Reaction Paper on William Li's Ted Talk

I learned a lot of interesting things about angiogenesis in relation to cancer and food while watching the Ted Talk featuring a doctor named William Li. To start, angiogenesis has to do with the process that our bodies use to grow blood vessels. We get most of our blood vessels in the womb, so as an adult, blood vessels don’t usually grow. An interesting fact that I learned in this Ted Talk is that our bodies have about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in them as an average adult! Blood vessels only grow when women’s walls of the uterus need to be lines, when the placenta is being grow during pregnancy to connect the mother to the baby, and when there is a wound.

Angiogenesis is not bad by itself, but it is bad when it is not functioning properly. When angiogenesis is out of balance, it accounts for many diseases. This means that the body can’t get rid of extra blood vessels, or the body can’t produce more blood vessels when the body needs them. There are over 70 diseases that effect people that have abnormal angiogenesis as the main problem. Lots of people have small amounts of cancer in them, but they will never grow to be larger than “the tip of a ball point pen”, according to William Li. This is because cancers don’t grow unless they have a blood supply that is feeding it oxygen and nutrients that it needs in order to grow. Therefore. The body’s ability to control angiogenesis is what makes it so that blood vessels can’t feed small cancer cells, which would cause them to grow out of control. Why this is so bad is because cancer is not usually detected when it is extremely small. It is usually diagnosed when the cancer is huge, angiogenesis is turned on, and cancer cells are growing like crazy.

So, with all of this information, William Li started to experiment with antiangiogenic therapy, which is different from chemo because it aims at the blood vessels that feed the cancer; and this isn’t hard to do because blood vessels that are feeding cancer are easy to spot because they’re big and abnormal looking. While researching, Li discovered that as human’s our diet accounts for 30-35% of environmentally caused cancers, which in fact is a huge amount. So, Li decided to try to experiment with antiangiogenic food and adding it to diets to see what would happen. Some antiangiogenic foods include red grapes, strawberries, and soybeans.

What Li discovered is that these antiangiogenic foods literally starved the cancer cells so that blood vessels couldn’t grow. And something even more interesting is that there is food synergy when it comes to antiangiogenic foods, which means that the more you eat, the more potent it becomes. Li is working on a scoring system for the potencies of these antiangiogenic foods so that people can try to eat foods that are more potent so that they can try to starve cancer cells.

The best part of this Ted Talk to me was the fact that William Li talked about how in poorer countries, dietary cancer prevention may be all that they can have and afford, so I think that antiangiogenic therapy can be revolutionary for poorer parts of the world. Now that I know this information, I’m definitely going to try to eats more foods that were on the list of antiangiogenic foods.

Another thing that Li brought up is that fat is highly angiogenesis dependent, which means that when fat grows, blood vessels grow. So, essentially, we can starve those blood vessels and fat cells with antiangiogenic foods in order to prevent or reverse obesity. This is also a very revolutionary idea, and I truly think that it’s something that can change the world.