16th Annual Patient Day
Your Mother Should Know, Your Doctor Should Know Better!
Patient Day - March 2, 2025
Einhorn Auditorium
Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City
Scientific Director
Dan Martin, MD
Program Director
Tamer Seckin, MD
I'm going to introduce our next speaker, Dr. Samir. VE is an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York where he leads a research group investigating the cellular and molecular mechanisms linking nutrition to health and disease. He earned his PhD in immunology from Harvard University in 2017 focusing on the dietary regulation of intestinal stem cell function and to neurogenesis Dr. Bees' current work explores how dietary and metabolic perturbations affect the immune system and contribute to diseases associated with immune dysfunction such as cancer. Please welcome to the stage Dr. Bees.
Alright, thank you so much Caroline for the kind introduction and thank you all for being here. I'll talk about food, the food that you eat and the food that yourselves like to eat. And before I start, I want to take you back in time, how did we evolve eating what we are eating and how does it influence who we are as humans in the context of health and in the context of disease? So it took us few million years to go from eating nuts and fruits into cooking. So we figured out cooking around 800,000 years ago when some curious person started experimenting with fire and food and that led into invention of cuisines. And so the explosion of different food and cuisine that you are all choosing and eating right now in the lunch buffet came around 10,000 years ago when we decided to settle down and stop being hunter gatherers and build cities.
So that was the agricultural revolution when we learned how to grow grains, how to make bread that started the civilization as we know it now. So you would think that would keep getting better and better. We will learn how to eat better. We will use food to become healthier. But unfortunately in 21st century, we are running into a lot of issues with our health and these are all attributed to what you eat or what you don't eat. So if you look on the top chart, overnutrition is your condition that is stemming from easy access to bad food. So back in the days these guys had to hunt, had to move around to get their food, and the food and the human relationship is very intimate. There is a hypothesis that the reason that we evolved as who we are directly depends on what kind of food we ate.
So the difference between the homo Habilis and Homoerectus and homo sapiens is their brain size and the brain content. And that directly correlates with the ability of humans to start consuming meat and high density nutrients. And so you come here to 21st century and you may ask yourself, why do we get more cancer? Why is endometriosis is so common? Why are we depressed? Why do we have inflammatory diseases? Why do we have dementia? Why do we have diabetes and metabolic syndrome? Why do we have cardiovascular diseases? So almost every single disease that you can think of right now that humans are going to hospitals is one way or another attributed to food. The food again that you eat and the food that you don't eat. So I'm not going to go into too much details, but I would love to answer questions that you may have to my best capability.
But I will tell you this, your grandmother told you that and probably her grandmother told her that, that you are what you eat. Food influences who you are. And humans, until today experimented turning food into medicine, if you look at ancient civilizations, every single disease was trying to be cured by some sort of sort of extract that was non empirically used as medicine. And if you look at apes, if you look at birds when they get sick, if they have a stomach infection, if they have a bacterial infection, they go travel and they try to get some plants or some seeds and they eat that to alleviate. So the urge to turn food into medicine is not limited to humans, it's what life is. Every single organism needs to eat something to become the organism that it is. But the problem is that we don't know how what you eat defines who you are as an organism and how when you are sick, things are changing so you are getting sick.
And why this is very important to understand because if we can unlock that mystery, we can unlock the secret for life and hopefully this problem that we are going through, the association between malnutrition and diseases, including endometriosis, will lead to preventative and therapeutic strategies. So why do in my lab, I'm not going to lose you with the and jargon, molecular mechanisms and jargons, but it's a very simple question. So all of you chose something to eat. What are you think? What are you think? Tell me. Some of you are vegan, some of you chose the chicken wrap, some of you just ate the salad, you made a decision, you made a choice because either that's your habit that you get used to or depending on some random association you make that make that decision. So your cells also make that. So there are three reasons that you eat and your cells eat.
You need energy. Without food, you cannot make energy. So plants can make energy by sunlight in their chlorophyll, but you need food to make energy. The second reason is you need food to actually make your cells. The building blocks. The building blocks are protein, carbohydrate, lipid essentially. And then you get irid and minerals and everything. You need that from your environment. If you don't get that, you die. You life cannot exist. And the last part is the least understood part. So we understand how we make a TP. So past a hundred years, smart scientists, great scientists, figured out how cells generate a TP, the currency, the money of your cells used to survive. And then we also understood how cells and tissues are made. When you eat protein, carbon fat, how is it distributed throughout your body? We understood that, but we don't know. What you eat influences the identity of your cells.
