EP 306 Transcript

All right, believe it or not, my health was not always great. In fact, for many years I was obese, suffered from migraines every day and had such bad arthritis I had to wear braces on my knees to run. And what’s interesting, at the same time, I was running 30 miles a week. I went to the gym one hour every day, and ate what I was taught was a healthy diet, very low fat, high carbohydrate. I was doing everything right, or so I thought. It wasn’t until I began my research on the human microbiome that I realized I was doing it all wrong. So today I’m gonna share some of the foods I used to eat and why they were contributing to my terrible health back in the day. Alright, number one, low fat foods. The low fat diet was the biggest diet trend of the ’80s and ’90s. In fact, the low fat food was dead wrong. The fact is, eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Now, I too fell for this at one point. Why did this happen? Back in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. And so why did this happen? So they appointed the greatest nutritionist of the United States, a Professor at the University of Minnesota, Ancel Keys. Why did they choose him? Dr. Keys was the inventor of the K-ration, which is what kept our troops alive during World War II. So who better than to figure out what befelled President Eisenhower than Ancel Keys, K-ration for Keys. Ancel Keys studied about 20 different people around the world, countries around the world, and he wanted to show that the more saturated fat that people ate, then the more heart disease they developed. And conversely, the less saturated fat they ate, the less heart disease they had. Now, unfortunately, out of those 20 countries, he could only find seven that actually proved his point. And he published a study called The Seven Countries Study that really showed an impressive correlation between the amount of saturated fat the people ate, and heart disease, heart attacks. Now, what’s really interesting, and I wrote about this in “Unlocking the Keto Code” and “The Energy Paradox” is that there were a number of countries in Europe that met his criteria, for instance, post-war Italy. But right next door, France was not on the list as a really good country for avoiding heart disease, and they had an incredibly high fat diet. But because it didn’t meet his criteria, that didn’t make it onto the list of countries he studied. So he was appointed as the advisor to what’s called the McGovern Commission, George McGovern of Presidential Campaign Fame to establish the national guidelines for Americans to eat. Now, the Department of Agriculture was given the oversight of making the food pyramid. Now, that’s kind of like the fox guarding the hen house. The Department of Agriculture’s job is to get you and me to eat agricultural products and to foster the growing of agricultural products. So surprise, surprise, the food pyramid became heavily weighted towards grain products and other farm commodities. And when the low fat part hit, people rapidly found out in food producing companies, that fat gave flavor to food. And when you took the fat away, the food lost all its flavor, so you had to put in sugar to counteract that effect. So most low fat products became sugar bombs. Now, I should add that during the time when Ancel Keys was going after fat, the contrarian, Dr. Joughin from England was saying, no, no, no, no, no. Dr. Keys has got this all wrong. It has nothing to do with fat, it has to do with sugar, and sugar is the culprit. Now in academic circles, the two duped it out, and Dr. Keys was, let’s just say, a much better public speaker and a much better debater. And he had the ear of the US government, and Dr. Joughin did not. And so the sugar as evil fell by the wayside, helped by the American Sugar Council, which gave generous grants to the Department of Nutrition at Harvard to show beyond a reasonable doubt that sugar had nothing to do with heart disease, diabetes, and when all this was uncovered by the New York Times a number of years ago, we now know why Dr. Keys won, and Dr. Joughin lost. But that was the start of the end. Now, are fats bad? Well, there’s great fats and there’s bad fats. And as I’ve written about in “The Energy Paradox”, the worst fat is actually probably palmitic acid, palmitate. Among other things, palmitate is directly converted into ceramide. And if you’ve read the book, there’s a famous paper called “Death by Ceramide”. And ceramide completely gums up the functioning of mitochondria. It’s death to mitochondria. So where does palmitic acid come from? Well, originally, palmitic acid was named for one of the fats in palm oil. But surprise, surprise, the vast majority of palmitic acid in humans is manufactured