Dr. William Li On How To Protect Your Health: What To Eat, What To Avoid & The Daily Habits That Help Fight Disease & Slow Aging

Michael Bosstick (0:01)

Welcome to The Bossticks.

Starring Lauryn Bosstick and Michael Bosstick. Together, they are The Bossticks.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Bossticks. It is a long awaited episode with someone who we admire very much, Dr. William Li. We've been trying to make this happen from a scheduling perspective for a very long time. He is an internationally renowned physician, scientist and New York Times bestselling author. His groundbreaking research has led to the development of more than 40 new medical treatments that impact care for more than 70 diseases including diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity. His TED Talk, Can We Eat To Starve Cancer, has garnered more than 11 million views. He is also the president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and he's leading global initiatives on food and medicine. In this episode, we're talking about building resilient bodies, the power of healing, cancer prevention, food as medicine, cellular health, disease prevention, longevity, cellular aging, nutrition, preventative health takeaways. We cover a lot in this episode with an expert that we've been looking to have on this show for a very long time. With that, Dr. William Li, welcome to The Bossticks.

Lauryn Evarts Bosstick (1:05)

How are the gut and cancer and overcoming cancer related?

Dr. William Li (1:10)

Well, most people don't appreciate the fact that our gut pretty much controls every aspect of our health, from our brain health, that's gut brain, to our heart health, to our metabolism, to our lipids, and to our body's ability to resist cancer. And so when I went to medical school, X number of years ago, I can tell you that cancer was something that suddenly appeared and was diagnosed when a patient had some symptoms and went to the hospital or felt a lump. And we now know that cancer actually is a normal state.

I'm going to repeat that again. Cancer is normal. We all have cancer from the time we're children all the way until we are as old as we can get. People talk about longevity. And let me explain that to you because it makes people, it takes people back a little bit.

Our body is made of 40 trillion cells. It's a lot of cells, more cells in our body than the stars in the sky on a clear night. And those cells have to divide so that they can reproduce themselves. That's why we're still going to be around tomorrow. And that's why we're still here today compared to yesterday. Our cells are dividing, copying and pasting themselves. And if they make a mistake when they're copying, you create a mutation, an error of copying. And that's the beginning of a microscopic cancer. Now our body is amazing because it has these copy paste detectors. Let's call them a spell checker.

So if I asked you to record Mary Had a Little Lamb and write it down ten times, you'd get a perfect. If I asked you to write it down a hundred times, you'd probably make a mistake, a spell checker would have to get it. Now if you're the human body and you had to write that copy that forty trillion times, even after you ran the spell checker to fix the mistakes that result in microscopic cancers, do you know how many the spell checker is going to miss on average every day?

Ten thousand mistakes are still going to sneak through. So every single day in our lives on average, we're carrying ten thousand mistakes that just happen because we're trying to copy ourselves. Each of those mistakes can turn into a microscopic cancer and they just sit there harmless. They never cause disease for the most part because our body is able to resist and defend our health against those cancer cells growing. And our gut plays a role in that defense.

Michael Bosstick (3:55)

So this may be a dumb question, but on that line of reasoning, are there things that we're doing to our bodies to increase the amount of mistakes that our body makes?

Dr. William Li (4:05)

That is an amazingly insightful question. And the reason I'm saying that that's insightful is because now you're getting it.

You're putting the pieces together.

What can we do that might make mistakes? Well, look, every time you have a cellular stress, we call it an oxidative stress.

And it could be from anything. It could be from ultraviolet radiation. Why do you think we actually increase our chances of getting melanoma from getting lots of sunburns over the years? It could be from alcohol exposure that causes oxidative stress. Why does heavy drinking lead to a higher risk of liver cancer? It could be from chemical exposures that we see. And it also could be from, and we really begin to believe this now, it's true, not a theory, that eating ultra-processed foods with a lot of these synthetic chemicals, artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners, artificial coloring, flavoring, that these things contribute to inflammation in our body, but some of them directly can cause oxidative stress that increase the odds that there will be more mistakes or that your body might not be able to defend as effectively against them. The other thing besides ultra-processed foods is the stuff that they're packaged in, plastics. Now, we are just beginning to have, I think, a consciousness that microplastics are everywhere. Do you know where microplastics mostly come from? Not from water bottles. That's not where we mostly get them. Do you know where we're exposed to them primarily? The source.