Dr William Li returns to the podcast to talk about his latest book, Eat To Beat Your Diet: Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer. He describes it as an anti-diet book for people who love food. It’s 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.
We talk about the common foods that are marketed as healthy yet are anything but. We talk about the important role that our gut bacteria play in our metabolism, and we talk about the foods that can damage our gut microbiome, resulting in us processing food less efficiently and potentially contributing to weight gain.
That being said, Dr Li is actually really keen not to villainise any food – there are many reasons why humans choose to eat certain foods and drinks, from our innate sweet tooth to cultural, social or religious traditions. He just wants us to be mindful of what we’re consuming, how and why.
 
We also do a deep dive on fat. What exactly is fat? Many of us have negative associations with that word but the truth is that fat is a very important endocrine organ. The problems only start to arise when we start storing too much, of the wrong type of fat, in the wrong places. And one of those harmful types of fat is something called visceral fat - which is a harmful type of white fat, not visible from the outside, that can sit inside us, causing inflammation, hormone disruption and playing havoc with the health of our internal organs. Dr Li explains why an expanding waistline and snoring at night, could be early indicators that you have an issue with internal fat, that needs addressing.
As well as being a scientist and medical doctor, Dr Li is really a foodie at heart. And, so of course, we talk about some of his favourite foods which have medicinal properties and fat-burning potential. He also explains why his preferred diet is something that he calls ‘MediterrAsian’ and he is keen to bust some common myths around metabolism – such as, is it true that our metabolism slows down as we get older?
This is an episode jam-packed with insights and practical information. Dr Li is an excellent communicator and full of passion. I hope you enjoy listening. 
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We're either born with a slow or a fast metabolism.

You know, when kids are teenagers, they're eating 2 or 3 meals, their metabolism must be going off the charts.

When we reach our middle age, we're naturally going to expand our middle because our metabolism naturally slows down.

It turns out all of those ideas are false.

Humans all go through only 4 phases of metabolism from birth to the end of life.

The first thing is that everyone's born with the exact same metabolism.

The real mic drop here is that from age 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 60 is rock solid.

So in this research, when they added the effect of extra body fat back into the system, it crushes your metabolism.

So excess fat slows your metabolism, not the other way around.

It's good news because it means that we now have the power to be able to affect some change, to fight that extra body fat in our middle years.

Rongan Chatterjee, And this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

William Lee, a world renowned medical doctor who is keen to help us all understand better how we can use food as medicine.

Lee first came on my podcast back in early 2022 to talk about his first book, Eat to Beat Disease.

And the occasion for his return is the publication of his second book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer.

Now he describes his latest book as an anti-diet book for people who love foods.

It's a groundbreaking look at the latest science around how we can harness the power of foods to activate our innate fat burning systems and transform our health.

We begin our conversation talking about the common foods that are marketed as healthy, get to actually anything but.

We talk about the important role that our gut bacteria play in our metabolism.

And we talk about the foods that can damage our gut microbiome, resulting in us processing food less efficiently and potentially contributing to weight gain.

Lee is actually really keen not to villainize any foods.

There are many reasons why humans choose to eat certain foods and drinks, from our innate sweet tooth to cultural, social or religious traditions.

He just wants us to be mindful of what we're consuming, how and why.

We also do a deep dive on fat that I think you will find really, really interesting.

You see, many of us have negative associations with that word, but the truth is that fat is a very important endocrine organ.

The problems only start to arise when we start storing too much of the wrong type of fat in the wrong places.

And 1 of those harmful types of fats is something called visceral fat which is a harmful type of white fat not visible from the outside that can sit inside us, causing inflammation, hormone disruption, and playing havoc with the health of our internal organs.

Someone could look thin on the outside, but be fat on the inside.

Lee explains why an expanding waistline and snoring at night could be early indicators that you have an issue with internal fat that needs addressing.

Lee, as well as being a scientist and medical doctor, is really a foodie at heart.

And so of course we talk about some of his favorite foods which have medicinal properties and fat burning potential.

He also explains why his preferred diet is something that he calls mediteration.

