Dr William Li is a world-renowned medical doctor who is keen to help us all understand how we can use food as medicine. He 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 this book 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 begin this conversation talking 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.

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Watch the video version of the conversation here: