Boost Your Longevity: Dr. William Li’s Favorite Foods for Stem Cell Activation

Highlights

• Dark chocolate mobilizes stem cells from places like the bone marrow into the bloodstream.
• Goji berries protect and mobilize stem cells and are believed to help preserve vision health.
• Red bell peppers are a source of compounds that contribute to stem cell mobilization and are believed to help vision health.
• Tea (black and green) revitalizes and mobilizes stem cells, yet adding dairy to the tea can reduce the absorption of its beneficial compounds.

Dr. William Li is a world-renowned physician, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author, having written books like Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. In a Modern Healthspan YouTube video, he reveals three foods and a drink he recommends to activate stem cells for longevity: dark chocolate, goji berries, red bell peppers, and tea.

Background On Stem Cells

Our bodies are naturally equipped to regenerate using stem cells—cells capable of forming any part of the body, from bones to nerves to muscles. These cells formed at the beginning of your life when the fusion of the sperm and egg formed a little ball of cells with no face, spine, or legs that were all stem cells.

As infants develop in a mother’s womb, these stem cells take on a life of their own, following genetic instructions on what to do. Some stem cells become the eye, the jaw, the ear, etc., until infants develop a face. In a similar way, stem cells give rise to every single organ in the body so that after nine months, an infant is ready to come out of the womb.

Intriguingly, even after nine months of development in the womb, we have an extra 70 million or so stem cells, held within the bone marrow, body fat, and skin. These cells serve as our reserve as we get older, into our middle-aged and elderly years. Through the years, they are called into action to follow their respective instructions for repairing things like muscle and regenerating the body from the inside.

Evidence for human body regeneration comes from examples like hair growing back after being plucked, skin regenerating after a wound, and nerves growing back — up to one millimeter a day — after an injury. Moreover, your gut regenerates pretty much every day, according to Dr. William Li, and your body can regenerate portions of the liver over the course of a few months to a year if up to two thirds of it is removed. Similarly, if a snippet of your lung tissue is removed, the lung can eventually regenerate the tissue.

The reason the regenerative capacity of some parts of the body is important is because our stem cells can become exhausted as our bodies degenerate with age. In other words, our reservoirs of stem cells can become depleted and the ones left are not as functionally vigorous. However, according to Dr. Li, the good news is that certain foods can revitalize and repopulate these cells.

Stem Cell-Activating Foods

When asked about whether stem cell-activating foods repopulate the stem cell reservoir, revitalize stem cells, or both, Dr. William Li says that scientifically, he does not know for sure. He does say that some types of foods and teas can mobilize stem cells from reservoirs to the bloodstream for tissue rejuvenation. In this way, he adds that stem cells “buzz” out like bees from a hive and travel to regions where they are needed for repair, such as an area with an injury. As such, Dr. William Li recommends three foods and one drink for stem cell activation.

Dark Chocolate

Chocolate is a food that almost everyone enjoys. According to Dr. William Li, dark chocolate is the most dramatic food for mobilizing stem cells into your bloodstream from places like bone marrow. The cacao in chocolate contains compounds called proanthocyanidins that cause stem cells to act vigorously, kind of like giving them a workout.

Goji Berries

Goji berries have compounds like lutein and zeaxanthin that protect and mobilize stem cells, according to Dr. William Li. He says this is remarkable, because possibly through their effects on stem cells, these compounds are believed to protect vision health.

Red Bell Peppers

Lutein and zeaxanthin are also found in red bell peppers. Evidence on these compounds also suggests that they protect aged people against an eye disease that is the leading cause of blindness in aged people — age-related macular degeneration.

Black and Green Tea

Dr. William Li also says that black, green, and matcha teas have compounds called polyphenols (like EGCG) that mobilize stem cells. He adds that while he knows that in European cultures, people like to put dairy milk in tea, fat bubbles from the milk trap the polyphenols. When this happens, the milk bubbles travel down your gut with the polyphenols and do not get absorbed. For this reason, he recommends not adding dairy milk to tea.

Dr. William Li says that to get the most polyphenols you can, he recommends matcha tea, because with matcha tea, the entire tea leaves are ground up into the drink. In this way, you consume all of the leaves with the tea.

Questioning Whether These Foods and Tea Activate Stem Cells

Dr. William Li concludes that most of us want to live longer lives in a healthy state. To do this, he says we can eat and drink things like dark chocolate, goji berries, red bell peppers, and green, black, and matcha teas. Doing so may help preserve things like vision health and help the body to regenerate after exercise or injury. Not only that but you can purchase proanthocyanidin, EGCG, or lutein and zeaxanthin supplements.

A quick search of the literature does not link dark chocolate consumption with stem cell mobilization. However, dark chocolates contain proanthocyanidins, and a proanthocyanidin extract from sea buckthorn berries has been associated with stem cell mobilization. As for lutein and zeaxanthin, research suggests that these compounds may delay the progression of age-related macular degeneration. At the same time, evidence is lacking that they mobilize stem cells. Furthermore, the polyphenol EGCG has been linked to a better stem cell regenerative capacity in rats, so it is possible that it mobilizes and rejuvenates stem cells.

It remains unclear where Dr. William Li is getting his data suggesting that dark chocolate, goji berries, red bell peppers, and green and black teas activate stem cells. While there is data suggesting that proanthocyanidin, found in dark chocolate, mobilizes stem cells, there is no direct evidence linking dark chocolate consumption with stem cell activation. It also remains unclear whether lutein and zeaxanthin from goji berries mobilize stem cells. EGCG from green and black teas may also boost stem cell mobilization in a rat model, but whether these findings apply to humans needs testing with clinical trials.

Perhaps the biggest question from Dr. William Li’s presentation is what dose of each of these compounds is required to activate stem cells, if indeed these compounds do activate them. With all of these questions surrounding Dr. William Li’s claims, clinical trials will be necessary for confirmation. For this reason, Dr. William Li’s claims that these three foods along with black and green teas activate stem cells should be considered with some skepticism.