And he is really keen to bust some common myths around metabolism, such as our metabolism slows down as we get older.

This is an episode jam-packed with insights and practical information.

Lee is an excellent communicator, full of passion and knowledge.

Lee, you talk in your new book 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?

You know, 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, 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.

Look, I enjoy drinking the taste of fruit juice, but when you guzzle fruit juice, which many people do, it's a problem.

I love oranges, especially when they're in season during the winter.

I love eating a regular juicy, sweet orange.

But a single orange is very nutrient dense.

I could guzzle, 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 8 oranges to make in 30 seconds.

And so that's an example of where you can easily overload the sugars, the fruit sugars, by having a tall glass of its juice instead of eating the whole fruit.

So that's an example, like lots of fruit juices 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-thrus, you get your handed that special seasonal version with the pumpkin or whatever.

You know, a lot of those flavors, as tasty as they may be, I even like them, You know, they're artificial.

They're artificially flavored, artificially sweetened.

And that also takes something that's healthy and makes it, frankly, not just less healthy, but actually unhealthy.

Another example would be plant-based foods, the plant-based burgers that they talked about that everyone says is a healthier version than a regular burger.

Well, look, we know that ultra-processed foods that you buy anywhere are not good for our overall health.

Although something that might be plant-based sounds healthy, 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 snowed 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 not.

Yeah, I appreciate you outlining some of those common foods there.

Lee, 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 in your new book, 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.

And this whole idea of ingredient labels, I think is something that will come up time and time again.

You write about this beautifully in your book.

Bread is 1 of those foods that is consumed all over the world, but there are probably some breads that for some people are health promoting, whereas others are not so good, are they?

I'm glad you brought up the idea of bread.

I actually think of bread and wine as 2 categories of foods that date back to the origins of our humanity, right?

So basically when humans started to put together their societies thousands of years ago, we fermented grapes, we made bread.

They're some of the elemental foods that characterize sort of human society from a cultural sense.

And 1 of the things that I think is quite challenging is, first, the quality of the ingredient that goes into the product.

So for bread, as an example, the least expensive, softest, longest lasting breads that you can buy in the grocery store, in the supermarkets, are the ones that are made with the lowest quality flour and that have lots of other preservatives added to it to allow it to kind of survive the centuries.

Like some of these breads probably could stay intact in a pyramid for thousands of years, I kid you not.

And yet those are some of the cheapest ones that people are accustomed to, maybe from childhood.

Our mom might've fed us this and made our sandwiches out of this.

And we become accustomed to having cheap bread.

That's 1 thing, is the quality of the grain used for something as elemental as bread.

Second is really that, you know, whether we're having whole grain or whether actually ultra processed flour can also make a difference.

There's lots of different types of grains that can be used to make bread.

And then of course, there are some historically important breads like sourdough, which in fact has microbiome, probiotic starters that are good for our gut health.

For example, like Lactobacillus ruteri, it happens to be 1 of the starters.

It's actually developed over the centuries of humans making sourdough bread generation after generation to develop its own probiotic bacteria that grows right in the bread itself in the little dough that gets pinched and saved from baker to baker and passed down through the generations.

So I think that there's also nuance, as you say.

And then of course, there's something that's maybe less nuanced, which is volume.

A little bread probably is just fine, but eating bread the way that we are often served bread or accustomed to eating bread, which is wolfing down large quantities of bread, that clearly, like anything else, that is consumed in excess, definitely can compromise our health.

It's interesting what you said there about quantity.

This is something I've learned about in my own life, not necessarily dealing with patients of course, that's taught me a lot over the years, but I have experimented with wearing a CGM for a couple of weeks, a few times a year, not all the time, but now and again, and I have learned whether it's white rice or bread, the quantity makes a huge difference on the impact it has on my body.

And So that device for me has been a really great learning tool to go, hey, if you want to enjoy this, you can, but if you want it to not cause long-term health consequences, maybe just go easy on the volume and the amounts.

I probably changed the amount I was consuming.

Let's say I'm gonna have white rice in the evening with my meal, which I grew up in an Indian family.

