Pod Insights Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee BITESIZE | How to Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer | Dr William Li #507 About this episode You probably already know that your diet can hugely influence how well you feel, but how much power do your food choices really have over your health?
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today’s clip is from episode 376 of the podcast with world-renowned medical doctor and author of international bestseller ‘Eat to Beat Disease’, Dr William Li.
His latest book, Eat To Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer. takes a ground-breaking look at the latest science around how we can harness the power of food to activate our innate fat-burning systems and transform our health.
In this clip, he describes some of the common foods that are marketed as healthy yet are anything but. the important role that our gut bacteria play in our metabolism, and Dr Li shares some of his favourite foods which have fat-burning potential.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Rangan Chatterjee? See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 376 of the podcast with world-renowned medical doctor and author Dr William Lee. In his latest book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, Dr Lee takes a groundbreaking look at the latest science around how we can harness the power of food to activate our innate fat-burning systems and transform our health.
2:05 Rangan Chatterjee? In this clip, he shares some of the common foods that are marketed as healthy yet are anything but, the important role that our gut bacteria play in our metabolism, and he also shares some of his favourite foods which have fat-burning potential.
2:25 Rangan Chatterjee? You talk about certain foods which can impact how much fat we store on our bodies. Now, before we get to those specific foods, I wonder if you can talk me through some of the common foods that people are consuming that they think are healthy, but actually are not.
2:45 Speaker 01 This is where I think we all get confused by the surround sound of marketing of things that are supposedly healthy. And I think that you can think about like diet sodas being better than regular sugar sweetened sodas. Not true. Diet sodas with artificial sweeteners damage our gut health, which then damages our metabolism, which can actually have tremendous impact in our body's metabolism. Another one is fruit juice. I enjoy drinking the taste of fruit juice, but when you guzzle fruit juice, which many people do, it's a problem. And I'll give you an example. I love eating a regular juicy, sweet orange. I love all the fiber that's in it. I love the taste of the whole orange.
3:29 Speaker 01 It's very sweet, but a single orange is very nutrient dense. It would take me a few minutes to eat an orange, but I could guzzle down a tall glass of orange juice, which it would take eight oranges to make in 30 seconds. Right? And so that's an example of where you can easily overload the fruit sugars by having a tall glass of its juice instead of eating the whole fruit. And some of the fruit juices you get in a store are also sweetened. And so people don't check the ingredients to look at all those other additives that are in there as well. You know, we know that coffee and tea are also healthy beverages, but if you take a look at some of the flavored coffees, you know, the drive-throughs, you get your handed
4:11 Speaker 01 that special seasonal version with the pumpkin or whatever, a lot of those flavors, as tasty as they may be, I even like them, they're artificially flavored, artificially sweetened. And that also takes something that's healthy and makes it not just less healthy, but actually unhealthy. Another example would be plant-based foods, you know, the plant-based burgers that they talked about. Everyone says is a healthier version than, you know, a regular burger. Well, look, we, we know that ultra-processed foods are not good for our overall health. And in fact, it compromises our metabolism when we eat too many ultra-processed foods. And although something that might be plant-based, it sounds healthy.
4:52 Speaker 01 In fact, when it's ultra-processed, it winds up being something less than healthy and falls squarely in the box of ultra-processed foods. And so it's sort of a bit of buyer beware. Be careful about not being snored by the marketing messages that are out there. Understand what we're looking for in terms of healthy foods and kind of exclude everything that's, that's not.
5:15 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, I appreciate you outlining some of those common foods there. You know, as you were talking there, the word that came up for me was nuance. Tea and coffee are healthy drinks for most people. Lots of these blue zones around the world are consuming tea, coffee and water as their main drinks, as you write about. But they're not probably putting in the syrups and all the flavors and all the things. So coffee can be healthy for some people in the right dose at the right time. Potentially can turn into something quite unhealthy, depending on what you're putting in it. I wonder if we can talk about gut health and weight loss and in particular fat loss.
5:57 Rangan Chatterjee? One of the foods you mentioned at the start, which can be problematic was diet soft drinks. And again, a lot of people will say, well, why Dr. Lee, you know, surely that's better than my sugar sweetened soft drink. And this all kind of speaks to gut health. So I wonder if you could talk to these themes a little bit and help people understand what that relationship is.
6:18 Speaker 01 Well, we're just beginning to peel back the layers of the onion to discover how important gut health is for our metabolism. For example, we know that a properly functioning neighborhood ecosystem of gut bacteria, our microbiome, as we know.