from our ingestion of sugar and fructose. In other words, we make this very evil fat by eating the very thing that was supposed to make us healthy, fructose and fructose, and avoiding all the evil fats. No wonder I was a big fat mess. Now, the other thing I did is I drank several bottles of carrot juice a day. The first thing I did when I went to the Loma Linda cafeteria was grab a big thing of fresh pressed carrot juice and drink it. And I have another one at lunchtime. Why carrot juice? Well, it didn’t have any fat in it, and it was a great source of vitamin A, and everybody knows how good vitamin A is for you. It had betacarotene. In fact, I drank so much carrot juice that I had a kind of healthy orange glow to my skin, and I didn’t spray it on, I drank it. Now, juicing was and still is a craze, and it’s quite frankly a shame. Juicing means you’re really just drinking the sugary part of a fruit or vegetable, even if you’re drinking green juice. Now remember, natural sugars are still sugar, and sugar is where not only calories hide, but drinking pure sugar, particularly fructose, is mainlining the components that make palmitic acid and ceramides. Like I say, give fruit the boot. You should reverse juice instead. What you’re looking for in fruit, and vegetables for that matter, are the polyphenols and the fiber, the very things you are throwing away when you juice. So get out that juicer, get yourself organic fruits and vegetables, juice them, throw the juice away and take the pulp and put it into your organic yogurt, put it into your smoothie, freeze some and drop ’em in. You’ll go a long way to improving your health, and that’s exactly what I do. Number three, I was eating oatmeal, whole grain breads, et cetera. Little did I know, that number one, these were lectin bombs, but even if you don’t believe me that they’re lectin bombs, these are glyphosate bombs. These are Roundup bombs. Unfortunately, all of our grains are sprayed with Roundup, even non-GMO crops. Conventional grains, oats, wheat, rye, barley, corn, a lot of our rice is sprayed with Roundup. Roundup, we could go on and on. Roundup is an antibiotic against the earth. 90% of our agricultural crops, 90% of our corn and soy is sprayed with glyphosate, and corn and soy are in a lot of our food products. Now, we’ve been told by the FDA that Roundup is safe because Roundup targets the shikimate pathway that animals do not use to stay alive. Unfortunately, plants do, but unfortunately so do bacteria. So we now know that when you swallow glyphosate, it kills off your microbiome. It’s also a direct gut wall disruptor. And one paper shows that glyphosate interferes with mitochondrial function, meaning what? You gain weight, you feel low energy, you’re more susceptible to disease and illness, and the list goes on and on. And I can tell you, as a heart surgeon, when I was feeling low energy, what did I do? I ate more, because clearly I was low on food and I needed more energy. And I see this over and over again in my patients. We also know that glyphosate kills off the bacteria that handle the tryptophan pathway that produces 5-HTP, that produces serotonin, that produces feel-good hormones and doesn’t make you seek out food. Finally, you are what you eat, but you are what the thing you’re eating. So glyphosate, tainted corn and soybeans and wheat is fed to our animals, and glyphosate ends up in their tissues. So you are getting a double dose of glyphosate literally every time you eat. So what do I do instead? Well, I certainly don’t eat anything that might have been in touch with glyphosate. I limit animal protein. I only eat pastured poultry. I eat pastured or Omega-3 eggs occasionally, and I eat wild caught seafood. You’ll see in the new book, “Gut Check”, that I’m going to warn you away from even grass-fed and grass-finished beef, lamb, and pork, and you’ll be startled why I am warning you about those foods as well. Please buy organic, especially if you’re buying mushrooms, berries, cruciferous vegetables, leafy greens. Buy lectin-free flowers and grains like sorghum or millet, but buy organic. Unfortunately, Roundup has leached into many of our regular fruits and vegetables. Number four, bad mistake I made, diet soda. Many people, including me when I was overweight, turned artificial sweeteners to quell their cravings without packing on the pounds, or so I thought. Back then I would’ve happily performed heart surgery with a Diet Coke in my hand, if I could have only found a way to sterilize it. Ironically, all these products which are supposed to help with weight loss do exactly the opposite. That’s because these products are filled with sucralose, saccharin, aspartame, and other new or non-nutritive sweeteners, which unfortunately