And like I told you, similar to what you just did during lunch break, you chose food. Different cells in different contexts. When they are carrying out special functions, they choose a specific nutrient source. So for example, for endometrium, when endometrium is going through its cycle, there are cells there. Some of them are called epithelial cells. They look like these cubes. And then they are the ones that accept the fertilized egg. That's the primary function of endometrium. And throughout that cycle there are different metabolic requirements. There are different metabolic needs that cells choose. So we are trying to figure out that process. What is the determinant of a cell to make a choice to take a specific nutrient? And can you then turn on and off some of those nutrient processes to change the behavior of the cell when it's doing something that you don't want to or can you give a cell that is not having what it needs to and then alleviate a disease.
So for example, infertility, right? Why endometrial epithelium cannot accept, why cannot be receptive in some people, but it is in some others. Is there a nutritional underpinning there? Right? So this is one example I wanted to give, but so this all sounds great, but how do we solve that? It's not easy. It's not easy because it's a whole body of problems. What are the problems? When you try to turn food into medicine, you need to keep in mind that your cells are in your tissues. You have billions, trillions of cells, and every one of those cells when you eat something will get influence from the systemic ingestion of the food like the cookie that you're eating right now. So you'll eat that cookie as you digest it in your mouth. Some of it'll get captured to the bloodstream, it'll go to your brain. Your brain will be like, oh my god, I love this.
And then will ask you to eat more. Then it'll go to your stomach, it'll pass, it'll go to your small intestine and then it'll be mostly absorbed there. Over there, what will happen is that some cells will change their state. It'll go from sleeping state to a awake state. They would absorb that nutrient. What will happen is that combination of cells are present in your tissue. So you have these epithelial cells that we study. These are the inner lining of tissues. So in the stomach and intestine they play a huge role. And also in endometrium. Then you have immune cells, you have neurons, and you have this glue that connects all of these together and nutrients can alter all of these interactions. Then you go more complex, like how does one organ talks to another organ? So how does endometrium talks to blood to adipose tissue to ovary?
There is organ communication that is facilitated normally by functions of the distant acting hormones and food directly impacts and indirectly impacts those processes. So for most of you who are going to ask me, okay, so what do I eat? What do I eat? If I have diabetes, what do I eat? If I infertility, what do I eat if I have endometriosis or cancer? Short answer is I don't know. And long answer or to give you an answer, this is what we need to interrogate. Humans come in different flavors. So life come in different flavors. We don't know your, we need to interrogate your current metabolic state, systemic metabolic state. We need to interrogate your age, your genetic makeup, and at what stage of the disease you are, right? So we consider diseases in one single box, but disease is a continuum. So as health, so when we are trying to figure out how food affects health and disease, we need to see it as a continuum and interrogate all of the variables, meaning that what stage of the disease you are, what's your indication?
Did you get treatment? Did you get surgery? These are all important variables, but I'll give you hope. There is a promise. We have been trying that for thousands of years. If you go to the Amazons and go to the tribal communities, they don't have CVS, they have plants and they are one way or another figuring that out. If they have an upset tummy, they eat a plant and it works. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it's not empirical. You have CVS, you have Walgreens, your doctor prescribes you something, you go, birds don't have CVS, they also travel and find food. So there is a promise. There is a promise that we can turn food into medicine. But for humans to do that effectively, we need work, we need research, we need science. And so that can turn this dream into reality. And in the last few minutes I will show you.
So this is the problem that I highlighted to you that we are going through. It's called malnutrition. So everything that you just ate is a problem. The cookie that you ate is a bigger part of that problem, but I love it too. I love the cookies and I some too. Yeah, but this is the dream. This is the promise that I'm giving you. You can make your tissues more regenerative, meaning that you don't get sick as you age. Maybe your endometrium will be more functional past certain age. Maybe you'll counteract menopause. Maybe you are going to have a healthy aging, improve your lifespan. And healthspan, who likes to get sick in this crowd? Does anyone like to get sick? No, we don't like to get sick. So maybe you are going to have a healthy process in which food is directly going to impact this. And some people want to go live in this space. What are they going to eat? For those of people that I wish, they make it to Mars and so we can get rid of them and we can live on this beautiful planet earth, we need to figure out what they will eat too so that they don't come back for our food.