6:36 Speaker 01 Actually helps makes our, our body's ability to use insulin and to absorb glucose more efficient. So every time we eat food, we put it in our mouth, our pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. And that insulin, combined with the food that we've absorbed through our stomach into our bloodstream, draws the energy into our cells so that we're actually able to use that energy from the food we eat in order to power our body. Now, our gut bacteria actually helps to contribute to how smooth that process is. When our gut bacteria is unhealthy, the ecosystem is disturbed. Think about how easy it is to disturb a beautiful pond in your backyard.
7:20 Speaker 01 If you were to take a gallon of dish soap and just start pouring it into the pond, you're going to start poisoning some of the tadpoles and the frogs and the natural wildlife there. And the, and the pond is not going to be healthy. That's basically what happens when we consume things like diet sodas. It's been shown now that many of those artificial sweeteners, non-nutritive sweeteners, alter our gut microbiome, they change the neighborhood. And how do we know that this actually has an impact on our metabolism? We know this from clinical studies because ironically, even though people drink diet sodas so they don't gain weight, many people do gain weight if they consume enough diet soda.
8:01 Speaker 01 So if you poison your gut microbiome sufficiently and you, and you disrupt your metabolism sufficiently, even though you're having quote diet soda, that's just the name on the can. The reality is, is that we're actually changing the biology in our body in such a way that our body is actually going to start to grow body fat and use our food, our inner, our fuel source, much less sufficiently. So many other things can actually disturb our gut health as well. Overconsumption of alcohol can clearly interfere with your gut microbiome. Ultra-processed foods, all those things are back to the reading the ingredient label. If you don't recognize those ingredients, if you can't pronounce them, think,
8:44 Speaker 01 are these ingredients potentially impacting my gut health, my gut microbiome? And if so, could that have an adverse effect on my metabolism? That is something that we should all be thinking about as we just cruise through the shopping, as through the supermarket, putting things into our car.
9:02 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, it really speaks to.
9:06 Rangan Chatterjee? I think this idea behind fat loss, there is this prevailing view out there in society that it is simply an equation, okay? It is calories in versus calories out. Or let's be a bit more precise than that. It's if your body is burning more calories than it is actually taking in, you're going to lose weight. But the question is, how does that occur, right? How are we going to actually cause our body to burn off more than it's taking in? And sometimes it's about lots of different inputs, right? So let's just go back to these artificial sweetness for a minute. And the reason I'm pausing here, Dr.
9:46 Rangan Chatterjee? Lee, is because this appears to be one of the most controversial areas. Sugar sweetened drinks versus diet drinks. Now, for many years, certain scientists have been advising, we proceed with caution and say, listen, I'm not sure about these things. There appears to be early evidence that the gut microbiome is getting affected. Now, when you say that online, typically, a lot of the views that come back are, that's a load of rubbish, right? It's surely better than having the sugar sweetened drink. And my take as a doctor has always been to adopt the precautionary principle. A lot of these things are very new. They haven't been around for long.
10:30 Rangan Chatterjee? I personally just don't like advising people, consume them. Doesn't mean I know for sure, or this was a few years ago, but I say, guys, until we know more, I think you're better off not having soft drinks. You're better off not just going to a different version of soft drink. Let's try and get you off them by and large. So I wonder if you could speak to that. Why is it so controversial? And why are you so confident to be able to tell people, cut out these diet drinks from your diet?
10:58 Speaker 01 My own stance and my advice is very similar, which is take a precautionary stance and be informed. Look, I mean, life is for the living. So we're all, we all do things that are, that are maybe not so good for us from time to time. But every time you commit yourself to making a decision like that, just be aware, it may not be so good for you. The science of the body is continuously changing and advancing so that we understand more and more what the impact is of something that we might consume and how our body responds to it. 10 years ago, there were some inklings that maybe diet, soft drinks might not be so good for our metabolism. Now
11:38 Speaker 01 that we've dived deeper into gut health, we're beginning to see more concrete data that suggests that there is an impact. We also do know more greatly than ever that our gut health is so important for our overall health. And so when we start to put together this hypothesis and start to stitch together some of the information, the precautionary position is, you know, be really careful about diet sodas and be careful about sodas in general. If you have the awareness that things that we may enjoy may not be that good for us and we're mindful about restricting, limiting, consuming only modestly, that's a good first step. I don't believe that people should go hardcore and just come off of everything that they enjoy. No.