kill your gut buddies, change your gut buddies and allow bad bugs to flourish. These bad bugs are obesogenic in their nature. They actually make you seek out sugars and saturated fats. But more importantly, they’re really good at extracting extra calories from the food you eat, and passing them on to you, exactly what you don’t want to happen. Now, sad but true. You have no sugar receptors on your tongue. You have sweet receptors. Your brain, when it tastes sweet, assumes you’ve just eaten sugar. It’s the only thing possible, and it assumes you just ate fruit or honey. It sends a message to your pancreas to make insulin, ’cause sugar’s on the way. When sugar doesn’t arrive, your blood sugar goes down. Your brain says, wait a minute, he just ate sugar, where is it? He got cheated. Go back and gets some more. And what drives you to eat more when you have an artificial sweetened drink is your brain thinks that you should go get some more. And that’s exactly what happened to me. Now sadly, even the real thing, like fructose in fruit has been shown to be a mitochondrial poison and a poison to kidneys. And unfortunately, fructose is converted into uric acid. Uric acid is what causes gout. Uric acid causes insulin resistance, uric acid causes kidney damage, and uric acid causes high blood pressure. None of these do we want, and all of these I had by eating a healthy low fat diet. You can turn things around quickly, and that’s why I tell you what to be where and why I never eat what I used to eat. Soda is number one on the list to stay away from. Yes, even diet soda. Now, if you think diet soda is better than regular soda, you are wrong. All of these ingredients in diet soda, now we know, kill off friendly bacteria in our gut dramatically. Yes, I’m talking about things like aspartame, sucralose, which is called Splenda. Even now, the zero sodas have acesulfame, which is now recognized as just as evil as aspartame and sucralose. So there’s no way out of this problem. Now, diet soda fools your brain. Your tongue has no sugar receptors, it has sweetness receptors. Now, back in the day, the only time you encountered sweetness was when you were eating fruit or happened upon it, honey. That sugar would go into your bloodstream, it would prompt your pancreas to make insulin, and that would handle the sugar. Your brain would get sugar and it would say, oh, that’s sugar. So when you have a artificial soft drink, a diet soft drink, the signal is sent to your brain and your pancreas that you are having sugar, ’cause you tasted something sweet. Your pancreas kicks up insulin, which is a fat storage hormone, but worse, your brain doesn’t get any sugar and your brain says, wait a minute. You’ve been robbed, you’ve been cheated. I tasted sugar, they lied to you. Go back and get some more and keep getting it until sugar arrives in my brain. That’s why when I was at my peak weight, I was drinking eight diet cokes a day and wondering why I was a big fat guy, because I was constantly hungry, ’cause my brain was constantly telling me, what the heck are you doing? Go find some sugar, you idiot. Well, that’s why it’s so dangerous, and we didn’t even know back then how bad it was on your microbiome. Now what are you gonna do instead? Well try one of my fake Diet Cokes. You know, all you need is San Pellegrino and balsamic vinegar. Try to get the thick balsamic vinegar, it really tastes great. It’s absolutely delicious. Amaze your friends at a restaurant. You can even customize it by adding some lemon, or if it’s still too bitter for you, just add a little allulose, which is a true sugar that has no calories that actually feeds friendly bacteria. So it’s a win-win-win. So if that vinegar taste or apple cider vinegar in sparkling water is just a little too tart for you, add some allulose. All right, number two on the list to avoid, sports drinks. Now there are some very popular sports drinks out there that you might think are good for you. So next time you see one, I want you to check out the label. These drinks are usually loaded with sugar, and the scary part is that that sugar can be hidden by multiple names. Sucrose, dextrose, fructose, evaporated organic cane syrup. Cane syrup is sugar folks, and when you evaporate it, that’s table sugar. Corn syrup, corn syrup solids, high fructose corn syrup. These are ways of putting multiple sugars and hiding them throughout the label so that you think that one individual sugar isn’t that high, but it’s cumulative. Many of these sports drinks have artificial colors and dyes that make them look more appealing. Look out for red number 40 and yellow number six. If you see ’em on the label, run. Again, even if it’s a diet drink, diet sports drink where it says zero calories or