Eat to Beat Disease The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself

In your book eat to beat disease you discuss something called epcs and you say they're really important I have never come across these before but you have this thing you call them like cellular seamstresses so I just want to say that because it sounded great what are they and are they important in this story from your perspective

I'm so glad that you brought that up okay an epc these are initials e is for endothelial and I just told you this was that's what you call the lining of the blood vessels p is for progenitor meaning it's a stem cell so epc is a stem cell of the lining of the blood vessel which means what's this which means that it's a cell that is held in reserve to help repair and regenerate damage scuffed up lining of the blood vessels

So super important for maintaining good blood flow between heart and brain and every other organ in the body but here's something that is stunningly important these progenitor cells or stem cells endothelial progenitor cells apcs also have the ability to turn into other cells as well

Epcs can turn into other cells that's one of the hallmarks of stem cells by the way I wanted to make a clarification here I'm not talking about a stem cell that you can go to the corner strip mall to get injected into your knee or your shoulder that to me is a commercial venture that's not quite ready for prime time and I've been involved by the way with the biotech industry to try to develop real bona fides cellular therapy with stem cells it works we're not we're not ready to actually get it mainstream yet it's it's still working its way through the development process but our body does it already and the thing about we know about stem cells is that if a stem cell wants to turn into a blood vessel done deal if a stem cell wants to turn a liver it can do that too and guess what epcs as stem cells can also turn into brain cells so the amazing thing is that we didn't realize until maybe a decade ago just starting to have the inkling we can actually regenerate our brain

It's long been thought that you know once your brain tissue dies that's it you had a stroke you can't recover wrong we can actually regenerate parts of our brain does not happen very quickly and gosh if we could actually figure out how to do it better and faster more efficiently that would actually completely turn the tide on dementia so this is an area of research that I work on it's really really exciting it not only repaves the blood vessels the zamboni of the good circulation which we need for brain health and other organ health but it is also the well spring for regenerating actual brain tissue

He's written a book called Eat to Beat Disease, which explains how certain foods can heal or harm our bodies.

What these foods do is essentially starve tiny cancers and prevent them from being able to grow larger by stopping those extra blood vessels from growing.