12:23 Speaker 01 Nor do I really believe in villainizing foods. The science tells us that if we eat mindfully, and if we make good choices, and we actually think about the volume, sort of what we eat and how we eat, we can use the equipment, the hardwiring, the operating system that's in our bodies to be able to work on our behalf without going to these extreme fad interventions, fad diets. And for me, a healthy diet is something that you can actually, is sustainable. You can enjoy it, it can become second nature. If we were to have a conversation about foods that can actually activate and elevate our body's natural processes to help us become healthier,
13:09 Speaker 01 and we can pick among those food ingredients and combine them in ways that are delicious and do bring us joy. That's something that would be wonderful to be able to adopt. And that, to me, is what's important.
13:22 Rangan Chatterjee? I want to really dive now into some of the science in your new book. The subtitle, I think, says it all. Burn fat, heal your metabolism, live longer. I think these are three things most of us are pretty keen to have a bit more of in our lives. Now, let's start with fat. There's quite a few areas of science around metabolism and brown fat.
13:47 Speaker 01 Well, as a doctor, I've told many people that having excess body fat puts them at high risk for chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease and cancer. And it's in their interest to really try to lose some of that extra body fat, not just weight. You don't want to lose muscle weight. You want to lose body fat. And frankly, not every kind of body fat. Fat is an organ, an endocrine organ for our metabolism. In fact, it's the largest endocrine hormone secreting organ in our body. And the hormones that fat secretes, there's at least 15 of them. These, the hormones that your normal, healthy body fat secretes allows you to stay alive and gives you the energy to just be who you are and to function.
14:31 Speaker 01 Okay, but like anything else, it's about balance. Anything that's excess in our body is generally not very healthy for us. And so fat can be thought of as absolutely a healthy tissue that we need to have enough. Now, we've got two colors of fat in our body, white fat and brown fat. White fat is wiggly and jiggly. It's the stuff under the arm, under the chin. It's the muffin top that people don't want to have. It's in your thighs and your butt. White fat, subcutaneous, under the skin fat is the stuff most people want to get rid of. White fat is also visceral fat. Visceral fat's packed inside the tube of your body. And when it's too much, it's dangerous. The kind of fat that we want to tame grows first in locations that we can't see very easily,
15:15 Speaker 01 but it's deep inside our body. If you want to look better because you want to shape your body in a way that's pleasing to you, please do. I don't have a problem with that. But what I do think is that people go to extremes and focus only on that and they ignore what's really important. Which is this visceral fat inside our body that you can't see? And now, what's the simplest way we can tell you're gaining visceral fat? Well, it's actually your belt size. So the simplest way is if your pants start getting a little tight and you have to unloosen your belt by one hole, you're probably growing visceral fat. You know, the proverbial beer gut. The good news is that we can actually shrink that visceral fat.
15:58 Speaker 01 There are ways that we can actually utilize our metabolism and foods to be able to shrink that visceral fat. This is actually something that we have agency over. Brown fat is completely different than that. And this is actually something that a lot of people don't appreciate. Brown fat is paper thin, wafer thin, and it's not close to the skin, so you can't see it. It is close to the bone. And this brown fat acts like a space heater. Actually, another analogy is it acts like the burner on our gas range or gas stove in the kitchen. You click it on, it goes whoosh, and you get this flame. And to burn that flame, so you can heat up your water or heat up your soup or cook your stew,
16:41 Speaker 01 that fuel to that flame has to come from someplace. And what brown fat does is it draws that fuel, that energy from your harmful white fat. So this is a strange but wonderful system where brown fat, good fat, can burn down white fat, harmful fat, what we eat and how we eat and with whom we eat can all be small, subtle, but powerful things that can help us not only gain overall health, but also lose some of the weight and the dangerous visceral fat along the way.
17:15 Rangan Chatterjee? I really do think we should get into what you're just talking about now, which is what are some of these foods? Right? So we started off the conversation, Dr. Lee, talking about some foods that... People think are health promoting, but actually if consumed too often, for too long a period of time, actually are not health promoting. We then spoke about the relationship between gut health and the fat in our bodies. We then were talking about fat actually is an organ and we need to think about it. It's not all bad, but if we get too much in the wrong places, it starts to become problematic. And you are one of the leading experts in the world, I think, researching and writing about food
17:55 Rangan Chatterjee? as medicine. So I really want to talk about what are some of these foods that can burn off that fat for us? And there was a very provocative paragraph, I would say, in your introduction that I really liked. Certain foods can stop fat cells from expanding. Other foods cause bad fat cells to become good fat cells. Still, other foods can even redirect a fat stem cell so it can't create more dangerous fat. Some foods even crank up your brown fat space heater. And I could go on, but essentially, I'm not sure that
18:39 Rangan Chatterjee? is common knowledge, that actually the foods you can eat, specific foods can actually go in and target fat. So we're all waiting. What are some of these foods that we can start bringing into our diet to do all these magical things?