zero sugar, look at the label. If you see aspartame, sucralose or acesulfame, run. Now usually the sports drinks and the energy drinks are right next to each other and they’re designed to give you a buzz. Usually they have an incredibly good dose of caffeine. The caffeine may be hidden in other ways other than cola or caffeine. You may see guarana, you may see other buzzy words, but they’re usually wrecking your health. Manufacturers aren’t required to show how much caffeine is in their beverages, so they will hide it. Some are very proud of the amount of caffeine, but other ones just hide it under these fruit names or names of cola berries. They can be really dangerous for your heart health. They can cause high blood pressure. So the no calorie energy drinks, that sounds like a winner. They’re loaded with these artificial sweeteners. So you’re getting a double whammy again. I’m all for sports drinks and electrolyte drinks, but use my favorite. My wife is addicted to it. She’s a great athlete. It’s a powder called LMNT. Now LMNT is L-M-N-T. There are no additives, there’s no artificial sweeteners or flavors, but it still gives you all the properly proportioned electrolytes that you’re looking for. And they even have like eight different flavors. There’s even a watermelon. I kind of like the salty chocolate myself. Number four worst thing to pick up are fruit smoothies. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Give fruit the boot. Fruit is full of sugar and it makes you gain weight. Now it’s one thing to eat a whole fruit, but when you throw a piece of fruit or lots of fruit in a fruit smoothie and then whip it up, those sugar molecules, which were bound to fiber are now freed up. So you get a main line of fructose. And remember that many fruits sold at big box stores are sprayed with chemicals like Roundup, like herbicides that you probably absolutely don’t want to consume. Be careful of the fruits in fruit smoothies that are sold at these shops. You really don’t know where that fruit came from. Are there alternatives? Sure. Make a green drink from The Plant Paradox, easy to do. If you really want to get those little portable smoothie makers, just throw in a handful of lettuce, a half an avocado, some lemon juice, maybe a handful of spinach leaves, some ice cubes, and you’re good to go. Just stay away from these fruit smoothies. Number five, cranberry juice. First of all, cranberries are fruits. Fruit juices are a silly trend that should be stopped. They’re full of sugar and they’re not healthy for you. I get a kick out of seeing no sugar added cranberry juice, or no sugar added orange juice, or no sugar added apple juice. If you see the words “no sugar added”, what that really means to you is there’s so much sugar in here already, we didn’t have to put anymore in. That’s what no sugar added means. Now it’s a common misconception, particularly among women that cranberry juice is healthy for you, especially for preventing urinary tract infections. Now, the problem is that there is a really good chemical in cranberry juice called D-mannose. D-mannose is actually very effective, but there isn’t enough D-mannose in cranberry juice to make that much difference. You can use cranberry extracts or get D-mannose capsules and you’ll be far better off. And unfortunately, low sugar cranberry juices now get their sweetness from artificial sweeteners. So you’re back to square one. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Stay away from juices. Let me give you one example that’s a real fun one. Ocean Spray makes a cranberry juice, and it says no sugar or sweetener added. There are 31 grams of sugar in an eight ounce glass of Ocean Spray cranberry juice. That’s seven and a half teaspoons of pure sugar per glass. Coffee with milk or sweeteners, coffee is fantastic. It’s a great source of polyphenols, but if you put milk or other binders in it, you will bind those polyphenols, so you won’t get any benefits. You’re only gonna get benefits of polyphenols by drinking black coffee, and putting all those other wonderful things to make coffee delicious like in a frappuccino, that is just a giant sugar bomb that has no health benefit whatsoever. Alternatives, hey, learn to drink coffee black. I had to learn how to do it, my parents drank it black. Or add allulose if you want a sweeter coffee. I finally weaned my wife off from adding almond milk to her coffee by sneaking every day a little bit of allulose into her coffee. And after about a week she says, man, this new coffee is fantastic. I don’t need any almond milk in it. What are you doing? And I said, uh-huh, I’m putting allulose in it. She said, alright, you know, you’ve convinced me. Let’s go for it. Worst comes to worst, add unsweetened