The 3 Drinks That Regenerate Stem Cells & Repair The Body | Dr. William Li

Alcohol is a perfect example of one you know you often hear that the blue zones all except for loma linda. They all have a little tiny amount of alcohol on a regular basis now can we infer that alcohol is good or is that that population can handle it because the rest of their lifestyle is organized we don't know yet right. through it so the beverage section in the grocery store is a pretty confusing section because it's in the middle isles and there are endless sea of juices and sodas and bottled waters that are there and so i try to bring a little bit of clarity to you know what are the three beverages that are unquestionably healthy for you there's no real controversy of them all right because other drinks like juices and sodas lots of controversy lots of data but the three things i call the holy trinity of beverages are water okay water actually uh is critical for hydration critical to maintain our health defenses critical for our metabolism you need water in the system okay uh and drinking water is something that is very natural and important to us uh uh and again when you drink cool water you activate these uh temperature gauges in our stomach that are triggering our metabolism to kind of warm up uh the water in our stomach so we don't cool our core body temperature so there's even metabolic benefits to drinking water water is also by satiating so when you actually drink water with a meal you're naturally stretching out your stomach a little bit and rather than actually having food in there that water stretch actually basically slows down your appetite slows down your hunger as well which also helps to contribute to preventing you from overeating as well so water is really good for you there's no you know like it's a human right to drink water you know we we have to drink water it's really great footnote to that and this is actually something that i think really deserves um careful uh research more careful research is you know bottled water which is so commonly consumed probably will have microplastics in it almost certainly does and you know even though the research doesn't hasn't clearly nailed what the harm of microplastics are i would say it's probably not so good for you we can find it like attached to a red blood cell circling our blood that's that freaks me out actually think about that so if you can drink water if you can if you can drink water from a source other than bottled water it's probably preferable yeah get a filter at home get a filter at home i had there's a great quote that a friend said years ago uh an acquaintance said years ago he said either you get a or you become the filter that's actually really true and our kidney is going to be the filter and our bloodstream is going to become the filter yeah you don't you don't want to be not all that accumulating these microplastics but the water is really really good beverage second is tea we talked a little bit about green tea um as being beneficial to you um and you know tea is the second most popular beverage in the world after drinking water uh so we're talking about something that a lot of people have a lot of experience with but i but when i point out my book it's not just green tea it's different kinds of green tea matcha tea is actually good for you oolong tea which is slightly fermented green tea also has metabolic benefits also has polyphenols and then for green tea if you have matcha you know what you find in a ceremonial tea you find in a japanese restaurant it's bright green tea it's kind of opaque because it's actually made with powder and it's the entire tea leaf that's powdered a lot of people don't realize this but matcha is super packed with polyphenols you know why matcha is grown in a very particular way 28 days before they pick the the tea leaf from to make matcha they put it under shade they put they they basically cover it with a canopy and the shade is there so the tea in response to the tea leaf tea plant in response to shade actually wants to make more polyphenols so they make anywhere from 30 to 300 times more polyphenols under the shade all right and then what happens when you pick the leaf you cut off the stem and then they powder the drying powder the entire leaf and so that's why you have so much more polyphenol it's like a stress response to not having this first is a stress response on the plant but then you get more rather than having a tea bag or loose tea leaves you actually powder the entire leaf so you're getting the entire leaf including all the polyphenols so you drink all the polyphenols which is why you get 30 to 300 times more than just dunking a tea bag you also get the dietary fiber good for your gut microbiome so matcha tea actually is quite amazing actually done a study to show that that matcha tea extracts can kill breast cancer stem cells wow i'm always amazed by that because look as somebody who's been involved with biotech development um and cancer treatment development finding something that could kill stem cells cancer stem cells like breast cancer stem cells which is what makes cancers come back is a holy grail we don't have a drug for it but here matcha tea actually been shown in the lab to actually be able to do that to me is actually really jaw-dropping then going down into even more fermented tea because traditionally again you know this idea that in our wellness community we wind up having all these mantras um must drink green tea and oxidized fermented tea is no good turns out that's not true the science is showing that oolong tea which is slightly fermented also good for your metabolism you can lose your waist you can shrink your waist size your waist circumference lose body fat and then even perhaps more surprising if you take the extreme of fermented smoky dark teas there's a tea that i write about called pu-erh tea p-u apostrophe e-r-h one of your favorites right one of mine as well uh this is comes from a village of pu-erh that um back thousands of years actually traded tea on the silk road so they smoked the tea they fermented it so it actually survived the tea journey and it turns out research had been done to show that pu-erh tea lights up your brown fat burns up you know triggers your fat excess fat burning by burning the cells uh decreases your stem cells from making more fat uh and whites uh fats visceral fat as well quite remarkable that this fermented tea that's supposedly you know fermented it's not can't be good doesn't have any of the polyphenols left wrong and on top of that they've actually discovered just a few years ago that there is this tradition thousand-year-old tradition of making pu-erh tea there's even a bacteria a probiotic that actually is then the bacteria is grown in the way that's fermented in fact they call it pu-erh cilis uh like a bacillus that actually grows in pu-erh tea so this is actually a probiotic tea which to me is remarkable and not only does it improve gut health it's good for your as well so it fires up your brown fat so again you know tea is the second part of the holy trinity the third um which i always drink and you asked me what did i want if i you know i was coming in to do this podcast with you and i requested a cup of coffee coffee has chlorogenic acid and many other