18:55 Speaker 01 Within the realm of food as medicine, there's this new discovery that the bioactives that are present, that mother nature has laced into our foods, can activate the healthy fat to reshape itself, not grow so big, redirect itself so we're creating more beneficial fat than harmful fat, and literally get rid of visceral fat. And as I dove into this deeper and deeper, the discoveries were getting more and more exciting to me, because not only was the lab research there showing, identifying what these compounds are, they could be the catechins in tea, they could be the elatic acid in strawberries and chestnuts, they could actually be the sulforaphanes in brassica, the broccoli in bok choy and
19:37 Speaker 01 galan, or turmeric. Their clinical studies were also being done.
19:43 Speaker 01 To show that eating these foods specifically could actually shrink your waistline, your waist circumference, making your body tube a little bit smaller because it is knocking down the visceral fat. Weight loss is sort of, when overall weight loss is sort of a side effect to actually right sizing your body in ways that eating foods can actually generate. And so it's been about 10 years doing metabolism research, but two years really cataloging these foods. What's in a caper? What's actually in green tea? What's in coffee? What's in a pear? That can, what's in a bean? That can actually light up our fat, not only our brown fat, but it can also change and shape shift our white fat in order
20:26 Speaker 01 to be able to burn down and slim down the harmful fat. So we can be more physiologically fit. So I can't give you the one food that I eat all the time. That's my secret. Let me just take you through the grocery store quickly of some of the things that catch my eye. I go into the grocery store and the first thing I go to the produce section, I love fresh foods. I will look at tomatoes during the summertime. Avocados, I love avocados, a great source of dietary fiber surprisingly because they don't taste very fibrousy. And they've got avocatin B, a substance that actually fights white fat and lights up brown fat. Tomatoes have lycopene, by the way. Lycopene is a fat soluble substance. It lights
21:09 Speaker 01 up brown fat. It fights harmful body fat. The really cool thing about lycopene in tomatoes, and this has been studied in humans, when you eat lycopene containing foods like tomatoes or watermelon, or guava, or papaya, actually the lycopene gets absorbed in our bloodstream. And you know where it goes? It immediately goes to the fat in our body. First in our belly fat, then in our thighs, then in our butt. And there it's kind of like a, it's sort of like a fat fighting bomb that gets implanted into your fat to fight fat, right where it needs to be fought. The battle needs to be fought, which is pretty cool. I look at greens. I like leafy greens. Brassica, you know, what people think about broccoli, but I write about broccoli.
21:52 Speaker 01 Gakalini, gai lan, bok choy, baby bok choy. Again, these are vegetables you saute with a little garlic and extra virgin olive oil. You blanch it, you can stir fry it, add a little oyster sauce or soy sauce. Man, you can make amazing tasty dishes with it. Chili peppers, I actually like to cook with chili peppers. And it's a whole gamut, hundreds of chili peppers out there. Love mushrooms, maitake mushrooms on the grill, roasted. Simple white button mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, morels. I talk about studies with canned beans that can actually shrink your waistline by fighting visceral fat by eating them. Lentils, other legumes, olive oils, extra virgin oils.
22:35 Speaker 01 Look for the high polyphenol type, barley, buckwheat, soba noodles. The foods that can actually do this fit within the realm of culinary traditions from healthy eating patterns from around the world that people find delicious. That's to me can give you joy and better align. You know, all the science that we've been talking about with really behavior changes that you can look forward to.
22:58 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, there's a section in the book, respect tradition. I really like that section that you wrote about. And you ended it with something that I think speaks to what you've just said. Take advantage of the wisdom of centuries. When it comes to healthy foods, newer inventions are rarely better. That was profound, Dr. Lee, because, you know, it's been said many ways, like eat the foods that your grandparents would eat. Or however we want to talk about it, but you know, there's nothing that fancy and new. Like if we eat in that old fashioned way, most of the time we're going to benefit. So that's a very powerful section in the book, which I think people are going to benefit from.
23:38 Rangan Chatterjee? For that person, Dr. Lee, who feels inspired, but who has really struggled to lose excess body fat before and really, really wants to, do you have any final words for them?
23:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think you should love your food to love your health and love your metabolism. If you align what you enjoy doing with ingredients that can activate your metabolism, help you fight body fat with your goals of health, you will actually start to move in that direction. And I think small steps actually have a big difference.
24:13 Rangan Chatterjee? Hope you enjoyed that bite sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.
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