coconut milk and just make sure you’re looking for unsweetened. Number seven, the hip drink, coconut water. Now, this is probably the most popular part of the coconut, but please steer clear of it. It’s loaded with sugar, and that’s even before manufacturers add more sugar and artificial sweeteners to make it taste better. The alternative, come on, stick to regular water or eat the other parts of the coconut. Coconut meat is actually great for you, and if you’ve got leftover coconut water, put it in your hair. It’s great for hair strength and health. Number eight, vodka. Why? Vodka has absolutely zero benefits, besides the buzz. It has absolutely no polyphenols in it. Now why is that important? Well, most spirits are merely a way of getting polyphenols into you. So for instance, anything that’s aged in wood, extracts wood polyphenols, and believe me, wood polyphenols are really important. There’s a polyphenol supplement that I love called Pycnogenol French Maritime Tree Bark. These spirits soak these polyphenols out of the wood. So if you’re gonna have tequila, get the dark stuff. If you’re going to have rum, get the dark stuff, bourbon, scotch, that’s extracting polyphenols. Even gin has juniper berries and other herbs that are part of that. But vodka, there is an absolutely no benefit. Stay away from them. Red wine is aged in wood. Some white wines, like some chardonnays are aged in wood, but most of the white wines are not aged in wood. The other thing that’s a problem with our American system of drinks before dinner, particularly cocktails, is we don’t realize that our cells will actually preferably use alcohol for energy production. A lot of time what happens at cocktail hour is you drink vodka, for example, and then you go and eat. So what happens is that you’ve already met your energy requirements with that vodka, and so now all the carbs, all the proteins and all the fats that you’re going to eat at dinner arrive, and your cells are full. So what does your body do? It deposits them as fat. Believe me, true Skid Row alcoholics are incredibly skinny, ’cause quite frankly, they don’t eat very much. But people who use alcohol and notice their weight’s going up, it’s because the alcohol is being used first and then you’re going to store all the rest of the things you eat as fat automatically ’cause your cells have no more room. Finally, most of us realize that alcohol releases our inhibitions in lots of ways. I don’t have to tell you in lots of those ways, but one of the inhibitions it releases is food tastes better, you want more food, and you say, oh, what the heck? I normally don’t have dessert, but just tonight I’ll make an exception. So alcohol in general, buyer beware. Act like a European, and if you’re gonna drink, drink wine during the meal so you don’t run into that problem. Is fake meat healthy? Well, if you’re a vegetarian or a vegan, we live in a time of the most abundant choices of plant-based proteins. Specifically I’m talking about mock meat, like vegetarian sausages, vegetarian chicken nuggets, vegetarian bacon. The meat alternatives are endless. It’s exciting to have so many options right now, but are these new inventions actually healthy? Well, first of all, I enjoy looking at the ingredients of these vegan or vegetarian options, and one of the things that you’ll frequently discover is the presence of gluten in a great number of these alternative foods, if not in the meat fiber itself, certainly in the breading. And as you’ve learned in gut check, 100% of my patients with an autoimmune disease and leaky gut or intestinal permeability have antibodies to the various forms of gluten that occur in wheat, rye, and barley. So that’s a no starter right there. But what about these wildly popular Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers? Surely those are okay? Well, I see them on the menu everywhere, but we need to take a closer look. Let’s start with Beyond Meat. So what’s in it? Well, there are a few ingredients of the dozen or so, like vinegar and lemon juice that are great. But those are the very last two ingredients on the list. So let’s take a look at the top four main ingredients besides water. Number one, pea protein. What is it? Well, it’s protein that has been extracted from peas. They actually break peas down and just take the protein out of the peas. Now most peas in the United States are sprayed with glyphosate, better known as Roundup. Why do they do that? Because even though peas are not genetically modified, it is much easier to harvest peas or soybeans if they are dead and dried. It turns out harvesting a dead plant is much more efficient than harvesting a living plant because the water weight is decreased. Now, why pea protein? Believe it or