics today. It's kind of a free for all between two guys who are kind of nerdy about food nutrition. We talk about the underlying healing mechanisms of the body, which I think are really important to know. These five key defense systems that he talks about that allow our bodies to heal and maintain. We discuss how food can regulate those fundamental systems in the body to keep us healthy. We get in and out of different topics like, is dairy good or bad? Is coffee good or bad? Should we be eating soy? What about other foods? What about alcohol? So we get into all this important stuff that you need to know to optimize your health. I think you're gonna love this conversation. It's gonna be very interesting. He's a brilliant guy and I hope you love it. And let's get into the conversation with Dr. William Li. William, so great to have you back on The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Welcome back.

**Dr. William Li** (1:52)
Thanks very much. Always great to be here.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (1:54)
Yeah, so William, I go way back and he is an extraordinary physician. As you heard from the intro, he is a leading scientist and an incredible visionary about the future of medicine and health.
He works in all sorts of sectors, changing the world. And what his passion is now is about food as medicine and how we use food to beat disease. And he's written a number of great books. We talked about Eat to Beat Disease. He's wrote just an incredible book that I think set the stage for thinking about using food, not as prevention, but as treatment, right? And one of the most impressive things I ever saw was at a conference we were at together was I think the Milken Institute. And you presented a slide and you showed, here's the effect of these bioactive compounds in plants, really these phytochemicals. And here's the effect of drugs on the same pathway.
And the phytochemicals actually seem to be more effective than a lot of the drugs, which was kind of blew my mind.

**Dr. William Li** (2:52)
Yeah, no, I mean, listen, that's how I got into this whole area of Food is Medicine is I started with developing new medicines for cancer, diabetes, vision loss, cardiovascular disease, and really getting at the underpinning of how is our body being derailed from health. And the pharmaceutical biotech world is all focused on that derailment, you know?
Everything in health care that we've ever been trained on in medicine is about diagnosing the train wreck and figuring out how to tease apart the carcass of the cars that actually have run into each other and crushed and smoking hulks, right? And so for me, with the success of developing cancer treatments, I realized, you know, we should probably up our game and throwing foods into the same systems that drugs are being tested on. And that's the same slide that you were just referring to. 50% of the food extracts that I tested were as or more potent than the drugs we were testing at the time. And so to me, that was my eureka moment that what we should be doing is taking a hardcore scientific, evidence-based approach to thinking about how foods could benefit us, not just hand-waving, you know, like the, you know, look, the salad bar is great, but if you just pick up a kale leaf and wave it around, somebody who is critical is gonna say, well, how do you know? Well, so that's what I do, is to figure out how do we know?