So I'll end with this. The question is that you are going to ask me, I'll give you the answer. Can we develop specific nutrient regimens for each of you for boosting your fitness, your tissues, fitness, your health, and then for whatever disease you have, every one of you may have a different question about a disease. And I get it. We need to define a precise nutritional regimen. So think about how much work I need to do and I'm doing it. I'm not running away after this, I'll go back to the lab and I will do the work to towards that goal. The challenge is that we need data. We need to actually do an experiment, right? Birds did that experiment for thousands of years. They didn't record what the data was. They just passed on innately or adaptively to the next generation. We got some data from.
You can go see the Amazonian cultures like other cultures. They passed on some knowledge. But we need data that interrogate the genetic complexity that we have and the exposure complexity that we have. I can find you a precision nutrition advice, but if you ate a cookie, I don't know how to combat that. I cannot hold you accountable for compliance. So this is the biggest challenge, but the impact, the impact is when we do that research, it's not just about turning food into medicine, it's making medicine better and more personalized. Then we can define targets. So for example, what's the biggest problem that you have in endometriosis is you don't have a proper tool to make diagnosis. So you can turn these targets into diagnostic tools, preventative tools and treatment modalities. So your future is what you eat. How can we make it a healthy one?
How can we make it really a healthy one? So I gave you the clue that I need to go back to the lab and do the research and there are thousands of thousands of people like me who go to the lab and do the research. So I'll pause for one second and I'll tell you something really horrible that's happening to us right now. And you need to know because we need your awareness and we need your advocacy and support more than ever in the history of human civilization, except for maybe they put Galileo to the jail when he was trying to figure out what's going on with the stars. Maybe that was a really horrible time and now we are having the second horrible time. I'll show you some news highlights. Scientists need support from public and the government to go to the lab to do experiments.
Right now, our funding is frozen. I got top score with grants that I need to get from the federal government so that I can go back and figure out how food can be turned into medicine. The impact of that cannot be calculated with billions or even trillions of dollars. And this is the biggest investment a government or a society can do. You get $1, you get like 10 times, 20 times, 30 times long-term investment. So for finance people in the crowd, do the math. What kind of investment gives you that? And what did I tell you? We can turn your future into a healthy one, but without science, without the work, we can go back to the lab and do it. The future is really dark. I will tell you, I'm a cancer scientist. I'm a stem cell scientist, and now I'm dedicating my research into understanding and finding diagnostic, preventative and treatment strategies for endometriosis with these news to me.
What will happen to my students? What will happen to the science community? If you stop science for six months, scientific discoveries are delayed for 60 years. If you stop science for a year, it's going to shut down the scientific enterprise in this country. This country's biggest, biggest power that 60, 70 years ago, some smart people said, we are going to invest in science and we are going to make it systematic and we are going to make it a priority. That's why this country has been and currently still is the biggest, the best country in the world to do science. That's why I came to this country. I did my PhD at Harvard. Why? Because it was science first mentality. Now I'm at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Why? Because I can have the freedom to do the science that will come back and help you. So we need your advocacy.
How can you help? Let me tell you, you are in New York. Call your congressman, Republican, democrat. Doesn't matter. This is not politics. This is our country's future. This is your children's future. Second, some people in Arizona, in Alabama, in Nebraska, call them. Tell them about what I told you because we need their support. We need people to know what's going on. If we don't do science, there will be no cures. And not just in the us, in the world, us is the leader steps. If the leader falls, the others are going to also fall. So we need you to go out there, talk about it, call people, say that, Hey, I heard the scientist told me about that struggle. Let's stop this. So I'll end with that note. Science and discovery always endures, so we will get through that darkness. But I don't want this process to delay the significant impact of our research that can have on your lives, on your daily lives. Now ask me anything. Oh, we don't have time. So ask me something at the social. I'll be there. Thank you so much.