not, pea protein is dirt cheap. It is one of the cheapest sources of protein there is. Gee, do you think maybe they decided to use pea protein not because of its health benefits, but because it’s cheap? Hmm, I wonder. Now, why do you want to avoid it? Peas are part of the legume family, and lectins are proteins, and lectins are present in pea protein. And a large number of my patients with leaky gut with autoimmune diseases react to the protein, lectin, in peas. That’s why you want to avoid it. Are there other thoughts about why you might want to avoid it? Well, here’s number one. Anytime you take a whole food and break it apart into its individual amino acids or sugars or fats, you’ve predigested that food, so that you now, believe it or not, have a ultra-processed food. So just because Beyond Meat or Beyond Beef looks like a whole food, looks like a burger, in fact, it’s as ultra-processed as anything else. So the next time you think you are eating healthy and a non-processed food, think again. You are eating an ultra-processed food. Now number two ingredient is expeller pressed canola oil. Now, it doesn’t say non-GMO canola oil, does it? That’s because almost all canola oil in the United States is sprayed with Roundup and is genetically modified. So there’s another no-no. Now, don’t get me wrong. In my books, I allow organic canola oil, if you can find it. Why? Because canola oil is loaded with a short chain Omega-3 fat, alpha-linolenic acid, ALA, which has dramatic health benefits. But the vast majority of canola oil doesn’t carry that health benefit because it’s been sprayed with Roundup. Number three, refined coconut oil. Now, what does it mean refined? Believe it or not, what they’ve done is taken away all the polyphenols in coconut oil. Now, even coconut oil actually has polyphenols. Fun fact, the polyphenol content of regular coconut oil is only about a 10th of the polyphenol content of olive oil. So there’s not very much, but refining the oil means it’s been chemically treated and usually heated to remove these compounds. Not exactly what you want to do to an oil. Number four, rice protein. Well, what’s this? Well, same thing. They’ve taken rice and broken it down into its individual components of amino acids. And just remember, particularly if it says brown rice protein, brown rice, the lectins are primarily in the hull, which makes it brown. So once again, you are getting a potential lectin in your rice protein, but more importantly, you’re no longer getting a whole food that’s actually going to take time for you to digest. Instead, you are getting an ultra-processed food made to look like a natural food. Buyer beware. Are there potential interesting benefits? Well, it depends. For instance, there was a 2020 study funded by Beyond Meat at Stanford University, and they compared the Beyond Burger with animal meat, and they looked at 36 people who alternated between eating the Beyond Meat versus eating animal meat. Now, as you probably expected, the Beyond Meat led to less saturated fat and more fiber in their diet. But interestingly enough, their people’s protein and sodium levels stayed exactly the same. The TMAO, which I’ve talked about, is a controversial substance that our gut microbiome can make from animal protein and animal fat. The TMAO levels in these people was lower in the Beyond Meat than the meat. But interestingly enough, the microbiome analysis showed absolutely no difference between the two groups. So long story short, if you are interested in lowering saturated fat, and I’m not sure why, unless you are an APOE4 person, you’d be interested in that and interested in more fiber, there’s certainly a whole lot easier ways to get fiber than Beyond Meat. Okay, so let’s take a closer look at the Bleeding Plant Burger or the Impossible Burger. Now, besides water, here are some of the main ingredients. Number one, soy protein concentrate. Here we go again. First of all, almost all soy in the United States is genetically modified and is sprayed with Roundup. Oops. Number two, you are not taking a soybean that potentially could be beneficial, because if you took it and fermented it and made it tempeh, you could denature the lectins in that and make it an acceptable food that millions of people around the world use. But when you take soy and break it apart, you once again have an ultra-processed food. Number two, sunflower oil. Now this is a, once again, seed oil that is primarily alpha linoleic acid, a rather nasty Omega-6 fat, not a friendly Omega-3 fat. Plus most sunflower oil is heated and refined, becoming a toxic compound. Alright, number three, coconut oil. Okay, it’s not refined coconut oil. Finally, we actually have a good ingredient, it’s number three. Now, just a word