How To Use Food As Medicine with Dr. William Li

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Farmacy.

**Dr. William Li** (0:03)
There are foods that actually can lower inflammation. I mean, simple foods containing vitamin C, lower inflammation, strawberries, guava, tomatoes, red bell peppers.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:18)
Welcome to The Doctor's Farmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy with an F. And today, we're going to have a conversation that really matters because we are talking to one of my favorite people and also one of my favorite thinkers and scientists in the field of medicine and food, Dr. William Li, who is a world-renowned doctor, scientist speaker, he's author of Eat to Beat Disease, one of my favorite books, The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. He is best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation and his groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. His Ted Talk, Can We Eat To Starve Cancer, has been seen over 11 million times. He's been on the Dr. Oz Show, Martha Stewart, CNN, NPR, Voice of America. He's been at the Vatican's Unite to Cure Conference where he invited me. I spoke virtually during COVID. I wish I had got to go. Maybe next time. He's the author of over 100 scientific publications, including ones in major journals like Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet. He's on the faculty of Tufts, Harvard, and Dartmouth. No slouch. Welcome, William.

**Dr. William Li** (1:25)
Thank you, Mark. It's always a pleasure to be back and to have a conversation about things that we both care about.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (1:31)
Absolutely.
I think the real challenge is that people don't really get what food is. Most people understand they need to eat to live and they need to actually have the ability to choose foods that are nourishing and have not too many calories. But people don't understand the power locked in the kingdom of plants and even animals that are medicinal, true drugs in the sense of pharmacologic activity. And as I began to think about this science years ago, when I was studying functional medicine, learning about food as medicine, I'm like, what does that mean? And I began to look at the biochemistry and biology and the pathways and how these plant compounds somehow know to bind to specific receptors in our body. It doesn't even make sense. Like it makes sense that you have, you know, testosterone binding to a testosterone receptor, insulin binding to an insulin receptor in the body. But why in the heck would we have a broccoli receptor or a seaweed receptor, you know? And yet the body has co-evolved with these compounds that we don't think of as essential, but I think of them as conditionally essential.
You're not necessarily going to get a deficiency disease, but you're going to get a chronic disease if you don't eat them. And there's massively protective foods. And we were chatting earlier before the podcast that right now in science, and it's advancing so fast that we are understanding the mechanisms by which food actually has its action and how we can use it in a pharmacologic way. It's not like, oh, just eat healthy. There are, just like there are thousands of drugs, there are thousands of molecules in food, and we can use those in very specific, targeted ways to do different things in the body to create health or if we eat the wrong things, to create disease. So you're this extraordinary scientist. You've been published in all the major medical journals at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Tufts. And somehow you come back to this simple notion that Hippocrates said 5,000 or so years ago, let food be their medicine and medicine be thy food. What made you take that left turn or maybe it was a straight ahead, every elbow else is going left. And how do you sort of begin to sort of unpack this notion that was so critical for you to understand that you could eat to beat disease?

**Dr. William Li** (3:48)
Yeah. Well, so Mark, like yourself, as an MD., we're trained to identify diseases, diagnosis diseases and write prescriptions and send patients to specialists to take care of the disease. But we all know that the ways that we have been trained in medicine fall short of what it is that patients really seek. And if you've ever been a patient yourself, you certainly know, you know, what what we want is really to be healthy and to be well. It's okay to get sick once in a while, but if you are, you want to kind of bounce back. And so that led me as an internal medicine doctor to ask the question that nobody in medical school ever taught me, which is what is health? Health is not just the absence of disease. That's an extremely unsatisfying definition, the absence of something like what's a good day? It's the absence of rain. That doesn't make any sense, you know? So so you want to actually have a definition. And the working definition that I came to emerged out of 25 years that I had involved with drug development. I'm still doing it. But the idea with drug development is that we have to understand the body inside and out, we have to identify those molecular pathways, those receptors, that kind of the Achilles heel of disease. Well, turn that inside up, up in that idea, you still need to know what the mechanisms are and the receptors are. But rather than looking at the Achilles heel of disease, let's take a look at the struts that support the infrastructure that support health. If you take a look at everything that is unpharmaceutical with a pH, you wind up actually with pharmaceutical with an F, which is why I love being on the doctor's pharmacy.