polyphenols but the chlorogenic acid not only boosts your health defenses but it also triggers your metabolism uh and it stimulates your metabolism from going as well a little bit the caffeine which i'm able to tolerate not everybody can tolerate caffeine but i'm able to tolerate the caffeine caffeine also uh stimulates not only your kind of like your brain but also stimulates your metabolism as well and i'm not encouraging people to go after caffeine i'm just saying that coffee is one of the the third of the holy trinity coffee tea and water that actually is really really healthy you know the beautiful thing about the way you present it is like pu-erh one of my favorite teas i drank it so much during yeah like i would drink it all the time and then i had a little bit of a gap and then i'm thinking recently i'm like you know what it's probably been a year or two since i've had it like when you know the information it's another reminder of like oh this thing that i used to enjoy or that i've heard of or that i heard somebody else having like wow like that's exciting for me and you include it back into your routine and all this culminates together and it really goes into this last principle that you talk about in the 10 principles which is live to eat right the joy of searching out being a food hunter forger in our modern world and really leaning into the idea of not being fear-based around food but actually you know i'll let you set it up you know sometimes we hear this phrase like people say oh do you eat to live or do you live to eat and almost like live to eat has a demeaning tone that people give it in that capacity talk about how you're representing it to the audience yeah well in my book one of the things that i really try to and i hope the readers get this convey is that we don't need to fear our food the very foods that taste great can be actually good for us if we're mindful about how we eat it and when we eat it and all that kind of other stuff and and to find good combinations of it and that these are connected to our old traditions and that's really how i really became very mindful of this whole idea of living to eat so i did a gap year before i went to medical school to become a doctor i was a biochemist in college and i was very enamored by history and i was always interested in the mediterranean because when i studied i took a very influential course called the renaissance history of man and that course fascinated me because it was really talking about that inflection point between the dark ages the middle ages and the renaissance sort of the enlightenment and all the incredible arts and sciences and literature explosion of culture that occurred during the renaissance right and i realized something that was really amazing which is that at any point like it didn't happen overnight it wasn't like you know one day was in a dark room it's called the middle ages and one day somebody clicked on a light switch and oh it's a renaissance no this actually took place over hundreds of years that this evolution actually occurred and and i realized that there was something really valuable about this idea of of growing to higher light a stage of enlightenment that occurs over time i really wanted to see where this occurred which happened to be in the mediterranean that i we were studying in italy and greece so i really wanted to get over study it and then i also realized that the food traditions also as part of my study changed dramatically between the middle ages where people are just like you know cooking you know those gigantic um you know bronto burgers over a fire to really beginning to um understand how ingredients melded together you know the the simmering and the cooking and the stewing like these were not medieval age you know you have cavemen weren't doing that but really it started during the modern asian and mediterranean uh actually cooking techniques came into being so i wanted to see this so before i went to medical school i did a gap year and i went to italy i kind of embedded myself so to speak and i was um i lived with a family and i was there explicitly to study the link between food and culture and health i wanted to see what it was like over there in italy and greece i traveled all around italy um uh and i actually also did some cooking uh for the families i was living with uh in greece i went to a monastery uh i i literally volunteered to be a cook in the monastery uh one day because the abbott announced that the the chef uh monk was sick had the flu and they needed volunteers and who knew how to cook and so i raised my hand and off i went in there we were stirring uh a ginormous pot of beans with a canoe paddle literally and cooking for the entire monastery this is like cooking easter feast and you know um and and to me that experience burned into my brain while i was living there that people really enjoyed their food they knew about their food they talked about their food they looked forward to their food so you know if you go to mediterranean anyone if you knew have a friend in italy or in greece and and in they took you out to a meal or cooked a meal for you while you sat down with your meal they would be talking about their food italians talk about what they're eating as they're eating it and they talk about the season it is and how to prepare it and different nuances about it people are passionate about their food same thing in asia you know and you know i would imagine the same thing as in india people take the time to prepare their food and when they serve it that's what people talk about they talk about their food and and they really really relish it and enjoy it and they look forward to their next meal i think to me i learned that was the antithesis was what i came back to when i went to medical school where we were so rushed you know we were so busy we didn't have time to eat and so when you sat down it was really just to pile in some sustenance and to get through to get to the next thing and that to me was um uh you know i i really wanted to live to eat as opposed to just eat to live to i think i've i've really lived my life that way and what i hope for people who read my book is that they'll they'll really they'll really see from the way that i write about food that it's something that i i enjoy it's passionate and that it's something that you can really look forward to like when i was writing some of the things uh that i wrote i actually i wrote part of this book by the way in the mediterranean i went back i was doing some research um in places um and i finished i finished my book actually in greece i was on a greek island um and i went to a little writing cave and the food that i would eat like i would write about afterwards and it would make my mouth water to write about the food i just ate all over again so you know i hope people i hope readers really get this idea like please don't fear your food you know um love your food and it's just so amazing that we're so fortunate actually to be able to you know benefit from societies and histories and cultures i've actually figured out a lot of stuff for us um uh and and now what's cool is that science is bringing us really to the cutting edge that forefront where we begin to understand why the things that taste so great are actually so great