of warning. If you carry the APOE4 gene, which 30% of people do, coconut oil is probably not your best choice. Number four, thickener. INS 461, what the heck is that? Well, it’s most likely methylcellulose. Methylcellulose is basically wood. So if you like chewing on wood to give that mouth feel, go ahead, but you’re not a termite. Okay, let’s skip down to check out the last one. This is my favorite, soy leghemoglobin, genetically modified. Now, this is what makes this burger bleed. Soy has been genetically modified to have the hemoglobin molecule. But spoiler alert, there’s never been any testing to decide if this compound is actually safe to eat. It’s just never been done. So if you like the idea of being healthy and avoiding genetically modified food, dig in, it’s right there on the label, genetically modified. And the ingredient that’s not listed on either of these and is probably the most harmful is of course glyphosate. Now, why didn’t they put glyphosate on the label? Because the USDA and the FDA have decided that glyphosate is harmless to humans. Even though the environmental working group, multiple European agencies have banned glyphosate because of its very strong association with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma development and other leukemias. In fact, if you’re paying attention to the news, Bayer, which bought Monsanto, is paying out a large amount of money in lawsuits because of this association. So if you think it’s a good idea to have your healthy plant alternative burgers, you’re eating glyphosate, and it doesn’t have to show up on the label. Please stay away from these things. But all is not lost. Now, I think there are actually some very healthy mock meat substitutes. First of all, one of my favorite is a company called Quorn, and people hear the word corn. It’s not. It’s Q-U-O-R-N. This uses simplistically mushroom roots mycelium, that’s combined with a tiny bit of egg white to make two of my favorite mock meats. One is called Crumbles, which is exactly like it sounds. It looks and tastes like ground turkey, and the other is chicken pieces or meat pieces, and they look like it sounds, like little pieces of cut up chicken or cut up beef. Please avoid most of them that are coated with breading because they contain gluten. A great number of stores have this in the vegetarian freezer aisle. Look for it. You can even go to their website and put in your zip code and you can find it. I have no relationship with them. I just think it’s been a real useful thing for my patients. I’ve even fooled friends who have come over for tacos in cassava flour tortillas, and they thought they were having turkey tacos, but it was Quorn. Hillary’s Root Burger, if you can find it, is good. There are jackfruit-based products, but please avoid the sugar-soaked ones. Now, when I was at Loma Linda, a great number of the foods, the mystery meats, as we used to call them, were made from TVP, capital T, capital V, capital P as in Paul. That’s texturized vegetable protein. Now what that is, is de-fatted soy meal that’s been extruded under high pressure and high temperature to make a fake meat. And you can make just about anything fake from this. The great news about it is because of the high pressure and the high heat, it doesn’t contain any lectins. And this is available, usually you’ll find it in a BPA-free can, and go ahead and do it. Also, we’re beginning to see more and more in certain stores, mushroom-based mock meats, and for the most part, they have good ingredients. Be careful, a lot of them are breaded. But if you want to just make a portobello mushroom pizza like we have in the Plant Paradox book, and you’ll get all the benefits of mushrooms in a burger-like consistency without any muscle fills. Alright, so whenever you’re looking at these plant-based alternatives, look out for soy proteins, look out for pea proteins. Word to the wise. If it says protein isolate, the lectins have been removed. But word to the wise, that’s also a processed food. So buyer beware, many of these products have gluten, particularly the breading. One product that I won’t mention starts with a G. Sounds like garden, uses vital wheat gluten in most of their products. That’s the last thing. Now, if you’re not a vegan or vegetarian, opt for wild fish or pasture-raised poultry or wild shellfish, and those will be great for you. If you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, you are definitely gonna want to see this one. Most of these salads that are in fast food restaurants are often higher in calories and fats than the burger or Chicken McNugget options, which shocks most people. Now, despite being a healthier, quote, food choice, these dressings are an unmitigated health disaster.