It's a food that I grew up eating, but I can actually have a really small amount now and enjoy it and actually not see it impact my blood sugar.

So that's been really quite amazing for me.

Have you experienced things like this yourself as well?

And I guess, is that what you're getting at with quantity?

Yes, I mean, you know, I'm so glad you brought the continuous glucose monitoring as a non-invasive way for us to measure ourselves.

I mean, you know, the, the, this, and I think this is where the future is going, giving us the ability relatively easily to see how we're doing from from moment to moment day to day is super helpful.

For me a simple device that I've actually experimented with similarly to is a I don't know if you've seen these It's like a breathalyzer for whether you're burning carbs or fat, it's called a lumen device.

And it's quite interesting that the fact that it breaks down a respiratory equivalent for your metabolism just through a breathalyzer, you know, if a policeman can pull you over to the side of the road for drinking too much alcohol, why can't we actually be at home and measure in the morning as I sometimes do occasionally, just to check in to see how I've been done.

I found that when I'm actually moderate and mindful in what I consume, not only in terms of what, but also the quantity of how much I ate, I actually do better.

And that's actually a positive reinforcement.

So you know I think these little signals that actually help us get smarter about our own behavior and what's good for us, it's not a big ask.

Yeah it's It's interesting what we've just been talking about, how we might be able to use tech or, you know, all kinds of things, blood tests, whatever it might be to actually learn what's working for us and what's not working for us, I think really speaks to the message in your new book, which is very much 1 of personalization.

You've done a beautiful job outlining I think

These foods are going to help you burn fat, they're going to help you lose weight, give you more energy, whatever it might be you're looking for, these foods are gonna help you.

But you really beautifully put across this idea, which I'm a huge fan of, that you have to personalize this for you.

If some of those foods on that list you don't like or don't fit you and your culture and your upbringing, that's okay.

You know, there's other foods you can focus on.

And you know, you're not prescribing an actual diet per se in this book, more I think a way of eating and you're trying to help people with I guess some some base principles.

Lee that you prefer people to be mindful eaters rather than prescriptive eaters.

I think 1 of the things that makes diets fail, and by the way, my title of my new book, Eat to Beat Your Diet, is a trick title, purposefully.

It's actually an anti-diet book, which is why it's called Eat to Beat Your Diet.

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.

I mean, as you now know, it goes crazy when people are, we're in a society obsessed with weight loss, whether it's, you know, prescription drugs for weight loss, or whether it's sucking out fat from your cheeks.

There's lots and lots of intense things that people do.

The problem is, you know, they don't last.

And for me, a healthy diet is something that you can actually, it's sustainable, you can enjoy it, it can become second nature.

And I think 1 of the things that I also want to add to your idea of just the opposite of prescriptive diet and a more natural personalized diet is aligning your life patterns, your eating patterns with what gives you joy.

Because food is different from supplements or medicines.

Yes, Food is medicine, but food is in so many ways, but yet food is not medicine because nobody gets joy from actually taking a medicine.

If I wrote a prescription or you wrote a prescription and you gave me a prescription and I went to the pharmacy to fill it out and I started taking the pills or I went to a hospital to get an infusion, I guarantee you it's not gonna give me joy.

But if we were to have a conversation about foods that can actually activate and elevate our bodies' natural processes to help us become healthier, and we can pick among those food ingredients and combine them in ways that do are delicious and do bring us joy, that's something that would be wonderful to be able to adopt.

It's very clear from reading this book and your previous 1 to be fair that you are a foodie, that you enjoy cooking, you enjoy observing different cultures, you like putting it all together.

So there's a real joy I think in reading the book because your love of food absolutely comes through really beautifully.

There's quite a lot of new science in there.

A lot of the time I feel people think, well, we know everything there is to know now, we just need to do the things that people are telling us And while some of the principles I guess we know about, there's quite a few areas of science around metabolism and brown fat, which I thought were really, really interesting that I'd love to explore with you.

Before we get to that, I wonder if we can talk about gut health and weight loss, and in particular, fat loss.

You've touched on it a couple of times already in terms of the probiotics within certain breads.

1 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.

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.

Well, gut health is something that, you know, we live with gut health until our guts unhealthy, right?

We don't think about our gut health until we have that crampy, bloated, gassy, uncomfortable feeling.

That's our body, our gut telling us there's something wrong in the neighborhood of those 40, 39 trillion bacteria living in our cecum, which is really the final part of our colon.

And the thing that is really remarkable is what these gut bacteria do for us when it comes to our metabolism.

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, actually helps makes our body's ability to use insulin and to absorb glucose more efficient.

Now let me just put that in the context for your listeners in terms of something that they probably have heard about but maybe didn't connect with gut health.

So every time we eat food we put 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.

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 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, when we consume them, alter our gut microbiome.

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 soda so they don't gain weight with sugar, Ironically, many people do gain weight if they consume enough diet soda.

So if you poison your gut microbiome sufficiently and you disrupt your metabolism sufficiently, even though you're having quote diet soda, that's just a name on the can.

The reality 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 fuel source, much less efficiently.

So many other things can actually disturb our gut health as well.

Antibiotics, which are so commonly prescribed, over prescribed perhaps might be the right word to say in many societies.

I think that over consumption of alcohol can clearly interfere with your gut microbiome, ultra processed foods, all those things are back to the ingredient label that we don't do enough.

I mean, honestly, it's not a big deal to pick up something that you might put in your shopping cart, but just take a moment before it goes in to turn the box to the side and look at what's actually inside it.

If you don't recognize those ingredients, if you can't pronounce them, think 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.

Yeah, it really speaks to, I think this idea behind fat loss.

I wanna talk about fat shortly, what it is, why it's not as harmful maybe as it's been made out to be.

You make a very compelling case for the benefits of fat, which I think is really, really nuanced, very, very important for us to understand.

But 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 in 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 sweeteners for a minute.

Lee, is because this appears to be 1 of the most controversial areas.

You know, 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.

the views that come back are, that's a load of rubbish, Right?

It's surely better than having the sugar sweetened drink.

And it becomes very, very inflammatory, like many things to do with foods these days, to be fair.

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.

I personally just don't like advising people consume them.

Doesn't mean I know for sure, this was a few years ago, but I was like 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.

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.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think I have the same general outlook as you in my own stance and my advice is very similar, which is take a precautionary stance and be informed.

So we all do things 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.

And of course, everyone's a little bit different.

But here's what I read about in my book, because I was deeply researching this.

People will say, well, fruit juices must be okay because they come from fruits, which are plant-based.

Aren't you talking about eating plant-based foods?

Yes, But again, this is, you know, back to this idea of nuance, which is really important.

I think that 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 that we've dived deeper into gut health, we're beginning to see more concrete data that suggests that there's 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, be really careful about diet sodas and be careful about sodas in general.

And so for my book, 1 of the things that I wanted to do is just to write about like, where's the safe harbor in all this, right?

By the way, I take people in my book through the...

As I was writing this section of my book on foods, I wrote for the reader, imagining that they were sitting in the grocery cart, like we all did when we were kids in our mom's grocery cart, and she was pushing us through the grocery store and what I'm doing is kind of whispering your ear telling you what is healthy and good for your metabolism to put in the grocery cart and when we get to the beverage aisle okay there's a whole chapter on beverages I really come to this conclusion that there are 3 beverages that I call the holy trinity for health.

It's water, it's tea, and it's coffee in their elemental forms, right?

Not the stuff that's got the syrups and things put in them, not necessarily the flavored waters necessarily, but in their elemental forms.

These 3 beverages all have very, very compelling and deep evidence that they actually benefit our physiology.

They help our body do its things in a way.

Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to a brand new sponsor for this show, Exhale Coffee.

Many of us like to drink coffee and of course we need to be careful about how much we consume and at what times of day, but I do believe that for most of us, if we want to, coffee can be enjoyed as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Well, the truth is that not all coffee is made the same and about a year ago, my good friend Dr.

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#376 How to Burn Fat, Heal Your Metabolism and Live Longer with Dr William Li